On Wednesday afternoon the Dutch TTF benchmark crossed €100.37 per megawatt-hour, the first time since December 2022. Hours earlier, the Commission's energy chief, Dan Jørgensen, had told reporters that Europe faces "another energy crisis" and a winter that will be difficult for citizens and the economy. He attributed it to "geopolitical turbulence." That is the phrasing you use when the weather is to blame for a flood that was built into the floodplain.

The price stood near €32 before the Iran war began in late February. The shock is real. LNG shipments were disrupted, Qatari volumes almost disappeared over the summer, and the bloc now sources roughly 30% of its gas from the United States. ACER estimates the war has added between €18 billion and €33 billion to Europe's gas import bill. None of that is in dispute. What the official framing leaves out is the decade of choices that turned a single supply disruption into a question of whether the lights stay on.

Storage entered the summer low. It ended last winter at 28% full, against a nine-year average near 40%. On 21 October it stood at 75%, while the usual target is 90% by 1 November, a target member states have now been allowed to apply flexibly. Watch that word. When a storage target becomes negotiable, the margin it was meant to provide is already gone. Refilling is slow and expensive because the system was designed around the assumption that molecules would always arrive from somewhere cheap and friendly, and then the policies that would have built slack in the meantime were treated as too dirty or too slow to bother with.

Refining tells the same story. The Commission now wants more output from European refineries, roughly a quarter of which have closed over the past two decades. Those closures were not acts of nature. They were permit fights, carbon costs and planning delays, each defensible on its own, that added up to a continent importing its diesel while it lectured itself about decarbonisation. The Commission expects the global diesel market to stay tight into 2027. Officials speak about that the way a farmer speaks about a drought he did not water for.

Iberia makes the contradiction sharper. Spain and Portugal have some of the largest LNG regasification capacity in Europe, including the Enagas plant in Barcelona shown in the agency's own file photo. Yet they are priced as part of one European pool, and the pipeline that was supposed to move their gas north, Midcat, was abandoned in 2019. The peninsula built the terminals and was told to wait for the pipes to the rest of the continent. Those pipes were never built, and the terminals now sell into a market set by whoever can still get cargoes through a war zone.

The demand story is the one the Commission will prefer. Gas demand is around 20% below its pre-2022 level, which the agency presents as proof of adaptation. Part of that reduction was adaptation. Part of it was industry leaving, households turning the heating down, and a recession that nobody scheduled. A lower bill for a smaller economy is not the same as resilience.

So the people who warn about a crisis are the same people who wrote the rules that made the crisis expensive to survive. They will describe the next price spike as weather, the way they described this one. Winter bills will arrive for households with no hedge, no fixed tariff and wages that have not caught up with the last shock, let alone this one. The ministers will meet on Thursday. The communiqué will talk about supply diversification, and the LNG deal with Canada will be presented as a strategic achievement. Nobody at the table will be asked which of the European decisions from the last decade should be reversed. That question is still not on the agenda, and it will be uncomfortable when it finally is.