riding the echo down

Posted by Doktor Zoom

https://www.wonkette.com/p/want-to-end-wars-for-oil-do-a-clean

While Lil’ [sic] Marco Rubio tried to insist that the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro wasn’t a military invasion, but “an arrest operation” — mind you, serving the no-knock warrant required a bit of help from the US Navy and other troops — Donald Trump hasn’t bothered with such fictions. This time, Trump had no trouble saying the oil grab is an open oil grab, although no one even gave him credit for being honest.

Trump was so happy about it, and has a very definite concept of a plan! “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure and start making money for the country,” he explained after the operation.

Of course, there might be a few little hiccups, he acknowledged, but honestly nothing that would get in the way. Trump decreed, “We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which requires billions of dollars that will be paid for by the oil companies directly. […] They will be reimbursed for what they’re doing, but it’s going to be paid, and we’re going to get the oil flowing.”

Who’s going to reimburse the oil companies? You hush, it’ll probably come from all the revenue they’ll get from refining Venezuela’s shitty, dense crude, which only a few US refineries can even handle. Luckily, those US refineries are currently being sold to a billionaire Trump megadonor, Paul Singer! Or maybe “they will be reimbursed” by US taxpayers, because the beauty of the passive voice is that things just happen without saying who made them happen. If things go further south, Trump can just say “mistakes were made.”

Trump Says Many Things He Completely Made Up

Tuesday evening, Trump turned his Venezuelan oil fantasy up to Eleven with a social media post (Bluesky screenshot) claiming that in fact, he’s already made Venezuela agree to hand over some of its beautiful excellent oil, the very best oil:

We particularly like the line about “High Quality, Sanctioned Oil,” a huge tell that Trump is just making shit up, because as we’ll discuss in a bit, Venezuelan oil is, like Trump’s mind, thick and sludgy, with a high sulfur content.

Also, no, the president of the United States of America does not have the constitutional authority to personally sell other countries’ natural resources and then dispose of the funds as he sees fit. That may not matter since there’s zero evidence that this amazing deal is real.

We also wondered why Trump would say “storage ship” instead of “tanker,” which led us down an interesting rabbit hole: Just to add an extra level of surrealism, an anonymous “senior administration official” told CNN that “the oil has already been produced and put in barrels. The majority of it is currently on boats and will now go to US facilities in the Gulf to be refined.” Yr Wonkette is not an oil industry expert, but this makes no goddamn sense at all; our cursory searching indicates that this is bullshit, since your average oil supertanker has a capacity of around a million to two million barrels. Physically shipping even 30 million 55-gallon barrels of oil is pretty fucking improbable. But sure, all you need is 30 million oil drums, the pallets to load them on, and a whole lot of “storage ships” that are not actual tankers. (Yes, the senior administration official may have been confused. But even in bulk, that would be a lot of tankers supposedly making their way to US refineries.)

But who knows? Maybe big strong storage ship captains and refinery owners came to him with oily tears in their eyes and told him, “Sir, thank you for securing this beautiful gift of about two days’ worth of America’s oil demand.”

57 Dollars And Nothing On

Trump loves superlatives and big numbers, so you can see why he’d want to get at Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, at around 300 billion barrels (with a B). But there’s a much smaller number that could undermine Trump’s Venezuelan oil fantasies: 57, which is how many dollars a barrel of US benchmark crude fetched at the end of trading Friday.

Oh wait, make that $56, the price to which US oil fell Tuesday after his obvious lie. Venezuelan crude, by the by, currently trades at just $55 per barrel (and then there’s the cost of each barrel, apparently, plus the labor to fill each barrel with a hose, one at a time).

As the Washington Post points out (gift link), getting Venezuela’s oil production back to peak levels could cost as much as $100 billion, and unless world oil prices go up a hell of a lot, the investment just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oil companies learned after the US brought the blessings of democracy to Iraq that it’s kind of important to have stability and a modicum of peace before you risk billions, even to get at huge reserves.

Even here in the USA, oil companies have been holding back from drilling new wells, because there’s so little profit in it. US oil production peaked when Joe Biden was in office and the economy was growing strongly, but some forecasts predict it will actually decline this year.

Industry experts say oil companies wouldn’t be inclined to invest tens of billions of capital rehabbing Venezuelan oil fields without being sure of at least a decade of production. There’s no government in Venezuela to make such a guarantee, and although Trump may promise to secure long-term stability for US oil investments, companies know better than to just take his word for it.

Politico reports that even with more advance notice of the invasion than the US Congress received, US oil companies aren’t exactly champing at the bit to jump into Venezuela, even with the pretext that they could recoup some of their losses from the nationalization of its oil industry 50 years ago.

“They’re saying, ‘you gotta go in if you want to play and get reimbursed,’” said one industry official familiar with the conversations.

The offer has been on the table for the last 10 days, the person said. “But the infrastructure currently there is so dilapidated that no one at these companies can adequately assess what is needed to make it operable.”

Then there’s the basic fact that Venezuelan oil is, to use some technical language, shitty and bad. It’s heavier than the “light sweet crude” produced in most of the US, requiring more processing to become vehicle fuel, at a time when the world’s vehicle fleets are rapidly electrifying, a trend that’s simply not going to reverse, Trumpian dreams of Oil Forever notwithstanding.

China, currently the top buyer of Venezuela’s remaining oil production, has gone all in on renewable energy and EVs to eliminate its need for imported oil. And even in South America (where Chinese EV factories are popping up all over), recently discovered oil fields in Guyana are the hot new draw for oil investment, since its oil is lighter and its taxes are lower than Venezuela’s.

The Energy Transition Is A Peace Movement

It’s actually a very good thing that Venezuela’s heavy crude oil is more expensive and difficult to process, and that US oil companies may just nope out altogether. Not only would that be a Big Black Eye for Trump, it would also be good news for the planet, since Venezuela’s oil is “among the dirtiest oils in the world to produce when it comes to global warming,” according to UC Santa Barbara political science professor Paasha Mahdavi. Like Canada’s tar sands oil, it’s far more carbon-dense per barrel than the oil the US pumps, so putting more of the shit into the air would worsen global warming substantially.

Currently, thanks to sanctions and the deterioration of its oil infrastructure, Venezuela produces about a million barrels of oil per day (BPD), roughly one percent of world production. That’s well below its peak of 3 million BPD in the 1970s. But as Mahdavi points out, even increasing production to 1.5 million BPD would produce 550 million tons of atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide, more than the CO2 emissions of entire nations like the UK or Brazil. So hooray for all the factors that might get in the way of an oil resurgence in Venezuela.

The other thing to keep in mind is that fossil fuels remain a dying industry, and the faster the world transitions away from them, the less incentive there’ll be for imperial adventures aimed at taking smaller nations’ oil. As Bill McKibben says, there may not be any easy way to stop a bully from stealing your lunch money, but “what if lunch was free, and no one was carrying lunch money?”

[If] you’re for peace and democracy, then a solar panel is a valuable tool (and a valuable symbol, a peace sign for our age). Every one that goes up incrementally reduces the attractiveness of the oil that underlies so much conflict and tyranny. Right at the moment treaties and charters and constitutions offer limited protection at best; we should work to restore the national and global consensus that makes them valuable, but we should also work to push out the kind of energy that can’t be hoarded or controlled.

Why does Trump hate solar and wind energy so passionately? It’s because they’re somewhat outside his or anyone else’s control. A nation that builds its prosperity on oil makes itself a target; a nation that depends on imported oil to survive makes itself a vassal. A nation (say, China) that rapidly builds out its own supply of energy from the sun—energy that can’t be embargoed or effectively attacked, energy that is by its nature decentralized, energy so spread out that no particular bit of it is all that valuable—is a nation that can go its own way.

Consider the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, adds Rebecca Solnit: One of Vladimir Putin’s assumptions appears to have been that European nations, dependent on Russian fossil gas, would go along without too much complaint. Instead, despite some short-term increases in coal, Europe doubled down on speeding up its energy transition, and renewables keep providing ever-greater shares of the EU’s energy.

To be sure, even if Al Gore had become president in 2000 and moved the US toward clean energy two decades before Joe Biden finally did, that’s no guarantee that we wouldn’t end up with a Trump. He may yet go to war with Greenland to seize its critical minerals, after all. (Those minerals are also prohibitively expensive to get at, in case you see a theme here.)

But just as a wide transition to clean transportation will remove “gas prices” from future presidential campaigns, renewable energy isn’t just good for the planet, it’s also good economics, and far better for the countries using it. As McKibben says, “it’s going to be hard to figure out how to fight wars over sunshine.”

[Politico / CNN / WaPo (gift link) / The Crucial Years / Meditations in an Emergency / NPR]

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Give Us The Green!

https://www.wonkette.com/p/want-to-end-wars-for-oil-do-a-clean

Posted by Evan Hurst

https://www.wonkette.com/p/its-time-to-laugh-at-trump-and-his

Everything is scary right now, maybe scarier than it’s been anytime since the beginning of Great Dementia Satan Trump’s Fourth Reich War On All Of Humanity. Something about Trump invading a sovereign nation, kidnapping its leader, admitting he’s doing it for looting purposes and to turn himself into king of one entire hemisphere, not even paying lip service to doing it to “liberate” people, threatening other sovereign nations, threatening allies, threatening to blow up the NATO alliance to serve his own ambitions and also obviously to further ingratiate his tongue up his Kremlin handler Vladimir Putin’s asshole …

Sí, es malo.

But, and hear us out here, we need to take a breath. There’s this pattern with Trump Terribleness, where they do some horrible scary thing, and all of our hearts start palpitating, and the pits in our stomachs sink a centimeter further, but all too soon after we’re reminded that the people who did the newest Trump Terribleness are the same fuckin’ pathetic loser conservative white boys who did the last Trump Terribleness, and did the new thing just as stupidly and incompetently as the last thing, and before long everybody starts laughing at them again.

We’re already seeing signs, like how Trump did “regime change” in Venezuela without actually changing the regime. Nicolás Maduro’s veep Delcy Rodríguez is a complete operator, who increasingly looks like she engineered this, and engineered Trump, for her own benefit. It sounds like she may be starting her own reign of terror, and if so, heckuva job keeping the people convinced the Americans were liberators. Plus, Trump appears to be is too stupid to know what “take their oil” entails, and American oil companies are like WTF is even happening.

Clownshow. We’ll find out more about exactly how much clownshow that is as the days go forward. (And we won’t forget about the Epstein Files in the meantime!)

But another thing that’s already happening in the wake of this weekend is those same pathetic loser conservative white MAGA boys, both in the administration and their eager fluffers in state media, are prematurely jizzing all over our TV screens bragging about how smart and #BeBest their new crusade is, how perfectly straight and hard their erections are, how valiant, how WARFIGHTER, how MAN, and you only have to watch it for about five seconds before Pornhub asks you to verify your age you realize that this circle jerk faces inward, and nobody else is joining.

Want proof? Well, ladies and gentleladies, may we direct you toward Will Cain, Pete Hegseth’s former “Fox & Friends Weekend" work wife, who is currently OD-ing on the Viagra of Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, based on the geopolitical theory that the Western Hemisphere is just like The Lion King and We! Are! Simba! and RAWWWWWWWR! and oh my fucking God, we wish were kidding.

CAIN: [Blah blah blah] the reaction you’re seeing from Democrats, who today wail about illegality. Illegality, I guess, when it comes to international law. But here’s the cold honest truth: There is no such thing as international law. It’s a papered-over fiction to give some powers power and deny it to other nations. The truth is, what rules the world and has ruled humanity is the law of the jungle. It is power. It is leverage. And the United States maintains preeminent power in this world. There is no illegality to this intervention. […]

There was a time when conquest was celebrated, for God, for king, for glory, for Americans. There’s no such thing as stolen land. There’s no such thing as international law. There is only such thing as conquest. And if it serves Americans, then so be it. We rule the jungle. We are the lion.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha, bless his heart.

This from a guy who was probably impressed when his work-ex Secretary Shitfaced summoned all the generals from every end of Kingdom Come so he could talk to them about hairstyles. Now he’s over here tweezer-whacking it to furry lion slash fiction about “conquest.”

Cuck.

Now yes, granted, it’s horrifying that Cain is talking about literally the end of international law, which is something the United States in large part created so that we could live in a civilized world, and Trump is now furiously trying to destroy so that instead he and his fellow dictators can carve the world up into separate Epstein Islands of influence, where the boss of each zone is allowed to rape and pillage whoever in their backyard is weaker and/or wearing a short skirt. Yes, that’s terrifying.

But again, the Defense secretary in charge of the military side of that strategy is the same WARFIGHTER who gave that famous hairstyle speech to the generals, and his work-ex is on Fox News giving himself orgasms over SIMBA GO RAWR.

He’s not the only one either. The message has clearly gone out to all the white wangs of wingnuttia to take their Don-Roe Doctrine Viagra and show everybody how hard they are. Jesse Watters is doing it. Bootlicker Matt Walsh is doing it, babbling about owning hemispheres, and saying that international law is “fake and gay,” and more! Manliest man Ben Shapiro is also invoking the law of the jungle, but let’s be honest, he probably had to go lock himself in his bathroom and belt out “The Circle Of Life” afterwards, because such is Ben Shapiro.

Cain followed up yesterday saying that “if you fly a flag in the Western Hemisphere, that flag might be soon the stars and stripes.”

It’s OK to start laughing at these losers. The rest of the world will be before long.

Of course, we can’t talk about pathetic MAGA screamy clown bitches without mentioning that nutso Stephen Miller interview on the Jake Tapper show. Since everyone is trying to figure out exactly why Donald Trump and his flying monkeys got dry-drunk and invaded Venezuela this weekend, it’s good to check with the guy who according to many sources is the one truly running things.

So what did Miller, who looks like the lovechild of a 940-year-old baby and a skidmark, have to say? Well, he said “hemisphere” and rubbed himself raw about all this dominance and conquest shit, so yes, it does look like this really is the imperialist white power fantasy it looks like. These losers think they own this entire half of the world, and that God wants them to have it, because they are special.

Miller’s cartoon villain quality really came out in the interview. One imagines this might be what his webcam sees when he’s furiously stroking it to old Hitler speeches and his mom comes into his room without knocking like right before he O-faces everywhere.

HEEEEEENNNNNGHHHHHHH GO AWAY STEPHEN MILLER’S MOM, HE’LL COME DOWNSTAIRS TO DINNER IN JUST A MINUTE, HEEEEEEENNNNNNNGHHHHHH!

Tapper asked about Trump’s saber-rattling at Greenland, noting that Miller’s snarling troll of a wife posted a map of Greenland with the American flag superimposed over it, and the caption “Soon.”

“Can you rule out that the US is ever going to try to take Greenland by force?” asked Tapper.

Miller was mad Tapper was treating their Nazi expansionism like some kind of breaking news.

MILLER: The President has been clear for months now that the United States should be the nation that has Greenland as part of our overall security apparatus.

TAPPER: Right. But your wife posted that like hours after the Venezuela operation.

MILLER: I know.

TAPPER: That’s why it’s newly relevant.

Miller made clear that Trump has wanted to grab Greenland by the pussy since his first term, and assured Tapper that Denmark and Greenland will just let him do it.

MILLER: It wouldn’t be military action against Greenland. The Greenland has a population of 30,000 people, Jake. The real question is, by what right does Denmark assert control over Greenland? What is the basis of their territorial claim? What is their basis of having Greenland as a colony of Denmark? The United States is the power of NATO, for the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests. Obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States.

And so that’s a conversation that we’re going to have as a country. That’s a process we’re going to have as a as a community of nations.

Will the “conversation” and “process” be that Trump will pin Greenland down in the Bergdorf Goodman dressing room and demand they say thank you? Just asking.

Miller wouldn’t even entertain the idea that it would require military intervention, because it’s not like anybody will come to save her, we mean it:

MILLER: Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.

So these people are absolute monsters.

Wanna see Miller really lose it, while Tapper sits there like bud, I have zero fucking idea what you are even talking about? Here is his I AM SIMBA!!!!!!!!1!!!!!111! moment, this time about Venezuela:

MILLER: The United States is using its military to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere. We're a superpower.

Oh, Stephen, honey, if you have to say you’re a superpower, it usually means you’re not a …

MILLER: And under President Trump, we are going to conduct ourselves as a superpower.

Especially if you say it twice. It’s kind of like when you start an argument by explaining that you’re a high-IQ individual, which is … another thing white MAGA men do.

Here come the babble-screams:

TAPPER: Sovereign countries should be able to do what they want to do.

MILLER: The Monroe Doctrine and the Trump Doctrine is all about securing the national interests of America. For years, we sent our soldiers to die in deserts in the Middle East to try to build them parliaments —

TAPPER: But Stephen —

MILLER: — to try to build them democracies, to try to give them more oil, try to give them more resources. The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology. This whole period that happened after World War II, where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging these mass reparations schemes —

TAPPER: I don't even know honestly what you're talking about right now.

Shrugs.

MILLER: — it's a — what I'm talking about, Jake, is the idea — and by the way, you do — I know you love doing that smarmy thing, Jake, and I was hoping it would be better than that this time.

TAPPER: I'm just — I asked you about if there should be an election.

Yeah, Jake Tapper can be a real ass, but that wasn’t it.

Anyway, Miller just kept screaming or something, watch the video if you need to see him Goebbels all over the screen.

MILLER: And let's just take a moment and just acknowledge, Jake, that what we've witnessed under President Trump's leadership this last week is one of the greatest foreign policy and military victories this country has ever had.

LMAO, OK, it was super hot, Lion King.

Rawr.

Yesterday, Fillers Barbie Karoline Leavitt issued a statement saying that yes, military options are definitely on the table for Hitler to invade Poland Greenland. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio told lawmakers during a Venezuela briefing that naaaaah that’s just Trump Art of the Dealin’ ‘em, he simply wants to buy it.

Meanwhile, Lawrence O’Donnell explained his theory again on MS NOW last night that the Greenland shit is all bluster, and that the true most imminent threat is to Cuba, where Rubio has been creaming himself his entire pathetic Cuban American Republican Fascist life to oversee the invasion and overthrow of that government. We personally think that according to the spheres of influence theory, they probably really do want all of the above, including Greenland, perhaps primarily because Donald Trump is very stupid and thinks the Mercator projection is how big countries really are and he thinks he’ll finally be as big as Putin if he can have Greenland (and Canada).

All of this is horrifying. But again, all of these people are the same clownfucking bumbleshits they were the last time these bumblefucking clownshits did a horrifying thing. Rebecca Solnit has an entire piece this week on how unbearably stupid all these people and these news cycles really are. Sample line: “Part of the unbearable stupidity of the current administration is its feckless enthusiasm for doing things that seem like manly feats of strength to manosphere idiots and also make this country weaker.” Read the whole thing!

We’ll close this post with these words from Anne Applebaum, along the same lines, explaining how quickly Trump’s unbearably stupid plan to take over and declare himself king of the whole Western Hemisphere is likely to blow up in his unbearably stupid face:

Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects.

If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.

What’s that thing Secretary Shitfaced is always saying?

Oh yeah: “fuck around and find out.” (Except he’s scared his Daddy or Jesus will beat him up if he says the word out loud, so he just spells out “F-A-F-O,” like a loser homeschooled fundamentalist Christian youth pastor shouting “Son of a biscuit!” or “Mylanta!”)

These dipshits just might, though. At the expense of the entire world.

Fuckin’ A, man.

[Miller transcript / Media Matters / Atlantic]

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