Tension between catastrophe and opportunity has shaped the contours of the climate-change debate in Russia
FIRST CAME fires that turned the Siberian skies into a wall of solid smoke stretching for thousands of kilometres. Then came a drought that sucked the Lena River nearly dry, leaving boats marooned in the mud. It has been an arduous summer in Yakutia, an icy republic in Russia’s far east. Add to that the fact that the regional capital, Yakutsk, stands upon thawing permafrost that warps roads and buildings, and climate inaction becomes hard to defend.
At an Arctic forum in 2017, Vladimir Putin called climate change a “factor that bolsters optimism”, adding that it “provides more favourable conditions for economic activity in this region”. He once quipped that climate change would enable Russians to spend less money on fur coats. Ratification, though, will have minimal practical impact. Russia’s emission-reduction pledge for the Paris Agreement uses as a benchmark its levels in 1990—a year before the collapse of Soviet heavy industry and the downturn of the Russian economy. That sleight of hand means that cutting emissions by 25-30%, as Russia committed to achieve by 2030, requires virtually no reduction from today’s less industrial levels .
And if Russia does go greener, it may not be in a way that Western environmentalists will like. It has a flourishing domestic nuclear industry, and a well-padded foreign-order book. Mr Putin recently raised eyebrows with an attack on wind turbines over the harm they do to birds and, he said, worms. “They shake, causing worms to come out of the soil,” he said. “This is not a joke.”
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