“Sweden’s climate emissions both increased and decreased in 2022,” announced the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency (Naturvårdsverket), rather cryptically on 14 December. I don’t know about you, but the perplexing headline of this press release certainly got my attention. Kudos to the PR genius who managed to put some Christmas sparkle into the otherwise dull official statistics regularly released by the agency.
Here comes a spoiler alert for those of you who intend to read the mystery report in its entirety (available in Swedish).
The culprit, as it turns out, is the major gas leak in the Baltic Sea from the sabotaged Nord Stream pipelines. Remember the catastrophe that led to the single largest methane discharge on record? Massive amounts of the short-lived yet potent greenhouse gas were emitted into the atmosphere in September 2022. Most of it occurred in Denmark’s economic zone (poor Danes!). Still, about 5.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent ended up weighing down Sweden’s greenhouse gas budget, resulting in a 7% increase in emissions compared to 2021. The good news, according to the agency, is that if we disregard Nord Stream’s hefty contribution, Sweden’s climate emissions were actually down 5% since 20211.
Well, I believe disregarding this calamity would be a mistake. After all, we are not talking about a freakish accident or a natural disaster. There are no innocent explanations for what happened. The experts all agree at this point that someone attacked the biggest natural gas delivery system from Russia to Western Europe ever built.
I’ll leave the fascinating whodunit to more resourceful and inquisitive journalists, like Mark Bowden at The Atlantic. (Now, there is a mystery story you wouldn’t want to miss and a much more entertaining one than the report from Naturvårdsverket.) Suffice it to say that geopolitics were involved. And, if anything, the past couple of bleak years have taught us just how perilous it is to ignore geopolitical risks.
My point is, when building infrastructure of this magnitude, we can’t afford to disregard the very real risk of it being disrupted by our enemies, or someone else’s for that matter. And few energy projects have ever attracted as many enemies for so many different reasons as Nord Stream. The US, for instance, was vocally against the project long before Putin decided to weaponise Russia’s gas deliveries to Europe to stifle the support of Ukraine. Everyone had been duly warned.
“Some opponents point to the environmental impact of the pipeline’s construction, as well as the contradiction between the EU’s climate goals and long-term investments in fossil fuel import infrastructure,” wrote Martin Russell of the European Parliamentary Research Service back in July 2021 in a briefing to the European Parliament. “However, the pipeline’s geopolitical implications are its most controversial aspect… The pipeline looks set to perpetuate Russia’s stranglehold on EU energy markets and compromise European strategic autonomy.”
The biggest mystery around Nord Stream appears to be not whodunit but whydunit at all.
1 And down 37% since 1990, by the way.
