Re: A secret energy treaty that protects oil companies

J

John Larkin 3 years ago

>> Here is a secret treaty that protects fossil fuel companies. How many more

>> secret treaties are there? It pays to uncover these things. Our future is
>> at stake.
>
>The fact the proceedings of the investor-state arbitration courts established under the ECT are "secret" does not mean the ECT itself is secret, it is not. And there is no such thing as an international treaty for economic cooperation that does not have protections for investors against loss due to changes in laws by investee states. Because without that there won't be any investment. The E in ECT means energy so the majority of its authority is over fossil fuel industry concerns, duh.
>
>Your thought for the day:
>
>A wise old owl lived in an oak.
>The more he saw the less he spoke.
>The less he spoke the more he heard.
>Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?

The economic optimum is generally an open competitive market where supply and demand self-adjust around price. We have antitrust laws to keep that mechanism working, but there are no international anti-trust laws, so we get cartels like OPEC.

It's ironic that most western governments have declared war on fossil fuels, and deliberately act to push prices up, and whine when the price goes up.

The US can avoid the cartel monopoly easily. Just drill, equivalent to joining OPEC but without price collusion.

European governments want high fuel prices, but they want the cost to be mostly in taxes. Paying OPEC (or the USA) cuts into their margin.

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J

John Larkin 3 years ago

Many countries are morally opposed to drilling and fracking in their own territories, so buy at cartel prices and suffer Russian blackmail.

That would be funny if not so painful for the citizens.

True, but facilities on both ends are probably the real limits on our keeping europe illuminated.

What hasn't changed is Economics 101. The big disasters come from idiot politicians messing with the natural equilibrium.

What we have in excess supply now is politicians. That should make them cheap but doesn't seem to somehow.

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J

John Larkin 3 years ago

There have been proposals that political leaders should always be executed at the end of a fixed term in office. A little less severe would be term limits, not on just one elected/appointed politicial office, but a lifetime limit on any.

Our most powerful politicians have never had a real job; they were on the student council in high school and are now old and have a lifetime of accumulated corruption.

And got rich somehow.

I should write a book, "Tribes, or social crystallography." Inherent human wiring makes people form into social pyramids, usually with the upper layers being thugs. China and Russia are classic warlike thugocracies, with nuclear weapons.

Let's hope that the russian nukes are as unreliable as other native russsian technology. The nuclear test ban treaty was a giant advantage to the USA; the russians were snookered big time on that one.

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A

Anthony William Sloman 3 years ago

That's nuts. There are competent and honest politicians. I know one personally

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! He's a bit too intelligent and honest to have been wildly successful as a politician, but he did pretty well.

If they were corrupt. Some of them aren't. John Larkin's idea of what might constitute a real job is rather narrow. He has claimed that an average plumber would be a better-than- average US president if parachuted into the job, which is a trifle unrealistic. My personal hero (mentioned above) trained as high school teacher, won a lot of money on TV quiz shows and earned enough voter recognition in the process to get himself elected. The Science Policy research group at Sussex University thought highly of him, and when my copy of his "Sleepers Awake" book got water-damaged in Cambridge I didn't have any trouble buying a replacement in a Cambridge book shop (Heffers) because it was a set text in one of the course taught at Cambridge University

Competent people make money in all sorts of unexpected ways.

It doesn't

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makes it clear that social pyramids are not hard-wired into the human psyche. When they do happen with with thugs at the top, they have a nasty habit of taking over their neighbors - Putin is exhibiting that tendency right now - but people don't like being ruled by thugs, and they do get rid of them. Trump didn't last, but it can take longer to get rid of less ineffectual creeps.

Like the AK-47?

So why did they sign it? In fact it didn't advantage anybody except the people who ended up not being damaged by the extra radiation that the nuclear tests dumped into the environment.

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