22 The New York ReviewA Hotter Russia
Sophie Pinkham
Klimat :
Russia in the Age of Climate Change
by Thane Gustafson.
Harvard University Press,
312 pp., $39.95After Russia’s February 24 invasion of
Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelen-
sky and countless ordinary Ukrainians
entreated Europe to embargo Russian
energy, which has long been central to
European economies. The first rounds
of economic sanctions placed on Russia
by the EU were unprecedented in their
scope and severity, but they excluded
oil and gas—and did little to stop Rus-
sian aggression. Amid new revelations
about Russian atrocities, the EU re-
cently proposed fast- acting sanctions
on the Russian oil sector. Natural gas,
which is almost impossible to acquire
on short notice, has not yet fallen under
EU sanctions, but Russia has imposed
its own countersanctions on European
gas companies. Europe now finds itself
at risk of an energy crisis, with all the
economic and political consequences
such a shortage entails.
Thane Gustafson, a longtime spe-
cialist on Russian energy, wrote Kli-
mat: Russia in the Age of Climate
Change before the invasion, when the
Covid pandemic seemed the great un-
expected event complicating every
prediction. Yet with its focus on the
future of Russia’s energy, grain, and
metals markets, all of which have been
reconfigured by the war and the new
sanctions, Klimat could hardly be more
timely. Gustafson argues that Russia’s
days of hydrocarbon- funded might are
numbered. Unfortunately, the end of
this era will not come soon enough for
Ukrainians, or for the planet.
Russia is warming 2.5 times as fast as
the world on average, and the Arctic is
warming even faster. The cliché, avidly
promoted by Moscow, is that the coun-
try will be a relative winner in climate
change, benefiting from a melting and
accessible Arctic shipping route, longergrowing seasons, and the expansion
of farmland into newly thawed areas.
Gustafson counters, with a dry but per-
suasive marshaling of facts, that in the
redistribution of wealth and power that
will result from climate change, Russia
is doomed. After reading Klimat, Rus-
sia’s attack on Ukraine begins to look
like the convulsion of a dying state.About two thirds of Russia is covered
in permafrost, a mixture of sand and
ice that, until recently, remained frozen
year- round. As permafrost melts, walls
built on it fracture, buildings sink, rail-
ways warp, roads buckle, and pipelines
break. Anthrax from long- frozen rein-
deer corpses has thawed and infected
modern herds. Sinkholes have opened
in the melting ground, swallowing up
whole buildings. Ice roads over frozen
water, once the only way to travel in
some remote regions, are available for
ever- shorter periods. The Arctic coast
is eroding rapidly, imperiling struc-
tures built close to the water.
In 2020 the aging, poorly maintained
cement foundations of a power plant
storage tank in Norilsk split, pouring
21,000 tons of diesel into local water-
ways and threatening to contaminate
the nearby Arctic Ocean. Public out-
cry led to the punishment of some of
those responsible for the spill, but it
wasn’t enough to make the Russian
government take meaningful action on
the root causes of the disaster, includ-
ing climate change. The authorities re-
mained more focused on the opening
of the Northern Sea Route. The Arc-
tic was the Soviet Union’s “treasure
house,” as Gustafson puts it, the source
of much of its oil, gas, coal, metals, and
diamond reserves, and today Russia
takes the same extractive rather than
conservationist approach to the region.
Russia’s forests are the largest in the
world, accounting for a fifth of Earth’s
trees, but they are being grievously
damaged by fire, drought, and disease,all of which are caused or exacerbated
by climate change. Smoke has choked
Siberian cities. During the 2019 fires
that burned about 10,000 square miles
of forest in Siberia, the Internet lit up
with protest, and Russian singers and
actors took part in a flash mob called
“Siberia Is Burning.” President Putin
sent in military units to help extin-
guish the fire, but he was soon rescued
by rain. The problem was forgotten.
As burning, dying, clear- cut forests
become carbon producers rather than
carbon sinks, they make the problem of
climate change even worse. The same
is true of melting permafrost, which re-
leases methane, another potent green-
house gas.
Putin has presided over an impres-
sive expansion of Russian agriculture,
with grain harvests almost doubled
since the 1990s. Russia now makes
far more money from agriculture than
from arms sales; agricultural prod-
ucts are its third most lucrative export
after oil and gas. The 2014 sanctions by
Western countries in response to Rus-
sia’s annexation of Crimea only served
to increase this trend, as Russian coun-
tersanctions on imported foods led to
rapid increases in production.
In Klimat, Gustafson maintains that
Russia’s agricultural exports and reve-
nues will continue to increase until the
end of this decade, with global warm-
ing of one degree Celsius improving
Russian agricultural productivity. But
in the 2030s and 2040s the rate of in-
crease will diminish, because of harm
to Russian crops caused by drought,
heat waves, and torrential rain. Some
of these difficulties may be coun-
teracted by rising prices, as climate
change compromises the world’s food
supply, but Russia will also hit the
limit of its supply of arable land. Two
thirds of European Russia, the coun-
try’s most fertile agricultural area, is
already too dry. Thawed permafrost,
meanwhile, is sandy and infertile, and
will not make good farmland. Russiawill require more resources to pro-
duce the same amount of food. More
aggressive tactics to increase produc-
tion (e.g., heavy use of fertilizer) will
ultimately cause acidification and
erosion.Despite climate change’s many
frightening effects, it has produced
less concern in Russia than has exter-
nal pressure to reduce carbon emis-
sions. Before the invasion, Russian
companies with close ties to the out-
side world—those that were listed on
foreign exchanges or that had signif-
icant assets abroad, such as metals
companies, one of the most globalized
branches of Russian industry—had be-
come alarmed not necessarily by the
state of the environment or by Russia’s
position as the world’s fourth- largest
emitter of greenhouse gases, but by po-
tential financial losses if they failed to
meet new environmental regulations.
The EU’s 2019 proposal to tax im-
ports that did not conform to its emis-
sion standards threatened Russia’s
access to its primary market. (The pro-
posal, called the Carbon Border Ad-
justment Mechanism, was adopted in
July 2021 and will become fully opera-
tive in 2026.) The most important mar-
kets affected will be gas, copper, and
nickel, since Russia’s production of oil,
unlike its consumption, does not use
large amounts of carbon. Russia scram-
bled to find loopholes in the border tax,
such as dubious recalculations of the
carbon absorption of its forests. Some
in Russia called for a domestic carbon
tax or carbon trading scheme, but the
government was more inclined to com-
pensate companies for their losses.
It seems that there is almost nothing
that will convince the current govern-
ment to decarbonize. Hydrocarbons
are the source of its power, in every
sense; decarbonization would require
a reinvention of the whole political
system. Russia has the world’s largest
oil and gas reserves, outstripping even
Saudi Arabia. In 2019, before the eco-
nomic upheaval caused by Covid, oil
accounted for 44 percent of all Russian
export income. Oil and gas revenues
together made up 56 percent of Rus-
sia’s income from exports, contributing
39 percent of the federal budget.
Oil became a central part of the So-
viet economy in the 1960s, after a suc-
cessful effort to increase production.
By the mid- 1980s the Soviet Union
was the world’s leading oil producer.
In keeping with the practices of the
Soviet command economy and its ap-
proach to natural resources and the
environment—and as elsewhere in the
world—oil production was wasteful
and heedless of the future: resources
were misallocated (for instance, heavy
investment in single- industry towns in
West Siberian swamps and tundra), and
workers were pressured to meet high
targets using low- quality equipment
and primitive, inefficient techniques
that damaged oil fields. The chaotic pri-
vatization process in the 1990s helped
halve oil production. After Putin took
office, he reconsolidated the industry
under government control, both formal
and unofficial, and in 2018 Russian oilThe world’s largest permafrost crater, Batagay, Russia, 2017Padi Prints/ToyTVStock/AlamyPinkham 22 24 .indd 22 5 / 25 / 22 3 : 28 PM