Dumb and Dumber: Putin And Granholm -- March 4, 2022

Quality matters, link here:

• some US Atlantic coast refiners will allow US crude to substitute for Urals; will cost them to make change;

Why Russian oil can't find buyers even as crude soars above $100 / bbl. Link here. Or direct to paywall at MarketWatch.

Stories on Russian economy: a race against time is tracked here.

• Putin's fortress Russia is crumbling: this is probably the best article and the fact that it is in The Economist speaks volumes, a left wing magazine that generally favors Russia over US whenever it suits them.
• Aljazeera: what's awaiting Russia may be much worse than the chaos of 1990s. If Putin does not change course -- and fast -- he has ten days -- the clock started ticking March 3, 2022 -- Russia may find itself in an economic catastrophe akin to that of 1918. What happened in 1918? Oh, yeah, that's right? Where did that revolution start? Need to re-read Dr Zhivago.
• Did Putin just blink: "Russia has no ill intentions towards its neighbors." Calls for international cooperation to return, for relations to normalize. He needs to hire Jen Psaki.

Jen Psaki, looking pretty uncomfortable in this clip (play it without the sound):

• building the Keystone XL pipeline would have taken too long, and would not have helped;
• renewable energy -- that's the answer -- four million acres of solar panels; eight years instead

Dumb and dumber: link here. 

Demand destruction: this is a poorly written article, especially for Reuters. It reads as if the writer had a them -- demand destruction -- but then couldn't find corroboration.

High gasoline prices?  

The good news: diesel is no more expensive than highest grade gasoline out in Malibu, CA. Link here. A reader tells me gasoline is $6.55 / gallon in Los Angeles. What folks don't realize is this: Californians have very long commutes. It's not unusual to have to re-fuel three times weekly just for work.

Known all along: how cheap energy -- fracking -- was killed by Green lies and Russian propaganda. Link here. 

Britain has one of the richest and thickest seams of shale: the Bowland shale across Lancashire and Yorkshire contains many decades of supply. Fracking it would mean drilling small holes down about one mile, then cracking the rocks with millimetre-wide fractures and catching the gas as it flowed out over the next few decades. Experience in America showed this could be done without any risk of contaminating ground water, which is near the surface, or threatening buildings. The seismic tremors that have caused all the trouble are so slight they could not possibly do damage and were generally far smaller than those from mining, construction or transport. The well pads would be hundreds of times smaller than the concrete bases of wind farms producing comparable amounts of energy.