AIBU to think my friend is overdoing emergency stockpiling?

[bagpuss90]

I get that we have been advised to stock up on essentials, though I think it will encourage panic buying. I will probably get a few days worth of stuff at some point . My friend however has, at least in my opinion gone ott about it. She’s stocking up a six month supply of food. She’s bought head torches, a camping gas stove and various other stuff. She thinks I’m being naive …Am I missing something here ?

I'm interested in timescales and what some of these effects are likely to be. Shortages at the pump or high diesel prices that mainly affect farmers and food suppliers, forcing up prices? Power cuts almost definite, or just much more likely than previously in the event that other as yet unknown disruption happens?

It depends on where in the world you are, how big your reserves are and how much your country (and other countries) have been buying up stock.

At this stage we don't know the implications and that level of detail.

It will add an additional couple of weeks in shipping times from China to the UK on anything not already through the red sea. With the Yemenis taking control the back end of last week, you are going to start seeing delays to normal delivery times, in about ten days I expect. This is not oil products, this is all products.

The storage units at Yanbu were said to have 5 to 7 days of capacity they could load with the pipe out. Except the refinery there and storage units have since been attacked, so it's now anybody's guess how much is left in the Saudi Red Sea exit.

The pipe may be able to have a lower capacity of flow before it is fully restored, but the issue isn't necessarily how quickly it can be repaired, but how much security the entire pipeline has against future attacks - that's basically whether the Yemenis remain a threat or not. The Saudi army/air force sounds completely incapable and on the brink of collapse without outside international support. Which the US and Pakistan have refused despite Defensive Alliances. Many feel the Saudi regime could collapse entirely, which definitely means all bets are off.

Iraq has stepped up production and was using overland routes through Syria to the Med. We now have a situation where then Syrian government put up fuel prices within the country and this has resulted in riots - so the safety and security of those tankers is potentially at risk (it's going to cost more for that).

Tankers getting bomb up, means insurance for all tankers is going through the roof, especially that do risk Hormuz. This is now significantly impacting costs even for barrels that are delivered

One reflection I've seen is that buying a barrel of oil on paper is not the same as physically having it - in reference to corruption. If there are shortages, then inventories may not actually match what is delivered. Again we aren't going to know this until further down the line.

We ALREADY know that restrictions on shipping has affected the price and availability of fertiliser. This means some farmers in parts of the world already haven't had it when they've needed it. So they've either planted less or have planted without. So the next crop yields will be significantly down. This is going to be an interesting going issue with Wheat being such a key one if those crops. The futures markets on all commodities like this - wheat / rice etc has been shooting up. We won't see the effects of some of these for a year but those issues are now built into the supply/demand system - some countries will have better reserves than others to ride that out.

So we are probably looking at effects from the situation currently being at least 18 months if we got normalisation tomorrow. The long it goes on, the worse it gets because of the using of emergency reserves.

Some of these geo-political security issues may become permanent too (say a change of government in Saudi).

I would expect there to be motives to reopen or start drilling for oil in other more stable parts of the world fairly soon as a result. Politically this won't be liked by environmentalists but we simply do not have the infrastructure to switch to alternatives quicker. Plus we don't have the money to invest in big infrastructure schemes. Who controls Greenland gets more important in this context...

So it's a bit of a how long is a piece of string type question with so many variables it's hard to say.

The big thing is prices at pumps are already going up, so a lot of this is already starting.

paper plated!
I’ve bought 50 from Tesco, £2, sure they were something like
£1.20 not so long ago
I felt it was a good idea to have a stock if we have no power
no water, no dishwasher even
my OH will expect to reuse them so they should last a while

A graph.

Alex Wickham AT Alexwickham
EXCLUSIVE: Andy Burnham is considering requests from Saudi Arabia for a range of military support to counter attacks from the Houthis, as the UK fears a “catastrophic” economic hit from a new front in the Iran war.

The Saudi asks include operational support for its military to repel the Houthis’ push along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key trade chokepoint, and help to defend against strikes on its oil infrastructure, sources tell Bloomberg.

Burnham has agreed to send British military advisers to Saudi Arabia in response to the requests, sources say. It’s unclear whether he’s willing to approve the other asks, which haven’t been disclosed by the UK government. The Foreign Office and MoD declined to answer questions.

Burnham is facing one of his first major foreign policy and economic dilemmas since he became PM. Britain is determined not to get drawn into the conflict, not least because it didn’t support Trump’s war on Iran. Yet the crisis poses serious challenges ahead of next month’s budget.

Burnham has been advised by his officials that if the Houthis take control of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait it will have a “catastrophic” impact on international shipping and provide another hit to the global economy through a further spike in the oil price and inflation, the sources said.

The Houthi attacks have sent Brent crude toward $110 a barrel. Gilts extended a drop today as money markets added to bets on Bank of England interest rate rises off the back of inflation fears. Traders now fully price five quarter-point BoE hikes by the end of 2027, an outcome that would badly complicate the PM’s key pledge to reduce the cost-of-living.

The Treasury is also worried that the recent escalation is taking place as the OBR prepares its economic and fiscal forecasts for the budget. John Healey had been hoping for a market reprieve during the assessment window. Instead it’s going further in the wrong direction and potentially leaving the chancellor with even more of a fiscal hole.

Under Rishi Sunak the UK hit Houthi targets in Yemen to combat disruption in the Red Sea. Under Keir Starmer it deployed Sky Sabre air defences to help Riyadh.

Tweet links to a paywalled Bloomberg article.

'considering'

'sending advisors'

This is not really a significant meaningful action that is of serious note.

Meanwhile...

petrol has gone up 10p in a week!
that is unheard of, well for me anyway

Yes its been rising almost daily.

James Lucas AT JamesLucasIT

More than 2400 years ago, the greatest democracy in the world was starved into surrender because its enemy seized one narrow strait.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And it's hard not to notice that we have built our modern world on the same fragile foundation...

In the fifth century BC, Athens was the wonder of the ancient world, powerful, wealthy, and culturally unmatched. But Athens could not feed itself. It depended on grain shipped from the Black Sea, and every one of those grain ships had to pass through a single narrow channel, the Hellespont (Dardanelles), the slender strait separating Europe from Asia.

Everyone knew that whoever controlled that passage controlled Athens itself.

In 405 BC the Spartan admiral Lysander understood exactly what to do: rather than storm the city, he sailed to the Hellespont and defeated the Athenian fleet guarding the grain route at Aegospotami. The historian Xenophon records that Lysander went there deliberately "to prevent the passing out of the grain ships." He closed the strait, and within a year, facing starvation, the mightiest city in Greece surrendered. Its golden age was over...

Until recently, a fifth of the world’s oil passed through a single narrow channel in the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz. But since war broke out with Iran earlier this year, traffic through it has dropped dramatically. So the world’s shipping has leaned on its backup route, the Bab el-Mandeb, the strait between Yemen and Africa. Now, in the past few days, the Houthis have seized new territory along Yemen’s Red Sea coast and reportedly taken control of multiple strategic islands, tightening their grip on the Bab el-Mandeb chokepoint. Saudi Arabia has also shut down its East-West oil pipeline following recent attacks.

But the deepest danger is not the price of fuel, it's the thing that flows through the same strangled waterways: fertilizer. In August of this year, JP Morgan published a report with a title that says everything, Food Security Is National Security: A Compounding Storm. Roughly a third of the world's nitrogen fertilizer, the thing that grows about half of all the food on earth, normally passes through the very Middle Eastern chokepoints now under threat, and unlike oil, there is no strategic reserve of it. You cannot release fertilizer from a stockpile the way you release oil. When it does not arrive in time to be spread on the fields, the harvest simply shrinks.

JP Morgan projects global food inflation climbing from around 2.8 percent now to roughly 5 percent in early 2027, and it warns the crops most exposed are the ones that feed the poorest, rice, wheat, sugar. The United Nations has said the same thing: if these straits stay closed, a severe food price crisis can form within months, and the countries that will suffer first are the ones that already spend half their income just to eat.

There is an old saying: "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." Three days without food is what separates an orderly society from chaos. The Athenians discovered that during the Peloponnesian War, and the frightening part is not simply that something similar could happen again, but that the way our world is built today, a disruption in a few critical places could be felt by millions, if not billions, at once...

Brett Erikson AT BrettErikson28
The single most dangerous risk for the United States right now is a mass casualty event that would give the Israeli Lobby and Iran Hawks the ammunition to push Trump to employ insane measures against Iran.

If the blockade works, as we have seen over the past week, economic and energy infrastructure will be destroyed… and we lose.

If the blockade fails… we lose.

When the unavoidable reality is America being forced to end this war without accomplishing Washington’s ultimate goal of regime change, it is the RESPONSIBLE decision to derisk from the extreme tail events like an American mass casualty event.

This is the exact thesis of my recent op-ed in The Hill on Thursday, and the destruction of the Saudi East-West Pipeline makes this reality unavoidable.

There’s no way to accomplish all of America’s goals in the Iran War, but there ARE catastrophic risks of continuing the war.

Remove the troops. Call off the blockade. Avoid disaster.

Sigh.

This all spells "oh fuck" one way or another.

Reuters are reporting that Saudi Arabia is informing European customers that some of their orders have been cancelled.

They were due to arrive late September.

So there's a date in the sand for you.

Oh theyve cancelled orders due for delivery in October too. So they aren't expecting restoration of those pipes, storage tanks and refineries quickly then...

Happy times.

It feels like there is no real reporting to the extent of how badly this is really going.

Nope.

I really feel this is like back in Jan 2020 when no one was paying much attention to China and happily going about their lives without care in the world.

The news coverage of what's happening Nd the editorial decisions going on in the media are absolutely outrageous at this point.

Someone in Europe is in deep doo doo if shipments have been cancelled for Sept and October, if they didn't do some contingency to source more to cover these unexpected dropped shipments. We don't know who those shipments were destined for at present.

What would be the first effect on us?

If they were our oil orders for september and october then things get pretty serious very quickly. It's the wrong time of year for this to happen since it's about to get cold. If we rely on another country to supply us with certain products and it was their orders then we start seeing shortages and big gaps on shelves coupled with rapid price increases.

Got to agree.

Slightly off topic though relevant in some ways, I ordered some more gas canisters yesterday for our portable stove and noticed a price rise already hitting those which obviously wasn't a surprise. If mainstream media does actually start reporting the current issues you can guarantee there will be a spike in buying certain items. Possible that they're not doing so exactly for that reason...? Though we've been told to prepare to an extent..

Prices. Like mad prices. Particularly on diesel.

Diesel=deliveries.

Then if we hit the next level possible panic when people start to grasp there's an issue, before the government get their act together.

Then possible shortages. Even if there is enough to go around (similar to runs on fuel in the 2000s).

Rationing is probably a better option than chaos and roads blocked as people queue for fuel. So hope for this as mad as it sounds. (Been there done that).

Beyond that, I don't think I'm going to speculate presently.

But yeah. It should be higher in the news cycle than it is.

Probably.

Yep. This.
I put away the last of the extra stores I could afford to buy this afternoon and not ashamed to admit I used my very small amount of savings to do so.

No prepping for me lol got a few of the normal things like pasta/tinned soup/baked beans but that’s normal!

I'm well prepped on the food front now, all in hand.
Medicines etc.
Solar panels.
Candles.
Getting to grips with some water.
Now turning my attention to a means of cooking. Never having been a camper, I'm a bit wary of camping stoves and gas canisters. Some of the cheap camping stoves look very flimsy. And I'm assuming they need to be used outside. We have a decent sized garden and I'm thinking about what could be a good spot to cook if we can't cook indoors.
Anyone with thoughts on this? Recommendations for a camping stove or other method of cooking if the electricity is off?

I suggest a ghillie kettle or a kelly kettle or similar. They have to be used outside

What did you get, food?

There are very important safety risks, yes, in using a portable stove inside. Ours is sturdy, checked regularly, and I used it inside frequently during power cuts where we last lived. I would use it in the garden if possible, but I am not averse to using it indoors. The biggest risks are obvious: they produce gases, only if faulty or not burning correctly, carbon monoxide is a risk. We have a mains carbon monoxide detector (with battery back up) but also have a separate extra battery operated one to be doubly safe.
If using indoors, placed on top of our ceramic flat top electric cooker which is always switched off at the wall when not in use anyway, and has a stainless splashback and natural ventilation plus a large window adjacent and no flammable risk fabrics or similar nearby. This is the safest I can manage, if needed. We also have a firepit and bbq outside and large supply of charcoal and wood. I kept a few old pans in case I ever needed to heat water or food on firepit. Again, only because we have outside space do we have that option.

Yes, food we use anyway, tinned sauces, fruit, more pasta, rice pudding, milk powder (full cream I hate the skimmed), breadsticks, crackers, cereal bars, more tuna, cat food, instant mash, noodles etc. Also more wipes.