Doug Sheridan “Joseph Sternberg writes in the WSJ, non-Europeans shouldn’t underestimate how shocking a new war on the Continent has been to Western Europeans….”
By Doug Sheridan
Doug Sheridan
Joseph Sternberg writes in the WSJ, non-Europeans shouldn’t underestimate how shocking a new war on the Continent has been to Western Europeans, let alone such a war perpetrated by a power with which EU nations were accustomed to doing profitable business.
The shock isn’t only the war, but its brutality. It’s no use noting that Europeans should have known better about the ends and means of Vladimir Putin’s regime. The reality is that despite the evidence of Chechnya and Georgia, to cite only two examples, they didn’t. But now they are starting to.
What Europeans haven’t done is seriously discussed the far trickier question of what they are prepared not to do—in terms of social-welfare projects, green-energy boondoggles or the like. Expect this argument to become fiercer, and the sense of purpose less sure, as rising interest rates trigger acute fiscal strains.
Speaking of energy boondoggles, that is the one lesson Europe absolutely refuses to learn—that green energy is incompatible with energy security, which makes it incompatible with national or continental security.
The claim is that disruption of the supply of energy imports from Russia is supposed to have highlighted the necessity of developing wind and solar—and now hydrogen—as a local alternative. Except that these energy sources are more costly and less stable than fossil-fuel or nuclear workhorses.
Renewables are also arguably worse for the environment once one considers the mess made while mining and refining the rare-earth minerals that go into renewable tech. And since China controls much of the global supply chain for those minerals, green energy merely replicates in Asia the form of energy dependence Europe now loudly bemoans regarding Russia.
A serious European leader would point out that energy security that holds advanced economies hostage to the weather and Beijing is no security at all. They'd instead make the case for exploiting European sources of shale gas that could power an economy such as Germany’s for decades, or nuclear.
Alas, European leaders are proving deeply unserious. For example, Berlin can't seem to make peace at long last with nuclear energy—despite a panicked decision in the autumn to extend the service of its three remaining reactors a little longer.
There is some ground for optimism to the extent that now Europe’s energy neuroses at least are controversial in a way they weren’t before. A pro-nuclear coalition in Germany slowly is finding its voice, and a tentative debate about shale-gas fracking has begun in that country as well.
To Sum It Up: From the Ukraine war’s earliest days one suspected Europe’s problem wouldn’t be ignorance of the dangers facing it, but rather a refusal to address them. The surprise of the past year has been that this refusal persists even as Europe pays the price for the C….
it's perverse willingness to go dark before it gets smart.