Heat Wave Complicates Global Energy Crisis and Climate Fight

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.

This week, Europe found itself in a nasty feedback loop as record temperatures sent electricity demand soaring but also forced sharp cuts in power from nuclear plants in the region because the extreme heat made it difficult to cool the reactors.

France on Tuesday detailed its plan to renationalize its electricity utility, EDF, to shore up the nation’s energy independence by refreshing its fleet of aging nuclear plants. Russia, which for decades has provided much of Europe’s natural gas, kept Europe guessing as to whether it will resume gas flows later this week through a key pipeline. Germany pushed the European Union to greenlight cheap loans for new gas projects, potentially prolonging its reliance on the fossil fuel for decades longer.

The cascading effects of the war and the coronavirus pandemic on energy and food prices have punished the world’s poorest citizens the most. In Africa, 25 million more people were living without electricity now, compared with before the pandemic, the International Energy Agency estimated.

Meanwhile, in the United States, history’s largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, extreme temperatures scorched swathes of the South and 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.

In effect, the world’s ability to slow down climate change has not only been undermined by the producers of the very fossil fuels that are responsible for climate change, but further challenged by deadly heat — a telltale marker of climate change.

At a global conference aimed at reviving climate action in Berlin, the German foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, called climate change the “biggest security challenge” facing the world and urged countries to use Russia’s war as an impetus to more swiftly switch to renewable energy. “Today, fossil energies are a sign of dependence and lack of freedom,” she said Tuesday. Germany relies on piped Russian gas for 35 percent of its energy needs.

At the same conference, the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, put it more bluntly. “We continue to feed our fossil fuel addiction,” he said.

The Berlin meeting took place against the backdrop of a bleak moment in global climate action.

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.

China produces the world’s largest share of planet-warming gases at the moment, and it plays a pivotal role in the planet’s climate future: It burns more coal than any other country right now, but it also produces the largest share of…