–The end of the wars could see the chance for a historic improvement in the global market structure … in favor of the climate.
Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
Jan. 2, 2024 — Dutch gas rose first thing Thursday, dropped by 10am in London and ended up at the highest for 13 months after America-backed Ukraine and Russia failed to renew a gas-transit deal that expired at the end of 2024.
Prices advanced only about 1.7% in the end. (Ukraine is an American-military vassel state).
The market still should not underestimate the determination of the market riggers. They love taking money from the good people of Europe that they don’t deserve.
See Yahoo / France 24 for background on the attempt to ramp prices (it’s worked to some extent with prices near their highest in a year despite low demand on unseasonably warm weather):
Thursday Jan 2 trading and two-year history
Prices should be plunging because of the historically mild weather…because climate change is getting very bad very quickly.
Germany is in the crazy position of buying Russian LNG …which is much worse for the climate than piped Russian gas, according to reporting by Al Jazeera.
If the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East were to end, gas and oil prices could plunge.
The bright side
That would leave scope to introduce higher carbon prices to speed the climate transition. The end of the wars could see the chance for a historic improvement in the global market structure … in favor of the climate.
While taxpayers would fail to win all the benefit of falling fossil fuel prices, they will get the money from the sale at higher prices of carbon allowances. Carbon pricing could spread to 75% of global human-produced GHG emissions by 2030 from only about 25% now…as other countries adopt carbon pricing (this seems unlikely under Donald Trump …but let’s see what happens).
Warming temperatures will hurt demand for gas for heating buildings and electricity for heating.
There are no forecasts of daily high temperatures in Berlin to be below zero C on any day between now and the middle of Feb: Accuweather (As of Thursday …this forecast is subject to change). That means few really cold snaps are expected in the next six weeks, so demand will be lower.
Daily high to rise to 12C on Jan. 6. (Normally the high is about 3C in January) That will be an example of a very low demand day.
The ability to change market structure has existed for years….yet politics and wars have made that difficult.
This from June 2023
The chance to shift to much cleaner energy is now.
NOTE
Jan. 2 snip from Financial Times:
(update to include daily gain, context on carbon)