Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
pipeline directly connecting Russia with German markets started pumping in
November 2011. The Commission initially committed to supporting the Nabucco
pipeline, but in early 2014 this project was suspended. It may fund the Trans-
Caspian Pipeline, to be
nished by 2018. Poland and other member states have
insisted that the EU must create and fund Platforms to help all major infrastructure
projects abroad. The energy NGO Counter Balance argues that the EU is, if any-
thing, more obsessed with large oil and gas infrastructure projects now and less
focused on the broader implications of low carbon than it was in the mid-2000s.
This is despite the serious setbacks encountered in all such projects. The Trans-
Sahara pipeline has overshot its budget by an estimated $15 billion and struggled to
cient investment to progress. The opening of the Medgaz pipe was con-
tinuously postponed until 2011, by which time it was running at $1 billion over
budget and had to be expensively rescued by EIB loans. These pipelines represent
the very opposite of the localism needed to mitigate climate change: they entail
huge environmental damage, signi
nd su
cant energy losses in transmission and deepen
reliance on hydrocarbons.
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Climate aims remain disconnected from policy delib-
eration of oil and gas pipelines; the EU already enjoys an incoming pipeline capa-
city well in excess of what its hydrocarbons consumption must be to meet its 2050
emission targets.
33
The EU
s new energy dialogues with producer states have remained narrowly
couched and have not tackled the climate-security nexus in any systematic or
operational fashion. Middle East producers have been particularly resistant to
broadening notions of security to include climate security issues or to cooperating
with the EU on mitigation (even the richest of Gulf states are still classi
'
ed as
developing states and thus not subject to binding emissions reductions).
34
Member
states have pushed for more high-level political involvement in energy dialogues, as
a means of e
ecting linkages to strategic priorities. But the Alliance for An Energy
E
cient Economy admonishes the EU for failing to engage more systematically in
meaningful dialogue with consumer states on the broader political dimensions of
energy and climate policy. Areva executives argue that the EU should be pressing
hard for a new United Nations (UN) agency that has a broader remit covering all
energy- and climate-related questions.
Senior o
cials now talk enthusiastically of a new emancipation of energy policy
from climate policy. Energy commissioner Gunther Öttinger has been a notable
sceptic of any more politicised climate security agenda. Experts interpreted the EU
s
2050 roadmap as signalling the end of the consensus that energy policy should be
unequivocally led by climate policy.
35
The economic crisis and squeeze on compe-
titiveness, combined with a new rise in oil prices, have produced a swing away from
the absolute priority attached to climate policy in previous years. Long-term energy
security is increasingly a matter of the
'
'
switch to gas
'
. In February 2012, a mid-term
