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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

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...

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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