David Craig, on December 18th, 2023Monday/Tuesday blog
I’ve been surprised that our Net-Zero-obsessed rulers don’t seem to have noticed a rather major shift in geopolitics.
For years/decades our grandstanding, virtue-signalling rulers have been pompously and arrogantly telling the main oil- and gas-producing countries that their products are destroying the planet or mankind or whatever and that soon the ‘energy transition’ means that we’ll no longer want to buy any of the oil and gas these countries currently sell us.
So, what have these countries done? Wait passively while their major customers wean themselves off oil and gas? Or just go and find new customers who do want their products?
I’ve written on previous blogs about the rise and rise of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation.
Many readers will be aware of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) ‘Belt and Road’ programme. This is aimed at making China the world’s economic superpower by gaining control of the world’s natural resources and by dominating trade routes across the globe. The CCP is pursuing the Belt and Road programme mainly through what has been called ‘debt colonisation’. The CCP lends large sums of money to resource-rich or geographically-strategic, but often massively corrupt countries, which are usually dictatorships. Much of the money is siphoned off by the local political, bureaucratic and business elites. Then, when the interest payments can’t be made, Chinese companies controlled by the CCP take over assets such as mines, ports, airfields agricultural land and so on.
But not so many people know about The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). The SCO, formed in 2001 with objectives such as combating terrorism, promoting border security, strengthening political ties and expanding economic cooperation, initially included China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. India and Pakistan officially became members of the SCO in 2017, and Iran is in the process of obtaining full-time membership. Coal- and mineral-rich Mongolia is an ‘observer’. Moreover, many more countries are lining up to join.
But the key development, in my uneducated, ignorant and humble opinion, has been the fact that countries which are moving towards membership by becoming ‘dialogue partners’ include key oil- and gas-producing countries such as Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia:
(left-click on image then left-click again to see more clearly)
In fact. Mr Putin, who is a key driver of the SCO, was recently on a friendly diplomatic visit to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia:
The Net-Zero-pursuing West is already experiencing the highest energy prices in the world – around four times as expensive as in China or India – and energy shortages due to the economically-suicidal stupidity of Net Zero. One of Biden’s first acts as president was to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline which was expected to carry 830,000 barrels per day of Alberta oil sands crude to Nebraska. Following this, the US didn’t have sufficient oil and had to offer to lift sanctions on its arch enemy, socialist dictatorship Venezuela, in return for Venezuela agreeing to supply more oil to the US.
In New South Wales (Australia) the authorities are asking/begging households to cut down their use of airconditioners, washing machines and other electricity-guzzling devices due to a power shortage. And energy rationing and blackouts will soon become a regular feature of our lives in Britain and across the EU. For example, one of the key functions of Britain’s so-called ‘smart meters’ is to enable ‘dynamic pricing’ – this lets electricity suppliers increase the price of electricity at peak times to discourage households from using so much – a policy, like all the ‘green’ policies, which hurts the poorest households the most.
The move of the main oil-and gas-producing countries towards closer relations with China, Russia and the SCO doesn’t bode well for the West. In a few years Western leaders may find to their utter astonishment, what the rest of us have known for years, that you can’t run a modern economy on intermittent, unreliable and ludicrously-expensive wind and solar with a smidgen of nuclear and hydro. What then? Will we go begging the oil- and gas-producers to sell us more of their products just like the idiotic Biden went begging to his arch enemy Venezuela? Will we find that the oil- and gas-producers have committed most of their production to long-term contracts with members of the SCO? Will we then be told that they can sell us what we need, but this will be at much higher prices than they sell to the SCO countries as we haven’t set up long-term supply contracts? Or will they just tell us – ‘you said you didn’t want our oil and gas, so unfortunately we’ve commited our production to countries who do want what we sell. Maybe come back next year and we’ll see if we have a bit to spare for you’?
Hopefully our rulers have thought about this and made contingency plans to rescue the declining West from the catastrophic effects of our rulers’ own self-imposed, self-destructive and scientifically-ignorant Net-Zero policies?
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Luckily the UK and its overseas territories such as the Falkland Islands have plenty of gas and oil. The only problem is we are not allowed to drill it because of made up climate bollocks.
But really how long can this charade last as reality hits the fan. We have enough to last 100 years and the expertise to start building nuclear reactors which is the real long term solution to the transition.
Just need the political will and cojones. Start excluding all the international treaties we have piled into trying to bind the hands of subsequent governments and override sovereignty.
The UK politicians are world leaders in stupidity and they intend to keep that position. They have done more damage to essential infrastructure and the economy than Hitler’s bombing, and our new King is greatly pleased.
I think Paul is right to say that nuclear energy must be the long term solution, but the UK expertise is long gone. It is a French company building them and the experience in France is not encouraging. We hear about a small reactor but there is no sign of any prototype. I don’t understand why we don’t go back to gas cooled reactors. They don’t have the safety issues of the pressure vessel. The problem was their reliability because the CEGB wanted on-load refuelling. Why not develop off-load refuelling? I doubt that we will ever see a fusion reaction.
Geography is a problem for the UK and Europe. It was well placed in the distant past because of basic materials and importantly large navigable rivers for transport. Britain was world leader with the industrial revolution but has fallen behind because we seem incapable of adjusting to competition. Especially after the war we had poor products at a high price and never really recovered, preferring to import from China. This does not work in the long term because we have to export something to pay for imports, and that includes food as well as energy.
Africa has different problems. Lots of natural resources but corrupt governments. It has been held back in the past by geography because of a lack of navigable rivers going far inland because the rivers start on a plateau. It also has a very straight and shallow coast so creating safe harbours is an issue. China isn’t helping and seems to be taking from Africa to preserve its own resources. As you have often pointed out it has the disadvantage of rapid population growth.
It is said that world poverty is reducing but it could easily decline and it is perhaps the most fundamental issue humanity must solve. The UK must consider its declining position in the world and it involves more than energy. We seem to have a sense of entitlement to high incomes and now apparently having them for being at work for less time.