Research

“After focusing on electricity market interventions in September, the European Commission has now turned to measures to tame gas prices,” says Elisabetta Cornago, a researcher at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank. “Price limits for gas transactions on the TTF exchange may be difficult to implement and might risk muddling incentives to save energy. Joint procurement of gas instead is a smart approach to negotiate more convenient gas prices, which should ultimately benefit consumers.”

In figures provided to me by the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think-tank, Britain’s average GDP growth rate (in real terms) from 1945 to 1973 - outside what was then called the European Common Market - was 2.8 percent.

Elisabetta Cornago from the Centre for European Reform think-tank, for example, has described the gas price-cap proposal as “kind of a cry for help. The bloc has run out of low-hanging fruit to address the energy crisis and is gradually moving away from orthodoxy, despite the potential perils the shift entails.”

This so-called “social climate fund,” initially designed as a €72 billion cushion for vulnerable households and to finance more energy-efficient buildings, could be retooled and launched sooner to fit the current crisis, argues Elisabetta Cornago, of the Centre for European Reform.

The other great test of Europe’s solidarity, this winter and beyond, will be its ability to share those gas supplies between countries in the event of shortages. Failure to do so, said Elisabetta Cornago, senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, would damage not only people’s well-being — but faith in the EU itself.

About half of the French nuclear power plants are under maintenance, which has deprived France of its title of Europe’s largest energy exporter and required it to import electricity from Germany.“But it seems to be more of a technical, managerial planning failure, as opposed to a political one,” like in Germany, said Elisabetta Cornago, a Brussels-based researcher at the Centre for European Reform.

"My impression is that member states are looking at prices and quantities in isolation and that's difficult because of economics," said Elisabetta Cornago, a senior energy researcher at the Centre for European Reform."It's hard to picture such a level of market intervention This is uncharted territory."

Foreign policy expert Ian Bond, from the Centre for European Reform think-tank, says the West needs to stop being - and sounding - afraid.This is what he told the Doomsday Watch podcast:"Nothing is as provocative to Putin as weakness, so the more the West says 'we are afraid that Russia might use nuclear weapons', the more likely it Putin is to continue making the threat of using nuclear weapons - and perhaps even use one or two to demonstrate he really means it."