24 The New York Reviewproduction finally surpassed its Soviet
peak.
But the long- term future of the Rus-
sian oil industry, like that of the Russian
economy, looked dismal even before the
new sanctions. West Siberia, long the
country’s primary source of oil, is run-
ning low. The extraction of Arctic oil is
already well underway, but it is expen-
sive and relies in part on foreign technol-
ogy that was sanctioned even before the
invasion of Ukraine. The new sanctions
are also causing backups in shipments
that could eventually lead to a shortage
of storage space, which could in turn
require a slowdown in production.
As time goes on, Gustafson argues,
the Russian oil industry will be more
and more dependent on government
tax breaks. A dwindling supply will
lose value in a global market that is
shifting to renewable energy. In Gus-
tafson’s account, most of the factors
that will determine the future of Rus-
sia’s oil exports lie outside its control:
exhaustion of its most accessible oil-
fields, increasing difficulty and expense
in reaching remaining sources, damage
to oil infrastructure caused by climate
change, and reduction in demand from
the EU and later from Asia. But Rus-
sia’s choices have had some effect. Its
invasion of Ukraine has vastly accel-
erated the timeline for this squeeze by
prompting new sanctions and informal
boycotts even as it drives the price of
oil to over a hundred dollars a bar-
rel. Putin can use these high prices to
compensate for some of the economic
losses caused by sanctions, and to fur-
ther increase his personal wealth, but
he can’t replenish Russia’s oil wells,
refreeze permafrost, or stop the global
adoption of renewable energy sources.As the world tries to shift away from
oil and coal, gas will likely function, for
better or worse, as a “br idge” f uel ; Gus-
tafson’s previous book was titled The
Bridge: Natural Gas in a Redivided
Europe (2020). The Soviet Union left
Russia with the world’s largest gas in-
dustry and largest gas reserves. Gas
was, and remains, the country’s essen-
tial source of cheap domestic energy,
the reason for the notoriously stifling
heat of Russian residences in winter.
Cheap gas is one of the crucial bene-
fits that the state provides to keep its
citizens content and to assist domestic
industry. Unsurprisingly, this abun-
dance leads to wastefulness. One way
for Russia to greatly reduce its carbon
emissions would be to make its build-
ings energy efficient.
Under Putin, Russia began produc-
ing gas from the Yamal Peninsula,
making up for declining production
in older fields. There will be no short-
age of Russian gas, Gustafson judges,
into the 2050s. The problem, again,
may be on the demand side. Russia can
ship natural gas to Europe at a lower
cost than anyone else via pipelines, the
easiest means of transporting it; the al-
ternative, liquefied natural gas (LNG),
can be shipped overseas but requires
the construction of special terminals,
an expensive, time- consuming pro-
cess. Russia has spent a huge amount
of money to develop new gas fields
and pipelines for the European mar-
ket—but that market was poised to de-
cline even before the recent invasion,
because of public pressure to reduce
dependence on fossil fuels, especially
Russian ones.Much of the developing world sees
natural gas as a cleaner, less polluting
alternative to coal, an important con-
cern given life- threatening levels of
air pollution in China, India, and else-
where. Most developing countries have
also declined to join in sanctioning Rus-
sia; some are inclined to take its side,
in part because of their dependence on
Russian energy, arms, and other com-
modities, notably grain. (Russia and
Ukraine together provide 15 percent
of the world’s imported grain, and the
current war is threatening food secu-
rity in the Middle East and parts of Af-
rica.) Russia was already trying to pivot
its gas export business toward Asia, be-
ginning with LNG shipments and a new
pipeline to China. But Gustafson con-
cludes that even if this means a growth
in gas revenues from Asia to compen-
sate for declining sales to Europe in the
coming decades, this will not make up
for the loss in income from oil, because
of competition from Chinese coal and
LNG sales from Australia and Qatar.
Sanctions and public outrage have
now provoked a high- speed effort
to quit Russian energy. The United
States, which became the world’s lead-
ing hydrocarbon producer in the 2010s
thanks to the “shale oil revolution”
under President Obama, is shipping
LNG to Europe to help the EU avoid
dependence on Russia (but not on
planet- destroying carbon emissions).
When the US became a net energy
exporter in 2019, it aspired to rival
Russia in providing gas to Europe.
Now that ambition has been achieved
in the space of a month, and, accord-
ing to the Financial Times, US shale
companies are enjoying a “tsunami of
cash.” There has been much acrimoni-
ous debate about the degree to which
NATO expansion into Eastern Europe
contributed to Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine; perhaps US- Russian compe-
tition over energy provision to Europe
ought to receive more attention.If one views the Russo- Ukrainian war
as a matter of energy politics, there are
clear material as well as historical, polit-
ical, and cultural reasons for Ukraine’s
victimization. In March Gustafson
told n+1 that Putin has long been “ob-
sessed by Ukrainian gas,” making nu-
merous unsuccessful attempts to gain
control of the gas pipeline system that
runs from Russia to Europe through
Ukraine. In a chapter on the two coun-
tries in The Bridge, Gustafson called
the Ukrainian- Russian gas relationship
a “prolonged and difficult divorce.” In
this sense, Gustafson said, Putin’s self-
defeating behavior becomes “clinically
understandable.”
Soviet gas came first from reserves
in Ukraine, which is why Soviet pipe-
lines were built there. When the Sovi-
ets reached the end of the Ukrainian
reserves, they found new ones in
West Siberia—but the gas continued
to pass through Ukraine. Post- Soviet
Ukraine—heavily reliant on Russian
gas, politically independent but also
impoverished and corrupt—charged
Russia for the passage while skimming
gas off as it traveled west. Some of this
gas was used to heat Ukrainian house-
holds and businesses, while some went
to oligarchs who then returned a por-
tion of their ill- gotten gains to highly
placed Russians.
The bonds of industry and corrup-
tion kept Ukraine tied to Russia, andthe two countries were locked in a cycle
of “conflict and collusion,” as Gus-
tafson calls it. In the mid- 2000s Russia
began demanding a higher price from
Ukraine for its gas, and Ukrainian
buildings got colder. Price disputes led
to repeated supply disruptions and po-
litical crises between the two countries.
I was at an event in Odesa in the winter
of 2007 that included both Ukrainian
and Russian participants. In the chilly
sanatorium that was being used as a
conference center, the Russians com-
plained incessantly about the tempera-
ture. “Why don’t you Ukrainians heat
your rooms properly?” they joked.
Their Ukrainian colleagues seethed in
silence.
Anxious to cut out an increasingly
recalcitrant Ukraine, Russia began
constructing a new system of pipelines
to Turkey, Germany, and Poland. The
fifth and final pipeline, NordStream 2,
was the first to attract widespread op-
position from 2016 onward, owing to
concerns about excessive European de-
pendence on Russia for energy and in-
creasing US- Russian tensions. Though
Ukraine no longer relies on Russian
gas, at least not gas piped directly from
Russia (rather than passed through
a European middleman), it opposed
the construction. Ukraine’s revenues
from pipeline transit amounted to about
$1 billion a year—money that the country
needed more desperately than ever with
its fragile economy grievously damaged
by the Donbas war that began in 2014.
And without a pipeline going through its
territory, Ukraine would seem to have
no leverage at all over Russia.
Imperialism originates in a struggle
for resources; the ideology justifying
the brutality of conquest and control
is secondary. Oil has been one of the
most coveted resources of the modern
era, but the oldest and most essential
resource is food. Ukraine’s famously
fertile “black earth,” desired by many
invaders and colonizers over the course
of the country’s history, may also be
among the motivations for Russia’s
new aggression. According to recent
reports, Russia has been comman-
deering or destroying Ukrainian grain
stores and making off with Ukrainian
agricultural equipment, smuggling the
stolen grain to Syria for sale in the Mid-
dle East. Gustafson points out that as
shortages become more frequent, food
will become an increasingly significant
tool of geopolitical influence.It will be a long time before Europe
can break its reliance on Russian com-
modities. The transition to renewable
energy requires fossil fuels for mining,
construction, and shipping; aluminum
and steel for solar panels, wind tur-
bines, and electric vehicles; rare- earth
metals for batteries. The Russian com-
pany Rusal, founded by the billionaire
Oleg Deripaska, is the largest alumi-
num producer outside China. (Rusal
denounced the Bucha atrocities, a star-
tling move, and it previously supported
carbon taxes and other climate- friendly
measures. Both are signs of its global
ties and concern about damaging its
business relationships.) The Russian
company Norilsk Nickel is the world’s
largest refined nickel producer and a
major copper producer, and Russia is
one of the world’s leaders in palladium
and platinum production.
Gustafson thinks that the increase
in the price of metals for renewableswill not compensate for Russia’s loss of
revenues as fossil fuel prices and sales
decline. Still, the need for these met-
als makes a full economic break with
Russia unrealistic. In March the price
of nickel rose 250 percent in two days,
although official sanctions did not in-
clude Norilsk Nickel or its chairman,
Vladimir Potanin, out of concerns
about price shocks.
Economically, Russia has chosen to
bet on the short game; the long game
will be ruinous. Though Putin made
substantial progress in modernizing
Russia’s oil, gas, and agricultural sec-
tors, and despite the striking success
of Russia’s civilian nuclear power pro-
gram, the country’s economic gains
during the Putin era have been based
on extraction rather than innovation,
with the state dominating most indus-
tries. State control is being reinforced
by the new sanctions, which make
Russian business more dependent on
the Kremlin and have led to an exo-
dus of Western companies and a con-
solidation of their holdings in Russian
hands. Russia’s failure to produce its
own technology follows a pattern that
is not simply Soviet but dates back to
the prerevolutionary period. Russians
have their own name for this phenom-
enon, calling their country a resursnyi
pridatok, or “resource appendage.”
Russia’s only major areas of techno-
logical innovation are in nuclear power
and weapons.
Russia’s economic model has been
extremely conservative, focused on
accumulation. (Much revenue is also
stolen, of course.) This meant failing to
invest in development—and now much
of that money is unavailable thanks to
the freeze on Russia’s foreign currency
reserves. Even before the new sanc-
tions, Gustafson wrote that Russia’s
“nest egg,” collected over twenty years,
would soon run out. Like oil, it is not
renewable. Meanwhile, fear of expro-
priation or persecution even among
Russia’s richest and most powerful
politicians and businesspeople means
that much of the country’s money has
been spirited away to offshore bank ac-
counts. One study found that by 2015,
rich Russians’ offshore wealth was
about three times greater than net for-
eign reserves and roughly equivalent to
all household financial assets in Russia.
Much of that may have been frozen in
the new sanctions on Russian individu-
als. But either way, it is not available to
the Russian economy.
As Russia’s income declines, so will
its ability to placate its population with
cheap household gas and generous wel-
fare policies. This will likely lead to
social destabilization, exacerbated by
the disruption and suffering caused by
climate change and a weakening econ-
omy. The Russian war on Ukraine,
meanwhile, has resulted in the emigra-
tion not only of opposition politicians
and journalists but also of profession-
als, especially younger ones, who have
skills marketable elsewhere in the
world—for instance, IT specialists,
who find it easy to work from safer,
freer cities like Bishkek or Tbilisi.
The scientists, activists, and business-
people who might help Russia cope
with climate change are also among
those likely to emigrate. Klimat’s time
horizon of 2050 is short, but Putin’s is
even shorter: he is now almost seventy
years old. After him will come the del-
uge, the wildfires, the droughts, the
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