[traceroute66]

> Or actually brcause gas is expensive.

Gas in the UK is expensive because the Tories spent decades selling off the storage so developers could turn them into real estate. This continued well into the 2000's when, for example the lettuce (Truss) closed the Rough storage facility in 2017.

Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation. Another one of the Tory's great ideas. The UK privitisation model is designed to generate profit. Norway made a different choice. Equinor is majority state-owned, and Norwegian extraction operates within a framework designed to capture resource rents for public benefit. Britain privatised its way out of that option decades ago in the Thatcher-era and has never seriously revisited it.

Analysis from the University of Oxford[1] found that maximising oil and gas extraction from the North Sea would only save households £16 to £82 per year – and this would rely on tax revenues collected being distributed to households to offset their energy bills.

Dr Anupam Sen, co-author of the analysis, said the idea that “draining” the North Sea would make the UK more energy secure and significantly cut household bills is “sheer fantasy”. “We show that regardless of the remaining lifetime of North Sea oil and gas, a ‘drill baby drill’ approach to extraction would actually cost households more money versus continuing on our path to clean energy.”

The authors stress that savings gained from the clean energy transition are recurring annual reductions in bills which would continue indefinitely, whereas North Sea oil and gas are finite resources that would run out around 2040.

[1] https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/news/drill-baby-drill-appro...

[jordand]

Exactly, and the Tories banned onshore wind, and refused to really invest in offshore wind. We've got the North Sea and its perfect for wind farms we should have had for decades

[skippyboxedhero]

They didn't refuse to invest in offshore wind. Tories were the ones who started this ball rolling in the mid-2010s by breaknecking the removal of non-renewable energy production without any clear plan.

The issue with offshore wind is that it isn't always windy. If you look at modelling with energy system with a high proportion of offshore wind, you need other sources of energy which often isn't factored into the economic return of the original investment.

We are doing this because, for some reason, we have decided there is political capital in paying out these huge subsidies to large companies to produce expensive energy. I would think that would be obvious when the UK has extremely high electricity prices and renewable production is very high...where do you think the money is going? It is going to subsidise inefficient and expensive supply.

Also, one of the primary issues with the UK is that the political system heavily incentivizes people to blame "the other side" for these issues. The Tories were extremely aggressive in moving towards green energy but people who vote for Labour, because they support green energy, will have to believe the opposite. There are other posts on this chain that also blame the Tories for things that didn't happen. In this system, it is very hard for anything good to happen and is how you end up with someone like Starmer who appears to have almost no opinions on anything other than staying in power and keeping the gravy train going for the lads. Not serious. Expect things to get significantly worse.

Our electricity prices are much higher than anywhere else. I remember reading research last year that the cost of government intervention in so high that if gas prices tapered to zero, electricity prices would not fall. It is going to get much, much, much worse.

[shadowgovt]

General question because I'm ignorant of UK internal politics: are the Isles' energy prices just generally higher? There aren't any large sources of fossil fuels or natural gas that aren't offshore, right? And the coal got significantly used up by hundreds upon hundreds of years of mining.

I'm wondering if really, the causality is reversed: it's not that the renewables make energy expensive in the UK, it's that energy is expensive in the UK, which incentivized construction of a lot of renewables, because they're an overall cheaper source of energy long-term since you don't have to either pay your neighbors to import them or build rigs in the saltwater ocean?

[skippyboxedhero]

Yes, there are massive onshore reserves. The Tory government that has been accused on here of pimping the environment immediately banned all exploration.

There is are also two relatively big offshore fields that were taken to a very late stage of development and then stopped because of opposition by local government.

I would research exactly how big the gap is with other countries (and, remember, retail price is subsidised). The Cameron government made the active decision to order companies to shut down power plants with no plans for replacement. To be clear, nothing about energy...this is jut electricity provision. There was no economic incentive, that is why tens of billions were given to energy companies to produce non-economic, expensive power with guaranteed payments.

There was some research done last year iirc: if the UK paid zero for gas, the price of electricity would not stop rising because of the government intervention.

It is reasonable that you assume something rational must be going on here. But that model does not apply in the UK. Politics took over from economics a long time ago.

[youngtaff]

There aren’t massive untapped offshore reserves… the North Sea is a mature basin

The Tories granted a hundred plus drilling licenses and so far they’ve yielded a months worth of gas supply

[DrBazza]

There are still large untapped known fields in the North Sea within UK waters adjacent to the same that Norway are still profitably using. There is also vast swathes of UK waters that are unexplored, and are currently artificially expensive to do so due to UK taxation on fossil fuel companies.

The price of petrol at the pump is at least 50% Government direct tax - fuel duty, VAT (which multiplies the duty value - very cheeky). Then the other parts - wholesale price, retailer profit, delivery costs, have their tax implicitly priced into that. That probably makes the overall Government take something like 70% of the price you pay.

As for coal, there's apparently about 600 million tons of accessible usable coal left, which at current UK usage is good for quite a few decades if not more.

[bjourne]

Last I read the strike price for offshore wind was about half of that for nuclear power (Hinkley Point). In other words the "huge subsidies" aren't going to who you think they are.

[skippyboxedhero]

You don't understand what a subsidy is. Offshore wind subsidies are taken out of electricity bills, not the price. The price you are seeing does not include the subsidy.

The reason why Hinkley Point is expensive is completely solvable. The reason why it is expensive is because it is supposed to be expensive, that is the purpose. An A road near me has required two lanes, so far they have spent near £100m over twenty years and have not built anything. The basic premise of the UK political system is that people have no idea what the price of anything should be because it is all a political fiction.

When the costing was done for Hinkley 10 years ago the price was going to be, iirc, something like 50% above the price of gas which was at record lows. This was regarded as extremely expensive...electricity prices are up multiples and multiples since then. Since then, you have had armies of lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, planners working on the project full-time...and you are asking why it is expensive? Thinking this requires knowing so little about how much nuclear costs around the world and having literally zero idea about infra projects work in the UK (spoiler: there is massive corruption at almost every level, tens of billions in graft every year).

[ZeroGravitas]

Hinckley Point C has a Contract for Difference that basically means they know what they will be paid in advance.

Any savings they make constructing or overruns don't affect that.

So if anyone is grifting they are grifting the French taxpayer via EDF.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/16/edf-hinkley-...

[skippyboxedhero]

Yes, offshore wind has CFDs too. If you are building an offshore wind farm, you are spending lots of money to construct something that isn't a low-cost operator and will likely cause significant economic issues with customer's ability to pay you...therefore, CFD. This is how the government was able to intervene to cause non-economic outcomes.

And yes, as I explain above but which you seem to have not read...there was unbelievable levels of graft involved with Hinkley. EDF is not the victim, the reason why the CFD is there is to pay suppliers to EDF which are: lawyers, consultants, planners, etc. At some point, someone may get paid for building a nuclear power plant but that is a largely accidental outcome. If you compare to what other countries with functioning political systems, Korea for example, it is multiples. The costs and prices are so ludicrous, so out of control that no-one could think they make economic sense...and, of course, they don't. It is just corruption.

[jordand]

Labour and the Conservatives are no different from each other. The Tories back then expected the "free market" to take care of everything. And that "free market" has clearly failed British people given where we are. They were "extremely aggressive" in their words (like BoJo back in 2020) but really extremely passive in their actions. Britain really needs grid-scale energy storage to make renewables work and that is its own big challenge.

[phil21]

> grid-scale energy storage

This is currently called natural gas. You store it in the ground, and in "day tanks" on land connected to pipes.

Nuclear can also be seen in the same way in relation to renewables.

Batteries are currently much further than I ever thought possible, but still nowhere close to being cost effective enough for most areas.

If you forced every solar or wind installation to have at least 48 hours of nameplate capacity in storage, you would get closer to the true cost of deploying renewables. Right now there is a whole lot of cherry picking going on, where investors are taking the profitable easy stuff, collecting subsidies, and then making the hard expensive stuff someone else's problem.

Right now battery deployments cover the few hour duck curve at best, because that's the only profitable way to deploy them. Hopefully the trend continues though!

[skippyboxedhero]

Come on bro...next election, it will be different this time.

Tories do not back the free market. You said it yourself, the two parties are the same. Elections are irrelevant, both political parties pander towards orthogonal groups of voters, they tell them they are different, and they get in government and will do the same thing. Reform will do the same thing.

Also, the characterisation of what the government is able to do is extremely inconsistent. Able to lock down the whole country by fiat? Happened in an afternoon. Able to approve a 2-bed house twenty miles away from anyone? Sorry mate, need 26 forms, planning authority, need solar panels, need heat pump, etc. One of the big issues the UK has is with the understanding of government, it is the most bizarre mix of extreme libertarianism and extreme authoritarianism. It is a country where police will arrest someone from criticising a politician or the police AND a country where the police are unable to investigate almost all crimes (fraud investigations are outsourced to banks and private companies but there is action at multiple layers of government to control what happens on Twitter).

Storage is not possible. Everyone knows this. What game is being played here? Which other medium-sized country has large amounts of renewables with as much storage as we require. Electricity prices are already ruinously expensive. The solution is simple: do the stuff that works, that is it. The UK is a tale in being unable to do simple things that work.

[jordand]

"Storage is not possible"

Interestingly, the reality is that the "free market" is making this happen and its already here. 'The UK grid-scale battery storage market grew 45% by operational capacity in 2025, with 4GWh coming online during the year, bringing total operational capacity to 12.9GWh.'

Link: https://www.energy-storage.news/another-record-breaking-year...

[skippyboxedhero]

Congrats you have storage for about twenty minutes of national consumption. Rough had 9 days and was basically just a hole in the ground in the sea, rather than the manically expensive battery storage which involve massive levels of corruption and legal battles to get started. Genius.

Again, this is the issue. People suggesting that stuff that makes no obviously no sense for political or social reasons. Why? This is a very simple problem too, but there is massive political pressure to find solutions which produce more corruption.

[mytailorisrich]

The current government is banning wind turbines factories and billions of Pounds in investments because "China". It is too easy to blame the previous government(s) when the current one has no strategic thinking or plan, either.

[jordand]

The previous government was in power for 14 straight years. The current (useless) government only came into power in July 2024. Yes, I think the previous government should have some of the blame. Just to add, wind turbine factory investments have failed for a few other reasons too. One local to me fell through because it was no longer economically viable (local competition, low margin, and of course cheap imports)

[mytailorisrich]

Chinese company Ming Yang was planning to invest 1+ billion to build a factory in Scotland. They were going to be the local competition. UK government has just officially refused to approve it. This is a government decision based on politics and lobbying from other interests (US gov and EU competitors) and yet another U-turn for the government (as apparently gov was initially keen...).

[GlacierFox]

I don't want a Chinese company to own 1 billion pounds of energy infrastructure in Scotland.

[mytailorisrich]

Because?...

This would have been a factory to produce wind turbines, which would have benefited the country. And I thought net-zero was a priority.

Essentially all solar panels are made in China. All our car factories are foreign-owned, and even nuclear power plants are.

[8note]

couldnt you do the same thing china does? force them to have a local partner that ends up owning it?

[HPsquared]

High prices and maximum rent extraction is the plan. Same plan as the Tories and everyone else who gets close to power.

[huijzer]

What's the point that incompetence flips over to malice?

[RobinL]

Why would additional storage make a significant difference to the price of gas?

[nicoburns]

Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.

[traceroute66]

> Presumably because the price is a volatile, and storage gives you more flexibility around when you buy.

I will give credit to the person who got there before me. :)

Smoothing out price volatility is a big one.

But also it gives you options:

You can buy it "today" when its cheap and store it for when you need it (e.g. winter months).

You can also trade on that basis too. For example you can make a future-dated commitment to buy gas (knowing you have the storage available to take delivery). But if the situation changes and you later find you don't need it, you can sell that contract to someone else (or you can still take delivery and re-sell it). But you can't do any of that without having the ability to take delivery, because the person who sold you that future-dated contract will want both your money and to get the gas they sold you off their hands.

[teamonkey]

Because if you have enough renewables and storage to eliminate gas from the mix you are no longer paying gas prices. The more often that happens, the cheaper your bills get.

[skippyboxedhero]

The study you have linked is completely wrong.

There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex. This is why gas is priced very differently despite it being chemically similar (unlike oil). Anyone who says anything different should be immediately disregarded as someone who should not have an opinion.

This is technically true for oil but there are two other factors. One, importing oil is environmentally-intensive and relies upon the assumption of free and open trade in oil...hopefully, the last few weeks have demonstrated why this is untrue. Two, the assumption is that mix of imports is not changing, because of high energy costs and reduction in North Sea production, UK refineries are shutting down so we are completely losing domestic capacity across the whole space. We aren't importing oil, we are importing refined products, losing domestic chemicals capacity, losing margin. Lower jobs, lower tax revenues, more reliance on imports.

The above take would be somewhat funny if we weren't ten years into seeing the consequences of this. At this point, we could be back to the stone age and you would have the same people screeching that inventing fire is dangerous (I worked in equity research in the mid-2010s...I remember when Cameron was really pushing hard for this, Clegg was saying how expensive nuclear is, etc. people in the industry were saying this would very badly...the issue is that the political cycle is far shorter than the economic cycle, all of this stuff is obvious but people in the UK run on the political cycle so if it isn't the newspapers, no-one normal reads them, next week then it will never happen...same issue with housing, exactly the same thing happened, we are now subsidising retail electricity which is impossible to get out of, I remember specifically this idea was thought of as an insane impossibility but producers were saying it would have to happen, and giving huge subsidies to producers...this is all obvious, obvious things happening are obvious, producers were fine, they get paid the subsidies but consumers are getting shafted AND consistently voting to get shafted).

Also, Roughs storage facility is in the sea...so I am not sure what "real estate" development was done here (the UK has been building 10-20% of the required growth in housing stock for something like two decades...again, the same people will be screeching about developers if we lived in caves). The reason it was closed was due to economics.

For some reason, you deny that producing more gas would be useful but are outraged at a storage facility closing when the primary function of a storage facility is to allow energy producers to arb derivatives markets effectively. I have no idea how this makes sense to you based on all of the above...perhaps you just want to complain about the Tories? I have no idea.

The current tax rate on North Sea production is 75%, there was ample opportunity for public benefit but multiple governments took that money and spent it on benefits. The reason why Norway has worked is because they incentivized exploration (again, something that you imply later would have no benefit...but okay). The policy of the last fifteen years has been to tax the industry heavily and disincentivize exploration. Revisiting this approach is extremely unpopular amongst all politicians which is why production has dropped. Even with this limitation, we have large gas fields that have been blocked (by the Tories btw) for environmental reasons.

This isn't complicated: if you want more oil and gas, produce it and create more incentives to produce it. The reality is that people want to have their cake and eat it: North Sea production is both very pointless but paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea and we have to pay subsidies of 30-40% electricity bills to subsidies green production...which is also very profitable but requires subsidies because of Tory developers or something.

The UK isn't a serious country. What is happening to the UK is a reflection of phenomenally poor political leadership. It is deserved.

[traceroute66]

> paying huge amounts of carbon to import from the Middle East is a good idea

You are wrong here.

UK oil has a very high carbon footprint.

British North Sea oil is sour (high in sulphur). It is the "wrong" type of oil for UK refineries. So it gets sent to other countries around the world for refining.

UK oil is viscous, waxy, crude which needs to be heated to pipe it. This means it takes a lot of energy to pipe (hello carbon footprint !) and it is not compatible with UK refineries anyway, so it has to be moved overseas (hello carbon footprint !!).

UK crude is nothing like Norwegian crude and massively different from the stuff drilled in the Middle East which requires barely any refining in comparison.

[hardlianotion]

Brent crude is a light, sweet oil. UK oil is extracted from same oilfields as Norways - little difference in quality - and the major extraction from both is Brent crude

A handy explainer on Brent quality is here: https://kimray.com/training/types-crude-oil-heavy-vs-light-s...

[traceroute66]

> Brent crude is a light, sweet oil.

Brent is yesterday's story....

All the oil that would come from the prospective fields if extra drilling were to be permitted would absolutely be the heavy, viscous, waxy stuff.

[hardlianotion]

I am going to have to ask you for a source this time.

[Gud]

So why not refine it in the UK?

[traceroute66]

> So why not refine it in the UK?

I already gave the answer in my original post.... UK crude is the wrong type of oil for UK refineries.

Almost all UK refineries were built back in the day (late 60's/early 70's), before North Sea, when the UK was mostly importing oil from Libya and elsewhere in that region.

All the stuff from Libya and elsewhere is far removed from the viscous, waxy sludge that emerges from the North Sea. It requires a far less intensive refining process.

So if your refinery has been built for a low-intensity process you can't just bolt on the shit-ton of high-energy stuff required for waxy crude.

[skippyboxedhero]

It isn't the wrong type of crude. Forties pipeline was directly connected to a refinery. That refinery is now shutting down because of high energy costs, high general costs of doing business, and the investment outlook for UK North Sea.

The solution even if this wasn't true is also simple: build more refineries. This is all within our control.

You also said above it takes "energy" to pipe...do you have no understanding of physics? How do you think stuff moves in a pipe. Dear God.

You also said above that Norwegian crude is different...it is not. Brent is a crude blend that includes UK and Norwegian crudes. The chemical differences are relatively small, Norwegian refineries import UK crude (I am using UK crude because, for some reason, you seem to think that is something exists in the real world...it is just Brent).

One of the most confidently wrong posts I have seen on here...and that is after you said that an offshore gas field was given over to real estate development. Lol.

You should consider a career in the Civil Service. You will fit in well.

[youngtaff]

Grangemouth has been precarious for years and has received tens of millions in public subsidies

High electricity prices aren’t really a thing for oil refineries as they’re capable of generating their own as Valero Pembroke does

[gambiting]

That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil without having to ship it abroad for processing.

[traceroute66]

> That begs the question why aren't we building refineries that can process our own oil

Putting aside the legal and "public appetite" aspects that someone else already mentioned, it all comes back to privitisation in the end.

Given that the extraction was privitised, clearly market theory dictates that you cannot then interfere with where the extracted oil goes.

So if a private company is deciding on refining then it will follow the path of most profit, i.e. build/expand vs use existing capacity elsewhere. Given that most oil companies are large multinationals they will likely also prioritise using their own facilities vs paying a third-party refinery.

And clearly at the time, carbon footprint was not on the agenda of the private companies, either directly or enforced via legislation.

[WarmWash]

The writing is on the wall that people, especially young people, don't want to be using fossil fuels anymore.

Refineries are expensive (like $10B for country scale) and take years to build.

Which begs the question, how much renewable energy can you get for $10B? And perhaps even faster?

But it's not that clear, because reality has these fractal trade offs and the future is typically pretty opaque. So then will/motivation because an issue too.

[lotsofpulp]

Most likely the legal and public relations costs of building it are predicted to be more than shipping it somewhere else and back.

[dmix]

I ask the same question about why Canada sends most of it's oil to the US to be refined. The answer is usually the government doesn't allow it and/or no one wants to take a private capital risk in the economic environment.

[nl]

> There is no international market for gas because export/import is physically complex

I live in Australia and I assure you there is a huge international market for gas. It's one of Australia's major exports.

Also in Europe the Russian sourcing of gas is a major strategic factor in energy policy.

[enlyth]

Is gas expensive though? It's like 6p per kWh at the moment with electricity about 25p per kWh for consumers.

I think gas is dirt cheap, heating your home and hot water with electricity is 4x more expensive and costs hundreds a month.

[simonsquiff]

It’s only x4 more expensive to use electricity with old methods like immersion / resistance heaters

Heat pumps are 400% efficient or more, so have parity or better with gas prices

[leonidasrup]

Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.

https://www.irena.org/Innovation-landscape-for-smart-electri...

With electric resistance heating you can gen very high temperatures, but with less than 100% efficiency. With electric arc heating you can melt steel, but again less than 100% efficient.

[pfdietz]

> Heat pump have problems to reach high enough temperatures for most industrial heat applications.

They do if you start from ambient temperature, but they can be more effective if they are pumping heat out of the waste heat stream of a process. This requires different working fluids than lower temperature systems, though.

Most industrial heat energy is not consumed at very high temperature. IIRC, 2/3rds is at less than 300 C.

Electric resistance heating might also allow PV to dispense with auxiliary equipment, like inverters, so even if inefficient that might not matter as much. Heat also allows easy long duration storage at scale, even at rather high temperature, so resistive heating can be used with intermittently available cheap surplus power.

[leonidasrup]

For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient. This process is accounting for 1–2% of global energy consumption, 3% of global carbon emissions, and 3% to 5% of natural gas consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.

Heating storage (also cold storage) in industrial applications is possible and is done, but in many cases you are limited by allowed temperature range of chemical/physical processes. For example you are limited on the lower side by melting temperature of material and on higher side by high temperature corrosion.

Cold storage for electric demand response https://www.enersponse.com/cold-storage

In cement industries models have been developed to flatten the grid's hourly demand curve by minimizing the industrial customer's hourly peak loads and maximizing the shifting of demand to off-peak periods.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626192...

[pfdietz]

> For example Haber process used for ammonia production, requires a temperature of at least 400 °C to be efficient.

I should note that this process doesn't require external heat input (except at startup). The reaction is exothermic and the excess heat is used to make steam that either is used to make power or to provide steam to other processes. It does require pressurization, but that's an input of work, not heat.

It would be nice if the process could be run at lower temperature, but we just don't have the catalysts for that.

> Electric resistance heating generated from PV will supply energy only for few hours each day.

Electric resistance heat is very storable and can provide heat 24/7, possibly even 24/7/365 at high latitude with PV.

[enlyth]

That's cool but who is going to pay the upfront cost for the heat pumps? The sources I could find say we currently have 412 heat pumps per 100k people in the UK.

Ordinary people can't just afford to drop 10k for a heat pump + installation for it to pay for itself 20 years down the line.

[leonidasrup]

You have to include the costs of conversion - gas power plant. Also you have some some losses during conversion from heat to electricity, a modern gas power plant can be up to 60% efficient.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas-fired_power_plant

Then you have electric distribution costs (costs for building and maintenance of electric grid, transformers, power lines).

In many industrial process heat applications direct burning of gas is preferred, because it lowers the costs.

[mike_hearn]

> Gas in the UK is expensive because of 1980's privitisation

Post privatization domestic gas production rose 900%. Increasing supply = cheaper prices. Prices were low and stable at the time compared to today:

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

This claim is the sort of dangerous ideological nonsense that is so common in Britain, and which has wrecked it. Literally every time socialist policies fail people come out of the woodwork to blame privatization, and yet invariably this made things better despite an often botched process. The American oil/gas industry is fully private and yet they have much cheaper energy: blaming Thatcher is dumb and not the answer.

Gas in the UK is expensive because successive British governments wanted to have nothing to do with it and did everything they could to crush the suppliers. They thought deliberately deindustrializing the country was moral and ethical, for "climate" reasons. So they:

• Imposed massive "windfall" taxes on the industry to the extent that nobody developed new sources

• Then imposed very high carbon prices on it

• Banned fracking

• Stopped issuing licenses for exploration

• Imposed price caps

• Chased all the industry that needed cheap energy away to Asia

• Shut down gas storage facilities, exposing Britain to the global spot price

• Didn't build other reliable energy sources like nuclear or coal

End result: high prices and shortages. There are graphs here that show how much of the British electricity price is artificially created by government:

https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-is-my-energy-bill-so-...

Other countries didn't make all these mistakes together. And they were mistakes by the government. Really, can you even claim the British energy industry is private when the government takes 80%+ of its profits? Socialist policies always create shortages and high prices. Always.

[mytailorisrich]

The UK (and Europe) could produce much more gas and consequently control prices if they wanted. It is easy to always blame the previous government(s) but the current situation is policy across Western Europe.

Edit: puzzled by the blunt downvotes for stating a noncontroversial fact. Over the last 15 years the US has invested in shale gas while the UK and EU have banned it. Even today the UK refuses expension of North Sea gas extraction. Whatever the reasons (environment, decarbonisation) it does mean that the situation we have now with gas across Western Europe is policy, not an unfortunate consequence of world events...

[pydry]

It takes time though and it's hard to anticipate geopolitical shocks like the war in Ukraine and Iran.

[traceroute66]

> Iran

To be fair, I think you would be hard pushed to find anyone outside Israel who seriously thought Iran would ever be on the cards.

Netanyahu dedicated 40 years of his life going to various US presidents trying to get their buy-in. The US presidents all clearly listened to what their advisors had to say regarding Hormuz etc. and said "Thanks, but no thanks" to Netanyahu. Then Trump came along who was ready to over-rule his advisors and surrounded himself with yes-men in his cabinet.

I'm not being political here. A lot of it is public, for example just go to YouTube and look up the decades of videos of Netanyahu visiting the UN or US repeating the same line about "Iran being weeks away from a bomb", almost word-for-word for the last 40 years.

[gambiting]

I don't think Trump particularily cares himself. But he's surrounded by weird religious cult who all think that attacking Iran and bringing in war in the middle east will bring on the end times and second coming of jesus christ. I honestly wish this was just a facade for attaining political power, but these nutjobs seem completely earnest in their beliefs.

[vizzier]

Combining those god awful beliefs with a set of advisors with room temperature IQs (and I'm in canada where we use metric temps) results in a true inability to forsee any of these issues in advance. Real shame, I can only hope it drives your populace to finally do something about it, but I won't hold my breath.

[mytailorisrich]

No, this has nothing to do with either. It is policy in the UK and EU not to produce gas on environmental and decarbonisation grounds, and so in fact high priced are policy.