Explosion at US natural gas plant raises risk of shortages in Europe
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I am sure that people responsible for security of such objects are perfectly aware of the risks, but then the same must be true on the Russian side.
Example from the past: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...
More directly, I find this conspiratorial view hard to believe given the state of monopolization and infrastructure in the US. There is a much more logical explanation that should be eliminated first before this idea is even remotely entertained.
As someone below mentioned.. if "escalation in Ukraine" is a potential outcome, then you should be very certain of what you claim or allow to be claimed.
except, that's not how natural gas plants work. Shouting "Russians!" doesn't pay the repair bills, nor does it make up for the lost revenue in the meantime.
I'm suggesting that a more banal circumstance, lack of maintenance, and then a true accident, is much more likely. My point is that the current political environment makes deflecting blame in this situation a possibility, not that you would stage an accident to intentionally take advantage of it.
How this is a harder idea to accept then "the russians are secretly blowing this up" is amazing to me, particularly on this forum.
[0] https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/russia-appears-to-confuse-the-...
That is, the actual words "signature not legible" instead of what an FSB higher-up probably wanted to be an inscrutable scrawl masquerading as the signature. Some of these FSB guys come straight from a Monty Python sketch.
Meanwhile, during VP Biden family was getting rich off of Ukrainian natural gas with Hunter Biden placed strategically on the board of directors at Burisma. And our DoD and intelligence agencies spent 8 years propping up Ukraine military build up. This is a proxy war and as ill-conceived as any other countless proxy wars U.S. has been dumb enough to get dragged into.
The story is hilarious. It is plausibly true: the Russian frontline has a lot of folk from remote, impoverished provinces: poorly educated, subsistence-farming, expendable farm boys.
One notes that you phrasing reads opposite to the story. It claims Russian troops posing as Ukr terrorists left behind absurd “evidence” based on misunderstanding their commander’s orders.
Well, in this case there is not much to believe. Straight from the horse's mouth:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjF3-4IcvoA
Note this is not the official channel of Ria Novosti, I believe they have been banned, but their ridiculous video is out there in numerous copies. It doesn't matter if it's FSB or some rank-and file soldiers, someone had to approve this ridiculous material to air it worldwide. I know the target is their internal audience, but still.
On the other hand, I have to say I wasn't that surprised. The level of their sophistication at all levels is quite consistent.
Siberia pipeline explosion Thomas C. Reed 1982Because if Russia does that, the west will have to declare war and then this shit is over.
And if you are going to reply anything about nukes, don't. Neither the us or Russia will fire them.
USA pushes Russia back to pre Crimea seizure borders?
Why stop there? Why not go to the Volga? Ukraine reached almost all the way to the river before WWII. Maybe go all the way to the Caspian? Provide some security for Georgia and incidentally get A LOT of oil.
At what point do you suppose Russia abandons its "no nukes" policy in this hypothetical conflict?
As I’m sure we all know, we have made the tragic mistake of connecting a lot of our own infrastructure to the internet: water treatment plants, electrical grid, pipelines, and more. All of which are, naturally, now susceptible to over-the-net attack.
The spetsnaz needn’t do anything: Russian hackers can fuck it all up from the safety of their keyboards.
https://www.wired.com/2004/03/soviets-burned-by-cia-hackers/
https://www.npr.org/2011/05/09/135854490/inside-the-united-s...
For those who don’t believe it, look up the story of sandworm
The Colonial Pipeline supply shock was started by criminal hackers in Russia using ransomware as a service. The company halted service to deal with the computer issue. Then traditional media and social media amplified panic buying.
Russia says they arrested the extortionists. This is the country that brags about "patriotic hackers."
Well the energy transition better be over by October or we're in for an unfathomable crisis here in the old world.
no one knows that -- you think that Exxon and crew are ready to sit down ? They fired their Dutch CEO for trying to make the transition almost twenty years ago IIR
As others in this thread say -- this change reveals the struggles between giants, not the quarrels of simple people in media that happens daily
But if so, they underestimated how much this could cripple economies.
When you've got the elite/ruling-class flying in to climate conferences on dozens of private jets, it's clear who isn't going to modify their lifestyle for the sake of the environment.
EVs will remain luxuries for the relatively wealthy. You need a spacious home with a garage or at least a driveway if you want to charge at home. No luck if you're in an apartment. And there's still no sign of serious efforts to build charging infrastructure on a 'for the masses' scale, despite bans on new ICE cars planned for less than a decade from now.
(If we get to the point of fully-autonomous self-driving taxis being a thing - they'll be owned in bulk by the super-rich and their corporations, not by regular individuals. It'll probably be illegal for a regular citizen to operate such a service, even when the tech is ubiquitous)
It's not enough but there are 2,000 EV charging stations installed in the EU every week. 10,000 would be better but we're not even one order of magnitude off the target.
I forsee a huge bait+switch, with sky-high prices once enough people have invested in an EV and are dependent on the service, and once the charging service providers have built up local monopolies on public charging.
It won't be long before there's heavy taxes on EV charging, to make up for the lost fuel tax revenue. Were're not going to escape governments taking their cut, but if we can prevent a big slice of the revenue from going directly into private pockets, that'd be a good thing.
Some states are adding punitive EV and hybrid registration fees that are equivalent to a fuel tax paid for a 13 MPG truck. They provide the justification that fuel tax needs to be fully replaced, EVs are heavier vehicles causing more road wear, and since EV owners are wealthier on average it's a progressive tax.
If charging station prices skyrocketed, competition would appear overnight with chargers popping up in every available parking space until the prices stabilized at something reasonable enough for sustaining the industry at a FMV.
In theory, anyone can open a new charging station. Also, in theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice - they are not. In the real world, economies of scale and supply chain limitations basically guarantee an outcome of oligopolies coalescing into a silent cartel, each of them happily milking their 5-10% margins without any desire to rock the boat.
Tesla's are rather niche, as a percentage of vehicles on the road it's insignificant. There's not enough demand yet. Tesla drivers are still largely well-heeled early adopters of a luxury brand, of course they're going to be exploited.
The up front investment is higher but the long term costs are lower. If you think in purely purchase money terms you can trick yourself to think a Yugo or Skoda or Yaris or Leaf etc. is cheaper, but I factor in safety and fun, so my calculation differs.
If a big retail chain does a deal with one company to provide a number of chargers in each of its car parks, the contract will likely prohibit the use of other providers to install more charging points.
Who ever gets in first can most likely ensure they control the vast majority of the car parks in the local area - all the major retailers and apartment complexes. They'll probably offer to install chargers for free so long as they get to bill for the power.
Once demand is high enough, they don't need a perfect monopoly, if the dominant company has a plentiful supply of chargers and the cheaper competitor only has a few and there's constant queues for them.
And who will give you a permission to build your own infrastructure to generate electricity on top of your apartment building?
But why? How does it benefit them? The "oil companies lobbying in the US to make car-free lifestyle difficult" conspiracy makes sense because it benefits them, but how does it benefit the elite in europe to "price the working class off the roads, with no alternative beyond walking or cycling"?
As an added bonus, they're all now crammed into tiny apartments that don't require much carbon emission to heat or cool, and where they don't have space for many physical possessions (less consumption of physical resources, more spend/profits on digital/virtual products)
Meanwhile, the elite can have even more massive rural estates, and drive their luxury EVs on a near-empty road network to and from their private jets.
The problem comes when all the forced-city-dwellers want to escape their urban prison at the weekends... With real travel unaffordable if not outright prohibited, I guess that'll be where the 'metaverse' comes in?...
There doesn’t have to be a reason why someone believes in it.
"Just use slow, crowded, unsafe and inefficient public transit" "Don't worry about me, I have to be chauffeured around, security reasons you know!"
"Just give away your guns. You don't need them for protection, you and your kids will be safe with the police" "Me? Oh it's different. See I need theses armed bodyguards with me. For security reasons you know!"
Many European countries have efficient public transit. Some allow firearms. One territory even has mandatory open carry.
Where might you be from?
Public transport is never likely to be effective in more rural areas, though.
Private Jets Set to Escape Higher EU Energy Taxes - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-09/private-j...
"Pricing the working class off the roads and onto the sidewalk" is the sort of thing that Europeans don't really worry about, because their cities are actually built for pedestrian traffic first and cars second. American cities are built for cars first, and pedestrian traffic if you feel like death from being thrown fifty feet in the air is a good way to go. Furthermore, Europeans already pay way more for gas than we do, and this is politically allowable because most people do not drive to work in Europe. EVs are popular in America because it's the easy quick bandaid fix to the fact that making the entire population drive a powered personal vehicle to work is an environmental nightmare. Europe has trains and buses that work.
Totally agree about self-driving taxis; but again, that's an American solution to an American problem for the same reasons I mentioned above.
The real problem for Europe is going to be the coming winter. Forget pricing the poors off the roads, how about pricing the poors out of a warm home? Most of Europe's home heating gas came from Russia pre-war. And while Nordstream was very much a geopolitical bad idea, there weren't very many better options to get cheap gas into the region. In fact, this is exactly what Putin is banking on, and much of Russia's prior acts of aggression can be better understood as "what can we do to ensure we have a monopoly on European gas imports and pipelines?".
It's also a mistake to look at elites and assume they hate their population purely because they are failing them. The underlying problem is not that they are feckless dictators, it's that they have no good options. If, a decade and change ago, Germany had said no to Russian gas in response to, say, the invasion of Georgia; whoever made that decision would have been punished by being voted out for having taken away the cheap gas from people. You'd have yellow-vest protests all over the Union, and then the whole EU would sheepishly walk back to Russia and beg for the gas pipeline to be turned back on. This is the same reason why the EU has found it difficult to actually fully transition to renewables or low-carbon energy[0], and America has found it outright impossible.
In fact, I'm not entirely convinced that we won't see yellow-vests all over France[1] this winter. Petrostates have the uncanny ability to survive and evade sanctions, because their people do not have the luxury of deposing elites that fail them, and resource wealth is highly fungible. If you want to see elites that truly hate their poors, look at any country whose wealth comes out of the ground instead of from the people. In contrast, elites in democratic countries are, well, democratically accountable for any policy they implement that harms the people - even if that policy is otherwise a good idea.
[0] i.e. renewables plus nuclear; though the history of nuclear power in Europe has it's own problems
[1] Insert the appropriate cultural equivalent for your EU member state here
Amsterdam has decent public charging infra. The best (and having biggest quantity) in Europe even. Heck even the Netherlands in its whole on its own accounts for most of the public charging points in Europe. Finding a public charing point is entirely possible in Amsterdam even though still a nuisance sometimes.
But go outside Amsterdam and the situation deteriorates exponentially. Outside Amsterdam I don't count on being able to charge most of the time. I went to a vacation park last month and they had one charging point for the entire park, with no alternative in a radius of 20 km. Outside the Netherlands I don't count on being able to charge at all.
This is a huge failure in foresight.
On the other hand, I would agree it would be better and easier with on-site charging. But it wasn’t bad at all.
That’d be coal. Which Europe produces some of, but was importing from Russia until a few months ago. In general, it is not like Europe has a big pile of practically exploitable-in-reasonable-time fossil fuels that it isn’t using.
The number of installed wind turbines in Germany has stagnated, for example. Output has increased, but that's because of repowering old installations. NIMBY rules and incredibly complex approval procedures prevent growth.
You'd think this would be all the motivation required to rapidly expand renewables. Evidently not, we'll just keep having the same conversation. Whatever.
It's like they plan nothing and just let things grow organically, which causes lots of issues and is inefficient.
These things aren't part of the physical environment, they're political realities. Are they fixable? I doubt it, like I said above, if people haven't got it by now, they never will. In the long run, Germany doesn't matter anyway, that's the good news.
I think this is VERY wrong if you believe in the severeness of (man made) climate change. It does indeed not matter as a share of emissions but if developed countries can not pull it off in a profitable way (or at least without loosing too much prosperity) the no other countries will follow (unless the WEF archieves to assemble their authoritarian super power to force everyone to comply)
Or was it some fly-by-night "hot-backup" contraption tied to the internet?
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Replacing Russia with Qatar or Saudi Arabia (Jemen war?) is hypocritical.
Replacing Russia with the U.S. gives the U.S. too much power over the EU. It can be used as a bargaining chip in unrelated negotiations like privacy rights etc.
The fallacy in this reasoning is that with the money from the sales of gas Russia can - and is continuing to - arm themselves and conquer more land and kill more people. The Qatar is not engaged in killing thousands of people right now - if they were, we would not be buying oil from them, either, for the same reasons we are reducing our dependence on Russian gas.
Russia can always trade with China to have enough money for weapons. Anyway, even with all the Europe trade in the past decades they can barely advance 50 km in Ukraine.
I agree this is a problem, and hopefully its scale will be much lower in a few decades as we are moving away from fossil fuels. But even if we were consuming them rapidly as we are doing now, we are talking ca. 50 years for oil and natural gas. Whereas the danger from Russia is right now.
I agree with this.
Bullshirt
Russia has already explicitly used energy blackmail on EU nations, and is specifically pushing Nordstream, etc. pipelines to create such dependency. Most recently Russia broke it's contracts and demanded payment in Rubles in order to support it's currency after launching a genocidal attack on it's neighbor.
US policy has been explicitly AGAINST even allowing exports for decades, and only relaxed recently in order to support our EU friends.
Russia is an entirely unreliable supplier, the US is reliable.
Take your new troll account and go back to Leningrad, Boris.
Nordstream was built because Ukraine was an unreliable transit nation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Russia%E2%80%93Ukraine_ga...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/jan/03/russia-ukraine...
In Putin's latest speech, he laid bare the goals - to re-enact Peter The Great and restore Russian lands', which basically include anything Russia wants, not merely Ukraine, but Poland, Lithuania, Sweden (which PTG took with the same excuse of it 'being Russian'.
Putin is literally working to rebuild a 19th century empire with 19th century war rules, genocide included.
If you are supporting this in any way, again, you are at best a Useful Idiot (in the Vladimir Lenin sense) or at worst a paid bot/troll.
Stop it
You literally are carrying Putin's water in this discussion.
People doing that are either fooled, or doing it deliberately. I did leave out the option that you could actually support anti-democratic authoritarian governments, because there is no enlightened thought path to that conclusion (& no Hobbes' writings do not get there), leaving us with only the two options, fooled, or trolling for a higher power structure. I'm not really interested in which.
There are many things one could have said here (e.g. PDOs -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi... , regulations on hazardous materials, etc. ) , but privacy rights is not exactly one of them. The EU can and has been squashing those on its own just fine.