#russian fossil fuels

[thoughtlessarse]

The EU is spending more money on Russian fossil fuels than on financial aid to Ukraine, a report marking the third anniversary of the invasion has found. The EU bought €21.9bn (£18.1bn) of Russian oil and gas in the third year of the war, according to estimates from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Crea), despite the efforts under way to kick the continent’s addiction to the fuels that fund Vladimir Putin’s war chest. The amount is one-sixth greater than the €18.7bn the EU allocated to Ukraine in financial aid in 2024, according to a tracker from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel). Vaibhav Raghunandan, an analyst at Crea and coauthor of the report, said: “Purchasing Russian fossil fuels is, quite plainly, akin to sending financial aid to the Kremlin and enabling its invasion. [It’s] a practice that must stop immediately to secure not just Ukraine’s future, but also Europe’s energy security.” The researchers compiled trade data to estimate the value of Russian fuels that were sold around the world in the third year of the invasion. They forecast data for February 2025, which is not yet available, based on imports in January. In the calendar year 2024, the EU spent 39% more on Russian fossil fuel imports than it set aside for Ukraine. The aid figure does not include military or humanitarian contributions.

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So much for independence from Russian fuels.

[nando161mando]

Fossil fuel capital propaganda

[kirstythejetblackgoldfish]

Colombian President Gustavo Petro's statement on Russia and Ukraine:

I decided with most Latin American governments to be neutral in the Russia/Ukraine war. That is a war between brothers, armed by powers outside the Slavic peoples

Now Zelensky and Europe are betrayed by the USA, who put it into war.

Hundreds of thousands of young Russians and Ukrainians dead in oil and gas: the dying fossil economy abroad.

It's good that the war that will be waged at the cost of Ukraine ends. I've never been on the side of insulting Russia and its history, but you have to pay attention because it hints at an alliance of oil tankers at the front of the world.

If oil political leaders, i.e. fossils, dominate the world, then the extinction of humans and life accelerates their pace.

The fundamental political contradiction is not between the USA and Russia, or between the USA and China, but between Greed and its power and Life and its power. Greed is in the great fossil capital and everywhere, Life is in all the peoples of the world, in women, and in nature.

Perhaps it is now, in the midst of these oil wars, that preach the deaths of young and children, that woman all over the world should take to the streets.

[tomorrowusa]

Russia makes money primarily off of fossil fuels. It does have decent agricultural exports but those alone could not pay for Putin's war machine. So disrupting Russia's oil and gas industry is a way of reducing the country's revenue which allows it to conduct an illegal war of aggression.

Hostile drones have been winding their way across the Russian landscape this winter, striking refineries and related oil and gas infrastructure all the way from the Baltic Sea in the northwest to the Black Sea in the southwest. Drones attacked both the Ilsky and Afipsky refineries in Russia's Krasnodar region, east of occupied Crimea, on Feb. 9, less than a week after another refinery in Volgograd, the largest in southern Russia, was hit. Further attacks have struck other refineries and oil depots near the Ukrainian border, as well as much deeper into Russian territory. Though Ukraine does not typically confirm its actions outside its borders and Russia has not officially acknowledged drones were the cause of these incidents, media reports have identified Kyiv's hand in the attacks occurring with regularity as Moscow's invasion of Ukraine nears the two-year mark. Analysts say the drone attacks are demonstrating that oil and gas targets of economic significance are not out of reach, even far from the front lines of the war. 

The late Sen. John McCain nailed it.

Late U.S. Senator John McCain once derisively described Russia as being "a gas station masquerading as a country" — a jibe underlining the critical importance of oil and gas products to Moscow. Indeed, Russia draws heavily on its resource reserves to support the state. The International Energy Agency says Russia's oil and gas export revenues accounted for 45 per cent of its federal budget in 2021.

Of course a lot of that fossil fuel money gets siphoned off by corrupt oligarchs who use it to purchase superyachts and expensive real estate in Western countries.

A January attack on a Novatek facility in Ust-Luga halted gas processing operations there for several weeks. The plant processes gas condensate into various fuel products that are exported to customers in Turkey and Asia, according to Reuters. Sergey Vakulenko, a former strategy executive at Gazprom Neft, a subsidiary of the larger Russian energy firm, believes the Ust-Luga episode may illustrate a bigger problem for Russia than a temporary disruption to production at a single facility. In a recent analysis published online, Vakulenko reasoned that if small drones can get all the way to Ust-Luga, which is hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, there are some 18 Russian refineries at risk of being targeted, and they account for more than half the country's refinery production. He's not the only analyst noticing this concern for Russia's refineries.

And because hundreds of thousands of competent Russians have (wisely) fled the country and others are being used as cannon fodder for Putin's war, it takes longer to repair facilities damaged by Ukraine.

And the fossil fuel industry mostly has to fend for itself.

Maxim Starchak, an independent expert on the Russian defence and nuclear industry, says regulations have been put in place to restrict drones from flying close to "the most significant fuel and energy sector facilities" and operators are using electronic warfare systems to defend against drone threats. But Starchak said Russian energy firms must foot the bill for expenses related to defence of their facilities. "Moscow will not specifically help," he said, noting Russian authorities may hold firms accountable for not putting measures in place to protect their facilities.

So that burden cuts down on revenue as it adds to the cost of doing business.

One thing Ukraine has been innovative at is drone technology. It's become one of the world's leaders at that.

As Ukraine continues to fight to repel Russian forces from its lands, its military leaders have signalled drones and related technology will be needed to win the war that seems to have no end in sight.

And Western countries find it easier to provide additional drones to Ukraine than to send tanks and cruise missiles.

So Russian convict troops can luxuriate in the ruins of Avdiivka while their oil refineries back home get blown up by Ukraine.

EDIT: Speaking of fuel, just saw this at NPR.

Putin's regime is 'running out of fuel,' a Russian opposition activist tells NPR

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

Norway's car market is 94% EVs – and a quarter of them are Chinese

No other country comes close to Norway’s level of market penetration. Unlike the U.S. and EU, the Scandinavian country does not impose tariffs on Chinese cars – and they represent almost a quarter of the EV market. CGTN’s Johannes Pleschberger reports from Oslo

[enviropostsov]

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainians-find-new-energy-sources-beat-blackouts-winter-arrives-2024-12-03/

[climatepostsoviet]

Follow-up article: https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/12/17/miles-of-shoreline-in-russia-s-krasnodar-krai-polluted-after-tankers-spill-oil-into-black-sea

[dogmoder]

german greens are opposed to nuclear for stupid ideological reasons. that's pretty much it

germany's green party after the country phases out all nuclear energy to save the planet and becomes the EU's largest coal consumer

[head-post]

OPEC+ agreed to cut oil production

OPEC+ oil producers agreed on Thursday to voluntary production cuts totalling about 2.2 million barrels per day (bpd) for early next year. Saudi Arabia, which extended its current voluntary cut, headed the agreement, according to Reuters.

Baseline global oil prices declined about 2 per cent, partly because the cuts were voluntary, but also because investors expected before the meeting that additional supply cuts could be deeper.

Saudi Arabia, Russia and other OPEC+ members, which produce more than 40 per cent of the world’s oil, met online on Thursday to discuss supply policy. JP Morgan analyst Christyan Malek stated that the market reaction reflected a distrust in the cuts’ full effectiveness.

However, setting a new framework for each member to deliver on its cut reflects the degree of trust and cohesion among the members; case in point, the fact Brazil is joining is testament to the strength in numbers for OPEC+.

Read more HERE

[gatheringbones]

[“When an issue is framed as a life-or-death dilemma, as a test of commitment or integrity, it’s hard to have an open discussion. If we’re arguing about whether to cut the weeds with a scythe or a weed-whacker, we could argue the pros and cons of each. But if your frame is “Every small decision is a test of our moral commitment to the environment,” there’s not much room for me to argue the merits of the weed-whacker without being branded as an anti-environmental lout. If my partner and I are arguing about which movie to go to, and my frame is “A compatible relationship means perfect agreement — if we can’t agree then we shouldn’t be together,” there’s not much room for my partner to prefer a Russian drama with subtitles over my choice of a light, romantic comedy.

Progressives tend to be morally driven people so integrity and consistency are important to us, and we have strong feelings and strict standards for how people should behave. Yet we live in a world that is not set up to further many of our goals and aims. We are constantly forced into compromises. We often do drive a car to get to the meeting about reducing our carbon footprint. If we want to establish open and vibrant communication, we should take care not to frame every disagreement as a moral test. Instead, we should look for ways to frame our issues that encourage and support diversity and a wide variety of opinions and options. We might reframe the movie argument as, “A strong relationship can stand diversity — if we go see each others’ preferred movies, we’ll each stretch and grow.” We might look at the weed-whacker debate as an opportunity to evaluate the trade-offs of time and energy vs. fossil fuels. Then we can hear all sides of the story.”]

starhawk, from the empowerment manual: a guide for collaborative groups, 2011

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

P.S. Nothing to worry about: In countries that do not have their own fossil fuel reserves, RENEWABLE ENERGY is the CHEAPEST AND MOST EFFICIENT ENERGY SOURCE ANYWAY! The fact that US "conservatives" want to turn into an energy Taliban and voluntarily gift the world energy market to communist China, these are the problems of these fake "conservative" idiots. Insidious "conservatism" that is based on lies and abandonment of common sense IS DESTINED TO FAIL...! 

“Against a backdrop of record-breaking heat and floods this year, the $22m endeavor, Project 2025, was convened by the notorious rightwing, climate-denying thinktank the Heritage Foundation, which has ties to fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch” https://ow.ly/xuZX50PuxWV

[nando161mando]

[mariacallous]

What would a force hostile to the United States—a nation whose power has been the envy of the world for more than seven decades—do if it were able to set up an influential pipeline for policy ideas directly to the White House? Or, better yet, if it could somehow burrow into the mind of its president?

With so many points of U.S. strength, it is hard to know where to begin. One might start by fanning a backlash against the long-standing, if halting, trend in U.S. society toward inclusiveness, which has gradually sought to bring disfavored groups into the fold of the country’s prosperity. This might include waging a war against diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives—one that, in its most Orwellian dimension, would extend to policing the use of words such as “bias,” “privilege,” and “equality” in government agencies.

One might pull the rug out from under a country sitting on the doorstop of Washington’s long-standing European allies, which has suffered invasion and continued assault from a revanchist autocracy bent on expansion. For instance, one might shy away from identifying Russia as the aggressor in Ukraine and sometimes blame the latter for the conflict, all while conceding major Russian war aims even before the start of peace negotiations.

One might criticize European democracies such as Germany for not providing more space to extreme-right political parties that have openly flirted with ideology reminiscent of the Nazis. Or one might disparage longtime friends and democratic allies, from Canada to Japan, saying that they are cheating the United States, imposing high tariffs on them, and demanding that they pay for the security protection they get from Washington.

One might ravage the staff and budget of the Internal Revenue Service, the body that collects the taxes that fund the government, while passing budget resolutions that will provide large tax breaks to the wealthy—all but ensuring massive increases in future budget deficits. While doing so, one might insinuate that Social Security—a pillar of the U.S. political compact since the Great Depression—is being fleeced by millions of phantom super-centenarians, whose relatives cheat the system by collecting benefit checks long after their deaths.

One might withdraw from United Nations bodies such as the Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization, thus ceding influence to countries that make no pretense of respecting human dignity and freedom, and ending U.S. leadership in combatting diseases that threaten people worldwide.

One might try to shutter the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides technical assistance and funding to much poorer countries to boost their economic development while also bolstering U.S. soft power.

One might liquidate the country’s international broadcasting capacity, ending the delivery of relatively objective news to hundreds of millions of people who live under dictatorships, including in China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.

One might seek to hinder the development of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind while pushing the acceleration of fossil fuel production, not only ensuring huge environmental damage, but also ceding U.S. leadership in a sector that is vital to future wealth and competition.

Why stop there, though? One could move to weaken a body such as the National Institutes of Health, which has long been a major force in the United States’ world-leading medical research, or even take a swipe at one its biggest recent triumphs: the breakneck development of the mRNA vaccine technology that helped the United States become a global leader in limiting the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There are so many ideas for how to sap Washington’s strength that one could imagine fatigue setting in among those charged with manning the pipeline to the president imagined at the outset of this column. But it turns out that U.S. President Donald Trump does not even need such a unit. And there is little sign of his administration slowing down its efforts to sap the country’s vitality. His team’s other ideas involve hindering nuclear safety and research for nuclear energy and weapons, degrading the country’s ability to monitor or even discuss global warming, and defunding weather forecasts. There are many more.

With a list as prodigious as this, it has taken me too long to get to perhaps the brightest, and most insidious, idea of all for bringing the United States down to the status of an average power: pursuing a campaign of destruction against the country’s world-leading universities. The Trump administration is already carrying this out on several fronts, with little sign that most Americans are concerned about or even aware of what is happening.

This campaign was signaled in advance by hostile rhetoric from conservatives such as Vice President J.D. Vance. Even before he was elected, Vance, himself a product of elite education, spoke of U.S. higher education as “the enemy.” Since Trump returned to office, his government has acted accordingly. It has moved to undercut federal support for university-based research, tightened visa access for international students, and made U.S. campuses a priority area in its war against diversity. Potentially most damaging of all, it has weaponized the idea of antisemitism as a tool to extend the government’s political control into university departments and classrooms.

Full disclosure: I have been a professor at Columbia University—ground zero for much of this campaign—for nearly two decades. Protests on my campus over Israel’s offensive tactics in Gaza have been the pretext for much of this; now, the Trump administration practically equates criticism of Israel with legally punishable antisemitism.

I lived and taught through the period of campus protests, and it is my sense that they were overwhelmingly peaceful, but I would never rule out the possibility that Jewish students were sometimes made to feel uncomfortable by the signs, slogans, or even taunts of some individual protestors. However, this should not be used to justify restricting one of the most vital U.S. freedoms and the essence of the country’s culture of excellence in higher education: free speech.

By arresting and seeking to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate and legal permanent resident of the United States, for participating in these protests, the administration has revealed its hand and shown that its war on education and war on speech are fundamentally intertwined. Not only has Khalil never been charged with a crime, but in interviews, Department of Homeland Security officials have been unable to clearly explain his alleged offense.

The punishments and supposed remedies run together. The Trump administration has canceled $400 million in government funding to Columbia unless the university fulfills a series of wildly unreasonable demands. This includes the requirement that Columbia’s department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies be placed under “receivership,” which would remove oversight of the department from its faculty.

“We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way,” Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s longtime former president, said last week. “Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize the universities, and you’re on your way.”

Although routinely unacknowledged as such, the country’s universities are the crown jewel in its entire democratic system. Some, such as Harvard University, are considerably older than the nation itself. But more than that, the United States’ sense of itself—of law, of science, of the humanities—flows from its campuses and their great tradition of academic freedom, including free speech. This is also true of the United States’ economic, technological, and military prowess.

Universities have been able to buttress U.S. leadership largely because of their pull on ambitious people from all over the world, many of whom have fervently embraced U.S. ideals, becoming naturalized as citizens or spreading democratic values overseas. The powerful force that attracts them is built on more than individual hopes of wealth, or even of personal achievement. It is built on freedom, and once that ultimate value—practically an American brand—is destroyed, it may never be restored.

[awesome-casuallyfamouscollector]

NEW Citroen e-C3 Review: The affordable EV we've been waiting for!

The 2024 Citroen e-C3 is a £22,000 electric car with an official WLTP range of 199 miles from a full charge of its 44kWh lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery. Along with the Dacia Spring, it is part of a new wave of much-needed electric cars with much lower starting prices, yet that still have decent range and appealing design. In this CarGurus UK review, Vicky Parrott test drives the e-C3 as well as assessing how it fares for practicality, design, technology and performance. Would you consider this small Citroen as your first (or next) electric car?

P.S. A very interesting, attractive and affordable car for daily commuting for city dwellers in countries with a good network of electric car charging stations...In addition, it is a pretty good alternative to electric cars made in China...

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

On Dec. 15, 2024, in a raging storm, two Russian oil tankers carrying more than 9,000 tons of heavy oil collided off the coast of Port Taman in the Kerch Strait in the Black Sea. A video posted to Telegram allegedly depicting the crash shows one of the tankers, with a broken bow, sinking into the sea. The second vessel reportedly ran aground closer to the port.

The crash spilled thousands of tons of toxic heavy fuel oil and has harmed thousands of birds, dozens of dolphins, and other animals, and resulted in a state of emergency in Crimea. By mid-January the fuel had spread far enough that it could be seen from space. Satellite images studied by Greenpeace show coastal contamination stretching from Novorossiysk in the Krasnodar Krai to Ozero Donuzlav in the western coast of Russian-occupied Crimea. Even Russian president Vladimir Putin called the disaster “one of the most serious environmental challenges we have faced in recent years.”

For a region accustomed to rough seas and choppy weather, this accident, while unfortunate, was not uncommon. Experts have raised alarms about Russian tankers in the region for years, following previous accidents that caused smaller but still significant spills.

With this new crash continuing to cause damage, experts and activists warn that the region remains heavily militarized and under the control of the corrupt, autocratic Russian government, making response to the oil spill increasingly challenging.

This has left a vacuum in disaster response, filled sparingly by local volunteers who’ve worked for three months to mitigate the damage.

The problems facing volunteers are not just logistical. The nature of the fuel they’re attempting to clear is itself problematic.

“Fuel oil is quite heavy, so it sinks,” Anna explained. “But if the temperature rises or there are storms, it rises in the water and hits the shorelines again.”

The vessels carried mazut, a type of low-quality heavy fuel oil that can be very difficult to clean in a spill.

“Heavy fuel oil, also known as residual fuel, is what’s left at the end of the refining process,” explained Sian Prior, a marine science expert and lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, an organization that has advocated for tighter rules on fossil-fuel shipments in the region. “It’s used by a lot of ships in many different parts of the world.  Most of the heavy fuels also have very high sulfur levels, which when burned releases sulfur oxides, which is bad for health and the environment.”

In 2020 the International Maritime Organization, which regulates global commercial shipping, introduced a limit on the amount of sulfur allowed in the fuel.

But the fuel industry responded by blending fuels, mixing lighter fuels with heavy fuel to create a product that has low sulfur but still has a lot of heavy residual fuel, Prior said.

The resulting mix poses several challenges after spills. “It’s very difficult to clean up, because it’s very viscous and emulsifies when it mixes with water, so its volumes actually increase,” she said. “Once this fuel is spilled … it’s virtually impossible to clean it up adequately.”

The effects of a mazut spill could be worse than regular oil spills, which in themselves are disastrous.

“The lighter fuels, distillate fuels, will break up much more quickly in the environment,” Prior explains.