IS OBAMA ON PUTIN’S PAYROLL?
"The campaign to stop shale gas proving its case in the market is political, not scientific. Behind it lies vested interests. The Russian gas industry, which is alarmed at losing its impending near-monopoly on European gas supplies, has been vocal in its criticism of shale gas."
This is Matt Ridley’s observation yesterday (4/25) in Can We Get Over Fear of Fracking Now? He’s a brilliant science writer who fully understands the fraudulent arguments against fracking. Last year, he won the Hayek Prize, awarded for upholding "Friedrich Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty." (He is also now a British Lord – upon the passing of his father last month, he became the 5th Viscount Ridley.)
Science is Ridley’s forte, however, not the geopolitical underworld. The "Russian gas industry" has been vastly more than simply "vocal in its criticism." It is run by Putin’s mafia, and operates as do all mafias: through threats, extortion, and bribery. Their focus is primarily upon journalists and politicians.
Just like the Saudis, the KGB has journalists all over the world on their payroll. There’s hardly a major newspaper or newsmagazine in Europe, for example, that doesn’t have one or more of their prominent writers and editors being paid on the sly by the Saudis to say nice things about them and nothing critical.
It’s not quite as extensive throughout the US media, but you’d be surprised what US pundits and media stars are on the Saudi take. The Saudis particularly like to see if they can rope in one of them on the right. Well-known conservative columnist and television commentator Robert Novak (1931-2009) was one of their prize catches. For years they paid him a fortune to be pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel.
The KGB – since 1991, it was supposedly renamed and divided up into the FSB (Federal Security Service internal to Russia) and the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service), but it’s still the same outfit of Russian thugs – does the same, and a lot more. Putin has tasked it with demonizing natural gas fracking with life-or-death importance.
The "Russian gas industry" is one company, Gazprom, the largest single producer of gas on earth (17% of worldwide production). It is Putin’s principal cash cow, with revenues well in excess of $100 billion – billion – a year over which he has personal control. Much of Europe, especially Germany and Eastern Europe, would freeze in the winter without Russian gas, for which Gazprom charges extortionate prices.
60% of Gazprom’s 550 billion cubic meters of yearly gas production is sold domestically at a huge loss to keep Russians from freezing and rioting due to too-high prices. It costs $132 to produce and distribute 1 tcm (thousand cubic meters), yet Russians pay on average only $80. At a loss of $52 per tcm, this puts Gazprom in a $17 billion hole. It makes it up by charging monopolistic extortionate prices to Europe, averaging $415 per tcm.
Thanks to shale gas fracking, US natural gas prices (at the Louisiana Henry Hub) are now under $70 per tcm. Thanks to shale gas fracking, the US has overtaken Russia and is now the largest gas producing country in the world, with over 600 billion cubic meters last year. So it’s easy to see how Putin’s cash cow will go belly-up if Europeans are free to frack their gas reserves.
Fracking technology can liberate countries like Poland and Bulgaria from Russian extortion. Since it also dooms the "renewable energy" industry with its wind and solar scams, as well as the dream of the eco-wackos to deindustrialize Western Civilization, the KGB happily shovels money into enviro groups producing studies "proving" fracking will kill us all, then organizing street protests with useful idiots whipped into hysteria.
Heavily bribed politicians then propose legislation to ban fracking, pointing to the street demos and the local media frenzy created by bribed journalists citing the phony studies.
This worked like a charm in Bulgaria last January, when its KGB-bribed parliament banned fracking. Bulgaria has conservatively 500 billion cubic meters of shale gas which fracking could extract, and consumes only four billion a year: fracking could liberate Bulgaria from Russian gas for over 100 years.
The good news here is that the ban is so obviously masochistic that sanity is making itself heard – and Bulgarians realize they can make a lot more money via fracking prosperity than bribes from the Kremlin. Thus the ban may soon be lifted.
The shale gas reserves in Poland dwarf those of Bulgaria – in excess of five trillion cubic meters -enough to keep Poles toasty warm for centuries while screwing Russia by selling gas across Europe at prices Gazprom can’t match. That’s a Dream Twofer for Poland.
Polish hatred for Russia makes their pols more impermeable to KGB bribery. So Putin sent his folks to Brussels to bribe the Eurocrats into passing anti-shale gas restrictive rules and regulations. The Polish government subsequently announced that it would refuse to obey them if passed.
So Putin, in tandem with the EU enviro lobbies, have currently settled for delaying tactics, bribing the EU parliamentarians into approving rules designed to slow down the approval process, such as requiring complex "environmental impact studies" before fracking commences. Sound familiar?
Earlier this month (4/13), Zero issued an Executive Order to regulate fracking. Zero’s Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, has done everything bureaucratically possible to stymie increased oil production, but hasn’t had the regulatory firepower to do the same with fracking. This EO may provide what he needs.
Salazar is so anti-oil and anti-US energy independence that this week (4/24), he speculated that gasoline could go to $9 a gallon as it is now in Greece, and there was nothing he could do about it.
Today (4/26), Zero’s head of the EPA, Lisa Jackson, issued the first EPA rules for fracking – of which you can be confident there will be many more.
We know this because the day before (4/25), one of EPA’s punk fascists was revealed to say his agency’s policy was to "crucify" oil and gas companies like the Romans did to villagers, making them obedient to EPA edicts and "easy to manage."
As noted by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) who broke the story, soon after the punk announced this (in 2010), the EPA began targeting gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wyoming. The punk, Al Armendariz, promptly issued an apology, but Inhofe wasn’t buying it. The EPA’s threats to crucify American oil & gas companies are "all a part of Obama’s war on domestic energy," he told Fox News.
Jim Inhofe put his finger right on it, warning on national television that Zero is conducting a war on our country’s energy production and energy independence. So you might ask, is he being paid to do so, by Putin or others equally nefarious?
Certainly, many in the US media are, and many within the US government. But Zero himself?
There is a remarkable 4 minute-39 second video issued on "Earth Day" (April 22, Lenin’s birthday) last Sunday denouncing the environmental agenda as an "economic suicide pact." It is entitled "If I Wanted America To Fail" —
Please watch it first before I continue – for I’m going say how it ends.
After, with excruciating poignancy, describing all that Zero is doing to ensure the failure of our blessed nation, the narrator concludes with the last thing he would do "if I wanted America to fail… I wouldn’t change a thing."
The answer to our question, is Zero on Putin’s payroll?, is: given his behavior, given his actions as president, it makes no difference whether he is or is not. He could be a full-blown Manchurian Candidate. He could be bought and paid for by the KGB. He could be a brain-damaged black racist moonbat consumed with hatred for America. He could be a megalomaniacal narcissistic sociopath.
It doesn’t matter if he actually is any or all of these. What matters is that his actions are such that he could be-for those actions are what he would do if he were. So we need not make accusations for which we do not have solid proof. It suffices to know that, whatever the cause, whatever his motivation, this man means us and our country mortal harm. And he has the capacity, as President of the United States, to do so. His every day in the Oval Office is dedicated to doing so.
What matters is: Nobama 2012. Our country’s life depends on it.