There’s a good article out today in Compact magazine (mostly behind a paywall, alas) about the de-industrialization of Europe:

In 2008, the European Union’s economy was slightly larger than America’s; America’s economy in 2023 is one-third larger than those of the European Union and Britain combined, and 50 percent larger than that of the European Union without the United Kingdom. To put it differently, the eurozone’s economy has grown about 6 percent over the past 15 years, compared with 82 percent for the United States, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

One of the biggest parts of this story is Europe’s stupid energy policies, which we are trying hard to emulate here. This chart of changes in recent European Union electricity demand caught my eye recently:

The decline in industrial demand for electricity almost surely reflects factories closing or cutting production rather than huge, one-year leaps in energy efficiency or substitution.