Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

The cover this week is about the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables and nuclear energy. Our analysis reveals that, as Western firms stop producing oil because of greenery and costs, the market share of OPEC plus Russia will grow in the coming few decades, giving them more clout. And the transition to renewables will give rise to new electrostates supplying green metals such as copper and lithium, production of which will still be concentrated. Building a cleaner and safer energy system is essential, but it is also daunting and dangerous.

The job of the cover was to link this striking observation to the darkest petrostate of them all. Under Vladimir Putin, Russia is waging war on its innocent neighbour. Over the two decades of his rule, $4trn of oil and gas exports have paid for the tanks, guns and missiles now killing Ukrainians.

This ties oil to the wrong war. Russian aircraft dropped barrel bombs even more basic than this on the people of Syria. Packed with explosive and bits of steel, they were designed to maim, kill and terrorise. By contrast, the slaughter in Ukraine is mostly from artillery and missiles—if only because Russia has not yet won control of the skies.

Here we have an oil-barrel generalissimo in the style of Muammar Qaddafi. It evokes the corruption that can result when politics and violence control access to a natural resource—and hence to vast sums of money. Although that is clearly the story in Russia, too, this image is of African or Latin American dictatorship rather than the white shirts and expensive suits that Mr Putin wears to Red Square parades.

The nozzle has a magazine attached, as if it were a petrol-powered Kalashnikov. But it’s better suited to Al Capone than to a war criminal. In Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, Mr Putin’s soldiers are killing people by the thousand. Joe Biden, America’s president, has warned of the use of chemical or biological weapons. Scale matters, and this weapon is not sufficiently murderous.

Amid a landscape strewn with tank-blocking Czech hedgehogs, this design elides the mine with the minefield. It says that commodities pay for wars and wars are waged for commodities. That is true of some invasions, especially in the past. But Mr Putin does not covet what Ukraine has so much as he yearns to destroy its young, Western-leaning democracy.

Simply by angling the chimneys of these power stations, energy becomes a weapon. The focus on artillery is apt, too. Russian guns are flattening Ukrainian cities from afar. We would have been happy with this cover.

But we preferred this idea. Grad missiles have been raining down on Ukrainian cities. The Russian word means “hail”—and the Grad launcher has become one of the war’s memorable images. Here it is reflected in a lake. The derrick sucks oil out the ground, the Grad spews missiles up into the sky. The 100m-year-old residue of dead organisms is paying for another round of death. It is a fearful symmetry.