Economist Thomas Sowell once noted that there are no policies, only trade-offs. When we ignore them, the policies themselves become incoherent. This leads us to the complex quagmire of energy policy in the European Union. Given the availability of liquefied natural gas from the United States and Qatar, those ban decisions did not necessarily deal a fatal blow to the EU's manufacturing and chemical industries. Europe imposed a ban on Russian gas exports to deprive Putin's war machine of the necessary revenue, but at the expense of the cheap energy needed to drive the European industrial engine. "These trade-offs reveal the contradictions between policy goals."
