by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog
If 7,000 Greeks can stop the Persian empire at the narrow pass at Thermopylae, I think it’s absurd to think Iran can’t stop 20-30% of global oil traffic at the 3 kilometer-wide shipping lane in the Strait of Hormuz. That would, of course provoke a global crisis and economic disaster.
That’s the “nuclear option” for Iran. It is reportedly part of a military plan called “Ghadir”, which evokes the alpha letter of modern Iranian Islamic history – Ghadir Khumm is the location where Prophet Mohammad anointed Imam Ali his successor, but (those who came to be called) Sunnis amazingly rejected the Prophet’s wishes. Shia – which means “partisans of Ali” – did not.
The US has severely overestimated their military capability to defend this attempt to politicise oil and get Iranian oil exports to zero. Mining the strait, mini-subs, kamikaze speedboats – all of these will be hugely effective against anything the US Navy has. For all the US drones and satellites and aircraft carriers, there is no way they can protect the Straits of Hormuz long-term, not any more than they could hold any of a thousand Afghan mountain passes long-term. Should we trust history or the sales pitches of corrupt Pentagon contractors?
No military can stop endless kamikazes. But who wants to be a kamikaze? What could produce the desire to be a kamikaze?
$0 in oil sales may do it.
There is undoubtedly a part of the Iranian psyche which now wants a final showdown. The years of talking, talking, talking about the JCPOA pact on Iran’s nuclear energy program… and then its failure, thanks to US unilateralism and spineless European hypocrisy, has created a lot of existential angst for Iranians. How can Iranian diplomacy work when the opponents refuse diplomacy and honor?
That is an existential and philosophical question, but there is also a lot of undeniable frustration since the inhumanly effective 2012 Triple Sanctions (US, UN, EU). Iranian society has been forced to become perceptibly more desperate, more coarse, less warm, less Iranian – it is difficult to admit this.
Iran cannot be forced into starvation indefinitely. That is why blocking the Strait of Hormuz – if it ever happens – will certainly be accompanied with an ultimatum: the West must end Iran’s isolation and finally accept the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. The world must live with us, finally, because it cannot live without us in the 21st century.
Unfortunately, due to Islamophobia, even more so than 40 years of media-led Iranophobia, nobody in the West is going to burn a draft card for Iran. The opposition to the obviously immoral war on Iraq produced just a day of street protests in the US – hardly worth the effort. Neither is Iran in the position of the USSR, meaning it has no chance to save the West from racist fascists – after all, the West supports the racist fascists (Taliban in the 1980s, ISIL today, et al).
Because nobody in the West will put any pressure on the governments to stop the oppression of Iran, perhaps Iran has to force the issue by closing the Strait of Hormuz? Is Iran backed into a corner?
I say no, because Iran is not going to sell $0 in oil in month of May.
Firstly, should Iran be worried? Answer: no. The world needs Iranian oil (and revolutionary culture)
When is the last time the US policy worked out in the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen – all have had their growth retarded, but are not destroyed… just like Iran.
As Pepe Escobar pointed out, it’s much easier to retard the Colombian dream of Eurasian integration by attacking its weakest major point – Iran, as opposed to China and Russia.
The bottom line is: can the US do what it claims – reduce Iranian oil sales to $0. No, they cannot.
It certainly seems like the US is foolishly believing self-aggrandising and duplicitous claims from Gulf princes, who are overestimating their oil production abilities.
However, we must first remember that Saudi hatred for Iran is not based on religion – even though “Saudis are not Muslims – they are Wahhabis,” as the regional saying goes – it is based on politics: they hate Iran for proving that all monarchies are immoral, ineffective, undemocratic and a hindrance to the type of democracy Muslims want (Islamic socialist). Their animosity is based on Iran’s ability to make Muslims aware of their modern Islamic socialist rights, and to show how acquiring these rights does not – as the West insists – require the exclusion of their culture, history and religion. Iran, in the manner of all true revolutionaries, insists on constantly couching it in these drastic but honest terms, thus continually flouting their rebellion and their success in the face of the horrific Gulf monarchs.
But the Gulf monarchs, shockingly, are liars: They will NOT be able to give China and India enough replacement oil.
Saudi production peaked at 11 million bpd (barrels per day) last November, which was the system’s maximum stress level, but is now down below 10 million. Offsetting Iranian production – getting up to at least 12 million bpd – thus seems impossible: “A 2-million-bpd Saudi production increase would move the Kingdom’s oil production into unchartered territory and would wipe out completely the kingdom’s spare capacity,” according to Gary Ross, head of global oil analytics at S&P global, via Reuters.
Anyway, Saudi Arabia is not going to increase oil production in May despite the sanctions – they want higher prices to continue bankrupting shale oil / fracking. Because the Saudi state full of disorganised and egotistical princes, they are also full of conflicting agendas.
As far as the UAE, they produce only 3 million bpd, so they aren’t capable of tipping the output scales drastically.
Furthermore, OPEC is at its lowest production since 2015, and Venezuela and Libya show no signs of regaining former glories anytime soon. Even if slow increases from the Saudis and UAE arrive, there are other drains on oil inventories to offset even before cutting off Iran.
So why should Iran feel like we aren’t needed anymore?
Only an administration as filled with incompetents as the Trump administration is could take such lies and mixed signals seriously. But the US is about Israel first, corporations second and everyone else last, therefore any attempt to foment regional stability and higher oil prices makes their constituents happy. Of course, it also advances capitalism-imperialism.
Iran – still no retreat, no surrender… still no big deal
Even just moderately-intelligent Westerners know that “Iran sanctions aren’t a realistic path to peace”, because the sanctions are not designed for peace, but for fomenting internal civil war and to support regional US imperialism.
There is another way Iran could decisively end Western antagonism: simply accede to Western demands, as encapsulated by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s totally-absurd 12 demands. All Iran has to do is – just like the North Vietnamese, North Koreans, Cubans and Chinese – is renounce their revolution entirely, like Egypt, post-Sankara Burkina Faso and now, to a lesser extent, Julian Assange-betraying Ecuador.
I examined what steps Iran would have to actually take in order to get the Cold War called off in this article, Iran detente after Trump’s JCPOA pull out? We can wait 2 more years, or 6, or…., which caps my upcoming book on Iran.
Beyond Pompeo’s fatheaded nonsense, it all comes down solely to capitalist-imperialist logic: Iran must sell off a controlling chunk of the nation into Western hands. There is no way Iran will do that – there are just too many people who are too committed to upholding the 1979 Revolution, the Constitution and Iranian sovereignty.
It’s not as if Iran’s politicians are as out-of-touch, arrogant and stupid as a Persian Gulf prince: the current budget is based on only exporting just 1.5 billion barrels per day with a price of only $54 per barrel (or $83 million per day) because we all knew back in early 2016 that a Trump presidency would hit Iran, Cuba and Palestine the hardest. The price is already around $70. If we assume that things really progress badly, we must also assume the price of oil will rise – a price of $80 means Iran needs to sell just 1 million barrels per day ($80 million per day) to stay under budget. Last month, with some countries already instituting cutbacks, Iran sold 1 million barrels.
The reality is that it is all about China and India for Iran – they sell 3 times more oil to them than even Iran’s #3 customer. Reports are conflicting, negotiations are ongoing – we can’t truly say with 100% confidence what will happen in Beijing and New Delhi.
But… India is the more compliant nation, and they are reportedly going to reduce sales to 100,000 bpd using a rupee payment system. The links are going to remain open, and that is all that matters – the numbers will certainly be fudged. Long-term, Iran is quite happy to sell oil in non-dollar denominations and be the pioneer in that move away from the petrodollar.
Regarding China: Some reports say China will actually increase imports from Iran up to 1 million bpd, totally sabotaging the US. I would hold out absolute certainty until the US and China signs their trade deal next month. However, I highly doubt China is going to sabotage the key node – and the absolutely key energy node – in their Belt and Road Project. China might sell out Iran for a couple years, perhaps during the Trump administration, but long-term? No way. China is not an island, and Iran is the only country which has proven to be revolutionary enough for Red China to trust, which is why they have such serious multi-decade plans already signed. Hard to predict the future, but there’s always both short- and long-term considerations, and long-term China and Iran are united, firmly.
Beyond the two big customers, Turkey says they will flout sanctions, but Turkey also talks a much better game than they punch.
Regardless, Iran will still sell oil “illegally”. Iran, as Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently joked, has a “PhD in that area” of sanctions-busting. Iran was the first modern nation to barter oil for something other than US dollars, and they will be the first nation (I predict) to successfully implement a national crypto-currency.
Iran will obviously send oil to places like Turkey (and India, as Iraq is a top-3 supplier for them) through friendly Iraq. Will Iran lose some profit as a result? Yes, but it’s not like Iranian oil is going to be sold for pennies on the dollar to Iraqis – we are talking minor losses of 10-20%, I’d guess. Over decades that’s significant, but if we are talking about enduring 2 or 6 years more of Trump, then it’s certainly not enough to bankrupt Iran, which is the goal of the illegal US tactic. Crucially, it is certainly fair to assume that now-higher oil costs will offset this new surcharge for sanctions-busting via Iraq.
Regarding bankruptcy: It’s hard to say exactly how much hard currency reserves Iran has, but the IMF said $100 billion in 2017. What reduced oil sales really means – again, $0 won’t happen – is a cutback in new projects.
What does that mean? It means cutting out future infrastructure projects, as well as savings into the National Development Fund. Just as Cuba prioritises their far, far fewer pesos for health, education and food, so will Iran – neither country will starve, neither country will relent… and Iran will still make billions selling oil, unlike Cuba. The years of worsened sanctions has meant things like: Iran have to postpone record breaking projects, like Niayesh Tunnel, the 2nd-largest urban tunnel in the world, finished in 2013, or the Sadr double-decker Expressway, also finished in 2013… but only for a few years. It has meant things like: Iran will get all the global infrastructure in place and start broadcasting PTV Français, and even tap yours truly as its Paris correspondant, but a lack of money means that all the journalism is done solely in Tehran for now. But someday I’ll be reporting in French, Inshallah.
Of course, sanctions do more than retard Iranian growth – the existential angst leads to unnecessary inflation, reluctance for private domestic investment in the “real economy”, and major cutbacks in quality of life for the average Iranian. But, as I’ll point out later – Iran is not Yemen, which is what the US mistakenly thinks they can achieve.
People on the left and the right in Iran actually welcome each new tough sanction with a Persian carpet rollout – it necessarily fuels the “Resistance Economy” championed by Leader Ali Khamenei and others. There is no doubt that a sanctioned people do not just throw up their arms and quit – domestic capacities, initiatives and genius must be honed and further created. In 1995 Iran produced almost no cars – by 2010 they were 14th in the world and the undisputed Middle East leader. These are the types of things I am talking about, but which are not possible without socialist-inspired central planning and central control over industries.
Iran also has recent experience instituting a true War Economy, with rations and coupons to enforce economic egalitarianism, and that is another counterpunch to the US. It also creates countless future economic and cultural benefits.
The Iranian government are not Yemeni rebels, who have no factories, no bureaucracy, no refineries – and thus they are starving, sadly. The Iranian government is the stable status quo, and the status quo always has a million levers to pull before things get hairy… but because they are socialist-inspired, Iran’s government has three million levers. As I have repeatedly demonstrated over the years, the Iranian government controls essentially 100% of the non-Black Market and non-carpet economy. So, far beyond oil, the government actually has the power to completely mobilise the economy in favor of the People, which is something that Eurozone nations no longer have.
The end for US unipolar dominance will arrive swiftly. Iran’s reversal of isolation will also be swift, just as – all of a sudden – the US made detente with China in 1971 after decades of the same sanctions and exclusion Iran deals with. But detente certainly cannot happen during Trump’s first term, given how the US Deep State has so effectively mobilised against him to neuter his once-diplomatic foreign policy plans.
There is no long-term game plan for ending the phobia of Islamic democracy – in 2019, only Iran’s continued determination and success is the answer. Giving up in order to sell oil “legally” is not an answer, nor necessary. Iran has domestic levers to pull for years, and the experience to pull the right ones.
Maybe someday Iran will finally strike back and play their “now the talk really starts” exterior lever – closing the Straits of Hormuz? Iran is all about “neither East nor West but the Iranian Republic”, but I still don’t think that will happen until China feels secure enough to give the signal that they back Iran to the hilt, and that won’t come until the Belt and Road Initiative is further along.
As far as “more sanctions” – certainly disagreeable, but never terminal for Iran.
Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China. His work has appeared in various journals, magazines and websites, as well as on radio and television. He can be reached on Facebook.
Well, I think achieving $0 of oil sales is well underway by iranians themselves – they’re most definitely moving to sale their oil for euros, rubles and yuans.
George Kovachev
That is true. Oil sanctions cannot work against Iran, because Iran can always find middlemen, like Russia and China. The US cannot supply Europe, China and India with all the oil and gas they need, especially not gas.
Washington came to the simplistic conclusion that sanctions against Iranian oil will see Iran implode financially, economically and socially, and that Washington, with Saudi aid, will make up the difference, while at the same time setting certain political and economic conditions. A foolish expectation, especially since Saudi oil fields are becoming depleted, which is the reason for the war in Yemen, which has untouched oil reserves.
A few days ago the Federal Reserve presented a chart, showing that the US is 72 trillion dollars in debt, although the true figure is even higher than that. Washington is getting desperate and making rash moves, all because of it’s finances. All it is achieving is to drive the world away from its self.
Thanatopia and its controller, the Zionazi fascist theocracy, Talmudistan, would love to destroy Iran, and return to destroying Iraq, Syria-you name it. It satisfies their basically ‘religious’ blood-lust, rooted in their barbaric ‘religious’ hatred of others. The more deaths, the more suffering, the happier their ‘God’, in reality their ego-projection onto the cosmos. As the control of Thanatopia by Talmudistan deepens and deepens, and as Talmudistan marches ever further Right, the final, and I do mean terminal, outcome is pretty obvious.
Mulga, here is a take on talmuistan and its most curent disciple, pompeo, looking for the rapture:
(with tongue firmly in cheek)
http://www.unz.com/freed/pence-a-christian-pompeo/#comment-3180683
I can see Pompeo as a ‘snake-handler’, in the sense of, if you’ll pardon the vulgarity, his ‘one-eyed trouser snake’. That’s if he can find in down there among the billowing folds of adipose tissue.
@Mulga
Dont forget the impact of less Iranian fossil dinosaur oil on clima change.
The planets temperature will go down as a result of less used Iranian fossil oil to 4WD and CO2 outlet.
Icebears will freeze and drown to death and could go instinct.
This is dangerous as the Obama socialists clan cannot predict precisely what happen with the planet because of Iran´s aggression, Trump´s lunacy and the lack of due funding to more global leftish research and offices on the matter.
I’m very concerned that you see fit to comment on existential threats that you plainly do not understand at all. Have you considered a career in politics?
One point… Iran would not need to sink every oil tanker to stop oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuze. They only need to attack one or two and threaten to keep doing so. The insurance companies will then do the rest.
I agree. The insurance companies are the key, and no amount of naval force can offset the lack of maritime insurance.
But Iran has some other cards, too. Some Iranian official has suggested that Iran might quit the NPT, or perhaps they could just announce that the Europeans have vacated the JCPOA.
Another aspect of the tragedy, in Syria; these asshats in dc are without morals, heart, soul, but what the hell, they have the bit in their teeth and thus far,nothing is happening to stop them:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-26/assad-victorious-us-oil-sanctions-now-strangle-entire-syrian-population
Remember a couple of years ago,the reports of tanker truck fleets of Syrian and Iraqi stolen oil that ISIS was sending to Turkey,and then transshipped to Israel . It seems to me that is what Iran should be doing today for Syria. Iran needs to sell oil to a country that cares nothing about obeying US sanctions.And Syria needs to buy oil from a country that doesn’t obey US sanctions.A match made in heaven.If the US or Israel was to make the fatal mistake of attacking those convoys,then war would be certain in response.
And SDF hanging onto the oil fields east of Euphrates
…..maybe that can change….we noted Iran Iraq and Syria getting together recently re improving transport links ….that could assist in oil movements and rebuilding eastern oilfield reconstruction and solutions to this area hopefully.
“There is no doubt that a sanctioned people do not just throw up their arms and quit – domestic capacities, initiatives and genius must be honed and further created.”
If the Americans know their own history (which they don’t), they know this to be true. This is the story of the years leading up to the American Revolution. As the colonies became more uppity, the English tried using economic warfare in their mercantilist system to force the colonist to heal. Taxes (aka tariffs) and such on bringing the fine manufactured goods from Europe were supposed to bring the colonists to heal. Instead, the colonies did just like anyone else, and boosted their own local manufacturing. As an example, the word “homespun” still exists on the fringes of American English. This is because it became very fashionable to colonial ladies to wear homespun cloth instead of fine English textiles.
‘The stable status quo’ is what will guarantee Chinese, and Russian, support for Tehran. They have too many vital interests in the region to allow any attempt to destabilize or bring about regime change in the Islamic Republic. Turmoil would spread into Central Asia, posing a challenge to the economic and military security of these two powers. An existential threat to Iran would at some point become an existential threat to the governments in Beijing and Moscow. Ultimately, can world war be avoided? The pattern of history says not.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
clicking on the link to ghost of history brought this warning:
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You know there are so many things wrong with the oil and gas industry that it boggles my mind about the coming consequences of it all. Just read this:
Russian oil flow contamination roils Europe’s refiners
MOSCOW (Reuters) – The quality of Russian oil flowing to northern and central Europe has deteriorated significantly in recent days, traders and Russian officials said, roiling the continent’s refining industry. Oil flows via the Baltic port of Ust Luga and via the Druzhba pipeline to Belarus, Poland, Germany, Hungary and the Czech Republic have been contaminated with high levels of organic chloride since April 19.
The material is used to help boost oil output but must be separated from oil before shipment as it can destroy refining equipment.
According to traders with several European majors, levels of organic chlorine have fluctuated at 150-330 parts per million (ppm) instead of the 10-ppm maximum norm and the usual level of around 1-3 ppm.
The Russian energy ministry confirmed there were quality issues and said pipeline monopoly Transneft was trying to fix the problem as soon as possible, giving no timeframe.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-oil-quality/russian-oil-flow-contamination-roils-europes-refiners-idUSKCN1S01TU
and this:
If it is not one thing that goes wrong, it is another.
There was an article not long ago called Tainted US shale oil is being turned away by Asian buyers.
As various types of crude pass through the supply chain from inland shale fields spanning Texas to North Dakota, they risk picking up impurities before reaching Asia — the world’s biggest oil-consuming region. Specifically, refiners are worried about the presence of problematic metals as well as a class of chemical compounds known as oxygenates, which can affect the quality and type of fuel they produce.
Two refiners in South Korea — the top buyer of U.S. seaborne supply — have rejected cargoes in recent months due to contamination that makes processing difficult. Growing North American output from dozens of fields pushes everything from highly-volatile oil to sticky residue through shared tributaries and trunk pipes. Smaller carriers then take cargoes from shallow-water ports to giant supertankers in the Gulf of Mexico for hauling to far-away buyers.
Throughout its transit from pipes to tanks and onto vessels, foreign compounds from other fuel or chemicals for cleaning tanks or stabilizing material can leach into the supply and foul up refining equipment. While crude passes through a similar chain in the Middle East too, the risk of impurities is lower because each oil variety typically has its own designated infrastructure.
Basically, now we are trying to put such a range of stuff through pipelines that pollution gets to be a problem.
Gail Tverberg
https://ourfiniteworld.com
and now for Trump to pull this off wow? Doesn’t it raise questions about what is really going on. And his desire to open all protected lands and parks to oil drilling in America certainly spells for me anyway that the writing is on the wall?
There is certainly a big environmental problem with shale oil fracking…but the first report you referenced about chlorine in Russian oil sunds more like an anomaly…or even sabotage…since it says that the problem is only in ‘recent days’…
@FB
I work in the oil and gas industry in a non elite supportive role and the last 6 years has been a real eye-opener for me. Gail Tverberg thesis about affordability problems and diminishing returns has been on full display for me. what get me though is last year I asked our former director of company {retired} who worked in the Alberta oilsands how many years left really up there for oil extraction? His reply was around 20 years. He then added if something were to happen in the Middle East that is where America would go for its oil that is why all the majors are up there. Yep, I said too myself that day of reckoning you mention will soon be at our doorstep I am afraid.
And then looky here just found this as well:
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/money/topstories/exxons-refining-shocker-puts-rockefeller-legacy-in-doubt/ar-BBWlFIS?ocid=spartandhp
Exxon Mobil Corp.’s worst refining performance in almost two decades may revive questions about the so-called integrated model engineered by founder John D. Rockefeller and espoused by every CEO in the company’s 149-year history.
A surprise loss in a business line Exxon typically relies on to prop up more volatile units eroded first-quarter profit and cast doubt on the strength of the oil titan’s comeback from its annus horribilis in 2018.
In the last decade, when other oil companies spun off refining businesses to concentrate on drilling for crude, Exxon steadfastly adhered to the wells-to-retail model. The refining loss is particularly stinging for Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods, who rose through the ranks of the fuel-making side of the company rather than the oil-exploration business of his chief competitor for the top job, Senior Vice President Jack Williams, and predecessor Rex Tillerson.
Affordability and Diminishing returns that is unfortunately the name of the game. Gail really has got it right I believe that.
In my own company there is an amalgamation going on with companies that used to be our competition. They increasingly need to work together now.
Someone who understands economics and finance and is not blinded by politics and ideology. A real breath of fresh air. If you like Mr tverberg I can offer you to check out http://www.beforethecollapse.com and if it clicks for you try out the trilogy too. An eye opener! Once you see the pieces you won’t be able to unseen them.
@G
All the years studying the oil industry it was a Banks report that finally put the nail in the coffin for me that we do indeed have a major problem:
New scientific research suggests that the world faces an imminent oil crunch, which will trigger another financial crisis.
A report by HSBC shows that contrary to the commonplace narrative in the industry, even amidst the glut of unconventional oil and gas, the vast bulk of the world’s oil production has already peaked and is now in decline; while European government scientists show that the value of energy produced by oil has declined by half within just the first 15 years of the 21st century.
The upshot? Welcome to a new age of permanent economic recession driven by ongoing dependence on dirty, expensive, difficult oil… unless we choose a fundamentally different path.
Imagine a major international bank reporting on peak oil?? Does http://www.beforethecollapse.com/ speak on this?
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/brace-for-the-financial-crash-of-2018-b2f81f85686b
@Milan
It speaks. We game the incomming reset and categorize the different aspects of the Collapse. The community is mainly professionalists with extensive experience in economy, finance, industry and politics. You are very well informed that our world is function of energy consumption, I. E. Hydrocarbons. If the oil consumption drops 20-30% at least 1,5-2 bn people will take dirt nap in the space of a year. The situation is very excerbated and the world monetary elites are shutting down territories and exclude them from the energy transportation/consumption matrix. See Venezuela, Syria, Argentina, even India etc.
Also you are properly orientated that the CBs act in concert to prop the oil price and create liquidity in order oil to be bought. The issue is that the maximum allowed affordability is going down and the CBs have trapped themselves with their interest policy.
Same old same old. This is peak oil nonsense repackaged as a conversation between disinformation trolls about what, exactly?
The oil will last forever because it is continuously produced by the earth. Humans, on the other hand, make problems because of greed while oil ‘shortages’ are just made up excuses for price increases.
Another Anomalous contribution sans content, sans rationality and sans facts. Abiotic oil? It’s the product of the flatulence of the giant tortoise upon whose back our Flat Earth resides. I thought everyone knew that!
Ahahahah. You really make my day, Mugla. Also I am Def going to pick up a terry pratchet book to read in the AM.
@Ano
When we are saying peak oil we don’t refer to available oil reserves. Peak oil basically means that you waste more than 1b oil equivalent of oil to get a barel of oil out of the ground. A diminishing returns game in the last lap. And given that the economy is function of energy consumption what do you think will be the end game when the Big oil fields cross the max affordability and the price of extraction of a barrel is more than the price of this barrel? Sorry to say it but politics, ediology and diplomacy are after energy and economy.
Here’s the thing…I’m an engineer by training, with a strong background in thermodynamics…the science of energy…
The hydrocarbon chains that constitute crude oil and natural gas can only come about under conditions of great heat and pressure…which are only found at depths many miles below where any form of life has ever existed…so the notion of ‘fossil’ oil is pseudoscience…
These thermodynamics were rigorously scientifically established in the Soviet Union in the 1950s…and also the converse…that it is a thermodynamic impossibility for oil to form from biomass…
Maybe you haven’t noticed that we live in a world of ‘alternative realities’…formed out of whole cloth by our ruling elite…start by researching abiotic oil…
@FB
Yeah, FB hope you are right but many have argued the nonsense of this as well. In any case we’ll stop right here
Thanks
You’re a remarkable person.
Here’s Comment #159 on the thread on the Boeing Max upgrade article by James Thomson at Unz.com:
“FB says: • Website
March 21, 2019 at 3:52 am GMT • 400 Words
@Erebus
Wow…so you can build a Boeing 737 with a hammer, hacksaw and magic marker…cool…
You know none of this surprises me in the least…there is huge corruption in the aviation industry and in fact this is part and parcel of turbo capitalism…I spent most of my career in flight test and so was somewhat insulated from the production goings on…since the flight test aircraft were always hand-built to the highest possible standards…even so, it never ceased to amaze me how they regularly had brutally obvious handling problems that should have been obvious on the drawing board…incidentally, I’ve heard that the flight test team involved with the MAX were the ones that insisted on increasing the system’s authority from a maximum tailplane deflection of 0.6 degrees to 2.5 degrees…ie for what it was supposed to do, it needed four times as much power…of course it wasn’t the test team’s job to rule on how stupid the very idea of MCAS really is…although I am sure that some did just that…I hope they step forward as this unfolds…”
Cortes… you have decided to copy and paste here one of my comments on the 737MAX discussion on the UNZ website…but what is the connection to my comment here that you have replied to…?
Are you trying to say something…anything…?
Maybe you are confused about the well known fact that becoming a test pilot requires an engineering degree…look up test pilot in Wikipedia…so what exactly is your point…?…you seem to be implying something…
I think everyone here knows about the abiotic theory. The issue with it if real is the speed of refilling of the oils. The 1st big oil field in Ussr was emptied circa ’65. If I remember correctly when the field was reopened in the 90s it really has started to refill (partially) . And here comes the but. But if you need ~20 years to empty an oil well and ~30 for the well to refill you are again stack with the affordability issue. Peak oil comes again to haunt you because if we waist more than 1 b of oil equivalent to get a b of oil from the ground we are facked,totally faced.
Tip: take the economic expansion chart of whatever country you choose and look over the chart of said country oil/energy consumption. You see the correlation. This is the real world bro.
And I am a medical doctor with eco/bio background and the allifate chains of the oil can be synthesised from biomass in the absence of purifying bacteria but in the presence of saprolhitic ones. Gosh, this is biochemistry 101 and every sophomore student has Conducted it in a lab. I am not discarding the abiotic theory but I still wait to see direct experimental results which back it.
G…there are some types of bacteria that can, apparently, help facilitate the chemical reactions to get hydrocarbon chains from biomass…but this has nothing to do with the ‘fossil fuel’ theory…which says this happened as a purely thermodynamic process…albeit one that is impossible to demonstrate in the lab, or to even hold together on fundamental thermodynamic theory…
Sorry to say but your response is quite unserious…
“purely thermodynamic process…albeit one that is impossible to demonstrate in the lab, or to even hold together on fundamental thermodynamic theory”
Sorry, but your theory can be tested using diamond anvils under extreme pressures!
As for abiotic hydrocarbons generation, perhaps you are aware that a massive biomass of chemosynthetic bacteria reside many miles down in the crust. As in hydrothermal vents, the high pressures protect the cells from exploding under the high temperatures.
Yes, organic containing marine sediments are subducted under plates such as at the Oregon coast where you can see the rippled underwater sediments above the contact zone.
Futhermore, take a look at the complex stratification in the Permian basin (for example) and you will see that the hydrocarbons are deposited within many resistant strata and not bubbled up in some unproven abiotic process.
Your comment is an incomprehensible jumble…I suggest you address the facts I stated…
1. The thermodynamic process for ‘fossil fuels’ has never been demonstrated…
If you have evidence to the contrary then by all means point to it…
@krolchem
Here opinions are facts as per FB. You won’t be given any fact or any peer reviewed theory, especially when it not fits FB’s ‘world view’.
@G
Let back up FB. There is further links in the comments of the following: “The origin of fossil oil”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdSjyvIHVLw&feature=youtu.be
Please note it makes sense and the info can be tracked.
Agreed.
Abiotic oil should be bubbling up everywhere according to FB’s cited theory. Unfortunately the Kola Superdeep Borehole didn’t find oil. The researchers did find plankton microfossils at a depth of 4 miles.
Guess not everyone believes in the scientific method.
Thanks for you input in this matter.
@FB
So I am citing a lab experiment which creates long alifatic hydrocarbon chains. An experiment which kids in chemistry schools perform on a daily basis. And you are telling me I am not serious and this is not argument. Where is your experiment data, where is your argument? You can fake quality by quantity. The fact that you flood every post in this site with comments does ot give you credentials and does make expert on everything. Quite the contrary – when you have opinion on everything it is obvious you don’t know nothing. Дървен философ is what you are. Once again – if you can show evidence, lab data/research etc. Please do it otherwise do not try to jibe with me. I myself cited the only one physical half-evidence for the abiotic oil theory. And I myself said I don’t dismissed it 100% but if you want to take you seriously and think of you as a knowledgeable and knowing do cite research, experiments and so on. If yiu can’t it is obvious that you are just another ideological drone humming from his/her keyboard chair.
@FB
Thanks. Finally someone with a brain.
It was Rockefeller (Wall Street´s Godfather) who started the dinosaur oil hoax and found out how he could make billions on a stupid middle class who would believe in anything as long as they were feeling VIP.
Fracking it a perfect example of the genius of Free Market capitalism. A process that has never made a dime in profits, and is financed by junk-bonds produced by the Federal Reserve’s free fiat money sausage machine. A process that pollutes ground-water with various filthy chemicals including carcinogens like benzene, many kept secret for ‘commercial’ reasons. The effluent is often polluted with heavy metals and radio-active residues, and is just dumped, often surreptitiously, but what the heck!! This is BUSINESS. And, need one remember-burning this garbage worsens anthropogenic climate destabilisation, already well past the point of no return to Near Term Human Extinction. It’s a win-win-win scenario for those working so assiduously for death and destruction.
It’s a sign of Peak Hydrocarbons, and the desperation to find new sources of material the combustion of which dooms us to anthropogenic climate destabilisation and near term extinction. Homo sapiens at its most ‘sapient’.
Hi Mulga
Your on a roll let me help. We are reduced to blowing up the earth to extract whatever there is left nice eh.
As for Anonymous and his same old same old might I suggest going here
https://medium.com/future-vision/the-oilparty-is-over-c06d3c723655
Information trools? Maybe start reading a little more and eh for those of British descent check out some amazing slides by this Pagett here on coal and iron works from the Ketley Canal circa 1788 on.
ooops if I forgot link
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/pagett-history-of-the-ketley-canal.pdf
Dear Mulga…let me state that I greatly enjoy and value your input here…but just a quick word on ‘global warming’…it may very likely be a plutocratic agenda that has nothing to do with protecting our biosphere…and everything to do with ulterior motives…
First let me state some real horror stories…massive chemical toxicity in our soil and groundwater is bad enough by itself [think glyphosate]…but now there is evidence that we may be seeing mass extinction of bee populations due to the toxins we have saturated into our earth…a crash of our entire food supply hangs in the balance because pollination is key to most of our food…
Habitat loss is literally wiping out apex predators like bears, wolves and big cats…like the pollinating insects, the apex predators are hugely important to the food chain…but nobody is proposing to do anything about any of this…WHY NOT…?
Instead we have ‘global warming’ dropped onto our heads like the stone tablets of Moses…all of our problems neatly rolled into one little ball…
You know what surprised me the most…?…one day I googled ‘benefits of global warming’ just to see what would come up…the most interesting thing [other than the accepted fact that higher CO2 results in more plant life]…is the number of highly prominent scientists that are lending their voice to the ‘nay’ camp…
It’s not hardly a slam dunk…remember…how often have we been deceived before…?
@ FB
Yeah, the deception is everywhere. like the words of Christ better
“Do not be Deceived.’
This is especially the case where climate change is concerned. I mean really the bible teaches it and enormously so. In fact practically every book of the Old Testament and a few of the New especially the Book of Revelation mentions it. But no we won’t even consider it? Won’t even go there and ask questions and the right questions?
Ah, such is life. A shame really. What we could learn could save us all.
Higher temps and CO2 also mean mass extinction for a lot of plants. Think about seed germination. Around here there are sky islands with for example medicinal plants that need several years to germinate, usually with cold (Osha is one of them).
We’re like kindergarteners doing baby steps when it comes to all the mysterious ways seed germination works, and how the climate is involved. Also kindergarteners learning the mysterious ways of the human body. Consider that gut bacteria were not discussed at all twenty years ago, and the idea that anyone would rather drink kombucha than coca-cola would get you laughed out of the board meeting.
There used to be an old stand-by of the laissez-fair utopians, “The solution to polution is dilution.” Well, they tried that. Didn’t work out so well. You don’t hear people saying that much these days.
Another thing I notice is that younger people don’t know how the seasons used to be, and have no frame of reference for change for the last oh say 40 years.
I can’t speak for everywhere on earth, but around here there used to be regular monsoons. You could practically set your clock by them. Nowadays every year is different, and sometimes we get lucky, but the climate has definitely changed. Not always warmer, but more unpredictable for sure.
In these parts, there are windy sirroccos blowing like jets half the year. I don’t remember them when I was growing up.
I agree with you that the whole “debate” has been used by the powers that be for nefarious scumbag purposes, as usual, the PTB being the hateful, cynical bastards they are. I mean, Al Gore (of “Gore/Blood”) as enviro-wunderkind, for f*ck’s sake.
You just automatically linked higher temperatures with CO2…but what do we know about these alleged linkages…?
If you read up on Milankovitch cycles you will find that the Earth’s temperature has varied quite strongly due to the geometry of the Earth’s axial tilt…which does change…as well as orbit…which also varies…
CO2 levels have been much much higher in previous epochs…we know that from the sedimentary record…
Now we do know of course that we are putting a lot of CO2 into the air…but is this what is causing the warming…is there even a warming to begin with…?
If any scientist can definitively answer these questions then I will take my hat off to him…because I understand quite enough about our physical world…as an aerospace engineer…and as a professional pilot of over three decades I also understand quite a bit about how the weather works…since the very science of meteorology came about as a need to accurately forecast atmospheric conditions for large scale air travel…and guess what…even the short term weather forecast we get minutes before lifting off is very rarely accurate enough to make me think of it as a precise science…
The layman will have a very difficult time understanding even the very basics of our physical world in any kind of thorough way…so to think that you can come to conclusions about things like climate change without even applying the very first rule of the scientific method…skepticism…is not very logical I’m afraid…
They have established the science of CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and its crucial role in the planetary climate, with research over the last 170 odd years, since the time of Fourier, Tyndall, Foote et al. In epochs past when CO2 was higher in concentration in the atmosphere, temperatures were higher, and at levels that would make human life very difficult if not impossible. At other times the distribution of the continents was markedly different, so the planetary climate regime was different, and solar activity lower, as the Sun has been slowly increasing in radiance as the aeons pass. The Milankovitch cycles are well understood and taken into account in the climate modeling.
Another thing I notice is that younger people don’t know how the seasons used to be, and have no frame of reference for change for the last oh say 40 years.
@ Internal Exile USA
I’ll never forget about the power failure of Los Angeles too many years ago now and how thousands of people were seen staring up into the night sky in awe because they never experienced the incredible shining heavens stars and such. The light pollution really destroyed it all.
And there was the map of Los Angeles can’t remember where now but the shocking grey of it all meaning how
everything was paved over with concrete was shocking.
We, Humans, as Oscar Wilde once lamented, “Man always destroys what he loves.”
Internal, out here in Austfailia it is almost impossible anymore to find a gardener, a farmer, a grazier or an Indigenous person still living in contact with their ‘country’ (as they call their home turf), who denies climate destabilisation. You mentioned the salient fact-the more or less reliable weather patterns of the last few millennia have been replaced by ever greater variability from year to year. In some places the changes are subtle so far, but in others they are quite marked already. And the behaviour of animals and the activities of plants like bud set, leaf burst and fruiting etc, are being radically disrupted.
FB, I absolutely agree that there are more ecological crises than just anthropogenic climate destabilisation. Just of the top of my bonce I could list pollution of every kind eg chemicals, heavy metals, micro-wave radiation, plastics etc, biodiversity loss, the disappearance of insects, deforestation, desertification etc, and on you go. But I am firmly convinced that anthropogenic climate destabilisation caused by the rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and its concomitant disasters eg ocean heating, warming and stratification, oceanic de-oxygenation, oceanic acidification and weather catastrophes etc, is the greatest of all.
As far as the fakestream media is concerned, ALL ecological crises are downplayed, because a second’s thought illuminates the truth that all are caused by the cancerous omnicide cult of capitalism, with its absolute, indeed inherent, insistence on infinite growth. Anthropogenic climate destabilisation is just the least downplayed, and the capitalists have also funded a gigantic denialist industry of lies, disinformation and misrepresentation concerning this existential danger.
And the question of the ‘benefits’ of climate destabilisation is pretty clear, too. A gradual rise in temperatures of a degree or two might, indeed, benefit some regions, while leaving others worse off or not affected much. But the rate of the current rise is too rapid for species to adapt, and is certain to reach two degrees Celsius, almost certainly more, within decades. That will be cataclysmic. As for raised CO2, it does, indeed, benefit plant growth, all other factors being equal. But the world is not a greenhouse, and raised CO2 levels come with other consequences, such as raised temperatures, less stable hydrological regimes, ie longer and deeper droughts and consequent mega-fires and greater and more frequent deluges and flooding, plus changes in disease and animal pest range and population densities. Most science is fairly plain that, on balance, these changes will be detrimental to planetary forests, and the evidence is already there from disasters like the spread of pine beetle infestations in North America.
Mulga, I like your term “climate destabilization”… that seems more accurate than warming.
Milan: Thank you for the lovely LA story… I lived in LA for a year, 20 years ago you couldn’t see the stars at night, just an orange/pink horizon with a little dark patch at the zenith. I really never got used to it.
I just noticed that climate scientists were using ‘disruption’ instead of ‘warming’ because the process was not entirely one-way in all places, and to lazily assert so was just playing into the denialist industry’s paws. Then I thought that the stability, or relative stability, of the Holocene was an essential prerequisite of the rise of human ‘civilization’, if you can still call it that, and ‘destabilisation’ would signify the civilization-ending potential of rapid climate change. I’m sure I saw someone using it already, and found it useful. And it certainly is rapid.
New (to me) information re.local climate change: deforestation is likely the most singal thing affecting global warming . See here: https://news.mongabay.com/2019/04/less-rainforest-less-rain-a-cautionary-tale-from-borneo/?n3wsletter=&utm_source=Mongabay+Newsletter&utm_campaign=7e4b5c476b-newsletter_2019_04_25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_940652e1f4-7e4b5c476b-67247155
Excellent article…full of details and nuance about the political and economic issues surrounding the US attempts to subdue Iran…
I agree that the US cannot succeed in this harebrained scheme…in fact they cannot even break little Venezuela…
Ultimately the imperialist US is its own worst enemy…imperialism belongs in the past…it doesn’t work any more with a resurgent China, Russia and Iran playing increasingly powerful positions on the global chessboard…in today’s world the US is a dead man walking…just waiting for the next Ponzi economy crash to put it six feet under…
Iran’s socialist system [with Shiite characteristics] is definitely moving the country forward…the country graduates as many engineers as the US, according to Forbes…last night I watched an interesting PBS documentary from 2018 about Iran’s Jews…they consider themselves Iranians first and Jewish only by religion…they have been in Persia for 2,700 years…since the Persian empire freed them from Babylonian bondage…
I don’t think China is going to cut Iranian oil imports as part of a possible trade deal with the US…first China is a stickler for international law, same as Russia…and it’s the US that’s in violation of the UNSC with its illegal exit from that resolution, as well as its illegal sanctions…China has its image at stake as it seeks cooperation with many countries under its Silk Road development plan…it’s not going to fritter that away to appease a state that is as aggressive as Nazi Germany…
In fact I would be more inclined to see China buying even more Iranian oil since this would put it in a position to neuter the entire US sanctions project against Iran…and thereby flex its muscles and send the appropriate message about global power balance to the fantasts in DC…
Also the Iranian issue has nothing to do with the China-US trade issue…and the Chinese will never agree to such a linkage…as for the trade issue itself, it is China that’s in the driver’s seat…the US needs Chinese manufacturing capacity [since it no longer has nearly enough of its own] than China needs the US export market…since the gigantic Chinese domestic consumption is growing by leaps and bounds…
I believe we are fast approaching a day of reckoning…the US has been living on borrowed time for at least a decade now…and has been a pirate state for more than a century…the final tally has to come sooner or later…
The US will only be neutered if the US dollar and payment system can both be by-passed. Won’t be too long to wait. Only Saudi Arabia stands in the way.
In fact a combo of Russia, Iran and Iraq oil production traded in a basket of currencies can more than balance the Saudis’ oil output traded solely in USD.
I wonder why this is not happening?
Why not? Because a psychopathic regime in Thanatopolis, run by a psychopathic narcissist, Trump, and TOTALLY controlled by a psychopathic, theocratic cum fascist regime in Israel, led by a truly Evil and deranged supremacist fascist, Satan-yahoo, will not take its eclipse peacefully. In fact, following Talmudistan’s ‘Samson Doctrine’, Thanatopolis DC will be very happy to destroy the world rather than have its totalitarian rule over it ended. The Chinese were no doubt hopeful of a gradual collapse being navigated peacefully, as the USA crumbles, but I’m sure that they realise now that the descent will be abrupt, chaotic and immensely destructive, rather like that of the Nazi Reich, with similar pathopsychologies driving the process.
Why is this not happening…?
That’s a very good question that is worth scrutinizing very closely…
Here are a few things that come to mind…first is the fact that the vast majority of global oil is traded on a handful of commodities markets…all of them Western based…these markets are part of the giant and globe-spanning western financial infrastructure…so there is a large finance component involved…for instance a buyer of oil [and other commodities] will seek to buy at a set price for delivery next month or six months from now…that means finacial derivatives like oil futures contracts underpin the whole thing…
If there is any area where the west’s power is unchallenged, it is in finance…and this has been built up over centuries of imperialism, colonialism and outright piracy…so the reality is that trading oil requires a certain nuts and bolts infrastructure…and putting in place an alternative infrastructure that can do everything that’s physically required is not as simple as flipping a switch…
What will be required is to build up a commodity trading infrastructure, and that is probably a very big and complex project that will require a lot of dedicated effort from Russia and China…the world’s energy superpower and the world’s biggest economy…
Are they even working on this actively…I would say that they are probably laying the groundwork…but we still have a ways to go before we can flip that switch…but again the US is its own worst enemy…it’s slapping sanctions on half the world, and threatening the other half to kneel down and go along with this economic warfare…this can’t continue…and this is why these alternative trading mechanisms will eventually take over…
One way out for Iran – make peace with Israel. That will undercut the Americans and the Netanyahu regime.
Interesting thought, but I fear that is impossible. The State of Israel has, well, let me put it very politely, a smell of illegal founding over it. Add to that the racist behaviour, that is worse than the south of the USA in the sixties. The philosophy of it is genocidal and striving for more ‘Lebensraum’ based on a fairytale, at the same time whining that everybody hates them (and even threatening to destroy everything around them when we don’t lick their boots).
Just read the Talmud, the KKK are boy scouts compared to that.
You cannot negotiate with psychopaths.
Cheers, Rob
How is Iran not at peace with Israel…?
Is Iran attacking Israeli soldiers that are illegally on Syrian territory [Golan Heights]…?
Or is Israel illegally attacking Iranian soldiers who are in Syria legally…?
Sorry, FB, but facts are irredeemably ‘antisemitic’.
Simon Chow
Iran and Israel to make a peace deal ? impossible, and not only because of Iran’s oil and gas. Some time ago Netanyahu stated that Iran was created on Israeli holy land, which surprised even me, who read many strange things in his life. Worse, some years back Netanyahu openly stated that Israel controls the US, which is true. The US is used for a globalist foreign policy on behalf of the Rothschild’s, Rockerfeller’s and others. This foreign policy cannot be reversed, as it would lead to an immediate crash of the dollar. The backbone of this foreign policy is the Military Industrial Complex, which needs wars and interventions. US industry is tied to the MIC. A few days ago the US Federal Reserve admitted that US debt amount’s to 72 trillion dollars, although it’s certainly higher than that. The current globalist US foreign policy will be terminated when the dollar crashes, after which we will see severe social unrest in the US, a situation approaching civil war. After that I don’t see the US lasting in it’s present geographic form.
Thanks BF for your insights. Gave me some pointers to consider. Peace can be so difficult in the middle-east or as Pepe escobar put it, south-western Asia.
BSF
@ Simon Chow
BF is a great Analyst! :-D
Oh wouldn’t you just wish!
Iran will never bow to Israel and debase itself like the US.
In the US, leading politicians in both house of Congress and from both parties and also including the president of the US, try to outdo each other, in who can lick Israel’s boot the cleanest, or who can give it the most aid, at the expense of US taxpayers.
Trump backing out of the JCPOA had absolutely nothing to do with US national interests – it was done because Sheldon Adelson and other Zionists demanded that it be done.
In fact, the US stood to gain enormously if the deal was adhered to, because Iran wanted to buy Boeing passenger planes, among other things. Billions of dollars from potential deals with Iran and corporate America went up in smoke when Trump terminated the deal.
Please remember, that Trump cited the billions of dollars in deals that would be lost if Saudi Arabia was sanctioned over the killing of Khashoggi. He said that as president he had to think of American jobs and put American interests first and not let morals dictate the relationship with Saudi Arabia.
Yet with Iran, he allows the demands of Israel and its supporters to rank above the interests of the US.
“America First – just not when it conflicts with the interests of Israel” – should be Trump’s campaign slogan for 2020.
The world sees how Israel treats America : like a vassal state to be ordered about and from which to extract tributes.Conservative estimates put US daily aid to Israel at $11 million.
America is Israel’s bitch!
The Islamic Republic is a proud country with 1000s of years of history and will never bow to Israel.
The murderous regime that occupies Palestine should know that it will never receive validation from the Islamic Republic!
Selah
Ramin, OMG!!!
“Prophet Mohammad anointed Imam Ali his successor”
-There’s a fatwa coming your way from someone in Washington’s anointed kingdom.
That quote is THE source of all the Sunni Shia conflicts. Going on more than a thousand years now…
If you have proof of the anointment, maybe you can show it to our Mecca overlords.
Closing the Straits of Hormuz needs to be only the start. The US is certain to retaliate with air and missile strikes. Iran must be willing to fire the big “nuclear option”.Which is to back (heavily back) the Shia in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. Much of the Saudi oil is in the area of the country with large Shia populations. Destroy the pipelines and oil fields.Cooperate with the Shia forces in Yemen to attack the Saudis in the North and the South.Destroy the ability for the Saudis to access their oil as well as closing the straits. Some might say that is extreme.But we are talking about life and death here.If Iran must close the Straits of Hormuz,then we are past the time of worrying about extreme measures. And its a matter of win that fight,or be destroyed.
The destruction of the Wahhabist pathology in Sordid Barbaria ought to be a universal imperative. A genocide cult disguised as a country, it is a cancer on the whole world. And the Sordid Mafia family needs to be rounded up and Wahhabism purged from its ranks. That will require emptying the casinos and brothels of Europe of sundry thousands of princelings, but I’m sure that the princesses will appreciate the process.
Uncle Bob, I would add a Hezbollah missile strike on the Yenbo installations, if within range.
But I am confident that General Soleimani has already thought of these things.
Right, there’s no way the AngloZionist West can stop Iran and its (Islamic socialist) Muslim democracy – least of all with Pompeo-like aggression – nor rising democracy in the rest of the Muslim world, such as in for instance Turkey and Pakistan. Quite the contrary, the West’s aggression has even the opposite effect.
“…that it is all about China and India for Iran -” . . . I think anti-Muslim/anti-Chinese Hindutva India, behind its deceptive non-alignment mask, is completely aligned with the anti-Muslim/anti-Chinese AngloZionist West, but it’s definitely all about China’s cooperation with Pakistan, Iran, and Turkey (BRI).
Ramin: Hello, sir. You write:
“…Saudi Arabia is not going to increase oil production in May despite the sanctions – they want higher prices to continue bankrupting shale oil / fracking.”
I understood that shale oil fracking is only profitable if the price of oil is very high, since it costs so much to produce oil through fracking. Am I wrong?
You also mention that ” Iranian society has been forced to become perceptibly more desperate, more coarse, less warm, less Iranian – it is difficult to admit this.”
Can you share an example of what makes you write this? Thank you, and allow me to say that i greatly appreciate your writing here.
Precisely Anomynous
Higher oil prices will keep the fracking industry alive…exactly the opposite of what Ramin stated.
Cheers
Col
That remark about the Saudis wanting higher oil to bankrupt fracking is an embarrassing mistake and I hope everyone reading realised that!
Indeed, one of the main reasons for lower oil prices recently is to bankrupt the fracking industry – not higher – so I don’t know what on earth I was thinking? I do know there are a few typos as well, so this clearly needs a proper editing before reposting everywhere. Major brain failure there, and thanks for pointing out my mistake.
Regarding Iran changes for the worse since the 2012 sanctions – I appreciate your sympathetic interest, truly, but I don’t want to air dirty laundry in public. Just admitting this makes Iran’s enemies happy, but I bring it up as a reminder of how devastating Cold War and sanctions are.
I see where I was going with that, but I rather feel asleep at the wheel, LOL. Must be too many Yellow Vest demos tiring me out. This is the new paragraph for future publication:
“Anyway, Saudi Arabia is not going to increase oil production in May despite the sanctions – they want higher prices after years of trying to bankrupt shale oil / fracking. Because the Saudi state is full of disorganised and egotistical princes, they are also full of conflicting agendas: not everybody wants to raise money by selling off part of Aramco to foreigners – they just want to turn off the taps and watch the price get back to $100 bpd, which solves a lot of problems for any oil producing state.”
Iran is not Rothschild. It gives it a freedom and a leeway that very (very) few countries have left on Earth. And the Persians are not Arab. They know their roots and their identity.
The happy days phone call by Trump to Hafter presages an imminent strike on Iran.
Venuzuelan oil is another source the US scrambles to secure.
Prompting a global economic slowdown is another method employed to cut oil demand.
Macron’s diesel tax hikes aim to free up heavy fuel capacity for European theatre operations.
European austerity is about driving down oil demand to accommodate a global oil market minus Iran, Venuzuela, and the Arabs.
Trump is being funneled into the role of the King of the South in Daniel 8 to fulfill Zionist eschatological imperitive. For them ‘things’ have to come together in a certain way so they can absolve themselves of the fate they have thought to choose for us.
And they fete Trump as the return of Cyrus the Great.
The antichrist Macron has a fell role to play. Pity him not.
Yes,the US is trying to control all the oil production and sales in the world. But as of now that can’t do it. The Russian,Central Asian oil,Iranian,Venezuelan,and possibly Iraqi oil is out of their hands.That probably makes up half of the world’s oil supply and reserves.The US wants that as soon as they can get it.But “so far” they don’t have it.If Iran was to destroy or cripple the Gulf supply,the US and their other oil vassals can’t make up for that loss.And if the non-US oil states were to refuse to accept the US dollar as payment for their oil.The US would be strangled with useless dollars.Its time for the nations of the world to stop “worrying” about the US’s actions,and start planning their own actions to take.
https://www.sott.net/article/411946-Accidental-discoveries-Scientists-create-a-new-wonder-material-that-could-revolutionise-batteries-and-electronics
It seems we are fated to die, our wings amelt, as we fall away from the sun.
In terms of global esteem it is getting to the stage the l US will go all in against the resistance axis in a deluded attempt to recover its self referencing glory.
Armageddon however cannot be sideswiped. All our work and genuis thrown away by doom seeking religious nutcases.
@Anonymous “It seems we are fated to die”
The minute we were born, we were all “fated to die”. Something do to with biologic matter having to die, rot, feed other biological matter such as animals and plants and mineral one, such as Earth and all her resources, so that birth can always take place and life can always go on. Humans’ profound error is that is what they define as “life”, from their limited, self-important and self-centered perspective of “Jewel of God’s creation” (Zionist in extreme).
I wouldn’t spend so much time finding culprits and pointing fingers. Humans were set up to fail, they do and they die. Doesn’t matter how. Actually, I don’t waste my energy on the blame game. Listening to -and mingling with- Near Death Experiencers is the best thing we can do for ourselves. I highly recommend it. It resolves fear and cognitive dissonance.
Their ranks keep growing by the day, even though they have always existed and testimonies have existed for millenia. What was occulted for so long is now widely in the open. We are at a crossroad, we know it will blow up, we don’t know when and we don’t know how but we know it will (and humans have made sure we will: science-without-conscience will always win in the end and the end is always… destruction. Hence the first Tower of Babel and us, building the second one as we speak).
The journey of man is feted to die.
I am of the belief that heaven is a place where people dont die, at least not for a thousand years. Where as during the times of Jesus, most people were lucky if they lived 30 years, flipping kids every 15 years. So if today humans are lucky to live to a 100, they still have a ways to go to reach heavenly life. In this middle ground we portray life in heaven after death, this is a myth, approaching death of any sort is painful, so with death comes the easing of pain, this is not a heavenly outcome, its closer to a lights out forever sleep and should and could be viewed that way if it were not for the religious snake oil salesman.
300 greeks.
Come and take him.!
“The world needs Iranian oil”, this is obvious, but “(and revolutionary culture)” is more doubtful.
@Anon (the one who prioritizes the need for oil over revolutionary culture).
Actually, it’s the other way around.
“Civilization is not oil nor gas, civilization is the drive to diminish our traces of original sin”. — Baudelaire.
I am not sure that the ‘Iranian revolutionary culture’ would ‘diminish the traces of the original sin’ since Islam rejects the ‘original sin’. Nor that it represents what Baudelaire understood by ‘true civilization’.
Baudelaire doesn’t say anything about oil, but only gas, steam and turn-tables* (the exact quotation is: ‘ “Théorie de la vrai civilisation. Elle n’est pas dans le gaz, ni dans la vapeur, ni dans les tables tournantes*. Elle est dans la diminution des traces du péché originel. Le vrai progrès ne peut être que moral et donc individuel. Est de droite qui reconnaît la vérité du péché originel. Est de gauche qui s’accroche à la théorie de Darwin. On exagère ? Peut-être. Mais en un temps où le monde s’éloigne de l’art avec un telle horreur, où les hommes se laissent abrutir par l’idée exclusive d’utilité, je crois qu’il n’y a pas grand mal à exagérer un peu dans le sens contraire”.
*”Table-turning (also known as table-tapping, table-tipping or table-tilting) is a type of séance in which participants sit around a table, place their hands on it, and wait for rotations. The table was purportedly made to serve as a means of communicating with the spirits; the alphabet would be slowly called over and the table would tilt at the appropriate letter, thus spelling out words and sentences”.
Anon, thank you for supplying the full text of that quote. It reminds me that Baudelaire, like another great French poet Valery, foresaw the self destructive future of an amoral technology with “la gauche” embracing godless social Darwinism as it has in the West. Islamic Socialism is the right idea; whatever happened to all those Christian Socialists who used to be so common in the West? “O Ye of Little Faith”, withered away.
I should have provided the context of Baudelaire’s quote: “écrivait Baudelaire au chantre du Progrès, le républicain [Victor] Hugo (of the “Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482” fame). Coincidence?
People (mainly of Anglo-Saxon extraction) use nowadays to swoon about the ravings of a Nietzsche about the degradation of the civilization. I offer you another quote of Baudelaire:
« Il est impossible de parcourir une gazette quelconque, de n’importe quel jour, ou quel mois, ou quelle année, sans y trouver, à chaque ligne, les signes de la perversité humaine la plus épouvantable, en même temps que les vanteries les plus surprenantes de probité, de bonté, de charité, et les affirmations les plus effrontées, relatives au progrès et à la civilisation.
Tout journal, de la première ligne à la dernière, n’est qu’un tissu d’horreurs. Guerres, crimes, vols, impudicités, tortures, crimes des princes, crimes des nations, crimes des particuliers, une ivresse d’atrocité universelle.
Et c’est de ce dégoûtant apéritif que l’homme civilisé accompagne son repas de chaque matin. Tout, en ce monde, sue le crime : le journal, la muraille et le visage de l’homme.
Je ne comprends pas qu’une main puisse toucher un journal sans une convulsion de dégoût. »
Baudelaire died in 1867, only three years after the foundation of the “International Working Men’s Association” aka “The First Internationale”, the Mother of all ‘socialisms’ and grandmother of the murderous Comintern.
Would you think that Baudelaire, the aesthete, the inspired poet, the lover of the murdered beauty of traditional France would have seen an ‘Islamic socialism’ vandalizing and desecrating France’s monuments to Beauty as the ‘right idea’?
Anon, thanks for yet another nourishing tranche of Baudelaire. Re his condemanation of newspapers for regaling the bourgoisie with filth while praising the values of their own civilization, I can only marvel at his foresight of the modern MSM sewer. I have not read a newspaper nor watched any other MSM for years, and rely on Trpther sites like the Saker for information and dialogue with intelligent and educated interlocutors such as yourself.
But what have you got against Persia? When did Islamic socialists destroy France’s artefacts of beauty? If anything it’s the other way around: France both as part of NATZO and on her own initiative has been destroying churches and antiquities in socialist Islamic countries like Syria and Libya — as well as being crassly indifferent to the upkeep of its own beautiful and hallowed Notre Dame de Paris. I shudder to think what cretinous vandals such as Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron could do to the cultural heritage of Persia if contemporary France and her NATZO goons got a chance to do in that country what they have done in Syria, Libya and Christian Serbia.
I do not have anything against Persia as such. My contention is with ‘Islamic revolutionary culture’, which is admittedly the very core of ‘Islam’.
I love Omar Khayyam, frowned upon and actively persecuted by the Islamic revolutionaries of his time (doubts that he was a closet ‘zoroastrian’ have never been disconfirmed). His praise of Wine is very much akin to Baudelaire’s praise of the ‘Soul of wine’ (L’Ame du Vin), who sings for the “man, dear disinherited, this song full of light and of brotherhood”. He was rediscovered by the poets of the ‘Pre-Rafaelite’ circle (Dante Gabriel Rossetti), contemporary with Baudelaire, and became more popular in the ‘West’, reaching almost cult status (in reaction to the almost Islamic puritanical prudery of the Victorian Age), than in his native country. His Rubaiyat were a veiled protest against the “welter of fanaticism and superstition, of disorder and brutality” brought about by the fanatical new converts to Mahomedanism, the Turks (and later Mongols), which marked the beginning of the end of the short ‘Golden Age’.
But Baudelaire was talking of the ‘true civilization’ of Christianity which aim is to ‘diminish the traces of the original sin’. Islam (like Judaism) does not admit that there is an ‘original sin’, a falling of the Man from his exalted status of ‘image of God’, and that the ‘image of God’ can be restored in the fallen Man, to achieve the ‘likeness’ with God, by “eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ” in the Church (“So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. For My flesh is real food, and My blood is real drink”). For Islam Man is not made in the image of God, but ‘sins’ when he does not submit to the tyrannical dictates of Mahomed. The interdiction of drinking wine in Islamic ‘cultures’ (revolutionary, socialist, or not) is a perfect sign. Man is actually debased in Islam.
On the other hand, you can’t justify (and deflect attention from) the actual rampant wanton and massive destruction of France’s (and not only) Christian monuments by Islamists, by supposing what France ‘could do if…’ (actually it was not France which destroyed any church or cultural heritage in ‘Islamic socialist countries’, but the same Islamic ‘revolutionaries’, in a long ‘tradition’ of ‘smashing the crosses’) or by a pervasive ‘Islamophobia’. As a matter of fact the French did much to prepare the public to ‘accept’ Islam, both by relentless anti-Church campaigns and by exalting the wonders of Islamic ‘cultures’.
Russia, China, and India are buying gold hand over fist. Iran could have been stockpiling gold and silver for decades, especially when these precious metals were venerated by Muhammad! This strategy not only provides useful commodities for trading but it also puts the precious metals markets under intense pressure, due to the lack of supply and the racketeering practices of using false trades, in the futures markets, to manipulate market prices. This strategy then kills two birds with one stone as it destroys the basis of international usury. Win-win, non?
Now Macron has burnt down Notre-Dame and folks have put the facts together one can expect him to pull the military card big time in the Middle East.
Iran will suffer to cover up Macron’s sacrilege.
I attach a few paragraphs translated into English from:
https://www.voltairenet.org/article206324.html
Immediately, the President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron decided not to rebuild Notre Dame, but to realize a difficult project that had been waiting in drawers for two and a half years.
In December 2015, a mission was sponsored by the then President of the Republic, François Hollande, and the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. It lasted a whole year while Emmanuel Macron was Minister of the Economy, Industry and Digital.
Numerous personalities took part, including Audrey Azoulay, then Minister of Culture and now Director of Unesco [1], or Préfet Patrick Strzoda, then Chief of Staff to the Minister of the Interior and today Emmanuel Macron.
It was headed by the President of the National Monuments Center, Philippe Bélaval, and the architect Dominique Perrault.
Noting that the island of the City is, since its remodeling by Baron Haussmann in the nineteenth century, an administrative complex closed to the public, housing the Sainte-Chapelle and the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, the mission proposed to transform it into a “Island-monument”. The opportunity is provided by the removal of the Palace of Justice, the reorganization of the Prefecture of Police and the hospital of the Hotel Dieu. It will indeed be possible to reorganize everything.
The mission has thus listed 35 coordinated projects, including the creation of underground traffic routes and the canopy of many interior courtyards, to make the island a must-drive for 14 million annual tourists and, possibly, French people.
The mission report [2] evokes the incredible commercial value of this project, but does not say a word about the heritage value, especially spiritual, of the Sainte-Chapelle and Notre-Dame that it addresses exclusively as sites potential sources of income.
Unfortunately this ambitious project could not, according to its authors, be realized quickly not so much because of the absence of financing as heavy administrative habits and enormous legal constraints. Although there are only a few people on the island, the slightest expropriation can last for decades. More surprisingly, the director of the National Monuments Center seemed to regret the prohibition to destroy part of the heritage to enhance another part. Etc.
Use google translate to read the following article about Macron burning the cathedral.
The word ‘macron’ means a ‘mark’
He won the electoral play-off with 66.06% of the votes cast.
Google: could Emmanuel Macron be the Antichrist.
Hello and thanks for this article.
Question; how do high oil prices help bankrupt the fracking frackers in the US?
Thanks.
They obviously don’t, that was a mistake, LOL. Someone else asked that, and I posted this reply:
I see where I was going with that, but I rather feel asleep at the wheel, LOL. Must be too many Yellow Vest demos tiring me out. This is the new paragraph for future publication:
“Anyway, Saudi Arabia is not going to increase oil production in May despite the sanctions – they want higher prices after years of trying to bankrupt shale oil / fracking. Because the Saudi state is full of disorganised and egotistical princes, they are also full of conflicting agendas: not everybody wants to raise money by selling off part of Aramco to foreigners – they just want to turn off the taps and watch the price get back to $100 bpd, which solves a lot of problems for any oil producing state.”
I just finished reading this article and some of the comments when I read this article in The Global Times
I read the Global Times because it gives a tiny glimpse into what ‘Beijing’ is thinking …. or, it gives a tiny glimpse into what ‘Beijing’ wants you to think it is thinking
‘Even after sanction waiver ends, impossible for Washington to bend Tehran’
http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1147872.shtml
‘Beijing’ is well aware of the issues
China needs oil if it is to continue to develop …. it is a player
I am temped to say China is facing an increasingly erratic ‘Beltway’, but I wonder if the world is just the plaything of the bankers ….. and we all know which bankers I am referring to
If I am thinking that is a possibility, then you can be assured I am not alone
Remember the saying, ‘buy when there is blood on the streets’
More blood, more buying opportunities
Patience might be the best practice.
Of course the US can’t command the Chinese with whom they are allowed to trade, and I don’t see how they are going to stop oil transportation without the risk of shooting themselves in the foot. Skyrocketing oil prices will hurt them the hardest.
What we are awaiting is something that is not said loudly: the collapse of Saudi Arabia. They are running out of money, and they are running out of oil. It is well-known in the refinery world, that the so called ‘water cut’ of Saudi oil is rising. Two thirds of their oil reserves (a mystery better preserved than the Coca Cola recipe, but sometimes people just talk too much) come from the large Ghadar oil field. And this field is on the verge of exhaustion.
The recent delusional quarrel with Qatar, and the genocidal war with Yemen must be seen in this perspective: they are desperately searching for new goodies.
Don’t think the Saudi’s are fighting themselves, they won’t leave their nice airconditioned camps. Ground forces are from Pakistan, and rumours are that the bombing is done by the British AF. They can’t win from ragheads in the hills, and it costs a fortune.
The Saudi society runs on oil money. Nearly all the important work is done by expats. The society needs doctors and engineers, not people graduated in ‘islamitic phylosophy’. Those are paid off with useless government jobs, shifting paper.
I’m sure this will collapse in the coming years. When this happens, a demented king and a risky idiot as clown prince cannot prevail it. Then fasten your seat belts and grab popcorn, it won’t be pretty. Yes, also you, Condoleezza Rice, with your nice ‘Project New Middle East’. Do we think Turkey and Iran will sit idly by? Large changes are ahead, I think.
Cheers, Rob
Another ‘problem’ has jumped to my mind, because it was from a few years ago: Saudi Arabia is running out of water.
Their groundwater aquifers are running dry, and desalination of sea water is extremely expensive. Add to that, the water usage per capita is double of that in the EU (ok, it is some hotter there).
Whole article here: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/saudi-arabia-is-running-out-of-water-a6883706.html
(This is also a big reason why Israel will never give up the Golan Heights, it is a large supply of water for them.)
Cheers, Rob
The Prophet of Islam foresaw the fall of Arabia 1400 years ago. You wouldn´t believe how accurate he described our era 1400 years ago and Arabia of our time. The Prophet himself foresaw the victory of the iranian people. There is a verse in The Quran, that talks about a people, that will change the world. Obviously everybody came to The Prophet and asked, if their people were the ones mentioned in The Quran and everytime the reply was negative. In the end they asked him, whom these people were and he put his hand of the chest of Salman The Pure the iranan philosopher, that was one of his closest companions and said his people. The only thing, we iranians must fear more than anything is to submit to the west!
Does China ever back anyone to the hilt? My impression is, never. I hope I’m wrong.
Since the second Gulf War I am musing what effect a few 100 kg of Uranium enriched to say 60% would have on the price of ME oil and the wellbeing of the Wahaby kingdom would have. The Persian Gulf is part of the Indian Ocean Monsoon system.
I mean evenly distributed over Ras Tanura
Ramin,
I am an American citizen. I most certainly would burn any draft card sent to me by the US government in order to wage war on Iran, a nation and civilization that I admire in many ways. In fact, if I had to pick a side, I would most likely fight with the Iran/Syria/Hezbollah resistance rather than the ZioUS Empire.
Frankie P