The European Union, which has been starved for cheap energy since the start of the Ukraine war, is betting that the future of its energy system lies under the North African sun. On Tuesday, the European Commission pledged €5 billion of EU money to renewables projects in North Africa and the Middle East, which could feed electricity back into Europe’s grid, Politico reported.
The dream is that solar panels in the sun-soaked Sahara Desert and wind turbines along the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean generate electricity that is then sent through high-voltage transmission lines under the sea and into Europe’s grid. While visionary, the probability of this happening in the next decade is slim, meanwhile the bill for Europe - which is even more cash-strapped than it is energy-strapped - would be astronomic.
That electricity would replace imported fossil fuels, helping Europe meet its ambitious electrification and climate targets.
The Commissions hopes the EU funding will lure private money to co-invest, mobilizing up to €25 billion of investment in solar, wind, hydrogen, electricity grids and other clean technologies by 2035.
"The EU's bill for fossil fuel imports has increased by over €47 billion in the past 100 days, but not a single molecule of energy in addition," EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said during a press conference announcing the new initiative on Tuesday.
By 2035, the Commission expects the initiative to support the development of at least 15 gigawatts of new renewable-energy capacity, create more than 100,000 jobs and strengthen electricity interconnections across the Mediterranean. It wasn't clear if the Commission also factored in the astronomic costs such a project would require, or where it would get the funds.
The launch of the initiative, known as T-MED, comes as Europe faces renewed volatility in global energy markets because of the war in Iran. Jørgensen linked the initiative directly to the current crisis, arguing that recent events have once again exposed the risks of relying on fossil fuels.
"Our energy security must be based on electrified energy systems that are based on clean energy, modern grids and increased connectivity," he said.
According to Brussels, North Africa and the Middle East holds around 2,300 gigawatts of renewable-energy potential, more than twice the EU's current installed capacity. Solar and wind power can be produced 30 to 40 percent more cheaply than in Europe, the Commission estimates.
"Our objective is simply to turn potential into projects, projects into investments and investments into jobs and growth," said Mediterranean Commissioner Dubravka Šuica during the launch on Tuesday.
Yet the scale of the challenge remains enormous. By the Commission's own estimates the region will require well over €100 billion in investment by the end of the decade to fully exploit its renewable-energy potential. Officials acknowledged Tuesday that the €25 billion target is only a starting point. Meanwhile, as Rabo's Michael Every notes, such a project would require both massive capital as well as Africa not wanting that power for its own economy, not to mention an EU ability to physically protect such installations in a region plagued by Islamist attacks and Russian influence in places. "That could therefore cost more than €100bn."
The Commission hopes a new T-MED investment platform, due to become operational in September, will help bridge that gap by bringing together governments, development banks, project developers and private investors. At the same time, Brussels plans to push partner countries to simplify permitting procedures, improve grid access and strengthen regulatory frameworks in order to make projects more attractive to investors, which of course will be critical since the project would have to be funded with new debt. Lots of debt.
The initiative resembles a strategy Europe has pursued before. More than a decade ago, the Desertec project sought to harness North African solar power and export it to Europe. Despite early enthusiasm, the project ultimately ended up as a - pardon the pun - flaming disaster amid political uncertainty, financing challenges and concerns over the cost of new infrastructure.
Similar projects in other parts of the world have also collapsed: the Sun Cable project, for example, which promised to power Singapore with Australian sunlight via what would have been the longest undersea power cable in the world, was a flop.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/11/2026 - 04:15The European Union recently announced the first recipients of its new European Order of Merit, the organization’s highest award. The headliner was Angela Merkel, former Federal Chancellor of Germany, who indeed personifies the European Union for both her fans and her critics. For many years, some of us have criticized Merkel as one of the leading forces behind European censorship efforts that have eviscerated the “Indispensable Right.”
Not surprisingly, Merkel called for more censorship and attacks on free speech to a thrilled audience of EU bureaucrats and globalists.
In one of the most ironic moments, Merkel declared, “Europe was not handed to us. It was built treaty by treaty, crisis by crisis and by people who chose solidarity over division and cooperation over self-interest.” Indeed, it was not handed to them.
As I discuss in my new book, “Rage and the Republic, the EU was formed by design to incrementally get citizens in Europe to give up their national identities and rights:
The EEC worked to remove barriers to trade and coordinate national regulations to achieve greater uniformity. As nations conformed to such transnational standards, the final step toward transnational governance became less of a conceptual barrier for citizens, particularly younger citizens…
…The evolution of the EU is a cautionary tale. It began with assurances of marginal coordinating bodies and policies over areas like nuclear power and scientific research. Through this planned incrementalism, each insular move was defended on its narrow purpose while dismissing objections as nationalistic or conspiratorial. That planned incrementalism worked brilliantly in getting citizens to accept transnational governance.
Merkel was critical in that effort. She is blamed for opening the borders to a flood of undocumented immigrants that has caused rising violence and protests throughout Europe. However, her crowning jewel was the crackdown on free speech. She can honestly claim that Germans (and Europeans as a whole) have fewer rights after her public service. She increased the power of government, stripped away free speech rights, and reduced national identities without firing a shot.
Merkel consistently opposed free speech, building a censorship system that gave the government ever greater control over speech. Her decision to first apologize to authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for a satirical poem and then approve the prosecution of the comedian is a shocking and chilling disgrace. Now, she is throwing her support behind a crackdown on “hate speech” on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube — radically expanding the already broad scope of government regulation of speech.
Merkel declared, “I support efforts by Justice Minister Heiko Maas and Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere to address hate speech, hate commentaries, devastating things that are incompatible with human dignity, and to do everything to prohibit it because it contradicts our values.”
Merkel was a driving force in using such subjective standards as “compatibility with human dignity” as a foundation for government-imposed speech controls.
Merkel also threatened social media companies, warning they would face a government crackdown if they failed to get rid of “fake news.” Merkel insisted that such postings must be dealt with by the companies or the government will step in.
In her speech in May to the EU, Merkel doubled down on her attacks on free speech as a threat to the world order. She called for the prosecution of American companies for spreading “disinformation” and “hate” online.
She denounced the “so-called social media” platforms as still not facing “accountability for lies.” She added, “I can only encourage you to continue regulating social media.”
I could think of no better recipient for the first European Order of Merit. No one better sums up EU values than Angela Merkel and her unrelenting campaign against free speech. For globalists who have called for “A New World Order with European Values,” Merkel is the perfect personification of a globalist dream of a world of regulated speech and transnational government.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/11/2026 - 03:30Poland will not obstruct the commencement of negotiations regarding Ukraine's accession to the European Union, but Warsaw remains firmly opposed to granting any preferential treatment to Kyiv, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has told journalists.
Relations between the two Eastern European allies have reached crisis-mode of late, after President Volodymyr Zelensky named an elite special operations unit after "UPA Heroes" - to denote a high honor for battlefield performance.
For Warsaw, uplifting this name is tantamount to backing the genocide against the Polish people:
For Poland, the UPA, or the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, is responsible for a campaign of genocidal ethnic cleansing in the 1940s that resulted in the deaths of an estimated 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia (known as Volyn in Ukrainian and Wołyń in Polish), a historic region with deep Polish and Ukrainian roots. This violence also systematically targeted Jewish survivors who had escaped the Holocaust.
Amid the diplomatic dispute sparked by the renaming, the Polish government is still promising not to let the issue steer its thinking on Ukraine's aspirations to join the European Union. It is pledging to remain objective related to examining Ukraine's status.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk specifically pledge before reporters this week that his government will not use the WW2 issue to block the start of EU negotiations centered on Ukraine.
"We are not going to trade our support for [European] ambitions of Ukraine," Tusk stated. According to more background:
The Prime Minister was responding to a reporter's question about whether Warsaw intended to block the accession talks following recent decisions by Volodymyr Zelenskyy to glorify historical followers of Stepan Bandera.
Despite the diplomatic friction, Tusk emphasized that Warsaw would maintain a strict, standard approach to the accession process.
"Nevertheless, there will be no special terms from our side. Poland will support Ukraine on its path to Europe on terms that will be European, as well as safe and beneficial for Poland," Tusk added.
🔴Poles' Reaction to "Heroes of the UPA" is an act of Cain
Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn — an educator within the Azov-rooted 3rd Assault Brigade whose callsign is "Nachtigall" (after the Abwehr battalion formed from the OUN in 1941) — described Polish outrage over awarding a military… pic.twitter.com/kxXat3M3in
Poland also has other pressing concerns, not the least of which is the immigration and war refugee issue. Poland has throughout over four years of the Ukraine war had to absorb hundreds of thousands of refugees and war-displaced families.
A future where Ukraine could become part of the EU might prove a major drain on Poland's own struggling economy and resources.
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/11/2026 - 02:45Authored by Monica Showalter via American Thinker,
Northern Ireland went up in flames as angry Irish mobs rioted in the streets and burned down publicly funded migrant housing complexes last night.
The spark that set it off was a migrant who tried to behead a resident.
This is the attack in living color, which was posted on X:
Tekijä: Hadi Alodid, sudanilainen turvapaikanhakija
Video tapahtuneesta: pic.twitter.com/XLHbgMxRCo
Mob action is never desirable but the anger was predictable, as the details were worse than they looked: An innocent Scotish resident, Stephen Ogilvy, who is partially deaf, was helping a Sudanese 'asylum seeker' move into his residence. The migrant, Hadi Alodid, had entered the country in 2023 and got a five-year pass to seek 'asylum.' For unknown reasons, the migrant grabbed Ogilvy, began slashing him with a knife, gouging out one eye and severely damaging the other, slashed his knife all over Ogilvy's face, and then began to cut Ogilvy's head off in the street. He was intercepted by locals, one of whom hit him over the head with a shovel, saving Ogilvy's life. Ogilvy's alive, but gets to go through life not just nearly deaf, but nearly blind, too.
Coming on the heels of the Henry Nowak murder by a migrant-involved person, along with the bad police response, and it was too much for many in Belfast.
The riots that followed were the result of the state which failed to protect the people from uninvited barbarians who repaid kindness with savagery and who exhibited little consideration for the victims.
Brendan O'Neill, who's a heckuva good writer, sums it up this way at Sp!ked:
Yes, only the blood-stained degenerate bears responsibility for the horrors inflicted on that innocent man. But we now know the piece of scum had an army of witless aiders and abetters. There lurks in the background of this abomination a whole regime of complicity. The wilfully oblivious technocrats who have overseen the withering of our borders. The spineless legal system that refuses to remove people who should not be here. The virtue-hoarding activist class that agitates for the right of every 'asylum seeker' to stay, because they cherish the spotlight of self-righteousness far more than they do the safety of working-class men and women. None of them wielded the knife, no; but all helped to pave the way for that reprobate's presence in Belfast.
Isn't there now a case against officialdom of reckless endangerment? Every week there are reports of horrifying rapes carried out by illegal immigrants. Working-class women and girls have suffered sickening abuse at the hands of men who came on small boats under the noses of our apathetic, cowardly rulers. People have been murdered, too. From the alleged rape gang overseen by Afghan nationals in Norwich to last night's demented bloodletting in Belfast - when are we allowed to say this is all the bitter harvest of state failure, the predictable outcome of refusing to get a handle on who is coming here and why?
But the response of the state was utterly repulsive.
Officials expressed umbrage about the news getting out, not the migrant problem and the state that had ushered them in.
Their fury was concentrated almost solely on the reacting rioters, who were branded 'racists' as they always are, instead of the underlying crime - notice that the U.K. legislator shows no 'horrified' sentiment about the crime, just the resulting disorder:
🇬🇧 A single knife attack in Belfast cost a man his left eye and set off a night of city-wide violence and unrest.
Hadi Alodid, 30, has been charged with attempted murder.
PM Starmer addressed the resulting unrest in Belfast at PMQs, calling the disorder "completely... https://t.co/9pDVq3bmgT
I am horrified by the disorder and racist violence in Belfast last night.
Far too often now, we see extremists exploiting people's anger and grief to spread hatred and violence - with the help of divisive algorithms on social media.
This has to stop.
Then they tried to cover it up by shutting the family up.
These crimes and bad responses from officials are now so frequent the British public believes it knows what's going on:
100% written by the government.
Nobody refers to their own family member as "loved one" pic.twitter.com/uGOhWB8Zui
It took the nudge unit a day, but they got to them in the end. https://t.co/025qI3NWVO
- Gary McLeeve. (@GaryMcleft) June 10, 2026Nudge unit. In the U.K., they have them.
After that, they blamed Elon Musk, who owns X:
🚨KEIR STARMER COMMITS TO CRACK DOWN ON X
Lib Dem Leader Ed Davey says it's "NOT FREE SPEECH"
Starmer agrees and says we need to crack down on X for whipping up violence
These people are insane
They're authoritarian and dangerous
They must be removed from power pic.twitter.com/mnC1VtJdWG
The scenes we saw in Belfast yesterday were horrific, and people are right to be concerned.
The Government must take action against tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who control the divisive and harmful social media algorithms that are inciting violence and hatred. pic.twitter.com/aBBcPUYzSH
Including the media intelligentsia:
24 hours after footage of an African man trying to saw the head off his Scottish victim in a Belfast street circulated online, Irish politicians and journalists openly discuss on live TV how such videos can be suppressed, in future.
We're going down a dark road. #TonightVMT pic.twitter.com/oDWSYiOVxw
Because what's shown on X does mess up their narrative - innocent migrant, racist Irish locals - and shames the press for its obeisance to the powers that be.
The only reason we're hearing about this Belfast horror is because it flooded X first
Had X not existed - much to Labour's desire - the story would not reach MSM
This is why Starmer & Co Hate X and Musk
THEY CANNOT CONTROL THE NARRATIVE 🇬🇧
There may have been a second migrant involved in the attack, too, which certainly wouldn't have come from the press - it's slowly coming out on X, too. That shames them.
It also exposed the elites' bizarre priorities as to who gets into the country:
I am banned from entering the United Kingdom because I have been deemed to be "not conducive to the public good".
The Sudanese migrant who literally was cutting a man's head off in the middle of the street in Belfast was given refugee status and full financial benefits by the...
It's a Europe-wide problem and it keeps happening over and over. This one, meanwhile, is emerging from Italy.
Outrage in Italy as an Albanian man was almost beheaded by a North African gang for defending an elderly man during a robbery.
The North Africans entered a restaurant in Fermo and began harassing an elderly Italian man, demanding money.
The Albanian noticed what was happening... pic.twitter.com/n0YriWUHT2
Like the Irish, the Albanians often have their own ways of solving problems, so it's a case worth watching.
The bottom line here is that it isn't just a few bad apples among the migrant communities, it's large numbers of them, with outrageous incidents happening over and over now. The public has seen its candidates banned and demonized for questioning the system, so it's very difficult to change it to get a responsive government that promotes what the public wants. We even see that behavior in the U.S., as we can recall the many ways the left tried to disqualify President Trump from winning his current term.
What it underlines is that there is a massive, evil deep entrenched state everywhere with interests in replacing the population with criminal migrants. The Irish are rebelling, at least temporarily, as the riots die down. But they are awakened. And one wonders how long these matters will just stay temporary matters with a government as unwilling to change its ways as the U.K. The trouble seen is their doing.
Image: X screenshot
Tyler Durden Thu, 06/11/2026 - 02:00