[Leondros]

What a ridiculous piece by Politico... Ranking Putin as the most influential person impact Europe's green agenda. What a joke!

https://www.politico.eu/list/green-2...ladimir-putin/

By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.

The political response from the EU was swift: Within weeks of the February 24 invasion, a plan was sketched out aimed at unhooking the Continent’s energy ties from Moscow. It leaned on three pillars: cutting oil, gas and coal supplies from Russia; getting gas and other fossil fuels from elsewhere; and massively speeding up the roll out of renewable power and energy saving measures.

“Renewables give us the freedom to choose an energy source that is clean, cheap, reliable, and ours,” EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans said less than two weeks after Putin’s tanks rolled in.

Seven months on, a POLITICO survey of data on clean energy, energy savings and policies shows that the first signs of that green surge are appearing. Analysts are in little doubt that the change is structural, permanent and historic.

“We will look back at this situation in 10 years time and see, OK, that was the moment where we really got serious about the green transition and we really had the big green acceleration,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a research fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.