Drive through the swamplands of Western Siberia, and you’ll pass one oil installation after the next. This is the largest petroleum basin on Earth and the heartland of Russia’s vast oil and gas reserves.
Pipelines cut through the swampy ground. Fuel tankers thunder past, carrying hydrocarbons for global delivery.
There is not much sense of a climate crisis here.
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Surgut is Siberia’s Houston, the oil capital of the region if not the country. Surgutneftegaz (‘neft’ is Russian for oil) is the main employer in town. Salaries, like in Russia’s other oil and gas cities, are among the highest in the country. Working for big oil has its perks.
In the city centre, Surgutneftegaz has built a monument in the shape of a fountain of oil, the faces of the oil workers modelled on actual employees.
There we meet a group of young recruits out on a team-building exercise, pretending to be oil pumps, which they do to peals of laughter.
“Climate change doesn’t worry us a lot,” one says.
“We were born here, we got used to the cold. Any climate conditions for us are fine.”
It is a sentiment you’ll hear a lot, especially among Siberians. That warmer temperatures as a result of climate change might not be all bad. President Putin‘s promise of carbon neutrality by 2060 draws blank stares. These youngsters have not heard about it and don’t know what it means.
For some young Siberians, climate change is not seen as a worry
I ask one of the supervisors if he thinks Russia will make it by 2060.
“Not in our lifetime,” he replies.
Our local driver remembers flying into Surgut in Soviet times, when the night skies were so lit up by flares from the oil fields that you…
Source : skynews
