This month, Greece announced a new offshore natural gas exploration deal with Chevron, covering areas south of the Peloponnese and Crete. At the European level, the agreement met no notable pushback, even as renewed fossil fuel exploration sits uneasily alongside the European Union’s climate commitments. This contradiction is often framed as policy “tension.” Yet it increasingly looks like a defining test for a continent that has pledged climate neutrality by 2050.

Europe does not face a simple tension. It faces a moment of reckoning.

In Brussels, the word most often used is “balance.” A balance between climate ambition and industrial competitiveness, between strategic autonomy and open markets and between energy security and decarbonization. It sounds measured, responsible, technocratic.

But what we are witnessing is not merely tension. It is a lack of directional clarity at a time when clarity is precisely what is required.
The EU has staked its global identity on the green transition. Electrification of transport was not only an environmental necessity; it was presented as Europe’s industrial renaissance. Batteries, electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, critical minerals, hydrogen. This was to be the new engine of European growth and sovereignty. Climate policy became industrial policy. Industrial policy became geopolitical strategy.

Yet reality has been less forgiving.

The EU has staked its global identity on the green transition, but China has moved faster and deeper across the supply chain, from mining and processing critical minerals to battery manufacturing and electric vehicle scale

China has moved faster and deeper across the supply chain, from mining and processing critical minerals to battery manufacturing and electric vehicle scale. The transatlantic relationship with the United States has been progressively hollowed out. Across administrations, Washington has moved toward an explicit prioritization of domestic economic power and strategic competition with China, often treating Europe as an afterthought rather than a co-architect of global order. The alliance has lost its sense of reciprocity.

Then, almost abruptly, artificial intelligence burst onto the scene with a force that altered the tempo of everything. What had been framed primarily as a green industrial transformation became, almost overnight, a digital power race. Data centers, cloud infrastructure, advanced chips, algorithmic dominance. AI reoriented capital, policy attention, and geopolitical rivalry.

Heightened rivalries

Europe responded by attempting to fuse these trajectories, linking digital leadership to green competitiveness under a renewed innovation drive. But the addition was not neutral. AI dramatically intensifies energy demand. It sharpens mineral dependencies. It heightens the rivalry between the United States and China. And it compresses time horizons. What was already a demanding climate transition became layered with a new, energy hungry technological contest.

In response, Europe is hedging. It is securing gas supplies. It is revisiting domestic extraction. It is softening timelines. It is speaking of pragmatism. Gas is once again framed as indispensable. Fossil infrastructure reappears under the banner of resilience. Energy security, understandably, becomes paramount.

None of this is irrational. We live in a fractured world, one in which energy, minerals, semiconductors, data, and finance have all become instruments of statecraft. Interdependence has been securitized.

But there is a deeper risk. When climate ambition is rhetorically upheld while fossil expansion proceeds, public trust erodes. When the green transition is sold as destiny but implemented as contingency, citizens sense the contradiction. Entrenched interests regain confidence. The political space for delay widens. What was once framed as an inevitable transformation begins to look optional. Europe’s challenge is not that it faces difficult trade-offs. Every serious transition contains trade-offs. The challenge is that they are not being articulated within a unifying strategic narrative.

Greece’s role

And this is where Greece becomes both participant and mirror. Recent fossil fuel exploration agreements are narrated domestically in triumphalist terms. Geopolitical elevation. Strengthened ties with Washington. Contribution to European energy security. Greece presents itself as a reliable team player willing to shoulder part of the burden in a volatile geopolitical environment. It also aspires to position itself as an energy and digital node in the emerging AI economy, aware that data centers and advanced technologies require abundant and stable power.

These are not trivial ambitions. In a world of contested supply chains, geographic positioning matters. Yet Greece is not a heavy industrial economy seeking to power vast manufacturing complexes. Its economic backbone remains tourism, real estate, services, culture, climate, and landscape. Its comparative advantage lies in environmental quality and historical depth. The natural beauty of the Aegean and Ionian seas is not peripheral to its prosperity. It is central.

Here, too, the narrative fragments. Everything becomes opportunity. We can be a gas hub, a renewable champion, an AI node, a tourism haven, a logistics gateway, a real estate magnet, a strategic outpost. But a strategy is not the accumulation of opportunities. It is the discipline of prioritization.

Europe faces the same temptation to do everything at once. It faces the same temptation to hedge in all directions, to secure fossil capacity while subsidizing electrification, to champion climate leadership while tolerating backsliding and to race into AI expansion while scrambling for the energy to power it.

Greece’s recent fossil fuel exploration agreements are narrated domestically in triumphalist terms, and it aspires to position itself as an energy and digital node. Yet Greece is not a heavy industrial economy

The result is not hypocrisy in the crude sense. It is drift. And drift is dangerous in an era of acceleration. What is needed now is not moralism but coherence, not denunciation but design. Europe possesses extraordinary assets: regulatory power, technological depth, financial sophistication, democratic institutions and social capital. It remains uniquely positioned to shape global standards from carbon markets to digital governance. But standards without strategic alignment will not suffice.

The umbrella theme must be resilience anchored in decarbonized competitiveness. Energy security cannot be framed as an alternative to climate action; it must be embedded within it. Industrial policy cannot oscillate between protectionism and laissez faire; it must identify where Europe intends to lead and where it will partner. Transitional fossil use, if deemed necessary, must be transparently bounded, not rhetorically normalized.

For Greece, the same principle applies. If fossil exploration is pursued for geopolitical or security reasons, the parameters must be clear: time horizon, environmental safeguards, integration with renewable expansion and fiscal allocation toward long-term transformation. Otherwise, short-term gains risk undermining the very assets that sustain the economy.

This is a moment of recalibration. Europe is not declining, it is navigating a profound structural shift driven by climate stress, technological upheaval and strategic rivalry. The path forward will not be linear. But citizens need a clear signal; what is the central organizing idea and what future is being built. Without it, the public hesitates, markets waver and policy drifts.

The question is not whether Europe must secure energy or respond to geopolitical volatility; it must. Nor is the question whether Greece seeks opportunity in a turbulent landscape; of course it does.

The question is whether today’s choices form a coherent arc that aligns climate responsibility, industrial renewal, digital ambition, and geopolitical realism, or do those choices remain episodic reactions to crises.

Moments of reckoning can become moments of renewal, but only with candor. Europe does not need less ambition, it needs clearer ambition. And Greece, at the crossroads of energy, technology and climate vulnerability, has the opportunity not just to follow Europe’s direction, but to help shape it. The future will not be secured by hedging alone. It will be secured by choosing, and aligning, with conviction.

Sophia Kalantzakos is Global Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Public Policy at New York University/NYUAD.