I Was Skeptical – And Then Russia Invaded

I’ve been skeptical for years about how much influence the environmental movement has had on European energy policy.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that skepticism turned into something much clearer: we had made ourselves vulnerable.

By aggressively phasing out nuclear power, countries like Germany and Sweden became heavily dependent on Russian gas. Russia saw the weakness and exploited it.

Here in Sweden we shut down perfectly working reactors, driven more by ideology and fear than by facts and long-term thinking. Now, only five years later, we’re already talking about building new nuclear power. The cost to Swedish taxpayers runs into many billions of kronor.

The bitter irony? Some in the environmental movement are now slowly admitting that nuclear power should be considered fossil-free. But this realization comes far too late. The damage – both economic and to our energy security – has already been done.

Hindsight is easy.

But some mistakes were foreseeable. When ideology wins over engineering and common sense, the bill always arrives – and it’s expensive.

AI-generated image with Grok