Everyone knows that the global warming/climate change true believers in the Biden Administration hate fossil fuels and want to eliminate its use. One of Joe’s first acts was to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline while inexplicably opening up the Russian Nord Stream 2. The other blow struck against devil oil was to shut down drilling on federal land, off shore and in Alaska. The final kick in the ass to oil companies has been to pressure banks to refuse to lend money to oil companies for drilling and exploration and cancelling leases for drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge.
The result was to take the US from being a net exporter of oil to an importer, especially from Russia. It also more than doubled the cost of a barrel of oil to $93. Everyone feels this when they pull up to the pump to fill up or when they pay their monthly heating bill. Indirectly it is felt in the increase in cost of everything as fuel costs increase costs for shipments and delivery. Inflation is now running at 7.5% and certainly headed higher.
Sale of Russian oil and gas accounts for 60% of its exports and 30% of its GDP. Much of Europe relies heavily on it as does the East Coast of the US. It’s not as if the US has any shortage of natural gas. The nearby Marcellus shale deposit covers much of West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York. New York State will not allow fracking so it is not produced there and, global warming true believers and their well-financed lawyers have prevented any pipelines from being built to deliver it. They need it, but can’t get it, so they buy it from the Russians.
There appears little doubt that Putin will invade Ukraine and Biden has threatened to shut down the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. This will certainly cause oil prices to jump up even higher. If Russia retaliated by stopping shipments of gas to the US, the east coast of the US would be in deep shit. The issue is not that we do not have enough natural gas, it’s that there are not sufficient pipelines to deliver it!
Biden’s team has put the US in this box and his global warming fanatics will not permit him to get out of it. I suspect gasoline prices at the pump will be at least $7.00/gallon by the time mid-term elections roll around and Biden’s approval rating will be near 30%. Let’s just hope we don’t find ourselves in another war over oil, especially when we are sitting on oceans of it.
Tag Archives: Russians
Oil Wars
Filed under Democrats, Drilling, Environmentalism, Global Warming, Oil
What About Bob?
Ever since Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary there has been a concerted effort to get rid of the guy. They were convinced he could not have done it without help from somebody. Of course, it was obvious that the famous stolen emails from Hillary and the DNC played a large role. Initially it was reported that at least 5 foreign governments had all broken into the totally unsecure computers. Then John Brennan, Director of the CIA and James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence said no, it was the Russians. Both of these guys were appointed by Obama and had total control of all the various intelligence organizations. The much-touted line that all 17 of the intelligence operations agreed that the Russians did it is meaningless because these two yahoos controlled them all!
Clapper and Brennan got to show their true colors when after leaving government went on to serve as “experts” for anti-Trump TV networks. Brennan went to MSNBC and famously called Trump a traitor. Clapper, who once lied in testimony to Congress and later admitted it, went to CNN. Both former Obama appointees frequently accused the President of having colluded with the Russians to steal the election.
The appointment of Bob Mueller as Special Counsel, the Democrats believed, would get rid of Trump. Over two years and $35 million dollars later, staffed with a collection of blood-thirsty Hillary supporting Democrat prosecutors concluded that there was no collusion. On the issue of obstruction they left some wiggle room although it seemed impossible to obstruct an investigation into a non-crime. Democrats decided that if they could get Mueller to say he thought Trump obstructed justice that they could have grounds for impeachment. They brought him in to testify before Congress.
Mueller’s performance was, to say the least, pitiful. He clearly knew little about the whole investigation and had obviously just been a figurehead. It was a total bust for the Democrats and that it became obvious he did not write the report and seemed totally oblivious to the highly partisan leanings of his committee.
Then suddenly Bob Mueller disappeared from the anti-Trump talk shows of CNN and MSNBC and the other media outlets. It was like heroic Bob never existed. Now the Republicans wanted to know how this whole false story got started in the first place and that might raise some embarrassing questions before the next election. No one on the left wanted to mention Russia.
The brain trust of the Democrat party came up with a new strategy to damage Trump. He’s a racist! The Democrats have relied on the black vote to lead to electoral success. They routinely get 90 to 95% of the black vote. All major cities have Democrat mayors. As retired basketball superstar, Charles Barkley said a few years ago, “Blacks have been voting for Democrats for their whole lives and they are still poor.” Indeed, anyone courageous enough to drive through the inner city of any major US city will soon discover what a hopeless mess they are.
Trump’s policies have helped these folks and they noticed. Black support for Trump has grown and this worries Democrats. Hence the constant cries that he is a racist. As a famous Nazi propagandist named Goebbels once said, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Democrats need to keep that black vote to succeed and the loss of even 10% support scares the shit out of them.
Trump needs to continue to go after the black vote by campaigning in black communities and doing some new programs like establishing trade schools in the inner cities. Inner city schools are awful. The teachers unions obstruct any effort to improve them but why can’t the administration set up some federally funded trade schools?
The Department of Education has a budget of $68 billion and has 4000 employees. Since the DOE does not educate a single child, what the Hell do they do? Surely the administration could slash the paperwork and whole departments and have lots of cash left to fund trade schools. Teach these hopeless kids to be welders, plumbers, carpenters, etc. and give them some skills to find a job. Blacks would notice.
Filed under Uncategorized
Russia Russia Russia
It is an article of faith among Democrats and the Media that Russia preferred Trump over Hillary. Nobody disputes it. To do so would get you curious stares like you had suddenly lost your mind. But it never made any sense to me. Trump promised to put the missiles back in Europe to dissuade Russian aggression. Hillary was never going to do that. Trump promised to build up the military. Hillary hates the military.
But here’s the biggie….. Trump promised to unleash the oil and gas producers of the US, to approve the stalled pipelines and open up drilling in ANWR and other areas. Hillary surely would have done none of that. She came out against fracking to secure Bernie Sander’s endorsement and she would never cross the anti-oil environmental groups that form an essential part of her constituency. Russia gets half of its annual budget revenues and 70% of its export revenues from the sale of oil and gas to other countries. Does anyone seriously believe they would purposely try to put Trump in the White House knowing he would harm their business and indeed their very survival?
Now comes proof of just how far they are willing to go to frustrate drilling, fracking and pipeline building. As everyone knows (hopefully) New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia sit atop a massive natural gas deposit called the Marcellus Shale estimated to have somewhere between 141 to 400 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas by fracking. Pennsylvania and West Virginia allow fracking but New York does not which accounts for the disparity in prosperity between the counties in the gas producing states and those who do not.
It turns out that environmental groups opposed to fracking and pipelines received hundreds of millions of dollars from environmental foundations that get the money from a shell company in Bermuda, that got the money from (wait for it) the Russians. The exposure of this money-laundering scheme was exposed recently by Kevin Mooney, a Heritage Foundation investigative reporter and published an article in the “Daily Signal”, a Heritage publication on 4/22/18.
Mr. Mooney discovered that a shell company called Klein Ltd. was set up by a law firm called Wakefield Quinn and some Russian officials including Putin. The law firm runs Klein and a dozen other shell companies at the same address. The Russians give the money to Klein who in turn sends it to several environmental foundations like the Sea Change Foundation and the Energy Foundation. These groups then distribute the cash to activists groups like the Serria Club and the National Resources Defense Council and likely others including the anti-pipeline groups in Canada.
They have been effective. Activist groups have been able to derail the Mariner 2 East and Constitution gas pipelines that would have pumped natural gas from the huge Marcellus Shale deposit to the East Coast where it could both help out with gas customers but also be liquefied for shipment over seas. The Russians continue to sell natural gas to several coastal states and, of course, have a strangle hold on some Eastern European countries.
In Canada the environmental activists have been successful in preventing the building of the Energy East pipeline and the Northern Gateway pipeline. The former would carry natural gas from Alberta and Saskatchewan to the east coast where it would be liquefied and shipped. The Northern Gateway would have carried crude from the oil sands of Alberta to the northern coast for shipment. The Russians definitely don’t want Canadian oil and gas getting dumped into the world market for energy. Prices would come down and they would have competition.
There may be some unintended consequences from blocking these pipelines, particularly the gas pipelines. During the unusual cold spells of the last two winters, gas supplies were extremely tight in eastern NA because of limited pipeline capacity. Couple that with the wholesale conversion from coal to gas fired electricity generation and you have a formula for blackouts during extended cold snaps. I read reports that it nearly happened last winter.
Right now we are having a major war over the building of a second pipeline next to an existing one that terminates at the Fraser River near Vancouver. It’s called the Transmountain pipeline. It would bring oil and refined gasoline to people of the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. There is currently a gas shortage here and gasoline costs $1.61 per liter. That’s $6.09 per gallon!
I’ve been curious as to how these protesters can spend weeks and months camped out obstructing the guys trying to build a pipeline. I ask myself, “How do they support themselves? How do they eat and pay the rent?” I guess the answer is….. from the Russians, indirectly. Unwitting stooges for Putin.
Filed under Drilling, Environmentalism, Oil, Soviets