yurbud
yurbud's JournalFossil Fuel Industry Risks Losing $33 Trillion to Climate Change
A while back I posted an article that speculated gas prices had dropped because Saudi realized demand for their product has an expiration date.
This analysis seems to confirm that, and it couldn't happen to a more deserving industry.
Government regulations and other efforts to cut carbon emissions will inevitably slash demand for fossil fuels, jeopardizing traditional energy producers, Mark Lewis, Barclays’s head of European utilities equity research, said Monday during a panel discussion in New York on financial risks from climate change.
His comments are part of a growing chorus calling for more transparency from oil and gas companies about how their balance sheets may be affected by the global shift away from fossil fuels. As governments adopt stricter environmental policies, there’s increasing risk that companies’ untapped deposits of oil, gas and coal may go unused, turning valuable reserves into stranded assets of questionable value.
“There will be lower demand for fossil fuels in the future, and by definition that means lower prices” Lewis said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-11/fossil-fuel-industry-risks-losing-33-trillion-to-climate-change
Chilcot Report: UK Oil Interests Were Lead Motive For Iraq War
I thought this was going to be the main thrust of the Chilcot report since the false evidence publicly presented has already been hashed over pretty thoroughly.
Still, any documentation of the oil motive is historically important, and this clearly shows it was even strategic access or anything like that--it was just a matter of who would profit from sucking the oil out of the ground.
That's why our government killed a couple of hundred thousand to over a million Iraqis, left the country in a shambles, and created recruits for ISIS.
Our democracy and foreign policy is based on a lie until this gets a similar investigation and honest discussion here.
Secret meetings between government officials and BP and Shell to discuss how they would proceed once Saddam was been toppled are revealed in the document. Iraq, the minutes of one such a meeting read, is “special for the oil companies” and “BP are desperate to get in there.”
In other words, what Chilcot’s report has revealed, albeit reluctantly and seemingly unwillingly, is that energy, not weapons for mass destruction (non-existent as it turned out) was the main motive for the Iraq invasion and the bloody conflict that ensued.
Energy concerns continued to top the agenda in the aftermath of the war as well. According to Open Democracy, a theme repeatedly appearing in the documents that were analysed by Chilcot and his team was “to transfer Iraq’s oil industry from public ownership to the hands of multinational companies, and to make sure BP and Shell get a large piece of that.”
http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Chilcot-Report-UK-Oil-Interests-Were-Lead-Motive-for-Iraq-War.html
Will release of Chilcot Inquiry report on Iraq War lies this week affect the election?
The farther we get from 9/11, the less credible some of those lies seem, including not just the facts of whether Saddam Hussein had WMD, but the assumption that even if he did, he would dare use them against us or our allies or give them to terrorists who may use them against us or our allies given our THOUSANDS of nukes we had (and have to retaliate with) and even the hundreds Israel has and their willingness to attack their neighbors when they feel the need.
Any politician old enough to remember the Cold War or even vaguely familiar with our nuclear arsenal should have known what Bush was selling was nonsense, and it is likely that the Chilcot Report will show exactly that being discussed behind the scenes as well as the real business and finance motives for turning Iraq into a mass grave and first of several ungovernable free fire zones we've created since like Libya and are seemingly trying to create in Syria.
It is also shameful that the Chilcot Inquiry has no parallel in the United States. For all the problems the Brits have, their pols are at least honest enough to do that, but ours can't be bothered.
George Orwell on why economic inequality exists
I stumbled upon this a couple of years ago, but it is even more relevant today.
It is a neat piece of doublethink that has distracted us from how much more wealth a worker creates than in the past, yet isn't shared with them.
Instead, we have been convinced that being given a job is a form of charity bestowed upon us by "job creators" and that they deign to pay us at all is further sign of their altruism and generosity.
The investor class could let a lot more of the grain the ox tramples make it into our feed bag and still be wealthy beyond human imagination, but the reason they don't is precisely what Orwell mentions here.
But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -- indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.
http://professorsmartass.blogspot.com/2008/01/orwells-1984-war-economy-exists-to.html
Wasn't ISIS smuggling oil through Turkey?
The changing sides in the Syria mess is truly dizzying.
Who will be punished for Brexit?
This is a separate question from who should be, which I would argue are those who set the economic and foreign policy that made average Brits decide this was necessary.
EDIT: I mean punished by the financial elite, not soccer hooligans, or anybody else without a trust fund.
Obama Excoriates Republican Obsession With The Term ‘Radical Islam’
Source: Huffington Post
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Tuesday forcefully rebuked Republicans who have berated him for refusing to characterize lone wolf terror attacks by Muslim individuals as acts of “radical Islam.”
Speaking from the Treasury Department two days after a Muslim man shot 49 people to death at a gay nightclub in Orlando after declaring allegiance to the self-described Islamic State group, the president challenged his detractors to identify a single tangible benefit of adjusting his choice of words to describe the attack.
“What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?” Obama asked rhetorically, using another name for the Islamic State.
“The answer is none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away.”
Read more: http://new.www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/obama-radical-islam_us_57603cdbe4b0e4fe5143dc4c
He should have called bullshit on them like this the day he was inaugurated.
TOON: the economist & the goose that laid the golden egg
I would put hedge fund manager instead of economist, but same difference.
MORE of the same
Profile Information
Member since: Sun Jul 11, 2004, 07:58 PMNumber of posts: 39,405
