Europe’s zealous embrace of climate change ideology is yielding destructive dividends. State-compelled directives and wasteful subsidies implemented to reduce carbon dioxide have created an economic dependency on renewable energy technologies before they were proven and built. Europe’s economic engines have been shut down along with its nuclear reactors, coal-fired plants, and industrial production. Natural gas prices are rising quickly while EV sales plummet. Europe’s Green Deal is an economic disaster worsening by the day.
The EU Economy Isn’t Renewable
The blind pursuit of a “clean energy transition” faces two fatal flaws. First, chemical-spewing renewable energy technology is far from clean. Second, the economic impacts are devastating. These undeniable consequences of the climate change movement are a glaringly inconvenient truth in Europe, where once-ascendant economic powerhouses like Germany, France, and the United Kingdom are imploding in tandem with their rash push to implement an impossible fantasy.
Climate change activists have asserted that conversion to so-called renewable technologies would improve the European and American economies by way of job creation while reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Emissions targets, EV and other renewables subsidies, and the shuttering of nuclear and coal facilities have all inflicted dramatic burdens on these economies, pushing industrial production out of the EU and into China, India, and other third-world nations. In these less developed – or regulated – climes, toxic pollution is spewed without restraint, ensuring more “net-carcinogens” for the planet than if the same products were produced in pre-Green Europe.
The climate change movement’s manufacturing fantasy has been touted by industrial and political proponents who have profited mightily. An entire industry of enviro-lobbyists and renewable subsidy advocates have warped government economic policies in a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich – not just via regressive corporate subsidies for EVs and solar panels, but in a booming London financial sector that employs white-collar financial and professional specialists who unwittingly or uncaringly export millions of blue-collar jobs out of Britain, Germany, France, and the EU.
EU Economy Plummeting Fast
The economic decline of most of Europe is accelerating before the world’s eyes, even as renewables proponents complain the faux energy conversion there must be quickened to “save the world” and American climate propagandists push to implement the same destructive policies on this side of the Atlantic. The United States has already come a long way down the same path, funding a gargantuan industrial shift of renewable energy production to foreign lands, including China (EVs, solar panels, and wind turbines), but also devastating lithium mining in the Congo and other regions. Like Europe, America has exported the toxic industrial pollution these industries entail along with the “high-paying union jobs” promised by the Biden administration. Even if carbon dioxide is being reduced “on net” in America, the toxins generated abroad are environmentally apocalyptic.
The United States and Europe differ greatly in a vital economic respect: The US produces natural gas, while Europe is dependent on imports. The “real science” of manufacturing requires high-temperature industrial processes to fabricate steel, cement, plastics, and synthetic fertilizers, with very real economic impacts in the EU. Silicon for solar panels and aluminum smelting for EVs cannot be produced with electricity from solar panels. The entire renewables industry depends on the fossil fuels it seeks to displace in a dragon-eats-its-tail folly that destroys both the environment and the economies of nations seeking to replace the latter with the former.
This vulnerability has become alarmingly apparent in the EU (especially Germany), yet climate alarms and hands glued to museum pieces continue to eclipse the very real economic Titanic that has struck the climate change ideological iceberg. Global natural gas prices in the EU were rising precipitously prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, further aggravated when the Nord Stream 1 & 2 pipelines (both delivering Russian gas directly to the German economic machine) were sabotaged. Ukraine has now terminated Russian gas lines that have supplied natural gas to Europe without interruption since 1991, and record cold snaps in France, the UK, and the US have sparked the fastest rise in global gas prices in years.
EU Economy Running Out of Gas
Advocates for shutting down Russia’s natural gas exports claim it will hurt Putin, but the risks to Europeans trying to warm their homes and profitably operate factories are much higher. Rising gas prices are a boon for Russia but a bane for Europeans who have closed down nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants in an ideological fervor that has seeded very real suffering.
The global tangent of this experiment is apparent. Climate activists similarly seek to stymie populations in developing nations from obtaining the cheap fossil fuels that have permitted rising standards of living for Western nations, including the EU and the US. Restricting oil drilling and canceling oil leases escalates energy prices for non-oil-producing nations around the world. Europe has painted itself into an economic corner with no way out without fossil fuels – let America take heed.
Citizens deprived of affordable food, housing, and heat will abandon concerns about the environment quickly. Worse for the faux environmentalists, the true eco-toxin costs of massive investment in renewables manufacturing are becoming apparent in movements like MAHA in the US and farmer revolts across Europe. Bogus globalist climate propaganda has yielded unconscionable short-term financial profits for a few European financiers and London NGOs at the expense of both the common citizens and the world’s ecosystem. More than just the European economy hangs in the balance as the EU implodes.