Russia’s finance minister has admitted the country can’t use nearly half its $640 billion foreign currency war chest because of Western sanctions
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/russias-finance-minister-admitted-country-035159374.html
Tag: Russia
America can’t solve its gas price problem (or its Russia problem) with drilling
“Biden has done nothing to halt oil leasing. In fact, the Biden administration has outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands and water in its first year, according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity. His administration set a record for the largest offshore lease sale ever in the Gulf of Mexico last year, before a federal court blocked the lease sale for not considering climate impacts.
There was a temporary pause on new federal leases in the first few months of Biden’s administration when he placed a moratorium on them while the administration reviewed how to better integrate climate costs in lease sales. Meanwhile, the president has done nothing to prevent the vast amount of gas production that occurs on private lands or halt existing oil leases on federal lands. The moratorium is now irrelevant, anyway, because a Louisiana federal judge ruled against it last June. (There’s a second, temporary pause on new lease sales because another court invalidated the administration’s use of a social cost of carbon.) The US also became the world’s largest exporter of liquified natural gas (LNG) for the first time in 2021.
Clark Williams-Derry, an energy analyst with the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, offered a reality check to those complaining that climate regulations have changed the fate of oil and gas. “The idea that the tiny marginal changes in US policy have anything to do with the big shifts we’ve seen in prices is just preposterous,” he told Vox. The marginal Biden measures — like reversing Trump-era environmental rollbacks — haven’t made any kind of dent in the global oil market.”
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“oil companies have made it clear in earnings calls with shareholders that they don’t plan to produce much more, anyway. Remember that just two years ago the industry was in a complete free fall when demand crashed because of the pandemic. Banks sought government bailouts for oil investments that went under, and oil prices actually hit negative levels as producers grew desperate for oil to be taken off their hands.”
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““If the president wants us to grow, I just don’t think the industry can grow anyway.’’ The largest US fracking companies reiterated in earnings calls in February that they intend to keep output roughly flat, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.
In other words, now that companies are making handsome profits, they’re using that extra cash to reward investors and pay down debts, not invest in new production.”
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“LNG exports don’t solve Europe’s or America’s energy challenges. In some ways, they exacerbate them.
To export gas to Europe, a facility first needs to convert it to liquified natural gas, which cools and pressurizes the methane so it can be shipped across continents. On the other end of the ocean, another facility must turn it back into gas for shipment via pipeline.
That’s a lot of infrastructure, which is impossible to scale up in enough time to make an impact on current prices. There’s one new LNG terminal that opened this year in Louisiana. On the European side, the LNG terminals are already at capacity. This isn’t going to help make up Russia’s supply of 40 percent of Europe’s gas either.
So it’s not particularly helpful or possible to boost exports to Europe, but it also wouldn’t help prices in the US.
Williams-Derry says that US exports of liquified natural gas have been the primary reason for climbing prices. In 2016, the US completed its first LNG export terminal in decades, which the gas industry hoped would alleviate a glut of natural gas that was keeping US gas prices too low for the industry’s liking.
“The reason we’re experiencing higher natural gas prices right now is we’re exporting more,” Williams-Derry said last week. “It’s not that we’re consuming more. It’s not that we’re producing less. It’s that we’re exporting.””
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“LNG will always be the more expensive option because of its processing and transport. “By locking yourself into a gas-powered future, you’re locking in higher costs for the long haul,” Williams-Derry said. “There’s not a good alternative to Russian gas if you want to have inexpensive gas in Europe.”
“If you’re going to double down on gas, essentially, you’re doubling down on Russia,” Williams-Derry added.”
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“The biggest risk is if the US and Europe respond to this crisis by over-investing in the future of fossil fuels. Actions like building LNG terminals and approving new leasing don’t help in the short term when people are struggling to pay high bills. It doesn’t achieve energy independence. But it would lock the world onto a dangerous path for climate change.”
Invasion jolts Russia’s friends in tiny West-leaning Moldova
https://www.yahoo.com/news/invasion-jolts-russias-friends-tiny-095941132.html
The unprecedented American sanctions on Russia, explained
https://www.vox.com/22968949/russia-sanctions-swift-economy-mcdonalds
How high can gas prices go?
“The US is not a major consumer of Russian crude oil, which makes up less than 4 percent of US consumption, so banning imports shouldn’t have a huge effect; the US doesn’t import any Russian gas. The US can make up the oil gap with imports from other countries, and the Biden administration already is pursuing that path by opening talks with Venezuela. Nor is Russia all that reliant on the US, because US purchases account for about 9 percent of its exports.
The bigger impact on the price of oil comes from what Biden’s announcement portends. Global oil prices have been fluctuating wildly in recent days, reflecting that there is a wide range of uncertainty over what could happen next. One of the uncertainties is whether more countries will follow the US’s move to ban imports, taking Russian oil off the table for a number of foreign markets. Cutting out Russia makes oil more expensive, because it upends the existing network of pipelines and makes countries’ paths to getting oil longer and more expensive.”
Why even a “limited” no-fly zone is a bad idea
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22967674/russia-ukraine-no-fly-zone-limited-nuclear-war
The House vote on a Russian oil ban underscores how much support it has
https://www.vox.com/2022/3/9/22967876/congress-russia-sanctions
“The alarmists were right all along”: A Moscow journalist on Putin and the new Russian reality
“For a long while, Russia has “flooded the zone” and bombarded the population with so many contradictory accounts of reality that they weren’t sure what to believe, or they were too cynical to believe anything. But now it’s full Orwellian control of reality, and that’s a much heavier lift because it’s not about undermining consensus, which is easy; it’s about enforcing one.”
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“I have to be honest, there were a handful of people here who have been warning about this for a long time, who were telling people like me that this was going to be a fascist dictatorship one day, and we’ve been dismissing these people. We were like, “Come on, Putin is a cynic, he’s evil in so many ways, but at least he’s a rational guy. All he wants to do is get himself insanely rich. He’s not going to do anything really drastic.”
But we were all fucking wrong. The alarmists were right all along, and almost every one of them is either dead or in jail or exiled.”
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“we’re in uncharted waters. All these major foreign media outlets, like the New York Times and the BBC, are fleeing Moscow. That’s never happened. The New York Times has had a bureau in Moscow throughout the entire 20th century, including three revolutions and two world wars and the entire Cold War. But now Moscow isn’t safe for the New York Times. I really don’t have the words to describe how unpredictable this situation is.”
What Would It Take For Americans To Support War Against Russia?
John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism
“It should be acknowledged that his approach offers real insight. Indeed, though it is not stated out loud, Mearsheimer’s diagnosis of the Ukraine crisis is shared de facto by a large part of the US foreign policy establishment. The promise of Nato membership bounced through by the Bush administration in 2008, was an act of hubris. The West will not abandon Ukraine, but nor will it intervene militarily. Part of the rage against Mearsheimer is deflected frustration on the part of liberals who recognise in his frankness with regards to the actual limits of Western commitment – and there are good reasons for those limits. A direct confrontation with Russia is something that Nato has always tried to avoid. The US made it clear to Putin that there would be no military participation. Emergency weapons deliveries go a long way towards blurring that line. A no-fly zone would be lethally dangerous.
But for all that, to claim this as an intellectual victory for Mearsheimer’s realism would be perverse. He is no doubt right about the underlying causes of tension. But that is not the same as actually explaining war, any more than gesturing to imperialism is an adequate explanation for why the Kaiser gave the Austrians a blank cheque in July 1914. The realist model is grossly underspecified and fails to grasp the qualitative shift implied by the opening of hostilities. The Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz may have said that war is the extension of policy by other means. But that still raises the question of why anyone, great power or not, would resort to such a radical and dangerous means.
In Moscow itself, none of the serious foreign policy establishment – all devotees to Russia’s future as a great power – believed that Putin would go to war. They were incredulous not because they do not understand the logic of power, but precisely because they do. They saw no good reason for Russia to risk employing the means of all-out war, with all its hazards, uncertainties and costs. Events are proving them right.
Morality and legality are one reason for opposing war. The other is simply that over the last century at least, it has a poor track record for delivering results. Other than wars of national liberation, one is hard pressed to name a single war of aggression since 1914 that has yielded clearly positive results for the first mover. A realism that fails to recognise that fact and the consequences that have been drawn from it by most policymakers does not deserve the name.”
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“If we want to understand what happened in the Kremlin to precipitate the criminal folly of the invasion, what we need are not platitudes about the security dilemmas of great powers, but a forensic account of an epic failure of decision-making and intelligence.”
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“adopting a realistic approach towards the world does not consist in always reaching for a well-worn toolkit of timeless verities, nor does it consist in affecting a hard-boiled attitude so as to inoculate oneself forever against liberal enthusiasm. Realism, taken seriously, entails a never-ending cognitive and emotional challenge. It involves a minute-by-minute struggle to understand a complex and constantly evolving world, in which we are ourselves immersed, a world that we can, to a degree, influence and change, but which constantly challenges our categories and the definitions of our interests. And in that struggle for realism – the never-ending task of sensibly defining interests and pursuing them as best we can – to resort to war, by any side, should be acknowledged for what it is. It should not be normalised as the logical and obvious reaction to given circumstances, but recognised as a radical and perilous act, fraught with moral consequences. Any thinker or politician too callous or shallow to face that stark reality, should be judged accordingly.”