Safe bet that Donald Trump has never read military strategists Carl von Clausewitz or Sun Tzu.
DeutsheWelle has some historical perspective on what those globally acknowledged experts might have to say on the current fiasco.
The host, who specializes in China, made a salient point towards the end, referring to one of Sun Tzu’s most famous aphorisms.
China watching quietly as its main rival for global leadership tears itself apart in useless, expensive conflict.
Even before the weekend’s escalation, oil prices had risen 17% this year due to Trump’s recently ramped-up rhetoric against the Iranian regime. The Trump administration has also ratcheted up sanctions on Iran in recent months.
Speaking at the White House on Monday, Trump said the U.S. would continue to execute large scale strikes in Iran. The president added that he expected the conflict to continue on for weeks but it could become a prolonged battle.
“Whatever the time is, it’s OK,” Trump said. “Right from the beginning, we projected four to five weeks, but we have capability to go far longer than that. We’ll do it.”
Prices have already started rising at gas pumps nationwide, according to GasBuddy, a price-tracking service. The national average has risen 5 cents since Sunday to $2.99/gal., GasBuddy’s website showed. “I believe we may see it touch $3/gal later tonight as the jump in prices begins to show up at more stations,” said Patrick De Haan, an analyst for the website, posted on X.
Retail gas prices move about 2.5 cents for every $1 move in the price of crude oil, so even higher prices could be on the horizon for consumers who have been grappling with the high cost of living for the last few years.
“This right now will increase gas prices a little bit, and again, if it’s not prolonged it’s not going to be a major inflationary hit,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC on Monday. “If it went on for a long time, that would be different.”
Continue reading “Can’t Find Strait of Hormuz on a Map? Here’s Mideast Oil 101”
The U.S. war with Iran could cost the American economy as much as $210 billion, according to fiscal analyst Kent Smetters, director of the widely used Penn Wharton Budget Model.
The ongoing conflict is already driving disruption to trade, global energy markets, and gasoline prices, though it is difficult to precisely estimate how much the war will impact the economy, Smetters told Fortune.
His predictions currently estimate a $115 billion economic loss, though that figure could range between $50 billion and the upward bound of $210 billion depending on the nature and duration of the conflict.
One impact of the war being waged by the US and Israel against Iran that is not getting as much attention as it deserves, is the impact on the global supply of fertilizer.
Continue reading “Oil, Gas, and So Much More to the Cost of War”Above, Meteorologist Chris Groningen has been doing yeoman’s work on social media pushing back against climate denial, but also explaining and advocating the energy transition.
Below, Christiana Figueres, an architect of the Paris Agreement adds some context as to the massive historical error the US made by electing Donald Trump and his fossil fueled agenda in a world that is decisively moving away from fossil dependence.
The current conflict only underlines the scale of the debacle.
Long time readers here will appreciate the role that Insurers are playing in delineating climate risks.
Similar analysis shows that the true damages of the current war go beyond what bombs and mines alone can achieve.
Dubai is done. No one is going to be pouring billions into that oligarch playground in the foreseeable future. Enormous damage being done to the economic infrastructure that underpins the fossil fuel industry in the Middle East – and it will last long after the smoke clears.
BREAKING: QatarEnergy just declared Force Majeure.
Three words that mean: we cannot deliver, and legally, we do not have to.
This is no longer a supply disruption. This is a contract collapse.
Force Majeure is not a precaution. It is a formal legal declaration that an unforeseeable event beyond QatarEnergy’s control has made fulfillment impossible. Every affected buyer just had their contract voided. The gas they were counting on is gone, and they have no legal recourse to get it back.
82% of Qatar’s LNG goes to Asia.
China relies on Qatar for 30% of its LNG imports. India 42 to 52%. South Korea 14 to 19%. Taiwan 25%. Japan is already rationing to spot markets.
Asian benchmark prices jumped 39% the day production stopped.
Force Majeure just made that permanent until further notice.
Indian companies have already cut gas supplies to industry by 10 to 30%. That is not a market adjustment. That is factories running at reduced capacity today, across the world’s most populous continent, because Iran sent drones into Ras Laffan.
Here is the number the market still has not fully absorbed.
Two weeks to restart a liquefaction train after a full cold shutdown. Then two more weeks to reach full capacity. That is a minimum of four weeks at zero, assuming no further strikes, no security complications, no inspection delays.
The war is still running.
Continue reading “Insurance, not Mines, Will Keep Hormuz Closed”
New York Times:
“In a prolonged conflict, the combination of higher energy costs, disrupted logistics and a generalized confidence shock would constitute a meaningful drag on global trade volumes at precisely the moment the world economy was still digesting the inflationary and growth consequences of the tariff shock,” noted analysts at ING, a bank. “The mother of all bad timings
Fears of disruption to shipping on the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway on Iran’s southern border through which a large share of the world’s oil and gas passes, upended energy markets. Oil prices continued to surge, with Brent crude oil, the global benchmark, rising more than 6 percent, to $83 a barrel, the highest level since mid-2024.
Natural gas prices soared. European natural gas futures jumped for a second day; prices have roughly doubled over the past two days. A measure of gas cargoes in Asia rose 45 percent on Tuesday.
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Ask yourself the simple question: why does China have 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail — roughly 30,000 miles — and the United States has not one mile? Why is Chinese infrastructure advancing at a pace that would have seemed impossible a generation ago while American
infrastructure is literally falling apart? The answer is not complicated. China does not go to war. The United States is in nonstop, undeclared war. War that is never voted on, never debated, never honestly accounted for.
The cost is not just money. It is freedom. It is the steady transformation of this republic into a military state — one that funds foreign carnage while its own people live on crumbling foundations, both literal and figurative.
Continue reading “Oil, Gas Surge. Sun, Wind, Prices Stable”
No, hell, they didn’t suddenly start believing in science. They don’t care about the planet, or their children.
They just want to make sure the price of electricity doesn’t spike to the moon before the ’28 election.
I’ll take it.
Newt Gingrich in the Daily Caller:
Solar and wind power are popular, with 80 percent and 74 percent respectively backing local construction. In the right areas, they make a ton of sense. Further, these technologies grow cheaper and more reliable every year. They have their place in a comprehensive energy-abundance strategy—but they can’t work alone.
America’s energy future demands a bold, diversified plan emphasizing natural gas, clean fuel technologies, nuclear, and renewables. Diversification reduces supply disruptions and ensures economic stability. Modern grid technology improves reliability and affordability. Securing abundant energy is vital for economic growth, innovation, and global competitiveness.
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Washington Post took note of White House resident racist maniac Steven Miller’s wife Katy posting a note favorable to solar energy.
“Solar energy is the energy of the future,” Katie Miller posted recently. “Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.” Another of her posts suggested solar is more vital to the U.S. than coal power, contradicting White House messaging and policy.
Trump has been blunt about his distaste for solar panels, calling them a “blight” on the landscape, “very inefficient, and very ugly too” and — along with wind turbines — “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY.” His administration has blocked hundreds of projects from final approval as it prioritizes fossil fuels.
Yet Katie Miller is no outlier in her willingness to buck MAGA orthodoxy on energy from the sun.
Continue reading “Is MAGA Waking Up to Clean Energy?”If all our fear and uncertainty over climate change could be distilled into a single statistic, then arguably it was delivered to an emergency summit on the future of the Antarctic last month.
Nerilie Abram at the Australian National University, Canberra, opened her presentation with a slide headlined “Antarctic sea ice has declined precipitously since 2014, and in July 2023 exceeded a minus 7 sigma event”.
At times, the noise of the 500 researchers who gathered for the Australian Antarctic Research Conference in Tasmania was overwhelming, as they tried to make sense of the unprecedented shifts underway at the bottom of the globe. But as Abram’s slide sunk in, it was as if the whole room was holding its breath.
Put simply, a minus 7 sigma event, meaning seven standard deviations below the average, should be all but impossible, says Ed Doddridge at the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership, who works with Abram.
It is “actually really hard to convey just how extreme this difference was, how extreme the low sea ice extent was”, he says. One way is to liken it to the concept of a one-in-100-year flood, for example. “If you run those sorts of statistics for Antarctic sea ice last year, you get a number somewhere between one in 7.5 million years and one in 700 billion years,” says Doddridge.
Continue reading “Antarctica “in Crisis” with Vanishing Sea Ice”Below, a farmer pleads to be allowed to host a wind farm, so that other young people, like his own son, will not be sent to the Middle East in wars for energy.
Continue reading “More War for Oil Begins in Iran”