My opinion
is that our federal government has proven its shortsightedness with its
wrecking ball approach to our oil industry. Misinformed by their tragic
devotion to low potential solar and wind energy technologies, the Liberals and
their accomplices in the NDP and Green parties have rendered Canada unable to
help our allies in Europe mitigate the problems created by Russian oil exports
going offline. And yes, they are
headed offline. European ships are refusing to fetch the product and dock
workers are refusing to handle it. Russia has pretty much run out of storage
facilities for the unsold production, so they are beginning to shut down production
facilities.
Of course,
the exodus of companies such as Exxon, Halliburton, Schlumberger, which in the
absence of skilled Russian workers, have been running the facilities,
particularly the easterly ones that export to China, has also contributed to the
shutdowns. During the final decade of the Soviet Union, there were substantial
closures, and it took 32 years to get things fully operational again. It will take
a long time again.
That decade
also saw the demise of higher education in Russia. The Russian educational
system tended to be like that of some other European cultures: students started
technical training during their high school years, went on to post-secondary
routes that built on the secondary school training, then apprenticed (even in
the professions), and then got jobs based on their training. Ronald Reagan’s
efforts that provoked the USSR into spending 50% of their GDP to maintain military
parity with the much wealthier USA meant that something had to fall by the
wayside. Higher education was one of the victims. So, the last generation that widely
received the benefit of higher education are those in their late 50s now. Add
to that the fact that over two million more highly educated Russians have left
the Motherland since 1995, and Russia is seen to have a deficit of skills.
Hence, the problems keeping the petro industry going.
The lack of
education carries over into the military. Officers do not have the education that
might have given them the know-how to manage the Ukraine war. Combine that with
conscripted soldiers who are scared and do not want to be there, and there will
be trigger fingers resulting in what are now being seen as war crimes. The
higher military brass are skilled and they have powerful weapons available to
them, so we must not sell the Russian military short. Kiev has not been taken,
but I do not think it was meant to be taken until near the end of the takeover.
So what’s
going on there? Well, Putin, KGB man that he is in spirit (as post Brezhnev Russian
rulers have tended to be), is not happy that Moscow is only 300 miles from a
potentially hostile power (Ukraine). Of course, Zelensky, now hailed as a
modern-day Churchill, could have prevented the war by agreeing to keep his country
neutral and agreeing to stay out of NATO, but he is a U.S. puppet that sits
where the Russian puppet sat until America overthrew that regime in 2014. The
major powers have been exchanging puppets in Ukraine, and Putin is not happy to
be on the losing end of the process.
In western
Ukraine are two topographical gaps through which invasions of Russia have
occurred over the centuries, and Putin wants to plug them while he still can. With
a birthrate of 1.4 children per couple, Russian demographics are collapsing. We
have a similar birthrate in Canada, but we have immigrants to supplement the
deficit. And as much as I dislike our Liberal government, I commend the
Liberals for being friendly to immigration. It is a needed here. By the way, a
business associate recently remarked to me “You don’t love the Prime Minister,
do you?” to which I replied “I love him. I love all humans. And he is kind of human.” Yes, I love him as a
person, but am dismayed with how he has handled the job of being PM. Anyway,
back to Russia: Russia, for obvious reasons, does not have the immigration
needed to replace its dying population. Now is the last chance Putin has to
raise the army he needs to restore the buffer he wants between Russia and
western Europe. The buffer isn’t just Ukraine, by the way. It’s wherever
invasions of Russia have passed. Romania, Poland and the Baltic states all need
to be subjugated.
We are in
for a lot more trouble. For example, look at semi-conductors. With the shortage
in semi-conductors, we have suffered significant impingement of the supply of
devices that use them. It’s about to get worse. A lot worse. A semi-conductor is made by a laser etching a silicon
chip. The laser uses neon, 90% of which is exported by the Ukraine from Odessa,
soon to be captured by the Russians. Anyway, insurers are no longer insuring
ships that ply the north half of the Black Sea, so Odessa is not able to export
through its seaport.
The West
has mounted an unprecedented set of sanctions upon Russia, a large part of
which sanctions have yet to take effect. Russia will be choked, but the
sanctions will kick back like a gun. We are already seeing a shortage of
fertilizer because of the absence of Russian potash, nitrogen and phosphates.
Cut off financially from the West, how will Russia make their international loan
payments? The West is being hurt by the sanctions it has authored, but not as
much as Russians.
China
surely has noticed what is happening and must realize now that Taiwan is off
the table. Mind you, even before 2022, I couldn’t see how a Chinese invasion
could succeed. It’s a five hour trip by sea from China to Taiwan, and even if
the USA did nothing, I doubt that the second largest navy in the world ---
Japan’s --- would sit by and let the invasion occur. Chinese military leaders
are not trained in battle nor by those who have been. Japan’s military leaders
learned from experienced military strategists and tacticians. Five hours is
plenty of time for Japan to demolish the Chinese navy.
Back to
solar and wind. Great if the wind blows and the sun shines. But it often doesn’t.
Germany, with its green sympathies, found out the truth of it, and so reverted
to coal. Yes, coal of all things. Lately they are moving more to natural gas,
and are even having an overdue look at uranium. Uranium is where abundant safe carbon-neutral
energy is.
Solar and wind
can supplement a grid. They cannot provide the base load. Storage batteries are
no answer. The largest battery factory in the world, if it worked flat out,
would take 500 years to build enough batteries to store enough electricity to
power the USA for one day. Batteries are built from non-renewable materials.
Solar and wind power are not environmentally friendly. They take huge amounts
of mining efforts to provide materials that yield a small amount of energy.
On the
other hand, hydrocarbons supplies seem inexhaustible, and they provide the
benefit of putting some CO2 into the atmosphere where it is needed by plants.
We are a carbon based lifeform, and photosynthesis is how the carbon is
distributed to the plants from which we derive it. Plants are starving for CO2,
which is why greenhouse operators raise the level of CO2 in greenhouse from the
normal 400 ppm to 1000 ppm and greater.
Our
government made a wrong turn, as ideologues are prone to do, when they selected
against the oil industry. Our allies in Europe will suffer for it, and we will
too. At least, that’s my opinion.
