The invasion of Ukraine has thrown into dramatic relief the danger of relying on foreign, unfriendly countries for the vital energy needed to run a modern industrial state. Fossil fuel still provides 85% of global power, but the British are capping gas wells and demonising oil companies in a bid to rely solely on renewable energy by 2050. Much of this fantasy has been possible in the past because gas has been widely available and cheap.
The European Union sources about 40% of its gas from Russia. Britain still has its own North Sea resources and also buys nearby Norwegian gas. Russia provides only 4% of our gas supply and the price is set by world supply and demand. Wind and solar renewables make a 23% grid contribution, but electricity only accounts for about 25% of U.K. energy needs. These renewables, however, require enormous subsidies to be viable – £11 billion this year, rising to over £14 billion in 2026 – and provide only about 5% of UK energy requirements.
Against this factual background, it is interesting to note that Roger Harrabin of the BBC recently wrote that the best way to ease consumer’s high energy prices, “is to stop using fossil fuels rather than drill for more of them”. Harrabin was reporting on a recent statement by the Government’s Climate Change Committee that wants a tighter limit on future production and a “presumption against exploration”. Harrabin helpfully noted that producing more gas would end up being be sold on the international market, and barely reduce current high prices.
Missing from Harrabin’s report is that fracking for gas and exploring for North Sea oil would create thousands of well paid jobs for British workers, cut the UK balance of payments deficit, ensure more security of supply, increase company profits along with pension fund dividends and boost government tax revenues.
The writer Paul Homewood recently itemised the various subsides paid to wind and solar operators. Over £8.5 billion was given last year to provide guaranteed price support. A recent innovation called “Contracts for Difference” guarantees sustainable energy producers an index-linked price for 15 years. Homewood noted that the Government cannot cancel the contracts, but the generators “can withdraw at any time on payment of a small penalty charge”. A further £1.1 billion a year is paid to gas companies to stand by for when intermittent renewable generation is low. Homewood also estimates that there is another £2 billion per annum not shown in official Office for Budget Responsibility figures, which is spent on managing intermittency.
Green activists often talk about fossil fuel subsidies, although most of the figures quoted are an invented price for the supposed damage of CO2 emissions. Homewood recently reported on Government oil and gas statistics and found that over the last 20 years the tax take, minus corporation tax which all companies pay, was £43.7 billion. Corporation tax added another £52.2 billion. In addition, £29 billion is collected every year in fuel duty, none of which, of course, is contributed by electric vehicles.
Firmly embedded within influential British elites is a stubborn belief that Net Zero must be pursued, whatever the cost. Their connections to green interest groups are commonplace. The chairman of the Climate Change Committee is Lord Deben. As John Selwyn Gummer, he was a Cabinet member in the Thatcher and Major governments, but since 2012 has driven a hard line green agenda on the CCC. In 2019, the Mail on Sunday disclosed that undeclared payments had been received by his private consultancy firm totalling £600,000 from firms heavily involved in the green energy business. Deben weathered the storm and his solicitor said, “Allegations of conflict of interest and other improprieties are wholly false and misconceived.”
In February last year, Baroness Brown stepped down as the deputy chair of the CCC to take up a non-executive directorship at the Norwegian wind generator Orsted. The Baroness, a frequent media performer, is also known as Professor Dame Julia King, and according to House of Lords declarations, she is the chair of Carbon Trust and CleanTech Advisory Board, BGF (Investments). She remains the chair of the CCC’s Adaption Sub-Committee.
Over at the Oil and Gas Authority, a middling minister from the 1980s and 90s named Tim Eggar is making life more difficult for oil and gas producers. According to Eggar, who is chairman of the regulator, the industry’s “social license to operate is under serious threat”. It must do more to solve the challenges of the climate emergency. Debate about the cause of this crisis “is over”, he declares. As we have reported in the Daily Sceptic, that conversation is far from over, with hundreds of scientists debating the effect of increasing C02 in the atmosphere.
In the meantime, Eggar is ordering that Britain’s only two shale gas wells should be abandoned and sealed with concrete. Drilling at the Lancashire wells was suspended in 2019 following a well organised green activist campaign that, according to Matt Ridley, was part-funded by Russia concerned about reducing Europe’s dependence on its gas exports. An earth tremor measuring 2.9 was recorded near the site and the OGA is now reported to have said that it is not possible to predict the size of tremors caused by fracking. According to the Richter scale, a tremor of 2.9 is “generally not felt by many people, though recorded by local instruments”. There are said to be over 100,000 such minor shakes a year. Given rising gas prices, the well’s owner Cuadrilla said the OGA’s decision was “ridiculous”.
Quite whether the Russian invasion of Ukraine will jolt anyone out of this green complacency remains to be seen. In the meantime, some green activists are slowly moving towards accepting nuclear power as an energy replacement for fossil fuel. But again, events in Ukraine, with missiles flying around the Chernobyl site, might cause a rethink. Even without a fully equipped army on the march, nuclear plants remain at risk from smart missiles and cyber attacks. In 2015, a Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations – Jan Eliasson – warned a security council meeting that non-state actors can already create mass disruption using cyber technologies “and hacking a nuclear plant would be a nightmare scenario”. Of course, since then cyber attacks by hostile states seem to have increased.
But at least all is peaceful in the sleepy White House where the absurd John Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy and a private jet owner, said war in Ukraine could have a “profound negative effect on the climate obviously”. Putin must remain committed to lowering greenhouse gas emissions.
Whatever they are smoking in the White House, it does not seem very good stuff. A more measured contribution came in Saturday’s Telegraph from Charles Moore. For 30 years, and particularly since the election of New Labour, he said, “we have pursued a politics which is almost proud of its self-indulgence. The big issues have concerned ethnicity, sexuality, gender, personal identity and a green lifestyle – a luxurious world where we can all become picky about our dietary preferences, micro-aggressions, well-being, pronouns and carbon neutrality.”
Turns out, the peace and prosperity the West has enjoyed is more precarious than we thought.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic‘s Environment Editor.
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Fracking ruins the countryside. Frack Off! As they say.
Not as much as poverty does. When people freeze they will take any wood to get heat. Look at a satelite picture of the dominican republic, and compare it to their neighbour.
it looks no worse than any rural industrial site, I’ve seen worse farms, this is cuadrillas lanc site
Your picture tends to support my argument. Fracking can also pollute groundwater and cause minor earth tremors.
Nonsense, it looks better than this (subsidized) biomass pellet plant
Whereas this, of course, truly enhances the landscape and operates silently and unobtrusively (in the dreams of people who want other people to suffer from them).
Right, because if you oppose fracking you must be in favour of bird choppers.
Since this is what anti-frackers regularly argue. You may be different, but then I wasn’t talking to you.
“Anti-frackers”? Oh dearie, dearie me…
No logical link between the two halves of your statement; Mumbo Jumbo is referring only to the hypocrisy of suggesting that a fracking site is an eyesore while accepting the very obvious damage done to natural vistas by wind farms. The ‘bird chopping’ aspect of these windmills is something you’ve introduced, irrelevantly.
it silently and stealthily funnels billions of pounds from people who work to people who own windy land and does nothing positive in the process
Who cares about your view? What I want is not to be cold.
Same goes for not shutting down nuclear power plants.
Windmills in the N. Sea
https://notrickszone.com/2022/02/26/messing-with-the-environment-to-fight-climate-change-wind-farms-are-altering-the-north-sea/
Photos like this don’t even begin to show the damage caused by large scale onshore wind projects. Having seen a wind farm under construction in the Highlands I regret not taking pictures, but can report that it involves building 10’s of miles of tracks as wide as a 2 lane road across sensitive peatlands and quarrying 1,000’s of tons of rock to make way for the turbine bases as well as providing a surface for the new tracks. This blasting of rock causes earthquakes (magnitude unknown, but probably as large as any caused by fracking).
Prove it, idiot. Rather than spout green nonsense.
Give us facts around how much economic damage has been done at the fracking operations at Wytch Farm since the late 70s when it was discovered?
Moonbeam .
What you gonna do – preserve a corner of a field or keep people warm? Sacrificing a bit of the countryside is sad, but necessary. Wake up!
Fracking takes place hundreds, if not thousands of metres below the water table.
Kindly explain to everyone how that can possibly affect groundwater?
Shhh. People don’t want to hear the TRUTH do they?
Have you seen what the mining of rare earths for turbines and solar panels does to the environment? And to the people mining them?
Never mind the cost
So they’re on their best behaviour when looking for permission.
Reality: they’ll take huge short term profits , then bugger off and leave the long term costs to be borne by the rest of us.
Note, ImpObs, this is the site UNDER DEVELOPMENT.
Once completed it will have the well head pad usually inside a modest shed and the perimeter of the site will be hedged and landscaped.
But it will produce more energy than square miles of wind turbines or solar subsidy farms. The energy produced will be clean and reliable and the producers (who invest their own money rather than 100% relying on taxpayer’s subsidies) will pay a huge tax rates to the exchequer.
Let Trenchy and his gormless GangGreen chums admit how much the AntiFracking campaign received and still receives from Russia. Even Hilary Clinton admitted that.
Indeed, good points.
or solar and wind farms… who take up vastly more space to generate energy far less efficiently, whilst generating huge profits for those involved, even when they are not working.
No it doesn’t. Keep your ignorance to yourself.
Bollacjs Tenchy
Have you any idea the devastation windmills and the pylons and roads cause to the pristine Scottish landscape
but razing at least 10 times the space, covering it in concrete and sticking windmills in there doesn’t?
It can certainly ruin the water table. If anyone thinks allowing a bunch of corpoate criminals to play Russian Roulette with the water table is a good idea, they need their head reading
Bollocks.
Your version of the “truth” is why old people will be dying this next winter. Instead of eating or heating their home.
Feel good, dolt?
Yes, he does, plummeting living standards is his desired goal
How does that work then? The bore holes are lined imperviously (if they weren’t the hydraulic system could never build up enough pressure to fracture the rocks) and the strata where the fracking takes place are typically 1 to 3 km below the surface, and as I suspect you know the water table is not far down else water wells wouldn’t work.
Another lie, probably watching GangGreen and ŔT too much.
Almost no potable water is extracted from deeper than 100m.
Fracking occurs significantly deeper than 1000m.
There is absolutely zero evidence of any damage to the water table and this is confirmed by the Environment Agency and the British Geological Survey.
The only Russian Roulette is GangGreen taking Russian money to enrich crony capitalists, to impoverish the poorest and most vulnerable and to destroy the economy.
No doubt you are hugging yourself already about the successes of GangGreen and Vladimir Putin.
You might want to ask yourself why the largest country in the world would mobilise against a tin pot scrap of land like the Ukraine.
Mineral or hydrocarbon resources? Not really. The threat of NATO? The Ukraine would likely never achieve membership status, quite apart from breaking agreements already in place.
But then the west is as privy to western propaganda, similar to that brought to bear during covid, as any communist state (which Russia isn’t) has ever been.
We went to war in the middle east over western government’s propaganda and lies.
Have people learned nothing?
Explain how fracking affects the water table?
How about hundreds of acres of land covered in solar panels which work considerably less than 12 hours per day. Nor has anyone invented a means by which they can be economically recycled. Instead they, like wind turbine blades which also can’t be recycled, are simply buried in landfill to leach destructive chemicals for hundreds of years.
The malicious greens moaning and bitching about nuclear waste when a Rubix cube of fissionable material is all that’s required to power an individuals entire lifetime, yet they utterly ignore the tons of material per person required by any other means to power a life.
It’s the idea of socialism on steroids; every socialist voter expects to be part of the privileged elite, come the revolution, yet it’s clear they will never achieve a position in life more than a compliant serf, assuming they evade the gulag.
“An Inconvenient Set of Truths”.
Care to comment about the dumping of raw sewage into ground level water courses? I assume you rely on bottled water ( hahaha , from where ) and a reed bed to recycle the faecal effluvia from both ends?
Or you frack off “as they say”.
Look and learn:
http://exploreshale.psu.edu/
Opposition to fracking is opposition to all energy
Apart from fracking geothermal wells, of course, where the Government and GangGreen are quite relaxed about using 7,000 times as much energy to frack as that permitted by Potato Ed Davey with his 0.5 Richter Scale limit.
No wonder he boasts about killing shale fracking. And gormless Boris won’t change it!
Point one the British Geological survey debunked the myth of major Earthquakes.
Point two as ImpOps picture below, a fracking well takes up a far smaller area of countryside than a vast Windfarm or Solar Farm.
Sorry Tenchy, you’ve fallen for the massive advertising and social media campaigns which the oil and existing energy providers have funded to wind up the emotional green mob (y’ know, those who really don’t want us to be more self-sufficient).
Never apologise for being right.
Or maybe he desires destruction for the sake of destruction. If he does desire that, what would he say differently?
You should see what lithium mines do to it…
So do wind farms and they kill the migratory birds, nit to mention the to s of concrete in the ground and the blade cemeteries needed.
You’d rather this then?
or this?
or even this?
Many of us think for ourselves. Why not have a go?
Unfortunately, thinking for yourself doesn’t necessarily return the correct answer.
I know, it’s just a few Chinese miners, and there’s loads more where they come from.
You were saying? Something about “ruining the countryside”?
Can I join in?
https://www.industryweek.com/technology-and-iiot/article/22026518/lithium-batteries-dirty-secret-manufacturing-them-leaves-massive-carbon-footprint
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/06/21/blood-batteries-climate-advocates-grappling-with-the-gruesome-extractive-price-of-renewable-energy/
https://stopthesethings.com/2017/08/10/wind-industrys-dirty-little-secret-turbines-to-generate-40-million-tonnes-of-toxic-waste/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/26/wind-turbines-generate-mountains-of-waste/
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2022/01/27/local-councils-are-subsidising-ev-charging/#comment-209973
“jimlemaistre PERMALINK
February 3, 2022 4:09 pm
A Lithium-Ion battery in one Electric Car weighs about one thousand pounds, and it is about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside there are 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.
It should concern us all, that those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for . . . just for . . . ONE . . . Electric Car Battery.
Let that one sink in, then added, “I mentioned disease and child labor a moment ago. Here’s why. Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car ?
The embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labor, and the inability to recycled Used Batteries.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which all are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and furthermore the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the Ultimate in embedded costs and Environmental Destruction. Each one weighs 1,688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and they contain 1,300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel (Concrete and Steel = 15 % Global CO2) 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent.
I am trying to do my part with these comments. ‘The Embedded Costs’ of Going Green, but who ever asks ? Thank you for your attention, have a good day, and good luck going Green.
https://www.academia.edu/49057069/Electric_Cars_Burn_31_More_Energy_than_Gas_Cars
And we are paying for this madness so that the ‘Rich’ can signal their virtue while we starve . . .
Today the UK government approved a 54% increase in Electricity pricing . . . The madness of going ‘Green’ coming home to roost . . .”
Thank God for clean renewable energy eh? Dear me, you witless ideologue
Whilst yer actual green turbines massacre wild life, cannot sustain themselves financially and require larges areas of commercial woodlands to be hacked down, shipped across the Atlantic and burnt to provide spinning back up power.
You missed the “S” off your “name”..
Rubbish.
There have been fracking sites in the UK for 50 years, one is in a wildlife site is invisible to visitors and has never caused a problem.
They don’t care if energy becomes unaffordable for the plebs, the plebs still pay their bills regardless, we have no choice.
Someone reported the other day some MP claimed £3500 (from memory) for heating their stables or some such.
They’re stark raving mad, with the confidence we’ll still pay for it, even if we vote the other lot in we still have no choice, they’re on the geeen looney bandwagon all in too
It’s no use voting for the other lot. Labour and Conservative are two cheeks of the same arse. They’ll all have us burning £50 notes to stay warm.
Yes Tom, No matter who you vote for the bloody government gets in
“They’ll all have us burning £50 notes to stay warm.”
This.
The British government could have clamped all Russian state money in the City by now. They haven’t.
The Russian state is a “sovereign borrower”. That means its debt is very valuable to its holders. Interfere with its ability to keep up its payments on that debt, and to be considered a reliable borrower, and those holders may become obliged to write off some of their assets. You all know what happens next.
The Abramovich story is also interesting. Instructions to journalists:
Money can buy anything if you are rich enough.
Here you go, Tom, hold your hands to the screen…
Thanks!
It they get their way then the Russian will provide us with life-long heating, and we will reciprocate. Unfrotunately life at that time will be measured in milliseconds at best, but the heat will become unbearable quicker.
we need to put a stop to this:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17330995/mps-charge-you-3500-energy-bills-second-homes/
Our old mate ‘Honest’ Nadhim:
“Millionaire Conservative MP Nadhim Zahawi claimed for electricity bills at his stables”
“The politician, who claimed almost £6,000 in just one year for energy bills, revealed power for the mobile home and stables was linked to his house.”
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/millionaire-conservative-mp-nadhim-zahawi-2715379
thks for that, I knew they were ripping us off, I got the two ammounts in the headlines confused
Romania has been struggling with energy prices for years. It has one of the highest energy price compared to median income. All this despite having extensive reserves of natural gas and oil. Why? Because the EU does not allow Romania to mine gas and sell it internally at low cost. They are forcing Romania to sell their own gas to their own people at European prices, despite the median income being far below the European average. But it’s ok, because Germany sold Romania its old, beat up wind turbines. And I have it from good authority that, despite the absolute massive investment in wind power, those turbines cannot be brought online because the wind is not consistent enough.
That’s the EU for you, when are people going to realise the EU is not your best friend!
Mmmmm, seem to remember a similar EU scam involving agriculture
dumpingproducts to Africa whilst maintaining high tariffs on certain African exports to the EU…?Covid and Climate the two dominant religions of our time.
I think only two MP’s voted against net zero.
Labelling Russia ‘unfriendly’ doesn’t help. The country has always wanted to be friends with us but the criminal Yanks have always made sure that it didn’t happen.
Prove it
Spot on! The more I learn the more I am appalled at the British government’s handling of this. We prove we are aptly named as being America’s poodle and the ridiculous thing about this is they despise us anyway! I’ve always thought the claim of America being our best buddy was a lie, we were useful ‘tools’ that’s all.
Peter Hitchens agrees with you :https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-10555573/PETER-HITCHENS-West-acts-tough-Russia-just-feeble-stand-China.htm
I think the government would rather we starve or freeze to death.
“The invasion of Ukraine has thrown into dramatic relief the danger of relying on foreign, unfriendly countries for the vital energy needed to run a modern industrial state. “
Quite the contrary. The Ukraine situation is absolutely zero to do with energy dependence and everything to do with NATO expansion.
In fact, if the US had been dependent upon Russia as the Europeans are, then they would never have chosen to wage a campaign of aggression against that country and certainly would never have committed in 2008 – against the explicit warnings of Germany – to pushing NATO further east into the Ukraine and Georgia. This is the second international war that has exploded as a direct result of that policy (the previous one being in Georgia).
They might even have been adult enough to woo Russia as the natural ally against rising China that it ought to have been, instead of forcing them into each other’s arms
There are plenty of good arguments against the stupid green panic energy policies of US sphere countries, without resorting to pandering to infantile warmongering propaganda tropes. There’s more than enough of the latter around in our mainstream media at the moment. “Evil Russian baddies! Boo! Hiss!”
Yes, it’s a joke.
And nobody has become dependent on China for anything, eh?
I am not pro-Russia (nor against). I do think the US just wants to crush the life from them. China are scary, but the US are the most scary I think. Paranoid, gung-ho, trigger-happy Defenders of Democracy.
The level of hypocricy and whiter-than-white truly sickens me. All the US cares about is power, and it will associate with whoever and do whatever without hesitation.
It amused me to hear that the West is going to ban selling semiconductors to Russia. In my experience most of them emanate from the East.
Of course. Russia is a true danger to to western woke culture. They are resolutely anti-diversity, and believe in the roles for the sexes that were mainstream in the West until recently. To be clear they see separate and distinct roles for men and women and value each for different reasons.
As indeed do I. Russia is also a Christian country, something we cannot claim to be anymore.
This does not mean what some of those in the West (but I trust nobody here) used to mean by “separate and distinct roles for men and women”.
UNESCO figures for 2018 show that 41% of Russian researchers were women (compared to 29% worldwide). I use the figures from perhaps the last year when one could have a fair idea of who was classified as a woman.
I’m pretty sure they don’t use terms like “pregnant people” and “chestfeeding”. I suspect those backward people think that’s just for women.
Son went to Moscow with a vegan friend recently. The friend made a date on Tinder with a Russian girl. When she turned up at the restaurant to meet him, my son tells me she immediately lost interest in him when he started ordering vegan food. From son’s Russian girlfriend she assured him that most Russian girls see woke Britons and vegans as gay.
I have it on very good authority that the Russian people are disgusted the west is surrendering the democratic values they were deprived of for generations and fought so hard to re-establish.
so am I. It’s criminal to see liberties being handed over without a fight and those of us who want to keep them feel totally helpless.
On Putin, someone needs to put lead between his ears and fast before we’re all dead.
And instead of talking via diplomatic channels ( as JFK did for the benefit of mankind) , one party decides to point and fire offensive weapons at the population of a country who wants to join a mutual defensive organisation. You and the rest of the deluded folks here today are fast becoming the “useful idiots” of a serial murderer guilty of using bio weapons; and a murderer who cannot be voted out via “free elections” or has that escaped notice too?
“And instead of talking via diplomatic channels“
The Russians have been talking for decades, without any indication of compromise or backing off from the US.
Eventually, it appears they decided the only course left to them was to do what the US and UK did in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya – wage an illegal war of choice to achieve their policy goals.
Pretending there’s some kind of moral light between Russia and the US on the use of war as a tool of policy is fatuous and dishonest, in the light of direct experience in the past quarter century.
“You and the rest of the deluded folks here today are fast becoming the “useful idiots” of a serial murderer guilty of using bio weapons”
If you still believe the comical nonsense about those “bio weapon attacks” then you are every bit as gullible as the average mask-wearing lockdowner.
Did it never occur to you that you were being lied to in much the same way you were lied to over covid?
“ and a murderer who cannot be voted out via “free elections” or has that escaped notice too?”
Free elections!?
What the heck makes you think Russia is any less “democratic” than here? There hasn’t been a party worth voting for here for a decade, and setting up a party with opinions contrary to the elite Official Truth would be flat illegal.
Stunning piece of footage here:
Illuminati Council Of Foreign Relations 2015 Reveal Ukraine Plan
https://www.bitchute.com/video/4x0jpl7GCzBn/
I was thinking that those who see themselves as the rulers of the world see that part of the world as a pivotal area in terms of who is truly dominating, who is in power. If the idea that there is a deliberate collapsing of the West going on is correct – and there is plenty of evidence for this – that the kakistocracy are moving their security to the East ie Russia and China, so they are deliberately weakening the West (would you like more woke with your convid gene therapy bioweapon spiked military sir) so that this transition can take place, seizing power in Ukraine away from the West and the EU and US sphere makes sense from that perspective.
Well, thanks for introducing me to a new word, kakistocracy (government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state, for those who like me didn’t know). How apt.
Fascinating lady on War Room today, ex American Intelligence Putin specialist, describing how Russia has been flooding Western eco pressure groups with cash.
Why?
To kill off local gas/coal/oil production.
Result?
Germany sources 40% of its gas from Russia; Italy 50%; etc, so would be relectant to exact sanctions in the event of a conflict.
She explained how Putin plays the long game.
Our leaders, inc Johnson, have been taken for fools.
https://rumble.com/vvxxrc-author-rebekah-koffler-in-studio-talks-ukraine-russia-and-putins-playbook.html
The only fool is you for forwarding the rantings of this deranged woman. Absolutely no evidence to support anything she garbled on about.
No evidence?
Even Hilary Clinton admitted the Russian money behind the Anti frack and Anti pipeline campaigns.
If you want a fool to look at, go fetch a mirror.
Hilary Clinton says blah blah. Seriously she is just another politician I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw her and the same goes for her husband too. Its worrying you think what she says is true.
Matt Ridley has made the same observation.
Putin has benefited hugely from opposition to fracking
That’s down to the West’s corrupt green ideology, nothing to do with Russia.
I thoroughly recommend Christopher Andrew’s “Secret Service” for a run through the extent of the Russian penetration of the west from the late 1800’s onwards; bone up on Philby, Burgess, MacLean, Hollis, Blunt, Blake…
Ever heard of “The Great Game”?
Gosh, to think the Russians, needing hard foreign currency to pay for their military spending, would stoop so low as to fund green movements in countries, who sign up for their gas exports, because the rouble is not the currency of choice for suppliers of essential imports….heaven forfend.
Sounds about right to me. Let’s face it Biden’s idea of a long game is getting through the current press statement.
“Our leaders, inc Johnson, have been taken for fools.”
They haven’t done well on that score recently, have they?
German chancellor Olaf Scholz says Germany will send 1000 anti-tank weapons and 500 Stinger (anti-aircraft) missiles to Ukraine.
Germany has no border with the Ukraine. I doubt the plan is to send them by sea past Gibraltar and through the Straits of Marmara. At least one other country (looking at you, Poland) will have to allow them to transit through its airspace or across its land territory.
Will Russia allow these to arrive?
What happens when one of the Stingers brings down a Russian plane?
No Russian armoured column is on its way to Lviv as far as I am aware. That’s a situation that may change rapidly. In any case this supply of weapons may be considered a target before it even leaves Germany.
In other news, the US is denying it assisted a Ukrainian naval operation.
It has been obvious for several years now that both Jens “Loony Steinerite” Stoltenberg (NATO) and Ursula von der Leyen (former German defence minister and now president of the EU Commission) want war with Russia – they want WW3. Both of them must be in seventh heaven right now.
They are deliberately putting NATO assets in the firing line so as to trigger a NATO response. They have been plotting and planning this moment for years. This is their best chance of reducing Russia to yet another client state.
Agreed that that’s what they’re doing, but not that making Russia their client is their aim. That would require another Operation Barbarossa but successful this time. NATO-Russia war would turn nuclear within a fortnight.
The MSM in Britain are saying Russia has a lung-attacking weapon. CS gas and tear gas also attack the lungs, but the narrative now is kinda combining a view of conventional with a view of chemical and in the context of Covid also biological.
The “lab leak” hypothesis may soon morph into something very different. “How naive we were,” etc.
The US has been operating ~15 DTRA bioweapons research labs in Ukraine. This is part of a massive end run around the 1972 bioweapons resarch convention. If anything useful had been developed there, the US will have taken it to safety. It sounds like the MSM is being primed for a false flag event implicating Russia.
Seriously I pray Russia can withstand this onslaught, it sickens me the lengths the West will go to for monetary gain.
The next thing is blocking access to SWIFT and sanctioning the Russian Central Bank. Russia and China already have SWIFT alternatives, so all the sanctions will do is strengthen the alternatives.
All western countries are complicit in this war, fighting it frim the safety of their own homes without their blood being spilt.
I suspect fracking operations will create real jobs in the UK rather than mainly illusory green jobs which, in the main, only benefit the overseas manufacturers of the windmills and solar panels.
Seriously, you quote Harrabin?
This place has lost the plot.
Toby, Will, you’re fucked.
They quote himand refute his claims.
2 covid back tracking articles and a Lord Sumption one on freedom and law reform, front and centre on the Telegraph this evening, sneaking in a few reverse ferrets while everyone is distracted by the Russian squirrel. More and more are coming every day. Personally I cannot wait for the hedge funds and legal challenges to bankrupt Pfizer.
The BBC and its stooges just cannot be believed.
Gummer, who I had the misfortune to encounter over fishing matters in Suffolk, managed to find time in between his ridiculous MP expense claims, to keep the cash rolling in from his “green” business interests. A clearer conflict of interest would be difficult to find.
Yes frack if done safely, also nuclear. More will die in economic collapse but that’s the plan of some.
So if we frack for the gas to heat our miserably built, draughty, uninsulated, gas-guzzling homes, there’ll be so many earthquakes that our our miserably built … homes will fall down and be replaced with super-insulated passive houses that can be heated by a single candle and we won’t need the fracked gas …
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/More-earthquakes-in-Permian-Basin-could-shake-up-16774068.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Insight-The-cost-of-dealing-with-Permian-16811840.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Editorial-Permian-earthquakes-show-the-risks-of-16785983.php?cmpid=gsa-chron-result
There’s enough blood for everybody, but Vlad has the gas that the cold west so desperately needs. What if he turns it off? Will the buffoon send in the troops? I’m sure Blair would have… but then, he’s a blood-thirsty maniac.
Good to see Bob is still telling it like it is.
Gas was supplied without issue during the worst of the Cold War. If Europe orders and pays for the gas, it will be supplied, spot or long term contract as the buyer wishes. If it does not order or pay for gas deliveries, it will not be delivered.
If Europe doesn’t want to buy gas from Russia, there are other suppliers (not so cheap, but that’s the customer’s choice). Russia can readily sell gas and oil elsewhere – India has signed a rupee-deminated contract, China a massive contract (yuan ?). Currency swaps are the way it is being done. No need to buy USD for energy anymore.
And which Banks will fund the SWAPs….
It should but it won’t, the goal of Net Zero and Environmentalism is the abolition of energy.
No because the British government is corrupt, they all have their Snouts deep into the Green trough.
Green as in greenbacks?
In WW2 we fought battles in the sands of the Middle East because we and the Germans both needed oil. But we didn’t learn the lesson that we needed secure energy supplies.
In the 1970s we were held to ransom by OPEC and had serious fuel shortages.
But we didn’t learn the lesson that we needed secure energy supplies.
This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by oil and gas fields. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal, oil and gas at the same time.
“This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by oil and gas fields”
As a geologist who worked for years in the hydrocarbon exploiting industry, you are only correct is you are speaking from the early 1800s.
Most of the easily exploited oil gas and coal has been, as Blackadder commented “found, nicked, and spent”.
I would love it if was possible to have it all again, but you are living in the land of Boris “I’ll have my cake and eat it” Johnson.
I was paraphrasing Aneurin Bevan.
A bit of dramatic licence rather than a geology lesson.
The Afrika Korps was there to stop the Italians losing, not because the Germans thought that was the route to Middle Eastern oil.
Yes, I was being simplistic.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/How-Oil-Defeated-The-Nazis.html
Oil fields around the Caspian Sea were one of their primary targets during Operation Barbarossa. They didn’t get that far.
I’m still reeling from seeing that the term “anti-frackers” is now apparently a thing, after reading the comments here.
I really do not know if Russia is unfriendly towards us. So far I have seen no evidence of them stopping our trade or taking our money under false pretences or sending unwanted migrants across our channel. If anything I believe France is our enemy as they have always been vindictive towards us. I also think Ireland has an underlying dislike of us, not to mention Scotland. Whoops, these are the historical countries we have bailed out financially and have always had battles with……..
We have done everything we can to antagonise Russia whilst following America around like its lapdog.
We have been part of the EU for the last 40 years, or hadn’t you noticed.
If we are anyone’s lapdog it would be Germany’s.
Somewhat OT but just reading Dan Hannan’s piece in the DT about Ukraine, i was struck by his observation that Zelensky has stayed at his post in the face of Russian invaders. Compare and contrast the performance of Trudeau in the face of peaceful if angry truckers…
Nope. Zelensky ordered the distribution of ~20,000 AKs to anybody and everybody, with a couple og magazines of ammunition, then high tailed it off to Lviv into the safe loving arms of the US.
Oh, well hannan has got it wrong then!
Hannan often gets it wrong.
I heard Biden offered to get him out, but Zelensky declined.
Don’t expect our British government to do what is right for its people. If there is nothing in it for them personally, they are not interested! They don’t care about the poor or the elderly, they prefer to throw money at foreign countries, and getting us involved in wars we cannot afford.
“These renewables, however, require enormous subsidies to be viable….”
A product which requires enormous subsidies and people have to be forced to buy through coercion, punitive taxes and in due course bans on the cheaper and more efficient alternatives, ISN’T viable.
But it is incredibly lucrative for insiders.
I am against fracking for the following reasons…
If our so-called leaders had any genuine interest in the needs of the population, we would have 100% non-fossil fuel power generation, serious investment in nuclear fusion research and the creation of a public transport network that makes car ownership optional for the majority.
Fresh water isn’t pumped into the ground. It is a proprietary ‘secret sauce’ of chemicals intended to facilitate hydraulic fracturing relatively local to the injection well.
Fracking is an actual ‘pump and dump’ scheme. Based on evidence from the US, a given fracture well site has an economic lifetime of 3 – 5 years before the costs of extraction become a significant overhead. The US system is financed through ‘financial engineering’ leaving it highly susceptible to changes in gas price. The expired wells are sold on cheaply to suckers and the frackers move on to the next well site.
“It is a proprietary ‘secret sauce’”
Known as sand and a tiny fraction of lubricants.
Roughly speaking, water and sand are injected into shale causing millimetre wide cracks. The sand holds the cracks open allowing gas to filter through it.
The lubricants are for the drill bits, common in any drilling operation.
Fresh water is mixed with chemicals and sand and pumped into the ground. Something like 4 million gallons per well (which isn’t that much on the scale of things). Problem is where does all that chemical slush go afterwards?