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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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Remember the big energy crisis that Europe was supposed to be doomed with for years to come? Yeah, it's pretty much gone. Worth pointing out two things.

First, natural gas demand has been much weaker than anticipated since China is weaker. Indeed, there is now a surplus of gas in the world market.Some people claim that "last winter we got lucky", but this doesn't explain how gas storage is at historically high levels. Germany, Europe's biggest gas consumer, has an excellent position going into the autumn.

Second, renewable energy is beating new records by the day. In Northern Europe, electricity prices are bouncing around zero and occasionally dipping below the line into negative territory.There's also a structural trend of rapidly growing renewable energy, which means that even as gas prices return to historical norms, it is unlikely that consumption will stay the same. The shift now underway to renewable and clean energy (e.g. nuclear) is permanent. Russia had its chance at energy blackmail and it turned out it was a dud.

I think there are a couple of conclusions to draw from this. The most important one is that scaremongering and hysteria rarely pays to listen to. We can broaden this to a discussion about climate change or even immigration. Sure, there will be issues, but the doomsters on both issues were proven wrong historically. So were the doomsters on Europe's supposedly "permanent energy crisis" thesis.Then why do people persist by wallowing in fear? I don't have a clear answer but perhaps there are evolutionary adaptions that were beneficial to those who were erring on the side of caution?

Another important takeaway for me is once a crisis gets going you should never underestimate humanity's capacity for adaption and change. The system we inhabit may look brittle, but it's probably a lot more sturdy than we give it credit for. Some of us still remember the panicked predictions about the food supply chains breaking down when Covid hit, and plenty people stocked up on tons of canned food, often for no good reason. Some even talked of famine.

Perhaps being the optimist just isn't socially profitable. You're taken more seriously by being a "deeply concerned" pessimist. If this is true, then social incentives will be skewed to having the bad take. People who will be aware of this will probably draw the right conclusions in times when most other folks are losing their minds in fear.

What happened is that Russian oil was bought by India and sold onto Europe. Meanwhile, the Europeans bought gas from Asia (which buys from Russia) and the US. It's one of the biggest and most wasteful fails in sanctions policy of all time (for Europeans at least, America is doing quite well). They've just been moving gas and oil in circles around Eurasia.

Furthermore, gas is necessary for all kinds of industrial processes and fertilizer, in which ways which cannot be replaced. The EU's nuclear renaissance looks pretty pathetic. As of May 2022, two nuclear plants were under construction in Slovakia and one in France: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513671/number-of-under-construction-nuclear-reactors-worldwide/

The EU's 'nuclear renaissance' is 1/5 of what China is building. Now it may have changed since then but do people expect really efficient, dynamic, rapid construction in the European Union?

Even now, German electricity prices are 0.69 Euros/kilowatt, down 3-4x since the peak of the crisis in 2022. So what? That's still ridiculously high! In Australia, electricity costs about a third of that. It's even cheaper in the US. Europe is in a permanent energy crisis and has been for years because their energy policy is enormously expensive and doesn't work.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-electricity-by-country

The high taxes on European electricity often go towards funding renewable energy - plus there are enormous subsidy packages to lower electricity prices.

Edit: Germany is in a recession, Russia is not.

I’m no energy expert but know a little. I don’t think natural gas can just be moved around like that. You need pipelines and lng facilities which are long term projects.

Gasoline of course could more easily be moved around.

China did buy far more electric cars than expected which helped out oil. I get energy not be at infinity prices makes a lot of sense as some usages get cut out but I’m surprised it’s flipped to below pre-war.

LNG can indeed be moved around like that.

After building facilities which I did mention. Which are expensive and no one built facilities to places with cheap Russian gas.

Like I literally said that so what was your point?

...via the pipelines and LNG facilities, which are long term projects.

As pipeline flows were closed, Russia hit a bottleneck in its shipping capacity by port, because they didn't have the infrastructure to simply take all the pipeline-gas and then push it through ports on top of the usual port-exports. Hence why they filled their storage to capacity and then started cutting production.

The Russian Deputy Prime Minister statement from February was a 25% reduction in gas exports by volume in 2022, blaming the loss of the Nord Stream Pipeline and European customers (who primarily bought via pipelines) shunning it, and stating that the solution was the eastern China route, which is itself a pipeline project.

Were LNG truly fungible in the way RandomRanger describes and sliders1234 contested, that wouldn't have happened. The Russian gas that used to go to Europe wasn't simply put on ships to India to be resold to the Europeans. It just didn't reach the market, beyond whatever surge capacity the Russians had beyond their normal sea-based LNG export capacity.

Rather, the Europeans paid premiums to buy the sea-based LNG that was typically exported for Asia, which has been a market the Russians aren't a major party in.