A Price Cap on Gas Is the Wrong Answer to Europe’s Energy Crisis
Artificially lowering gas prices will worsen the continent’s energy shortage. There’s a better way.
Save, but don’t cap.
Photographer: John Thys/AFP via Getty Images
Don’t just do something; sit there. So goes an old witticism among meditators. Just sitting there, of course, isn’t a luxury available to policymakers during an emergency such as the energy crisis caused by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Leaders of the European Union feel they must do something — anything, right now, before winter.
Unfortunately, the something they’re converging on is likely to make the continent’s problems worse. Among all the insanely high prices around us, the most obscene is the going rate of natural gas. So the European Commission, under pressure from a majority of the EU’s 27 member states, is proposing a cap on gas prices.