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Climate Action
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Eastern Europe, Caucasus
and Central Asia
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Climate chronicle of the
war
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The upheaval in oil and
gas markets started by Russia's war in Ukraine
is helping fuel a clean-energy boom as countries
scramble to secure their power supply. One
notable record: Investment in solar outpaced
that in oil for the first time last year,
according to the International Energy Agency,
which released a report recently on global energy
investment. But the world is
still investing far too much in fossil fuels,
the Paris-based group warned. Investment in that
sector is currently double the maximum amount
that would be allowed if nations are to meet
their stated pledges to reduce emissions, the
IEA said.
Russia’s
gambit to deter support for Ukraine by
restricting energy supplies flopped—thanks to
concerted action by European countries. The most
significant defeat in Russia’s war on Ukraine
was suffered not on a battlefield but in the
marketplace. The Russian aggressors had expected
to use natural gas as a weapon to bend Western
Europe to their will. The weapon failed. Why?
And will the failure continue? Unlike oil, which
is easily transported by ocean tanker, gas moves
most efficiently and economically through fixed
pipelines. Pipelines are time-consuming and
expensive to build.
Ukraine war and
Biden’s IRA force EU to accelerate energy
transition
In
order to accelerate the move away from Russian
fossil fuels and protect EU businesses, the
European Commission in May 2022 significantly
increased its targets for clean energy capacity
in the bloc. That same month, Brussels signed a
joint commitment with electrolyser manufacturers
to increase electrolyser capacity for hydrogen
production tenfold, by 2025. Sunfire has
increased its order numbers by a factor of 10
compared with 2021, Aldag says. “This is really
because hydrogen is seen as a way to substitute
large amounts of energy that we’re buying now at
extremely high costs from countries that we
shouldn’t buy this from.”
Energy-efficient
housing will be rebuilt for Kharkiv
residents
The
mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, said that the
restoration of housing stock in the city will be
carried out using the latest energy-saving
technologies. This, among other things, will
make it possible to restrain the increase in
tariffs for communal services, he said in an
interview with the "News. Topic of the Day"
project. Terekhov emphasized that the city plans
to use a number of green technologies in order
to have cheap electricity. This will help not to
increase fares for city electric transport, as
well as tariffs for other communal services.
However, he did not reveal the
details.
The
11th package of sanctions is unlikely to include
a ban on ships carrying sanctioned cargo from
Russia from entering European ports, and
measures against transport companies seen
transshipping goods on the high seas to
circumvent restrictions are likely to be
relaxed. On one of the key points of possible
sanctions - on measures against third countries
that will not be able to explain the sharp
increase in imports of sanctioned goods from the
EU and will be suspected of assisting Moscow -
there are also contradictions. Germany and a
number of other participants in the discussions
propose that sanctions should not be aimed at
entire countries, but at individual companies,
which will reduce both tension and the
effectiveness of restrictions.
The
head of the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA) on Tuesday urged the UN Security Council
to unambiguously support five principles aimed
at preventing a nuclear accident amid the war in
Ukraine, now in its 15th month. The Zaporizhzhya
plant has come under fire during the war. It has
lost off-site power seven times and had to rely
on emergency diesel generators – “the last line
of defence against a nuclear accident,” he said.
“We are fortunate that a nuclear accident has
not yet happened,” Mr. Grossi told ambassadors.
“As I said at the IAEA Board of Governors last
March - we are rolling a dice and if this
continues then one day, our luck will run out.
So, we must all do everything in our power to
minimize the chance that it does.”
Ukraine’s
energy sector is among those that have suffered
the most because of the war. The energy
infrastructure is commonly the target of Russian
air attacks, and as such strikes continue, the
damage mounts daily and will not magically
disappear with the war’s end. On the other hand,
Ukrainian energy assets were deeply depreciated
and obsolete even before the full-scale
invasion, and the Ukrainian economy was among
the most energy-hungry globally. The lack of
market approaches to energy sector management,
half-hearted reforms, the drag of populism, a
nontransparent and unpredictable energy policy,
and an unattractive business environment created
barriers to investment in the sector and,
accordingly, its modernization.
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US deal could plug
Turkmenistan’s colossal methane
emissions
The US is in
negotiations with Turkmenistan over an agreement to
plug the central Asian nation’s colossal methane
leaks. Turkmenistan was responsible for
184 “super-emitter”
events
in which the powerful greenhouse gas was
released in 2022, the highest number in the
world. One caused climate pollution equivalent
to the rate of emissions from 67m cars. US
officials hope that some leaks from
Turkmenistan’s oil and gas industry could be
halted by the start of the UN’s Cop28 climate
summit in late November. Success would represent
a major achievement in tackling the climate
crisis.
For more than 50 years,
Afghanistan has contemplated building an
enormous canal that will divert the waters of
the Amu Darya River and irrigate the country’s
dry northern plains. In January this year, it
became suddenly apparent that the project is
well underway, with the release of a video by the Taliban. Since
then, the Qosh Tepa canal, which may divert
up to a
third
of the Amu Darya, has been the subject of
international interest and concern. “It is our own fault
that we are not prepared for such a situation,”
said Yusup Kamalov, an Uzbek ecologist who is
chair of NGO the Union for the Defense of the
Aral and Amu Darya.
Self-described
environmental activists in Azerbaijan who took
part in the government-backed blockade of
Nagorno-Karabakh are voicing discontent over
their finances. On May 26, a group of
Azerbaijani NGO heads assembled in front of the
presidential administration office in Baku,
protesting against what they called cuts in
their state grants. The same people participated
in a demonstration on a key road connecting
Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia that lasted for 138
days and ended after it was made
redundant by a new Azerbaijani customs
checkpoint at the other end of
the road.
UN
climate talks in Germany kicked off on Monday
without an agreed final agenda for its technical
discussions, a senior negotiator said, clouding
optimism that the 10-day meeting would result in
a clear programme for the COP28 conference in
Dubai. The Bonn Climate Change Conference,
designed to prepare decisions for adoption at
COP28 in the United Arab Emirates, is seen as a
mid-way check for how ambitious international
climate talks will take shape at COP28 in
December.
Rich industrialised
countries responsible for excessive levels of
greenhouse gas emissions could be liable to pay
$170tn in climate reparations by 2050 to ensure
targets to curtail climate breakdown are met, a
new study calculates. The proposed compensation,
which amounts to almost $6tn annually, would be
paid to historically low-polluting developing
countries that must transition away from fossil
fuels despite not having yet used their “fair
share” of the global carbon budget, according to
the analysis published in the journal Nature
Sustainability. The compensation
system is based on the idea that the atmosphere
is a commons, a natural resource for everyone
which has not been used
equitably.
In
Germany, wind and solar generation are expected
to provide 76% of total energy by 2030 In
Europe, the increase in renewable energy
capacity, in particular solar, has led to a
record decrease in the price of natural gas from
mid-2021 by more than 65%. Thus, in June, Dutch
gas will be delivered for €24.68 per
megawatt-hour, and prices are likely to continue
to fall, Bloomberg reports. The material said
that such a price reduction is due to a number
of factors, including a warm winter. However,
the main factor was the growth of RES. Thus, in
Germany, from the beginning of 2023, 11% of
solar capacity was added from the level of
2022.
In a recent address to
global climate envoys, the Emirati President of
Cop28 Sultan Al Jaber proclaimed that the United
Arab Emirates had “embraced the energy
transition.” The speech was the fore-runner to
the start of a typically slick public relations
campaign, with the UAE’s Minister of Climate
Change Mariam Almheiri telling
Reuters that the world is not
ready to “switch off” fossil fuels. If there are
any within the climate movement holding out
hopes for the UAE’s approach to climate change,
this is the moment to start paying attention to
its record as a profoundly regressive and
dangerous actor in global
affairs.
Italy could abandon
coal by 2024, environment minister
says
Italy
could shut down its coal-fired power stations in
2024, a year earlier than planned, if gas prices
remain at current low levels, Environment
Minister Gilberto Pichetto Fratin said on
Monday. Italy, which had to find an alternative
for the gas it used to import from Russia
following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine,
increased its production of energy from coal to
7.5% of the total last year, from 4.6% in 2021.
"The intention is to abandon coal by 2025 or
even earlier... I hope to succeed by 2024, if
gas prices hold at the current (low) levels,"
Pichetto Fratin said.
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Sent: Tuesday, June 06,
2023 8:55 PM
Subject: 🌏 CAN EECCA
Newsletter: Turkmenistan’s colossal methane emissions, More money for
solar power
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