This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Moscow • When forest fires roared through Siberia this summer, so vast that the smoke blocked Lake Baikal from satellite view, Russian officials blamed the blazes on arsonists and disorganized fire crews. Environmentalists say there was another culprit: global warming.
As temperatures rise worldwide, areas such as Siberia are suffering increasingly long dry spells. Russia's national weather agency says the country is the fastest-warming part of the world.
But Russia has taken little action to reduce its own emissions of the greenhouse gases believed to be behind the warming and at next week's international climate conference in Paris it aims to push a proposal that would allow its emissions to increase.
To Vladimir Churpov of Greenpeace Russia, the country's leadership is obtuse and in denial.
"Of course the forest won't burn if it's not set on fire, but the unusually dry environment and high temperatures — that's global warming," he said. "The fact that the fires burned for so long, that's because the government can't adapt to the new demands of a warming climate."
The issue is largely absent from public discussion and officials appear to give it only lip service, when they're not sardonically dismissing it.
In 2003 at the World Climate Change Conference, President Vladimir Putin quipped that "Russia is a northern country. It's not scary if it's two to three degrees warmer. Maybe it would even be a good thing. We'd have to spend less money on fur coats and warmer things."
Leading up to the Paris conference, which seeks to implement the most ambitious emissions cuts ever, Russia presented a paradoxical pledge by promising to reduce its greenhouse gas output over the next 15 years by 25 to 30 percent from what it was in 1990. However, 1990 saw a spike in industrial output before the Soviet industrial complex collapsed during the decade, causing a steep drop in emissions. So Russia's pledge means it could actually increase emission levels by about 40 percent from current levels by 2030.