this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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While this is still a big number, Russia's oil revenue both from the EU and in total has been massively reduced.
I think it's hard to argue reducing dependency on resources from a frequently hostile country is "harming themselves", especially since Russia has intentionally interrupted supply as leverage.
Yeah, I overstated my point, Russia hasn't been untouched by sanctions and trade war. That said? The Eurozone slipped into a recession in June and GDP growth been flat since then, I don't know why people are trying to argue that they haven't been hurt by this. The US has orchestrated a master stroke of geopolitics. It has been able to hurt its rivals in both Europe and Russia at the same time and tricked them both into doing it to themselves and thinking its in their own interests.
The Eurozone slipped in to recession because of COVID AND the war. Not only that: Ukraine was a big shadow player in the subcontractor field. Not only that: Most European countries are already out of their recession, only Germany is struggling right now and that's also mostly because as a country relying on export, it was hurt the most. However, the growth is still around the 0,2 in the plus, so no recession either.
woaw .2%
so growth
🤡
Better than shrinking - which would actually be a recession.
Surely you realize that near-zero growth isn't good, right? Or that it's a clear sign that Europe is still clearly being harmed?
And anyway, that still dodges my overall point - the US benefits from keeping its rivals weak.
Taking less from the environment would be better, not taking more - especially if the global population peaks and the population shrinks.
The idea of perpetual growth of finite resource extraction that many governments and corporations try to tell us is good is getting tired. How about we settle for a good enough standard of living, and work on making it more equally distributed and on recycling to reduce / eventually eliminate the extraction of non-renewable resources?
As terrible as Putin's invasion and occupation of Ukraine is, I think the decarbonisation and transition to renewable energy as a response to it is a very positive thing. The transition to higher percentages of renewables was always going to be painful, but it is one of those things where putting it off because it is perceived to be too hard only makes it harder in the future. Ideally, we should have gone much harder much earlier - we are already locked in for a lot of warming and habitat and arable land lost, but a push now is better than going even longer without solving the problem.
Except the response has been shipping LNG from the US to Europe.
Direct trade has reduced, but Europe is still buying Russian energy through third parties. Russia is still making record profits, third parties are skimming off top, and European public is footing the bill. Pretty good deal for everyone but Europe is seems.
Not really. Although Russia revenue from the EU has been reduced significantly, they manage to open up a new market in the East that massively stabilise their gas overall revenues. Russia is nowadays redirecting its resources east and building news pipelines to meet the demand from the East e.g. China. They no longer care much about the EU market.
That was never the intention and totally unexpected outcome of the sanction. They never thought China, India and even Turkey will come to the rescue. To say EU are not affected is an understatement. The EU now has to depend on the higher price gas from the US, Germany had to abandon their green initiatives and go back to coal, and they even have to buy Russian gas at higher inflated price from middleman to circumvent their own sanction - do you really think they dont know they are actually buying Russian gas? Of course they know. But they have to because they will suffer more if they don't.