When Ursula Von der Leyen sealed the EU’s abject capitulation to Donald Trump, adding to the Euro NATO pledge for 5% of GDP to be spent on “defence” by the end of the decade and doing a “deal” for a lower tariff than Trump had originally threatened with no reciprocal obligations on the part of the US; she copper bottomed it with a pledge to import $750 billion worth of US fossil fuels in coming years.

This is a core part of Trump’s attempt to dig in on the fuels of the past – he has to bully his subordinate allies into buying the stuff, even if its not in their economic interests to do so; and they will struggle to find a use for it. As long as they cough up, that’s not his concern.

Von der Leyen, in the process, seems to have caught Trump’s habit of telling giant lies with breezy self confidence. She repeated her comment from December last year that US LNG is cheaper than Russian natural gas. “We still get a lot of LNG (liquefied natural gas) through Russia, from Russia. Why not replace it with U.S. gas, which is cheaper for us and reduces our gas prices?” she said at the time.

This is not simply untrue, it is the OPPOSITE of the truth. Ask any German consumer or business. At the end of last year Germans were paying 74% more per unit of gas than they were before the sanctions imposed on Russia and the blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline.

Possibly more disturbing than the lying, is the way that these comments are reported without being debunked, as are Trump’s continuous assertions that wind is “the most expensive form of energy”, when it is one of the cheapest, which is why it is growing so fast.

We should also note that US LNG has a carbon footprint 33% worse than coal.