LE BOURGET, France – Many observers
were surprised on Monday when President Vladmir V. Putin of Russia –
the head of a heavily polluting petrostate and a longtime skeptic of
climate change – offered a platter of climate-friendly platitudes to his
fellow world leaders.
“Climate change has become one of the
gravest challenges humanity is facing,” he said. He went on, “Caused by
global warming, hurricanes, droughts, floods and other anomalies are the
source of economic damage.”
If the other leaders’ jaws did not drop,
it was only because they were being polite. The remarks were a departure
from Mr. Putin’s years of publicly mocking the issue. In 2003, for
example, he noted that climate change could have the advantage of
causing Russians to spend less on fur coats.
Were Mr. Putin’s statements merely
further attempts to win a place back in the international fold, after he
was marginalized because of Russia’s aggression in Crimea,
eastern Ukraine and Syria? Or were his remarks a sincere attempt to be a
team player as almost 200 countries try to reach a climate deal?
On Monday, he did more than acknowledge
the problem. “Russia,“ he said, “has been contributing actively to
addressing global warming. Our country is taking the lead.”
Is that so?
In fact, Russia is the fourth largest greenhouse gas polluter, and a global survey of 40 countries
released this summer found that Russians had the lowest level of
concern about global warming out of every country but one – Ukraine.
Observers have speculated that one
possible reason for this is that the issue is barely addressed in the
state-run news media in Russia.
While Mr. Putin stood before other world
leaders in what appeared to be a show of solidarity with the overall
goals of the talks — to lower carbon emissions and save the planet —
numbers designed to demonstrate the depth of his environmental
stewardship told another story.
Many of the figures were from Russia’s
climate change plan submitted ahead of this summit meeting – it was one
of the very first plans submitted, in April.
Reviewing the figures, he noted that under the Kyoto Protocol,
adopted in 1997, Russia has reduced its levels of greenhouse gas
emissions by 40 billion tons from 1990 levels – an amount nearly
equivalent to the entire global output of greenhouse gases today. He
pledged that over all, Russia will cut greenhouse gas levels by 70
percent from those levels by 2030.
That sounds very productive until you
take a closer look at the numbers. While many countries pledge to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions using 2005 as a baseline year – the
number used in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord – Putin pledges cuts from
1990, the number used as a baseline year in the Kyoto Protocol. That is
when the Soviet Union’s emissions saw a steep spike, ahead of a plunge
in industrial activity after the fall of the iron curtain.
By measuring from an outlier year, the results are skewed. And if you look at Russia’s numbers
compared with their current level of emissions, they would actually
lead to a roughly 40 percent increase over today’s levels by 2030.
So despite Mr. Putin’s remarkable change in tone, there appears to be little change in substance.
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