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Comment by qalmakka | Hacker News Reader

It's a paramount imperative for Europe to wean itself from fossil fuels, regardless of environmental arguments (which are extremely relevant still). Getting a safe, unfettered provider of fossil fuels is getting a basically unsolvable problem. China is trying to build as much solar and nuclear capacity as humanly possible; we should do the same too. We've been having these energy shocks since the Yom Kippur war basically, it's like a broken cycle of instability and crisis we can't leave behind. There's no shale to be found in Europe, we just have wind, sun and nuclear to save our backs. And maybe geothermal pretty soon?

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I don't understand leadership thinking. Surely spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project would have a relatively short payoff time (on country scale) given the instability of relying on foreign energy sources. I mean how long does oil have to sit above $100/barrel before it costs everyone that much anyway?

> spending €250B on a continental scale renewable energy project

Let me stop you there: the EU budget for 2026 was €193B. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/budget/www/index-en.htm

Basically Europe doesn't have political leadership, nor does the EU itself have a budget larger than the member states like the US Federal budget. In return, the EU, primarily Germany, has imposed "fiscal discipline" which prevents running a short term large deficit in order to make this kind of capital investment.

Also, two hundred billion Euro is a lot of money for anyone who isn't an AI startup.

The EU is not funding projects directly, it's setting the rules. Individual governments pay the bill

Is this perhaps changing with Macron indicating Europe will keep the €300B Europe has been investing in the US annually in Europe?

Macron says €300B in EU savings sent to the US every year will be invested in EU - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46722594 - January 2026 (207 comments)

Europe can go fast when it wants to.

How Europe Ditched Russian Fossil Fuels With Spectacular Speed - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/ukraine-n... | https://archive.today/yxGp2 - February 21st, 2023

> But what the past year has shown is that it’s possible to go harder and faster in deploying solar panels and batteries, reducing energy use, and permanently swapping out entrenched sources of fossil fuel.

> Solar installations across Europe increased by a record 40-gigawatts last year, up 35% compared with 2021, just shy of the most optimistic scenario from researchers at BloombergNEF. That jump was driven primarily by consumers who saw cheap solar panels as a way to cut their own energy bills. It essentially pushed the solar rollout ahead by a few years, hitting a level that will be sustained by EU policies.

This is not entirely correct. The EU actually does both — it sets regulatory frameworks and funds projects directly through several mechanisms.

What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

This would need to be a joint venture as some places are really good for wind, and some places are really good for solar, but not every country on their own has access to those locations. The budget for the EU doesn't matter, because this project would be a separate line item with it's own funding.

Energy independence is extremely valuable. Way way way more valuable then $250B or even $500 or $750B for that matter. Society runs on energy, and if it's not fully yours, you are always a rug pull away from social collapse.

If 2022 was a cold winter, and America had a cold leader, this project probably would have breezed through the bureaucracy in a week.

> What is the value of the EU if's it not coordinating multi-national scale efforts?

Remember the EU is just a fancy self-updating free trade agreement, not a nation.

The coordination that the member states have thus far allowed the EU to take responsibility for is ~ "make all our rules be equivalent so everyone's degrees are accepted everywhere, everyone's food is accepted everywhere, we all agree what counts as a safe consumer product, limited range for tax shenanigans, etc."

(And for this, they get denounced as "complex" and "bureaucratic").

Actual direct investments do also exist, I just missed out on one for startups 20 years back apparently due to a rules change, but it's peanuts compared to what member state governments do directly.

>> Energy independence is extremely valuable.

Not if your top politicians are on putin's payrol like Orban and Merkel.

The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say:

Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!

I think the lesson of the UK winter fuel subsidy payment is that while it feels great in year one, it doesn't actually solve any of the problems, and then the voters get incredibly mad if you try to take it away again.

everything of importance ever done in EU was in response to a major crisis, in no small part because these exact voter emotions are dampened in such times.

"Never let a good crisis go to waste."

This can be viewed as a feature not a bug. The defining feature of a republic is stability. Orderly and lawful transfers of power. Not rocking the boat. Deliberative processes. If the people are enjoying prosperity and peace why make drastic changes? So yes when the situation is extreme that's when big shifts in policy happen.

>The problem is that 30-50% of voters would just look at that and say: Why are you spending €250B on corporate subsidies instead of giving us €250B?!

Why is it a "problem" for voters (aka the taxpayers) to ask such questions to their leaders to justify on how their tax money is being spent? To me this feels like basic transparency that keeps democracy in check.

To me it's the problem if politicians don't have or don't want to answer those questions because then, either they're grifting or they're incompetent.

It's not like we don't have a laundry list of mismanagement, couch corruption cough, of governments spending money on bullshit with nothing to show for, while stuff healthcare keeps being underfunded.

So yeah, if you spend my money, you better have an answer.

It's a mix between decades of brainwashing, fossil-lobby having the bigger paychecks, unstable times, and all leaders fear to invest in something new and uncertain. In every industry/organization there is the old saying that nobody ever gets fired for supporting/using the established solutions. This is the same situation, there is more motivation for staying with the known paths, especially after there is strong propaganda against the new paths.

The recent "Offshore Wind Investment Pact" announcement was aiming for 1 Trillion euro of investment into North Sea wind by 2040.

Plus there's lots of other stuff happening. Also lots of pushback from those clinging to fossil fuels.

Wind, sun and geothermal we have. Albeit technology to harvest them seldom come from the Europe. But getting a safe, unfettered provider of nuclear fuel risk to be just another unsolvable problem.

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