That's not especially ironic though. In doing that Europe avoids the pollution associated with shale gas exploitation. The gas itself isn't different once it is extracted, so it doesn't matter if the imported gas is shale gas or whatever else.
The root problem is needing gas at all, of course.
If a problem has no solution then it's not really a "problem", it's just a fact to be accepted. Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals. There is no conceivable future where we don't need that stuff to maintain a modern industrial civilization.
> Regardless of heat and power generation, natural gas is a crucial feedstock for manufacturing many types of chemicals.
Maybe, but the vast majority of gas use in industry is for heat and power and electricity is a trivial substitute there.
And even the direct use as process input is far from unavoidable, because in a lot of cases this use could be reduced/eliminated or shift to synthetic inputs, which would happen organically if prices shifted long-term anyway.
The hypocrisy is that, like many other polluting industries, Europe is just sending pollution somewhere else. Then it self-congratulates on how green it is. And it pays foreign powers through the nose at the same time, and then European governments say that "there is no money".
There is very little strategic thinking in Europe.