(Zero Hedge)—While the green pseudo-economy drags the broader economy into the basement, two-thirds of Germans say they are satisfied with renewable energy or even want to see it expanded more rapidly. Meanwhile, the construction of a European war economy marks the next stage in Europe’s ongoing impoverishment.
The most popular yet most destructive economic strategy remains the modern interpretation of Keynesianism. With his oversimplified view of economic activity, the British economist John Maynard Keynes inadvertently handed postwar politicians a toolkit that they later perverted into an all-purpose “solution” for every economic crisis. The condensed version reads as follows: nearly every recession stems from a demand shortfall by consumers. The state’s job, therefore, is to create artificial credit to fill this demand gap.
Recipe for Bureaucratic Expansion
Lower interest rates, print credit, and—so the fairy tale goes—the economy takes off. In reality, what remains is a mountain of state debt, a swelling bureaucracy, distorted financial markets, and declining productivity. These are economic facts, easily verified even by non-economists. Prosperity arises from a growing capital stock that serves consumer demand efficiently and precisely with more goods and services.
Keynesian policy has proven disastrous for Europe, because it hands politicians a permanent excuse to expand their influence, build bureaucracy, and manipulate markets. Political institutions such as the European Commission, most European parties, and the governments of member states operate almost exclusively in this mode.
The Green Deal
It was in this spirit that the Green Deal was born—a pseudo-economy disguised as “green transformation” and sold to the public as a contribution to saving the planet. In truth, it is a monstrous contraption, a grotesque response to Europe’s strategic energy dependency, which devours ever-larger portions of the economy each year just to keep its oversized subsidy machine running.
In 2024 alone, Germany poured between €90 and €100 billion into this machine. The federal government provided €58 billion, while the European Investment Bank added €8.6 billion in fresh loans, the EU’s InvestEU program €9.1 billion, and the EU’s Innovation and Environment Funds about €20 billion. Without this constant flow of financing, the zombie economy would collapse. As if to prove the point, the German government has funneled another €100 billion of debt—disguised as a “special fund”—into the ever-hungry green subsidy machine.
Pseudo-economies survive only through new injections of capital, producing continuously against market demand. Internal tensions rise until collapse becomes inevitable. The Green Deal has trapped Europe in precisely this downward spiral.
The Spillover
Germany is now in its third year of recession and recording a record number of corporate bankruptcies. At the same time, the government has added half a million public-sector jobs in just six years, while 1.2 million private-sector jobs disappeared. Combined with uncontrolled migration, the result is extreme pressure on Germany’s welfare system.
Politics has retreated into a purely defensive posture: the welfare state as a catch basin for the hundreds of thousands losing their livelihoods, while the private sector collapses under the burden of energy costs and subsidies.
The diagnosis is clear: the Green Deal is a dead end. Every euro spent on it crowds out private capital markets, misallocates resources, and shackles workers in unproductive sectors. The contrast with Argentina is striking: there, President Milei slashed the state’s share of GDP by six percentage points and triggered an economic boom of 7.7% growth.
Transformation Requires Pain
The only way out for Europe is to accept a painful transformation phase, shrink the state, and abandon its eco-fantasies. Rational energy policy means nuclear power and reintegrating Russian energy supplies.
Yet public opinion tells a different story: 64% of Germans are satisfied with renewables or want more of them. Years of state propaganda have erased the link between green subsidies and economic collapse. The climate-change narrative- moralized and weaponized – has cemented itself into public consciousness.
Renewables may have their place, but only in free markets, without coercion or forced levies. The green zombie economy has never succeeded in reviving Europe’s growth. It is time to face reality and tear down this structure before anything new can be built.
The Next Attempt
But Europe shows no signs of changing course. The bureaucracy has grown too large to dismantle itself. From Berlin to Brussels, leaders treat the industrial exodus as a series of unfortunate accidents rather than the direct result of their policies. The cozy “Made for Germany” roundtable between Friedrich Merz and DAX CEOs confirmed the suspicion of corporate-statist collusion.
Having failed with the Green Deal, Europe’s politicians are now trying a new pseudo-economy: a debt-fueled military-industrial complex. According to a study by Ernst & Young, Germany’s DAX companies cut 30,000 jobs in the first half of 2025—except for defense contractors Rheinmetall and MTU Aero Engines, which increased headcount by 17% and 7%, respectively.
The EU’s plan: by 2035, half of all European defense goods—from artillery and cyber defense to precision munitions—will be produced within the bloc, creating up to 660,000 jobs. This will be financed not only by swelling national defense budgets but also by EU programs like ReARM Europe and SAFE, which will raise hundreds of billions in new debt.
Eyes Wide Shut
Brussels plans to mobilize an additional €800 billion in defense spending by 2030. Yet no sector produces further from real consumer demand than the arms industry. This is Keynesian pseudo-economics in its most extreme form—buying time with debt while starving private capital markets.
The rise of the defense lobby as Brussels’ new darling will turbocharge corruption, deepen the divide between parasitic EU structures and shrinking productive forces, and cement corporatist cronyism as the EU’s operating system. Von der Leyen’s Pfizer text-message scandal remains the most fitting symbol of this clandestine Brussels machine.
In the end, Europe’s war economy has neither the resources nor the technology to deliver on the dream of a militarized EU. It is a tragic rerun of the Green Deal—propaganda-driven, debt-fueled, and doomed to collapse.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
