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Ed Webb

OPEC Is in its Death Throes | Foreign Policy - 0 views

  • In February, OPEC called for an oil production “freeze” to raise crude prices in conjunction with Russia. But this effort collapsed at a meeting in Doha, Qatar, in April when Iran refused to join any freeze in order to regain the pre-2012 production levels of close to 4 mbpd it enjoyed before U.S. and European Union nuclear sanctions were imposed, following the removal of certain sanctions after the 2015 nuclear deal. A similar proposal failed at the OPEC meeting in June, again following Iran’s refusal, despite outreach by the Qataris.
  • OPEC again called for a form of output cut on Sept. 28 at an extraordinary meeting in Algiers. Markets bit on the news, with Brent prices rising sharply by about 15 percent in the following week, from $46 to $52 per barrel.
  • Can action by the cartel sustain higher crude prices over the long term? Probably not. Like a desert mirage, the image of an OPEC resurrection vanishes when approached.
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  • The massive fall in oil prices from over $100 per barrel in early 2014 to under $30 by January 2016 was caused primarily by then-Saudi Minister of Petroleum Ali al-Naimi’s strategy to gain market share for the kingdom and hurt the U.S. tight oil (or “shale”) industry by allowing the market, not OPEC interventions, to set prices.
  • While Riyadh has cranked up its production from mid-2014 to today by over a million barrels a day (to a peak of 10.7 mbpd in August this year), its fiscal position has taken a serious blow, with the budget deficit rising from 3 percent of GDP to 16 percent in 2015
  • The resilience of U.S. shale makes the argument that OPEC has experienced a resurrection a fragile claim. The cartel can probably raise prices in the short term through an output cut, but it will only be so long, perhaps already by mid-2017, before the U.S. shale industry revives and grabs any market share conceded by OPEC in a higher price environment. This will ultimately bring prices lower again, all else being equal.
  • Within OPEC, while other Gulf Co-Operation states, namely Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, may be prepared to make a small cut to their production, key producers like Iraq and Venezuela are in too difficult a fiscal position to agree to any major cut.
  • Outside OPEC, Russia reached a production record of 11.1 mbpd in August, eclipsing Soviet levels. Being so close to the maximum anyway, Russia has little to lose by supporting the OPEC output cut and agreeing not to raise production further. Yet the Kremlin is unlikely to impose actual cuts on the range of oil companies that operate in the country.
  • In the short term, it seems Riyadh’s fiscal position was under such pressure from low oil prices that something had to give. While the kingdom has eased the fiscal pressure by starting to issue sovereign debt, the burn rate through its foreign reserves has been relentless (from about $740 billion in mid-2014 to $550 billion today) as it has attempted to defend the currency in the face of substantial capital flight from the country since the oil price crash in 2014.
  • Climate change will plainly be a major problem of the 21st century, and the world is moving away from fossil fuels: game over for an unreformed Saudi Arabia.
  • Saudi Arabia will face hard years ahead as the oil market increasingly looks to U.S. shale, not OPEC, as a handrail to oil prices on the supply side. However, this might well be the jolt that Salman needs to push through painful but necessary reforms
Ed Webb

Analysis: West struggles to understand Russia's Syria stance - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • They say Moscow's opposition to foreign-backed "regime change" reflects a fundamental disagreement with the West over sovereignty and the rights of states to deal with domestic instability by whatever means necessary. "The Russian position can be explained by their hostility to any interference in the internal affairs of a country, especially in the current climate, because at home they have things to be worried about,"
  • Time and time again, Western officials have confidently briefed that Russian President Vladimir Putin was on the brink of dumping his long-term ally, only to be disappointed
  • A death toll in Syria of well over 10,000 seems unlikely on its own to change Putin's mind. Estimates vary widely of the number of dead in Chechnya - a conflict in which he was involved as prime minister and president - but often exceed 100,000.
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  • "Putin has spent the last decade obsessing about 'color revolutions'," says Stephen Sestanovich, principal State Department officer for the former Soviet Union between 1997 and 2001 and now senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "He hates the idea that the international community has anything to say about who holds power in a country whose leaders have done something awful. He tends to sympathize with those leaders."
  • In Alawite-run Syria, and perhaps to a lesser extent in Shi'ite Iran, Russia also has a regional counterweight to an increasingly vocal bloc of Sunni Muslim-led countries allied with Washington, primarily Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.
  • "In the West we often exaggerate Putin's dictatorial side," says former U.S. official Sestanovich. "In Russia, many criticize him for indecisiveness. It may be that in Syria he's actually confused about what to do, and is slowly concluding that Assad has had it. That's the hopeful interpretation: Putin the conflicted ditherer."
Ed Webb

Simon Dalby, 400ppm: Anthropocene Geopolitics | Society and Space - Environment and Pla... - 1 views

  • Humanity is remaking the biosphere; producing the new natures in which the human future will play out. Hence the now widespread use of the term Anthropocene for the period of planetary history in which the dominant ecological force is humanity, or more precisely, fossil fueled industrial capitalist humanity.
  • Natural environments are no longer in any meaningful sense the given context for human existence; they are being remade by land use changes, urbanization and by both technologies and species moved and recombined in numerous artificial assemblages. Atlases with their designations of planetary biomes frequently need replacement with a dynamic cartography charting the changing “anthromes” that are the new terrestrial ecological patterns that matter.
  • Globalization now has to be understood as a process of material transformation quite as much as a matter of trade, culture and politics crossing frontiers. The processes whereby business decisions are made to produce particular products by using certain technologies is key to understanding the future of the planet; economic geography has become essential to geomorphology.
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  • The Westphalian political imaginary of separate competing territorial states is a spatial arrangement singularly unsuited to the collective tasks ahead, but it is the institutional context within which we have to act.
Ed Webb

Dam Rising in Ethiopia Stirs Hope and Tension - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Ethiopia, one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, has poured its resources into a slew of megaprojects in recent years, including dams, factories, roads and railways across the country.But its strong, state-driven approach has been criticized for displacing rural communities, elbowing out private investors and muzzling political dissent. The Renaissance Dam, its biggest project, has met with resistance even outside Ethiopia’s borders, setting off a heated diplomatic battle with Egypt that, at one point, led to threats of war.
  • From the very beginning, this relentless drive has put Ethiopia at odds with Egypt. The Renaissance Dam is on the Blue Nile, a tributary that contributes most of the water flowing into the Nile River, heightening concerns that it could threaten Egypt’s most vital natural resource. Fears of armed conflict surfaced during the brief tenure of Egypt’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, who said last year that “Egyptian blood” would substitute for every drop of lost water.But under Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the icy relationship between the two countries has begun to thaw. Ethiopia’s prime minister, Hailemariam Desalegn, and Mr. Sisi had a cordial first meeting in June, and water ministers from Ethiopia, Egypt and Sudan met for renewed discussions in late August. Egypt’s new foreign minister, Sameh Shoukry, set a diplomatic tone during a visit last month to the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, declaring “a new phase of our relationship based on mutual understanding, mutual respect and a recognition that the Nile binds us.”
  • A smaller dam nearing completion in southern Ethiopia could threaten ecosystems affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Huge land leases to foreign commercial farms have displaced communities and left tens of thousands of acres uncultivated.
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  • Building the vast reservoir needed to generate maximum power, on the other hand, poses some risks to Egypt and Sudan, as it will temporarily lessen the flow downstream.
Ed Webb

Syrian war spurs first withdrawal from doomsday Arctic seed vault - Yahoo News - 1 views

  • Syria's civil war has prompted the first withdrawal of crop seeds from a "doomsday" vault built in an Arctic mountainside to safeguard global food supplies, officials said on Monday. The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers in the Middle East to replace a collection in the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.
  • Many seeds from the Aleppo collection have traits resistant to drought, which could help breed crops to withstand climate change in dry areas from Australia to Africa.
Ed Webb

Barack Obama's great test | open Democracy News Analysis - 0 views

  • the limitations of Obama's style and approach
  • His administration, he promised, would do its best to revive the world's economy, to address climate change, to prevent Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, and to bring peace to Israel and Palestine. These are all admirable aspirations, and it is perhaps unreasonable to hope that the president might have admitted that the United States has been largely responsible for each of these problems.
  • Barack Obama is increasingly coming to look like Lyndon B Johnson, a brilliantly gifted politician whose ambition to build a "great society" was sacrificed because of the war in Vietnam. The heart of the Obama approach is now clear. He genuinely wants to move away from the frozen folly of the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century, but he is not willing to take the political risk of acknowledging America's responsibility for the problems he wants to solve.
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  • Still less does anyone in Washington seem to understand that "Gitmo" itself was always an absurd colonial anomaly of the kind Americans used to denounce. Nor does there seem any will to undo the creation of an even more scandalous, though militarily more useful, colony in the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia.
  • Washington's instinct is to treat China as a potential partner in the domination of the world
  • Because Europe is divided into many different states, and no doubt because many American politicians and policy-makers find European attitudes annoying, American policy does not recognise that collectively Europe has a bigger economy than the United States and far bigger than China (even if China's growth has been spectacular).
  • No one questions Barack Obama's personal goodwill, still less his political intelligence. But on the basis of his first nine months in office, his commitment to a serious reassessment of the limitations of American power - let alone to an acknowledgment of the implications of the country's relative decline - is not yet clear.
Ed Webb

Israeli FM wants to eject Israeli Arabs - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • The principle guiding peace talks "must not be land for peace, but an exchange of land and people," Lieberman told reporters
  • Asked if Lieberman's position reflected the government's, official spokesman Mark Regev noted that the different parties in Netanyahu's coalition "have different political outlooks." Lieberman has made such declarations before, and the prime minister, not the foreign minister, sets Israeli foreign policy. But the comments threatened to further cloud the negotiating climate at a sensitive time. Palestinians envision the West Bank as the hub of a future state and object to any Jewish construction there. Netanyahu says a 10-month slowdown on building won't be extended beyond its Sept. 26 expiry. There is intense pressure from the U.S. on Israel to extend the slowdown, and at the same time, on the Palestinians not to abandon the talks. Both sides say they expect to reach a compromise.
Sarah Romano

Meeting on Iran's nuclear programme cancelled - 0 views

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    "Correspondents say the news marks a setback for efforts to present a unified front on Iran in the face of continued defiance from Tehran. The Iranians are under UN Security Council sanctions for refusing to stop enriching uranium. "
Ed Webb

Arab States Buy up Vast Tracts of African Farmland as Food Prices Skyrocket | Green Pro... - 0 views

  • the Arab states, led by Saudi Arabia and UAE, have decided to take matters into their own hands, according to Arabian Business. They are using their vast oil wealth to buy up tracts of land the size of small countries in Africa, intending to turn them into agricultural hotbeds to feed their multitudes. They have paid millions of dollars to the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia, and smaller amounts to those of Kenya, Sudan and Mozambique, for the use of hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural farmland.
  • “It wasn’t only the prices going high that worried some of the Gulf countries, it was also the fact that, at the same time, a number of major food exporters, decided to impose export bans in an attempt to keep prices down” said David Hallam, an analyst with the FAO. “So what they feared was that not only were they facing high prices, but it might not be possible to secure supplies at any price.” And that, in turn, makes the wealthy Arab states, with the food crisis for their own rapidly growing populations, only more concerned. High oil prices lead to food shortages, which have destabilizing political effects. Interesting times ahead.
Ed Webb

Key oil figures were distorted by US pressure, says whistleblower | Environment | The G... - 1 views

  • The world is much closer to running out of oil than official estimates admit, according to a whistleblower at the International Energy Agency who claims it has been deliberately underplaying a looming shortage for fear of triggering panic buying.The senior official claims the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.
  • John Hemming, the MP who chairs the all-party parliamentary group on peak oil and gas, said the revelations confirmed his suspicions that the IEA underplayed how quickly the world was running out and this had profound implications for British government energy policy.He said he had also been contacted by some IEA officials unhappy with its lack of independent scepticism over predictions. "Reliance on IEA reports has been used to justify claims that oil and gas supplies will not peak before 2030. It is clear now that this will not be the case and the IEA figures cannot be relied on," said Hemming."This all gives an importance to the Copenhagen [climate change] talks and an urgent need for the UK to move faster towards a more sustainable [lower carbon] economy if it is to avoid severe economic dislocation," he added.
Ed Webb

Why the Islamic State is the minor leagues of terror | Middle East Eye - 2 views

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    "The sole advantage the Islamic State has when it comes to this country is that it turns out to be so easy to spook us."
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