Free Republic

Russia is gradually turning its back on Syrian President Bashar Assad, evacuating some 100 expert advisers and their families from Syria and refusing to repair regime fighter jets, an Arab daily reported on Sunday. “Senior sources in the Gulf” told pro-opposition London-based daily a-Sharq al-Awsat that the change in Russia’s position toward the Assad regime stems from diplomatic pressure exerted by Arab Gulf states. It also comes as part of Moscow’s efforts to shake international sanctions imposed on it following a military confrontation with Ukraine, the sources said. Meanwhile, Syrian opposition sources told the newspaper that 100 of Russia’s top...

Israel’s defense minister on Wednesday warned that Iran, an ostensible partner in the US-led fight against the Islamic State, has nothing but ill intentions toward Iraq and has cynically perpetuated the conflict in order to ensure that the country remains a failed state. “He who did not allow stability in Iraq since 2003 is Iran,” Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said at the Fisher Institute for Air and Space Strategic Studies’ annual security conference. “From its perspective, a strong Iraq runs counter to its own interests. From its perspective Iraq needs to be weak, bleeding.” Ya’alon said that Tehran’s primary goal...

As the bloc’s 12 oil ministers meet in Vienna, the march of Isil jihadists in the Middle East is putting Iran and Saudi Arabia on a collision course with explosive consequences Thick black smoke rising from the Baiji oil refinery could be seen as a dirty smudge on the horizon as far away as Baghdad after fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) set fire to the enormous processing plant just over 100 miles north of the capital last week. The decision to torch the refinery, which once produced around a third of Iraq’s domestic fuel...

As it appears GDP will be seasonally adjusted again, I find myself wondering just one thing: why? Earlier GDP figures showed the US economy on the brink of recession for the first two quarters of this year. Now, with more fudging going on, who knows what it will show. The government appears to be following the Hollywood mantra: if you can bend perception enough, it will become reality. Look no further than the Federal Reserve, which continues to raise expectations of higher interest rates in the second half of this year, in hopes of inducing faster growth.

A scientist has raised questions about the latest detection of methane on Mars, suggesting that NASA’s rover could be responsible for the mysterious burp. Highly unlikely, but not impossible, says the Curiosity team.

<p>Judging by its critics, the energy industry – and specifically the oil and gas industry in North Dakota – isn’t female-friendly. Yet women who live and work in the oil patch say the energy industry isn’t just a safe place for women, but that there are plenty of opportunities for everybody.</p>

At a reception at the State Department that marked the U.S. taking over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, Secretary of State John Kerry said that if Benjamin Franklin lived today and was nominated for office he would never be confirmed. […] “(T)here is, of course, a second connection between Franklin and this reception,” Kerry said. “And that is that he liked to have a really good time, folks. And he didn’t spare the booze, and while he was in Paris he led a life that clearly meant that had he lived today and been nominated, he would never have...

Storage withdrawals and falling rig count have been the main sources of hope that U.S. tight oil production will fall and that oil prices will rebound. That hope is fading as it is now clear that recent withdrawals from U.S. crude oil storage are because of price, not falling supply, and that the drop in rig count has stalled. Figure 1 below shows the relationship between U.S. crude oil storage inventory and WTI price. The thinking around recent withdrawals from storage is that this reflects depleting supply. The data, however, reflects that traders were storing crude oil during the price...

President Vladimir Putin signed a bill into law Saturday giving prosecutors the power to declare foreign and international organizations “undesirable” in Russia and shut them down. […] The law is part of a Kremlin campaign to stifle dissent that intensified after Putin began his third term in 2012. His return to the presidency had been accompanied by mass street protests that Putin accused the United States of fomenting. Russian suspicions of Western intentions have been further heightened because of tensions over Russia’s role in the conflict in Ukraine. The new Russian law allows prosecutors to declare an organization undesirable if...

From the first sudden, and quite dramatic, appearance of the fanatical Islamic group known as ISIS which was largely unheard of until a year ago, on the world's stage and which promptly replaced the worn out and tired al Qaeda as the world's terrorist bogeyman, we suggested that the "straight to beheading YouTube clip" purpose behind the Saudi Arabia-funded Islamic State was a simple one: use the Jihadists as the vehicle of choice to achieve a political goal: depose of Syria's president Assad, who for years has stood in the way of a critical Qatari natural gas pipeline, one which...

On May 18, the U.S. average retail price for gasoline was $2.74 per gallon ($/gal), or 92¢ per gallon (¢/gal) lower than at the same time last year. This is the lowest average price heading into the Memorial Day weekend—the traditional start of the summer driving season—since 2009. Lower gasoline prices reflect lower crude oil prices, with the spot price of North Sea Brent crude oil at more than $45 per barrel ($/b) lower than the same time last year, despite having increased more than $10/b since the beginning of February. Average retail prices for all regions of the country...

Seeps from which gas and oil escape were formative to many ancient cultures and societies. They gave rise to legends surrounding the Delphi Oracle, Chimaera fires and "eternal flames" that were central to ancient religious practices - from Indonesia and Iran to Italy and Azerbaijan. Modern geologists and oil and gas explorers can learn much by delving into the geomythological stories about the religious and social practices of the Ancient World, writes Guiseppe Etiope of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy. His research is published in the new Springer book Natural Gas Seepage. "Knowing present-day gas fluxes...

The oil and gas industry has been one of the better investments made by Michigan’s two largest government employee pension funds, according to a recent report by Sonecon LLC, a Washington D.C. economic advisory firm. The report examined the combined investment returns of Michigan's separate pension funds for school and state employees. Together, their investments in oil and natural gas companies gave a rate of return that was 37 percentage points higher than the return on all of their investments. Oil and gas investments outpaced investments in other industries by 43 percentage points. Due to chronic underfunding, both pension funds...

What the EPA is attempting to impose on America is a drain on our production of electricity coupled with an increase in its price. It is an obscene attack on our economy There are many things I do not like about the Environmental Protection Agency, but what angers me most are the lies that stream forth from it to justify programs that have no basis in fact or science, and which threaten the economy. Currently, its “Clean Power” plan is generating its latest and most duplicitous Administer, Gina McCarthy, to go around saying that it will not be costly, nor...

While we constantly analyze short-term data, the industry has a longer-term problem. And it is not related to what lies below the ground. There is a retirement tidal wave that could wash over the oil and gas industry over the next few years. The seeds of this crisis were planted in the late 1980’s after the last major oil bust. Oil prices crashed after Saudi Arabia became fed up with losing market share, and beginning around 1986, it pumped flat out in order to force out other producers. The price of oil crashed and a lot of US drillers cut...

Fossil fuel companies are benefiting from a global subsidy of £3.4 trillion a year, the International Monetary Fund has declared. The figure dwarfs that of government handouts for renewable energies, which amount to £77 billion a year. But closer inspection reveals the fossil fuel related sum not to be a subsidy, as it amounts to nothing more than the alleged costs to governments of dealing with fossil fuel pollution. The IMF have insisted that their figure is “shocking,” but “extremely robust”, and are using it to lobby for an end to “subsidies” for fossil fuel companies on both health and...

Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m every minute of every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The IMF calls the revelation “shocking” and says the figure is an “extremely robust” estimate of the true cost of fossil fuels. The $5.3tn subsidy estimated for 2015 is greater than the total health spending of all the world’s governments. The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused...

China Retakes Top Spot as the Biggest Foreign Owner of U.S. Debt By IAN TALLEY It was a short-lived domination. After just a month of being the top holder of U.S. Treasury debt, Japan has once again been pushed into the No.2 slot as China bulked up on Uncle Sam’s bonds and notes. As we noted last month – and several times before that – Treasury’s data is a rough guesstimate. That makes it hard for analysts sifting through the obscure sheaves of digital data to glean anything but rough trends. It also makes it difficult to draw precise conclusions....

To the casual observer, the American right can appear an undifferentiated wall of denial and obstructionism on climate change, but behind the scenes there are signs of movement. A growing number of conservative leaders and intellectuals have come to terms with climate science and begun casting about for solutions. Led mainly by libertarians and libertarian-leaning economists, they've begun to coalesce behind a carbon tax, which they consider the most market-friendly of the available alternatives. Jerry Taylor, a longtime veteran of the libertarian think tank Cato Institute who recently founded his own libertarian organization, the Niskanen Center, is a vocal proponent...

...Shell acquired the lease for just over $2 billion in 2008, and, absent a very good reason, the government felt obliged to approve it. Shell will be bound by safeguards that did not exist seven years ago. Several factors — including lawsuits and vigorous lobbying by environmental groups, widespread public dismay caused by the 2010 BP oil spill, and Shell’s ineptitude in earlier trial runs — have led the government to devise rules that are likely to make this project safer than it would have been. Shell is seeking to drill up to six exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea...