- The EU is abandoning its 2035 ban on new gasoline and diesel cars.
- It will instead propose a softened 90% emissions reduction target.
- This follows intense pressure from a struggling European auto industry.
- Consumer rejection of costly and impractical electric vehicles forced the reversal.
- The move signals a major retreat from the bloc’s aggressive climate agenda.
(Natural News)—The European Union is preparing to abandon its core plan to outlaw the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2035. This dramatic reversal, expected to be formally announced next week, follows intense pressure from a struggling auto industry and confronts the reality that consumers have largely rejected the forced transition to electric vehicles. The move represents the bloc’s most significant retreat from its aggressive green agenda in half a decade, signaling a victory for economic pragmatism over climate alarmism.
According to senior European Parliament member Manfred Weber, head of the center-right European People’s Party, the European Commission will propose scrapping the outright ban. Instead, automakers will face a 90% reduction in CO? emissions for their fleets by 2035, compared to 2021 levels, a softening of the original 100% cut mandate. Weber called the initial plan “a serious industrial policy mistake.”
This policy surrender did not happen in a vacuum. For years, traditional automotive powerhouses like Germany have watched with growing alarm as their markets shrank under the weight of unworkable mandates, while competition from lower-cost Chinese rivals intensified. The economic pain became undeniable. Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz all reported weaker deliveries this year. As the provided materials state, “Large parts of the automotive industry in Europe, including in Germany… are in an extremely difficult economic situation.”
A rebellion against reality
The original 2023 regulation was a hallmark of EU climate activism, designed to forcibly accelerate an electric vehicle revolution. Yet it ignored fundamental market truths. Consumers, concerned with cost, reliability, and practicality, never embraced EVs with the fervor that bureaucrats predicted. Ford CEO Jim Farley highlighted this disconnect, stating, “It’s not a sustainable reality today in Europe,” and that industry needs were “not well balanced” with EU CO? targets.
The narrative pushed by climate activists—that the technology, infrastructure, and consumer demand were all aligned—has crumbled. Although European carmakers are making EVs, many report demand is not meeting expectations as consumers hesitate to purchase more expensive EVs and charging infrastructure remains insufficient.
The high cost of green dogma
The economic consequences of this top-down engineering extended beyond showrooms. The EU’s self-imposed energy crisis, following its decision to drastically cut imports of Russian oil and gas after the Ukraine conflict, sent power prices soaring, further crippling industrial competitiveness. Automakers were shackled with soaring production costs while being commanded to sell products their customers did not want.
The proposed compromise opens the door for continued sales of combustion engine vehicles that use so-called “CO?-neutral” fuels, such as biofuels and e-fuels. This “multi-technology approach,” as advocated by industry experts, acknowledges that the internal combustion engine, as one fuel systems executive noted, will “be around for the rest of the century.” It is a concession to technological openness that should have been the starting point, not a desperate correction.
While EV-only companies like Polestar protest, asking, “So what are we waiting for?” the market has already answered: it is waiting for affordable, practical, and consumer-driven innovation, not diktats from Brussels. The EU’s retreat is a lesson in the limits of political power against economic and consumer reality. It reveals the folly of letting activist agendas override basic industrial strategy and consumer choice. This isn’t just a policy tweak; it’s a necessary correction from a bureaucratic machine that finally hit a wall built by the very people it sought to control. The question now is whether other sectors shackled by similar green dogma will see their own long-overdue liberation.
Sources for this article include:
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
The EU let a stupid little girl, with no life experience, convince the EU the end of the world was coming. They rejected coal that made electricity and powered their industry. How does industry compare to 10 to 20 years ago? How many jobs were lost? Will those jobs ever come back?