Dirty Fuels

The numbers are getting scarier.

Today's Trump Scam Explained

The Deal Is Not A Deal

You know it's a lie because it's something Trump said.

Mr Global

The triple whammy:

• The Strait of Hormuz is closed
• The Bab el-Mandeb is closed
• Russia's main oil hub at Novorossiysk is closed

Some very important arteries of world trade - particularly, but not limited to, oil - are being strangled.

The ships can make it through the Suez Canal, but the canal is too shallow to accommodate the big ones, so they have to go half full or the shippers have to down size their boats.

Delivery to Asian customers will take an extra 40 days, and the shippers are sending half the volume to customers who aren't lowering their demand.

Again:

How is this not being leveraged by Democrats to push harder for a conversion away from The Dirty Fuels Cartel?

It's Coming

We've been drilling for oil for 160 years, and it's never been enough.

If Only

I've been wondering why I haven't heard much about how Trump's fuckup in Iran could be making for some very good reasons to push harder for wind and solar.

I asked Google's AI where we'd be if we'd stuck with renewables when we had the chance.

AI Overview

If the U.S. had kept its 1970s push for wind and solar, the nation could have "solved" its carbon footprint decades ago. America would have gained immense geopolitical power by ending reliance on foreign oil, and electricity would likely be a cheap, stable utility today.

In the 1970s, the U.S. faced severe oil shortages and gas lines. President Jimmy Carter treated this crisis like a war. He created renewable tax breaks, expanded early green energy research, and installed White House solar panels.

If the US had stayed on that path:

1. A different political and economic reality

In the 1980s, oil prices dropped. The U.S. shifted back to fossil fuels, and President Ronald Reagan removed the White House solar panels. If the US had stayed with wind and solar, it would have spent the last 50 years mastering clean tech instead of fighting endless wars to protect global oil routes. Everyday citizens would have been insulated from global gas price spikes.

2. Global leadership in green technology

During the 1970s, the U.S. led the world in developing early solar technology and modern wind power. When the U.S. cut funding in the 1980s, countries like Germany and Japan took American research and ran with it. If the U.S. had stayed the course, American companies would likely control the multi-trillion-dollar global green energy market today.

3. The climate crisis avoided

Today, about $1.4 trillion is spent globally each year on fossil fuel subsidies. If the U.S. had converted to wind and solar in the 1970s, greenhouse gas emissions would have plummeted decades ago. We would not face today's intense climate anxiety, and the aging US electric grid would have been modernized long ago.

Mr Global

A word about "we" being all manly macho, exporting all that oil.

Here It Comes

Would it be rude to mention the fact that we wouldn't be in this fucked up mess if we'd followed Jimmy Carter's lead 50 fuckin' years ago, and started to detach ourselves from the Dirty Fuels Cartel?

While it's not good now, it's not quite time to jump up and down in a total panic. But be advised - it could get really really really fuckin' bad in big fuckin' hurry.

Am I cussing too much? No, I am not.

Oil industry warns Trump administration of price spikes within weeks

Industry executives said the loss of oil through the Strait of Hormuz is draining petroleum inventories to dangerously low levels.

The oil industry is warning the Trump administration that a Hormuz-sized hole in the world’s petroleum market is steadily draining inventories to levels that are likely to send global energy prices surging in the next several weeks, according to four executives.

Industry executives have flagged the issue to senior White House officials and Cabinet members in recent weeks as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing dialogue with the U.S. energy industry, the people said. The warnings came as recently as late last month as data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources began showing that fuel makers were increasingly relying on oil and fuel from their storage tanks to replace products no longer arriving from the Middle East.

“We’re at dangerously low levels already,” said one industry executive who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations with the administration. “We have shared those concerns at the highest levels of government about what’s coming in mid-to-late June. … I hope they are paying attention to inventories right now. You’re hitting tank bottom.”

Iran has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz since the U.S. and Israel launched military strikes three months ago, kicking off what has become the biggest disruption in crude oil flows ever. Countries are drawing down supplies in their oil and fuel storage tanks to make up for the shortage of supply coming from the Middle East, but inventories are now running dangerously low and some companies and market analysts are sounding the alarm that a price spike could come later this month.

Some of the conversations have been general warnings while others have focused on tight inventories of specific fuel types in particular locations, such as jet fuel on the West Coast, a second person involved in the conversations said.

A White House official denied that any senior members of staff have been warned privately by the industry about inventories. “Politico’s anonymous sources are wrong,” the official said.

An Energy Department official said that while the agency remains in regular dialogue with energy industry leaders, there have been “no such discussions” about inventories.

Executives from Exxon Mobil, Chevron and other oil companies are also raising the alarm publicly, warning last week that fuel prices are poised to jump if inventory levels continue their rapid decline. The U.S. average gasoline price was $4.26 a gallon Wednesday, according to AAA, $1.28 a gallon higher than before the war started, off the levels near $4.50 reached a few weeks ago.

Neil Chapman, Exxon’s senior vice president, told an investor conference last week that dated Brent — the benchmark for physical crude oil prices — could hit $150 or $160 a barrel soon in that scenario.

“You can debate whether that’s going to hit those really low levels in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see prices shoot up,” Chapman said.

“The administration has already been told that,” a second oil company executive told POLITICO of Chapman’s statement. The recent public pronouncements from industry executives are “a message for the consumer,” this person continued. “Don’t think that an open strait is going to mean your July 4 gasoline bill isn’t going to be higher than what it is today. It’s going to be.”

The White House is closely watching the oil and fuel supply levels, said another person who is in touch with the administration on energy policy and who was granted anonymity to describe private conversations.

U.S. crude stocks held by companies fell by 8 million barrels last week, the eighth straight weekly decrease, and are now 3 percent below the five-year average, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Wednesday. The government also released 8 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve last week, bringing it near the low hit in July 2023 after the Biden administration tapped the supply in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The Trump administration has pointed to record-high U.S. oil production — along with new supplies unlocked in Venezuela and through the Jones Act waiver that allows foreign-flagged ships to make deliveries between U.S. ports — as protecting American motorists from spiking prices. It has promised that the eventual opening of the Strait of Hormuz would bring costs back to levels seen in February — or lower.

“President Trump and his energy team anticipated short-term market disruptions, communicated them openly to the American people, and implemented an aggressive plan to mitigate any impacts,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in a statement. “President Trump will never allow Iran to possess a nuclear weapon, and he will continue to advance America’s core national security interests.”

The United States “is in an excellent position. We’re in a position of strength” when it comes to Iran, White House National Energy Dominance Council Executive Director Jarrod Agen said during a webinar with consulting firm Widehall on Wednesday. “We do not have a supply problem, obviously.”

Rich Goldberg, former senior counselor for the National Energy Dominance Council, said the White House is “aware that there is a discussion” about the inventories issue and should be examining closely whether global stocks can outlast Iran’s ability to cope with the ongoing U.S. blockade on its oil exports.

“The whole strategy rides on whose timeline is longer, who has a longer runway, and so therefore, if I were in the White House, I’d be studying this very closely,” said Goldberg, who is now a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Goldberg added that some industry officials disagree that a price shock is imminent and expect markets will be able to adapt through a combination of alternative supplies and reduced demand. “I don’t personally know where the White House comes out on it,” he said.

Many market analysts have expressed surprise that oil prices have not reached even higher levels because of the three-month shipping disruption. Early in the conflict, some forecasters predicted prices would go as high as $200 a barrel given that 20 percent of global oil flows through Hormuz. Iran’s attacks on ships in Hormuz has slowed that flow to a trickle, although some crude is being diverted out of the region using pipelines.

“What’s been remarkable is that prices have not moved higher so far, and a big reason for that is the inventory cushion around the world,” said Jim Burkhard, vice president and global head of crude oil research at S&P Global Energy. “But that can’t go on forever.”

The stoppage has caused other impacts in the U.S. markets: Not only have global crude prices gone up as supply from the Middle East dries up, but countries are also increasingly buying American oil and fuel to make up for the loss.

Gasoline stocks are 5 percent lower than the five-year average, and diesel and jet fuel are 3 percent under that mark, according to EIA data. Overall, total U.S. commercial petroleum inventories — including crude oil and finished fuel — are down 52 million barrels from when the war began.

The U.S. SPR release is part of a 400-million barrel effort by members of the International Energy Agency to prevent prices from skyrocketing.

Even with those barrels coming into the market, global petroleum inventories have been falling by roughly 5.8 million barrels a day since the war began, according to Burkhard.

Worldwide stocks now hold around 7.5 billion barrels — a decline of about 500 million barrels from the start of the war. But most of that oil already has buyers and is not being held in reserve, Burkhard said, and inventories in some regions may be hitting or soon to hit operational minimums, he said.

“I’ve never seen inventory numbers fall so much so quickly,” he said. “It is stunning.”

The oil markets have been sensitive to comments from President Donald Trump and retreated last week after he said that a peace deal with Tehran was near that would return shipping traffic to prewar levels. But his remarks Wednesday that the U.S. blockade of the Hormuz could last until Labor Day have raised questions about whether oil tanker traffic out of the Middle East will approach anything near normal levels this summer.

Drained storage tanks are an “iceberg under the water,” Helima Croft, global head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, said during a Council on Foreign Relations event Wednesday.

“You may not see immediately on the horizon the actual economic challenges that will be coming, because you look at the flat price and you say, ‘OK, we can muddle through this and Iran will come to terms eventually,’” Croft said. “But if we get in a situation where we have this strait effectively closed, or the strait status quo, and we’re sitting in September or October, then you’re going to be looking at industrial shortages.”

It's Not Getting Better

Momentary "relief" is not what it seems.

It'll get better after it gets a whole lot worse. We've prob'ly got another year or two of what could be some really bad shit.

The battlefield is still not about missiles and bombs.

Mr Global

This is not a government - it's a trading desk with cruise missiles.

Mr Global

The law of Supply-n-Demand is a harsh mistress.

The Oil

The Stoopid-Fuck-in-Chief continues to fuck up his fuckup - because he's too much of a fuckup to know what a fuckup he is.

Dunning-Kruger is a real thing.

A Reminder

In 1979, Jimmy Carter had solar panels installed on the roof of the White House.

In 1986, Ronald Reagan had them removed.

If we'd listened to Carter, and continued to follow his lead, we wouldn't have to worry about the Strait of Hormuz.

Republicans, on behalf of The Dirty Fuels Cartel, have been fucking us over for a very long time.

Here's Comes Trouble?

It takes about 6 weeks for an oil tanker to get from the Strait of Hormuz to a western port city.

It's been 38 days - ie: 5 weeks and 3 days - since Trump started his stupid little war with Iran on  Feb 28, which of course, was when the last tanker could've passed through the strait.

This Friday - Apr 10 - may well be the day we see the last of the middle east oil for a while.

If Trump has a sudden bout of Un-Crazy and calls the whole thing off right now, and the Iranians forget it ever happened, and the whole world lets us off the hook, we're still probably royally fucked for the next couple of months.

Since Trump is very likely never to do the smart thing, nothing good is bound to happen,

So file that under:

On the other hand:

I don't know if Mr Global is on point here - seems a little counterintuitive - but he's saying we shouldn't see a major shortage of gasoline in USAmerica Inc.

Trump's stupid little war in Iran is starting to cause - and will continue to cause - some big problems in the overall economy.

So no - we're not safe and secure. We have to be part of the world we live in. We are all interdependent economically, and we're all going to be effected no matter what - good or bad.

IT COULD GET BAD

WE'LL SEE

IT COULD BE ALRIGHT

WE'LL SEE

Stepping On Our Dicks

Sure glad our greatly awesome and amazingly tremendous president had the foresight to kill all the incentives and subsidies for wind and solar so our precious Dirty Fuels Cartel can stay profitable while the rest of us nobly fight to the death over for the last package of low carb tortillas.

I don't remember oil selling at $3 a barrel when I was in my 20s.

Consider my gast thoroughly flabbered.

Today's Belle

Trump got a billion dollars - or is in the process of getting a billion dollars - from the Dirty Fuels Cartel, and he's doing everything necessary to turn the US into New Russia.

What's Coming

I haven't been back in Colorado for that long - about 18 months - so I haven't seen an oil bust like we had in the late 70s - early 80s. I don't know that was one in the 35 years I was in Virginia.

But if history is any guide at all, and if Trump is as reckless and ignorant as we've come to know him to be, then we could see some pretty bad times come about summer.

About The Oil

Republicans like to say Biden has completely fucked up the petroleum markets, and he's so anti-oil that he's crippled our ability to be a good producer of Dirty Fuels.

That's a big fat lie.

Yes, we hit Net Exporter status under Trump, but these things don't happen overnight, so the drive towards that goal had to have started earlier - like under Obama maybe(?)

And it's not like Biden couldn't have fucked it up if he'd wanted to - but apparently, he didn't want to.

As much as I hate the Dirty Fuels Cartel, and I wish we were doing smarter things, I have to say Biden's actually doing what Republicans are always carping about, which means they're being true to form - ie: they're a buncha lyin' sacks of shit.

So Trump's "drill baby drill" is bullshit (surprise surprise), cuz that's kinda what we've been doing this whole time. And it lends a little more credence to the already fairly well documented belief that Trump is willing to turn the US into a Russia-style hellscape in return for the billion dollar "donation" he's asked the Dirty Fuels Cartel to give him. 

(ed note: It took me a minute to get my brain to make the distinction that 'Crude Oil' is not the same as 'Petroleum Products')

Oil and petroleum products explained

The United States became a total petroleum net exporter in 2020

In 2020, the United States became a net exporter of petroleum for the first time since at least 1949. In 2022, total petroleum exports were about 9.52 million barrels per day (b/d) and total petroleum imports were about 8.33 million b/d, making the United States an annual net total petroleum exporter for the third year in a row. Total petroleum net exports were about 1.19 million b/d in 2022. Also in 2022, the United States produced about 20.08 million b/d of petroleum and consumed about 20.01 million b/d. Although U.S. annual total petroleum exports were greater than total petroleum imports in 2020, 2021, and 2022, the United States still imported some crude oil and petroleum products from other countries to help to supply domestic demand for petroleum and to supply international markets.

The United States remained a net crude oil importer in 2022, importing about 6.28 million b/d of crude oil and exporting about 3.58 million b/d. Some of the crude oil that the U.S. imports is refined by U.S. refineries into petroleum products—such as gasoline, heating oil, diesel fuel, and jet fuel—that the U.S. later exports. Also, some of imported petroleum may be stored and later exported.

U.S. petroleum imports peaked in 2005

After generally increasing every year from 1954 through 2005, U.S. gross and net total petroleum imports peaked in 2005. Since 2005, increased domestic petroleum production and increased petroleum exports have helped to reduce annual total petroleum net imports.

Shares of U.S. petroleum imports from OPEC and Persian Gulf countries have declined, and the share of imports from Canada has increased

U.S. petroleum imports rose sharply in the 1970s, especially from members of OPEC. In 1977, when the United States exported relatively small amounts of petroleum, OPEC nations were the source of 70% of U.S. total petroleum imports and the source of 85% of U.S. crude oil imports.

Since 1977, the percentage shares of U.S. total petroleum and crude oil imports from OPEC countries have generally declined. Saudi Arabia, the largest OPEC petroleum exporter to the United States, was the source of 7% of U.S. total petroleum imports and 7% of U.S. crude oil imports. Saudi Arabia is also the greatest source of U.S. petroleum imports from Persian Gulf countries. About 12% of U.S. total petroleum imports and 12% of U.S. crude oil imports were from Persian Gulf countries in 2022.

Petroleum imports from Canada have increased significantly since the 1990s, and Canada is now the largest single source of U.S. total petroleum and crude oil imports. In 2022, Canada was the source of 52% of U.S. gross total petroleum imports and 60% of gross crude oil imports.

Most U.S. total petroleum exports are petroleum liquids and refined petroleum products

Because of logistical, regulatory, and quality considerations, exporting some petroleum is the most economical way to meet the market's needs. For example, refiners in the U.S. Gulf Coast region frequently find that it makes economic sense to export some of their gasoline to Mexico rather than shipping it to the U.S. East Coast because lower-cost gasoline imports from Europe may be available to the East Coast.

Petroleum liquids include hydrocarbon gas liquids (HGLs). HGL exports, mainly propane, have increased substantially since 2008, and in 2022, were about 25% of total U.S. total petroleum gross exports.

Some companies purchase imported crude oil and gasoline

Although we cannot identify which companies sell imported gasoline or gasoline refined from imported oil, we publish data on the companies that import petroleum into the United States. A company that imports crude oil does not necessarily use those imports to produce the gasoline sold as that company's brand of gasoline. Gasoline from different refineries and import terminals is often combined when shipped by pipeline. Different companies owning service stations in the same area may be purchasing gasoline at the same bulk terminal, which may or may not include imported gasoline or gasoline refined from imported oil.

Paying Up

Factor this shit in, and it gets real clear we're paying a lot more for gas than we think.

Colorado oil and gas wells can’t fund their own cleanup. Taxpayers may foot the bill

A Carbon Tracker report shows the cost to safely shut down low-producing wells is $3bn more than what they earn

Thousands of oil and gas wells across Colorado cannot generate enough revenue to cover their own cleanup costs, according to a new report. Unless state officials act “simply and quickly”, it says, Coloradans can expect to be on the hook for a $3bn shortfall.

In its report, the thinktank Carbon Tracker found that 27,000 low-producing oil and gas wells in Colorado – more than half the state’s total – will generate, at most, $1bn in revenue. The state’s oil and gas reserves peaked five years ago, with production volumes declining dramatically in all but one region. It will cost $4bn to $5bn to decommission those sites responsibly, the analysts found – meaning the state can expect a cash crunch of at least $3bn.

Unless properly decommissioned, unplugged wells can leak carcinogens and methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But according to Colorado’s energy and carbon management commission (ECMC), the state’s energy regulator, it can cost $110,000 or more to close a single site. Many companies have avoided paying those costs, either by delaying cleanup indefinitely, selling off ageing wells to smaller competitors or simply going out of business. Today, there are at least 120,000 “orphan” wells across the US that lack financially solvent operators, making them instead a problem for government entities to solve.

“The biggest problem here is just the nature of this activity: You make a lot of cash at the beginning, and then you have a big cost at the end,” said Rob Schuwerk, executive director of Carbon Tracker and a co-author of the report. “The way you cover a cost like that is you make people save along the way, and this is not done now.”

In 2022, Colorado rolled out a much-lauded approach to ensuring fossil fuel companies foot the cleanup bill. The regulations, which Colorado governor, Jared Polis, last year called “an example the nation can follow”, included major changes to the state’s bonding requirements – the system of financial assurance it uses to make it harder for operators to walk away from polluting wells.

Yet a review of public financial documents by DeSmog and the Guardian showed that Colorado’s modest reforms failed to keep pace with the fossil fuel industry’s ballooning liabilities.

“Even under the new rules, the gap between projected cleanup costs and secured bonding is measured in the billions of dollars,” said Margaret Kran-Annexstein, director of the Sierra Club’s Colorado chapter. “It’s frankly dangerous for Colorado to imply this is the best we can do.”

This dynamic is widespread across the US. In the 15 biggest oil- and gas-producing states, funds on hand for cleanup amount to less than 2% of estimated costs, a recent analysis by ProPublica and Capital & Main found. That Colorado, a state that’s been celebrated for an unusually proactive approach to bonding, still faces such a dramatic shortfall suggests that other state governments have much more to do before the trend can be reversed.

“The bonding isn’t enough. It’s never been enough,” said Kelly Mitchell, a senior analyst at Documented, a watchdog group. “And I think the states typically aren’t being very sober in considering the scale of the problem they’re facing.”

In emailed comments, Megan Castle, ECMC’s community relations supervisor, noted that plugged wells outnumber unplugged wells in Colorado.

Colorado’s financial assurance structure is designed to ensure operators – not the State – remain responsible for the entire lifecycle of the well and site,” she wrote, adding that Colorado’s bonding programs are meant to act as “a backstop” only when companies cannot fulfill that obligation themselves.

But the rules, by law, were designed to ensure that all operators have the ability to meet their plugging obligation fully – and that outcome is still very far away.

‘More loopholes than net’

In 2019, Colorado became one of the first states to try to take comprehensive action on the soaring costs of oil and gas cleanup. That year, lawmakers passed sweeping legislation that set the stage for a broad regulatory overhaul, while also giving ECMC a mandate to protect human health and the environment over industry profits. The commission imposed a fee on producers and set restrictions around transferring wells, an effort to stop bigger companies from selling off low-producing assets to smaller, poorer companies without adequate plugging resources. But the centerpiece was the revised financial assurance requirements, which ECMC officials called “by far the highest” in the nation and “truly a paradigm shift”.

ECMC required every operator to develop a unique, company-specific bonding plan based on well count, production levels and other factors. But the rules’ high degree of flexibility and customization allowed some companies to exclude certain poorly performing wells from their totals or to propose their own bespoke plans.

The result, said Dwayne Purvis, a petroleum engineer and consultant who co-authored the Carbon Tracker report, is that companies generally aren’t bonding enough. The rules are so flexible they end up being “more loopholes than net”, he said.

Rich reserves in a single region – the Denver-Julesburg basin – could generate more than enough to one day close down all of the state’s wells, something that will cost between $6.8bn and $8.5bn, according to Carbon Tracker. But most of those longer-term future profits will be concentrated in the hands of just three publicly traded companies: Chevron, Occidental and Civitas.

Schuwerk called it “a case of haves and have-nots” and said existing ECMC policy doesn’t do much to correct that fundamental imbalance: one group is sitting on billions in profits while the other can’t afford to resolve its billions in liabilities.

At least one operator, KP Kauffman, has already said it can’t pay. Reportedly Colorado’s largest owner of low-producing, so-called “marginal” oil wells, the company in 2021 said it could not afford to pay a $2m fine ECMC levied for environmental violations, and in January it sued regulators in protest of the amount ECMC had ordered it to bond.

The commission has struggled to enforce other bonds, according to an analysis of an ECMC database that tracks daily activity. As of 25 June, 66 companies representing 1,075 wells hadn’t even filed initial paperwork to develop bonding plans. And at least two dozen operators have still not filed financial assurance after their bonding plans were approved. Two of those companies are more than a year late, according to a review of public documents.

The non-compliant companies “have been sent some enforcement letters”, then-ECMC commissioner Karin McGowan said in a public webinar on 22 May. “We are trying to close that out and find out what’s going on with those operators.” She added that this group represented a small overall proportion of the total number of unplugged wells in the state, about 2%.

After initially telling the Colorado Sun it planned to have $820m in bonding in hand by 2044, ECMC now plans to have just $613m in financial assurance on hand in 20 years. Even if every dollar of that amount materializes, it’s still $2.4bn less than the state will need to safely shutter its lowest-producing wells.

A separate analysis by Carbon Tracker, shared exclusively with DeSmog and the Guardian, showed that the state’s wells that face near-term risk of being orphaned represent at least $520m in liabilities. In other words, the amount of assurance ECMC plans on for 20 years from now may barely cover what’s already needed today.

“Negotiation and compromise cost six years of delay with no tangible improvement” in covering budget shortfalls, the Carbon Tracker analysts conclude.

‘Socialize the cost of plugging these wells among operators’

Adam Peltz, a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Fund who praised the ECMC’s rules in 2022, said Colorado is still better off than other states like Pennsylvania and New Mexico, which both have more unplugged wells than Colorado and have struggled to pass more rigorous rules.

He said Colorado will need to look outside the bonding system to solve its massive shortfall.

“You can’t solve this problem with bonds alone, because for so many companies it’s too late,” he said. “They’ll never generate enough money to pay to close their own wells.”

He pointed to another aspect of the rules developed in 2022 as a potential revenue source: the fee on producers. Currently, that program only generates $10m a year, which Peltz conceded is not enough to overcome the billions Colorado faces in oil and gas liabilities, even factoring in the availability of matching federal funds. But, he said, raising that fee significantly could help to redistribute funds from resource-rich Denver-Julesburg to depleted areas in the state.

“Colorado’s innovation was saying, here’s this additional fee, you need to pay to socialize the cost of plugging these wells among all operators,” he said. “I wish every state would do that.”

Ultimately, the Carbon Tracker analysts conclude, policymakers must decide between developing new, rigorous alternatives, or sending the bill to taxpayers by default. That will likely involve compelling resource-rich firms to start setting aside savings from their profits now.

Mitchell, the Documented analyst, recalled advice she first heard from a former colleague at the Department of the Interior: “The best time to collect is on payday.”

“In this period of record profits for the oil and gas industry,” she said, “this is kind of it.”

BTW - Trump has already proposed a deal that trades our lands and our air and our water to the Dirty Fuels Cartel in exchange for their "donation" of $1 billion to his "campaign". Let Trump win, and we're guaranteed to lose big on this.

Dirty Fuels

We have to keep moving away from dirty fuels, but that threatens the plutocrats who are looking for control by commoditizing everything, and then monopolizing it.

You can't sabotage the sun, you can't cut back on the production of wind, and you can't blow up the motion of the water.

If we want energy independence, and the healthier world, and the freedom all of that implies, then we have to stomp the rent-seekers out of existence (figuratively of course - if possible).

How do you expect to hold me hostage to something that you don't have?

The WaPo editors conveniently miss that point.

(pay wall)

Opinion
Undersea pipeline sabotage demands the West prepare for more attacks

Evidence continues to accumulate regarding underwater explosions that blew huge holes in two Russia-to-Germany natural gas pipelines on Sept. 27, and the circumstances all point to what a official NATO statement called “deliberate” sabotage. Sweden and Denmark have officially informed the U.N. Security Council that there were “at least two detonations” using “several hundred kilos” of explosives. This is the kind of capability usually wielded by a state actor, though NATO did not say officially what everyone suspects unofficially: The author of this strike against Europe’s stability and security was Russia. Now, the United States and its allies must meet a new challenge: threats to critical infrastructure, just as they are about to try to get through winter without Russian oil and gas.

Intelligence sources had foreseen this, and, indeed, Ukraine’s government warned of it. Getting the response right begins with understanding why Russian President Vladimir Putin might have chosen to strike where and when he did. In some ways, the pipelines — known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 — made attractive targets precisely because the short-term harm to Europe’s economy would be relatively limited. Neither carried much gas. Russia shut off the flow in Nord Stream 1, ostensibly for routine maintenance, more than a month ago, and the German government canceled Nord Stream 2’s planned opening in response to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Furthermore, the explosions took place in international waters in the Baltic Sea, meaning they cannot be construed as a direct attack on any NATO member, which could have triggered the alliance’s mutual-defense agreement. As for the timing, the attack came on the day a new undersea gas pipeline opened from one NATO member that borders on Russia, Norway, to another, Poland, which the latter had billed as a quantum leap for its energy security.

Put it all together and the attack looks very much like an attempt to take revenge on countries that have backed Ukraine — a signal to them that more expensive energy supply disruptions might be coming — while preserving plausible deniability.

The West has long been aware of Russia’s capacity to disrupt critical energy and communications infrastructure through cyberattacks and disinformation. In April, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, along with the FBI and the National Security Agency, issued a joint warning about the cyberthreat to critical infrastructure such as energy and utilities. And so far, Ukraine and its supporters have kept cyber-damage to a minimum. Sabotage to the gas pipelines shows that Russia might use more prosaic “kinetic” tools — high explosives — to achieve the same purposes. In fact, Norway has suspected the Russian navy damaged its undersea fiber-optic cables earlier this year.

NATO was wise not to assign blame without ironclad proof, while warning it would respond forcefully against known culprits. What must come next, however, is stepped-up air and naval surveillance of the global network of undersea pipelines and cables, more accumulation of energy reserves for the winter and assurance that existing pipeline repair services — they already exist in both the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea — can act rapidly if needed. In protecting critical infrastructure, resilience is an essential part of deterrence.