Two predictions for six months time

And one refusal to predict

My thanks to Google Gemini AI for this picture

I want to make two predictions, and decline to predict a third. First, I predict that in six months time it will be winter, and it will be cold enough that I, and most people in Britain, will have our heating turned on. That is hard to imagine today, but I will bet a lot of money on it. Summers may be unpredictable in Britain, but winters are not.

I am almost as certain that in six months time President Donald J Trump will be the President of the United States of America. Only almost as certain because according to the US government Social Security Agency, an 80 year old man has a 5.5% chance of dying in the following year. It is, therefore, exceptionally likely even if not certain, that he will be President this winter.

And that means I am not going to predict what will happen to oil or gas prices, or to oil or gas availability. Most of the world lives north of the equator, so global oil and gas demand rises in winter as we heat our homes more. In the US, for example, demand for natural gas is 50% higher in the winter than in the summer. The fact that the world has survived President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury so far does not mean that we should be sanguine about the winter.

It could be that…