Germany’s Energy Suicide: An
Autopsy
By Pepe Escobar
September 12, 2022:
Information Clearing House
--When
Green fanatic Robert Habeck, posing as Germany’s
Economy Minister, said earlier this week “we
should expect the worst” in terms of energy
security, he conveniently forgot to spell out
how the whole farce is a Made in Germany cum
Made in Brussels crisis.
Flickers of intelligence
at least still glow in rare Western latitudes,
as indispensable strategic analyst William
Engdahl, author of A Century of Oil, released a
sharp, concise summary revealing the
skeletons in the glamour closet.
Everyone with a brain
following the ghastly Eurocrat machinations in
Brussels was aware of the main plot – yet hardly
anyone among average EU citizens. Habeck,
Chancellor “Liver Sausage” Scholz, the European
Commission (EC) Green Energy VP Timmermans, EC
dominatrix Ursula von der Leyen, they are all
involved.
In a nutshell: as Engdahl
describes it, this is about “the EU plan to
de-industrialize one of the most
energy-efficient industrial concentrations on
the planet.”
That’s a practical
translation of the UN Green Agenda 2030 – which
happens to be metastasized into crypto Bond
villain Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset – now renamed
“Great Narrative”.
The whole scam started
way back in the early 2000s: I remember it
vividly, as Brussels used to be my European base
in the early “war on terror” years.
At the time, the talk of
the town was the “European energy policy”. The
dirty secret of such policy is that the EC, “
advised” by JP MorganChase as well as the usual
mega speculative hedge funds, went all out into
what Engdahl describes as “a complete
deregulation of the European market for natural
gas.”
That was sold to the
Lugenpresse (“lying media”) as “liberalization”.
In practice, that’s savage, unregulated casino
capitalism, with the “free” market fixing prices
while dumping
long-term contracts – such as the ones
struck with Gazprom.
How to
decarbonize and destabilize
The process was
turbo-charged in 2016, when the last gasp of the
Obama administration encouraged massive export
of LNG out of the U.S.’s huge shale gas
production.
For that one needs to
build LNG terminals. Each terminal takes as much
as 5 years to build. Within the EU, Poland and
Holland went for it from the start.
As much as Wall Street in
the past invented a “ paper oil” speculative
market, this time they went for a speculative
“paper gas” market.
Engdahl details how “the
EU Commission and their Green Deal agenda to
‘decarbonize’ the economy by 2050, eliminating
oil, gas and coal fuels, provided the ideal trap
that has led to the explosive spike in EU gas
prices since 2021.”
The creation of this
“single” market control implied forcing illegal
rule changes on Gazprom. In practice, Big
Finance and Big Energy – which totally control
anything that passes for “EU policy” in Brussels
– invented a new pricing system parallel to the
long-term, stable prices of Russian pipeline
gas.
By 2019, an avalanche of
Eurocrat energy “ directives” by the EC – the
only thing these people do – had established a
totally deregulated gas market trading, setting
the prices for natural gas in the EU even as
Gazprom remained the largest supplier.
As lots of virtual
trading hubs in gas futures contracts started
popping up across the EU, enter the Dutch
TTF (Title Transfer Facility). By 2020 the
TTF was established as the real EU gas
benchmark.
As Engdahl points out,
“TTF is a virtual platform of trades in futures
gas contracts between banks and other financial
investors. Outside, of course, of any regulated
exchange.
So LNG prices soon
started to be set by futures trades in the TTF
hub, which crucially happens to be owned by the
Dutch government – “the same government
destroying its farms for a fraudulent nitrogen
pollution claim.”
By any means necessary
Big Finance had to get rid of Gazprom as a
reliable source to allow powerful financial
interests behind the Green Deal racket to
dominate the LNG market.
Engdahl evokes a case
very few know about across Europe: “On May 12,
2022 although Gazprom deliveries to the Soyuz
gas pipeline through Ukraine were uninterrupted
for almost three months of conflict, despite
Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, the
NATO-controlled Zelensky regime in Kiev closed a
major Russian pipeline through Lugansk, that was
bringing Russian gas both to his Ukraine as well
as EU states, declaring it would remain closed
until Kiev gets full control of its pipeline
system that runs through the two Donbass
republics. That section of the Ukraine Soyuz
line cut one-third of gas via Soyuz to the EU.
It certainly did not help the EU economy at a
time Kiev was begging for more weapons from
those same NATO countries. Soyuz opened in 1980
under the Soviet Union bringing gas from the
Orenburg gas field.”
Hybrid War, the
energy chapter
On the interminable soap
opera involving the Nord Stream 1 turbine, the
crucial fact is that Canada deliberately refused
to deliver the repaired turbine to Gazprom – its
owner – but instead sent it to Siemens Germany,
where it is now. Siemens Germany is essentially
under American control. Both the German and
Canadian governments refuse to grant a legally
binding sanction exemption for the transfer to
Russia.
That was the straw that
broke the (Gazprom) camel’s back. Gazprom and
the Kremlin concluded that if sabotage was the
name of the game, they couldn’t care less
whether Germany received zero gas via Nord
Stream 1 (with brand new Nord Stream 2, ready to
go, blocked by strictly political reasons).
Kremlin spokesman Dmity
Peskov took pains to stress “problems in [gas]
deliveries arose due to sanctions that have been
imposed on our country and a number of companies
by Western countries (…) There are no other
reasons behind supply issues.”
Peskov had to remind
anyone with a brain that it’s not Gazprom’s
fault if “the Europeans (…) make a decision to
refuse to service their equipment” which they
are contractually obligated to do. The fact is
the whole Nord Stream 1 operation hinges on “one
piece of equipment that needs serious
maintenance.”
Deputy Prime Minister
Alexander Novak, who knows one or two things
about the energy business, cleared up the
technicalities:
“The entire problem lies
precisely on [the EU’s] side, because all the
conditions of the repair contract have been
completely violated, along with the terms of
shipping of the equipment.”
All that is inscribed
into what Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov
describes as “a total war declared against us”,
which is “being waged in hybrid forms, in all
areas”, with “the degree of animosity of our
opponents – of our enemies” being “enormous,
extraordinary.”
So none of this has
anything to do with “Putin weaponizing energy”.
It was Berlin and Brussels – mere messengers of
Big Finance – which weaponized the supply of
European energy on behalf of a financial racket,
and against the interests of European industry
and consumers.
Beware of the
toxic trio
Engdahl has
summarized how, “by systematically
sanctioning or closing gas deliveries
from long-term, low cost pipelines to
the EU, gas speculators via the Dutch
TTP have been able to use every hiccup
or energy shock in the world, whether a
record drought in China or the conflict
in Ukraine, to export restrictions in
the USA, to bid the EU wholesale gas
prices through all bounds.”
Translation:
casino capitalism at its finest.
And it gets
worse, when it comes to electricity.
There is a so-called EU Electricity
Market Reform in progress. According to
it, producers of electricity – from
solar or wind – automatically receive
“the same price for their ‘renewable’
electricity they sell to the power
companies for the grid as the highest
cost, i.e. natural gas.” No wonder the
cost of electricity in Germany for 2022
increased by 860% – and rising.
Baerbock
incessantly parrots that German energy
independence cannot be secured until the
country is “liberated from fossil
fuels.”
According to
Green fanaticism, to build the Green
Agenda it’s imperative to completely
eliminate gas, oil and nuclear power,
which happen to be the only reliable
energy sources as it stands.
And it’s here
that we see the toxic trio Habeck/Baerbock/von
der Leyen ready for their close up. They
pose as saviors of Europe preaching that
the only way out is to invest fortunes
in – unreliable – wind and solar power:
the “answer” from Providence to a gas
price debacle manufactured by none other
than Big Finance, Green fanaticism and
Eurocrat “leadership”.
Now tell that to
struggling pan-European households whose
bills will surge to a whopping,
collective $2 trillion as General Winter
knocks on the door.
Pepe's
latest book is
2030. Follow him on
Facebook.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Reader financed- No
Advertising - No Government Grants -
No Algorithm - This
Is Independent