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Don't forget that climate change is good for Russia...

• freeflight 5y ago
  The same could be said about the US as the warming will also make natural resources in Alaska more approachable.
  • refurb 5y ago
    Pretty sure transportation and drilling/mining is harder when the ground thaws and is a swampy mess.
    • freeflight 5y ago
      Which is exactly what's gonna happen to the permafrost in Siberia, yet that's apparently "good" for Russia? Why wouldn't it also be good for the US in Alaska? Or could it rather be that this "Climate change good for Russia!" talk is just the same old American jingoism merely adopting modern environmentalism? Why would Russia be the only country for which climate change is "good"?
• hnbad 5y ago
  Sure, except for all the flooding, forest fires, droughts, etc. Climate change doesn't simply mean some areas get warmer. Climate change means the entire climate system changes. Air streams and water currents shift, ground water evaporates or rises, and so on.
  • panick21 5y ago
    If everything changes it is very hard to say who benefits and who loses and how much. In some places there will be more, in others less. Some places will have more droughts in others less. On avg no country is better placed for overall warming then Russia, except maybe Canada.
    • hnbad 5y ago
      Paradoxically climate change can also cause more severe winters despite an overall net warming effect. Being better placed because most of your territory gets extremely cold a lot of the time doesn't mean climate change would provide a net benefit to you. This isn't Civ, you can't just reload a save file if your strategy doesn't work out. Heck, the best strategy for Russia would be to break up large international trade blocks by destabilizing their political structures, especially in Europe, to be gain more leverage and make it easier to expand its territory further into southern Ukraine. And incidentally with Turkey provoking NATO, the UK leaving the EU, Trump being president and the rise of far-right anti-EU sentiments in other EU countries that matches what happened for several years prior to the pandemic, whether with their influence or without. It's far more likely Russia having little interest in averting climate change is for the same reason as with everybody else including the US: it's a long-term process requiring intense international collaboration putting anyone fully committing to it at a competitive disadvantage if anyone else doesn't join in. Economically it's a game of chicken. EDIT: I guess I struck a nerve with some people? I'm not arguing that Russia is manipulating the political climate of EU countries or the US. I'm arguing that if you want to engage in conspiracy theories like Russia intentionally accelerating climate change for strategic benefit, there are better strategies that are more plausible and don't require rolling the dice on whether your entire country will go up in flames (or drown) in ten years.
    • bserge 5y ago
      Oh yeah, melting of permafrost destroying a lot of their roads and tracks and releasing a lot of greenhouse gases, floods and droughts in areas where people actually live and farm, damage to mines, pipelines, industrial sites. No problem though, everyone will just pack up and move north east. /s
• randomopining 5y ago
  Except for the methane gas that's trapped in the frozen permafrost in Siberia. Once released it will start a positive feedback loop to supercharge our messing up of the atmospheric chemical makeup.
  • exyi 5y ago
    That is issue for all of earth, but Russian oligarchs don't have to care about it.
• mananaysiempre 5y ago
  Possibly, but not entirely obviously. European Russia (as well as Ukraine, and I expect, but have not explicitly heard, Belarus) has reams of arable land suitable for many crops (if not all, e.g. you need relatively hardy varieties of grapes) with extremely good soil (something that current biotech can’t really reproduce, only create subpar workarounds for, or so biologists tell me). It’d already be enough to feed the rest of Europe if not more, if only the Soviet Union had not repeatedly and systematically burned out any trace of initiative or entrepreneurial spirit in the agricultural workers. There is now some development (if with a strong criminal tang to it), but the Russian village is, to put it bluntly, dying. You could call it “flyover country”, I guess, except there’s hardly any local air traffic, etiher. It’s not hard to see: board a (non-express) train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, get off on a small station of your choice somewhere in the middle, the kind that has a couple of platforms if that, then take one of the (cheap) local taxis to a random local settlement that’s not on the railroad. Stay there for several days. The people you’ll see will be fundamentally lovely, but most will be one or more of over 60, deep into the bottle, or only there until they can leave for what passes for a larger settlement. (Stay away from the local disco, though, and don’t expect anybody to speak anything but Russian.) Or at least that’s how I learned it. All of this is to say that the main thing keeping Russian agricultural development down is disintegrating infrastructure and a horrid business environment, not an inhospitable climate. (If you’re wondering why I’m overlooking the enormous three fourths of the country that are known under the unassuming name of the “Asian part”, the simple answer is—with apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Novosibirsk and many other places—not that many people live there; 20% of the already pretty sparse population, in fact. So if you’re looking at all of those humongous tracts of land and thinking what life would be like if they were used for agriculture, think again. The problem is not that it’s cold there on average, necessarily, even if it is in many parts—the problem is that it’s very continental there, and there is no friendly neighbourhood body of water to even things out. Wikipedia tells me Novosibirsk and Omsk are about as far north as Ontario and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, while Chita and Irkutsk are even further south. There’s also only the one railroad, with a rugged 4x4 your only hope of getting to most other places, and the soil sucks. If it thaws out, which would of course be disastrous in terms of greenhouse gases, it would still suck, only in a more squishy fashion. Can’t farm it, can’t quarry it, can’t build upon it, which is why people hardly ever do. My God, it’s full of empty space.) As a final note, looking at Russia as an adversary ... serves to tickle the fancy of the powerful arseholes here, of course, but looks kind of silly to me TBH. There’s a lot of good people and interesting stuff happening, but the population is half that of the US and the GDP is less than a tenth. I mean, come on. Not in third world territory, yet, but getting there, definitely. Russia is not an all-powerful boogieman, except in the fever dreams it has on its sickbed. Even if it still contains enough spite to ruin your day repeatedly (as well as enough brilliance to carry the world forward for years).
• exyi 5y ago
  Probably not for Russians (the ordinary people), since it will likely bring more extreme climate. And in general it's quite hard to predict what will come. The Russian elites (politicians, oligarchs) could however benefit significantly - opening of north passage -> better access to ocean for the navy; better access to natural resources; and other powers will suffer more, so Russia could get relatively more powerful. I think this is part of the reason why we see climate denial from the disinformation sources...
• keewee7 5y ago
  That is true. But what are they gonna do about it? The Russophiles in the West are already climate change denialists and nobody takes them serious
• rtkwe 5y ago
  Where the permafrost melts it'll be a giant horrid swamp not particularly useful land. Not to mention every established interest will be stressed by the chaos of climate change from losing land directly to the economic chaos that big migrations and flooding/storms/droughts will cause.