Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine has laid bare some uncomfortable truths about Europe’s energy future. For one thing, it has demolished the presumption in Germany that Russia would be a reliable fossil fuel partner. The war has also blown apart Europe’s claim to moral leadership on climate change. At the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in the fall of 2021, the European Union unsuccessfully demanded that China and India commit to a timetable for phasing out coal. Now that demand appears almost hypocritical, because countries such as Germany are keeping open coal-fired power stations that were due to close to deal with their present energy woes. In doing so, these leaders have demonstrated that coal is still the primary energy source of last resort for generating electricity.
The fact is, Europe’s energy consumption is misaligned with the resources to which European countries have secure access. This problem has been a persistent source of strife in European history and seems likely to shape Europe’s future, as well. At the World Economic Forum gathering in Davos in 2020, German Chancellor Angela Merkel proclaimed that “Europe intends to be the first continent to be CO2 free.” Even if that is a plausible aim, it won’t make Europe free from foreign resource dependency.
