The founding idea of the European Union was to build, through shared prosperity, solidarity and a sense of shared destiny among the nations of Europe. That was why three communities were formed: the economy, coal and steel, and nuclear energy. Until around 2000, in terms of growth and innovation, the European economy, year in, year out, was on par with the American one.
Of that initial -- and fairly brilliant -- gesture of "peace through prosperity," literally nothing remains.
None of the EU's current leaders cares about the financial well-being of Europeans. Coal is regarded as the devil's fuel, and nuclear energy is abhorred by Europe's elites, who say they prefer the inefficient and erratic wind turbines. Since 2000, the European economy has been mired in stagnation, which has worsened since 2008 and threatens to reach its height in the coming years -- ending in the destruction of Europe.
The EU is a web of institutions with which an American would find nothing familiar, so let us just say that this web is dominated by one institution: the European Commission.It is a kind of European "government'" with a monopoly on legislative initiatives. Nothing is voted on in the EU without the Commission's assent.
The Commission makes no secret of the fact that its absolute priority is the Green Deal:
to turn Europe into a "Carbon Neutral Society" by 2050. This means achieving a balance between the greenhouse gas emissions produced and those absorbed by natural or technological carbon sinks. The EU's key strategies to achieve this balance include reducing emissions by massively increasing the use of "renewable energy" sources such as solar, wind, hydro and biomass, improving the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles and industries, and moving towards low- or zero-emission industrial processes, particularly in steel, cement and chemicals. They also aim to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies to absorb and store CO2 from combustion sources or from the air. Carbon dioxide captured is typically stored in geological formations such as depleted natural gas fields, or old coal mines. In Europe, the North Sea seabed serves as an ideal location for carbon storage.
The problem is that these CCS technologies are extremely expensive. Imposing them in the gigantic way that zero-carbon requires implies additional costs that are impossible for any developed economy to digest. That is probably why these fantastical CCS technologies play such a marginal role in Europe. The truth is that the reduction in CO2 emissions in Europe is almost exclusively due to industry leaving Europe. That is the dirty little secret of the Green Deal: Europe is reducing its CO2 emissions to the extent and in proportion to the destruction of its industry.
The industry destroyed in Europe, however, is immediately reborn elsewhere in the world: in East Asia, South America and, of course, the United States. This means that the CO2 emissions destroyed in Europe reappear as if by magic somewhere else -- before the products of that particular industry are re-exported to Europe. In the majority of cases -- because transporting anything emits CO2 -- the balance sheet in terms of this European sleight of hand in reducing global CO2 emissions is negative.
The stated motive and reason for being of the Green Deal is to save the climate, which in European circles is often spelled with a capital C – "Climate" -- which says a lot about the religiosity of the whole approach. To "save the planet," we are told, we need to reduce CO2 emissions.
The only technological way we know so far to reduce CO2 emissions is by nuclear power. The EU "elites," however, hate nuclear power: their real objective is not to mitigate climate change and "save the planet", but to force an exit from capitalism and return to the subsistence economy that has always been the ambition, the dream and the horizon of environmentalists -- long before there was any talk of global warming. "Capitalism is killing the Planet", wrote The Guardian.
If there is one reality that leaders whose power is founded on myths abhor, it is transparency. Whereas in 2020, the power of the American legacy media still allowed it to make people believe that Hunter Biden's laptop was a Russian disinformation operation, over the last few years, this power was been reduced to shreds. The same shift is happening in Europe, under the influence not of European social media networks, because they do not exist, but of American ones, such as X. The EU elite has lost control of the narrative. Europeans are turning away from the lies and myths of the Green Deal en masse.
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