There is something poetic about the way Europe deals with crises: with the same agility as an ocean liner attempting to make a U-turn in a drainage channel.

As the winds of war in the Strait of Hormuz blow chillingly on our hopes for recovery, continental and national politics perform an acrobatic dance act between ‘good intentions’, ‘fiscal patches’ and ‘air taxes’. Welcome to 2026, the year in which we discovered that the ecological transition cannot be eaten and that, without energy, even the best of possible worlds remains in the dark.

Hormuz: it’s not just oil, it’s the end of manufacturing

For decades, we have looked at the Strait of Hormuz as a distant geopolitical curiosity, a place where ships pass that allow Americans to drive their SUVs. Today, that funnel of sea has become our jugular vein. But beware: the most common mistake is to think that Hormuz just means ‘more expensive petrol’. If it were just that, we could get away with a few Sundays on foot.

The reality is much more metallic. Hormuz is the transit route for 20% of the world’s LNG and, above all,aluminium.
The Gulf produces about 9% of global primary aluminium and Europe imports about 30% of it from there. Why? Because it takes a monstrous amount of energy (solid electricity, they call it) to make aluminium and we, in our infinite wisdom, decided years ago that it cost too much to produce it in Europe. So we relocated our industrial sovereignty to the feet of the Ayatollahs and the petrodollars.

Today, aluminium billets – those cylinders essential for making window frames, electric motors and, ironically, the frames for solar panels – have become rare commodities.
Prices at the LME in London have exploded, breaking through the $4,000 per tonne mark. Without aluminium, the green transition of which we so much stuff our mouths in Brussels is a dream book without a cover. You cannot build a green economy if the metal needed to build it is stuck behind an Iranian destroyer.

The ETS: self-sabotage as a strategy

In this apocalyptic scenario, European government representatives have decided to keep its eleven-pack: the ETS (Emission Trading System ). For the uninitiated, the ETS is the mechanism by which the EU forces companies to pay for every tonne of CO2 emitted. A noble ‘air tax’ created to save the climate.

The problem is that in 2026 the ETS has become a noose. While American and Chinese companies produce at ridiculous energy costs (because they don’t care about emissions or have plenty of shale gas), our companies have to add to the – already insane – cost of raw material the cost of the ‘licence to pollute’. ETS quotas run over 90 euros per tonne, acting like a multiplier of doom on every electricity bill.

Some Italian politicians, in an attempt not to look like climate deniers, have launched a creative proposal: ‘Let’s not eliminate ETS, let’s use them to reduce bills!’ The idea would be to use the proceeds of the auctions (which bring billions into the coffers of the states) not to finance abstract research projects in 20 years’ time, but to directly reduce system charges today.
Or, as suggested by the Meloni government, to ‘decouple’ the price of renewables from that of gas doped by the ETS. It is a proposal that in Brussels sounds like heresy, but in a factory in Brescia it sounds like the last wish before capital execution.

The excise charade: 500 million for a breath

And while maximum systems and carbon quotas are being discussed in Brussels, the ‘band-aid policy’ is being staged in Rome. We are talking about the temporary cut in excise duties.

Fuel excise duties are the heavy drug of the Italian state: they bring in around 20 billion euro every year.
Easy, safe money, taken directly from the wallets of anyone who has to go to work.
Faced with the price hike caused by Hormuz, the government came up with a 500 million euro intervention to cut prices for just 15 days.

The question arises: where did this ‘five hundred million’ come from? Simple: they were taken from the budgets of the various ministries. We have taken funds away from health, school and road maintenance to give ourselves a few cents’ worth of petrol for the duration of an Easter holiday.
It is the economy of desperation: selling furniture to pay the electricity bill, hoping that next month someone will give us a new piece of furniture. If Hormuz is closed for three months, what will we do? Are we going to close the carabiniers to finance another weekend of discounts at the pump?

The energy gap: Europe as an open-air museum

The final figure is the one that should take every European (and a fortiori Italian) citizen’s sleep away: the cost of energy in Europe today is three to five times higher than in the United States. This gap is not just a number, it is an industrial death sentence. And let us emphasise that Italy has the highest energy cost in Europe. To say.

If it costs three times as much to produce a piece of aluminium or a bolt in Europe as it does in Texas, the company does not ‘resist’: the company relocates. We are witnessing a silent but inexorable deindustrialisation. Capital flees to shores where energy is not an ethical luxury, but an industrial commodity.

The real risk is that in ten years’ time Europe will be a beautiful open-air museum, very clean, with zero emissions (because we no longer produce anything), but where no one can afford the entrance fee because there are no more jobs.

Less mantra, more realism

If we want to save the environment, we must first save those who live and work in that environment.
We need a brutal reform of the electricity market, we need the courage to use ETS revenues to give oxygen to companies, and we need, above all, to stop thinking that the ’15-day discount’ policy can stop a geopolitical hurricane.

Dear Europe, wake up. The thermometer is running a high fever, and it will not be enough to tax the thermometer to bring the temperature down.

Either we find a way to produce energy and metals at competitive costs, or our only export will remain regrets. And those, unfortunately, cannot be traded on the ETS market.