VLADIMIR PUTIN: WHY HE FEARS A HILLARY CLINTON WHITE HOUSE
BY LEAH MCGRATH GOODMAN ON 11/3/16 AT 8:10 AM
On June 4, 2013, at the verdant plantation-style Inn at Palmetto Bluff in Bluffton, South Carolina, Hillary Clinton spoke in strikingly ambitious terms of her plans for America’s energy boom to a private audience in a speech for the global investment bank Goldman Sachs. “The energy revolution in the United States is just a gift,” she said in one of three speeches that year for which the bank paid her $675,000. “We can have a North American energy system that will be unbelievably powerful. If we have enough of it, we can be exporting and supporting a lot of our friends and allies.”
Clinton meant exporting oil and gas to allies who are heavily reliant on Russian imports. The Democratic nominee’s private positions on energy, as indicated in speeches released by WikiLeaks in October, suggest how she might use America’s oil and gas industry as a bludgeon against Moscow. While her campaign declined to comment for this story, her speeches also made it clear that Clinton wants the U.S. to lead an environmentally friendly energy revolution to tackle climate change.
“I’ve promoted fracking in other places around the world, because when you look at the stranglehold that energy has on so many countries and the decisions they make, it would be in America’s interest to make even more countries more energy self-sufficient,” she said in a private speech to Deutsche Bank in April 2013. “So I think we have to go at this in a smart, environmentally conscious way, pursuing a clean-energy alternative agenda while we also promote the advantages that are going to come to us.”
Clinton delivered many of the leaked speeches as America was becoming the world’s top oil producer, overtaking Saudi Arabia. A few months after the U.S. hit this watermark in April 2014, Clinton made the direct link between America’s energy fortunes and targeting Moscow. “We are now energy independent, something we have hoped for and worked for over many, many years,” she said in a July 2014 speech. “That gives us tools we didn’t have before. And it also gives us the opportunity not only to invest those resources in more manufacturing and other activities that benefit us directly here at home, but to be a bulwark with our supplies against the kind of intimidation we see going on from Russia.”
Russia’s consternation also stems from the fact the U.S. has already started its energy war. As of January, America began exporting crude oil for the first time in four decades. This March, it also began exporting more liquefied natural gas than it was importing for the first time since Dwight Eisenhower was president, the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Timothy Hess tells Newsweek. As energy companies race to build more facilities along the Gulf Coast, Hess expects exports to continue rising. Because the U.S. is only starting to ship out natural gas to other countries, he says it’s still a “pretty small amount,” but expects the current rate to double by December 2017. As Clinton noted, this is the equivalent of a Molotov cocktail directed “right at the source of Russia’s wealth.”
Russia depends on its revenue from oil and gas for more than half of its federal budget, according to its Ministry of Finance. That, combined with weak energy prices in recent years and Russia being stuck in its longest recession in two decades, leaves the country and Putin in a very precarious position. Much of its petroleum export revenue comes from countries in the European Union, many of which are U.S. allies. Mindful of this, Clinton told Deutsche Bank in October 2014, “I want to export gas, especially to our friends in order to undercut, in Europe’s case, the pressure from Russia.”
Moscow is well aware of this vulnerability. As Clinton noted in mid-2014, Russian state-owned company Gazprom was taking over strategic energy infrastructure across Europe, including its largest underground gas storage facility in Germany and engaging in what she called “pure power politics.”
more:
http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-hillary-clinton-energy-oil-natural-gas-ukraine-europe-fracking-516397
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