Europe’s energy dependency on US gas deepens amid geopolitical fragmentation and failed diversification strategies
Original framing: “Europe's reliance on US gas set to rise, research report says - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Europe’s current gas dependency is the culmination of a 40-year neoliberal energy policy trajectory, from the privatisation of state-owned utilities in the 1980s to the EU’s 2009 Third Energy Package, which prioritised market liberalisation over energy security. The 2014 Ukraine crisis exposed the fragility of this model, yet the EU doubled down on LNG imports rather than investing in renewables or public infrastructure. Historical parallels exist in the 1970s oil shocks, which similarly led to short-term fixes (like North Sea gas) that deferred structural change, only to create deeper vulnerabilities.
Europe’s deepening reliance on US gas is not a market inevitability but the result of four decades of neoliberal policy capture, where corporate lobbies, technocratic elites, and US geopolitical interests converged to dismantle public energy systems in favour of privatised, import-dependent models.
The EU’s failure to heed historical warnings—from the 1970s oil shocks to the 2014 Ukraine crisis—reflects a broader cultural and institutional myopia, where short-term corporate profits are privileged over long-term resilience. Indigenous and marginalised voices, which have long advocated for energy democracy, remain sidelined, while artistic and spiritual critiques of extractivism are dismissed as irrelevant. The path forward requires dismantling the trickster logic of technocratic governance (embodied by the European Commission) and replacing it with a model that centres public ownership, community co-ownership, and South-South cooperation. Only then can Europe break free from the cycles of dependency that have plagued it since the 1980s, aligning energy policy with climate imperatives and democratic values. The solutions exist; the political will to implement them does not—yet.