By Nafeez Ahmed, courtesy of the European Policy Centre Oil prices have crashed. The most visible cause has been the measures taken to contain the COVID-19 pandemic, which have triggered record lows in global oil demand. Yet the crisis also exposes structural vulnerabilities in our fossil fuel-dependent economic system, which requires us […]
Tag: oil
Oil War Aims At U.S. Fracking
By Daniel McGroarty, TES GeoPolicy Editor APRIL 14, 2020 UPDATE: In one of the few non-COVID news stories still commanding attention, global economy watchers are focused on an Easter agreement brokered by Saudi Arabia that aims at global oil production cuts of at least 10%. The catch: the cuts won’t come immediately, but in May. […]
Coronavirus, Butter and Oil: As We Brace for Pandemic, We Also Need to Inoculate Ourselves Against Group-Think
Daniel McGroarty, TES GeoPolicy Editor As the world wakes each morning to new numbers mapping the Coronavirus’ spread, along comes a piece by Andrew Butter provocatively titled, “What China Knows About the Coronavirus that Oil Traders Don’t Know.” Read it in full at SeekingAlpha. Butter watches global oil markets, and he’s noticed […]
White House takes victory lap with economic report
By Erik Sass, TES Editor-in-Chief The United States is enjoying the longest period of economic growth in its history, now 127 months into the current economic expansion, with unemployment hovering around 3.5% and a GDP growth rate of 2.3% of 2019. The White House highlighted these gains – and the benefits […]
Trump is Not Pulling Us Out of Syria, But He Should
By Dominick Mellusi, George Mason University On October 7th President Donald Trump announced via tweet “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so…it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” […]
Russia muscling into Middle Eastern energy production
It’s widely acknowledged that Russia uses its vast supplies of oil and gas, along with its position athwart transit routes from Central Asia, as economic and diplomatic weapons, intimidating opponents in Western Europe and subordinating client states in Eastern Europe with the threat of cutting […]
U.S. energy independence won’t free it from foreign entanglements
The rise of fracking has turned the U.S. into an oil exporter and raises the possibility of total energy independence, something unthinkable two decades ago. However the potential for supplying all its own fossil fuel demand will not magically free the U.S. from […]
U.S. needs military threat to negotiate credibly with Iran
Iran’s escalation of the not-so-secret proxy war in the Persian Gulf with two drone attacks crippling Saudi Arabian oil production, raises the obvious question of how the U.S. and it allies should respond. But America’s options are constrained in large part because of the […]
Cheering on evil: Maduro’s American supporters
by Egoli “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke’s words were as apt in the 1700s as they are today. As someone who witnessed weeks- long protests outside the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC, I might add, far less […]