neels

⚡️The von der Leyen quote is one of the most revealing things a European leader has said in the last decade and almost nobody is going to process it correctly. “The cheapest energy is the one you don’t use.” That is a sentence spoken by a person presiding over civilizational decline who has decided to reframe the decline as virtue. It’s not a policy statement. It’s a theological position. The energy crisis isn’t a problem to be solved by producing more energy. It’s an opportunity for Europeans to need less. To want less. To consume less. To live smaller lives in smaller apartments heated to lower temperatures with less travel and less activity and less economic output. The scarcity isn’t a failure. It’s the goal. This is the thing Americans and everyone outside of Europe cannot fully grasp about where European elite thinking has landed. They genuinely believe that reducing European energy consumption is morally good regardless of the economic consequences, because European consumption is tied to European environmental guilt which is tied to European colonial guilt which is tied to a broader belief that European civilization has been net negative for the world and should shrink. The energy crisis gives them political cover to implement policies that would otherwise be unpopular. Now they can say circumstances force the reduction when the reduction was always the plan. Von der Leyen is not an aberration. She represents the consensus view among the European political class. Macron believes this. Scholz believes this. The entire EU Commission believes this. They don’t say it this directly usually because it polls badly, but every major policy they implement is consistent with this worldview. Degrowth is not a fringe academic position in European politics. It’s the operating framework at the top. The American version of this framing would be “the cheapest energy is the one we produce ourselves at scale.” That’s what actually reduces cost and increases resilience. Building more nuclear, extracting more gas, expanding the grid, investing in new production. The European version is the opposite. Don’t build anything. Don’t extract anything. Don’t produce anything. Just use less. And when citizens can’t heat their homes or fly for work, frame it as virtue. This is why Europe can’t recover from the current trajectory. The recovery would require a complete reversal of the ideological framework that produced the decline, and that framework is held most strongly by exactly the people who have the power to change it. They’re not going to reverse it because they don’t see the trajectory as a problem. They see it as necessary and good.