Berlin has just been treated to a glimpse of what “net zero” looks like when it stops pretending. As temperatures plunged well below freezing, a suspected arson attack on high-voltage cables near the Lichterfelde power plant plunged swathes of the city into darkness. Tens of thousands of residents found themselves shivering in the dark—initially hitting roughly 45,000 households and more than 2,000 businesses.
The cause was not a technical glitch but a deliberate, terroristic act of “climate defence.” German media reported a claim of responsibility from the “Volcano Group” (Vulkangruppe), a far-left network that stated their aim was to punish the “ruling class” for their “greed for energy”. While hospitals and care facilities scrambled to run on backup systems, the reality is stark: In a modern city, sabotaging power in freezing temperatures is not a “protest.” It is a deliberate endangerment of human life—with officials warning it put patients, elderly people, and children at acute risk.
It is easy to dismiss the Vulkangruppe as lunatics. But we must be honest: The logic of these arsonists is not an aberration. It is merely the armed, jagged edge of the very same philosophy that governs the European Union’s energy policy. The arsonists in Berlin want to turn the lights out to “save the planet”. The bureaucrats in Brussels are achieving the exact same result—just more slowly, and with more paperwork.
The uncomfortable truth is that the Vulkangruppe’s manifesto reads like a melodramatic draft of an EU Commission press release. If you buy the core environmentalist story—that plentiful energy is the enemy, that “consumption” is a moral failing, and that ordinary life is an ecological crime scene—then the Berlin attack is simply that logic acted out without the usual PR varnish. The saboteurs operationalised the premise: Make energy scarce, and you force society to decarbonise.
The EU has spent years normalising this contemporary austerity, Look at REPowerEU—sold as resilience, but saturated with the language of behaviour-management. It tells “every citizen, business and organisation” to save energy via “small behavioural changes” like lowering heating, driving “more economically,” and “switching off the lights.” Whether it comes from a masked arsonist or a suited Commissioner, the underlying assumption is identical: That human demand for energy is a dangerous vice that must be curtailed. The Vulkangruppe are merely the most fanatical and dangerous instantiation of this ideology.
Of course, there is world of difference between technocrats nudging thermostats lower and militants setting cables on fire. But politically, the gap is not that narrow. Both rely on the logic of “energy austerity” – and this logic is deeply embedded in the EU’s energy policy.
The first pillar of this logic is ideological: Energy is treated not as the lifeblood of modern society but a danger to the planet and a sign of our immoral thirst for growth. This is especially true when energy comes from the cheapest and most convenient sources like gas. But it is also true of the attitudes towards the miracle of nuclear power – where EU directives have strangled investment and tied nuclear power projects in red tape. The vision of de-growth lurks behind the EU’s whole approach to energy.
The second pillar is behavioural: The EU insists that consumers and businesses must be directed at every opportunity to lessen consumption. Sometimes this is about encouraging people to change lightbulbs, sometimes about demonising people’s desire for nice warm homes, and sometimes about making it almost impossible to install basic comforts like air-conditioning. Each environmentalist attack on basic comforts is a step in the direction of Berlin.
The third pillar is infrastructural: The EU has deliberately set out to weaken the EU’s energy supply. This goes far beyond the much-highlighted shift away from Russian gas – it’s a decades-long policy of opposing the development of new hydrocarbon energy supply and the upgrade of energy transit infrastructure. Instead, much investment has been funnelled into renewables. But not only are renewables unreliable (as we saw recently in blackouts across Spain and Portugal), they actually increase the need for reliable, dispatchable supply like gas generation, which can be turned on the moment the wind stops blowing.
This approach is only the logical outcome of the utopian targets set by the EU to reach carbon neutrality. For all the bleating about renewables, they simply cannot be met unless energy consumption is radically reduced.
The eco-terrorism in Berlin was therefore only the logical continuation of the energy policies of European elites (in fact, as the blogger Eugyppius has shown, these eco-terrorists have been actively indulged by German judges). But the EU does not need to blow up power lines – they can dismantle them legally and frustrate power supply through legislation. The blackouts are a stark illustration of the future that awaits Europe if it continues down this path of environmentalist madness. If Europe wants to avoid a cold, dark, and de-industrialised future, it needs to break with the misanthropic cult of energy austerity in all its forms—illegal and official.
We do not need less energy; we need more. We need to recapture the Promethean fire that built the modern world, rather than embracing a policy that manages our decline into the dark. The terrorists turned the lights out in Berlin to make a point. Unless we change course, the EU will eventually do the same for the rest of us.
Jacob Reynolds is Head of Policy at the think tank MCC Brussels
How Brussels is moving to bailout Europe’s left-wing NGO industry