This kind of behavior is totally in-character for Europe though. Europeans want to have all the fruits of a high-income society, but they want to outsource all

This kind of behavior is totally in-character for Europe though. Europeans want to have all the fruits of a high-income society, but they want to outsource all the morally dicey bits. This pattern is constant: immigration (they want the migrants to go away, but want to seem enlightened and progressive, so they pay Tunisia and Morocco a bunch of money to have the concentration camps stay out of sight and out of mind), defense (they want national defense but don't want to pay for it or look militarized, so they underspent for decades and offloaded all the costs onto America, which was a viable strategy until all of a sudden it wasn't), and so on. It's not hard to see European energy policy following exactly the same pattern.