U.S. Frackers Seek Ways to Reverse Well Productivity Declines

By Tsvetana Paraskova - Apr 24, 2024

As well productivity in the U.S. shale patch has declined in the past two years, producers are looking to deploy new technology to reverse these declines, but small companies often cannot afford the high upfront costs, industry executives and analysts have told Reuters.

While shale production pushed U.S. crude oil output to record highs in recent months to above 13 million barrels per day (bpd), the rate of productivity declines has steepened since 2020 as the fracking of closely located wells has interfered with geology and pressure, resulting in more difficult extraction of the resources.

Oil decline profiles have steepened across U.S. shale oil plays over the last decade, Enverus Intelligence Research (EIR) said in a report in August 2023.

“We’ve observed that decline curves, meaning the rate at which production falls over time, are getting steeper as well density increases,” Dane Gregoris, report author and managing director at EIR, commented at the time.

“Summed up, the industry’s treadmill is speeding up and this will make production growth more difficult than it was in the past.”

But advances in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies have increased well productivity over the past year, helping U.S. producers extract more crude oil from new wells drilled while maintaining production from legacy wells, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) said last month.

One of these technologies, simultaneous fracking technology, or simul-frac, can achieve over double the gains in lateral footage, in less time, compared to zipper-frac operations, says Halliburton, the leader in the U.S. fracking services market.

The simul-frac tech, however, needs a lot of wells drilled beforehand and then fracked simultaneously. This requires a lot of investment before oil can flow from the wells—and not all companies can afford that.

“That's $100 million in the ground before you see any revenue,” Mike Oestmann, chief executive at small company Tall City Exploration told Reuters. 

By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com

The Iraq War Remade the World in Its Grisly Image

The 2003 invasion of Iraq has been swept to the margins of collective memory. We must refuse to forget it — and seek to understand what led to it, who benefited, who suffered, and how it transformed the world.

By Brendan James, Noah Kulwin , Daniel Denvir 

March 20, 2024

Source: Jacobin


The failure to reckon with the people and the politics that made the Iraq War happen is one of the most tragic and significant oversights in recent history. To understand where we are today, in terms of both domestic politics and global affairs, we must understand the US invasion of Iraq — what led to it, which actors were strengthened by it, who suffered and for what purpose, and how it remade the world in its grisly image.

The first season of Brendan James and Noah Kulwin’s podcast Blowback, which aired in 2020, sought to rectify that failure, diving into not just the specifics of the Iraq invasion and occupation, but also about the deeper colonial and imperialist history that brought it about. Their podcast was, in many senses, a knowledge recovery mission. Not only is the prehistory of the Iraq invasion buried under heaps of obfuscatory myths and ideology, but its consequences are too — even though they are still being felt powerfully in Iraq, the broader Middle East, and the entire world.

The people who led the Iraq invasion were never held accountable. Mistakes were made, the consensus goes, but it’s all water under the bridge. The fate of the entire bipartisan establishment was bound together: George W. Bush had to be redeemed, in part because Joe Biden had to be redeemed. Today Bush enjoys a largely rehabilitated reputation and Biden is the President of the United States, confirming total impunity for the murderous affair that was the Iraq War.

In 2020, host Daniel Denvir interviewed James and Kulwin for the Jacobin Radio podcast the Dig. The following is a transcript of their conversation about the origins, unfolding, and consequences of the Iraq War. It has been edited for clarity.
DANIEL DENVIR

I think you’re entirely right that we have to look to the Iraq War because, as you say, it provides a skeleton key for the present. And the memory of the Iraq War has been stuffed down our collective memory hole. What has been the result of this mass forgetting and mass disassociation?
NOAH KULWIN

When Brendan and I came up with the idea, I think a lot of what we were responding to was the stuff that you saw in the news — you know, like George W. Bush getting candy from Michelle Obama, that kind of thing. It was rage-inducing, but we didn’t want to let our anger stay at just anger. We had a bunch of questions, like why was George W. Bush, who we thought we all agreed was a bad guy when he left the presidency, being rehabbed now?

When we began researching and looking into it, we came to see the Iraq War, in and of itself, as incredible process of forgetting. And we did a lot of things to make ourselves forget, because remembering would’ve produced a totally distended portrait of who we thought ourselves to be and what we thought our government capable of.
BRENDAN JAMES

Forgetting is part of the algorithm of empire — and the Iraq War is probably the last stand of what we used to think of as the American Empire. That’s not to say the empire ended with the Iraq War, but it was never really the same after that. It was the last gasp of pure hubris.

Every so often empire needs to have a cleanse, basically, and rehabilitate old figures. That happens a lot throughout history in any given empire. Turn them into respectable figures, whether they be dead or alive. That’s a way to not lose the faith you have in this imperial project. And whether it serves a purpose for domestic or foreign conquest, it’s something that you have to do over and over again.

The title of our show, Blowback, is meant to say that the consequences of our previous meddling and violence done toward the rest of the world come back cyclically. In order for the cycle to repeat, you need to forget. You need to cleanse your palate and find yourself surprised when all of a sudden guys you trained in the hills of Afghanistan that were rabidly, militantly dedicated to jihad end up blowing up your center of global commerce.

Things like that require forgetting. And we were attempting to refresh everybody not only on why George W. Bush personally is evil, but what purpose forgetting serves.
DANIEL DENVIR

It’s not just that the victors are the ones who get to write the history. It’s that being a global hegemon requires, as part of its process of legitimation, that history be rewritten and forgotten in particular ways.

And new erasures reaffirm and deepen preexisting erasures, which is why your podcast is not only about taking a fresh look at the monstrosity of the entire political moment around the invasion of Iraq, but looking much deeper than that into the history behind it — the whole invisibilized arc of history of the US and European colonial powers in that region more generally, the US backing Iraq and its murderous war against Iran, the selling out the Kurds to Saddam [Hussein] during the Cold War, the entire history of British colonialism and Iraq after World War I. Why do you think it’s so important to make the entire century of history that precedes 2003 clear?
NOAH KULWIN

On one level it’s because it’s the same cast of characters. You have Donald Rumsfeld helping bring Saddam and the US closer together in the 1980s, and then you have him as the secretary of defense when we invade Iraq in the 2000s. They’re just different chapters of the same story.
BRENDAN JAMES

Colin Powell is head of the Joint Chiefs during the Gulf War. Obviously he comes back as secretary of state. Similarly, Dick Cheney is secretary of defense in the Gulf War and then vice president during the invasion of Iraq.
NOAH KULWIN

It is useful to think of American policy toward Iraq and American interests in Iraq, and how American power gets wielded vis-à-vis Iraq, as one longer story. Then, by the time we get to the point of the invasion in 2003, it sort of makes sense as to why people act the way they do, even though it was doomed in retrospect.
BRENDAN JAMES

With regard to the even deeper history, we get into Cold War politics. Iraq had a pretty significant revolution in the ’50s. It essentially abolished the British sponsored monarchy and gave birth to a lot of different fresh and exciting politics for Iraqis to finally seize their own destiny.

The US, of course, moved in pretty quickly to stomp out any possibility of that happening. And one consequence of that was the Ba’ath Party coming to power with the support of the CIA because they were very hardcore anti-communist. And of course, in the tradition of blowback, the Ba’ath Party was the party that Saddam Hussein would soon take over, who the US would then depose in 2003, but also tried to knock off in 1991 as well.

Of course, the US is our main villain in the story. But to bring up British imperialism as well, I think it serves to show that this is really the same playbook whether you’re talking about British or American, French or German colonial projects. There is a basic toolkit, and there is a basic goal that any of these places have. It’s not in the DNA of Americans. On second thought, it might be in the DNA of the British. [Laughs]

In any case, the British carved up Iraq after World War I. And the conglomerate of oil companies that held the keys to all of Iraq’s oil deposits was called the Iraq Petroleum Company, but there wasn’t one share that went to the nation of Iraq — it was mainly British.

Similarly when the US invaded in 2003, almost a hundred years later, the project of Paul Bremer, the viceroy in Iraq — back to Britain, we’re even using the term viceroy there — his main job besides pacifying the country was to crack open that oil market and privatize a whole other bunch of Iraq’s national state industries.

So that’s full circle. It isn’t an American prerogative or a British prerogative. It’s the prerogative of any empire that seeks to do what empires do, which is plunder and control and guard the spigots of the world economy.
NOAH KULWIN

But there are some aspects of how America executed this in 2003 that are pretty distinctly American. In particular, we failed in distinctly American ways. Rumsfeld envisioned a “light footprint.” That was the phrase they were very fond of using in the Defense Department. It meant a military that would be leaner and that would be able to accomplish effectively many of the same goals that these imperial powers had set for themselves in previous decades, but —
DANIEL DENVIR

On the cheap and contracted out.
NOAH KULWIN

Exactly. And it fits very firmly within the neoliberal tradition and that policy rubric and theory of political economy more broadly. And you could see that failure in Iraq quite vividly.
DANIEL DENVIR

The US certainly did “mismanage” the invasion and occupation on technocratic grounds. But of course, and unsurprisingly, that critique also sort of gives cover to liberal supporters of the war, who then disassociate themselves from it afterward by saying, “Well, it was poorly managed.”
BRENDAN JAMES

Yes. The invasion that went pretty smoothly by American standards, but the occupation and the “nation building” in Iraq, if you want to call it that, was definitely bungled. And we don’t pass over all the ways in which it was, but I do think that there’s been such an emphasis — and to your point, a kind of exculpatory emphasis — on the bungling aspect. I think that has helped some figures, not really [Dick] Cheney or Rumsfeld but certainly Bush, to be remembered as basically like Frank Drebin from The Naked Gun, who meant well, but he’s a bit of a goofy cowboy who forgot to dot the Ts and cross the Is. And that is an overcorrection.

We need to get back to a more accurate and honest and therefore critical view, which is that, sure, there were a lot of mistakes, but the basic goal to thrash a country into submission and then create a base of operations inside the Middle East was achieved. And the chaos that spiraled out after that is not altogether unwelcome as, again, the concept of blowback has long showed us. So was it really that big of a bungle on the micro level? Yes. But we want to take “Mission Accomplished” — that banner that Bush stood in front of that everyone thinks is a punchline — at face value in the show.
DANIEL DENVIR

I think you guys talk about the Bush administration or the Defense Department sending like a penis enlargement guy or erectile dysfunction guy or something to talk to a major Shiite leader. [Laughs]
BRENDAN JAMES

Yes. That is in the very wonderful book by Rajiv Chandrasekaran Imperial Life in the Emerald City — just so I can cite my source, so no one thinks I made that up. [Laughs]

That really speaks to the lack of curiosity and knowledge about Iraq. Paul Bremer was quite an aristocrat. He was a career diplomat. He spoke, I’m sure, a bunch of different languages. He was a French-trained chef. But he didn’t know about Iraq. So he just ended up appointing some guy who held a patent to penile enhancement implants to go talk to an ayatollah inside of Iraq, which is like probably the most inappropriate thing you could do. And beyond that, there’s much more bloody and horrifying consequences of that sort of cavalier American right approach.
NOAH KULWIN

One example that I think of a lot in the story is that we demolished in the city of Fallujah a Sunni stronghold where we said there were all these Sunni terrorists that we had to eliminate. We reduced the city to rubble in 2004 over a couple different battles. And one of the ways that we were going to attempt to manage the city of Fallujah was by creating a Fallujah brigade, which meant that in many cases the US military was literally just handing out rifles to people that it had just been fighting. It said like, “Alright, you’re going to help us pacify it,” and then they would just be fighting with the guns the US gave them months later.

The same kind of cavalier attitude as sending the dick pill doctor extended to the most basic assumptions. It was just a matter of empowering US military leaders to make the worst possible decisions at every stage.
DANIEL DENVIR

The origins and trajectory of the Iraq War and the “war on terror” really set the stage for the entire political situation at present. And when it’s forgotten or disavowed, everything just appears like it’s out of the blue, because there’s no relevant prior history that the United States might be implicated in. So instead of causality we have interminable enemies who emerge and threaten and hate us, like Iran and ISIS, and conflicts that are tragic but whose roots are unknown, like the Syrian Civil War.
BRENDAN JAMES

This holds for domestic politics as well. It was the Bush administration that created ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] in 2002 out of the Department of Homeland Security as a direct response to 9/11. This is now obviously one of the most recognizable faces of the abhorrent politics of Donald Trump, but as I’m sure listeners of your show know, ICE had been operating under George W. Bush in an early version, then [Barack] Obama, and then Trump.

The forgetting, or the outright ignorance altogether, the never-having-known, that’s something that we try to dedicate some time to in the show with regard to domestic politics. Because the story is mostly about Iraq, and most of it takes place in Iraq. But you could easily do a whole show on authoritarianism and Bush and the descent into a baby’s first fascism in America.
NOAH KULWIN

And I think that there are some other places in Iraq specifically where you can see this, like Abu Ghraib and the policy of torture. Iraq, if not necessarily exactly a laboratory, is absolutely a place where a lot of the worst policies that will evolve to become even worse over time were ultimately first carried out, or exposed in their full horror.
BRENDAN JAMES

During the actual invasion itself, it’s striking to look at the Associated Press photographs in their archives of American soldiers throwing Iraqis with hoods over their heads into trucks and just driving them away.

I think people rightly recoil in horror at the images that come out of the Trump regime and the operations of ICE. But I mean, what are we looking at in Iraq if not that same treatment of human beings? And the man in office then is now Secret Santas with Ellen DeGeneres and Michelle Obama. The people at the top of this imperial system just think, “Yeah, all’s forgotten. Those were just Iraqis after all.”
DANIEL DENVIR

I think that we should pause just to emphasize, especially for younger listeners, how shocking it initially was to a lot of us how quickly George W. Bush has been rehabilitated. Because thinking back to 2008, when Obama won, Bush wasn’t just hated by liberals — like really hated by liberals — but he was also abandoned by many conservatives, and he exited office with a rock-bottom approval rating.
NOAH KULWIN

Oh, absolutely. And people also forget that his exit was marked not just by failure in Iraq, but also an enormous breadth of scandal. There was the Alberto Gonzales US attorneys firing scandal, to name just one example. And then, I mean, Dick Cheney shot a guy. [Laughs]
BRENDAN JAMES

Hurricane Katrina, to name another.
DANIEL DENVIR

Which is relevant to the COVID-19, in that it exposed the US government’s total lack of infrastructure or will to protect vulnerable people’s lives in the face of a massive disaster, which we’re now experiencing on a nationwide and global level.

Certainly many things are the same, but the mass forgetting also reflects an incredible weakness of the Left throughout the 2000s. And something we should keep in mind as we mourn the end of the Bernie [Sanders] campaign, at least as we had known it, is that we’re still in a much stronger place now than we were in the 2000s, when we weren’t even relevant.

There was a strong antiwar movement then — not against the invasion of Afghanistan at all, which I know because I was at those protests and not many people were. But the anti–Iraq War movement was really big. However it was incredibly short-lived, and then immediately folded into the 2006 midterm elections when the Democrats took back Congress, and then into Obama’s 2008 campaign, who was an antiwar candidate of sorts in the way he was presented and interpreted.
NOAH KULWIN

The Democratic political leadership are ostensibly — I mean, as we know, this is a joke, but supposedly — meant to represent a Left of some sort. And they just became Bush’s willing co-conspirators in many respects. The Democrats offered very big-picture criticisms of Bush, saying that he lied and that he was bungling the war. But they were happy to continue helping to pass the bills to fund the war, and they were happy to pass the bills that allowed the White House to acquire all of the executive power with which they could do the bungling. So I think that if you want to look for or identify some of the weakness of the Left, a lot of it is because the people who were supposed to represent something like an opposition instead just became lapdogs to power.
BRENDAN JAMES

The Democratic Party was the gravedigger of the antiwar movement. It wasn’t the Republican Party. They were doing all the war. That was a very good opponent to have if you’re an antiwar movement. It was the Democratic Party.

I interviewed Cindy Sheehan a couple years ago in the lead-up to the 2016 election to talk a bit about what she felt about Hillary Clinton being the candidate, and the Democrats portraying Sheehan back in the midterms in 2006. [Nancy] Pelosi and the congressional leadership of the Democrats took back Congress in a bloodbath. In the election, they used Sheehan in particular, but also the antiwar movement in general, as their credential. They were trotted out for the Democrats to embarrass Bush and to claim that the Democrats would essentially end the war. And once they got in, they completely abandoned all of them.

That was yet another lesson about what it means to trust the Democratic Party. And the movement pretty much fizzled. Unfortunately, as you say, it was not much of a broader movement other than this very specific, very worthy issue of ending the war in Iraq. But when you’re attached to a gang of complete flimflams like the Democrats, and they betray you when they get back in power and don’t owe you anything, your movement is almost certain to dissipate. I’m not saying that’s the only thing that was contaminating the antiwar movement, but it was certainly the reason why they fell out of any real position of notice or power in the mid-2000s. And as you say, it took a long time after that for any public face of radical demands from the American left to come up again.
NOAH KULWIN

And Dan, you talked a moment ago a bit about how Barack Obama ran an antiwar campaign of sorts. He spoke to a very obvious disaffection and he didn’t deny the very clear reality of how bad things were going. And his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, was somebody who had voted to help make those bad things the way that they were. I had a very big aha moment when I was going through some of the reporting about Hillary Clinton’s response to the fact that she had supported the war in 2007 and 2008 when she was being pressed on that by Obama. It later emerged that she told staffers that she thought an apology or taking responsibility for it would be a distraction, that it was irrelevant, and that it wasn’t an issue.
BRENDAN JAMES

And also the Iraq War was insanely unpopular by the time that Obama was running for office. He did not talk the same way about an equally destructive and disgusting war in Afghanistan because he didn’t feel politically required to. When he got into office he couldn’t not withdraw from Iraq, which was a good thing of course, but he increased the levels of troops in Afghanistan by tens of thousands.
DANIEL DENVIR

And this became liberal Democratic Party orthodoxy, at least beginning in 2004. John Kerry’s race had this idea that there was a good Iraq War and a bad Iraq War. Like, we took our eye off the ball. And so opposition to the Iraq War is not embedded within some larger anti-imperialist critique. It’s like a technocratic critique that we did the war on terror wrong.
BRENDAN JAMES

Yeah, exactly. And another thing we should mention is that we do bring up Joe Biden during the show, but we were recording this most of January and February, so it wasn’t quite clear how much of a mainstay in our political landscape he was going to be still at that moment. But Biden was the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If anyone in the Democratic Party had the access and the basic position to sniff out what a horrifying crime this was looking to be in early or mid-2002, let alone by go time in March 2003, it would’ve been him.

And Joe Biden was one of the war’s most enthusiastic advocates. He famously called it “not a rush to war, but a march to peace.”
DANIEL DENVIR

Cool. That’s literally Orwellian.
BRENDAN JAMES

Literally. I was cutting the audio to use in the show of a lot of senators. There’s a montage we have in episode three of some of the key figures you’ll recognize today voting for the war, and then some that voted against it, Bernie Sanders and Barbara Lee being among them. But when I was cutting the audio, I had to hand it to Hillary. She did it in about fifteen minutes. She gave her speech, and then voted for the war and sat down. Biden spoke for like three hours. [Laughs] He wouldn’t shut up about how great the war was going to be, or how there wasn’t even going to be a war because Saddam was just going to surrender or whatever.
DANIEL DENVIR

He gave like a Fidel-level stem-winder making his case for the war. And he not only was a leading supporter of the war, but then in the Obama administration proposed ethnic cleansing!
BRENDAN JAMES

After supporting the war and then being a weasel and running away from that, he wanted to carve it up into three different ethnically cleansed territories.
NOAH KULWIN

When we got to Iraq, Iraqi society was not riven with sectarian conflict naturally, at least not to anything resembling the degree that we unleashed on the country.
DANIEL DENVIR

Intermarriage was super common in Baghdad.
NOAH KULWIN

Yes. I mean, Sunni and Shia lived side by side. It was a fairly diverse society. It’s not to say that there weren’t tensions or that there wasn’t even sectarian violence on some level, but the degree to which things changed from pre-invasion to let’s say 2005 is pretty much impossible to overstate. So part of what I guess makes the Joe Biden solution particularly horrifying is proposing apartheid as a solution to a previously functional system. It was only our intervention that messed it up in the first place, obviously.
BRENDAN JAMES

Or to bring it back to the question about the twentieth-century history we dig into in the first episode, just like the British, he wanted to take out a big red pen and carve into the earth his preferred division of one country into three or four. This stuff doesn’t really change from century to century. Unfortunately, neither does the carnage that comes out of those types of decisions.
DANIEL DENVIR

And it’s a proposed solution that participates in and facilitates this whole process of mass forgetting because it frames Iraq’s problems as not rooted in the US invasion, or more profoundly in the history of Western colonialism and petro-capitalism and all of this stuff, but in these ancient tribal sectarian animosities.
BRENDAN JAMES

I think a lot of normal Americans don’t tend to care about foreign policy at all, be it good or bad. They thought, “Well, these religious psychos in Iraq, they should just calm down. What’s the big deal? We were trying to help you out.” And that was another way in which, as you point out, we could pathologize the country rather than face up to any accountability for what happens when you try to run the world on a hegemonic, British imperial-style system of conquest.
DANIEL DENVIR

And then we see part of the Trump and Trumpism origin story as well, because we have this process of forgetting. We have no strong left-wing movements at the time that can frame the situation in anti-imperialist terms. So Trump and the Right are able to identify the enemy and the source of the problem as Islam and the solutions to xenophobia and this kind of militaristic pseudoisolationism of Trump’s. So Trump’s Muslim ban is the imperialist war on terror coming home to roost as nativist politics.
NOAH KULWIN

Jeremy Corbyn had the best response, I think, to this very particular line, and that he formulated very successfully, at least within Britain — this idea of actually framing anything resembling the knife attacks in the UK as a consequence of our own meddling, our own decision-making that we saw with our own eyes in Iraq. There is absolutely a very transparent, obvious, and lucid left-wing case to be made. It’s just that nobody in America, outside of our dear recently departed [Bernie Sanders], has ever seemed to have the courage to make it, at least on a national stage, providing a single coherent answer that everybody can see.
BRENDAN JAMES

And that’s a point there about the Trumpified version of how to process and frame the enemy and the global war on terror. That’s something that we try to touch on as well as far as aftershocks of the Iraq War go. I mean, Trump ran against the Iraq War in 2016. Honestly, there were moments where, I’ll say it completely with and some guilt, no one thought he was going to win. You know, it was kind of awesome when he was on the debate stage with Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz, owning them, saying there were no WMDs [weapons of mass destruction], they all lied. And the audience booed him in the first couple of debates, but they switched over once they saw he was the strong man, and said, “Oh, you know what? Yeah, that was probably all a bunch of lies.”
DANIEL DENVIR

Well, he had that important asterisk that we shouldn’t have gone in, but if we did, we should have taken the oil. The perfect Trumpian twist.
BRENDAN JAMES

Yes, it is a xenophobic know-nothing type of rejection of imperial wars, of conquest — not because, as you said, it’s based in any anti-imperialist logic, but because they’re all savages over there and they should just go on chopping their own heads off or whatever the parody is that they picture in their heads, and we should just take their resources while they’re not looking.

It’s not sufficient to let scoundrels like Trump get away with being the only really meaningful antiwar voice in American politics. That’s not to credit right-wing populism or to say they’re starting to come over to our side. But when we look at the way that certain things are mutating right now, how the Right is reconstructing itself, it’s absolutely connected to the massive explosion of trust that fell apart in the Bush administration after the war in Iraq. We don’t need to kid ourselves that they’re on our side, but we need to take that seriously. It’s a very scary thing if the Right mutates into something that has a monopoly on nonintervention in the world.
NOAH KULWIN

And they also thrive because there is no cogent visible left-wing answer or alternative that we have been able to present thus far. Bernie Sanders started to do that and articulate and chart a different vision of what that could look like. But the reality is that if you were to ask: What is the Democratic Party’s position? What is Joe Biden’s position on Iraq or America’s role in the world? I don’t think anybody on his team could even give us a straight answer because they’ve never thought about it.

In its weak, desiccated state, what is the Democratic Party establishment’s response going to be, if they try to formulate one? Because, as Brendan points out, the far right has synthesized an answer to that question. It’s a very ugly and dangerous one. And as it stands right now, there’s not an alternative.
DANIEL DENVIR

And if there’s a total void and no critique, no comment from the establishment Democrats, then we just have this Trumpist critique given free rein. And their critique of Bush’s imperialism is that it was wrong to try to save and do charity for the Muslims, which is how the neocons framed the war as this noble, civilizing mission. One of the craziest stats that I found researching my book is that Republican public approval ratings of Islam and Muslims skyrocket upward after 9/11 because of this neocon framing of the war as a civilizing mission. And then when it cracks, it’s the Trumpists who pick up the pieces and reframe it on their terms.
BRENDAN JAMES

I don’t spend a lot of time on Fox [News] in the podcast because honestly, we know what we think about that side. The ecosystem is clear. It was cheerleading and jingoism. But it was also a paternalistic jingoism, especially those images of that stupid little statue coming down of Saddam and the American flag being put over his face, and us helping these poor little Iraqis who couldn’t do it themselves with a big tank pulling down the statue of the dictator. By the way, that moment was completely stage-managed. Managed by the Marine Corps in particular.

Anyway you hear Fox News anchors, some of whom will go on in the coming years to bemoan Obama for not calling all Muslims radical Islamic jihadists, and they’re saying paternalistically, “In the Arab culture. It’s very important to understand that the shoe-throwing is a sign of disrespect.”
DANIEL DENVIR

In the US it’s a friendly gesture. [Laughs]
NOAH KULWIN

And then immediately like the camera shifts and suddenly you’re asking literally any Muslim in America who lived those years, or any Iraqi who lived those years, and you will find out that that paternalism is entirely a facade, such a transparently flimsy justification for wanting to do all these things.
BRENDAN JAMES

It coexisted with the Bush administration infiltrating mosques, developing the new capacity to spy on and disrupt life in Muslim communities inside of America.
DANIEL DENVIR

So I think another thing that we should talk about in terms of the present-day impacts is just that it really did impact the Democratic primary. And we need to think about this mass forgetting as one reason that Joe Biden defeated, or is in the process of defeating, Bernie Sanders. Because Bernie’s attacks on Biden over his support for the Iraq War, he made a bunch of them, and they were totally necessary and justified, but I don’t think they really stuck. There was a sense that this was picking on Biden over old news.

While Bernie’s attacks didn’t hurt Biden as much as they should have, and as much as we would’ve liked them to, Bernie raising the issue and attacking Biden for supporting the war is good in and of itself for the same reason that your podcast is — because it re-politicizes this history and makes it newly visible. So on the one hand, I’m disappointed that the attacks didn’t stick and that not enough people considered them relevant. But Bernie, in making those attacks, did more to kind of keep the Iraq history alive and keep it from being erased than any politician I’m aware of in a long time.
NOAH KULWIN

Oh, absolutely. And I guess one thing that I would also note there is that he’s making those attacks now, but it’s also going to be the future of the Democratic Party, those attacks. Like, if it’s not Joe Biden, it’s going to be any of these other stand-in political figures who have the same legacy, the same beliefs, the same attitudes, and they’re going to have to suffer the same kind of scrutiny. Bernie is not going to be the last one to make these critiques within Democratic or left-wing politics. It’s a sign of what’s to come. Because I think that the awareness and the outrage and the frustration is all there.
BRENDAN JAMES

Well, I think it’s unfortunately though a catch-22 for anyone looking to attack, say, their opponent on the Iraq War, as Sanders tried to do with Biden. Because if you really want that attack to mean anything, you have to say a lot of reasons why America is bad and sucks and is evil actually. And you have to maybe say it wasn’t just like this vague war where like things blew up and then it ended.

We designed a forced labor system in Fallujah. That’s kinda like what the Nazis did. People go, “Ugh, shut up. That’s not my country. What, he’s calling us Nazis?” You have to say we killed at least six hundred thousand people, maybe a million. I wonder if it’s possible to effectively make the attack without being dismissed as a caricature of an anti-American leftist. Bernie Sanders, for instance, had to balance criticism with a message of redemption for the country. I’m unsure if this approach can transition to a more effective strategy. Corbyn managed to pull it off in the UK, blaming terrorism on imperialism, but it’s uncertain if the same tactic would resonate with the American public if employed by Sanders. Unfortunately.
DANIEL DENVIR

The story you’re telling is also a media story, a product about other media products. You have the New York Times with Judith Miller, who infamously laundered the Bush administration’s totally false case for war to the public. There were some important exceptions, but it wasn’t just Judith Miller’s active misinformation — there was also this general failure of mainstream media to question the invasion.

So Miller’s kind of an extreme example that obscures the more banal everyday deference that, in part, is this conventional issue with the media that emerges in mass media and capitalist societies — basic manufacturing consent type stuff. But then everything was exacerbated by post-9/11 jingoism that younger people who weren’t sentient at the time won’t recall. That jingoism really softened much of what little critical edge did exist in the mainstream media. Say a little bit about the media’s role.
NOAH KULWIN

Yeah, I think there are several different ways in which the media helped sell the war and manufacture a certain set of stories about the case for war and the war itself. You had people like Judith Miller who were willing launderers of bad or slanted information. Then there’s the pundit class, like Jonathan Alter, for example. In an early episode, Brendan kicks to me a column that he wrote about how after 9/11, we had to start torturing people. This kind of jingoism after 9/11 came very naturally to the armchair pundits, liberals, and conservatives alike, and it would lead them to vociferously declare that we had to go after Saddam.

The Washington Post had reams of reporting making the case for war, and it was actually quite easy to find a lot of those stories about how shaky the case for war was. But they were just buried. They weren’t actually presented on the front page. You have to look at all these different pieces and how they fit together. While the Judith Millers surely deserve a lot of the blame, there’s also a series of institutional failures ranging from the New Yorker to the Washington Post to obviously cable television, where they simply weren’t interested in asking any of those questions. Even when they did ask, and they knew, and they had the information about how sketchy what al-Libi was saying, when they had the information about how [Lewis] Libby’s sourcing was total bunk, they too chose to ignore it. So it wasn’t that they were just totally misled or lied to. I think some of the failures of the media that at least we discussed reveal that they were actually quite comfortable dismissing the information that was made available to them.
BRENDAN JAMES

There were more critical stories coming out in the Times or in the Post. But you can push those to another page. In a medium like cable news, where it’s pretty much right in front of your face, you can’t marginalize information like that as much. Phil Donahue on MSNBC was crying bloody murder about the war being a horrible and bad idea, and they just fired him. He obviously was a staple of most people’s understanding of daytime American talk shows, and they canned him because he wasn’t getting with the program. So you had that going on, and the journalism proper from the New York Times and the Washington Post and a bunch of other papers. Then you had the pundit side, the philosopher kings Thomas Friedman and David Brooks.
NOAH KULWIN

One thing I would note is that in this pundit space, there was a cottage industry of experts, especially liberals like Kenneth Pollack who wrote a book called The Threatening Storm, which was supposed to be the liberal intellectuals’ case for war. I remember going into good liberal family friends’ homes at this time and seeing that book on the shelf, and it had a lot of influence. There were a wide range of experts from Stephen Hayes on the Right to someone like Kenneth Pollack or Paul Berman ostensibly on the Left, who were creating material that would then get tossed around on cable news as a justification for buying into all of this cooked intelligence.
DANIEL DENVIR

Or Christopher Hitchens, who was never on TV that I recall when he was a Nation writer. And then he becomes the big hawk who breaks up with the Left over the Iraq War, and he is everywhere. His celebrity explodes.
NOAH KULWIN

He’s rewarded when he gets US citizenship. And who is it that swears him in? It’s a secretary of homeland security, Michael Chertoff.
DANIEL DENVIR

Speaking of apologists for war, we also see the rehabilitation of Jennifer Rubin and Bill Kristol, who are now giving daily advice to liberals on the internet.
BRENDAN JAMES

Yeah. The “Resistance” is truly a big tent.
NOAH KULWIN

David Frum is probably the most offensive example to me personally.
BRENDAN JAMES

Also, he did not come up with that phrase. According to Bob Woodward, he did not come up with “Axis of Evil,” which is his claim to fame as a Bush speechwriter. He had something way shittier, like the “Axis of Ignitability” or something. The actual speechwriter to Bush was like “Let’s tune that up a little bit.”
NOAH KULWIN

The guy who was the actual speechwriter to Bush, Michael Gerson, was a much funnier and more interesting person than David Frum ever was. When Gerson was getting hopped up to write a Bush State of the Union, he gave himself a heart attack in his fervor of trying to write this up. And when he went to his doctor, his doctor told him that he was stressing himself out by thinking about and fantasizing too much about Bush in Iraq.
BRENDAN JAMES

He was too horny for the war. Probably getting those dick implants from our ambassador to the ayatollah in Baghdad.
DANIEL DENVIR

For all that we’ve just said about the press, you do make a point of citing mainstream sources, which I like a lot, and I think it’s a left approach to mass media that I agree with. Because like we were talking about earlier, although there are outright fabrications like what Judith Miller did, there are still lots of valuable facts turned up by mainstream reporters. And then there are some exceptionally good ones, like the people who were doing the work at McClatchy Washington Bureau that was contradicting.

That was getting syndicated in all kinds of medium-sized papers, but I wasn’t seeing it reading the New York Times at the time, for example. I think what your approach is premised on is the correct idea that the pernicious distortion is, sure, sometimes the Judith Miller–style outright fabrications, but is most often to be found in this more basic framing of stories in particular and of the news in general. What’s on the front page, what’s buried on page sixteen — the story isn’t so much censored or suppressed in the US. It’s more obscured.
BRENDAN JAMES

Yeah. I think that’s the old construal of American-style management of the press versus a more authoritarian idea.
NOAH KULWIN

The UK is a good example. They just censor there. The press just does not have the same rights that it does here.
BRENDAN JAMES

Sure. But ultimately, these are all liberal bourgeois constructs. These are illusory freedoms that you don’t need to have as heavy a hand, because in many ways the American press is all too happy to deliver the official narrative and the narrative preferred by, certainly in the case of the Iraq War, the Bush administration. And so there’s no need to crack down on them. You’ll spoil a good relationship. And there’s that old poem about how there’s no need to bribe a British journalist, considering what he’ll do unbribed. So the same goes for America.

But that’s not to say we didn’t censor and do totalitarian-style media management in Iraq. Paul Bremer shut down Mukhtar al-Sadr, the Shia cleric that became the face of resistance for the underclass of Shia in Iraq and in Baghdad. He had a newspaper, and the newspaper had accused Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, of becoming the new Saddam. So Bremer promptly shut down the newspaper operating in Mukhtar’s neighborhood and imprisoned one of his lieutenants in a move to prove he was not the new authoritarian.
DANIEL DENVIR

This is kind of taking things in a new direction to end on, but do you think that the COVID crisis posing these sorts of, at least temporarily, biological limits or contradictions to US empire provides an opportunity to rethink the politics of American imperialism — to re-politicize them at a time when everything is up for debate, but people are very distracted with ensuring their emotional, physical, and economic survival?
BRENDAN JAMES

I think that an obvious reference point here would be the sanctions imposed on Iran while they undergo an even more serious crisis than America, which is a pretty high bar, and how it is directly resulting in untold suffering that will scar that country for decades to come. It’s a war crime. One of the arguments of our show is that, for example, the Iraqi sanctions in the ’90s were as big of a crime and certainly created almost as much violence as the invasion and conventional war itself that exploded after 2003. Similarly, I would say what we’re doing to Iran, what we’ve been doing to Iran for a long time, is one of the many war crimes taking place that coronavirus certainly puts in full view. Unfortunately, I have to offer the pessimistic answer right now.

I think unlike the Iraq War, where Americans were encouraged to consume more and take pride in overseas actions, this crisis directly affects everyday Americans. It’s uncertain whether this will broaden our compassion or drive us to be more introverted and dismissive of others’ suffering. However, if any good can come from this crisis, ending the sanctions on Iran would be a crucial step. Like the Iraqi sanctions, they are not only inhumane during this devastating plague, but also priming the pump for us to make war on them in the future, whether it be a year from now, five years from now, or a little bit longer.
NOAH KULWIN

Yes, one thing I would emphasize is that our show, and where the title comes from, “blowback,” suggests that events of mass destruction are often by design, serving private interests rather than the public good. While the coronavirus itself serves no master, we must be wary of how decisions in response to it may serve the interests of those seeking to eliminate social safety nets altogether.
BRENDAN JAMES

The Naomi Klein thesis.
DANIEL DENVIR

Could you call it… the “shock doctrine”?
BRENDAN JAMES

[Laughs] Yeah, disaster capitalism. But whether there’s a disaster imperialism or a disaster anti-imperialism, it really does remain to be seen. Stuff could get really weird within the next couple years in a good way —
DANIEL DENVIR

Or in a nightmares way.
BRENDAN JAMES

But I think that the circumstances could give rise to something more constructive. I mean, the wheels of history are turning. I don’t know whether or not capital can fully recover from this. I think it’s possible that it can, but it’s probably as panicked as anybody else.

As the Naomi Klein thesis goes, this would be a great time for a lot of looting and a lot of pillaging and a lot of sneaky maneuvers to take place, just as they did in the catastrophe in Iraq, in which Exxon and Halliburton and Blackwater got to wet their beaks while a slow-moving genocide occurred over about five years in that country. So we need to be paying attention for that very approach going forward.
NOAH KULWIN

What I would hope is that we do at least now have something resembling a toolkit and the beginnings of what looked like mass movement politics.
BRENDAN JAMES

As long as things don’t go back to normal. Because that’s the worst outcome.

The UAE holds a major oil and gas conference just ahead of hosting UN climate talks in Dubai

JON GAMBRELL
Updated Mon, October 2, 2023 







United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei talks during the ADIPEC, Oil and Energy exhibition and conference in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Monday Oct. 2, 2023. 

(AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — The Emirati president-designate of the upcoming United Nations COP28 climate talks urged oil and gas companies Monday to be “central to the solution” for climate change, a message delivered even as the industry boosts its production to enjoy rising global energy prices.

The appeal by Sultan al-Jaber highlights the gap between climate activists suspicious of his industry ties and his calls to drastically slash the world's emissions by nearly half in seven years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with pre-industrial times.

While addressing a major international concern, his remarks came at a marquee oil industry event highlighting the state oil company he oversees — feeding the concerns of those already critical of his appointment while also drawing applause from the same energy firms he wants to court at the upcoming COP28 talks starting in November.

“That is our North Star. It is, in fact, our only destination,” al-Jaber said. “It is simply acknowledging and respecting the science.”


However, he added: “We must do this while also ensuring human prosperity by meeting the energy needs of the planet’s growing population."

Al-Jaber serves as the CEO of the state-run Abu Dhabi Oil Co., which has the capacity to pump 4 million barrels of crude oil a day and hopes to reach 5 million barrels a day. He also made the call to the annual Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference, known by the acronym as ADIPEC, which brings together the largest players in the oil and gas industries.

While this year's conference has been described as focusing on “decarbonizing faster together,” the event is primarily about the drilling, processing and sale of the same carbon-belching fuels driving climate change — which cause more-intense and more-frequent extreme events such as storms, droughts, floods and wildfires. And al-Jaber himself has repeatedly said the world must rely on oil and gas for the near-term to bridge that gap.

“A phase-down of fossil fuels is inevitable. In fact, it's essential,” al-Jaber said. “Yet, this must be part of a comprehensive energy transition plan that is fair, that is fast, just, orderly, equitable and responsible.”

But on the business side, the oil industry is on the rebound. After prices briefly went negative during the lockdowns of the coronavirus pandemic, benchmark Brent crude now trades around $92 a barrel.

Diesel prices also are expected to rise as Russia has stopped its exports of the fuel, which likely will worsen global inflation through boosting transportation prices that will get passed onto consumers.

Gazprom, the state-owned natural gas company that is a pillar of Russia’s economy, had a major stand at the conference despite facing U.S. sanctions over Moscow's war on Ukraine. Russian officials took part in Abu Dhabi's major arms fair earlier this year, showing the UAE's deepening financial ties to Moscow despite its long ties to the American military and hosting thousands of U.S. troops.

The conference highlights the challenge the United Arab Emirates has faced in trying to convince already-critical climate scientists, activists and others that it can host the U.N. Conference of the Parties — where COP gets its name.

Though all smiles at Monday's conference, al-Jaber has acknowledged the withering criticism he's faced. On Saturday, he offered a full-throated defense of his country hosting the talks he's slated to lead, dismissing critics who “just go on the attack without knowing anything, without knowing who we are.”

“For too long, this industry has been viewed as part of the problem, that it’s not doing enough and in some cases even blocking progress,” al-Jaber told the conference. “This is your opportunity to show the world that, in fact, you are central to the solution.”

Following immediately after al-Jaber, OPEC Secretary-General Haitham al-Ghais praised his speech and defended the oil industry.

“We see calls to stop investing in oil. We believe this is counterproductive,” al-Ghais said. “The cornerstone of global economic prosperity today is energy security.”

Al-Jaber said 20 oil and gas companies had pledged to be “net zero” by or before 2050 and eliminate routine gas flaring by 2030. However, the industry would still be producing the oil and gas that release the carbon dioxide that traps heat in the atmosphere.

Al-Jaber, a 50-year-old longtime climate envoy, has been behind tens of billions of dollars spent or pledged toward renewable energy by this federation of seven sheikhdoms on the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Jaber and his supporters — including U.S. climate envoy and former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is on a trip to the UAE this week — say that's a sign he can lead the COP28 talks.

Meanwhile, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said at the Abu Dhabi conference that an Iraqi-Turkish oil pipeline that had been halted for months would see its flow restart this week.

“As of today, the pipeline is ready to operate,” he said. “And within this week we will start operating the Iraqi-Turkey pipeline, which after the resuming of oil operations, will be able to supply half a million barrels to the oil market.”

He did not elaborate on what the terms would be for the 970-kilometer (600-mile) pipeline, which is Iraq's largest. In March, Iraqi officials won an international arbitration case to halt oil exports from the semiautonomous Kurdish region to Ceyhan, Turkey, on the Mediterranean Sea.

Iraqi and regional Kurdish government officials did not immediately acknowledge the pipeline reopening, though Iraq's oil minister has said it was anticipated, without elaborating. Gulf Keystone Petroleum Ltd., which operates Shaikan oil field in Kurdish region of Iraq, saw its stock jump up by over 20% in trading Monday on the London Stock Exchange on news of the pipeline restarting.

Bayraktar said the pipeline also sustained damage in the recent earthquake and flooding in Turkey that had been repaired.

___

Follow AP's coverage of the climate and environment: https://apnews.com/climate-and-environment


Oil Latest: Industry Is Part of Energy Change, Executives Say

Anthony Di Paola and Salma El Wardany
Mon, October 2, 2023



(Bloomberg) -- Ministers and oil industry chiefs are gathering for the biggest energy conference in the Middle East as crude heads toward $100 a barrel. Whether prices can hold at these levels and the outlook for OPEC+ supply cuts are among topics that will be discussed from Monday.

But this year, climate is looming large over the forum. Delegates at the annual Adipec summit in Abu Dhabi, which has been dominated by oil in its long-running history, will devote a lot of their time to the energy transition. The meeting comes just two months ahead of the United Arab Emirates also hosting the crucial COP28 conference.

All times UAE

Oil Firms Must Be Heard in COP28, Executives Say (5:04 p.m.)

The oil industry is part of the energy transition and its voice should be heard at COP28, executives including Halliburton Co. CEO Jeff Miller, Liam Mallon of Exxon Mobil and Gordon Birrell of BP, said in a panel discussion.

Companies need to upgrade downstream operations to lower emissions, while a transformation of upstream operations is also required, they said.

Electrification of operations, carbon-capture and emissions detection can support the decarbonization process, they said.

Shell CEO Says Investors Will Decide If Low Carbon Is Viable (2:50 p.m.)

Shareholder needs to make a judgment on whether the low-carbon energy options that Shell Plc is pursing are viable, Chief Executive Officer Wael Sawan said.

“We need to be able to cover our cost of capital and make a return for our shareholders,” he said.

Oil Industry Is Central for Energy Transition: COP28 Chief (4:23 p.m.)

Large swathes of the global oil industry will pledge to eliminate methane emissions and gas flaring by the end of the decade, the president of the COP28 climate summit said.

More than 20 private and state oil and gas producers have made the commitment alongside setting targets to reach net zero by 2050, Sultan Al Jaber said. He did not name the companies.

Adnoc Testing Geothermal Energy for Cooling (3:24 p.m.)

Adnoc, the main oil producer in the United Arab Emirates, is testing using geothermal energy for district cooling in a preliminary program, as the country seeks to diversify energy sources.

The company is also studying capturing carbon in acquifers, said Musabbeh Al Kaabi, executive director of low-carbon solutions and international growth. Adnoc said Sunday it is doubling its carbon-capture target in a push toward net zero emissions.

UAE Warns About Lack of Oil Investment as It Boosts Own Capacity (2:30 p.m.)

The global oil industry has been losing capacity in the last few years due to a lack of investment, said United Arab Emirates Energy Minister Suhail al Mazrouei.

The minister rebuffed concerns about rising oil prices, arguing that crude needs to be high enough to justify making new investments. The UAE will expand its own capacity to 5 million barrels a day by 2027, Mazrouei said. From 2025, OPEC+ output quotas will be based on the latest capacity numbers, not outdated figures, he said.

Non-OPEC+ Oil Supply Is Outstripping Demand Growth: Yergin (2:11 p.m.)

Oil production in countries that are not part of the OPEC+ alliance, such as the US and Canada, is growing faster than demand, Dan Yergin, vice chairman at S&P Global Inc., said in a Bloomberg TV interview. Still, continued supply curbs by Saudi Arabia can be worrying because of concerns over global economic growth.

India Is Telling Oil Producers That Prices are Too High (1:54 p.m.)

India has “a constant dialogue with all producing countries where we keep raising this point” that crude prices are too high, Pankaj Jain, secretary at the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, said in an interview.

His country isn’t comfortable with current oil prices, which are near $93 a barrel in London, and “we need more production now,” Jain said. While India acknowledges OPEC’s right to decide how much they produce, the group’s cuts have increased prices.

“High prices lead to demand destruction,” Jain said. “Our viewpoint is we are finding these prices difficult to pass, difficult to continue to meet our energy needs.”

BP’s Interim CEO Reiterates No Change in Strategy (1:30 p.m.)

There will be no change in BP Plc’s strategy that was laid out in February, following the abrupt departure of Bernard Looney as head of the company, interim CEO Murray Auchincloss said.

“That’s a strategy that’s endorsed by the management team and endorsed by the board and a person leaving does not change the strategy,” he said. “We remain firmly committed to it.”

Looney resigned last month after admitting he had not fully disclosed relationships with colleagues. BP’s head of US operations, David Lawler, has also quit to pursue other opportunities outside the company.

Also read: BP Ends Its Week of CEO Chaos With Many Unanswered Questions

Iraq Official Says Ceyhan Pipeline Can’t Restart Yet (1:11 p.m.)

An Iraqi official cast doubt on a statement from Turkey that a key pipeline bringing oil from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean coast can resume this week.

Flows can’t restart until commercial and financial issues have been resolved, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. Earlier on Monday, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said the pipeline will resume operations this week. The oil conduit, which can carry almost half a million barrels of crude a day, has been offline since March amid a payment dispute between Ankara and Baghdad.

OPEC+ Has ‘Right Policy’: UAE Energy Minister (11:22 a.m.)

OPEC+ currently has the “right policy” for the oil market, the UAE’s Mazrouei said in an interview at the Adipec conference in Abu Dhabi.

Prices will increase if there’s no further investment in the industry, he said, adding that OPEC isn’t setting a price target.

Iraq Oil Pipeline Will Resume This Week (11:08 a.m.)

A crude oil pipeline running from Iraq’s Kurdistan region to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey will resume operations this week, Turkish Energy Minister Alparslan Bayraktar said.

The pipeline was shut earlier this year after an arbitration court ordered Ankara to pay about $1.5 billion in damages to Iraq for transporting oil from Kurdistan without Baghdad’s approval.

Citi Says Oil to Collapse to Low $70s in 2024 (9:53 a.m.)

Brent crude will collapse to the low $70s a barrel next year as the global market swings back to a surplus, according to Citigroup Inc. The shift reflects “more oil coming into the market,” analysts including Ed Morse said in a quarterly report.

“Higher prices in the near term could make for more downside for prices next year,” the Citi analysts said.

Oil Markets Will Continue to Tighten, Halliburton Says (9:18 am)

There’s a lot of support for oil prices and the market will continue to tighten, Halliburton Co. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Miller said in a Bloomberg TV interview at the Adipec conference.

The company is returning cash for our shareholders, he said.

Also read: Halliburton Sees US Gas Glut Freeing Up Gear for Oil Explorers

Deeper OPEC+ Production Curbs Unlikely: Eni (9:00 am)

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies are unlikely to deepen their production cuts, Eni SpA CEO Claudio Descalzi said in a Bloomberg TV interview. Crude prices in London rose almost 10% last month as ongoing supply curbs squeeze the market.

A lack of investments in projects is the main issue for oil, while demand remains strong, Descalzi said.

--With assistance from Nayla Razzouk, Ben Bartenstein, Leen Al-Rashdan, Salma El Wardany and Yousef Gamal El-Din.

Bloomberg Businessweek




3 Oil Companies Leading in Renewable Energy Investment

Nilanjan Banerjee
Mon, October 2, 2023 



Economies across the world are gradually transitioning to cleaner energy sources. There has been a steady increase in pressure on energy companies to act on climate change on multiple fronts. Most analysts believe that although renewable energy will meet future energy needs, oil and natural gas demand will not be completely wiped out.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration, in its Annual Energy Outlook 2023, revealed that through 2050, renewables will increasingly match power demand. Thus, there are abundant opportunities for energy companies with a footprint in oil and gas resources or transporting commodities and the renewable energy space. Three such companies are Shell plc SHEL, Eni SpA E and Enbridge Inc ENB, which are well-poised to gain in the long run.
3 Stocks

Growing renewable business at a rapid pace is among the core strategies of Shell. In the renewable energy front, Shell has roughly 50 gigawatts (GW) of renewable generation capacity, considering projects either in operation, under construction or in the pipeline. Thus, for renewables and energy solutions, SHEL is investing actively in solar energy, wind energy, electric vehicle charging and others.

To implement the production of renewable energy, Plenitude, a benefit company, was established and is being controlled by Eni. To counter the decarbonization challenge, renewable energy generation is among the key strategies of Eni. This is reflected in its ambitious goal for more than 15 GW of installed renewable energy generating capacity by 2030.

Enbridge has been investing in wind farms, solar energy, geothermal projects and power transmission developments, reflecting the company's strong focus on renewables. Considering all the renewable energy projects that are either operational or under construction, Enbridge boasts a net of 2,173 megawatts of zero-emission energy generating capacity.

THEM IS FIGHTING WORDS
Ex-UN climate chief has 'lost patience' with fossil fuel industry

AFP
Thu, September 21, 2023 

Speaking at the "Climate Changes Everything" summit at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Christiana Figueres, among the key negotiators of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, said that the industry had failed to put "out of the park" profits back into developing renewables (Ezequiel BECERRA)


The UN's former climate chief said Thursday she had "lost patience" with fossil fuel companies and that they should steer clear of crunch talks in Dubai if the industry refuses to be part of the solution.

Speaking at the "Climate Changes Everything" conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Christiana Figueres, among the key negotiators of the landmark 2015 Paris Agreement, said that the industry had failed to put "out-of-the-park" profits back into developing renewables.

"Instead of doing everything that they do and applying their amazing engineering capacity, they've been actually doing the opposite," she said.

Oil and gas companies have been slowing down their decarbonization commitments, paying out handsome dividends to shareholders and lobbying governments to reverse climate commitments.

Asked whether to welcome them at the two-week talks in Dubai starting in late November, Figueres said "it should depend on whether they are there to help and to accelerate decarbonization," or "whether they are literally operating against those objectives."

The issue of the industry's participation is a hugely contentious point for the climate action community, even as the president-designate of the talks, Sultan Al Jaber, is himself an oil executive.

Figueres said the sector from which the COP president comes was not as relevant as being true to the mandate, and in this regard, she offered some cautious praise.

While she was initially skeptical Al Jaber was separating his country's national interest from global interest, "lately I have seen he is moving in that direction, which I celebrate.

"I think he has understood the political international responsibility, multilateral responsibility that comes with that presidency."

Jaber addressed a UN climate summit on Wednesday, acknowledging "the phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable” and "essential."

ia/sct/jh

‘Fossil fuel industry speaks with forked tongue’:***

Al Gore tells Big Oil ‘get out of the way’ in climate battle

Louise Boyle
Thu, September 21, 2023 at 11:03 AM MDT·4 min read

Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States, speaks onstage at The New York Times Climate Forward Summit 2023 at The Times Center on September 21, 2023 in New York City (Getty Images)


Al Gore unleashed on the fossil fuel industry for engaging in “massive fraud” for decades and called on the powerful multinationals to “get out of the way” of those fighting the climate crisis.

The former vice president is the latest prominent political figure to break a long-held taboo, and directly name the fossil fuel industry as core perpetrator of creating - and continuing - the global crisis.

“I was one of many who felt for a long time that the fossil fuel companies, or at least many of them, were sincere in saying that they wanted to be a meaningful part of bringing solutions to this crisis,” Mr Gore told the New York Times at its Climate Forward event in Manhattan on Thursday, held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

“But I think that it’s now clear they are not. Fossil fuel industry speaks with forked tongue.”

Mr Gore noted how the industry has been able to infiltrate the political process at every level including the United Nations annual climate summit.

He said that this year, the UN had gone “too far” in naming Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, as president of Cop28 in the United Arab Emirates this December.

“That’s just like taking the disguise off,” Mr Gore said.

“The fossil fuel companies, given their record today, are far more effective at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions.”

He pointed to how the fossil fuel industry spent just 1 per cent of overall profits on the clean energy transition last year.

“It is a ruse,” he said. “And many of the largest companies have engaged in massive fraud. For some decades now, they’ve followed the playbook of the tobacco industry, using these very sophisticated, lavishly-financed strategies for deceiving people.

He added: “I don’t think it’s fair to expect them to solve this when they’re incentivised to do otherwise. But I think it’s more than fair to ask them to get out of the way, and stop blocking the efforts of everybody else to solve this crisis. I think it’s time to call them out.”

Despite the challenges, and the worsening climate impacts, the former VP said there were encouraging signs like the speed of transition to clean energy in the power sector, and the growing number of electric vehicles.

“There used to be an old cliche, denial is just a river in Egypt, and you could add that despair is just a tire in the trunk,” he said.

“Despair is just another form of denial, and we have to resist it. We don’t have time to wallow in despair, we’ve got work to do. We can do this.”

Mr Gore’s fiery denouncement of the fossil fuel industry was part of a shift among some leaders in public statements about the climate crisis.

It was similarly evident on the floor of the UN headquarters on Wednesday at the so-called “no-nonsense” Climate Ambition Summit – an event championing the “movers and doers” taking accelerated action to cut emissions.

Presidents and prime ministers along with state and local leaders were invited to speak, including California Governor Gavin Newsom, who excoriated the fossil fuel industry for its decades of deception.

“It’s time for us to be a lot more clear. This climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis,” he said, to applause and cheers in the chamber.

Ms Mottley also laid responsibility at the door of the fossil fuel industry, noting it had benefited from $7 trillion in subsidies last year, along with naming financial institutions and the transport sector.

“If you don’t take corrective action now, you will have to tell us where you’re keeping all your scientific research to relocate you and your families to the planet Mars or Pluto,” Ms Mottley said.

Petro Gustavo, president of major fossil fuel exporter Colombia, gave a stark assessment.

“The real goal that all countries should have is aiming for zero in terms of production and supply of coal, gas and oil. If we keep as we are on our current track, it will be suicide,” he said.
***(LIKE 'OFF THE RESERVATION' THIS IS RACIST)

Svitlana Romanko: UN climate summit offers chance to confront Russian fossil fuels, climate crisis

Svitlana Romanko
Fri, September 22, 2023 

As world leaders gather for meetings at the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit, the urgency of addressing the climate crisis cannot be overstated. At the same time, we must confront Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, where innocent lives are being lost daily.

Over-dependence on Russian fossil fuels has already created severe energy insecurity, helped wreck the climate, and continued to threaten democracy.

Russia's war connects these seemingly disparate issues, and the role of the international community and multinational companies in indirectly supporting violence by facilitating Russia’s fossil fuel industry must be addressed.

The U.S., as a leader on the global stage, must spearhead efforts to create full and transparent sanctions against Russia’s fossil fuel industry. Equally important is holding U.S. companies like Halliburton accountable for their role in sustaining this industry.

The Climate Ambition Summit convened by U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres is held at the U.N. headquarters in New York, U.S., on Sept. 20, 2023.

 (Photo by Kyodo News via Getty Images)

As we discuss international climate action, it is essential to recognize that real progress means keeping Russian fossil fuels in the ground. Cutting down oil and gas production in Russia should be a priority for both ending the war in Ukraine and mitigating climate change.

While climate change threatens the planet, the expansion of Russian fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly liquefied natural gas (LNG), poses a dire threat to energy security, climate stability, and global peace.

As U.S. President Joe Biden arrives in New York, the U.S. must strengthen sanctions on Russia to halt the growth of this infrastructure. We also can’t ignore the fact that LNG expansion in the U.S. will also lock us in gas export dependency if the renewable energy revolution is not fast-tracked.

Furthermore, Russia has amassed about $445 billion for its exports of fossil fuels, and G20 countries that cause 80% of world emissions have paid $314 billion of this sum as of Sept. 1.

Ukraine has also called for major financial institutions like JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and HSBC to be prosecuted for war crimes for allegedly financing companies that trade oil with Russia. TotalEnergies, a France-based multinational corporation, has faced accusations of complicity in war crimes due to its involvement in Russia’s energy sector.



In particular, the recent exposure of multinational fracking corporation Halliburton sending over $7 million worth of oil refining hardware to Russia highlights the need for immediate action, not empty promises.

These revelations cast a shadow over the role of Western companies in the ongoing violence in Ukraine.

The time to move forward and build out clean-energy solutions to the climate crisis is now, at the same time as Russia’s fossil fuel-propelled war is raging in Ukraine. It is not enough to merely express concern; we must take concrete steps to stop these crises.

To bridge the gap between climate action and accountability for Ukraine, we propose a two-fold approach.

Strengthening sanctions and oversight

The U.S. and its allies must enhance sanctions against Russian critical industries, especially oil and gas extraction and exports, which are key sources of revenue to fund the war.

Embargoes and secondary sanctions on entities involved in cooperation with the Russian oil and gas industry are only partial thus far and are limited in effect.

In the U.S., legal action is expected to close the “refining loophole,” which allows Russian oil to be laundered and flow into the U.S., by banning the import of oil products produced from Russian crude in countries like India and Turkey.

For its part, the EU is working on a 12th sanctions package, which should include an embargo on Russian LNG.

Regulatory bodies should intensify oversight of financial institutions' transactions with entities connected to the Russian government.

Transparency and accountability should be at the forefront of these efforts, and it must be the responsibility of national governments to monitor and hold firms operating under their oversight responsible.


Responsible corporate conduct

Multinational corporations operating in Russia must engage in responsible business conduct. This includes conducting due diligence to ensure their operations do not indirectly support war crimes or human rights violations.

Companies that fail to uphold ethical standards should face legal consequences and reputational damage.

New York Climate Week provides an opportunity for world leaders, corporations, and individuals to align their actions with the principles of justice, peace, and environmental stewardship and start their full-speed shift to a renewable energy future.

Empty promises will no longer suffice. To secure a sustainable future, we must simultaneously tackle the climate crisis and demand accountability for those inadvertently financing violence in Ukraine.

As we embark on a journey toward a greener, more just world, let us ensure that our steps are marked by integrity, responsibility, and a genuine commitment to the well-being of all, both on our planet and in regions marred by war and conflict.

The people of the world demand not only words but actions from their leaders to save the climate and create peace, and I will be keeping up the pressure to make them act at this pivotal moment of history.

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