Just Thinking — Nord Stream, Sweden in Nato, Heat Pumps
A weekly summary of bits and pieces from my reading and the thinking it inspired — designed as a complement to my medium-length “Just Thinking” pieces, and to my longer articles.
An Answer — Nord Stream
Questions are what we mainly seem to have these days. Now we have an answer. We know who blew up the Nord Stream pipelines that used to — or were poised to — carry Russian gas directly under the Baltic Sea to Germany. US navy divers did it, on the orders of President Joe Biden. Famed investigative journalist Seymour Hersh laid it out in fascinating and totally plausible detail last week. I’m writing about it now because it’s important and the mainstream media apparently doesn’t have the nerve to do so.
The administration denies Hersh’s reporting in the dismissive language used when they have no plausible denial, and the New York Times and Washington Post haven’t mentioned it, even though what it means is that the US blew up important infrastructure belonging in part to one of its closest allies, Germany. The article is true, and everybody who knows anything about the pipeline and the Ukraine combat knows it’s true. Whether the Germans knew about it before it happened it not so clear, and what political repercussions there will be inside Germany, across the EU, and between the US and EU is totally unknown.
Why would the US blow up a pipeline to Germany, when the pipeline wasn’t running anyway? I don’t know. I suspect it was because Biden and some of his advisers don’t trust the Germans and wanted to be sure Berlin didn’t retain the option to resume purchases of Russian gas without their consent and that of Ukraine and its hardline supporter Poland. The reason Nord Stream ever got built was to bypass long existing pipelines that carried Russian gas to Germany, one running through Ukraine and the other through Poland. Those lines still exist and have massive unused capacity. In fact, the line through Ukraine is still operating, crazily enough. But Ukraine and Poland hold a de facto veto over their use by Russia and Germany.
Nord Stream was built to make sure Ukraine and Poland had no such veto. It wasn’t needed for capacity reasons. It was needed to bypass Ukraine and Poland. End of story. Now they have the veto back. Washington fought against Nord Stream for decades, claiming it left Germany too dependent on Russia. Right or wrong, from Washington’s perspective, the problem no longer exists. Now there’s no going back for the government in Berlin. My experience suggests there may also be a few still around who simply enjoy humiliating Germans, but perhaps that’s wrong.
You might think there’s no temptation for Europeans to buy Russian gas now anyway, if you read about natural gas prices plummeting in Europe and Asia. But gas prices in Europe are still six times US benchmark levels — which have also fallen sharply — and are still two to three times what Europeans would have considered “normal” before 2020. In the interim, European countries have spent roughly $800 billion cushioning households and business from the full impact of the war-related spike in natural gas and electricity prices.
Gas prices still aren’t low enough to keep energy-intensive European industries competitive at a world level. Last winter’s gas crisis has passed, but the situation remains tenable. The Germans’ only obvious option is to get onto renewables quickly and heavily, and to hope that not too many of their manufacturers move away or go bust in the interim.
Speaking of renewables, here’s a number for you. The global oil industry made $4 trillion last year, much of it in the Middle East Gulf, according to the International Energy Agency. That would buy a lot of heat pumps, solar panels and windmills. We can afford the energy transition. What humanity cannot afford is to go on the way it has been.
A Question — Sweden
Is Sweden’s quest for Nato membership making the country safer? Or has it actually exposed the country to greater danger? From the day Sweden and Finland each nearly simultaneously applied for Nato membership last spring, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been pushing for them to crack down on Kurdish activists in their countries and even extradite some Kurdish activists to Turkey where, if they’re lucky, they would languish in prison along with many other Kurdish activists.
As a Nato member, Turkey has a veto on new entrants. Finland can probably sidestep Turkish objections and get in. Sweden, maybe not.
Sweden has taken in around 100,000 Kurdish refugees over the years, and it has provided aid to the Kurdish regional government in northeast Syria, an area the Kurds call Rojava — and which Erdogan was threatening to invade until deadly earthquakes hit the Turkish-Syrian border area last week. The Kurds have had US and, at times, Russian backing over years of fighting in Syria, not least because they are the most effective opposition to the bad guys of Islamic State along the Syrian border with Turkey. It’s widely accepted that Erdogan helped many of those Islamic extremists get into Syria in the first place, because he didn’t like the Syrian government at the time and has never liked the Kurds.
For Sweden, the problem now is not only that Turkey is blocking it from joining Nato, but also that — especially after recent demonstrations in which a copy of the Koran was burned — “Sweden is deemed to be in greater focus than previously for violent Islamic extremists globally,” says a statement from the Swedish Security Service.
Adding to the convolution, the ruling conservative government in Stockholm is in power thanks to tacit support from the rightwing nationalist Sweden Democrats, the second largest party in this once leftist country. The anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats are advocating a tough line against Turkey, and will probably gain still more voter support if the security services’ warnings of Islamic extremist violence against Swedes prove correct.
Did I mention:
* That there’s an election upcoming in Turkey which could cost 20-year leader Erdogan his job, especially what with the bungling of building regulations that cost so many lives in last week’s horrific earthquakes? He needs Turkish nationalist votes, and the Turkish nationalists are anti-Kurdish, so don’t expect Erdogan to soften up on Sweden’s Nato bid soon.
* That the worst damage from the earthquake on the Syrian side is adjacent to Kurdish-run areas along the border with Turkey and that, at least until Feb. 13, Turkish aligned forces were blocking Kurdish attempts to get aid to earthquake victims on the Syrian side?
* That the Kurds in Rojava are running — amid threats of a full invasion by Turkey and amid their own efforts to work with a semi-hostile Syrian government — what is the most innovative experiment in governance the Mideast has seen in decades, with strong ecological and feminist overtones?
* Or that the Sweden Democrats are climate-change skeptics, while the Kurds in Rojava are “social ecologists?”
Applying for Nato membership has not made Sweden safer. All it has accomplished is to irritate Russia further, endanger needed support for the admirable Syrian Kurds, and probably strengthen the already strong hand of the anything-but-admirable nationalist right in Sweden.
If you’re interested in how often nationalists figure in this tale and how retrograde their climate positions are, check out White Skin, Black Fuel by Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Cooperative.
Another Answer — Heat Pumps
Do heat pumps work when it gets really cold? Yes, is the resounding answer. I live in Maine, where early this month temperatures fell one night to 15–20 degrees below zero F, and the wind blew at 20–25 miles per hour. That’s really cold. My roughly 190-year-old house is heated by five interior and three exterior heat-pump units with no fossil fuel back-up. Every unit worked through the cold snap, and the house remained comfortable. A nearby heat-pump servicing company told Maine Public Radio they received a plea for help from not one of the owners of 1,500 units on their service list. The units all worked.
I imagine we’ll find out when the bill arrives that our warmth came at a hefty price, especially since electricity rates recently rose sharply in a delayed reaction to this fall’s big natural gas price runup. But our experience over the last two years has been that the electricity bill with heat pumps is much lower than the combined cost of heating oil (no natural gas around here) and electricity would have been with our old heating system. Heat pumps work and they save money.
