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Heavy shelling as rebels keep pressure on Ukraine’s Debaltseve

VUHLEHIRSK, Ukraine (Reuters) – Separatists are keeping up attacks on the strategic railway junction of Debaltseve despite a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, a Kiev military spokesman said on Monday, and witnesses reported heavy shelling in the area. "The illegal armed groups are not supporting the ceasefire," military spokesman Anatoly Stelmakh told reporters, adding that the Russian-backed rebels were using Grad rockets and tanks to attack government forces holding the town. "The number of attacks on Debaltseve has even increased in comparison to previous days and they are using all types of weapons," he said. "The terrorists have been given the order to take Debaltseve at all cost." A Reuters correspondent at Vuhlehirsk, about 10 km (some six miles) to the west of Debaltseve, reported heavy shelling from the direction of the town, with blasts around every 10 seconds. Underscoring the fragility of the ceasefire, which was negotiated by Ukraine, […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Euro up but on edge before crunch meeting on Greece

LONDON (Reuters) – The euro edged up on Monday ahead of a meeting of euro zone finance ministers that investors hope will find common ground to support Greece beyond its current bailout program and keep it inside the currency bloc. The single currency has gained steadily through a nervous month of deadlock between the new government in Athens and its international creditors in Europe and at the IMF. That, and the relative calm on debt markets in Spain, Italy and Portugal, suggests euro zone leaders might be risking less in letting Greece leave the euro now than they would have done during a previous standoff in 2012. But at least for now, analysts seem more inclined to attribute the lack of a significant sell-off to confidence that ministers will find a way to satisfy the complicated political agendas on both sides. "This can quickly turn sour for the euro […]

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Putin Lets Russian Consumers Feel Pain as Economy Succumbs

A customer holds bread rolls as he stands with a shopping cart in the baked goods area inside a Perekrestok supermarket in Moscow. Consumers are retrenching after the ruble lost almost half of its value against the dollar in the past 12 months. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg (Bloomberg) — Russian households are bearing the brunt of the blowback from the crisis in Ukraine and a tailspin in oil prices, setting the stage for the biggest drop in consumption in more than two decades that will deepen the country’s recession. Crushed by a 44 percent slump in the ruble in the past year as prices soar, retail sales are set for what Otkritie Capital predicts will be their biggest decline since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, when savings were wiped out and households endured food shortages and hyperinflation. That’s unnerved consumers like Svetlana Korotkova, who’s stockpiling cereals and […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Ukraine Cease-Fire Largely Being Respected

ENLARGE Ukrainian soldiers make their way on the road leading to the embattled town of Debaltseve on Saturday, after a cease-fire came into effect. Photo: Getty Images The cease-fire between Ukrainian government forces and Russia-backed separatists was largely being observed on its first day despite sporadic exchanges of fire, the head of an international monitoring mission said Sunday. Ertugrul Apakan, the chief monitor of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, said in a news conference in Kiev that the cease-fire was observed throughout east Ukraine overnight and during the first half of Sunday, with the exception of the area around the city of Debaltseve, where fighting had been heaviest in recent days. The separatists claim that the area should be under their control under the cease-fire agreement, and that thousands of government forces were surrounded there. Kiev officials deny the claim of […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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A Flawed Plan B for Greece

ENLARGE Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras addresses a news conference after a European Union leaders summit in Brussels on Thursday. Photo: Reuters It is a mark of the gulf that still separates Greece and the rest of the eurozone that an agreement last week simply to engage in “technical discussions” was hailed as a step forward in the search for a solution to the country’s debt crisis. It was certainly a climb-down by the new Greek government, which had previously ruled out any negotiations with its “troika” of international lenders. And it followed previous climb-downs: Athens is now asking for debt restructuring rather than write-downs, and it now says it will abide by 70% of the reforms required under its current bailout program. But talking signifies nothing. Even this latest step was only possible on the basis of a fudge after an initial attempt by eurozone finance ministers to […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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Peak Oil and Scotland

As it is a finite resource, by definition, we will run out of Oil at some point. Around the year 2000, Scotland (and the UK Continental Shelf as a whole) reached “peak oil” (Oil and Gas UK 2014).  So what is “peak oil”, and what are the implications of it? Peak oil is the point at which the highest rate of oil production is achieved, and beyond which oil production enters terminal decline. This could be due to many reasons – be it due to conscious policy choices by world governments to leave oil in the ground, or it becoming impossible or undesirable to extract what oil remains. The reason it is so difficult to anticipate when peak oil will occur is because new technology becomes available which either makes it possible to extract more difficult and remote fields, or it becomes possible to get more oil from fields […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple
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William Catton’s warning

William Catton Jr. hadshot William Catton Jr., author of the seminal volume about our human destiny,  Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change , died last month at age 88. Catton believed that industrial civilization had sown the seeds of its own demise and that humanity’s seeming dominance of the biosphere is only a prelude to decline. His work foreshadowed later works such as Joseph Tainter’s  The Collapse of Complex Societies , Richard Heinberg’s  The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies , and Jared Diamond’s  Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive . In  Overshoot  Catton wrote: "We must learn to relate personally to what may be called ‘the ecological facts of life.’ We must see that those facts are affecting our lives far more importantly and permanently than the events that make the headlines." He published those words in 1980, and now, it […]

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The crash in the price of oil may change the oil market – a look at the IEA’s “Oil Medium-Term Market Report 2015”

On Tuesday 10 February at 13:00 GMT the IEA released its “Oil Medium-Term Market Report 2015 ”. The day before the release I was contacted by Jens Ergon at Sveriges Television (“Sweden’s Television, SVT) who wanted to get my opinion on the report. I had a number of hours to read through the 140 pages of the version provided to media prior to the report’s official release. This meant that I could comment on the report immediately it was released. SVT has now reported some of those comments in an article that Jens Ergon has written, “The Price Crash Will Reshape The Oil Market”. The subtitle is, “American oil boom behind the falling price. But opinions vary widely on the future of oil.” Let’s now go through the article together and I will make a few comments as we do so. “The comprehensive fall in the price of oil […]

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Oil Prices Gain on Hopes for European Demand

Oil prices rose Friday, with Brent climbing above $60 a barrel for the first time this year, as improving economic data from Europe boosted hopes for crude demand. Brent, the global benchmark, closed up 3.8% to $61.52 a barrel on ICE Future Europe, its highest price since Dec. 23. The price of U.S. benchmark crude closed up 3.1% at $52.78 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Both benchmarks rose for the third week in a row, posting their largest three-week percentage gains in nearly four years. Brent prices have risen 26% and Nymex crude has gained 16% since Jan. 23. The gains reflect investors’ expectations that a global glut of oil will be shrinking soon, as energy companies slash production and economic growth spurs greater demand for gasoline and other crude products. Diesel fuel is stored in the U.K. Germany led an acceleration in eurozone economic growth […]

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Oil tops $60 for first time in 2015; oversupply persists

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Oil hit its highest level for the year on Friday with Brent crude rising above $60 a barrel, as euro zone economic growth exceeded expectations and market bulls priced in another drop in the U.S. oil rig count. The rise in prices was also fueled by bets that cuts in energy firms’ exploration budgets will help mop up some of the excess oil in the world market. Many analysts and traders believe there is a global oversupply of nearly two million barrels per day in crude oil. They say little has changed fundamentally to explain the rally of the past two weeks. Brent rose about 3 percent in Friday’s session and was on track to a 6 percent on the week and 15 percent on the month. Gains heightened after its front-month contract switched on Thursday at a premium. Brent had collapsed from a high […]

Posted On : Published By : Tom Whipple