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“The world is moving inexorably in the direction of low carbon energy. Increasing numbers of multinational companies are seeking to manufacture and operate using low carbon energy to power their industries. Increasingly, investments – and the good, decent jobs they create, including high quality jobs for women – will go where emissions are low.”

The above gem of a quote comes from a Joint article [sic] on Just Energy Transition Partnerships authored by the UK, U.S., Italy, France, Canada, and the European Commission, and they were probably in a hurry to get it out before Trump woke up on Inauguration Day.

In case your reaction to the quoted sentences, in order, was something along the lines of “What?”, “No, they are not”, and “Hahahahaha”, I know exactly how you feel. The article, while only a couple of days old, already feels obsolete. It’s also wrong but that’s just business as usual for the authors. Yet it is truly stunning how much the deterioration of the transition narrative has accelerated — even if it doesn’t yet look it.

Take the reference to “Increasing numbers of multinational companies are seeking to manufacture and operate using low carbon energy”. No, they are not. Every single company in the world is seeking cheap energy, colour be damned. And those investments that would go where emissions are low? Yeah, that’s why all those banks are leaving the sinking ship of net-zero abbreviations. But we already covered that on Monday. Today, it’s Take the EU to the Shredder Day.

You know the EU? The trade bloc with delusions of grandeur it worked hard to turn into reality? Right, so that same EU is considering building a supergrid to bring down energy prices. Also, the same EU will likely have to revert to 2019 transition targets because the biggest political party in the EP, the European People’s Party, wants it — even as its member and Commission President von der Leyen continues talking up “clean sources of generation” — while the new U.S. president punches straight into the EU gut with “The European Union is very, very bad to us. So they're going to be in for tariffs. It's the only way ... you're going to get fairness.”