The European Commission is looking at a windfall profit tax on oil and gas companies because energy prices have climbed again. Reuters reports the idea is under review, and the instinct behind it is familiar enough to be predictable. Prices rise, the bloc looks for someone to charge, and the levy arrives wrapped in the language of fairness.

The precedent is not hypothetical. In late 2022 the Council adopted an emergency regulation creating a solidarity contribution on fossil fuel companies, a 33 percent charge on profits above a baseline tied to 2018 to 2021 earnings. A separate cap on inframarginal revenues for electricity generators followed. Both were described as temporary. Both were justified as a response to an exceptional moment. Neither added a single cubic metre of gas capacity or a single megawatt of firm generation that Europe did not already have on order.

The mainstream framing treats the spike as a market event that needs a referee. The record points somewhere else. The EU priced carbon into the marginal molecule through the ETS, shut down nuclear capacity in several member states, and then built a permitting regime in which a transmission line can take a decade to approve. It cut itself off from cheap pipeline supply before the alternatives were in place, and it still writes rules that slow the grids and storage that would dampen volatility. A windfall tax addresses none of that. It moves the cost of the shortage onto the balance sheets of companies that then reallocate capital to Norway, the US Gulf or Qatar, where nobody in Brussels has a veto over the investment.

There is a second-order effect that the press release does not model. Windfall levies are paid out of profits that are often reinvested in exploration, refining and the kind of long-cycle projects the Commission says it still wants. Investors read a tax on surplus as a tax on the next surplus. The forgone capital expenditure never appears in an impact assessment, because the impact assessment is written to justify the levy, not to test whether it reduces the supply that caused the spike.

The pattern is a loop. Crisis, levy, exemption, extension, then a new directive on reporting or compliance to show that something was done. Each step is defensible on its own terms. Together they describe an institution that has lost the ability to add supply and has become very good at redistributing the cost of its absence. The households paying the bill are the same ones told that the transition is affordable, and the companies being taxed are the same ones whose output the transition still depends on.

Member states that already run tight budgets will be tempted to book the revenue and spend it before the next price cycle. That is how temporary measures become permanent line items. Nobody in the chain has a reason to ask why the price moved in the first place, because asking would implicate the regulatory architecture that everyone signed off on.

Whoever ends up paying a windfall tax is, by construction, someone who did not cause the shortage. That is the discomfort worth sitting with. A continent that cannot build the infrastructure to stop being price-taker in its own energy market keeps choosing to tax the producers it still has, and calling the result solidarity.