Gefira #21 Geopolitics and big money are about gas not oil

Description

Gefira #21 is only about gas. Alternative wind and solar energy sources attract a lot of attention from the media, yet investors and geopolitical strategists should be more interested in gas. Although financial analysts believe that the future belongs to electricity, which will be produced using wind and sun, data still shows that fossil fuels dominate the energy market. Clean energy is primarily about gas, which emits 55 percent less carbon dioxide when combusted in a new, efficient natural gas power plant. Europe’s gas and oil resources are depleted, so the old continent depends more and more on its neighbours for energy. Under the leadership of Brussels non elected commissioners, relations between Turkey, Russia and other European countries have deteriorated. Russia, as Europe’s major gas supplier, holds more power over the continent than ever before, and Gazprom has become one of the most powerful companies in the world. We will explain why European geopolitics is contingent on gas and how it can lead to a war between Cyprus and Turkey, or even Israel and Lebanon.

Gazprom more influential in Europe’s gas market than Brussels

In 2002 President Putin appointed Alexei Miller, a former member of the Committee for External Relations of the Saint Petersburg Mayor’s Office, chairman of Gazprom’s board of directors. Vladimir Putin rose to power during the early nineties when he worked in Saint Petersburg and witnessed Boris Yeltsin’s policy of dismantling the So-viet Union. At that time Russia’s resources were up for grabs for Western companies, life expectation declined and a group of Jewish oligarchs, like Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky pulled the strings in the Kremlin. Russia collapsed while Western politicians applauded the political and economic reforms carried out by Boris Yeltsin.

Vladimir Putin, embittered by the plundering of the country which was carried out under the pretext of introducing a free market economy and neoliberal policy, set himself a task of nullifying a lot of previous transactions and preventing wealth from being transferred from the Russian state to Western Companies and Russian and Jewish oligarchs. Alexei Miller managed to recover gas assets. For example, Gazprom acquired the majority stake in the Royal Dutch Shell-led oil and gas project Sakhalin-2. Shell had to surrender, acting under the threat of being forced to pay a multibillion-dollar fine for environmental damage and out of fear of having its licenses revoked by the Kremlin.