Russian president Vladimir Putin might be many things, but stupid is not one of them.
“Woke” is another: Putin is one of the last people who’d be browbeaten by a bunch of scowling teenagers and bourgeois loonies gluing themselves to roads.
Putin is also not the sort to deliberately cripple the Motherland just to appease finger-wagging greenies.
European governments are drawing up plans to phase out coal, US coal-fired power plants are being shuttered as prices of clean energy plummet, and new Asian projects are being scrapped as lenders back away from the dirtiest fossil fuel.
And Russia? President Vladimir Putin’s government is spending more than $US10 billion ($13 billion) on railroad upgrades that will help boost exports of the commodity. Authorities will use prisoners to help speed the work, reviving a reviled Soviet-era tradition.
The project to modernise and expand railroads that run to Russia’s Far Eastern ports is part of a broader push to make the nation among the last standing in fossil fuel exports as other countries switch to greener alternatives. The government is betting that coal consumption will continue to rise in big Asian markets like China even as it dries up elsewhere.
Putin is, whatever his faults, a realist. Doddering Joe Biden, delusional Boris Johnson and dimwitted Jacinda Ardern can bang on all they like about “net zero”, but that’s all just so much piss and wind. China and India, already the world’s biggest emitters, aren’t about to give up what’s supercharged their economies and dragged them out of the Third World.
Neither are Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi or Vladimir Putin about to be fooled by bogus claims like “prices of clean energy plummet”.
Let the gullible Germans, Danes, Brits and Australasians pay the highest electricity prices in the world while doing absolutely nothing to “save the planet”.
In fact, Putin is profiting handsomely from Europe’s idiocy. Germany in particular is importing vast amounts of Russian gas and oil. It’s a two-fer for Putin: a handy income stream, while making Russia’s traditional energy dangerously dependent on Putin keeping the pipelines open.
Now, he’s eyeing the East.
Putin is betting that his country’s land border with China and good relations with President Xi Jinping make it a natural candidate to dominate exports to the nation that consumes more than half of the world’s coal. His case is helped by the fact that Australia, currently the number one coal exporter, is facing trade restrictions from China amid a diplomatic dispute.
Not that a good lefty journalist could bring themselves to admit Putin’s wily good sense. Time to invoke the dreaded sky dragon.
But the plan is fraught with risk, both for Russia’s economy and the planet. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommends immediate phasing out of coal to avoid catastrophic global warming and the effects of climate change are expected to cost Russia billions in coming decades. Earlier this month the International Energy Agency went one step further and said no new fossil-fuel infrastructure should be built if the world wants to keep global warming will below 1.5 degrees Celsius. With all but one of the top 10 economies committed to reaching net-zero emissions within decades, the IEA’s Net Zero by 2050 Roadmap calls for phasing out all coal power plants without carbon capture as soon as 2040.
“Commitments” aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Dozens of countries “committed” to virtue-signalling targets at Kyoto and Paris – and then ignored them. Politicians talk a good game to try and appease the loony Climate Cultists, but it’s all talk. Except for the few who are truly drunk on the green Kool-Aid, like Boris Johnson, or are just away with the fairies, like Jacinda Ardern, most will say one thing and quietly do another.
Russian coal companies aren’t hamstrung by woke corporate activists, either.
The country’s biggest coal producers are privately run, meaning they aren’t facing the kind of financing problems currently being encountered by listed companies elsewhere as banks pull back funding for dirty energy. Suek, owned by billionaire Andrey Melnichenko, and Kuzbassrazrezugol OJSC, controlled by Iskander Makhmudov, are both planning to increase output. Russia also plans to boost coal production for steel making.
A-Property, owned by Russian businessmen Albert Avdolyan, bought the Elga coal mine in Russia’s Far Eastern region of Yakutia last year and plans to invest 130 billion roubles to expand output to 45 million tonnes of coal from the current 5 million tonnes by 2023. A third stage of Russia’s railroad expansion project will focus on boosting infrastructure for shipping coal out of Yakutia, a Russian Railways official said last month.
Sydney Morning Herald
So Russia and China are steaming ahead, Greta Thunberg be damned. But woke corporates, gutless politicians and delusional activists in the West are crippling their nation’s economies and industrial capabilities.
Putin probably can’t believe his luck.
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