No Joke: Greens Embrace Putin

W e thought we’d seen greenies praise all kinds of authoritarian moves to further their agenda. But Politico Europe, a well-read publication by elites who are marinated in green politics, has outdone everyone by having Vladimir Putin top its annual Green 28, a list of “the 28 power players behind Europe’s green agenda.”

Politico argues vigorously for its choice of Putin, such that it convinced me that it’s not joking. The magazine claims that the war in Ukraine has been great for the environment because it “forced Europe to finally break its fossil fuel addiction” and helped speed up the continent’s “green revolution.”

By launching his brutal invasion and manipulating energy markets to keep oil prices high, Putin has “achieved something generations of green campaigners could not,” Politico explains.

Clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security. . . . Putin invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge.

It notes that the European Commission’s president, Ursula von der Leyen, responded to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine by calling for Europe to “massively invest in renewables,” a dubious short-term course given the limitations of wind and solar technology.

I don’t know which is more deranged. Supporting Putin’s murderous attack on Ukraine or cheering on Europe’s green new deal, which has thrust Europe into an energy crisis, with energy rationing, power outages, $10-a-gallon gas, and a return to burning wood for home-heating purposes. To avoid blackouts, Germany must keep open nuclear plants that were scheduled to close in December. It’s a return to a new form of the Dark Ages in Europe.

Most people applaud that Germany has suspended operation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia. The country was already dependent on Russia for 50 percent of its natural gas. But Politico enters the realm of sheer fantasy with its claim that Europe can now overcome energy shortages with “an array of cheap and reliable alternatives . . . which now generate power at a fraction of the cost of gas.”

But German environmentalists have made it clear that they still view any energy source that’s not completely coated in green theology as the enemy. “Fossil fuels and nuclear power are the problem,” Robert Habeck, a Green Party leader who serves as the minister of economy in the socialist-led government, told his party’s conference last week. He won grudging party approval for his plan to keep two nuclear power plants temporarily open until April 2023 in the event of a serious energy crisis.

Germany’s third remaining nuclear plant, in Emsland, however, will go offline at the end of 2022, as previously planned. The Greens have vowed that the government they are a part of will not agree to anything that allows any of the plants to procure new nuclear fuel.

“We have never seen such a huge gap between the foreign-policy needs of the West in energy and the complete refusal of policy-makers in both Europe and the U.S. to resist the special-interest demands of environmental groups opposing energy development,” James Lucier, an energy analyst with Capital Alpha Partners in Washington, D.C., tells me. Now, the Greens are no longer just wrong; they are putting the future of Western economics at risk.

The satirist Sonny Bunch says, “Environmentalists make good movie villains because they want to make your real life worse.” We’d add that they are also somewhat entertaining because they say the darnedest things — such as that Vladimir Putin, the environmental despoiler of Ukraine, is somehow a green icon.