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Energy

Venezuela oil czar in surprise resignation amid graft probes

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A boy jumps near the “Los Petroleros” sculpture that shows two men working on an oil drill of Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A, PDVSA, on the Sabana Grande boulevard, in Caracas, Venezuela, March 20, 2023. Venezuela’s oil czar, Tareck El Aissami announced his resignation on Twitter and pledged to help investigate any allegations involving PDVSA. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

By Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — The man responsible for running Venezuela’s oil industry — the one that pays for virtually everything in the troubled country, from subsidized food to ridiculously cheap gas — has quit amid investigations into alleged corruption among officials in various parts of the government.

Tareck El Aissami’s announcement Monday was shocking on multiple counts. He was seen as a loyal ruling party member and considered a key figure in the government’s efforts to evade punishing international economic sanctions.

And he led the state oil company PDVSA in a Venezuelan business sector widely considered to be corrupt — in a country where embezzelment, bribery, money laundering and other wrongdoing are a lifestyle.

“Obviously, they are giving it the patina of an anti-corruption probe,” said Ryan Berg, director of the Americas program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

“Rule of law is not being advanced here,” Berg added. “This is really a chance for the regime to sideline someone that it felt for some reason was a danger to it in the moment and to continue perpetuating acts of corruption once particular individuals have been forced out of the political scene.”

Hours after El Aissami revealed his resignation on Twitter, President Nicolás Maduro called his government’s fight against corruption “bitter” and “painful.” He said he accepted the resignation “to facilitate all the investigations that should result in the establishment of the truth, the punishment of the culprits, and justice in all these cases.”

Venezuela’s National Anti-Corruption Police last week announced an investigation into unidentified public officials in the oil industry, the justice system and some local governments. Attorney General Tarek William Saab in a radio interview Monday said that at least a half dozen officials, including people affiliated with PDVSA, had been arrested, and he expected more to be detained.

Among those arrested is Joselit Ramirez, a cryptocurrency regulator who was indicted in the U.S. along with El Aissami on money laundering charges in 2020.

Corruption has long been rampant in Venezuela, which sits atop the world’s largest petroleum reserves. But officials are rarely held accountable — a major irritant to citizens, the majority of whom live on $1.90 a day, the international benchmark of extreme poverty.

“I assure you, even more so at this moment, when the country calls not only for justice but also for the strengthening of the institutions, we will apply the full weight of the law against these individuals,” Saab said.

Oil is Venezuela’s most important industry. A windfall of hundreds of billions in oil dollars thanks to record-high global prices allowed the late President Hugo Chávez to launch numerous initiatives, including state-run food markets, new public housing, free health clinics and education programs.

But a subsequent drop in prices and government mismanagement, first under Chávez’s government and then Maduro’s, ended the lavish spending. And so began a complex crisis that has pushed millions into poverty and driven more than 7 million Venezuela to migrate.

PDVSA’s mismanagement, and more recently economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., caused a steady production decline, going from the 3.5 million barrels a day when Chávez rose to power in 1999 to roughly 700,000 barrels a day last year.

David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has conducted extensive research on Venezuela, said the moves by Maduro’s government are more than just an effort to clean its image.

“Arresting important figures and accepting the resignation of one of the most powerful ministers in a case that involves $3 billion does not improve your image,” he said. “It is probably because the missing money actually has an important impact on a government with serious budgetary problems.”

The Biden administration recently loosened some sanctions, even allowing oil giant Chevron for the first time in more than three years to resume production. Maduro’s government has been negotiating with its U.S.-backed political opponents primarily to get the sanctions lifted.

U.S. congressional researchers saw El Aissami as an impediment to Maduro’s goals.

“Should Al Aissami remain in that position, it could complicate efforts to lift oil sanctions,” a November report from the Congressional Research Center said.

The U.S. government designated El Aissami, a powerful Maduro ally, as a narcotics kingpin in 2017 in connection with activities in his previous positions as interior minister and a state governor. The Treasury Department alleged that “he oversaw or partially owned narcotics shipments of over 1,000 kilograms from Venezuela on multiple occasions, including those with the final destinations of Mexico and the United States.”

Under the government of Chávez, El Aissami headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He was appointed minister of oil in April 2020.

“El Aissami was a key player in the Maduro government’s sanctions evasion strategy. We’re talking about someone who knows where all the bodies are buried, so it will be key to watch where he ends up,” said Geoff Ramsey, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council focused on Colombia and Venezuela. “If El Aissami ends up being implicated himself, it could have serious implications for the entire power structure.”

In September, Maduro’s government renewed wrongdoing accusations against another former oil minister, Rafael Ramírez, alleging he was involved in a multibillion-dollar embezzlement operation during the early 2010s that took advantage of a dual currency exchange system. Ramírez, who oversaw the OPEC nation’s oil industry for a decade, denied the accusations.

In 2016, Venezuela’s then opposition-led National Assembly said $11 billion went missing at PDVSA in the 2004-2014 period when Ramirez was in charge of the company. In 2015, the U.S. Treasury Department accused a bank in Andorra of laundering some $2 billion stolen from PDVSA.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

New documentary exposes climate agenda as ‘scam’ to increase globalist power and profit

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

Martin Durkin’s new film ‘Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth)’ shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping their alarmist narrative alive – despite the facts.

Martin Durkin’s new film Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) opens a hot topic with some very spicy takes.

“This is the story of how an eccentric environmental scare grew into a powerful global industry” – so says Durkin’s voice-over, following a reprise of Greta Thunberg’s infamous “How dare you!” speech. The imagery of those deathly pale women in their blood-red costumes cat-walking doom for the cameras fades into whirling wind farms, followed by some striking claims.

One, from the co-founder of Greenpeace, sets the tone: “There’s no such thing as a climate emergency on this planet.”

Climate scam: Global control?

The film directly challenges the claim that CO2 levels from human activity are causing runaway climate change and shows how the livelihoods of climate scientists and a host of green advocates rely on keeping this narrative alive – despite the facts. Professor Steven Koonin of NYU asks on behalf of the climate science industry: “If CO2 is not having this impact – how are we going to stay in business?”

Precisely what that business is, and how it is maintained, is also the subject of a film whose central premise is that the world is in fact entering a period of cooling. Patrick Moore, the co-founder of environmental campaign group Greenpeace, says the presence of the polar ice caps shows that “this is an ice age. We’re at the tail end of a 50-million-year cooling period, and they’re saying it’s too hot.”

READ: Texas pulls $8.5 billion from BlackRock over DEI rules, left-wing climate agenda

It is an opinion shared by noted scientists featured in the film, such as Professor Koonin.

This is an inconvenient truth, Durkin argues, which explains the rising alarmism from the green lobby.

“The climate alarm is nonsense. It’s a hoax” – so says William Happer, emeritus professor of physics at Princeton. “I think ‘scam’ is a better word – but I am willing to live with ‘hoax.’”

Alongside other claims in the film that “activists are calling for the criminalization of climate skepticism,” Happer observes that “we see all these kinds of authoritarian measures being adopted, in the name of saving the planet. You’ve suddenly got the population under control all over the world.”

Yet power is not the only motive – there is also profit – for some. Professor John Clauser, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2022, warns of how “there are not only billions but trillions of dollars at stake.”

Fear, power, and profit

Durkin is no stranger to climate controversy, with his 2007 film The Great Global Warming Swindle being praised in the British Parliament for showing how “anyone not agreeing with the orthodoxy of how climate change levy comes about sees their public funding drying up.”

The motion, supported by seven Conservative MPs, also noted “that one of the contributors [to the film] received a death threat.”

The climate of fear looks set to intensify, with Durkin’s new film showing how the science we are told to follow is made by an inhuman agenda of mandated poverty, food shortages, and depopulation – as this 2023 piece from Spiked makes clear.

READ: Trudeau gov’t paid WEF nearly $500k for report justifying its climate agenda, documents show

Man-made climate of opinion

Yet the tide outside the climate skeptical movement may also be turning.

Durkin gave a pre-release interview on March 14 to the UK’s Daily Telegraph. He told the hosts that the climate science we are told to follow is another example of a locked-down discourse presented as a debate.

“We have such an enormously powerful, publicly funded establishment that is able to control, directly or indirectly, what we hear, what we read, what we’re taught, what is okay to think, and what’s not okay to think,” he said.

The exclusion of dissent has manufactured the scientific “consensus” for the climate agenda.

“The frustrating thing for scientists in this area is you’re not really allowed to point to scientific data or observations published in mainstream journals carried out by scientists from very respected universities and so on, even cited by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN body] … if it doesn’t fit the narrative,” Durkin said.

“And the pressure on them to shut up is extreme.”

This is the man-made climate of opinion in which fear has become the latest currency of choice.

Within days of the release of the film, German physicist and science vlogger Sabine Hossenfelder asked her YouTube audience whether “we should be terrified of climate change.” Her answer?

“I am indeed terrified, terrified that scientists support manipulating people.”

She cites several recent sources in mainstream and academic media which advocate “evoking fear” to “spur climate action.”

Instead of fearmongering, she suggests we might best look at what can reasonably done to help preserve natural habitats for wild animals. This seems a reasonable position, and she cites a lack of clarity arising from climate modeling which may conflate natural fluctuations in climate with man-made changes.

Fact-checked

The film is intended to reveal that man-made climate change is a fraudulent operation which can only succeed by censorship and propaganda. It claims this vastly profitable industry – which one Swiss bank estimates will require $270 trillion to realist its goals – reduces to a campaign to enforce global authoritarian control by manufacturing an emergency that is not supported by the evidence.

These are bold claims, and we have heard them before. In this case, however, we can check the record for ourselves with ease.

One climate skeptic has taken the trouble to produce a detailed fact-check of the claims made in the film.

Describing his efforts as an “annotated bibliography.” retired petrophysicist Andy May has supplied information supporting “70 key statements” made in the movie, ranging from natural climate variation through unreliable models to data manipulation – and the existence of a multi-trillion dollar climate lobby which ensures that “skepticism is career suicide.”

May has published four books – most recently The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, which “documents biases and errors in the International Panel for Climate Change assessment.”

May’s book challenges the fearmongering such as that of the UN head Antonio Guterres that “we are on the road to climate hell,” saying instead that the IPCC “seeks to rewrite climate history” to frame a narrative of doom unsupported by the facts.

“The strategy of the IPCC seems to be to hide any good news about climate change,” says the summary for his book, available via May’s website. 

Fact-checker responds

May had this to say about the film whose facts he checked: “From the very beginning of this very well edited and produced movie we learn about the man-made climate change hoax or scam.”

He argues that this agenda is secured by the familiar tactic of demonizing and deplatforming skeptics.

“We learn that anyone skeptical that humans are causing dangerous climate change are to be shunned, or censored, or worse!” he says.

Finally, he shows the method in this madness. The alarmism is all about control.

“We also discover the ugly truth that all this government insistence that we are about to die due to global climate change is not true, and is all about money and power,” he explains. “The logic is that if it is truly a global problem, then it requires a global government, and all nations must submit to global domination by those who know what is good for us.”

Criminalizing dissent?

In one note, not included in the film, May cites evidence of “the U.S. Senate attempting to legislate scientific research outcomes,” saying “it doesn’t get worse than this.”

He directs readers to page 202 of a 2021 book by S.E. Koonin, which documents the attempt led by Senator Chuck Schumer in 2019 to pass bill S.729, which aimed “to prohibit the use of funds to Federal agencies to establish a panel, task force, advisory committee, or other effort to challenge the scientific consensus on climate change, and for other purposes.”

As May notes, “Fortunately, the bill failed to pass, but the political pressure to find humans caused recent climate changes is overwhelming.”

This is an agenda which holds much of government, media, business, and even the scientific community captive. With trillions of dollars and the lives and liberty of humanity at stake, it is a welcome development that Durkin’s film, and the facts behind it, are now reaching a global audience.

You can see Climate: The Movie (The Cold Truth) here for free.

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Alberta

Oil and gas in the global economy through 2050

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From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Ven Venkatachalam

The world will continue to rely on oil and gas for decades to come, according to the International Energy Agency

Recent global conflicts, which have been partly responsible for a global spike in energy prices, have cast their shadow on energy markets around the world. Added to this uncertainty is the ongoing debate among policymakers and public institutions in various jurisdictions about the role of traditional forms of energy in the global economy.

One widely quoted study influencing the debate is the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook, the most recent edition of which, World Energy Outlook 2023 (or WEO 2023), was released recently (IEA 2023).

In this CEC Fact Sheet, we examine projections for oil and natural gas production, demand, and investment drawn from the World Energy Outlook 2023 Extended Dataset, using the IEA’s modelled scenario STEPS, or the Stated Policies Scenario. The Extended Dataset provides more detailed data at the global, regional, and country level than that found in the main report.

The IEA’s World Energy Outlook and the various scenarios

Every year the IEA releases its annual energy outlook. The report looks at recent energy supply and demand, and projects the investment outlook for oil and gas over the next three decades. The World Energy Outlook makes use of a scenario approach to examine future energy trends. WEO 2023 models three scenarios: the Net Zero Emissions by 2050 Scenario (NZE), the Announced Pledges Scenario (APS), and the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS).

STEPS appears to be the most plausible scenario because it is based on the world’s current trajectory, rather than the other scenarios set out in the WEO 2023, including the APS and the NZE. According to the IEA:

The Stated Policies Scenario is based on current policy settings and also considers the implications of industrial policies that support clean energy supply chains as well as measures related to energy and climate. (2023, p. 79; emphasis by author)

and

STEPS looks in detail at what [governments] are actually doing to reach their targets and objectives across the energy economy. Outcomes in the STEPS reflect a detailed sector-by-sector review of the policies and measures that are actually in place or that have been announced; aspirational energy or climate targets are not automatically assumed to be met. (2023, p. 92)

Key results

The key results of STEPS, drawn from the IEA’s Extended Dataset, indicate that the oil and gas industry is not going into decline over the next decade—neither worldwide generally, nor in Canada specifically. In fact, the demand for oil and gas in emerging and developing economies under STEPS will remain robust through 2050.

Oil and natural gas production projections under STEPS

World oil production is projected to increase from 94.8 million barrels per day (mb/d) in 2022 to 97.2 mb/d in 2035, before falling slightly to 94.5 mb/d in 2050 (see Figure 1).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian overall crude oil production is projected to increase from 5.8 mb/d in 2022 to 6.5 mb/d in 2035, before falling to 5.6 mb/d in 2050 (see Figure 2).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian oil sands production is expected to increase from 3.6 mb/d in 2022 to 3.8 mb/d in 2035, and maintain the same production level till 2050 (see Figure 3).

Source: IEA (2023b)

World natural gas production is anticipated to increase from 4,138 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022 to 4,173 bcm in 2050 (see Figure 4).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Canadian natural gas production is projected to decrease from 204 bcm in 2022 to 194 bcm in 2050 (see Figure 5).

Source: IEA (2023b)

Oil demand under STEPS

World demand for oil is projected to increase from 96.5 mb/d in 2022 to 97.4 mb/d by 2050 (see Tables 1A and 1B). Demand in Africa for oil is expected to increase from 4.0 mb/d in 2022 to 7.7 mb/d in 2050. Demand for oil in the Asia-Pacific is projected to increase from 32.9 mb/d in 2022 to 35.1 mb/d in 2050. Demand for oil from emerging and developing economies is anticipated to increase from 47.9 mb/d in 2022 to 59.3 mb/d in 2050.

Source: IEA (2023b)

 

Source: IEA (2023b)

Natural gas demand under STEPS

World demand for natural gas is expected to increase from 4,159 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2022 to 4,179 bcm in 2050 (see Figures 6 and 7). Demand in Africa for natural gas is projected to increase from 170 bcm in 2020 to 277 bcm in 2050. Demand in the Asia-Pacific for natural gas is anticipated to increase from 900 bcm in 2020 to 1,119 bcm in 2050.

Source: IEA (2023b)

 

Source: IEA (2023b)

Cumulative oil and gas investment expected to be over $21 trillion

Taking into account projected global demand, between 2023 and 2050 the cumulative global oil and gas investment (upstream, midstream, and downstream) under STEPS is expected to reach nearly U.S.$21.1 trillion (in $2022). Global oil investment alone is expected to be over U.S.$13.1 trillion and natural gas investment is predicted to be over $8.0 trillion (see Figure 8).

Between 2023 and 2050, total oil and gas investment in North America (Canada, the U.S., and Mexico) is expected to be nearly U.S.$5.6 trillion, split between oil at over $3.8 trillion and gas at nearly $1.8 trillion (see Figure 8). Oil and gas investment in the Asia Pacific, over the same period, is estimated at nearly $3.3 trillion, split between oil at over $1.4 trillion and gas at over $1.9 trillion.

Source: IEA (2023b)

Conclusion

The sector-by-sector measures that governments worldwide have put in place and the specific policy initiatives that support clean energy policy, i.e., the Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS), both show oil and gas continuing to play a major role in the global economy through 2050. Key data points on production and demand drawn from the IEA’s WEO 2023 Extended Dataset confirm this trend.

Positioning Canada as a secure and reliable oil and gas supplier can and must be part of the medium- to long-term solution to meeting the oil and gas demands of the U.S., Europe, Asia and other regions as part of a concerted move supporting energy security.

The need for stable energy, which is something that oil and natural gas provide, is critical to a global economy whose population is set to grow by another 2 billion people by 2050. Along with the increasing population comes rising incomes, and with them comes a heightened demand for oil and natural gas, particularly in many emerging and developing economies in Africa, the Asia-Pacific, and Latin America, where countries are seeing urbanization and industrialization grow rapidly.


References (as of February 11, 2024)

International Energy Agency (IEA), 2023(a), World Energy Outlook 2023 <http://tinyurl.com/4nv9xyfj>; International Energy Agency (IEA), 2023(b), World Energy Outlook 2023 Extended Dataset <http://tinyurl.com/3222553b>.

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