With the shadow of conflict in Ukraine threatening to turn the EU’s energy crisis into a full-blown catastrophe should Russia turn off the gas supply, it is worth reflecting on how we got here.
Who’s to blame for this state of precarity, why is our energy system so vulnerable, and how can we stop it from happening again?
Russia has been exporting fossil gas to Europe since the late 1960s. While discoveries of oil and gas in the North Sea and the Netherlands allowed some European countries to be largely self-sufficient in the 1970s, European gas production has been in steady decline since the early 2000s and is currently at historically low levels. (Today, Europe imports almost 90% of all the fossil gas it uses.)
