There’s nothing more useful to a corrupt political dynasty like the Clintons than a place and cause like Ukraine. It’s a golden opportunity to resurrect one of the most corrupt “non-profit” institutions in the history of the West, the Clinton Global Initiative. She’s back! https://t.co/hqpKMHxUSC
“Oil opened in Asian trading Sunday night up another shocking $10 a barrel, reaching $126 at one point—a 13-year high, up from just $65 in December. The Biden administration and its pro-embargo cheerleaders in both parties are to blame, not the Russians.
If the price of oil is sustained at this level for more than a short period of time, it will cause a global recession. Gas could reach $5 per gallon or more. It just crossed above an average of $4 per gallon across the USA on Sunday.
If you think truckers are mad now, just wait. Rising transportation costs will increase the price of everything from food to housing. Already-rampant inflation will be out of control.
Of the many Biden-inspired parts of the crisis, the most recent were dumb comments made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. On Sunday, he appeared to endorse the idea of banning Russian oil exports, caving in to anti-Russian hysteria in Washington and Europe. As Reuters reported:
The United States and European allies are exploring banning imports of Russian oil, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday, and the White House coordinated with key Congressional committees moving forward with their own ban.
This is the insane work of a bipartisan, globalist ruling class that does not understand economics or even simple math.
Total world petroleum production is about 95 million barrels per day, and supplies are tight with little extra capacity. Russia is the third-largest producer with 11% of the world total, just behind Saudi Arabia. By contrast, Iran, the largest producer previously to face extreme sanctions, accounts for just 3% of global production. We can isolate Iran, not Russia.
It is simply impossible to remove Russian oil from the world market without causing the runaway spike in prices we are now seeing. The White House knew this before it didn’t. Even as it sanctioned Russian banks just over a week ago, it said it intended to exempt trading in energy products.
Disingenuously, White House spokesman Jen Psaki said:
The reason why the price of gas is going up is not because of steps the president has taken they are because President Putin is invading Ukraine, and that is creating a great deal of instability in the global marketplace.
In fact, Russia is still producing and willing to export just us much oil as before its invasion of Ukraine. It was the Biden administration’s excessive and sloppy sanctions on Russia that resulted in a de facto embargo on Russia. In particular, Biden’s decision not just to sanction Russian banks but to swipe $400 billion that the Russian central bank unwisely kept in U.S. financial instruments, and to bar that central bank from any dollar-denominated transactions, spooked banks and oil traders globally.
Even though the administration mused that sanctions don’t apply to energy products, and even though the Treasury Department put out a document on Friday reasserting that claim, fear over the climate of hysteria is winning out. Late on Friday, Shell made the first purchase of Russian oil since the sanctions, likely at the urging of the British government, and got creamed for its action. Now, Blinken and a nonstop parade of virtue-signaling Republican and Democratic congressmen entertaining an embargo has led to a crisis.
But isn’t it our duty to pay outrageous prices for gas and everything else to help the Ukrainians? Isn’t this like buying a war bond during World War II?
It is not. High oil prices won’t help Ukraine or deter Russia. In the near term, the spike in oil prices will enrich big exporters like Canada and Arabian Gulf nations. Russia will eventually resume exports, even if not at the level before the war. It simply produces too much oil and gas to be isolated. Furthermore, China and India, which declined to join the U.S.-led sanctions regime, will gladly buy what others will not. Japan has also stated the obvious fact that it needs to continue to buy Russian energy to avoid economic catastrophe. Europe will also cave when it begins to understand the crippling financial and political cost of oil anywhere above $90 a barrel.”
“As Joe Biden’s approval numbers sink further into the sewer, the only thing he’s building back better is 1970s-style inflation. Up until Biden, most polls usually named Jimmy Carter as one of the weakest and most inept presidents we’ve ever had. That was until Biden showed up and said, “Hold my beer!” Which you have to know has brought so much joy to Carter. Heck, he probably has a set of “Let’s go Brandon!” PJs that he wears every night as he thanks God for the gift of Biden.
Fact is, this country is now being “led” by a man who absolutely will go down as one of the worst presidents in our history. In just over a year, Biden has brought inflation roaring back to levels not seen in 40 years, has destroyed our southern border as millions of illegal aliens, along with Chinese fentanyl, flood the country, and now we have been involved in two major international debacles with Afghanistan and Ukraine. The list could go on, but perhaps that’s too depressing.
Rest assured, however, it’s not going to get better. Biden is like the anti-Midas, turning everything he touches into crap.
With every opportunity to make the right decision, Biden and his administration choose the most asinine choice possible, leading one to ask, “Is this a clown show led by an imbecile? Or do you just completely hate this country?”
Answer: both.
Consider his actions on the energy front, which is part and parcel of the inflation disaster: they’re so committed to the hoax and woke religion of man made global warming and shutting down fossil fuels that they sacrificed our energy independence on its altar. Crude oil more than doubled under Biden before war broke out in Ukraine, and natural gas had risen 74 percent before the Russians invaded. Now with the crisis in Ukraine we’re seeing oil approaching $120 per barrel. None of this had to happen, mind you, especially since under Donald Trump the United States had become a net exporter of energy.
But Biden wasted no time enacting his idiotic policies. On day one of his administration he shut down the Keystone pipeline, put thousands of people out of work, crippled our self-sufficient energy production, and made us reliant on purchasing absurd quantities of oil from countries that despise us.
He is Example A of how quickly things can go wrong with terrible leadership.
With America now importing 595,000 barrels of Russian oil a day—that adds up to more than $1 billion a month we’re paying Russia—the fact is our terrible energy policy is helping finance Putin’s invasion. If you want to really know how bad it is, consider that in 2021 alone it’s estimated that European nations, most of which are NATO members, paid Russia $100 billion for oil and gas. So the infantile Left has weakened the United States and Europe in the face of Putin’s energy dominance and strengthened his hand by pumping up his coffers with oil and gas money. The environmentalist wackos and weak-kneed political “leaders” are absolutely responsible for what are now being described as war crimes in Ukraine.
Back on the home front, Americans were already feeling the soaring oil prices at the pump thanks to Biden’s moronic energy policies. Now with Ukraine, if the trends remain the same, we’ll be looking at $5-per-gallon prices on average for regular unleaded gasoline at stations across the country, which of course increases the costs of production, food, and so forth.
But Biden’s response to this? The imbecile actually pitched his climate change bill as anti-inflation at the State of the Union, claiming it will save American families $500 a year . . . by 2030. Mind you, the American people’s increase in cost of living right now is $385 per month, or over $4,600 per year.
I know many will be shocked to learn that Biden’s “solution” is a lie. Germany tried this. It committed to renewables and becoming carbon “net zero” by 2045 and is going to spend nearly $600 billion when all is said and done. For all of that, the German people now get to pay twice as much for electricity as they did before the foolish plan was implemented.
Oh, and to put a fine point on the utter failure of Germany’s plan, it still needs to import 55 percent of its natural gas from—wait for it—Russia. A sober-minded person might understandably look at this asinine behavior and say, “Ya’ll have lost your damn minds.” And that person would be absolutely correct.”
“The Willow oil project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve would deliver 160,000 barrels of oil per day to U.S. consumers for the next 30 years if completed. The project was approved by President Donald Trump but blocked by far-left activists in federal court. Now, President Joe Biden’s administration must decide if it will issue a new environmental report approving the project or side with environmental activists and kill the project.
And this is a foreign policy decision.
Some Democrats don’t see the link between domestic oil production and national security. “This is the same tired argument they’ve been making for the last several years, where we live in this binary world where countries have to either buy our fossil fuels or Vladimir Putin’s,” California Democrat Jared Huffman recently said. “In a decarbonized world, he is powerless, his country is poor, and they’ll be looking for a new leader.”
If Huffman were able to snap his fingers and magically decarbonize the world overnight, then he might have a point. There would no longer be a binary choice between developing American fossil fuels or buying Putin’s. But here in the real world, renewable energy is decades away from replacing fossil fuels. Putin’s entire grand strategy involves exploiting that reality as long as he can. Both Europe and Biden have played right into his hands — at least until now.
Just look at the decisions Europe has made over the last decade and how those decisions have already empowered Putin.
As recently as 2000, EU countries produced almost 10,000,000 terajoules of natural gas per year and imported just about 7,000,000 terajoules a year from Russia. Then, far-left environmentalists came to power and moved the European Union away from producing natural gas. The movement toward renewable energy production was not nearly fast enough — by 2020, EU countries produced less than 4,000,000 terajoules of natural gas and had to import over 9,000,000 terajoules from Russia.
So yes, the EU did reduce natural gas consumption by 4,000,000 terajoules, but it became more dependent, not less, on Putin’s natural gas exports in the process. If Democrats don’t think Putin was acutely aware of this crippling, voluntary dependency when he made his calculations on whether to invade Ukraine, then they don’t know the first thing about geopolitics.
Biden has similarly started the U.S. down the road toward energy dependency. On his first day in office, he imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on all federal lands, and he canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.”
Rule #1: get back into something that can be heralded as the Iran deal, no matter what. This is less a policy idea than a matter of Democratic honor – refusing to admit the failure of Obama’s major foreign policy goal, repudiating Trump, etc.
And so the admin is left begging bad regimes for oil. It’s morally appalling, it’s nonsensical as a policy to reduce carbon emissions, but it pleases eco-activists. So it is done.
There are a lot of these inviolable policies in Dem politics today, signifying a weak party largely controlled by interest groups. They’re making Dems bad at governing – unable to respond to events w/ reasonable course corrections. /end
More here in this thread on the noble, pro-human-rights Westerners who have decided that this war is too important to bother with annoying legalities like the Geneva Conventions:https://t.co/y6O0C77Yxd
It seems entirely reasonable that parents in Florida and elsewhere wouldn’t want their kids’ elementary schools turned into…whatever this is. https://t.co/LnopfwdlTh
— Christina Pushaw 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) March 7, 2022
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LMAO oh noes people who speak Spanish might hear viewpoints other than Leftist propaganda, that's DEFCON-1! (Not Vladimir Putin threatening actual nuclear war.) https://t.co/rzm3XmrgPq
Grifters grift. It’s what they do.
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LikeLike
“Oil Spiking Because No One Putting America First”
https://supermacro.substack.com/p/oil-prices-spiking-because-no-one?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&s=r
“Oil opened in Asian trading Sunday night up another shocking $10 a barrel, reaching $126 at one point—a 13-year high, up from just $65 in December. The Biden administration and its pro-embargo cheerleaders in both parties are to blame, not the Russians.
If the price of oil is sustained at this level for more than a short period of time, it will cause a global recession. Gas could reach $5 per gallon or more. It just crossed above an average of $4 per gallon across the USA on Sunday.
If you think truckers are mad now, just wait. Rising transportation costs will increase the price of everything from food to housing. Already-rampant inflation will be out of control.
Of the many Biden-inspired parts of the crisis, the most recent were dumb comments made by Secretary of State Antony Blinken. On Sunday, he appeared to endorse the idea of banning Russian oil exports, caving in to anti-Russian hysteria in Washington and Europe. As Reuters reported:
The United States and European allies are exploring banning imports of Russian oil, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Sunday, and the White House coordinated with key Congressional committees moving forward with their own ban.
This is the insane work of a bipartisan, globalist ruling class that does not understand economics or even simple math.
Total world petroleum production is about 95 million barrels per day, and supplies are tight with little extra capacity. Russia is the third-largest producer with 11% of the world total, just behind Saudi Arabia. By contrast, Iran, the largest producer previously to face extreme sanctions, accounts for just 3% of global production. We can isolate Iran, not Russia.
It is simply impossible to remove Russian oil from the world market without causing the runaway spike in prices we are now seeing. The White House knew this before it didn’t. Even as it sanctioned Russian banks just over a week ago, it said it intended to exempt trading in energy products.
Disingenuously, White House spokesman Jen Psaki said:
The reason why the price of gas is going up is not because of steps the president has taken they are because President Putin is invading Ukraine, and that is creating a great deal of instability in the global marketplace.
In fact, Russia is still producing and willing to export just us much oil as before its invasion of Ukraine. It was the Biden administration’s excessive and sloppy sanctions on Russia that resulted in a de facto embargo on Russia. In particular, Biden’s decision not just to sanction Russian banks but to swipe $400 billion that the Russian central bank unwisely kept in U.S. financial instruments, and to bar that central bank from any dollar-denominated transactions, spooked banks and oil traders globally.
Even though the administration mused that sanctions don’t apply to energy products, and even though the Treasury Department put out a document on Friday reasserting that claim, fear over the climate of hysteria is winning out. Late on Friday, Shell made the first purchase of Russian oil since the sanctions, likely at the urging of the British government, and got creamed for its action. Now, Blinken and a nonstop parade of virtue-signaling Republican and Democratic congressmen entertaining an embargo has led to a crisis.
But isn’t it our duty to pay outrageous prices for gas and everything else to help the Ukrainians? Isn’t this like buying a war bond during World War II?
It is not. High oil prices won’t help Ukraine or deter Russia. In the near term, the spike in oil prices will enrich big exporters like Canada and Arabian Gulf nations. Russia will eventually resume exports, even if not at the level before the war. It simply produces too much oil and gas to be isolated. Furthermore, China and India, which declined to join the U.S.-led sanctions regime, will gladly buy what others will not. Japan has also stated the obvious fact that it needs to continue to buy Russian energy to avoid economic catastrophe. Europe will also cave when it begins to understand the crippling financial and political cost of oil anywhere above $90 a barrel.”
LikeLike
“Wokeness on Energy Is Weakness
Biden’s energy policy is bankrupting the country and making us a paper tiger abroad.”
https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/06/wokeness-on-energy-is-weakness/
“As Joe Biden’s approval numbers sink further into the sewer, the only thing he’s building back better is 1970s-style inflation. Up until Biden, most polls usually named Jimmy Carter as one of the weakest and most inept presidents we’ve ever had. That was until Biden showed up and said, “Hold my beer!” Which you have to know has brought so much joy to Carter. Heck, he probably has a set of “Let’s go Brandon!” PJs that he wears every night as he thanks God for the gift of Biden.
Fact is, this country is now being “led” by a man who absolutely will go down as one of the worst presidents in our history. In just over a year, Biden has brought inflation roaring back to levels not seen in 40 years, has destroyed our southern border as millions of illegal aliens, along with Chinese fentanyl, flood the country, and now we have been involved in two major international debacles with Afghanistan and Ukraine. The list could go on, but perhaps that’s too depressing.
Rest assured, however, it’s not going to get better. Biden is like the anti-Midas, turning everything he touches into crap.
With every opportunity to make the right decision, Biden and his administration choose the most asinine choice possible, leading one to ask, “Is this a clown show led by an imbecile? Or do you just completely hate this country?”
Answer: both.
Consider his actions on the energy front, which is part and parcel of the inflation disaster: they’re so committed to the hoax and woke religion of man made global warming and shutting down fossil fuels that they sacrificed our energy independence on its altar. Crude oil more than doubled under Biden before war broke out in Ukraine, and natural gas had risen 74 percent before the Russians invaded. Now with the crisis in Ukraine we’re seeing oil approaching $120 per barrel. None of this had to happen, mind you, especially since under Donald Trump the United States had become a net exporter of energy.
But Biden wasted no time enacting his idiotic policies. On day one of his administration he shut down the Keystone pipeline, put thousands of people out of work, crippled our self-sufficient energy production, and made us reliant on purchasing absurd quantities of oil from countries that despise us.
He is Example A of how quickly things can go wrong with terrible leadership.
With America now importing 595,000 barrels of Russian oil a day—that adds up to more than $1 billion a month we’re paying Russia—the fact is our terrible energy policy is helping finance Putin’s invasion. If you want to really know how bad it is, consider that in 2021 alone it’s estimated that European nations, most of which are NATO members, paid Russia $100 billion for oil and gas. So the infantile Left has weakened the United States and Europe in the face of Putin’s energy dominance and strengthened his hand by pumping up his coffers with oil and gas money. The environmentalist wackos and weak-kneed political “leaders” are absolutely responsible for what are now being described as war crimes in Ukraine.
Back on the home front, Americans were already feeling the soaring oil prices at the pump thanks to Biden’s moronic energy policies. Now with Ukraine, if the trends remain the same, we’ll be looking at $5-per-gallon prices on average for regular unleaded gasoline at stations across the country, which of course increases the costs of production, food, and so forth.
But Biden’s response to this? The imbecile actually pitched his climate change bill as anti-inflation at the State of the Union, claiming it will save American families $500 a year . . . by 2030. Mind you, the American people’s increase in cost of living right now is $385 per month, or over $4,600 per year.
I know many will be shocked to learn that Biden’s “solution” is a lie. Germany tried this. It committed to renewables and becoming carbon “net zero” by 2045 and is going to spend nearly $600 billion when all is said and done. For all of that, the German people now get to pay twice as much for electricity as they did before the foolish plan was implemented.
Oh, and to put a fine point on the utter failure of Germany’s plan, it still needs to import 55 percent of its natural gas from—wait for it—Russia. A sober-minded person might understandably look at this asinine behavior and say, “Ya’ll have lost your damn minds.” And that person would be absolutely correct.”
LikeLike
“Yes, Biden’s climate policies empowered Putin”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/yes-bidens-climate-policies-empowered-putin
“The Willow oil project in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve would deliver 160,000 barrels of oil per day to U.S. consumers for the next 30 years if completed. The project was approved by President Donald Trump but blocked by far-left activists in federal court. Now, President Joe Biden’s administration must decide if it will issue a new environmental report approving the project or side with environmental activists and kill the project.
And this is a foreign policy decision.
Some Democrats don’t see the link between domestic oil production and national security. “This is the same tired argument they’ve been making for the last several years, where we live in this binary world where countries have to either buy our fossil fuels or Vladimir Putin’s,” California Democrat Jared Huffman recently said. “In a decarbonized world, he is powerless, his country is poor, and they’ll be looking for a new leader.”
If Huffman were able to snap his fingers and magically decarbonize the world overnight, then he might have a point. There would no longer be a binary choice between developing American fossil fuels or buying Putin’s. But here in the real world, renewable energy is decades away from replacing fossil fuels. Putin’s entire grand strategy involves exploiting that reality as long as he can. Both Europe and Biden have played right into his hands — at least until now.
Just look at the decisions Europe has made over the last decade and how those decisions have already empowered Putin.
As recently as 2000, EU countries produced almost 10,000,000 terajoules of natural gas per year and imported just about 7,000,000 terajoules a year from Russia. Then, far-left environmentalists came to power and moved the European Union away from producing natural gas. The movement toward renewable energy production was not nearly fast enough — by 2020, EU countries produced less than 4,000,000 terajoules of natural gas and had to import over 9,000,000 terajoules from Russia.
So yes, the EU did reduce natural gas consumption by 4,000,000 terajoules, but it became more dependent, not less, on Putin’s natural gas exports in the process. If Democrats don’t think Putin was acutely aware of this crippling, voluntary dependency when he made his calculations on whether to invade Ukraine, then they don’t know the first thing about geopolitics.
Biden has similarly started the U.S. down the road toward energy dependency. On his first day in office, he imposed a moratorium on new oil and gas leasing on all federal lands, and he canceled the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline.”
LikeLike
Indeed, and we all suffer for it.
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Pegging the cringe meter…..
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Oh…. the horror…..
🙄
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Yep, he did indeed.
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Plus he lives in 🤡 world, with the other 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
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