Europe today consumes roughly 38 exajoules of hydrocarbons against only six exajoules produced domestically, with Russian supply now largely severed and Russian LNG under a 2027 phase-out deadline. The continent's hydrocarbon import dependency has swung from roughly 30 percent in 1995 to 80 percent in 2026 - an extraordinary inversion that a Decouple analysis describes as the product of choices made by a political class unmoored from the physical foundations of its own prosperity.
The first Conference of the Parties climate meeting opened in Berlin in 1995 - the same year that marked Europe's high-water point of energy self-sufficiency, as "Hvylya" reports. The analysis argues that timing is no coincidence. Neoliberalism and Ricardian comparative advantage, applied as governing doctrine, held that offshoring industry and supply chains to wherever production was cheapest was rational efficiency rather than strategic vulnerability.
Europe's oil and gas consumption peaked at roughly 45 exajoules around 2005 and has declined to around 38 exajoules - a reduction of roughly 15 percent. The European Environment Agency attributes the decline to efficiency improvements, warmer winters, higher post-2022 energy prices, renewables deployment, and structural shifts toward less energy-intensive industries. The Decouple analysis gives that last factor a blunter name: de-industrialization.
Steel mills, chemical plants, ceramics manufacturers, and glassmakers that once anchored regional economies across the Ruhr, the Po Valley, and the Midlands have contracted or closed, taking their energy demand with them. Each factory that relocated to cheaper jurisdictions removed another supporting beam from the economic base, trading the material foundations of working-class prosperity for lower headline energy consumption figures that Brussels could present as evidence of a successful transition.
What this framework failed to account for was the difference between efficiency in a stable trading environment and resilience under supply stress. A just-in-time supply chain optimized for cost turned out to be the opposite of what a continent needs when the supply is interrupted. The 2022 energy crisis exposed that flaw; the current one is testing whether Europe learned anything from it.
"Hvylya" also reported on how China has outpaced the United States in the strategic competition that matters most, according to a Brookings analysis.