Russia-Ukraine war shows urgent need to move off fossil fuels

Espen Barth Eide is Norway’s Minister of Climate and Environment. Fatih Birol is the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency.

The energy crisis triggered by Russia’s inexcusable aggression against Ukraine has focused attention on the vast amounts of fossil fuels that economies in Europe and around the world rely on to continue functioning day to day.

People need them to go about their lives and earn their livelihoods. Cutting off supplies abruptly would result in tremendous damage. But it’s equally clear that to continue to consume fossil fuels at current levels will result in tremendous damage from global warming, as the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes painfully clear.

A rapid but managed decline of fossil fuels is a central part of transforming the global energy sector to one with net zero emissions by 2050, which would give the world a fighting chance of limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 °C. This requires massive deployment of clean energy technologies such as solar, wind, EVs and energy efficiency in the coming years to reduce and replace the use of fossil fuels.

This is an immense undertaking of a speed and scale the world has never seen before. Making it a reality will require many millions of interdependent micro-decisions by policy makers, investors, businesses, and consumers. And the managed decline of fossil fuels needs to be conducted in a fair and just way that provides sufficient support for affected communities.

But the recent willingness of European leaders to take strong and rapid steps to start reducing reliance on Russian supplies of natural gas shows that when the reality of a threat becomes clear, governments can act decisively to lead the way on necessary changes. The climate crisis demands similarly decisive action. The growing catalogue of climate-induced disasters around the world frequently remind us that the dangers are already here and only increasing.

At the same time, Russia’s aggression demonstrates that the need for responsible energy exporters like Norway is greater than ever. As Europe rightly turns its back on Russian supplies, it will rely more on oil and gas from other producers in the near term – but less and less over time as its efforts to decarbonize accelerate.

Norway realizes that the writing is on the wall for fossil fuels in the coming decades. It is pushing hard to develop and deploy technologies such as EVs, hydrogen-powered passenger ships and even electric planes, all of which will reduce the transport sector’s use of oil. And it is eager to share what it has learned with other countries to help them use less oil as well. This puts Norway in the seemingly paradoxical position of being an oil producing country that is actively working to undermine demand for its biggest export.

Norway is also playing a…