But access to oil, gas, and coal still determines the fate of nations. Growing concern about climate change and the push for renewable fuels also led many to underestimate just how dependent societies still are on fossil fuels. In the decades following the end of the Cold War, global stability and easy access to energy led many of us to forget the degree to which abundant energy is existential for modern societies. Instead, questions of energy security have returned with a vengeance as countries already struggling with energy shortages and price spikes now face a fossil fuel superpower gone rogue in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, the headlong rush across Western Europe to replace Russian oil, gas, and coal with alternative sources of these fuels has made a mockery of the net-zero emissions pledges made by the major European economies just three months before the invasion at the U.N. “ Climate Change Is Harming the Planet Faster Than We Can Adapt” simply couldn’t compete with “ Putin Is Brandishing the Nuclear Option.”
But the outbreak of the first major European war since 1945 kept the report off the front page or, at the very least, below the fold. Leading media outlets did their best to pick out the most dire scenarios and findings from the report. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its latest assessment of the impacts of global warming. Four days after Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the U.N.
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