If we were still in the EU, this deal would also involve Britain. The government today would fight for extraordinary cuts in energy use. This could include scheduling blackouts as in the Three-Day Week of the 1970s, or ordering factories and other factories to reduce production. The option we are trying to follow, to try to maintain supplies by increasing North Sea production and increasing imports of liquefied natural gas from the US and Qatar, would not save us, since under the EU agreement we would have to reduce the use 15 percent, regardless of how well we were able to replace oil and gas imports from Russia with fuels sourced elsewhere. While there are exceptions for Ireland, Cyrus and Malta, which are not connected to the European grid supplied with gas from Russia, every other member state has come under political pressure to comply. Yes, it’s technically voluntary, but isn’t it telling that only Hungary is holding out against the deal so far? The EU’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – indeed, since the annexation of Ukraine in 2014 – has been a disgrace. Germany signed the Nord Stream 2 deal, further increasing its dependence on Russian gas, a year after Crimea. After the Ukrainian invasion, there was much talk of ending energy imports from Russia, but the oil and gas continued to flow. It is Vladimir Putin, not the EU, who now dictates EU energy policy, forcing it to go without Russian energy well ahead of the timetable set by EU states. Europe is in this situation partly as a result of a flawed environmental policy. EU states are happily decommissioning their own oil and gas production in the name of working towards net zero carbon emissions (a goal, I should add, that Germany has set for 2045, five years before Britain’s own overly ambitious goal). Russian oil and gas imports were seen as a roadblock to this nirvana, a way to remove fossil fuel production from Europe’s carbon bills while still keeping the lights on. Geopolitical considerations did not enter into it at all, despite the obvious signs of Putin’s aggressiveness. The result is that the EU faces a winter like the one Britain experienced under Sir Edward Heath: with partial energy consumption, perhaps through scheduled holidays. For EU supporters, Sir Edward has long been a totemic figure: the Prime Minister who got us into the bloc without bothering to ask the people in a referendum. How ironic that the EU’s energy policy is now taking it down the same path as Heath’s Britain.
