He’s their pick for the top power player advancing Europe’s green agenda.

We thought we’d seen greenies praise all kinds of authoritarian moves to further their agenda. But Politico Europe, a well-read publication by elites who are marinated in green politics, has outdone everyone by having Vladimir Putin top its annual Green 28, a list of “the 28 power players behind Europe’s green agenda.”

Politico argues vigorously for its choice of Putin, such that it convinced me that it’s not joking. The magazine claims that the war in Ukraine has been great for the environment because it “forced Europe to finally break its fossil fuel addiction” and helped speed up the continent’s “green revolution.”

By launching his brutal invasion and manipulating energy markets to keep oil prices high, Putin has “achieved something generations of green campaigners could not,” Politico explains.

Clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security. . . . Putin invaded Ukraine after the EU had spent two years laying the foundations of its Green Deal program for zeroing out emissions by 2050. That meant the policy machinery for a total remake of the European energy economy was already moving. All it needed was a nudge.