Tom Fairless

I think one thing that the Europeans would like is if the Chinese were to build more factories in Europe and to share some of the technologies, it would be a sort of reverse of what European and US companies were doing in China where they were sharing tech.

It would be China coming to Europe and sharing tech.

The question is whether China would accept.

And there's some question about that.

I mean, everyone's energy bills in Europe have gone up substantially, and that is exacerbating a cost of living crisis in the U.K., and it's also feeding into a sense that the system has failed them.

I think it's fair to say that Europe was hit by a combination of bad policy and bad luck when it comes to climate.

It was bad policy in the sense that it charged ahead with a massive shift in how it produced electricity without really investing...

in the transmission networks needed to move that intermittent burst of energy that renewables provide, or investing in sort of more constant sources of energy like nuclear power.

And then it was bad luck in the sense that there was a war in Ukraine, which pushed up the cost of gas, which underpins the cost of electricity for a lot of European nations, and interest rates also went up.

So it became a lot more expensive to finance these products.

So the net result is that consumers in Europe are being hit by a double whammy.

They're still at the mercy right now of imported volatile fossil fuels, while also shouldering enormous upfront costs to build out this new green energy infrastructure.

Yeah, there have been a series of, especially in the chemicals industry, of firms effectively shutting up shop.

in Europe to then move production to places like China.

So you have this kind of perverse effect where the energy intensive industry isn't stopping, it's just happening the other side of the world and its products are then being shipped all the way back to Europe to be consumed.

So in a weird way,

There's no net reduction in pollution.

If anything, it's worse.

And that seems to be a big effect.

And the secondary effect is really on people on the ground.