While the unprovoked and illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia has caused huge devastation and mass movements of people, there is one possible positive outcome from the war.

According to Wikipedia, in 2020 before the war, Russia was the world’s largest exporter of natural gas, the second largest exporter of petroleum and the third largest exporter of coal.

Since the invasion, Russia’s customers have been trying to move to other fossil fuel suppliers and increase their domestic electricity production. Because of fossil fuel supply shortages, prices have reached unprecedented levels, precipitating a global energy crisis, widespread inflation and huge government debts.

In October 2022 the International Energy Agency (IEA) published World Energy Outlook 2022 which sees some possible positive outcomes of the current crisis.

It predicts that worldwide demand for every type of fossil fuel will peak in the near future and then decline as countries build more green energy generation plants, manufacture more electric cars and install more heat pumps to heat their homes. This decline will also impact Russia’s economy.

However the IEA says that countries will need to move to green energy even faster to avoid dangerous levels of global warming.