An article on the Guardian website today has a dramatic headline (‘The trend is irreversible’: has Romania shattered the link between economic growth and high emissions?”) to cheer the faithful, but the article itself undermines the message in the headline. Wisely, perhaps, the headline speculates, rather than asserts, that Romania may have “shattered” the link between economic growth and high emissions. Wisely, because even a shallow dive (never mind a deep one) into economic and demographic data suggests that the answer is in the negative, whatever the Guardian might like you to think.

The sub-heading to the article claims that emissions have plunged 75% since communist times, but admits that “for some” the transition has been “brutal”. After talking about wind and solar developments in Romania, plus an extension to the life of a nuclear plant, we are then told:

Few would consider Romania a climate leader but on one metric it has found the holy grail of the energy transition. The country has decoupled economic growth from pollution faster than anywhere else in Europe, and perhaps even the world. Its net greenhouse gas emissions intensity fell by 88% between 1990 and 2023, the latest data shows, meaning each dollar’s worth of economic activity heats the planet almost 10 times less than it did before. Emissions have plunged by 75%.

And then the Guardian moves on from asking, to claiming:

How did Romania shatter the historical link between the economy and the climate?

It would have been better to ask than to assert. For there are quite a few problems with the assertion. Even the Guardian acknowledges “the oppressive reign of Nicolae Ceaușescu, a dictator obsessed with self-sufficiency, the Romanian economy became industrial and polluted.” As the Guardian also acknowledges: “When Ceaușescu was shot and industry privatised, factories closed, mines shut and power plants slashed their output.” First, the economy collapsed. Then remove the dead hand of an appallingly inefficient totalitarian Communist state, and improvements to economic efficiency are bound to follow. Wikipedia confirms Romanian “economic stagnation throughout the 1980s and – towards the end of the decade – the conditions were created for an economic crisis. The country’s industrial capacity was eroded as equipment grew obsolete, energy intensity increased, and the standard of living deteriorated significantly. Draconian restrictions were imposed on household energy use to ensure an adequate supply for the industry.” GDP slumped by 5.8% in 1989 alone.

While it is true that Romania’s emissions have declined rapidly (some of which reduction is explained above), that has probably been achieved by plucking the same low-hanging fruit that the UK plucked – reducing reliance on coal and switching to gas (though it still seems to be 16^th among EU countries in terms of the proportion of coal that it uses to generate electricity). It’s also worth noting that Ember’s recent report shows Romania’s electricity generation being sourced from wind and solar to the extent of “above 20%” (how much above isn’t stated), which is well below the EU average, and nowhere near the claim made for the EU as a whole that wind and solar are generating more power than fossil fuels. In Romania that most certainly is not the case, as the graph on page 12 of the Ember report makes abundantly clear. Indeed, of the 22 countries featured in the Ember report, Romania features 16^th as regards solar’s share of its electricity generation. Romania merits no special mentions in the Ember report, and I assume that is because Ember is less impressed than the Guardian appears to be regarding its “progress”.

As to how rapid that “progress” is, I thought I should take a look at EDGAR (the European Commission’s Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research). This shows very clearly that per capita emissions and absolute emissions declined rapidly between 1990 and 2000 but that thereafter the rate of decline slowed significantly. Moreover, both absolute emissions and per capita emissions actually increased slightly in Romania between 2023 and 2024. The slow reduction in emissions between 2000 and 2023, followed by the slight rise between 2023 and 2024 is even less immpressive when one bears in mind that Romania’s population has declined steadily from a peak of roughly 23.2 million in 1990 to something less than 19 million today. Emissions are now increasing slightly, even as the population continues to decline.

One of the reasons why the population is declining is because so many Romanians left their home country in the years following its accession to the European Union. Whatever some of us in the UK think of EU membership, there can be little doubt that it has produced a massive financial bonus for Romania, a bonus that is unconnected to the source(s) of its energy, and a bonus that the Guardian article didn’t think to mention. First of all, direct payments to Romania from the EU to date amount to more than €100 million (gross). Depending on which source one believes, this is anywhere between €70 and €80 billion net. EU funds have significantly boosted Romania’s economy; for every €1 contributed, Romania has received roughly €3 back in aid.

This largesse is set to continue: The European Commission has proposed increasing Romania’s budget for the next seven-year cycle (2028–2034) to €60.2 billion, up from the previous €46.8 billion.

Furthermore, there is the addition of financial remissions from the Romanian diaspora. Romanians working abroad have sent around €60 billion back home over the past 12 years (from 2013 to mid-2025).

Despite these huge financial inflows, Romania remains very much at the bottom end of the EU financially, according to Eurostat, with GDP per capita between 20% and 30% below the EU average. It’s not exactly shattering the link between economic growth and high emissions, is it?

And much of the reduction in emissions (which no longer seems to be happening) is explained by the Guardian thus:

The shift to a service-based economy also led to upheavals in agriculture, where livestock numbers fell and farms modernised or closed. Beleaguered forests got a respite from the high levels of logging under communism and expanded on to abandoned plots. The amount of carbon absorbed by nature increased by 77%, official data suggests.

Furthermore:

Entire communities withered after workers lost their jobs in factories and mines. Former coal towns depopulated at alarming rates as young people sought better-paid work abroad….“…the transition was brutal for a lot of people.”

As for the future, even the Guardian acknowledges that the Romanian picture still seems to involve oil and gas:

…“We’ll use petroleum for at least 100 years more,” said Iulian Pițoiu, a petroleum engineering student at the Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiești, the only such institution on the continent. Adrian Muşoiu, a fellow student following in the footsteps of his father, who has worked in the surrounding oilfields since he was 16, said he was aware of job losses but did not feel his career was at risk. Their classmates agreed that neither they nor their professors were worried about Romania’s energy transition.

The students may well be correct. In March, drilling began in the Black Sea for Neptun Deep, which is expected to be the largest gas extraction project in Europe. In July, workers finished an EU-subsidised pipeline to funnel the fuel to Podișor – a village over from the solar-and-battery farm Enery is about to build – where it joins a pipeline linking it to the rest of Europe. The Mintia coal plant, which was mothballed in 2021, is being converted into a gas-fired power plant expected to rank among Europe’s biggest….

A “dash for gas”, then. And lots of oil.

I’m not really sure what the point of the Guardian article is. It’s an interesting read, and it does properly mention lots of caveats regarding its main claim. Yet it doesn’t offer a deeper analysis, and its claim seems to be superficially correct at best, while being highly misleading in reality. I suppose causal readers get no further than the headline, in which case they will be reassured that all is well in the world of net zero. I would suggest that any confidence thus engendered is likely to be severely tested in the UK in the years ahead.