WSJ What’s News - How Green Energy Slashed Emissions But Crippled Europe's Economy

Episode Date: December 4, 2025

A.M. Edition for Dec. 4. A controversial U.S. boat strike takes a new turn, as an Admiral plans to tell lawmakers that two survivors were trying to continue their drug-run. WSJ correspondent Shelby Holliday explains why videos of the strike have sparked allegations of war crimes. Plus WSJ’s Tom Fairless and Max Colchester detail how the promise of Europe’s green energy transition has proved costly for consumers and damaging for the economy. And the billionaire class is booming – with a new study showing the world has more mega-rich than ever before. Caitlin McCabe hosts. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Get no frills delivered. Shop the same in-store prices online and enjoy unlimited delivery with PC Express Pass. Get your first year for $2.50 a month. Learn more at pceexpress.ca. A controversial U.S. boat strike takes a new turn, as an admiral plans to tell lawmakers that two survivors were trying to continue their drug run. Plus, we dig into why Europe's ambitious. vicious green energy plans delivered emissions cuts, but none of the economic benefits. I mean, everyone's energy bills in Europe have gone up substantially, and that is exacerbating

a cost of living crisis in the UK, and it's also feeding into a sense that the system has failed them. And the billionaire class is booming, with a new study showing the world has more mega-rich than ever before. It's Thursday, December 4th. I'm Caitlin McCabe for the Wall Street Journal, and here's the AM edition of What's News. The top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Now we begin with a journal exclusive. That a senior U.S. commander is expected to tell lawmakers that the two survivors of a controversial boat strike were attempting to continue their drug run. Details of the September strike have emerged as a matter of concern for Congress.

They are seeking information about the role that Admiral Frank Mitch Bradley played in continuing to target the two-sumption. survivors, along with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on whether the operation violated the laws of war. Hegseth has told reporters that Bradley ended up firing another round of missiles at the two survivors to sink the ship, destroy the drugs, and kill the alleged narco-terrorists. Journal correspondent Shelby Holiday explains why that is proving so controversial. The Department of Defense's own law of war manual states that the U.S. cannot fire upon combatants in a shipwreck who are unable to fight. But Admiral Frank Mitch Bradley, the Special Operations Commander who executed the mission at the direction of Defense Secretary

Pete Hegeseth, plans to tell lawmakers that the survivors were not considered to be shipwrecked. Instead, the men remained on board the damaged vessel alongside packages of narcotics. Secretary Hegeseth, who oversaw the strike as the target engagement authority that day, has defended the attack. Law of war experts say that evidence might be needed to make a call on whether the strike was legal or illegal. For example, if the boat was incapacitated and the drug runners couldn't threaten U.S. assets, they may still meet the definition of unable to fight.

Yesterday, President Trump released a video showing the first strike. When asked if he will release the video showing the second strike, he said he would and signaled his continued support for the operations. I don't know what they have, but whatever they have would certainly release. No problem. You know, we stopped. Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives. For more of our exclusive coverage of the boat strikes, check out Shelby's analysis.

We've left a link in our show notes. For years, European leaders sold their citizens on a seemingly simple story. Embrace the green energy transition and virtually everyone would benefit. Citizens would have green jobs and cheap and abundant solar and wind energy alongside a sharp reduction in carbon emissions. But roughly two decades on, that promise hasn't played out. Carbon emissions are down, but Germany, for example, now has the highest electricity prices in the developed world. Journal reporters Tom Fairless and Max Colchester have been digging into the consequences of the green energy transition. Tom, Max, thanks for joining. Can you give us a bit

of a backdrop of how we got here? For the past two decades, European leaders have been promising this green transition as a central part of their future energy plans. And they promised plenty of green jobs as part of this transition away from fossil fuels onto solar and wind energy and cheap prices and low emissions. And now parts of that promise aren't going to come true. The cheap energy, seems like, according to economists, it could still be decades away if it ever comes. There are green jobs. There are people putting up wind turbines all over Germany and the UK, putting up solar panels on people's roofs. At the same time, you have job destruction. So net net, some studies suggest it'll be a wash or there'll be maybe even fewer jobs in future during this

transition. I think it's fair to say that Europe was hit by a combination of bad policy and bad luck when it comes to climate. It was bad policy in the sense that it charged ahead with a massive shift in how it produced electricity without really investing in the transmission networks needed to move that intermittent bursts of energy that renewables provide or investing in sort of more constant sources of energy like nuclear power. And then it was bad luck in the sense that there was a war in Ukraine which pushed up the cost of gas, which underpins the cost of electricity for a lot of European nations, and interest rates also went up. So it became a lot more expensive to finance these products. So the net result is

that consumers in Europe are being hit by a double whammy. They're still at the mercy right now of imported volatile fossil fuels, while also shouldering enormous upfront costs to build out this new green energy infrastructure. Your story mentions that the green energy transition in Europe has crippled consumers and been damaging for industries. Can you give us some examples of how that's played out? Yeah, there's been a series of, especially in the chemicals industry of firms effectively shutting up shop in Europe to then move production to places like China. So you have this kind of perverse effect where the energy intensive industry isn't stopping. It's just happening the other side of the world and its products are then being

shipped all the way back to Europe to be consumed. So in a way, we're way there's no net reduction in pollution. If anything, it's worse. And that seems to be a big effect. And the secondary effect is really on people on the ground. I mean, everyone's energy bills in Europe have gone up substantially. And that is exacerbating a cost of living crisis in the UK. And it's also feeding into a sense that the system has failed them. But they were promised cheap energy as part of this transition. And politicians across the board said that this is something that would lead people better off. But in fact, they're paying more. I think it's always very easy to look back at situations like this in retrospect and think about the ways that things could have

been done differently. What was another alternative that the continent could have pursued? So whereas the renewables in the US and China are also being added in large volumes, they're being added on top. But in Europe, there was this effort to do a transition to switch one for the other. And that has created energy shortages, which is what, what is driving the higher prices. One alternative would be to focus on places in Europe where the renewable energies make sense economically. There are places where they do. In Spain, which has got these high plateaus with lots of wind and lots of sun, it seems as though that might be an economical place to use renewable power widely and even maybe to funnel, pipe that power

up into central Europe. And in the Nordic countries as well, the calculation is better. better for renewables because they have hydropower. And that's more of a steady source of energy, which is what industrial businesses need. The problem with solar and wind is that they're volatile. You have to store them. And that the overall cost for the system is probably higher. So you need extra power capacity. You need extra grid. You need extra power lines. And you need storage, which is expensive. So then what is the landscape right now? Are we seeing, net zero projects being scrapped entirely, or where do people think things had from here? The fact is Europe's quite far down this transition road. It's not something you can just stop

at this point. Once you start it, you kind of have to try and see it to some form of conclusion. Goldman Sachs did some work on this, and they found that over the next decade, around three trillion euros worth of investment will have to go into grid infrastructure in Europe. And that's double what Europe spent in the last 10 years. That's a massive outlet. especially at a time when a lot of these countries are fiscally constrained, it's a bit of a conundrum as to what you do. Do you race ahead to try and get this thing done in the hope that electricity prices do fall and you just suck up a big hit over the next few years?

Do you try and stretch it out? Or do you end up with a sort of half-completed transition, which kind of could end up with the kind of worst of both worlds? And I think a lot of people fear that we'll end up with that last scenario. That's the journal's Tom Fairless and Max Colchester. Thanks both. Thanks, Caitlin. Thanks, Kailen.

Coming up, why Open AI boss Sam Altman is looking to space. Yes, you heard that right, for AI's energy needs. Plus, we look at why there are now more billionaires in the world than ever before. Those stories after the break. Now, the billionaire space race is heating up once again. We are exclusively reporting that Open AI boss Sam Altman has explored acquiring or partnering with a rocket company, potentially building a competitor to Elon Musk's SpaceX. We understand that Altman reached out to at least one rocket maker, Stoke Space, over the summer,

and that discussions picked up in the fall. While those talks are no longer active, one of the proposals discussed was for OpenAI to make investments worth billions of dollars over time in order to end up with a controlling stake. Altman has been interested in the possibility of building data centers in space for some time, thinking that the energy needed to run AI systems might eventually become so large that it could strain Earth's resources. The idea is that orbital data centers would allow companies to harness the power of the sun to operate them.

Big techs ventures are also garnering the interest of Congress, with Senator Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats pressing the bosses of companies, including NVIDIA, META, and Amazon to provide details of their donations to President Trump's White House ballroom. The journal has seen letters to corporate executives in which the lawmakers note that many of the donors have active business before the federal government, raising questions about whether the donations could lead to more favorable treatment. So the obvious question is, what are these corporate donors expecting in return for their money? Look, they're not donating to Trump's ballroom out of the goodness of their hearts.

If you asked me, it sure looks like bribery for special favors from Donald Trump and his administration. That's Elizabeth Warren speaking there in a video posted to her website recently. Invidia said in a statement that as an American company, its support for the U.S. is paramount and independent of any other business interests. Meta and Microsoft declined to comment. The other companies didn't immediately respond. And one final update on the lifestyles of the rich and famous. The world has more billionaires than ever before. That's according to Swiss Bank UBS, which calculated that some 2,900 billionaires now control

$15.8 trillion. That's 287 more billionaires than a year ago. The growth of the billionaire class was partly due to the soaring valuations of tech companies, and rising stock markets. UBS found that the new self-made billionaires created in 2025 were entrepreneurs from a range of fields. They include Ben Lamb, founder of colossal biosciences, a company working to de-extinct several extinct animals. The list also includes crypto-billionaire Justin's son. You might remember him as the guy who paid more than $6 million at a Sotheby's auction last year for a banana duct tape to a wall.

And that's it for What's News for this Thursday morning. Today's show is produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff. And I'm Caitlin McCabe for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back tonight with a new show. Until then, thanks for listening.