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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

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Not a single sentence of this article refers to renewables.

I think it’s implied.

I don't think so, he explicitly states exactly what he thinks Europe should have done, and that's negotiate with Putin. Out and out victim blaming.

There were tons of attempts of negotiation. So mich that the long table became a meme. But if a party has aims which are unacceptable for the others, there isn't much negotiations can lead to.

Right, by negotiate with Putin he means accept whatever terms Putin demanded.

Russian displomats demanded denazification of Ukraine. When pressed on the details, they didn't know what it meant.

They can't know because they have a paranoid, ramblish (did you see the recent speech?) geneatric emperror and slave-ish, self desteuctive subservience.

One does not simply negotiate with the Russians. It only works until after the've been beaten them and they have their back to the wall.

As xwdv points out, it's implied, inescapably, by two points:

1) it blames the EU, somehow, instead of Russia

2) if by some magical thinking one avoids blaming Russia somehow, the only other possible thing the EU could have done wrong is to have not somehow built a lot more of its own fossil-fuel infrastructure and production, earlier. Which isn't really a strong argument, but if you're trying really hard to avoid admitting that Russia is the problem, and you have a bone to pick about relying more on fossil fuels, that's the only trick in the bag.

Russia is the primary problem. The secondary problem - as it pertains to the energy context - was the EU's (affluent Europe more broadly) wide failure to understand or accept what Russia is (and what consequences the Russian culture would inevitably produce again for Europe, namely wars of conquest against their neighbors).

If they'd actually done the thing everyone is blaming it on (ie. spend vastly more on renewables than fossil fuels or nuclear) it wouldn't be a problem

Replying to myself as I just realised it was written by the same person:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/europe-s-descent-into-de...

It's more about Pilkington's longstanding right-wing anti-American, Russophilic bias; even as late as August he was trumpeting the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a stunning success and Russian weapons as qualitatively superior to US systems, even as Ukraine -- with a tiny portion of NATO's arsenal and a fraction of the average NATO soldier's training -- was already assaulting into Russian-occupied territory.

So pushing energy doomerism (Putin's last card, short of the nuclear ladder, to play against Europe) and blaming Europe for Putin's decision to cut off energy supplies (and pipelines!) is just amplifying the Kremlin's message against the West, something that Pilkington seems very happy to do.

Thanks for pointing this out. The author's other articles remind me of something you'd see from a Russophilic survivalist blogger like Dmitry Orlov. I think the general tone of the world has become biased toward negativity and so anything that predicts doom is getting paid attention and given less critical thought.

What do you mean by all that?

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