The reason these sanctions are harming normal people is that Europe is driving for a change in Russia that will never happen unless the people blame its own government for the situation.

It's absolutely possible, it would just come with an enormous impact on citizens and the economy.

The result would be exploding prices, shortages and rationing of gas, potentially even power cuts at night or reduced availability of power to industry.

But the EU countries could absolutely do it if they really wanted to.

But this is also a big escalation.

Energy exports are the lifeline of the Russian economy. Canada just banned crude oil imports from Russia yesterday. Without a delay Russia just stopped diplomatic relations with the country and withdrew all diplomats.

It's basically a declaration of war to them, because if it spreads and even countries like China theoretically were forced to join in, they would really collapse.

And if Russia is pushed I to a corner there's no telling what they might do.

The US is hypocritical as well. They could reduce their excessive energy consumption and help the Europeans to replace the Russian coal, gas and oil.

It's simply not possible to change the infrastructure that fast. Gas is used for heating, that's not optional in winter. Europe needs to build more LNG terminals (which they decided to do) and order gas from other countries that have the ability to greatly increase their output. This all takes time, but in the long run Europe will stop being as dependen on Russian gas and oil as they are now, Putin made sure of that.

Surely not possible everywhere, but I have turned off the heater and am wearing 3 sweater instead, as a symbolic act and also to find out how realistic it is. We have temperatures around 5 deg C here, I think. So far I am doing fine.

Western Europeans willingly made themselves dependent on gas. It was supposed to be an intermediate step for "ecological" transition away from coal. But unlike coal, which is widely available in Europe and from other countries (the coal mines may have closed in many countries, but the coal is still there), gas is hard to obtain in Europe and need to rely on a few gas countries.

When Trump criticized German dependency on gas and was slowing the construction Nord Stream 2 he was criticized and laughed at.

This is true, especially Germany and Italy, and Germany in particular. Even now they're in the process of shutting down more nuclear power, to become even more dependent on Russian gas. It's idiotic and pathetic, really. I hope Scholz has more of a brain than Merkel.

>and order gas from other countries that have the ability to greatly increase their output.

Which is why the west fucked up in Syria and Russia got a great deal. Now Syria blocks gas pipeline options from Qatar at Russia's behest.

They've had nearly a decade

I'd bet heat pump manufacturers are ramping up for their biggest year ever.

Heat pumps don't work well in older houses that were not build for them. This is not going to be quick at all.