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Seen some quite shocking pictures this morning of the Rhine and the Loire, both basically dry.

The Rhine is so low that it's almost impassable for river freight, and the Loire, well, it's gone. Given that 3 nuclear power plants use the Loire for cooling, that just piles even more pressure on the French electricity system.

The pictures of the Loire are really shocking.

My energy trading friend made a lot of money (hedging for his employer), a few weeks ago when the rivers in Italy were so low and so hot that the gas powered leccy stations had to shut down even though there was no shortage of gas. This caused an unprecedented shortage of leccy in north Italy which caused daily blackouts in Milan, exacerbated with everyone running their aircon flat out.

The prices were already high, but in his opinion they were still under priced as he said the suppliers would have to pay whatever it takes to maintain supplies, therefore he bought heavily into short term Italian leccy futures.

The politicians blamed speculators for driving up the prices and I did question him as to whether there was any truth in that as I knew the amount of money he made. His replay was, the failure is with the politicians and regulators not planning for climate change and also that the market had got the prices severely wrong (too low) because they were pricing based on gas inventory and gas prices, but in this case the gas inventory or gas price was irrelevant because the power stations had to shut down. The prices would have gone to the levels they reached irrespective of whether he bought the futures or not.

Fintray wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 10:53 am The pictures of the Loire are really shocking.

I haven't seen pictures but shocked as we were camping on the banks of the Loire River only a month ago. It looked fine.

Joeboy wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 1:26 pm

Fintray wrote: ↑Thu Aug 11, 2022 10:53 am The pictures of the Loire are really shocking.

I haven't seen pictures but shocked as we were camping on the banks of the Loire River only a month ago. It looked fine.

On some of it you could have camped where the river should have been!

It's very sad, on the 26th June the fields were full of healthy sunflowers by the mile upon mile and there were commercial pleasure craft and canoeists on the river.

Being familiar with Saumur and Cologne that have featured in pics to highlight the drought, all I can think is catastrophe.

Unless we/they have significant rainfall through the Autumn and Winter, the effects, particularly if next summer is dry, are going to be horrendous.

Perhaps somebody should have highlighted climate change

strange is it or is it not .... during that low water carrying rivers, the Oder river between Poland and Germany was poisoned ..... Maybe was allways the case and when more water in the river not noted

https://www.euronews.com/2022/08/13/ode ... and-poland

Very sad and somehow hard to keep the faith