>I'm sure the richest country in the world will do fine.

You underestimate how addicted the US is to cheap energy and how wasteful it is at the same time.

Remember how your lifestyle always expands to fill the available resources no matter how good you have it? Well if tomorrow they'd have to pay EU prices, the country would have a war.

When you lived your entire life not caring about the energy bill or about saving energy, it's crippling to suddenly have scale back and be frugal even if that price would still be less than what other countries pay.

It's hard to appreciate the difference in 'abundance mentality' between the median US and EU person. It always struck me as an interesting culture difference. While both EU and US grew in prosperity post WWII, I feel the US narrative was quite on another level.