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by F. William Engdahl
Most citizens are told by the Scholz regime that the reason is Putin and Russia's war in Ukraine.
The truth is quite otherwise...
EU politicians and major financial interests,
The consequences are not accidental.
This is the UN Green Agenda 2030 otherwise known as Klaus Schwab's Great Reset.
For almost two decades the EU Commission, backed by the mega banks such as JP MorganChase or large speculative hedge funds, began to lay the basis for what is today a complete deregulation of the market for natural gas.
Beginning around 2010 the EU began to push a radical change in rules for pricing natural gas.
Prior to that point most gas prices were set in fixed long-term contracts for pipeline delivery.
With a change in US laws to allow export of LNG from the huge shale gas production in 2016 US gas producers began a major expansion of LNG export terminal construction.
The terminals take an average of 3 to
5 years to build. At the same time Poland, Holland and other EU
countries began to build LNG import terminals to receive the LNG
from abroad.
As Henry Kissinger noted during the oil shocks of the 1970s,
Since the 1980s Wall Street banks, led by Goldman Sachs, created a new market in "paper oil," or futures and derivative trading of future oil barrels.
It created a huge casino of
speculative profits that was controlled by a handful of giant banks
in New York and the City of London.
The EU Commission and their Green Deal agenda to "decarbonize" the economy by 2050, eliminating oil, gas and coal fuels, provided the ideal trap that has led to the explosive spike in EU gas prices since 2021.
To create that "single" market control,
the EU was lobbied by the globalist interests to impose draconian
and de facto illegal rule changes on Gazprom to force the Russian
owner of various gas distribution pipeline networks in the EU to
open them to competitor gas.
A series of virtual trading "hubs" had been established to trade gas futures contracts in several EU countries.
By 2020 the Dutch TTF (Title Transfer Facility) was the dominant trading center for EU gas, the so-called EU gas benchmark. Notably, TTF is a virtual platform of trades in futures gas contracts between in trades between banks and other financial investors, "Over-The-Counter."
In 2021 only 20% of all natural gas imports to the EU were LNG gas, whose prices were largely determined by futures trades in the TTF hub, the EU de facto gas benchmark, owned by the Dutch Government, the same government destroying its farms for a fraudulent nitrogen pollution claim.
The largest import share of European gas came from Russia's Gazprom supplying more than 40% of EU imports in 2021.
That gas was via long term pipeline contracts whose price was vastly lower than today's TTF speculation price. In 2021 EU states paid an estimated penalty cost around $30 billion more for natural gas in 2021 than if they had stuck with Gazprom oil-indexation pricing.
The banks loved it. US industry and consumers not...
Only by destroying the Russian gas market in the EU could financial interests and the Green Deal advocates create their LNG market control.
It would double the capacity of Nord Stream 1 to 110 billion cubic meters annually, allowing Gazprom to be independent of interference with gas deliveries via its Soyuz pipeline going through Ukraine.
The EU Commission, backed by the Biden Administration, blocked opening of the pipeline with bureaucratic sabotage, and finally German Chancellor Scholz imposed sanction on the pipeline on February 22 over Russian recognition of Donetsk People's Republic and Luhansk People's Republic.
With the
growing gas crisis since, the German government has refused to open
Nord Stream 2 despite the fact it is finished.
That section of the Ukraine Soyuz line cut one-third of gas via Soyuz to the EU.
It certainly did not help the
EU economy at a time Kiev was begging for more weapons from those
same NATO countries. Soyuz opened in 1980 under the Soviet Union
bringing gas from the Orenburg gas field.
In December 2021, two months before the Ukraine conflict, the Polish government closed the Polish part of the pipeline cutting Gazprom gas delivery at low prices to Germany as well as Poland.
Instead Polish gas companies bought Russian gas in the storage of German gas companies, via the Polish-German section of the Jamal pipeline at a higher price in a reverse flow.
The German gas companies got their Russian gas via long-term contract for a very low contract price and resold to Poland at a huge profit.
This insanity was deliberately downplayed by the Green Economics Minister Robert Habeck and Chancellor Scholz and German media, even though it forced German gas prices even higher and worsened the German gas crisis.
The Polish government refused to renew its gas contract with Russia, and instead buys gas on the free market for vastly higher prices.
Finally gas delivery via Nord Stream 1 undersea pipeline has been interrupted because of needed repair of a Siemens-made gas turbine.
The turbine was sent to a special facility of Siemens in Canada where the anti-Russian Trudeau regime held it for months before finally releasing it on request of German government.
Yet they deliberately refused to grant the delivery to its Russian owner, but instead to Siemens Germany, where it sits, as the German and Canadian governments refuse to grant a legally binding sanctions exemption for the transfer to Russia.
By this means Gazprom gas through Nord Stream 1 is also dramatically reduced to 20% of normal.
Hungary's Viktor Orban, by contrast, secured continuation with Russia of TurkStream gas.
By systematically sanctioning or closing gas deliveries from long-term, low cost pipelines to the EU, gas speculators via the Dutch TTP have been able to use every hiccup or energy shock in the world, whether a record drought in China or the conflict in Ukraine, to export restrictions in the USA, to bid the EU wholesale gas prices through all bounds.
As of mid-August the futures price at TTP was 1,000% higher than a year ago and rising daily...
On August 28, German Finance Minister
Christian Lindner, the
sole cabinet member from the Liberal Party (FDP), revealed that
under the opaque terms of the complex EU Electricity Market Reform
measures, the producers of electricity from solar or wind
automatically receive the same price for their "renewable"
electricity they sell to the power companies for the grid as the
highest cost, i.e. natural gas...!
The fanatical Green Economics Minister Habeck immediately replied that,
Habeck in fact is doing all possible to build the Green Agenda and
He refuses to consider re-opening three nuclear plants closed a year ago or to reconsider closing the remaining three in December.
While declaring in a Bloomberg interview that,
Habeck as well as the EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen have repeatedly declared more investment in unreliable wind and solar is the answer to a gas price crisis that their policies have deliberately created.
In every respect the suicidal energy crisis
ongoing in Europe has been "Made in Germany," not in Russia...
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