Vladimir Putin's Carbon Tax

[hatrack]

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The strategy to split from Russian energy, expected to be announced by the European Commission next week, would give Europe a freer political hand against Russia than it has had in the past. It would take years and come with a hefty bill for European taxpayers. But it comes with the crucial backing of Germany, a nation so entangled with Russia that one of its former chancellors, Gerhard Schröder, is the chairman of Rosneft, Russia’s biggest oil company.

With this week’s arrival of Russian boots on Ukrainian soil, Germany had enough. Chancellor Olaf Scholz shelved the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany, a new project that was emblematic of Europe’s energy-focused approach to Russia. President Biden on Wednesday imposed U.S. sanctions on Nord Stream 2 and its corporate officers. And the European Commission’s planned strategy next week aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy so that Europe never again is so dependent on the Kremlin to keep households warm and factories humming.

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European policymakers acknowledge they would be in a better spot if they had started more concerted work on building robust energy independence years ago, but they say that in some ways skeptics have needed this crisis to be kicked into action. The planning has been underway for months, after Russia started scaling back gas deliveries last year but before it deployed troops along Ukraine’s border.

“Russia carefully calibrated this energy crisis to precede the circumstances around the current invasion,” Sarah Ladislaw, a managing director at RMI, an organization devoted to the clean energy transition, said in an email. Even ahead of the new strategy, a constellation of efforts has been underway. Italian consumers are being urged to swap out their gas-fired water heaters in favor of electric ones. French President Emmanuel Macron declared ambitious plans to build more than a dozen nuclear power plants that — if actually built — would limit Russian natural gas sales to French utilities. Germany approved $68 billion in December to accelerate its climate and green infrastructure spending.

“It’s been a seismic shift over the last six months,” said Henning Gloystein, an energy analyst at the Eurasia Group. The sharpest turnabout may have come Tuesday, with Scholz’s decision to freeze the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The move was so sudden that even some of Germany’s closest European allies were taken by surprise. In meetings at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend, Scholz had told fellow leaders that he would place a hold on the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine, according to a senior European diplomat familiar with the conversations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive talks. The diplomat said that the furious tone of Putin’s speech Monday may have accelerated the German decision.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/02/23/russia-ukraine-eu-nordstream-strategy-energy/

[multigraincracker]

1. Nuke Russia with

NATO nuke plants. Every plant that goes online will now be a bomb on Russia.
👍

[NNadir]

2. The reality is that Germany will up it's coal reliamce.

In no way does that represent any positive for climate.

Germany didn't need to do this. Fear and ignorance won the day and every human being on this planet will be affected by the continued reliance on coal in Germany and every other country and locality that declared, in defiance of simple math, that nuclear energy is more dangerous than climate change.