Out of Gas
When it comes to energy, Britain tells Germany to hold its beer.
“The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.” – Plato
In the two and a half decades between the end of the two World Wars, Britain transformed from an empire upon which the sun never set to a bankrupt state bailed out by the new global hegemonic power. No spinning of history can excuse the string of British leaders who oversaw this collapse from culpability. The path from dominance to insignificance is necessarily marked by a string of catastrophic decisions, and political leaders are first and foremost in the decision-making business.
Being insignificant and realizing as much are two entirely different things. One marvels at the parade of prime ministers occupying 10 Downing Street throughout the modern era skillfully ignoring Britain’s diminished geopolitical standing. Sure, the country has a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council and a role in shaping Western culture, but, above all else, London’s standing in Washington matters most. This makes Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to throw the full weight of the Labor Party’s support behind the losing candidate in the latest US presidential election an utter catastrophe, to say nothing of the recently illuminated immigration scandals.
In frantic need of a new narrative to spin for both domestic and international audiences, Starmer raised more than a few eyebrows in mid-January when he took to a podium bearing a 'PLAN FOR CHANGE' sign and proclaimed the following:
“British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he wanted to make the UK an artificial intelligence ‘superpower,’ promising to take a pro-innovation approach to regulation, make public data available to researchers and create zones for data centres. Starmer, whose Labour government is expected to have little choice but to cut spending after borrowing costs jumped, said he wanted to put AI at the heart of his ambition to grow the economy…
‘Britain will be one of the great AI superpowers,’ he said on Monday at University College London, noting that the country was already the European leader for AI investment. ‘We're going to make the breakthroughs, we're going to create the wealth, and we're going to make AI work for everyone in our country.’”
The announcement startled global investors and sparked a massive stock selloff, with AI darling Nvidia shedding $593 billion in market capitalization on fears of formidable new competition arriving on the scene. Oh, wait… that was after China entered the chat. LOL.
One reason the market probably shrugged off Starmer’s bold decree is that a country can’t be an AI superpower if it can barely keep its lights on, and few nations have a more profoundly illogical energy strategy than the UK. AI prowess is but a derivative of energy prowess, as supercomputers and data centers need an abundance of cheap and reliable power. Britain is in desperately short supply of both:
“UK gas storage has fallen to ‘concerningly low’ levels on the back of cold weather and high gas demand for power generation, Rough gas storage operator Centrica said Jan. 10. Gas storage was already lower than usual heading into December as a result of the early onset of winter, Centrica said, and combined with high gas prices this has meant that it has been more difficult to top up storage over Christmas.
‘The UK's gas storage levels are concerningly low. We are an outlier from the rest of Europe when it comes to the role of storage in our energy system and we are now seeing the implications of that,’ Centrica's CEO Chris O'Shea said.”
If you are wondering how it could be that Britain is still mired in a natural gas crisis nearly four years after Europe first descended into the energy abyss, you would not be alone. Digging into the details, we find a profoundly irresponsible combination of utter dependency and wholly inadequate infrastructure—a nation so perilously close to disaster that just one prolonged cold spell or pipeline outage might do it. The numbers are truly staggering, so let’s take a closer look.