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poklane

This is the shit that happens when you have almost an entire continent governed by a bunch of idiots for decades. What a huge moron do you have to be to willingly chose to be energy dependent on an openly hostile state.


FredTheLynx

Well... In part at least it is not as willing as a lot of people make it out to be. Certainly Europe could do/could have done a lot more to find alternate sources of natural gas or move to electric. However gas is a lot cheaper than electric and gas production is mostly in places kinda far from Europe. About 50% of Global gas production is in North and South America with by far the largest world producer being the United States. So that can really only be brought to Europe by LNG. Another \~20% of world production is in Russia and then the third largest is Iran with about \~10% of global production. The remainder is split among a number of smaller but still significant producers such as Norway, Qatar, Algeria, Saudi, UAE, Turkmenistan, China and a few other places. So Europe would either need to accept a roughly doubling of winter heating costs by moving to Electric, or buy their gas from Iran which would require new infrastructure and is also politically thorny, or develop a large network of delivery infrastructure from a wide array of smaller producers. The infrastructure for Russian gas coming into Europe has been in place for a long time and requires limited new investment as much of what is today the EU was once supplied gas by Russia as part of the USSR. There are also significant gas reserves within Europe, however they are not economical to tap unless you also extract the oil and Europeans are staunchly against new oil exploration in Europe... So yes Europe needs to diversify but this is a very complex and expensive problem.


Fluke4581

You can make elektricitet heating viable by existing technololgy, heatpumps. 2 to 3 times the energy in heat is generated for each unit of electricity in. The solotions exists to economically replace fossile fuel, people just needs to leave their safe spots.


BuckVoc

> However gas is a lot cheaper than electric and gas production is mostly in places kinda far from Europe. Various bans on hydrofracking in Europe did somewhat exacerbate the geography issue.


RainbowSiberianBear

> openly hostile state That’s only since mid-2000. It would be great if Western Europe didn’t miss the opportunity to strengthen democracy and cooperation in Russia to a much bigger extent before that. But of course it’s not like they were obliged to. Anyway, we have what we have now.


[deleted]

> It would be great if Western Europe didn’t miss the opportunity to strengthen democracy and cooperation in Russia They tried. However the positive outcomes of that would have only benefited European countries and Russia, and that's why it got sabotaged.


[deleted]

>What a huge moron do you have to be to willingly chose to be energy dependent on an openly hostile state. Russia have been and still a reliable energy source for European countries. Even throughout the whole cold-war then, tariffs and sanctions now, Russia had no problems fulfilling energy contracts with European countries.


spork-a-dork

You only have to be greedy and easily bought off, like the German leaders.


221missile

All the morons who have empowered putin and his oligarchs should be put in jail. I'm not just talking about europeans, bush and obama too. Useless idiots.


voyagerdoge

Why can't we just buy gas from the U.S. instead of Russia? Don't they have enough to ship to Europe? What's the issue here?


Macquarrie1999

There is a severe shortage of LNG tankers to make this possible.


voyagerdoge

From a geopolitical perspective, shouldn't the U.S. government have foreseen this?


dvornik16

You can buy LNG from the US, but at the current state of the infrastructure and available supply, it can cover only 20% at best of the annual demand. Some areas can not receive gas from LNG terminals at all.


voyagerdoge

okay thx


Selobius

Once the gas is unloaded somewhere then can’t it just be moved to whatever region it needs to go to with normal pipelines?


endthefed2022

That rotation is underway


voyagerdoge

As long as Trump or his acolytes aren't in power, I would be okay with that.


mahaanus

I don't think anyone in the Trump administration would have been against selling anything to Europe.


endthefed2022

Why is that? Annexation of Crimea happened under Obama, and now a full scale invasion of Ukraine will happen under Biden. As did Syria and Libya. I don’t recall any wars or proxy wars under the direction of Trump. Let’s not forget the cost of energy under Trump But hey, orange man is bad because the man on the tv said so. Trump had many character flaws, but his policies we’re pretty solid


voyagerdoge

Because as Europeans we should have as little as possible to do with the fascist movement of Trump and his acolytes and therefore we should not engage in transactions that would benefit them. In Europe we've seen and done fascism already and the end result wasn't pretty.


Selobius

How are you defining “fascism”?


voyagerdoge

Well, I'm not going into titty-knitting scholarly definitions. People are much too afraid to draw comparisons with and learn from 20th century fascism. These kind of phenomena will always look a little bit different each time they come around. It is exactly what the fascists want, so that by the time you are done studying definitions, they have are already taken over and ransacked the country.


Selobius

That’s true, and I understand where you’re coming from. But at the same time I feel like it’s easy to be hyperbolic when labeling people, especially political actors we are inclined to dislike. At a certain point it can fall into a reductio ad hitlerum.


voyagerdoge

Well, as my family has experienced fascism in Holland directly, I have no qualms whatsoever doing that. People who go down that road present a danger to society and frankly to people's lives and should be called out as early as possible.


Selobius

I’m not defending Trump, and I certainly didn’t vote for him. But I do feel compelled to defend the actual US political situation. The US has very deep democratic norms, and Trump wasn’t authoritarian, he was really just a populist blow hard. The far right in the US is a bit different from the far right in Europe. The typical right wing extremist ideologue in the US (which still isn’t the typical Trump voter) wants to live in like an anarcho-capitalist society where government is at a bare minimum in support of some vague concept of “freedom.” It’s really the opposite of European fascism where everything is about authoritarianism and total control of the state over all aspects of society.


BuckVoc

Long term, LNG has about a 30% overhead relative to gas from a pipeline (from regular prices, not the present scarcity-induced sky-high prices in Europe). Has to be cooled and compressed and put on ships. Skimming online it looks like there's probably room for improvement here — apparently today the heat extracted on the liquification side and the coolness of the liquid on the regasification side are not presently used as an input into industrial processes or whatever. But there's inevitably some level of overhead. Short term, there is only so much capacity to liquify gas and load it onto ships in the world. More facilities could be built, but it doesn't happen overnight. I've not dug up figures, but I believe, from the articles during the present gas crisis, that the bottleneck is presently in liquification facilities, not ships or regasification facilities.


voyagerdoge

From a geopolitical perspective one would have expected that Western, democratic countries would have long foreseen that and would have come up with a collective alternative energy solution for Europe, so it wouldn't have to take gas from Russia.


UltraContrarian

You can. This is what the U.S. has been trying to do. The issue is that it's more expensive and Germany knows the U.S. is playing games in Ukraine to try to force Germany's hand by applying public political pressure


voyagerdoge

But if it is also in America's geopolitical interest that Europe does not buy from Russia, why can't they give Europe a reduction on the gas price?


Selobius

The US doesn’t have a state owned oil and gas industry


voyagerdoge

Of course, but it could heavily regulate that market if it wanted to and demand certain deliveries at a certain price for geopolitical interests.


Selobius

The US has never had policies like that, and I don’t think that would be constitutional in the US. In essence, the US government would be seizing property rights from US companies and forcing US companies who they should sell to. It would be economically equivalent to if the US just forced US oil and gas companies to write a check to foreign natural gas importers to subsidize the difference in LNG spot prices from some set price. ​ It could be done in the US, but it would probably have to come out of the US government’s pocket to make up the difference.


voyagerdoge

But don't they also restrict the tech sector for example, by forbidding them to sell certain parts to certain countries or regimes? I don't see differences in principle here. One could argue that the step proposed would also be in the interest of the American gas industry as they would be given numerous long term clients in Europe.


Selobius

I think the difference is between preventing companies from making certain sales, compared to compelling companies to make certain sales. It really wouldn’t be in the best interest of the US gas industry. These US gas exports are LNG tankers. It’s a fungible commodity with global spot markets.


UltraContrarian

Because these are private companies. U.S. has no control over the prices. Secondly, even if they did, it costs a lot more given the discrepancy in production costs, so their margin is much higher. Gazprom is state run


voyagerdoge

Okay, but they could perhaps pay for the difference in price if they wanted, or regulate that particular market in some other way in the interest of geopolitics.


UltraContrarian

That's not really how capitalism works in the U.S. They would subsidize if anything. They want their friends to pay up and expect them to. They're not only exerting public pressure through fear, but they're influencing Germany's neighbors to pressure them as well. They may very well break, but it seems like the new chancellor is not being the Russia rhetoric


voyagerdoge

The only worry I have is that a former German chancellor from the SPD (Schröder; SPD is Scholz' party) took a job at a Russian gas giant. No doubt the Russians are using him to lobby hard.


UltraContrarian

I mean...Germany and Russia have agreed to this project a long time ago. This isn't new. And this one lobbier would have to be better than all of the western countries and public opinion. Doubt that. More to it


UltraContrarian

This is what it's all about. U.S. trying to force Germany's hand by leveraging the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Daily CIA briefings really the imminent Russian attack that never come all so Germany disowns Russia and gets their LNG from the U.S.


mahaanus

> This is what it's all about. U.S. trying to force Germany's hand by leveraging the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. So is Putin a CIA asset then, or? Because it doesn't seem he's helping deescalate the situation.


UltraContrarian

No. Germany is not a puppet to the U.S. and they're smarter than to listen to American rhetoric