Food for Thought: Managing Transition to a Decarbonized Economy
12 January 2023
Author: EIES &SAFE
The energy challenges that the world faces today are increasingly global in nature. As Europe searches for a path towards a safe, secure, and clean energy future, it must broaden its perspective to address those global challenges together.
In NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept, Alliance leaders identified climate change as “a defining challenge of our time, with a profound impact on Allied security,” nothing that “[i]t is a crisis and threat multiplier [and] affects the way our armed forces operate.”
Of course, all the above was true well before Russia brutally invaded Ukraine a few months before the Strategic Concept was announced at NATO’s June Summit in Madrid. But in the interim, contradictions between energy security and prosperity, traditional European security, and climate ambitions have become clearer. What had been viewed as theoretical risks to reliable energy supplies, critical infrastructure, and an irreversible path to decarbonization have become immediate and real. And there is no escaping the fact that Europe’s focus on rapid decarbonization (and, in some cases, denuclearisation) had been exploited to undermine NATO’s resilience, freedom of action, and deterrence leading up to the invasion.
The Strategic Concept committed NATO to “enhance[ing] our energy security and invest[ing] in a stable and reliable energy supply, suppliers and sources [and] invest[ing] in our ability to prepare for, deter, and defend against the coercive use of political, economic, energy, information and other hybrid tactics by states and nonstate actors.”
Going forward, it is clear that the new geopolitical context, which also includes reliance on the authoritarian leadership in Beijing for raw materials to enable the electrification and renewable energy revolution, has raised the stakes and exacerbated the already challenging trade-offs required for a prosperous, secure, and low-carbon future. At the same time, an activist and visible constituency is reluctant to concede that anything has changed. More than ever, leadership needs to actively manage this transition.
In this light, NATO in Madrid tasked a Comprehensive Assessment of NATO’s Energy Security in Times of Energy Transition. This assessment will cover areas including NATO’s strategic competition, supply chains, stock situation, energy transition, critical minerals, and implications for the military. This paper is intended to help guide discussion of managing the energy transition in the new geopolitical context.