Europe sleepwalked into yet another energy crisis

ZeroGravitas

Any money spent on blunting short term spikes in fossil fuels should be added back to fossil fuels over time. And windfall profits should be automatically seized. Otherwise you are just incentivising wars.

mesk

Only Europe ? What a fantastic news ! /s

michael1999

Spain didn't. https://www.ft.com/content/19f2ee15-dc86-4964-b23f-d644b18a7...

eqvinox

I really wouldn't call it sleepwalking when it's the result of a lot of lobbying and deeply ingrained mis-views of politics ("conservatives are good with the economy").

tl1293

The BBC misrepresents "the Chinese lesson". China does build up renewables, but it does so while still supporting its heavy industry with cheap Russian gas. It does not help at all to put aluminum smelters on Qatari ground, claim zero emissions, and then watch those being bombed together with the LNG facilities. It also does not help if Russia is the last country on earth that still has natural gas and can dictate fertilizer production. The journalists are all about short term thinking, mindless green agenda religion and no economic knowledge.

fhn

"They prefer to flare the gas than to deliver it" What Russia chooses to do with their resources is none of your business. Her sense of entitlement is astronomical like most of the west. "This market is not functioning anymore." so you point fingers at everybody else?

PearlRiver

No plan survives an encounter with Donald Trump.

mitchbob

https://archive.ph/2026.03.19-073746/https://www.bbc.com/new...

michieldotv

From speaking with others, I will say that, on average my peers seem not to have learned from the energy crisis following the invasion of Ukraine. It's business as usual. Consequently those learnings have not permeated society up to the political class. Since then, I renovated my house, installing a heat pump. That's long term planning when it comes to a household. The same kind of judicious long-term thinking we did not see from our leaders. Yeah, supply chains were shifted quickly and we started importing LNG from the USA and Qatar soon after giving some semblance of stability, but really we are still captives to petrostates. Now with LNG prices spiking, exposing the vulnerability of our imports once again, we have our PM De Wever saying that we should aspire for normalised relations with Russia ASAP so that we can tap that cheap gas? That's a hard pass for me. Fossil fuels are problematic enough as it stands but, I get it: Saudis draining the Colorado river for cow feed using their oil money, or whatever, that doesn't register very high up in what matters in the here and now. Yet another oil-shock fueled inflation wave though? That stings. So perhaps the silver lining here is that at the very least, the geopolitical risk they pose is now truly very palpable. Again. It's out in the open. Again. We should seize the moment and see it as an opportunity to really double down on our efforts in phasing out fossil fuels. Again. The world will be a much better (albeit different) place without them.