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BRUSSELS — Oct. 15, 2026 — European Union leaders opened a two-day emergency summit on Thursday with an old political trick: making climate policy the fall guy for an energy price shock that was largely triggered by war and volatile fossil fuel markets. The meeting wraps up Friday.
A bloc of conservative governments, led by Italy, Estonia and the Visegrad Four, arrived with a common message: suspend carbon taxes, postpone clean-energy rules and ease regulations blamed for the surge. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš said in a joint statement that a “temporary suspension” of the EU’s carbon price on power plants and polluting manufacturing sectors “would provide immediate relief” to industry. Estonia’s Kristen Michal demanded the bloc “postpone or scrap” an upcoming CO2 tax on heating and transport fuels. And the leaders of Poland, Czechia, Hungary and Slovakia asked for a two-year delay of that same measure.
The European Commission is already bending. This week the EU executive proposed a one-year postponement of new methane rules after warnings from governments and fossil fuel companies that the regulation could worsen price and supply problems. Conservative lawmakers in the European Parliament want to go further. German MEP Christian Ehler said the delay should be three years, arguing that “security of supply and lower energy prices” take priority. Critics say the methane rules would have a negligible effect on consumer bills and are being sacrificed to appease the gas industry.
The backlash is not limited to the EU. In Britain, opposition Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has made net-zero a political target, saying in August that “current net-zero targets have driven up energy costs, weakened our industrial base and made us more dependent on energy imports.” In Australia, the right-leaning Coalition has promised to dismantle the government’s net-zero policies, with National Party figure Matthew Canavan vowing to “unleash all Australian energy resources (coal, oil, gas, uranium and renewables)” to cut prices and end carbon taxation. In Washington, the Trump administration used affordable energy as justification for scrapping emissions limits on power plants. EPA chief Lee Zeldin called the move a protection of “American energy” and affordable power.
But the anti-green alliance is not unanimous. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez pushed back at the summit, saying the price spike “stems from two wars that have clearly violated international law” — Russia’s attacks on Ukraine and the Iran war. Sánchez touted Spain’s aggressive renewable rollout as the real insulation: “Electricity prices in our country are much lower than the European average.” His argument underscores a broader point that is often lost in the blame game: climate policies are not the main cause of today’s energy bills.
That’s not to say the policies are cost-free. Carbon taxes deliberately make polluting fuels more expensive to nudge consumers toward clean electricity. Expansion of grids adds network charges. Electric vehicles and heat pumps often require high upfront investment. Yet these costs are generally dwarfed by the swings in global oil and natural gas prices. Even the International Renewable Energy Agency, in a report released this week, acknowledged that the transition carries short-term household costs. Under its more ambitious decarbonization scenario, global real household income would dip in the early years before improving strongly after 2030-2035. IRENA urged governments to design policies that cushion low-income households and sustain public support.
The public is already anxious. A survey published this month found that more than half of Germans expect the green transition to damage their personal finances. UK government polling shows that around half of Britons believe renewable policies will raise bills in the near term. With four of the EU’s five largest economies heading into elections within twelve months, these worries are putting pressure on leaders to weaken green measures — even if the long-term benefits remain.
Outside Europe, the same argument plays out along a geopolitical axis. Chinese state media published a commentary Thursday claiming Beijing had prevented an even worse energy crisis by slashing its oil imports nearly 15% in the first eight months of 2026. In the Economic Daily op-ed, writer Wang Yichen argued that China’s enormous crude inventories and electric-vehicle drive allowed it to buffer the market after U.S.-Iran fighting shut off shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. International oil prices would otherwise have hit $200 a barrel, he wrote. The piece, republished by Xinhua, portrayed China as a stabilizing force and, by extension, the United States as a disruptive one. It was a rare case of Beijing using its green transition as a geopolitical selling point.
Meanwhile, the United States is pushing to expand fossil fuel finance through multilateral institutions. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the World Bank on Wednesday to support upstream oil and gas projects. Bessent, who did not attend the World Bank-IMF annual meetings in Bangkok, argued that removing constraints on natural gas would improve energy access. The Trump administration has long accused the bank of “mission creep” on climate, and this year the bank quietly abandoned its target of spending 45% of total operations on climate-related projects. It also approved $140 million for gas projects in three African countries in June. But shifting to upstream oil and gas funding would be a “dramatic departure” from the bank’s Paris Agreement alignment, said Clemence Landers of the Center for Global Development. She noted that because the U.S. is the bank’s largest shareholder, management might push it through.
The U.S. is already the biggest public financier of fossil fuels among G20 nations, according to Oil Change International and Friends of the Earth U.S. Data compiled by those groups show the World Bank has provided roughly $19 billion in fossil fuel financing over the past decade, though annual lending fell to $784 million between 2023 and 2025. A further expansion of that book would signal that Washington is serious about pulling the global development establishment back into fossil energy.
For Europe’s embattled leaders, the temptation to blame climate policy is understandable. Energy prices have spiked for reasons they cannot control — wars, sanctions, supply disruptions and speculative markets. Rules on emissions are visible, domestic and relatively easy to change. But weakening those rules will not make gas cheaper or end the war. If Europe sacrifices its climate agenda to win votes, it risks a longer-term economic and environmental bill that voters may not forgive.
