As part of a series that it ran during the Bali Conference on reactions to global warming around the world, El País, Spain's leading newspaper did an article (in Spanish) on global warming in Russia. In this diary I'll translate parts of the article and summarize others. It is, to say the least, eye opening.
Any visitor who flies in a helicopter over Siberia will notice, from time to time, flares of orange on the immense white plain: it is the gas that is found with the petroleum and which is always burned and wasted. This same traveler, when lodging in Moscow in winter, may find that his room becomes hellishly hot and be forced to open the windows since most of the radiators are not adjustable.
These images illustrate the principal problem that confronts Russia: its lack of conservation and efficiency in the consumption of energy, which is worsened by the warming being experienced in certain areas of the country. The flame seen from overhead and the open window are symbols par excellence of the wastefulness that is the Russian attitude toward energy use.
According to Igor Podgorny of Greenpeace Russia, Russia wastes between 40% and nearly 50% of it's total annual fuel consumption. Expressed in terms of petroleum, Russia wastes around 250 million tons of petroleum each year, an amount roughly equal to its annual petroleum exports. So, contemporary Russia is little different from the old USSR in its wastefulness and inefficient use of natural resources. Yet, this also means that Russia could make huge cuts in its greenhouse gas emission, not with complicated new technology, but simply through increased energy efficiency.
But to increase energy efficiency you have to want to do it and there are few signs that Russia does. Because of the economic collapse that accompanied the fall of the Soviet Union Russian CO2 emissions although the 3rd highest in the world after the US and China at 1.5 billion tons per annum, are still less than 50% of what they were in 1990. Russian officials can claim to be meeting Kyoto targets, but the reality is that it's happened not because of policy choices but because the Russian economy imploded and its inefficient manufacturing sector collapsed.
According to Podgorny those inefficiencies remain in the current Russian economic system. It takes energy inputs 2 1/2 to 3 times those of a developed nation to produce a unit of GDP in Russia. Russian plans for future energy production rely chiefly on the worst polluter, coal fired power plants with some attention paid to nuclear power and quixotic schemes for enormous and environmentally destructive hydroelectric projects. Current Russian legislation provides no incentives for development of wind or solar power.
In many ways Russia still has a 19th century world view. There is probably no place on earth where more people still believe in a heroic vision of man conquering nature. Some have seen the Russian Weltanschauung as being that of an even earlier era. After this summer's opéra bouffe at the Arctic where the Russians used a mini-submarine to plant a Russian flag under the North Pole, newly accessible as summer sea ice disappears, Canadian Foreign Minister Peter McKay declared in a statement reminiscent of one of my favorite Eddie Izzard routines:
"Look, this isn't the 15th century. You can't go around the world and plant flags and say, 'We're claiming this territory,"
But even if we grant that Russia still thinks like a 19th century imperial power, how do we explain this lack of concern with global warming? Rodrigo Fernández, author of the El País article puts it thus:
Another factor that contributes to the failure to give the emission of greenhouse gases the importance it deserves is the opinion, widely disseminated even in the highest political circles that warming will benefit Russia. Even President Vladimir Putin has said that "if the temperature rises 2 or 3 degrees, nothing terrible will happen; quite the contrary, maybe it will be good: we'll spend less on fur coats".
For his part, Konstantin Pulikovsky, head of the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological, and Nuclear Inspection stated in May that he sees no threat to Russia from global warming for the next 100 years.
Next year, Bush will be gone. Meanwhile, Putin and his minions are busy entrenching themselves for the duration. Expect problems, lots of problems.
Crossposted at European Tribune