* Even amateur campers routinely cope with sub-freezing temperatures at night. A decent sleeping bag is good to very low temperatures, and a down blanket in a bedroom can work even better. Why do people run expensive furnaces to keep their houses at "room temperature" at night?

The Greek government had announced €1.1 billion in financial support earlier this week to help struggling businesses and lower-income households. But farming associations say they were largely left out of the package.

Huge rises in energy costs have hit Greek farmers, who have passed many of the increases on to food prices.

eurostat
• Energy inflation rate continues upward hike, hits 27% a/o 25 Feb 2022
• Weekly Oil Bulletin / Maps with the € prices in EU countries a/o 14 Mar 2022
• Comparative price levels of consumer goods and services (HFCE 2020); next update 20 June 2022

The Spanish government of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has ended nearly five decades of neutrality on the issue by backing Morocco's 2007 proposal that Western Sahara should be granted autonomous status, albeit under the North African country's control. In a letter to Morocco's King Mohammed VI, Sánchez described the plan as "the most serious, credible and realistic basis for the resolution of this disagreement."
[...]
Algeria's TSA news agency quoted a senior official in the country's government who described this as "the second historic betrayal of the Saharawi people by Madrid" -- after it handed the colony to Morocco and Mauritania in 1975.

Last year, Algeria supplied nearly half of Spain's natural gas. In the context of the ["]European energy crisis["], aggravating a major supplier could seem foolhardy. The conservative former prime minister, José María Aznar, said Sánchez had made "a mistake with historic consequences for which we will pay dearly."

"I don't think [Algeria] are going to play energy hardball," said Jacob Mundy, visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, who points out that Spain is the North African country's second-biggest buyer of gas, after Italy. "If Algeria are going to try to position themselves as an alternative to Russian gas supplies, cutting off Spain over Western Sahara is not going to be the way to demonstrate that," he added.

Nonetheless, Sánchez has faced substantial domestic blowback from his surprise Western Saharan shift, with claims that the decision was hatched without consensus or transparency.

"In Spain, rents cannot continue to be revalued with this inflation. There are several billion people with salaries and with very vulnerable and low incomes, people who earn less than the Minimum Interprofessional Wage (SMI), because they work part-time, and people with hardly any resources who require help to be able to face essential expenses such as electricity or the shopping basket," Sordo said.

It's not just the manufacturing capacity that is running behind - the lack of skilled workers is also an issue.

... A simple calculation shows the monthly transport of 5.8 billion cubic metres of LNG by vessels with a capacity of 266,000 cubic metres of LNG requires a total of 21,852 shipments per month or approximately 705 shipments per day.
[...]
Since the EU has voiced the intention to fully eliminate the need for Russian LNG by the year 2030 the time to recover the investment in vessels and related LNG infrastructure is extremely limited. Within 8 years the EU seeks to fully replace the entire volume of LNG represented by Russian imports. The IEA Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Roadmap helps fulfil the European Green Deal, an ambitious plan to eliminate all FF emissions in 28 years.

In 2020, U.S. natural gas production was about 10% greater than U.S. total natural gas consumption. The volume of produced gas surplus to US demand amounts to 91.5 billion cubic feet per day or 2.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas per day. This surplus is already contracted to the following countries ...