California Free Press

'A Watershed Moment': California Sues Big Oil Over Decades of Climate Destruction

A man runs past a fallen tree amid Tropical Storm Hilary on August 21, 2023 in San Diego, California. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

 

by Jake Johnson, September 16, 2023, from Common Dreams

"California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered."

The state of California on Friday filed suit against ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, accusing the five oil and gas giants of a decadeslong campaign to mislead the public about the threat fossil fuels pose to the climate.

The lawsuit makes California the largest economy on the planet to take legal action against fossil fuel companies over their efforts to deceive the world about their destructive—and immensely profitable—business model. California is also a major producer of oil and gas.

"This has been a multi-decade, ongoing campaign to seek endless profits at the expense of our planet, our people, and the greedy corporations and individuals need to be held accountable," California Attorney General Rob Bonta toldThe New York Times in an interview on Friday. "That's where we come in."

With its new civil lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco court, California joins Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and other states that have sued the fossil fuel industry over its role in massive climate damages. Dozens of municipalities, including several in California, have also filed lawsuits against oil giants.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. has experienced a record-breaking 23 billion-dollar extreme weather disasters this year, from deadly flooding in California to the catastrophic wildfire that killed nearly 100 people in Maui, Hawaii—which is also suing Big Oil.

Cities and states representing 25% of the U.S. population are currently taking part in some kind of climate-related legal action against the fossil fuel industry, according to Fossil Free Media, and the Biden Justice Department is facing growing pressure to join the fight.

In an effort to improve their chances of winning the mounting legal battles, fossil fuel giants have tried to move climate liability lawsuits from state to federal court—but the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear their appeals earlier this year.

"Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

Richard Wiles, the president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement Saturday that "California's decision to take Big Oil companies to court is a watershed moment in the rapidly expanding legal fight to hold major polluters accountable for decades of climate lies."

"Whether it's fires, droughts, extreme heat, or sea-level rise, Californians have been living in a climate emergency caused by the fossil fuel industry, and now the state is taking decisive action to make those polluters pay," said Wiles. "As similar cases proceed toward trial, California's move is an unmistakable sign that the wave of climate lawsuits against Big Oil will keep growing and that these polluters' days of escaping accountability for their lies are numbered. Just like tobacco and opioid companies, the oil and gas industry will have to face the evidence of its deception in court."

California's lawsuit, which also names the American Petroleum Institute as a defendant, comes days after The Wall Street Journalpublished a front-page story based on previously unreported documents that detail Exxon's behind-closed-doors effort to cast doubt on climate science after 2006, when the company publicly acknowledged the link between fossil fuels and climate change for the first time.

Exxon and other oil companies have been aware of the connection since the 1970s.

"For more than 50 years, Big Oil has been lying to us—covering up the fact that they've long known how dangerous the fossil fuels they produce are for our planet," California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "It has been decades of damage and deception."

"Wildfires wiping out entire communities, toxic smoke clogging our air, deadly heatwaves, record-breaking droughts parching our wells," Newsom continued. "California taxpayers shouldn't have to foot the bill. California is taking action to hold big polluters accountable."

The Times noted Friday that California's lawsuit aims to establish "a fund that would be used to pay for recovery from extreme weather events and mitigation and adaptation efforts across the state."

"The lawsuit claims that California has already spent tens of billions of dollars paying for climate disasters, and expects costs to rise significantly in the years ahead," the Times added.

Jamie Henn, the director of Fossil Free Media, said Saturday that with its lawsuit, "California just kicked open the door for every city and state in America to sue the fossil fuel industry for climate damages."

"After this summer of brutal heat waves and climate disasters, I think the public is hungry for a way to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the damage they've done," said Henn. "Big Oil knew, they lied, and now it's time to make them pay."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

 

 

Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

It's Not Biden's Job to Reduce Inflation. That's Jerome Powell's Job.

by John Lawrence

Republicans are so stupid. They blame Joe Biden for not doing something that's not his job to do. Furthermore, the way Powell is going about his job requires him to create more unemployment, to reduce economic activity. That's the traditional way to reduce inflation. So getting rid of inflation requires more economic pain not less. Then if there is a recession, they'll blame Joe Biden, not Jerome Powell, for that. As far as house prices being out of sight for more and more people, how about blaming the hedge funds and other entities that are bidding up asset prices. Eventually houses will be unaffordable for the masses of people which will turn the American people into renters and basically debtors. Is that Joe Biden's fault or the fault of hedge finds and other cash flush investors who are entering this market? In fact they are in the process of cornering this market. Higher interest rates are also hurting would be home owners and car buyers. Is that Joe Biden's fault or Jerome Powell's fault for raising interest rates? Joe Biden has no control over interest rates. The American consumer is all about me, me, me not what is best for the country as a whole.

Biden has done more than any President since Lyndon Johnson to improve the economy with the Chips Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, the American Rescue Plan and more. Nearly 11 million jobs have been created since President Biden took office – including 750,000 manufacturing jobs. It's the first time the US government has had an industrial policy. He kept the economy afloat during the COVID lock down. The US economy has been left to free enterprise for too long. With deregulation this has allowed corporate entities to pollute, to create dangerous products, to do nothing about carbon dioxide emissions.The government was just supposed to be hands off and let corporations run wild, all in the name of maximizing GDP. Well there are more important things than maximizing GDP like saving the planet from global warming. It is all ready too late to do that. It's only a question at this time of how bad it will get before some of the measures that are being taken today will kick in and save the planet, hopefully, from complete destruction. Each year heat waves and floods are getting more severe. Each year is hotter than the previous year. How important is it to maximize GDP under these conditions?

During World War II, the government made sure that the economy was completely focused on the war effort. Consumer consumption was kept low in order to support the war effort. Today with an even larger danger looming, the economy is going on its merry way with so many elements of it not focused on climate change. In fact I call it the Taylor Swiftization of the economy. Entertainment including professional athletics are very large components of GDP. Nero fiddling while Rome burned is nothing compared to what is happening today. Perhaps the energy going into these frivolous sectors should be refocused on climate change. But the American people don't even all agree that climate change is even a serious situation. They want more fossil fuels, more drilling, more pipelines, more gas production. Fortunately, some states like California are doing more like outlawing gas powered cars by 2035. However, 2035 is too late. Too little, too late is the story of the world's response to climate change. So major disasters will continue with the government's fiscal budget increasingly committed to bailing out these disasters. FEMA, by the way, is bankrupt, and insurance companies no longer want to insure.

Off the Top of My Head

Will Renewable Energy Be Sufficient to Stave Off Global Warming?

by John Lawrence

More than a third of the world's energy will come from renewables by 2025. The International Energy Agency says electricity demand is forecast to grow by 3% a year over the next three years compared to 2022. So in 10 years demand will be 30% higher than it was in 2022 Meanwhile, renewable energy generation is increasing about 10% a year. In 10 years renewables will be producing 100% of the energy demand as of today, but, since demand will be 30% higher than today, that leaves about 30% of demand still to be fulfilled by fossil fuels. But electricity generation is not the only source of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. Steel and cement production also releases greenhouse gasses. Agriculture, especially cattle farming, releases large amounts of greenhouse gasses. Virtually every aspect of production and consumption releases greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. To reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses, the world's population needs to go to a plant based diet and get away from the demand for meat, especially beef. Substitutes in building materials need to be found for steel and cement. Otherwise the demand for fossil fuels will never go away. Airplanes and container ships release a lot of greenhouse gasses. Might we have nuclear powered container ships in the future? Will there be a substitute for jet fuel?

Meanwhile, the release of greenhouse gasses is increasing. NBC News reported on March 2, 2023:

"Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

"Emissions of the climate-warming gas that were caused by energy production grew 0.9% to reach 36.8 gigatons in 2022, the International Energy Agency reported Thursday. (The mass of one gigaton is equivalent to about 10,000 fully loaded aircraft carriers, according to NASA.)"

World society needs to make an all out immediate effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, something it's definitely not doing. Instead the human race is preoccupied with war and preparations for war. It is also business as usual for production and consumption especially in the western industrialized societies. There needs to be an immediate cessation of consumption at the level that western societies are used to consuming, but that would bring about an immediate recession in the US whose economy is based 70% on consumption. It seems problematic to suggest that building materials should henceforth be of the kind used in medieval Europe, namely stone which was used to build the great cathedrals. Also earth based materials like adobe would not contribute to greenhouse gas emissions at the same levels that concrete and steel buildings do, not even to mention concrete roads and freeways. It seems all modern methods of production and consumption are based either on fossil fuels or carbon dioxide emissions from steel and cement production. Plastics which are based on fossil fuels need to be immediately replaced with other materials like glass and paper products. Even the wind turbines that produce renewable energy are made almost entirely of steel which generates huge amounts of greenhouse gas. Why couldn't a wind turbine be made of stone except for the moving parts?

Suffice it to say that, when you look at the entire picture, it is not enough just to go to renewable sources for electricity production. For sure that's one component in terms of automobile travel and electricity usage for homes and businesses, but until the problems associated with airplane and ship travel are solved and the problems associated with steel and cement production are solved, we will never reduce the levels of greenhouse gasses being spewed into the atmosphere enough to prevent climate catastrophe. We are moving at a snail's pace when an all out immediate effort is needed.

Off the Top of My Head

The Way to Cure Inflation: More Immigrant Workers

by John Lawrence

There is a supply shortage which means that there is not enough supply to meet consumer demand. At the same time there is a worker shortage. The worker shortage causes the supply shortage as companies have to cut back on their supply of product because they don't have enough workers to make more. They have to pay workers more because they are in a competition for workers. So there is a gap between supply and demand because there is a gap between available jobs and the supply of workers. The solution: increase the supply of immigrants to fill the demand for workers. Then companies could ramp up supply to meet demand, and wage price spirals would diminish. Instead, the government has restricted immigration. This limits the supply of workers especially those who are in demand for the lower skilled jobs. Republicans are all concerned about immigration when the solution to the inflation problem is to let more immigrants into the country to fulfill the need for essential workers. This would fill the void in the job market and increase supply of goods and services. This in turn would lower prices and go a long way to taming inflation. The Fed cannot solve the problem of inadequate supply of workers by raising interest rates. This will only tend to rein in asset prices which in and of itself is a good thing since housing and rents are too expensive. But it will not increase the supply of commodities for which there is more demand than supply.

After noting that reversing the Trump tariffs on Chinese products would lower inflation, Fareed Zakaria also noted the following:

The second one, he noted, would be immigration reform. This is the time to reverse more of Trump’s restrictions on immigration, many done by executive action and hundreds of which are still in effect, which have caused severe worker shortages in industries such as farming, construction and health care.

The problem, however, is not one relating to facts or logic. No one seriously disputes the validity of these claims. During the campaign, Biden lambasted Trump’s tariffs on China and much of his immigration policy. Yet after entering office, the Biden White House has behaved on these issues like a deer caught in the headlights — paralyzed by fear that any major shifts might get attacked by Republicans.

I also might add that cranking up the Cold War rhetoric regarding China is not the way to lower the price of consumer products most of which are manufactured in China. China is learning the lesson that Russia learned during their ongoing war with Ukraine. If you have a product or commodity that the west wants or needs, you can cause a lot of damage by withholding that product or in other ways making it more expensive. As Russia has made the price of gas more expensive, they have directly caused inflation in the US and Europe. One could also point out that sanctions on Russian oil by western governments have contributed to rising inflation so in that sense the Biden administration has shot itself in the foot. China could take a page out of Russia's book, and increase costs to western consumers. In fact it already has as container ships (wholly owned by Chinese companies) have raised their prices to transport goods from China to the US. The US needs to cooperate with China if it wants the trade relationships so vital to consumer spending, which is 70% of the US economy, to remain on a salutary basis.

It is to be noted that China turned the tables on the US by sanctioning Nancy Pelosi and her family after her trip to Taiwan. It's as if they're saying, "See, you guys aren't the only ones that can do sanctions." China could get into a sanctions war with the US if tensions between the two countries continue to escalate. China could take steps to increase the cost of Chinese produced consumer goods which are essential to the functioning of the US economy. Or it could even withhold some essential manufactured goods altogether. As Russia has us over a barrel with regard to gas prices, China could put us over a barrel with respect to any number of consumer goods that we are dependent on them for. On the other hand, if we cooperated rather than competed with China, that might go a long way to solve the climate change problem. Ditto for Russia. Those 2 countries have a lot to do with whether or not planet earth gets a handle on climate change. Can we afford not to cooperate. In the long run the fate of Taiwan or Ukraine is less important than the fate of the whole planet.

Off the Top of My Head

Why the Fed's Raising Interest Rates Won't Work

by John Lawrence

Inflation is a supply and demand problem. The Fed only sees it as a demand problem: there is too much demand. Therefore, it seeks to reduce the public's ability to demand by reducing wages and creating more unemployment. Problem is that businesses are short staffed. They are trying to hire more workers, not laying them off. There is no "industrial reserve army" of people competing for jobs. Businesses are competing for workers. The reason why prices are going up (hence inflation) is not that there is too much demand, but that there is too little supply. This is caused by supply chain problems which comes down to the fact that most things Americans consume are produced overseas, mainly in China. Also the sanctions on Russian gas and oil combined with Russia cutting off supplies even beyond the sanctions means that everything that is transported including consumer goods is even more expensive. The problem is that the US does not produce much of what it consumes. Again it's a supply problem. Container ships coming from China raise their rates because gas is more expensive. This makes the goods they transport more expensive. When the major things Americans consume come from China (consumer goods) and Russia (energy costs), America is at the behest of countries that it considers enemies. And so is Europe.

The traditional way of fighting inflation is for the Fed to raise interest rates and drive up unemployment. When unemployment increases, demand decreases because unemployed people don't have as much money to spend. In other words money is withdrawn from the economy. This is of course to the detriment of the unemployed people which are usually those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder. But as we've seen during the pandemic, those at the bottom of the economic ladder are usually those who are indispensable workers - grocery workers, agricultural workers, truck drivers, nurses, caregivers. The economy cannot function for anyone without their services. So the only way the Fed can achieve its goal is to drive businesses into bankruptcy. Then all those workers will be in the ranks of the unemployed and be forced to underconsume. Actually, the more that Americans consume, the more greenhouse gasses are created. Underconsumption could have a very salutary effect on the atmosphere and the environment.

Another way to withdraw money from the economy in order to reduce demand is to raise taxes. Again taxes are usually raised on the poor and middle class further immiserizing them. Congress refuses to raise taxes on the rich which Joe Biden has proposed doing. This would help inflation to some extent, but the rich don't consume basic items to the extent that the middle class and poor do. So in order to reduce demand to the point where it is more or less equal to supply, money must be taken out of the pockets of the poor and middle class. The other alternative is to increase supply. But since the US is dependent on supply from foreign suppliers, this is not that easy to do. Long range, the solution is for the US to make more stuff, but corporations have settled on a model of getting stuff produced where labor is cheapest and that means overseas.

Off the Top of My Head

Sea Levels to Rise by 200 Feet if Poles Melt

by John Lawrence

Based on 410 ppm which is the concentration of carbon dioxide right now in the atmosphere, the ice on the poles will go completely away albeit at a glacial pace. Concentrations of carbon dioxide have varied between 100 ppm and 300 ppm for hundreds of millions of years, and earth has gone through hot periods in which there was no polar ice and at least one period where the entire earth was encased in ice. Reliable predictions by scientists show that 410 ppm will guarantee the disappearance of ice from the poles and a 200 foot sea level rise which will wipe out most of the east coast including a total disappearance of the state of Florida. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is continuing to increase. It will continue to increase way above the current 410 ppm. Humans are still pouring billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere year after year. There has been no diminution of this trend. In fact it is accelerating. The world emits about 43 billion tons of CO2 a year. So already there is enough carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to guarantee that the poles will melt, and the earth will become very hot. And we're still making it worse year after year.

As the oceans warm and the polar ice melts, we are seeing more extreme weather events due to increased water evaporation from the oceans. That increased amount of water in the atmosphere is released in the form of torrential downpours which cause flooding and weather events such as hurricanes. Higher temperatures are also causing droughts and forest fires. Although these events are tragedies for those directly affected, geological history has shown that life can adapt. One of the first major catastrophes the human race will be faced with is the loss of major cities situated close to oceans such as New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, Miami and New Orleans. However, humans can adapt to this by just moving further back from the shore lines as sea levels rise wiping out most low lying areas. Of course this will increase anti-immigrant sentiment due to the the number or refugees in the world as humans crowd onto remaining habitable areas. At this stage we will still be better off than Venus which has a runaway greenhouse gas effect and a surface air temperature of 800 degrees F. Its atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide.

The lesson here is that it is to the advantage of the human race to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as quickly as possible. This means major changes to our civilization which human beings are reluctant to make especially in democracies which are governed by the will of the people. While most will give lip service to preserving the planet for future generations, in fact they don't want to do anything that will change their lifestyles or inconvenience themselves in any way. Only when war and pestilence force humans to diminish their numbers on the planet will the human footprint get down to a certain size which, along with the adoption of renewable energy systems, will allow the planet to sustain enough habitable land mass for the furtherance of human life at least for some people. How fast we proceed with changing the human ecosystem in terms of greenhouse gas reduction will determine what kind of a planet future generations will be forced to live on. At the very least it will resemble a hot house earth, similar to conditions which existed millennia ago in which the polar regions were tropical swamps.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden Could Solve the Gas Crisis Today by Taking Sanctions Off Russian Oil

by John Lawrence

Sanctions on Russian oil have been an abysmal failure. Russian oil profits are up 50% from last year! Just as American and British oil corporations have been scoring record profits, so has Russia. Oil prices are set on the world market and soaring prices result in record profits for Russia. If Putin had designed the sanctions himself, he couldn't have wreaked more havoc on the US and European economies. It's time for Biden to admit that his policy of sancti0ns against Russia has failed. They haven't deterred Russia from pursuing a war of attrition against Ukraine. They have demonstrated the abject failure of using US sanctions to control the actions of other countries. They are a total lost cause now and in the future. That's the lesson of the war in Ukraine for the west.

Bloomberg reported:

Russia’s oil revenues are up 50% this year even as trade restrictions following the invasion of Ukraine spurred many refiners to shun its supplies, the International Energy Agency said.

Moscow earned roughly $20 billion each month in 2022 from combined sales of crude and products amounting to about 8 million barrels a day, the Paris-based IEA said in its monthly market report. 

Russian shipments have continued to flow even as the European Union edges towards an import ban, and international oil majors such as Shell Plc and TotalEnergies SE pledge to cease purchases. Asia has remained a keen customer, with China and India picking up cargoes no longer wanted in Europe.

The IEA, which advises major economies, kept its outlook for world oil markets largely unchanged in the report. Global fuel markets are tight and may face further strain in the months ahead as Chinese demand rebounds following a spate of new Covid lockdowns, it said. 

Reduced flows of Russian refined products such as diesel, fuel oil and naphtha have aggravated tightness in global markets, the agency noted. Stockpiles have declined for seven consecutive quarters, with reserves of so-called middle distillates at their lowest since 2008.

But for all the disruption, Moscow has continued to enjoy a financial windfall compared with the first four months of 2021. Despite the EU’s public censure of the Kremlin’s aggression, total oil export revenues were up 50% this year. 

The bloc remained the largest market for Russian exports in April, taking 43% of the country’s exports, the IEA said.

So where is this "world market" that is setting the price of oil? Is it on Wall Street? I'd like to have a word with whoever is in charge of this "world market." Lord knows the US produces enough oil to supply all the US' gas needs so why not take US oil production off the world market and just sell it to the American people at a reasonable price? Oh, I guess that's not how capitalism works. Ironic, isn't it, that a formerly communist country like Russia is now profiting from capitalist markets! So even if the US, Canada and Europe are having record inflation with recessions predicted in the near future, Biden won't take the sanctions off of Russian oil, and basically this is all for spite, all because he hates Putin so much. Biden has staked American prestige on fighting a proxy war with Russia based on the almighty dollar and the power it supposedly possesses over every financial transaction going on in the world. Problem is that all the sanctions on Russia have only proven the weakness and futility of using sanctions to achieve policy goals. Russia has demonstrated that the sanctions just don't work. They haven't deterred Russia in the least. China and India have taken up the slack in Russian oil purchases.

Besides that, what Biden fails to understand is that like the US, Russia's currency, the ruble, is a fiat currency. That means that unlike China, it is not pegged to the US dollar. Russia's central bank can print as many rubles as it wants without asking US permission. The US can of course do the same thing - print as many dollars as it wants except the limiting factor is inflation. So the US can't print dollars right now, but Russia can still print rubles. That means that Russia controls Russian investment in Russia and Russian control of internal consumer markets. Imported products come mainly from China, and China is Russia's friend. Russia is demanding payment for its gas in rubles rather than dollars, and this supports the value of the ruble as a convertible currency just as Nixon's demand that the Saudis price their oil in dollars supported the value of the dollar and made the dollar the world's reserve currency.

All this boils down to the fact that Russia is in the driver's seat with respect to the war in Ukraine. It's hard to see how the unending supply of western weapons is sufficient to win the war for Ukraine now that the policy of sanctions has failed. Demonizing Putin is not a policy that is likely to have an effect on the war one way or other. Putin still has a lot of friends in the world and US inflation, while being primarily a function of sanctions on Russian oil, is also dependent on the supply chain of products coming from China, Russia's friend. Biden should be careful about whom he demonizes. After demonizing MBS, he's now about to get back in bed with him and the Saudis. Biden's Build Back Better policy could have helped the American people, and even now could fight inflation, but alas, after promising that it would be passed "in tandem" with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it never was. What up with that?

Off the Top of My Head

Did Biden Shoot Himself in the Foot by Putting the Kibosh on Russian Oil?

by John Lawrence

If Putin wanted to ruin the US economy, he couldn't have done it more successfully than if he himself had refused deliveries of Russian oil. The US and European embargo on Russian oil has driven the price of oil on the world market sky high, and Putin is benefiting from the price increase! In fact he has made more money from the sale of oil this year than he did last year! No wonder Putin is smiling. He's laughing all the way to the bank as his war in Ukraine not only devastates Ukraine but drives inflation in the US, UK and the rest of Europe while US sanctions on Russia's economy does little or no damage. Do they really need imports from Europe or the US when China is the world's manufacturer of practically everything, and China is an ally of Russia? Not every financial transaction in the world involves the US dollar. Furthermore, Russia's blockade of Ukrainian grain is causing food prices to rise which makes for another increase in inflation. But even worse than that, countries that depend on that grain consumption will likely find their citizens going hungry further contributing to world political instability.

Biden's insane pandering to Saudi Arabia after declaring them a pariah country will not do much to lower the price of gas even if Saudi Arabia increases production to their limit. They don't have the ability to fully replace the potential supply of Russian oil. So win or lose the war in Ukraine, Putin is having a debilitating effect on the US economy while there is not that much of a debilitating effect on Russia's economy. Another reason this is so is that the Russian ruble is a fiat currency not pegged to the US dollar so the Russian central bank can spend as many rubles as necessary to keep consumers and businesses going. Even MacDonald's has been "Russianized" so that MacDonald's pull out has had little or no effect on the Russian preference for US fast food. Furthermore, Russia and China, among a few other nations, have been hard at work to limit the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) envisions a prosperous, inclusive, resilient, and sustainable Asia and the Pacific, while sustaining its efforts to eradicate extreme poverty in the region. China's Belt and Road initiative also is furthering the cause of dedollarization of the world economy. However, China's currency is pegged to the US dollar so China needs to hold dollars in its account at the Federal Reserve, but Russia's currency is fully convertible. That's how it can demand that Finland pay for its gas in rubles thus supporting that fully convertible currency. Russia, therefore, is not dependent on the US dollar. It just needs to import anything that it doesn't produce domestically and China can provide that.

Meanwhile, the US is dependent on the supply chain from China which has been disrupted lately causing more inflation. Dependency on China for most of its products while trying to cast China as an adversary is not a very good idea. The proposed Cold War with China is only pushing Russia and China closer together. Meanwhile the war in Ukraine is becoming a money pit for the US government which is spending billions and billions to give Ukraine a never ending supply of weapons. This is also inflationary because, whereas the product is shipped to Ukraine, the money is spent right into the US economy via the US weapons manufacturers. To fight inflation money needs to be extracted from the US economy hopefully by means of taxing the rich and not taxing anyone making less than $400,000 a year as Biden has proposed. Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Putin has proven that by withholding Russian oil from world markets, he can drive up the price of gas and cause inflation in car centric America.

Off the Top of My Head

What Mass Shootings and Global Warming Have in Common

by John Lawrence

Even if sales of AK-15s were banned today, there would still be enough AK-15s on the streets for mass shootings to continue for decades. Even if no more carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere starting today, there is enough already there to provide weather disasters for decades. Meanwhile, gun sales and carbon dioxide generation are continuing apace. There will be no diminution of gun violence nor will there be any diminution of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. If there were zero gun sales tomorrow and zero carbon dioxide generation tomorrow, there might be a chance for recovery from both travesties, but, no, those travesties will continue along predictable lines. There will be even more mass shootings and assorted other gun violence while gas powered vehicles and power generating plants will continue to pump out carbon dioxide using the atmosphere as a waste dump. Plastic will continue to pollute the oceans. Chemical fertilizer and pest control chemicals will continue to pollute waterways. People pursuing the American Dream will continue consuming products to the point of commercial gluttony and beyond.

The production of steel and cement produces large amounts of carbon dioxide that goes directly into the atmosphere. It's a matter of sheer chemistry. Steelmaking is one of the most carbon emission intensive industries in the world. As of 2020, steelmaking is estimated to be responsible for 7 to 9 per cent of all direct fossil fuel greenhouse gas emissions. In order to mitigate global warming, the industry will need to find reductions in emissions. In 2020, McKinsey identified a number of technologies for decarbonization including hydrogen usage, carbon capture and reuse, and maximizing use of electric arc furnaces powered by clean energy. A Swedish company has developed a way of making carbon dioxide emission free steel. The Guardian reported:

The world’s first customer delivery of “green steel” produced without using coal is taking place in Sweden, according to its manufacturer.

The Swedish venture Hybrit said it was delivering the steel to truck-maker Volvo AB as a trial run before full commercial production in 2026. Volvo has said it will start production in 2021 of prototype vehicles and components from the green steel.

Steel production using coal accounts for around 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Hybrit started test operations at its pilot plant for green steel in Lulea, northern Sweden, a year ago. It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen. Hydrogen is a key part of the EU’s plan to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

So the chemistry is being changed so that water H₂O is produced as a by product instead of carbon dioxide, CO².

CNBC reported:

Cars and electricity get a lot of attention in conversations about decarbonization, and they should. But building materials like cement and steel also need to be scrutinized.

The production of cement is responsible for about 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions and 5.5% of total global greenhouse gas emissions.

On [April 28, 2022], Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates’ climate finance firm, and DCVC, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, announced they led a $55 million funding round in Brimstone Energy, a start-up aiming to commercialize carbon-negative cement.

“We need to recognize that cement is a massive problem for climate and that nobody has figured out how to address it at scale without dramatically increasing costs or moving away from the regulated materials that the construction industry knows and loves,” Breakthrough partner Carmichael Roberts told CNBC.

So it is not enough to get gas guzzlers off the roads. Gas prices going up is a good thing. It will guarantee that more new car purchases will be hybrid or all electric vehicles. But the world is not changing over to non-polluting forms of energy quick enough. Major climate related disasters are already occurring and will continue to occur. Since we are still adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, these disasters will only get worse as time goes by. Meanwhile, all kinds of other ecological disasters are taking place including the insane and greedy pursuit of insatiable profits in the gun production industry and the buildup of military hardware. In 2019, a report released by Durham and Lancaster University found the US military to be “one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries”. In addition to climate pollution the military is responsible for the development of assault rifles like the AR-15 which was first developed for combat operations. Very conveniently, it is now a profit center for US gun corporations, and in addition to killing combatants on the field of battle, it has brought war time slaughter into children's schools, people's super markets and night clubs. We've come full circle. And in addition the production of steel weapons results in increased carbon emissions.

Off the Top of My Head

Biden Alternately Fights, Fuels Inflation

by John Lawrence

Normally the government spending money into the economy is a good thing. It promotes economic growth and prosperity. But when the economy overheats causing inflation, the government needs to extract money from the economy. It does that by, among other things, raising taxes. Also the Fed, like it's doing now, raises interest rates. This puts a damper on major purchases because of interest costs. The American Rescue Plan injected a lot of money into the economy that kept the wheels turning during the worst parts of the pandemic. That was a good thing, but too much of a good thing is a bad thing. The traditional way the Fed controls inflation is to squeeze the economy in such a way as to cause higher unemployment. The Phillips curve is a theoretical economic tool that shows the relationship between inflation and unemployment, the higher unemployment, the lower inflation and vice versa. At present, however, businesses are begging for workers, not laying them off. This is good news for workers, bad news for inflation.

Biden is trying to blunt the cost of inflation to low wage workers by getting Congress to pass some of the remnants of his Build Back Better plan. However, some of these items would cause the government to spend more money into the economy causing even more inflation. Biden doesn't want to tell the truth about inflation which is that the traditional solution is to cause even more pain for low wage workers by squeezing the economy to the point that they will lose their jobs thus increasing unemployment as the Phillips curve dictates. So basically there is nothing Biden can do except to decrease government spending. Republicans would cut programs that benefit the poor and raise taxes on the middle class to do just that.

Biden is continuing to spend money into the economy by purchasing billions of dollars worth of weapons which are then sent to Ukraine. This is inflationary in and of itself. As of May 20, 2022, the US has spent $54 billion on Ukraine, and, evidently, even more will be allocated. Ukraine has become a ward of the US with the US taking responsibility not only for supplying weapons but also for keeping the whole economy afloat. All this money spent on Ukraine is money not spent on programs for the American people unless you are an employee of the military-industrial complex for which Ukraine spending has become a bonanza. Of course there are other causes of inflation than too much government spending. The loss of Russian oil is causing gas prices to rise. Chinese COVID lockdowns are exacerbating the supply chain crisis. This is not a traditional inflation, but too much government spending is certainly a part of it. Biden's good intentions of protecting the American people during the COVID pandemic by flooding the economy with money had the concomitant effect of also causing inflation. Biden will never, of course, tell Americans the truth which is that in order to fight inflation the government will have to turn around and cause them more pain especially low wage workers.

Off the Top of My Head

Russia Stands to Profit From Global Warming

by John Lawrence

With half the Arctic coastline, Russia is in a position to dominate the Arctic region as sea ice disappears. Ships will soon be able to sail directly across the top of the world, bringing new commercial, political, and economic opportunities for the Arctic region, while substantially reducing transit times between Asia and Europe by up to a third compared with taking the Suez Canal. Also there is $1 trillion worth of precious metals and minerals under the ice, along with the biggest area of untapped petroleum deposits left on the planet. While the rest of the world suffers from global warming, Russia will profit from the opening of the Northern route across the Arctic region and a wealth of natural resources that it will be possible to extract. Siberia could become the world’s next breadbasket. Time magazine reports:

"The Russian government is already positioning itself as a net beneficiary of global warming, writing in its 2020 Arctic Strategy that “climate change contributes to the emergence of new economic opportunities.” With half the Arctic coastline under its control, it’s not hard to see why. Led by Rosatom, a state-owned nuclear technology and infrastructure enterprise, the country has invested approximately $10 billion to develop ports and other facilities along a 3,000 nautical-mile-long shipping lane that stretches from Murmansk, near the Finnish border, to the Bering Strait. The Northern Sea Route offers the shortest passage between Europe and Asia, shaving nearly two weeks off a journey around India, while saving fuel, limiting vessel wear and tear, and reducing emissions. The investments are already paying dividends. In 2010 international cargo shippers made only one full Northern Sea Route transit. In 2021 there were 71, according to Norway’s Nord University’s Centre for High North Logistics.

"Russia is building up its existing 40-strong icebreaking fleet by commissioning at least half a dozen nuclear-powered heavy icebreakers at a cost of $400 million each. When the first of the newest batch—the world’s biggest and most powerful, according to Russian officials—launched its maiden voyage in 2020, Russia hailed it as the start of a new era of Arctic dominance. In 2021, commercial tankers, equipped with special ice-hardened hulls, started transporting natural gas between Russia’s Arctic coast oil installations and Chinese ports in the middle of winter—a strategic advance that results in a timely lifeline for Moscow if European nations follow through on threats to cut off purchases of Russian gas because of the conflict in Ukraine. “The creation of a modern nuclear icebreaker fleet capable of ensuring regular year-round and safe navigation through the entire Northern Sea Route is a strategic task for our country,” said Vyacheslav Ruksha, head of Rosatom’s Northern Sea Route Directorate, in a statement."

The war in Ukraine may pale in significance compared to the climate change issues which Russia is in a position to exploit. While the rest of the world is trying to slow down climate change, Russia just may be trying to accelerate it. The more climate change the better according to them because it will make for an ice free Arctic, an ice free passage across the Arctic via the Northern Sea Route connecting Europe with Asia and the ability to extract trillions of dollars of natural resources. Part of the route goes very close to Nome, Alaska which could bring the US and Russia into direct military contact.

Because of the changes brought about by global warming, It makes it even more important to not make Russia a pariah nation but to bring it into the community of nations. The Northern Sea Route will bring Russia and China even closer together as China also profits from shorter shipping routes to Europe. Rather than helping to get the world off of fossil fuels, Russia will profit immensely from their continued use. They certainly will not look kindly on supplications to limit the exploitation of fossil fuels if the western world considers them to be a pariah nation. The lack of cooperation among major world powers or even major blocs of power would be enough to doom the earth to greenhouse gas oblivion which eventually would destroy Russia and China too although Russia would probably be the last nation to succumb.

'This Is Robbery': Chevron Profits Quadruple and Exxon's Double Amid Ukraine Crisis

A price sign is seen at a Chevron gas station in West Linn, Oregon on March 11, 2022. (Photo: Getty Images)

 

"Big Oil is intentionally profiteering off the war in Ukraine," said one campaigner. "We need a Big Oil windfall profits tax."

 

Jake Johnson

April 29, 2022, from Common Dreams

Chevron and ExxonMobil announced Friday that their profits surged during the first quarter of 2022, prompting fresh calls for a windfall tax as the U.S.-based oil giants continue to exploit Russia's war on Ukraine to hike prices at the pump and lobby for more drilling.

"Letting polluters rake in obscene profits at the expense of consumers and the climate is simply unconscionable."

"This is robbery," Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media, said in response to the new profit figures. "Big Oil is intentionally profiteering off the war in Ukraine—a crisis they helped create by working with Putin for decades to expand Russian oil and gas production."

"We need a Big Oil windfall profits tax," Henn added.

The first three months of 2022 marked a banner quarter for Chevron and Exxon, which respectively saw their profits quadruple and double compared to the previous year even as the U.S. economy contracted.

Chevron's profits soared to $6.3 billion—their highest level in a decade—as the company reaped benefits from the global energy market chaos spurred by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which has sparked a "fossil fuel war" between Moscow and the West.

Exxon's profits, meanwhile, jumped to $5.5 billion, a number that would have been significantly higher had the company not shut down operations in Russia in response to the Ukraine war. Exxon announced that it would use the windfall to reward shareholders by tripling its stock buyback program to $30 billion.

"Consumers should not get punched in the face so that Big Oil can stuff its overflowing coffers," said Robert Weissman, the president of Public Citizen. "There's no secret as to why their profits are soaring: Big Oil has fixed costs of production while the market price of oil is skyrocketing, thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and other reasons. This is a classic situation of windfall profits."

The earnings reports came as U.S. oil giants faced mounting scrutiny from Democratic members of Congress, New York's attorney general, and climate campaigners for price-gouging consumers in an effort to extract as much profit as possible from Russia's devastating assault on Ukraine.

"Just imagining Exxon's and Chevron's executives toasting their record profits and laughing at how they've duped so many people into blaming climate action for high prices, when that's the only long-term solution to stop Big Oil gouging us at the pump," Henn wrote in a Twitter post on Friday.

To combat Big Oil's war profiteering, Democratic lawmakers introduced legislation in March that would impose "a per-barrel tax equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the pre-pandemic average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019." Revenue from the tax would be paid out to U.S. consumers as a quarterly rebate.

Survey data released last month showed that the proposal is overwhelmingly popular, with 80% of U.S. voters—including 73% of Republicans—expressing support.

"If Congress bothered to tax windfall profits, these two companies would face a combined bill of $5.4 billion for just three months of war profiteering and price gouging," Lukas Ross, program manager at Friends of the Earth, said in a statement. "Letting polluters rake in obscene profits at the expense of consumers and the climate is simply unconscionable. It's time to send Big Oil an invoice."

Mitch Jones, managing director of policy at Food & Water Watch, sent a similar message, condemning oil giants for "cashing in on the global energy crunch, pinching American families, and sending excess profits back to shareholders and Wall Street speculators."

"This demands a policy response—namely, a windfall profits tax like the one introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, that would recover much of these ill-gotten gains and return them to struggling households," said Jones. "Lawmakers who complain about corporate concentration and inflation should do something about it—like tackling the damage being caused by polluting profiteers."

"Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer should bring this legislation forward for a vote," Jones added.

This story has been updated to include new comments from Public Citizen and Food & Water Watch.

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Off the Top of My Head

UN Secretary General: "There is no way a war can be acceptable in the 21st century"

by John Lawrence

Really, Mr. Guterres? Did you forget about the Iraq war that killed over a million Iraqis, approximately 100,000 of them civilian? In the 21st century? That war, by the way, was based on the lie that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction which the Bush administration knew he didn't have. And as far as a dictator goes, did George W Bush have a declaration of war from Congress? No, he did not. There was a resolution ginned up by the Bush administration that was used as an excuse for the invasion of Iraq. As far as war crimes, this war in Ukraine is getting all sorts of scrutiny by the media that the Iraq war didn't get. The fact is that in modern wars more civilians are being killed than military. That's an unfortunate fact of urban combat. It's not like the Napoleonic wars or even the US Civil War in which armies lined up on fields far away from cities and fought it out. The Battle of Gettysburg took place in a rural setting. Pickett's charge was across a hay field not an urban boulevard. The only difference in terms of time period between the Iraq war and the Ukraine war is that we are much more aware now that global warming is upon us destroying lives and livelihoods. So we don't need another war to do that. Probably much more real estate and many more lives will be destroyed this year by the effects of global warming than by the Russian military.

So the west wants to get off of Russian oil? Then why aren't they building green infrastructure and converting to non polluting energy as quickly as possible? The answer is that the fossil fuel corporations are lobbying hard to get us not do that. And they have billions of dollars to spend to get their way whereas the green protest movement has pennies to spend by comparison. The renegade Democrats, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, themsleves have profited by Big Oil's huge donations to their campaign funds. But for them we could have had a substantial effort to rebuild American infrastructure along non-polluting lines. But Joe Biden presented himself as not someone who wanted to go full steam ahead to get off of fossil fuels. No, he wanted to do it in a more moderate way, a way that did not inconvenience the American people in any way. They could still have all the toys and appurtenances they were used to. As opposed to the progressive wing of the Democratic party which wanted to go full steam ahead to green the economy. So the Big Oil executives are on the same page with the Russian government. Both could care less about global warming because both are profiting immensely from the sale of fossil fuels.

So why is there not a concerted western effort to get the poor and elderly civilians out of the war zone where they are sitting ducks? The young and the rich have already got out. Only the poor and elderly remain. There is plenty of money for weaponry that the US and other NATO nations are sending into Ukraine. No effort, diplomatic or otherwise, is being made to get the poor and elderly civilians out. There have been some humanitarian corridors, but the poor and elderly don't have the money to support themselves even if they got out. Someone else would have to pay for their transportation and for their support even if they got out. Why isn't that forthcoming? Does NATO want them still sitting there in the war zone as a deterrent to the Russian army? That's nonsense and suicidal. There needs to be direct talks between Ukraine, the west and Russia about getting those civilians out. Then the two armies can fight it out. Instead, western media bemoans the fact that civilians are being killed while doing nothing to get them out. I repeat only the rich and the young, those with the means to pay, and probably pay bribes, are getting out of Ukraine and are able to support themselves outside of Ukraine. Money should be forthcoming from NATO to get the rest of the civilians out of there. They are effectively being used as human shields. I have not heard Biden or anyone else speak of money being set aside for this purpose. Only more money for weapons.

Energy War in Europe Intensifies as Russia Cuts Off Gas Supply to Poland, Bulgaria

A gas storage facility owned by PGNiG company in Kosakowo, Poland is pictured on September 13, 2014. (Photo: NurPhoto/Corbis via Getty Images)

 

Russia's move "makes it clearer than ever that Europe needs to move quickly to reduce its reliance on Russian energy," said the head of the International Energy Agency.

 

Jake Johnson

April 27, 2022, from Common Dreams

European gas prices surged Wednesday after Russia's state-owned energy giant Gazprom cut off the supply of gas to NATO members Poland and Bulgaria, a move seen as a significant escalation of what has been dubbed a "fossil fuel war" between Moscow and the West.

Announced two months into Russia's deadly assault on Ukraine, Gazprom's decision came weeks after the United States halted fossil fuel imports from Russia and vowed to help European nations end their reliance on Russian oil and gas.

The Kremlin said the suspension of gas shipments to the Bulgarian company Bulgargaz and the Polish firm PGNiG over their "failure to pay in rubles" instead of euros or dollars and signaled it could take similar action against other countries.

Bulgarian Prime Minister Kiril Petkov characterized Russia's move as a breach of contract and said that "we will not succumb to such a racket"—a message echoed by the leadership of the European Union, of which Poland and Bulgaria are members.

"The announcement by Gazprom that it is unilaterally stopping delivery of gas to customers in Europe is yet another attempt by Russia to use gas as an instrument of blackmail," said Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. "This is unjustified and unacceptable.”

The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Russia's move "could eventually force targeted nations to ration gas and deal another blow to economies suffering from rising prices."

"It could also deprive Russia of badly needed income to fund its war effort," the AP added. "Natural gas prices in Europe shot up 25% before the market opened Wednesday and then eased off but remained significantly higher."

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, tweeted Wednesday that "Gazprom unilaterally cutting gas supplies to Bulgaria and Poland today makes it clearer than ever that Europe needs to move quickly to reduce its reliance on Russian energy."

Prior to Russia's full-scale assault on Ukraine, the European Union relied on Russia for around 40% of its gas supply and 27% of its oil imports, dependence that initially left E.U. members hesitant to target the Russian fossil fuel industry.

Last month, the Biden administration announced that it would take steps to increase U.S. gas exports to E.U. nations as they attempt to wean themselves off Russian fossil fuels. The U.S. move, which climate advocates slammed as dangerous for the planet, could be a major boon for American fossil fuel companies as they seize upon the war in Ukraine to expand their operations and boost profits.

One recent analysis estimated U.S. oil and gas corporations are poised to rake in windfall profits of up to $126 billion this year as Russia's attack on Ukraine continues with no end in sight.

The Intercept reported earlier this week that U.S. fossil fuel lobbyists are hard at work exploiting Russia's war on Ukraine to bolster their long-sought plans to increase fracked gas production and export capacity despite years of local opposition to such projects—and their role in accelerating the climate crisis.

"The unfolding crisis is now a common—and effective—talking point for corporate interest groups seeking regulatory relief," the outlet noted.

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Off the Top of My Head

How Are We Doing With Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

by John Lawrence

In 2009 President Obama pledged that the United States would cut carbon emissions “in the range of seventeen per cent by 2020". Let's see if the US succeeded. In 2009 the US produced 6772 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. In 2020 US totaled 5981 million metric tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. 17% of 6772 is 1151. So for Obama's pledge to be fulfilled greenhouse gas emissions for 2020 would have to have been about 5621 million metric tons. His pledge was almost but not quite fulfilled thanks to the fact that the pandemic decreased greenhouse gas emissions from 2019 to 2020 by 11%. In 2019 greenhouse gas emissions were 6571 million metric tons down only 3% from 2009! One might conclude that the pandemic was good for the environment, and also that Obama's pledge would not have been fulfilled except for the fact that so many cars were off the road due to the pandemic. More people worked remotely. This kept cars off the road. Going forward as many people who can work from home should continue to do so in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible. In addition conversion to electric vehicles needs to be done posthaste.

The Copenhagen climate conference of 2009 was widely considered a disaster since no country would commit to actual reductions of greenhouse gasses. The Guardian reported:

"The UN climate summit reached a weak outline of a global agreement in Copenhagen tonight, falling far short of what Britain and many poor countries were seeking and leaving months of tough negotiations to come.

"After eight draft texts and all-day talks between 115 world leaders, it was left to Barack Obama and Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, to broker a political agreement. The so-called Copenhagen accord "recognises" the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2C but does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal.

"American officials spun the deal as a "meaningful agreement", but even Obama said: "This progress is not enough."

"We have come a long way, but we have much further to go," he added."

At this point in time it seems like a fool's errand to get all the countries of the world to cooperate to save planet earth from becoming uninhabitable for our species at least. With war raging in Ukraine and the world lining up on one side or the other, all hope of cooperation seems lost especially when Russia, the second largest producer of fossil fuels, is widely considered a pariah. Getting nations like Russia whose economy is dependent on the production of fuels which produce greenhouse gasses to cooperate seemed a stretch even before war broke out. Production of fossil fuels means money is at stake as long as there is a market for them, and that market doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. In fact the war has uped the ante for increased production. China and India need energy and they are dependent on the consumption of coal and Russian oil. They will not be cooperative with wealthy western nations to diminish dependency on fossil fuels especially if there is little trust between east and west. It would take Jesus Christ Himself to bring all parties together in a mutually beneficial agreement to save earth from global warming. But I think that God has left it up to humanity to figure this out without divine intervention, and if the human species can't figure it out, it's one more species that will go extinct.

Off the Top of My Head

US Weapons Manufacturers Profiting From War in Ukraine

by John Lawrence

So far the US has spent $13.6 billion on the war in Ukraine. The money includes weapons, military supplies and one of the largest infusions of U.S. foreign aid in the last decade. But it also covers the deployment of U.S. troops to Europe and money for domestic agencies to enforce sanctions. Stock prices for Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are up. They are making money from all the Javelins and Stinger missiles they are selling to the US government which is giving them to Ukraine free of charge. Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin Corp jointly produce Javelins, while Raytheon makes Stingers. EU countries are buying even more US weaponry from the US military-industrial complex. Germany even wants F-35 aircraft from Lockheed Martin. U.S. weapons exports rose 2.8% to $175 billion in fiscal 2020. The Ukraine war is a field day for the weapons industry. As far as they're concerned, the more arms shipments to Ukraine the better. They are bullish. CEOs will probably get a substantial increase in pay, and the weapons contractors will be able to buy back more of their own stock boosting stock values even more. The US policy so far is no boots on the ground, but plenty of taxpayer money going up in smoke, money that could have been spent on bettering the lot of the American people.

The is always money available for war, but when it comes to Biden's Build Back Better package, Congress gets very stingy. So a localized war is more important than the fate of the whole planet due to global warming. Or it's more important than affordable health care. Or it's more important than imposing a tax on multi-billionaires who, by the way, are not paying for the war because they pay no taxes. If they have defense contractors in their portfolio, they are profiting from the war. Politico reported:

More than 25 nations have joined in purchasing and delivering weapons to support Ukraine’s war effort. The U.S. has sent billions of dollars in missiles, ammunition and other items to the front. The EU signed off on a €500 million ($551 million USD) package — a first for the 27-country European bloc — to help arm Ukraine. And both Finland and Germany have rewritten long-standing policy that barred exporting weapons into war zones.

At the same time, there are tens of thousands of troops being activated and deployed by NATO countries in Eastern Europe.

Using a resource guide retrieved from the Forum on the Arms Trade that mostly relies on official government statements and reports in the media — and backfilled with our own independent research — POLITICO has worked to track and compile weapons and materials that have been announced or directed to Ukraine by various countries since January.

This non-exhaustive list focuses on lethal weapons and some non-lethal material. It does not count humanitarian and developmental aid that has been sent to Ukraine in the same period. Arms trade research organizations have noted the timeline and official receipt of equipment is hard to confirm due to security concerns. In some cases, such as with France and Turkey, an official tally has not been made public.

While US taxpayers are paying for the war in Ukraine and for the delivery of weapons to Europe, Saudi Arabia and other places in the world, billionaires are paying nothing. Congress will not even pass a tax on billionaires so that they would be forced to pay, as Biden says, "their fair share." Their fair share is zero, zip according to Congress which is basically on the side of the billionaires. So planet earth diminishes in importance, as far as global warming is concerned, because fighting and paying for war is so much more important. In fact not only is war more important than peace, which doesn't move the stock market, it's more important than renewable energy. All of a sudden there is a need for more oil, more fossil fuel, all of which produces more greenhouse gasses. The attitude is if we need to destroy planet earth in order to win this war, then that is the price we'll have to pay.

Off the Top of My Head

What Are the Implications of Russia's Pariahdom for Global Warming?

by John Lawrence

All western politicians and pundits (with the possible exception of Tucker Carlson) agree that Russia is and shall ever be a pariah state. Putin is a pariah who should be tried for war crimes. So how is the world and the community of nations going to combat our truly mortal enemy - global warming? As a major producer of fossil fuels, in order to get off the fossil fuel bandwagon, we would need Russia's cooperation. If Putin is to be a pariah, he could care less about global warming. He's probably thinking about all the resorts he could build in Siberia! Besides that, as the world warms, the tundra in Siberia is thawing releasing tons of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In recent years, climate scientists have warned thawing permafrost in Siberia may be a “methane time bomb”. But now a study by three geologists says that a heat wave in 2020 has revealed a surge in methane emissions “potentially in much higher amounts” from a different source: thawing rock formations in the Arctic permafrost. Russia and Putin could have the last laugh as the rest of the world goes up in flames and Russia adapts to a more moderate climate.

The Washington Post reported:

"The difference is that thawing wetlands releases “microbial” methane from the decay of soil and organic matter, while thawing limestone — or carbonate rock — releases hydrocarbons and gas hydrates from reservoirs both below and within the permafrost, making it “much more dangerous” than past studies have suggested.

"Nikolaus Froitzheim, who teaches at the Institute of Geosciences at the University of Bonn, said that he and two colleagues used satellite maps that measured intense methane concentrations over two “conspicuous elongated areas” of limestone — stripes that were several miles wide and up to 375 miles long — in the Taymyr Peninsula and the area around northern Siberia.

"The study was published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Surface temperatures during the heat wave in 2020 soared to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the 1979-2000 norms. In the long stripes, there is hardly any soil, and vegetation is scarce, the study says. So the limestone crops out of the surface. As the rock formations warm up, cracks and pockets opened up, releasing methane that had been trapped inside."

Have the western politicos miscalculated or are they just playing into the Russian playbook in which the Russians are thinking 3 moves ahead on the chess board? The politicos and pundits all agree that Russia's financial lifeline is the sale of oil and gas and that the west must do everything it can do to shut off those sales starving Russia financially. But wait a minute. What they fail to understand is that Russia does not need the sale of gas or any other commodity to survive financially because the ruble is a fiat currency. The Russian central bank can print as many rubles as it likes with the only constraint being inflation. The US dollar is also a fiat currency and the US Federal Reserve can print as many dollars as it likes, the only restraints being political and again inflation which the US is now experiencing to a greater degree than Russia is. In fact the printing of Russian rubles will only tend to balance their economy and prevent it from going into recession. Meanwhile, the west, Germany in particular, struggles with replacing Russian gas and oil with gas and oil from other sources in a futile attempt to starve Russia financially. Ellen Brown has pointed out why sanctions may even be good for Russia because it forces Russia to develop sectors of its own economy rather than relying on imports from the west.

Besides Russia has a lot of friends in the world, some of them like Hungary who are even NATO members. Viktor Orban, Hungary's authoritarian leader and key Putin ally, calls Zelensky an 'opponent' after winning reelection. So while the US and Britain mainly fulminate over Russia's Putin being a pariah, not everyone in the non-western world agrees. Russia still has plenty of friends, just not in the US or Britain. Which brings is back to our original question, how can we solve the problem of global warming without Russia's cooperation even if we are not friends with them? Is it worth it to destroy the whole planet earth because of two countries engaging in a war no matter how brutal and ill founded? The west must eventually come to terms with Russia and with Putin if Putin is still the Russian leader when the war ends or watch while planet earth, not just Ukraine, goes up in flames.

Off the Top of My Head

According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits

by John Lawrence

So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.

The New York Times reported:

"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."

We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.

Common Dreams reported:

In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."

Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.

The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."

"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."

So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.

Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.

Off the Top of My Head

Two Truths About War and One About Planet Earth

by John Lawrence

1) Truth is the first casualty of war. 2) War is hell. 3) Planet earth can't survive without the cooperation of all nations. Despite the outcome of the war in Ukraine, the whole planet will go up in flames unless all nations can cooperate to solve the problem of global warming. If peace among all nations on earth is not possible, then we can kiss planet earth good-bye as a habitable refuge for humans and other forms of life. The cockroaches may survive, but there is no guarantee even for them. While we humans are busy fighting wars, the planet is warming, and there is not a lot of time to fix this problem before it gets to the point of being unfixable. Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions rose by 6% in 2021 to 36.3 billion tons, their highest ever, as the world economy rebounded strongly from the Covid-19 crisis and relied heavily on coal to power that growth, according to a new IEA analysis released this March 2022. So we're going in the wrong direction heading for a cliff full steam ahead. Not only are we not turning around this catastrophe, we're accelerating it.

"The increase in global CO2 emissions of over 2 billion tons was the largest in history in absolute terms, more than offsetting the previous year’s pandemic-induced decline, the IEA analysis shows. The recovery of energy demand in 2021 was compounded by adverse weather and energy market conditions – notably the spikes in natural gas prices – which led to more coal being burned despite renewable power generation registering its largest ever growth"

So now with the sanctions on Russian gas, there is a likelihood that even more coal will be burned as gas prices soar around the world. We are shooting ourselves in the foot! More natural gas usage, even Russian natural gas, should be encouraged because it produces less greenhouse gas emissions than does the burning of coal. So whoever loses the war in Ukraine, the biggest loser of all will be planet earth. Combined with the methane emissions estimates that the IEA published last month and estimates of nitrous oxide and flaring-related CO² emissions, the new analysis shows that overall greenhouse gas emissions from energy rose to their highest ever level in 2021.

The IEA report emphasized:

"The use of coal for electricity generation in 2021 was intensified by record high natural gas prices. The costs of operating existing coal power plants across the United States and many European power systems were considerably lower than those of gas power plants for the majority of 2021. Gas-to-coal switching pushed up global CO² emissions from electricity generation by well over 100 million tonnes, notably in the United States and Europe where competition between gas and coal power plants is tightest."

So now because of sanctions on Russian natural gas, even more power plants across the US and Europe will be switching to coal! We should be closing all coal powered plants and even those powered by natural gas replacing them all with renewables, geothermal and nuclear. There are alternatives available, but the human race would rather be all concerned about war fighting and not at all concerned about the fate of the planet and the fate of the human race. When it comes to war, there is an unlimited budget. When it comes to peace, there is hardly any money available. Why? Because war is profitable. Defense contractors will be making record profits in the United States and Europe and their stock prices will soar. Meanwhile, there is a paltry budget for switching to renewable energy.

Off the Top of My Head

Two Contradictions in the Narrative About the War

by John Lawrence

1) That Saudi Arabia is a good friend. Then why do they refuse to pump more oil to relieve the gas crisis? 2) That it's a war between democracy and autocracy. Then why is the world's largest democracy, India, on the side of Russia? Let's take #1 first. If Saudi Arabia is our great friend, they could end the gas crisis tomorrow simply by pumping more oil. This they refuse to do. So whose side are they on? For all the criticism of Putin as a butcher, we forget that Mohammed bin Salman, affectionately known as MBS, had Jamal Khasoggi butchered. Khashoggi, 59, was a Saudi citizen living in Northern Virginia and writing columns for The Washington Post that were often critical of the Saudi monarchy. He was killed during a visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, 2018. His body was dismembered, and his remains have never been found. Then Donald Trump, defying Congress, proceeded to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to the Saudis. Reuters reported:

"The Trump administration informed congressional committees that it will go ahead with 22 military sales to the Saudis, United Arab Emirates and Jordan, infuriating lawmakers by circumventing a long-standing precedent for congressional review of major weapons sales.

"Members of Congress had been blocking sales of offensive military equipment to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for months, angry about the huge civilian toll from their air campaign in Yemen, as well as human rights abuses such as the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey."

I repeat whose side are they on, and what values do they and our vaunted "western values" have in common? But enough on the Saudis.

Let's take #2. India, I repeat, the world's largest democracy, is on the side of Russia. At least they have not sided with the US, NATO and the west even though they supposedly share our democratic values which are totally at odds with "autocratic values." The narrative that the war in Ukraine represents a war between democratic values and autocratic values is totally bogus. India has long been a purchaser of Russian military equipment and was an ally with Russian support in its war with Pakistan. India’s friendship with the then-Soviet Union became official in 1971, after the two countries signed a Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation. That year, the Soviets backed India in a war with Pakistan that ultimately led to the independence of Bangladesh. The US backed Pakistan. Now India is taking up the slack by buying more Russian oil, oil that isn't being sold to the western world which needs it badly to get gas prices back to normal. China is buying more Russian Ural crude oil as well.

As the world rallies to condemn Russia, India remains silent on the sideline. In addition to India some other countries siding with Russia or at least remaining neutral are China, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Vietnam, Libya, Algeria, South Africa, Angola, Morocco. Nearly half of all the countries that abstained from condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the U.N. General Assembly are in Africa, and many are reluctant to join sanctions against Russia. In fact, only 28 out of the 54 African countries (just over 51 percent) represented in the U.N. voted in favor of the resolution. So not all countries are willing to turn Putin into a pariah and Russia into a pariah state. Even South Africa, which has a parliamentary democracy and is a strategic partner of the United States, was not willing to condemn Putin.

However, the war ends, it is important for world peace and the fight against climate change, let alone globalized markets, that some sort of constructive alliance among all countries be enacted taking the security interests of all countries into account. The problem with NATO is that it didn't do that. In fact the expansion of NATO eastward rubbed Russia's nose in the fact that it had lost the Cold War. Some American leaders gloated over that fact. Instead Russia should have been accepted into the community of nations. If Finland right on Russia's border can remain nonaligned and neutral without threat of invasion, perhaps that would have been the best course for other nations on Russia's border as well.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Plastic Waste and Climate Change: Both Problems Created by Oil

by John Lawrence

Every year 400 million people dispose of tons of plastic waste in the Ganges or in dumps near it to be washed down the river during the monsoon season. The river carries an estimated 6200 metric tons of plastic waste to the sea annually. Plastic is made from oil. Greenhouse gas emissions are caused by oil. Oil is ruining the planet. Yet we are addicted to oil. Oil is killing us on land due to climate change and killing us in the sea as sea life ingests plastic trash. Meanwhile, Indians bathe in the polluted Ganges thinking its waters are the purest in the world. The problem is primarily packaging most of which is discarded immediately after use. Globally, it accounts for 36 percent of the nearly 500 million tons of plastic manufactured annually. In the United States, a person creates an average of 286 pounds of plastic waste a year - the highest rate in the world and more than 6 times India's rate of 44 pounds per person. Civilization and its comforts and conveniences are literally killing the planet, and, therefore, us.

National Geographic reported:

"Most of the research about plastic waste has focused on plastic already in the oceans and its potential for harm—it poses a lethal threat to a wide range of wildlife, from plankton on up to fish, turtles, and whales. Less is known about how the waste gets to the ocean. But it’s clear that rivers, especially rivers in Asia, are major arteries.

"In 2019 the National Geographic Society sponsored a research expedition to one of those rivers: the Ganges, which flows across northern India and Bangladesh, through one of the largest and most heavily populated river basins in the world. A team of 40 scientists, engineers, and support staff from India, Bangladesh, the United States, and the United Kingdom traveled the full length of the river twice, before and after the monsoon rains that dramatically swell it. Sampling the river and the land and air around it, and interviewing more than 1,400 residents, the team sought to find out where, why, and what kind of plastic was getting into the Ganges—and from there into the Indian Ocean."

The growing impurities in the environment are probably contributing to the increase in degenerative diseases like cancer. We eat fish and other seafood products like sushi after sea creatures have ingested plastic waste. We use the rivers and oceans as places to dump our trash, and then we eat animals which inhabit those trash pits. Not too healthy. Like climate change, plastic waste is a side effect of our hydrocarbon habit—most plastics are made from oil and gas—and its impacts, as well as the solutions to the problem, are both local and global. Humans have existed for a couple hundred thousand years, but it has been only about 120 years or 4 generations during which time humans have essentially destroyed planet earth and its ecosystems. Oil and its byproducts like plastic are turning planet earth into a trash dump from which it's not likely to recover in view of the fact that little if anything is being done about it.

What needs to be done immediately? Conversion of all power plants to renewables or nuclear. Conversion of all vehicles to electric. Conversion of agriculture to sustainable and primarily meatless. Conversion of building materials like cement and steel to other materials which don't cause greenhouse gas emissions, such materials as stone and adobe like have been used for centuries. Think of the medieval cathedrals still in use today.

How to stop big oil from profiteering off Putin?

Hit them with a windfall profits tax

by Robert Reich, March 15

Hello friends, and welcome to Tuesday.

This morning I filled my car with gas costing over five dollars a gallon. My car is a Mini Cooper that I bought years ago, partly because it wasn’t a gas guzzler. Now it’s guzzling dollars. But when I consider what’s happening in Ukraine, I say what the hell. It’s a small sacrifice.

Yet guess who’s making no sacrifice at all — in fact, who’s reaping a giant windfall from this crisis?

As crude oil prices hit levels not seen in more than 13 years, Big Oil has hit a gusher. Even before Putin’s war, oil prices had begun to rise due to the recovery in global demand and tight inventories. Last year, when Americans were already struggling to pay their heating bills and fill up their gas tanks, the biggest oil companies (Shell, Chevron, BP, and Exxon) posted profits totaling $75 billion. This year, courtesy of Vladimir Putin, Big Oil is on the way to a far bigger bonanza.

How are the oil companies using all this windfall? I can assure you they’re not investing in renewables. They’re not even increasing oil production. As Chevron’s top executive Mike Wirth said in September, “we could afford to invest more” but “the equity market is not sending a signal that says they think we ought to be doing that.” Translated: Wall Street says the way to maximize profits is to limit supply and push up prices instead.

So they’re buying back their own stock in order to give their stock prices even more of a boost. Last year they spent $38 billion on stock buybacks — their biggest buyback spending spree since 2008. This year, thanks largely to Putin, the oil giants are planning to buy back at least $22 billion more.

Make no mistake. This is a direct redistribution from consumers who are paying through the nose at the gas pump to Big Oil’s investors and top executives (whose compensation packages are larded with shares of stock and stock options).

Though it’s seldom discussed in the media, lower-income earners and their families bear the brunt of the burden of higher gas prices. Not only are lower-income people less likely to be able to work from home, they’re also more likely to commute for longer distances between work and home in order to afford less expensive housing.

Big oil companies could absorb the higher costs of crude oil. The reason they’re not is because they’re so big they don’t have to. They don’t worry about losing market share to competitors. So they’re passing on the higher costs to consumers in the form of higher prices, and pocketing record profits.

It’s the same old story in this country: when crisis strikes, the poor and working class are on the frontlines while the biggest corporations and their investors and top brass rake it in.

Robert Reich @RBReich

Oil prices are surging due to Putin's war, and hugely-profitable oil companies are passing higher costs on to customers rather than absorbing them. It's radical not to pass a windfall profits tax right now.

March 11th 2022

What to do? Hit Big Oil with a windfall profits tax.

Days ago, the European Union advised its members to seek a windfall profits tax on oil companies taking advantage of this very grave emergency to raise their prices.

Democrats just introduced similar legislation here in the United States. The bill —introduced by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Ro Khanna — would tax the largest oil companies, which are recording their biggest profits in years, and use the money to provide quarterly checks to Americans facing sticker shock as inflation continues to skyrocket.

(The bill would require oil companies producing or importing at least 300,000 barrels of oil per day to pay a per-barrel tax equal to half the difference between the current price of a barrel and the average price from the years 2015 to 2019. This is hardly confiscatory. Those were years when energy companies were already recording large profits. Quarterly rebates to consumers would phase out for individuals earning more than $75,000 or couples earning $150,000.)

Ro Khanna @RoKhanna

Gas in my district is at $6 and it costs over $100 to fill a tank. Working families are hurting. We need to pass @SenWhitehouse & my bill taxing the excessive profits of Big Oil and giving checks to working class Americans to pay their bills.

March 12th 2022

Republicans will balk at any tax increase on Big Oil, of course. (They’re even holding up the nomination of Sarah Bloom Raskin to the Fed because she’s had the temerity to speak out about the systemic risks that climate change poses to our economy. ) But a windfall profits tax on Big Oil is exactly what Democrats must do to help average working people through this fuel crisis. It’s good policy, it’s good politics, and it’s the right thing to do.

© 2022 Robert Reich Unsubscribe
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Biggest Oil Giants Made 'Eye-Popping' $205 Billion in Profits in 2021: Report

Gas prices of more than $7.00 per gallon are posted at a downtown Los Angeles gas station on March 9, 2022. (Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, fossil fuel giants are trying to "cash in on inflation and the crisis in Ukraine," said one critic.

 

Kenny Stancil

March 15, 2022

While millions of working people have been hurt by surging gas prices, a new analysis out Tuesday shows that 25 of the world's biggest fossil fuel corporations collectively pulled in an "eye-popping" $205 billion in profits last year—and Big Oil is exploiting Russia's war on Ukraine to charge even more at the pump in 2022 and advance its financial interests.

"All this money helps to line the pockets of wealthy oil executives who receive massive chunks of their compensation in company stock."

According to a new report from government watchdog Accountable.US, top oil and gas companies took "full advantage" of last year's sky-high prices and record profits. Fourteen firms rewarded shareholders with more than $35 billion in stock buybacks and dividend bumps.

As the report details, Big Oil has been bragging to investors about its windfall profits on recent earnings calls. Chevron, for instance, called 2021 one of its "most successful years ever." Shell CEO Ben Van Beurden described it as a "momentous year." Meanwhile, Coterra CEO Tom Jordan characterized high gas prices as "good," and Equinor CEO Anders Opedal marveled at how the industry has been "capturing value from high prices."

Last year's record profits came as average gas prices in the U.S. steadily increased—hitting around $3.40 per gallon in December 2021, up from $2.10 a year before. As consumer demand rose last year following a brief coronavirus-driven decline in 2020, shareholders pressured fossil fuel corporations to restrict supply to drive prices higher.

Oil and gas costs have soared even higher during the first three months of 2022. Since President Joe Biden announced one week ago that the U.S. would ban imports of Russian fossil fuels in response to Moscow's deadly assault on Ukraine, the average price for a gallon of gas in the U.S. has continued to climb, surpassing $4.31 on Tuesday.

Given that the United Kingdom and the European Union have also taken steps to clamp down on imports of Russian oil and gas, fossil fuel executives are reportedly salivating at the prospect of forcing consumers to accept higher costs amid the war.

According to Accountable.US, the fossil fuel giants responsible for hiking prices have already announced plans to buy back nearly $80 billion in stocks in 2022, boasting of their ability to deliver "even better" returns for shareholders this year. Devon Energy, for example, said last month that doubling down on share buybacks is the "clear thing for us to do."

"All this money helps to line the pockets of wealthy oil executives who receive massive chunks of their compensation in company stock," states the report.

When Biden announced the U.S. boycott of Russian petroleum products, he stressed that this is "no time for profiteering or price-gouging."

The Congressional Progressive Caucus followed up with a call to swiftly pass legislation to prevent more "shameless" price hikes, ramp up investments in renewable energy, and raise wages and lower the costs of necessities for working families amid high levels of inflation, which 82% of U.S. voters attribute to "corporate greed."

Big Oil, meanwhile, has sought to deflect blame for worsening pain at the pump, baselessly accusing Biden—who approved more permits for drilling on public lands and waters in 2021 than former President Donald Trump did in 2017—of suppressing domestic extraction.

As Biden bragged last week, U.S. fossil fuel corporations "pumped more oil during my first year in office than they did during my predecessor's first year."

Domestic oil and gas production is "approaching record levels," said Biden, "and we're on track to set a record for oil production next year." The president, who has ordered the release of tens of millions of barrels of oil from the nation's strategic reserves, argued that any blame for untapped extractive potential should be placed on the shoulders of those who are sitting on millions of acres of federal property.

"They could be drilling right now, yesterday, last week, last year," Biden said, referring to leaseholders who possess thousands of unused permits.

Kyle Herrig, president of Accountable.US, said in a statement that "as Americans encounter higher prices to fill their gas tanks or heat their homes, Big Oil is grasping at straws to explain why they are swimming in unused leases and hundreds of billions of dollars in profits—money they hand over to wealthy oil and gas company executives and shareholders rather than struggling consumers."

Last decade's drilling and fracking boom turned the Permian Basin into the most productive oil and gas field in the world, transforming the U.S. into a major exporter of fossil fuels but keeping prices low, much to the chagrin of shareholders.

The unwillingness of oil and gas companies to boost production in recent months "has been driven by investor sentiment," Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, told CNN last year. Wall Street, she said, doesn't want producers "to spoil the party" by expanding supply.

As Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told the news outlet earlier this month: "Oil and gas companies do not want to drill more. They are under pressure from the financial community to pay more dividends, to do more share buybacks instead of the proverbial 'drill baby drill,' which is the way they would have done things 10 years ago. Corporate strategy has fundamentally changed."

Herrig argued that "it's time for Big Oil to stop lying about the Biden administration's public land policies, quit using it as a cover to cash in on inflation and the crisis in Ukraine, and pass the benefits of their massive profits on to consumers."

On Thursday, as Common Dreams reported, congressional Democrats introduced the bicameral Big Oil Windfall Profits Tax. The measure would hit large fossil fuel companies with a per-barrel tax—whether the oil is domestically produced or imported—equal to 50% of the difference between the current price of a barrel of oil and the average price per barrel between 2015 and 2019. An estimated $45 billion in annual revenue would be redistributed to U.S. households in the form of quarterly rebates.

Dems Introduce Windfall Tax on Big Oil So Companies 'Pay a Price When They Price Gouge'

Andrea Germanos

Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Biden said last week, "should motivate us to accelerate the transition to clean energy."

"Loosening environmental regulations and pulling back clean energy investment... will not lower energy prices for families," said the president. "But transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles powered by clean energy, with tax credits to help American families winterize their homes and use less energy—that will, that will help."

"If we do what we can," he added, "it will mean that no one has to worry about prices at the gas pump in the future."

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity has a "brief and rapidly closing window" to avoid the worst effects of the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency, which is on track to exacerbate deadly extreme weather, with especially catastrophic consequences for the world's poorest and most vulnerable.

While progressives have long urged Biden to exercise his executive authority to the fullest possible extent to improve the lives of working people and help secure a livable planet in the face of staunch opposition in Congress, they also have not given up on pushing for further legislative action.

On Monday, nearly 90 House Democrats urged Biden to revive the party's stalled reconciliation package—which has been approved by the lower chamber but blocked in the Senate by every Republican plus right-wing Democrats Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.)—by prioritizing measures designed to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. 

In addition, more than 120 advocacy groups called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) to swiftly translate the party's domestic priorities into a reconciliation package that can reach Biden's desk by next month.

"We cannot wait another day," said Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), "to safeguard the future of humanity."

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Off the Top of My Head

We're Taking Our Eyes Off the Ball Regarding Climate Change

by John Lawrence

It's all about war and oil. Climate change is taking a back seat to the peril of human existence on planet earth. It won't matter who wins the war in Ukraine if we forget about the constant dumping of carbon dioxide greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. When we should be getting rid of oil consumption, all most Americans seem to care about is the price of gas. 2, 4, 6, 8 we don't want to mitigate. Mitigating climate change will take the cooperation of every nation on earth. Instead nations of earth are dividing into two dissenting camps. If the production and consumption of oil is to be mitigated, the world needs the cooperation of the world's largest oil producers. Let me see who that might be. Could it be Russia and the United States? And let me see who could be the largest greenhouse gas emitters? Could it be China, India and the US? India, by the way, the world's largest democracy, hasn't condemned Russia over the war. The BBC reported:

"India has had to walk a diplomatic tightrope over Ukraine in the past few days as it tried to balance its ties with Moscow and the West. ... Delhi continued with its strategy as it chose to abstain when the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to demand an immediate end to the invasion of Ukraine. ... India's strategy has raised questions, particularly in the West, over whether the world's largest democracy should have taken a clearer stand. ...There are several reasons for India's quest to find a diplomatic balance over Ukraine. The most important are India's time-tested defence and diplomatic ties with Moscow."

So kiss planet earth good-bye insofar as human habitation is concerned. The cockroaches are willing and able to take over. It's almost a foregone conclusion as homo sapiens marches inexorably toward its own extinction. Right now is the time to convert to renewable energy post haste ... with all possible speed. Instead we're squabbling over the price of gas and involved in a war which is destroying what fragile good will existed a few weeks ago. We're all concerned about where our oil production is going to come from instead of using this opportunity to get off oil consumption. But all good American middle-of-the-roaders consider it too radical to take the emergency measures necessary to avoid the complete destruction of the planet for future generations. Instead they want to continue business as usual as if gradual measures will be enough. The time window for doing anything of consequence keeps getting smaller and smaller while greenhouse gas emissions keep bigger and bigger.

O

While There is Increased Pain at the Pump, There is Increased Pleasure in the Corporate Board Rooms of Shell and Exxon

by John Lawrence

Biden's ban on Russian oil is largely symbolic as it will do nothing to decrease the price of gas. On the other hand as gas prices soar, so will corporate profits. Booming prices for oil and natural gas propelled Shell’s profit in the fourth quarter of 2021, lifting its adjusted earnings to $6.39 billion, up from $393 million a year earlier. On the other hand consider the price of gas in Saudi Arabia - less than a dollar a gallon in Riyadh. Also less then a dollar a gallon in Kuwait. It's 38 cents a gallon in Lagos, Nigeria! The US produces as much oil as it consumes. So why are we at the mercy of oil and gas corporations? Why isn't Biden demanding that Shell and Exxon donate their excessive corporate profits to average Americans in order to keep the price of a gallon of gas at a reasonable level? Why are American consumers at the mercy of the global oil market?

Shell's profits were $20 billion in 2021. Shell is not even an American owned corporation. "High oil and gas prices boosted forecast-beating 2021 profits for Shell and BP, and are expected to continue doing so this year, allowing both U.K. energy giants to strengthen their balance sheets for energy-transition investments." Make sense? Increased profits will allow them to transition to greener energy. Such a rationale! These energy giants are using their excessive profits to buy back their own stock. This is enriching shareholders as well as CEOs whose pay packages are based on stock values. Everyone in the corporate board room is happy while American consumers are taking it on the chin among other places. The New York Times reported:

"Shell, Europe’s largest energy company, also said that it would accelerate returns to shareholders, buying back $8.5 billion in shares in the first half of 2022 — a big increase on the total of $3.5 billion set aside for buybacks in 2021.

"Shell also said it would increase the dividend it pays to shareholders by 4 percent, to 25 cents per share for the first quarter.

"In the short term, at least, Shell is carrying out a strategy of using the proceeds from oil and gas to reward shareholders as well as invest in new businesses like hydrogen."

So now is the ideal time for the government to give incentives to convert to electric cars. Biden needs to get those charging stations installed pronto and give everyone a generous subsidy to go electric. It's the right thing to do. All this talk about combating global warming is only so much poppycock as long as oil rules the world which it seems to do as Europe is so dependent on Russian oil. As long as that's the case, Putin is in the driver's seat. The last thing Europe will sanction is Russian oil. At the present time the oil market is driving the world. Oil corporations are enjoying record profits and pain at the pump is only filling corporate board rooms with glee.

 

Off the Top of My Head

The US Produces as Much Oil as It Consumes. So Why Should Gas Prices Go Up?

by John Lawrence

The US is the world's largest oil producer at about 18 million barrels per day. Saudi Arabia is number 2 while Russia is a close number 3. The US is also the largest consumer or oil at about 18 million barrels a day. So the US produces about as much oil as it consumes. So why doesn't the US control the price of its own oil? Because oil is put on the world market so the price is determined by the supply and demand for oil on the world market. If there is a shortage on the world market, the price of gas goes up for US consumers. That is what is happening now because of the Russia Ukraine situation and the US sanctions on Russian gas and oil. Because of the sanctions, the price of gas for US consumers will increase so President Biden is essentially shooting US consumers in the foot. Why couldn't he take US oil out of the US market and just let US oil be consumed by US consumers. Since supply and demand would be about equal, there would be no surge in US oil prices.

The problem is that the US government does not own US oil resources. They are privately owned, and it's in the interests of the oil corporations to get as much for a barrel of oil as they possibly can. This means that when there is a shortage on the world market, and the price of a barrel goes up, US oil corporations profit from the price increase. There is an analogy which makes this process easily understandable.Say you are a grower of tomatoes. In the early days of your tomato business you just sold the excess tomatoes that your family didn't eat to your neighbors directly at what you both thought was a fair price. As time went on you decide to take your tomatoes to the local market where other tomato growers were also bringing their tomatoes to sell. The price of your tomatoes was then determined by the market price and not the "fair" price you charged your neighbor. If there was a shortage of tomatoes at the market compared to the cumulative demand for tomatoes by consumers, you made a lot more per tomato than you would make selling them directly to your neighbors at the "fair" price. When your neighbor comes to you for tomatoes, you tell him that he has to buy them at the market at the market price because this represents progress.

Now say there is a glut of tomatoes at the local market and the price of tomatoes drops. Now you offer to sell your neighbor tomatoes directly at the "fair" price, but your neighbor says that he can get them at the market for much less than the "fair" price. Such are the vagaries of the market place. So getting back to oil, when there is a glut on the world market, gas prices plummet. When there is a scarcity, prices can skyrocket which is what is happening now not due to the war in Ukraine but due to sanctions on Russian gas and oil which constitutes a major component of the world supply. President Biden can do little or nothing about the price of gas because oil and gas resources are privately owned and they will profit immensely as the price of oil soars above $100 a barrel. However, much of Russia's oil industry is state owned. Therefore, Putin can control the price of gas and energy inside Russia so Russian drivers will pay less at the pump than will American drivers in all probability.

So now while the world needs to transition from fossil fuels to renewable non-polluting energy sources in order to combat global warming, all anyone can think about is how desperately we need oil and the price of gas. This is a foreboding situation for the future of planet earth. We need to get off of our addiction to oil. However, there are trillions of dollars wound up in the oil industry and none of the owners whether they be private or government concerns are willing to give up their investments. Maybe surging gas prices are a good thing. People will drive less, use public transportation more and work remotely from home instead of commuting. Less tailpipe carbon dioxide will be emitted into the atmosphere. In the long run we should thank President Biden for sanctioning Russian oil and the NORD stream 2 pipeline. It will help the global warming situation although American consumers will not be pleased with Biden because they will blame him for gas prices being so high.

Off the Top of My Head

The BIG LIE

by John Lawrence

A lot of people still believe the Big Lie - that Joe Biden didn't legitimately win the election. What isn't talked about is all the other Big Lies which the Republican party has been telling their constituents for years: the Big Lie that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, the Big Lie that Obama was born in Kenya, the Big Lie about selling arms to Iran to benefit the Contras, the Big Lie represented by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which escalated  the Vietnam war (OK that was Johnson, a Democrat), the Big Lie that Hillary was responsible for the death of White House attorney Vince Foster, the Big Lie that Hillary ran a child sex ring in a pizza restaurant and much more. There are more Big Lies, most of them associated with Republicans, especially Republican Presidents George W Bush, Ronald Reagan and Dick Nixon (his Big Lie was "I am not a crook.").

Lying is part and parcel of the way Republicans do business. How else to get a bunch of people to vote against their own real interests? Republicans have trained their base to respond favorably to them based on lies. Lies are usually juicier than the truth. The truth is often very mundane and quotidian. The truth is that Hillary was a very experienced and capable public servant. That's not too exciting. And then there was George H W Bush's dog whistle racist campaign ad about Willy Horton, a murderer who escaped prison on a week-end pass devised by his opponent Michael Dukakis. Racism probably won Bush the Presidency.

George W Bush was determined to invade Iraq. He went out of his way to no avail to pin 9/11 on Saddam. When no evidence could be found of this, he fabricated evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In The Untold History of the United States, the authors write:

"Lacking evidence, they manufactured their own. Cheney and Libby pointed repeatedly to a meeting in Prague between the hijacker Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence official, even though Tenet had proved that Atta was in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting, living in Virginia in the shadow of CIA headquarters. ...

"Using this kind of notoriously false information, the administration challenged the findings of CIA analysts and UN weapons inspectors and tirelessly made its case for invading Iraq. "We know they have weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfield insisted. "There isn't any debate about it." In early October 2002, Bush, echoing a similar warning from Rice a month before, announced, "we cannot wait for the final proof - the smoking gun - that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud." But no one could outdo Cheney when it came to outright fabrications and dire prognostications:

"'The Iraqi regime has ... been very busy in enhancing its capabilities in the field of chemical and biological agents, and they continue to pursue the nuclear program. ... Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror and a seat at a top [sic] 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of a great portion of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten America's friends throughout the region and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail. Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction; there is no doubt that he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies and us.'"

Of course after the invasion no weapons of mass destruction were actually found. Recently deceased and highly decorated General Colin Powell was sent forth to argue about the existence of WMD in Iraq. The authors continue:

"But the most ignominious moment came on February 5, 2003, when Secretary of State Colin Powell, the most respected and trusted member of the administration, went before the United Nations and made the case for war. Bush had handpicked Powell for the job. "You have the credibility to do this," he told Powell. "Maybe they'll believe you." ...

"It was a thoroughly shameful performance that Powell later called a low point in his career. ... Members of the intelligence community were outraged over Pentagon neocons' hijacking, distorting and fabricating intelligence. When the nonexistent WMD failed to materialize, New York Time columnist Nicholas Kristof described them as "spitting mad" and eager to have their say. One lashed out, "As an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, I know that this administration has lied to the public to get support for its attacks on Iraq."

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said, "As we know today, the Bush administration's reasons for the Iraq war were based on lies."

George W Bush's Big Lie cost a lot of American and Iraqi lives. So far Trump's Big Lie has cost the lives of relatively few Capitol policemen. But the stage is set for an assault on American democracy itself. The perpetration of Trump's Big Lie is being carried on by his henchmen in Congress and in the media. Their use of symbols such as flags in the January 6 insurrection is reminiscent of all the flags, symbols and pageantry of Nazi Germany, much of which was designed by Hitler himself who was an artist who failed to gain entrance to the Munich University before aspiring to world domination. The cries of "We're Number 1" by the insurrectionists and other bellicose Americans are echoes of their predecessors' cries of "Heil Hitler."

Off the Top of My Head

Biden's Goal of 50% Electric Vehicles by 2030 in Peril Because of American's Freedom of Choice

by John Lawrence

Fast forward to 2029 and we find ourselves in the situation that many Americans are insisting on purchasing gas fueled vehicles because of their freedom of choice. Even though the government has subsidized electric vehicles to the tune of $10,000 per vehicle, and electric vehicles outperform gas powered ones in every category, even though electric vehicles have more bells and whistles than the same identical gas powered one, Americans are insisting that their freedom of choice is more important than helping President Biden reach his goal of 50% electric vehicles on the road by 2030. Wolf Blitzer's son, Chip Blitzer  interviewed Joe Blow of Shrevesport, Louisiana. Blitzer: "Why do you want to purchase a gas powered vehicle when the electric one is cheaper and a better performer?" Blow: "My Daddy drove a Ford F-150 with an internal combustion engine which was the pride of America as did his Daddy before him. The internal combustion engine is what built this country. It's how we won every war we ever fought in. My Daddy was a roustabout in the oil fields and my family has a long history of fossil fuel products. You won't ever catch me in an electric vehicle as long as I have my freedom of choice."

President Biden is considering mandates to get gas powered cars and trucks off the road, but some southern Governors are balking at that. Governor P.T. Abernathy of Texas said this: "The Federal government is overstepping its bounds when it comes to telling us here in the south what kind of vehicles we can drive. I've always preferred a gas powered vehicle myself, and, as long as I'm Governor, I will let our citizens decide for themselves what kind of vehicle they want to drive. It's unAmerican to dictate to American citizens that they have to drive an electric vehicle. We also won't be following Federal government incentives to get people to move out of flood plains." Back in Shrevesport Mr. Blow had this to say. "I ain't moving out of my house even though it is in a flood plain. My Grandpappy built this house. We Blows have lived here for generations, and no Federal government is going to order me to move out of my house." It is notable that 2 years ago, FEMA gave Blow $350 K to rebuild his house after Hurricane Upsilon totally destroyed it. Yet Blow said at the time: "I've never seen anything like it before in my life, but I will rebuild. I'm not going anywhere. This is America."

We note that in blue states people are 90% compliant with Biden's goal. They are buying electric vehicles at a fast rate taking advantage of the generous government incentives in doing so. Red state Governors on the other hand are imploring their residents to support the oil and gas industry by buying gas powered vehicles making it less likely that Biden will reach his goal of 50% electric vehicles on the road by 2030. Despite the cleaner air that has come with more electric vehicles on the road not to mention helping in the effort to forestall and mitigate global warming, many in southern states primarily are insisting on their right to choose as Americans citizens. Ex-President Donald Trump said at a CPAC convention: "Global warming is a hoax. We have so many wonderful oil and gas resources in this country that we'll never have to import another barrel of oil. Yet these socialists like Biden want to cripple that industry destroying the livelihoods of red blooded Americans to feed their families." As a result of American hesitancy to go ahead and buy electric vehicles, Biden will probably not be able to reach his goal. One guy from Alabama said: "Have these electric vehicles even been FHA fully approved. I heard that they were just provisionally approved. When there is full FHA approval, then I might consider buying one. In the meantime I'll just stick with my F-150 with the American internal combustion engine, the engine that made America great. Don't tell anyone, but I take off that godforsaken catalytic converter every time I buy a new pickup. Internal combustion rules, baby! Let 'er rip!"

Off the Top of My Head

Instead of Oil Pipelines We Need Water Pipelines

by John Lawrence

The east and midwest have too much water. The west has too little. As part of an infrastructure plan, we need to build one or more pipelines to transport water west. This might require more reservoirs in the east and midwest to collect the water. If we can transport oil from Canada to the Gulf Coast, we can transport water from east to west. It's a worthy infrastructure project. Another one: underground utilities so that storms don't knock out power and communications infrastructure. Besides it's more esthetically appealing when all the telephone and power poles are out of sight. There is so much work to be done with infrastructure not to mention all the green infrastructure that needs to be planned and built.

What's more building green infrastructure needs to be a global effort. If one country succeeds and others fail, planet earth will average out the totality. We share a cpmmon atmosphere with every country on earth. Just as the virus knows no limits and no bounds, the attempt to rein in global warming can know no limits and no bounds. Solving things in one country is not enough. There have to be global solutions and that means that rich developed countries have to help poor and undeveloped countries. Patriotism can't any longer be defined as allegiance to one country. Our allegiance has to be to planet earth if we want earth to be a habitable planet for our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

The planet Venus once had flowing water, but now is waterless as all the water has turned to vapor, a greenhouse gas, which compounds its runaway greenhouse effect. It's atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. Earth could soon follow Venus and become an uninhabitable waterless planet. The sun is getting warmer which contributes to atmospheric temperature rises on earth as it did on Venus. As surface temperatures go up, more water evaporates changing from liquid to gaseous form. The more water evaporates the more greenhouse gasses are in the atmosphere and the more surface temperatures go up in a never ending positive feedback loop. This is what happened to Venus, and it will eventually happen to earth. Human beings are just hastening the day when earth emulates Venus and becomes engulfed in greenhouse gasses. When water disappears so does life. Some day, billions of years off, our sun will become a red giant. This means that planets near the sun will become uninhabitable. However, planets and moons in the outer atmosphere could become habitable as their frigid surface temperatures become more moderate. Titan is a planet size moon of Saturn which has flowing methane and methane lakes since surface temperatures are so cold right now that methane can exist in liquid form. As temperatures on Titan become warmer, some day water may be able to go from solid form to liquid form and Titan may be able to support life. At that point the methane will change from liquid to gaseous and water will change from solid to liquid. Flowing water is thought to be the hallmark of a habitable planet.

How Sweden Delivered The World’s First Fossil Fuel-Free Steel

Aug 19, from Forbes

David Vetter

Senior Contributor

This post has been updated.

A shipment of fossil fuel-free steel, produced by a joint venture between three Swedish firms, was ... [+] HYBRIT/Magnus Kryssare

Sweden has delivered the world’s first shipment of steel produced without the use of fossil fuels, a major milestone on the road towards cutting carbon emissions from industry.

A shipment of the steel was delivered to Swedish truck maker Volvo AB, but industrial quantities of the stuff won’t be available until 2026.

The news is significant in the context of efforts to limit climate change. While much emphasis has been placed on the role of fossil fuels in electricity generation, research published by Carbon Brief shows that just 553 conventional steel plants worldwide are responsible for 9% of all carbon dioxide emissions, owing to the large quantities of fossil fuels—in particular coking coal—used to produce the alloy. The IEA forecasts that steel production globally will grow by a third through to 2050.

Speaking at a press conference, the Swedish minister for business, industry and innovation Ibrahim Baylan said he was “happy to be minister for enterprise and energy in a country where industry is bubbling with energy for a [green] reset.”

Baylan further noted: “Industry and especially the steel industry create large emissions but are also an important part of the solution.”

The steel was created by a joint venture between Swedish steelmaker SSAB, energy company Vattenfall, and iron ore miner LKAB. A technology dubbed HYBRIT—a contraction of Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology—replaces fossil fuels both in the production of the iron pellets that are the key ingredient of steel, and in the removal of oxygen from the iron by replacing carbon and coke with green hydrogen. SSAB then uses that iron to produce steel slabs for delivery.

Baylan further noted: “Industry and especially the steel industry create large emissions but are also an important part of the solution.”

The steel was created by a joint venture between Swedish steelmaker SSAB, energy company Vattenfall, and iron ore miner LKAB. A technology dubbed HYBRIT—a contraction of Hydrogen Breakthrough Ironmaking Technology—replaces fossil fuels both in the production of the iron pellets that are the key ingredient of steel, and in the removal of oxygen from the iron by replacing carbon and coke with green hydrogen. SSAB then uses that iron to produce steel slabs for delivery.

Comparison of conventional fossil fuel-based steelmaking process versus the new approach from ... [+]

HYBRIT

The whole country of Sweden produced just over 45 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2020, but across all its operations SSAB was responsible for almost 9 million. HYBRIT claims that by eliminating fossil fuels from the steelmaking process, it could reduce Sweden’s total CO2 emissions by “at least” 10%.

 

Martin Lindqvist, CEO of SSAB, told media: “The first fossil-free steel in the world is not only a breakthrough for SSAB, it represents proof that it’s possible to make the transition and significantly reduce the global carbon footprint of the steel industry. We hope that this will inspire others to also want to speed up the green transition.”

Anna Borg, CEO of Vattenfall, which is also responsible for some of Europe’s largest wind farms, said HYBRIT “shows how partnerships and collaboration can contribute to reducing emissions and building competitiveness for industries.”

SSAB, LKAB and Vattenfall say they will begin full industrial production of the new steel in 2026. Earlier this year, Volvo announced that it would be the first manufacturer to produce vehicles from fossil-free steel.

While this project might be the first to deliver, it’s far from the only project working on the challenge to create “green steel.” Other Swedes are racing to be the first to create industrial quantities, with H2 Green Steel claiming it will be up and running by 2024.

Outside Europe, China’s Baowu, the world’s largest steelmaker, has committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050, and is beginning to develop hydrogen technologies as a way to cut fossil fuels out of production. India’s Tata steel has developed what it calls the HIsarna process, which still uses coal but claims to reduce emissions by 20%. Meanwhile, Japan’s COURSE 50 project uses a range of technologies to reduce emissions from the blast furnace.

Update 08/23/2021 BST0933: This post has been updated to clarify that the HYBRIT process covers the iron pelletizing and ironmaking stages of the process.

Off the Top of My Head

The Manufacture of Steel and Cement Releases Huge Amounts of Greenhouse Gasses

by John Lawrence

It's not enough to electrify cars and make power plants carbon free. About one third of greenhouse gasses are produced by manufacturing processes - mainly in the manufacture of steel and concrete. In order to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions, we need to come up with new ways to manufacture steel and cement. Fortunately a Swedish company has come up with a way to manufacture steel without at the same time releasing large amounts of greenhouse gasses. Ironically, wind turbines which produce fossil fuel free energy require large amounts of fossil fuels in the manufacture of their steel. For every ton of steel produced in the world, almost two tons of CO₂ are emitted as well. To really combat climate change, major manufacturing processes need to be revolutionized as well.

Sweden’s SSAB says it has “produced the world’s first fossil-free steel” and has started delivering it to the Volvo Group, its first customer. Cars and trucks are made with lots of steel. Volvo has announced plans to manufacture cars using fossil fuel-free steel by 2026. Fossil fuel free steel has been developed by a consortium of three Swedish companies, two of which are owned by the Swedish state. The Hybrit project was set up in 2016. The idea underpinning Hybrit is to use “100% fossil-free hydrogen” rather than coal and coke in steel production. The goal is to develop the technology so it can be demonstrated at an industrial scale. It’s hoped this could happen as early as 2026. The question is can this process be scaled up on a world wide scale so that the production of steel in its totality can be made fossil fuel free?

The cement industry dumps more than 2 billion tons of carbon into the air each year to make its ubiquitous building material, roughly three times as much as the aviation industry. Plastics are made from fossil fuels, but replacing plastics should be as simple as going back to materials that were used before plastics were invented. In fact going back to the way of life of the 19th century, before oil was discovered, would eliminate a lot, but not all, greenhouse gasses. There is still coal which was ubiquitous in the 19th century. As far as transportation, before the advent of the fossil fuel powered car, horse drawn conveyances were ubiquitous. This produced a lot of horse manure which was a problem in urban settings. People concerned about that breathed a sigh of relief when cars entered the scene because that eliminated the horse manure problem while at the same time creating the greenhouse gas problem which was unseen and unrecognized at the time. As it turns out horse manure is a very good fertilizer and can be put to a constructive use while carbon dioxide emissions from cars and trucks are deleterious.

But we can't go back to the 19th century. Modern development, using tons of steel and cement, will continue apace. We need to do what the Swedes did, and that is to develop manufacturing processes using hydrogen rather than carbon. We need to get smart about eliminating greenhouse gas emissions wherever they occur. It's not enough just to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy. We need to create manufacturing processes free of fossil fuels as well. Also we need to find a substitute for plastics. Many are currently being developed. The question is can they be scaled up in time. The same can be said for eliminating industrial farming and finding plant based substitutes for cows and pigs. The economy of the world needs to be reoriented from the pursuit of profit and even of development to the pursuit of creating an earth suitable for human habitation because with out that the human race has nothing.

Off the Top of My Head

It's Almost Thanksgiving: Let's Talk Turkey

by John Lawrence, November 14, 2020

So what are Republicans saying about a Biden administration? That the progressive wing of the Democratic party will push him too far to the left. Well, what exact policies would be "too far to the left"? Defund the police? That's just a radical slogan that means about as much as "Lock her up." In other words it means nothing in terms of either Biden's agenda or progressives in the Democratic party. Reform the police - that would be more like where the Democratic party actually stands. As far as Medicare for All, Biden favors Medicare for All Who Want It. I guess there are those Republicans who so love their employer based health insurance that they are terrified by the possibility that it might be taken away from them and replaced with something better. So Biden's position is go ahead and keep it. He just wants to make it possible that those who do want it will be able to have it or a public option which amounts to the same thing.

So Republican concerns amount to whipping up a bunch of meaningless hysteria just like Trump has always done. It's his stock in trade. So what about the Green New Deal? Who could object to creating jobs to build infrastructure and combat global warming? Oh maybe it's that they fear their taxes will go up? There's actually no reason why anyone's taxes should go up based on the realities as they exist in the 21st century. The government has shown that any amount of money can be found and spent to bail out banks or to add to the debt to give people tax breaks. Trump's tax cuts added a trillion dollars to the debt. Quantitative easing and the money to bail out the big banks amounted to several trillion dollars and yet it has had no adverse effect on inflation or anything else. Modern Monetary Theory has shown that Deficits Don't Matter whether those deficits originate from bailing out the banks or a Green New Deal or Biden's Green Deal which is more or less the same. Expect Republicans to cry bloody murder any time government threatens to formulate a program to combat global warming or to create jobs for poor people or to raise wages for essential workers to $15. an hour.

Money spent constructively on infrastructure or other things will never cause inflation. What will cause inflation is money that is pissed away frivolously or unconstructively. Reorienting out priorities can and should be done even if deficit spending is required to do it. When the economy is rebalanced, it eventually will mean that the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes in order to reduce inequality. That's the main thing that Republicans are afraid of - that eventually the rich will have to pay their fair share of taxes. In the meantime economic history since 2000 has demonstrated the fact that, if trillions of dollars were found to bail out the banks and give tax cuts to the rich, trillions of dollars can be found to repair and rebuild infrastructure and prevent the world from the disaster of global warming. Private enterprise has done nothing but accelerate global warming because private enterprise consists of the fossil fuel industry. Private enterprise profits from pollution that it doesn't have to compensate for. Therefore, it's up to government to balance out what private enterprise seems incapable of doing. That's not to say that private enterprise is unimportant. It does some things very well, some things that government does not do well. It's a matter of finding the correct balance between private enterprise and government enterprise.

Does any fossil fuel worker object to working in the renewable energy industry providing they are guaranteed a job in that industry? I don't think so. There's no one that loves fossil fuels per se or just because they are fossil fuels. They are not like Scrooge who just loves the look and feel of money. Are there people who so much like the look and feel of oil that they can't bear the thought of working in an industry that doesn't pollute the planet? There are new industries coming - a straw with the look and feel of a plastic straw that biodegrades and doesn't stay in the ocean for hundreds of years like the plastic straw does. These straws are being manufactured today. If government can assist in the ramping up of this private enterprise - Newlight Technologies - we will be all better off except for the plastic straw manufacturers which are using mainly robots to produce their straws so there are not that many jobs involved there.

Huntington Beach, California-based Newlight produces an ocean-degradable biopolymer called PHB using air and greenhouse gas. Newlight's methods are supported by more than a decade of research and development as well as an extensive patent portfolio. Newlight's Series F finance round coincides with the commissioning of a new commercial-scale production facility in California called Eagle 3 and the launch of branded products including a line of cutlery and drinking straws for the food-service industry. Newlight's foodware products deliver a unique level of material safety and certified sustainability, resulting in high-performance, ocean-degradable foodware that works for people and the planet. 

Government can provide an assist to private enterprise as long as that enterprise is headed in a new direction which doesn't pollute and which doesn't produce greenhouse gasses. Which is more important - hanging onto the familiar past or striking out in a new direction that saves the planet and makes it better for our grandchildren? Are we pioneers and adventurers like our ancestors or what?

Off the Top of My Head

US Consumed More Energy from Renewables Than Coal in 2019

by John Lawrence, September 24, 2020

In 2019, U.S. annual energy consumption from renewable sources exceeded coal consumption for the first time since before 1885, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Monthly Energy Review. Despite that global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were up .6% in 2019 over 2018. The world is still going the wrong way. In order to keep global temperatures to within a 2 degree C increase, we have to decrease GHGs between now and 2050 so that there are net zero GHGs emitted by 2050. This will be hard to do as developing countries are still installing coal fired electricity generating plants. However, they are just trying to catch up with the US which has contributed much more in terms of GHGs than any other nation over history starting with the industrial age.

GE has dropped its coal fired power business. GE was one of the largest manufacturers of coal fired power generating plants. Five years ago it bought Alstom's power business, which makes coal-fueled turbines, for $9.5 billion. Now that investment is a total loss. GE has laid off thousands of power workers, slashed its dividend to a penny, fired two CEOs and sharply written down the value of its power business. GE's exit from coal "highlights the billions of dollars of shareholder value destruction that is embodied with the failed Alstom acquisition," John Inch, senior analyst at Gordon Haskett Research Advisors, said. GE's jet engine business is also way off thanks to the pandemic and the decline of airline revenues. GE's stock has gone down since the announcement that it is getting out of the coal business.

China is still very much involved in the coal business despite its goal of reducing GHG emissions. China’s “economic miracle” has seen the country become the world’s second-largest economy and pulled nearly a billion people out of poverty. But this progress has been built on a boom in energy from coal, and China has also become the world’s largest carbon polluter by far. It's a trade off between economic growth based on cheap and plentiful coal or a desire to reduce GHGs. China’s CO² emissions increased again by around 2% in 2019, based on recently released official economic data, and 65% of the annual growth in energy consumption came from fossil fuels.

India also is building more coal fired plants in an attempt to grow and develop its economy. India, the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, saw its annual coal demand rise 9.1% to nearly 1 billion tons in the year ended March 2019. Coal demand from utilities accounted for over three-quarters of total consumption. India expects coal-fired power capacity to grow 22% in 3 years. This is bad news for India's cities which are highly polluted at the present time and will only get worse. Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambition to make India a $5 trillion economy by 2024 and turn the country into a manufacturing hub will require industries to have access to continuous and dependable power supplies. It is also bad news for the world which needs to decrease GHG emissions if a climate catastrophe is to be avoided. If GHGs keep being emitted into the atmosphere, the goal of keeping the increase in global average temperature to 2 degrees C will not be met and the earth will become uninhabitable in many regions.

It's very important that the US cooperate with China, India and Russia which is number 4 in world GHG emissions. The world needs to pull together on this issue. Instead the US at the present time is going forward with its fossil fuel industry especially fracking and natural gas which is methane, an even more potent GHG than carbon dioxide. The US is also increasing tensions with China in particular under the Trump administration while a Democratic administration would probably be hostile against Russia. This is not helpful or constructive in terms of the cooperation needed to convert to non polluting renewable energy as quickly as possible and as universally as possible. Instead of harping on the shortcomings of these countries, it's of paramount importance that the whole world unite in an attempt to reduce GHG emissions. Intellectual property protection is just not important. Patents are not important because it is unthinkable that individuals or corporations would seek to profit off technologies invented to save the world from global warming. All those technologies and intellectual property should be widely shared with other countries in order to bring down GHG emissions. The alternative is that the world burns because nations refuse to give up their petty squabbles.

Off the Top of My Head

Instead of Helping American Workers, the Fed Prints Money and Swallows US Debt

by John Lawrence, June 25, 2020

The Federal Reserve is printing trillions of dollars and buying US government debt. The market for US Treasury bonds is a hard sell these days because they pay so little interest: 1.37% for a 30 year bond, less than the inflation rate. China is dumping its Treasuries. It will probably accelerate the rate of dumping if tensions between the 2 countries continue. China was the US' largest creditor till recently when Japan took over that role. While the Federal Reserve has set interest rates effectively at zero, credit card companies are still charging as much as 30% interest which creates a huge number of Americans debtors especially when you throw in student loan debt which stands at $1.5 trillion. In fact, revolving consumer credit card debt reached nearly $1.1 trillion at the end of February 2020, according to the Federal Reserve G19 Report. Americans were paying as much as $121 billion in interest and fees combined by the end of 2019. That's no surprise since the Federal Reserve reported in February 2020 that the average interest rate on credit cards reached an astronomical 16.61%. While billionaires can borrow money at zero percent interest, average Americans pay 16% and up.

The effect of zero interest rates on savings accounts and Treasury bonds is to force everyone into the stock market which, although we're in a recession bordering on depression, continues to go up. It is totally divorced from reality; it wouldn't go down even in a depression like it did during the Great Depression. The Fed is keeping it artificially pumped up because so much American wealth is at stake there.

The Fed is buying Treasuries and mortgage backed securities (MBSs) to the tune of trillions of dollars. Wolf Street reported:

In March (2020) and April combined, the Fed monetized 100% of the additional Federal debt. Over the two-month period of March and April, the US government increased its debt by $1.56 trillion (most of it in April); and over the same two-month period, the Fed bought $1.56 trillion in Treasury securities (most of it in March) and thereby monetized 100% of the additional pile of debt during the two-month period.

The Fed is just swallowing all kinds of debt which is enriching the richest Americans and foreign banks even more. Problem is this forced feeding of cash by the Fed is not trickling down to the American people. It is not creating jobs. Now the Fed is creating even more ways to monetize debt by creating Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs). These SPVs can buy assets the Fed is not allowed to buy, and they can lend to entities and rich individuals to buy certain assets. Under the arcane Federal Reserve Act, these SPVs require taxpayer backing from the Treasury Department to protect the Fed from losses. The SPVs can buy asset backed securities (ABSs) on a non-recourse basis which means that, if there are any problems, taxpayers take the losses. Indirectly via its Special Purpose Vehicles and its Primary Dealers, the Fed can buy even old bicycles, as long as taxpayers take the losses.

Wolf Street reported:

These ABS can be backed by credit card loans, auto loans, student loans, equipment loans, floor plan loans, insurance premium finance loans, some loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration (SBA), and eligible loans on receivables. The loan amounts will be “equal to the market value of the ABS less a haircut and will be secured at all times by the ABS,” the Fed says.

A little history on Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) : At the end of 2010, under orders from Congress, the Fed released data on over 21,000 transactions it performed during the Financial Crisis, which revealed among many other outrageous acts, that the Fed lent to well-connected individuals and all kinds of hedge funds and others under its TALF program so that they would buy certain assets, such as these consumer loan ABS, drive up their prices, sell them to pension funds and others later for a huge profit, and pay back the loans to the Fed.

These well-connected individuals included John A. Paulson, Michael Dell, Christy K. Mack (wife of former Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack), Kendrick R. Wilson III (former Goldman executive and top aide to Hank Paulson Jr.), H. Wayne Huizenga (founder of AutoNation and Waste Management), Jonathan S. Sobel (head of Goldman’s mortgage department), etc. Some very wealthy people made a lot of money off the Fed’s bailout programs even as workers and the economy was in deep trouble.

So the Fed is paying John Paulson money by means of an SPV. Paulson is the guy who bet against the subprime mortgage market in 2007 and made one billion dollars in one day. Goldman Sachs had to pay him off, but eventually due to all the legerdemain in the financial markets, it was French and German taxpayers that paid him for his astute bet. That's casino capitalism at its best. Now he has direct access to the Federal Reserve's money printing press. Why? When there are so many poor and unemployed people in the US, why is the Fed intent on only bailing out financial markets, meaning rich people? Suffice it to say that the Fed is able to buy most anything from rich people and monetize their debt. Because of this and the fact that the rich can borrow at zero percent interest, they engage in risky bets. If they win, they pocket the money. If they lose, the Fed bails them out at zero percent interest.

Compare this with how the situation was dealt with during the Great Depression. Instead of force feeding wealthy people with interest free cash and adding trillions to the US National debt, FDR created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). The original legislation establishing the RFC did not limit it to lending to financial institutions; it was also authorized to provide loans for railroad construction and crop lands. In other words it created jobs for average Americans. An amendment passed in July 1932 allowed the RFC to provide loans to state and municipal governments. The purpose of these loans was to finance projects like dams and bridges, and the money would be repaid by charging fees to use these structures. To help with unemployment, a relief program was created that would be repaid by tax receipts. Under the New Deal, the powers of the RFC were greatly expanded. The agency now purchased bank stock and extended loans for agriculture, housing, exports, businesses, governments, and disaster relief. The RFC actually made money on these loans.

So the RFC could actually create jobs for average working people (and not just for hedge fund managers) doing constructive things like building houses and infrastructure. Part of the New Deal was the Works Progress Administration (WPA) relief program which made the federal government by far the largest employer in the nation. A Green New Deal would create money much as the Fed does with a few keystrokes on a computer, but, instead of just providing liquidity to banks, hedge funds and rich people, it would provide money for productive jobs paid for by the government. The government needs to be employer of last resort in order to recreate a full employment economy.

A Green New Deal would convert the American economy from a fossil fuel dependent economy to one fueled by renewable energy. In so doing it would provide good paying jobs for those in American society who have been left out or left behind. The Fed should monetize the $3 trillion backlog in American infrastructure repair and rebuilding. Making the Fed a public bank instead of a bank whose main purpose is to swallow US government debt and give money to rich people in order to provide "liquidity" would go a long way to reducing inequality and bringing the American poor including minorities into the middle class. IMHO the COBID pandemic will insure that the old economy based on 70% consumerism is not coming back. The new normal will be based on government spending to create a Green New Deal or will sputter along at about half its former level.

Off the Top of My Head

A Jobs Program for Inessential Workers
by John Lawrence, April 30, 2020

Turn inessential workers into essential workers by putting them to work building green infrastructure. This is essential work that is not getting done. Much of the previous inessential work they did is better left undone even in a recovery. It is still inessential. It'll always be inessential compared to what needs to be done in creating and building green infrastructure. Building out solar and wind renewable energy could employ thousands if not millions of people. Repairing roads, bridges, waterways, clean water systems, airports, railroads and all other infrastructure could employ millions. This is essential work that has remained undone despite the fact that the American Society of Civil Engineers has given the US a D rating for infrastructure. High speed rail needs to be built. The widespread adoption of electric cars has to be mandated, and construction of a national electric vehicle charging network to power them has to be built.

Unemployed people still need jobs. Mark Cuban said on CNN this morning that there should be a jobs program similar to that of the New Deal. He is exactly right although he didn't make the necessary connection about the essential work that's still being left undone and the inessential work that doesn't need to be done even in a recovery. Forget Cuban's sports and entertainment enterprises. I hate to tell you that they are basically inessential. What is essential is greatly expanding the public health undertakings of the Federal  government which has been totally behind the curve in this pandemic.

We must ask ourselves what is essential and not go back to a new normal in which all the inessential businesses of the past are brought back just in order to provide employment to the millions who have lost their jobs. The pre-pandemic economy was 70% consumerism. The economy post epidemic should be much less a consumerist economy and much more an investment economy. The four components of gross domestic product are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Of these government spending must be ramped up to provide the essential jobs in infrastructure building as well as in the areas that the pandemic has made clear are indeed essential: health care, education, transportation, agriculture.

Government spending must go up; personal consumption must go down. It's as simple as that. As for business investment, it's a lost cause as business will only do what's profitable for itself as has been made abundantly clear. Investment in fossil fuels and plastics which the big oil companies are making is only destructive to a green economy, not constructive. As far as exports are concerned, the dollar has already been weakened as much as it could possibly be by zero interest rates, so increased exports, although desirable, are not likely to happen any time soon.

Private enterprise knows only one thing in terms of the economy "reopening": get back to consumer spending. It ain't going to happen. People are still afraid of the virus. The pandemic is not over. They will use their money to pay off debts instead of going in debt to the hilt like they are used to. People will save their money instead of entertaining themselves to death. Why? Maybe they have learned their lesson that a high employment economy predicated on the fact that people will always have a job and always have a prepensity to consume is just a chimera. Rather than living paycheck to paycheck, I hope people will understand that there may come a rainy day, and they need to save for that. That lesson has really been brought home by the coronavirus pandemic.

The true heroes are essential workers not the military. The military itself was brought to its knees by COBID-19. There is a lesson there. It's more important to spend our collective money on preparing for the coming pandemic of global warming than on a bloated military. It is more important to house the homeless and guarantee the economic rights of shelter and health care to all Americans as in the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights. It is more important to help people all over the world escape from extreme poverty because poverty breeds health crises which then can spread all over the world. It's more important to make peace with our rivals rather than try to control them with military threats and sanctions.

May the next President (and I hope to heaven that it's not Donald Trump) see the light of a more rational, compassionate and humane world, one more concerned about the health and welfare of all the world's peoples. I hope Governor Cuomo's values of being tough, smart, disciplined and most importantly loving spread to every corner of US and world society, and we get on with essential business instead of the inessential business of amusing, entertaining and consuming ourselves to death.

As Oil Prices Fall Below $0 Per Barrel, Climate Advocates Urge Against Fossil Fuel Industry Bailout

Published on Monday, April 20, 2020

by Common Dreams

"The oil price collapse creates a historic opening: a public buyout of the fossil fuel sector to enact a managed decline of extraction and ensure a just transition for workers and communities."

by Julia Conley, staff writer

 

19 Comments

A liquid petroleum tanker vessel on a refinery berth. Demand for oil has fallen so drastically during the coronavirus pandemic that companies are storing millions of barrels of oil in off-shore tankers. (Photo: Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

The price of U.S. crude oil collapse to below zero for the first time on record, falling to negative-$37 per barrel and forcing oil producers to pay buyers to take the product off their hands. 

As The Guardian reported last week, 160 million barrels of oil are being stored in tankers near shipping ports around the world due to the sharpest drop in oil demand in a quarter of a century because of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting global lockdown.

BREAKING: Oil drops below $2 a barrel https://t.co/t3BgDHfs0s pic.twitter.com/Hk39WgzrAk

— Bloomberg (@business) April 20, 2020

Monday's free-fall saw oil prices drop 105% in a matter of hours and came after extensive negotiations between President Donald Trump, Russia, and Saudi Arabia in which the U.S. president asked the two countries to cut their oil output by 10 to 15%. 

"Trump's attempt to prop up oil prices was front-page news a few days ago," economist Paul Krugman tweeted, calling the effort "a complete bust."

Trump's attempt to prop up oil prices was front-page news a few days ago. So I'm surprised at how little attention is being given to the fact that it has been a complete bust pic.twitter.com/uizM31RVWp

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) April 16, 2020

It's worth underscoring that Trump spent the last few weeks diligently working with Saudi Arabia and Russia to prop up oil prices. https://t.co/uf8AUHy78f

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) April 20, 2020

The plummeting of oil markets on Monday, the last day oil producers can trade barrels for next month, solidified a trend which has been evident since the coronavirus pandemic brought economies around the world to a halt last month. 

Critics urged U.S. policymakers not to approach the collapsing markets as a problem that can be solved by propping up the oil industry. As David Roberts wrote at Vox Monday, the sector has been in decline for years and any taxpayer funds which go to propping it up further would be "wasted."

First, fracking was a financial wreck long before COVID-19 hit. U.S. fracking operations have been losing money for a decade, to the tune of around $280 billion. Overproduction has produced a supply glut, low prices, and an accumulating surplus in storage.

[...]

Both oil and gas prices were persistently low leading into 2019. Due to oversupply and mild winters in the U.S. and Europe, there is a glut of both natural gas and oil, such that the entire world’s spare oil storage is in danger of being filled.

The fossil fuel industry, Roberts reported, is "furiously lobbying" for relief funds, but others on social media joined him in denouncing the possibility of a bailout.

Oil prices have crashed below $11 as demand has collapsed, and the cost of storing the oil for future use is now too high. But highly indebted oil companies being propped up by the Fed keep pumping anyway. The solution is to let these oil companies go bankrupt and stop pumping.

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) April 20, 2020

Our thoughts on bailing out the oil industry: No

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) April 20, 2020

Some climate action advocates reiterated earlier calls to nationalize the oil industry, a move which New Republic journalist Kate Aronoff said last month would "ensure the country's energy demands are met responsibly as it transitions to a net-zero-emissions economy, without the need to appease [fossil fuel] companies' shareholders."

"This is our chance to publicly own oil and gas companies," the Sunrise Movement tweeted Monday.

What if we took public ownership of oil & gas companies?

Hahaha, jk

...unless? 👀 https://t.co/Q5OiiNrGlW

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) April 20, 2020

The oil price collapse creates a historic opening: a public buy out of the fossil fuel sector to enact a managed decline of extraction and ensure a just transition for workers & communities.

Read more in our GND series by @johannabozuwa @carlaskandier https://t.co/WY54Rbe7lB

— Common Wealth (@Cmmonwealth) April 20, 2020

Roberts agreed that the collapse of oil markets represents an opportunity to begin a shift toward renewable energy in the U.S., but said Trump is not likely to heed the warnings of groups including the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL), which wrote in a recent report, "The pandemic exposes and exacerbates fundamental weaknesses throughout the sector that both predate the current crisis and will outlast it."

"At best [policymakers] can slow down the transition to clean energy a bit. They cannot stop it," wrote Roberts. "Meanwhile, other countries will be establishing a commanding position in some of the biggest growth industries of the 21st century."

"It would be a shame to emerge from this crisis still clinging to the past rather than facing, and preparing for, the future," he added.

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TRUMP’S DIRTY DEED: LATEST EPA DEREGULATION WILL KILL AMERICANS

from WhoWhatWhy blog

by Celia Wexler and DonkeyHotey, April 5, 2020

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / WhoWhatWhy (CC BY-SA 2.0) See complete attribution below.

It is silent, deadly, and all around us. No, it’s not the coronavirus. It’s the dirty air millions of Americans are forced to breathe. And while the Trump administration has done too little to protect Americans from the current pandemic, its record on pollution is much, much worse — and its recent policies seem particularly cruel and wrongheaded right now.

Without even factoring in the ravages of COVID-19, we know that air pollution is very hazardous to health. Epidemiologists at Washington University in St. Louis examined the medical records of 45 million US veterans over ten years, and found an estimated 200,000 deaths were linked to particulates in the air that actually met current US air quality standards.

Even more concerning, African American vets were more vulnerable to the ravages of poor air quality than white vets exposed to the same level of pollutants in the air.

“I went into it thinking pollution is color blind … it’s not true,” Dr. Ziyah Al-Aly told the Guardian. “Actually, pollution itself does discriminate. For the same level of pollution, black people tend to be affected more. And on top of that, black people get exposed to more pollution than white people.

“It’s kind of like a double-whammy,” he added. “It’s really unfair.”

Just this week, capping three years of unraveling nearly 100 regulations, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule that would drastically reduce automobile fuel efficiency standards. The new rule revises an Obama administration standard put in place to address climate change. Under the Obama rule, cars would have had to average 54 miles per gallon by 2025. The Trump rule changes that requirement to 40 miles per gallon.

The EPA not only is primed to allow automakers to unleash almost one billion tons of additional carbon into the air, increasing global warming. The rule also will make US air more dangerous to breathe.

That’s in part because anything that increases the amount of carbon in the air increases global warming. Climate change helps trigger events like forest fires that make the air we breathe dirtier.

This new policy would be cruel at any time, but seems particularly callous when the country is in the grip of a pernicious virus that preys in particular on Americans who already have respiratory problems, like asthma and lung disease.

In a statement, the American Lung Association (ALA) charged that the new rule “will result in dirtier cars that pollute the air and harm public health.”

The fumes from car tailpipes add to pollution, the ALA stated, particularly for minority and low-income people who often live near major highways.

Even worse, this federal policy will apply to all states. Over the past half century, under authority given the states by the federal Clean Air Act, California has imposed stricter mileage standards on automakers. Thirteen states and the District of Columbia follow the Golden State’s mandates.

Indeed, in 2019, California — fearful that the Obama standards would be gutted by the EPA — reached an agreement on a compromise standard with a few carmakers.

President Donald Trump reportedly was furious that some auto companies already had agreed to accept California’s requirement that they achieve 51 miles per gallon by 2026.

Perhaps his ire explains why the White House revoked the permission the federal government had routinely given California to impose stricter rules. The Trump Department of Justice also opened an inquiry into the four auto companies — Ford, Honda, BMW, and Volkswagen — that agreed to accept California’s standards for alleged antitrust violations. The DOJ dropped its investigation in February. 

But that’s far from the only thing the White House has done recently.

Just last week the EPA capitulated to every special interest. The agency announced that any company it regulates is excused from any penalty for the duration of the pandemic — if it can demonstrate that its violation of rules was related to the crisis.

So with this logic, if someone robs a grocery store and says it’s because of the pandemic, the cops should not arrest them, at least for the duration of the crisis. Ditto for murder, particularly if one spouse, cooped up in the house with his or her partner, can offer the COVID-19 excuse.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern.”

This new policy is particularly good news for oil and gas companies, in trouble for not complying with air and water pollution regulations, consent decrees at their refineries, unsafe disposal of fracking waste, and emission reporting requirements.

It might seem reasonable to give companies a break on some reporting requirements, given the disruptions the pandemic has caused, but this blanket relaxation of enforcement of environmental regulations has much more serious consequences. Without oversight or the threat of penalties, companies could easily expose thousands of people near polluting operations to much higher levels of toxic chemicals. In a letter to the EPA, dozens of environmental groups charged that the “suspension of monitoring and reporting requirements would have a very specific impact on public health and safety.

“Allowing a company to postpone the repair of equipment that leaks toxic gases into the atmosphere, as API [the American Petroleum Institute] has suggested, leaves the public exposed to those pollutants for longer periods of time, increases the risk of fire and explosion, and is not just a paperwork concern,” the groups said.

The environmentalists pointed out that just one example — allowing oil refineries to ignore the rule to monitor the amount of benzene they emit — can expose nearby communities to this “deadly pollutant.”

But of course, the Trump White House is not content to roll back rules, the administration also is seeing to it that future rules will be dumber, because they’ll be informed by less scientific data.

Remember that study of millions of veterans and deaths related to pollution? It found not only an estimated 200,000 pollution-related deaths, it also tracked pollution’s impacts on kidney disease, hypertension, and dementia.

If the Trump White House has its way, this study will not be able to guide the EPA in the future. The EPA’s proposed “secret science” rule directs the agency to rely almost exclusively on studies whose underlying data is not fully disclosable to the public. Public health studies, like the one that estimates the health impacts of air pollution, cannot be disclosed because of federal rules protecting the privacy of individual patients.

I don’t know about you, but as a member of the public, I have not been clamoring to see the “raw data” that underlies massive epidemiological studies, sometimes involving millions of health records. The EPA’s claim that this is all about transparency is disingenuous, especially for an agency that so churlishly responds to requests for other more useful public records. Just last year, the agency tried to do an end run around its rulemaking process to make it easier for political appointees to control access to documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

Maybe the Trump White House and all its political operatives might want to practice more “social distancing” and keep their mitts off federal agencies, at least until we’ve escaped the coronavirus, a risk to health almost as damaging as their bad policies. 

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The cartoon above was created by DonkeyHotey for WhoWhatWhy from these images: Donald Trump caricature (DonkeyHotey / Flickr – CC BY 2.0), body (The White House / Flickr), White House lawn (Obama White House / Flickr), boxes (Pexels), EPA Logo (EPA / Wikimedia), and lighter fluid (Bonnie Pierce / Flickr).

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Related front page panorama photo credit: Adapted by WhoWhatWhy The White House / Flickr.

Off the Top of My Head

They are Speaking of a War Time Effort to Defeat the Coronavirus. A War Time Effort is Necessary to Defeat Climate Change, and It is Even More Important.

by John Lawrence, March 15, 2020

Are we all in this together? Is every nation on earth suffering the effects of the coronavirus? Is it a war? The changes that will come about from global warming, if we don't act now, will kill a billion times more people than the coronavirus ever will. The coronavirus is a clear and present danger to the world's population right now, but mainly to old people with underlying conditions. Global warming is a present danger even if that's not as clear to Americans especially those who have been swayed by Trump's wishy washy response to it.

As Americans we must stop investing trillions of dollars in no win, go nowhere wars, and use that and even more money to help the world divest from the usage of fossil fuels. It goes way beyond just converting the US energy system to renewable energy. We must have a leading role in converting the entire world to renewable energy. That means, instead of creating enemies in the world, we need to develop friendships with all the nations of the world in order to facilitate a threat that will affect every nation of the world just as the coronavirus does right now. We must join China on their Belt and Road initiative but insist that it be a Green Belt and Road initiative. That means building green infrastructure not only in America but in some of the highest polluting countries of the world, namely India. This must be our foreign policy, not sanctions or the threat of war.

That means we must partner with Russia which stands to lose a lot of money if they keep all their extensive supplies of oil in the ground. We are already allies, supposedly, with Saudi Arabia, but we must insist that they and OPEC keep their prodigious oil reserves in the ground. All of this means a humongous change in the world's economic system, which is based on oil, but, if we are unsuccessful as a species in doing this, the earth will surely burn, habitats will be destroyed and future generations will not have a habitable planet to live on. We might as well take off for another habitable planet right now. I understand from Cosmos on TV that there might be one only 20 light years away.

Bernie Sanders is clearly the candidate who will take a Green New Deal the most seriously. Joe Biden will try to tinker around the edges of the current oil based system which will not be enough to deter future disaster, and we don't have too many years to get this right. Clearly, we must do everything we possibly can at the utmost possible speed starting on Day 1 of the next Democratic administration in January 2021.

At 'Shock Doctrine Press Conference,' Trump Bails Out Oil Industry, Not US Families, as Coronavirus Crisis Intensifies

Published on Friday, March 13, 2020

by Common Dreams

"Trump has once again put the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities."

by Jon Queally, staff writer

 

43 Comments

Surrounded by members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, US President Donald Trump speaks at a press conference on COVID-19, known as the coronavirus, in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC, March 13, 2020. (Photo: Saul Loeb / AFP)

Climate action groups and progressive critics expressed disappointment and outrage on Friday afternoon after President Donald Trump—despite a continued failure to offer far-reaching support to the U.S. public—moved to bolster the bottom lines of oil and gas companies by announcing a massive federal purchase for the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

"Based on the price of oil, I've also instructed the Secretary of Energy to purchase at a very good price large quantities of crude oil for storage in the U.S. strategic reserve," Trump announced during a White House press conference—surrounded by CEOs from major corporations, including Walmart, CVS, and Target—in which he also declared an official national emergency in order to combat the outbreak of the coronavirus. 

"With this move, Trump has rolled out a plan to prop up U.S. oil companies before he has even bothered to guarantee paid sick leave for US workers who are going to be on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis for weeks to come."
—Alex Doukas, Oil Change International

"We're going to fill it right up to the top," said of the SPR, but critics were quick to point out that move has everything to do with helping his wealthy friends and cronies in the fossil fuel industry, and nothing to do with helping average people now under threat from the spreading pandemic.

"Trump has once again put the interests of oil and gas executives ahead of the interests of people and communities," said Alex Doukas of Oil Change International. "With this move, Trump has rolled out a plan to prop up U.S. oil companies before he has even bothered to guarantee paid sick leave for US workers who are going to be on the frontlines of the coronavirus crisis for weeks to come."

The news came Friday as additional school closures were announced for states nationwide, grocery store shelves were wiped clean, and worry continues to spread about just how extensive the outbreak will become.

Greenpeace warned that the total cost of the oil purchase "could exceed $2.6 billion in public funds," a stark comparison when put next to the proposal put forth by House Democrats just hours earlier. Introducing the "Families First Coronavirus Response Act"(pdf), which calls for an estimated $1.7 billion aimed at helping working families and children to weather the public health crisis, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, "The American people expect and deserve a coordinated, science-based and whole-of-government response to keep them and their loved ones safe: a response that puts families first to stimulate the economy."

By putting his adminstration's emphasis on bailing out the oil industry, John Noël, a senior climate campaigner for Greenpeace USA, said the president is doing the opposite of putting people first.

"Trump's response to a global pandemic is to put billionaires and corporate polluters ahead of American families. There's no evidence that this handout would protect jobs, pensions, benefits, or ease the hardships facing fossil fuel workers or communities confronting the COVID-19 outbreak right now. It's nothing more than a gift to the industry that created the climate crisis."

Doukas agreed, calling it "wildly inappropriate" for Trump "to abuse the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as a tool to prop up the oil and gas industry at a time when the White House should be focusing on how to help everyday people in the US."

"Where is the relief for workers grappling with caring for their families, retail workers risking exposure every day, families grappling with debt and mounting bills while their livelihoods are put at risk?" he asked. "No, today President Trump focused on propping up polluting industries and trotting out CEOs to sell their wares."

Despite the criticisms from those focused on the needs of families, it appeared the announcement during what was dubbed Trump's "Shock Doctrine press conference" had the desired result.

The entire press conference now appears to be an attempt to pump up stocks of big american companies right before the close. Astonishing. https://t.co/BPNQ1DviVK

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) March 13, 2020

As CNBC reported, following Trump's late-day announcement, "crude futures jumped 5%" in the last hour of market trading.

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Off the Top of My Head

Russia and Saudi Arabia Selling Oil at $40 a Barrel. US Fracking Industry in Deep Debt. Can't Survive at That Price.

by John Lawrence, April 11, 2020

As if the coronavirus was not a big enough threat to the US economy, Russia and Saudi Arabia are in a price war over oil driving the price down to $40 a barrel. The world now needs less oil because of the coronavirus, but Russia is still producing at the same rate. Not to be outdone Saudi Arabia is also maintaining its same level of production producing a glut on the world market. To be profitable at all the US shale oil industry needs prices to be at least $60 a barrel. So effectively, Russia is forcing the US fracking industry, which is totally overleveraged in the first place, into bankruptcy. To boot Russia can produce oil for less money than Saudi Arabia. The US has sanctioned Russia's oil industry in terms of the NORD II pipeline to Europe and its Turkstream pipeline to Turkey, but there is no way that Trump can sanction the price of a barrel of oil if Russia floods the market.

Market Watch reported:

The rapid growth of the U.S. shale industry is at the heart of a Russia-versus-Saudi Arabia crude-oil price war that threatens to upend a global economy already under threat from the spread of the coronavirus, experts said Monday.

“Russia has made no secret of the fact that it is concerned about the growth of the U.S. shale industry and of its view that repeated output cuts by OPEC were effectively handing market share to U.S. producers,” said Caroline Bain, chief commodities economist at Capital Economics, in a Monday note.

Russia’s rejection last week of a Saudi push for additional production cuts prompted Saudi Arabia over the weekend to slash prices on crude exports in a move analysts said was aimed at taking market share from Russia. But it was Russia’s longstanding frustration with rapidly growing U.S. shale industry that prompted Moscow to resist the push for additional production curbs.

Saudi Arabia over the weekend slashed prices on oil exports, a move that traders took as a sign that the Riyadh was ready to take on Russia in a global price war that would flood the world with crude at the same time demand is curtailed by the COVID-19 outbreak.

The fracking industry has survived basically on zero percent interest loans from Wall Street. The whole American economy is based on no interest loans with the Federal Reserve providing quantitative easing whenever banks or major industries needed money. The average American pays through the nose for a loan. The whole economy is on life support, and it would collapse unless it is continually salvaged by government deficit spending and the Fed flooding the markets with liquidity. The fracking industry and the banks that carry its loans are in trouble now because Russia is essentially controlling the price of oil and pricing it below what the fracking industry needs just to pay on its debts. Now that the world needs to consume far less oil because of restrictions on travel, less greenhouse gasses are going into the atmosphere. This is the silver lining which is not being talked about.

So now the world is at war, not one nation towards another nation, but the whole world vs the coronavirus. Finally the world is coming together against a common enemy. So far the world has not come together in the same way in the common fight against global warming. If it can come together in the fight against the coronavirus, why can't it come together in the fight against global warming which is far more serious. The coronavirus is so far only killing the elderly with underlying conditions. So nursing homes have to be very concerned about their patients, but so far in the US young people that have acquired the virus generally get over it just as they would with the flu virus. The coronavirus may kill millions, but global warming has the potential of killing billions.

Off the Top of My Head

The Changes Needed in the Composition of GDP

by John Lawrence

The four components of GDP are personal consumption, business investment, government spending, and net exports. Right now personal consumption is 70% of GDP in the US. Business investment is 18%. Most businesses are buying back their stock rather than investing in manufacturing or R&D. Government spending is 17%. More than 60% is military spending. Net exports were -5% since imports (18%) were greater than exports (13%). This represents an oil based economy heavy on fossil fuel pollution. What needs to happen to fend off global warming is a reduction in personal consumption especially in those aspects that are high in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions such as automobile, airplane and cruise ship travel. Government needs to increase its spending in areas of infrastructure rebuilding and spending on renewable energy systems while reducing military spending which is highly GHG contributing as well.

Businesses need to be encouraged to manufacture here in the US instead of importing everything from China and elsewhere because cargo ships are highly polluting. Businesses which help solve the climate change dilemma need to be encouraged while high polluters need to be reined in. We need to become more like Europe where personal consumption is only 54% of GDP. In Europe government spending is 46.5% of GDP. Of this spending on defense amounted to 1.2 % of GDP in 2018. Contrast this with the 60% that the US spends on defense, and you see the difference between a highly militarized nation that has no money to spend on infrastructure much less a Green New Deal and a group of countries that spends more of its money on the welfare of its citizens. Trump has been agitating to get European countries to spend 2% on defense. This would still mean that the US would be spending 30 times as much.

If Bernie Sanders wins the election for President of the US, we can expect radical changes in the current composition of GDP. Certain items of personal consumption need to be reduced, namely combustion engine car travel. The infrastructure for electric automobiles needs to be built out. Government subsidies need to be given to electric car purchasers. Mass transit needs to be built out and encouraged. Military expenditures need to be reduced both to promote peace in the world and so that the money can be freed up for more constructive purposes. Coal fired electric power generating plants need to be replaced with renewable energy electric power generating plants. Frivolous personal consumption needs to be discouraged while consumption based on human needs for all people should be encouraged especially affordable housing, nutritious non-industrialized food production which is affordable for all and universal health care like Europe has.

In short we need to become more like Europe with a reduced military empire and an increased build out of green infrastructure based on renewable energy. Bernie Sanders represents this kind of change for America - a government which invests in its people and takes radical steps to mitigate global warming.

Off the Top of My Head

China Bans Use of Single Use Plastics

by John Lawrence, February 2, 2020

Not reported on nightly news, but single-use and non-degradable plastic bags will be banned in major Chinese cities by the end of 2020 and across the country by 2022. Just like that! While the US "grapples" and "prevaricates", China just does it in one swell foop! In fact US oil corporations are planning to build more petrochemical plants in order to produce more plastic. Why? Because they anticipate that oil consumption will go down due to more electric cars being on the road. Well, they can't let all that oil and all those profits go to waste, can they? Therefore, more plastic. If they can't harm the earth one way, they'll choose another. The NY Times reported: "Royal Dutch Shell’s plant will produce more than a million tons of plastic, in the form of tiny pellets. Many in the Pittsburgh area see it as an economic engine, but others worry about long-term harm."

While Shell is planning to continually pollute the environment in one way or other, their CEO is on a campaign to show how environmentally conscious Shell really is. An article in Time magazine ballyhooed their efforts:

Shell CEO Ben van Beurden has a bird’s-eye view of the situation from his corner office at the company’s global headquarters in the Hague. “We have to figure out what are the right bets to take in a world that is completely changing because of society’s concerns around climate change,” he says.

Projections from energy companies show demand for oil could peak and fall in the coming decades; some outside analyses suggest demand for oil could plateau as soon as 2025. Markets are already jittery about the industry: energy was the worst-performing sector on the S&P 500 index in 2019. In 1980, the energy industry represented 28% of the index’s value, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA). Last year, it represented less than 5%. The shift away from oil looms so large that Moody’s warned in 2018 that the energy transition represents “significant business and credit risk” for oil companies. The heads of the Banks of England and France said in an op-ed that any company that does not change strategically to the new energy reality “will fail to exist.” On Jan. 14, Larry Fink, founder and CEO of investment giant BlackRock, wrote in an open letter that “climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects.” ...

Under van Beurden’s leadership, Shell is charting a path that will allow it to continue to profit from oil and gas while simultaneously expanding its plastics business and diversifying into electrical power. By the 2030s, the 112-year-old fossil-fuel giant wants to become the world’s largest power company. As part of this strategy, Shell has worked to present itself as environmentally friendly. Last year, it committed to reduce its emissions by as much as 3% by 2021, and by around 50% by 2050, tying its executives’ compensation to the cuts.

Mind you, Shell is more concerned about its investors than it is in the long term habitability of planet earth. Even executives' compensations are going to be tied to reducing emissions. Whoo Hoo! It's only now though that Shell is prepared to do something about climate change. Shell knew it was contributing to the problem of climate change a long time ago. “Yeah, we knew. Everybody knew,”  [Shell CEO van Beurden] said. “And somehow we all ignored it.” Just like the tobacco industry! They knew too that cigarette smoking caused cancer. They just didn't tell us about it in order not to forego their profits.

The NY Times reported:

The 386-acre property looks like a giant Lego set rising from the banks of the Ohio River. It is one of the largest active construction projects in the United States, employing more than 5,000 people.

When completed, the facility will be fed by pipelines stretching hundreds of miles across Appalachia. It will have its own rail system with 3,300 freight cars. And it will produce more than a million tons each year of something that many people argue the world needs less of: plastic.

Yes, more plastic, thanks to Shell's concern about global warming. It's a modern miracle. In the movie, "The Graduate," “plastics” is understood to mean a cheap, sterile, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition—the embodiment of everything about the values of the older generation that seems repugnant to young Benjamin. Today, the word "plastic" has taken on a far more sinister meaning. But to Shell it's a less offensive way to pollute. If you can't pollute one way, then try a less offensive way. I guess that's Shell's mantra.

China's policy will ban the production and sale of disposable plastic tableware and cotton swabs by the end of 2020. Production of household products containing microbeads will be banned by the end of 2020 and sales of such products will be banned two years after that. Single-use and non-degradable plastic bags will be banned in major Chinese cities by the end of 2020 and across the country by 2022. In addition, single-use straws will be banned by the end of 2020. By 2025 the proposal, which was introduced by both the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, would ban all single-use plastics across the country.

Meanwhile, only three states in the US have banned single use plastic bags: California, Hawaii and New York. I'd say the US has a long way to go to be as progressive as China. Like the song says, the US will do the right thing after it has exhausted all the profits from doing the wrong thing. "Everybody's crying peace on earth, just as soon as we win this war." Thank you, Mose Allison.

Off the Top of My Head

Sanctions Hasten Other Nations' Exit from the Dollar

by John Lawrence, January 11, 2020

The US threatened to put sanctions on any nation buying Iranian oil. So far this strategy doesn't appear to be working since some other nations don't agree with this US policy and are willing to go ahead and buy Iranian oil anyway although they are probably not paying in US dollars. In 1971 President Nixon made a deal with Saudi Arabia that it would accept payment for oil only in dollars. This made the US dollar the world's reserve currency. Since the beginning of 2003, Iran has required payment in euros for exports to Asia and Europe. The government opened an Iranian Oil Bourse on the free trade zone on the island of Kish, for the express purpose of trading oil priced in other currencies, including euros. So even before the sanctions, Iran broke ranks with the US-Saudi agreement and was willing to exchange oil for other currencies.

This is how Iran got in trouble with the US originally when in 1951 Iran nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Foreign companies owned most of Iran's oil prior to that time. In August 1953, the government of Mosaddegh, who had spearheaded the nationalization of Iranian oil, was overthrown by a military coup d'état orchestrated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency and the British Secret Intelligence Service. Mosaddegh was sentenced to three years in prison and then kept under house arrest until his death in 1967. This ushered in the era of the notorious Shah of Iran who immediately unnationalized Iranian oil and gave control of its oil back to the US and Britain.

Now that the US is sanctioning all exports of Iranian oil, Iran is selling oil anyway on the "gray market." Essentially it is smuggling Iranian oil to willing buyers who are paying Iran much less than they would be paying other countries in dollars for the same oil. China is the main nation willing to defy US sanctions and buy Iranian oil. However, the US is hesitant to put sanctions on China, a major trading partner, which has become too powerful to bow to US demands. This is all leading to dedollarization in world markets and the use of other currencies for trading. Since the US has weaponized the dollar, the result will be that other currencies will take on perhaps a shared role in becoming world reserve currencies.

In August 2018, Venezuela joined the group of countries that allow their oil to be purchased in currencies other than US Dollars, thus allowing purchases in Euros, Yuan and other directly convertible currencies. This tendency will be increasing around the world as the US tries to bully other countries by using sanctions. This means that petrodollar recycling which has allowed the US to run huge budget deficits will decline. The US will probably continue to run huge budget deficits with the Federal Reserve just printing the money to make up the difference between the deficits and diminished petrodollar recycling.

Another trend that will diminish the role of the dollar as the world's reserve currency is the conversion from fossil fuel products to renewable energy sources which must be done at a faster rate if the earth is to be protected from global warming. As the Fed ramps up its printing of dollars, the dollar will, inevitably lose value even if it doesn't result in inflation in the US. But inflation is in the eyes of the beholder. Already the increased money printing has caused tremendous inflation in asset prices, namely the stock market and real estate. It's just that the government excludes these assets from its inflation index so it seems like there is low inflation. Those experiencing skyrocketing rents would probably disagree.

China became the world's largest trading nation in 2013, overtaking the US. This means that the US can hardly threaten a more powerful nation economically with sanctions. In 2018, China was the world's largest economy for the fourth year in a row. It produced $25.3 trillion in economic output according to estimates by the International Monetary Fund. It contributed 19% of the world's total gross domestic product of $135.2 trillion. The European Union was in second place, generating $22 trillion. Together, China and the EU generate 35% of the world's economic output. The United States remained in third place, producing $20.5 trillion.

The US is losing its ability to push other nations around because the dollar is the world's reserve currency. The dollar is fast losing even that status so, if China wants to buy Iranian oil, they will do so, sanctions or no sanctions. Even the EU is defying US sanctions as Germany continues developing the Nord Stream 2 pipeline which will deliver natural gas from Russia to Germany. The US has no hesitation in sanctioning Russia, but it will back off from sanctioning a major NATO ally, Germany, over this deal which Germany badly wants. The sanctions amount to no more than a slight delay in the completion of the pipeline.

Off the Top of My Head

San Diego: America's Finest Pothole City

by John Lawrence, December 27, 2019

As an Uber and Lyft driver, I try and remember where the potholes are. Otherwise, I am wrecking the heck out of my car. I scan the road in front of me and swerve to avoid them. The route from downtown to the airport along Harbor Drive and back is particularly hazardous, and, since I drive it a lot, I know where they all are at. The other day I hit an egregiously bad one at Sassafras and Kettner. Since it's a route I'm navigated through a lot, I made a special point to go back there and see exactly where the it was located because I never want to hit that pothole again. One of my riders said he hit one and knocked his car out of alignment in one fell swoop.

So why doesn't the city do anything about them especially on roads that all Uber and Lyft drivers and taxis navigate over on a daily basis? It's all about infrastructure, and this city as well as the US as a whole could care less about infrastructure. As far as the city is concerned, they probably care more about adding to the private economy of automobile dealerships in repair bills than to public expenditures of funds. My poor car is in the position of some poor person in India who can't afford his insulin rather than someone who has good medical insurance. Come to think of it, many Americans can't afford their insulin either. That's why the life span is decreasing and people are dying younger as time goes on.

The US ranks 13th in quality of infrastructure according to the World Economic Forum behind such countries as Singapore, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, U.K. France,  Germany, Japan, Korea and Spain. America's infrastructure is desperately in need of investment, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. They estimate that the US needs to spend some $4.5 trillion by 2025 to fix the country's roads, bridges, dams, and other infrastructure. They gave the nation's overall infrastructure a grade of D+ in their 2017 "infrastructure report card".

Its the American way: let every public institution go to hell while privatizing as much as possible. Schools, drinking water, sewage systems are all underfunded largely to give private corporations the biggest tax breaks possible. Having given those who have largely funded public infrastructure in the past huge tax breaks means that there is little money left over to repair aging infrastructure much less build more modern and up to date, state of the art infrastructure. Far from building infrastructure, the Trump administration is hell bent on deregulating every protection of the environment in order to make corporations more profitable. With regulations in place corporations would have to clean up after themselves and this would decrease corporate profits. We can't have that. Better to let corporations dump their waste products in America's rivers and streams. This is the way you maximize profits.

Instead of eliminating coal and oil as energy sources in order to reduce global warming, Trump and his associates positively salivate over all the money to be made from fossil fuels. Other nations, namely Russia, are doing the same thing because they have enormous natural resources of coal, natural gas and oil. However, those resources need to go untapped if the earth is to be spared runaway global warning and become like its sister planet, Venus, which has a surface temperature of 900 degrees.

We have to keep 80 percent of the fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground. If we don’t—if we dig up the coal and oil and gas and burn them—we will overwhelm the planet’s physical systems, heating the Earth far past the red lines drawn by scientists and governments. It’s not “we should do this,” or “we’d be wise to do this.” Instead it’s simpler: “We have to do this.” However, the American government is spending billions of dollars a year subsidizing the fossil fuel industries. We're going in the wrong direction.

So are we as residents of planet earth willing to forego digging up or extracting what is estimated to amount to $20 trillion worth of fossil fuels still underground? Or will we maximize short term profits and say to hell with future generations?

No War for Oil, Say Climate Advocates, as Trump Admin Pushes for Conflict With Iran

Published on Monday, September 16, 2019

by Common Dreams

"Oil has fueled violence and the climate emergency for far too long."

by Andrea Germanos, staff writer

 

1 Comments

Protesters hold a sign against the Iraq War outside the White House in 2004. (Photo: Elvert Barnes/flickr/cc)

After President Donald Trump threatened Iran via tweet Sunday, climate campaigners on Monday drew renewed attention to the danger of pursuing war for oil.

Their calls came after Trump tweeted the U.S. is "locked and loaded" in response to a weekend attack on Saudi oil facilities and suggested he was merely waiting for the directive from Riyadh. The White House has blamed Iran, without evidence, for the attacks.  

The focus on wars for oil came as thousands of young activists worldwide mobilize for the global #ClimateStrike on Sept. 20.

Commenting on the simmering tensions, author and 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben wrote on Twitter, "Getting ready for war to insure the supply of a substance that is wrecking the planet."

 

Climate group Greenpeace International weighed in as well, urging the use of "diplomacy over force" and "peaceful renewable energies" over fossil fuels.

Between 1/4 and 1/2 of all wars between countries since 1973 are linked to oil. Oil has fuelled violence and the climate emergency for far too long. We must choose diplomacy over force, and peaceful renewable energies, like wind and solar, over dirty, destructive oil. https://t.co/dUdkvum0mW

— Greenpeace PressDesk (@greenpeacepress) September 16, 2019

"Fossil fuels are dangerous," tweeted environmental scientist Jonathan Foley late Sunday. "For our security. For our economy. For our health. And for the planet."

"Let's not be held hostage by this industry any more," he added. "It's time to move to a better world."

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Off the Top of My Head

Power to the People and Venezuelan Oil

by John Lawrence

This was a slogan in the sixties. We are a lot less naive today. Today it would mean public banking, a central bank owned by the People of the US and not private shareholders, accountable to Congress and printing its own money. Today the privately owned Federal Reserve prints the money. As Ellen Brown vividly illustrates in the accompanying article, Venezuela's problems are mainly caused by its assets and debts being denominated in American dollars and not Venezuelan bolivars. The US is then able to squeeze Venezuela and any other country that disagrees with it by the use of sanctions. To quote Ellen: "[Venezuela] owes massive debts in a currency it cannot print itself, namely, U.S. dollars."

The US would not have a debt problem if the Central Bank were publicly owned and printed its own money instead of delegating that function to the privately owned Federal Reserve. Venezuela would not have its problem with inflation if it had the ability to print its own money and pay off its debts that way. We've seen from history that things don't go well when a country affirms that it will sell its oil for anything other than US dollars as Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi found out. A Green New Deal as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other progressive Democrats are proposing has the accompanying suggestion that oil should be made irrelevant; it should be left in the ground as we convert to renewable energy. That would certainly wreak havoc with countries whose national income is highly dependent on the sale of oil.

In the meantime China has invested $62 billion in Venezuela's nationalized oil industry. John Bolton wants to get his hands on the Venezuelan oil industry so he can privatize it and place it in the hands of American corporations. How climate change, the need to convert to renewables and the potential clash over Venezuelan debt and US perceived interests there plays out is anyone's guess. China wants Venezuelan oil. The US wants Venezuelan oil. Progressive Democrats want a Green New Deal which eliminates oil as a source of energy. Does all this portend an upcoming clash between superpowers played out in a Venezuelan landscape?

The Venezuela Myth Keeping Us From Transforming Our Economy

by Ellen Brown, from truthdig, February 7, 2019

Alex Lanz / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is getting significant media attention these days, after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an interviewthat it should “be a larger part of our conversation” when it comes to funding the “Green New Deal.” According to MMT, the government can spend what it needs without worrying about deficits. MMT expert and Bernie Sanders adviser professor Stephanie Kelton says the government actually creates money when it spends. The real limit on spending is not an artificially imposed debt ceiling but a lack of labor and materials to do the work, leading to generalized price inflation. Only when that real ceiling is hit does the money need to be taxed back, but even then it’s not to fund government spending. Instead, it’s needed to shrink the money supply in an economy that has run out of resources to put the extra money to work.

Predictably, critics have been quick to rebut, calling the trend to endorse MMT “disturbing” and “a joke that’s not funny.” In a Feb. 1 post on the Daily Reckoning, Brian Maher darkly envisioned Bernie Sanders getting elected in 2020 and implementing “Quantitative Easing for the People” based on MMT theories. To debunk the notion that governments can just “print the money” to solve their economic problems, he raised the specter of Venezuela, where “money” is everywhere but bare essentials are out of reach for many, the storefronts are empty, unemployment is at 33 percent and inflation is predicted to hit 1 million percent by the end of the year.

Blogger Arnold Kling also pointed to the Venezuelan hyperinflation. He described MMT as “the doctrine that because the government prints money, it can spend whatever it wants . . . until it can’t.” He said:

To me, the hyperinflation in Venezuela exemplifies what happens when a country reaches the “it can’t” point. The country is not at full employment. But the government can’t seem to spend its way out of difficulty. Somebody should ask these MMT rock stars about the Venezuela example.

I’m not an MMT rock star and won’t try to expound on its subtleties. (I would submit that under existing regulations, the government cannot actually create money when it spends, but that it should be able to. In fact, MMTers have acknowledged that problem; but it’s a subject for another article.) What I want to address here is the hyperinflation issue, and why Venezuelan hyperinflation and “QE for the People” are completely different animals.

What Is Different About Venezuela

Venezuela’s problems are not the result of the government issuing money and using it to hire people to build infrastructure, provide essential services and expand economic development. If it were, unemployment would not be at 33 percent and climbing. Venezuela has a problem the U.S. does not, and will never have: It owes massive debts in a currency it cannot print itself, namely, U.S. dollars. When oil (its principal resource) was booming, Venezuela was able to meet its repayment schedule. But when the price of oil plummeted, the government was reduced to printing Venezuelan bolivars and selling them for U.S. dollars on international currency exchanges. As speculators drove up the price of dollars, more and more printing was required by the government, massively deflating the national currency.

It was the same problem suffered by Weimar Germany and Zimbabwe, the two classic examples of hyperinflation typically raised to silence proponents of government expansion of the money supply before Venezuela suffered the same fate. Professor Michael Hudson, an actual economic rock star who supports MMT principles, has studied the hyperinflation question extensively. He confirms that those disasters were not due to governments issuing money to stimulate the economy. Rather, he writes, “Every hyperinflation in history has been caused by foreign debt service collapsing the exchange rate. The problem almost always has resulted from wartime foreign currency strains, not domestic spending.”

Venezuela and other countries that are carrying massive debts in currencies that are not their own are not sovereign. Governments that are sovereign can and have engaged in issuing their own currencies for infrastructure and development quite successfully. I have discussed a number of contemporary and historical examples in my earlier articles, including in Japan, China, Australia and Canada.

Although Venezuela is not technically at war, it is suffering from foreign currency strains triggered by aggressive attacks by a foreign power. U.S. economic sanctions have been going on for years, causing the country at least $20 billion in losses. About $7 billion of its assets are now being held hostage by the U.S., which has waged an undeclared war against Venezuela ever since George W. Bush’s failed military coup against President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Chávez boldly announced the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a series of economic and social reforms that dramatically reduced poverty and illiteracy as well as improved health and living conditions for millions of Venezuelans. The reforms, which included nationalizing key components of the nation’s economy, made Chávez a hero to millions of people and the enemy of Venezuela’s oligarchs.

Nicolás Maduro was elected president following Chávez’s death in 2013 and vowed to continue the Bolivarian Revolution. Recently, as Saddam Hussein and Moammar Gadhafi had done before him, he defiantly announced that Venezuela would not be trading oil in U.S.dollars following sanctions imposed by President Trump.

The notorious Elliott Abrams has now been appointed as special envoyto Venezuela. Considered a war criminal by many for covering up massacres committed by U.S.-backed death squads in Central America, Abrams was among the prominent neocons closely linked to Bush’s failed Venezuelan coup in 2002. National security adviser John Bolton is another key neocon architect advocating regime change in Venezuela. At press conference on Jan. 28, he held a yellow legal pad prominently displaying the words “5,000 troops to Colombia,” a country that shares a border with Venezuela. Clearly, the neocon contingent feels it has unfinished business there.

Bolton does not even pretend that it’s all about restoring “democracy.” He blatantly said on Fox News, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.” As President Nixon said of U.S. tactics against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, the point of sanctions and military threats is to squeeze the country economically.

Killing the Public Banking Revolution in Venezuela

It may be about more than oil, which recently hit record lows in the market. The U.S. hardly needs to invade a country to replenish its supplies. As with Libya and Iraq, another motive may be to suppress the banking revolution initiated by Venezuela’s upstart leaders.

The banking crisis of 2009–10 exposed the corruption and systemic weakness of Venezuelan banks. Some banks were engaged in questionable business practices. Others were seriously undercapitalized. Others still were apparently lending top executives large sums of money. At least one financier could not prove where he got the money to buy the banks he owned.

Rather than bailing out the culprits, as was done in the U.S., in 2009 the government nationalized seven Venezuelan banks, accounting for around 12 percent of the nation’s bank deposits. In 2010, more were taken over. Chávez’s government arrested at least 16 bankers and issued more than 40 corruption-related arrest warrants for others who had fled the country. By the end of March 2011, only 37 banks were left, down from 59 at the end of November 2009. State-owned institutions took a larger role, holding 35 percent of assets as of March 2011, while foreign institutions held just 13.2 percent of assets.

Over the howls of the media, in 2010 Chávez took the bold step of passing legislation defining the banking industry as one of “public service.” The legislation specified that 5 percent of the banks’ net profits must go toward funding community council projects, designed and implemented by communities for the benefit of communities. The Venezuelan government directed the allocation of bank credit to preferred sectors of the economy, and it increasingly became involved in private financial institutions’ operations. By law, nearly half the lending portfolios of Venezuelan banks had to be directed to particular mandated sectors of the economy, including small business and agriculture.

In a 2012 article titled “Venezuela Increases Banks’ Obligatory Social Contributions, U.S. and Europe Do Not,” Rachael Boothroyd said that the Venezuelan government was requiring the banks to give back. Housing was declared a constitutional right, and Venezuelan banks were obliged to contribute 15 percent of their yearly earnings to securing it. The government’s Great Housing Mission aimed to build 2.7 million free houses for low-income families before 2019. The goal was to create a social banking system that contributed to the development of society rather than simply siphoning off its wealth. Boothroyd wrote:

… Venezuelans are in the fortunate position of having a national government which prioritizes their life quality, wellbeing and development over the health of bankers’ and lobbyists’ pay checks. If the 2009 financial crisis demonstrated anything, it was that capitalism is quite simply incapable of regulating itself, and that is precisely where progressive governments and progressive government legislation needs to step in.

That is also where, in the U.S., the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is stepping in—and why Ocasio-Cortez’s proposals evoke howls in the media of the sort seen in Venezuela.

Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to create the nation’s money supply. Congress needs to exercise that power. The key to restoring our economic sovereignty is to reclaim the power to issue money from a commercial banking system that acknowledges no public responsibility beyond maximizing profits for its shareholders. Bank-created money is backed by the full faith and credit of the United States, including federal deposit insurance, access to the Fed’s lending window, and government bailouts when things go wrong. If we the people are backing the currency, it should be issued by the people through their representative government.

Today’s government, however, does not adequately represent the people, which is why we first need to take our government back. Thankfully, that is exactly what Ocasio-Cortez and her congressional allies are attempting to do.

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Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including "Web of Debt" and "The Public Bank Solution." A thirteenth book titled "The Coming Revolution in Banking" is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

 

Off the Top of My Head

Will Trump Bring the Troops Home From Syria and Afghanistan?

by John Lawrence, February 7, 2019

Short answer: NO! It's a meaningless question. The troops have never come home from any war the US has fought. There are still 35,116 military troops in Germany, 54,281 troops in Japan, 25,813 troops in Korea and 5,200 in Iraq. More importantly, the US has invested billions in real estate in these and other countries in the form of military bases such as Bagram AFB in Iraq and al-Asad base in Syria. There are also 36 bases in Germany, 23 in Japan, 15 bases in Korea and 12 bases in Iraq. The US has invested billions in infrastructure in other countries while neglecting its own infrastructure. It doesn't want to just abandon these bases so there will never be a complete troop withdrawal from any of these countries. The US has effectively colonized certain parts of every country it has ever been at war with in addition to the hundreds of other military bases in countries which are considered our allies.

Despite recently closing hundreds of bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States still maintains nearly 800 military bases in more than 70 countries and territories abroad—from giant “Little Americas” to small radar facilities. Britain, France and Russia, by contrast, have about 30 foreign bases combined as of 2015. Maintaining bases and troops overseas cost $85 to $100 billion in fiscal year 2014; the total with bases and troops in war zones is $160 to $200 billion. These hundreds of billions of dollars could be spent on building and maintaining US infrastructure, converting to renewable energy, subsidizing electric vehicles and ameliorating climate change.

On the other hand China is investing in infrastructure in other countries with its Belt and Road initiative. Instead of investing in military bases, China is investing in ports, railroads, shipping infrastructure, airports and raw materials. This is not a giveaway. China is loaning these nations who are the recipients the money while building with Chinese expertise and manpower. While China will reap the rewards of increased trade with these countries, they will also have an income stream of repayments on their loans coming back to them. It's a win-win for China and the recipient countries and a lose-lose for the money drain that US bases in foreign countries represents.

Case in point: Over the past decade, Venezuela received over $62 billion from China, which is 53 percent of all money lent by China to Latin America. China currently owns $23 billion worth of Venezuela's foreign debt, making it the country's biggest creditor. China needs Venezuela's oil and is willing to pay for it. But here's the rub. The US wants the current Venezuelan President Maduro out, but China wants him to stay in. The US wants a regime in Venezuela that is not "socialist." It doesn't have a problem with the socialist regimes in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark, however. Basically, it doesn't want regimes around the world that shout "Death to America" and "Yanqui Go Home." Maybe if these countries changed their rhetoric, we could all get along. But privatizing Venezuela's oil industry would leave China out in the cold with a potential loss of its sizable investment.

So will the US confront China over Venezuela? Will a US backed Venezuelan regime privatize Venezuela's oil industry? Will China fight to retain its $62 billion investment in Venezuela's nationalized oil industry? God only knows. Let's see how this plays out.

Off the Top of My Head

The US Creates the Migrant Situation in Latin America

by John Lawrence, February 3, 2019

Here's the playbook: 1) The US identifies a regime it doesn't like such as the Maduro regime in Venezuela. 2) The US applies economic sanctions. 3) The economy is ruined. 4) People flee the country looking for a better life. 5) Migrants show up at US border. 5) Trump builds a wall to keep them out.

If the US played a more constructive role in Latin America instead of promoting regime change such as the CIA backed coups in Argentina, Peru, El Salvador and Guatemala, there might be fewer economic migrants showing up at the US border. Some of these regimes that were overthrown were democratically elected. The US doesn't care. They were more interested in protecting the interests of United Fruit Corporation.

In the case of Venezuela there is a new twist. China is heavily invested in Venezuela's oil production. Venezuela has the highest know oil reserves in the world. However, US National Security Advisor John Bolton wants Venezuela's oil. He told Fox News: “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela." Well, Dick Cheney wanted Iraq's oil too especially when Saddam Hussein threatened to trade it for currencies other than the US dollar. How did that work out? Never mind that oil should be left in the ground and not exploited economically if the earth is to survive climate change.

Hugo Chavez wanted to use Venezuela's oil riches to benefit the people of Venezuela. But due to mismanagement the oil industry went downhill. Then he died. Maduro took over with the same goal, but hasn't been able to pull it off. Meanwhile, the US applied economic pressure through sanctions. Reuters reported last September:

Venezuela has sold 9.9 percent of shares in oil joint venture Sinovensa to a Chinese oil company, President Nicolas Maduro said on Tuesday, adding the OPEC nation expected some $5 billion in joint investment with China to boost its crude output.

He did not say how much Venezuela received or which company bought the shares in Sinovensa, which is partly owned by state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC). China will own 49 percent in Sinovensa after the sale, he said.

Maduro traveled to China, his key foreign financier, last week in search of fresh funds for his cash-starved government, which is presiding over a grueling economic depression. But it remains unclear whether he secured any new credit lines.

Maduro said the Sinovensa sale formed part of plan to invest $5 billion over the next year in Chinese projects to double oil production and be able to send a million barrels per day to China. Venezuela’s oil production is at a 60-year low after years of little investment and crumbling infrastructure. ...

Over a decade, China invested over $50 billion in Venezuela through oil-for-loan agreements, securing energy supplies for its fast-growing economy while bolstering an anti-U.S. ally in Latin America....

Maduro on Tuesday said he could count on China as an ally to survive an “economic war” he accuses the United States of waging against Venezuela. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has levied several rounds of sanctions on Maduro’s government.

So the US will have to confront China if it wants to take over Venezuela's oil fields. The US better be careful as to how it treats Latin American migrants. It seems they're the only potential friends the US has in Latin America. For the rest, it's "Yankee Go Home." Seriously though, the US could play a positive role by helping to take out the drug gangs and supporting the economies of Latin American countries instead of seeking to destroy them in order to effect regime change. It has provoked China enough already with the sanctions it applied to Huawei and other Chinese corporations for selling things to Iran. Not to mention the arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. The US is definitely poking the bear, but this time the bear is China, not Russia.

Off the Top of My Head

Don't Cry For Me Venezuela

by John Lawrence, January 31, 2019

We have seen a whole bunch of US and CIA backed coups in Latin America like the 1976 coup in Argentina that ousted the democratically elected Isabel Peron, the 1973 coup in Chile that ousted the democratically elected Salvador Allende and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the overthrow of the democratically elected, left-leaning Jacobo Arbenz in Guatamala. Arbenz was overthrown during the US-backed 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état leading to right-wing US-endorsed authoritarian governments.

The pattern is all too familiar. The people want a better life so they elect a socialist or left leaning President. In Venezuela's case it was Hugo Chavez in 1999. Unfortunately, Chavez died of cancer at the age of 58. His successor is the current democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro who is also a left leaning socialist. Naturally the US wants to get rid of him because he's a left leaning socialist and also Chavez nationalized (or socialized) Venezuela's oil industry. Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but due to mismanagement it's not producing that much oil.

In the meantime, China has invested huge sums in Venezuela's oil industry in an attempt to get it up and running again and obtain the benefits of Venezuela's oil for China, a nation woefully deprived of any oil reserves. China is not too much concerned that Venezuela has a socialist government. The US playbook is to apply economic pressure by means of sanctions to Venezuela, bring the economy to its knees and then cheerfully install a President more to its liking. Hint: Not a socialist. So US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has announced that the US recognizes Juan Guaido as Venezuela's President even though he's not been democratically elected.

This pits the US directly against China which has, so to speak, taken Venezuela under its wings. Again the Venezuelan people are mere pawns suffering under a crappy economic system made much worse by US sanctions. The Chinese need oil and Venezuela badly needs investment in its oil industry. The US would like to see Venezuela's oil industry privatized again. However, China now owns a 49% share of it so that privatization does not look like a good option as far as China is concerned. What does the US want - a privatization of the 51% still controlled by the Venezuelan government. Presumably Exxon or Chevron (which is being sued by the Ecuadoran government for pollution) would step in and become more or less equal partners with China? It will never happen.

So the US once again is involved in an oil dispute. Adding fuel to the fire, it prefers right wing dictatorships to democratically elected socialists. It didn't end so well in Iraq when the US couldn't tolerate Saddam's threat to sell oil in some currency other than dollars. Is it any wonder that Latin Americans are migrating here to get away from the economic conditions in their countries brought about by their own mismanagement and US sanctions? The oil needs to be left in the ground if global warming is to be prevented. Why are we fighting over access to oil? Can't we all get along and switch to renewables?