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More posts like this of watching Russkies burn and less posts about who has the bigger geopolitical phallus. The arguments of the last 15 pages have definitely culminated and it's time to move onto a new branch/sequel. More posts about Ukrainians killing Russians and how we can stick it to Putin/Russia now and in the future please!

Are you related to Circle Back Jenn? She has been spewing that same lie for months. This narrative is a talking point right out of the Pravda playbook, Putin himself must smile when he reads it. Lets get to some facts about all of the "unused leases". - The law already requires companies to either produce oil and/or gas on leases or return the leases to the government – the so-called “use it or lose it” provision – generally in the first 10 years. - When a company acquires a lease, it makes a significant financial investment at the beginning of the lease in the form of a non-refundable bonus bid and pays additional rent until and unless it begins producing. - For federal onshore, the Mineral Leasing Act prevents any one company from locking up unproductive excessive federal acreage. - Developing a lease takes years and substantial effort to determine whether the underlying geology holds commercial quantities of oil and/or gas. The lengthy process to develop them from a lease often is extended by administrative and legal challenges at every step along the way. This administration discouraged American energy. For more than a year it has halted new federal leasing – key to future energy investment and production. It canceled energy infrastructure, blocked development in parts of Alaska, entertained new taxes to punish the U.S. energy industry and chilled future investment by signaling that oil and gas wouldn’t be part of America’s future energy mix. All last summer, the administration called on OPEC+ to increase its production more rapidly in the face of rising energy costs, bypassing American producers. Don't believe what either party says at that podium, do your own due diligence as am American and get to the facts. This administration has done everything within its executive, legislative and judicial power to thwart American energy production and the lease argument is simple propaganda meant to distract all the folks too lazy to look up the facts. A federal judge canceled major oil and gas leases over climate change

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-03-04/what-if-russia-loses Good analysis of what Putin's failure in Ukraine could mean for NATO, the US, and Europe going forward.

Because they aren’t. They’ve done everything possible to shit on domestic production. My brother works in the oil industry, it’s heartbreaking to see what this administration has done: appeal to domestic environmentalists by crushing domestic oil, simultaneously increasing reliance on brutal dictators. I love the environment, but green energy isn’t ready for the volume our nation requires. And sending money to OPEC instead of US based production has been awful for national security.

Good video of a destroyed Russian fuel convoy.

Some film from my last squadron in the Navy. Made is as a sort of ‘cruise video’ and memento to almost a decade in the same squadron.

It's easy to get caught up arguing about this project or that project, but the macro trends are very clear. The U.S. has massively ramped up domestic fossil fuel production and exports, and our reliance on foreign fossil fuel imports has dropped significantly. We're a net exporter of fossil fuels as of 2020. However, not all fossil fuels are interchangeable obviously, so there's some stuff we import because we have less of it than we need or it's cheaper to import than to produce domestically to meet our needs 100%. Repeal the Jones Act for one. Overall though fossil fuels are a giant global commodity and there's not some lever on the Resolute Desk that makes oil (or consumer gasoline) prices go up or down. Fair arguments can be made that Dem administrations typically try to reduce fossil fuel production/usage at the margins due to climate change concerns and GOP administrations usually don't, but the big numbers don't lie, see the graph below. 2008-2020 was 2/3 controlled by Democrats and our domestic production went up very significantly and our net imports dropped very significantly. BL: Obama admin recently oversaw very substantial domestic fossil fuel production increases! Trump admin also did this. Good work. Long-term, I'm personally in favor of an energy abundance policy - we need *massively* more energy as a human species and we can do a lot of amazing things if we're able to achieve that. Space colonization, significantly more food production, large-scale ocean water desalination, and direct carbon capture all become much more commercially viable with energy abundance. That means way more nuclear (ideally figuring out fusion), way more solar/wind/tidal/geothermal, and yes also some fossil fuels so long as you can price in or mitigate the negative externalities of carbon emissions and other pollution. If you have direct carbon capture powered by fusion for example, and other emissions controls such that net emissions/pollution are negative, burn all the fossil fuels you want! It's also currently impossible to launch rockets without fossil fuels so even in the above fantasy example, there will likely always be a place for extremely energy-dense types of fuels. Medium-term, I'd love to rely less on OPEC dictators + Putin and would rather see us put more effort into energy sources that are more sustainable. Nuclear + renewables > domestic/friendly-nation fossil fuels > hostile-nation fossil fuels while we still need them, which we do. We are well on way down this track. Short-term, we still import fossil fuels from Russia and we should stop. Their illegal and immoral war in Ukraine is a travesty and we should punish them as directly as possible without risking significant further escalation or loss of American lives. This will cause pain at the pump and we should do whatever we can to alleviate that, e.g. temporary federal gas tax holiday, increasing any domestic production that we can, and leaning on the rest of OPEC+ to pump more. Not to detract from efforts to move toward abundant, sustainable energy as described above, but we can and should do both. Source for the graph below. Edit to add: f*ck Putin, long-live Ukraine...to stay on topic 🇺🇦

Soooo, the Russia/Ukraine war spreads and involves NATO to include the US. How does that play out? How many ground divisions of various flavors will be required? How long will it take for the US to bring in serious numbers? How will the logistics flow? For how long? How about local ground and air defense of staging and flying bases needed to move/support kinetic ops inside Ukraine? How do the good guys tell the bad guys apart in an urban environment? Shedding a uniform is easy. Not everyone in Ukraine will welcome the intervention, particularly the further east the action might move. Would the Russians fight better if it becomes a direct fight of defense for them as opposed to being the aggressor against a smaller state? I.e., if this is NATO attacking Mother Russia, might the enthusiasm ramp up? Barring a full-on WWII level of effort in industry, increased shipping capacity, etc, etc, etc, this ain't happening. Which, by the way, would stretch us to the limit. And we would then be unable to respond anywhere else. Like Taiwan or Korea. Nor should it. Do you really believe that Old Europe - Germany/France/Italy, etc - is going to risk thousands of troops for this? Let alone the threat of catching airstrikes or a nuke if they are in the game? Also, those proudly proclaiming "I'll pay $6-7 per gallon" are awfully generous with those who aren't on the government dime at decent wages. Feeding any size family when the income is $20-30k or less becomes a no kidding fight to survive. Think of your airman who, unfortunately, got married at 18 and now has 2 kids and a spouse to try and feed/clothe/house when real inflation is taking 20% or more of his purchasing power. Another pretty immediate effect of this war is the supply of food - wheat/soy/etc - that has stopped. Egypt, as only one example, is a ticking bomb since they get 60% of their food from Ukraine. The Egyptian government subsidizes that purchase. Prices are more than skyrocketing. People get pretty cranky when they are starving. And that's just one country. Plenty of others almost in as bad of shape for feeding their people. Finally, this war going south for Russia (and I, again, hope it does), risks a nuke going off. If the war spreads outside the current conflict, the risk of that increases as does the number of targets on both sides. Blithely writing off those consequences as "meh" is dishonest. Go Ukraine; bleed Putin out, demoralize his forces, and the world should give you all the arms and supplies you can ever use, plus some. Anyone else pulls a trigger and this gets ugly everywhere.

To consolidate discussions from both the Ukraine & politics threads. Open for discussing all things energy policy! I’ll lead with this: despite rhetoric to the contrary, US domestic oil production is projected to set a new record high in 2023, reflecting a full recovery from the losses due to the pandemic. “U.S. crude oil production averaged 11.2 million b/d in 2021. We expect production to average 11.8 million b/d in 2022 and to rise to 12.4 million b/d in 2023, which would be the highest annual average U.S. crude oil production on record. The current record is 12.3 million b/d, set in 2019.” Source: Energy Information Administration Short-Term Energy Outlook, Jan 2022

Muddy fields sure come in handy to slow maneuver too. GO TEAM BLUE & YELLOW!!!!

Keystone pipeline sends about 850K BBL a day. Or did you mean the Keystone XL? I'm not too sad about Canadian product having to take the long way to refineries; the XL would have helped out Canada for sure, not a lot of impact for the U.S. The post from nsplayr above is way more comprehensive, but domestic crude production is presently higher than it was at the beginning of Trump's presidency (by a large amount) and also at the end of Trump's presidency (source). So again, which executive branch energy policy is hurting us right now? I'm not the biggest Biden fan, but I just don't see that he's the boogeyman here.

Hell of a lot easier...and cheaper... to hit em when their on the ground eh?. I just googled an rpg-7 rocket.......a whopping 200-500 a round. Loads cheaper than a stinger.

Unconfirmed reports coming out on Twitter night now saying a Ukrainian Marine unit conducted a raid on Kherson airfield and destroyed around 30 forward deployed Russian helicopters. Here’s to hoping it’s true.

Houston for the most part. Its not that exciting though. Working with pipelines etc..There aren't as many as there use to be. I work for a tech vendor, its been fun. Not without its challenges but better than anything else I've done.

https://www.nametags4u.com/

Possible Biden Saudi Arabia trip could mean embracing oil, ignoring brutality Still have yet to see an article about this administration looking to re-embrace domestic oil production.

Isn't that what they are doing? I know Biden floated a plan to bring manufacturing back to the US.

There is a real missed opportunity to blame inflation and oil prices, etc. on Russia. Make an argument that the higher prices are needed to combat Russian influence on the energy markets. Circle back to the previous administration's energy policies and take credit for them.

If anybody played any part in stinger program/development, hats off to you. Quality work on display.

Good video, thanks for posting.

It’s hard to kill the devil Sent from my iPhone using Baseops Network mobile app

Well. Well. Well. "horse paste" for the win.

I'd nail it

Of course I have, but I'm also not dumb enough to think personal purchasing is equivalent to foreign policy. I do go out of my way (and spend more) to avoid Chinese goods where I'm able. Where has it gotten us? Literally the free-est and most prosperous the West (and the rest of the world largely) has ever been. South Korea and Taiwan are certainly better off. Germany, the rest of the EU, and Japan are looking pretty great too. I'm sure Israel appreciated our intervention. Sitting out Rwanda, however, was a bad look, and one of Clinton's biggest regrets. And when we pulled out of Vietnam there was an unfathomable slaughter in Cambodia. Afghanistan isn't looking to great, but I suppose zero deaths in the year prior to the withdrawal was too high a price for the "no more foreign wars!" crowd. It's trendy right now to act like our history is some comedy of errors. It's intellectually hollow and incredibly self-righteous to retroactively interpret history in the most negative light. The world is immeasurably better for billions of people as a direct response to US power projection. "The better part of a century" with American "interventionalism" has been pretty fucking good compared to the better part of a millennium without it.

Yes

Anybody feel like discussing how this whole thing could’ve been avoided if only Putin had considered our Western perspective and not just thought with his Eastern one? Maybe there are some tweets on the subject? It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge there are 2+ perspectives in every conflict. To whatever degree one might understand the other, the fact remains that whoever decides to take up arms is more at fault for upsetting peace and stability. If I’m reading some of these opinions correctly, they’re saying that just because Russia is wrong to have invaded Ukraine that doesn’t relieve the West of culpability. That must be true since here we are, but the problem with the next step of identifying what we could’ve/should’ve done differently is it forces us to prove a negative. It is not a fact that not expanding NATO/disbanding NATO/losing the Cold War/not entering WW2/etc. would have resulted in a more peaceful world today, especially if the person responding to these moves may or may have not been a rational actor. It may be that Russia was going to retake Eastern Europe no matter what and under whatever pretext was most convenient. We’ll never know, and just because Putin’s said something on the topic carries little water given his loose relationship with the truth. So while I encourage introspection to identify specific steps we could’ve taken to help avoid catastrophe, unwinding 30 years of the new world order and all the national interests that we have made concrete gains on is a bridge too far for me.

A country seizing parts of a neighboring country while governments with the power to stop it say things like "its not our concern" and "we don't want to start a bigger war" certainly seems analogous to me.

Flea, I suspect that when we dig down we will find that we have an important fundamental difference here: I believe that liberal democracy is by far the best system of government and society that man has developed so far (not perfect by a long shot, but that’s another debate). While I agree that we’ve had some recent stumbles in how and where we choose to project our values, a country that asks to be a part of the team is a much different animal than one that has our values attempted to be forced upon it. When you have countries like Ukraine, Poland, Georgia, and the Czech Republic that have seen the other side and decide that they want to be a part of the free world, we should welcome them with open arms. A free and prosperous Ukraine is a Ukraine that doesn’t harbor terrorists, criminals, and despots that make the world less safe. When you scale that concept up to scores of countries to include the vast majority of Europe, the world is a much safer place. So yes, I do believe that a free Ukraine that is fully under the European umbrella, including NATO has tangible benefits for every American. I also don’t believe for a minute that any of this is about border security or historic power struggles for Putin. Those are just the excuses he uses to act the way he does. This is about power and greed, plain and simple.

"ahhhhhhh roggggggaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh follow the greens" [sexy female Japanese accent]

This is why I so dearly my cargo gig. I land at ICN, and they say “follow the greens.” Wait…scratch that, cuz then I go to anywhere in China, which is like O’Hare…in mandarin.

Hay-sus Krist, this 'thing' won't die... Multiple political outlets have reported on the Clintons spooling up their "Clinton Global Initiative" machinery again. You know, that multi-hundreds of millions of dollars in donations for access to then-Senator, later SecState, later presumed POTUS heir apparent. When she crashed and burned in 2016, donations went down from the 10s of millions per year in, largely, foreign money - Russia/Saudi/Pakistan, etc - to the thousands. Now, the old band is getting back together. She's gonna try again.

Less walls of text more pics of hot eastern european chicks please

Which policies, specifically? There are a shitload of oil leases that are unused, and a whole lot of wells that aren't producing. Which was the case both before the Biden administration, and now today. I'd be more eager to criticize any executive branch energy policy if we were actually operating anywhere near capacity, and were somehow hamstrung because of it.