Is fracking the answer to the energy crisis?

I’ll approach the hot topic of a ban on Russian oil by way of personal anecdote: I’ve never been a soldier or a spook but I have twice found myself ensconced in secure Nato conference rooms. The first occasion was a group visit to the military alliance’s Brussels headquarters 42 years ago, when an unsmiling American defence expert introduced us to the concept of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ – whose acronym was the key to the tense but relatively stable Cold War stand-off. In simple terms, it would have been utter madness for either side to fire the first nuclear missile.

The odds on that happening by Kremlin order or error today are by no means as long as they were in 1980. But if that thought is too grim to contemplate, we’d better get our heads around a shorter-priced scenario: mutually inflicted economic mayhem. No version of that phrase I can come up with forms a label as neat as ‘MAD’ – but perhaps acronymic failure captures the randomness of impacts ahead. In simple terms again, we can only guess how markets and consumers will behave as the Ukrainian conflict unfolds. What we know is that the post-pandemic recovery is under threat and that inflation is set to multiply. What we’re told is that the only powerful weapon the West can deploy against Russia right now is a comprehensive sanctions regime, including a boycott of its oil and gas exports, so severe that it will cripple its economy. What we’re not told – because no one really knows – is how that assault will rebound on our own prosperity.