Back around 1989 and the fall of the Berlin Wall the cartoonist Tolles, then from Buffalo, NY, produced a two panel cartoon.  The first panel showed an areal view to the Pentagon with the caption: "Planners at the Pentagon are working hard on how to bring the Soviet Union down."  The next panel showed a quadragon version of the pentagon with the caption: "Planners at the newly downsized quadragon are working hard on how to bring the Soviet Union back!"  That captured it better than any pundit I read.  There was panic in the M-I Complex when Democrats started asking: "Where is the peace dividend?"

If sanity be culturally normative, then by the norms of this culture I claim insanity.

Not just capitalist but neoliberal too.

...Medvedev holds the same neoliberal and meritocratic values as his G8 peers; he is no more of a socialist or even a social democrat. In a telling passage in his inaugural speech, he said he wanted more Russians "to swell the ranks of the middle class and gain access to good education and healthcare". There was no suggestion that single mothers, the elderly, the poor and unskilled workers might also deserve decent services. No word either about stopping the decline of state schools and hospitals and their accelerating marketisation, as parents and patients have to pay for what used to be free while private institutions emerge to cream off the best staff. Everything is subordinated to the rightwing yuppie view that only the middle classes matter, since they (ie people like me) are the motor for growth and democracy.

Jonathan Steele, At last, a true moderniser in Moscow. Why punish him?, Guardian, Monday July 14 2008

Don't forget that there are two Ukrainian gas businesses:

• the official one, whereby the national Ukrainian gas company gets a given volume of gas (around 20-25bcm/y) in exchange for transit fees for Russian exports further West. This is a mostly fair deal for both sides, although it allows for lots of funny accounting

• the shady one, where shady intermediaries linked to Gazprom sell to shady buyers in Ukraine, which onsell to friends and other clients at lowish prices and take a nice cut along the way, shared with the Russian intermediary. Gazprom gets very little money on that chunk of the business, and final customers get a more or less good price depending on how friendly they are with the intermediaries.

Clans fight permanently to be the preferred party to that second deal, and the clans that have control over the national Ukrainian gas company can use that position to blackmail Gazprom, or rather those of its Russian managers involved in that trade, into better side deals. Occasioanlly, those 'side' facts spill into the open.

There is also some fighting over the first deal, as gas prices go up while transit prices don't seem to need to change as much, and Gazprom gets unhappy about the original deal (although note that in 2006, it was Ukraine that chose to re-open the issue despite then benefitting form a 5-year contract frawmework with favorable prices in that respect, ie a guaranteed volume of gas for free for 5 years).

So imagine Shell coming with its gas at the Russian-Ukrainian border.  It will be willing to pay market rates for gas transit - to the Ukrainian gas company. But the gas can still be siphoned out by Ukrainians, becuase they can - the question then become, (i) why would they do that (because gas is valuable and they can onsell it), (ii) who can do something about it (the Ukrianian authorities, but could luck with that), and (iii) what can Shell do (they have nothing to offer, unlike the Gazprom managers who can offer to allocate company income for personal gain)?

Like I said, it would quickly put Ukraine in an interesting spot, and Gazprom in an even more interestign one, because they (well, again, its managers) would actually have solutions that would get Shell some money... if not the amounts they's expect.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

I agree that incompetence is often underestimated. But how does this mean it can be changed more easily?

If politicians, experts and pundits are incompetent we can replace them with ourselves. Just gimme a call in 10 years and you'll see. ;)

Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

The obvious problem being that "too late" may come at a later point in time for Big Oil than for the rest of us...

- Jake

Ceterum censeo Chicago esse delendam