I do think expensive and wasteful is the right choice here.

Just because you’ve got no other option’s doesn’t mean a strategy isn’t “expensive and wasteful”. It just means you’re desperate, so you’ll happily eat the cost.

But long term I would expect Europe to use a much less expensive and wasteful strategy. But obviously it takes time to build and deploy alternatives.

The strategy in question is, more generally, moving volatility in the shoulders of the distribution to the central region. It knowingly subjects us to worse-than-normal price movements in the stable regime so that price movements aren't as crazy when we go out to more extreme regimes.

The alternative would be to, well, not do that. Or any other of a number of volatility-controlling strategies. I don't think any of them are better, but there's always an alternative.