Irina Slav on the upcoming shock of energy shortage in Europe

“On the Barricades” s05e33

As temperatures drop, the “Stand with Ukraine” and blame-Putin propaganda campaign will become too thin a cover to hide what has been a massive shortsightedness and mismanagement of the energy supply by European politicians– especially now that Putin has stopped the flow of gas in the Nord Stream 1 pipeline.

On this special release of “On the Barricades,” hosts Boyan Stanislavski and Maria Cernat invite repeat-guest Irina Slav to provide a sense of how the winter will look for normal people, how the politicians will try to abate panic, and how this is more proof that liberalization of the market has utterly failed on its promise to provide energy at affordable prices, if it can provide any at all. Some countries expect government intervention into energy markets with price caps, and/or a cut-off of energy to consumers, neither of which will solve the problem.

Irina, Boyan, and Maria discuss the situations particular to Romania (which has its own gas production which gets siphoned away onto the EU market), Bulgaria (with its supposedly viable deal to secure gas from Azerbaijan), and Poland (which is awash with coal it no longer has the infrastructure to mine, and which awaits a miniscule gift of coal from Zelensky in Ukraine). Why can the politicians not back down and go in reverse to their anti-Putin line? And will this literal freeze and darkness lead to a mass movement to take down the current governments across Europe, as some claim is Putin’s intention?

Irina Slav is a Bulgarian specialist in the production and trade of energy. In addition to being an author at OilPrice.com, she is also the proprietor of an independent blog, which can be found on Substack: https://irinaslav.substack.com/