“No doubt there will be diffucult problems during this transition. But it has to be borne, as removing the dependency on Russia is an absolute strategic necessity.”
Europe’s choice, but I don’t see the necessity. Russia’s gas supply to Europe was (and still is) as reliable as ANY energy supply in history - far more reliable than the Middle East, for example.
Russia’s policy is that you pay for it, you get the gas. It’s the US and much of the West that plays games with other countries to advance their agenda.
Do you love the USA buying everything from China?
Too many globalists on this site who think it’s a good idea to send billions of dollars a year to our enemies.
Reliability depends on a lot of things.
In re nat gas (or coal), a secure supply is vital. This stuff is used for a large number of purposes that will not tolerate outages. Therefore to ensure reliable supplies a number of factors apply. One of these is that wonderful catchall, “political risk”.
Lets look at how California arranged their nat gas supply, set up back when California was forward looking, conservative and rational. There are three main pipelines transporting gas, from three different sources - Western Canada, the Rocky Mountain Basin (mainly Montana), and Texas-Oklahoma, all feeding an in-State transmission system. Three independent sources, three pathways. California is thus highly protected from any number of physical or circumstantial threats, including political threats.
It is very much a stretch to imagine that Montana will turn hostile to California over some war of words over cultural disputes, or that Nevada, through which one pipeline goes, will escalate a taxation argument, but that too is accounted for.
Unfortunately Russia is not a US state vis-a-vis Germany, so there always was a large political risk. That single source of gas was always available for blackmail in any potential dispute, as Russia and Germany could always, were very likely to, develop severely divergent interests. Trump pressed that point with the German leadership in 2017, and he was laughed at. Nobody is laughing now.
Germany failed to do basic utility planning, and laughed at all sorts of single source risks.