First the United Kingdom, now Sweden: As the European economy falters, Net Zero plans are retooled from hard deadlines to moving walls of future utopian aspiration

The United States is the centre of empire, and events there colour European politics and culture like no other country. The establishment press report on American news as often as they do domestic issues, and not always favourably. American mass shootings, for example, provide EU countries that have much stricter gun laws valued chances for moral preening.¹ Donald Trump’s presidency worked in much the same way, as an opportunity for European elites to congratulate themselves on their allegedly superior politics and greater maturity. The pre-Covid peak of Euro climate hysteria was, in no small part, a response to Trump’s general rejection of energy transition policies.

Thus in 2017, when then-Deputy Swedish Prime Minister Isabella Lövin signed into law a landmark climate bill committing the country to carbon neutrality by 2045, she tweeted a girl-power picture of the act …

… mocking this photo of a freshly inaugurated President Trump banning funding for foreign abortion-promoting NGOs:

Both the contents of Lövin’s law and its target date were conceived to position Sweden as the energy-transition leader of the European Union:

“There is a global demand for climate leadership. I want to show that Sweden is ready to take that leadership,” [Lövin said].

Sweden has criticised the Trump administration’s approach to climate policy as it announced legislation binding future governments to a goal of phasing out greenhouse gas emissions by 2045, among the most ambitious by any developed nation.

Lövin urged European countries to take a leading role in tackling climate change, now “the US is not there anymore to lead” …

The law will come into force from 1 January 2018.

Sweden’s goal would demand at least an 85% cut in domestic greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 from 1990 levels, the government said. Remaining emissions would be offset…

In April 2021, the EU followed Sweden’s example, binding itself not merely to substantial emissions reductions but to full carbon neutrality by 2050. By then, Trump was out of office, and Lövin’s defiant vision had already begun to decay.

Today, it is in full-scale collapse: