Political herd thinking is at least as skewed and dangerous as Wall Street herd thinking, enabling politicians to airily dismiss all “minor details”. Europe’s energy transport and oil refining infrastructures, for starters, have been adapted to and based on large, reliable supplies of Russian oil and gas, for decades. Claiming this can be “switched’ in an eyeblink of time is nonsense but politicians operate in that cloud cuckoo domain, especially at times of panic.
The consensus view of energy-economists, not politicians, is that it would take at least ten years for even the most industrially and technically advanced EU countries, starting with Germany, to significantly reduce Russian energy dependence and significantly diversify supply sources, including American gas supply. And this would be on the understanding that heroically massive financing was first made available, to satisfy the political fantasy.
I do not agree with everything this guy writes, but I surely like they scope from which he considers these things. So far only the German government has shown to be awere of the risks sanctions on Russia impose. All the ex-USSR countries seem happy to cut their energy ties, even if that means economic suicide.
