Crazy energy paradox puts Europe in a shaky position

Despite its cool Green parties and ambitious wind and solar agendas, Europe remains by far the world’s largest importer of oil and natural gas.

Oil output in the North Sea is declining and the European Union is quietly looking for fossil fuel energy anywhere it can find it.

Europe is naturally rich in fossil fuels. It likely has more reserves of shale gas than the United States, currently the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. Yet in most European countries, horizontal drilling and fracking to extract gas and oil are either illegal or face so many court challenges and protests that they’re not feasible.

As a result, Europe is almost entirely dependent on Russian, Middle Eastern and African sources of energy.

The American-Iranian standoff, coupled with radical drop-offs in Iranian and Venezuelan oil production, has terrified Europe. The EU has almost no ability to guarantee the delivery of critical oil and gas supplies from the Middle East should Iran close the Strait of Hormuz or harass ships in the Persian Gulf. Europe’s only maritime security is the NATO f leet (read: the U.S. Navy).

Vladimir Putin’s Russia supplies an estimated 30% of Europe’s oil. Putin could exercise de facto control over the European economy.

In other words, Europe isn’t developing its own gas and oil reserves and won’t fund the necessary military power to ensure the safe import of energy from problematic sources.

It’s no wonder Europe’s traditional foreign policy reflects these crazy paradoxes.

This explains the EU’s eagerness to maintain the so-called “Iran deal.”

Europeans also are uneasy about the Trump administration. They see the current U.S. government as nationalist and unpredictable. Americans appear not so ready as in the past to enter the world’s hotspots to ensure unimpeded commercial use of sea and air lanes for the benefit of others he result is a sort of European schizophrenia when it comes to America and foreign policy in general. The EU resents its military dependence on Washington but also prays for its continuance. The EU loudly promotes freedom and democracy abroad, but it’s careful to keep ties with oil-exporting Middle Eastern autocracies antithetical to these values.

Germany agrees with its allies that Russian imperial agendas could threaten European autonomy. But privately, Berlin reassures Putin’s Russia that it wants to buy all the gas and oil it can. Germany increasingly seems far friendlier with a suspicious Russia than it is with an America that protects it.

In sum, what ensures that Europeans have daily gasoline and home heating fuel aren’t batteries, wind farms and solar panels but instead a mercurial Russia, unstable Middle Eastern governments and an underappreciated U.S. military.

In a logical world, Europeans would retake control of their own destiny. That recalibration would entail beefing up their military power and their navies in particular.

They also would begin to frack and horizontally drill. Europeans would push ahead with more nuclear power, hydroelectric projects and clean-coal technologies, at least until new sources of clean energies become viable.

Europe should applaud U.S. gas and oil development, which has upped world supplies, diversified suppliers and lowered global prices. Europeans should especially remember that the U.S. military keeps global commerce safe for all vulnerable importers such as themselves.

But these remedies are apparently seen in Europe as worse than the disease of oil and gas dependency.

Europe lectures about greenhouse gases while it desperately seeks supplies of fossil fuels.

The danger for Europe now is that the charade may soon end.