The UK is in a slightly odd place on this. The media have as usual been horrendous (running all the anti-wind-farm scare stories), while the renewables expansion and coal phaseout has proceeded pretty well. We do even have some idle coal capacity in case of emergencies. What we don't have is quite enough gas. See previously 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/24/how-uk-ener...
"In 2013, the then energy minister Michael Fallon said the decision to allow Rough to close would save the UK £750m over 10 years."
.. at the cost of up to $100bn being proposed to subsidize emergency supplies. Absolutely classic "just in time" supply chain economics.
I would also say a lot of people in the UK share the blame for not taking Russia seriously enough as a threat after the terrorist attack in Salisbury and the shooting down of an airliner.
Pretty much across the board, the media has been pushing anything the government didn't do as the solution to the crisis which we missed out on because our government is incompetent regardless of its actual usefulness, including stuff like onshore wind and solar which is just plain worse as a way of keeping the country reliably supplied with electricity during winter than the offshore wind the government went with instead.
Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.
So, while it is quite indirect, our vote does influence the membership of the comission.
Of course, as in any such system, the more direct way of gaining some kind of influence is to try to organize others to vote a certain way, to participate yourself, or to organize others to campaign together to directly convince/shame the members of the Comission or Parliament or Council to take particular policies.
> Then, the nomination of the Comission and individual comissioners are validated or not by the European Parliament, whose members are again chosen democratically in every member state.
No, each member state votes about their own portion of seats. So Germany and France decides for everyone. That's shit. Germans go crazy anti-science and everybody pays - except the Germans who get the EU to find solution out of the money it takes from all states.
Seats in the European Parliament are apportioned based on population (with some rounding to allow a maximum of 751 MEPs), so it is about as close to democratic as possible. Also, France and Germany have ~24% of the total seats, how exactly are they deciding for everyone?
> how exactly are they deciding for everyone?
That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.
In fact, having allocated seats for each country is bending pure democracy towards giving more power to small countries than they would otherwise have. In a purely democratic system, a small country would often not even get 1 seat, unless it was extraordinarily well organized (assume every person in the EU had a chance to vote for each of the 751 MEPs - then, even if your country was voting 100% with the same politician for every seat, they would affect 2% of each vote).
> That's easy - by building the largest cohesive blocs. The rest is divided to small bickering parties with just a few seats each (often just one each), and easy to conquer.
Nothing stops politicians from the smaller countries to also form a bloc. The fact that our politicians (I'm also a national of a smaller / less powerful EU country, Romania) are prone to bickering and not much else is a different problem entirely.
If you have a better idea what it means to be "held responsible" I'm happy to hear it.
At the scale of counties and continents, this either means some statutory duty has been breached, or some political decision has been taken that favours the current arrangement over one with more availability of backup supplies - in exchange for other downsides (e.g. cost).
Realistically it's the latter. And this means that different politicians and political movements can now propose more plans for energy stability—maybe additional funding for renewables, expanding nuclear provision or so on—and hopefully this will affect political and regulatory decisions in the future. At this scale—and for all its flaws—the ballot box is the only real tool for accountability.