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Europe’s supercharged green transition
Russia invaded Ukraine one year ago on February 24, 2022. If you would have predicted then that it would supercharge the green transition in Europe, your sanity would have been questioned. And yet that is exactly what has happened. While the war rolls on in Ukraine, Europe has managed to not only avoid the worst-case scenario of a winter filled with blackouts and deaths from cold, but also potentially, according to The Economist, knock “a full decade off the continent’s decarbonization timeline.”
Color me impressed, even though part of the success was the luck of a mild winter, and even though the cost has been heavy—the Greek government, for example, has been covering almost two-thirds of my recent electricity bills here in Athens.
How did this all happen? Vox has more on Europe’s recent, rapid rise in renewables here, and Euronews has more on the populace’s quick adoption of heat pumps here. Regarding the latter, it turns out the threat of skyrocketing heat prices is a good motivator to look for cost-saving alternatives. Although many of us—including me, I’m sorry to admit—in Europe got through the winter burning wood and coal instead, a far less climate-friendly move, Euronews reports that the more innovative European citizens among us who installed heat pumps in their homes are “helping Europe to avoid 54 megatonnes of CO2, or roughly the equivalent annual emissions of Greece.” (A special shoutout to Italy and France, where the highest numbers of heat pumps were sold in 2022, as well as Finland, Norway, and Sweden, where the most heat pumps were sold per 1,000 households.)
Despite all of this movement, in the short term, the news is not good. Emissions in the power and heat sectors hit record highs in 2022 due to the market and energy shocks of Russia’s invasion, says a new report from the research group Rystad Energy. Medium and long term, however, the news is encouraging. Rystad Energy projects total worldwide emissions to peak in 2025, what their head of clean tech research, Artem Abramov, calls “an outstanding global achievement, exceptional when considering the current supply chain roadblocks and the high focus on energy security.” He continues, “If the industry can maintain this momentum, global warming of less than 2.0 degrees Celsius is within reach.”
Reaching the climate goal of our dreams? One thing we’ve learned this past year is that where there’s a will, there’s a way.
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