> which is trivially disprovable, not least because the pipelines were not transporting any gas and hadn't for a while.
This doesn't disprove anything. Energy prices could still have surged for multiple reasons, e.g. because countries might have worried about similar attacks on other, active pipelines and might have become more eager to boost their reserves. We'd have to look at some actual stats, but even then it might be hard to tell apart any effects from the utter market chaos at the time.
I mean, the sentence in the article is very vague. "Energy prices surged". Which energy? How soon? For how long? Where? For which buyers (private or public)? It could mean a lot of things, so I'll grant this one line of journalism isn't great. Journalism isn't easy, though. I have no opinion on the WSJ in particular as I don't really know it, but if you dismiss everything that has a few sloppy lines in it, you might not necessarily end up with the best sum of information.
This doesn't disprove anything. Energy prices could still have surged for multiple reasons, e.g. because countries might have worried about similar attacks on other, active pipelines and might have become more eager to boost their reserves. We'd have to look at some actual stats, but even then it might be hard to tell apart any effects from the utter market chaos at the time.