The continent answered with reactors, pipeline diplomacy, and offshore drilling, then spent three decades neglecting and dismantling everything it had built.
Fantastic. We will see by next winter what the choice Europeans make will be. My guess is that it will take much more pain before rationality, forced by steps down on Maslow’s ladder, push European countries to make the tough choices they have put off. It is just as likely, probably more likely, that the EU comes apart.
Talvolta penso se l'Europa possa, un domani, innamorarsi della Russia, come avrebbe fatto Tramp, riconoscendo la superiorità degli armamenti e della vastità del suo territorio.
Europe has been suffering from a nasty case of luxury beliefs. Governments rapidly need to understand that they are responsible for a few basic requirements to their citizens/ subjects and energy security is one of those.
It’s so easy to read this and change any use of the word “Europe” to “California” and have it make just as much sense. My favorite was this passage:
“Europe could signal ecological virtue by de-industrializing while guzzling hydrocarbons produced out of sight and out of mind, congratulating itself on declining domestic emissions that had not so much been eliminated as outsourced.”
Tell me that doesn’t sound like California. I think the only thing that keeps California marginally viable is that people can go to other states, for relief. The U.S. is fortunately big enough to be able to absorb the California/NY follies and cost average the country’s survival. Sadly, Europe is more like having half the states being of the California NIMBY variety with a single political party. We’ll see how long that can last.
Congratulations. This is exactly the kind of grounded, no-bullshit analysis the energy debate needs right now — which of course means it will be gently escorted into the nearest memory hole by the people whose entire careers depend on ignoring it.
I like the Maslow framing. It neatly shifts the question from “why are we spectacularly incompetent?” to “when exactly did we decide that food, heat, and electricity were cute lifestyle accessories?” No need for 400-page theories of institutional decay when Flamanville is sitting there screaming: 13 billion euros versus the original 3.3 billion fairy-tale estimate. The building is basically cosplaying as a money incinerator at this point.
I was writing about the same disease yesterday — China’s death-grip on rare earths and permanent magnets. Same plot, different continent. The West spent thirty years optimising itself into a pretzel, proudly announcing it was running on half a tank of blood, then acted shocked when the fainting spells started.
“De-industrialisation as progress” is chef’s kiss. Germany dismantling its industrial base with the serene confidence of a vegan at a barbecue. France quietly watching its nuclear workforce retire faster than you can say “we’ll just import the engineers from… somewhere.” At some point “energy transition” stopped meaning “to something that works” and became polite code for “away from anything that still functions, thanks.”
And then there’s China.
That coal-to-liquids buildout is the biggest tell since a poker player showed up wearing sunglasses indoors. Nobody sinks serious cash into Fischer-Tropsch plants because the Excel model said “this looks economical.” You do it when you’ve looked at the future, decided it’s probably going to be a dick, and started stockpiling lube. Germany and South Africa only built that stuff with a gun to their heads. China’s doing it while it still has options. Think about that for a second.
Their primary energy import dependence hovers around 15%. Europe’s pushing 80% on hydrocarbons and still acting like it’s winning the sustainability Olympics. That’s not a policy gap, that’s two species occupying different planets. It should be career-ending. Instead it’ll be explained away as “complex global dynamics” — which is diplomat for “please don’t make me admit we fucked this up on purpose.”
Reading your piece next to mine, the contrast is hilarious in a crying-laughing way. China’s patience isn’t some mystical Eastern wisdom. It’s just… infrastructure. Stockpiles, overcapacity, buffers — they built a system that can actually take a punch without immediately filing for emotional damages.
Europe optimised for a frictionless world, then removed the last shock absorbers to save three euros and a diversity consultant’s fee. Brilliant. Works fantastically right up until reality shows up and says “hold my beer.”
You can restart Groningen with a pen stroke. Restarting an entire generation of nuclear engineers? Yeah… good luck with that. Those guys don’t respawn like video game NPCs once they retire, move to Thailand, or decide they’d rather explain basic thermodynamics to TikTok policymakers for the rest of their lives.
This is brilliant. The question for me is, outside of Europe’s behavior being the result of communist/one world government conspiracy, why are they committing suicide?
On the conspiracy question — I’d gently push back. You don’t need Marx, Soros, or a shadowy room to explain this. You need PowerPoint, quarterly earnings cycles, and the universal human tendency to stop maintaining the roof once it’s stopped leaking. The explanation isn’t sinister enough for a good thriller, which is exactly why it’s so hard to fix. Conspiracies at least have someone in charge. What we actually have is nobody in charge — just a thousand individually rational decisions that aggregate into collective suicide. Marx would have called it something, actually — just not what most people invoking his name think he’d call it.
Here’s what Marx would say - “You weren’t sabotaged by my followers — you were sabotaged by yours: capital did exactly what I told you it would do, fled every industry that couldn’t return a profit by Tuesday, dressed the wreckage up as progress, and handed you the ideology to applaud it.” Remember, Marx was primarily a historian, an observer and commentator, not a polemicist
No wonder UK, CAN, AUS, FR, GER, EU not interested in keeping Hormuz open nor dealing with terrorist IRGC. Elites there don’t get it and don’t care. This article proves elites are not interested in taking care of their own, so why anyone else?
Excellent piece. Not only did Europe outsource there, economic capabilities, they outsourced their national defense as well. They’re facing a double whammy. The question is, which will they do first, and will they have to choose one over the other? They’re not exactly flush with cash these days.
In fairness the last 3 decades was about dismantling everything across the board; industry, energy, security, family, society, law… financializing all that could be and simply destroying the rest.
Sort of North Korea with a lot more to ruin.
Perhaps fairness is the wrong “in” here…
On outsourcing : Apparently Asia only keeps a small amount of energy reserve especially LNG. Oh dear. Just in time is just too late.
China is now playing its card of refining. The easy solution for Australia and others is capitulation to China which some (like Australia) have been doing for years on the down low. A labor/socialist government makes it easier/faster. Japan and Vietnam are probably less prone for various reasons.
The historical narrative in this piece is largely correct, and uncomfortable reading for anyone who cares about European energy security.
France built 54 reactors in two decades and achieved 75% nuclear electricity — the fastest large-scale decarbonisation in history, driven by pragmatic self-interest rather than climate ideology. Germany’s decision to shut its last three reactors in April 2023, in the middle of an energy crisis, will be studied for decades as a case study in political identity overriding physical reality.
Groningen should have stayed open. North Sea development should not have been taxed into extinction. The article is right that Europe’s political class lost touch with the material foundations of its own prosperity.
But the article’s prescription — restart gas, drill shale, rebuild fossil infrastructure — mistakes the lesson of the 1970s for the lesson of the 2020s. The 1970s response worked because it matched the available technology to the strategic need. The equivalent response today is not more hydrocarbons. It is electrification.
Europe’s Renewables Are Already Working
The article frames Europe as having dismantled its energy base with nothing to show for it. The numbers tell a different story. In 2025, wind and solar provided 30% of EU electricity, surpassing fossil power at 29% for the first time. Renewables generated 47% of all EU electricity in 2024, up from effectively zero two decades ago. Solar generation alone grew 24.6% year-on-year in 2025.
Spain shows what happens when you actually commit. Renewables generated 57% of Spain’s electricity in 2024, with 7.3 GW of new capacity added in a single year — the largest annual increase ever recorded. In April 2025, renewables met 100% of Spain’s electricity demand for the first time on a weekday. Spain’s wholesale electricity price is now 32% below the EU average. Renewable output has reduced the influence of expensive gas generators on Spain’s electricity price by 75% since 2019.
This is not marginal. This is a structural shift in the cost of energy for an entire economy. Spain and Portugal are now dodging the energy price shock that the article describes as Europe’s defining vulnerability — precisely because they deployed renewables at scale. The article asks what Europe can still do. Spain already answered.
The Real Fix Is Cheaper Electrons, Not More Molecules
The article is right that Europe needs to rebuild its energy foundations. Where it goes wrong is assuming those foundations must be hydrocarbon. The pragmatic response — the one that would actually have the Messmer Plan’s spirit of matching technology to strategic need — is to keep existing nuclear running, build new nuclear where possible, and deploy renewables and storage at the pace the technology now allows, while fixing the regulatory and tax framework that still systematically favours gas over electricity.
An electric drivetrain converts over 90% of its energy into motion. An internal combustion engine wastes two-thirds as heat. A heat pump delivers three units of heat for every unit of electricity consumed. When you electrify transport, heating, and industry, you don’t just change the source — you slash total energy demand because electrons carry useful work far more efficiently than molecules. An 80% electron economy requires roughly a third to a half of the primary energy input of an 80% molecule economy to deliver the same energy services. That is the efficiency gain that makes electrification not just greener but cheaper and more secure — because the fuel is domestic sunlight and wind, not imported gas transiting contested straits.
The obstacles are not technical. They are institutional — precisely the point the article makes about European governance, but applied to the wrong conclusion. Europe doesn’t need a shale revolution with a 20-year American head start and no service industry infrastructure. It needs to stop taxing electricity at three times the rate of gas, stop treating every wind farm application as a decade-long planning inquiry, and stop pretending that restarting fossil infrastructure is a substitute for building the system that actually wins on cost.
China: The Primary Energy Fallacy
The article uses primary energy figures to describe China’s energy position. This is like measuring a city’s transport system by counting horses in 1920. Primary energy counts the thermal waste in combustion — the two-thirds of every unit of coal or gas that escapes as heat doing no useful work. Renewables have no thermal conversion losses, so primary energy systematically understates their contribution. On a final energy basis — the energy that actually does something — China’s picture looks completely different.
In 2024, clean sources met 84% of China’s electricity demand growth. In the first half of 2025, they outstripped all demand growth entirely, and fossil generation fell 2%. Wind and solar doubled their share of generation from 9% to 18% in just four years. Solar generation grew 43% year-on-year in H1 2025. Wind and solar capacity overtook coal capacity in early 2025. Coal utilisation rates have fallen to around 50% and are projected to hit 35% by 2030.
This is the pattern the article entirely misses: China is not building energy security through fossil fuels. It is building it through electrification — which is precisely why it wins on both efficiency and cost.
China is executing this at a scale no other country can match. It sold 12 million EVs in 2025, more than the entire European car market. BYD alone overtook Tesla in pure battery-electric sales. China’s EV exports surged 70% to 3.4 million vehicles, overtaking Japan as the world’s largest vehicle exporter. Chinese automakers are projected to capture 30% of global car sales by 2030. And this isn’t just passenger cars — China’s electric heavy truck sales nearly tripled in H1 2025, electric buses have already reached near-100% market penetration, and commercial vehicle electrification is approaching 28%. The entire automotive and commercial fleet value chain is flipping to electrons.
The coal capacity overbuild is a provincial GDP story, not a war-readiness story. In 2014, Beijing decentralised coal plant approval to provincial governments. Approval rates tripled. Local officials whose promotions depend on hitting GDP targets built coal plants because construction boosts local employment and investment statistics — even when the economics don’t stack up. Nearly 50% of China’s coal plants were running at a net financial loss by 2018. You don’t build strategic assets and run them at under 50% utilisation. These are stranded assets being built by provincial governors competing for promotion, not a coherent central plan for energy autarky.
The system that wins is not the one with the largest stockpile of fuel. It is the one that needs the least fuel to deliver the most useful work. That is what China is actually building. The article’s primary energy framing obscures the single most important energy story of this century.
I’ve been trying to explain to my “liberal” friends that precisely because of stuff like this we needed Trump in the WH. My fear is that once the D’s get the power back they’ll undo some or all of Trump’s energy related policies.
The problem with Europe, of course, and the big difference between 1970 and now is that they were not ideologically hostile to the solution to their problems.
Thank you ALL very much - a very insightful and well structured piece … spanning the arch from the 70’s to today. Let us share it among fellow EU citizens - to switch the “intermittent light bulb” in some of their heads on again and restore full power mode 💡
The picture at the top with the green bird says enough:
+ The North Sea is on the wrong side of the UK.
+ Finland is marked as Russia.
+ Czechia is marked as Germany.
i.e. on Europe this guest is misleading or doesn't know the difference. I had to turn this episode off about half way through, it was a bit like listening to Elon Musk talk about Europe. I'm sure that there are good points in there, but they are embedded in too much distortion and 'worldview'. I am a fan of decouple and of Chris, and I'm a Nuclear Engineer - this was a disappointment.
Fantastic. We will see by next winter what the choice Europeans make will be. My guess is that it will take much more pain before rationality, forced by steps down on Maslow’s ladder, push European countries to make the tough choices they have put off. It is just as likely, probably more likely, that the EU comes apart.
Talvolta penso se l'Europa possa, un domani, innamorarsi della Russia, come avrebbe fatto Tramp, riconoscendo la superiorità degli armamenti e della vastità del suo territorio.
Europe has been suffering from a nasty case of luxury beliefs. Governments rapidly need to understand that they are responsible for a few basic requirements to their citizens/ subjects and energy security is one of those.
It’s so easy to read this and change any use of the word “Europe” to “California” and have it make just as much sense. My favorite was this passage:
“Europe could signal ecological virtue by de-industrializing while guzzling hydrocarbons produced out of sight and out of mind, congratulating itself on declining domestic emissions that had not so much been eliminated as outsourced.”
Tell me that doesn’t sound like California. I think the only thing that keeps California marginally viable is that people can go to other states, for relief. The U.S. is fortunately big enough to be able to absorb the California/NY follies and cost average the country’s survival. Sadly, Europe is more like having half the states being of the California NIMBY variety with a single political party. We’ll see how long that can last.
More to the point however, great post! 😃
The same could be said for Canada.
Congratulations. This is exactly the kind of grounded, no-bullshit analysis the energy debate needs right now — which of course means it will be gently escorted into the nearest memory hole by the people whose entire careers depend on ignoring it.
I like the Maslow framing. It neatly shifts the question from “why are we spectacularly incompetent?” to “when exactly did we decide that food, heat, and electricity were cute lifestyle accessories?” No need for 400-page theories of institutional decay when Flamanville is sitting there screaming: 13 billion euros versus the original 3.3 billion fairy-tale estimate. The building is basically cosplaying as a money incinerator at this point.
I was writing about the same disease yesterday — China’s death-grip on rare earths and permanent magnets. Same plot, different continent. The West spent thirty years optimising itself into a pretzel, proudly announcing it was running on half a tank of blood, then acted shocked when the fainting spells started.
“De-industrialisation as progress” is chef’s kiss. Germany dismantling its industrial base with the serene confidence of a vegan at a barbecue. France quietly watching its nuclear workforce retire faster than you can say “we’ll just import the engineers from… somewhere.” At some point “energy transition” stopped meaning “to something that works” and became polite code for “away from anything that still functions, thanks.”
And then there’s China.
That coal-to-liquids buildout is the biggest tell since a poker player showed up wearing sunglasses indoors. Nobody sinks serious cash into Fischer-Tropsch plants because the Excel model said “this looks economical.” You do it when you’ve looked at the future, decided it’s probably going to be a dick, and started stockpiling lube. Germany and South Africa only built that stuff with a gun to their heads. China’s doing it while it still has options. Think about that for a second.
Their primary energy import dependence hovers around 15%. Europe’s pushing 80% on hydrocarbons and still acting like it’s winning the sustainability Olympics. That’s not a policy gap, that’s two species occupying different planets. It should be career-ending. Instead it’ll be explained away as “complex global dynamics” — which is diplomat for “please don’t make me admit we fucked this up on purpose.”
Reading your piece next to mine, the contrast is hilarious in a crying-laughing way. China’s patience isn’t some mystical Eastern wisdom. It’s just… infrastructure. Stockpiles, overcapacity, buffers — they built a system that can actually take a punch without immediately filing for emotional damages.
Europe optimised for a frictionless world, then removed the last shock absorbers to save three euros and a diversity consultant’s fee. Brilliant. Works fantastically right up until reality shows up and says “hold my beer.”
You can restart Groningen with a pen stroke. Restarting an entire generation of nuclear engineers? Yeah… good luck with that. Those guys don’t respawn like video game NPCs once they retire, move to Thailand, or decide they’d rather explain basic thermodynamics to TikTok policymakers for the rest of their lives.
— Taurean Matador
This is brilliant. The question for me is, outside of Europe’s behavior being the result of communist/one world government conspiracy, why are they committing suicide?
On the conspiracy question — I’d gently push back. You don’t need Marx, Soros, or a shadowy room to explain this. You need PowerPoint, quarterly earnings cycles, and the universal human tendency to stop maintaining the roof once it’s stopped leaking. The explanation isn’t sinister enough for a good thriller, which is exactly why it’s so hard to fix. Conspiracies at least have someone in charge. What we actually have is nobody in charge — just a thousand individually rational decisions that aggregate into collective suicide. Marx would have called it something, actually — just not what most people invoking his name think he’d call it.
Here’s what Marx would say - “You weren’t sabotaged by my followers — you were sabotaged by yours: capital did exactly what I told you it would do, fled every industry that couldn’t return a profit by Tuesday, dressed the wreckage up as progress, and handed you the ideology to applaud it.” Remember, Marx was primarily a historian, an observer and commentator, not a polemicist
Wasn’t Marx’s primary influence Hegel’s dialectic along with the Muslim takiya?
I’ve always wondered if the socialist/communist/progressive/woke etc. wasn’t an elite counter to rational governance…
Can you do a separate piece on China's gas industry? From what I understand the gas boom is recently due to unconventional sources (shale)
No wonder UK, CAN, AUS, FR, GER, EU not interested in keeping Hormuz open nor dealing with terrorist IRGC. Elites there don’t get it and don’t care. This article proves elites are not interested in taking care of their own, so why anyone else?
Excellent piece. Not only did Europe outsource there, economic capabilities, they outsourced their national defense as well. They’re facing a double whammy. The question is, which will they do first, and will they have to choose one over the other? They’re not exactly flush with cash these days.
In fairness the last 3 decades was about dismantling everything across the board; industry, energy, security, family, society, law… financializing all that could be and simply destroying the rest.
Sort of North Korea with a lot more to ruin.
Perhaps fairness is the wrong “in” here…
On outsourcing : Apparently Asia only keeps a small amount of energy reserve especially LNG. Oh dear. Just in time is just too late.
China is now playing its card of refining. The easy solution for Australia and others is capitulation to China which some (like Australia) have been doing for years on the down low. A labor/socialist government makes it easier/faster. Japan and Vietnam are probably less prone for various reasons.
Chris, you and Doomie make beautiful music together. The EU deserves itself.
The historical narrative in this piece is largely correct, and uncomfortable reading for anyone who cares about European energy security.
France built 54 reactors in two decades and achieved 75% nuclear electricity — the fastest large-scale decarbonisation in history, driven by pragmatic self-interest rather than climate ideology. Germany’s decision to shut its last three reactors in April 2023, in the middle of an energy crisis, will be studied for decades as a case study in political identity overriding physical reality.
Groningen should have stayed open. North Sea development should not have been taxed into extinction. The article is right that Europe’s political class lost touch with the material foundations of its own prosperity.
But the article’s prescription — restart gas, drill shale, rebuild fossil infrastructure — mistakes the lesson of the 1970s for the lesson of the 2020s. The 1970s response worked because it matched the available technology to the strategic need. The equivalent response today is not more hydrocarbons. It is electrification.
Europe’s Renewables Are Already Working
The article frames Europe as having dismantled its energy base with nothing to show for it. The numbers tell a different story. In 2025, wind and solar provided 30% of EU electricity, surpassing fossil power at 29% for the first time. Renewables generated 47% of all EU electricity in 2024, up from effectively zero two decades ago. Solar generation alone grew 24.6% year-on-year in 2025.
Spain shows what happens when you actually commit. Renewables generated 57% of Spain’s electricity in 2024, with 7.3 GW of new capacity added in a single year — the largest annual increase ever recorded. In April 2025, renewables met 100% of Spain’s electricity demand for the first time on a weekday. Spain’s wholesale electricity price is now 32% below the EU average. Renewable output has reduced the influence of expensive gas generators on Spain’s electricity price by 75% since 2019.
This is not marginal. This is a structural shift in the cost of energy for an entire economy. Spain and Portugal are now dodging the energy price shock that the article describes as Europe’s defining vulnerability — precisely because they deployed renewables at scale. The article asks what Europe can still do. Spain already answered.
The Real Fix Is Cheaper Electrons, Not More Molecules
The article is right that Europe needs to rebuild its energy foundations. Where it goes wrong is assuming those foundations must be hydrocarbon. The pragmatic response — the one that would actually have the Messmer Plan’s spirit of matching technology to strategic need — is to keep existing nuclear running, build new nuclear where possible, and deploy renewables and storage at the pace the technology now allows, while fixing the regulatory and tax framework that still systematically favours gas over electricity.
An electric drivetrain converts over 90% of its energy into motion. An internal combustion engine wastes two-thirds as heat. A heat pump delivers three units of heat for every unit of electricity consumed. When you electrify transport, heating, and industry, you don’t just change the source — you slash total energy demand because electrons carry useful work far more efficiently than molecules. An 80% electron economy requires roughly a third to a half of the primary energy input of an 80% molecule economy to deliver the same energy services. That is the efficiency gain that makes electrification not just greener but cheaper and more secure — because the fuel is domestic sunlight and wind, not imported gas transiting contested straits.
The obstacles are not technical. They are institutional — precisely the point the article makes about European governance, but applied to the wrong conclusion. Europe doesn’t need a shale revolution with a 20-year American head start and no service industry infrastructure. It needs to stop taxing electricity at three times the rate of gas, stop treating every wind farm application as a decade-long planning inquiry, and stop pretending that restarting fossil infrastructure is a substitute for building the system that actually wins on cost.
China: The Primary Energy Fallacy
The article uses primary energy figures to describe China’s energy position. This is like measuring a city’s transport system by counting horses in 1920. Primary energy counts the thermal waste in combustion — the two-thirds of every unit of coal or gas that escapes as heat doing no useful work. Renewables have no thermal conversion losses, so primary energy systematically understates their contribution. On a final energy basis — the energy that actually does something — China’s picture looks completely different.
In 2024, clean sources met 84% of China’s electricity demand growth. In the first half of 2025, they outstripped all demand growth entirely, and fossil generation fell 2%. Wind and solar doubled their share of generation from 9% to 18% in just four years. Solar generation grew 43% year-on-year in H1 2025. Wind and solar capacity overtook coal capacity in early 2025. Coal utilisation rates have fallen to around 50% and are projected to hit 35% by 2030.
This is the pattern the article entirely misses: China is not building energy security through fossil fuels. It is building it through electrification — which is precisely why it wins on both efficiency and cost.
China is executing this at a scale no other country can match. It sold 12 million EVs in 2025, more than the entire European car market. BYD alone overtook Tesla in pure battery-electric sales. China’s EV exports surged 70% to 3.4 million vehicles, overtaking Japan as the world’s largest vehicle exporter. Chinese automakers are projected to capture 30% of global car sales by 2030. And this isn’t just passenger cars — China’s electric heavy truck sales nearly tripled in H1 2025, electric buses have already reached near-100% market penetration, and commercial vehicle electrification is approaching 28%. The entire automotive and commercial fleet value chain is flipping to electrons.
The coal capacity overbuild is a provincial GDP story, not a war-readiness story. In 2014, Beijing decentralised coal plant approval to provincial governments. Approval rates tripled. Local officials whose promotions depend on hitting GDP targets built coal plants because construction boosts local employment and investment statistics — even when the economics don’t stack up. Nearly 50% of China’s coal plants were running at a net financial loss by 2018. You don’t build strategic assets and run them at under 50% utilisation. These are stranded assets being built by provincial governors competing for promotion, not a coherent central plan for energy autarky.
The system that wins is not the one with the largest stockpile of fuel. It is the one that needs the least fuel to deliver the most useful work. That is what China is actually building. The article’s primary energy framing obscures the single most important energy story of this century.
I’ve been trying to explain to my “liberal” friends that precisely because of stuff like this we needed Trump in the WH. My fear is that once the D’s get the power back they’ll undo some or all of Trump’s energy related policies.
The problem with Europe, of course, and the big difference between 1970 and now is that they were not ideologically hostile to the solution to their problems.
I'm a bit sceptical to AIs suggestion of new (or current?!?) borders for Russia and Germany. I don't think the Fins and Czechs approve.
Thank you ALL very much - a very insightful and well structured piece … spanning the arch from the 70’s to today. Let us share it among fellow EU citizens - to switch the “intermittent light bulb” in some of their heads on again and restore full power mode 💡
The picture at the top with the green bird says enough:
+ The North Sea is on the wrong side of the UK.
+ Finland is marked as Russia.
+ Czechia is marked as Germany.
i.e. on Europe this guest is misleading or doesn't know the difference. I had to turn this episode off about half way through, it was a bit like listening to Elon Musk talk about Europe. I'm sure that there are good points in there, but they are embedded in too much distortion and 'worldview'. I am a fan of decouple and of Chris, and I'm a Nuclear Engineer - this was a disappointment.