The bloc’s dependence on US natural gas is reportedly on its way to 80%.
An American think-tank has some bad news for Europe. Just as the continent tries to wriggle free from an abusive relationship with Washington, it turns out they’ve never been more dependent on their tormentor.
“EU risks new energy dependence as U.S. could supply 80% of its LNG imports by 2030,” blared the latest report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, pegging current dependence at 57%.
That was actually the EU’s plan all along. Apparently, it was very important to the Eurocrats that this dependence on American energy be locked in before Putin makes his grand entrance in 2030, as they keep telling us. Because by then, the charade will likely have served its purpose in washing taxpayer cash into the GDP-boosting defense sector. The French are even hiring young people for paid military training – as bakers and cooks. Will they be pelting Putin with baguettes?
They sure didn’t seem to predict the need to also fire up the ovens for some croissants to ward off Trump. Or that Trump could shut down the ovens by cutting off the gas.
It was only last summer that Ursula von der Leyen – unelected European Commission president – announced a deal with Trump. He would drop tariffs on European imports in exchange for locking the EU into even greater reliance on American gas. “We have reached a deal on tariffs and trade with the US. Today’s deal creates certainty in uncertain times. It delivers stability and predictability, for citizens and businesses on both sides of the Atlantic,” she said. “Purchases of US energy products will diversify our sources of supply and contribute to Europe’s energy security. We will replace Russian gas and oil with significant purchases of US LNG, oil, and nuclear fuels.”
Fast forward to today, and the EU is trying to calculate the likelihood of an American invasion after receiving notes from Trump, who apparently decided that because the Oslo-based Nobel Committee (which Norway doesn’t even control) didn’t give him the Peace Prize, he’s now feeling less motivated to keep his Pentagon toys and GI Joes out of Greenland.
He says that the EU sucks at protecting Greenland, so it needs a real man – like him. At the same time, Trump caught European nations doing their job of trying to protect it by sending a handful of troops and materiel over for military exercises. But since only he can date Greenland, he punished them by slapping new tariffs on his own people who happen to import European products. Which is like yelling at your dog because you stub your toe.
What a victory for Queen Ursula’s much-celebrated “stability and predictability.”
After years of sacrificing their energy diversity with tunnel vision on anti-Russian goals, EU leaders have now positioned themselves to be completely dependent on the very country that threatens to invade them whenever it suits.
Surely now they’ll recalibrate in their own interests, right? I wouldn’t bet on it. Consider how Germany is handling its own ideologically-induced, energy-related economic implosion.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has just come bursting out of the closet sounding like a passionate defender of nuclear energy. In reality, he has long resigned himself to lying down and letting the greenies have their way with him, like the client of a dominatrix offering the bare minimum of grumbling necessary for the show.
He says that Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear plants was a huge error that’s come at a serious cost to the economy. “It was a serious strategic mistake to exit nuclear energy. If you were going to do it, you should have at least kept the last remaining nuclear power plants in Germany on the grid three years ago, so that we would have had the same electricity generation capacity,” he said. A pretty bold U-turn for a guy who has long shrugged off as inevitable the idea of Germany – the EU’s economic engine – being powered by the weather.
So it turns out that if you shut down your most reliable, stable source of carbon-free power, electricity doesn’t magically become cheaper because of the odd gust of wind. Who knew? Merz did, actually. Which is why he’s long been a critic of the nuclear phase out. But it’s not like he proposed a concrete, credible reversal plan while he was in opposition. He just basically went like, you guys are morons, but hey, whaddaya do? Like he was a frustrated bystander instead of an actual lawmaker.
So now that Merz is in the driver’s seat and at the controls as chancellor, he’s saying, let’s get going on fixing this! All those clean energy nuclear reactors, like those that France gets to rely on, now need to be fired up again here in Germany, too, after being shut down since 2023.
Nah, just kidding. He’s actually just still shrugging, and going, oh well, nothing can be done about it now. Except blaming the previous administration. Oh, and we’re looking at exploring these new things called little modular reactors. Also nuclear, by the way. So huge change there going from nuclear to nuclear. And which won’t actually exist until maybe sometime in the next decade. Great comfort to Germans paying a fortune for energy right now that the guy in charge feels like all he can do is just complain for the time being.
Too bad he couldn’t have stepped in and done something more to fight for the same nuclear power whose disappearance he now laments. Instead, at the time, he sounded like a guy giving up on a marriage after his wife had found another dude. “They are being dismantled, they are being decontaminated. There is no way to fix this, most likely,” he said of the nuclear infrastructure.
Sorry, you can never come home. The hardware has literally been blown up – under Merz himself. Enjoy wandering the energy-deprived wasteland like in a Mad Max movie, looking for crumbs and praying for sun and wind. Too bad Merz couldn’t do anything about that either. Except stand around watching with his hands in his pockets – as chancellor – while his country’s energy supply was getting cucked by the green lobby.
Just to rewind a bit, the demise of Germany’s 60 years of nuclear power accelerated under former Chancellor Angela Merkel, of Merz’s own Christian Democrats party, as the Brussels Signal recently pointed out. She saw what happened with Fukushima in Japan and reacted like someone who decides that they need to avoid cars for the rest of their life because they once witnessed an accident. Merkel apparently had all the confidence in the world that political will could bend uncontrollable external factors, like the weather, in the country’s favor. Then in 2023, the German economy minister doubled down, saying that there was no intention of going back since the public, already being crushed by high energy prices at the time from cutting off both nuclear and Nord Stream’s Russian gas, was totally cool with it.
So how has all this worked out? Funny how ideology sounds great until reality shows up. Electricity prices are up. Fossil fuel use has increased as a result of firing up coal plants again to meet energy demand. Another American economic think-tank, the National Bureau of Economic Research, estimates the cost of the nuclear phase-out at $12 billion dollars a year, mostly from all the junk that the coal is spewing into the air, driving up health care costs.
And now Germany is starting to realize that swapping a diversified energy mix for disappointment was really stupid, all while Trump grins in the background, turning every European blunder into his personal playground of torment, with them hogtied like kids who ignored every warning about the ice-cream van.
Image credit: Quinten de Graff
Americans are addicted to America’s punishments being inflicted on them, loving their slavery to the Zionist Orb…!
The frogs have been slow-boiled…
The gradualistic Israeli-trained Police State tyranny always being passed off as ‘normal’…
Blue-haired nose-ringed bitches cheering on the Communist ‘Far Left’…and pink-haired Goy Soy Boys riding in tandem on (S)Lime scooters, while the Global Zionst Elite destroys the world.
They are left with nothing, as the WEF has touted, but they are NOT happy with their imposed politically-correct Police State existence, as they have realised they have been severely duped!
Carl Sagan’s comments: (Note- Sagan is J3wi$h…)
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
More, especially about the non-productive present tense future of the U.S…and the rest of Western Civilisation…
But there’s another reason: science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number one video cassette rental in America is the movie Dumb and Dumber. Beavis and Butthead remains popular (and influential) with young TV viewers. The plain lesson is that study and learning – not just of science, but of anything – are avoidable, even undesirable.
We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements – transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting – profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
A Candle in the Dark is the title of a courageous, largely Biblically based, book by Thomas Ady, published in London in 1656, attacking the witch-hunts then in progress as a scam ‘to delude the people’. Any illness or storm, anything out of the ordinary, was popularly attributed to witchcraft. Witches must exist, Ady quoted the ‘witchmongers’ as arguing, ‘else how should these things be, or come to pass?’ For much of our history, we were so fearful of the outside world, with its unpredictable dangers, that we gladly embraced anything that promised to soften or explain away the terror. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Ady also warned of the danger that ‘the Nations [will] perish for lack of knowledge’. Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.
The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.
(30 years ago, Carl Sagan predicted what the United States would be like in the future. How accurate is it today?)
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”
~ Carl Sagan in “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark