Opinion – Thomas L. Friedman: Putin and Bin Salman laugh at the West and cheer for Republicans in the US

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Wars generate surprising alliances. Today we have the United States and its NATO allies supporting the brave Ukrainians fighting to save their country from being torn apart by Vladimir Putin.

And we have Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Bernie Sanders, the progressive caucus of the House and the entire Republican Party all working – intentionally or because they are stupid – to ensure that Putin has more oil revenue than ever before with which to kill Ukrainians. and freeze Europeans in winter until they leave Kiev.

In another dark corner, Putin and the “de facto” Saudi ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, are likely also rooting for rampant energy inflation triggered by the Russian invasion to help Republicans led by Donald Trump regain control of at least the House. in the November elections.

That would be the icing on the cake for both, who regard Trump as a president who still prefers black crude to green solar and who knows how to look away when bad things happen to good people.

Am I being too cynical, do you think? No, I’m sorry. One can’t be too cynical when it comes to this cast of useful brutes, thugs, and idiots. Just analyze the facts.

On Wednesday (5), with the world already heading for a recession and with the global oil and natural gas market already in a difficult situation, the OPEC+ cartel, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, decided to reduce its production by 2 billion tons. barrels a day — to ensure that oil prices don’t fall but instead climb back above $100 a barrel and stay that way.

The actual reduction in production is likely to be closer to 1 million barrels a day, as many smaller OPEC producers are already extracting less than their quotas, but with the market in its current state it will still be felt. As the Financial Times noted: at around $90 a barrel today, “crude is well below levels reached just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but higher than at any time between 2015 and early 2022.” .

Putin’s motivation for pursuing this price hike is no mystery. With his army in Ukraine constantly losing ground — and with him having annexed parts of Ukraine he doesn’t even control — the Russian has only one hope before he is forced to do something truly unwise: reduce the supply of oil and gas and increase the price enough to force the European Union to abandon Kiev and Washington and accept their annexations, in exchange for a ceasefire and a resumption of Russian energy exports. The Saudis hitched a ride on Putin’s tram.

The strategy is not crazy nor is it necessarily doomed to fail, because Western countries have spent two decades failing to think about energy strategically. They set the goal they were looking for: a world that was no longer dependent on fossil fuels, in the shortest possible time. But they have not defined the means to achieve this goal in a stable way – maximizing their climate security, their energy security and their economic security simultaneously.

Instead, they pretended.

In Europe, and with Putin’s hidden encouragement, they pretended that they could abandon large-scale, largely emission-free sources of energy — nuclear, as the Germans did — and that they could simply jump straight to intermittent wind, solar and other renewable sources, and everything would be beautiful and wonderful. Wow.

The Germans felt virtuous in doing so — not recognizing that the only reason they were able to feed this elusive dream was that Putin was selling them cheap gas to make up for what was missing.

When Putin put an end to this charade, here’s what happened: On September 28, as Reuters reported from Frankfurt, “the German cabinet passed two decrees to extend until March 31, 2024 the operation of large anthracite-fired power plants.” [carvão mineral duro] and to reactivate the lignite capacity [carvão fóssil] until June 30, 2023, to increase the offer”.

In the US, we’ve made our own version of this green “virtue sign”. Green progressives demonized the oil and gas industry — for good reason, in some cases — and basically told it to go away and die quietly while we moved on to wind and solar. Bankers and investors got the message and began to delay or suspend investments in new gas and oil production, focusing instead on profiting as much as possible from existing wells.

In the words of a Goldman Sachs newsletter in April: “How much future production have we lost due to delays in investment decisions on new oil and gas projects? The answer is 10 million barrels a day of oil, equivalent to Saudi Arabia’s daily production Saudi Arabia, and 3 million barrels per day of oil equivalent in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG), more than the equivalent of Qatar’s daily production. to have had a new Saudi Arabia and a new Qatar”.

Although the US, unlike Europe, can still theoretically supply most of its oil and gas needs today, we do not have enough to export on the scale that would be necessary to compensate for the reductions made by Putin and OPEC+ and to facilitate the transition. of Europe towards a decarbonised future.

But green progressives never got that message. At a House committee hearing two weeks ago, Representative Rashida Tlaib asked whether JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and other bank executives present at the hearing had policies “against the financing of new oil and gas products.” Dimon replied, “Not at all, and that would be the road to hell for the United States.”

Tlaib then said that any students who had student loans and JPMorgan bank accounts should retaliate by closing their accounts. Make no mistake: Putin must have loved this kind of childish moralizing speech. But he is nowhere near as damaging as the Republican senators who for years have been inspired by ExxonMobile’s lies that climate change is a hoax and who have used that argument to block our clean energy transition. Even so, Tlaib must have made Putin happy.

What excited Putin even more was when he saw Bernie Sanders, progressive Democrats in the House and the entire GOP joining forces last week to reject a bill backed by President Joe Biden and the Democratic leadership to streamline the bill authorization process. domestic energy sources, especially the authorization of gas pipelines and transmission lines for wind and solar energy – one of our biggest obstacles to a stable transition to green energy.

It’s hard to know who’s worse: the progressives who don’t understand the extent to which solar and wind power require faster authorization for their transmission to enable a safe passage to clean energy, or the Republicans who knew that utilities oil and gas need faster authorization for pipelines to be able to increase their gas production, but they rejected the measure to prevent Biden from having another victory.

As Joe Manchin, a pro-fossil fuel Democrat who championed the bill, put it: “What I didn’t expect was that Mitch McConnell and my Republican friends would ally with Bernie or try to achieve the same result by not passing reforms to authorize the pipelines.” .

All things considered, Putin had a bad month in Ukraine, but a good month in the US Congress.

It’s not complicated folks: do you want to score a point or make a difference? If we want to make a difference, we need to maximize our energy security, national security and economic security all at the same time. The only way to do this effectively is to encourage our market to produce a stable and secure supply of energy, with the lowest possible emissions and the lowest possible costs, in the shortest possible time.

The only really effective way to achieve this is with a strong price signal – either by imposing emissions taxes or offering clean energy incentives – in addition to constantly raising clean energy standards in power generation, in line with what Hal Harvey recommends. and Justin Gillis in his new book “The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet”.

As long as we’re not prepared to do that, we’ll just be faking it, making virtue signals directed left and right – and Putin and MbS will be profiting and laughing.

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