Spiritual Forum

Russian President Vladimir Putin says global warming is being used as an economic weapon against his country.

He characterized climate change as a “fraud” used to prevent Russia from tapping its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Greenpeace claims 85 percent of CO2 equivalent emissions in Russia come from its energy industry.

According to a political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia.”

“We found that, while climate change does exist, it is cyclical, and the anthropogenic role is very limited,” Andrey Illarionov, Putin’s senior economic adviser in the early 2000s, told The New York Times. “It became clear that the climate is a complicated system and that, so far, the evidence presented for the need to ‘fight’ global warming was rather unfounded.”

In September Putin’s top adviser on global warming dismissed criticism of Russia by Climate Action Tracker, a group of climate research groups linked to the United Nations and the World Wildlife Fund, a Rockefeller funded NGO. The group said Russia has a worse record of carbon emissions than China, the United States and the European Union.

Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund have complained Russia does not consult them on its climate policies.

“It is their opinion, it does not reflect anything and is not objective,” said Alexander Bedritsky.

Bedritsky made the remark on the sidelines of a Moscow meeting of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change.

“They can say whatever they want, but our commitments are based on around 70 scenarios of how the climate system will be developing.”