In February, Russia began its all-out military assault
on neighboring Ukraine.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,
the largest invasion of a neighboring country in Europe
since World War II.
Russia’s brutal tactics have included
indiscriminate shelling of civilian areas.
“It’s a war of annihilation,” in the words of Ukraine’s president,
and nowhere is that more clear than Mariupol.
In response, Western countries imposed crippling economic sanctions
against Vladimir Putin's government.
Putin chose this war,
and now he and his country will bear the consequences.
But the EU remains deeply dependent on Russia for its energy needs,
with one quarter of its oil coming from Moscow.
We are financing Russia’s war
[by] purchasing oil, gas, and other fossil fuels.
EU countries have paid Russia $46 billion for oil and gas
since the conflict began,
fueling Putin’s war machine.
The more global demand there is for oil and gas,
the easier it is for dictators like Putin
to profit and grow their armies.
For decades, oil wealth has emboldened dictators
and funded war and violence.
Saddam in Iraq. Gaddafi in Libya.
Each of those dictators built their regimes
on a boom in oil production and oil prices,
which funded enormous brutality.
Far from benefiting ordinary people,
countries with oil are more likely to be corrupt and repressive.
Where there’s a lot of oil money,
that oil money finds its way into the democratic system
and undermines it.
It corrupts it.
Oil is actually the fluid behind
the source of much of the oppression that we see around the world.
Researchers have called this “the oil curse,”
and multinational oil companies are often complicit,
cozying up to brutal regimes while citizens suffer.
The oil sector is the area where you have
almost about 70 percent of the corruption in the country.
And as bombs fell over Ukraine,
the UN reminded the world
that fossil fuels were driving a much larger crisis.
We are on a fast track to climate disaster.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine needs to be a wake-up call
for weaning our economies off of oil and gas.
So is the world finally ready to break from an industry
that bankrolls tyrants and their autocratic regimes?
Or will our addiction to oil
not only continue to fund the destruction of Ukraine
but also the planet itself?
[SYSTEM ERROR]
Since the end of the Cold War,
it was widely believed that closer economic ties would create peace
on the European continent.
As the former Soviet Union began disintegrating,
foreign brands started setting up shop,
and many were immediately popular.
Three decades on, the European Union is heavily reliant on Russian energy.
Europe gets around 45 percent of its natural gas from Russia.
Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, and Germany
are amongst the most energy dependent.
But instead of preventing conflict,
this dependence left Europe open to blackmail.
In a significant economic escalation,
Russia halting gas deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria.
Amid growing tensions over Ukraine,
Russia has cut gas supplies to two EU countries
and threatened to do the same to the rest.
Putin has deliberately weaponized fossil gas and oil
to increase his existing energy dominance
over the European Union.
Putin has a long history of using oil and gas
as a tool to achieve his goals.
Both Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia and the 2014 invasion of Crimea
took place when oil was at historically high prices.
This meant that any sanctions imposed by the West
would be less effective.
Putin’s much more confident when prices are high.
The world needs his oil and gas,
and this gives him an edge in getting away with these kinds of aggressions.
And after the seizure of Crimea,
rather than move away from Russian energy,
the EU became even more reliant on it.
This time it’s different.
In the wake of the recent war,
the US, UK, Canada, and Australia
quickly placed outright bans on Russian oil.
Russian oil will no longer be acceptable at US ports,
and the American people will deal another powerful blow
to Putin’s war machine.
However, this only drove prices up.
And as European countries were still buying,
this meant more money for Russia.
European countries have been subsidizing the Russians
by paying for energy.
Well, we are not subsidizing.
We are paying.
Despite its economic sanctions,
the EU is still lining Putin’s war chest.
If we had moved more aggressively to green energy,
Putin wouldn’t have this sort of lifeline
that keeps him going in the face of all these other sanctions.
In 2011, another oil-rich strongman
was facing pressure from Western nations.
NATO planes have flown 15,000 sorties
and unleashed 5,600 airstrikes on ground forces in Libya.
The Arab Spring saw Libyans rise up against their leader,
Muammar Gaddafi, after decades of autocratic rule.
Months into a NATO-led bombing campaign,
Gaddafi was brutally murdered by rebels.
A wounded Gaddafi, clearly alive, being manhandled by the crowd,
shoved into the back of a Toyota pickup, and taken away.
During his 42-year reign,
Gaddafi funded invasions into several African countries
as well as terrorist attacks such as the Lockerbie plane bombing.
Debris from Pan Am 103 rained down on their streets and homes.
The aircraft, luggage, and bodies were scattered over a wide area.
Many see Gaddafi as a textbook example of the oil curse—
like Putin, using oil profits for his own misadventures.
Gaddafi was able to launch a remarkable number of wars
in his time as leader of Libya
because what he was so gifted at
was using Libya’s extraordinary wealth coming from oil
as a way of avoiding any kind of real political accountability at home.
Research shows autocrats are more likely to stay in power
if they’ve got a lot of oil.
Because the proceeds from oil go right to the central government,
often oil allows dictators to float freely above the will of the people.
Part of the reason is that they can appease their population with payouts
while also funding tools of suppression,
such as police and state media.
According to a Russian human rights group,
the government arrested more than 13,000 protesters
in the first two weeks of the war.
As a result, there's less pressure to end wars.
In non-petrostates, they worry that if they lose the war,
they will get thrown out of office or even killed because of it.
It is the case that in petrostates, that’s much less likely to happen
because oil wealth has provided the ability
to get rid of a lot of domestic political opposition.
From Saudi Arabia to the United Arab Emirates,
many associate oil with wealth,
but this is often not the case.
In 2008, two major oil spills
destroyed the livelihoods of the 70,000 people living in Bodo,
a town near the Niger Delta.
It continued pouring, we appealed to Shell, and they refused to come
to stop the spillage.
Shell later agreed to pay them $83 million in compensation,
but it paled in comparison to the environmental damage caused.
This basket you’re seeing
is the crayfish that I sell for a living.
Now they’re all dead.
We are suffering.
See this oil all over me.
Oil spills such as these are part of a dark trend.
Since the discovery of major oil reserves
in the Niger Delta area in 1956,
oil has been more of a curse than a blessing.
This oil spillage that Shell doesn’t want to do anything about it
because we continue to wait on Shell.
Shell Oil will not do it.
They came here since the 50s, and they have done nothing for us.
Oil wealth can provide governments with significant income,
but due to the capital-intensive nature of production,
only a few see the rewards.
Local people often lose their rights to land.
It produces very few jobs.
They, in short, get all the bad things,
whereas the central government and the oil companies
get all the money.
Nigeria’s oil curse is made worse by multinational companies
that are happy to make deals with corrupt officials.
Nigeria is said to be losing about $30 billion on an annual basis
to illicit financial flow.
How would you say the country has been benefited?
Corruption is entrenched
as oil companies use tools such as lobbyists and campaign donations
to influence politicians.
During their campaign, they will say all sorts of promises.
But at the end of the day, they will loot our money to foreign countries.
So elections are more about who has the biggest campaign chest,
who’s paying off whom
rather than who’s going to deliver best for citizens.
And while multinational oil companies help drive global corruption,
they are also fueling the greatest threat to humanity.
Can you believe this!
They burnt our village,
they left us with no water,
no electricity.
In February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
issued a stark report on the future of the planet.
Climate scientists warned that half of the world’s population
was vulnerable to disasters
stemming from the burning of fossil fuels.
Burning forests in Argentina, massive floods in Bangladesh,
drought in Spain.
The impacts of climate change are here,
and they’re getting worse.
Some fear that oil companies will use the war
to persuade Western policymakers
that more fossil fuels need to be produced domestically.
Energy independence is the idea that
you don’t have to depend on on other countries
to keep the lights on and to keep your economy functioning.
Let’s buy American energy!
Not Saudi, not Venezuela, not Russian!
Really, the only route to true independence and energy security
is to get off of fossil fuels
and get on something that’s renewable.
In May, at a Victory Day parade in Moscow’s Red Square,
Vladimir Putin committed to continuing the war in Ukraine.
I’m now addressing our armed forces and the Donbas militia:
You are fighting for the motherland, for its future,
so that no one forgets the lessons of World War II.
And in Brussels,
EU leaders scrambled to draft a new package of sanctions,
including a ban on Russian oil.
Today, we will propose to ban all Russian oil from Europe.
But the plan is still to be agreed,
and a ban on gas, for now at least, is out of the question.
The longer reckoning will need to happen
of what does it mean to cooperate economically with a dictator
who’s engaging in human rights violations on a regular basis.
No matter the outcome of the war,
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
will change not just how the world sees Russia
but also how the world sees oil.
We can and must move faster
because the sooner we replace oil, gas, and coal
with cheap, safe, and renewable energy,
the sooner we can all live in peace.