By Tamar Jacoby, Director of the New Ukraine Project
President Biden’s visit to Kyiv this past week was met with jubilation across Ukraine. Ukrainian friends messaged me with glowing thanks. A bartender who knows I’m American offered me a drink on the house. The president’s trip underscored what Biden has often said – that America will stand by Ukraine “as long as it takes.”
Nothing made this point more viscerally for Ukrainians than the way Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ignored the air-raid siren screaming in the background as they walked across the square in front of golden-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral on Monday. For Ukrainians, air raid sirens are a weekly if not daily scourge, and everyone knows what it’s like to decide, should I heed this one or not?
Russia’s illegal invasion and brutal occupation of Ukraine will soon enter its second year. The Progressive Policy Institute is marking the occasion by launching a New Ukraine Project to report on the war, its impact on everyday life in Ukraine, and its wider implications for peace and international security.
Directing the project from Kyiv is Tamar Jacoby, a prominent journalist, author, and thought leader widely respected for her work on immigration, the struggles of working class Americans, and public school reform. In addition to her dispatches from the front lines of the conflict, her work will focus on the social, economic, and political reconstruction of Ukraine, as it seeks to take its place in Europe’s free and democratic community.
“Every American has a stake in Ukraine’s war of independence, which in many ways resembles our own break from a different empire,” said PPI President Will Marshall. “We are fortunate to have in Tamar Jacoby an astute witness to the history that is being made on the ground today in eastern Europe.”
See this dispatch from Jacoby just published in The Washington Monthly on what Ukrainians want to know about America’s support for their cause.
“The war in Ukraine isn’t just another regional conflict,” Tamar Jacoby said. “Everything we hold dear as Americans — our fundamental liberal values — hangs in the balance. Can the international order prevent brutal imperialist aggression? How should the West respond to an emerging nation willing to risk everything to embrace democratic ideals? What are and aren’t we willing to do to protect human rights and human dignity? And then, beyond ideals, there’s the actual threat: If we don’t stop Russia in Ukraine, where will the story end — who will Putin blackmail next, with oil or gas or grain or weapons of mass destruction? It’s a privilege to be on the ground witnessing what’s happening and telling the story for American readers.”
“Having Tamar interpret the daily successes and struggles of Ukrainians during this Putin invasion will help Americans appreciate that our commitment to Ukraine needs to go beyond the battlefields and well after the Russians retreat: helping Ukraine create a sustainable democracy is the victory the people of Ukraine deserve and the defeat that will define Putin failures,” said Lindsay Mark Lewis, Executive Director of the Progressive Policy Institute.
This is the third major international project for PPI, with PPI Brussels established in 2018, and the Project on Center-Left Renewal based in the U.K., established in January of 2023.
Tamar Jacoby is currently based in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the president of Opportunity America, a Washington-based nonprofit working to promote economic mobility, and a former journalist and author. She was a senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and, before that, the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Weekly Standard and Foreign Affairs, among other publications. She is the author of “Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration” and “Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience.” Her edited volumes include “Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American” and “This Way Up: New Thinking About Poverty and Economic Mobility.”
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
When President Joe Biden touched down in Kyiv on February 20, it was more than another secret presidential trip like the visits Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama made to Afghanistan and Iraq. There was no stealthy meeting with American troops, no photo op on a base in an American theatre of operations. Biden’s goal was to demonstrate American support for a democratic ally fighting the most devastating war in Europe since 1945. Not even Franklin Roosevelt did this. He never visited London during the Blitz, choosing to meet Winston Churchill on safer ground in Washington, Casablanca, Tehran, and Yalta. That Biden’s visit came on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine made it all the more significant as a show of determination to halt Vladimir Putin’s push to crush a democratic neighbor. “I thought it was critical that there not be any doubt, none whatsoever, about U.S. support for Ukraine,” Mr. Biden said.
Andrey Dubenko is the co-owner of a small shopping mall on the river between Bucha and Irpin, two of the Kyiv suburbs that saw the worst fighting in the weeks after Russia’s invasion last February. The boundary between the two towns—one was occupied through the next month, the other remained in Ukrainian hands—became the front line. Air strikes, artillery fire, and hand-to-hand combat in the parking lot gutted Dubenko’s mall. Now the 54-year-old investor and developer, a man old enough to have served in the Soviet army in the 1980s, is rebuilding and optimistic. But he is also unflinchingly clear-eyed about who will determine what happens in Ukraine. “When will the war end?” he asks rhetorically. “That will be decided by Americans. The war will end when the U.S. wants it to end – when they stop sending weapons and ammunition.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vicious mauling of Ukraine is shattering quite a few grand illusions about the post-post-Cold War world.
For starters, Russia’s failure to defeat its much smaller and poorer neighbor has demolished its image as a military juggernaut. Instead of confirming its status as a great power and pillar of a new, multipolar world order, Putin’s war has exposed Russia as a declining power — at best a junior partner in the new league of autocracies directed from Beijing.
Plagued by old equipment, bad logistics and poor leadership, Russian troops have been outfought by determined Ukrainian defenders. In just under a year, the war has cost Russia “significantly” more than 100,000 casualties, says General Mark Milley, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s more in one year than Russia suffered in a decade of war in Afghanistan.
Maybe Europeans are not from Venus after all. In a rare display of unity and resolve, they are pouring advanced weapons into Ukraine, expanding NATO, kicking their addiction to Russian gas and tightening the economic squeeze on Moscow.
With the reprehensible exception of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, our European allies seem determined to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutish attempt to dismember Ukraine if not erase it from the map altogether. To the surprise of many Americans, the creaky old transatlantic alliance is beginning to look like a strategic asset again.
Sweden and Finland, strictly neutral during the Cold War, are joining NATO. That’s confronted Putin with a new, 800-mile northern border with the defensive alliance he loathes and falsely claims poses an offensive threat to Russia.
But the most consequential shift in Europe’s dovish zeitgeist has occurred in Germany. Stung to action by Putin’s second invasion of Ukraine in February, Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a “Zeitenwende” – turning point – in the quasi-pacifist drift of Germany’s post-Cold War diplomacy. Instead of the usual humanitarian aid, he promised to send Kiev weapons for self-defense and to boost Germany’s military spending by $100 billion a year.
Since his election as president in 2000, Vladimir Putin has methodically consolidated power in his hands with the expressed aim of making Russia great again. Instead, he’s diminished his country’s power and global standing in every respect but one — Moscow’s ability to threaten its neighbors with nuclear weapons.
Russian observers have characterized Putin’s increasingly autocratic reign as a tacit pact with Russian society: The Kremlin won’t interfere in the everyday lives of citizens if they stay out of politics. It’s a bad bargain for the Russian people.
For one thing, it’s cost them a rare shot at governing themselves after centuries of czarist and totalitarian despotism. Over the past two decades, Putin has steadily snuffed out post-Soviet Russia’s incipient democracy — rigging elections, jailing dissidents and journalists, suppressing independent civic associations and colluding in the assassination of regime critics at home and around the world.
Regulating Tech in the Digital Age: Lessons from China
Wednesday, September 7, 2022
5:30 p.m. — 8:30 p.m.
Open Gov Hub
1100 13th St NW Suite 800, Washington, DC 20005
About this event
How is China approaching tech regulation? What should policymakers and regulators learn from China’s approach? And how should this impact the way the rest of the global community approaches China?
Join us for an expert panel discussion on tech regulation, geopolitics and globalism. Stay for a reception with light bites and beverages as we bring together the DC tech policy community with the Tony Blair Institute’s London, Singapore and San Francisco teams.
The Panel
Max Beverton-Palmer (Moderator) – Director, Internet Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Xiaomeng Lu – Director, Geo-technology at Eurasia Group
Matt Nguyen – Policy Lead, Internet Policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Jordan Shapiro – Economic and Data Policy Analyst at Progressive Policy Institute
Six months after invading Ukraine, not much has gone right for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. But it’s dangerous for despots to admit defeat, so he’s doubling down on death and destruction in hopes of salvaging something he can call a win.
Having failed to topple Ukraine’s government or overwhelm its highly motivated defense forces on the ground, Putin is settling into a grinding war of attrition, featuring World War II-style leveling of cities and terror attacks on civilians.
His aim is to seize more land along Ukraine’s eastern and southern borders that adjoins territories already contested by pro-Russian separatists following Putin’s 2014 incursion. U.S. officials expect Moscow to declare its intent to “annex” the conquered terrain, just as it did with Crimea.
In this way, Putin would have something to show Russians for the horrendous butcher’s bill he’s running up. CIA director Bill Burns last week estimated that 15,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far and as many as 45,000 have been wounded.
Since Ukraine is fiercely resisting its piecemeal dismemberment and occupation by Russia, the fighting could continue indefinitely. Putin shows no interest in negotiating an end to the war, either because he still believes he can break Ukraine, or, more likely, because he thinks a military stalemate works in his favor.
This calculation rests on unflattering assessments of the West’s strategic stamina. As long as the NATO countries keep supplying Kiev with weapons and financial support and enforcing suffocating sanctions on Russia’s economy, Ukraine probably can hold out against its bigger and heavily armed neighbor.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – the most successful and enduring mutual security pact in history – is about to start its second act. In Act 1, the United States played the leading role in deterring Russian aggression and keeping the peace in Europe. In Act 2, Europeans will take center stage.
With longtime neutrals Sweden and Finland knocking on its door, NATO likely will grow to 32 members. For the transatlantic allies, however, the wise course isn’t merely to expand NATO, but to reinvent it.
How to seize that opportunity – which goes well beyond hackneyed calls for greater “burden-sharing” – should be the focal point of NATO’s Madrid summit later this month.
NATO should be fundamentally reconfigured to reflect three geopolitical realities. First, since its creation in 1949, the alliance has expanded dramatically as many of Europe’s ancient feuds and rivalries have been subsumed within pan-European values and institutions.
Second, NATO’s 27 European members (excluding Turkey) vastly exceed Russia in economic clout, population and military spending. Third, America inexorably is turning its strategic gaze to China and the balance of power in Asia.
The war in Ukraine has relied heavily on information warfare and the struggle to control the global narrative. It has highlighted both the impact that online campaigns can have on international crises, as well as the danger posed by false information on internet platforms. Social media-based disinformation is not the unknown threat it once was, but despite acknowledgement by internet platforms, online users, and American public officials that state-sponsored disinformation was likely to disseminate in the days following the Russian invasion, false claims have succeeded in blunting the world’s overwhelmingly adverse global reaction to Putin’s war. The response to this disinformation makes it clear that while we have learned from some of the mistakes of the past, false claims persist in both online and traditional media. Internet platforms have had to assume a defensive role, and right-leaning American media sources have echoed an online narrative consistent with that of the Russian state, further blurring the line between fact and fiction. Now, as we approach two months since the Russian invasion, it is important to assess what has worked well as a defense against false claims, as well as where state-backed disinformation continues to spread.
Given the familiar history of Russian weaponization of internet platforms for political purposes, the online propaganda offensive is hardly a surprise. In fact, the battle to frame the “special military operation” as essential to Russian security predates the invasion, with the European Expert Association identifying the dissemination of online rumors aimed at justifying the invasion of Ukraine sourced in Russian news media as early as October 2021.
This reality of Russian-backed disinformation on social media is a familiar one for many Americans following the 2016 election, during which at least 10.4 million tweets, 61,500 Facebook posts, and 116,000 Instagram posts were traced back to Russian state actors looking to influence the campaign debate. Since then, the question of how to counter false information online has shaken global politics, from claims of misinformation regarding the pandemic to the question of online censorship. As a result, global governments and online platforms were better prepared to combat disinformation than they have been in past conflicts.
The Biden administration’s decision to get out early and make public intelligence about Putin’s intent to invade Ukraine was hugely successful. It drowned out Russian state propaganda depicting Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis,” threatening Russian security. In early February, President Biden warned of the potential for a false flag operation under which Putin would invade Ukraine in response to some staged provocation. Despite Moscow’s claims that the Ukrainian government had plans to attack separatist regions of the country, the attempts to justify the invasion as a preemptive strike fell flat with a global audience. At the same time, social media posts coming out of Ukraine quickly went viral, leading to an outpouring of international sympathy and solidarity. Russian propagandists could not compete with vivid posts and videos capturing the horrors of war — for example, scenes of conditions in bomb shelters or one video of a Ukrainian vlogger being interrupted by a nearby missile strike. At this point, Russia was clearly losing the “information war.”
However, as the war continues, Russian disinformation has gained more traction online. For example, a map posted on left-wing websites showed recent airstrikes in in Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. Evidently its purpose was to underscore that all conflicts are deserving of progressives’ attention, not just the war in Ukraine. However, the first iteration of the image was posted by Redfish, a company staffed by former employees of the state-run outlet Russia Today. More recently, Moscow has filled social media with bogus claims that Ukraine is developing biological weapons funded by the United States. In fact, these supposedly sinister “biolabs” are a part of a longstanding U.S. program to support public health infrastructure in former Soviet countries. The story gained mainstream attention in the U.S. after the Russian Defense Ministry put out a statement claiming that funding for the biolabs could be traced back to Hunter Biden and George Soros, a preposterous claim that nonetheless has parroted in the U.S. by Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and some popular conservative podcasts.
This echoing of Kremlin propaganda on the Trumpist right shows that much work remains to be done to combat the deliberate pollution of online discourse with lies. The Biden administration should continue to wield accurate U.S. intelligence on what’s happening in Ukraine and in Putin’s ruling circle in Moscow. Washington should also redouble efforts to counter disinformation in countries friendly to Russia, including China, Brazil, and India. Additionally, while the value of an informed public holds its own weight, the urgency is heightened when one considers how the online narrative around the war has shaped real world outcomes. The early surge of online support for Ukraine unified the Western democracies in condemning and calling for tough economic sanctions on Russia and provoked an outpouring of donations to Ukraine from internet users, including $67 million in cryptocurrency.
Particularly considering these implications, moderation of online content and safeguards against state-sponsored propaganda online are critical in controlling the spread of harmful disinformation. U.S. lawmakers should encourage and support social media platforms in stepping up efforts to filter out lies and propaganda and support an ongoing push for media literacy to equip Americans with tools necessary to defend themselves against online disinformation. The recent proliferation of fables such as the Ukrainian American biolabs show that, although platform companies are more aware of and prepared to deal with disinformation than they were in the past, bogus information and conspiracy theories will still get through. The United States, which led the world into the digital age, must now take the lead in separating fact from fiction online.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has a Siberia-sized chip on his shoulder. He hasn’t gotten over the unraveling of the once-mighty Soviet Union, which he served as a KGB agent, and he doesn’t think the West pays sufficient attention to Russia’s security interests.
What’s a strongman to do? Threaten war, of course. Putin has amassed over 100,000 troops on the border of Ukraine, which Russia already has invaded once (in 2014) to forcibly annex Crimea.
As Ukrainian forces continue to battle pro-Russia separatists in the country’s Donbas region, a second invasion is a plausible threat. To defuse it, the Biden administration dispatched diplomats to meet their Russian counterparts in Geneva Monday. At Russia’s insistence, neither Ukraine nor European nations were invited to this parley, an omission that reflects Putin’s disdain for Europe and nostalgia for Cold War-style summitry.
Here’s the gun-to-the-head deal Russian diplomats put on the table: Russia won’t invade Ukraine if Washington agrees to halt NATO’s eastward expansion, and dismantle military infrastructure in Eastern European countries that have joined the alliance. They presented draft security treaties obliging NATO to rescind its 2008 offer of membership to Ukraine and Georgia.
Join the Progressive Policy Institute’s Paul Bledsoe for a virtual educational webinar for Congressional staff on how the European Union’s reliance on imports of methane-heavy Russian gas is undermining international climate goals and funding a geopolitical crisis.
The dominance of Russia in the European gas market is troubling — with Russia providing nearly half of total EU gas imports in 2020. This Russian natural gas has extremely high rates of fugitive emissions of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, and is a leading factor in Russia being by far the world’s largest methane emitter.
However, the United States can reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas. The Biden Administration, Congress, and the U.S. natural gas industry are beginning to undertake a series of strategic steps to make U.S. gas super-low emitting compared to gas from Russia and other major exporters.
WHAT: Virtual Congressional briefing for staff and interns
WHEN: Wednesday, January 26; 1:00-2:00pm ET; Zoom
PANELISTS: Paul Bledsoe, Senior Advisor to the Progressive Policy Institute and former Communications Director of the Clinton White House Climate Change Task Force
Additional Panelists TBA
Brexit is done and U.S. voters have fired Donald Trump, but the neo-nationalist uprising that gave rise to both continues to shake up transatlantic politics. No country has seen its traditional political order more thoroughly fractured than France.
President Emmanuel Macron, who is running for reelection next spring, leads a centrist party he created in a tour de force of political improvisation after leaving the Socialist Party shortly before his 2017 election. Long France’s leading party of the left, the Socialists have been decimated. Their presidential candidate, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, barely registers in the polls with about 4 percent support.
The wild card in the race is Eric Zemmour, a political neophyte many observers are calling the French Trump. He is a writer and television pundit whose best-selling book, “Le Suicide Francais,” contends that immigration, globalization and a fast-growing Muslim minority represent fundamental threats to French values and culture.
Report Finds Opportunity for Lower-Methane U.S. LNG to Gain Market Share in EU and Globally While Reducing Emissions and Cutting Kremlin Revenue
A new report authored by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Paul Bledsoe finds that the European Union’s huge reliance on high-methane emitting Russian gas undermines the EU’s climate goals. The report, entitled “The Role of Natural Gas in Limiting European Union Emissions: Key Opportunities to Cut Methane, Coal and CO2,”also has major implications for U.S. and global climate policy. Cutting methane from gas, first in the EU and U.S., then globally, can greatly reduce near-term emissions, speeding up the phase out of coal in the EU and Asia, and providing new market share for lower-methane U.S. liquefied natural gas exports. This report is the first of four reports on the role of natural gas in reducing emissions.
“Due to massive methane leaks in its production system, Russian gas is worse than coal for the climate, yet Europe, the world’s largest gas importer, gets 25% of its total gas supply from Russia right now. To meet climate goals, the EU must adopt regulations to require low methane gas, including from imports. This can provide a new opportunity for U.S. LNG exports to Europe to outcompete Russia on lower emissions, as strict U.S. methane regulations and the gas industry rapidly reduce methane from U.S. gas production,” said Paul Bledsoe, Strategic Adviser for the Progressive Policy Institute. “Russia also continues to use its gas as a geopolitical weapon against Europe, threatening Ukraine with impunity and handing Putin and Gazprom record profits because of the EU addiction to the Kremlin’s gas. The U.S. and EU each have strong climate and geopolitical incentives to limit natural gas emissions and Russia’s malign policies by displacing Russian gas with both cleaner gas and renewable energy.”
The dominance of Russia in the European gas market is troubling — with Russia providing nearly half of total EU gas imports in 2020. This Russian natural gas has extremely high rates of fugitive emissions of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas, and is a leading factor in Russia being by far the world’s largest methane emitter.
However, new sources of gas, including liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from the United States and other clean sources, can reduce the EU’s reliance on Russian gas. The United States has long had better methane and carbon dioxide reporting standards and measurements than other gas exporters, leading the world in both methane science and efforts to reduce methane emissions. And importantly, the Biden Administration, Congress, and the U.S. natural gas industry are beginning to undertake a series of strategic steps to make U.S. gas super-low emitting compared to gas from Russia and other major exporters.
PPI’s report calls for an international effort to accurately verify and monitor methane emissions from domestic and imported gas and then regulate emissions to as close to zero as possible. These actions, if taken together, could play a major role in reducing greenhouse as global emissions as renewable energy grows.
Select key recommendations from the report include:
The EU should put in place rigorous monitoring, reporting and verification rules covering all natural gas, both domestically produced and imported.
Over the next few years, the EU should require gas exporters to accurately verify lifecycle emissions of methane as a condition for gaining access to the EU market.
The EU and United States should harmonize their monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) regimes of lifecycle emissions from natural gas as a key interim step in this process. This step is crucial in setting a global benchmark for MRV emissions from gas.
The EU should consider adopting stringent methane emissions regulations for domestically produced natural gas immediately, and then extend these requirements to imported gas at the earliest opportunity.
The EU should seek to diversify and expand its natural gas importation sources both to reduce gas prices to phase out coal and to pressure importers of all types to begin to cut its lifecycle methane and carbon emissions.
The United States should accelerate its already significant measures to drive down U.S. methane emissions from natural gas production and transportation.
The EU should measure precisely the extent to which Russian gas with high fugitive methane emissions is undermining progress toward both EU and global climate change goals. Specifically, Brussels should study potential emissions from gas transported through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline before allowing the pipeline to become operational.
Over time, the EU should require all natural gas used in the EU achieve super-low methane and CO2 emissions, as gas will be needed to displace coal in the EU to meet climate goals.
Increasing low-emitting U.S. liquefied natural gas imports to the EU can play a key role in this process, and should be a domestic and international climate change policy priority for both the EU and U.S.
The EU should prioritize LNG port construction, access, and related infrastructure to spur a competition toward super-low emitting gas, and to displace Russian gas.
The EU can advance its own energy and security interests, as well as its climate goals, by acting on its stated policy of reducing its dependence on Russia gas, cutting imports by at least half during the current decade.
Read the full report:
Paul Bledsoe is a strategic adviser at the Progressive Policy Institute and a professorial lecturer at American University’s Center for Environmental Policy. He served on the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton, at the U.S. Department of the Interior, as a staff member at the Senate Finance Committee and for several members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Read his full biography here.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) is a catalyst for policy innovation and political reform based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Brussels and Berlin. Its mission is to create radically pragmatic ideas for moving America beyond ideological and partisan deadlock. Learn more about PPI by visiting progressivepolicy.org.
The European Union in recent actions and the United States under President Joe Biden have both offered bold visions for deeply reducing greenhouse gas emissions and asserting leadership in the global fight against climate change. Each is taking important steps to reduce harmful emissions from natural gas, including more aggressive methane controls, emissions reporting, and investments in carbon capture and storage technology.
These initiatives hold great promise in helping Europe lessen its dependence on coal and other dirtier fuel types, as well as ensure that gas imported into the EU is as clean as possible to help Europe meet its climate goals.
For example, on July 14, 2021, the European Union announced sweeping new climate change goals in its “Fit for 55” directive. The extraordinarily ambitious program requires the EU to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 55% below 1990 levels by 2030, relying on the EU carbon trading and pricing market, new Green Deal programs, a wide range of clean energy subsidies, and the beginning of some fossil fuel use restrictions. Most climate experts see the EU proposal as the first-ever attempt by one of the world’s three major centers of economic growth and innovation to reduce emissions in keeping with the key Paris agreement goal of reaching net zero emissions globally by 2050 and keeping temperatures from rising more than 1.5 Celsius.
However, today, the EU still gets at least 15% of its electricity from coal, with far higher percentages in Germany, Poland, and other eastern European countries. Analysis by the International Energy Agency and other leading experts predicts that the EU will use a mix of renewable energy and natural gas to displace coal. Indeed, most studies find that gas use in the EU will grow over the next decade to balance increased intermittent renewable energy on the EU electrical grid as other forms of baseload power (coal and much nuclear power) are phased out.
Yet even as the European Union undertakes these unprecedented steps to reduce emissions, it is increasing its reliance on natural gas from Russia’s notoriously leaking, antiquated, and nontransparent gas production and transport system, which has extremely high fugitive emissions of methane, a super-potent greenhouse gas. The EU imports about 40% of its total natural gas from Russia — despite data showing that Russian gas is worse from a climate change perspective than the very coal natural gas is meant to displace. Indeed, new data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that Russia is the world’s largest methane emitter, with massive new “super-emitting” methane plumes detected this year, even as studies how Russia has consistently lied about and covered up its emissions for decades.
The EU’s importation of high methane emitting Russian gas is a profound flaw in the EU’s climate plans which may prevent it from truly reaching its 2030 emissions goals. While huge methane emissions from Russian gas imports may not be technically counted under the EU’s greenhouse gas accountancy system, they are nonetheless causing massive greenhouse gas emissions of methane (84 times more potent than CO2) at precisely the time leading experts say cutting methane emissions is the key to keeping temperatures below the Paris targets of 1.5°C and 2°C.
Indeed, in mid-September 2021, the EU recognized the urgent need to cut emissions of methane in an agreement with the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations to reduce overall methane emissions from all sources within their borders by 30% before 2030. Such admirable efforts to reduce methane, however, will be swamped and rendered ineffectual by global methane emissions from Russian gas and other sources of the EU’s gas imports which are outside of this agreement.
In recent months, in fact reducing methane emissions has become a centerpiece of climate protection, as evidenced by the EU, U.S. and over 100 other nations signing a pledge at the recent UN climate negotiations in Glasgow, Scotland, to cut methane by 30% by 2030. However, Russia, Iran, Qatar and other major gas exporters and methane emitters have not signed the pledge.
This report finds that the EU has an array of new options to reduce near-term dependence on Russian gas. These include greater renewable energy use, electricity storage technologies, and imports of lower-emitting U.S. liquefied natural gas. Current high natural gas prices are roiling European markets and consumers, spotlighting the increasing need for larger liquefied natural gas shipments from the US and other sources, both this winter and for years to come. In fact, specific methane reducing actions by the EU and U.S. can play the key role in forcing all global gas imports to lower their emissions dramatically by creating demand competition for low-emitting gas.
The most important imperative is for the lifecycle of methane emissions from natural gas production to be driven down as close to zero as possible by both major exporters and importers. In the United States, President Joe Biden and Congress are acting to both impose stringent regulations on methane emissions and take new steps to sharply reduce fugitive emissions and the venting of gas from existing and old unused wells. Such efforts are crucial to limiting near- term temperatures globally as a series of studies have concluded, especially the August 2021 urgent report by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change.
Moreover, as the IEA noted in its “methane tracker” report released in January 2021, it is in the “strong interest” of natural gas companies to cut methane emissions, since, over time, users will demand, and nations will require, the lower- emitting methane gas sources. “Aside from the environmental gains, oil and gas operations with lower emissions intensities are increasingly likely to enjoy a commercial advantage,” the report said.
Nonetheless, government action to limit methane globally is critical. This should include requirements by the EU, the world’s largest natural gas importer, that methane emissions from both domestic and imported gas be accurately verified and monitored, and then regulated to as close to zero as possible. Such a “global race to near-zero fugitive methane emissions” among natural gas competitors would dramatically cut global emissions, even as gas displaces remaining coal in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. In this way, super-low-methane gas exports (and also low-CO2 gas with carbon capture and storage) can play a major role in reducing greenhouse gas global emissions even as renewable energy grows.
The IEA and other top analysts believe that the EU will have to use natural gas to displace remaining coal use and balance the EU grid, with gas over the next two decades providing baseload electric power as intermittent renewable energy becomes a higher percentage of the EU’s power supply and as the demand for electricity increases due to electrification of transportation and broader growth. Methane from oil and gas is Europe’s third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, reducing methane emissions from all EU natural gas sources, including imports, is essential to meet the European goal of cutting emissions 55% compared to 1990 levels by 2030.
The EU imports more than 60% of its gas, and total methane emissions from gas-exporting countries like Russia are at least three and eight times the emissions from the domestic EU gas supply chain. If these “imported methane emissions” are calculated by the European Union as it determines its overall emissions profile, they will swamp progress made on other fronts and prevent true reduction of its total emissions. The EU also imports more than 40% of its total natural gas from Russia. Yet data consistently shows that Russian gas is even worse than coal in contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Russia has deliberately prevented attempts to fully assess its high methane emissions for decades, choosing instead to point the finger at other gas producers and use the echo chamber of its influence operations in Europe to attempt to discredit attempts to hold Moscow to account.
The EU Commission has committed to reducing methane emissions in its domestic energy sector and engaging in a dialogue with its international partners about what carrots and sticks could be used to lower the methane profile of imported gas. But it has not yet promulgated standards to accomplish these goals.
Fortunately, new and more accurate methane detection technologies are increasingly being deployed. They should become standard in the world’s major natural gas producing nations. Nations that refuse to have their gas monitored and verified should be denied import status by the EU and other major importers over time.
New sources of gas, including liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from the United States and other clean sources, can reduce the EU’s reliance on methane-heavy Russian gas. But of course, that will require the United States and other exporters to drive down methane and carbon dioxide emissions from the lifecycle as close to zero as possible, and verify their reductions with credible methodologies.
Moreover, the geopolitical costs of Russian gas continue to plague the EU broadly, and Ukraine and other Eastern European nations specifically. EU imports of Russian gas have actually increased since Moscow’s illegal annexation of the Crimea in 2015. Over time, limiting Russian gas imports thus could diminish its political leverage over Europe while also helping the EU achieve its climate goals.
Given these realities, European support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany is a massive strategic mistake. Making the pipeline operational would clearly increase Russia’s leverage over Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. In addition, allowing Russia to operationalize the pipeline will dramatically reduce the EU’s leverage to compel the state- owned Russian monopoly Gazprom to reduce its methane emissions.
The United States has long had better methane and carbon dioxide reporting standards and measurements than other gas exporters, leading the world in both methane science and efforts to reduce methane emissions. More importantly, the Biden Administration, Congress, and the U.S. natural gas industry are beginning to undertake a series of strategic steps to make U.S. gas super- low emitting compared to gas from Russia and other major exporters. This would give U.S. gas a competitive advantage in world markets, boost U.S. LNG sales abroad, and enable European gas importers to make deeper cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as they transition away from burning coal.
Summary of Key Recommendations:
• The EU should put in place rigorous monitoring, reporting and verification rules covering all natural gas, both domestically produced and imported.
• Over the next few years, the EU should require gas exporters to accurately verify
lifecycle emissions of methane as a condition for gaining access to the EU market.
• The EU and United States should harmonize their monitoring, reporting, and verification(MRV) regimes of lifecycle emissions from natural gas as a key interim step in this process. This step is crucial in setting a global benchmark for MRV emissions from gas, given the much greater transparency and accuracy of emissions measurements from natural gas produced in the EU and U.S.compared to other gas exporters to the EU.
• The EU should consider adopting stringent methane emissions regulations for domestically produced natural gas immediately, and then extend these requirements to imported gas at the earliest opportunity.
• The EU should seek to diversify and expand its natural gas importation sources both to reduce gas prices to phase out coal and to pressure importers of all types to begin to cut its lifecycle methane and carbon emissions.
• The United States should accelerate its already significant measures to drive down U.S. methane emissions from natural gas production and transportation. In the near-term, the U.S. should aim at making its gas super-low emitting, with fugitive emissions of less than 0.5% of total volume, by far the lowest emitting in the world. In time, U.S. gas should be even lower-emitting, with close to zero methane emissions, and dramatically increase the deployment of carbon capture and storage technologies for CO2 emissions from gas.
• The EU should measure precisely the extent to which Russian gas with high fugitive methane emissions is undermining progress toward both EU and global climate change goals. Specifically, Brussels should study potential emissions from gas transported through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline before allowing the pipeline to become operational.
• Over time, the EU should require all natural gas used in the EU achieve super-low methane and CO2 emissions, as gas will be needed to displace coal in the EU to meet climate goals. Such EU actions during the current decade can help not only meet its own greenhouse gas emissions goals for 2030, but begin the process of bringing natural gas emissions to the lowest possible levels around the world and using it to displace global coal use.
• Increasing low-emitting U.S. liquefied natural gas imports to the EU can play a key role in. this process, and should be a domestic and
international climate change policy priority for both the EU and U.S.
• The EU should prioritize LNG port construction, access, and related infrastructure to spur a competition toward super-low emitting gas, and to displace Russian gas.
• The EU can advance its own energy and security interests, as well as its climate goals, by acting on its stated policy of reducing its
dependence on Russia gas, cutting imports by at least half during the current decade.
Twice in recent months President Biden has publicly affirmed a U.S. commitment to defend Taiwan should China attack. Both times, the White House walked his comments back, admitting that no such formal obligation exists.
While the media was quick to pounce on Biden’s “gaffes,” it’s likely that the Chinese received his message loud and clear: America has Taiwan’s back.
The United States has no mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, as we do with Japan and South Korea. On the contrary, since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, Washington has explicitly recognized the island as a part of China. Since then, “strategic ambiguity” has governed U.S. Taiwan policy: Washington won’t support the island’s independence so long as China refrains from seizing it by force.
