They stopped their oil and gas exploration.  They chose to chase ‘net zero’ academic pontifications.  They closed their refining operations. They took apart their coal-fired electricity plants.  They disassembled their nuclear power capabilities. Then, the absolute cherry on the proverbial cake, they voted to stop purchasing oil and gas from Russia.

The EU is now in the Find Out stage of their FAFO positioning.

Gasoline prices have skyrocketed. The last shipments of jet fuel have arrived. Major airline carriers are cancelling flights due to lack of fuel.  Faster than the EU can organize meetings to discuss their position, EU destined LNG shipments have diverted to southeast Asia and India as the ASEAN nations bid higher purchase prices for the vessels literally on the water.

Folks, it’s quite an article written by EU Politico as they outline how each of the leaders from the nation states are now discussing how vulnerable they are to the changed oil/gas environment with the mid east conflict ongoing.  The entire energy sector in Europe is now in crisis mode with leaders predicting it will get much worse within days, not weeks.

EU Politico – “Germany’s Friedrich Merz warns the economic fallout from the war in Iran is on track to rival that of the Covid pandemic or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

[…] With the war in Iran threatening to choke off energy flows for the foreseeable future, Europe is facing a supply shock that promises to cripple manufacturing, ground airlines, hike up the price of food, spike borrowing costs and send inflation spiraling back to crisis levels.

As the last tankers carrying fossil fuels from the Persian Gulf pull into European ports, the scale of what is about to hit seems to be dawning on the continent’s leaders.

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The origin of this issue goes back to 2021 and the relaunch of the Build Back Better European green energy program to fight the non-existent climate change problem.  We have been highlighting the consequences within the EU auto sector.

We noted in October of last year, the EU’s mandated fines against auto manufacturers who do not hit their production goals for electric vehicle sales began in 2025.  EU automakers unable to meet the regulatory compliance goal began purchasing carbon credits to avoid stiff EU fines.  Many of those carbon credits were purchased from Chinese EV automakers, who then turned around and started using the extra EU revenue to discount Chinese cars sold in Europe.

At the same time as Chinese autos hit record highs in Europe, EU car sales are flat or declining.  Now, Volkswagen is announcing they lost half their profits in one year and will be cutting 50,000 jobs in the next four years.

(MSM – Europe) – Volkswagen just revealed its operating profit sank like a stone last year, dropping by more than half as tariffs, Chinese competition, and shifting strategies took a serious bite out of the bottom line. And that performance now has the VW Group’s execs reaching for the cost-cutting scissors, including plans to shed 50,000 jobs by the end of the decade.

The German automaker reported an operating profit of €8.9 billion ($10.3 bn at current rates) for 2025. That’s down a hefty 53 percent from the year before and well below what analysts were expecting. Revenue, meanwhile, barely moved, slipping only slightly to around €322 billion ($374 bn). (read more)

This was very predictable. In essence, EU car companies buy Chinese car company carbon credits, to avoid the EU fines.  The Chinese car companies then use the carbon credit revenue to subsidize lower priced Chinese EVs to the European car market, thereby undercutting the European EV car companies.

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According to the Washington DC spin, the various EU energy ministers changed clean energy justification of ‘climate change’ during the International Energy Agency (IEA) summit because they were concerned the U.S. would pull out of the IEA group.  The IEA shifted to green energy as a security priority, no longer concerned with climate change.

However, given the situation with European energy costs and the severe problems they are having within their collective and individual economies, what they consider “national security” appears to be their need to control public outrage at the green energy consequences.

Affordable or ‘cheap’ energy production is directly linked to the underlying economy.  If energy production costs more, heating, electricity, fuel, transportation, just about everything costs more.  Energy prices drive consumer prices and that has become a serious problem for the U.K and EU who have chased the “Build Back Better” global energy reset.

With President Trump targeting reciprocity in a global trade balance, suddenly the economies of Europe, Canada and parts of Asia are feeling the impact.  Industrial manufacturing in Europe continues dropping and various sectors like the automotive manufacturing showcase the contraction.  The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or economic output within each of the contracting nations is putting hard data behind the problem.

Suddenly, with their economies now quivering, the IEA meeting in Europe drops the climate change objective as justification for their ‘renewable’ energy programs.  They blame the USA, but in reality, they appear to be trying to save themselves from feeling the full consequences of their action.

(POLITICO) – […] Ministers, senior officials and ministerial advisers told POLITICO that the event had cemented a long-running rebranding of the green transition that emphasizes the security benefits of renewables rather than their climate-saving potential. It’s a change that has been slowly building since U.S. President Donald Trump returned to office 13 months ago, and that was turbocharged by Wright’s threats on Tuesday to quit the IEA and fears Washington might stop funding the body. The U.S. provides around 14 percent of the IEA’s funding.

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It’s around lunchtime and I’ve spent so much time deep in the weeds of an issue that I need a break.  So, here’s a little funny story from my real-world travels in the past few years that given the current Davos meeting topics you might find interesting.

I went to Russia in 2024, because what I was hearing in western media about the sanctions did not align with what I was seeing from reports inside Russia.  Before I went into Russia, I spent several weeks in Northern and Eastern Europe visiting various institutions, reading material and checking to see how systems in Europe were engaging with commerce given the Russian sanctions.  It wasn’t very exciting work, and sometimes I literally just sat in the lobbies of banks listening to conversations.

When I went into Russia (April, May, June and July ’24) I noticed many of the “Uber cars” were BYD brand, Chinese electric vehicles.  It made sense given two years of existing sanctions and few cars from Europe or America available except under costly brokerage fees for acquisition.  They like the Geely brand better, but BYDs are much cheaper.  A brand new BYD costs around $5,000 to $10,000 USD, in some places even less.

Then later I noticed even more of these BYD cars in Europe.  I started to pay attention to them and saw them everywhere.

When I went back into Russia a year later in 2025, there was a very noticeable increase in BYD cars.  It was crazy, they were everywhere.

My travels also took me to southeast Asia and again those damned BYD’s were all over the place.  In Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, these BYD’s were everywhere, maybe even 30% of total vehicle traffic at times – most certainly well over 50% of all EVs – and there are digital billboards for “Build Your Dream” (BYD) all over the place throughout Asia.

Australia is stocked full of those things, and the middle east, yup, even there too.  It became increasingly weird to notice.  So many were visible I was wondering how the heck China can mass produce and ship this many cheap EVs so fast.

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Giddy up.  Yesterday, President Trump and Marco Rubio announced the U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). {GO DEEP} Today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent makes the official notification to the UN.

The notification is important because the 1992 UNFCCC was ratified by the U.S. Senate 34 years ago, making it one of the first UniParty climate change pacts supported by the ¹DC business model.

According to the terms of the treaty, withdrawal from the UNFCCC requires an official notification to the United Nations, and the dissolution takes effect one year later.

TREASURY PRESS RELEASE – WASHINGTON – In alignment with the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the U.S. Department of the Treasury has notified the Green Climate Fund (GCF) that the United States is withdrawing from the Fund and stepping down from its seat on the GCF Board, effective immediately.

“Our nation will no longer fund radical organizations like the GCF whose goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction,” said U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.

The Trump Administration is committed to advancing all affordable and reliable sources of energy, which are fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. The GCF was established to supplement the objectives of the UNFCCC, and continued participation in the GCF has been determined to no longer be consistent with the Trump Administration’s priorities and goals. (SOURCE)

For those who have a tough time accepting wins, no, the next President cannot just rejoin the agreement; nor can the Senate block Trump’s withdrawal from it.  The entire process would have to be restarted, and it’s a heavy lift to sell the American public on paying higher prices just to make pontificating global elites feel better about themselves.

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Underpinning the contracting EU economy are two major forces.  First, the instability of their financial markets, thanks in majority to their catastrophic Build Back Better energy agenda.  Secondly, China exploiting the economic vulnerability and dumping massive amounts of cheap goods onto their consumer market.  Both forces are working against the EU economy.

To backstop the collapse, the EU is counting on expanded militaristic spending to get them out of their dead-end path.  Again, in majority, the economics of the thing is why they want expanded war with Russia – regardless of the detrimental outcome.  Without war they have to give up their Build Back Better green energy program.

In this interview, EU Central Bank President Christine Lagarde obfuscates both issues and points a finger at President Trump’s geopolitical economic and trade reset.  The only thing she accurately presents is the scale of the issue, the “trillions at stake” part.  WATCH (Transcript Below):

[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re joined now by the President of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde. The ECB sets interest rates for many countries in the European Union, which is America’s largest trading partner. Good to have you here.

CHRISTINE LAGARDE: Lovely to be back, Margaret.

MARGARET BRENNAN: From where you sit, how would you describe the state of the global economy?

CHRISTINE LAGARDE: In transformation.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Transformation.

CHRISTINE LAGARDE: Transformation, I think caused by a couple of things. One is the tariffs, which have changed the map of trade around the world and reconstituted new alliances and reformed the way in which we trade with each other. I think the second major transformation is the impact of artificial intelligence on everything we do from data management to dating and everything in between.

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After President Trump took a very visible position against the International Maritime Organization’s plan to levy a global shipping tax, the EU favored climate scam fundraiser has been stalled for a year.

In addition to President Trump, Saudi Arabia, Russia and China opposed the tax on shipping.  The result from the meeting in London is a year delay before the next vote.

LONDON — A U.S. diplomatic broadside personally led by President Donald Trump derailed a historic effort to tax climate pollution from shipping.

A fractious meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London ended Friday with a decision to adjourn for a year, after Saudi Arabia, backed by Russia, pushed for a pause.

That means the effort to set binding international rules to cut greenhouse gases from shipping — responsible for about 3 percent of global emissions — goes into the deep freeze for a year. During that time, the U.S. and other opponents can try to rally more support to kill it completely. (more)

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This is a big one, and well worth the November vote all by itself.

President Trump has announced his intention to Make Straws Great Again, by signing an executive order reversing the insufferable paper straw dictate from the Biden era.

[SOURCE]

As the story was told, there is a certain percentage of Americans who like the paper straw mandate; however, I never met anyone from that tribe.

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Interesting move and office location in yet another election year.  In 2022, Joe Biden appointed John Podesta as the “Clean Energy Czar,” essentially giving him control over doling out the $326 billion in Green New Deal, aka “Inflation Reduction Act,” money provided by Congress.  At least that was the pretense of the purpose.

The actual agenda for Podesta, in 2022, appeared to be using the $316 billion GND money fund leftist support networks of the Biden administration in the midterm election cycle.  Now we enter another election year, and Podesta is being given a new title to assume the role of John Kerry as Biden’s latest “Climate Diplomat” as soon as Kerry exits this spring.

In an interesting datapoint that highlights both the domestic (election ’24) and foreign policy political motivations, John Podesta will work out of the White House and not the State Dept where Kerry’s current office is located.  John “Skippy” Podesta had no experience in “climate policy” prior to being tapped as the climate czar in 2022.  Then again, none was needed considering the non-pretending version of his responsibility.

It will be interesting to see how expanded this effort will be as the replacement to Kerry.  In my opinion, the move is about a change in title only, as the “inflation” part of the Green New Deal payment system doesn’t poll well with the American people.  Continued rampant inflation, despite the ‘inflation reduction act’ is a hot button issue.  Changing the title allows the process to continue albeit under a different guise.

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Everything about the Maui fire is sketchy.  It was sketchy when it happened. It is sketchy in the aftermath, and it remains sketchy in the recovery stage.  The FBI, EPA and FEMA have essentially locked down the island, and there are reports of people being evicted who did not perish and did not lose their homes.

I’m not sure if the issues are related to systemically gross incompetence, nefarious constructs, a blue state with poor systems and weak leaders, or a combination of all the above.  However, what is abundantly clear is that the people of Maui are victims of more than just a massive wildfire.

Hawaii Gov. Josh Green appears on “Face the Nation” to tell Margareet Brennan that the failure of the now-resigned Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator was “utterly unsatisfactory, to the world.” “Of course, as a person, as a father, as a doctor, I wish all the sirens went off,” Green said.  The governor also stated there are more than 1,000 people still missing and many of them are children.  He blames global warming. WATCH:

[Transcript] –  MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to Hawaii’s Governor Joshua Green in Honolulu. Good morning. Thank you for getting up so early, and I’m so sorry for what is going on in your state.

GOV. JOSH GREEN: Thank you, Margaret.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, can you tell us how many are still unaccounted for, and how long will it take to identify remains?

GOV. GREEN: More than 1000 are unaccounted for, about 1050. It will take several weeks, still, some of the challenges are going to be extraordinary. As you reported, 85% of the- of the land of the impact zone has been covered now by what amounts to an army of search and rescue teams and 41 dogs. So 85% of the land has been covered. Now we go into the larger buildings, which require peeling back some of the floors and structures. That last 15% could take weeks. We do have extreme concerns that because of the temperature of the fire, the remains of those who have died, in some cases, may be impossible to recover meaningfully. So, there are going to be people that are lost forever. And right now, we’re working obviously with the FBI and everyone on the ground to make sure that we do what we can to assess who’s missing.

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