The EU’s response to the energy shocks of 2022 and 2026 looks good only compared to Trump-era America. Even though EU chief Ursula von der Leyen urges Europe to move off fossil fuels faster, not nearly enough is happening. Paul Hockenos reports.

Although two energy crises in the space of four years – in 2022 as a result of Russian embargoes and Western sanctions, and the second (ongoing) the upshot of the US war against Iran – have underscored the hazards of the industrial world’s reliance on fossil fuels, the long-term thinking and concrete responses have been meagre. Although this perfect storm of crises – including the summer’s unprecedented heatwaves – calls for bold, dramatic action, there’s been a profoundly underwhelming response.

Although the Biden administration initiated pathbreaking policies to respond to the climate crisis (not to the energy repercussions of the Russian invasion of Ukraine), these have been whittled down or swept away entirely by the Trump administration. Since taking office in 2025, the Trump administration has frozen federal clean-energy disbursements and gutted tax credits for electric vehicles (EVs), home solar and heat pumps.

Most recently, Trump officials paid the German utility RWE $1.2 billion to abandon several wind power projects in the US. The company is reinvesting the assets in gas projects, such as a liquefied natural gas export terminal project in the state of Louisiana. All of this happened while the Strait of Hormuz was closed and American energy bills were climbing upwards.

US American critic Ryan Cooper made the obvious point in The American Prospect back in April 2026: solar was already the cheapest form of electricity in most of the world in 2025, subsidies or not, and Trump has now made its only competition, fossil fuels, more expensive too, with oil shooting above $100 a barrel earlier this year.

None of that is a surprise, though. Nobody expected Trump to do anything else.

Cooper also noted that this crunch pushed much of the world elsewhere toward renewables investment (although not in the quantity necessary to stem global warming). Spain is the standout case. Its solar and wind buildout has kept its average and daytime prices structurally lower than gas-heavy peers, and made it the European leader in cheap and negative pricing (although this hasn’t insulated Spain completely from price spikes tied to gas price shocks).

So much for faint praise. Europe’s response is better than that of the US, but still egregiously insufficient in light of the summer’s terrible heat waves and the in-your-face message from the energy crises that renewables can help both mitigate global warming and improve energy security.

In May 2026, von der Leyen, when announcing a forthcoming Electrification Action Plan, said: ‘The situation in the Middle East is sending shockwaves across the world. […] As long as we rely on oil and gas, we remain vulnerable. If we want true independence, we must accelerate electrification. We need to do more at a European level. Electrification and homegrown clean energy are the path to independence.’ Bravo!

And the European Commission tried to reframe the crisis as an opportunity. Its AccelerateEU proposal called for cutting dependence on volatile fossil imports, speeding up electrification, upgrading the grid and directing EU funds and carbon revenues toward industrial electrification. The package, it argued, addresses ‘rising energy costs and further reduce[s] dependency on volatile fossil fuel markets, particularly in light of the escalating Middle East conflict’. This is clear-eyed analysis.

But it also states that EU Member States should coordinate gas storage filling, and revive joint oil and gas purchasing. A new ‘fuel observatory’ should track refining capacity and jet fuel supply. State aid rules should be loosened to enable governments to shield consumers – temporarily. And instead of enshrining the continent-wide energy saving rules briefly adopted in 2022 into law, Brussels fell back on ‘voluntary demand reduction’, the path of least resistance.

The NGO umbrella organisation Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe called it broadly welcome but said it lacks a solid financial package to scale up relief for vulnerable people and reach those who need it most. It warned that coming state aid frameworks shouldn’t end up propping up fossil generation instead of supporting energy independence.

And what’s happened since then? According to Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, EU-wide fossil fuel subsidies rose rather than fell, spiking to the tune of more than €11.8 billion in fiscal measures to cushion households from Iran war price shocks. Greenpeace called the approach riddled with deep structural incoherence: short-term handouts to the fossil fuel industry have taken priority over the transition that the crisis should have accelerated. Every euro spent cushioning gas prices, the group argued, is a euro spent entrenching the dependency Brussels claims to be fighting.

The Jacques Delors Institute puts the war’s cost to EU Member States for the first 100 days alone at roughly €62 billion. As the Institute puts it, this isn’t just an economic and fiscal burden – it’s the direct consequence of Europe’s continued exposure to fossil fuel price volatility. Bruegel’s tracking tells the same story: the majority of funds committed so far are untargeted, contrary to the European Commission’s own recommendations and the European Central Bank’s, with over half of the measures it tracked falling into that category.

And though it hasn’t happened yet, the EU is pondering the scaling back of its strongest climate weapon: the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), its carbon pricing system, which makes polluters pay and drives industrial decarbonisation. In July 2026 it announced proposals to slow the pace of businesses’ greenhouse gas emissions limits. The reforms would relax the rules of the ETS to give businesses more time to reduce their carbon output.

The European Environmental Bureau harshly criticised the proposal: ‘Rather than reinforcing this critical investment signal at a time of fossil fuel volatility, the proposal weakens key provisions, rewarding polluters while undermining businesses investing in fossil-free production.’

While it’s not a surprise that environmental NGOs harshly criticise the EU ETS reform, many critical voices from established industry stakeholders support an ambitious and strict EU ETS because they consider it as indispensable for making their businesses future-proof, according to Corporate Leaders Groups, a business management consultant in Cambridge, England, and Cleantech for Europe, an initiative that bridges the gap between the clean technology community and EU policymakers.

The dismal takeaway: Europe opted for short-term, even contradictory measures instead of using the shock to accelerate the energy transition. Brussels still treats climate protection and energy security as competing priorities rather than one integrated strategy. The real issue isn’t whether the EU is doing better than the US, but whether the EU’s response comes anywhere close to what the moment actually demands.

The views and opinions in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung European Union | Global Dialogue.