Posted on 09/19/2022 5:55:02 AM PDT by Alter Kaker
Globohomo will defeat Russia.
Falter? I hadn’t heard that the price of gas in Germany had fallen down to $1/gal., or even to what it was before the invasion.
Yeah, we all getting ready to get a front row seat to that ‘falter’.........
General Winter is coming.
Like the WSJ never lies.
Dreaming.
Winter is coming.
Oil is flowing from Russia to India, SA, etc. - where is is refined and sent to EU countries.
Germany still rationing hot water and Sweden jailing those with thermostats set aboe 66 degrees?
The Eurofreeze is coming. Soon.
That's easier than Europe doing energy on their own. Doing that would violate their warmageddon cult beliefs.
NATO nations may be nervous about sending jets to Ukraine, but there is no such nervousness about sending fuel. This was always going to be a bad bet for Russia.
Neocon much?
He always does. Accuracy is not what the media is known for but better than anything from the Puffer cult.
“Looks like Mr. Putin once again overplayed his hand.”
Yep, LNG prices are now only 10 times what Europe had been paying for pipeline gas, rather than 20 times earlier in the summer.
Putin has failed!
It’s going to be a cold day in hell this winter.
To me, it is disingenuous to conflate the price of gasoline for automobiles and their prices with what is happening on the natural gas front. Europeans aren’t gonna heat their homes and apartments with automobile gasoline.
“... Sweden jailing those with thermostats set above 66 degrees?”
If they’d simply Complied and worn their Booster Sweaters they wouldn’t have violated the law and committed Thermostat abuse.
“Falter? I hadn’t heard that the price of gas in Germany had fallen down to $1/gal., or even to what it was before the invasion.”
For Russian Natural Gas via pipeline, it was a bit under $1 gallon equivalent energy content to crude. That’s why they were laughing at Trump - they simply figured Trump was trying to move-in and take over with a much more expensive product (LNG).
Then with Europe now bidding for LNG, the price of LNG went up to $15 (gallon crude equivalent), now it’s around $8 as people as storage reserves are getting topped off. The problem is that the reserves only hold a small amount, and when the cold weather hits, Europe needs an almost continuous flow of gas. The WSJ will learn that the hard way, I guess.
Trump/conservatives/America gets the long-term changes in European energy politics that was wanted and Russia has permanently killed its best market and permanently removed its most powerful tool in European politics.
One of the most extraordinary left-wing mysteries many of us have seen in Europe was how in the world Russia got into the position of being their energy supplier in the first place, but now Putin has fixed that and it is unlikely to ever happen again.
“NATO nations may be nervous about sending jets to Ukraine, but there is no such nervousness about sending fuel. This was always going to be a bad bet for Russia.”
Assuming you mean shipping fuel to Europe, the problem is going to be sending it in a form they can readily use. Shipping crude doesn’t help with furnaces that run on natural gas.
And beyond that, shipping the wrong grades of crude to Europe won’t help with refineries/processes that are tuned for Urals Crude, at least until major modifications are made in those facilities. (something I was taught here by FR energy experts)
Putin should have boned up on history.
When Thatcher took on the commie coal mining industry, she waited until the country had a year’s worth of coal stockpiled AND had alternative sources. But that was after years of wrangling where past governments had backed down to the unions in every fight, and ended up locked into spiralling costs.
The entire industry going on strike, and solidarity from other sectors, hurt... For a year or two. But Thatcher won.
The coal is still there, under UK feet. If we need it in the future it’ll take effort to reopen the mines but it’s doable.
But the commies won’t get to control it.
This is how it’ll play with Russia.
Germany was totally dependent on them, just as the UK was totally dependent on the National Union of Mineworkers. That dependency is only as strong as the political will to avoid the pain of switching.
Germany was also highly dependent on nuclear - a political calculation ended that dependency. Now they have another decision to make, whether or not to reopen nuclear.
Americans have been conditioned, actually brainwashed, into thinking of the Quarterly Numbers. The national economy is hogtied to short termism. Venture Capital does it.
Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime cancel brilliant shows based on less than a month’s worth of great reviews but insufficient hits. They lose subscribers, they burn goodwill, and they’re smashing up eggs on the basis it’s taking too long to figure out if they’re golden eggs or not.
So, the logic behind taking a massive, massive short term hit as part of a long term resilience move doesn’t compute in the MBA dominated mindset.
If Russia pushes its extortions too far, the cost of the switch ends up lower in the long term than the cost of trying to placate Russia.
If Russia wants to be the superpower equivalent of North Korea, do we REALLY want to be a hostage to fortune?
Trump gets this. He even wanted Europe to make the move while Russia was still a reliable and cheap supplier, while the cost of change outweighed the short term benefits of doing nothing.
Pro Russian caution was winning the argument before Putin went all out on totalitarian lockdown, blackmail and a war in Ukraine. But it’s now losing the room in Europe.
Hungary, Serbia and Slovakia are going to be hit hard by the transition and they are reluctant to sever the last of their emotional ties with Soviet Russia. Cheap energy. Russia will always have a route back into Europe.
The question is, will Europe even need that. Or, will it be like the UK’s coal reserve - an asset that’s better off left where it is until we genuinely have to tap it AND can be confident that we’re not signing up for another 30 years of being held hostage by Moscow proxies.
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