Trump, Putin and a new "axis of fossil fuels"

When Trump and Putin finally meet, we could well see the emergence of a new axis of resurgence for the fossil fuel industry.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin said a week last Friday that the Russian leader is keen to meet with US President Trump. That now seems an age ago, since Trump's U-turn on Syria.

It seemed likely then that the meeting would be soon. But when they do finally meet, as they must, even if they don't have policy on Syria and the Ukraine in common, there's something else on which they do share much: a love of coal, gas and oil.

A pre-sarin-attack-in-Syria version of this article appeared on April 6 on The Fifth Estate.

Both Trump and Putin support this industry – and the mining industry in general – and deprecate climate change and the Paris Agreement.

People close to the powerful Russian oil community say that both countries see energy cooperation as one of the few common grounds to move the strained relations forward.

Putin and Trump have much in common on the topic of energy. As InsideClimate has pointed out last year:

Russia is the fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Yet the plan it submitted under the Paris agreement to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 is one of the weakest of any government and actually permits Russia to increase carbon pollution over time. The Paris Agreement went into effect last November, but Russia is the only major emitter that has not ratified it. Instead, it has laid out a timetable that would delay ratification for almost three years.

Trump’s climate-sceptic appointee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, has not confirmed whether the United States will remain in the global climate change pact.

Artic exploration

The meeting looks likely to happen in Finland once it assumes chair of the Arctic Council. This is significant because the Council is a forum for discussing access to the mineral rights of the sea-bed within the circle.

Due to climate change (which Trump does not believe in) and melting of the Arctic sea-ice, more energy resources and waterways are now becoming accessible.

Both leaders want access to the vast reserves of oil and gas known to exist there. Their desire is vigorously opposed by environmentalists. Putin’s government famously imprisoned Greenpeace activists in 2013 for protesting about Russian oil exploration in the Arctic.

Igor Yusufov, Tillerson and Russia

Igor Yusufov, Russian energy minister (2001-2004) who presided over the privatisation of the industry is now, oddly, head of US$3 billion energy investment Fund Energy. This fund does deals in oil and gas projects with the likes of US oil service multinational Halliburton.

Yusufov has issued a statement supporting greater cooperation between the two superpowers. He believes that Russia and the USA will discuss the development of coal production and corresponding technologies. Russia is in possession of the world’s second largest coal reserves.

Yusufov has known Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, formerly head of ExxonMobil, since 2002. He is enthusiastic about Tillerson’s involvement in building bridges between the two countries – and forging links on energy.

Tillerson has been involved in Russian energy projects since January 1998 when he took over ExxonMobil’s operations in Russia and the Caspian Sea region.

ExxonMobil and Gazprom did very well out of Tillerson’s involvement in Russia. Both sides will be hoping this success can be repeated.

In connection with the ongoing suspicions about Mr Trump’s connections to Russia, and the degree of support he received from Mr Putin, John McCain, a senator from Arizona, has said he is “very concerned” about Tillerson’s 2013 acceptance of Russia’s Order of Friendship from Mr Putin.

The man Tillerson will be talking to is foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, whom Yusufov speaks admiringly about and says “also possesses a profound knowledge in energy”.

Trump will be jealous of Russia’s achievements with its coal industry. Contrary to the state of affairs in the US, which he wants to reverse, in the last five years Russian coal production increased by 12.7 per cent. Yusufov attributes this to the benefits of privatisation.

Much of the increase is due to open-cast mining, which has lax environmental controls – another (non)-policy favoured by both Trump and Putin.

The end of the Paris Agreement?

Yusufov says that Russia is concerned about the likely slowdown in global demand for coal due to the Paris Agreement. But its Energy Ministry still forecasts an increase in production to 425 million tons in 2020 and to 480 m tons in 2030.

How does this square with being a signatory of the Paris Agreement? It doesn’t. Russia says one thing and does another. This is its form of Orwellian “doublethink”.

An example is Yusufov’s statement: “We see [the Paris Agreement] as a cornerstone of the future environmentally conscious world. At the same time we clearly understand, that at this stage the Russian economy would not survive without hydrocarbons our companies explore and produce.”

At least Russia is honest about wanting to have its climate cake and eat it.

As with the West’s misplaced faith in carbon capture to achieve this dual end, Putin believes in nanotubes. He mentioned them in Paris prior to the climate change conference. He said that these Russian-made fibres, one billionth of a metre in diameter, will “cut Russian CO2 emissions by 160-180 million tons”.

Russia currently emits 2322 Mt CO2 a year, or 5.4 per cent of global emissions.

In the US last week, Trump signed an order – which would need to be passed by Congress – rolling back former President Barack Obama’s climate change policies, including the Clean Power Plan to slash carbon emissions from power plants.

This would damage the United States’ ability to meet its Paris commitments.

Only the U.S. Congress stands between this emerging alliance and the goals of the Paris Agreement.

The world will be watching this summit more closely than it has watched any summit in the last few years.

David Thorpe is the author of a number of books on energy, buildings and sustainability. See his website here.

Greenpeace heroes thrown into Arctic Sea by Gazprom oil workers

Activists protesting at Arctic oil drilling were thrown into the freezing Pechora Sea this morning by Russian sailors working for oil giant Gazprom.

The action is occurring as Arctic sea ice cover reaches its lowest ever extent four weeks earlier than the previous record five years ago, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

The ice extent was 4.10 million square kilometers (1.58 million square miles) on August 26; 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles) below the previous record low extent of 4.17 million square kilometers (1.61 million square miles), recorded on September 18 2007.

The graph above shows how unprecedented this drop in ice cover is in historical terms.

NSIDC scientist Walt Meier called it "an indication that the Arctic sea ice cover is fundamentally changing", and its Director Mark Serreze, commented that: "The previous record, set in 2007, occurred because of near perfect summer weather for melting ice. Apart from one big storm in early August, weather patterns this year were unremarkable. The ice is so thin and weak now, it doesn't matter how the winds blow."

There is little doubt now that this pattern of ice loss is due to the unexpectedly fast increase in the rate of global warming. And yet the reaction of countries bordering the Arctic Ocean has been to see it as an opportunity to access the resources that lie on its seabed.

On Sunday, Royal Dutch Shell asked the U.S. Interior Department to extend a September deadline to complete planned drilling in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northern coast, because it realised that its Arctic Challenger ship would become icebound later in the season than it had previously estimated. Shell also plans to drill in the Beaufort Sea.

Greenpeace is mounting a global challenge, which it claims is supported by almost two million people, to stop the drilling for oil and gas in the region. It argues that firstly any spillage or accident would have disastrous consequences and be almost impossible to clean up, and secondly that it is madness to continue to use fossil fuels when the climate of the planet is so obviously radically changing.

Its activists have been in the Arctic for five days. For the first three days they occupied the first permanent oil rig in the offshore Russian Arctic.

Then, Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo and six other Greenpeace activists in the Pechora Sea headed in two high-speed boats to intercept the Anna Akhmatova, a passenger vessel carrying workers to the rig, and were soon supported by two other boats carrying seven more.

14 activists from 10 countries attached themselves and their boats to the anchor chain of the Anna Akhmatova in order to prevent it from sailing out to the Prirazlomnaya oil platform.

When the first officer sought orders from management in Moscow he was told to “use any means at your disposal to continue operations," according to Greenpeace. At 5am this morning, he ordered two Gazprom ships to train high-pressure water cannons onto the Greenpeace inflatable boats.

Their occupants were washed out of the boats, and thrown into icy water some distance away. They were rescued and are safe, and not long afterwards the action was called off.

The Prirazlomnaya is the first permanent oil platform in the offshore Arctic and marks what Greenpeace calls “the creeping industrialization” of the Arctic. The construction phase on the platform is nearly complete, and Gazprom is eager to begin drilling and become the first oil company to commercially produce oil from the offshore Arctic.

However, Greenpeace has warned that Gazprom has no strategy to prevent oil spills or clean them up if they occur. “Despite extreme operating conditions, Gazprom has only released a summary of its oil spill response plan to the public. Yet even this document shows that the company would be completely unprepared to deal with an accident in the Far North, and would rely on substandard clean-up methods, such as shovels and buckets," it said in a statement.

All countries that border the Arctic Ocean are lining up to exploit its riches. This includes Britain, which, under David Cameron's leadership, signed an agreement with Norway in June that commits it to tapping gas and oil reserves in the Arctic.

While campaigners reissued their call at the Rio+20 Earth Summit in June for the Arctic to be made a scientific reserve along the lines of the Antarctic, the World Ocean Council has convened a meeting of the “Arctic Business Leadership Council” which is the start of a forum for representatives of shipping, oil and gas, fisheries, aquaculture, tourism, marine science/technology and other industries with interests in the Arctic to see how they can “responsibly" exploit the new opportunities presented by the melting ice.

They will meet on 17 September in Reykjavik. The draft agenda calls for the setting up of a roadmap to show how it can be exploited. It also asks for opinions from industry on how the guidelines for Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainable Business could be applied in the region.

Greenpeace said in a statement: “We're determined to save the Arctic. We know this is a different fight, at a different time; not least because the Arctic is home to millions of people who have a critical say in the future of their region; and because the threat is not just from industrial development, but from the global crisis of climate change."