10 ms·

I did not realise that Russia has such leverage on natural gas relative to oil: > Russia’s oil sales are 30% of the country’s revenues, but the gas market is o

I did not realise that Russia has such leverage on natural gas relative to oil: > Russia’s oil sales are 30% of the country’s revenues, but the gas market is only 6% of the state’s budget. A total loss of Russian volumes into Europe would be catastrophic. As in - industrial shutdowns, blackouts, hypothermia catastrophic. > The one-sided balance of power with respect to natural gas leads us to expect that Europe will not sanction gas, but Russia will hold its volumes as a sword of Damocles over the continent to extract maximum value from its position. Just like it did last Monday. That's certainly illuminating, and, from the point of view of geopolitical mercantilism, alarming!

XorNot 5y ago
The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade, though there is an argument that it was done in part because Germany believed that strong trade ties were a good impediment to war. What it does distinctly reveal is that ultimately there's no reasonable negotiations with dictatorships: if the other party can't be easily replaced internally due to outcomes for their people, then you don't have the leverage you think you do. The lesson here should be globally that we should start to expect the same thing from China: Xi's position is too unassailable right now to think that things can't get substantially worse before he'd be in any real danger of being replaced.
- abalashov 5y ago
  Yeah, I would agree with that. In my limited observational capacity as a Russian, I would also add that Western notions of Putin being toppled in a popular coup are, while adorable, profoundly facile; the repressive capacity of an autocratic siloviki state is greatly underestimated in this fairy tale. You ain't seen _nothin_ yet.
  - alephxyz 5y ago
    I agree that's there's no chance of a popular coup anytime soon. Russian intelligence services were able to influence the results of the US election just by buying Facebook ads, leaking hacked DNC emails to WikiLeaks and funding a few extremist voices. Now imagine what they could do by controlling every single media outlet in a country for the two decades Putin has been in power.
    - nradov 5y ago
      How many Electoral College votes did the Russian intelligence services change in the US election?
      - dmead 5y ago
        In Philadelphia, there was a trump rally organized on the east side of city hall before the 2016 election. Turned out it was organized entirely in Facebook ads and groups paid for by proxies of the fsb. So, to answer your question 20. In my community it was potentially 20 electoral votes.
        djrogers 5y ago
        So you’re saying enough people to swing 20 electors, who weren’t already planning to vote for Trump, went to a Trump rally organized by Russian proxies, and were convinced to vote for him because of this rally? That sounds… Unlikely.
        WillPostForFood 5y ago
        There’s no evidence that the rallies scheduled in October 2016 for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, and Erie ever took place. There were no permit applications filed for the day of the Philly rally, either. https://www.inquirer.com/politics/mueller-report-miners-for-trump-philadelphia-russia-photo-20190423.html https://www.inquirer.com/politics/mueller-report-miners-for-... Russia through 100k in facebook ads, and got the typical results, nothing much. Even if they were the best FB ad optimizers in the world how much impact is 100k in an election where the spending was estimated at $2.65 billion dollars? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-billion/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-bi...
        dmead 5y ago
        okay, so i'll just relay that to the south philly rubes that told me they went. /shrug.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    Whenever I have seen the analysts making hypothesis about a possible coup in Russia, it always was not a popular coup but a 'palace coup' or one orchestrated by some part of siloviki. Popular protests can prevent the state from taking some action, but a full coup seems unlikely, as you state.
    - abalashov 5y ago
      Of the two possibilities, it's certainly more likely -- in strictly relative terms. But Western media seems to put a lot of stock in 'people power'. In this particular case, it's misplaced.
      - BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Is it ? Putin until now had managed to carefully play the Russian opinion to be mostly favorable to him, and I just don't see how this can possibly continue once the reality of what is currently happening in Ukraine to their friends and family filters through the propaganda. His own glorification of WW2 over the last decades is going to play against him here, as the pictures of bombed cities are going to raise immediate associations putting in question just who are the real "Nazis" here. This leaves the repressive option... but this would require levels of repression not seen since Stalin, and we're living in a completely different mediatic landscape. No way that this doesn't end up in a revolution. Nor I believe that attempts of going full North Korea with almost completely cut off media and communications would be accepted by the population, or even feasible in practice. The only thing going for Putin is the indiscriminate nature of economic sanctions, strengthening his "the West wants to destroy Russia" line.
        frenchy 5y ago
        Nazi Germany didn't fall to a coup (though at least one was tried).
        BlueTemplar 5y ago
        And Hitler didn't raze Austria.
- tonmoy 5y ago
  China is autocratic, but maybe not a dictatorship like Russia. I had the feeling that the CCP has some leverage over Xi, whereas Putin’s power is more concentrated on himself.
  - abalashov 5y ago
    Any inner circle of political elites has some leverage over the individual leader, but Putin didn't stay in power for 22 years by failing to understand how to maintain delicate balance among these forces, play them off one another, and in general route all plots and intrigue around himself. It's wishful thinking to imagine that a lone disgruntled civil servant with a gun is all it takes. If it were that easy, it would have happened a long time ago; autocrats, by their very nature, are always in peril, in that in any given moment there's no shortage of people who ahem, wish them ill. That's what makes my skin crawl about assessments of other global autocrats in Western media as irrational. This childish way of looking at things makes them into some kind of cartoon villains; the "Mad Mullahs" who run Iran, "Crazy" Kim Jong-un... These people may be distasteful, however, they are _anything_ but irrational. They are the most eminently rational and sophisticated calculators and political operators on the planet. They wouldn't last two seconds in power if they weren't.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      It's the distinction that autocrats are all whining, pathetic losers - they torture their political enemies because they feel justified doing so - but it doesn't make them less dangerous.
  - simulate-me 5y ago
    > I had the feeling that the CCP has some leverage over Xi Based on what? "Feelings" about dictators is how the world got into this mess in the first place.
- pcwalton 5y ago
  Yeah. It's important to remember that Mao killed between 15 and 55 million of his own people during the GLF and he still managed to claw his way back to power with the Cultural Revolution a few years later.
  - tenpies 5y ago
    This is not specific to Mao. Even in democracies, the people often vote against their own interests or often compromise on fundamentally important issues for the sake of luxury beliefs or in-group approval.
    - chii 5y ago
      > the people often vote against their own interests the people who died under mao aren't the ones who voted for the policies that lead to them dying.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- toast0 5y ago
  > The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade, though there is an argument that it was done in part because Germany believed that strong trade ties were a good impediment to war. It worked; Germany is unwilling to wage war upon a trading partner its developed a dependency on. The problem is Russia didn't develop a dependency on outside trade, so it's less concerned about maintaining trade.
  - kadoban 5y ago
    > The problem is Russia didn't develop a dependency on outside trade, so it's less concerned about maintaining trade. Sure it did. The rulers in Russia just care less if their people suffer and die.
    - abalashov 5y ago
      I believe one could make a compelling argument that Russians themselves are more prepared to endure hardship for politico-economic reasons. They're just so used to it...
      - nwiswell 5y ago
        I am not sure it is a matter of being "prepared" to suffer rather than a defeatist cultural attitude about the ability to effect change. It's not hard to understand where that attitude comes from: for the past century, any hint of dissention was rapidly repaid with a one way ticket to a gulag in one form or another. This isn't to say that e.g. there isn't genuine support for the regime; there certainly is, but there's also low inclination toward the kind of activism that changes hearts and minds, and consequently state propaganda has an outsize influence on political opinions. Meanwhile in the West, we are of the belief that if we complain loudly enough about things, they will get better. That attitude is correct a surprisingly large amount of the time! So next time you want to complain about people complaining about stuff that complaining about won't fix, remember it's (usually) a good thing that we're culturally wired to be difficult to please.
        5y ago
- simulate-me 5y ago
  One of the reasons that Trump wanted to break up NATO was specifically related to Germany's reliance on Russian gas: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-pipeline/trump-lashes-germany-over-gas-pipeline-deal-calls-it-russias-captive-idUSKBN1K10VI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-pipeline/trum...
  - blitzar 5y ago
    On one hand he wanted to "break up nato" and on the other he wanted nato to collectively spend 100s of billions every year to militarize. Broken clocks and politicians who take every side of every argument are right every so often.
    - abalashov 5y ago
      Yeah, exactly. Trump's position on NATO was, as his position on damn near anything else, unintelligible gibberish. There was no constant except a pervasive affectation--colouring his rhetorical posture on everything he ever discussed--that the US was, in some ineffable but profound way, being "screwed".
    - simulate-me 5y ago
      Those positions are not mutually exclusive. Rather, it's more of an ultimatum. "Spend more on our collective defense and reduce your dependence on our adversaries, or we'll no longer be allies."
  - BlueTemplar 5y ago
    Huh, this is a surprising lack of pro-Russian pandering coming from Trump !
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - CamperBob2 5y ago
      The only thing I can figure is that it was Tillerson's input as Secretary of State that Trump was passing along. Tillerson, being affiliated with US energy interests, may have wanted to encourage Germany to import more from us or our Middle Eastern allies. Trouble is, the summit took place in July 2018 and Tillerson was fired by Trump in March. (From Tillerson's Wikipedia article: "... Trump allegedly suggested a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which would cost trillions and take centuries. These reports were denied by White House officials and by Trump after which individuals familiar with the meeting told journalists that Tillerson either called Trump a "moron" or a "fucking moron.") It's not clear why Pompeo would have pushed this particular agenda item, only that Trump likely didn't come up with it on his own.
- ripper1138 5y ago
  Xi is far from unassailable. Wouldn’t be a surprise at all if someone else in the party wins support for the next term.
  - dan_hawkins 5y ago
    What term? : )
- _0ffh 5y ago
  >Xi's position is too unassailable right now I don't think he's quite there yet. If the 20th party congress later this year goes according to plan for him, he will be though.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  There was a frightfully insightful recent twitter thread making rounds, saying that extractive industries are perfect to be headed/owned by mob bosses, because the more complex the industry the more leverage the technical employees have. I.e. in extractive industries they have close to none, in manufacturing they have a solid measure of respect, while in tech industries they get to dictate the culture of the company. Which means a mob leadership (we're not pretending anymore Russia doesn't have one of those, right?) will favor extractive industries over everything else, not just because they're much easier to own and exploit, but because allowing other types of companies to grow creates power centers outside of their control. They actively prefer to outsource services abroad, even if they are more expensive and create reliance on foreign partners. Which means Germany's bet was wrong on two counts: 1. It propped exactly the kind of industries where the money goes in mob's pockets 2. It was unnecessary, because Russia was making itself incredibly vulnerable to sanctions all by itself by avoiding to develop anything more complex than a well or a mine (normally I'd say defense excluded, but seeing the quality of their current armed forces, it's more like an argument that even defense is included). The natural question here is if the blunder is an honest mistake... but honest mistakes and motivated reasoning go suspiciously well together, and by all accounts the German elites more than occasionally gained from trade with Russia.
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    Worth noting the historical influence of Russia on the German antinuclear/Green lobby, as well.
  - des1nderlase 5y ago
    Sure that's true for any nation having huge stock of natural resources (i.e Nigeria, UAE). But still, the west wants cheap oil and other resources. Mistake is perhaps, from the power play perspective, not to have tighter relationship with the government. Sadly, regular people always suffer in these kind of situations...
    - hollerith 5y ago
      The UAE has no oil reserves, but Saudi Arabia or Iran would work as a replacement for it in your comment.
- nmehner 5y ago
  Do you really think so? Russia has no way of winning this conflict. Their military is facing huge losses (increasing their demographic problems), there is no way they can keep Ukraine occupied and they have given up on regime change. The Russian economy is in shambles because of the sanctions (which hit a lot harder because of strong ties with western markets) and will never recover. Europe has accelerated its departure from fossil fuels. Putin has fired some generals and placed the head of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch under house arrest. How can this be seen other then a total strategic blunder of Putin? Do you really think Xi is looking at this mess and be like "Yeah, give me one of those, too."?
  - tarsinge 5y ago
    I would like to be as optimistic as you but this seems contrary to the article and the comments in that thread suggesting the sanctions on oil still have not shown their effects, and it has just started to make Europe question its Gas dependency. Departure will take at least a decade if chosen. As stated until then Europe will not be able to really sanction Russia.
    - nmehner 5y ago
      That is if you see sanctions as an all or nothing approach. For Europe the approach will have to be to reduce consumption step by step. This is not as glorious as stopping all imports in one day, but it will hurt Russia nevertheless. Also this process already started before the current crisis. In Germany heat pump sales have been exploding : https://www.waermepumpe.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/4/csm_Diagramm_Absatz_WP_2002-2021_9e7c2c0a61.png https://www.waermepumpe.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/4/csm_Dia... . In Norway the share of electric cars in new cars is at 85% and 16% of the existing fleet is already electric. This starts to become visible in oil consumption for traffic as well: https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statistikk/sal-av-petroleumsprodukt https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... (although the economic recovery after Covid masks this somewhat). In all of Europe 10% of all new cars are electric and that share will increase fast. The article only looks at the supply side of things, but long term the more important part is demand. These changes won't effect the outcome of the current crisis, but for Russia the coming decade will show what foolish decision this invasion was and future leaders will hopefully think twice about destroying their own country.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade This has been a problem for decades, plural: > The year: 1987. The president: Ronald Reagan. The dilemma: What to do about the new gas pipeline that Europe was building to Russia, one of America’s key foreign policy rivals. Blinken’s first book, Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis, was published by a then-unknown young writer in 1987. But the dilemma it explores bears remarkable similarities to the challenges the Biden administration is about to face when it takes office. In fact, looking at Blinken’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s provides some tantalizing clues as to how he plans to guide American diplomacy if he is confirmed as Biden’s secretary of state. > The “Siberian pipeline crisis” that formed the subject of Ally Versus Ally has been forgotten by all but specialists. * https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state-alliances-nato-ally-versus-ally/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state... * https://archive.ph/I6Ytj https://archive.ph/I6Ytj * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeli...
KarlKemp 5y ago
Russian gas makes up about 10% of Europe’s energy imports. That’s quite a bit, and there are regional and sectoral hotspots. But it’s not impossible to replace. Plus Russia continues to have an interest in selling he stuff. With all other sources of revenue being cut, it becomes even more important. What may have been 6 % of the budget will easily be 15 %, soon, and they will need every cent to avoid a complete economic collapse.
- abalashov 5y ago
  I wish I shared your optimism. But this 10% "energy imports" figure makes it seem like "energy" of all kinds is fungible...
- riku_iki 5y ago
  > Russian gas makes up about 10% of Europe’s energy imports. But 40% of actual gas imports. Europe can't rebuild all infra overnight to consume other sources of energy instead of gas for many industries, homes heating etc.
  - mortehu 5y ago
    I don't think you need much new infra to switch to electrical resistance heating. Where to get this energy? Turn off bitcoin mining (200 TWh/year) and you probably get enough energy to replace the heat lost from stopping German imports of Russian natural gas (40 billion cubic meters/year, 10 kWH per cubic meter = 40 TWh). Don't know how much mining is on the European grid though. As a bonus electrical resistance heating can work in a single room at a time.
    - abalashov 5y ago
      With average household electricity price in the EU at €0.2134/KWHr (second half 2021), I really wonder how much Bitcoin mining goes on there. The average cost in the US is less than half that, less in many of the southern states.
    - beiller 5y ago
908B64B197 5y ago
I have to wonder if US nuclear aircraft carriers could help supplying power to Europe.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Wouldn't even put a dent in it. Or are you joking?
- djrogers 5y ago
  They could, but not in enough to help the continent as a whole. A nuke carrier could power a small city, but there are only 11 of them, and most of them are kinda tied up right now… Also, powering 11 small port cities wouldn’t make a dent in the overall energy needs for an entire continent.
- labster 5y ago
  They’d help in the same way a raindrop helps to fill a pond. Maybe if the US sends a few hundred nuclear aircraft carriers to Europe it would help.
  - cyounkins 5y ago
    The US has 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, not hundreds.
- abalashov 5y ago
  Yeah... the numbers on that... not so much. Edit: I don't mean for this to sound ad hominem or overly pointed, but I've been shocked a lot lately--in the context of all these boycott discussions and so forth--by a widespread lack of basic energy density literacy. I'm no physicist myself, but I think the world could use a fast lesson in just how much energy is stored in oil and gas, and in concepts like EROEI. Without it, it's very hard to put the relative quantities in perspective and understand why it's so difficult to eliminate, substitute or reduce fossil fuel use, or why ramping up production or retooling for different inputs is something that happens more in decade time-scales than weeks or months... As sibling comments have intimated, the amount of power required even for a midsize city vs. what a small nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier could provide is just stupefying. It's a microscopic contribution. Moreover, the energy in a single 42 gal barrel of refined oil (~5.8 million BTUs) is enormous. Matching that in any kind of reasonable way is not impossible, but it's an insanely difficult problem with no quick or easy solutions.
throwaway894345 5y ago
It has been baffling to me since long before the Russian invasion that Europe would allow itself to be at the mercy of a single man like this. I just don’t understand how this could have been allowed to happen. Now Europe finds itself a party to genocide.
- abalashov 5y ago
  It's not such a mystery. A lot of the policies were decided from a combination of shorter-term political calculus and a rather optimistic view about the harmonising effects of the liberal economic order, globalism, free trade, democracy, interdependence, peace dividends, and other Thomas Friedman things. It's easy to forget now after a few years of erratic Trump and populist protectionism talk, but it was not long ago at all that was basically conventional wisdom in the US, too.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    Trump warned them, and the German delegation laughed in his face. He claims he gave a gift of a white flag to Merkel to waive in surrender to the Russians after negotiations to block the Nord pipeline fell through. But, Trump wasn't alone in thinking this way. In the 2012 election, Romney called Russia the USA's number 1 geopolitical foe, and Obama laughed it off. Meanwhile, several high profile poisonings, siding with Assad in Syria, behind the scenes antagonising in Iran, etc. all made one thing abundantly clear: Putin is no friend of "Western liberal economic order", and the uneasy truce was not in any way guaranteed to last. If nothing else, putting all of your eggs in one basket and hoping he played nicely with your natural gas supply was the sort of foolishness that shouldn't be given positions of power.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I’m can buy a certain amount of “liberal economic order” for things like household goods or perhaps putting your energy supply in the hands of a democratic nation, but putting your oil supply in the hands of a dictatorship seemed foolish well before Putin invaded Ukraine.
- dzhiurgis 5y ago

XorNot 5y ago

The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade, though there is an argument that it was done in part because Germany believed that strong trade ties were a good impediment to war. What it does distinctly reveal is that ultimately there's no reasonable negotiations with dictatorships: if the other party can't be easily replaced internally due to outcomes for their people, then you don't have the leverage you think you do. The lesson here should be globally that we should start to expect the same thing from China: Xi's position is too unassailable right now to think that things can't get substantially worse before he'd be in any real danger of being replaced.

abalashov 5y ago
Yeah, I would agree with that. In my limited observational capacity as a Russian, I would also add that Western notions of Putin being toppled in a popular coup are, while adorable, profoundly facile; the repressive capacity of an autocratic siloviki state is greatly underestimated in this fairy tale. You ain't seen _nothin_ yet.
- alephxyz 5y ago
  I agree that's there's no chance of a popular coup anytime soon. Russian intelligence services were able to influence the results of the US election just by buying Facebook ads, leaking hacked DNC emails to WikiLeaks and funding a few extremist voices. Now imagine what they could do by controlling every single media outlet in a country for the two decades Putin has been in power.
  - nradov 5y ago
    How many Electoral College votes did the Russian intelligence services change in the US election?
    - dmead 5y ago
      In Philadelphia, there was a trump rally organized on the east side of city hall before the 2016 election. Turned out it was organized entirely in Facebook ads and groups paid for by proxies of the fsb. So, to answer your question 20. In my community it was potentially 20 electoral votes.
      - djrogers 5y ago
        So you’re saying enough people to swing 20 electors, who weren’t already planning to vote for Trump, went to a Trump rally organized by Russian proxies, and were convinced to vote for him because of this rally? That sounds… Unlikely.
      - WillPostForFood 5y ago
        There’s no evidence that the rallies scheduled in October 2016 for Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, and Erie ever took place. There were no permit applications filed for the day of the Philly rally, either. https://www.inquirer.com/politics/mueller-report-miners-for-trump-philadelphia-russia-photo-20190423.html https://www.inquirer.com/politics/mueller-report-miners-for-... Russia through 100k in facebook ads, and got the typical results, nothing much. Even if they were the best FB ad optimizers in the world how much impact is 100k in an election where the spending was estimated at $2.65 billion dollars? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-billion/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/election-2016s-price-tag-6-8-bi...
        dmead 5y ago
        okay, so i'll just relay that to the south philly rubes that told me they went. /shrug.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Whenever I have seen the analysts making hypothesis about a possible coup in Russia, it always was not a popular coup but a 'palace coup' or one orchestrated by some part of siloviki. Popular protests can prevent the state from taking some action, but a full coup seems unlikely, as you state.
  - abalashov 5y ago
    Of the two possibilities, it's certainly more likely -- in strictly relative terms. But Western media seems to put a lot of stock in 'people power'. In this particular case, it's misplaced.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Is it ? Putin until now had managed to carefully play the Russian opinion to be mostly favorable to him, and I just don't see how this can possibly continue once the reality of what is currently happening in Ukraine to their friends and family filters through the propaganda. His own glorification of WW2 over the last decades is going to play against him here, as the pictures of bombed cities are going to raise immediate associations putting in question just who are the real "Nazis" here. This leaves the repressive option... but this would require levels of repression not seen since Stalin, and we're living in a completely different mediatic landscape. No way that this doesn't end up in a revolution. Nor I believe that attempts of going full North Korea with almost completely cut off media and communications would be accepted by the population, or even feasible in practice. The only thing going for Putin is the indiscriminate nature of economic sanctions, strengthening his "the West wants to destroy Russia" line.
      - frenchy 5y ago
        Nazi Germany didn't fall to a coup (though at least one was tried).
        BlueTemplar 5y ago
        And Hitler didn't raze Austria.
tonmoy 5y ago
China is autocratic, but maybe not a dictatorship like Russia. I had the feeling that the CCP has some leverage over Xi, whereas Putin’s power is more concentrated on himself.
- abalashov 5y ago
  Any inner circle of political elites has some leverage over the individual leader, but Putin didn't stay in power for 22 years by failing to understand how to maintain delicate balance among these forces, play them off one another, and in general route all plots and intrigue around himself. It's wishful thinking to imagine that a lone disgruntled civil servant with a gun is all it takes. If it were that easy, it would have happened a long time ago; autocrats, by their very nature, are always in peril, in that in any given moment there's no shortage of people who ahem, wish them ill. That's what makes my skin crawl about assessments of other global autocrats in Western media as irrational. This childish way of looking at things makes them into some kind of cartoon villains; the "Mad Mullahs" who run Iran, "Crazy" Kim Jong-un... These people may be distasteful, however, they are _anything_ but irrational. They are the most eminently rational and sophisticated calculators and political operators on the planet. They wouldn't last two seconds in power if they weren't.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    It's the distinction that autocrats are all whining, pathetic losers - they torture their political enemies because they feel justified doing so - but it doesn't make them less dangerous.
- simulate-me 5y ago
  > I had the feeling that the CCP has some leverage over Xi Based on what? "Feelings" about dictators is how the world got into this mess in the first place.
pcwalton 5y ago
Yeah. It's important to remember that Mao killed between 15 and 55 million of his own people during the GLF and he still managed to claw his way back to power with the Cultural Revolution a few years later.
- tenpies 5y ago
  This is not specific to Mao. Even in democracies, the people often vote against their own interests or often compromise on fundamentally important issues for the sake of luxury beliefs or in-group approval.
  - chii 5y ago
    > the people often vote against their own interests the people who died under mao aren't the ones who voted for the policies that lead to them dying.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
toast0 5y ago
> The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade, though there is an argument that it was done in part because Germany believed that strong trade ties were a good impediment to war. It worked; Germany is unwilling to wage war upon a trading partner its developed a dependency on. The problem is Russia didn't develop a dependency on outside trade, so it's less concerned about maintaining trade.
- kadoban 5y ago
  > The problem is Russia didn't develop a dependency on outside trade, so it's less concerned about maintaining trade. Sure it did. The rulers in Russia just care less if their people suffer and die.
  - abalashov 5y ago
    I believe one could make a compelling argument that Russians themselves are more prepared to endure hardship for politico-economic reasons. They're just so used to it...
    - nwiswell 5y ago
      I am not sure it is a matter of being "prepared" to suffer rather than a defeatist cultural attitude about the ability to effect change. It's not hard to understand where that attitude comes from: for the past century, any hint of dissention was rapidly repaid with a one way ticket to a gulag in one form or another. This isn't to say that e.g. there isn't genuine support for the regime; there certainly is, but there's also low inclination toward the kind of activism that changes hearts and minds, and consequently state propaganda has an outsize influence on political opinions. Meanwhile in the West, we are of the belief that if we complain loudly enough about things, they will get better. That attitude is correct a surprisingly large amount of the time! So next time you want to complain about people complaining about stuff that complaining about won't fix, remember it's (usually) a good thing that we're culturally wired to be difficult to please.
      - 5y ago
simulate-me 5y ago
One of the reasons that Trump wanted to break up NATO was specifically related to Germany's reliance on Russian gas: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-pipeline/trump-lashes-germany-over-gas-pipeline-deal-calls-it-russias-captive-idUSKBN1K10VI https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-summit-pipeline/trum...
- blitzar 5y ago
  On one hand he wanted to "break up nato" and on the other he wanted nato to collectively spend 100s of billions every year to militarize. Broken clocks and politicians who take every side of every argument are right every so often.
  - abalashov 5y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Trump's position on NATO was, as his position on damn near anything else, unintelligible gibberish. There was no constant except a pervasive affectation--colouring his rhetorical posture on everything he ever discussed--that the US was, in some ineffable but profound way, being "screwed".
  - simulate-me 5y ago
    Those positions are not mutually exclusive. Rather, it's more of an ultimatum. "Spend more on our collective defense and reduce your dependence on our adversaries, or we'll no longer be allies."
- BlueTemplar 5y ago
  Huh, this is a surprising lack of pro-Russian pandering coming from Trump !
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - CamperBob2 5y ago
    The only thing I can figure is that it was Tillerson's input as Secretary of State that Trump was passing along. Tillerson, being affiliated with US energy interests, may have wanted to encourage Germany to import more from us or our Middle Eastern allies. Trouble is, the summit took place in July 2018 and Tillerson was fired by Trump in March. (From Tillerson's Wikipedia article: "... Trump allegedly suggested a tenfold increase in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which would cost trillions and take centuries. These reports were denied by White House officials and by Trump after which individuals familiar with the meeting told journalists that Tillerson either called Trump a "moron" or a "fucking moron.") It's not clear why Pompeo would have pushed this particular agenda item, only that Trump likely didn't come up with it on his own.
ripper1138 5y ago
Xi is far from unassailable. Wouldn’t be a surprise at all if someone else in the party wins support for the next term.
- dan_hawkins 5y ago
  What term? : )
_0ffh 5y ago
>Xi's position is too unassailable right now I don't think he's quite there yet. If the 20th party congress later this year goes according to plan for him, he will be though.
radu_floricica 5y ago
There was a frightfully insightful recent twitter thread making rounds, saying that extractive industries are perfect to be headed/owned by mob bosses, because the more complex the industry the more leverage the technical employees have. I.e. in extractive industries they have close to none, in manufacturing they have a solid measure of respect, while in tech industries they get to dictate the culture of the company. Which means a mob leadership (we're not pretending anymore Russia doesn't have one of those, right?) will favor extractive industries over everything else, not just because they're much easier to own and exploit, but because allowing other types of companies to grow creates power centers outside of their control. They actively prefer to outsource services abroad, even if they are more expensive and create reliance on foreign partners. Which means Germany's bet was wrong on two counts: 1. It propped exactly the kind of industries where the money goes in mob's pockets 2. It was unnecessary, because Russia was making itself incredibly vulnerable to sanctions all by itself by avoiding to develop anything more complex than a well or a mine (normally I'd say defense excluded, but seeing the quality of their current armed forces, it's more like an argument that even defense is included). The natural question here is if the blunder is an honest mistake... but honest mistakes and motivated reasoning go suspiciously well together, and by all accounts the German elites more than occasionally gained from trade with Russia.
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  Worth noting the historical influence of Russia on the German antinuclear/Green lobby, as well.
- des1nderlase 5y ago
  Sure that's true for any nation having huge stock of natural resources (i.e Nigeria, UAE). But still, the west wants cheap oil and other resources. Mistake is perhaps, from the power play perspective, not to have tighter relationship with the government. Sadly, regular people always suffer in these kind of situations...
  - hollerith 5y ago
    The UAE has no oil reserves, but Saudi Arabia or Iran would work as a replacement for it in your comment.
nmehner 5y ago
Do you really think so? Russia has no way of winning this conflict. Their military is facing huge losses (increasing their demographic problems), there is no way they can keep Ukraine occupied and they have given up on regime change. The Russian economy is in shambles because of the sanctions (which hit a lot harder because of strong ties with western markets) and will never recover. Europe has accelerated its departure from fossil fuels. Putin has fired some generals and placed the head of the FSB's foreign intelligence branch under house arrest. How can this be seen other then a total strategic blunder of Putin? Do you really think Xi is looking at this mess and be like "Yeah, give me one of those, too."?
- tarsinge 5y ago
  I would like to be as optimistic as you but this seems contrary to the article and the comments in that thread suggesting the sanctions on oil still have not shown their effects, and it has just started to make Europe question its Gas dependency. Departure will take at least a decade if chosen. As stated until then Europe will not be able to really sanction Russia.
  - nmehner 5y ago
    That is if you see sanctions as an all or nothing approach. For Europe the approach will have to be to reduce consumption step by step. This is not as glorious as stopping all imports in one day, but it will hurt Russia nevertheless. Also this process already started before the current crisis. In Germany heat pump sales have been exploding : https://www.waermepumpe.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/4/csm_Diagramm_Absatz_WP_2002-2021_9e7c2c0a61.png https://www.waermepumpe.de/fileadmin/_processed_/2/4/csm_Dia... . In Norway the share of electric cars in new cars is at 85% and 16% of the existing fleet is already electric. This starts to become visible in oil consumption for traffic as well: https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statistikk/sal-av-petroleumsprodukt https://www.ssb.no/en/energi-og-industri/olje-og-gass/statis... (although the economic recovery after Covid masks this somewhat). In all of Europe 10% of all new cars are electric and that share will increase fast. The article only looks at the supply side of things, but long term the more important part is demand. These changes won't effect the outcome of the current crisis, but for Russia the coming decade will show what foolish decision this invasion was and future leaders will hopefully think twice about destroying their own country.
throw0101a 5y ago
> The German natural gas dependency is going to be the strategic blunder of the decade This has been a problem for decades, plural: > The year: 1987. The president: Ronald Reagan. The dilemma: What to do about the new gas pipeline that Europe was building to Russia, one of America’s key foreign policy rivals. Blinken’s first book, Ally Versus Ally: America, Europe, and the Siberian Pipeline Crisis, was published by a then-unknown young writer in 1987. But the dilemma it explores bears remarkable similarities to the challenges the Biden administration is about to face when it takes office. In fact, looking at Blinken’s analysis of U.S. foreign policy during the 1980s provides some tantalizing clues as to how he plans to guide American diplomacy if he is confirmed as Biden’s secretary of state. > The “Siberian pipeline crisis” that formed the subject of Ally Versus Ally has been forgotten by all but specialists. * https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state-alliances-nato-ally-versus-ally/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/03/blinken-secretary-state... * https://archive.ph/I6Ytj https://archive.ph/I6Ytj * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod_pipeli...

KarlKemp 5y ago

Russian gas makes up about 10% of Europe’s energy imports. That’s quite a bit, and there are regional and sectoral hotspots. But it’s not impossible to replace. Plus Russia continues to have an interest in selling he stuff. With all other sources of revenue being cut, it becomes even more important. What may have been 6 % of the budget will easily be 15 %, soon, and they will need every cent to avoid a complete economic collapse.

abalashov 5y ago
I wish I shared your optimism. But this 10% "energy imports" figure makes it seem like "energy" of all kinds is fungible...
riku_iki 5y ago
> Russian gas makes up about 10% of Europe’s energy imports. But 40% of actual gas imports. Europe can't rebuild all infra overnight to consume other sources of energy instead of gas for many industries, homes heating etc.
- mortehu 5y ago
  I don't think you need much new infra to switch to electrical resistance heating. Where to get this energy? Turn off bitcoin mining (200 TWh/year) and you probably get enough energy to replace the heat lost from stopping German imports of Russian natural gas (40 billion cubic meters/year, 10 kWH per cubic meter = 40 TWh). Don't know how much mining is on the European grid though. As a bonus electrical resistance heating can work in a single room at a time.
  - abalashov 5y ago
    With average household electricity price in the EU at €0.2134/KWHr (second half 2021), I really wonder how much Bitcoin mining goes on there. The average cost in the US is less than half that, less in many of the southern states.
  - beiller 5y ago

908B64B197 5y ago

I have to wonder if US nuclear aircraft carriers could help supplying power to Europe.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Wouldn't even put a dent in it. Or are you joking?
djrogers 5y ago
They could, but not in enough to help the continent as a whole. A nuke carrier could power a small city, but there are only 11 of them, and most of them are kinda tied up right now… Also, powering 11 small port cities wouldn’t make a dent in the overall energy needs for an entire continent.
labster 5y ago
They’d help in the same way a raindrop helps to fill a pond. Maybe if the US sends a few hundred nuclear aircraft carriers to Europe it would help.
- cyounkins 5y ago
  The US has 11 nuclear aircraft carriers, not hundreds.
abalashov 5y ago
Yeah... the numbers on that... not so much. Edit: I don't mean for this to sound ad hominem or overly pointed, but I've been shocked a lot lately--in the context of all these boycott discussions and so forth--by a widespread lack of basic energy density literacy. I'm no physicist myself, but I think the world could use a fast lesson in just how much energy is stored in oil and gas, and in concepts like EROEI. Without it, it's very hard to put the relative quantities in perspective and understand why it's so difficult to eliminate, substitute or reduce fossil fuel use, or why ramping up production or retooling for different inputs is something that happens more in decade time-scales than weeks or months... As sibling comments have intimated, the amount of power required even for a midsize city vs. what a small nuclear reactor on an aircraft carrier could provide is just stupefying. It's a microscopic contribution. Moreover, the energy in a single 42 gal barrel of refined oil (~5.8 million BTUs) is enormous. Matching that in any kind of reasonable way is not impossible, but it's an insanely difficult problem with no quick or easy solutions.

throwaway894345 5y ago

It has been baffling to me since long before the Russian invasion that Europe would allow itself to be at the mercy of a single man like this. I just don’t understand how this could have been allowed to happen. Now Europe finds itself a party to genocide.

abalashov 5y ago
It's not such a mystery. A lot of the policies were decided from a combination of shorter-term political calculus and a rather optimistic view about the harmonising effects of the liberal economic order, globalism, free trade, democracy, interdependence, peace dividends, and other Thomas Friedman things. It's easy to forget now after a few years of erratic Trump and populist protectionism talk, but it was not long ago at all that was basically conventional wisdom in the US, too.
- zdragnar 5y ago
  Trump warned them, and the German delegation laughed in his face. He claims he gave a gift of a white flag to Merkel to waive in surrender to the Russians after negotiations to block the Nord pipeline fell through. But, Trump wasn't alone in thinking this way. In the 2012 election, Romney called Russia the USA's number 1 geopolitical foe, and Obama laughed it off. Meanwhile, several high profile poisonings, siding with Assad in Syria, behind the scenes antagonising in Iran, etc. all made one thing abundantly clear: Putin is no friend of "Western liberal economic order", and the uneasy truce was not in any way guaranteed to last. If nothing else, putting all of your eggs in one basket and hoping he played nicely with your natural gas supply was the sort of foolishness that shouldn't be given positions of power.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I’m can buy a certain amount of “liberal economic order” for things like household goods or perhaps putting your energy supply in the hands of a democratic nation, but putting your oil supply in the hands of a dictatorship seemed foolish well before Putin invaded Ukraine.
dzhiurgis 5y ago