Energy is a topic with serious potential for a POD.
A common joke in fiction in the 1970s involved Soviet government meetings where the representative for energy assured all attending on the many triumphs of Soviet energy production. After which various other figures anticipate imminent Soviet energy disasters and how their agencies had planned ahead for those disasters.
After the Chernobyl disaster there was a joke claiming the Five Year Plan's thermal energy production quota had been fulfilled in four microseconds.