Condition critical
“Green transition” continues to erode economical growth across the EU, as it’s getting increasingly more clear how understated, how thoroughly masked was the condition of cheap energy resources, steadily flowing from Russia through the pipelines, for efficiency of that famed German economical engine.
Then it began to crumble and glitch.
Gone is the Nordstream, destroyed by the so-called “rogue Ukrainian special agents“ — Germany, and the EU in general, immediately stagnate. With a mighty few of not-so-unexpected system exceptions, e.g., Ireland, Hungary, Slovakia, and Austria.
Two years of Zeitenwende-tinted “decoupling with Russia” forward, and even relatively poor states of the US, like Mississippi, have higher GDP per capita than all the European countries, except the richest, like Switzerland… or net exporters of hydrocarbon fuel, like Norway. Both of the aforementioned, by the way, avoid the EU membership with a ten foot pole.
But there’s also a good news!
The Universe still has a cornucopia of "dirty" energy sources only because it is very, very young.
It's even possible that we are the first relatively highly developed race in the Galaxy, if not the Local Known Universe, simply because it's, indeed, that hard to produce sapient life (though I might add that I, myself, give little if any credence to such an explanation of the Fermi Paradox).
The closer cold frozen darkness at the end of time is, the more highly efficient engines and clean energy sources would be in a hot (pun intended) demand. This goes, of course, along with the crucial proviso that our current cosmological models, concerning future evolution and large-scale structure of the Universe, will remain strong, healthy, and relentlessly cruel for billions of years.
Let’s recall, though, that as recently as five centuries ago there dwelt humans who were busy burning other humans at the stakes of geocentrical model of the Universe.
And every stake, just like a star, needs a fuel to ignite.