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Find out how we are busy helping Britain achieve net zero at www.eduftenergy.com. Hello and welcome to a special Saturday edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm Katie Balls and I'm joined by James Syed Fraser Nelson and John Kempf, Senior Energy Analyst at Reuters. Energy prices are on the rise but the government has told us not to panic. Yet is this a short template or something much more long term and serious?

John, to begin with, can you outline your perspective on what we've seen so far?

Yeah, thank you, Katie. I mean, what we're seeing now is part of a global rise in energy prices,

not just in the UK and Europe, but also in the United States and in Asia.

And it's not just gas and electricity. It's also the price of coal and it's the price of oil.

So it's across the board. What we're seeing in many ways is a reaction to what we had last year.

So we had an unprecedented global downturn, a huge slump in energy prices, almost a complete

stall in new investment across the energy production system. Then this year what we've seen

is a really exceptional rebound in economic activity. Much of that focused on goods rather

than services and goods are more energy

intensive. So we've seen a surge in energy consumption and the energy production sector simply

hasn't been able to keep up. So where we had a big cyclical downturn last year in energy prices,

we're seeing an equally violent cyclical upturn this year.

And that's going to leave energy prices very high over the next sort of six to 12 months,

not just in the UK, but across the rest of Europe and indeed around the rest of the world.

Fraser, we've heard the government say that the energy price cap will stay and there's been

an effort by ministers to suggest that this is temporary. But what do you think of the warning

signs to look for when we're trying to work out long-term damage? Warning sign number one,

try to go for petrol this weekend. You'll see massive queues they've started already. We've had one petrol company BP, say it's rationing, basically not because of all price

spikes, but because of HGV delivery.

But when you get this sort of panic, things can start very quickly.

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