This month’s edition of European Security and Defence features an extensive interview with ‘Climate General’ Tom Middendorp in which the Cool Heating Coalition gets a mention (alongside advocacy groups Clean Heat Europe and the Coalition for Energy Savings), as Middendorp emphasises the importance of cooperation between civilian and military sectors.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in tackling climate change within military and security circles, as Middendorp explained: “There are more people like me, – military leaders who are concerned about climate. So we raised this International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS), which now has experts, military and other security experts […] that reinforce each other, and that creates a lot more understanding and insights in the nexus between climate and security.”
Topics of common interest between the Cool Heating Coalition and the IMCCS include increasing the resilience of our economies and power infrastructure and decreasing the degree of leverage held by hydrocarbon-exporting powers over our economies and foreign policy.
Coincidentally, Cool Heating Coalition director Delia Villagrasa underlined these important energy security points in relation to clean heating and cooling in a letter published on 29 August in the Financial Times.
She makes the point that heating provided through distributed and local renewables is inherently more resilient than centralised utilities, and can be a cornerstone of energy security. As well as physical / onsite attacks, there is increasing evidence that cyberattacks on utilities have been growing rapidly since 2018, reaching alarmingly high levels in 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
And although, as a consequence of the REPowerEU diversification strategy, EU imports of Russian gas have shrunk by two-thirds since 2021, our continued reliance on “indirect”
Russian pipeline gas or LNG is problematic, funding Russian aggression in Ukraine and leaving us vulnerable to the weaponisation of energy.
The transition to clean heating solutions, such as heat pumps, geothermal, solar thermal, district heating powered by renewables and community energy, is not only an environmental issue but a vital step toward ensuring energy security. It’s clear that cutting energy demand and prioritising distributed generation now has a new geopolitical meaning which requires a corresponding shift in EU energy policy.
Innovative partnerships and collaborations will be central to delivery; the Cool Heating Coalition looks forward to engaging in cross-sector efforts to realise a more sustainable and secure energy future in response to the global climate crisis.
