Oil

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Is fracking the answer to the energy crisis?

I’ll approach the hot topic of a ban on Russian oil by way of personal anecdote: I’ve never been a soldier or a spook but I have twice found myself ensconced in secure Nato conference rooms. The first occasion was a group visit to the military alliance’s Brussels headquarters 42 years ago, when an unsmiling American defence expert introduced us to the concept of ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ – whose acronym was the key to the tense but relatively stable Cold War stand-off. In simple terms, it would have been utter madness for either side to fire the first nuclear missile. The odds on that happening by Kremlin order or error

Wednesday

Angus Colwell

Why would the Saudis bail out Biden?

Is Saudi Arabia shunning Washington? Mohammed bin Salman has reportedly been refusing to phone Joe Biden, who wants the kingdom to turn on its oil taps as the West desperately seeks alternatives to the Russian energy market.  Riyadh – the world’s largest oil exporter – has so far failed to accommodate Washington’s pleas. Ahead of the Russian invasion in mid-February, the US asked the Opec+ cartel – of which Saudi Arabia is the most important member – to produce more oil to slow the already rising prices. Opec+ stood firm, and said they would increase production by 400,000 barrels a day in April, a rise agreed before the threat of a

Thursday

James Walton

For all its absurdity, it delivers the goods: BBC2’s Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America reviewed

In the latest episode of Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, Louis asked a rapper called Broke Baby if ‘it’s important to keep it real’. ‘You have to play your role,’ replied Broke by way of apparent agreement. Given how stoned he was, this neat paradox — that you keep it real by pretending to — mightn’t have been wholly intended. Either way, however, it was hard not to apply it to Louis himself. More than 20 years into his TV career, does anybody know for sure whether his familiar schtick is genuine or faked? Certainly not, I’d suggest, Louis — whose elaborate stage-English courtesy, wide-eyed bemusement and spectacular naivety are now

Saturday

John Ferry

Does Nicola Sturgeon care more about oil revenue or climate change?

‘Now, as I’ve hopefully made clear throughout all of my remarks, the North Sea will continue to produce oil for decades to come. It still contains up to 20 billion barrels of recoverable reserves. Our primary aim – and I want to underline and emphasis this – our primary aim is to maximise economic recovery of those reserves.’ The words are from a speech made in June 2017, a few months after the Paris Agreement that aimed to limit climate change came into effect. A speech by a pro-oil Conservative, or perhaps the head of an industry group working on behalf of the oil sector? No. They are, in fact,

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Are we trapped in an inflationary spiral?

Are we heading for a 1970s-style inflationary spiral? Not according to Catherine Mann, former chief economist at Citigroup, who argues that we are now less exposed to fluctuations in oil prices than we were then. She also makes the case that businesses are more reluctant to put up prices and that the link between inflation and wages is weaker than it was in the years of high inflation when wages often rose three or four times a year and prices in the shops were jacked up more frequently than now. Her opinion matters because she is the latest recruit to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, which is charged

Thursday

Hugh Thomson

Peru’s beauty has been a real curse

As the planet gets more and more ravaged, the mind can begin to glaze over at the cumulative general statistics — so much rainforest lost, so many glaciers melted, so much less oil left. Joseph Zárate’s masterly new book reminds us that when it comes to fighting on the front line of the environmental wars, it’s all in the detail, and that nothing is quite as simple as might at first appear. Some years ago I went to a remote area on the border between Peru and Bolivia where a meteorite had landed on a small village and caused mass poisoning. The hospitals had filled up both with the locals

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Rishi Sunak must stick to his guns

Was the Chancellor wrong to guarantee only 80 per cent, rather than 100, of ‘coronavirus business interruption loans’ to keep small- to medium-sized companies afloat? Rishi Sunak’s announcement this week of fully guaranteed micro-loans for the smallest companies seeking to borrow up to £50,000 was reported as a partial climbdown in the face of pressure from the CBI and many of his own MPs to do away with the on-risk slice of the larger scheme, which provides loans of up to £5 million through 40 accredited banks — but which many would-be borrowers have claimed is a bureaucratic nightmare. Readers certainly confirm that picture. One in the motor trade tells

Thursday

James Ball

The price of oil just hit $0 a barrel. What’s going on?

If you’ve ever wanted to own a barrel of oil, today might be your lucky day – for the first time in modern history, there are traders across the world who’ll let you have it for free. On Monday evening the price of oil futures plummeted, with one key oil price in the USA hitting $0 per barrel shortly after 7pm UK time. It sounds unbelievable – and illogical. Why go to such great efforts to extract oil, which was selling for $60 a barrel just three months ago – only to give it away for free? How did we get here? The collapse in the world economy has led

Katrina Gulliver

Shame and scandal in the American west

In the early 1920s, while the United States was entering its crazed phase of prohibition and prosperity, a group of Native Americans had also just struck it rich. The Osage were a tribe who had been driven west (like others), and had settled in a rocky region of northwest Oklahoma. Unlike other Indian nations, they purchased their new land (which meant the federal government couldn’t move them along again), and in 1906 they had the foresight to include a covenant to the title of what became the Osage nation. Land could be sold, but no matter who owned an individual plot, all mineral rights were retained by the Osage. In

Tuesday

John R. Bradley

Saudi may have won an oil truce – but a greater conflict now looms

For the first time in months, the coronavirus panic was briefly demoted as the main news story on Sunday when OPEC and oil-producing non-OPEC nations agreed a deal to cut oil production by 9.7 million barrels a day – initially to stabilise and then hopefully increase prices. It is the most dramatic production cut in history and of course not unrelated to the pandemic itself. Last month, demand collapsed as the global economy began to shut down but Russia shot down a Saudi opening proposal fearing it would give a boost to the American fracking industry. The kingdom’s de facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman threw a characteristic hissy fit

Thursday

Ross Clark

Don’t blame oil and coal companies for climate change

This year’s Nobel Prize for the silliest piece of scientific research must go to something called the Climate Accountability Institute, for revealing to the world that 35 per cent of all global carbon and methane emissions since 1965 can be traced to just 20 global companies. This week they were named and shamed in the Guardian and revealed to be, er, 17 oil companies and three coal mining companies. Scandalously, they have been pumping all this carbon into the air for their own self-enrichment while the rest of us suffer. As Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University – the fellow behind the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph – puts it:

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

An oil price spike doesn’t mean a recession is on the way

An oil price surge from $60 to $72 per barrel, as happened after the drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Abqaiq refinery caused a sudden 6 per cent cut to global supply, would once have been taken as a sure signal of economic troubles ahead. A 1990s study of postwar oil prices plotted against employment and other data by Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University showed that every spike in energy costs had shortly been followed by recession. The theory still held in 2008: even though the ‘Great Recession’ was attributed to financial mayhem, it came soon after a speculative oil peak of $147. But today’s barrel price seems to be

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

If investors are fleeing to gold this is not the time to be smug

It came as no great surprise that the UK economy contracted by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter, following a first quarter in which growth had been artificially boosted to 0.5 per cent by stockpiling ahead of the original 29 March Brexit deadline. It’s fair to claim, as our editorial did two weeks ago, that the UK has performed better than expected for the past three years — particularly in terms of job numbers, which rose again in April to June despite the growth setback. True also that we’re in no worse shape than our European neighbours, and that our flexible, if painful, exchange rate will help us cope

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 4 April 2019

German customs The original customs union, or Zollverein, was established by Prussia along with 17 other states which make up modern Germany in 1834. Prior to that, traders crossing what is now Germany, were obliged to make multiple declarations and pay taxes as they moved across state borders. — It had taken 15 years to establish, but achieved a big step towards realisation in 1828 when Prussia formed a union with neighbouring state Hesse-Darmstadt, Bavaria formed its own union with Wurttemberg, and Saxony with Thuringian. — Not everyone was convinced. Hamburg and Bremen, which conducted much external trade by sea and made a lot of money from import duties, were not

Thursday

Peter Frankopan

Kazakhstan is about the size of Europe — but we know almost nothing about it

Kazakhstan, say signs by the side of the road in this vast Central Asian country, is ‘a land of unity and accord’. Few outside pay a great deal of attention to a state that is almost as large as Europe, and home to eye-popping natural resources, chiefly — but not only — oil. One who does is Joanna Lillis, who used to work in Russia and then for the BBC Monitoring Service in neighbouring Uzbekistan, and knows the region as well as anyone. Her book, Dark Shadows, is astute, refreshing and revelatory; it is also surprisingly tender, showing not only her affection but her care in trying to make sense

Thursday

Philip Hensher

‘I am the master’

Whenever I find myself visiting some great historic house, I always like to break off from gawping at tapestries to ask the tour guide: ‘How did the family make its money in the first place?’ For some reason, this almost always astonishes and bewilders. It’s as if the devotion of capital to bricks and mortar, acres of commemorative canvas and fresco, marble and landscaping, covers up any roots in the slave trade or the amassing of bribes from Indian nawabs. Money is made, and then it sets about dignifying itself. The Gulbenkian Foundation is a solid organisation based in Lisbon. It dispenses money in improving ways and possesses a very

Thursday

William Cook

Donald Trump is wrong about Germany being a ‘captive’ of Russia

“What good is Nato if Germany is paying Russia billions of dollars for gas and energy?” tweeted Donald Trump on 11 July. Trump was surely referring to Nord Stream 2, the controversial deal between Russia and Germany, whereby Russia will pump natural gas direct to Germany through a new pipeline across the Baltic Sea. Trump reckons such arrangements make Germany a ‘captive’ of Russia. Is he right? America isn’t the only country that’s getting hot and bothered about Nord Stream 2. Denmark and the Baltic States have also voiced concerns. The most vociferous opponent of the scheme is Ukraine. Russia currently pumps gas to Europe via Ukraine, but once Nord Stream

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Nothing is quite what it seems

One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered Cézanne a ‘curiously incapable’ menace, and a cracking show it will be. Until then, we must take what we can from exhibitions like True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s & 1930s. Here, many of Tonks’s pupils, and others schooled with similar exactitude, can at last reclaim their rightful positions in British art after decades in the wilderness, pushed into the shadows by the alpha art of abstraction and the ironies of pop. True to Life is a marvellous show. The portraiture is the stand-out stuff, dominated by

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Here’s who should be Mrs May’s cabinet supremo to tackle the housing shortage

Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just about managing’ could afford. The number of affordable homes built in 2015-16 was just 32,000, half that built in the previous year and the lowest since 1992. But action is coming — apparently. ‘We will fix the broken housing market,’ declares Mrs May, mustard-keen on fixing broken markets, ‘to build a new generation of council

Thursday

Alan Judd

Out of hot water

During and after the second world war the Fourteenth Army in Burma became famous as the Forgotten Army, almost as famous for being forgotten as for its great victory. More truly forgotten, however, despite its great strategic achievement in keeping open the lifelines to the eastern empire, is the role of the Royal Navy in those warm and contested eastern waters. Typically, the only events most of us hear of are the disastrous losses of Singapore and of the warships Prince of Wales and Repulse, the latter blamed on Winston Churchill. We read of ossified naval thinking in the 1930s, of inadequate preparation and procurement muddle, symptomatic of inevitable national