For about a week now, gas has not been flowing through Nord Stream 1, the crucial pipeline from Russia to Germany. Officially, it’s down for scheduled maintenance, and we’ve even been treated to a minor farce, featuring Robert Habeck pleading with Canada to violate their own sanctions and return to Russia a pipeline turbine that had been shipped there for repairs. Unofficially, of course, we’re being squeezed, as an inducement to stop our war-prolonging material support to Ukraine, and for our imprudent bellicosity towards the country that keeps our lights on.

It turns out that Russia can do without German automobiles, but Germany can’t do without Russian gas. If the hydrocarbons don’t come back online, Germany will face its greatest economic crisis since World War II. The state will implement emergency rationing plans, which call for starving our lockdown-ravaged industry first, in favour of keeping people alive in their homes. Probably water will also be rationed as a secondary measure, so that not too much gas is wasted in the heating of it. Some municipalities are already establishing facilities where the elderly, the poor and the sick can sleep in heated rooms on cots in the coldest months.

Ironically or not, many of these warehouses previously served as vaccination centres or had been eyed as places to treat the surge of Corona patients that Germany never quite saw.

The newspapers are suddenly full of advice about the merits of electric space heaters and the costs of installing wood stoves. Fuel, though, is a fungible resource. Natural gas also powers electricity plants, and all you need is a slight increase in demand for wood itself to become scarce.