For a decade, Vladimir Putin and other Russian leaders have tossed off the threat of climate change. Putin famously said that Russians could spend less on fur coats with a warming planet. Like other oil powers, the US included, Russian leaders have excelled at denying and belittling the science of climate change. Those days are over. The 2022 war in Ukraine is arguably one of what will probably be a series of climate wars. Thane Gustafson in Klimate: Russia in the Age of Climate Change points out that Putin and Russian business leaders have recently woken to the threat of climate change. The news, Gustafson argues, does not look good for Russia.
Putin's power rests on a three-cornered pyramid of fossil fuel exports, the remarkable turn-around in agricultural production and the export of civilian nuclear power. Two of these pillars will likely crumble with increasing restrictions on fossil fuels to mitigate climate change. Climate change will bring an end, Gustafson argues, to an era of abundant natural resource exploitation that has levitated Putin from an ordinary elected official to a lifetime ruler.
Gustafson's first chapters document the cynical and self-interested manipulation of climate change science in Russia. He points out that Soviet scientists led climate change science in the 1950s and 1960s alongside Paul Keeling and a handful of US researchers. But as the USSR and then Russia came to rely on the sale of oil and gas, this interest trailed off. Putin sought to join the Kyoto Protocol only as a bargaining chip to gain access to the World Trade Organization. And since emissions had dropped so low from a 1990 high benchmark, it did not cost Russia anything. Dmitri Medvedev as president placed climate change on the agenda for the first time, but in keeping with Medvedev's Potemkin presidency, his policy recommendations were not carried out. A trend emerged. Scientific and environmental communities focused on the need for action, while business leaders and heads of ministries concentrated on developing defensive responses to diplomatic and financial pressures to mitigate climate change from outside Russia. Andrey Illarionov, Putin's economic advisor called the Kyoto Protocol a “global Auschwitz” (27). On the floor of the Duma, parliamentarians described climate change as a hoax invented by hostile western interests, the “scam of the century.” (36)
The media most often portrays Putin as an all-commanding dictator, but when Putin endorsed the Paris Accord in 2015, its passage came up against stiff resistance in the Duma. A powerful industrial lobby stalled action on the plan for three years until finally Putin withdrew it from parliament and passed the Accord with executive action.
In chapters on coal, oil, gas, nuclear, renewables, and agriculture, Gustafson analyzes Russia's economic prospects in the coming decades of changing climate and with it economic and political landscapes. He finds that Russian business leaders functioned well in renewing moribund Soviet industries to build highly-profitable export industries in fossil fuels, grain, and nuclear power plants. He rules, however, that the Russian state has squandered the opportunity to put the rents from these industries to work to renew Russia's economy for the future. Russia has accumulated a large nest egg of 800 billion, but, as we now know, most of that money is frozen with the onset of the war.
Russian business and political leaders operated for two decades on the premise that climate change adjustments would occur slowly over long time scales. This judgment served Russian business and political leaders’ goals. The majority (54%) of Russia's export revenue comes from oil, gas, and coal. By 2030, less than eight years from now, coal will be obsolete and oil demand will have peaked as renewables push CO2-emitting sources of energy out of the market. Russia, Gustafson argues, for the first time since it began exporting oil in the 1960s will be unable to fund economic growth by exporting energy. At the same time, it will lack the capital to invest and adapt to a warming globe (210).
Only as late as 2017 did Russian leaders wake to these problems, which they had to concede were caused by a warming globe. Russia's second source of income comes from the sale of grains. Gustafson applauds what he calls a remarkable turnaround in Russian agriculture inspired by state policies that subsidized and supported technology, seeds, and chemicals for large industrial farming. Oligarchs close to the Putin regime made fortunes in agro-holdings. Yet, like many places around the world, Russia's existing agricultural territories are not being replenished, and the farms will suffer from more drought and more floods, more warm spells in winter and cold snaps in spring and fall, all of which will make conventional farming precarious. Seventy percent of Russian territory is permafrost which is thawing at accelerating rates, leaving behind large craters of sunken earth. This land presents an unstable foundation on which to build infrastructure or new agricultural terrain. Permafrost soils are made up of ice, rock, and sand, not good for agriculture.
With fossil fuels on the wane, grain sales promise to hold up the Russian economy and thus the present Russian government. Gustafson went to print with Klimat before the war in Ukraine, but its major message is prescient. After stalling on taking preparatory measures to deal with climate change, Russian leaders panicked in February 2022. Ukraine offers salvation in the form of the sunny wealth of the eastern Ukrainian breadbasket. With help from Ukraine's fields of grain and its nitrogen fertilizer industries, Russia's portfolio looks much better. We are witnessing one of what will be probably many climate wars over the rapidly shifting landscapes of security and wealth.
