Will rising oil and gas prices ultimately just benefit the fossil fuel industry, or will it move us toward alternative energy? Who knows? It could go either way from here.

Here is what I do know. Republlicans refuse to budge from “drill baby drill.” They are striving mightily to hang rising gas prices around President Biden’s neck, even though there’s not a whole lot he can do about them (and what little he can do, he’s trying to do). At the same time, they are ignoring wholesale the need to invest in other energy technology. Instead, they are taking advantage of the moment to gaslight the nation about oil.

For example, according to Paul Waldman, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem recently said “President Biden’s Green New Deal destroyed our energy surplus and it turned it into an energy crisis.” I haven’t found this quote elsewhere; she may have said this at the recent CPAC convention. But it’s an astonishing thing to claim for a bill that was never even voted on, much less became law, and which I don’t believe President Biden supported. Just saying the words “green new deal” causes oil deposits to dry up, apparently.

Of course, nobody can beat the former guy when it comes to stupid.

OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022

At Mother Jones, Chris D’Angelo lists The GOP’s Four Biggest Lies About Joe Biden and Fossil Fuels. They are:

1. The administration “destroyed” our energy industry

2. Biden “ended” oil and gas drilling on federal lands

3. Biden “shut off” the Keystone XL pipeline

4. Biden “destroyed American energy independence”

And, they are indeed all lies, as D’Angelo explains. But here’s the money quote:

The GOP campaign to blame Biden for both Russia’s war and high gas prices has included misleading statements and outright falsehoods, as well as circulating lists of demands that closely mirror those of the fossil fuel industry. It is being led by some of Washington’s largest beneficiaries of industry campaign donations. And it comes on the heels of the latest dire climate report from the United Nations, which warns that the window for reining in greenhouse gases in order to “secure a livable and sustainable future” is rapidly closing.

Recently White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki shot down questions about Biden’s alleged refusal to allow oil companies to drill by noting that the oil companies are sitting on 9,000 approved drilling permits that are not being used. D’Angelo continues,

The goal, of course, is to leverage the crisis in Eastern Europe to provide more access and regulatory relief to an oil and gas sector that is already very profitable, heavily subsidized, has enormous sway in Washington, and is sitting on unused permits to drill across millions of acres of land and water. …

… In reality, the US produced more oil and gas during Biden’s first year in office than during Trump’s, and crude oil output is forecast to reach a record high in 2023, according to the US Energy Information Administration.

And the other goal is to undermine the Biden Administration, because they’d rather see the U.S. fail during a time of crisis than pass up an opportunity to bash Democrats.

Now, Mike Pence’s PAC is running a television ad with this voiceover:

“Before Russian bombs began to rain on Ukraine. Before hundreds of innocent Ukrainians lost their lives. A horrific decision had already been made. Joe Biden caved to the radical environmentalists and stopped America’s Keystone pipeline and dramatically increased Americans’ dependence on Russian oil, endangering America’s security 

Do read all of Glenn Kessler’s fact check of the ad, and other Republican talking points. Here is more about the ad:

Text appears at one point: “U.S. reliance on Russian oil hits record high.” And then another text appears: “U.S. ‘paying Putin to invade’ Ukraine.” That is attributed, oddly, to “Oil analyst, Fox News.” (It turns out to be Stephen Schork, a onetime commodity trader and research analyst who writes a newsletter.)

We’re hearing incessantly about Joe Biden cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline, and that’s why oil is so expensive. Kessler:

The net metering bill was basically written by Florida Power and Light. Documents obtained by the Miami Herald showed that its lobbyist delivered the text to the state senator who would introduce it in the legislature; two days later FPL’s parent company also delivered a $10,000 contribution to her PAC.

See also Jeff Goodell, Putin Is a Fossil-Fuel Gangster. Clean Energy Could Cut Him Off at the Knees at Rolling Stone.

As Ukrainian scientist Svitlana Krakovka put it in remarks during an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forum held (coincidentally) as Russian soldiers marched over the border: “Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels.”

The urgency of the climate crisis was underscored by the latest IPCC report, which, with doomsday levels of irony, was released the same week that Putin invaded. “The rise in weather and climate extremes,” the report notes, has already led to “irreversible impacts.” Heat waves have become more extreme, droughts deeper, wildfires more frequent, sea levels are rising faster. These changes are “contributing to humanitarian crises” that are driving people from all regions of the world out of their homes. Those who have done the least to cause the problem are likely suffering the most from it. So far, the feeble attempts to adapt have been pathetically inadequate and “focused more on planning rather than implementation.”

What else is new?

Predictably, Republicans and their corrupt band of climate crooks and deniers immediately used the invasion of Ukraine as an excuse to deepen our dependence on fossil fuels, not free ourselves from it. They willfully ignored the simple truth that there are better, cheaper ways of powering our world than with oil, gas, and coal. To them fossil fuels are the energy equivalent of testosterone. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio tweeted that Biden’s “war on American oil and gas” made Putin stronger. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem told Fox News that “from the very day [Biden] got into the White House, he gave Putin all the power.”

Goodell writes that the battle of economic power is shifting away from the fossil fuel and toward renewable energy. That may be more apparent in Europe than the U.S., because I’m not seeing that here.

The Democrats need to go on offense against this garbage, and they need to do it yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have refused to take phone calls from President Biden, who wanted to talk to them about supporting Ukraine and, yes, oil prices. I can’t get past the WSJ subscription firewall, but I picked up the details elsewhere. Josh Marshall:

The WSJ reports tonight that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have both signaled to Washington that they won’t help ease the global squeeze on gasoline supplies and surging prices unless the Biden administration falls into line on Yemen and other regional issues — one of these being immunity for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. The specific hook of the article is that the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE have both declined calls from President Biden in recent weeks.

Well, bleep them. Crown Prince MBS is one who specifically refuses to talk to the President, btw, according to other sources. Josh Marshall continues,

It has seemed clear to me since early 2021 that the Gulf states have been working to undermine the Biden administration in part because of these issues in the Gulf and also because of their close ties with ex-President Trump and Jared Kushner. But over the course of the year energy prices have become a key driver of inflation. Now the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made the need to open up new supplies of oil a matter of acute urgency for the United States and really much of the globe. What it amounts to is that at a moment of acute and profound economic and geopolitical need they’re squeezing us.

Saudi Arabia and UAE are sovereign states. Yemen and Iran are huge issues for them. They’re entitled to make their choices. But it goes without saying that the U.S. has directly and indirectly underwritten their security for decades. It is a reminder that they are on Team Autocracy. And in a moment when autocracy versus civic democracy is suddenly the central factor in global politics, we shouldn’t forget that. They produce products that the whole world is deeply dependent on but which are also driving the global crisis of climate change.

Yes, we should not forget this. The Daily Mail (UK) reports that MBS is asking Wall Street to bankroll a new project of his, “a $500 billion futuristic city-state, powered by robots and artificial intelligence, that would cover 10,000 square miles of Saudi Arabia‘s Tabuk province.” I seriously hope no one invests a penny. Arms sales? Nope. See also The top 11 favors the Trump administration has done for Saudi Arabia from 2019.

Business Insider:

MBS’s snub of Biden’s phone call is perhaps not surprising.

Since becoming president, Biden has made clear that he did not see the crown prince — the de facto ruler of the country — as an equal and that Saudi Arabia was a US partner, not an ally. Russia and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, have strengthened ties.

On the campaign trail in 2020, Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the murder of the Washington Post writer Jamal Khashoggi and the war in Yemen.

After Biden took office, the White House effectively demoted MBS to the rank of defense minister, and the two leaders have not spoken.

The news of the snub came in the wake of the publication of a rare interview with MBS in The Atlantic, in which the crown prince made clear his view of Biden and the US.

 

Here is a link to the Atlantic article, which I have not read. I do not care to know what this depraved piece of crap thinks about anything.

Ezra Klein interviews Fiona Hill about what Putin is really up to. There’s a transcript if you aren’t into podcasts.

See also Jennifer Rubin, The GOP: An unending display of toxic masculinity.  If she ever goes back to being an apologist for Republicans I’m going to miss her. 

President Biden dropped the big one today and banned import of Russian fossil fuels. The UK is banning oil imports but hasn’t banned gas yet.

Paul Krugman explains why China can’t save Russia’s economy, even if it wants to. And it may not.

Paul Waldman says Liz Cheney nails the truth about ‘the Putin wing of the GOP.’

Which companies have stopped doing business in Russia, and which are still there? Here’s the list of both as of March 8.

I understand the trucker convoy is driving laps around the Beltway again today, for no discernible reason other than showing off. See Absurd trucker convoy jamming up the Capital Beltway has me rooting for higher gas prices by Rex Huppke at USA Today.

I had said in an earlier post that the only way you could track the convoy was through local news stories, not national. The national news has been pretty much ignoring the truckers. According to Paul Waldman, even Fox News is paying little attention to them.

We seem to be living in a time of revelations. No, I don’t expect to see angels with trumpets anytime soon. Rather, we’re seeing things exposed for what they are rather than what they are marketed to be.

Let’s start with the Russian military. I’ve been cruising around reading op eds by military officers and experts. And they are uniformly stunned at how badly the Russian military is doing.

Max Boot is positively gloating.

News stories say Emmanuel Macron of France spoke to Vlad Putin this week and learned that Putin intends to take all of Ukraine. Of course he does; I hadn’t realized that wasn’t obvious. And it will take several more days, at least, maybe weeks. And a lot of people will die horribly. And it is all so pointless. Putin may win in the short run, but I don’t see how he can win in the long run.

On the American Right, you’ve got your hard-core nutjobs who still stand with Putin, and you’ve got your old-school national security hawks who never liked Putin anyway. In between are a lot of people who may or may not be making adjustments. Greg Sargent writes that Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance are having a moment of self-doubt over Putin, in which Tucker once again shows off his spectacular talent for being an asshole:

“The invasion of Ukraine already is a legitimate disaster for Europe and the world,” Carlson told his viewers. “We’ve been taken by surprise by the whole thing. We’re not the only ones who were. But we’re willing to admit it.” …

… But then Carlson blamed Vice President Harris for his mistake. His logic: If the Russian threat were all that dire, President Biden wouldn’t have sent Harris abroad to handle diplomacy!

Carlson then launched into a creepily obsessive segment of cherry-picked clips meant to portray Harris as stupid and unprepared. But never mind that garbage. More notably, Carlson has little to say about what the administration actually did do in the run-up to the invasion.

This was a few days after Tucker had called for Ketanji Brown Jackson’s LSAT Score. And apparently he gets his feelings hurt when people call him a “racist.” Poor baby.

Oh, and J.D. Vance has had to tap-dance around a lot of recent comments to the effect that Ukraine just isn’t important. We should only care about our own borders, especially the southern one where brown people get through. America First! Now he’s having to admit that, well, okay, Russia’s invading Ukraine was bad.

Jennifer Rubin hopes that the Ukraine crisis will bury America First!, because people will see that what goes on beyond our borders is important. Considering that World War II didn’t bury isolationism completely for all time I am skeptical. But Rubin wrote,

Donald Trump and his allies (even the crowd that joined the administration by rationalizing their expertise would prevent debacles) believed, in particular, that international organizations impeded our sovereignty, sucked up our resources and helped the enemies of the United States. They told us we had been played for “suckers” and would do better when we did not need to collaborate, cooperate and coordinate with others. …

… Then came Ukraine.

The January 6 House committee is still going strong. Here’s what I know about yesterday’s court filing.

The filing in a California federal court was in response to a suit filed by John Eastman, the Trump attorney who appears to be one of the architects of the scheme to overturn the election. Eastman is trying to block the committee’s subpoena for his documents on the Trump campaign, claiming attorney-client privilege.

The committee argued that communication is no longer privileged if the attorney is helping the client commit a crime. They asked the judge to privately review evidence the committee has so far gathered to understand Eastman’s culpability.

“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the filing says.

The filing also says, “The evidence supports an inference that President Trump and members of his campaign knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 Presidential election during the January 6 Joint Session of Congress, but the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor.”

It’s expected that the committee eventually will refer their findings to the attorney general, where they may either be acted upon or disappear into a big hole somewhere. It’s extraordinarily frustrated for a  year to have passed after an event in which we all bleeping saw what Trump was doing, and yet he’s still a free man.

Greg Sargent writes that it’s important for any future prosecutor to prove that Trump knew good and well he had lost the election.

For instance, the filing notes that Trump’s attorney general publicly announced that the Justice Department had found no serious fraud. It says the committee has collected information demonstrating that department officials privately advised Trump of this as well. It notes that Republican election officials also confirmed this for Trump, and that extensive media fact-checks also demonstrated this beyond any doubt.

Here’s why this matters: Because in spite of knowing all this, Trump continued to press his vice president, Mike Pence, to abuse his powers to delay the electoral count. And Trump and his co-conspirators also sought to do this in other ways, by trying to get friendly state legislators to send sham electors, and by leaning on at least one GOP senator to delay it while violence raged.

And of course, Trump incited the mob to go after Pence, which could amount to an effort to weaponize his supporters to intimidate Pence into disrupting the electoral count, which Pence had refused to do.

To demonstrate criminality, it must be shown that Trump corruptly tried to carry this out, i.e., that he did so knowingly on fraudulent pretenses, which is what the filing seeks to illustrate. (The filing also suggests Trump might be similarly vulnerable to criminal charges of conspiring to defraud the United States.)

And, remember, some time this spring there will be televised hearings. Yesterday’s filing may very well be a sneak preview.

Update: Jennifer Rubin caught this:

On Wednesday, we saw a matter-of-fact announcement from the Justice Department: “A regional leader of the Oath Keepers pleaded guilty today to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding for his actions before, during and after the breach of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. His and others’ actions disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress convened to ascertain and count the electoral votes related to the presidential election.” The announcement continued: “Joshua James, 34, of Arab, Alabama, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol breach. As part of the plea agreement, James has agreed to cooperate with the government’s ongoing investigation.”

So there is an investigation at the Justice Department.

John Eastman

I watched Biden’s State of the Union speech last night, and overall I think he did well. Here’s a transcript, if you want to review. One could always quibble that he might have said more about this or that, and at one point he did say “Iranian” when he meant “Ukrainian.” But overall, I believe he may have accomplished a lot. Most people who watched gave it positive reviews.

I didn’t watch the Republican response, but I understand it sucked. Of course, I’m getting that from partisan sources.

In Ukraine — it appears that Kherson is about to be overcome, although it hasn’t been overcome yet. The Russian convoy on its way to Kyiv is stalled. No one seems to no for certain why.

First, if you missed The war in Ukraine isn’t working out the way Russia intended in the Washington Post, from yesterday’s blog post, be sure to take a look. And then follow that up with Fred Kaplan at Slate.

Michael Kofman, a military analyst at CNA, an Arlington, Virginia–based think tank, who has been following the battle closely, tweeted late Sunday afternoon, “It’s taken me a while to figure out what [the Russian military is] trying to do, because it looks so ridiculous and incompetent.” B.A. Friedman, a military historian and tactician, went further: “This isn’t a good army executing a bad plan. It isn’t a good army executing outdated or out-of-context tactics. It’s a bad army!”

Then Kapan goes on for a few paragraphs about all the military mistakes the Russians made going into Ukraine. The word “amateurish” comes to mind. Do take a look.

There is a larger factor here: The Russian army is composed, by and large, of one-year conscripts, who are poorly trained (even within the confines of Russian military training), badly treated, and uninspired by ideology or any other motivating spirit. Hence the stories of captured Russian troops who had no idea why they were in Ukraine. At least a few didn’t even know that they were in Ukraine—they thought they were still doing exercises in Belarus. Others have reportedly been found knocking on village doors for food or, in one case, asking a local police station for fuel.

The Russian army is not trained to improvise if the plan worked out at headquarters falls apart. “In politics and in warfare, the small elite on top doesn’t want subordinates to get too creative—if they did, they might take over,” Kaplan writes. If Step 2 doesn’t work,  the Russians will still go on to Step 3, because that’s all they know. “Therefore, large troop-transport planes tried to land, even though the airport hadn’t been completely secured and Ukrainian air defense systems hadn’t been destroyed. As a result, two Il-76 transport planes, each carrying 100 airborne troops, were shot down.”

You’ve probably heard about the massive Russian convoy slowly lumbering toward Kyiv. We’ve all seen the satellite images. The tanks and other military vehicles are not being escorted by infantry, and I understand there are no combat planes above, protecting them. If it weren’t such a one-sided war, I imagine those tanks would have been bombed to oblivion already. Were it not for nukes, I’m sure somebody else’s bombers would have taken care of it. Unfortunately, the convoy is still moving as I write this.

Speaking of planes, see The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force. I don’t know anything about this site or the author, but it does describe a puzzling lack of coordination on the Russians’ part.

This is not to say that the Russians are going to lose, because they still have overwhelming advantages over the Ukrainians. And the Russian troops are about to be reinforced by troops from Belarus and Chechnya, I understand. But it does suggest that the Russian military isn’t as formidible as it was cracked up to be. Putin’s move into Ukraine revealed a huge weakness.

Looking at Russia from another angle — Paul Krugman is calling Russia a “Potemkin Superpower.”

Before Putin invaded Ukraine, I might have described the Russian Federation as a medium-size power punching above its weight in part by exploiting Western divisions and corruption, in part by maintaining a powerful military. Since then, however, two things have become clear. First, Putin has delusions of grandeur. Second, Russia is even weaker than most people, myself included, seem to have realized.

First, Krugman says, Russia’s economy is so small — a little more than half the size of either Britain’s or France’s — it seems remarkable that it could support a world-class military. And, in fact — maybe it couldn’t.

Further, Russia’s standard of living “is sustained by large imports of manufactured goods, mostly paid for via exports of oil and natural gas,” Krugman writes. This left it vulnerable to sanctions that might disrupt trade.

Before the invasion it was common to talk about how Putin had created “fortress Russia,” an economy immune to economic sanctions, by accumulating a huge war chest of foreign currency reserves. Now, however, such talk seems naïve. What, after all, are foreign reserves? They aren’t bags of cash. For the most part they consist of deposits in overseas banks and holdings of other governments’ debt — that is, assets that can be frozen if most of the world is united in revulsion against a rogue government’s military aggression.

I googled for the current value of the ruble, and got this —

I got this from an economist friend today — this is the chart of a Russian bank listed on the London stock exchange.

This is a new thing. We’ve never seen so much of the world rise up to impose such crippling sanctions on a rogue nation before. This could change the entire calculus of warfare. Perhaps the U.S. doesn’t need to be spending so much on being prepared to fight World War II again. Or, as long as we don’t plan to invade anybody, I suppose.

Back to Krugman —

But Europe mainly burns gas for heat; gas consumption is 2.5 times higher in the winter than it is in the summer. Well, winter will soon be over — and the European Union has time to prepare for another winter without Russian gas if it’s willing to make some hard choices.

Of course, gas is going up here, too. The Right is going overboard blaming Biden for our dependence on foreign oil, when they (and some centrist Democrats) are the ones who have blocked investment in alternative energies all these years. If we’d gotten started on weaning ourselves from fossil fuels back when people first started talking about it, the price of gas wouldn’t be an issue now, would it?

See also The Intercept, Saudi-Russian collusion is driving up gas prices. If the sanctions succeed in destroying Putin, send a note to Mohammed bin Salman — “You’re next.”

I keep reading that we’re on the brink of a new Cold War, but I don’t think so. I could be wrong, but what I’m seeing may just be the last gasp of the old Cold War and the beginning of a time in which the world’s democracies rely on other kinds of power to keep the despots in check. Let’s hope so.

Update: See In just 72 hours, Europe overhauled its entire post-Cold War relationship with Russia