We hear many people blaming Brexit for travel delays, shop shortages and many other ills. But how often do they stop and think about some of the things that would be going wrong now if we were still members of the EU? Yesterday, EU members agreed to cut their gas consumption by 15 percent in response to another gas cut from Russia – only 20 percent of the gas that flowed through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in February is still flowing now. Gas cuts were imposed on member states that don’t even import much gas from Russia, but may now be forced to ration gas to homes and order factories to shut down production in an attempt to, effectively, save Germany for its short-sighted policy of relying on Russian gas.
If we were still in the EU, this agreement would include Britain. Today, the government will fight for urgent cuts in energy consumption. This may have involved planning blackouts, as with the three-day week in the 1970s, or ordering factories and other plants to reduce production. The option we are trying to pursue, to try to maintain supplies by increasing production in the North Sea and increasing imports of liquefied natural gas from the US and Qatar, would not have saved us because under the agreement with the EU we had to reduce consumption by 15 percent, regardless of how well we did at replacing Russian oil and gas imports with fuel sourced from elsewhere. While there are exceptions for Ireland, Cyrus and Malta, which are not connected to the European grid that supplies gas from Russia, every other member state is under political pressure to comply. Yes, it’s technically voluntary, but isn’t it telling that so far only Hungary is opposed to the agreement?
The EU’s response to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine – indeed, after the annexation of Ukraine in 2014 – was 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 widespread talk of ending energy imports from Russia, but the oil and gas continued to flow. It is Vladimir Putin, not the EU, who is now dictating EU energy policy, forcing it to run without Russian energy well ahead of the timetable drawn up by EU countries.
Europe is in this situation partly as a result of misguided environmental policy. EU countries are merrily decommissioning their own oil and gas production in the name of working towards net zero carbon emissions (a target, I should add, that Germany has set for 2045, five years ahead of Britain’s overly ambitious target). Imports of Russian oil and gas were seen as a brake on the road to that nirvana, a way to remove fossil fuel production from Europe’s carbon bills while keeping the lights on. Geopolitical considerations do not enter into it at all, despite the obvious signs of Putin’s aggression.
The result is that the EU faces a winter like the one Britain suffered under Sir Edward Heath: with distributed energy, perhaps through planned outages. For EU fans, Sir Edward has long been a totemic figure: the prime minister who welcomed 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.
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