Politico Europe congratulates Vladimir Putin for '[doing] more than almost any other single human being to speed up the end of the fossil fuel era'

Sarah D | 1:06 PM on October 12, 2022

Politico Europe has put together their inaugural “annual ranking of the 28 power players behind Europe’s green agenda,” and guess who’s earned the top spot:

It took a war criminal to speed up Europe’s green revolution.

Vladimir Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has forced Europe to finally break its fossil fuel addiction.

For this reason, he has topped our inaugural #POLITICOGreen28 list.

Read more here: https://t.co/JRDcxqQTG7 pic.twitter.com/3AuZDs8RVn

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) October 12, 2022

By launching a bloody invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has done more than almost any other single human being to speed up the end of the fossil fuel era. https://t.co/31dUjP3OF6

— POLITICOEurope (@POLITICOEurope) October 12, 2022

If Politico Europe has got any sense whatsoever, they’ll delete those tweets.

Good thing we’ve got the sense to get screenshots:

Wooooooow.

Well, that's one way of looking at it https://t.co/k1JVRoKU0y

— Matthew Walther (@matthewwalther) October 12, 2022

https://twitter.com/endofanerajc/status/1580231001942261766

We wish. Oh Lord, how we wish.

Alas:

Putin’s influence on Europe’s green agenda in 2022 is inarguable. Every decision on investment, research and policy is now being filtered through the lens of energy as a matter of European security.

This has broadened the political coalition for green energy. Politicians who considered the safety of the climate a softer imperative than the economy or military can now embrace a heat pump as if it were a howitzer. In the days after the invasion, German Finance Minister Christian Lindner — a free market liberal who is no great friend of the climate agenda — declared renewable energy to be “the energy of freedom.”

While Ukrainians are the primary victims of the war, Europeans have been hit hard by Putin’s weaponization of energy. But the consequences mean an EU that becomes greener, faster, than before Russian troops marched across the Ukrainian border. That impact will be more than a footnote in the history of the war.