By Elena Siniscalco
These days, Europe is seen as the weak link in the developed economic world. The European stock market is underperforming its US rival, down 22 per cent year-to-date. Even risky emerging markets are doing better. Likewise, Europe’s surging inflation rates, in countries like Germany and Spain (not to mention what the UK is going through), are worse than it is in Mexico.
What is the primary policy culprit for all this economic woe? Most of all this is due to European sanctions on Russian energy as punishment for its aggression in Ukraine. That’s by far the most significant headwind. These sanctions have set off a massive commodity price spike that’s rebounded to damage the European economy.
Green zealots (and there are a lot of them in Europe) say that somehow all this economic misery is actually good for the continent because by abandoning Russian oil and gas, European Union leaders are signaling to its member states and its people that it is boldly moving into a post-fossil fuels world. Ursula von der Leyen, the out-of-her-depth EU Commission president, grandly describes the move beyond fossil fuels as Europe’s moon mission.
But all this utopian fervor hits the skids the moment reality intrudes, for facts are stubborn things. Punchy revolutionary rhetoric won’t turn Europe away from fossil fuels. Instead, ironically, the continent is being forced to return to coal to make up for the energy shortfall as a result of giving up Russian gas, merely to keep the lights on over the coming winter. Yes, coal is back in climate-purist Europe.
The Greens – the second in command in the ruling German coalition and occupying the pivotal Economic and Foreign Ministries– have been dragooned by reality into using more coal, a fatal sin in their climate change religion. This month’s ban on Russian coal just means Germany will simply get it from elsewhere. And the place to make up the difference is with their old American allies.
U.S. coal exports to Europe rose more than 140 per cent in May compared to a year earlier — and they are continuing rising at that stratospheric level because Europe desperately needs coal for electricity generation to replace Russian gas. By October, U.S. coal shipments will need to grow far higher than they already are just so enough coal will be available in Europe to keep the heat on by winter, says the U.S. Coal Exports Coalition, part of the National Mining Association.
Despite all the endless nattering about climate change and the Paris Accord getting re-signed by the Biden Administration in his first year in office, the world’s biggest polluters are also not falling in line with Europe’s utopian green agenda, given the raging global energy crisis. For example, India, not wishing to commit economic suicide, said it would delay coal power plant closures recently to maintain low energy costs. This makes perfect policy sense. But to put it mildly, it is not music to the ears of Europe’s green elite.
At the big picture policy level, it is now painfully obvious that energy sanctions on Russia have boomeranged, proving to be a disaster for European commodity prices, fueling the continent’s cost of living crisis, through the law of unintended consequences. On the other side of the ledger, the increase in global energy prices that the sanctions have brought about have led to an unbelievable increase in Russia’s energy export earnings, up a whopping 22 percent in the year to date, as at the end of September. Surely, this is not what the West initially had in mind.
It is time to take a deep breath and actually think in realist terms. Some sanctions placed on Russia are good and serve western interests, but others, clearly, do not. But it has become something of a political nightmare – once the sanctions are in place, which leader could justify rolling them back? In a rush to appear at the front of the pack, many sanctions were slapped on private companies vital to the global economy without a second thought for the unintended consequences.
Instead, the West has shot itself in the foot on energy, done great harm to climate change initiatives, and risks rising global food prices due to fertilizer production limits, and sky-high energy prices.
At the world market level, there is little doubt that the demand for coal will continue to grow, while the economic reality energy sanctions have unleashed mean that the green agenda in the European Union has been pushed into the background. The massive expansion of renewables is currently mainly on paper – while the increasing hunger for energy today is real.
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