Lying With Dogs
The consequences of Europe's Green Parties' outsized electoral influence. Will it last?
The next five years will define Europe’s place in the world for the next five decades. It will decide whether we shape our own future or let it be shaped by events or by others. – Ursula von der Leyen
So said the European Commission (EC) President in July 2024 in the Executive Summary of Europe’s Choice, Political Guidelines for the Next European Commission 2024-2029. Europe may have already chosen its place in the world for the next few decades by virtue of its energy policies. One political group owns the responsibility for those choices more than any other.
The Guidelines highlight three pillars to guide Europe for the next five years:
Defence and security. Sustainable prosperity and competitiveness. Democracy and social fairness.
The concerns, priorities, objectives and strategies Ursula von der Leyen articulated in Europe’s Choice share themes with the EC’s Strategic Agenda 2024 – 2029. That document was adopted by the European Council of the European Union (you can’t make up the Orwellian layers upon layers of bureaucracy) weeks earlier:
A free and democratic Europe. A strong and secure Europe. A prosperous and competitive Europe.
In the fall of 2023, recognizing Europe’s deteriorating competitiveness, lack of economic growth, increasing cost of living and declining living standards, (not to mention political volatility) President von der Leyen turned to former Italian Prime Minister and past President of the European Central Bank Mario Draghi for help. He delivered Part A of his report, The Future of European Competitiveness, to the European Commission two months after von der Leyen’s statement above. Draghi’s recommendations align with the other EC reports:
Closing the innovation gap with the US and China. A joint plan for decarbonisation and competitiveness. Increasing security and reducing dependencies.
The common threads between the three documents are clear. The security and defense anxieties detailed in in the EC’s Strategic Agenda 2024-2029, its 2024-2029 Political Guidelines and the Draghi Report necessarily relate to Russia. The competitiveness concerns draw most of their comparisons between the European Union (EU) and the world’s two largest economies, the U.S. and China. Missing is any cogent attribution of the role Europe’s chosen energy policies have played creating the conditions now plaguing the Continent (and the United Kingdom, for the same reasons).
Fortunately, data from the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy (the Review) helps us visualize what European Charlaticians™ would prefer to gloss over. Or pin solely on Russia.
The U.S. is an energy superpower. Europe and the United Kingdom (UK), on the other hand, are customers of energy superpowers. Doomberg routinely comments that the U.S. and Russia are energy gigapowers and Europe is a flaccid energy vassal. We both note that all of this is by choice.
Future historians may indeed record about the early twenty-first century that Europe’s energy policy choices both “shaped its own future” and “let it be shaped by events and others.” If so, European “Green” political parties - a small but dogged and vociferous faction that punched way above its electoral weight and had outsized influence on the EU’s energy policies – will be “credited” for the “success.”
What does the Review tell us about the consequences of Europe’s two-decade climate obsession? How does the data align with European leader’s paradoxical combination of concerned rhetoric and rosy ambitions? And what has to happen before the EU and UK face reality and change course? Through the lens of energy, let’s see what the Review tells us about how Europe stacks up against the nation it fears and the industrial leaders with whom it seeks to compete.
The two EC reports mentioned above and the Draghi Report concern themselves principally with three economic and military superpowers: The U.S. and China in the context of competitiveness, and Russia with regard to security. We begin with the latter.
Western Charlaticians™ and their traditional media Organs continue to attribute Europe’s lack of economic growth, non-competitiveness, and security concerns to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s use of energy as a strategic economic weapon against the EU. But long-term energy data shows the problems with the bloc’s non-competitiveness are structural, pre-dating the war by many years.
War and the ability to defend one’s nation depend on energy. Advanced military weaponry, aircraft, ships, armored personnel carriers, supply chains, and logistics cannot be built, transported, operated, maintained, or sustained by any combination of wind, solar, geothermal, biomass or biofuels. Russia is a military superpower by virtue of being an energy superpower.
Doomberg’s recent post Paint By Numbers provides an excellent, concise and highly relevant comparison between Russia and the EU in terms of energy production and consumption since 2000. The disparity is staggering.
While noting Russia’s obvious advantages economically, industrially, and militarily as a net energy exporter, the post quantifies the severity of the situation (emphasis ours):
In stark contrast to the Europeans, Russia has increased its total energy consumption from 24.9 exajoules in 2000 to 31.8 exajoules in 2024, a 28% rise over the period. More importantly, the country produced an impressive 53.2 exajoules of hydrocarbons last year, exceeding the EU’s total energy consumption across all fuels.
China is the other major industrial and military superpower that features prominently in the EC’s 2024-2029 Political Guidelines, Strategic Agenda, and the Draghi Report. All note that the EU is simultaneously falling behind China while being dependent on it. The reports highlight these concerns in everything from the critical minerals necessary to realize the “European Green Deal” (electrification, wind/solar, electric vehicles) to computer chips.
China is the world’s largest producer of polysilicon ingots used in computer chip fabrication, controlling over 90% of global supply. In terms of minerals, mining and Europe go together like peanut butter and tuna fish. It takes 5-11 years to open a new mine in Germany, France, or Italy (the EU’s three largest industrial economies), if you can do it at all.
Even if Europe would or could mine for the critical minerals it needs, China controls virtually of the refining and processing of most of those minerals, from Chilean copper to Australian lithium. Refining and processing are dirty work, and European firms would have to spend significant capital costs to deal with waste streams to avoid very real and significant environmental impacts and meet strict EU environmental laws. China is not bothered by such constraints or concerned too much about “the environment.”
Paraphrasing a point Doomberg commonly makes (eloquently explained in detail in Geopollutical Warfare), when your competitor’s idea of a wastewater treatment plant is a pipe to the nearest river and the government allows (if not condones) it, American and European companies are at a cost disadvantage that effectively cannot be overcome. (This is not to suggest America or Europe eliminate all environmental regulations, merely stating an economic reality.)
Europe would have to both dramatically increase mining to secure domestic supply chains for critical minerals and rapidly increase the necessary processing (e.g., smelting) and refining to control more of the end-to-end supply chain concurrently. This would have to be done meeting Europe’s stringent environmental standards while somehow becoming cost competitive against the key supplier who is unbothered with such distractions and unburdened by their significant capital costs. (If it makes Europeans and Britons feel any better, America faces a similar problem.)
As if these disadvantages weren’t enough, mining and mineral processing and refining require the consumption of copious amounts of hydrocarbon energy (diesel) and electricity (most of which comes from hydrocarbons). Europe would have to do all of this while in perennial energy deficit, increasingly relying on intermittent forms of energy, starting from a position with much higher energy costs.
Combine these factors and Europe’s chances of competing with China absent major course corrections are Slim and None. And Slim left town on the 9:35 Eurail to Barcelona.
Data from the 2025 Review helps visualize the divergence in energy policy and its consequences between Europe and the UK on one hand, and China and the U.S on the other. For our analysis, we combined the 15 largest industrial economies in Europe and the UK.
The graph below compares the primary energy consumption of those 15 European economies plus the UK to China and the U.S. over the last 50 years:
Removing the U.S. and China brings a stark reality into focus: the 15 largest European industrial economies plus the UK consume the same amount of primary energy today that they did in 1976.
Europe’s peak consumption during this time series aligns nearly perfectly with the year the United Nation’s first international climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, entered into force (2005). EU Green parties have held at least 7% of the votes in European Parliament since the 2009 elections (elections are held every 5 years), achieving 10% and holding the most seats ever (67) in 2019. But in 2024, when the impact of EU energy policy began to be even the slightest bit clear to more Europeans, Green parties lost 18% (12) of their seats, reverting back to 7.4% of the votes in European Parliament.
In Europe’s largest parliamentary democracies, no party ever receives over 50% of national or continental votes, which requires the party receiving the most votes to cobble together coalitions with some of the other parties in order to achieve a governing majority. In order to do that, the winners have to lie with some dogs.
For well over a decade, Europe’s Green parties (and their cancerous cohorts in the UK Labor and Tory parties) have tipped the scales with the deciding votes on the region’s energy policy in European Parliament and in national parliaments across the continent. This was evident as recently as March, when Germany’s new Chancellor and the ruling (“conservative”) CDU party needed the German Green party’s votes to bust the nation’s constitutional “debt brake” for defense spending, promising €500 billion for “climate change” and infrastructure over the next decade.
The consequences of this legislative hostage taking are clear. Germany is Europe’s largest industrial economy, but today, German industrial production is roughly equivalent to 2011 levels:
As Europe’s three largest industrial economies, Germany, France, and Italy serve as a bellwether for EU industrial output. For nearly 15 years, their combined production has barely changed.
Rather than face reality and change course, Europe is doubling down. Last summer, in Europe’s Choice, EC President von der Leyen stated (emphasis added):
“We must and will stay the course on all of our goals, including those set out in the European Green Deal.”
More of what caused the problem. Brilliant…
Doomberg’s Postulate states that “every molecule of fossil fuel produced worldwide will be burned by somebody somewhere, and local efforts to restrict consumption merely relocate the enjoyment of that privilege.” European Green parties’ legislative hostage taking “success” has restricted the continent’s hydrocarbon energy consumption over the last fifteen years and relocated the enjoyment of that privilege.
China is still enjoying it. The graphs below help visualize the magnitude of China’s thirst for hydrocarbon energy compared to Europe’s disdain for it since 2000.
First coal…..
Then natural gas:
Then oil……
The “two ships crossing in the night” visual comparison does not stop with hydrocarbon energy. While Europe and the UK eschewed nuclear power, China embraced it. Given China’s nuclear power ambitions and capabilities, it is only a matter of time before its nuclear power generation exceeds Europe’s and the UK’s combined.
The paradox between the physical reality on the ground and Europe’s ambitions is mind numbing. The EC’s 2024-2029 Guidelines and Strategic Plan and the strategies recommended in the Draghi Report are simply incongruent with Europe’s self-inflicted energy reality. As one example, Draghi’s strategies for “a joint plan of decarbonization and competitiveness” and “increasing security and independence” are hopelessly and paradoxically at cross purposes with themselves, and energy is the common denominator.
Despite the Sustainabilchemy™ narrative about wind and solar energy, competitiveness and “decarbonization” work directly against each other. High energy costs kill industrial competitiveness. Draghi’s own comments about European prices for electricity and natural gas (both critical for heavy industry, the latter also a chemical feedstock) acknowledge this reality.
“Security and independence” in advanced nations requires defense production (heavy industry) and domestic or friend-sourced supply chains. In the 21st century this means secure, affordable, reliable, abundant energy (whether domestically sourced like the U.S. and Russia or mostly imported like China) and basic (e.g., iron, aluminum, copper, nickel) as well as critical minerals (e.g., lithium, cobalt, neodymium).
Review data and our graphs above show Europe and the UK are not energy secure. That its top 15 industrial producers consume the same amount of primary energy they did 50 years ago dismisses any such notion.
Given what we noted earlier about Europe and mining, processing, and refining, the situation with basic and critical minerals is no more promising than it is with energy. As the Draghi Report notes:
“Increasing reliance on China may offer the cheapest and most efficient route to meeting our decarbonisation targets. But China’s state-sponsored competition also represents a threat to our productive clean tech and automotive industries.”
Europe’s dependence on Chinese solar imports demonstrates the point. According to energy think tank Ember, Europe is China’s largest customer for solar products, accounting for nearly 60 percent of all solar modules exported from China in the first six months of 2023.
In fact, according to Eurostat data, Europe imports 98% of its solar panels, 29% of its wind turbines and 36% of its liquid biofuels from China. The energy China has secured that Europe disdained is embedded in all of these “green” products.
Last November at the UN COP 29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, optimism was high that nuclear energy might play an increasing role in European primary energy generation sooner rather later, when 31 nations committed to triple nuclear energy generation by 2050. But days ago, when the European Commission recommended opening up the EU’s €2 trillion proposed budget for 2028-2034 to nuclear energy, Germany (who ignorantly closed its last nuclear reactors in 2023 in the middle of a self-inflicted energy crisis) immediately objected.
Germany’s environment minister Carsten Schneider said, “Germany rejects any subsidization of nuclear power from the EU budget.” Another EU country diplomat flatly stated, "There is no chance EU money goes to new nuclear" (words we predict will be eaten sooner rather than later.)
No ambitions, plans or strategies can change the basic fact that advanced nations cannot have prosperity and security without a steady supply of affordable, reliable, abundant, on-demand energy. By pretending the European Green Deal will somehow defeat that reality (spoiler alert: it won’t), the continent’s “Green” parties and EcoStatists, the EC’s Ursula Von der Leyen, UK Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero Ed Milliband and their cohorts have essentially become characters in a George Orwell or Ayn Rand novel that was never finished before the authors died.
We close by noting that in hindsight, it seems as though China played the EU, UK, and U.S. like a fiddle. They saw the opportunity presented by absurd western energy policies and seized it, subsidizing their production capacity across the wind and solar value chain at scale to gain a competitive advantage we would never overcome (before our eventual realization neither are “solutions” to “climate change”).
China accomplished all of this on the back of the forms of energy the West eschewed. The entire affair seems like an ironic, self-inflicted, twenty-first century, high-tech payback for the Opium Wars. We have previously termed the phenomenon the Green Cold War.
The U.S. will likely escape with its hide because of two differences. Our (remaining) willingness to extract our vast oil and gas resources renders a different calculus than Europe’s, and we will build (lots of) new nuclear power capacity sooner. And there is no material Green Party in America (only similar cancer cells within the Democrat party).
Meanwhile the situation will not materially change, and Europe will remain in a precarious energy, economic and geopolitical position, until EU Green parties (and their ilk in the UK) no longer have enough seats in the 5 largest European industrial countries and the European Parliament to constitute the necessary swing votes on energy policy. And that day will not occur until Europeans decide that their living standards are a more important denominator for energy policy than their CO2 emissions.
Europe’s flea-bitten economies will not recover until its majority political parties stop lying with Green dogs in order to build governing coalitions. In the meantime, expect more itchy, agitated, and poorer citizens.
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IOW: European Green parties, in particular, Germany, have thoroughly fucked their economy and future potential for prosperity and security due to their myopic energy policies.
Watching Trump slap around Von Der Leyen during the meeting regarding the trade deal showed how much we own them. The USA has massive leverage over Europe and we’re finally acting like it and not continually subsidizing their slow suicide. It’s a shame what’s happening to Europe but it almost seems like their arrogance will be the ultimate downfall. I don’t believe they’ll wise up in time.