Like virtually all emergency shortages, the current European Energy Crisis has been created by European elites per some sort of arcane political calculations. From Tom Luongo at tomluongo.me:

The European Gas Crisis keeps hitting new high after new high as gas prices around the world go ballistic. While this isn’t just a European problem, if you read the MSM, that’s all they seem to care about.
You know, it snows in Japan as well folks, and China.
Prices keep skyrocketing in Europe because there is no shortage of idiocy at the top of the European power structure. The confluence of the pressurizing of Nordstream 2 with the release of the “Pandora Papers” and the beginnings of German coalition talks just after the beginning of Q4 should have everyone’s Spidey-Sense shutting down like your adrenals do after a long period of self-inflicted stress.
And honestly, whose adrenals aren’t on the verge of collapse after eighteen months of ‘flatten the curve,’ ‘follow the science,’ and ‘just roll over to the Communism, already, you disgusting plebe!’ that we’ve been going through.
I guess that’s yet another thing we have to try and factor into our analysis of what collapse is the most imminent?
Because when you put this gas crisis in Europe into its proper context it should be clear where the battle lines are being drawn as the extreme pressure cooker of today’s geopolitical landscape forces everyone off the sidelines and into the fray.
On the one hand we have natural gas prices in Europe approaching coffin corner. On the other we have Russia browning out gas deliveries to Europe. China is experiencing major energy shortages and the entirety of the coal delivery network around the world is buckling.
These are facts. There are more I could list but let’s stay focused here.