Prospect of ‘peak demand’ prompts debate and long-term planning by global producers
.. The Hungarian company is rethinking its traditional focus on fuel supply and shifting investment to petrochemicals, the key ingredient of everyday plastic products and a sector where MOL believes growth will continue even when its fuel business falters... But that picture shifts radically if governments take further action to limit global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius with more stringent policies like carbon pricing, strict emissions limits and the removal of fossil-fuel subsidies. If that happens, oil demand could peak within the next 10 years, the IEA says... BP says oil demand could fall by the late 2020s if tougher emissions laws are enacted... Others don’t see peak demand coming so quickly. Exxon expects consumption to grow through 2040, though at a decelerating pace. Likewise, OPEC sees demand continuing to grow beyond 2040, but acknowledges new technologies and efforts to curb climate change could mean consumption peaks within the next three decades... Peak demand “will be later than the common dates that are being thrown around, but if it does happen, because we’re building multiple engines for the economy and we’re planning for an economy beyond oil, we’ll be ready,” Saudi Arabia’s energy minister,Khalid al Falih, told a conference in Istanbul last month... Shell, Exxon and others are pouring money into natural gas—a less-carbon-intensive fossil fuel they bet will benefit from efforts to curb global emissions. In China, where growing oil demand has supported global markets for years, the state-owned energy giants are aggressively embracing natural gas as a fuel for use in everything from power generation to running cars... France’s Total SA has said it wants 20% of its portfolio to consist of low-carbon businesses within the next 20 years.
Thugs and Kisses
The Russian Federation of 2016 is not the Soviet Union of 1986. True, it covers most of the same territory and is run by some of the same thugs. But the Marxist ideology is gone, and so is the superpower status. We’re talking about a more or less ordinary corrupt petrostate here, although admittedly a big one that happens to have nukes.
.. But today’s Russia isn’t Communist, or even leftist; it’s just an authoritarian state, with a cult of personality around its strongman, that showers benefits on an immensely wealthy oligarchy while brutally suppressing opposition and criticism.
And that, of course, is what many on the right admire.
.. Fuels account for more than two-thirds of its exports, manufactures barely a fifth.
.. Mr. Putin would actually have something to boast about if he had managed to diversify Russia’s exports. And this should have been possible: The old regime left behind a large cadre of highly skilled workers. In fact, Russian émigrés have been a key force behind Israel’s remarkable technology boom — and the Putin government appears to have no trouble recruiting talented hackers to break into Democratic National Committee files. But Russia wasn’t going to realize its technology potential under a regime where business success depends mainly on political connections.
Why Donald Trump’s Test for Immigrants Won’t Work
Donald Trump proposed an ideological test for immigrants, one that would allow in “only those who we expect to flourish in our country – and to embrace a tolerant American society.” Is it possible to implement a test like that
.. The practical reality is that you are dealing with people who, if they’re fairly sophisticated, are going to almost immediately learn what to say. So unless you intend to tie them to a polygraph, which is a notoriously uncertain device, you’re assuming that you are basically only going to catch the inexperienced or the stupid.
.. more and more extremist organizations are shifting to people who don’t come from a suspect country.
.. What you’re essentially saying is that if somebody is already sophisticated, educated, understands Western values, has money and comes from a country where they have no urgent reason to enter the U.S., they’re probably going to easily slip through. That is very odd criteria for a nation of immigrants. What do we do, change that plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty?
.. in this campaign people keep using ISIS as a term for virtually all terrorism.
.. ISIS is actually a fairly small percentage of global terrorism, and it’s a fairly limited percentage of even Islamist extremist terrorism.
.. It then exploited the fact that Nouri al-Maliki, who came to office during the Bush administration, basically chose to promote both himself and Shiites at the expense of Sunnis in western Iraq and alienated so many of them that when what became ISIS invaded, there was very little resistance.
.. None of this had anything to do with the Obama administration. I think it is unfair to say that it somehow was a product of the Bush administration. The fact is that Saddam Hussein created the divided Iraq where the moment you remove the dictator, all of the divisions became critical.
.. Mr. Trump said that “we should have kept the oil in Iraq.” Could the United States have done that?
Under international law that would’ve been illegal by every possible standard.
You can’t go in to liberate a country and then somehow steal its most important resource. That frankly is not simply illegal under international law, it directly contradicts virtually every value we have as a country.
Trump’s Iraqi obsession wasn’t ISIL but oil
In numerous interviews, he urged removal of troops except to ‘protect the oil’ for the United States.
As the U.S. prepared to exit Iraq in 2011, Trump offered conflicting and muddled opinions about America’s role in the country. He incorrectly predicted that Iran would “walk in” and lay claim to Iraq’s oil fields. In multiple interviews and a book, he said nothing about the threat of ISIL-style radicalism that many experts were publicly warning about at the time.
.. On at least once occasion in early 2011, Trump even said he supported a speedy U.S. withdrawal from the country. Asked by CNN’s Piers Morgan in a February 2011 interview what he would do about U.S. troops in Iraq, Trump said he would “get them out real fast.”
.. Instead, Trump fixated on the specific concern that Iran would take control of Iraq’s oil.
“Two minutes after we leave, Iran is going to come in and take the oil,” Trump told Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly in an April 2011 interview. “You stay and you protect the oil.”
.. One person who did focus on the threat of Islamic terrorism in Iraq after a U.S. troop withdrawal was Hillary Clinton, whom Trump has also described in recent days as a “founder” of ISIL.
.. In his 2011 book “Time to Get Tough,” Trump argued at length that the U.S. should “protect and control the oil fields” of Iraq, which are mostly located in south Iraq, far from the Sunni territories where ISIL has operated.
Trump’s book also argued for establishing a “cost-sharing plan” that would divide Iraq’s billions of dollars in oil revenue and reimburse the U.S. for its expenses from invading and occupying the country. “Call me old school, but I believe in the old warrior’s credo that ‘to the victor go the spoils,'” Trump wrote.
.. Indeed, Trump suggested in his Wall Street Journal interview that oil profits were a reason why he approved of the 2003 invasion of Iraq—which in recent months he has insisted he always opposed, despite evidence to the contrary.