来源：《卫报》
原文刊登日期：2022年1月16日
The good news is that energy prices will be coming down. The bad news is nobody knows when for sure. The UK’s biggest energy supplier, Centrica, says high gas and electricity prices could last for another two years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reckons that’s too optimistic. Households could face a doubling of annual energy bills to £2,400 a year - a cost-of-living catastrophe for millions. While Labour proposes a support package, Conservative ministers have said little – fuelling suspicions that they intend to reduce demand for energy by making people poorer.
好消息是能源价格将会下降。坏消息是没人知道确切的时间。英国最大的能源供应商Centrica表示，高企的天然气和电力价格可能还会持续两年。国际能源机构(IEA)认为这过于乐观了。英国家庭可能面临双倍的年度能源账单，达到2400英镑——这对数百万人来说是一场生活成本灾难。尽管工党提出了一项支持计划，但保守党的部长们几乎没有表态——这让人怀疑他们打算通过让人们变得更穷来减少能源需求。
Carbon-based energy will fade, but it won’t disappear completely. To keep temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, the IEA says the world in 2050 would have to use about half as much natural gas as today and about one-quarter as much oil. British policymakers must wake up to the security implications of greening the economy. Britain replaced coal-fired plants with wind power to reduce carbon emissions, becoming dependent on natural gas imports – especially in calm weather.
碳基能源将逐渐淡出，但不会完全消失。国际能源署表示，为了将气温保持在比工业革命前水平高出1.5摄氏度的水平，到2050年，世界将需要消耗约为今天一半的天然气和约四分之一的石油。英国的政策制定者必须清醒地认识到绿化经济对能源安全的影响。英国用风能取代燃煤电厂以减少碳排放，变得依赖天然气进口——尤其是在没有风的时候。
Britain should look to John Maynard Keynes for answers. The basic fault of commodity markets, he saw, was the private sector’s failure to make effective use of stockpiling. Keynes proposed government storage of raw materials and foodstuffs to stabilise prices – by buying up essentials from world markets when they were cheap and selling them to consumers when they were dear. His proposals were adopted partially by the United States, and others, after the second world war – becoming a defining feature of the golden age of capitalism.
英国应该向约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯寻求答案。他认为，大宗商品市场的根本问题在于私营部门未能有效利用库存。凯恩斯建议政府储存原材料和食品，以稳定价格——当必需品价格低廉时，政府从世界市场上购买，然后在价格昂贵时将其出售给消费者。他的建议在二战后部分被美国和其他国家采纳，成为资本主义黄金时代的一个标志性特征。
Keynes saw a pricing policy as a solution to high, unstable prices. This makes sense but is anathema to current economic thought. Britain closed its last big gas storage facility in 2017, a shortsighted decision by Centrica that left the country able to store only 2% of its annual demand. Other big gas importers, by contrast, can store at least 20%. As the economist Isabella Weber notes, the orthodox view today is that the state should put “free prices” above welfare considerations. History suggests that this is about politics, not economics. Ms Weber speculates that Keynes may have been inspired by ancient Chinese economic thinking on smoothing grain prices.
凯恩斯认为价格政策是解决高企、不稳定价格的一种方法。这是有道理的，但为当前的经济思想所不容。2017年，英国关闭了最后一个大型天然气储存设施，这是Centrica的一个短视决定，导致英国只能储存其年度需求的2%。相比之下，其他大型天然气进口国至少可以储存20%的需求。正如经济学家伊莎贝拉•韦伯所指出的，当今的正统观点是，国家应该将“自由价格”置于福利考虑之上。历史表明，这是政治问题，而非经济问题。韦伯女士推测，凯恩斯可能受到了中国古代关于平抑粮食价格的经济思想的启发。
A mixture of extreme weather, rising demand, post-pandemic economic nationalism and spiking energy prices will have profound effects. Commodity prices can potentially have a very powerful inflationary effect on the cost of goods. The United Nations says average food prices jumped about 28% last year to a 10-year high. In Italy, pasta risks becoming unaffordable. Britain has an energy price cap that does not live up to its name. The answer to soaring bills is not to raise interest rates and make families poorer. Instead, Britain should have a serious conversation about key commodities as a source of power and their absence as a strategic vulnerability; and heed the wisdom of the past to deal with crises of the present.
极端天气、需求上升、新冠大流行后的经济民族主义和能源价格飙升等因素混合在一起，将产生深远影响。大宗商品价格可能会对商品成本产生非常强大的通胀影响。联合国表示，去年平均食品价格上涨约28%，达到10年来的最高水平。在意大利，人们可能买不起意大利面。英国有一个名不副实的能源价格帽。解决价格飙升的办法不是提高利率，让家庭变得更穷。相反，英国应该就关键大宗商品作为一种力量来源，以及缺乏大宗商品是一种战略弱点展开严肃的对话；并吸取过去的智慧来应对现在的危机。