The Macabre Petroleum Waltz of Trump and Putin

[Oscar]

The Macabre Petroleum Waltz of Trump and Putin

[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/21/P ... tin-Trump/ ]

And the oil industry powers who are calling the tune.

By Andrew Nikiforuk , 21 Dec 2016 | TheTyee.ca

Oil has fueled a bully bromance between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.

Although this revolutionary union possesses a terrifying petro logic, it promises to be as volatile and tragic as any shotgun marriage. The relationship is, as Trump might well tweet, “unpresidented.”

How, after all, can a president-elect openly admire a foreign leader whose shadowy intelligence apparatus played a significant role in undermining the U.S. election by hacking into the files of the Democratic National Committee?

This dysfunctional story is about oil and carbon. The master resource and its climate destabilizing emissions have arranged the ballroom where Trump and Putin now waltz.

The only treason that matters to these oddly paired grandees is any attempt to stop or wind down the frenzied march of petroleum — an industrial composition now 170 years old.

The basic facts are self-evident: the world still runs on fossil fuels (86 per cent of our energy consumption) and Russia now tops the list of petroleum’s three main global players with production of 10 million barrels a day. Next comes Saudi Arabia, followed by the United States at nine million barrels — a short-term feat largely engineered by the brute force of hydraulic fracturing. (The U.S. still must import 52 per cent of what it consumes — largely from Canada, Mexico and Saudi Arabia.)

As a consequence, the energy intensity of American and Russian oil extraction help to explain why these two nations now account for more than one-quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. The global energy industry contributes more than 75 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

These emissions keep growing because it takes more and more energy to extract expensive and low-grade products such as bitumen, shale oil and offshore Arctic oil.

Energy, not capital, drives the global economy and that economy is now shrinking because shale oil, bitumen and Arctic oil provide lower returns, more volatility and more dangerous debt loads than conventional oil. Their exploitation is not a solution, but a trap that will lead to the collapse of institutions — and societies — built on the assumption that cheap energy would last forever.

Meanwhile the aging oil business leaks toxic carbons and liabilities as carelessly as North America’s 50-year-old pipelines.

Researchers now calculate that approximately two-thirds (63 per cent) of the industrial carbon pollution poured into the atmosphere since 1854 can be directly traced to the carbon mined from the Earth by just 90 enterprises, including 83 producers of coal, oil and natural gas and seven cement makers.

Incredibly, seven companies account for almost one-fifth of all industrial carbon spewed into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution. They include the U.S. corporate giant, ExxonMobil, and Russia’s mega-methane firm, Gazprom.

Almost everyone, except for much of the media, acknowledges that Russia behaves like a classic petro state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, once described the Russian Federation as “an oil and gas company masquerading as a country.”

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[ https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2016/12/21/P ... tin-Trump/ ]