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What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

by Antwan63Otcsprd Posted on March 7, 2014

Mother Jones

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Here’s how it’s been in Ukraine: Cheap natural gas and massive loans from Russia; crooks and oligarchs in both Ukraine and Russia skimming money from the energy sector; and understandably squeamish foreign investors balking at having skin in the game.

On top of all that, there’s the ever-present risk for Western Europe of Russia turning off the gas tap. Most of Russia’s gas exports to Europe go through Ukraine’s pipeline system; Russian exports account for 60 percent of Ukraine’s gas consumption and around a third of Europe’s as a whole. Russia has long been able to use Ukraine as an energy choke point.

It all came to head in recent days, as then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced from power and Russian-backed troops seized control of government buildings on Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula. On Tuesday, Russia decided to cancel the economic lifeline it extended last year to Yanukovych, a deal that had included a hefty 30 percent discount on natural gas and the purchase of Ukraine’s debt. “That is not linked to politics or anything,” Russian President Vladimir Putin insisted. “We had a deal: We give you money and lower gas price, you pay us regularly. We gave money and lowered the gas price but there are no payments. So Gazprom Russia’s state-run gas company naturally says this is a no go.”

Now, American and European leaders are confronting the question of how to deal with Russia’s significant influence over the world’s hydrocarbon economy while also helping Ukraine’s fledgling government stand on its own two feet and clean up its energy act.

Here are four things you need to know about the role of energy in the current crisis:

1. The United States is rushing to push more gas onto the market to undercut Putin’s power. Russia’s presence in Ukraine is prompting calls, especially among congressional Republicans, to loosen export restrictions on US natural gas in the hopes of diminishing Russia’s ability to use gas as a diplomatic weapon, like it did in 2006 and 2009. With America’s newfound dominance in gas production (in 2013, the United States surpassed Russia to become the biggest producer of oil and gas, thanks in part to fracking) comes greater power in energy diplomacy.

“One immediate step the president can and should take is to dramatically expedite the approval of US exports of natural gas,” House Speaker John Boehner said on Tuesday. Adding new supplies to the global market—the United States is already in the process of approving a range of proposals to export gas—”sends a clear signal that the global gas market is changing, that there is the prospect of much greater supply coming from other parts of the world,” Carlos Pascual from the State Department told the New York Times.

But Tim Boersma, a fellow in the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, warns that there are going to be no easy and fast solutions to the energy dominance Russia has established in Ukraine. “At the end of the day, what will not really change—whether we like it or not—is that Ukraine is an important transit country for natural gas,” he says. “The notion that some people have put out there that Ukraine could become independent of Russian gas in not realistic at all.”

2. Russia isn’t as powerful as you might think. But for all the Russian posturing, and the canceled energy deal, Ukraine—and Europe more broadly—does have some leverage over Russia to prevent the situation from deteriorating further, says Edward Chow, an energy and security analyst at Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). “Interestingly, the gas pipelines, as well as critically important gas storage facilities, all go through Western Ukraine,” he says. “Until Russians build additional bypass pipelines…they are still highly dependent on Ukraine to transit gas exports to Europe.” And Ukraine’s supplies, mostly in the pro-reform western part of the country, could withstand a four-month Russian blockade, according to Reuters.

Tim Boersma from Brookings says Europe is in a good place right now to apply pressure: “Both parties have a lot to lose here,” he says. “But I would argue that Russia has more to lose than Europe at the moment. Russia needs European markets. Russia needs European demands. It is making roughly $100 million dollars a day from hydrocarbons.”

“Making matters worse would not really be good for Russia,” Boersma says. “As a hydrocarbon state, it essentially needs these revenues.”

Ukraine is already flexing its muscle as a consumer, and other countries are willing to help. The government’s energy minister announced yesterday that Ukraine is planning to reduce its reliance on Russian imports, filling the gap with Slovakian and German gas.

Meanwhile, because of an unusually mild winter that has resulted in lower heating demand throughout Europe, gas storage across the continent are up 13 percentage points from the same time last year, the highest since 2008, according to reporting by Bloomberg Businessweek. More gas in the tanks could mean Europe is more willing and able to hold its ground with Russia.

Reuters is also reporting that the European Union is trying to loosen the grip Russia has over Ukraine by offering energy to Ukraine through “reverse flows” of gas, sending back gas back east so Ukraine doesn’t have to rely on imports from Russia. And there’s also plenty of talk about Ukraine exploiting its own shale gas reserves via fracking, which some argue would help cure its addiction to Russian gas. In 2013, Chevron and Shell signed separate deals to explore extracting shale gas in Ukraine.

3. Now is the time to clean up Ukraine’s corruption. Ukraine has been hooked on cheap Russian gas for too long, says CSIS’s Chow. That has stifled incentives to modernize the economy and look for energy alternatives, all the while lining the pockets of the rich and powerful to the tune of billions of dollars every year. Chow says graft is endemic in Ukraine’s oil and gas industry. (Transparency International ranks Ukraine 144 out of 177 countries for perceptions of corruption).

“There was a so-called gas mafia that was around Yanukovych, but he wasn’t alone,” says Chow. “So this goes way back in time: Basically, the gas lobby siphoned off money through the flow of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe. It’s a corrupt scheme.”

Chow hopes that the country’s fresh batch of leaders—with the mandate of a street revolution behind them and motivated by Putin’s “historic overreach”—will tackle the corruption that has infected politics and business since the country’s independence. “This is a once-in-a-long-while opportunity to finally fix the Ukrainian energy sector” by attracting foreign investment and making the gas deals transparent to the outside world says Chow.

4. The United States and European Union are making energy reform central to their aid packages. Bill Gibbons, a spokesman for the US Energy Department, said on Tuesday that the Obama administration is directing part of the $1 billion loan guarantee that John Kerry delivered to Kiev this week to “energy security, energy efficiency and energy sector reform.” The European Union’s $15 billion package is also aimed, in part, at modernizing Ukraine’s gas transit system.

With patrons of this much-needed aid linking their help to energy reform, there might well be a bigger chance of success, says Chow. “If you don’t do it now, when are you going to do it?” he asks. “Because Russia is not going to be interested in helping individuals from the new Ukrainian government extract rent like the previous government unless they can cooperate on other fronts. So this is quite a good opportunity to clean things up.”

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What the Ukraine Crisis Means for the Energy Industry

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The Global Economy Is Not Looking Too Great Right Now

by MollieUrquhart Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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I post here periodically about declining European inflation and rising European unemployment, and today Paul Krugman draws our attention to an IMF blog post about the threat of actual deflation in Europe. The bottom line is that there’s no actual deflation—yet—in most of Europe, but there is in three countries, and there’s persistently low inflation across the continent:

Although inflation—headline and core—has fallen and stayed well below the ECB’s 2% price stability mandate, so far there is no sign of classic deflation, i.e., of widespread, self-feeding, price declines.
But even ultra low inflation—let us call it “lowflation”—can be problematic for the euro area as a whole and for financially stressed countries, where it implies higher real debt stocks and real interest rates, less relative price adjustment, and greater unemployment.
Along with Japan’s experience, which saw deflation worm itself into the system, this argues for a more pre-emptive approach by the ECB.

The chart on the right illustrates one of the big problems with “lowflation,” even if it doesn’t turn into outright deflation: the countries with the lowest inflation are also the ones with the highest debt levels and the biggest growth problems. They need to reduce wages relative to other countries, but with low inflation that’s very hard to do. It requires actual pay cuts, something that’s historically difficult, rather than simply freezing wages and allowing them to erode via inflation. As a result, it’s hard for their economies to recover, and that in turn makes it all but impossible to fix their debt problem. It’s a vicious spiral.

Krugman warns that without more aggressive policy from the European Central Bank, the EU risks following Japan into economic stagnation: “When people warn about Europe’s potential Japanification, they’re way behind the curve. Europe is already experiencing all the woes one associates with deflation, even though it’s only low inflation so far; and the human and social costs are, of course, far worse than Japan ever experienced.”

In related news, I’ll also draw your attention to China’s latest woes: “China’s leaders kept the growth target for their giant economy unchanged but signaled that they are more concerned than ever about reaching it, giving themselves the option of letting credit flow freely to keep from falling short.” In the long run, China’s slowdown was inevitable as wages rose and demographic realities intruded. But it’s bad news in the short term. With the economy still flat in the US; European recovery threatened by debt and deflation; Chinese growth getting harder to come by; and the developing world seemingly running out of steam—with all that happening at once, there aren’t very many bright spots in the global economic picture. At best, it looks like we have fairly gray times ahead of us. At worst—well, it might be worse.

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The Global Economy Is Not Looking Too Great Right Now

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Putin Lets It All Hang Out at Press Conference

by VickieMathes Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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Julia Ioffe says Angela Merkel was right: Vladimir Putin has lost his marbles. Here is her reaction to his televised press conference earlier today:

Slouching in a fancy chair in front of a dozen reporters, Putin squirmed and rambled. And rambled and rambled. He was a rainbow of emotion: serious! angry! bemused! flustered! confused! So confused. Victor Yanukovich is still the acting president of Ukraine, but he can’t talk to Ukraine because Ukraine has no president. Ukraine needs elections, but you can’t have elections because there is already a president. And no elections will be valid given that there is terrorism in the streets of Ukraine. And how are you going to let just anyone run for president? What if some nationalist punk just pops out like a jack-in-the-box? An anti-Semite?

….The American political technologists they did their work well. And this isn’t the first time they’ve done this in Ukraine, no. Sometimes, I get the feeling that these people…these people in America. They are sitting there, in their laboratory, and doing experiments, like on rats. You’re not listening to me. I’ve already said, that yesterday, I met with three colleagues. Colleagues, you’re not listening. It’s not that Yanukovich said he’s not going to sign the agreement with Europe. What he said was that, based on the content of the agreement, having examined it, he did not like it. We have problems. We have a lot of problems in Russia. But they’re not as bad as in Ukraine. The Secretary of State. Well. The Secretary of State is not the ultimate authority, is he?

And so on, for about an hour. And much of that, by the way, is direct quotes.

Other sources aren’t quite as scornful as Ioffe, but they’re close. The Guardian described Putin’s remarks as “impromptu and occasionally rambling.” The New York Times said he was “clearly furious.” Adam Taylor of the Washington Post called it “a series of half-truths, circular reasoning, and bravado.”

In any case, the main actual news of the press conference is that Putin said he saw no need to send forces into eastern Ukraine “yet,” but reserves the right to do so in the future. So that’s the latest.

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Putin Lets It All Hang Out at Press Conference

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Follow-up: Why Are We Adopting the Stupidest Possible Payment System in the US?

by 0xde2zx Posted on February 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Yesterday I wondered aloud why it was taking so long for chip-and-PIN credit cards to come to America, and why, now that they’re finally here, we’re getting lame chip-and-signature cards instead.

First things first. There’s actually not a lot of mystery about why it’s taken so long, something I’ve written about before. Roughly speaking, the answer is that fraud detection in the US improved dramatically in the 90s, and that reduced the motivation to make the switch. Conversely, fraud detection in Europe was more primitive, so it made a lot of financial sense to transition to chip-and-PIN. Most of the transition costs were paid for by reduced fraud.

So that explains that. But now that we’re finally making the switch, why are we moving toward chip-and-signature? The whole point of smart cards is that the chip makes them hard to counterfeit and the PIN makes them hard for thieves to use. Chip-and-signature cards are still hard to counterfeit, but they can be used by thieves just as easily as current mag stripe cards. Plus they aren’t universally compatible in the rest of the world.

The answer, apparently, is that banks don’t want to do it:

The changeover in this country will be costly—as much as $35 billion, by some estimates…. According to the National Retail Federation, merchants are willing to spend that money if the banks issue the right kind of smart cards. Retailers want what are called chip-and-PIN cards, which require that a PIN be entered for each transaction.

….At a news conference Tuesday, Mallory Duncan, the federation’s senior vice president and general counsel, called chip-and-signature cards a bad idea. “It’s like locking the front door and leaving the back door open,” he said. “It would be a shame to spend all that money for a half-baked solution.”

The American Bankers Association said the marketplace should be able to accommodate both chip-and-signature and chip-and-PIN smart cards. “It’s the only way for this complex payments system to continue to deliver convenience and meet the needs of consumers,” said Jeff Sigmund, the association’s senior director of public relations.

Well, sure, the marketplace can accommodate both, but banks are apparently planning to issue signature-only cards, not cards that can be used both ways. Why?

“Merchants see the PIN as a more secure option, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to the banks because it really doesn’t do anything,” said Alphonse Pascual, a senior analyst for security, risk and fraud at Javelin Strategy & Research. “It would be like putting a new deadbolt on your front door and then putting gum in the lock. It’s the lock that’s protecting you, not the gum.”

This makes no sense. A PIN foils thieves. What’s really going on here is that it’s merchants who mostly pay the costs of fraud these days, so banks don’t care much about it. Apparently, this means they just don’t want to deal with the hassle of PIN cards:

There’s also the concern that Americans, who tend to have a variety of credit cards, would have a tough time managing multiple PINS.

“If the consumer doesn’t want to memorize all those numbers, they might choose the same PIN for each card,” said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the nonprofit Smart Card Alliance. “Using one PIN to protect 10 different cards in your wallet now exposes you to the potential for increased fraud.”

PIN technology could pose a challenge to credit card issuers, which must deal with users who can’t remember their PIN or need to change it. That was a problem when Canada switched to chip-and-PIN credit cards, but people eventually got accustomed to it.

This is a combination of insulting and crazy. Americans are already accustomed to using PINs, and would have no more trouble managing multiple PINs than Danes and Italians do. And while using one PIN for ten cards might not exactly be best practice, it’s certainly better than no PIN at all. How could it possibly increase fraud? Signature cards can be used with nothing more than a scrawl.

And then we get to the last paragraph. If cards have PINs, banks and card issuers will have to spend a bit of money helping people change their PINs.

And that seems to be what we’re left with. Merchants are willing to make the switch. Consumers would get used to the switch pretty quickly. But card issuers don’t want to bother because it might increase their customer support costs a bit during the transition.

Once again, the American financial industry is proving that there’s nothing they can’t screw up. For the last two decades they’ve been just about the least consumer-enhancing industry in the country, and they’re continuing their value-destroying ways in the transition to smart cards. I guess we shouldn’t really be surprised.

Bottom line: This really begs for regulation from the Fed or Congress. With all the public outrage over recent data breaches, you’d think this would be a relatively bipartisan kind of issue. I understand that it involves regulation, and Republicans have a knee-jerk opposition to regulation of any kind, but honestly, this is precisely the kind of regulation Congress is made for. Do your jobs, folks.

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Follow-up: Why Are We Adopting the Stupidest Possible Payment System in the US?

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We’re Still Losing the War on Carbon

by StefanieMercado Posted on February 13, 2014

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

Listening to President Obama’s State of the Union address, it would have been easy to conclude that we were slowly but surely gaining in the war on climate change. “Our energy policy is creating jobs and leading to a cleaner, safer planet,” the president said. “Over the past eight years, the United States has reduced our total carbon pollution more than any other nation on Earth.” Indeed, it’s true that in recent years, largely thanks to the dampening effects of the Great Recession, US carbon emissions were in decline (though they grew by 2 percent in 2013). Still, whatever the president may claim, we’re not heading toward a “cleaner, safer planet.” If anything, we’re heading toward a dirtier, more dangerous world.

A series of recent developments highlight the way we are losing ground in the epic struggle to slow global warming. This has not been for lack of effort. Around the world, dedicated organizations, communities, and citizens have been working day by day to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote the use of renewable sources of energy. The struggle to prevent construction of the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline is a case in point. As noted in a recent New York Times article, the campaign against that pipeline has galvanized the environmental movement around the country and attracted thousands of activists to Washington, D.C., for protests and civil disobedience at the White House. But efforts like these, heroic as they may be, are being overtaken by a more powerful force: the gravitational pull of cheap, accessible carbon-based fuels, notably oil, coal, and natural gas.

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We’re Still Losing the War on Carbon

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US-Russian Relations Now At Approximately 7th Grade Level

by CharlieE87 Posted on February 6, 2014

Mother Jones

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My goodness. Such language:

America’s new top diplomat for Europe seems to have been caught being decidedly undiplomatic about her EU allies in a phone call apparently intercepted and leaked by Russia.

“Fuck the EU,” Victoria Nuland apparently says in a recent phone call with the US ambassador to Kiev, Geoff Pyatt, as they discuss the next moves to try to resolve the crisis in Ukraine amid weeks of pro-democracy protests which have rocked the country.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Nuland “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologized for these reported comments”. She said that if the Russians were responsible for listening to, recording and posting a private diplomatic telephone conversation, it would be “a new low in Russian tradecraft.”

It’s possible that “Fuck the EU” might have been an appropriate sentiment under the circumstances. Who knows? I’ll try not to be judgmental here. Still, given the vast surveillance apparatus in daily use by the United States, it’s a little rich to call the Russian action “a new low” in espionage tradecraft. Unless, of course, Psaki meant that the Russians should have listened and recorded—that part was OK—but then released it a bit more discreetly. Certainly the United States would never leak something like this to YouTube. That just isn’t done. We’d leak it to someone reliable at the New York Times, for God’s sake. Show some class, people.

And while we’re on the subject of class, Vladimir, will you please let our Olympians’ yogurt shipment through? This is all getting just a little petty, isn’t it?

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US-Russian Relations Now At Approximately 7th Grade Level

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

by HalinaFreitas Posted on January 22, 2014

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Generally speaking, global investors are pretty optimistic. According to a new Bloomberg poll, they think China is a trouble spot, but they’re bullish on prospects in Europe and the US, and a large majority are more confident than they were at this time last year. But take a look at this:

After the great crash of 2008, investors sure are sensitive about bubbles. They think equity markets are close to being a bubble; fixed-income markets are close to being a bubble; and even US treasuries are inching toward bubblicious territory. That accounts for just about everything except real property, which investors are still sanguine about—in the US, anyway.

This is just raw data, and it might not mean anything. On the other hand, no matter what investors say about the economy, if they’re bearish on real-world ventures (factory expansions, etc.) and they’re getting cold feet about financial ventures, does this mean that more and more money is going to be sitting on the sidelines? Or does it mean that all this money is going to suddenly start pouring into the safe haven of US housing until everyone gets scared of that too? Or something else?

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Global Investors See Bubbles As Far As the Eye Can See

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Europe Going Wobbly on Carbon Emission Goals?

by cur07jqm Posted on January 13, 2014

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Speaking of carbon emissions, the Financial Times reports that high energy prices are “undermining support” in Europe for rules that mandate increased use of renewable energy sources:

European commissioners are considering scrapping the targets for 2030 in a move that would please big utility companies but infuriate environmental groups….A proposed compromise, at the heart of discussions over the 2030 package, envisages that a renewables target, of up to 27 per cent, would be non-binding.

….This compromise for 2030, if accepted in the face of German opposition, would represent a significant change from the EU’s 2020 targets, which included binding goals that EU states should cut overall greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels and derive 20 per cent of their power from renewables.

A long, grinding economic downturn cuts energy usage in the short run, but reduces tolerance for higher energy prices in the long run. That’s what we’re seeing happen here.

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Europe Going Wobbly on Carbon Emission Goals?

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Should You Ask Your Doctor for Antibiotics Over the Phone?

by SherlynHa Posted on January 13, 2014

Mother Jones

I’ve written before about the scary rate of antibiotic overprescription—so when a friend mentioned that she knew someone who had been prescribed antibiotics after his doctor evaluated him via Google Hangout, I was alarmed. Curious as to how common this practice was, I decided to do an informal survey of friends and colleagues. Their responses surprised me: While no one reported a similar Hangout antibiotics experience, most recalled describing conditions to their doctors via email or over the phone—and receiving a speedy response back that a prescription for antibiotics was waiting for them at the pharmacy.

One friend told me that because of her recurring urinary tract infections, she was grateful that her doctor was willing to give her antibiotics without seeing her. I could see her point: Why should she schlep all the way to her doctor’s office every time she feels an infection starting, only to have her doctor tell her what she already knows?

It’s hard to say how commonly doctors prescribe a patient antibiotics without an in-person visit; there isn’t much data on the practice, and there are no hard and fast rules governing it. In an email, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told me that the agency considers an examination necessary “to determine whether a patient likely has a bacterial infection to inform the provider whether an antibiotic is needed”—but CDC leaves it up to the individual physician how he or she determines whether to prescribe an antibiotic. A spokeswoman for HMO giant Kaiser Permanante said that company doesn’t have rules about the practice, either. “A physician will make an assessment about whether or not to administer antibiotics over the phone or by secure message by taking into account the personalized needs of that patient,” she wrote in an email.

A 2013 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that doctors are more likely to prescribe antibiotics when they don’t perform a physical evaluation. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine found that people with symptoms of a urinary tract infection who had “e-visits”—where patients answer a series of questions about their conditions online instead of visiting their doctors’ office—were 50 percent more likely to get antibiotics than their counterparts who made office visits. E-visit patients with symptoms of sinusitis (which is usually caused by a virus, which antibiotics are ineffective against) were 5 percent more likely to get antibiotics than office visitors with the same symptoms.

Stuart Levy, a microbiologist at Tufts University’s School of Medicine and president of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics, believes that over-the-phone prescribing is common, especially for conditions with distinctive symptoms, such as urinary tract infections and children’s ear infections. In some cases, he says, the practice makes sense—say, if a doctor has seen a patient in person a few days earlier, and the symptoms haven’t cleared up, or for certain chronic conditions. But he says people often abuse the system. “Parents will stay up until midnight or later and then call the doctor and convince him to give them a prescription without seeing the kid in person,” he says.

In most cases, Levy says, the trek into the office is worth the trouble. A physical examination gives doctors much more information than a phone call or email; in person, the doctor can, for example, assess a person’s coloring, check for swollen glands, and palpate the belly. For patients who really don’t want to (or can’t) come into the office, both Levy and the CDC recommend a compromise: the doctor can write a prescription that the patient can fill in a day or two if symptoms don’t improve.

This method is common in Europe, but Levy says that so far, few American doctors have embraced it. They should, Levy says. I’m inclined to agree: Considering the growing number of antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” the dearth of new drugs in the pipeline, and the high cost to our healthcare system of prescribing unnecessary antibiotics, it’s safe to say that these powerful drugs should be used as sparingly as possible.

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Should You Ask Your Doctor for Antibiotics Over the Phone?

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At least EPA is doing a little something to help bees

by Bob Jackson Posted on January 9, 2014

At least EPA is doing a little something to help bees

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The U.S. EPA still won’t follow Europe’s lead and suspend or ban the use of neonicotinoid pesticides believed to be killing honeybees and other pollinators — to the horror of beekeepers and environmentalists, who are suing the federal government over its inaction.

But at least the agency is doing something. On Wednesday, EPA announced it was awarding $460,000 in funding for research into integrated pest management, to help reduce the use of pesticides and lower risks to bees — “all while controlling pests and saving money.”

Louisiana State University, one of the grant recipients, will use its share of the funds to investigate how bees can be protected from pesticides used to control mosquitoes. Penn State University researchers will investigate the benefits of growing crops without treating seeds with neonic pesticides.

Margaret Reeves, a scientist at the Pesticide Action Network, one of the groups suing the EPA over neonics, welcomed the research grants. “EPA’s investment in integrated pest management puts the U.S. on the path of sustainable, cutting-edge farming,” Reeves said in an emailed statement.

But she noted that the EPA needs to do much more to protect pollinators from agricultural poisons. “Environmentalists, beekeepers, and farmers alike eagerly await bolder steps by EPA that will restrict the use of bee-harming pesticides,” she said. “Without better protections, and fast, bee declines will continue at an unprecedented rate.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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