With Russia temporarily cutting Germany off from its main natural gas supply, the threat of a permanent cutoff has become much more tangible. Russian President Vladimir Putin, at odds with Europe over his aggressive war against Ukraine, would not hesitate to use such a cutoff to create leverage over European affairs and the security of his neighbors.
Europeans are therefore scrambling to find new sources of gas. For example, one Dutch company, ONE-Dyas, just received government permission to develop a gas field in the North Sea that could start delivering 13 billion cubic meters of the stuff to German and Dutch households by 2024. That amount is only 10% of what Germany imported from Russia in 2021, but it’s just one piece of a larger puzzle that will include more gas fields, imports from Azerbaijan, and liquefied gas imports from the United States.
Unfortunately, Dutch and German environmental groups, one of which has the appropriate German acronym “DUH,” are suing to stop ONE-Dyas’s project. Their argument is that the creation of new energy infrastructure, no matter how badly needed, is inconsistent with European commitments to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases. “The construction of a new platform in the North Sea will create a new infrastructure that will increase our long-term dependence on fossil energy,” one group’s spokesman told Reuters.
First of all, it is ludicrous to assert that infrastructure is what makes people use energy. That’s like saying people would stop eating if you’d just stop building grocery stores — it’s all backward. Energy infrastructure is built out to meet demand. And in this case, the demand is a very real emergency that could plunge Europe into a dark, cold winter if nothing is done to prepare.
Germany, which made the foolish mistake of scuttling its nuclear power in an unjustified panic after the Fukushima disaster, would do well to restore that capacity as soon as it can. But that won’t happen overnight. The other alternatives are to find new sources of natural gas or to burn more coal.
Environmentalists may prefer to see Europe use less energy, but this isn’t a solution to a Russian cutoff. For one thing, that energy is needed for survival. Obviously, conservation can help bridge the gap, and consumers are always wise to conserve energy, but if you actually want Ukraine to defeat the Russian invasion, that simply will not do.
Gas prices are already high. If European governments let the war effort heap even more pain on energy consumers than they’re already suffering, the public may lose its stomach for the fight. In fact, it is likely that the only way Putin can emerge from this war victorious is if he turns Western populations against the war effort — probably by forcing energy prices up to intolerable levels.
You can bet that Putin is doing everything in his power to make that happen. Perhaps he is even funding some of the “phony anti-fracking groups” that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton once described.
President Joe Biden is still not doing everything he could from this side of the Atlantic, but he at least seems to have come to the realization that one cannot both stop Putin’s aggression and embrace environmental extremism. Biden seems to understand that the emergency in Ukraine is the greater threat to human flourishing and freedom — the continued heating of homes and electrification of Europe in winter probably isn’t going to cause the world to end any time soon. In this, at least, European courts and governments should follow his lead.
