> It remains a mystery why everyone was so calm walking in to this while tightening the screws on fossil fuel industries to stop them investing int he future.

Because the only half-solutions we got for mitigating climate change were drafted by people who are largely free market types, and they can only envision free market solutions - which require end users figuring out how they are going to deal with more expensive energy on their own.

That does, of course, result in quite a bit of pain along the way.

The German situation is pretty illustrative of what would have happened to anyone stupid enough to try and build more power plants in Western Europe - nuclear stations would have been shut down, fossil fuels have been staring down the barrel of the burgeoning Green movement for at least 20 years and are somewhere close to being hit with legislation designed to make them unprofitable.

Renewable haven't been cost-effective (or technically feasible in some cases, renewabled seem to have been a warning sign for incoming grid instability so far) and all the alternatives have been blocked by politics. I don't know about Europe's environmental legislation but it would be no surprise to discover even most renewable plays were facing legislative challenges too due to the area they take up.

For a market solution to work somebody has to be allowed build something and let it run for 20-50 years to reclaim the capital costs and make a profit. Speaking as someone who would quite have liked to be investing in energy plays about 5-8 years ago when the problem started to become apparent, the legislative environment in the west is too fraught to risk it. We weren't going to start doing anything useful until a crisis happened to get some political cover for the unpopular energy sources. Here we are, so now maybe something will get done.

On the contrary: everyone who invested in Europe in building any sort of capacity was handsomely rewarded (incl. nuclear).

Energy prices are so high because too many guarantees were given to too many parties to entince investment.

They aren't building new capacity in most forms of energy generation. Eg, in the UK they've basically only building renewables [0], and not in sufficient quantities to maintain their electricity production. The story is similar in most EU countries last I checked. Compare to, say, India to see a healthy approach [1].

Sure the market is signalling that anyone who can bring energy to the table will be rewarded, and trying desperately to keep people in the game who are already playing. But there'd be capacity built and the aggregate numbers wouldn't look so bad if new construction hadn't been politically blocked for years now.

They're choosing de-industrialisation rather than letting people use nuclear or fossil fuels. People really should be panicking about that, they are going to take a massive lifestyle hit. There will be trouble.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_generation...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:India_electricity_product...

It is a bit weird to call building of fossil plants "healthy" when it is leading us down to environmental destruction.

Nuclear on the other hand is game over everywhere except China. It won't come back within the next 20 years. After this renewables and power grids optimized for renewables (across countries and with lots of decentralized storage based on electric cars) will make any type of energy generation which isn't wind and solar infeasible.

Nobody is choosing de-industrialization. Cheap gas from Russia has been keeping energy cheap in Europe. People are choosing solidarity with Ukraine even if this means some harder years.

The global crisis is not because we under invested in the future of fossil fuels. They must have no future. The current crisis is because we relied on Putin.