The initiative was aiming to make Europe the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 while fostering innovation and strengthening its industrial base. Europe was also more or less forcing the rest of the world to go with wind, solar, batteries, biofuels, EVs and Heat Pumps. Europe saw this as an opportunity to expand its wind, solar, etc., systems to the rest of the world and make lots of money in the process.

The main problem of wind and solar are the hidden costs.

Hidden Costs: At a future 30% W/S annual penetration on the grid, based on UK and German experience:

- Onshore grid expansion/reinforcement to connect far-flung W/S systems, about 2 c/kWh

- A fleet of traditional power plants to quickly counteract W/S variable output, on a less than minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365, which means more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh, more cost of about 2 c/kWh

- A fleet of traditional power plants to provide electricity during 1) low-wind periods, 2) high-wind periods, when rotors are locked in place, and 3) low solar periods during mornings, evenings, at night, snow/ice on panels, which means more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh, more cost of about 2 c/kWh

- Pay W/S system Owners for electricity they could have produced, if no curtailment, about 1 c/kWh

- Importing electricity at high prices, when W/S output is low, 1 c/kWh

- Exporting electricity at low prices, when W/S output is high, 1 c/kWh

- Disassembly on land and at sea, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites, about 2 c/kWh

Total: 2 + 2 + 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 2 = 11 c/kWh. This cost is rarely talked about, but shows up in many ways.

How Green Ideology Undermines Europe’s Economy

These outcomes largely stem from policy choices. The EU’s binding targets—net zero by 2050 and a 55-percent emissions reduction by 2030—have constrained energy supply, despite Europe accounting for only six percent of global emissions.

At the same time, phasing out nuclear, restricting gas, and relying on intermittent wind and solar have weakened energy security and increased price volatility.

For industry—where energy often accounts for up to 30 percent of total production costs—this, combined with government-mandated carbon pricing, has become a critical constraint, driving firms to scale back, relocate, or shut down, accelerating de-industrialization across the continent.

The automotive industry clearly illustrates these pressures: representing over 7 percent of EU GDP and nearly 14 million jobs, the sector is under pressure from the 2035 ban on combustion engines, forcing a rapid shift to electric vehicles despite unresolved technological challenges and market constraints.

As Mercedes-Benz CEO Ola Källenius warned, the policy risks driving the sector “full speed into a wall.” The consequences for the sector are already visible: declining production, mounting restructuring, and significant job losses—86,000 jobs since 2020, with up to 350,000 more jobs at risk by 2035—while tightening regulations are set to reduce profits by seven to eight percent by 2030, pushing the sector toward losses and eroding Europe’s automotive leadership.

Agriculture has become one of the Green Deal’s clearest casualties

Stricter rules on emissions, land use, pesticides, and fertilizers are raising costs and decreasing crop yields per acre, hitting small farmers hardest and accelerating consolidation among large agribusinesses.

Targets such as cutting pesticide use by 5% and expanding organic farming risk significant declines in output, (crop yield per acre) threatening both rural livelihoods and food security.

Rather than enabling farmers to innovate and improve productivity, these policies are constraining production—fueling widespread protests and weakening both competitiveness and sustainability.

Taken together, these pressures are not isolated—they reflect a broader economic burden. The European Commission estimates that the transition will require at least €260 billion in additional investment each year, with total costs reaching up to 12 percent of EU GDP—a burden that is increasingly difficult for the European economy to sustain.

Europe, increasingly beset by a range of social-economic problems, is particularly burdened by:

1) The Brussels’ myopic, unaffordable, energy/enviro policies, such as wind, solar, batteries, biofuels, etc.,

2) Much increased defense expenses up to 5% of GDP (about $938 billion during the 2025 – 2030 period)

3) The huge loss of not selling about $100 billion/y of goods and services to the lucrative Russian market,

4) The huge loss of not buying about $150 billion/y of low-cost, energy, resources, fertilizers, etc., from Russia,

5) The increasing cost, chaos, crime, subversion of “integrating” the continued influx of undesirable, unskilled, uneducated dregs from mostly Islamic Third World countries. Europe’s migrant population was 40 million at end 2010, was 64.2 million in April 2026, at an A-to-Z cost of at least $25,000/y per person, or $1.6 trillion/y.

The Green Deal’s Central Planning Problem

The 2024 EU elections confirmed what was already clear: the once-dominant green consensus is unraveling all over Europe. In response, Brussels has begun quietly rolling back key elements of the policy—weakening regulations, introducing loopholes, and even avoiding the term “Green Deal” itself. What was presented as a “man on the moon moment” is now unraveling.

This backlash reflects a deeper failure. Although the EU allocated $680 billion from 2021 to 2027—over a third of its budget—the Green Deal has achieved only modest environmental improvements, while imposing a heavy economic burden on households and businesses, who now face higher energy and materials prices, taxes, and regulatory pressure, while having stagnant and decreasing real incomes and profits.

The problem is not merely execution—it is structural. The Green Deal relies on centralized planning to manage a complex energy transition, even though unelected bureaucrats lack the skills to do so effectively.

A major flaw is its rejection of technological neutrality. Leading manufacturers support a mix of electric, hybrid, hydrogen, and e-fuels to compete freely and allow efficient solutions to emerge, yet Brussels unelected bureaucrats are enforcing a single pathway—effectively dictating which technologies survive and dismissing the real expertise of industries; picking winners and losers. East European leaders are saying the idiocies of Brussels are outdoing the Moscow of the USSR.

In such a system, the outcomes are predictable: misallocation of expensive resources, distorted competition based on government bureaucrats picking winners and losers, and becoming ever more un-competitive in domestic and international markets.

These distortions are amplified by Europe’s restrictive regulatory environment, where internal barriers within the EU single market have the net effect of a 44% tariff on goods and 110% on services, further constraining efficiency and innovation.

Germany illustrates these dynamics clearly. Long regarded as the leader of Europe’s green transition, its Energiewende—expanding wind, solar, etc., while phasing out coal and nuclear—has cost around $800 billion since 2002, yet delivered only modest results and left German industries paying up to five times more for electricity than American competitors. All this was predicted by many independent energy systems analysts before 2000

Much of the progress in wind, solar, etc., has been offset by the closure of zero-emission nuclear plants. Estimates suggest that maintaining nuclear capacity could have achieved a 73-percent emissions reduction at half the cost, highlighting the limits of ideologically driven policy. Van der Leyen stated “closing nuclear was a mistake”. She omitted stated hundreds of other “mistakes” since 2000

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The comparison with the United States is instructive. In the U.S., emissions have declined , due to highly successful fracking for low-cost, making coal plants much less competitive.

The US economy more than doubled since 1990—driven largely by market forces, particularly the shift to more gas and less coal, and running the entire nuclear fleet at 80+% capacity factor, the highest in the world.

Prosperity requires free enterprise, open markets, private innovation, and especially very limited government, and a strong work ethic. All these are successfully practiced in the US.

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Net-zero by 2050 to-reduce CO2 is a super-expensive suicide pact, to: 1) increase command/control by governments, and 2) enable the moneyed elites to become more powerful and richer, at the expense of all others, by using the foghorn of the government-subsidized/controlled Corporate Media to spread scare-mongering slogans and brainwash people, already for at least 50 years.

CO2, just 0.042% in the atmosphere, is a weak absorber of a small fraction of the absorbable, low-energy IR photons.

CO2 has near-zero influence on world surface temperatures.

CO2 is a life-giving molecule. Greater CO2 ppm in atmosphere is an essential ingredient to 1) increase green flora and fauna, reduce desert areas, such as the Sahara, and 2) increase crop yields to better feed 8 billion people