Humanity will always find or create some excuse to keep burning stuff, we will always try to take the easy option, had we acted 30 or 40 years ago to get off the addiction to fossil fuels we would not have the geo-political carbon war we are seeing now. This war as well as being an ego driven act of insanity has its roots in fossil fuels, it's a fuel war, the Russians like drug dealers are making sure they keep their addicts (us the west) addicted, they supply a very significant part of total world energy but while they can inflict serious economic damage on us the west will maybe finally wake up to the need to get off oil and gas and in the medium term Europe will suffer badly economically but not as badly as Russia. It could go either way, if we all survive this then Europe might accelerate the switch to non fossil energy sources or maybe once again we will take the easy option which just delays the extinction of us all, who knows. Whatever way you look at it the outcome is miserable for everyone, and even if we (Europe) gained energy independence from Russia who's to say that they would not use that as a pretext to claim they were the victims of economic warfare and use it as another an excuse to invade the rest of Europe. Putin has miscalculated very badly.
I recall you saying over a year ago that oil prices would be buoyant once more and so right you were at 130 dollars a barrel. Not to mention gas prices. Yes, we have been caught out badly in both Europe and the U.K. My understanding is that to tap hydraulically fractured hydrocarbons would take a while anyway. Renewals are coming along nicely but not quickly enough. And we messed up dispensing with gas storage in the U.K. Ultimately Europe needs to stop buying Putin’s hydrocarbons but it will hurt us all in our pockets if it isn’t hurting already with eye wateringly high prices for petroleum and natural gas. And the knock on effects on transportation and various products. If there is a time we are going to reverse the fracking ban it is likely to be very soon.
Yes I did but not with this scenario in mind, I saw it as inevitable when resources became tight as they will over the next 10 to 20 years. But this is an artificial resource restriction potentially of 8% or so of total world oil supplies, and remember prices go high because they can, because someone indeed lots of countries are making money out of the scarcity including Russia when they switch selling their oil to their friends in China. We the population of Europe and America need to accept that we are in a war, that things have changed and in wartime our standard of living is going to diminish a lot, power cuts are quite believable we all lived through that in the 1970s it can come again and it probably should again all over Europe if we are actually serious about sanctions however I am not sure we are Johnson is already backpaddling on oil sanctions or at least playing down expectations. Power generation needs to be renationalised all over Europe and the UK, and costs to be distributed through the tax system to all, I did a two year electric fix at the start of March with EON but honestly I now would not bet they will still be in business in two years time, nationalisation in a time of war, we need that, we also need to accept that the shops are going to be empty, people will finally be forced to thin up a bit the hard way. There are other terrible things that can happen short of Putin nuking a western population centre, like he could nuke wind farms in the North Sea, he could also nuke UK and Norwegian oil and gas production in the north sea without elevating things to the level of direct retaliation against Russian population centres. None of this would have been happening if the West had taken climate change and the need to get ourselves off oil a couple of generations ago, but no, much easier to go and beat up oil producers much easier to start wars for control of resources all over the place, with the added advantage that the western capitalists got huge investment in their arms industry both production and R&D. Short termism, always, that's the rule we have thrust upon us all, think about this year's bonus and profits and damn the future. And we've left ourselves with little to no room to manoeuvre now.
Definitely. It could have been avoided to some degree if we had been better prepared. In the meantime… Not to mention the latest threat on European gas supplies overnight.
Hence Carbon war, economics and politics have been part of Putin's plan from the beginning, Ukraine has major pipelines running through it to the west, but with the west particularly Germany deciding to get rid of their nuclear power capacity it played right into Putin's plans, while we have huge economic tools at our command so does he. On the politics side Trump weakened Nato and Brexit weakened Europe but Putin has misplayed that card as it looks like Nato is coming together like never before. I knew I should have booked a flight already, too late now.
300 dollars a barrel of oil. Incredible. I filled up the car for Mrs Ash over the weekend and she moaned that it was costing a fortune now. I pointed out to her that it is keeping me in work.
I've not watched your video yet is that what they are predicting? I would not be surprised gas is already multiplied by a factor of 12 or more, someone quoted £6 per therm yesterday.
He's still in Canada And we pay 58p a litre in tax and don't forget the VAT, something like 60% of the cost of fuel in the UK is tax.
It was only a few years ago, circa 2017/18 that there were plans to drill in salt underneath the Fylde Coast, wash out the salt to develop massive caverns and then fill them with gas to ensure some degree of energy security or buffer. The company that was going to do the work is based just up the road from me but it never happened. Was canned and as a consequence we don’t have such a buffer. I see the USA has banned the purchase of Russian hydrocarbons. Let’s see the Russian response….
There's no way Putin will nuke anyone, Jim, that act is ridiculous. It's all bluster because he wants to get part of Ukraine back in his sphere of influence and to make sure Crimea gets enough water.
You're assuming he is still a rational actor Mike, I'm not, that's why I made the point about his age on the thread you started a few days ago.
I don't think Puten will nuke anyone close as surely the cloud of contamination will blow not just across the world but straight back over Russia resulting in slow painful deaths for many Russians.
He's just had his army fighting around the biggest nuclear station in Europe, flirting with the possibility of causing an uncontrollable disaster at a site that is much larger than Chernobyl. Water cooled reactors require a power supply you can't just turn them off drop in the control rods and walk away you have to keep cooling the reactors actively not passively, so ironically a Nuclear stations of this type needs electricity in order to remain safe, backup diesel generators can do that for a while but not forever, witness the Japanese mess at Fukishima. Tactical nukes exist which are much smaller than the 10kt Hiroshima bomb, these are battlefield weapons these are the weapons that would be used initially against Nato forces in the Baltic states and Poland, they could use quite a lot of them before really having to worry all that much about fallout, the meltdown at Chernobyl was an event massively beyond Hiroshima, the effects in Europe are that 1 in 3 to 1 in 2 of us get cancer at some point in our lives, you can't point explicitly at Chernobyl as the cause but it's probably one of the major reasons. I don't think Putin is all that rational or that he cares about consequences at this point.
