Category: Publication

Sakari Höysniemi wrote a new blog post “Onko Suomen ja Venäjän välinen energiakauppa uhka vai mahdollisuus?” (Is energy trade between Finland and Russia a threat or an opportunity?) for Winland project.

The report, released this week by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlighted the urgent need to reduce emissions and the need to spread climate policy to all social decision-making. Few countries, however, are doing this now. Sakari Höysniemi from Winland project looks at the recent research article on how the reduction of emissions affects trade and relationships between energy producers and consumers.

Read Sakari’s full post for the Winland blog online here.

New article “Finland’s Dependence on Russian Energy—Mutually Beneficial Trade Relations or an Energy Security Threat?” written by Jaakko J. Jääskeläinen, Sakari Höysniemi, Sanna Syri and Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen has been published today at Sustainability. The article is a part of the Winland‘s special issue “Enhancing Security, Sustainability and Resilience in Energy, Food and Water”.

Studies on energy security in the context of relations between European Union (EU) and Russia tend to focus on cases, with an open conflict related to supply, such as “hard” energy weapons, or on only one fuel, often natural gas. However, there is a need to understand the long-term impacts that energy relations have politically, economically and physically, and their linkages between resilience, sustainability and security. We analyse the Finnish-Russian energy relations as a case study, as they are characterised by a non-conflictual relationship. To assess this complex relationship, we apply the interdependence framework to analyse both the energy systems and energy strategies of Finland and Russia, and the energy security issues related to the notable import dependence on one supplier. Moreover, we analyse the plausible development of the energy trade between the countries in three different energy policy scenarios until 2040. The findings of the article shed light on how the trends in energy markets, climate change mitigation and broader societal and political trends could influence Russia’s energy trade relations with countries, such as Finland. Our analysis shows that Finland’s dependence on primary energy imports does not pose an acute energy security threat in terms of sheer supply, and the dependence is unlikely to worsen in the future. However, due to the difficulty in anticipating societal, political, and economic trends, there are possible developments that could affect Finland.

Ylioppilaslehti published a long-read, written by the newspaper’s sub-editor Pekka Torvinen, with a grim title “Tulevaisuus on tuhottu” (Future is destroyed).

People were so much besotted by the gift of energy they found under the ground, that we thought we could do anything. In that illusion we did not notice that we, at the same time, created our own destruction.

For this thought-provoking article about the fight with climate change, Torvinen interviewed Docent Dr. Tere Vadén and Professor Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen. Professor Tynkkynen spoke about the energy flows coming from Russia to Finland, oil spill that occurs in Russia during oil transportation through the pipelines, burning of the gas that is a byproduct of oil extraction, methane and carbon dioxide emissions, and other disadvantages of energy sector – that Finland and other countries benefiting from hydrocarbons extraction prefer to forget about. Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen does not believe that energy superpowers will reduce the use of fossil fuels and start investing in the renewables unless some climate disaster happens that would push them, but unfortunately it might be too late to react after it. Even though Professor Tynkkynen describes himself as a realist pessimist, he believes that there is always hope.

Read the full article online in Finnish here.

A new PONARS Policy Memo “Renewables in Kazakhstan and Russia: Promoting “Future Energy” or Entrenching Hydrocarbon Dependency?” written by professors Natalie Koch and Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen was released this August.

Energy and natural resource use has always been a key issue of geopolitics, but as more countries adopt “post-oil” transition policies, environmental sustainability has itself become an important geopolitical issue that is increasingly defining political relations among and within states. Leaders in both Kazakhstan and Russia—two of Eurasia’s leading hydrocarbon producers—have been investing in new alternative energy infrastructures, “green economy” development, and certain forms of environmental sustainability. Among these were high-profile initiatives: Kazakhstan recently hosted EXPO-2017 with the theme of “Future Energy” and Russia had “The Year of the Environment 2017.”

Iconic or exceptional as many sustainability initiatives may be, these projects shed light on the region’s changing energy geographies. They also raise important questions about how and why local leaders have been advancing these policies when both Kazakhstan and Russia’s political economies are still so tied to traditional energy extraction. Do new alternative energy projects mark a sea change of promoting “future energy” transitions in Eurasia? Alternatively, do these projects risk further entrenching hydrocarbon dependency in both countries? Whose interests are at stake in such transitions? And how might recent renewable energy initiatives support or challenge prevailing political configurations in Kazakhstan and Russia? While some changes are underway, infrastructure challenges and networks of power-players and rent-seekers, as well as a shallow civic commitment to environmental protection, make it difficult to create new energy capacities based on renewables, despite governmental advocacy of it.

Read the full text on PONARS Eurasia website.

A new book titled “Climate Change Discourse in Russia: Past and Present” was published by Routledge this August. The volume is edited by Marianna Poberezhskaya and Teresa Ashe and consists of 7 chapters written by different authors, all of whom address the issue of climate change and how it has been treated in Russia, starting from discussion in the Soviet Union. Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen contributed to the book a chapter “The Environment of an Energy Giant: Climate discourse framed by ‘hydrocarbon culture’”.

More information on the book can be found on the publisher’s website.