Europe’s Bureaucrats Whistle Along As They Barrel Towards China’s Green Energy Trap

European officials are seemingly not very concerned about the possibility that the continent’s green energy agenda may leave it vulnerable to Chinese aggression in the future, according to Politico.

Trump administration officials met with a group of European officials in the U.K. earlier in April, warning the Europeans that China is taking advantage of the West’s climate policies to further its own geopolitical goals, Politico reported. Despite the Trump administration’s cautions and Europe’s recent experiences relying on malign actors for energy, European officials mostly shrugged off the warning and signaled that the continent is still intending to make its energy system go green in the long-run.

“It’s not really a surprise that Europe has a hard time understanding the need to pivot on energy security and any serious approach to sustainability,” Stephen Yates, a senior research fellow for China and national security policy at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “How does an increased dependency on the world’s leading polluting nation do anything for the planet, much less their goals, whether we agree with them or not?”

As Yates alluded, China is by far the world’s leading emitter and also a prolific polluter of the oceans. China’s green energy giants, meanwhile, have been accused of engaging in unfair or predatory trade tactics, as well as benefitting from slave labor.

China dominates the global supply chains for green energy products, prompting some critics and analysts to warn for years that the West’s commitment to “net-zero” carbon emissions energy policy will make it even more reliant on China over time. Notably, President Donald Trump warned European and German officials directly in 2018 — about four years before Russia invaded Ukraine — that depending too much on Russian gas would leave Europe, and especially Germany, “captive to Russia.

Tommy Joyce, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) acting assistant secretary of international affairs, told delegates from 60 countries present at the meeting that green energy mandates are “harmful and dangerous” policies that will leave Europe vulnerable to “concessions to or coercion from China” in the future, according to Politico. Joyce further argued that “putting abstract emission goals and the interests of our adversaries first and the security of our people last.”

Spectators in attendance for Joyce’s speech reportedly sat in silence after he concluded his remarks, according to Politico. One European official who was there told the outlet that the “awkward but unanimous” reception of Joyce’s talk was “telling.”

U.S. officials continued emphasizing the same message in closed-door meetings at the summit and that the U.S. is a far more reliable energy partner than China, but their selling points were mostly ignored and thought to be out of touch with the event’s collaborative spirit, unnamed European officials told Politico, which granted them anonymity so that they could speak freely.

European officials, meanwhile, spent most of the summit saying that the continent’s energy future would be led by green energy rather than swapping out Russian imports for American imports, according to Politico. Some European leaders acknowledged that fossil fuels will remain a key part of the continent’s energy mix for the near future and credited the U.S. for stepping up in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine while also emphasizing that their goal is to stand up a European green energy industry that can rival China’s.

Yates added that in his view, it is an “open question” whether European leaders have learned from the Russia-Ukraine war that it is not advisable to rely on countries that may have malicious intent for energy when domestic resources are limited. In the context of the Ukraine war, Russia cut gas flows to Europe in 2022, launching the continent into economic turmoil and an energy crisis that threatened the West’s unified support for Ukraine in the early stages of the war.

Germany has already embraced the green energy transition for years, closing down its remaining nuclear power plants in 2023 in order to accelerate its energy shift. However, particularly following the Russian invasion, German energy prices have increased while manufacturing productivity fell, and policymakers even resorted to firing up coal power plants to produce electricity in late 2023 and early 2024.

“It was ideology versus reality, and this time ideology seemed pretty quiet and out of place, fundamentally missing the point,” Pete Chalkley, the director of a think tank called the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit who was present for the first day of discussions, told Politico.

Current European Union (EU) policy aims to have the continent reach “net-zero” carbon emissions by 2050 and to achieve a 55% reduction in emissions by 2030. The EU is aiming for an outcome in which “economic growth (is) decoupled from resource use.”