Subscribers to Benny Peiser’s CCNet may have noticed in today’s digest the growing chasm between Europe and the U.S (Ed notes one entry below). Having for years put other peoples’ money where the alarmists’ rhetoric was, there is serious momentum on the Continent to curb the Kyoto policies by which they have defined themselves for so long – and a growing reluctance to deepen the (failed) efforts to reduce GHGs in the face of mounting energy and other economic costs. Oh, and they want to drill in the Arctic, recognizing at the highest level that “any realistic energy strategy in the future will have to rely on oil and gas”.

Official Europe has reached the point of acknowledging that they created a looming crisis, and are getting their wits about them. This comes just as our own leaders race to replicate their mistakes.

Yes, the latter are the same people who brought us the lovely housing and financial crises by succumbing to noisy pressure-group demands, and whose very similar ostrich routine on energy supply while succumbing to other pressure groups has us on track for a very similar energy crisis — with utility executives increasingly warning that the Lights. Will. Go. Out.

The odd thing about that one is: As the reactive Congress, which loves creating risk for others while avoiding political risk to themselves at all cost (well, at a cost of about $1 trillion just this year), will find — no doubt to great shock and finger-pointing – the productive sector of the economy can’t just build energy capacity as fast as government can bail out the lenders they twisted into a pretzel in the first place.

And until Washington reforms the laws they have written delegating ultimate energy-supply authority to agencies and the courts, there’s nothing Congress or the productive sector could do about it even within about a decade, anyway.

What Europe is experiencing explains the open calls on their shores that the climate-change issue is too important to be left to democracy. I tremble when I reflect how we may find ourselves agreeing with that in the fairly near future, if not for quite the same reason.