Did you know that EU leaders are already making plans to ration energy this winter?

The world faces a “much bigger” energy crisis than the one of the 1970s, Birol told German daily Der Spiegel last month.

“Back then it was just about oil,” Birol told the news outlet. “Now we have an oil crisis, a gas crisis and an electricity crisis simultaneously,” said the head of the international agency created after the 1970s shock of the Arab oil embargo.” (“IEA: Europe Could See Energy Rationing This Winter“, Oil Price)

She’s wrong, isn’t she? We don’t have “an oil, gas and electricity crisis”.

What we have is a political crisis.

All of these shortages can be easily traced back to the foolish choices that were made by incompetent politicians doing the bidding of neocon fantasists who think they can turn the clock back to the heyday of American global primacy. But those days are over, and everyone seems to know they’re over except the insulated group of self-deluded fanatics at the Washington think tanks and their political spawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Bottom line: We all would have been much better off listening to Kissinger who advised his pals at the World Economic Forum (WEF) to wrap up the Ukrainian war pronto before Russia made changes that could not be reversed. Unfortunately, Kissinger’s appeal fell on deaf ears and Putin has already started redirecting his energy flows eastward. Check out this eyepopping excerpt from an article at oilprice.com:

“The biggest reshuffle of oil trade flows since the Arab oil embargo of the 1970s is underway—and things may never return to normal. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions on Russian oil exports are changing global oil trade routes. Over the past nearly five decades, oil flowed more or less freely from any supplier to any customer in the world…

This free energy trade is now over, after …. the Western sanctions that followed, plus Europe’s irreversible decision to cut off its dependence on Russian energy at any cost…

By the end of this year, Europe expects to have effectively banned 90% of all its imports of Russian oil before the war… For oil going to Europe, crude from the Middle East will now travel longer distances to European ports compared to the shorter routes to India and China…

For Europe, the choice of oil supply is now political, and it will be willing to pay a premium to procure non-Russian oil. This will tighten supply options and continue to support elevated oil prices for months to come.

Commenting on the EU’s embargo on Russian seaborne oil imports, Fitch Ratings said last week:

“This ban will have a significant impact on global oil trade flows, with about 30% of EU’s imports needing replacement from other regions, including the Middle East (Saudi Arabia and the UAE have sustained production spare capacity of about 2MMbpd and 1MMbpd, respectively), Africa and the US.” (“The Biggest Reshuffle Of Oil Flows Since The 1970s”, Oil Price)

What does it mean?

It means that inflation will continue to rise as Russia’s prodigious crude supplies are redirected eastward. It means that Washington has abandoned its 30 year-long ‘pet project’, Globalization, and splintered the world into rival blocs. It means that the dollar, the bond market, the western financial system and the so-called “rules-based order”—all of which are inseparably linked to economic growth that depends almost-entirely on the availability of cheap energy—will begin to creak-and-groan beneath the weight of feather-headed policy decisions that have brought certain ruin to the nations of the west and their people.

We’re going to pay a heavy price for Washington suicidal power-grab.

This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace

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