Global challenges and social justice: Energy security and climate change in a time of conflict

29th June 2022

There can be few challenges facing us more pressing than climate change, which if unchecked threatens to decimate food production as unstable climate conditions including droughts and floods damage crops, and make large portions of the globe uninhabitable, driving a new wave of climate refugees. The somewhat piecemeal efforts to tackle climate change have faced a setback in Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has interrupted Russian fossil fuel supplies with sanctions to dissuade Russia from aggression.

This has created an immediate problem for Europe, which imports around 40% of its gas supplies from Russia, with many individual European states also highly reliant on Russian oil. The conflict in Ukraine presented a potentially pivotal moment in energy policy, compounding the need to address climate change with a tangible incentive created by supply shortages to reduce reliance on high carbon fuels.

However, rather than state investment into reducing the demand for fossil fuels through a programme of mass upgrades of home insulation, solar panels and renewable heating, there has been a scramble in the West to source new fossil fuels. Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s new windfall tax on energy companies includes a 91% rebate for energy companies investing in oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, depriving the Treasury of enough funding to insulate 2 million homes.

Nor is Britain alone in its reaction. The European Union is extending and expanding its new network of gas supplies from Azerbaijan and importing liquified natural gas from America. This reflexive clinging to traditional energy sources when energy security is threatened by conflict is an opportunity missed and a folly sustained. Huge investments into fossil fuels, just when the world needs to move away from them, makes a mockery of the already weak promises of COP26 and of Western claims of climate leadership. COP26 did see new goals to bolster renewable power development, curb methane emissions and deforestation and create greater cooperation on reaching net zero. However, COP26 also saw acknowledgement that previous promises of climate change funding by the West had not been met. The unequal power relationships behind the lack of funding for climate change measures and Western demands for action from developing states, even without that funding, echo prior Western behaviours over development aid.

Western leadership of international politics has long involved imposing demands on developing states via development funding, while ignoring both their situational constraints and the damage done by Western imperialism. Western development was largely fuelled by slavery and colonialism, which provided the manpower, resources and markets needed by the industrialising West, without sharing the benefits of that development with the countries from which these resources were forcibly taken. After decolonisation, many of these states were described by the West as ‘failed states’, in part due to conflicts triggered by decolonisation, and in part because of their underdeveloped economies.

The answer to this underdevelopment, according to Western institutions, was Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPS). Introduced in the late 1970s by the IMF and World Bank, SAPs assumed that a ‘one size fits all’ model of economic development was universally applicable, imposing that model on developing states as a condition of development aid funding. SAPs forced economic liberalisation measures including the deregulation and privatisation of industry, implementation of free market economics and minimisation of the public sector. When UN Human Development reports showed that not only had this conditional development aid failed to reduce poverty, it had actually increased it, SAPs were abandoned.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) replaced SAPs in 1999, and changed the focus from market conditions to alleviating the human dimensions of poverty, including lack of access to education, shortened lifespans and maternal death rates. These human aspects of poverty were encapsulated in the Millennium Development Goals, eight UN goals to reduce poverty with targeted action against the deprivations poverty causes.

PRSPs initially placed decision-making power on aid spending in the hands of recipient states. However, aid conditionality was recreated by the demand for poverty-reduction plans that measured by progress against the Millennium Development Goals as a condition of access to development funding. Aid conditionality meant that states would only receive development funding if they complied with Western ideas of how poverty should be resolved, creating a new colonialism that assumed superior Western understanding of the problems faced by developing states. As such, aid conditionality constrained developing states, preventing them from addressing the local conditions that fed into poverty.

Old habits, it seems, die hard, and so global South mistrust of Western interventions as a new colonialism are not entirely unfounded. It is in this context that the fight to address climate change takes place.

Beyond the extensive changes needed in the West to fight climate change (including carbon-neutral energy security and the decarbonisation of transport and heating) are fundamental changes needed in developing states, who are some of the largest polluters. However, to demand change from such states without recognising their issues is unhelpful and repeats the mistakes of the past. Dictating terms for climate change to developing states while withholding vast Western resources that could make a difference, like a treat for good behaviour, smacks of the racial undertones of Western superiority that underpinned both colonialism’s civilising mission and post-colonial development aid. Much as with aid conditionality, Western imposition is counter-productive, inhibiting the change developing states could make if they were properly resourced and empowered to act.

Take China for example, who despite its growing dominance of the global economy is still a middle-income country with massive developmental needs. China is energy poor, with few domestic energy resources beyond the low-grade coal that fuels its industry, and requires massive levels of energy to fuel its development. The growth of wind and solar energy in China has been limited by inadequate Chinese energy infrastructure, necessitating the continued use of low-grade coal. Like other developing states, China is fully aware that climate change is a problem. West-led climate goals do not help China to overcome its energy constraints. Rather than high-handed pronouncements, a return to liberal principles of cooperation might offer a way forward on climate change.

Liberal principles of cooperation suggest that states work together because it is mutually beneficial to do so, an idea that obviously applies to the global, existential challenge of climate change. Such global cooperation would not be without difficulties, given the current strained geopolitical climate. States manoeuvre politically to gain power and enhance their own security, and energy insecurity gives states with natural energy sources a great deal of political power. Russia has effectively weaponised energy security in its conflict with Ukraine and the West by demanding payments in roubles to bypass sanctions, and by strategically withholding gas supplies to leverage state energy needs against political support, or at least non-intervention, in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. These tensions add to the pre-existing tensions between the West and China, and post-colonial relations between the West and developing states.

Still, global cooperation over global threats, even during times of deep conflict, is not without precedent. In 1987, the Montreal Protocol was signed by every nation, banning the use of chemicals that were eroding the ozone layer. The Montreal Protocol achieved universal support and ratification despite the entrenched political tensions of the ongoing Cold War, a political conflict between the West and Russia that threatened a nuclear catastrophe.

Russia might well resist measures to de-carbonise energy as they would diminish Russian geopolitical power, and yet Russia is not immune to climate change. Furthermore, with vast areas of steppe, Russia has the potential to become a major generator of wind and solar energy, offering a mechanism to offset the loss of carbon fuel revenues. The need for action on climate change is now so great that the normal political polarization of international relations should be set aside in favour of constructive cooperative action to address the problem.

Progress is reliant on funding and practical assistance, and that is dependent on rich Western states. The West grew rich by exploiting the people and resources of the developing world to fuel the industrialisation that has driven climate change. Now, it is time for the West to give some of this wealth back, offering unconditional financial and technological support for clean energy projects to replace fossil fuels and develop energy infrastructure in the global South. Such schemes would not be charity or altruism, but an acknowledgement of debt incurred, and of the mutual self-interest that demands we stop prevaricating and act while we can. Perhaps such acts, made freely and without strings attached, might even begin a political rapprochement and reset international relations on a more constructive basis. While constructive cooperation with states like China is not without difficulties, China’s human rights record perhaps chief among these, recent international disdain has accomplished little. For the sake of the world, it is time we in the West change our behaviour; making ourselves the changes we ask of others and putting our money where our mouths are, if we wish to encourage others to do the same.