NEW YORK - Deadly heat and Russia's war in Ukraine are packing a brutal double punch, upending the global energy market and forcing some of the world's largest economies into a desperate scramble to secure electricity for their citizens.
Germany pushed the European Union to greenlight cheap loans for new gas projects, potentially prolonging its reliance on the fossil fuel for decades longer. In the United States, history's largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, extreme temperatures scorched swathes of the South and the West as prospects of national climate legislation collapsed in the nation's capital. At the same time, global oil companies reported soaring profits as oil and gas prices shot up.
At the same conference, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it more bluntly."We continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction," he said.Without climate legislation in Washington, it is all but impossible for the United States to meet its national climate goal, nor can it exert much diplomatic pressure on China to slow down its increasing emissions.
The stakes are high. The EU's own climate law requires the 27-country bloc to shrink its emissions by 55 per cent by 2030. More coal plants are slated for closure than ever before, and there is no evidence that Europe is returning to coal for good, even though some countries are resuming operations at coal plants to meet immediate energy demands."Coal is not making a comeback," read the title of a report published last week by Ember, a research group.