Of course, as the saying goes, Europe is forged in crisis and consists largely of the sum of the solutions found to those crises. For Europe in the third decade of the 21st century to find itself at the mercy of the weather truly comes as a shock. But that was in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the continent was in ruins. A freezing winter in 1946-47 brought Europe to a standstill and helped to trigger Washington into launching the Marshall Plan. Weather has mattered in modern European history before. With no prospect of a resumption of Russian gas deliveries in sight, the outlook is grim-unless, that is, the weather stays warm. Gas prices for next year and for the foreseeable future remain severely elevated-in the $200-per-barrel range, around 8 times their precrisis levels. The gas storage facilities are sufficient to cover no more than a few months. It’s now the daily charges for LNG tankers that have gone through the roof, as shippers wait offshore for European demand to return. There is simply nowhere to put more of the stuff. Gas prices, at least for the next few months, have plunged. As a result, the gas storage facilities are now full. Europe’s purchasing went into overdrive, pushing gas prices to extraordinary levels-equivalent to roughly $400 per barrel of oil or more. Over the summer, as Russia’s situation became more dire, deliveries of Russian gas slowed to a fraction of their normal level. While buying as much Russian gas as it can, Europe has been scrambling to sign new gas deals and make up the impending shortfall by buying up cargos of liquefied natural gas, or LNG. Since the spring, as the scale of the conflict became clear, Europe has been bracing for the worst. This article appears in the Winter 2023 print issue of Foreign Policy magazine.
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