When Simon Wakter, Political Adviser to Sweden’s Minister for Energy,posted on Xlast Wednesdaywith a simple “Wow, incredible article” and a clapping emoji, he captured the shock rippling through Europe’s energy commentariat.

The target of his applause was not some fringe sceptic but Germany’s own Economy and Energy Minister, Katherina Reiche.

In aguest columnfor theFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Reiche delivered a verdict that would have been career-ending heresy only a year ago:“One fact has been concealed for too long: an energy transition that ignores system costs will ruin the country it claims to save.”To anyone who has watched Germany’sEnergiewende— that totemic experiment in decarbonisation-by-decree — unfold like a slow-motion train wreck, Reiche’s words land like a thunderclap from the Establishment itself.

Here isa senior CDU Minister in Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Government openly admitting that two decades of Green-inspired fantasy have saddled the continent’s industrial powerhouse with hidden costsnow running, according to estimates she cites, at €36 billion a year and climbing towards €90 billion. Grid expansions, backup power for intermittent wind and solar and the sheer inefficiency of trying to run a modern economy on the weather: all of it, she says, must stop being airbrushed out of the official narrative. The self-deception, she warns, is over.

This is not mere technocratic tinkering. It is the first major public crack in the ideological edifice that has dominated German — and by extension European — energy policysince the anti-nuclear, beatnik ’68ers’ generation seized the cultural high ground. Rupert Darwallchronicledthe phenomenon with great precision inGreen Tyranny: how a handful of German Greens, personified by the sneaker-wearing Joschka Fischer swearing in as Hesse’s environment minister in 1985, exported their peculiar red-green blend of anti-capitalist zeal and romantic environmentalism across the continent and beyond.

That gospel found a ready audience in the Anglosphere. In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen delivered his now-infamous testimony to the US Congress, declaring that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and is changing our climate now”. The moment was theatrical, the science shaky, but the political effect electric. It fused with the inchoate ideas already circulating among Western intellectuals: Paul Ehrlich’sThe Population Bomb(1968), which prophesied mass famine that never came; Rachel Carson’sSilent Spring(1962), which launched the modern environmental movement on the back of exaggerated claims about DDT; and E.F. Schumacher’sSmall is Beautiful(1973), the manifesto of ‘Buddhist economics’ that preached reducing human demand rather than raising living standards. As the great Chicago economist Frank Knightobserved, economic progress consists not in suppressing desires nor even in satiating them but in their “ever greater refinement and multiplication” — a direct antithesis to Schumacher’s call for ascetic material restraint as spiritual virtue.

This European ideological curse of environmental misanthropy spread among the young urban intelligentsia of the developing countries through the educational curricula and mass media and the vast number of students studying in the progressive universitiesof the West, from Canada to Australia, Ireland to Italy and New York to California and Florida.

The spread of Europe’s green gospel was enthusiastically supported by Left-wing billionaire foundations which sprouted thousands of “grassroots NGOs” in Asia, Africa and Latin America. These so-called grassroots NGOs were handy to provide a moral cover for grifting renewable-energy lobbies seeking rents from the public purse. Local ‘Bootleggers and Baptists‘ coalitions arose across the developing countries that derived mutual benefits inEurope’s carbon colonialism. To complete the circle,captured agenciessuch as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the IMF imposed anti-fossil-fuel constraints as a condition for aid and public finance to poorer African and Asian governments.

At the root of it all layEurope’s long love affair with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage”, the fantasy that the simple, low-energy lifestyles of Tahitian natives represented a purer existence than the artifice of industrial civilisation. When Voltaire received a copy of Rousseau’s bookThe Social Contract, hereplied:

I have received your new book against the human race, and thank you for it. Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid. One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours. But as I have lost that habit for more than 60 years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.

Source: ZeroHedge News