Europe closed its own gas fields and nuclear plants. Now, with storage at its lowest since 2011, Brussels wants to talk about how much less you should use.

For two decades, European energy policy has been built on a quiet promise: the switch to a greener system would be orderly, affordable and, above all, painless. Nobody would have to go without. The market, the pipelines and the ports would see to it.

This winter the promise is being rewritten in the passive voice of a Council document.

"What, if any, demand reduction measures should be considered at EU level?" asks a paper prepared by the Irish presidency for energy ministers, who meet on 29 October, according to Euronews, which has seen it. Rapporteur reported the same plan under the headline "EU to broach demand reduction as energy crisis deepens", with the Energy Commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, warning of a "tough winter".

Demand reduction. It is a wonderfully bloodless phrase. In plain English it means asking, or telling, households and businesses to use less heat, less power and less fuel, because there may not be enough at a price anyone can pay.

How bad is it?

The numbers in the Euronews report are sobering. Gas prices are up 140% since the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. The Strait of Hormuz, which carries around a fifth of the world's oil and gas trade, has been closed or disrupted for nearly eight months. On 20 October, EU gas storage stood at 74%, the lowest since 2011, according to industry body Gas Infrastructure Europe. Europe's gas grid operators have warned that a severe cold snap could leave the bloc 12% to 15% short of demand.

None of this is Brussels' fault. Wars in the Gulf are not written in the Berlaymont. But how exposed a continent is to someone else's war is very much a policy choice, and Europe has made a great many choices that left it here.

A continent that chose to import

The Netherlands closed the Groningen gas field, once the biggest in Europe, for good in 2024 after years of earthquakes. Germany switched off its last three nuclear reactors in April 2023, in the middle of the last energy crisis. Across the bloc, new domestic oil and gas exploration has become politically toxic; the EU's own Arctic policy has long said those fuels should stay in the ground.

Each of those decisions had its reasons. Together they produced a continent that relies on imported fuel and then discovers, every few years, that imports come with geopolitics attached. The result is that when a strait some 5,000 kilometres away closes, the conversation in Brussels turns to car-free Sundays.

That is not a figure of speech. Shortly after the war began, the International Energy Agency published a ten-point plan to cut oil use that included "car-free Sundays", Euronews notes, a measure borrowed from the 1970s oil shock.

Who decides what you go without?

The real fight on 29 October will not be about whether to save energy. Everyone will be for saving energy. It will be about who decides, and for whom.

The Commission has already floated a proposal, tabled at the 15–16 October summit, to aggregate energy demand at EU level, with Brussels coordinating supplies and distributing them to member states according to their needs, Euronews reports. Read that sentence slowly. It describes a central body deciding how much gas each nation should get in a shortage.

There may be cases where coordination helps. In a real emergency, countries outbidding each other for the same tanker is a bad outcome, and joint purchasing can strengthen Europe's hand. But a permanent mechanism under which the Commission allocates energy among nations is a new and enormous power. It deserves a proper debate in national parliaments, not a line in summit conclusions drafted during a crisis.

And the burden-sharing questions are brutal. Euronews lists them: should industry face restrictions, how do you protect vulnerable households, and how do you avoid further damaging competitiveness? Those are not technical questions. They are political choices about whose factory shuts and whose flat goes cold, and they belong with governments that voters can remove.

Cut red tape before you cut heating

There is an awkward contrast in the timing. In the same week that ministers prepare to talk about rationing, the European Parliament voted to delay the EU's methane rules for imported gas, after the Commission itself admitted importers might not find enough compliant supply. Brussels, it turns out, has spent years adding conditions to the energy it buys, and is now discovering that conditions have a price.

A sensible winter plan would start there. Suspend or simplify every EU rule that makes imported energy harder to buy this winter. Let member states extend the life of the plants they still have. Stop treating domestic gas production as a moral failing while importing the same molecules from further away. Fill the storage, buy the cargoes, and only then ask families to turn the thermostat down.

What Europe should not do is let an emergency become a precedent: a Commission that allocates energy among nations, and a political class that treats "use less" as an energy policy.

Households have done their part before. In 2022 they cut consumption, paid record bills and kept the lights on. Before asking them to do it again, the people who designed Europe's energy system owe them an honest account of why, four years later, the continent is still this exposed.