via MOA

Two days ago we looked at why Russia is doing what it does:

Russia understood Zelensky’s remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia’s border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.

I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia’s government to intervene by force.

The ‘west’ had failed to understand Russia’s need to act. It has failed to make the necessary commitments, and accept Russia’s reasonable demands, to avoid the struggle. In consequence it will now fall apart. The knee-jerk reaction to Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine will, as Alastair Crooke writes, lead to the end of the ‘liberal order’:

So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-political ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.

Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.

But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.

Now reality comes back to bite the inept minions who attempt to rule over us.

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Europe can not sustain this, Russia can:

In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiraling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiraling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.

The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”

And it is not only Europe. Energy prices are based on global markets. As are the prices for many other minerals and metals which have suddenly become rare:

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The U.S. will be hit just as much as Europe. Early today oil prices in Europe hit $139 per barrel, well above last week’s market close. They will increase further. Gasoline prices in the U.S. will soon hit $6-7-8 per gallon.

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The attempt by the U.S. to rush towards a new Iran deal to get Iranian oil flooding the markets has failed. Russia, together with Iran, has successfully blocked that move. Sanctions on Russia mean that Iran can not export its enriched uranium to Russia to be turned into nuclear fuel. No Iranian export of enriched uranium means no JCPOA deal. Secretary of State Blinken has failed to understand that. The supposedly ready to be signed return to the nuclear deal is now in jeopardy.

Some U.S. refineries at the south coast are designed to only process heavy oil variants. Since 2019 the U.S. has blockaded heavy oil imports from Venezuela and replaced them with imports of heavy Ural variants from Russia. It has now send too officials to Caracas to try to get Venezuela’s oil flowing again. That would of course require to lift all sanctions off Venezuela and to return all confiscated companies and the gold that is owned by that country. It is not going to happen anytime soon.

High end German cars are build with aluminum from Russia. Boeing needs Russian titanium to build planes. These manufacturers will soon start to lay off people. All this while food, heating and mobility costs will increase dramatically. A deep recession combined with strong inflation will rip social cohesion apart. I do expect strong anger in the streets of Europe and the U.S. There will be riots and in consequence a strong political move to the right. The mid-term elections will destroy the Russophobic Democrats.

Michael Hudson notes the immense strategic damage the U.S. has done to itself:

The recent escalation of U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving dollar diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States. But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

This will not just happen with China or Russia but the whole world will over the next years turn away from the dollarized U.S. system:

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.The next showdown may come within Europe itself as nationalist politicians seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics to subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.”

All the consequences of the ‘west’s’ reaction to Russia’s move were foreseeable. It is pure recklessness and stupidity that have allowed them to take place. The ‘west’ will now get punished for the bad movie it has launched.

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Too bad that I don’t speak Russian … It is now the place to be.

Jimmy Salford @1Fubar – 7:06 UTC · Mar 6, 2022Russia has already been cut off from CNN, Pornhub and Facebook. The US is now working on depriving Russians of MacDonalds and CocaCola. If they keep going with these sanctions, Russians will soon be among the healthiest, well adjusted and best informed people on the planet.

© Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

by Alastair Crooke via Strategic-Culture

Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market.

In its triple strike of sanctions on Russia, the EU initially was notlooking to collapse the Russian financial system. Far from it: Its first instinct was to find the means to continue purchasing its energy needs (made all there more vital by the state of the European gas reserves hovering close to zero). Purchases of energy, special metals, rare earths (all needed for high tech manufacture) and agricultural products were to be exempted. In short, at first brush, the sinews of the global financial system were intended to remain intact.

The main target rather, was to block the core to the Russian financial system’s ability to raise capital – supplemented by specific sanctions on Alrosa, a major player in the diamond market, and Sovcomflot, a tanker fleet operator.

Then, last Saturday morning (26 February) everything changed. It became a blitzkrieg: “We’re waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia. We will cause the collapse of the Russian economy”, said the French Finance Minister, Le Maire (words, he later said, he regretted).

That Saturday, the EU, the U.S. and some allies acted to freeze the Russian Central Bank’s foreign exchange reserves held overseas. And certain Russian banks (in the end seven) were to be expelled from SWIFT financial messaging service. The intent was openly admitted in an U.S. unattributable briefing: It was to trigger a ‘bear raid’ (ie. an orchestrated mass selling) of the Rouble on the following Monday that would collapse the value of the currency.

The purpose to freezing the Central Bank’s reserves was two-fold: First, to prevent the Bank from supporting the Rouble. And secondly, to create a commercial bank liquidity scarcity inside Russia to feed into a concerted campaign over that weekend to scare Russians into believing that some domestic banks might fail – thus prompting a rush at the ATMs, and start a bank-run, in other words.

More than two decades ago, in August 1998, Russia defaulted on its debt and devalued the Rouble, sparking a political crisis that culminated with Vladimir Putin replacing Boris Yeltsin. In 2014, there was a similar U.S. attempt to crash the Rouble through sanctions and by engineering (with Saudi Arabian help) a 41% drop in oil prices by January 2015.

Plainly, last Saturday morning when Ursula von der Leyen announced that ‘selected’ Russian banks would be expelled from SWIFT and the international financial messaging system; and spelled out the near unprecedented Russian Central Bank reserve freeze, we were witnessing the repeat of 1998. The collapse of the economy (as Le Maire said), a run on the domestic banks and the prospect of soaring inflation. This combination was expected to conflate into a political crisis – albeit one intended, this time, to see Putin replaced, vice Yeltsin – aka regime change in Russia, as a senior U.S. think-tanker proposed this week.

In the end, the Rouble fell, but it did not collapse. The Russian currency rather, after an initial drop, recovered about half its early fall. Russians did queue at their ATMs on Monday, but a full run on the retail banks did not materialise. It was ‘managed’ by Moscow.

What occurred on that Saturday which prompted the EU switch from moderate sanctions to become a full participant in a financial war à outrance on Russia is not clear: It may have resulted from intense U.S. pressure, or it came from within, as Germany seized an opportune alibi to put itself back on the path of militarisation for the third time in the past several decades: To re-configure Germany as a major military power, a forceful participant in global politics.

And that – very simply – could not have been possible without tacit U.S. encouragement.

Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes that the underlying shifts made manifest by von der Leyen on Saturday “herald a profound shift in European politics. It is tempting, but ultimately futile, to contextually place this shift as a reaction to the Russian decision to launch military operations in Ukraine. The pretext only provides the alibi, whilst the shift is anchored on power play and has a dynamic of its own”. He continues,

“Without doubt, the three developments — Germany’s decision to step up its militarisation [spending an additional euro100 billion]; the EU decision to finance arms supplies to Ukraine, and Germany’s historic decision to reverse its policy not to supply weapons to conflict zones — mark a radical departure in European politics since World War II. The thinking toward a military build-up, the need for Germany to be a “forceful” participant in global politics and the jettisoning of its guilt complex and get “combat ready” — all these by far predate the current situation around Ukraine”.

The von der Leyen intervention may have been opportunism, driven by a resurgence of SPD German ambition (and perhaps by her own animus towards Russia, stemming from her family connection to the SS German capture of Kiev), yet its consequences are likely profound.

Just to be clear, on one Saturday, von der Leyen pulled the switch to turn off principal parts to Global financial functioning: blocking interbank messaging, confiscating foreign exchange reserves and the cutting the sinews of trade. Ostensibly this ‘burning’ of global structures is being done (like the burning of villages in Vietnam) to ‘save’ the liberal Order.

However, this must be taken in tandem with Germany’s and the EU decision to supply weapons (to not just any old ‘conflict zone’) but specifically to forces fighting Russian troops in Ukraine. The ‘Kick Ass’ parts to those Ukrainian forces ‘resisting’ Russia are neo-Nazi forces with a long history of committing atrocities against the Russian-speaking Ukrainian peoples. Germany will be joining with the U.S. in training these Nazi elements in Poland. The CIA has been doing such since 2015. (So, as Russia tries to de-Nazify Ukraine, Germany and the EU are encouraging European volunteers to join in a U.S.-led effort to use Nazi elements to resist Russia, just as in the way Jihadists were trained to resist Russia in Syria).

What a paradox! Effectively von der Leyen is overseeing the building of an EU ‘Berlin Wall’ – albeit with its purpose inverted now – to separate the EU from Russia. And to complete the parallel, she even announced that Russia Today and Sputnikbroadcasts would be banned across the EU. Europeans can be allowed only to hear authorised EU messaging – (however, a week into the Russian invasion, cracks are appearing in this tightly-controlled western narrative – “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”, warns a leading U.S. military analyst in the Daily Mail. Simply “[b]elieving Russia’s assault is going poorly may make us feel better but is at odds with the facts”, Roggio writes. “We cannot help Ukraine if we cannot be honest about its predicament”).

So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?

Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-pollical ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.

Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.

But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.

Whereas EU states had hoped to spare Russian energy shipments, they did not take account of the frenzy raised against Russia. The oil market has gone on strike, acting as if energy were already in the frame for Western sanctions: Oil tankers had already started to avoid Russian ports because of sanctions fears, and rates for oil tankers on Russian crude routes have exploded as much as nine-fold in the past few days. But now, amid growing fears of falling foul of complex restrictions in different jurisdictions, refiners and banks are balking at purchasing any Russian oil at all, traders and others involved in the market say. Market players fear too that measures that target oil exports directly could be imposed, should fighting in Ukraine intensify.

Commodity markets have been in turmoil since the Special Military Operation began. European natural gas jumped as much as 60% on Wednesday, as buyers, traders and shippers avoid Russian gas. A combination of sanctions and commercial decisions by shippers and insurers to steer clear has cut that contribution to global supplies sharply over the last week. A default cascade by western companies is perfectly possible. And Supply line disruption is inevitable.

Many will be affected by the commodity turmoil, but with Russia providing 25% of global wheat supplies, the 21% hike in wheat and 16% rise in corn prices since 1 January will represent a disaster for many states in the Middle East among others.

All this disruption to markets comes even before Moscow responds with its own countermeasures. They have been silent so far – but what if Moscow demands that future payments for energy are to be made in Yuan?

In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiralling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiralling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.

“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.

The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”

One recalls that old prediction from the Middle East, that western values would turn against the West itself, and ultimately devour it.

Authored by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World,

Russia’s attack on Ukraine represents a demand for a new world order that, over the long term, will support higher prices for fossil fuels, especially oil. Such an economy would probably be centered on Russia and China. The rest of the world economy, to the extent that it continues to exist, will largely have to get along without fossil fuels, other than the fossil fuels that countries continue to produce for themselves. Population and living standards will fall in most of the world.

If a Russia-and-China-centric economy can be developed, the US dollar will no longer be the world’s reserve currency. Trade will be in the currency of the new Russia-China block. Outside of this block, local currencies will play a dominant role. Most of today’s debt will ultimately be defaulted upon; to the extent that this debt is replaced, it will be replaced with debt in local currencies.

As I see the situation, the underlying problem is the fact that, on a world basis, energy consumption per capita is shrinking. Energy consumption is essential for creating goods and services.

The shrinking amount of energy per person means that, on average, fewer and fewer finished goods and services can be produced for each person. Some countries do better than average; others do worse. With low fossil fuel prices, Russia has been faring worse than average; it wants to remedy the situation with long-term higher energy prices. If Russia can start transferring its energy exports to China, perhaps the new Russia-China economy, with limited support from the rest of the world, can afford to pay Russia the high prices for fossil fuels that Russia requires to maintain its economy.

In this post, I will try to explain what I see is happening.

[1] It appears that Russia now fears that it is near collapse, not too different from the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. Such a collapse would lead to a huge drop in Russia’s living standards, even from today’s relatively low level.

If we look back at the Soviet Union’s energy consumption, we see a strange pattern. The Soviet Union’s energy consumption rose rapidly in the period after World War II. It became a military rival of the US, as its energy consumption grew in the 1965 to 1985 period. Its energy consumption leveled off before the central government collapsed in 1991. In fact, energy consumption has never gotten back to its level in the late 1980s.

[2] The thing that seems to have been behind the 1991 collapse is the same thing that seems to be behind Russia’s current fear of collapse: continued low oil prices.

When we look back at inflation-adjusted oil prices, we see that a long period of low prices preceded this collapse. These low prices were harmful in many ways. They reduced funds for reinvestment, which led to the collapse in oil supply. They reduced the funds available to pay wages. They also reduced the tax revenue that the Soviet Union could collect.

I believe that these chronically low oil prices ultimately brought down the top layer of the government of the Soviet Union. This is because of the physics of the situation. It takes energy to provide the services of the top level of the government. As the total energy that could be purchased by the system fell because of low prices received for exports, it became impossible to support this top level of governmental services. This top layer was less essential than the lower levels of government, so it fell away.

In recent times, there has also been a long period of low prices, since about 2013:

Unless this pattern of low prices can be reversed quickly, Russia as a political entity could collapse. Exports of all of the goods it now produces would likely fall.

[3] While oil prices depend on “supply and demand,” as a practical matter, demand is very dependent on interest rates and debt levels. The higher the debt level and the lower the interest rate, the higher the price of oil can rise.

If we look back at Figure 4, we can see that before the US subprime housing bubble popped in 2008, inflation-adjusted oil prices were able to rise to $157 per barrel, adjusted to the 2020 price level. Once the debt bubble popped, inflation-adjusted oil prices fell to $49 per barrel. It was at this low point (and correspondingly low prices for many other commodities) that the US started its program of Quantitative Easing (QE) to lower interest rates.

After two years of QE, oil prices were back above $140 per barrel, in inflation-adjusted prices, but these soon started sliding down. By the time oil prices dropped to $120 per barrel, oil companies started to complain that prices were falling too low to meet all of their needs, including the need to drill in ever less productive areas. Now we are at a point where interest rates are about as low as they can go. Short-term interest rates are near zero, which is where they were in the late 1930s.

The quantity of funds in peoples’ checking and savings accounts is at an extraordinarily high level, as well. This is partly because of the availability of debt at these low interest rates.

Thus, even before the Ukrainian invasion, oil prices were raised about as high as they could go, through low interest rates and generous debt availability. With all this stimulus, Brent Spot Oil prices in January 2022 averaged $86.51 in January 2022. Even now, with all the disruption of the attack by Russia against Ukraine, oil prices are below the $120 threshold that producers seem to need. This price issue, plus the corresponding low-price issues for natural gas and coal, is the problem that Russia is concerned about.

Prices for imported coal and natural gas have bounced very high in the last few months, but no one expects these high prices to last. For one thing, they are too high for the European manufacturers that use imported coal or natural gas to stay in business. For example, producers that create urea fertilizer using natural gas find that the price of fertilizer produced in this way is way too high for farmers to afford. For another, the electricity produced by burning the high-priced natural gas or coal tends to be too expensive for European households to afford.

[4] The fundamental problem behind recent low oil prices is the fact that the current mix of consumers cannot afford goods and services produced using the high oil prices that producers, such as Russia, need to operate, pay high enough wages, and do adequate reinvestment.

When the price of oil was very low, back before 1970 (see Figure 3), it was relatively easy for consumers to afford goods and services made with oil. This was the period when the world economy was growing rapidly, and many people could afford to purchase automobiles and buy the oil products needed to operate them.

Once the cost of oil extraction started rising because of depletion, it became more and more difficult to keep prices both:

1. High enough for oil producers, such as Russia, and

2. Low enough to make affordable goods for consumers, as was possible prior to 1970

To try to hide the increasingly difficult problem of keeping prices both high enough for producers and low enough for consumers, central banks have lowered interest rates and encouraged the use of more debt. The idea is that if a person can buy a fuel-efficient car at a low enough interest rate and over a long enough term, perhaps this will make the vehicle more affordable. Similarly, interest rates on home mortgages have fallen to very low levels. All of this, plus the fact that debt is used to finance new factories and mines, leads to the relationship we saw in Figure 4 between oil prices and debt availability, related to interest rates.

[5] No one knows precisely how much oil, coal and natural gas can be extracted because the quantity that can be extracted depends on the extent of the price rise that can be tolerated without plunging the economy into recession.

If prices of these fossil fuels can rise very high (say, $300 per barrel for oil, and correspondingly high prices for other fossil fuels), a huge amount of fossil fuel can be extracted. Conversely, if energy prices cannot stay above the equivalent of $80 per barrel oil for very long without a serious recession, then we may already be very close to the end of available fossil fuel extraction. Both oil and gas producers and coal producers can be expected to go out of business because prices do not leave a sufficient margin for the required investment in new fields to offset the depletion of existing fields. Renewables will falter, as well, because both building and maintaining renewables requires fossil fuels.

The amount of resources of any kind (fossil fuels and minerals such as lithium, uranium, copper and zinc) that can be extracted depends upon the extent of depletion that the economy can tolerate. Depletion of any kind of resource means that a bigger effort (more workers, more machinery, more energy products) is required to extract a given quantity of each resource. It is clear that the entire economy cannot be transferred to the extraction of fossil fuels and mineral resources. For example, some workers and resources are needed for growing and transporting food. This puts a limit on how much depletion can be tolerated.

What Russia (as well as every other oil producer) would like is a way to get the tolerable oil price up significantly higher, for example, to $150 per barrel, so that more oil can be extracted. The hope is that a Russia-and-China-centric economy might be able to do this. Ideally, the tolerable maximum price for coal and natural gas would rise, as well.

[6] Europe, in particular, cannot afford high oil prices. If interest rates are increased soon, this will make the problem even worse. China seems to have definite advantages as an economic partner.

Europe is already having difficulty tolerating very high prices of imported natural gas and coal. Rising oil prices will add even more stress. Central banks are planning to raise interest rates. These higher interest rates will make loan payments more expensive. These higher interest rates will tend to push Europe’s economy further toward recession.

Given the problems with Europe as an energy importer, China would seem to have the possibility of being a better customer that can perhaps tolerate higher prices. For one thing, China is more efficient in its use of energy products than Europe. For example, many homes in the southern half of China are not heated in winter. People instead dress warmly inside their homes in winter. Also, homes and businesses in northern China are sometimes heated with waste heat from nearby coal-fired electricity plants. This is a very efficient approach to heating.

China also uses more coal in its energy mix than Europe. Historically, coal has been much less expensive than oil. What is needed is a low average price of energy. A small amount of high-priced oil can be tolerated in an economy that uses mostly coal in its energy mix. When all costs are counted, wind and solar are very high-priced energy sources, which contributes to Europe’s problems.

In recent years, China’s consumption of energy products has been growing very rapidly. Perhaps, in the view of Russia, China can use high-priced fossil fuel better than other parts of the world.

[7] Russia realized that the rest of the world is utterly dependent upon its fossil fuel exports. Because of this dependency, as well as the physics-based connection between the burning of fossil fuels and the making of finished goods and services, Russia holds huge power over the world economy.

The world economy should have known about the importance of fossil fuels and the likelihood that the world economy would face depletion issues in the first half of the 21st century, ever since a speech by Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover in 1957. In this speech, Rickover said.

We live in what historians may someday call the Fossil Fuel Age. . .With high energy consumption goes a high standard of living. . . A reduction of per capita energy consumption has always in the past led to a decline in civilization and a reversion to a more primitive way of life.
Current estimates of fossil fuel reserves vary to an astonishing degree. In part this is because the results differ greatly if cost of extraction is disregarded or if in calculating how long reserves will last, population growth is not taken into consideration; or, equally important, not enough weight is given to increased fuel consumption required to process inferior or substitute metals. We are rapidly approaching the time when exhaustion of better grade metals will force us to turn to poorer grades requiring in most cases greater expenditure of energy per unit of metal.
. . . it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost are likely to run out at sometime between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account.
I suggest that this is a good time to think soberly about our responsibilities to our descendants – those who will ring out the Fossil Fuel Age. Our greatest responsibility, as parents and as citizens, is to give America’s youngsters the best possible education [including the energy problem of a world with finite resources].

Many people today would conclude that world leaders have done their best to ignore this advice. The likely problem with fossil fuels has been hidden behind an imaginative, but false, narrative that our biggest problem is climate change caused primarily by fossil fuel extraction that can be expected to extend until at least 2100, unless positive steps are made to hold back this extraction.

In this false narrative, all the world needs to do is to move to wind and solar for its energy needs. As I discussed in my most recent post, titled Limits to Green Energy Are Becoming Much Clearer, this narrative of success is completely false. Instead, we seem to be hitting energy limits in the near term because of chronically low prices. Wind and solar are doing very little to help because they cannot be depended upon when needed. Furthermore, the quantity of wind and solar available is far too low to replace fossil fuels.

Few people in America and Europe realize that the world economy is entirely dependent upon Russia’s exports of oil, coal and natural gas. This dependency can be seen in many ways. For example, in 2020, 41% of world natural gas exports came from Russia. Natural gas is especially important for balancing electricity from wind and solar.

North America has historically played only a very small role in natural gas exports; it is questionable whether North America can ramp up its total natural gas production in the future, given the depletion problems being experienced with respect to the extraction of oil and the associated natural gas from shale formations. Continuously high oil prices are necessary to justify ramping up production outside of sweet spots. If drillers consider long-term prospects for oil prices to be too low, the associated natural gas will not be collected.

Europe is especially dependent upon natural gas imports (Figure 9). Its imports of natural gas exceed the exports of Russia and its affiliated countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States, referred to as Russia+ in Figures 8 and 9.

Without the natural gas exports of Russia and its close affiliates, there is no possibility of supplying adequate natural gas exports to the rest of the world.
Diesel fuel, created by refining oil, is another energy product that is in critically short supply, especially in Europe. Diesel fuel is used to power trucks and farm tractors, as well as many European automobiles.

An Argus Media report indicates that Russian supplies account for 50% to 60% of Europe’s seaborne imports of diesel and other gasoil, amounting to amounting to 4 to 6 million tons of fuel per month. It likely would be impossible to replace these imports, using supplies from elsewhere, without bidding the price of these imported fuels up to a much higher price level than today. Even then, countries outside Europe would be left with inadequate diesel supplies.

[8] Russia’s attack on Ukraine seems to have been made for many reasons.

Russia was clearly frustrated with the current situation, with NATO becoming increasingly assertive within Ukraine itself, even though Ukraine is not itself a NATO member. Russia is also aware that in some sense, it has far more power over the world economy than most people realize because the world economy is utterly dependent on Russia’s fossil fuel exports (Section 7). Sanctions against Russia will likely hurt the countries making the sanctions as much or more than they hurt Russia.

There were also several concerns that were specifically Ukrainian giving rise to the attack on Ukraine. There had been long standing conflicts about natural gas pipelines. Was Ukraine taking too much natural gas out as a transit fee? Was it paying the correct fee for the natural gas it used? Ukraine also seems to have mistreated quite a few Russian-speaking Ukrainians over the years.

Russia has become increasingly frustrated with the small share of the world’s output of goods and services that it receives. The way the economic system works today, those who provide “services” seem to receive a disproportionate share of the world’s output of goods and services. Russia, with its extraction of minerals of many kinds, including fossil fuels, has not been well compensated for the great wealth that it brings to the world as a whole.

Over the years, Russia’s great strength has been its military. Perhaps Ukraine would not be too large a country to do battle over. Russia might be able to eliminate some of its irritations with Ukraine. At the same time, it might be able to make changes that would help to raise what have become chronically low fossil fuel prices. The sanctions that other countries would make would tend to push the required changes along more quickly.

If the sanctions really did push Russia down, the result would tend to push the whole world economy toward collapse, because the rest of the world is extremely dependent upon Russia’s fossil fuel exports. In Figure 1, the laws of physics say that there is a proportional response to the quantity of energy “dissipated”; if a greater output of goods and services is desired, more energy input is required. Efficiency changes can somewhat help, but efficiency savings tend to be offset by the higher energetic needs of the more complex system required to achieve these savings.

If energy prices do not rise high enough, we will somehow need to get along with very little or no fossil fuels. It is doubtful that renewables will last very long either because they depend upon fossil fuels for their maintenance and repair.

[9] If higher energy prices cannot be achieved, there is a significant chance that the change in the world order will be in the direction of pushing the world economy toward collapse.

We are living in a world today with shrinking energy resources per capita. We should be aware that we are reaching the limits of fossil fuels and other minerals that we can extract, unless we can somehow figure out a way to get the economy to tolerate higher prices.

The danger that we are approaching is that the top levels of governments, everywhere in the world, will either collapse or be overthrown by their unhappy citizens.

The reduced amounts of energy available will push governments in this way. At the same time, programs such as government-funded pension plans and unemployment plans will disappear. Electricity is likely to become intermittent and then fail completely. International trade will shrink back; economies will become much more local.

We were warned that we would be reaching a time period with serious energy problems about now. The first time came in the 1957 Rickover speech discussed in Section 7. The second warning came from the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others, which documented a computer modeling approach to the problem of limits of a finite world.

The Ukraine invasion may be a push in the direction of more serious energy problems, emerging primarily from the fact that other countries will want to punish Russia. Few people will realize that punishing Russia is a dangerous path; a serious concern is that today’s economy cannot continue in its current form without Russia’s fossil fuel exports.