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October 1962: missiles, lies and diplomacy

The Cuban missile crisis cover-up

How JFK and Robert Kennedy hid confidential letter to the US president from Nikita Khrushchev confirming the quid pro quo that saved the world from nuclear war.

Le Monde Diplomatique by Peter Kornbluh

Oil Giants, After Surge in Profits, Are Wary About Spending

Economic and military uncertainty clouds the outlook for Exxon, Chevron and other energy companies, whose bonanza from high prices is already fading.

NYT by Clifford Krauss

Inside a Nuclear War Bunker Built to Save Canada’s Leaders

Amid renewed tensions with Russia, tourists are flocking to a decommissioned nuclear fallout shelter that Canada built to preserve its government during a nuclear war.

NYT by Ian Austen

Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas or coal in the EU in 2022

A report by the think tank Ember found that the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis have accelerated the transition and have not caused a 'return to coal.'

Le Monde by Perrine Mouterde

Cooperate with objective and ethical thinking…

What is Artificial Intelligency?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ability of a computer or a robot controlled by a computer to do tasks that are usually done by humans because they require human intelligence and discernment. Although there are no AIs that can perform the wide variety of tasks an ordinary human can do, some AIs can match humans in specific tasks.

October 1962: missiles, lies and diplomacy

The Cuban missile crisis cover-up

How JFK and Robert Kennedy hid confidential letter to the US president from Nikita Khrushchev confirming the quid pro quo that saved the world from nuclear war.

Le Monde Diplomatique by Peter Kornbluh

The Cuban missile crisis cover-up

President John F Kennedy talks to Soviet ambassador Anatoly F Dobrynin and foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, White House, October 1962

On 28 October 1962 – that dramatic day just over 60 years ago when Nikita Khrushchev publicly ordered the removal of nuclear ballistic missiles his forces had just installed on the island of Cuba – the Soviet premier sent a private letter to President John F Kennedy regarding the resolution of the most dangerous superpower confrontation in modern history. Officially, the USSR withdrew the missiles in return for a vague US non-invasion-of-Cuba guarantee. Secretly, however, the crisis was resolved when President Kennedy dispatched his brother Robert to meet with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin on the evening of 27 October and agree to a top-secret deal: US missiles in Turkey for Soviet missiles in Cuba.

‘I feel I must state to you that I do understand the delicacy involved for you in an open consideration of the issue of eliminating the US missile bases in Turkey,’ Khrushchev wrote to Kennedy in his private note (1), seeking to confirm the arrangement in writing. ‘I take into account the complexity of this issue and I believe you are right about not wishing to publicly discuss it.’

Dobrynin gave the confidential letter to Attorney General Robert Kennedy on 29 October. But instead of passing it on to the president, the next day Kennedy returned the letter to the Soviet ambassador. The United States would ‘live up to our promise, even if it is given in this oral form,’ Kennedy told him, but there would be no written record. ‘I myself, for example, do not want to risk getting involved in the transmission of this sort of letter, since who knows where and when such letters can surface or be somehow published,’ Dobrynin’s detailed report to the Kremlin quoted Kennedy as saying. ‘The appearance of such a document could cause irreparable harm to my political career in the future. This is why we request that you take this letter back.’

An epic cover-up

So began the epic cover-up of how the crisis actually ended and nuclear war was averted. President Kennedy was determined to keep the missile swap secret – to safeguard US leadership of the NATO alliance of which Turkey was a member, as well as to protect his political reputation, which, like his brother’s, would suffer if it became known that he had actually negotiated with the USSR in order save the world from self-destruction. To hide the quid pro quo, the president took a number of active measures: among them lying to his White House predecessors, misleading the media, and orchestrating a political hatchet job on his own UN ambassador, Adlai Stevenson – the first, and virtually the only, advisor to urge Kennedy to consider a missile exchange to resolve the crisis diplomatically, without the use of force. After JFK’s assassination, a handful of his former White House aides sustained the cover-up. They would maintain a wall of silence that endured for more than 25 years, obfuscating the true history, and real lessons, of the cold war crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.

Within hours of Khrushchev’s radio broadcast on the morning of 28 October, announcing his order to dismantle and repatriate the nuclear missiles, President Kennedy began to spread a false narrative of how the crisis had concluded. His secret White House taping system captured Kennedy’s phone calls to his three surviving predecessors – Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Herbert Hoover – about how he had dealt with it. He misled Eisenhower, telling him that ‘we couldn’t get into that [Turkey] deal,’ as missile crisis historian Sheldon Stern reported in his book Averting ‘the Final Failure’ (2).

‘We rejected that,’ he lied to Truman, about Khrushchev’s public demand on the Jupiter missiles in Turkey, saying that ‘they came back with and accepted the earlier proposal’ on the non-invasion pledge (3). To Hoover, Kennedy falsely reported that the Soviets had gone back ‘to their more reasonable position’ on non-invasion.

The next day, the president conferred with his brother about Khrushchev’s unexpected letter on the missile swap and decided that there should be no paper trail about the secret agreement. ‘President Kennedy and I did not feel correspondence on our conversations was very helpful at this time,’ was the message Robert Kennedy sent to Dobrynin, according to Kennedy’s top-secret account of their meeting. ‘He understood our conversation, and in my judgement nothing more was necessary.’

Fostering media stories

The president then set about fostering stories in the media that would distance him from any speculation about a quid pro quo. He gave a green light to his closest friend, Charles Bartlett, whom he had used as a secret emissary to Soviet intelligence officials during the missile crisis, to write the inside story of decision-making that ended the conflict; Bartlett teamed up with another Kennedy confidant, Stewart Alsop, to co-author the controversial article ‘In Time of Crisis’ for the Saturday Evening Post, which began to circulate around Washington in early December 1962 (4).

The Saturday Evening Post story established the official narrative of how the missile crisis was resolved. Indeed, the opening quote of the article, ‘We’re eyeball to eyeball, and I think the other fellow just blinked’ – attributed to Secretary of State Dean Rusk during the crisis – instantly became the iconic summation of how the world was spared the fate of atomic Armageddon. Threatening to invade Cuba, Kennedy had resolutely won the game of nuclear chicken with the Soviets; Nikita Khrushchev had ‘blinked’, withdrawn the missiles and given America a major cold war victory. ‘Rusk’s words,’ the authors of the article intoned, ‘epitomise a great moment in American history.’

But the article also contained a savage political smear on UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson, casting him as ‘soft’ on the Soviets for favouring political negotiations over military action. Worse, he was an appeaser. Alsop and Bartlett quoted an ‘unadmiring official’ as stating that ‘Adlai wanted a Munich. He wanted to trade US bases for Cuban bases.’ Before it was published, the editors of the Saturday Evening Post began distributing the article to the New York and Washington media with a press release titled ‘The controversial and hitherto unrevealed role played by UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson during the height of the Cuba crisis’. The attack on Stevenson immediately set off a political firestorm, as President Kennedy must have known it would.

As Kennedy White House aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr recounted in his widely read memoir A Thousand Days, on 1 December the president summoned him to the Oval Office and told him that the forthcoming article ‘accused Stevenson of advocating a Caribbean Munich’. Because of Kennedy’s close friendship with Bartlett, the president said, ‘everyone will suppose that it came out of the White House.’ He told Schlesinger to ‘tell Adlai that I never talked to Charlie or any other reporter about the Cuban crisis, and that this piece does not represent my views.’

In truth, Kennedy had talked to Bartlett as the story was being written; it did represent his views, or at least his political purposes, since he had surreptitiously edited the article and orchestrated the hatchet job on Stevenson as a way to distance the White House from how the missile crisis really ended. ‘In fact, the “nonadmiring official” was Kennedy himself,’ historian Gregg Herken revealed in his book The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (Knopf, 2014).

‘The president had pencilled in the “Munich” line when he annotated a typescript of the draft article,’ Herken wrote, drawing on interviews with members of Stewart Alsop’s family and correspondence between Alsop and the executive editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Clay Blair Jr, letters published in full for the first time – 60 years after the missile crisis – by my organisation, the National Security Archive (5). President Kennedy’s role ‘must remain Top Secret, Eyes Only, Burn After Reading, and so on,’ Alsop wrote to Blair four months after Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, when his editor urged him to write a ‘tell-all’ about the president’s participation in the drafting of the article. The manuscript page with the president’s handwritten remarks, Alsop said, had been returned to Kennedy in 1962 and destroyed. ‘I sent the ms to Himself as a Christmas present, through Charlie [Bartlett]. It has long since been reduced to ashes,’ Alsop wrote. ‘It would have made an interesting footnote to history, at that.’

In the years following Kennedy’s assassination, his top advisors, though privy to the secret deal, sustained the sacred myth of the Cuban missile crisis. Early memoirs from former officials such as Theodore Sorensen, among others, withheld all references to the missile swap. Robert Kennedy’s diary of the crisis did contain a detailed account of his climactic 27 October 1962, meeting with Dobrynin about the quid pro quo. But when the diaries were posthumously published in 1969 as the best-selling book Thirteen Days, those passages were omitted. Twenty years later, at a Moscow conference on the missile crisis, Sorensen confessed that he had quietly cut the references to the missile trade (6). ‘I was the editor of Robert Kennedy’s book,’ he admitted. ‘And his diary was very explicit that [Turkey] was part of the deal; but at that time, it was still a secret even on the American side … So I took it upon myself to edit that out of his diaries.’

‘There was no leak,’ former national security advisor McGeorge Bundy wrote in his book Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, finally revealing the cover-up in 1988 (7). ‘As far as I know, none … of us told anyone else what had happened. We denied in every forum that there was any deal.’

Indeed, only in the late 1980s and early 1990s did the full history of the diplomacy, negotiation, and compromise that resolved the missile crisis finally emerge. In 1987 the John F Kennedy Presidential Library began to release declassified transcripts of the secret tapes that recorded Kennedy’s meetings with his advisors during the conflict; they captured the president weighing the merits of a missile trade that might avert a nuclear conflagration. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian foreign ministry archives began to share key documentation, including Dobrynin’s cables to Moscow reporting on his meetings with Robert Kennedy. A series of international conferences, including 30th and 40th anniversary meetings in Havana bringing together surviving Kennedy White House officials, former Soviet military commanders and Fidel Castro, significantly advanced the historical record on how the dangerous nuclear confrontation began – and how it really ended.

That historical record remains immediately relevant today, as Russia’s threats to use nuclear weapons in its war of aggression against Ukraine have created another ‘time of crisis’. The degree to which the lessons of the past are applicable to the present remains unknown. But 60 years ago, in his 28 October 1962 letter to President Kennedy (8), Nikita Khrushchev issued a prescient warning for coexistence in a world of nuclear weapons: ‘Mr President, the crisis that we have gone through may repeat again. This means that we need to address the issues which contain too much explosive material. But we cannot delay the solution to these issues, for continuation of this situation is fraught with many uncertainties and dangers.’

Peter Kornbluh

Peter Kornbluh is co-author, with William M LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: the Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and author of The Pinochet File: a Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (The New Press, 2013). This article was first published in The Nation. To subscribe to The Nation go to this link.

Oil Giants, After Surge in Profits, Are Wary About Spending

Economic and military uncertainty clouds the outlook for Exxon, Chevron and other energy companies, whose bonanza from high prices is already fading.

NYT by Clifford Krauss

Feb. 1, 2023

Exxon Mobil made $56 billion in profit last year, its largest annual haul ever. Chevron earned $36 billion, also a company record. But after a bountiful 2022, the outlook for those companies and other big oil and gas producers is cloudy.

They benefited for much of last year from higher prices for nearly all fuels as the continued recovery from the pandemic slowdown increased demand and the Russian invasion of Ukraine strained supplies. The landscape already looks different.

Exxon’s fourth-quarter profit of $12.75 billion, while strong, was down sharply from the $19.7 billion it earned in the third quarter. Oil prices have settled to a level more than a third lower than their peak shortly after the Ukraine war began last February, and natural gas prices have crashed by 70 percent from their highs in August, mostly because of an unseasonably warm winter in much of Europe and the United States.

“We don’t know what’s ahead in 2023,” Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chief executive, told analysts last week, adding that the uncertainty called for “operational discipline.”

The U.S. Energy Department has projected that prices for Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, will average $83 a barrel this year — historically high, but 18 percent below 2022 levels. Gasoline-refining margins will slide by nearly 30 percent this year, the department forecasts, leading to a national average price for regular gasoline of $3.30 a gallon, more than a dollar below prices following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. The department also expects natural gas prices to average 25 percent below last year’s.

While lower prices are a comfort for consumers, they take a toll on companies’ bottom lines.

Oil and gas companies expect a profitable 2023, but revenues and profits should drop below those in 2022. And even while celebrating their profits, executives caution that the oil business is subject to abrupt swings in supply and demand.

So the companies have promised investors not to repeat the past mistake of drilling so much that prices crash. They have been hesitant to move aggressively to expand production — as President Biden urged them to do when supplies were pinched — or take meaningful steps to build profitability around cleaner fuels. That restraint could mean tighter markets and higher prices unless there is a serious recession.

Mike Wirth, Chevron’s chief executive, told analysts last week that the company would remain focused on “operational discipline.”Credit...Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Instead, executives said they were committed to returning surplus cash to shareholders by increasing dividends and buying back shares. Chevron announced a $75 billion buyback program last week. Exxon announced its own $50 billion repurchase plan in December.

While critics often accuse the oil industry of profiteering when prices are high, executives say their companies are prone to cycles. Their share prices have rocketed over the last year after a decade of underperforming almost every other industry. Only two years ago, Exxon reported an annual loss as demand collapsed because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The variables that will determine oil companies’ profitability this year are largely out of their control — in both supply and demand. The war in Ukraine could expand or not; a recession in the United States and Europe could be deep or averted entirely. Prices for fuels, and inflation generally, will largely depend on how events play out.

Despite the war, Europe’s economy in recent months has been stronger than expected, in large part because the mild winter has kept gas demand and prices in check.

The International Energy Agency has projected that oil demand this year will grow modestly, by nearly two million barrels a day, reaching 101.7 million barrels a day. That may support oil company profits.

As pandemic restrictions have eased, an increase in air travel has added to the demand on refineries for jet fuel. The ability of oil companies to provide fuel at reasonable prices could be stretched, especially since they have been cautious about increasing production.

And with lockdowns lifted in China, its economy should grow faster, and demand for oil and gas should increase, if the country can overcome a new virus surge. But the picture remains unfocused. Chinese oil imports remain low for the moment, and Chinese refineries are gearing up for a recovery by producing more fuels for domestic consumption and export.

Another wild card is Russia.

With Russia’s war in Ukraine, Russian oil and gas supplies might be constrained by lower production because of Western sanctions and a lack of foreign investment. Before the war, Russia produced one out of every 10 barrels of oil consumed worldwide. Its exports have declined, although more slowly than many analysts expected at the outset of the war.

Overall, many in the industry are betting that the balance will tip toward high demand, not a glut.

“Against tight supply, demand for oil and gas is strong, and we believe it will remain so,” Jeff Miller, chief executive of Halliburton, one of the largest oil-field service companies, told analysts last week. He said the only way to address the supply side of the equation would be “multiple years of increased investment.”

Even with last year’s bottom-line bonanza for the oil companies, executives have been wary of aggressively pursuing new investments that would yield production gains. But there are indications that they may be recalibrating that risk aversion.

“We are underinvesting as an industry,” Darren Woods, Exxon’s chief executive, told analysts Tuesday, noting that many oil fields were depleting. “We see the potential for continued tight markets.”

Exxon reported in December that it would spend $23 billion to $25 billion on exploration and production this year, which experts say could drive an increase of more than 10 percent in its production of oil and gas. That is a partial reversal from declines in activity during the pandemic.

Mr. Woods said Tuesday that Exxon’s capital spending relative to competitors’ would be an advantage as the company pushed forward with developing fields in the Permian Basin straddling Texas and New Mexico, and offshore Guyana and Brazil.

He was particularly upbeat about Exxon’s refining-business profits.

“With economies picking up, and China coming out of its Covid lockdown and economic growth there,” he said, “we’ll continue to see that tightness and high refining margins.”

Chevron plans to spend roughly $17 billion this year on exploration and production, over 25 percent more than it did last year but still less than the company had projected it would spend in 2020 before the pandemic slashed demand for energy during most of 2020 and 2021.

American oil companies have increasingly focused their investments in the Western Hemisphere. Last year, Chevron broke its record for oil and gas production in the United States even as its global output declined by more than 3 percent in 2022 from the year before. Exxon reported that it increased its combined production in Guyana and the Permian Basin, its principal growth drivers, by over 30 percent.

But the major oil companies, particularly Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, may be rethinking that strategy, and cautiously moving back to the Middle East, after decades in which they looked elsewhere to avoid the turbulence of political strife and expropriations.

Exxon recently announced that it had acquired two deepwater blocks for gas exploration off Egypt. That gives the company a large unbroken stretch of sea between Egypt and Cyprus to explore for gas that could eventually help Europe overcome the loss of Russian supplies.

Chevron, which operates two gas fields off Israel, recently announced a large discovery off Egypt. In his conference call with analysts, Mr. Wirth said Chevron was working on development plans in Israeli waters and elsewhere in the East Mediterranean.

“We’ve got seismic and we’re developing our exploration plans,” he said. “You’ll hear more about that as we go forward. So, it’s a high priority.”

Clifford Krauss is a national business correspondent based in Houston, covering energy. He has spent much of his career covering foreign affairs and was a winner of the Overseas Press Club Award for international environmental reporting in 2021.

Inside a Nuclear War Bunker Built to Save Canada’s Leaders

Amid renewed tensions with Russia, tourists are flocking to a decommissioned nuclear fallout shelter that Canada built to preserve its government during a nuclear war.

NYT by Ian Austen

Jan. 25, 2023

OTTAWA — Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Christine McGuire’s museum began receiving inquiries unlike anything she’d previously encountered during her career.

“We had people asking us if we still functioned as a fallout shelter,” said Ms. McGuire, the executive director of Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum. “That fear is still very real for people. It seems to have come back into the public psyche.”

The Diefenbunker still has most of the form and features of the nuclear fallout shelter it once was for Canadian government and military V.I.P.s. But the underground complex, decommissioned in 1994, has shifted from being a functioning military asset to being a potent symbol of a return to an age when the world’s destruction again seems a real possibility with a nuclear-armed Russia raising the specter of using the weapons.

The Diefenbunker history is not just of global tension but also of Canada’s parsimonious approach to civil defense, optimistic thinking about the apocalypse and Canadians’ antipathy toward anything they perceive as a special deal for their political leaders. Now, the privately run museum is one of the few places in the world where visitors can tour a former Cold War bunker built to house a government under nuclear attack.

These factors have made the four-story-deep, 100,000-square-foot warren of about 350 rooms into an unexpectedly popular tourist attraction despite its off-the-beaten-path location, in the village of Carp within the city limits of Ottawa, Canada’s capital.

Robert Bothwell, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, was on the board of an Ontario cultural organization during the 1990s when a group of volunteers proposed turning the bunker into a museum. At that time, he said, several other volunteer-based museums had failed to attract visitors even with ample funding.

“So I thought: ‘Diefenbunker? Give me a break,’” he said. “But I was totally wrong.”

Since its construction began in 1959, the bunker has carried a variety of official names: Emergency Army Signals Establishment, Central Emergency Government Headquarters and Canadian Forces Station Carp. But it came to be known as the Diefenbunker after John Diefenbaker, the prime minister who commissioned it, more as a form of mockery than in his honor.

For almost two years, during its construction, the bunker and 10 other much smaller bunkers across the country were disguised as military communications centers, which, in fact, was part of their role.

But The Toronto Telegram newspaper exposed the Diefenbunker’s true nature in 1961 with a detailed aerial photograph of its construction site. The photograph showed that dozens of toilets were to be installed, a sign that the complex would be more than a small radio base. Above the photograph, the headline read: “78 BATHROOMS — and the Army still won’t admit that … THIS IS THE DIEFENBUNKER.”

Unlike the United States, Canada did not establish an extensive network of stocked fallout shelters to protect civilians, said Andrew Burtch, a historian at the Canadian War Museum and the author of a book about the country’s limited civil defense system.

Part of it was simply cost, he said. But he said that the military also assumed that the Soviets had reserved their then-limited number of warheads for the United States and would not “waste” them on Canadian targets. In that scenario, planners assumed that radiation from Soviet bombers shot down over Canada would be the main threat. That led, Dr. Burtch said, to a civil defense system in which, “for the most part, the public was on its own.”

Mr. Diefenbaker acknowledged the bunker’s purpose after the aerial photograph appeared and vowed that he would never visit it and would stay home with his wife if the bombers and missiles came. But outrage over the exclusive bunker — reserved for 565 people, including the prime minister and his 12 most senior cabinet ministers — persisted. Compounding the outcry, the government refused to disclose the cost of the bunker, estimated at 22 million Canadian dollars in 1958 money, or about 220 million today.

From the outside, the Diefenbunker looks like a grassy hillside with a few vents poking up from behind the ground, along with a handful of antennas, one quite tall. The entrance, added during the 1980s, is via a metal building with a roll-up garage door that opens to the blast tunnel, an area designed to absorb energy from a bomb dropped on downtown Ottawa. Stretching for 387 feet, the blast tunnel connects to a set of doors, weighing one and four tons each, and then next is a decontamination area that opens to the rest of the bunker.

Much of the interior of the utilitarian and brightly lit space is a restoration of the original, which was stripped after the complex was decommissioned and replaced with similar or identical items from smaller bunkers or military bases.

The prime minister’s office and suite is spartan, its only touch of luxury being a turquoise-colored washroom sink.

The war cabinet room has an overhead projector and four television sets. A military briefing room immediately next door has a projector that tracked planes.

The bunker is surrounded by thick layers of gravel on all sides to help mitigate the shock of any nearby nuclear explosions. Its plumbing fixtures are mounted on thick slabs of rubber and connected with hoses rather than pipes for the same reason.

The most secure and best protected area of the bunker was a vault behind a door so immense it requires a second, smaller door to be opened first to equalize the air pressure. It was intended as a place for Canada’s central bank, the Bank of Canada, to place gold should an attack appear imminent. There’s no record that the bank ever delivered gold there, a Bank of Canada spokesman said, and the vault became a gym in the 1970s.

A small armory was raided in 1984 by a corporal stationed in the bunker. He stole a large number of weapons, including two submachine guns, and 400 rounds of ammunition before driving to Quebec City where he shot and killed three people and injured 13 others at the province’s legislative assembly.

The complex was designed to store enough food and generator fuel to support occupants for 30 days after a nuclear attack, under the assumption that by then radiation levels above ground would be low enough for everyone to emerge.

But the need never arose, and the bunker remained scorned. Ultimately, the only prime minister to tour it was Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of Justin Trudeau, the current prime minister, who flew in on a military helicopter in 1976. After the trip, his government cut its budget.

Visitors stream here now from across Canada and abroad to experience for themselves this window into the Cold War past — and perhaps for a sense of the security that many crave today.

It’s also a rare opportunity to step inside a bunker built to withstand a nuclear Armageddon.

While bunkers from various wars are dotted around the world and open to visitors, major Cold War ones are much less common. A decommissioned bunker under the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia — intended to hold all of the members of Congress — offers tours, but bans phones and cameras.

Gilles Courtemanche, a volunteer tour guide at the Diefenbunker, was a soldier stationed there in 1964, when he was 20. He worked there for two years as a signalman, setting up and maintaining communications and computer infrastructure. He was one of the 540 people, civilians and military members, who operated the bunker on three shifts before it was decommissioned.

Things have come full circle for him and for Canada. The Cold War of his youth has mutated to new kinds of threats, he said.

“It’s an important thing that we have here,” Mr. Courtemanche said, referring to the museum’s ability to remind visitors of threats past and present. “Now, China is starting to flex their muscles, and the Russians? Well, I don’t understand what they are doing at all. To me, it’s insanity.”

Wind and solar generated more electricity than gas or coal in the EU in 2022

A report by the think tank Ember found that the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis have accelerated the transition and have not caused a 'return to coal.'

Le Monde by Perrine Mouterde

Published on February 1, 2023

In the wake of the outbreak of war in Ukraine, the reopening of coal-fired power plants triggered fears that the energy crisis would deal a severe blow to the fight against global warming in Europe. That worst-case scenario seems to have been avoided. According to a report by the think tank Ember, published on Tuesday, January 31, 2022, Europe has instead seen an acceleration in the deployment of solar and wind power, with the crisis having only a "minor effect" on coal-fired power generation.

In 2022, wind and solar together produced more electricity (22%) than coal (16%) in the European Union (EU), but also more than gas (20%) – a first. "All fears of a coal comeback are now dead," insisted Dave Jones, head of data analysis at Ember. "Not only are European countries still committed to phasing out coal, they're now also working to phase out gas."

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, coal use did jump, increasing by 35% in March 2022 compared to March 2021. But this trend has not continued. In the last four months of the year, electricity generation from this fossil fuel was lower than it was a year earlier. According to Ember's count, the 26 coal-fired generation units brought back online operated at only 18% of their capacity in the last quarter. The think tank also noted that the EU used only one-third of the additional 22 million tons of coal imported in 2022.

France, a net importer

All in all, the balance sheet is still negative. Coal-fired power generation increased by 7% in 2022, contributing to a 3.9% increase in greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector. "It could have been much worse: wind, solar and a decline in electricity demand prevented a much larger return to coal," the report said.

The year 2022 was actually marked by two major phenomena. Firstly, with Europe experiencing its worst drought in at least five hundred years, hydroelectric generation reached its lowest level in over twenty years (down 19% compared to 2021) – France was one of the most affected countries. Then, nuclear production also reached its lowest level in history (down 16% compared to 2021). This was due in particular to the shutdown of an unprecedented number of French reactors for maintenance operations and corrosion problems, as well as the gradual closure of the last German plants.

Historically Europe's largest electricity exporter, France was a net importer in 2022. "Without France's problems, it's highly likely that coal-fired power generation would not have increased in Spain," wrote the report's authors. "France also likely contributed to part of the increase in production in Germany."

24% increase in solar generation

Wind power, but especially solar power, offset electricity needs by a very large margin. Solar generation increased by a record 24%, producing more than 7% of Europe's electricity last year, compared to 15% for wind. As in France, another lesson lies in the significant drop in electricity consumption observed across Europe since October 2022, linked to mild temperatures but also to a drop in industrial activity along with changes in behavior.

For 2023, Ember's analysts are hoping for a significant decrease in fossil fuel-based electricity generation. "Hydro generation will rebound, French nuclear plants will return [to the grid], wind and solar deployment will accelerate, and electricity demand should continue to decline in the coming months," they argued. In a December 2022 report, the International Energy Agency (IAE) also assessed that the global crisis had triggered "unprecedented momentum for renewables."

Nevertheless, Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, a researcher on European and French energy policies at the Jacques Delors Institute, is calling for vigilance, particularly regarding the evolution of electricity demand. "Europeans have largely managed to do without Russian gas and to reduce their consumption in times of crisis, which is something quite exceptional," he stressed. "But this will now have to be sustained, and in a fair manner." Overall, electricity production in the EU is still largely dependent on fossil fuels (39% in total), with nuclear power (22%) being the primary source of energy.