Global energy crisis: while Europe aims to cut 90% of fossil fuels, a 20% drop is enough to trigger skyrocketing prices, inflation and the risk of recession
For over thirty years it has been thoroughly explained to us that to save the planet it is necessary to “decarbonise” the economy, that is, to give up fossil fuels: oil, gas and coal must remain underground, as he said Greta Thunberg. They tell us by 2050. They call it the energy transition.
The EU has the ambition to lead it, and to be first in the class it has also set itself intermediate objectives: giving up 90 percent of fossil fuels by 2040. It’s funny: that’s in fourteen years.
If we want to laugh more, here are the statements of Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio: «We need a Europe free from dependence on fossil fuels, capable of focusing decisively on peace and renewable energy. Wars continue to be, too often, linked to oil. It is increasingly clear, as also highlighted by authoritative international analyses, that fossil fuels are not only among the main causes of the climate crisis, but are also structural factors of geopolitical instability and conflict. The important investments that Europe has started in renewable energy must be strengthened.”
It doesn’t even occur to them that if they end up going to war over gas and oil, perhaps they will have something valuable. On the other hand, it is worth remembering that ours is a lawyer who got it into his head that one can become rich with photovoltaics. Which is perhaps true, just as it’s true that you get rich by selling lotions to make your hair grow to bald idiots. But if we ask the lawyer what energy is and why fossil fuels would be responsible for an unidentified climate crisis, he wouldn’t be able to say a word. How do I know? I deduce this from the fact that once they asked me to speak in a debate the lawyer refused to participate when he knew I was there.
It is now happening that, precisely due to the war events in the Persian Gulf, the world’s oil and gas supply is suddenly missing not the 90% that we intend to abandon in 14 years, but just 20%. It would be a good start down that highway, wouldn’t it? Apparently not, because instead, panic immediately breaks out. The price of oil rises above 100 dollars a barrel, and various experts – ah, the experts, always invoked and never able to get it right – do not rule out that it will soon reach 200 dollars. Economists – good ones too – are announcing an imminent global economic recession if the interruption of supplies lasts more than a few weeks. You will wonder why I also mock economists, and here’s why: those who are now shouting the alarm about this 20% less are the same ones – but precisely the same ones – who invented the green economy by suggesting the 90% reduction. In any case, the stock markets collapse and inflation rears its head.
EU leaders call emergency meetings. Fatih Birol (economist, ça it goes without saying) director of the International Energy Agency has just declared that the US and Israeli military offensive against Iran has created “the greatest threat to global energy security in recent decades”. Why did he not suspect this threat when he was promoting, as he has been promoting for a long time, the reduction of the use of fossil fuels.
In the past thirty years, global consumption of all fossil fuels has grown by 50%; Coal, in particular, continues to set a new record every year. But no one in the European political class has the courage to say that the king is naked and that the entire European climate and energy policy has produced only one result: the flight of manufacturing activities from Europe and an economic decline. In thirty years, the 20% decrease in European CO2 emissions, equivalent to less than 2% of global emissions, occurred thanks to the increase in imports of goods produced in non-European countries. None of whom know the troubles of Pecoraro Scanio. However, everyone wants only one thing: for their economies to continue to grow.
Fine – you might say – but after this little rant, do you have any concrete proposals? I’ll try. So, in the short term:
- put the tombstone on public subsidies for photovoltaics;
- definitively abandon the ETS (Emission trading system), an absurd system that is destroying the economy of healthy energy-intensive companies;
- restart coal plants;
- listen to Moscow’s requests, which have so far been ignored, and reconsider Russia as a privileged gas supplier.
- In the longer term: launch an important program on large-scale electronuclear plants, the only ones with consolidated technology, whose economy of scale would provide electricity at costs that would bring today’s asphyxiated Europe to a competitive level.
