The European Union is facing new challenges in a traditional way — by drawing up corresponding documents. No exception has been made for Brussels’s approach to shoring up the EU’s resistance to future oil and gas commotions on stock exchanges, as well as to lessening energy dependence on monopolist suppliers. The suspension of gas supplies one year ago because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict and this year’s suspension of oil supplies, which was sparked by a disagreement between Minsk and Moscow over customs tariffs for “black gold,” only spurred the EU’s efforts to provide real diversification of the sources of energy supplies.
The “Green Book” plan outlining further EU energy policies, introduced last Wednesday, serves this purpose. With this document the European Commission is calling on the EU member countries to cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, thereby decreasing dependence on imported fuel and simultaneously launching a new “industrial revolution.”
“Today we have taken a step that will change the European Union. All EU members are facing climatic changes, growing dependence on fuel exports, and constantly rising oil prices. We need joint European responsibility for a stable, safe, and competitive energy sector,” said Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, while presenting the new strategy in Brussels. Official approval of the EU’s energy policy is expected in March, after it is confirmed by the governments of member countries and discussed by energy ministers. Barroso said that rising global temperatures, growing oil prices, recent irregular energy supplies in Europe, and also, as he put it, the unacceptable unreliability of Russia as a supplier of energy resources, have led to the need for a new policy under conditions of the new reality.
Andris Pibalgs, the European Energy Commissioner, underscored that if the EU makes the right decision now, Europe may become a world leader of the industrial revolution by developing an economy that is less dependent on hydrocarbons. “Our ambitions are to create a working domestic market, a clear and efficient energy sector, and to make the right choice about drafting and developing new scenarios that we are going to follow,” the commissioner stressed.
It is noteworthy that the primary tasks envisaged by the “Green Book” include the formation of a complete domestic market of electricity and gas. According to the project’s authors, ensuring fair competition on the part of energy suppliers is supposed to lead to a drop in fuel prices. European Commission experts believe that it is crucial to separate suppliers of energy resources from operators of pipelines and energy systems, and to reduce countries’ dependence on oil and gas supplies from other countries. This refers above all to Russia. Europe also needs to find alternative energy sources as soon as possible. In the opinion of the authors of the new energy strategy, if countries do not engage in diversification and save energy, then by 2030 the share of imported energy in the EU will have risen from 50 percent to 65, which in turn will intensify Europe’s dependence on unreliable suppliers.
COMMENTS
Arkady MOSHES, expert of the Finnish Institute of International Relations:
“I believe it is too early to speak about the real launch of the joint energy policy. To make it real, they will have to overcome the rather firm resistance of huge energy companies, chiefly German and French ones, which will be opposed to the liberalization of the European market. Certainly, the publication of this strategic document attests to the fact that Europe is beginning to take the problem of its energy security seriously, that it realizes the risks linked to excessive dependence on a single supplier, i.e., Russia, and that the process has gone too far during the last year and a half. I am not going to estimate the temporary conditions in which the 27 current EU members can come to terms on conducting a truly concerted, not just coherent, energy policy. The debates over this issue have been under way in leaps and bounds for the last 10 years. I think that today Europe’s approach has become more informed because the realization of risks has become more earnest as a result of the crises that have occurred over the last 15 months in Russian-Ukrainian and Russian-Belarusian relations. I think that some changes are sure to take place, but they will not happen any time soon.
