EU climate czar: Putin's war accelerated green transition

BRUSSELS (AP) — Russian President Vladimir Putin unwittingly accelerated the European Union's green transition with his war in Ukraine, with the 27-nation bloc reducing its dependency on Russian fossil fuels and increasing its renewable energy use over the past year, the EU's climate czar said Tuesday.
“The European Union now understands that if we want to increase our energy sovereignty, it can only go through renewables because we have very little gas left, we have almost no coal left, and we have no oil, Frans Timmermans, the commissioner in charge of the European Green Deal, said.  

Speaking during an interview with The Associated Press ahead of Friday's one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Timmermans said Putin completely underestimated the EU's resilience when Moscow cut off most natural gas flows to Europe amid the war, a strategy European leaders have called energy blackmail.  

“He’s been saying publicly that this winter Europeans would freeze and starve," Timmermans said. “Well, we neither froze nor starved because our food production was at high levels. There were no shortages. And our energy: We managed to make sure he didn’t use this weapon in the effective way." 

The war, however, fueled an energy price crisis in the EU that sent the bills of households and businesses through the roof.