The world can’t afford to keep burning fossil fuels indefinitely. The world’s supply of coal, oil and natural gas is not infinite, and burning of fossil fuels contributes to catastrophic climate change.
And indeed progress is being made in conservation of energy and development of renewable energy sources.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
==Philip K. Dick
Europe appears to be on the verge of economic collapse because of blowback from the sanctions war against Russia.
The European economic boom, it turns out, was based on availability of cheap oil and gas from Russia.
The UK and the European Union has deliberately cut themselves off, thinking it will punish Russia. But the Russians are doing okay while Europeans face a winter with shortages of electricity and fuel. Many are stocking up on firewood and coal.
Whole industries have shut down or relocated to Asia or North America.
Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris, in the video above, say the latest word from oil company executives is that the Europeans might just possibly have enough oil and gas in storage to get by this winter, depending on just how cold the winter is and depending on who you believe.
This is because the European countries bought all the cheap Russian oil and gas they could before the supply shut down. But next spring, the cupboard (or rather the oil tank) will be bare. So an even worse crisis will occur in the winter of 2023-2014.
Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates decline to increase their own output to help the Europeans out. They and the Russians benefit greatly from the sanctions induced increase in oil prices.
The Europeans are willing to buy second-hand Russian oil and gas from China, India, Turkey and other countries, at prices they refuse to pay Russia directly. The problem with this is that the importers of Russian oil and gas will only sell that which is surplus to their own needs, and at a very high price.
The U.S. plan is supply Europe with liquified natural gas from North America. But the infrastructure needed to carry out this plan doesn’t exist, and won’t for at least several years. Liquifying natural gas, and storing and shipping it, is not easy and not cheap.
In a new video this morning, Christoforou and Mercouris talk about how the economic situation in the UK is so bad that Rishi Sunak, the new British prime minister, has no choice but to raise taxes, cut public services and cut aid to Ukraine.
The goal of sanctions policy is to weaken Russia so as to help Ukraine. But sanctions policy is weakening Europe, not Russia. How does this make sense?
President Xi Jinping plans to visit Saudi Arabia soon. In the video above, Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris of The Duran speculate that Prince Mohammad bin Salman may be planning to join the BRICS alliance.
If so, this could be a big threat to U.S. power—a much bigger threat than the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The BRICS alliance consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Its ultimate purpose is to create a new reserve currency that would be a substitute for the U.S. dollar.
The fact that most world trade is conducted in dollars, which the U.S. government has the power to print, gives the United States enormous leverage over the world economy, including the power to impose economic sanctions.
If this changed, the United States would lose its financial power as well as much of its ability to finance the world’s largest military budget.
Saudi Arabia back in 1973 agreed, in return for U.S. military protection, to price its oil in dollars, to deposit its dollars in U.S. and allied countries’ banks, and to buy U.S. military equipment. As the leading oil exporter, Saudi Arabia has a lot of power in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), whose purpose is to control the price and production of the world’s oil
The Biden Administration earlier this year supported the Group of Seven’s plan to cap the price of Russian oil imports. This must have miffed the Saudis and other OPEC members, because, if successful, the plan would have infringed on the Saudis’ and OPEC’s power to set would oil prices.
Later President Biden asked Prince Mohammad bin Salman to increase oil production to help keep the price down and offset the loss of Russian oil due to economic sanctions. Bin Salman turned Biden down.
Christoforou and Mercouris think Bin Salman is taking a big risk. They expect the U.S. to try to destabilize and overthrow the Saudi regime. The U.S. is already trying to stir up trouble between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
Even a direct attack or invasion are not impossible, and Mercouris said Bin Salman needs to be sure of his personal security.
Algeria also has applied to join BRICS. Other countries are expressing interest.
In 2023, Saudi Arabia may push Ukraine off the front pages.
Or maybe not. I don’t have the power to read minds or predict the future.
But I don’t think President Xi would be planning to visit Saudi Arabia unless he had something in mind. And I notice that Saudi Arabia is not the only country who leaders are losing both respect for. and fear of, the United States.
I think the world is at the beginning of a major crisis and turning point – something like the eve of the Great Depression or of World War One. Future generations will look back on our generation and wonder how we could have been so blind as not to have seen the trap we are jumping into.
The destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines means the destruction of European economies.
The European countries are already in crisis. Whole industries are being devastated by the direct and indirect effects of the cutoff of cheap oil and gas from Russia.
The destruction of the pipelines means this cutoff will be permanent. Cheap energy was the foundation of the European economic miracle. This is gone indefinitely, unless the Russians can be persuaded to repair the pipelines – the pipelines they supposedly destroyed themselves.
From what I read, I understand there is a window of only a few months for this to take place. After that damage from sea water will be irreversible.
The economic crisis is not confined to Europe. It is spreading throughout the world. Failures of key energy-intensive businesses in Europe will cascade to businesses that depend on them as suppliers or customers. It will be a domino effect similar to the economic crash of 1929-1933.
The destruction of The Nord Stream pipelines takes the NATO-Russia conflict to a new level.
Nuclear warfare, chemical warfare, cyber warfare have all been off limits because there is basically no defense against them, and no nation’s leaders want to be the ones to initiate it.
Attacks on pipelines and undersea cables fall into this category. A taboo has been broken. There is no reason to believe that Russia is the culprit. Why would the Russians destroy an asset they spent years and billions of dollars to build and which is their main means of leverage over Europe? And Vladimir Putin has made it clear that he blames the USA.
What happens if there is retaliation? What, for example, would happen to the world’s financial markets if fiber optics communications between North America and Europe were broken? We can only hope Putin does not choose to follow that path.
Russia and the USA are committed to a fight to the finish in Ukraine.
Back in late March and early April, Russia and Ukraine were conducting secret peace talks. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. General Mark Milley reportedly flew to Kiev to tell Volodomor Zelensky that NATO’s goal is to fight on until Russia is defeated.
Zelensky had no choice. Ukraine is not a sovereign nation. It couldn’t survive without not only military support from the USA and NATO allies, but also economic support from the International Monetary Fund and other international agencies controlled by the USA.
Vladimir Putin defines the war as a clash of civilizations – a clash between Russia, representing Eastern Christianity, and the secular, imperialistic West. In his speech of annexation of Russian-occupied Ukraine to the Russian Federation, Putin denounced the USA for its history of slavery and conquest, and also its support of the new gender ideology.
Why is President Biden widening the economic war against Russia to include China? Why is he threatening to impose economic sanctions on countries who refuse to sanction Russia? Why is he raising the. stakes?
It may be because the United States is in a struggle for world power against not only Russia, but China, and that time is not on the side of the USA.
China’s Belt and Roads Initiative, also known as the New Silk Roads, is intended to bind together Russia, Iran and other nations in the interior of Eurasia by means of roads, railroads and oil and gas pipelines.
The result, if the Chinese can bring it off, would be a new entity that would be invulnerable to U.S. sea and power and that would be detached from the dollar-based world economy.
But that entity does not exist yet. Specifically, there is a lack of sufficient gas pipelines to enable Russia to switch over the gas it is now selling to Europe and sell it to China instead.
Russia is rushing to build new pipelines that will connect its western and eastern Siberian gas fields and free it from the need to sell to European markets. They’re scheduled to be completed in a few years, and then Russia will be in a position to cut off gas supplies to Europe.
Pepe Escobar noted:
An absolutely key issue for Russia is how to make the transition to China as its key gas customer. It’s all about the Power of Siberia 2, a new 2600-km pipeline originating in the Russian Bovanenkovo and Kharasavey gas fields in Yamal, in northwest Siberia – which will reach full capacity only in 2024. And, first, the interconnector through Mongolia must be built – “we need 3 years to build this pipeline” – so everything will be in place only around 2025.
On the Yamal pipeline, “most of the gas goes to Asia. If the Europeans don’t buy anymore we can redirect.” And then there’s the Arctic LNG 2 project – which is even larger than Yamal: “the first phase should be finished soon, it’s 80 percent ready.” An extra problem may be posed by the Russian “Unfriendlies” in Asia: Japan and South Korea. LNG infrastructure produced in Russia still depends on foreign technologies.
It makes no economic sense for European nations, including Ukraine, to cut themselves off from Russian gas. The U.S. plan is to substitute liquified natural gas (LNG) from the USA. Ultimately the best solution would be to substitute renewable energy for gas heating. But the physical infrastructure to do these things is not in place.
In fact, the ongoing mutually destructive economic warfare makes no sense for anyone, especially for the USA. We the American people get no benefit from economic warfare against other nations. We need to be rebuilding our own economy and preparing for the coming bad years.
The domestic U.S. fossil fuel industry is in trouble. Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at stake. President Joe Biden will face a choice: try to save them or replace them with something better. There is a good article in Dissent magazine about this.
In 2016, [Donald] Trump charged Barack Obama with waging a “war against coal” and promised to bring the sector back to its former glory.
He manifestly failed to do so, but his rhetoric still proved an effective bludgeon against Hillary Clinton in Appalachia during the campaign. In fact, more coal plants were retired under Trump than in either of Obama’s terms in office.
U.S. coal production had already been declining for years, as cheap natural gas edged it out of the energy mix used in power plants. Coal jobs had been disappearing for years even before that, as the industry replaced workers with machines.
At its peak in the 1920s, the industry employed over 800,000 people in the United States. Today, only about 42,000 coal mining jobs remain.
As coal companies have gone bankrupt, they have shed their pension obligations to former workers, leaving the federal government to pick up the bill. Last December, Congress bailed out nearly 100,000 coal miners’ pensions.
In the long run, this was a good thing, not a bad thing. Of all the important sources of energy production, coal is the dirtiest. It generates the most air and water pollution and the greatest hazards to its workers’ health and the public health. Still, that is no consolation if your livelihood depends on coal.
As energy researchers point out, coal is the canary for other fossil fuel industries. Oil isn’t on quite the same decline yet, but it’s headed in that direction.
The American fracking industry has expanded rapidly in the past decade with the use of cheap credit, and with encouragement from Obama, who boasted of making the United States the world’s leading oil producer.
But the shale oil that fracking produces is only profitable when oil prices are relatively high, and the overproduction of shale gas has glutted global markets.
The combination of a pandemic-spurred decline in demand and a price war between Saudi and Russian producers sent oil prices plummeting this year, resulting in a record number of bankruptcies among American oil producers. An estimated 107,000 oil industry workers lost their jobs in the United States this year.
While some of those may come back as the economy recovers (whenever that is), many will not. Some energy analysts suggest that the world may have hit “peak oil demand,” as renewable energy begins to replace fossil fuels. The Houston Chronicle reports that oil production employment in Texas “may never fully recover” as the overextended shale oil sector consolidates and learns to get by with fewer workers.
The fact thatthe fracking industry, or any other fossil fuel industry, is unprofitable doesn’t necessarily mean it will cease operations. The economic incentive for an industry in the red is to do everything possible—in this case, extract every little globule of shale oil and gas—to minimize the loss.
Of course, moving away from fossil fuels is a good thing, not a bad thing—also overall. Global warming is not imaginary. Greenhouse gas emissions are real. But what about all the people whose jobs depend on oil and gas?
We need something like a Green New Deal to create useful and sustainable jobs to replace jobs lost. Without some such program, Americans will be forced to choose between short-run economic survivable and a livable planet in the long run.
If a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact. [Attributed to Donald Rumsfeld]
It is possible to ignore reality, but it is not possible to ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. [Attributed to Ayn Rand]
A new Michael Moore movie, “Planet of the Humans,” is an attack on the renewable energy movement. Environmentalists by and large are outraged, and some demanded the movie be suppressed.
It actually was taken down from YouTube for 11 days, but it’s back up now. If it is taken down again, you can view it on the Planet of the Humans Home page.
It runs for 100 minutes, which is a long time to watch something on a computer screen. But it held my interest, and maybe it would hold yours, too.
In the first part of the movie, director Jeff Gibbs shows that solar panels and windmills are built through energy-intensive industrial processes and that they are made of materials such as high-grade quartz and rare earths that are scarce and non-renewable.
Solar panels and windmills wear out and have to be replaced. In one scene, he visits Daggett, California, which pioneered in the development of solar and wind energy. He sees a wasteland of dilapidated panels and windmills, because the pioneers couldn’t afford to keep them up.
And they don’t even fully replace fossil fuels. Because of variability of sun and wind, backup electrical generators have to keep spinning, and the ones that aren’t hydroelectric use coal, gas and nuclear fuel.
In the second part, he looks at the environmental destruction caused by biomass energy. There is no gain from freeing yourself from dependence on coal companies and embracing logging companies.
He makes a big point of pointing out the corporate ties of environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and of environmentalists such as Al Gore, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Richard Branson and even Bill McKibben.
He questions the whole premise, promoted by advocates such as Al Gore, that it is possible for middle-class Americans to enjoy our current material standard of living simply by adopting a new technology.
Fossil fuels made possible a world with an exponentially increasing population with the average individual using an ever-increasing amount of fuel and raw materials, Gibbs said. Such a world isn’t sustainable, he said.
According to the Energy Information Agency, the U.S. generates 4.03 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually.
Natural gas is now the top energy source at 32.1% of the total generating capacity, followed very closely by coal at 29.9%. Other major sources include Nuclear (20%), Hydropower (7.4%) and Wind (6.3%).
Finally, while solar is growing, it still only accounts for 1.3% of large scale energy generation (small scale solar [e.g. rooftop] would increase this by around 50%).
Click to enlarge.
Click to enlarge.
It’s going to be hard to expand the use of solar power and other renewable sources of electric power, because they depend on weather conditions, geographic location or both.
Until energy storage becomes really cheap, the USA and other countries are going to need nuclear power—hopefully in modern, well-maintained plants on sites not subject to earthquake or flooding.
The Chinese and Iranian governments have announced that China will invest $400 billion to develop the Iranian oil and gas industry, a petroleum industry newsletter has reported.
The Iranian government has embraced the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the New Silk Road, an ambitious plan to build infrastructure to unify the economy of the interior of Eurasia under Chinese leadership.
It will include $120 billion for new oil and gas pipeline, including a pipeline through Turkey in violation of U.S. sanctions. All the equipment for the new projects will be provided by Chinese contractors.
China has the right to buy Iranian oil at a discount and pay for it in soft currencies it has accumulated in dealings with countries in Africa and Asia. This amounts to an overall 30 percent discount from the world price.
China will employ 5,000 “security personnel” to guard its properties. This means that any attack on Iran would involve risk of killing Chinese and inviting Chinese retaliation.
Presumably the Iranians, like the Russians, would prefer to sell to Europe, their natural market, for full price, but the U.S. government has blocked them from doing business in Europe in dollars.
The goal of U.S. foreign policy for 70 years has been to control the oil of the Middle East. Now the oil of Iran is within the Chinese sphere of influence.
There is little intrinsic common ground between China, Iran and Russia. The U.S. government has driven them together by waging economic warfare against all three. In the process, it is antagonizing its allies in Europe by forcing them to act against their economic interests.
China’s foreign policy makes it economically stronger. United States foreign policy is a drain on U.S. strength. China is making friends. The U.S. is making enemies. This will end better for China than it will for the United States.
I came across an interesting history video that explains how access to oil was Adolf Hitler’s main goal in World War Two, how it determined his strategy and why his failure to achieve that goal doomed Nazi Germany to defeat.
It provides good food for thought, both about history and today’s geopolitics. Here is an outline of what it said.
Adolf Hitler believed that Germany could not be a powerful or even an independent nation so long as it depended on imports for food and energy. His long-range goal was to acquire the farmland of Ukraine and the oil of the Caucasus for Germany.
Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939 was a step toward that goal. If Britain hadn’t declared war on Germany in 1939 or had agreed to a truce in 1940 or 1941, he might have succeeded.
The United States during that period produced 70 percent of the world’s oil. Most of the rest came from the USSR and Venezuela. Even after Germany conquered most of Europe, including the oil fields of Rumania, the British blockade remained in place. Germany was cut off from the oil of the USA and Venezuela and the USSR did not supply enough to meet its requirements.
Germany’s blitzkrieg strategy depended on tanks and other motorized vehicles operating on a broad front. But Germany lacked enough oil of its own to conduct long campaigns.
The German army “demotorized” in order to provide enough fuel for the tanks. It used horse-drawn vehicles to move supplies. Messengers rode bicycles rather than motorcycles. It also used an expensive process to synthesize oil from coal, even though coal supplies also were limited.
This meant Germany had a limited time in which to invade Soviet Russia and obtain the oil it needed. Otherwise it would run short of the fuel needed to power its tanks and trucks.
That is why Hitler did not plan for a long campaign, and why he wanted his generals to concentrate on the Caucasus rather than Leningrad and Moscow.
The 1941 invasion failed. After that Germany had one last chance of victory—by using what fuel reserves it had in 1942 to make one last stab at Maikup and Grozny in the Caucasus while conquering Stalingrad so the Soviets could not transport oil up the Volga River from refineries in Baku.
Lack of fuel was why Hitler ordered troops to stand fast and hold the line at all costs rather than allowing his generals to engage in a war of maneuver.
If the Nazis had succeeded, Russia would have been cut off from both the oil of the Caucasus and the Ukraine breadbasket. Soviet forces would have been hard put to find the means to keep on fighting in 1943 and 1944.
But the Nazis failed. From then on, Germany’s only goal in fighting was to prolong the war in hope of a negotiated peace.
All this shows that while Hitler was evil, he was not a madman—at least not where military strategy was concerned. He understood strategy better than his generals.
It also shows the British blockade and American oil were as important to victory as the actual fighting by the Red Army. If Winston Churchill had not become Prime Minister in 1940, Britain might have made a separate peace with Germany, and the German army would have had the fuel it needed to blitzkrieg Russia.
The existing U.S. electrical grid can’t handle too much solar and wind energy. They’re too variable. They can’t be counted on when they’re needed most.
Until this changes, electric utilities will continue to rely on their aging fossil fuel and nuclear power plants as certain sources of power.
The problem, as Gretchen Bakke describes it in The Grid: the Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future, is in the unique nature of electricity as a commodity. It is the only commodity that has to be used as soon as it is produced.
The historic economic problem of electric power utilities is that they have to be able to supply as much electric power as their customers need at any point in time, but that most of the time this capacity goes unused. This is especially acute in the USA, Bakke wrote, because we Americans insist on being able to use as much electricity as we want, any time we want it.
The Public Utility Regulatory Power Act – PURPA – requires electric utilities to buy renewable energy at a price equal to their cost of making non-renewable energy. Now wind and solar electricity are reaching the point in which they’re competitive with fossil fuels and nuclear energy.
Bakke reported that 7 percent of U.S. electricity is generated from renewables. The percentage is bound to increase. Denmark reportedly gets 40 percent of its energy just from wind.
The problem is that wind and solar power are not always available when and where they’re needed. The windiest and sunniest parts of the North American continent are not necessarily where the population is concentrated. And the windiest and sunniest times of day are not necessarily when energy is most needed.
So some utilities are faced with the problem of insufficient solar and wind energy during some hours of the day, and so much solar and wind energy at other times that managers have to scramble to prevent the grid from being fried.
Solar power, by definition, is only available during the daytime. But electric power use peaks in the early afternoon. Fossil fuel and nuclear energy, on the other hand, can be turned on at any time of the day. Until this mismatch is eliminated, electric utilities can’t stop using non-renewable coal, oil, natural gas or uranium.
Electricity gives us Americans a material standard of living that, a century ago, would have seemed like a utopia imagined by H.G. Wells.
Most of us have access to air conditioning, thermostat-controlled heat, electric clothes washers and dryers, electric dishwashers, cable television, home computers, cell phones and Internet access.
This is made possible by one of the world’s most complex machines—a continent-spanning system of interconnected generators, transformers and 300,000 miles of wires.
We take this for granted—until the electric grid fails. Unfortunately, failures are becoming more frequent and longer-lasting.
Some of the reasons are found The Grid: the Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke (2016).
The average American is without electric power six hours a year, compared to 51 minutes in Italy, 16 minutes in Korea, 15 minutes in Germany and 11 minutes in Japan, Bakke wrote. The White House itself lost power twice during the George W. Bush administration and twice more during the Obama administration.
Our electrical grid is aging and, in many places, poorly maintained. About 70 percent of the grid’s transformers and transmission lines are more than 25 years old. In 2005, one fifth of generating plants were more than 50 years old. Just as with an automobile, the older electrical equipment is, the most it costs to keep it going.
The main reason for this is the change in the way electric power is regulated. Before the Energy Policy Act, which was enacted in 1992 and went into effect in 2001, electric utilities were regulated monopolies, with a legal responsibility to guarantee availability of electricity, in return for a guaranteed profit. There was no reason for a utility not to spend all the money necessary to keep the grid in tip-top shape because they were sure to get it back.
The EPA broke up the grid into (1) producers of electricity, (2) long-distance transmitters of electricity and (3) distributors of electricity. Supply and demand, not regulators, determined electricity prices. The idea was that this would open up the grid to new and creative sources of energy.
Suddenly it was possible for a U.S. electric company to go broke. There was an incentive to cut costs, including maintenance costs.
The most common cause of power outages in foliage—usually in the form of wires coming in contact with tree limbs. Another common cause is squirrels. Both the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ exchange have been shut down by squirrels chewing on wires.
After EPA, many utilities stretched out their tree-trimming schedules to save money. FirstEnergy, an Ohio utility, drastically cut back on its tree-trimming schedule, didn’t even come close to meeting the new schedule and laid off 500 skilled maintenance workers.
The following year three FirstEnergy power lines sagged onto treetops. That, and a computer bug, created a spreading power outage that left 50 million people in eight states without power for three days. Bakke described in detail how this happened. Economists estimate that the outage subtracted $6 billion from the U.S. Gross Domestic Product for that year.
I think that we the human race have to learn to stop burning oil for fuel because we’re at risk of overheating the planet. But another reason is that petroleum is such an amazing and versatile substance that it seems a waste to just burn it.
President Obama was elected in 2008 based on promises to, among other things, do something about global warming. My e-mail pen pal Bill Harvey called my attention to an article highlighting his refusal to act. Here’s an excerpt:
Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do. He came into office with control of both houses of Congress and a clear mandate to act on the climate crisis, with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms.
But in pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy, highlighted by the figurative explosion of frackingand the literal explosions of oil trains and deep sea drilling rigs, Obama has turned the US into the No. 1 producer of fossil fuels in the world.
The value of federal government subsidies for fossil-fuel exploration and production increased by 45 percent under his watch, even as he turned what were once climate “treaty” talks into a subterfuge for global inaction. This, from the guy who ran against “Drill, Baby Drill!”
True, Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency has enacted regulations classifying greenhouse gasses as pollutants, which are intended to close down aging coal-fired electric power plants. He has obtained subsidies to promote renewable energy. And he has set targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, to be accomplished by future administrations.
But this has been offset by his promotion of the domestic oil and gas industry and his opposition to enforceable international climate treaties.
The problem is that there is no immediate political payoff from trying to slow down global warming. The climate change that is manifesting itself right now—record-breaking temperatures, floods and droughts—is the result of decisions made or not made 30 or 40 years ago.
What is done—or not done—today about climate change will not change the present situation. It will only help people 30 or 40 years from now. There is little political incentive to do that.
Neither democratic government nor free-enterprise economic systems, assuming that this is what we have, would respond to the immediate concerns and wishes of the public, but not to warnings about future problems. Not that socialist dictatorships have a better record!
The only answer, as I see it, is for climate change activists to do what Naomi Klein describes in her book, ThisChanges Everything, which is to join up with those who are fighting fossil fuel companies on other grounds—protection of property rights, Indian treaties, public health and the environment, and the authority of local government.
Ellen Cantarow and Alison Rose Levy wrote an alarming and plausible article for TomDispatch about the likelihood of a Fukushima-type accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside New York City.
The Indian Point plant has a terrible safety record, even by industry standards. There is an ongoing leak of tritium (radioactive) water, whose source has not been identified, into local groundwater and the Hudson River. There is a known danger of flooding, which could cause a meltdown of the reactor core, but management of Entergy, the owner of Indian Point, has declined to install a $200,000 flood detector.
Now a high-pressure natural gas pipeline is planned by an energy company called Spectra, would carry fracked gas within 150 feet of Indian Point. Accidents in gas pipelines are on the rise, according to a study by the National Transportation Safety Board, due to gas companies cutting corners on safety.
How much risk should the nearly 20 million people who live in the vicinity of Indian Point assume?
Russia has played a master stroke in the current oil crisis by taking the lead in forming a new cartel, but it’s a move that could spell geopolitical disaster.
The meeting between Russia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela on 16 February 2016 was the first step. During the next meeting in mid-March, which is with a larger group of participants, if Russia manages to build a consensus—however small—it will further strengthen its leadership position.
Until the current oil crisis, Saudi Arabia called the crude oil price shots; however, its clout has been weakening in the aftermath of the massive price drop with the emergence of US shale.
The smaller OPEC nations have been calling for a production cut to support prices, but the last OPEC meeting in December 2015 ended without any agreement.
Now, with Russia stepping in to negotiate with OPEC nations, a new picture is emerging. With its military might, Russia can assume de facto leadership of the oil-producing nations in the name of stabilizing oil prices.
India has been told that it cannot go ahead as planned with its ambitious plan for a huge expansion of its renewable energy sector, because it seeks to provide work for Indian people. The case against India was brought by the US.
The ruling, by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), says India’s National Solar Mission − which would create local jobs, while bringing electricity to millions of people − must be changed because it includes a domestic content clause requiring part of the solar cells to be produced nationally.
The World Trade Organization rules that governments can’t subsidize infant industries because subsidies are trade barriers. The theory is that they are equivalent to tariffs because they give the home team an advantage.
WTO rules have been used to penalize solar and renewable power industries in the United States, Canada, China and other countries.
The problem with this is that once a particular nation or business monopoly has established dominance, it is very difficult for a newcomer to break in. That is why almost all industrial nations that came after Britain developed behind tariff walls, and why leaders of Britain, the first industrial nation, advocated free trade.
The warming Arctic is likely to be a new arena of conflict between Russia and the USA.
But unlike in current conflicts in Ukraine and Syria, there will be no question of democracy or a fight against terrorism to cloud the central issue—control of oil and gas resources and transportation routes.
The infrographic by the South China Morning Post provides a good snapshot of the situation. The potential conflict in the Arctic is even more dangerous than existing conflicts, because of its potential for direct confrontation between the USA and Russia.
The other nations with the greatest physical presence in the Arctic are Canada and Denmark (which controls Greenland). It will be interesting to see whether they will follow the lead of the United States or try to steer an independent course.
The irony of the situation is that the Arctic is being opened up by global warming, which causes the Arctic ice cap to shrink over time, and that the warming is caused mainly by burning of fossil fuels, but the new oil and gas supplied from the Arctic will make it easier and cheaper to keep on burning fossil fuels.
The best outcome would be for the Arctic powers to agree on sharing and conserving the region’s resources. That doesn’t seem likely anytime soon.
China and Pakistan have announced a new $46 billion project called the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Click to enlarge. Source: Express-Tribune, Pakistan
It will include a new railroad connecting the Chinese city of Kashgar with Pakistan’s port of Gwadar, extensive development of the port and construction of new oil and gas lines connecting China, Pakistan and Iran.
Other benefits to Pakistan are highway construction projects, improvements to the Gwadar airport, and a number of coal, wind, solar and hydro-electric plants. China in return gets to control Gwadar port for 43 years. Pakistan gets highway construction and energy reportedly is negotiating with China for purchase of eight attack submarines.
I think this is a good example of how China uses infrastructure investment to expand its power. Instead of trying to bend countries to its will by economic sanctions and threats of military force, as the USA is now trying to do, China offers projects of mutual benefit but under Chinese control.
Click to enlarge.
The benefit to China is that it gets access to Iranian oil without having to transport it through the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, where it would be vulnerable to disruption by India, Japan or the United States. The new route is 6,000 miles shorter. Ultimately China may have a direct pipeline connection to Iran, without having to go to sea at all.
The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor passes along areas controlled by the Pakistan Taliban. This gives the Pakistan government a strong incentive to bring its wing of the Taliban under control.
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The corridor goes through the portion of the disputed territory of Kashmir occupied by Pakistan, which means China thinks this project is important enough to take sides against India.
Previously Pakistan covertly supported the Taliban, and Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai allied with Pakistan’s enemy, India. But the new President, Ashraf Ghani, has aligned with China and Pakistan, which, I think, is bad news for the Taliban and a good reason to think the corridor plan is feasible.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy which punishes criminals by means of public be-headings, crucifixions, amputations and whippings.
Crimes include being a victim of rape, criticism of the Saudi ruling family and criticism of the Wahabi / Salafi sect of Islam, an extremist and radical form of Islam which is associated with terrorism and which the Saudi government is spreading throughout the world.
Saudi diplomats are in line to head the United Nations human rights commission.
All the American Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt through Barack Obama have pledged themselves to the defense of the Saudi royal family.
The reason: Access to Saudi oil is considered vital to American national security.
The need for Saudi oil was shown during the 1973 oil embargo, when Saudi Arabia and six other Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States in protest of U.S. support of Israel during the Six Day War.
President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger soon persuaded the Saudi royal family that Communism was a greater threat than Israel. Today Saudi and Israeli policy are aligned against Iran and Syria.
There is a resistance movement against the Saudi monarchy. What will Washington do when and if it succeeds?
The documentary by Abby Martin of teleSUR is an excellent summary of the Saudi situation and the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
Exxon Corp. commissioned scientists to research climate change from 1977 to 1982. They concluded that fossil fuels were causing a buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that would change the climate, an investigation of Inside Climate News has shown.
Top management hid and ignored the findings. There is a fine line between being willfully ignorant and lying. I think Exxon management crossed that line, and the world will suffer as a result.
But why are oil prices falling? It is because Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, is committed to pumping oil in large volume instead of shutting back in order to prop up the price.
What gives the Saudis so much leverage is that their production costs are low, and they can make a profit at a lower price than can Russians, Venezuelans or others.
That’s why the U.S. supports Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, and why President Obama recently reassured King Salman that the U.S. will continue its cold war against Iran despite the agreement with Iran over sanctions and nuclear facilities inspections.
My question is whether it is in the U.S. interest to wage cold war against either Iran or Russia. There is no moral issue here. The Iranian and Russian regimes are bad enough, but everything bad you can truthfully say about them goes double or triple or maybe 10 times for Saudi Arabia.
The European countries are already in crisis. Whole industries are being devastated by the direct and indirect effects of the cutoff of cheap oil and gas from Russia.
Obama has sufficient scientific resources at his command to know exactly what we are doing and failing to do. He came into office with control of both houses of Congress and a clear mandate to act on the climate crisis, with scientists the world over sounding all the necessary alarms. 
Ellen Cantarow and Alison Rose Levy wrote an alarming and plausible article for TomDispatch about the likelihood of a Fukushima-type accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside New York City.
India has been told that it cannot go ahead as planned with its ambitious plan for a huge expansion of its renewable energy sector, because it seeks to provide work for Indian people. The case against India was brought by the US. 
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