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Ah I see - the idea is sound, it's just the implementation that was faulty. Tell me, how do sellers access international markets without several layers of collective bargaining?

>Okay, I see this reality isn't politically correct for you so I'll not push it too much.

You mean this idea that "beggar thy neighbour" is not in someone's self interest? You haven't explained why that is necessarily true. The (very short) wikipedia article you linked also does not talk about "punishing other countries", and in fact is specifically focussed on reducing imports. In the context of our original discussion, we were talking about how Germany is now being screwed by the country it has signed up to gas deals with. How does that fit with your "be nice to everyone" idea?

>the value of British currency would likely drop even further, pushing up inflation and prices further

Why?

Examining a relatively similar historical record of exporting scarce resources that are in high domestic demand, are you telling me the Irish potato famine was the best that could have happened?

Your solutions are essentially what I've been doing for years - short of a benevolent government paying for people's lack of discretion when it comes to longer-term financial and energy planning, I don't see what could make people do any of that unless energy suddenly became more expensive.

>And the whole point of "begger thy neighbour" is that it hurts you

Not necessarily, and not necessarily across differing timeframes. Using the scenario at hand - Germany is reliant on a hostile regime to keep its lights and heating on. Why is it necessarily in some other country's own self-interest to send some of its own energy supply based purely on international economics, and not the needs of its own citizens?

A blind application of this "principle" would mean that less wealthy countries would be obliged to help out a wealthy neighbour in a time of distress, and just hope that the wealthy neighbour will be nice to them when they can. It assumes best intentions all around, which is nice but unrealistic.

>it's just a type of "Beggar-thy-neighbour“ game theory failure

Funny how much international politics looks like a "game theory failure", right? If only we could get along!

I'm mostly looking at this from the perspective of the "begger" - hence me originally pointing out that, in the current narrative of countries that are doing badly with energy geopolitics, Germany is in much bigger trouble than the UK. You can be the nicest country in the world, but you can't really predict or change what others will do.

For that matter, why should other EU countries bail out (in the form of energy exports) another country that has become absurdly reliant on energy imports from a hostile neighbour?

>What does help, is everyone using less natural gas.

Humans have burned stuff to heat their homes since the dawn of humanity - it's hard to see what could possibly replace that, unless we go nuclear. Heat-pumps require quite specific circumstances to function efficiently.

>I believe that what we are looking at in the USA now is closer to Rome in 180 AD than it is to 470 AD

Maybe, but following the argument in the parent comment about the speed of transfer of information and physical goods, the timeline now may progress significantly quicker.

I suspect that the root cause now will be a technological failure, or more accurately, the inability of even a large group of citizens to maintain or re-build the globe-spanning technological structures on which our lives depend. It's an effect I've called the "Anti-Singularity" - at some point, some key component of this technological structure will fail for whatever reason, and cause a cascading and quite rapid failure of the rest of the system. At this point, progress and knowledge growth will very rapidly halt.

It's getting ever-easier to observe this!

I understand that. However, the political aspect will be the dominant factor. You can have all the links to international suppliers, but it won't help if they won't sell to you. Russia has already decided to f** with Europe, and in a way that I can't see making any (short-term) financial sense for their own economy. France may decide to stop exporting quite so much of its nuclear-generated electricity. The UK could decide that it needs to slow exports of its gas, and keep it back for its own citizens. Germany will basically have to turn back to its own brown coal reserves for electricity generation, although that won't help its citizens heat their homes.

>The UK is getting hit much harder than other countries.

I don't understand this narrative. Germany will have its gas supply from Russia literally turned off for the next three days!

>but for heating I think they're about 50% gas while in the UK it's more like 80%

I saw that Guardian article too! A further 25% of Germans heat their homes with oil, and another 14% use district heating (which will be fossil-fuel powered).

Germany imports 98% of its oil, 95% of its gas, and a large amount of its coal, with a total of 63% of all energy being imported.

On the upside, the premature end of this age of exceptionally unreasonably cheap energy will hopefully teach us all a thing or two about what sustainability really looks like.

>It is like watching negative progress.

Oh no, my friend - what you are seeing is the ongoing march of progress! Who can argue against the latest in tech needing the latest in apps?

I see some people are having trouble working out what this badge means. It's pretty simple, really - they are for content-creators that make Meta lots of money.

>What's the "green agenda" that you're referring to?

eg:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/euro...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_90/The_Greens#Energy_...

>How are ICE cars being "banned" soon?

eg:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/california-decides-to-ban...

https://www.electrive.com/2022/06/29/eu-council-decides-on-1...

https://www.just-auto.com/news/uk-government-confirms-2030-i...

These are very easy questions to answer.