Trump/Russia: Big Carbon’s Last Monstrous Grasp

November 1, 2017

I’m not a huge Chris Mathews fan, but he’s the first “mainstream” journalist I’ve heard put his finger on what I’ve been saying since the election.  Caught Chris on Colbert’s late show last night.
Last time I looked, the Russian mob-ocracy is overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuel extraction to maintain their wealth and power.

Energy Information Agency:

Russia is a major exporter of crude oil, petroleum products, and natural gas. Sales of these fuels accounted for 68% of Russia’s total export revenues in 2013, based on data from Russia’s Federal Customs Service. Russia received almost four times as much revenue from exports of crude oil and petroleum products as from natural gas. Crude oil exports alone were greater in value than the value of all non-oil and natural gas exports.

Russia is one of the leading countries that actively produce oil and supply it to other countries: Over last ten years Russian economy depends on oil and gas revenues as the oil prices grow. This has double meaning. On the one hand, the Russian economy demonstrated growth; the budget revenues, therefore, grew due to oil and gas industry, which may be beneficial for the state. But then the oil dependency resulted in other industries underdeveloped or even did not develop at all, which would be negative in terms of diversification of the national economy and mitigation of risks. Therefore, as the oil prices reduced late 2014, it negatively affected the Russian economy and may adversely affect the prospects of economic growth under uncertainty of oil prices.

Trump/Russia scandal is about fossil fuels, the carbon bubble, and a last monstrous grasp by the rotting dead hand of the global carbon club.  Readers know that I’ve been saying this for a year, and managed to get thru to the Diane Rehm show days after the election a year ago, to point out that Putin’s election hack showed identical MO to the “ClimateGate” email hacks of the last decade – updated and rolled out on a global scale.

Complete interview below is very moving, and Mathew’s discussion of Bobby Kennedy brought Colbert to tears.



3 Responses to “Trump/Russia: Big Carbon’s Last Monstrous Grasp”

  1. ubrew12 Says:

    I think the 1990s was when we lost Russia. They had taken the very brave step of shucking off communism, and were stumbling their way toward a capitalist economy, and we did little to help them except perhaps show up as carpetbaggers. So the mafia/KGB element grabbed all the [oil] wealth and it became a showcase for all the worst excesses of capitalism: ordinary people being hoodwinked into poverty, money being laundered out of the country, strongman-rule, flirting with white-supremacy and fascism, etc. When GW Bush put anti-missile defense systems into Eastern Europe, pointed them toward Russia, and claimed they were there ‘just in case’ the Iranians ever built an ICBM with a nuke on it capable of reaching Western Europe, Putin lost whatever faith he ever had in ‘the West’ and saw, with clarity, that to defend Russia he had to retake (or at least re-influence) Eastern Europe. Everything bad seems to go back to those missile defenses, in which a powerful, ascendant America told Russia that, as far as we were concerned, they would always be ‘commies’. A lot of people forget that Obama won the Noble Peace Prize simply by replacing Bush, but the Nobel committee I think was truly mortified at the casualness with which Bush/Cheney seemed to be goading the Russian Bear into a nuclear conflagration right over Norway.

    Now, of course, thanks to deteriorating relations the Bear can’t sell its fossil fuels to the West, and the Putin mafia is desperate to get those sanctions lifted before the World goes the way of China (i.e. renewable). But there was a ‘camelot moment’ for Russian democracy/capitalism, in the late ’90s, a door to a better World that was decisively shut with the election of Bush in 2000. How do you say ‘coulda, woulda, shoulda’ in Russian?

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: