The war in Iran has us talking about fossil fuels without even mentioning the climate

By Bertrand Piccard and Monica Frassoni

The current situation is costing Europe €500 million a day in additional fossil fuel import costs. And in the face of this energy crisis, just as with those that preceded it, our first instinct remains to increase supply: to look for more gas, more oil – elsewhere.

That is precisely the mistake.

The real issue is reducing unnecessarily high demand, fuelled by an economy still largely based on waste. Europe needs energy, of course, but filling a leaking bath has never been a smart strategy. 

Every year, hundreds of billions of euros leave the continent to buy oil, gas and fossil fuels that end up as smoke and pollution. They merely make up for avoidable losses at home. All that money fails to benefit our factories, our innovation or household purchasing power. Whereas the same sums invested in efficient solutions and local renewable energy production would create infrastructure capable of saving energy and generating cheaper electricity for decades to come.

Europe’s real energy frontier does not lie in distant straits or at the end of pipelines. It lies in our poorly insulated buildings, our outdated combustion engines, our inflexible networks, our poorly managed consumption peaks, and the heat lost from our factories. It also lies in the exorbitant bills that millions of households struggle to pay.

We must therefore reverse the logic: focus less on chasing supply, and more on managing demand. But the challenge goes beyond energy.

What we need here is, in fact, a much broader principle: doing better with less.

Energy efficiency is the first building block of this. It heralds a new economic model, based on optimising resources and creating value rather than on accumulating volume. For the climate as well as for sovereignty, for competitiveness as well as for quality of life, the real challenge is no longer to produce ever more. But to produce better. A way of getting environmentalists and industrialists, left-wing and right-wing parties, all pulling in the same direction!

Efficiency can – and must – become the foundation of a new paradigm: a quality-driven economy in which we pay a little more for products that last longer – and where, ultimately, we buy less. An economy where performance is measured by the value created, not by the quantities produced. Where profit margins matter more than turnover. Where we produce better rather than ever more.

One point must be made clear: efficiency is not punitive frugality. It does not mean depriving ourselves, even if questioning our habits is as desirable as it is beneficial. Efficiency means, first and foremost, eliminating waste without waiting for everyone to change their lifestyle. It means producing better with less, by making full use of digitalisation and electrification.

This means high-performance heat pumps, electric motors, optimisation software, energy storage, heat recovery, smart buildings, high-performance materials and real-time network management. In short, intelligence applied to energy.

Europe is not without resources: it is already a world leader in energy efficiency technologies, a sector that generates €150 billion in annual turnover and supports 1.2 million local jobs across the continent. The current situation must be a turning point for the emergence of true European champions in this field.

As long as heating, transport and industry remain dependent on fossil fuels, Europe will remain vulnerable. Conversely, efficiency, coupled with electrification and the roll-out of renewables, will enable Europe to circulate electrons produced at home, rather than burning molecules from the other side of the world: a direct lever for sovereignty.

Every inefficient boiler replaced, every building renovated, every factory modernised, every vehicle electrified is thus a strategic micro-victory. Taken together, these micro-victories can become a continental force.

A crisis is paralysing when we are subjected to it, but it becomes an adventure when we decide to use it to evolve, to understand its mechanisms and to respond to it boldly. What if, rather than a threat, the current situation were a historic opportunity to break free from our dependencies, restore our sovereignty and reinvent our competitiveness – to shift towards a new paradigm?

First published by La Tribune, Le Temps, La Libre and EFE Verde, and Domani.