Why “Self-Sufficiency” will spark more climate action than “Moral Ambitions”

Three years ago, together with Geert Noels and Yanaika Denoyelle, I co-authored “Climate Shock”, a book in which we outlined twenty climate solutions for Belgium and quantified their CO₂ impact. Since then, the world has changed profoundly, and so has the way we approach climate policy. Public interest in climate issues has declined, and political support across Europe is far more fragile than it was just a few years ago.

Many of today’s challenges in climate policy can be traced back to its underlying assumptions. In what follows, we place climate within its geopolitical and economic context, showing how Europe’s traditional, morally driven perspective has made its climate strategy increasingly vulnerable. A renewed focus on Self-Sufficiency can help recalibrate this narrative, accelerate the implementation of climate action, and better align public spending across defense, competitiveness, climate, and energy.

Climate transition in a new world order

Where the climate transition had gained momentum in recent years, this has now weakened for several reasons:

• Europe is facing new fundamental challenges, such as defense and a loss of competitiveness.
• Multilateralism is increasingly under pressure.
• Hard power politics have returned, forcing countries and regions like Europe to focus more on themselves.

As a result, trust in global institutions is declining, and international cooperation is becoming increasingly difficult. This raises an important question: how do these profound societal shifts affect our view on climate transition? To answer this, we first return to the essence behind the complexity of the climate challenge.

What do climate change and the Prisoner’s Dilemma have in common?

Solving climate change is an extremely complex challenge, for three main reasons:

1. The effects of CO₂ emissions are global. No one can be excluded from the benefits of emission reductions, while the costs are borne nationally. This creates a classic free-rider problem: every country has a rational incentive to do nothing and to benefit from the efforts of others. The climate problem therefore exhibits many features of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: collectively we would be better off by cooperating, yet individually it is rational to remain passive and wait for others to act.
2. The payback period of investments is very long. Measures taken today will only yield results decades from now, making it difficult to sustain social and political support.
3. The issue is complex and cross-sectoral. Reducing CO₂ emissions requires interventions across energy, food production, materials, transport, and more. Unlike the ozone depletion, which could be relatively easily addressed by replacing CFCs, there is no simple quick fix for CO₂.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma provides a highly useful framework for understanding climate change, as it helps explain why rational behavior at the individual level can lead to collectively inefficient outcomes, why cooperation is often so difficult to achieve, and why action tends to lag behind. Moreover, by studying this dilemma, we can better understand the conditions under which meaningful action can emerge. In what follows, we explore these conditions in more depth.

The dominant moral narrative in Europe

If we focus exclusively on climate change as a problem in which CO₂ must be reduced to keep the planet habitable for current and future generations, global trust and cooperation are therefore required to solve the free-rider problem and break the Prisoner’s Dilemma. This has been the dominant perspective in Europe over the past decades, which we will refer to as the “moral narrative”. Specifically, it means that countries and individuals acknowledge a shared responsibility to protect the planet, placing ethics, solidarity, and justice at the center of decision-making, and making choices based on what is right for current and future generations, rather than solely on self-interest.

In the traditional moral perspective, climate policy can only gain traction when a sufficient critical mass of actors participates. This is a very fragile equilibrium: as long as there is no trust that other countries will also invest, it is rational for each country to remain passive. Even if everyone recognizes that collective action is better, a single actor can destabilize the entire balance. Today, this actor appears to be the United States under the leadership of President Trump.

This makes the moral narrative vulnerable. It requires not only shared ethical convictions but also a robust mechanism for cooperation and oversight. In a world increasingly dominated by geopolitics and power politics, and where multilateral institutions are under pressure, this fragile balance becomes ever harder to maintain. As a result, climate measures can stall, despite widespread awareness of their urgency and necessity.

From Moral Leadership to Self-Sufficiency

Many experts point out that Europe needs to focus more on securing its own safety and self-sufficiency. Professor David Criekemans notes in his new book that we must choose a path of hyperrealism. European ideals remain important, but we need to prioritize capacity and power. To remain relevant, Europe must possess technological superiority, economic strength, and a strong defense.

It so happens that climate solutions and self-sufficiency are rarely opposites; on the contrary, they reinforce each other. Consider local solar and wind energy production, or recycling materials to reduce import dependency. A climate narrative built around “Self-Sufficiency,” with regional self-interest as its focus, will therefore unleash far more climate action than a story based on moral ambitions. It reframes climate action from a moral duty to a rational self-interest.

Moral narrative	Self-Sufficiency narrative
Focus on ethics, solidarity and justice	Focus on regional self-interest (safety, independence, resilience)
“Cooperate, or climate change is inevitable.”	“Become independent, and you are stronger.”
Short-term costs, long-term benefits	Immediate tangible benefits (jobs, security, control)
Success largely depends on others	Success depends on your own actions

 

The implications are significant, because this new narrative helps break the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the moral model, the benefits of CO₂ reduction mainly lie in limiting warming, but these advantages will only be felt decades from now. Trust and cooperation are therefore essential: if one party waits, the rest do too.

In a world where that trust is eroding, the self-sufficiency narrative provides a suitable alternative. From a regional self-interest perspective, the pay-off structure looks very different: the benefits - energy security, strategic independence, and safety - are immediate and tangible. Each actor therefore has an incentive to act, regardless of what others do. Cooperation remains useful for synergies and efficiency, but it is no longer a necessary condition for achieving results. This makes self-sufficiency a more stable strategic equilibrium.

Self-sufficiency has dominated in China for decades

In principle, China has been following this philosophy for decades. The country’s massive push for electric vehicles has little to do with moral climate ambitions; rather, it is driven by the desire to reduce dependence on oil imports, to secure technological leadership in automotive and battery technology, and to address severe air pollution in Chinese cities.

While China links climate and energy issues to its strategic interests, European climate efforts today appear more vulnerable because they rely on collective agreements and political support. In China, by contrast, cleantech investments continue robustly, precisely because they fit within a logic of self-sufficiency and technological leadership. This is also reflected in concrete figures: the market share of electric vehicles is steadily growing in China, whereas in Europe it has stagnated around 20% since 2022.

Figure 1: Electric car sales share by country. Source: IEA

 

“Climate Shock” revisited

In “Climate Shock”, we calculated the CO₂ impact of 20 climate solutions for Belgium by 2030. This resulted in a mosaic of solutions, as illustrated in the figure below. However, if you view this mosaic through a “self-sufficiency” lens, it almost equally reflects the outcome of an exercise focused on independence. Circularity reduces our reliance on materials from outside Europe. Energy renovations make our homes far less dependent on heating oil and gas. Nuclear energy, wind, solar, and geothermal increase our resilience. And so on.

How to navigate in the new world order

Concretely, this paradigm shift leads to several practical recommendations:

• Increase independence through energy networks, renewable energy, and nuclear power. Growing dependence on American gas is unavoidable in the short term, but it poses a geostrategic risk in the long term.
• Ensure a local supply of critical raw materials through domestic mining and recycling facilities.
• Align defense budgets with multiple objectives. It would be entirely rational to use the 5% defense standard for dual-use purposes to make our society more energy- and resource-independent.
• Pursue binational win-win partnerships to achieve synergies with greater speed and flexibility. Consider a shared nuclear strategy with the Netherlands or a joint CCS strategy with Norway.
• Build a “coalition of the willing” with non-European countries that face similar challenges, share a comparable geopolitical position, and can help us achieve climate and security ambitions. Examples include Canada (nuclear, resources, etc.) or Chile (energy, critical raw materials).

At Ortelius—the economic consulting firm of the Econopolis Group—we have conducted several studies on these topics in recent years. We researched Europe’s supply of critical raw materials (https://ortelius.be/critical-raw-materials/) and formulated concrete actions to make the Flemish industry competitive again by 2030 (https://ortelius.be/vlaamse-industrievisie-2030/).