Investors Are Steering Away From Oil & Gas
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | October 14, 2021
This item appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s daily 10-point guide to the top stories yesterday.
It goes to the heart of the energy crisis:
Large swings in energy markets are nothing new. Because demand is so inelastic, even small changes in either supply or demand can cause big price changes.
We saw similar price spikes in the oil and gas markets in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crash. Indeed, it was arguably those price rises which triggered the crash. The cause of these rises was the increased demand from Asia, as China and other economies there began their rapid growth, thus increasing demand for energy.
Normally the energy market reacts by increasing capital spending to increase output. After 2008, it did just that, and, as tends to happen, the market swung the other way with surplus production and prices falling to economically unviable levels a few years ago.
However, this time around energy companies appear to be more reluctant to commit to new investment, as the WSJ notes, thanks to a combination of shareholder and government pressure, share buybacks and the easy money to be had from heavily subsidised renewable energy.
We have a similar situation in the UK and Europe, with companies like Shell keen to move away from oil and gas, along with political pressure to block North Sea oil development.
It is absolutely clear that, despite climate policies and renewable energy, global demand for fossil fuels will remain high, and probably increase, for at least the next decade. But if new investment does not come forward to maintain output levels, energy markets will become tighter still, driving up prices to crisis levels.
The knock on effect this will have on the world’s economy could be frightening.
Soaring gas prices in Western Europe due to mistaken reliance on wind farms, Russia on track for record exports in 2021 – Putin
RT | October 13, 2021
A surge in the cost of gas which has seen bills shoot up for households and industry is down to a shortfall in electricity generation, and not because Russia is somehow squeezing supplies, President Vladimir Putin has argued.
Speaking as part of a keynote address at Russian Energy Week on Wednesday, Putin said that a fall in output from wind farms had meant electricity prices shot up, having a knock-on effect on demand for gas. Wind power makes up an increasingly large share of Europe’s energy generation, particularly in the west of the continent, he went on.
“The rise in gas prices in Europe was the result of a shortage of electricity, and not vice versa,” the president insisted.
Putin went on to accuse Western leaders of “trying to cover up their own mistakes,” following a series of claims that the situation is because Russia is withholding supplies. He added that “proper analysis of the situation is often replaced by empty political slogans.”
According to the Russian president, an exceptionally long winter drained the continent’s energy reserves and disrupted pricing. Now, “the invisible hand of the market” is at play, Putin said.
Contrary to Russia seeking to worsen the crisis, Putin insisted that the country could well see record levels of exports in 2021 as Moscow works to meet the growing demand. That said, though, he claimed that the Kremlin doesn’t relish the prospect of shortages and that “the high price environment can have negative consequences for everyone, including producers.”
Some countries have seen gas prices rise by as much as 250% in recent days, with a knock-on effect being felt in the industry. Homeowners also face higher heating bills with winter fast approaching. Several energy companies in the UK, which has seen some of the sharpest increases, have entered into talks with the government to prevent them from potentially going bust.
Last month, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said that the state energy firm, Gazprom, is already fulfilling all of its contracts and no customers have been denied deliveries. According to him, “nobody has any grounds to claim otherwise,” and the company is making preparations to strike new deals and increase the volumes flowing westwards.
Southwest CEO: The President Forced Vaccine Mandates on Them
By Dr. Joseph Mercola | October 13, 2021
In an interview with CNBC, Southwest Airlines’ CEO Gary Kelly didn’t pull any punches when pinning the blame on his company’s hard-handed vaccine mandates — and laid it squarely on the head of President Joe Biden.
“I’ve never been in favor of corporations imposing that kind of a mandate,” Kelly said. “But the executive order from President Biden mandates that all federal employees and then all federal contractors, which covers all the major airlines, have to have a [vaccine] mandate … so we’re working through that.”
United and Hawaiian Airlines already had a COVID vaccine requirement in place before Biden’s announcement; American, Alaska and JetBlue followed through with theirs before Southwest instituted theirs. Like other carriers, Southwest started out by offering incentives to voluntarily get the shots.
Delta’s “incentive” came in the form of a $200 health insurance surcharge for unvaccinated workers. While Kelly claimed that the delays and cancellations of thousands of Southwest flights were due to bad weather and air traffic control issues in Florida, speculation continues to swirl that the real reason for the disruptions were mass “sick-outs” by employees protesting the mandate.
Still, Kelly insisted the whole thing was the president’s fault when he sent out a company message to Southwest employees: “I do not believe it is up to me … to mandate to people that they get vaccinated,” he said.
The Green Agenda or How This Energy Crisis is Different from All Others
By F. William Engdahl – New Eastern Outlook – 11.10.2021
The price of energy from all sources conventional is exploding globally. Far from accidental, it is a well-orchestrated plan to collapse the industrial world economy that has already been weakened dramatically by almost two years of ridiculous covid quarantine and related measures. What we are seeing is a price explosion in key oil, coal and now especially, natural gas energy. What makes this different from the energy shocks of the 1970s is that this time, it is developing as the corporate investment world, using the fraudulent ESG green investment model, is dis-investing in future oil, gas and coal while OECD governments embrace horrendously inefficient, unreliable solar and wind that will insure the collapse of industrial society perhaps as early as the next months. Barring a dramatic rethinking, the EU and other industrial economies are willfully committing economic suicide.
What only a few years ago was accepted as obvious was that ensuring an abundant, reliable, efficient and affordable energy defines the economy. Without efficient energy we cannot make steel, concrete, mine raw materials or any of the things that support our modern economies. In the past months the world price of coal for power generation has doubled. The price of natural gas has risen by almost 500%. Oil is headed to $90 a barrel, highest in seven years. This is a planned consequence of what is sometimes called the Davos Great Reset or the Green Agenda zero carbon madness.
Some two decades ago Europe began a major shift to mis-named renewables or Green Energy, mainly solar and wind. Germany, the heart of EU industry, led the transformation with former chancellor Merkel’s ill-conceived Energiewende, where Germany’s last nuclear power plants will close in 2022 and coal plants are rapidly being phased out. This all has now collided with the reality that Green Energy is not at all able to deal with major supply shortages. The crisis was entirely predictable.
Green Chickens Come Home to Roost
With the widespread covid lockdowns of industry and travel in 2020 EU natural gas consumption fell dramatically. The largest EU gas supplier, Gazprom of Russia, in interest of an orderly long-term market, duly reduced its deliveries to the EU market even at a loss. An unusually mild 2019-2020 winter allowed EU gas storage to reach maximum. A long, severe winter all but erased that in 2021.
Contrary to EU politicians’ claims, Gazprom has not played politics with the EU to force approval of its new NordStream 2 gas pipeline to Germany. As EU demand resumed in the first six months of 2021, Gazprom rushed to meet it and even exceed record 2019 levels, and even at the expense of replenishing Russian gas storage for the coming winter.
With the EU now firmly committed to a Green Energy agenda, Fit for 55, and explicitly rejecting natural gas as a long-term option, while at the same time killing coal and nuclear, the incompetence of the think-tank climate models that justified a 100% CO2-free, electric society by 2050 has come home to roost.
Because financial investors on Wall Street and London saw the benefit of huge profits from the Green energy agenda, working with the Davos World Economic Forum to promote the laughable ESG investing model, conventional oil, gas and coal companies are not investing profits in expanded production. In 2020 worldwide spending on oil, gas, coal dropped by an estimated $1 trillion. That is not coming back.
With BlackRock and other investors all but boycotting ExxonMobil and other energy companies in favor of “sustainable” energy, one exceptionally cold and long winter in Europe and a record lack of wind in northern Germany, triggered a panic buying of gas on world LNG Markets in early September.
The problem was the restocking was too late, as most available LNG from the USA, Qatar and other sources that normally would be available had already been sold to China where an equally confused energy policy, including a political ban on Australian coal, has led to plant closings and a recent government order to secure gas and coal “at any cost.” Qatar, US LNG exporters and others have flocked to Asia leaving the EU in the cold, literally.
Deregulation of Energy
What few understand is how today’s Green energy markets are rigged to benefit speculators like hedge funds or investors like BlackRock or Deutsche Bank and penalize energy consumers. The headline prices for natural gas traded in Europe, the Dutch TTF futures contract, is sold by the London-based ICE Exchange. It speculates on what future wholesale natural gas prices in the EU will be in one, two or three months hence. The ICE is backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank and Société Générale among others. The market is in what are called gas futures contracts or derivatives.
Banks or others can speculate for pennies on the dollar, and when news broke on how low EU gas storage for the coming winter were, financial sharks went on a feeding frenzy. By early October futures prices for Dutch TTF gas had exploded by an unprecedented 300% in only days. Since February it is far worse, as a standard LNG cargo of 3.4 trillion BTU (British Thermal Units) now costs $100-120 million, while at the end of February its cost was less than $20 million. That’s a 500-600% rise in seven months.
The underlying problem is that, unlike the case for most of the postwar period, since the political promotion of unreliable and high-cost solar and wind “renewables” in the EU and elsewhere (e.g. Texas, February 2021) electric utility markets and their prices have been deliberately deregulated to promote Green alternatives and force out gas and coal on the dubious argument that their CO2 emissions endanger the future of humankind if not reduced to zero by 2050.
The prices borne by the end consumer are set by the energy suppliers who integrate the different costs under competitive conditions. The diabolical way EU electricity costs are computed, allegedly to encourage inefficient solar and wind and discourage conventional sources, is that, as French energy analyst Antonio Haya put it, “the most expensive plant of those needed to cover demand (marginal plant) sets the price for each hour of production for all the production matched in the auction.” So today’s natural gas price sets the price for essentially zero cost hydro-electric electricity. Given the soaring price for natural gas, that is defining EU electricity costs. It’s a diabolical pricing architecture that benefits speculators and destroys consumers, including households and industry.
A fundamental aggravating cause for the recent shortages of abundant coal, gas and oil is the decision by BlackRock and other global money trusts to force investment away from oil, gas or coal—all perfectly safe and necessary energy sources—to buildup of grossly inefficient and unreliable solar or wind. They call it ESG investing. It is the latest rage on Wall Street and other world financial markets ever since BlackRock CEO Larry Fink joined the Board of the Klaus Schwab World Economic Forum in 2019. They set up front ESG certifying companies that award ESG “politically correct” ratings on stock companies, and punishing those who do not comply. The rush into ESG investing has made billions for Wall Street and friends. It has also put the brakes on future development of oil, coal or natural gas for most of the world.
The ‘German Disease’
Now after 20 years of foolish investment into solar and wind, Germany, the once-flagship of EU industry, is a victim of what we can call the German Disease. Like the economic Dutch Disease, the forced investment into Green Energy has resulted in the lack of reliable affordable energy. All for an unproven 1.5C claim of IPCC that is supposed to end our civilization by 2050 if we fail to reach Zero Carbon.
To advance that EU Green Energy agenda, country after country with a few exceptions have begun dismantling oil, gas and coal and even nuclear. Germany’s last remaining nuclear plants will permanently close next year. New coal plants, with latest state-of-art scrubbers, are being scrapped even before being started.
The German case gets even more absurd.
In 2011 the Merkel government took an energy model developed by Martin Faulstich and the state Advisory Council on the Environment (SRU) which claimed that Germany could attain 100% renewable electricity generation by 2050. They argued that using nuclear longer would not be necessary, nor the construction of coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). With that, Merkel’s catastrophic Energiewende was born. The study argued, it would work because Germany could contract to buy surplus, CO2-free, hydro-electric power from Norway and Sweden.
Now with extreme drought and a hot summer, the hydropower reserves of Sweden and Norway are dangerously low coming into winter, only 52% of capacity. That means the electric power cables to Denmark, Germany and now UK are in danger. And to make it worse, Sweden is split on shutting its own nuclear plants which give it 40% of electricity. And France is debating cutting as much as one-third of its clear nuclear plants meaning that source for Germany will also not be sure.
Already on January 1, 2021 because of a German government mandated coal phase-out, 11 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 4.7 GW were shut down. It lasted only 8 days when several of the coal plants had to be reconnected to the grid due to a prolonged low-wind period. In 2022 the last German nuclear plant will shut and more coal plants will permanently close, all for the green nirvana. In 2002 German nuclear power was source for 31% of power, carbon-free electric power.
As for wind power making up the deficit in Germany, in 2022 some 6000 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 16 GW will be dismantled due to the expiration of feed-in subsidies for older turbines. The rate of new wind farm approvals is being blocked by growing citizen rebellion and legal challenges to the noise pollution and other factors. An avoidable catastrophe is in the making.
The response from the EU Commission in Brussels, rather than admit the glaring flaws in their Green Energy agenda, has been to double down on it as if the problem were natural gas and coal. EU Climate Czar Frans Timmermans absurdly declared, “Had we had the green deal five years earlier, we would not be in this position because then we would have less dependency on fossil fuels and natural gas.”
If the EU continues with that suicidal agenda, it will find itself in a deindustrialized wasteland in a few short years. The problem is not gas, coal or nuclear. It is the inefficient Green Energy from solar and wind that will never be able to offer stable, reliable power.
The Green Energy Agenda of the EU, US and other governments along with the Davos-promoted ESG investing will only guarantee that as we go forward there will be even less gas or coal or nuclear to fall back on when the wind stops, there is a drought in hydroelectric dams or lack of sunshine. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize this is a road to economic destruction. But that’s in fact the goal of the UN 2030 “sustainable” energy or the Davos Great Reset: population reduction on a massive scale. We humans are the frogs being slowly boiled. And now the Powers That Be are really turning the heat up.
Southwest airlines cancellations continue, as “unforeseen crew issues” halt trains and industry accross U.S.
RT | October 11, 2021
Hundreds more Southwest flights have been canceled or delayed, as rumors of a staff “sickout” in protest over Covid-19 vaccine mandates persist. SouthWest’s union says no such action is taking place, but others aren’t convinced.
Some 355 Southwest Airlines flights were canceled and 571 delayed as of Monday morning, according to data from FlightAware. The cancellations and delays came after the airline, known for its budget fares, canceled around 2,000 flights over the weekend, leaving passengers stranded at airports throughout the US.
Rumors suggested that the cancellations were a result of employees calling in sick en masse to protest against the company’s recently announced vaccine mandate, which gives employees until December 8 to get immunized against Covid-19 or face unemployment. The mandate was issued to comply with orders from the Biden administration.
The airline, however, blamed the weekend’s delays on “[air traffic control] issues and disruptive weather,” and the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) – a union representing some 10,000 Southwest pilots – said on Sunday that “there are no work slowdowns or sickouts either related to the recent mandatory vaccine mandate or otherwise.” The union said that it would not authorize such action, and sided with the airline in blaming “staffing at Jacksonville Center,” the country’s fourth-busiest area control center which oversees air traffic in parts of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
The union said that while other airlines were relatively unaffected by the supposed staffing issue in Jacksonville Center, Southwest’s “operation has become brittle and subject to massive failures under the slightest pressure.”
A number of aviation journalists reported over the weekend that there was indeed a “sickout” at Jacksonville Center. However, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) dismissed these reports, and Jacksonville Aviation Authority COO Tony Cugno told the JAA board of directors that staffing shortages were the result of a number of employees taking annual leave, coupled with others staying at home immediately after receiving their Covid-19 vaccination.
Unverified reports suggest, however, that some air traffic control employees are bunking off work to protest against the mandates.
The explanations from Southwest and the authorities in Jacksonville haven’t tamped down rumors of discontent within the airline. For one thing, the SWAPA is suing the airline over its vaccine mandate, and filed a motion on Friday to have the mandate blocked. The union’s release also did not mention anything about anti-vaccine staff taking time off by using up vacation days, as some commentators online have suggested they’re doing.
Passengers affected by the weekend’s cancellations also reported that not only were flights not taking off, but Southwest’s airport desks were unstaffed. The airline has not yet explained this shortage of ground staff.
What’s happening at Southwest is still unclear. However, walkouts have been reported in a number of other critical industries in recent days. Shipbuilders in Newport News – who are also required to get vaccinated by December 8 – staged a protest on Friday, and “unforeseen crew issues” have halted trains in the Northeast, though information in the mainstream media remains thin on the ground.
“The mainstream media is doing its best to keep a lid on the expanding rebellion against the vaccine mandates,” former US senator Ron Paul wrote on Monday, adding that strikes and walkouts threaten “to completely derail an already crumbling economy and to obliterate a deeply unpopular US president and administration.”
Cultural Warfare in the 20th Century: How Western Civilization Came Undone
By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | October 9, 2021
In my last article “Guterres and the Great Reset: How Capitalism Became a Time Bomb”, I made the case that the time bomb justifying a Great Reset of civilization was set into motion over 50 years ago. In that location, we were introduced to a cast of characters surrounding the World Economic Forum and Trilateral Commission who played instrumental roles in bringing about a controlled disintegration of western civilization.
Despite the fact that this un-natural transformation occurred over the dead bodies of great statesmen of the 1960s, a question still lingers: HOW did the western nations… especially the United States, so deeply shaped by a love of freedom, wilfully relinquish its democratic institutions in favor of a new system of supranational governance and de-growth? How did the very people who were targeted for destruction not only let this happen but in some cases even aide and abet the perpetrators?
Epistemological Warfare in America
Here it helps to look to the writings of an imperial grand strategist who is too often championed as a defender of freedom: Aldous Huxley.
While Aldous’ brother Julian was reshaping the global paradigm by re-packaging eugenics under several new costumes post-1945, Aldous’ creative juices were driven entirely by his role as a cultural warrior.
Grand children of Thomas Huxley who was commissioned to re-organize the British Empire in the late 1850s, both grandchildren vigorously embraced the family business working closely with the elite Bloomsbury Group of Bertrand Russell, and John Maynard Keynes between 1914-1937.
Among these creative misanthropes, Lord Bertrand Russell (another celebrated pacifist) had gone far in outlining the sort of bone chilling ideal that Darwinian laws of evolution demanded be humanity’s destiny under a scientifically managed priesthood. In his 1930 Scientific Outlook, Russell stated:
“The scientific rulers will provide one kind of education for ordinary men and women, and another for those who are to become holders of scientific power. Ordinary men and women will be expected to be docile, industrious, punctual, thoughtless, and contented. Of these qualities probably contentment will be considered the most important. In order to produce it, all the researchers of psycho-analysis, behaviourism, and biochemistry will be brought into play…. All the boys and girls will learn from an early age to be what is called `co-operative,’ i.e., to do exactly what everybody is doing. Initiative will be discouraged in these children, and insubordination, without being punished, will be scientifically trained out of them.”
“Except for the one matter of loyalty to the world state and to their own order, members of the governing class will be encouraged to be adventurous, and full of initiative. It will be recognized that it is their business to improve scientific techniques and to keep the manual workers contented by means of continual new amusements”.
Huxley would have Russell’s thesis firmly in mind when he began writing his Brave New World in 1931.
Aldous Goes to Work
Having set up his base of operations in Hollywood in 1937, Aldous lived out his days in the USA writing scripts for Hollywood, exploring psychotropic drugs and coordinating a new cultural movement that would soon overtake the youth growing up amidst the insanity of the Cold War.
In an infamous 1962 speech titled “The Ultimate Revolution”, Aldous Huxley outlined the principles of this new science of governance telling adoring fans amidst the wannabe alphas in the Berkeley auditorium:
“If you are going to control any population for any length of time, you must have some measure of consent. It’s exceedingly difficult to see how pure terrorism can function indefinitely. It can function for a fairly long time, but I think sooner or later you have to bring in an element of persuasion, an element of getting people to consent to what is happening to them. Well, it seems to me that the nature of The Ultimate Revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this: That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques, which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist, to get people, actually, to love their servitude.”
Getting people to love their servitude would be made possible by an array of new techniques outlined in both Huxley’s fiction and non-fiction writings and put into motion by the hard work of CIA-funded laboratories working under secretive umbrella of Allan Dulles’ MK Ultra. Utilizing many techniques pioneered by Nazi psychiatrists in WWII, one of the primary objectives of MK Ultra was to deconstruct the human psyche using a mix of electroshock therapy, psychotropic drugs and other conditioning in order to reconstruct personalities from scratch by professional psychiatrists. As Naomi Klein demonstrated in her famous book The Shock Doctrine, the idea behind MK Ultra was always to extend these behavioral techniques to reprogramming entire groups, societies and nations.
Within Huxley’s Brave New World, psychotropic drugs (soma), cultural norms driven by pre-adolescent sensualism, constant Tinder-esque sexual escapades, the disintegration of family units and hyper-sensualized entertainment (dubbed “feelies”) did the job nicely. Huxley’s dystopia featured a society which had successfully evolved to become a total oligarchy with a scientific priesthood managing the test tube babies bio engineered to become alphas, betas, gammas or the lowly toilet cleaning epsilons reminiscent of the sub-human Morlocks described in H.G. Wells’ earlier Time Machine. In Huxley’s world, family units have long since disintegrated with the nation state and any belief in God.
In his 1958 Brave New World Revisited, Aldous decries the ultimate evil caused by faith in scientific and technological progress as an illusion which cannot provide an escape from the ultimate determining law of humanity: overpopulation. Citing creative breakthroughs in atomic power, space exploration and medicine, Huxley bemoans how each time humanity solves a problem that allows us to save more lives, the species replicates at faster rates bringing about the inevitable Malthusian problems of future wars for resources, diseases and the breeding of the inferior races.
Huxley writes:
“In this second half of the twentieth century we do nothing systematic about our breeding; but in our random and unregulated way we are not only over-populating our planet, we are also, it would seem, making sure that these greater numbers shall be of biologically poorer quality. In the bad old days children with considerable, or even with slight, hereditary defects rarely survived. Today, thanks to sanitation, modern pharmacology and the social conscience, most of the children born with hereditary defects reach maturity and multiply their kind.”
In another speech delivered to the University of California in 1961, Huxley elaborated on this bone chilling plan saying:
“There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel – by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
Huxley knew that if this sort of brainwashing were successfully induced, the ruling oligarchy could ensure that the hedonistic identities of those coming of age within this controlled environment would detach themselves from outdated concepts like nationalism, love of family, or religion, in order to create LSD-driven personal “micro-realities”. Honoring the past and sacrificing for the future became replaced with a new wisdom of “living in the now”.
Huxley was happy to discover that LSD-25 mixed with cannabis, hashish and mescaline was a perfect supplement for soma writing in his 1958 Revisited:
“In LSD-25 (lysergic acid diethylamide) the pharmacologists have recently created another aspect of soma – a perception-improver and vision-producer that is, physiologically speaking, almost costless. This extraordinary drug, which is effective in doses as small as fifty or even twenty-five millionths of a gram, has power (like peyote) to transport people into the other world. In the majority of cases, the other world to which LSD-25 gives access is heavenly; alternatively it may be purgatorial or even infernal. But, positive, or negative, the lysergic acid experience is felt by almost everyone who undergoes it to be profoundly significant and enlightening. In any event, the fact that minds can be changed so radically at so little cost to the body is altogether astonishing.”
During his time in the United States coordinating this new countercultural insurgency, Aldous recruited a young professor of psychiatry named Timothy Leary to his cause. Describing his interaction with Huxley as the two planned this final revolution, Leary wrote in 1983:
“We had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good natured pluralism and scientific paganism had arrived.”
The Creation of Organized Schizophrenia
How the counter-culture was formed in the bowels of such oligarchical psychiatric mental meatgrinders like London’s Tavistock Institute and was applied by psychiatric shock troops strategically placed across all schools, military, unions, corporate boards and government bureaucracies throughout the years is beyond the scope of this present article, although it was explored in a recent video by this author.
What must be kept in mind for our present purposes is that cultural warfare during this intense post WW2 period was full spectrum in nature- taking every major branch of human life into account and extracting all traces of creative reason, universality, Freedom, and Truth anywhere it could be found.
Whether it was in the fine arts and music or whether it was in scientific practice, new dualisms were imposed severing logical thinking from the “pollution” of subjective emotions. Where the arts became shaped increasingly by hedonism liberated from reason (with a “high” post-modern art for the elites and a “low” populist art for the dumb masses), the sciences became governed by the dogmatic faith in cold mathematical sterility governed by “statistics”, entropy, and blind fatalism.
Random paint splashes of CIA-funded artists like Jackson Pollock or the fuzzy squares of Mark Rothko became the new artistic ideal while scientists found themselves trained to think like computers modelling their minds of the methods of Bertrand Russell’s Principia, Norbert Weiner’s Cybernetics and John von Neumann’s Information Theory. Bertrand Russell’s role coordinating the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom should not be lost on anyone.
With the severing of creativity from reason, the minds of those processed by this new cultural field was increasingly shaped by blind rules and axioms enforced by expert consensus rather than personal acts of discovery. Computer modelling thus found itself replacing acts of genuine human thought and within this sterile intellectual climate, a new cult of artificial intelligence began to find fertile soil to grow its perverse roots.
When mixed with heavy doses of imperial wars, assassinations, coups, and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, the parents of the baby boomers had no clue what evil they were dealing with as their children were absorbed into a new drug/sex-ridden cultural field that no one had ever experienced before. Schizophrenic chaos in the world bred schizophrenic chaos in the culture as increasingly large arrays of youth gave up on reality in order to “tune in, turn on and drop out”.
Throughout the 1960s, patriotic forces around the world rallied to revive the spirit of scientific and technological progress which these neo-Malthusians despised so much. President John F Kennedy attempted to amplify Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace along with large scale investments into Africa, Asia and Ibero America alongside leaders of the Pan African and Pan Arab world who were committed to ending colonialism and bringing their people into the 21st century.
After Kennedy’s murder, Charles de Gaulle worked with international co-thinkers like Quebec Premier Daniel Johnson, Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker and German Chancellor Adenauer to bring about a coalition of progress which peaked in 1968 with Bobby Kennedy’s inevitable leadership of the United States.
Just as in the period of the late 19th century when a win-win system of international cooperation was threatening to replace the dying Hobbesian system of the British Empire, a dense string of coups, color revolutions and assassinations ensured the crushing of this dynamic as a new age of post-industrialism, Anglo-American imperialism and monetarism was unleashed onto an unsuspecting society.
The Club of Rome Takes the Stage
In this new post-1968 political climate, new scientific conferences were organized in an attempt to impose statistic modelling premised on systems analysis onto biological, economic and especially ecological systems. Extrapolating present trends into the future and disregarding the sorts of non-linear qualitative leaps caused by creative thought allowed this new breed of scientist to “predict” the inevitable crises caused by population growth and the diminishing returns on finite resources.
The iconic study for this new scientific movement was the Club of Rome-commission MIT report Limits to Growth that “predicted”, as Malthus had done two centuries earlier, the point of crisis when population pressures would outstrip nature’s bounty- giving technocrats managing humanity the tools needed to make the proper sacrifices in the present.
When figures like Mark Carney discuss the “greening of global finance” and placing monetary values upon the reduction of carbon footprints, this is the sick and unscientific foundation of their thinking. Where formerly, humanity valued economic growth via scientific and technological progress (and implicitly the support of increased numbers of people at higher standards of life), the new system of “values” promoted by these misanthropes demanded that profit be tied to the reduction of human activity on the earth.
Club of Rome co-founder Aurelio Peccei, who presented at the inaugural World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, stated:
“The economy and the ecology are inextricably united… A strategy of generating wealth and one of safeguarding this patrimony are opposed. Activities that generate wealth but destroy the natural patrimony even more, create negative value”.
Former President of the World Federation of Mental Health during the high point of MK Ultra, Margaret Mead (wife of MK Ultra controller Gregory Bateson) presided over one such 1975 conference on the environment and atmosphere sponsored by the Club of Rome (this club also being an early sponsor of the World Economic Forum in 1971). Echoing the spirit of Russell and Huxley earlier, Mead called for the creation of a new science of statistics premised on equating pollution to climate change that would become internally consistent and shape the behavior of humanity going into the 21st century. The focus was always population control. In her speech Mead said:
“The unparalleled increase in the human population and its demands for food, energy, and resources is clearly the most important destabilizing influences in the biosphere. We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a planetary scale.”
“What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane. [We must] draw from the necessary capacity for sacrifice. It is therefore a statement of major possibilities of danger, which may overtake humankind, on which it is important to concentrate attention”.
Rather than seeing science as a field for optimistic problem solving, this misanthropic cult of elitists demanded that science be redefined around a “new wisdom” of adapting to problems real or imagined. This cynical science of “problematique” (the science of problems) assumed that since all creative discovery caused population growth, the real enemy was found in the naïve optimists who believe it good to promote discoveries. Mead ridiculed those cultural optimists who rejected this cynical view of science saying:
“Those who react against prophets of doom, believing that there is not adequate scientific basis for their melancholy prophecies, [for they] tend to become in turn prophets of paradisiacal impossibilities, guaranteed utopias of technological bliss, or benign interventions on behalf of mankind that are none the less irrational just because they are couched as ‘rational.’ They express a kind of faith in the built-in human instinct for survival, or a faith in some magical technological panacea.”
Using more truthful language, Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the preface of The First Global Revolution (1991):
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
Today’s world is being pulled by two opposing dynamics.
The prophets of doom who set the time bomb in place half a century ago giddily prepare their utopian Great Reset which demands vast bloodletting as an overpopulated humanity is to be sacrificed by a modern pagan scientific priesthood devoted to Gaia and computer models. On the other hand, the spirit of progress and open system thinking has come alive in the form of the multipolar alliance which premises its planning on an opposing set of assumptions about the nature of humanity, creative thought, value, economics, progress and natural law.
Which future wins out in this battle over humanity will be shaped by the decisions and discoveries we make (or fail to make) in the days ahead.
FULL OF GAS
By Paul Robinson | IRRUSSIANALITY | October 8, 2021
It’s 20 degrees here in Ottawa. For October, that’s something of a heatwave, and it’s meant to stay this way for a week or so, well into the middle of the month. Beyond that, the weather guys say that we’re in for a generally warm autumn. No need for the winter tires just yet.
Europe, though, is said to be headed for a deep cold spell in the coming months. So good for us, bad for Europe – unless you like winter sports, of course, in which case it’s the other way around. But regardless of what weather you prefer, cold has consequences, one of which is that you have to turn the heating up, for which you need fuel. And in the modern post-coal world, that increasingly means burning natural gas.
Unfortunately, this is a bad time to do so, for the price of natural gas has shot up in recent months, as you can see from the chart below. This is a result of increased demand, reduced output from wind turbines, and a reduction in supplies as Europe’s main suppliers – Norway and Russia – fill up their own stocks before winter. This has apparently ‘all but wiped out stocks’ in the rest of Europe. The markets have responded with a binge of frenzied speculation, shoving natural gas prices up to unnaturally high levels.
Which is obviously Russia’s fault. Because, well … it’s bad, and it’s natural gas, and so Russia must be to blame. After all, we know that all those traders on the futures markets take their orders from the Kremlin.
To give example of the hysterical rhetoric floating around, CNBC ran this headline yesterday: ‘The US was right – Europe has become a “hostage” to Russia over energy, analysts warn.’ The following story then told readers that ‘Europe is now largely at Russia’s mercy when it comes to energy,’ citing analyst Timothy Ash (who regularly pops up on the pages of the Kyiv Post) denouncing Russia’s ‘energy blackmail’ and saying that:
‘Europe has now left itself hostage to Russia over energy supplies … [It’s] crystal clear that Russia has Europe (the EU and U.K.) in an energy headlock, and Europe (and the U.K.) are too weak to call it out and do anything about it … Europe is cowering as it fears [that] as it heads into winter Russia will further turn the screws (of energy pipelines off) and allow it to freeze until it gets its way and NS2 [North Stream 2] is certified.’
If I get this right, the logic is that Russia is deliberately withholding supplies from Europe in order to force Germany to complete the certification of the North Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany and Russia. Unfortunately, Ash fails to provide a shred of evidence for this claim, and it’s not as if the Russians are expressing any sort of concern that the certification may not happen, or that they are specifically targeting Germany.
In fact, there’s no evidence that Russia is blackmailing anybody. Russia’s president Vladimir Putin even sought to calm international markets by telling the Russian gas company Gazprom to keep sending supplies through Ukraine even though it would be cheaper to send them via alternative routes. It’s important to maintain Russia’s reputation as a reliable supplier of energy, he noted, adding that Russia would indeed increase supplies to Europe this year, with exports possibly reaching a record high.
Critics complain that Russia could be pumping more gas to Europe than it currently is. It is apparently true that the volume of deliveries has been down in the past couple of months, as Russia fills up its own stocks before what is expected to be a harsh winter. But, deliveries for 2021 as a whole are on par with last year and Russia is meeting all its contracts. Furthermore, as Ben Aris has pointed out, it’s not that easy for Russia to greatly increase the quantity of gas it supplies Europe via existing pipelines. This is because different gas fields serve different pipelines, with limited connections. The line going via Ukraine comes from fields that are already ‘maxed out’. Additional gas would have to come from the Yamal peninsula – i.e. via North Stream or North Stream 2. With the former already at capacity, that in essence means the latter. In other words, Aris concludes:
‘It is possible for Russia to send more gas west without using NS2 but it’s limited & most expensive option for Gazprom. By far easiest & cheapest option for both Gazprom & EU is to turn NS2 on. This would solve the current gas crisis.’
It seems to me that Russia’s critics need to decide what they want. For years, they’ve been complaining that Europe is buying too much Russian gas. Now, though, they’re complaining that the Russians won’t sell them more! The Russians sell you gas – that’s a sign that they’re out to get you. They won’t sell you gas – proof that they’ve got you!
Frankly, it makes no sense.
Besides which, people don’t sell you stuff unless you ask them to, which in business terms means signing a contract with them. Russia, as previously said, is fulfilling its contracts. What more is it meant to do? As German chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out this week, if European states haven’t signed up to buy Russian gas, they can’t really complain if they don’t get it. She said:
‘To my knowledge, there are no orders where Russia has said we won’t deliver it to you, especially not with regard to the pipeline in Ukraine. Russia can only deliver gas on the basis of contractual obligations, and not just only like that.’
Absolutely.
Of course, if Russia was exploiting the rising cost of gas by engaging in price gouging, there might still be some grounds for complaint. But that’s not the case. Russia prefers to lock its customers into long-term contracts. Anybody who had the good sense to sign such a contract with Gazprom a while back when prices were low will now be laughing: their supplies are guaranteed and they’ll be cheap. Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, and the like are probably feeling a bit smug right now. Others who preferred to gamble on the market, or to dump Russia for an alternative supplier such as American LNG will now have to pay the price. But that’s their fault not Russia’s. As Putin pointed out:
‘The practice of our European partners has confirmed it once more that they made mistakes. We talked to the European Commission’s previous lineup, and all its activity was aimed at phasing out of so-called long-term contracts. It was aimed at transition to spot gas trade. And as it turned out, it has become obvious today, that this practice is a mistake.’
None of this, unfortunately, has stopped the flood of stories blaming Russia for Europe’s gas crisis, a crisis that is in large part due to the latter’s own errors. To give a flavour, here’s some of the headlines in the American and British press this past 24 hours:
‘Don’t Fall For Putin or Orban as They Try to Exploit Europe’s Energy Crisis’ – Washington Post
‘As Europe Faces a Cold Winter, Putin Seizes on the Leverage From Russia’s Gas Output’ – The New York Times
‘Russia has the West over a barrel: Fury at “bullying” Putin for offering Europe more natural gas IF his Nord Stream 2 pipeline is approved.’ – Daily Mail
‘Gas price crisis: Is Putin using energy supply as a weapon and what is its new Nord Stream 2 pipeline?’ – Sky News
‘UK dubbed “Putin’s puppet” as “Soviet” Britain’s gas prices plummet after Russian offer’ – Daily Express
‘How “Sleepy Joe” handed Putin the bargaining chip he is using to hold Europe to ransom in gas crisis’ – Daily Mail
Now, I can understand why Western politicians would want to find a scapegoat for their own failings, but why does the press go along with this? Wasn’t there a time when the Fourth Estate prided itself on holding the powers that be at home to account? Apparently no more. Blaming Russia obviously sells more copy. As long as that remains the case, expect the pipelines of BS to keep on flowing profusely!
Hungary’s Orban blames Brussels & its climate change policies for soaring EU gas prices
RT | October 8, 2021
The EU should withdraw its policies aimed at tackling climate change as they’re the reason for the record surge in energy prices on the continent in autumn, Viktor Orban, Hungarian Prime Minister, has said.
Energy bills have been spiking for customers across Europe because of bad decisions made by “bureaucrats in Brussels,” who are fighting for ecology by continuously raising the price of energy generated from coal and gas, Orban insisted in a radio interview on Friday.
“These decisions must be withdrawn… at present gas prices are where they should be in 2035. Brussels isn’t the solution today, they are the problem,” he said. “Poles, Czech and we Hungarians demand that the rules should be withdrawn.”
According to the PM, the difficult situation on the energy market would top the agenda at the next EU summit, with Budapest, Warsaw and Prague to present a unified front at the meeting and offer their solutions to the crisis.
Orban again blasted EU climate policy chief Frans Timmermans, who is pushing hard for the EU to cut net greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. He recently warned that the rising emissions from Europe’s transport sector may prevent the bloc from achieving that goal.
“It’s a commissioner called Timmermans, who is posing the biggest threat to us,” the PM said.
The Hungarian leader already attacked Timmermans during his visit to Slovenia on Thursday, saying that “his calculations were incorrect and the EU residents must pay the extra price.” He also slammed the EU’s climate change policies as “foolish.”
Those not paying “the extra price” are actually the Hungarians, as caps on gas and power price hikes for households have been in place in the country after being introduced by Orban’s government in 2010.
The spike in energy bills in the EU, which the experts say was driven by rising gas prices and soaring cost of permits on the bloc’s carbon market, have only increased the split on green transition policies within the 27-member union. While wealthy nations see it as a sign to boost action against climate change, the poorer countries are voicing increasing concerns about the economic fallout of such measures.
Midweek, European gas prices have set a scary record by rising above$1,900 per 1,000 cubic meters – nearly three times higher than in September. The price dropped significantly after Russia said that it was going to boost gas supplies to the bloc, but the situation still remains harsh.
Palestinian factions call for cancellation of Oslo and adoption of national agenda
MEMO | October 7, 2021
Five Palestinian factions called on Wednesday for the cancellation of the Oslo Accords and the adoption of a national agenda agreed upon by their secretaries general in September last year, Sama has reported.
According to the news agency, the five factions are the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Islamic Jihad in Palestine, the Vanguard for the Popular Liberation War, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command.
They warned against what they called the blackmailing of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and undermining of its status at the expense of the rights of the Palestinian refugees. The EU’s “extortion” against UNRWA to make school textbooks and curriculums “Israel friendly” is intended to make Palestinian students grow up without knowing their national identity, they said.
The factions also reiterated the importance of fast-tracking the adoption of a national resistance strategy instead of Oslo and its related Paris Economic Protocol. The formation of a united leadership for a comprehensive popular resistance effort to push the Israeli occupation out of Palestine is also a priority, they insisted.
“Betting on the delusional international proposals” and dependence on the International Quartet led by the United States “is an extension of a three-decade of failure,” they added. “Political escalation is not achieved through illusory and empty statements, but through the accumulation of material power on the ground.”
Taliban, Iran conclude bilateral economic deals
MEMO | October 6, 2021
Afghanistan and Iran yesterday concluded “important” bilateral economic and trade agreements, a spokesman for the Taliban said.
Zabihullah Mujahid, who is also acting deputy minister of information and culture in the interim Afghan government, said in a statement that a meeting was held between Afghan and Iranian officials “with the aim of strengthening economic ties and providing necessary facilities for trade issues between the two countries”.
According to the statement, the two sides have decided to increase working hours to facilitate the flow of goods at the Islam Qala-e-Dogharoon border, reviewing existing tariffs on goods and services, as well as launching discussions on fuel supplies.
Last year, Iran’s exports to Afghanistan amounted to about $4 billion while Afghan exports to Iran ranged between $40-$50 million only.
The statement added that a Taliban delegation will visit Tehran to meet officials from the Iranian Oil Ministry.
The two sides also agreed that Iran would build roads in eight Afghan provinces in order to improve trade and transportation within the next month.
Japan Stocking Fossil Fuels for Winter (part of global pattern)
By Vijay Jayaraj | Master Resource | October 5, 2021
Right in the midst of a global political effort to reduce fossil fuel consumption, Japan is set to increase its fossil fuel use and imports as an expected colder-than-normal winter approaches.
The country’s meteorological department recently released its weather outlook for the upcoming winter, which expects that most regions will experience either 30-year-average or below average temperatures between December and February.
Climate Narrative vs. Energy Reality
Blind belief in the global warming narrative can catch nations off guard, risking severe energy crises due to unpreparedness. There is an old axiom that says, “Measure twice, cut once.” It reiterates the need for careful planning before embarking on a task. Doing so saves time and energy and prevents mistakes.
The axiom is extremely relevant in energy policy planning. With the ascendancy of the climate global warming narrative, many nations are susceptible to believing climate-model projections that may not reflect real climate, much less actual weather patterns.
On-the-ground weather forecasts contradict the narrative that winters will be milder. A Washington Post article read, “Winters are Shrinking.” Environmental Defense Fund claimed, “Winters are warmer” and “cold streaks are rarer.”
Such false climate forecasts can lead to chaos due to unpreparedness. Texas got suckered into this belief, making the great freeze of February 2021 shocking.
Japan, an energy-intensive country, is one such country where warmer world–milder winters can cause significant disruptions to energy planning. But this country is wise enough not to get caught in this global propaganda. It is aware of the importance of trusting regional weather patterns.
Fossil Fuels Deliver
Fossil fuels are the preferred energy source in many countries for tough winter conditions as they are the only dependable and affordable fuel source—alongside nuclear—in cold and snowy conditions.
Wind turbines work only in certain geographical regions and in certain months when wind speed is optimum. But in cold weather, they are not reliable. According to the government of Canada,
the operation of wind turbines in a cold climate such as Canada’s involves additional challenges not present in warmer locations, such as: Accumulation of ice on wind turbine blades resulting in reduced power output and increased rotor loads; Cold weather shutdown to prevent equipment failure; and Limited or reduced access for maintenance activities.
For these reasons countries like China and Japan depend heavily on coal, natural gas, and oil, instead of the highly unreliable wind and solar. The Japanese authorities know they cannot leave millions to freeze in the cold and have decided to stock up enough fossil fuels to sustain during the winter. S&P Global notes, “Japan’s demand for coal, LNG, crude and fuel oil for power generation as well as city gas and kerosene for heating was robust in January as a result of severe cold spells.” The scenario is likely to repeat this year.
Other Countries Too
Winter energy crises are of great concern the world over. The Japanese are very close to China, a country which in recent years has experienced severe energy shortages during winters due to its reluctance to increase coal consumption. A partial coal ban in northern provinces caused severe winter heating problems in recent years.
This year, news agencies in China predict widespread power blackouts in more than a dozen provinces as the country is critically short of coal and some power plants have stopped producing coal power due to high coal prices.
Japan, which has a bird’s eye view, is aware of the power shortage in China. So, to avoid a similar situation at home, Japan will not restrict the use of coal, natural gas and oil during winter months.
The demand for oil and gas is not just in Japan. The UK, too, is highly reliant on imported natural gas for winter heating needs, and analysts have urged the country to secure its resources before winter induces a power demand surge.
“If the winter is actually cold, my concern is we will not have enough gas for use for heating in parts of Europe. … it won’t only be a recessionary value, it will affect the ability to provide gas for heating. It touches everybody’s lives,” said Amos Hochstein, the US State Department’s senior adviser for energy security.
The Future is Now
The combined rise in demand for fossil fuels from Europe, China, India, Vietnam, and Japan has led to an increase in coal and natural gas prices. Investors see a “natural-gas crunch spilling into crude market, lifting oil prices.” OPEC, in its newly released World Oil Outlook 2045, observes that “oil will be leading energy source for decades (at least until 2045) as crude reaches 3-year highs.”
The demand for fossil fuels and the sharp increase in fossil fuels prices indicate that these energy fuels still dominate the global energy sector. The winter rush for fossil fuels also confirms their effectiveness in delivering reliable energy during cold weather.
COP26 planners, are you listening?
———————————–
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), is a Research Contributor for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation and resides in Bengaluru, India.
With much of Europe facing a worsening squeeze on gas supplies, the West is already looking to blame Russia
By Rachel Lloyd | RT | October 6, 2021
With gas prices rising dramatically across much of Western Europe, and a dip in its transit through Belarus and Ukraine to the EU, many commentators have pointed the finger once again at Russia, as the source for all their woes.
For some, this is evidence that President Vladimir Putin is weaponizing energy to the detriment of the rest of Europe. However, recent events and well-established agreements seem to tell another, less glamorous, story.
Turning off the taps?
The issue being painted as the next big Russian conspiracy is a noticeable drop in gas supplies being moved through Belarus to the EU. Posted on the site of Gazprom – Russia’s state energy corporation and Europe’s largest supplier of natural gas – are numbers that appear to substantiate a 70% dip in volumes reaching the EU, compared with last month.
That number has upset many, especially in the face of Europe’s biggest energy crisis in years. However, the fact is that there are other well-known factors at play using these numbers as evidence that Russian malevolence is more fear-mongering than fact.
Likely the biggest reason is last year’s agreement between Gazprom and its Belarusian subsidiary operator, where it was decided that much less gas would be transited through the Yamal-Europe pipeline in the fourth quarter of 2021. Unsurprisingly, this change was set to start in October of this year, perfectly coinciding with the drop seen today.
Could Moscow really predict a crunch in the European gas market a year in advance? Not likely, especially considering the uncertainty of Covid-19 and its effect on the near future of the world economy and society.
While there may be a dip in gas deliveries right now, when all data is placed on a timeline of the last four years rather than just two misleading months, it’s clear that such anomalies are typical and that there have been similar falls, which have quickly recovered.
Also, overall supplies from Russia to the EU are still on pace with the prior month’s numbers, if not a bit better. The first four days of October show an average of 210 million cubic meters, which is par for the course compared to September and previous months.
The full picture
There are, of course, other variables that need to be considered, some of which existed before the energy crisis first reared its ugly head. In December of 2019, Kiev and Moscow struck a deal on gas transit via Ukraine. As part of it, Russia’s minimum pledged for shipment was changed to 40 bcm annually from 2021 to 2024, down from 65 bcm in 2020 and 86.8 bcm in 2018.
Additionally, the September agreement between Moscow and Hungary has seen the TurkStream pipeline begin pumping supplies to the Central European nation, starting last week. The deal will supply Hungary with 4.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from Russia annually for the next 15 years. Gas supplies that may have generally transited through Ukraine or the Yamal pipeline are now being funneled through a new route across the Black Sea in order to reach Hungary and Croatia.
There’s also the genuine concern about the cold and snow of the winter season. Russia, known for its harsh winters, can see temperatures drop below -40 centigrade in Siberia – where many of Russia’s gas fields are located. The lower temperatures and harsh conditions of an extreme winter can directly impact oil and gas production and transit.
Typically, to avoid shortages, reserves are filled for storage. However, last year, Russia dealt with an especially long and cold winter and is currently scrambling to stockpile oil and gas to meet its own domestic needs. Gazprom’s oil and gas inventories plummeted to 16% at the end of last winter, well below the standard 35% seen in years prior.
And with the expectation of another brutal snowy season comes the unfortunate understanding that the natural gas powerhouse is not yet in a position to provide more gas to the rest of Europe. In November, when Gazprom should have storage sites replenished, there is hope that Russia can begin to prioritize taking excess volumes and channeling them into the Western European market.
Not orchestrated by Moscow
The unprecedented gas crisis in Europe is currently causing consternation from politicians and economists to those getting their heating bills in the mail. Prices have surged over the past few weeks, often breaking records each day. Current costs are six times higher than last year, with seemingly no end in sight.
However, faulting Putin for the increase is a reach. Demand globally has spiked, potentially as a result of the world economy’s reemergence after the end of global lockdowns. There is more competition among East Asian countries as they angle for a piece of the pie. Just as in Russia, Western European stocks of natural gas were depleted significantly following last winter. There may also be issues developing from Europe’s energy transition.
Delayed by American sanctions in 2019, Nord Stream 2 is beginning to run tests, with natural gas currently being filled in one of the two pipelines. The project will double the current export capacity of gas supplies to Western Europe and is currently awaiting German approval. Had such a delay at the behest of the US not occurred, perhaps gas prices would not be soaring.
In essence, Europe’s current crisis is the result of a perfect storm of conditions – many of which are out of Moscow’s control.
Gazprom “cannot wave a magic wand and deliver extra gas to any place in Europe that requires it on short notice,” notes Vitaly Yermakov, a senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies. “No matter how hard Gazprom tries, it cannot single-handedly balance such a huge market as Europe.”
Perhaps those countries worst affected should come together and start searching for solutions, rather than just for someone to blame.
Rachel Lloyd is a policy analyst at the Russian Public Affairs Committee (Ru-PAC). She writes about Russia-US relations, international law, and American foreign policy.
Featured Video
Fear Is the Mind Killer
or go to
Aletho News Archives – Video-Images
From the Archives
Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda
Dr. Joseph Mercola | July 9, 2022
“Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda,” is the fourth vaccine-related documentary by Dr. Andrew Wakefield. It tells the story of an intentional infertility vaccine program conducted on African women, without their knowledge or consent.
While it’s been brushed off as a loony conspiracy theory for years, there’s compelling evidence showing it did, in fact, happen, and there’s nothing to prevent it from happening again. … continue
Blog Roll
Aletho News- Fear Is the Mind Killer
- Israeli strikes kill 10 in southern Lebanon, including 3 rescue workers
- Israeli military ‘failed on all fronts’: Poll
- US at a crossroads: Iran’s firm positions leave Trump no option but to capitulate
- Iran signals decisive response to end US maritime bullying, piracy
- Trump eager for off-ramp in war on Iran, but Netanyahu has him trapped: Former official
- Trump’s ‘Golden Dome’ offers ‘limited’ shield against ballistic missiles: Defense official
- Ukraine Seeks to Provoke a Nuclear Conflict: Zakharova
- US squares up to China over Panama Canal
- Monroe Doctrine 2.0: ‘Great Reset’ for US Imperialism?
- If Americans Knew
- How Tony Dokoupil Became the Face of ‘Zionist Fanatic’ Bari Weiss’s CBS
- Far Right Israeli Settler Movement Enters Syria in a Push for “Greater Israel”
- ‘People Have the Right to Be Buried’: In Gaza, Thousands of Palestinians Remain Trapped Under Rubble
- Born during Israel’s genocide: Gaza’s child survivors bear the scars of war
- Who are the women and girls behind Gaza war’s horrific casualty toll?
- Beloved Gaza doctor detained “indefinitely” without charge – Daily Update
- By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal
- CBS News Reportedly Ousts London Bureau Chief Over Differences With Bari Weiss Over Gaza Coverage
- State Department Says US Is in Conflict With Iran ‘At the Request’ of Israel
- What ceasefire? Israel won’t stop killing in Gaza, Lebanon – Daily Update
- No Tricks Zone
- Oversupply Of Volatile Solar Energy Leads To Record NEGATIVE Prices!
- New Study: Extreme Heat Records, Heatwaves, Extreme Cold Records Declining Across US Since 1899
- It’s The Cold, Stupid! Cold 20 Times More Lethal Than Heat, Multiple Studies Show
- European Institute For Climate And Energy: “Climate Debate is Seldom About Science”
- New Study: The Climate May Be 5 Times More Sensitive To Solar Forcing Than Commonly Assumed
- EV Industry Reached $70 Billion In Losses In 2024 Due To Delusional Green Ideologies
- Reality Check: Maldives Have Actually Grown In Size Or Remained Stable Over Recent Decades
- Abrupt Climate Change Also Occurred NATURALLY In The Past …25 Times During Last Ice Age
- Cave Discovery Reveals Today’s Desert Climates Were Recently Far Warmer, Wetter, Teeming With Life
- German Expert: Heat Dome Led To Record Temps In Western USA…Warmer In 1934, 1936
Aletho News 