Page 60 - bne IntelliNews magazine February 2025

60 Opinion
Kyiv. And all this comes at a time as all of Europe sinks into
recession.
“Von der Leyen’s administration has no new ideas on this, and is instead simply changing names of things from “green” to “clean” and doubling down on the technologically failed Green Deal Model, based on the German Energiewende Model,” says O’Donnell. “EU strategy, as Ribera and Von der Leyen repeatedly remind us, is to use green tech development to regain EU competitiveness. But, that battle for Green
tech supremacy has already been lost. You know the story vis-à-vis both the USA and especially China... And so, there was, and still is, a wrong theory, a flawed model, and it is
now contributing to the deindustrialization of Europe, to its competitive failures.”
The failure to recognise the flaws in the EU’s green transition policies is leading to the deindustrialization of Europe. That in turn presents an acute economic and national security threat for Europe. The German industrial decline will pull everybody
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else down, especially their Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Baltic neighbours simply because it is so big and so important as a market to all its neighbours, O’Donnell argues.
As a solution, O'Donnell advocated for a diversified energy mix that includes nuclear power, citing France's historical success in decarbonising its electricity generation through nuclear energy without the need for new grids or long-term storage technologies.
"The French Messmer plan, which rapidly built nuclear plants, succeeded in decarbonising French electrical generation without any need for new grids or long-term grid- scale storage tech," he noted.
O'Donnell's critique calls for a reassessment of the
EU's current energy policies to address technological shortcomings and to consider a more pragmatic approach that ensures both energy security and industrial competitiveness.
Trump demands Europe import more US LNG, as the EU proposes banning Russian LNG completely. Neither will happen.
Ben Aris in Berlin
US President Donald Trump wants Europe to buy more US gas or face tariffs, and ten EU member states have called again for an end to all Russian imports. Neither of these things are going to happen. Europe remains hooked on Russian gas.
“Large scale purchase of our oil and gas. Otherwise, it is TARIFFS all the way!!!” Trump posted on social media last month.
That was followed by comments from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen shortly after her re-election as the European Commission (EC) president: “Why not replace [Russian gas] by American LNG?” she asked in an effort to curry favour with the mercurial US leader.
The problem that they both face is, despite their political desire to change the nature of the Europe energy market and cut Russia off from an important source of income, Europe’s gas market is commercial and neither leader has any power to force companies to switch suppliers. The brutal truth is that Russian LNG is cheaper than US gas.
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Trump is hoping to force the issue by imposing duties on Europe if it doesn’t buy more LNG. The freshly inaugurated president signed over 100 decrees on his first day in office, including ending all restrictions on developing new deposits and lifted a ban on exports of LNG to Europe. In his inauguration speech, he promised to make America rich again by exploiting its hydrocarbon reserves, “the biggest
in the world.”
The politicians are being ignored by the market. Europe imported a new record amount of Russian gas in 2024, up 14% year on year to 23.5bn cubic metres, still a fraction of the circa 150 bcm a year that Europe used to import pre-war.
The end of cheap Russian piped gas supplies has had a devastating impact on the EU’s economy. Germany has been particularly hard hit, posting two consecutive years of economic contraction in January for the first time since the 1990s, as it de-industrialises. German companies simply cannot afford to pay more for energy when energy prices are already currently triple their long-term pre-war average.