By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.

Inside the narrow frame within which the talks have taken place, the draft agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris is a great success. The relief and self-congratulation with which the final text was greeted, acknowledges the failure at Copenhagen six years ago, where the negotiations ran wildly over time before collapsing. The Paris agreement is still awaiting formal adoption, but its aspirational limit of 1.5C of global warming, after the rejection of this demand for so many years, can be seen within this frame as a resounding victory. In this respect and others, the final text is stronger than most people anticipated.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2015/dec/12/paris-climate-deal-governments-fossil-fuels

Cartoon of the day (above) : Buying oil from the Saudis has long funded Muslim extremism... but the Saudis are our best friends... The Saudis are also opposed to any agreement on global warming to reduce the usage of fossil fuels.

 

A bit of common sense from Annabel:

...

But this past week has been kind of special.

It was the week in which Tony Abbott popped out of the Monkey Puzzle Room to declare that everything he had done or tried to do as prime minister was perfectly fine and reasonable and not a problem at all.

He included, in this broad and optimistic assessment, even the bits he personally abandoned, like making young people wait six months for the dole and pinging people seven bucks to go to the doctor.

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And then he expressed the view that Islam needed to have a good hard look at itself; ideally by means of a formal Reformation process.

Now, the first-mentioned element of that particular interview in itself shows a degree of snake-hipped suppleness which is unusual even in the modern politician. To backflip once on a controversial political measure is perfectly unremarkable. To do it twice – now, that's something.

But the call for the reformation of Islam was the moment at which that interview stopped being marginally interesting post-match analysis and started being comedy gold.

Not because Islam is not in need of reform; it's pretty hard to disagree with that proposition. But because for a former prime minister who sustained two attempts – one successful – on his political life from his own colleagues arising directly from his cloth-eared inability to listen to what they and a majority of the Australian population were telling him to then accuse an entire religion of poor self-awareness is an auditory event at which the prudent listener instinctively covers her head, lest unconscious birds tumble spontaneously from the sky at such weapons-grade hubris.

Those poor old birds. They were at grave risk again on Friday morning, when Mr Abbott continued his perorations in the agreeable company of Mr Alan Jones, who commiserated with the former PM on the "astonishing heckling and even vilification from the media class" he had received while still in office.

"Even the way you spoke! The way you walked! The way you ate an onion!"  said Mr Jones  who advocated that another prime minister be drowned in a bag. And insulted her dead Dad.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/some-politicians-seem-indestructible-20151211-gllgb1.html#ixzz3uAC8ID1J
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There is some changes on the horizon. The "Arab" states are joining in to fight "terrorism". One should worry like hell. The 34-state Islamic military coalition is composed entirely of Sunnis — with strong strict Wahhabi religious connections. Thus one can see what is happening here. These 34 states are going to define and hit the Shia populations — presently resenting the Sunni influence in Yemen, Iraq and Syria — as "terrorists". It's a carte-blanche to destroy Shia resistance and let the Sunni terrorists go free. You've been warned.

Saudi Arabia has announced the formation of a 34-state Islamic military coalition to combat terrorism, according to a joint statement published on state news agency SPA.

"The countries here mentioned have decided on the formation of a military alliance led by Saudi Arabia to fight terrorism, with a joint operations centre based in Riyadh to coordinate and support military operations," the statement said.

A long list of Arab countries such as Egypt, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, together with Islamic countries Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Gulf Arab and African states were mentioned.

The announcement cited "a duty to protect the Islamic nation from the evils of all terrorist groups and organizations whatever their sect and name, which wreak death and corruption on Earth and aim to terrorise the innocent."

Shiite Muslim Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia's arch rival for influence in the Arab world, was absent from the states named as participants, as proxy conflicts between the two regional powers rage from Syria to Yemen.

The United States has been increasingly outspoken about its view that Gulf Arab states should do more to aid the military campaign against the Islamic State (IS) militant group based in Iraq and Syria.

Coalition to fight all terrorists, not just Islamic State

In a rare press conference, 30-year-old Defence Minister Prince Mohammed bin Salman told reporters on Tuesday that the campaign would "coordinate" efforts to fight terrorism in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan, but offered few concrete indications of how military efforts might proceed.

"There will be international coordination with major powers and international organizations ... in terms of operations in Syria and Iraq," Mr Salman said.

"We can't undertake these operations without coordinating with legitimacy in this place and the international community."

When asked if the new alliance would focus just on IS, Mr Salman said it would confront not only that group but "any terrorist organisation that appears in front of us".

Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab neighbours have been locked in nine months of warfare with Iran-allied rebels in neighbouring Yemen, launching hundreds of air strikes there.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-15/saudi-arabia-announces-34-state-islamic-military-alliance/7031592

Who specifically has attacked the U.S.? It was, of course, al-Qaeda that was responsible for the horrendous attack on 9/11 that opened the current phase of attacks. Its founder Osama bin Laden was a Saudi Arabian Sunni Wahhabi. Salafist-derived Wahhabism is a Sunni puritan school that idealizes the early Muhammad and his first associates and rejects any later liberalization or technical or moral modernizing, which it considers as the cause of Islam’s modern decline. Bin Laden, following Salafi Abdallah ‘Azzam’s teaching that every Muslim is obliged to defend Islamic lands against infidels and their teachings, objected violently to U.S. presence on Saudi soil after the Gulf War.

Having accused the Saudis of insufficient zeal against infidels, bin Laden was forced into exile in Sunni Sudan. Expelled from there under U.S. pressure in 1996, he moved to Afghanistan to secure the protection of the Deobandi Sunni Taliban. From his exile, he issued “a declaration of war” and armed struggle against U.S. troops stationed in Arabia and for harming Sunnis in Iraq by sanctioning Saddam Hussein. Bin Laden claimed responsibility for the 1996 explosions in Dhahran, which killed 19 U.S. servicemen, saying they were a warning to avenge the collusion between the Saudi regime and the “Zionist-Crusade” alliance.

Al-Qaeda continues in Syria today under the name al-Nusra and is probably still the next most effective force in the region, and of course is still Sunni Salafi. What is now known as the Islamic State (or ISIL or ISIS) separated from al-Qaeda by claiming to be the “commander of the faithful,” intending to then claim the Caliphate, including the power to decide what is and is not Sunni. Its Salafi roots have not been mitigated by the fact that former Saddam military officers became a critical part of the its leadership and perhaps to some extent manipulated the true believers. But if there was manipulation, it was in the context of Sunni Wahhabi doctrine.

Sunni and Shia forces have been competing since the seventh century. Their war against each other shapes all events in the region.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/naming-our-middle-east-enemy/

 

So oil prices crawled off their 11-year low overnight – big whoop. Such gyrations are merely part of the present tussle between supply and demand. There's a more serious problem hanging over the oil price that won't be solved by capping a few wells.

Passing remarks in a social setting made to me by a former oil industry CEO and current chairman provided some insight into the growing despair about price:  uncertainty about how much of the current plunge is merely the cycle, or something structural.

In either event, he thought it was only a matter of time before oil went the way coal is going.

Extrapolating his thinking, what worries hydrocarbon producers isn't just the surge in production meeting lack-lustre demand thanks to slower global economic growth - it's the way renewables are becoming cheaper as the technology rapidly improves, chasing oil, gas and coal prices down.

It becomes harder to believe coal and oil prices will bounce much out of this cyclical low simply because the falling price of renewables will effectively cap the upside.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/the-price-drop-thats-really-worrying-big-oil-20151223-glu0qy.html#ixzz3v7WkkMGR 
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See toon at top and read articles below it...

 

 

Call it the Saudi calculus.

Oil prices were already plummeting 14 months ago when, at Saudi Arabia’s insistence, OPEC put the global petroleum industry on notice: The member countries would not try to prop up prices by cutting production.

“We don’t want to panic,” Abdalla el-Badri, secretary general of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, told reporters at the group’s November 2014 meeting in Vienna. “We want to see how the market behaves.”

Since then, the market has behaved in a way few could have predicted — including Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter. The price of oil has collapsed under the weight of a growing international glut, made worse by slower growth in the global economy.

And yet the Saudis keep pumping oil at virtually full capacity. And they have persuaded their Persian Gulf OPEC allies — Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar — to do the same, despite mounting pressure from other big OPEC members to curtail production.

It is a risky strategy — one that is already straining Saudi finances and threatening the kingdom’s ability to continue providing generous social programs, like subsidized housing and cheap energy, that the royal family has long used to buy domestic tranquillity.

Oil provides more than 70 percent of Saudi government revenue. And though the Saudis still have about $630 billion in financial reserves, they are spending them at a rate of $5 billion to $6 billion a month, according to Rachel Ziemba, an analyst at Roubini Global Economics in New York.

But so far, Saudi Arabia is essentially betting that it can win an oil-price war of attrition — not only against its OPEC rivals like Iran, Iraq and Venezuela, but also against non-OPEC rivals like Russia and the many shale-oil producers in the United States that have contributed to the global glut.

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/28/business/energy-environment/saudi-arabia-keeps-pumping-oil-despite-financial-and-political-risks.html?_r=0

 

With global warming looming around the corner, the oil from the Saudis might have a last gasp at financial survival, grab as much as they can before the REAL COLLAPSE of fossil fuel energy hits them between the eyes. They might have to pull back on the Saudi largess (via hidden detours) to ISIS. Apparently ISIS has lost about 40 per cent of the terrirtory it acquired in Iraq... So there.

 

FOR the past half-century, the world economy has been held hostage by just one country: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Vast petroleum reserves and untapped production allowed the kingdom to play an outsize role as swing producer, filling or draining the global system at will.

The 1973-74 oil embargo was the first demonstration that the House of Saud was willing to weaponize the oil markets. In October 1973, a coalition of Arab states led by Saudi Arabia abruptly halted oil shipments in retaliation for America’s support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The price of a barrel of oil quickly quadrupled; the resulting shock to the oil-dependent economies of the West led to a sharp rise in the cost of living, mass unemployment and growing social discontent.

“If I was the president,” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger fumed to his deputy Brent Scowcroft, “I would tell the Arabs to shove their oil.” But the president, Richard M. Nixon, was in no position to dictate to the Saudis.

In the West, we have largely forgotten the lessons of 1974, partly because our economies have changed and are less vulnerable, but mainly because we are not the Saudis’ principal target. Predictions that global oil production would eventually peak, ensuring prices stayed permanently high, never materialized. Today’s oil crises are determined less by the floating price of crude than by crude regional politics. The oil wars of the 21st century are underway.

In recent years, the Saudis have made clear that they regard the oil markets as a critical front line in the Sunni Muslim-majority kingdom’s battle against its Shiite-dominated rival, Iran. Their favored tactic of “flooding,” pumping surplus crude into a soft market, is tantamount to war by economic means: the oil trade’s equivalent of dropping the bomb on a rival.

In 2006, Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi security adviser, warned that Riyadh was prepared to force prices down to “strangle” Iran’s economy. Two years later, the Saudis did just that, with the aim of hampering Tehran’s ability to support Shiite militia groups in Iraq, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Then, in 2011, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former chief of Saudi intelligence, told NATO officials that Riyadh was prepared to flood the market to stir unrest inside Iran. Three years later, the Saudis struck again, turning on the spigot.

But this time, they overplayed their hand.

 

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/how-saudi-arabia-turned-its-greatest-weapon-on-itself.html?_r=0

 

See toon at top...

A deal to freeze global oil output failed to materialise overnight, pushing oil to its biggest one-day loss in two months.

At a meeting in Doha, oil ministers from 16 countries, including Saudi Arabia and Russia, failed to come to an agreement on limiting supply, even after the summit dragged on for ten hours after its scheduled conclusion.

Talks hit a stumbling block after Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince Mohammad bin Salman said the kingdom would not restrain its production without commitments from other major producers, including Iran, which was not present at the meeting.

Iran had most of its sanctions lifted by the United States and the European Union in January in return for curbs on its nuclear program and has ruled out freezing output for the present time.

"With Saudi Arabia fighting proxy wars with Iran in Yemen and Syria/Iraq, it is understandable that they had little inclination to freeze their own production and make way for newly sanctions-free Iran to increase their market share," said Angus Nicholson, market analyst at IG in a note to clients.

"Given the fairly clear-cut incentive structure for Saudi Arabia it was surprising that the deal looked like such an inevitable affair."

The meeting is the first meaningful attempt in 15 years at coordinating oil output between the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and those outside the group.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-18/doha-oil-deal-failure-sparks-crude-price-plunge/7334436

 

too much too cheap... The planet will suffer...