I don't think it was a republican the one who "destroyed... inexhaustible energy supplies". It was well-meaning environmentalists in Europe who didn't bother with math nor science when they demanded to take down nuclear power and to buy gas from Russia. They were raised in the "end of history" culture of the nineties that was a little too cheerful, but busy shifting manufacture to Asia, and it favored more humanities in schools in this part of the world, in itself not a bad thing, but to the detriment of exact and logical thinking. Maybe all of it made our thinking an easy prey of the people selling the oil and the gas.

Republican or German butterflies (as in "butterfly effect") should not be blamed when they start a big scale avalanche on loose snow.