Every household in Europe sends roughly $2,500 a year to the fossil fuel system. The money leaves the house, leaves the street, leaves the town. To traders in Rotterdam. To LNG terminals in Qatar. To shareholders in Houston and Doha.
It does not come back.
Multiply $2,500 across a town of fifty thousand people. That's $125 million a year leaving the community. Every year. Not for local jobs or services. For molecules that arrive, burn, and vanish.
The €800 billion didn't fix the system. It paid the ransom to keep the existing one running for another winter.
In 2022, Europe had €800 billion to deploy. Thousands of euros per household across the continent. The mandate was real. The money was moving. And they sent it straight to the fossil fuel system — through the mechanism. Price caps flow to suppliers, who pay wholesale, which flows to producers already banking record profits. Shell $40bn. ExxonMobil $59bn. Vitol $15bn.
The bill didn't disappear. It moved onto public balance sheets — paid through debt, inflation, and taxes. The subsidy lasted a winter. The debt lasts a decade.
€800 billion in green investment would have been the largest local economic stimulus in European history. Instead it was the largest wealth transfer to oil and gas shareholders in European history.
When you invest in green, the installer lives twenty minutes away. The saving circulates. The multiplier runs. Fossil fuel subsidy has no multiplier. Green investment does. That's the whole argument.
The Iran crisis is the second chance.
Keep the money in the community. The $2,500 stops leaving. The jobs stay. The savings stay.