Interesting to see The Economist doing modeling. Curious that they see no problem in it being utterly unauditable. Unlike a research paper that would cite specific datasets and model parameters, this is just "here are some numbers we're taking as true because model". They don't even appear to have done any validation on their model (holding back a few years from the training set to see how well it predicted them).
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.
> We trained our model to predict the daily average gas demand per person for 26 countries (Britain and all EU member states except Malta and Cyprus, which use little or no gas), for each winter month between January 2013 and February 2022. After the model had learned the relationship between temperatures and gas demand, we gave it real temperatures from this winter and asked it to predict how gas usage might have played out had Russia not sparked an energy crisis.