Topic: The Economist: 335000 people could "freeze to death" in Europe (Read 650 times)

The information that Europe will freeze this winter was deliberately disseminated by Russian propaganda so that European countries would not refuse Russian oil and gas supplies, and would not assist Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression. We already see that the disseminated information has nothing to do with reality. Europe, in principle, successfully manages without Russian energy carriers, and this winter is even much warmer than usual. There is one more month of winter left, and so far we do not see even signs of the predicted horror stories. Russia has lost big here too.

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The price of gas at Europe's largest TTF hub in the Netherlands has fallen to 53 euros per MWh (about $562 per thousand cubic meters), the lowest level since September 2021. This is evidenced by the data of the tradingeconomics platform.

The fall in prices is due to the expected reduction in demand for gas due to warming on the European continent from next week.

The high occupancy of gas storage facilities in Europe for this period of the year also affects the price dynamics. The vaults are about 69% full, well above the 10-year average of 54% for this time of year.

An increase in the supply of liquefied natural gas from the United States to Europe is also expected after the launch of the Freeport LNG export gas hub, which has been closed since June 2022. Therefore, Europe is not going to freeze at all.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

Well, we are 2/3rds into the winter, so if anyone has any statistics on the number of people who have died from it, do post them here.

It's a pretty subjective statistic however because it depends on what you consider the "breaking point" for these people, as in, would you also count "displaced" people who have been evicted from their homes for not paying their energy bill, or would you count people in different circumstances as well.

Are you 100% sure that censored media can't write this on purpose? I'm just saying.
You can have a look at Winter mortality in England and Wales Statistical bulletins.
Btw it's not that cold in Europe this winter and I have no idea how could someone freeze to death. Even the nature is against Russia, Putin is very, very unlucky.

I want to make a sad announcement for you:
1. Media overdramatizes the whole situation, including the European news and media companies.
2. The Northern and Western European people overcomplain everything because they don't want their quality of life to decrease even a little bit.
The Northern and Western Europe won't fall down, the supporters of Russia and fans of Putin just want it to happen because they have envy on us.

It is not always about availability, it is also about affordability.

I've said it many times and I say it again: At this point the future of Europe affects the rest of the world a lot more than what happens in other countries specially if it is nothing new like increased mortality rate in Canada due to cold temperatures or increased number of homeless people in US.
If you think stuff happening elsewhere affects the rest of the world, I'd love to read your analysis.

Meanwhile, Europe that is caught between two "poles" and with the way United States is sucking it dry will have a significant effect on the global economy. The less US sucks the economy out of Europe (and a handful of others like Japan) the more inflation they'll export with printing dollar and the more they suck the economy out of them the worse their recession gets which means more capital will flee the continent into the rest of the world.

The energy crisis in Europe is one of the main factors that we can only analyze by its signs in order to be able to get a better understanding of the growing economical crisis and its scale. Namely the effects it has on deindustrialization of Europe (specially energy hungry industries) which is creating "voids" as the industries shrink or shut down. These voids are being filled and will continue being filled by others (now you see how it affects the rest of the world?).

From an economical standpoint it helps all of us make better investments during this chaos while we face inflation and some recession.

3 examples:
1. Car industry in Europe is affected by energy crisis and increased inflation and the recession. Suddenly we see China is silently but quickly growing as a car exporter and some are even saying that in a couple of years it is possible that we stop seeing "made in Japan and Germany" on cars! There are other countries that are taking advantage of this "void", specially among the car part producers. This could be a potential investment opportunity (or shorting opportunity for those knowing which companies have tanked or are going to tank in EU).

2. Another major example I can think of right now is the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe called Siemens (HQ in Munich, Germany) which is also among the handful of turbine manufacturers. Last year it lost part of its market, had its stock tank by more than 30% (another shorting opportunity) and had to lay off thousands of employees to recover. The voids were filled by others. In long term if they can't continue reducing their production cost (which could mean complete migration to another country like India) they can lose all their market since so far the replacement turbines are superior in cost and lifespan (another investment opportunity).

3. Finally last year the exports of cleaning products from Europe decreased and created a "void". Detecting that and following other news regarding how we were filling that void helped me make an investment in companies that were expanding their production and exports which in turn gave me a nice profit.
I even mentioned this in this board many months ago which people called "Russian propaganda" but as far as I can remember there were a couple of other Asian countries that were taking advantage of that opportunity to fill that void, I suppose anybody else who saw that and make wise investments, made good profit (or shorting opportunity for Europeans if the shares of those companies tanked).

P.S. I didn't even mention Uniper (the German energy giant) that tanked 92% while the German government kept saying everything is fine and there is no energy crisis.

I agree, homeless people are harder to die because they end up getting ready for the worst possible thing, and I do not believe that freeze to death is really a realistic thing in todays world. Like seriously, unless you are in wilderness, just go to a coffee house, even if you do not buy anything, it's better to stay there for an hour instead of dying, and then if they ask you to leave, you will leave.

The idea that people will die from it makes no sense to me, it's probably calculating what we have seen so far, and how it will go under that and it should cause this, but they do not take into consideration what people do when it gets worse, they expect people to do nothing about it and just die?

Maybe they raised the number for Canada as it wouldn't seem such harsh contrast against their own death count.
And as a Finnish guy i understand that Canada is pretty well prepared for cold weather as well so those numbers don't make much sense.
We know it's not just about electricity, it's about isolation of buildings, quadruple-glazed windows and clothing etc.

When one has been fighting cold all of their lives they are pretty well prepared even with some blackouts and super low temperatures.

since that I am Canadian.   who are these 13,000 people that are dying from the cold in my country?  those homeless that pretty much never seem to die from weather anymore?   13,000 dead people from cold in canada would be all over the headlines. 

since i think that numbers false the USA number is prob just as false.

This is one of the mildest winters in Europe and I hate to repeat myself because I have already written what I think about the fact that hundreds of thousands of people will freeze because there will not be enough electricity, gas or any other energy source. Instead of reading what the members of this forum write (and there are a lot of them from Europe), you think that any media is a relevant source of information - and if by any chance you don't find what you want, you think it's censorship...

People are freezing in some other parts of the world, but that's not an interesting topic, is it?

Well the stats are slowly making their way out to the media despite all the censorship that they are enforcing in Europe to prevent these things from coming out. Even THE propaganda machine BBC is reporting on them (BBC news at 10) reported 7409 died of cold in UK last month.
Here is an example of this in text form:

What did the terrorist country do well was the work of propaganda! Moreover, propaganda as internal - where the population has turned into a submissive, non-thinking, weak-willed mass. It is the same outside the country, where the Kremlin managed to gain access, influence (through bribery, threats, etc.) to the media, open its own media, buy local media and through them influence the minds of gullible Europeans and not only. Here, even the Goebel propaganda of Nazi Germany looks very weak, against the background of the propaganda of rashism. You watch their "news shows" - a normal person's brain will explode from this, but they watch it with pleasure on roshisi, and receive moral satisfaction. Moreover, what is surprising - but the Russian viewer does not ask the question - if yesterday, for example, they said that doing something like this is bad, but today doing the same is already good. The Russian layman, the consumer of this informational crap, is not worried that they are promised one thing, they do another, they explain it to a third, and there is no logic between all this. And often, one contradicts the other, but they "eat" all this, and they are comfortable ... This phenomenon will obviously be studied by psychiatrists

A living example of recent times: preparations for aggression against Ukraine. From about 2014 to today, the OFFICIAL versions justifying this terrorist act of state were (in the order of submission to the masses in Russia)
- Protection of the Russian-speaking population (with the subsequent killing by the Russian army of the peaceful Russian-speaking population of several regions)
- Protection of the borders of Russia from NATO, into which Ukraine was supposed to be brought by its government, but in the words of propaganda "junta". It was somewhere in 2015-2016 that the rhetoric changed. True, real changes in the legislation of Ukraine regarding NATO membership appeared only in 2018, but this does not bother Russians
- Then there was a wave of ideas that the Western world wants to plunge Russia into the chaos of the LGBT movement, coercion to homosexuality (!!?!?) since childhood (yes, and this Russian population "swallowed" and did not think)
- Then there were tantrums biolaboratories, fighting mosquitoes and zombies. I don’t laugh about mosquitoes - the Russian representative at the UN shook a 300-page "report" on "research on laboratories producing combat mosquitoes that will selectively bite Russians in order to make them homosexual or stop reproductive opportunities in Russian men and women" ...
Yes, it sounds like feverish nonsense, but for the Russians this is a REALITY, they believe in all this and categorically refuse to think

I have already expressed the same opinion, because many do not understand how long Russia has been preparing for the war it is currently waging, and the preparations were not only in the military sense, but in infiltrating all possible structures of all EU countries. Their state agencies even shoot promotional videos in which they tell Europeans that they will freeze this winter, although the situation is far from apocalyptic as they want to portray it.

Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with friends from several EU countries, and they all say that they feel the effect of inflation, but that the media pumps out too much negativity, which is not logical at all if you don't want to scare people for some reason. Yes, we will all have to tighten our belts a bit, but even that is better than pretending that nothing is happening.

Thanks, that is the information I was looking for. A source would have been useful.

Yep, that is right, a number of people in Europe die anyway for weather related matters, including freezing. Most of the people who freeze are by accident - most of Europe and certainly most of the developed countries have mechanisms and "safety nets" to prevent people from dying from hunger or freezing to death. I believe there is a lot of RF propaganda attached to this type of news.

335000 doesn't seem hyperbolic -- "freeze to death" is not in the proverbial sense that someone literally dies of hypothermia. There's a lot of ways someone can die from too low temperatures, mostly it's the elderly who die of heart conditions because the temperature provides excess stress on the cardiopulmonary system.

In any event, the only global cause of this issue is the energy crisis driven by the Ukraine war. This is mostly self inflicted, Europe chose not to diversify their energy sources and took a deep dive into unsustainable renewables. Cheap energy saves lives.

And the worst thing about this is that all these 4 major conflicts could happen at once. Each of them has already been happening to a certain degree right now, but it could blow up into a full-scale war any year from now. That's going to be hell. Deaths will multiply several folds. And it's not only because of bullets and bombs but also due to lack of food and water and shelter and a way to keep warm during winter.

As regards flu, at least we already have a vaccine for that. It's not going to be as problematic as COVID-19.

I think the projection for this increase of 35k is because of the shortage of gas supply to Europe by Russia to warm their houses because of sanction for invading Ukraine. Since Russia is making her retaliation doing a supply shortage of gas to the European countries, it will become difficult to live without heating most home during the winter season that the environment is cold.

an ALL-CAUSE mortality rate of EU people per year is about 4.2m

an average "climate" caused death rate is about 300k
they are saying this year it may be for climate deaths being 335k this year

an increase of 35k

Nobody should read negative news all day every day or they'll go insane. But also they shouldn't be ignored or swept under the rug otherwise they would lead to catastrophes. Every crisis today was a small problem yesterday. Like energy crisis which was a small problem when they ignored it and didn't diversify their sources!

If you read US or US linked sources, obviously you will think that way. Similarly if you read Russia or Russian linked sources they are denying all that too!
Also if you visit Iraq and talk to people there the "residents of Iraq" would also tell you the same thing about NATO and Ukraine as you are saying about Russians as "resident of Ukraine".

I don't think this chart includes COVID deaths as it is the "excess mortality" and some of the COVID death peaks don't match this chart either. eg. the COVID deaths are low on Nov Dec 2021 and there is a 2.5x rise in Jan and Feb 2022 reaching a peak whereas in this chart the peak is in Nov and Dec 2021 and it drops in Jan and Feb 2022.

No arguments there.

US hasn't left West Asia or other parts of the world they are occupying. They were kicked out of some parts like Afghanistan and to some extent Iraq and Syria but they haven't actually left. They still have dozens of military bases that are destabilizing each region.

As for similarities they are more similar than you think, the details are different which depends on a lot of factors like the country. For example what the West did to Palestine over 70 years ago was exactly "ethnic cleansing" that replaced population of Palestine with Zionists that is an Apartheid regime acting like a guard dog ensuring US interests in West Asia.
However, they can't do it everywhere so the strategy is different but the goals are the same. Usually the easiest strategy is replacing the regimes with US favored ones that fulfill US interests.

Take Afghanistan for example. The government that was installed there was a US made government that was pursing every single US interest that they ordered them to. From backing terrorist groups that had their guns pointed west (ie. at Iran) like Daesh or Uzbek militia to starting a water war with the neighbors. Even handing over Afghanistan to Taliban was somewhat similar strategy specially since they practically donated $100 billion worth of weapons and military equipment to these extremists.

Same with Iraq, the political infrastructure that the US has installed there is an absolute mess that has prevented any actual work to be done for the country and it is in constant internal conflict while they too fulfill US interests!

The worst thing that Europe has gone through throughout its history was a mixture of epidemics and wars. The last of which was during the Soviet era when war swept the entire continent and spread epidemics and famine. But it never happened that a proxy war turned into an arena for settling political and ideological scores at the expense of the daily basics of peoples' lives. Perhaps the best thing that Europe is currently going through is the solidarity campaign organized by all countries in order to save every affected country and reduce the impact of Russian sanctions on it. Nobody knows how long this can go on.

Europe Game Shows Will Pay Energy Bill If You Win
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_8mmVbAPwE

This says a lot about what is happening there. Absolutely murder.


Any country that wants to establish an empire does the same things, they loot and even display crowns and gold lootings to mummies in thier museums. And it's always the fight to be in control of the world. It's just that Russia has more leverage. And in the past decades, they have not gotten lots of enemies but relied on thier resources. Until they saw Ukraine is about to be used by NATO to get to them.

It's true the US left Iraq and Afghanistan. But the people there are hopeful that US will rebuild the nations they once ruined. But not, all but ruins. They left but completely put up a political party that will keep the country bowing. Zelensky administration is just one.

Now we compare what China is doing, although we may see them in the future going to dominate and might even control parts of the world through their technologies and what we call "debt traps", they help build a nation. No superpower ever tried BRI even if they have the chance.

Especially in the last 2-3 years, when a certain number of people died from the corona virus, and in the years before that, those two months were always the time when many people died as a result of the flu. Unfortunately, the EU has a lot of homeless people, and according to data from 2020, that number amounts to around 700 000, which is a truly devastating number, regardless of the fact that it is not much in terms of percentage considering almost 500 million inhabitants.


Many countries help their citizens by paying part of their electricity bills, so Germany has invested as much as 200 billion Euros for this purpose, and many other countries are doing similar things. Not everything is as black and hopeless as you can read in the media - we who live in the EU know best what is actually happening.


I am not saying that there is no similarity with what the Americans did in Iraq or Afghanistan, but they eventually left - while the Russians are carrying out ethnic cleansing with the intention of settling Russians there, and permanently occupying something that is not theirs.

I felt this genocidal barbarism on my skin 30 years ago when the Serbs brutally attacked my country and literally slaughtered thousands of people and burned and destroyed everything they could not loot. Russians do identical things, even their agenda is the same as if they copied it from their Serbian brothers.