The Short Position on the Quay

Look at the cover of the IEA's July update and you are looking at the whole argument before reading a word of it: a port apron somewhere in Asia, thousands of identical cars ranked in white rows tighter than any car park you have ever paid for, a roll-on roll-off carrier the size of a city block waiting at the berth — and not one of those vehicles, in any statistical sense, has been sold yet.

Five months into the energy crisis that began on 28 February, with Brent printing near ninety-eight dollars on 23 July — roughly thirty dollars above where it sat a year earlier — the commentariat is still crowded around the chokepoint's webcams, counting transits and parsing communiqués, while the demand side of the oil trade is being quietly rearranged on port tarmac.

Today the publication breaks new ground, and it is worth saying so plainly.

Electric vehicles have passed through these pages before — as the largest line on Australia’s net-zero bill, as the demand engine underneath lithium — but …