David Fickling

You might think that the world’s supply chains are returning to normal now that oil appears to be flowing unhindered from the Persian Gulf for the first time in four months. Watch out for what’s happening on the far side of the Arabian Sea, though. The key input into another sort of value chain is misfiring just when it’s needed most: India’s monsoon rainfall.

It was one of the hottest would-be commodities of the Covid-19 era. Like the virus, it’s since faded into the background, to the extent that few give it a second thought.

The fortunes of a remote tungsten pit have risen and fallen through more than a century of conflicts. The critical mineral could now be a deterrent.

To judge by the way many people discuss the energy transition, we’re engaged in a fight between green idealogues in government and academia on the one hand, and a more realistic private sector that recognizes the innate superiority of fossil fuels on the other.

Since the dawn of the nuclear age, techno-evangelists have been promising electricity too cheap to meter. It’s never quite made it — until now.

If you knew your local Coke factory was having chronic supply-chain problems, buying a bigger refrigerator to store more soda would be one way to deal with it. The better strategy, however, might be to switch to Pepsi instead. And yet the “bigger refrigerator” path is the one governments in Asia are following to protect themselves against any repeat of the oil shortages prompted by this year’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz.

For all China’s breakthroughs in clean technology and disruptive strength in artificial intelligence, there’s one area of frontier engineering where America is still way ahead: space. That may be about to change.

To hear some people talk about it, the problem with China’s car industry is a tsunami of state-directed spending on electric vehicles.

You might think that missiles flying over the waters of the Strait of Hormuz were a world away from your closet full of fleece jackets, leggings and trainers.

Just how little diesel can China get away with using? We’re in the process of finding out.