The Ballistic Efficiency Grind

It's Energy Crisis time again...

So the middle East went pop again and this time it's all looking a bit indiscriminate. Among the many human tragedies that this brings is the hidden one about to be rendered by the energy markets, as oil & gas exports from the immensely productive Gulf region are cut and redirected.

Whether from the steel rain of drones & ballistic missiles or the more subtle closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Iran looks set on disrupting an entire region and possibly the world. This might be deliberate strategy or the savage twitching of a decapitated monster, but it hardly matters to those on the relieving end. For certain the lion's share of the sympathy goes for those directly under the hard rain on either side, but there is a slower havoc about to be wrought upon billions more as energy markets constrict and prices skyrocket.

And if the barrage should continue, and major energy infrastructure starts getting taken out along the Gulf coast, this could get worse very quickly indeed. The costs of this aren't abstract either, because higher energy costs mean suffering for many millions, and a slow sort of constriction that can cost as many lives as war in the long term.

For you see, energy is life.

It's not just a bill, it's freedom and hygiene as anxious parents get up in the dead hours to load washer-driers with children's clothes, avoiding peak prices.

It's not just an inconvenience, it's industry: The skyrocketing cost of energy in much of Europe after Russia's invasion of Ukraine contributed hugely to the loss of heavy industry including steel and aluminium.

It's not just fuel, it's fertiliser: Cheap gas means cheap fertiliser, as the foundation of all our agriculture is propped up by the Haber-Bosch process, that pulls nitrogen from air. It lives on hydrogen, which is most easily obtained from natural gas.

It's not just oil, it's opportunity: Make travel expensive and you shrink everyone's horizons at once, and that means new jobs not taken, new friends not met, and the tightening of a noose that tries to squash anyone and everyone into a tiny metropolitan bubble.

For sure, none of this has the immediacy of a missile landing on your head, but it affects a hundred times more people, day in & day out. When energy gets unaffordable, everything becomes unaffordable, from lunch to labour, from housing to childcare.

Yet as missiles are shot out of the sky over Dubai and tankers logjam in the Gulf, spare a thought for Anatoly Dyatlov. Had he made a different decision on a test in Chernobyl forty years ago, history might have been very different. We might have kept on building nuclear plants and met the energy, um, meltdown in the middle-East with a Gallic shrug and not an intake of breath.

But it was not to be.

So… what are you going to do about it?

When good ol’ Vlad got up to his antics in Ukraine and energy prices in Europe went through the stratosphere, I stopped overtaking other cars on the way to work, I lightened my heavy foot, I closed curtains in rooms I wasn't in, worked an extra day from the home office and started putting the kids’ washing on at 5am. As, I'm sure, did absolutely everyone else.

I'm not a poor man (not rich either; don't get ahead of yourselves!) so I didn't have to. I could have just shrugged my shoulders, paid the 600 quid electricity bills and financially brute-forced my way through energy poverty, but I didn't and neither did anyone. I think it has to do with the special place energy has in our minds…

I know a family who live in a three story townhouse in one of Dublin's fancier neighbourhoods (so a million quid plus for the house), who have two kids, pay Dublin crèche fees (a second and third mortgage), have a Portuguese maid who calls in three days a week and do golf holidays and are considering an au pair… but who don't own a tumble drier because that'd be wasteful.

That's a bit like driving a Ferrari to work on cheap no-brand tyres. It makes no bloody sense at all! And yet I understand it.

Worrying about energy costs in a rich country is like being forced to pay rent for the air you breathe. You're not supposed to think about it when you turn on the kettle, activate the robot vacuum or drive to work. Mod-cons are supposed to be ubiquitous & easy, because that was the bargain of moving into the future; you weren't supposed to re-live the 80s and police lightbulb use like your father did. That's why we're so shocked that the future didn't work out that way.

Here I am, policing the thermostat. What goes around comes around. I see you, dad.

Europe's wholesale gas prices have just doubled, and may double again from Iran's antics, just as storage is running low and that nutcase in the Kremlin is still getting up to mischief. Here we go again.

Don't forget that this has a long term effect on society, because people react to it. Take this graphic for example, showing the energy intensity of GDP for a selection of large economies, mostly energy importers. This is basically how many kilowatt-hours it takes to generate a dollar. What you will notice is two things: Firstly, the energy intensity of most economies is going down, as we get richer much faster than we increase energy consumption. That's a relief I suppose, or else a couple of centuries from now we'd all be dry-roasted by the waste heat from millions of fusion reactors.

The second thing you'll notice is