European policymakers’ ideologically-driven green policies, detached from economic and engineering reality, are predictably making the continent poorer, weaker, and sicker. The staggering 60,000 heat-related deaths in Europe in 2022, close to 2.4 times more than America from 1999 to 2023, are a direct result of this, rooted in a shocking lack of adaptation. While air conditioning is near-universal in the U.S. and Japan (~90% adoption), it’s treated as a luxury in Europe, with just 19% adoption. This is because the rushed abandonment of reliable energy sources like nuclear power in favor of intermittent renewables has created costly, unreliable electricity, making widespread cooling unattainable. The consequences extend beyond preventable deaths to include cognitive decline and economic loss, demonstrating a profound failure of policy across a continent dependent on its human capital.
The Flawed Path: Renewables, Regulations, and Industrial Decline
The European Union’s aggressive “green” agenda, which deliberately phases out baseload power from reliable carbon sources and nuclear power while imposing “cap-and-trade” taxes, has led to soaring energy costs across the continent. This is particularly evident in Poland, where the nation’s reliance on domestic coal for energy security has meant the cap-and-trade system disproportionately punishes its economy and citizens with soaring electricity prices. In recent years, the price of these carbon allowances has skyrocketed, from under €10 per ton a decade ago to fluctuating between €70-€100 per ton.
Despite closing access to its own massive natural gas reserves, the Netherlands continues to import Russian LNG while the amount of biomass it burns for energy increased by roughly 70%. Although many environmentalists champion biomass as a renewable energy source because its fuel can be regrown, this belief masks the reality that it is the most materially intensive, land-hungry, and expensive form of power generation. Consequently, the Netherlands has exchanged a relatively efficient fuel for one that produces the most waste and releases more immediate CO₂ than natural gas, creating a significant “carbon debt” that contradicts its climate ambitions. Simultaneously, a subsidy caused expansion of solar power and demand for electric vehicles and cooking, is now overloading the national grid and causing localized blackouts. This has created the paradoxical situation where, on sunny days, an oversupply of solar power causes electricity prices to turn negative, meaning it can now cost money to feed energy back into the grid.
Germany, in particular, has seen its electricity prices skyrocket after shutting down its nuclear reactors and replacing them with an expensive, unreliable system of renewables that increases reliance on importing volatile natural gas. Ironically, they also import a lot of France’s nuclear energy. The devastating consequence of these policies has been a severe and lasting blow to Europe’s industrial base, epitomized by the German manufacturing sector, which has suffered a major plunge in production for its energy-intensive industries, forcing foundational companies to downsize operations and invest abroad (like BASF).
The chosen path of relying on Chinese made solar and wind comes with enormous, often unacknowledged, trade-offs in land use, material requirements, and grid stability. Nuclear power, the most potent source of carbon-free energy, has been sidelined by political fears, not scientific reality. To generate the same amount of electricity as a nuclear plant operating on just 1.3 square miles, you would need 62.5 square miles for solar or a staggering 140 square miles for wind. This inefficiency extends to materials, as building out a renewable infrastructure requires immense quantities of concrete, steel, copper, and other minerals, far more than what is required for a nuclear plant of the same capacity.
Furthermore, the fundamental flaw of renewables is their intermittency. The sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow, making them unreliable for baseload power unless paired with massive, expensive battery storage systems. Nuclear power, in contrast, provides stable power at a competitive cost.
The claim that Europe’s high energy costs are a necessary price to avert climate catastrophe is a dangerous misdiagnosis. This justification is flawed because the real tragedy of heat deaths stems not just from rising temperatures, but from a lack of access to adaptation, like air conditioning. By making energy prohibitively expensive, current EU mitigation strategies directly block this life-saving solution. Furthermore, the entirety of Europe’s painful energy transition has a negligible impact on global emissions, an effect often offset by a single day of industrial expansion in Asia. The rational and moral path is to prioritize abundant, affordable energy, which empowers citizens to adapt, prevents deaths today, and fosters the prosperous societies best equipped for future challenges.
The Proven Solution: Why the West Abandoned Nuclear (And Why It Must Return)
France stands as an European example of low carbon energy. By embracing nuclear power decades ago, France decoupled its economic growth from CO2 emissions. From the 1970s onward, as its nuclear fleet came online, France’s GDP per capita soared while CO2 emissions per capita fell.
Following the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, the West made a political choice to halt nuclear development, leading to a decades-long stagnation that dismantled supply chains and institutional knowledge. This created a “negative learning curve,” resulting in exorbitant costs for isolated projects, such as the Vogtle plant at an estimated $15 per watt. In stark contrast, China’s continuous construction of its 29 new reactors has fostered a “positive learning curve,” driving costs down to a highly competitive $2.3 million per megawatt. Therefore, the prohibitive cost of nuclear power in the West is not an inherent feature of the technology but a self-inflicted economic wound resulting directly from the political decision to stop building. The primary objections to nuclear power—waste and safety—are simply not true. The entire 20-year output of spent fuel from the Maine Yankee nuclear plant, for instance, is stored safely in a handful of casks on a concrete pad the size of a tennis court. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), nuclear power’s lifecycle emissions are among the lowest of any energy source, on par with onshore wind and significantly lower than solar.
The Choice Ahead: Energy Scarcity or Energy Abundance
Europe stands at a crossroads. It can continue down its current path of self-imposed energy scarcity, economic decline, and preventable death, or it can look at the empirical evidence and choose a different course. Human flourishing requires abundant, affordable energy. Policies that make energy expensive lead to poverty and death. Intermittent renewables like wind and solar cannot alone power a modern industrial society. To facilitate the shift to abundant energy, aside from removing the overregulation on nuclear energy, the cap-and-trade system must be carefully dismantled in phases, preventing the economic shock of an abrupt abolition while redirecting investment toward proven energy supplies. The choice for European leaders is stark: continue sacrificing their citizens on the altar of a flawed green ideology, or embrace the proven, pragmatic path of energy abundance.
