Could Macron trigger British blackouts?

‘We are living the end of an era of abundance,’ according to Emmanuel Macron, ‘the end of the abundance of products and technologies, the end of the abundance of land and materials, including water.’ It is hard to see how water has become less abundant, being the ultimate renewable resource, which evaporates before falling back to Earth as rain. Rewind a year and people in parts of Europe, you may remember, were complaining about a super-abundance of water – in the form of the Rhineland floods.

But let’s leave that aside and assume that Macron’s remarks were more immediately prompted by a shortage of energy. France, in common with other European countries, is suffering from soaring gas and electricity prices, hugely exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and Putin’s choking-off of gas supplies to western Europe – only a fifth as much gas is making it through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline as was getting through in February.