Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Russia ready to resume gas supplies to EU – official

RT | December 26, 2022

Moscow is ready to restart supplies of natural gas to the EU via the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak said on Monday. He noted that shipments through the route were halted for political reasons.

According to the official, the EU remains a relevant market for Russia, which is able to resume supplies to a region suffering from a gas shortage.

“For example, the Yamal-Europe Pipeline, which was shut down for political reasons, remains unused,” Novak said.

Gas supplies via the pipeline, which usually flow westward, have been mostly reversed since Poland terminated a supply contract with Russia ahead of its end-2022 expiry date, after rejecting Moscow’s demand for ruble payments. The Polish leg of the route is currently being used to pump stored gas from Germany.

In response to Warsaw’s move, Russian state-run energy giant Gazprom cut off supplies, saying it could no longer send gas via Poland, while Moscow imposed sanctions against the firm that owns the Polish section of the Yamal-Europe pipeline.

Although Russian gas deliveries to the EU via the Nord Stream and Yamal-Europe pipelines have been halted, Russian gas is still being supplied to certain European buyers via a transit line through Ukraine and the TurkStream pipeline through Türkiye.

Despite the persisting problems, Novak says he still sees the EU as a viable market for Russia.

“Today we can confidently say that there is a stable demand for our gas. Therefore, we continue to consider Europe as a potential market for our products. It is clear that a large-scale campaign was launched against us, which ended with acts of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipelines,” he said.

The market for liquefied natural gas (LNG) also remains open, according to Novak, who noted that Russian LNG supplies to the EU are expected to grow to 21 billion cubic meters by the end of the year.

December 26, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Russian Ammonia Supplies to Needy Nations Blocked Exclusively by Ukraine, Foreign Ministry Says

By Kirill Kurevlev – Samizdat – 23.12.2022

Exports of Russian food and fertilizers are part of the Black Sea grain deal with Ukraine but are not being carried out. At the same time, the UN has assured that the restrictions would be lifted altogether.

Kiev is blocking supplies of Russian ammonia, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry has said, noting that Ukraine is the only obstacle to the supply of fertilizers to countries in need.

“The resumption of ammonia supplies is blocked only and exclusively by Kiev (…) we are talking about seven million tonnes of raw materials per year, sufficient to produce 25 million tonnes of fertilizer to feed 150 million people,” the ministry said.

According to the ministry, similar examples “clearly show” which side in the conflict “not only does not help ensure global food security, but speculates on the needs of the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America, including in fertilizers, pursuing neo-colonial or narrowly selfish goals.”

Kiev, however, has claimed that Russia sabotaged the grain deal, despite Ukraine being the country which used the humanitarian corridor for military purposes. The diplomatic body said that it increasingly hears criticism about the insufficiently effective implementation of the agreement, with Kiev blaming Russia, “apparently forgetting that it was Kiev’s actions to use the maritime humanitarian corridor for military purposes that led to the temporary suspension of the initiative from October 29 to November 2 and its virtual failure due to the lack of key security guarantees.”

In this regard, the Foreign Ministry recalled that Russia began to fulfill the terms of the deal in good faith immediately after the signing of the agreements in Istanbul on July 22.

The ministry also recalled that after the expiration of the “Black Sea initiative” for the export of Ukrainian food from the ports of Odessa, Yuzhny and Chernomorsk on November 18, Russia did not object to its extension for another 120 days, until March 18, 2023.

“We made this difficult decision based on our commitment to our obligations to ensure global food security and in strict linkage with the achievement of real returns from the implementation of the Russia-UN Memorandum on the promotion of domestic agricultural exports, which is the second part of the Istanbul “package,” the diplomatic department noted.

The Russian diplomatic body emphasized that there has been no real progress in the implementation of the Russia-UN Memorandum on the normalization of domestic agricultural exports so far.

“Despite the exemptions for food and fertilizer declared by the West, including Europeans as part of the adoption of the 9th package of anti-Russian sanctions, Russian producers and suppliers continue to face blocking bank payments, prohibitive insurance rates and denial of access to ports,” the statement said. “Thus, the matter does not go beyond words and casuistry from Washington, Brussels and London, and in the meantime, countries in need continue to suffer not only from the crisis in the affordability of food and fertilizers but also from their physical shortage.”

It was also stressed that there are still serious distortions in the implementation of the Black Sea Initiative both in the geography of food recipients and in the range of exported products.

“Despite its declared humanitarian nature, cargoes are sent mainly to countries with a high level of income, while poor states receive no more than 3%. At the same time, 70% of the cargoes are fodder corn and feed grains that the needy, they say, can buy food at lower prices,” the ministry said.

Earlier, in an interview with Sputnik, Vladimir Olenchenko, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Studies, Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that the West purposefully obstructs fertilizer supplies under the Black Sea grain agreement in an effort to harm Russia’s international standing and compel African nations to purchase grain from Europe and the US.

Given the serious shortage of fertilizer supplies to needy African countries suffering from a food crisis, Moscow has promised to supply fertilizer to the continent for free.

The Black Sea grain deal was reached on July 22 between Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the United Nations to create a humanitarian maritime corridor for ships exporting food and fertilizer from Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Vladimir Putin has asserted on numerous occasions that the majority of the ships bringing grain from Ukraine did not arrive in the world’s poorest nations but rather ended up in Europe. Putin has also expressed his worries over the failure of Russian goods to reach international markets as promised by the deal.

December 23, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | Leave a comment

Deutsche Bank: “A Certain Degree of Eco-Dictatorship Will Be Necessary”

BY TOBY YOUNG | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 20, 2022

Izabella Kaminska, formerly the Editor of the FT’s Alphaville and now the Editor of the Blind Spot, has flagged up an alarming passage in a document published in January 2021 by Deutsche Bank Research entitled ‘What we must do to Rebuild’. Eric Heyman has written the section about the tough choices the EU must face it if’s to meet its goal of achieving ‘climate neutrality’ by 2050 – Net Zero, in other words – and says the following:

The impact of the current climate policy on people’s everyday lives is still quite abstract and acceptable for many households. Climate policy comes in the form of higher taxes and fees on energy, which make heating and mobility more expensive. Some countries have set minimum energy efficiency standards for buildings or similar rules in other areas. However, climate policy does not determine our lives. We take key consumption decisions, for example whether we travel at all, how much we travel and which means of transport we use, whether we live in a large house or a small apartment and how we heat our homes, how many electronic devices we have and how intensely we use them or how much meat and exotic fruit we eat. These decisions tend to be made on the basis of our income, not on climate considerations.

If we really want to achieve climate neutrality, we need to change our behaviour in all these areas of life. This is simply because there are
no adequate cost-effective technologies yet to allow us to maintain our living standards in a carbon-neutral way. That means that carbon prices will have to rise considerably in order to nudge people to change their behaviour. Another (or perhaps supplementary) option is to tighten regulatory law considerably. I know that “eco-dictatorship” is a nasty word. But we may have to ask ourselves the question whether and to what extent we may be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship (in the form of regulatory law) in order to move towards climate neutrality.

When he says we have to “ask ourselves… whether and to what extent we may be willing to accept some kind of eco-dictatorship” I don’t think he has a Net Zero referendum in mind. Rather, by ‘ourselves’ he means the EU’s ruling class. It has to ask itself whether it’s willing to pass laws forcing the EU’s population to modify its behaviour to meet the 2050 ‘climate neutrality’ target, regardless of whether it has a democratic mandate to do so or not.

I suppose we should be grateful that at least Heyman hasn’t tried to sugar coat this. It should be clear what “eco-dictatorship” means, even to those most reluctant to accept that Net Zero zealots have little love for democracy.

Stop Press: Izabella Kaminska has interviewed the neo-Malthusian Turkish-American economist Nourel Roubini for the Blind Spot podcast. In his book Megathreats: The Ten Trends that Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them he argues that individual freedoms will have to be sacrificed if we’re to contain another pandemic or avoid a climate catastrophe.

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 4 Comments

“Silent Majority” of Car Industry is Concerned About Electric Vehicles

BY WILL JONES | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 20, 2022

A “silent majority” of car companies is concerned that electric vehicles will not alone be able to end reliance on fossil fuels, according to a senior Toyota executive. The Telegraph has more.

Akio Toyoda, the company’s president and grandson of its founder Kiichiro Toyoda, said that many concerned senior figures are reluctant to say what they really think because of the pressure to go green.

It comes as the industry struggles to ditch petrol and diesel, in the face of materials shortages and complex processes that have kept the cost of building electric cars high.

In comments on a visit to Thailand first reported by the Wall Street Journal, Mr Toyoda said: “People involved in the auto industry are largely a silent majority.

“That silent majority is wondering whether EVs [electric vehicles] are really OK to have as a single option. But they think it’s the trend so they can’t speak out loudly.”

Meanwhile, MPs on the parliamentary Science and Technology Committee have warned that plans to require that all new boilers are able to run on hydrogen within a few years are unrealistic and the gas is likely to play a limited role in the future energy system, given the practical challenges of producing and handling it cleanly at large scale. From the Telegraph:

They argue huge questions still need to be answered about the potential deployment of the gas, and highlight “conflicting views” on the role it could play in domestic heating, given the merits of electric heat pumps instead.

Hydrogen is currently a niche product used in chemical production and oil refining, but politicians around the world hope it can replace fossil fuels in uses ranging from heating to transport, as it does not produce emissions when burned.

However, the committee argued that in practice this was likely to be limited to uses where other options are unsuitable, or in areas which are close to hydrogen production hubs.

“It seems likely that any future use of hydrogen will be limited rather than universal,” they said. “This limited – rather than universal – use of hydrogen should inform Government decisions. For example, we disagree with the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that the Government should mandate new domestic boilers to be hydrogen-ready from 2025.”

Both reports are worth reading in full.

December 21, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Elevated Living Standards Contradict Climate Doomsayers

By Vijay Jayaraj | RealClear Energy | December 14, 2022

Climate protestors destroying artworks and gluing themselves to roads without offering a shred of evidence for their alarm exhibit a malicious stupidity that is blind to the actual state of the world.

Why do these activists not hold up placards with graphs, histograms, and Venn diagrams? Because actual data show that life today is much better than at any time in human history. Ignored is the fact that the change in climate has made Earth better and helped to advance humanity.

Much of the progress in the last three centuries hinged on one important event in the 17th century: the waning of the Little Ice Age, which finally ended in the 1800s. Contrary to popular media and the politically correct, climate change has aided in the unprecedented growth of human civilization.

The Little Ice Age disrupted global plant growth and fostered periods of famine, disease and mass depopulation. However, since the advent of modern warming there has been an overall greening of the planet, more bountiful crop harvests and an eight-fold increase in humanity’s numbers. Contributing to the bounty has been the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric concentration has increased in recent decades.

Global maize (corn) production was approximately 205 million tons in 1961. Today the world produces five times more maize, — 1.16 billion tons. There have been similar increases for all major food crops, including rice, wheat, soybeans, cereals, nuts and vegetables.

Captures of marine fish during 1961–2018 increased from 34 million tons to 84 million tons. During the period, aquaculture production increased from two million tons to 82 million tons.

Meanwhile, malnourishment in developing countries reduced drastically from 34 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015, despite a rapidly growing population.

Improved nutrition and technological advancements have combined to make life not only better but also longer. In Oman, for example, the mortality rate for children under 5 dropped from 38 deaths per 100 births in 1950  to less than one. Similar progress has been registered across the world.

Transportation has become more affordable to the general population. Nominal prices for roundtrip airfare almost halved in the 2010s compared to 1980.

Electricity has become more available to households and businesses. In China alone, power generation increased by 18 times between 1950 and 2015, enabling 1.3 billion people to have greater access to electricity and experience remarkable economic growth.

People are better protected against nature’s fury than ever before. The annual death rate from natural disasters has plummeted globally since the 1920s and 1930s. This is because greater prosperity supported by cheap, abundant energy resources has provided sturdier infrastructure to withstand weather extremes and modern reporting systems to warn of dangers. Media reports of a world ransacked to an unprecedented extent by storms and floods are as false as the predictions of an overheated globe.

Species that were hunted to near extinction have been making a comeback, including the Arctic’s polar bears and India’s Bengal tigers. The number of humpback whales in the western South Atlantic doubled between 2006 and 2022. In Minnesota, Michigan and Wisconsin, gray wolves increased from 1,100 in 1975 to 3,600 in 2018.

In all of the U.S., there were merely 487 bald eagle pairs in 1963. By 2006, there were approximately 10,000. Today, wind turbines remain the only major threat to bald eagles, with the government dismayingly allocating “bald eagle-killing quotas” for each machine.

So, notions of a climate emergency and a planet in terminal decline are fallacious. The numbers do not lie no matter how much art is despoiled or how many commuters are delayed by the misguided.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

Policy Implications Of The Energy Storage Conundrum

By Francis Menton | Manhattan Contrarian | December 13, 2022

It occurs to me that before moving on from my obsession with energy storage and and its manifest limitations, I should address the policy implications of this situation. I apologize if these implications may seem terribly obvious to regular readers, or for that matter to people who have just thought about these issues for, say, five minutes. Unfortunately, our powers-that-be don’t seem to have those five minutes to figure out the obvious, so we’ll just have to bash them over the head with it.

Here are the three most obvious policy implications that nobody in power seems to have figured out:

(1) More and more wind turbines and solar panels are essentially useless because they can never fully supply an electrical grid or provide energy security without full dispatchable backup.

Here in the U.S. the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” of 2022 provides some hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and tax credits to build more wind turbines and solar panels. Simultaneously, the Biden Administration, directed by a series of Executive Orders from the President, proceeds with an all-of-government effort to suppress the dispatchable backup known as fossil fuels. Does somebody think this can actually work? It can’t.

And then there’s the December 6 press release from the UN’s International Energy Agency, touting how renewable energy sources (wind and solar) are being “turbocharged” to provide countries with “energy security.” The headline is: “Renewable power’s growth is being turbocharged as countries seek to strengthen energy security.” Excerpt:

The global energy crisis is driving a sharp acceleration in installations of renewable power, with total capacity growth worldwide set to almost double in the next five years. . . . “Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase of even faster growth as countries seek to capitalise on their energy security benefits. The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next 5 years as it did in the previous 20 years,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

Completely ridiculous. Wind and solar power provide the opposite of energy security. Back in the real world, just a few days after the IEA issued that nonsense, on December 11 the UK got a taste of the kind of “energy security” provided by wind and solar power, when a cold snap at the darkest part of the year came along with a prolonged period of calm in the winds — a typical winter occurrence. From the Guardian, December 11:

Live data from the National Grid’s Electricity System Operator showed that wind power was providing just 3% of Great Britain’s electricity generation on Sunday [December 11]. Gas-fired power stations provided 59%, while nuclear power and electricity imports both accounted for about 15%.

And what was the inevitable consequence of the wind conking out just when it was needed most?

UK power prices have hit record levels as an icy cold snap and a fall in supplies of electricity generated by wind power have combined to push up wholesale costs. The day-ahead price for power for delivery on Monday reached a record £675 a megawatt-hour on the Epex Spot SE exchange. The price for power at 5-6pm, typically around the time of peak power demand each day, passed an all-time high of £2,586 a megawatt-hour.

2,586 pounds/MWh would be equivalent to about $3 per kWh (wholesale), compared to a typical U.S. price for electricity of around 12-15 cents per kWh retail. Congratulations to the UK on achieving this level of “energy security.”

(2) The so-called “all of the above” energy strategy is equally disastrous.

In the U.S., Republicans sensibly looking to blunt the disastrous energy policies of the Democrats and the Biden Administration have somehow come up with something they call the “all of the above” strategy is their proposed alternative. For example, here is the webpage of the Republicans on the House Committee on Natural Resources, led by one Bruce Westerman of Arkansas. Excerpt:

Republicans support an all-of the-above energy approach that includes development of alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal and biomass, along with clean coal and American-made oil and natural gas. A comprehensive plan will help protect the environment and improve our economic and natural security.

No, no, no and no. Because of the impracticability and cost of energy storage, building more and more wind and solar facilities cannot lead to any reduction, let alone elimination, of the fossil fuel infrastructure. You will inevitably end up with two fully redundant energy systems, both of which must be paid for even though each supplies only about half of the power to the grid. Thus at the minimum you have doubled the cost of electricity to consumers. But the worst case is far worse than that, where the government suppresses the fossil fuel backup (as in the UK). In that case, when the fossil fuel backup has been reduced but is suddenly needed, the consumer may have to pay 10 or 20 or 30 or more times a reasonable price for electricity. All due entirely to government folly. Can the U.S. Republicans avoid the disastrous blind alley into which the UK Tories have driven their country? That remains to be seen.

(3) A carbon tax is a terrible idea.

Over at the GWPF (where I am the President of the American Friends affiliate), they are in the process of sponsoring a back-and-forth debate on the subject of carbon taxes as a way to address the issue of climate change. Professor Peter Hartley of Rice University has taken the side of advocating for a carbon tax. William Happer of Princeton and energy analyst Bruce Everett have taken the negative.

The gist of the Happer/Everett piece is that CO2 is not a pollutant and poses no danger to humanity, and therefore a tax designed to suppress it is unjustified. I agree with that argument. But an equally valid and independent line of reasoning is that, because of impracticability of energy storage and the consequent futility of trying to make wind and solar generation work without fossil fuels, a carbon tax can only serve to drive up the price of energy to consumers without meaningfully changing the use of carbon fuels.

As much as all three of these policy prescriptions are manifestly terrible and destructive ideas, they seem to reign supreme today, with virtually no push back anywhere. Maybe a few bouts of $3/kWh electricity this winter in the UK and Germany might start to wake people up.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular | , , , | 2 Comments

Qatar warns EU of consequences amid graft probe

RT | December 19, 2022

The European Parliament’s decision to suspend Qatar-linked legislation and deny the country’s officials access to the legislature could negatively affect gas supplies to EU member states, Doha has announced. The bloc’s move comes amid a Belgian probe into alleged graft by MEPs that may have involved Qatar.

The parliament’s decision is “discriminatory,” according to a statement by a diplomat with the Qatari mission to the EU on Sunday, as quoted by news agencies. It will “negatively affect regional and global security cooperation, as well as ongoing discussions around global energy poverty and security,” the diplomat added.

He stressed Qatar’s cooperation with the EU, particularly Belgium, on issues related to Covid-19 and its role as a key supplier of liquified natural gas to the country, expressing disappointment that Brussels is making “no effort to engage with our government to establish the facts once they became aware of the allegations.”

Qatari liquified natural gas plays a key role in the EU’s strategy to compensate for the loss of Russian fossils fuels, which it decided to stop purchasing over the conflict in Ukraine.

In November, Germany secured a 15-year deal for around 2 million tons annually. Berlin is leading a pan-EU effort to secure better terms from Doha, which is pressuring the bloc into signing long-term contracts that prohibit resale to other parts of the world, which would undermine the EU’s goal of phasing out fossil fuels, according to Bloomberg.

Last week, MEPs voted to suspend all work linked to Qatar and cut off “representatives of Qatari interests” from access to the legislature. The decision affects an EU-Qatar aviation agreement and an EU visa waiver for Qatari and Kuwaiti nationals. MEPs denounced “Qatar’s alleged attempts” to buy influence in the EU.

Belgian law enforcement announced earlier this month that it had charged four individuals linked to the European Parliament in an alleged corruption case. They are suspected of being influenced by lavish presents and cash originating from a foreign government.

The local press identified the unnamed Gulf nation as Qatar, which denied any involvement. The European Parliament’s now-former vice president, Eva Kaili, who was among those charged, was stripped of her senior EU office over the probe last week.

December 19, 2022 Posted by | Corruption, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Progressive Hypocrite | , | Leave a comment

DYSTOPIAN FUTURE: THE CITIES OF TOMORROW

Computing Forever | December 13, 2022

Buy How is This a Thing Mugs here: https://teespring.com/stores/computing-forever-store
Support my work on Subscribe Star: https://www.subscribestar.com/dave-cullen
Support my work via crypto: https://computingforever.com/donate/
Follow me on Bitchute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/hybM74uIHJKg/

Sources: https://computingforever.com/2022/12/13/dystopian-future-the-cities-of-tomorrow/

http://www.computingforever.com

December 18, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Timeless or most popular, Video | | 1 Comment

Oil Exports From Key Russian Port Cut In Half As Price Cap Kicks In

By Tyler Durden | Zero Hedge | December 17, 2022

The market may have been too quick to dismiss the impact of European oil price cap on Russian oil.

Assuming that the latest G-7 attempt to limit Russian oil revenues were one big nothingburger – after all, the US itself admitted that the goal of the price cap was not so much to cripple Putin’s Treasury as to maintain a more stable flow of oil – the market quickly ignored the potential of lower Russian output as it continued to sell oil into year end amid fears there won’t be enough demand to offset stable supply.

But in yet another case of poetic justice-cum-Murphy’s law, Europe’s exercise in virtue signalling optics is about to backfire and achieve precisely what it was meant to achieve, if only for virtuous public consumption.

According to Bloomberg, there are signs that oil tanker companies are avoiding sending their ships to collect crude from a key Russian port in Asia following the G-7 sanctions targeting Moscow’s petroleum revenues. As has been duly documented here previously, since Dec. 5, buyers of Russian oil have only been allowed to access industry standard insurance and an array of trade-critical services if they pay $60 a barrel or less. But shipments of the key ESPO grade from the Asian port of Kozmino are about $10 above that, meaning they need to make alternative arrangements.

Since the cap began, ESPO (which stands for Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean, the initials of a pipeline that takes the oil from east Siberia to the Pacific) has seen loadings cut in half from a month earlier, tanker tracking compiled by Bloomberg show. By contrast Urals, a much larger grade exported from western Russia, is flowing freely to customers in Asia — aided by the fact it fell far below the $60 threshold a few weeks before it was introduced.

However, amid the latest sanctions which set the $60 price cutoff, tankers are shying away from the Asian grade, and in the 10 days since the measures began, 4.4 million barrels have been loaded onto tankers at Kozmino, Bloomberg calculates. In the same period a month earlier, there were 8.8 million barrels loaded.

While it is too soon to say if the observed drop in ESPO flows reflects something structural, weather conditions haven’t been particularly bad and there doesn’t appear to be many candidate ships in place to collect cargoes in the coming few weeks. That said, tanker tracking data is always volatile, depending on the timings of loadings, and the comings and goings of individual tankers.

Shipbrokers and traders contacted by Bloomberg also said that said there are signs that ESPO sellers are struggling to secure tankers for cargoes purchased at more than $60 a barrel. At least two large and well-known shipowners, China Cosco Shipping Corp. and Greece-based Avin International Ltd. have stepped back from moving ESPO crude since Dec. 5, according to shipbrokers. Emails sent to both companies weren’t answered.

Their absence has taken at least five tankers out of the regular pool of ships that move the grade, they said. That leaves charterers to work with smaller independent owners who’re still willing to handle the trade. If charterers continue to face headwinds with the booking of tankers, flows could be impeded, they said. ESPO and Sokol, another grade that’s exported from eastern Russia, currently trade above the $60 a barrel threshold that gives access to insurance and G-7 services.

With Urals grade Russian oil trading well below the price cap, and last fetching about $45/bbl, shipbrokers said tanker bookings for Russia’s flagship crude from western ports are proceeding more normally. Tanker tracking also suggests no obvious disruption to flows of the grade.

Of course, all of this is just a snapshot in time: once oil prices spike, as they will after the year-end selling is over, it is virtually assured that all Russian oil grades will be priced above $60, even with the deep discount to spot. At that point, traders will be watching closely to see if Russian crude exports can be maintained and how Moscow will respond if supplies do get disrupted.

As noted previously, the irony behind all this is that the stability of Russian exports is crucial as the US and rest of G-7 work on ensuring security of global oil supplies ahead of the Northern hemisphere winter while simultaneously attempting to deprive the Kremlin of funding for its war in Ukraine. A sharp loss of output could backfire on the west if it boosts wider oil prices and reignites inflation. And while the price cap wasn’t really supposed to be a price cap, it just may end up being one with Russian oil exports suddenly cut off, sending all “non-Russian” oil prices explosively higher, and sparking a new energy crisis some time in early 2023.

As for Russian product just sitting there, about half the ESPO cargoes scheduled for loading in the rest of this month have yet to secure tankers, according to shipbrokers. That is slower than usual, and they attributing it to the smaller pool of willing tankers operated by a smaller number of owners. It’s possible that tankers which previously handled oil from sanctioned regimes such as Iran and Venezuela – the so-called dark fleet – would be booked, shipbrokers said.

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Russophobia | | Leave a comment

Why the Net Zero Policy is Illogical

BY NICK MACLEOD | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 17, 2022

The U.K. Net Zero Carbon policy (UK NZC) is a Government policy offered as a solution to a problem that involves a range of academic disciplines. As well as being complex, the science of anthropogenic carbon-based global warming is controversial. Although some climate scientists insist that it is ‘settled’, there are many dissenters, as an internet search or a trip to a good bookshop will confirm.

The multi-disciplinary nature of climate science coupled with differing views among experts makes it almost impossible for a layman to follow the arguments, let alone assess the evidence and come to an informed opinion. Despite these apparent difficulties, I’ll argue that it is possible to establish a simple framework that can clarify complex questions – in this case, “How likely is it that UK NZC will be an effective response to global warming? – without requiring specialist knowledge. I also show how the approach can be used to identify, measure and illustrate differences of opinion.

Start from a small number of statements that make up the Net Zero commitment.

  1. The Earth must actually be warming.
  2. The warming must pose a genuine and serious threat to life on Earth.
  3. The warming must be man-made. Specifically, it must be caused by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere arising from human activity.
  4. The U.K.’s NZC policy must bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon. That is, it must either make a significant reduction in its own right, or it must set an example that persuades other countries to reduce their own carbon emissions, to a degree sufficient to stop the warming.

For UK NZC to be effective, statements 1-4 must all be correct. If any one of them is false, the policy will fail, either because it doesn’t lead to sufficient carbon reduction, or because the policy wasn’t necessary in the first place.

The next step is to define a view (with respect to statements 1-4) as a set of probabilities p1, p2, p3, p4, which represent the respective degrees of belief placed in those statements. For example, the view of a particular climate scientist, Expert A, might be expressed as:

(p1, p2, p3, p4)= (0.8, 0.5, 0.2, 0.2), which means that Expert A is:

  • 80% sure that statement 1 – the Earth is warming – is true;
  • 50% sure that the warming is life-threatening (statement 2);
  • 20% sure that statement 3 is correct – warming is the result of human activity;
  • 20% sure that UK NZC will bring about a meaningful global reduction of atmospheric carbon one way or another.

Expert A rates the likelihood of all four statements being correct, i.e., UK NZC being effective, as:

P=p1 × p2 × p3 × p4 = 0.8 × 0.5 × 0.2 × 0.2 = 0.016.

If the view of a second expert, Expert B, with respect to statements 1-4, is:

(q1, q2, q3, q4) = (0.9, 0.5, 0.8, 0.3)

then a comparison with Expert A’s view shows that:

  • Expert B has a stronger overall belief than Expert A that UK NZC will be effective (Q=q1 × q2 × q3 × q4 = 0.9 × 0.5 × 0.8 × 0.2 = 0.108, versus P=0.016;
  • Both A and B agree that the Earth is warming (p1=0.8; q1=0.9);
  • Both of them are equally unsure whether that poses a significant threat to life on Earth (p2=0.5; q2=0.5);
  • They differ on the cause of the warming. Expert A doubts that it is man-made, whereas Expert B believes strongly that it is (p3=0.2; q3=0.8);
  • Both experts are fairly sceptical that UK NZC will lead to a significant reduction in global atmospheric carbon (p4=0.2; q4=0.3).

Neither expert is all that confident that UK NZC will achieve its aims, with Expert A being particularly pessimistic, seeing the likelihood as just 1.6% compared to 10.8% for Expert B. The main reason is that both of them are doubtful that unilateral U.K. action will have much influence on the choices of other countries.

The chart below represents the view of each expert on each requirement, and highlights statement 3, the one area of significant disagreement.

Summary:

  • Defining a view with respect to a set of statements in terms of the respective degrees of confidence associated with each individual statement provides a convenient means of summarising, comparing and illustrating a variety of opinions on the subject to which the statements refer. It also serves as a natural starting point for a cost-benefit analysis of any proposed action.
  • It isn’t necessary to be an expert (in this case on climate science) to make a reasonable assessment of the conditions that must apply if an argument or an assertion (such as “There is no alternative to UK NZC”) is to be persuasive.
  • It isn’t too much to expect someone – expert or otherwise – who advocates a particular course of action to be able to give rough estimates of the likelihood that the conditions essential to the success of that action will be met.
  • Long chains of necessary conditions lead quickly to low probabilities of overall success. The longer the set of plausible conditions that must hold if an assertion is to be true, the less likely the truth of that assertion. With 15 independent requirements, each of which has a 95% probability of success, for example, the probability of overall success is less than 50%. Complex policy issues like those associated with climate change typically have many requirements and much uncertainty.

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | 2 Comments

If Being Frozen To Death Doesn’t Work, Being Starved To Death Comes Next

By Patrick Clarke | December 14, 2022

First we were placed under virtual house arrest. Now we are being frozen by soaring fuel bills and energy supply shortages in those same homes. Coming next, we are to be starved. All in pursuit of one of the Net Zero cults: Covid or carbon emissions. Too bleak a picture? We have only to look across the North Sea to one of our nearest neighbours, the Netherlands.

Surprisingly for such a small country (it is only about twice the size of Wales), the Netherlands is the second largest food exporter in the world, second only to the United States. It is Europe’s largest meat exporter. Four million cows, 13 million pigs and 104 million chickens are reared annually. It provides vegetables to many of its Western European neighbours.

One would assume this success story would be widely cherished, especially in an era of increasing food insecurity and shortages, with other key sources such as Ukraine under serious threat due to the continuing conflict there.

Remarkably, and many would say sinisterly, the polar opposite is the case. The supposed crime of the Dutch farmers? They have fallen foul of the ‘Zero Carbon’ fixation of the Climate Change Cultists who control so much of the current political and economic agenda.

One of that agenda’s chief targets is agriculture, particularly the use of nitrogen. The Dutch are at the top of the tree for nitrogen use per hectare of cultivated land, at nearly twice the European average.

The European Commission has given strict guidelines to EU member states to reduce their use of nitrogen. To comply with this the Dutch Government introduced laws to enforce a reduction of 50 per cent in nitrogen emissions by 2030. Such draconian targets can only come with draconian enforcement measures.

Dutch farming is being strangled through an assortment of regulations, including new flood prevention regulations, bizarrely given the success of the Dutch in preventing flooding over the centuries despite the fact that large parts of the country are below sea level, having been reclaimed from the sea.

Perhaps worst of all, one of the Government’s new laws bans the children of farmers from inheriting the farm when their parents retire or die. Once a farmer stops farming, their entire family becomes banned from farming in the Netherlands again. A whole way of life plus decades, sometimes even centuries, of experience is being gratuitously thrown away.

Where regulation fails, mandatory purchasing of land by the state is feared to be the next step as farmers have so far shown little interest in selling any of their land. Around 300,000 hectares of farmland is earmarked to be converted into nature conservation areas between now and 2040. More than 1,000 farms face forcible closure.

Nor is it just the Dutch Government that the farmers are battling. A panoply of NGOs are on the case too, using the courts to pursue any part of the government at national or provincial level deemed to be faltering in enforcing these objectives.

Those of us in the UK, long weary of seeing how political charities and activist lawyers run rings round attempts to enforce curbs on immigration, will be familiar with the process.

It’s worth pointing out too that, despite Brexit, Northern Ireland still has to implement these same EU directives as part of the Northern Ireland protocol. Thanks for that one, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak. So while today it is Dutch farming under siege from its own government, tomorrow it will be farming in Northern Ireland that is compelled to go through the same pain.

Interestingly, no one has yet stepped forward with a credible plan for how these vital lost sources of food are going to be replaced. The Dutch Government hopes that it will come from artificially created meat from laboratories and is investing in this technology, though how it can be sufficiently scaled up remains to be seen. Given what is already widely known about the harmful effects of eating too many processed foods instead of natural foods, such as the triggering of obesity and potential heart disease, it has to be asked whether this is a desirable course, or indeed what the further health implications for users may be.

Some would say the whole agenda is a straight forward grab by bad actors intent on taking control of the world’s food resources, for whom Net Zero objectives provide a convenient camouflage for their own lust for power, control and yet more wealth than they already have. The usual suspects certainly spring to mind.

Others argue that out-of-control digital technocrats are so conditioned to assuming they can control anything, however complex, that they can’t accept that some things remain beyond human control, such as airborne viruses and the climate.

Each failure to learn that simple lesson is leading to ever more intensive efforts to achieve that control, control that must be achieved at all costs. Either way, vicious cycles of more authoritarianism, human misery arising from absurd and seriously harmful measures, plus more setbacks in failing to reach unobtainable goals lie ahead. Unless we can shake off the grip of these technocrats on our societies and the political institutions in thrall to them, the prospect of starving to death will become our grim reality in an increasingly tyrannical world.

Think that couldn’t happen here? Just look at Sri Lanka, though as with the Dutch farmers, most of the media and nearly every politician would prefer you not to!

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | , , , | 4 Comments

Brits struggling to keep warm at home – survey

RT | December 17, 2022

A quarter of British adults are struggling to keep warm in their homes as they cut back on energy use in the face of soaring costs, according to a new survey by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The report, which was published on Thursday, shows that 23% of adults were occasionally, hardly ever, or never able to keep comfortably warm in their living room over the past two weeks.

The ONS data indicated that 63% of adults were using less gas and electricity because of increases in the cost of living, and 96% of those adults were using less heating.

When asked about the measures they were taking to keep warm this winter, 82% of respondents said they were using more clothing or blankets, 46% were only heating rooms they use, 31% were using hot-water bottles or microwave warmers, while 27% were going to bed earlier.

Other measures included cutting back on the use of tumble dryers and washing machines, as well as bathing or showering less.

According to the ONS, many households have already cut back on their energy usage, with 34% of the polled adults saying that reducing heating has negatively affected their health or wellbeing as a result.

The ONS research on the “impact of winter pressures” also found that 16% of adults are worried their food will run out before they have money to buy more, and 19% have cut back on their portion size. The study showed 17% are eating food which is past its use-by date.

The survey of nearly 5,000 British households comes as the nation’s inflation hit 10.7% in November, which is slightly down from the 11.1% in the previous month but still well above the 2% rate targeted by the Bank of England.

December 17, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | 4 Comments

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »