Hi Everyone,

I thought I am going to write something different today that affects us very little. As many of you know, Russia has stopped the delivery of natural gas through the Ukraine for now due to a price dispute. This had a ripple effect across Europe, as many countries there get a lot of their natural gas from Russia, and not just the former eastern bloc, but also Austria with 80%.

The timing could not be more perfect, with the coldest weather in Europe in 15 or more years, and obviously the timing of this is not coincidental. Mr. Putin and anybody who follows weather pattern knew since before Christmas that this going to happen. In addition with the changing of the ocean patterns and the low sun spot activity, this kind of cold will be more frequent in the coming years and decades.

So why is this of interest to us. It shows again that being dependent on not very trustful partners for your energy needs is economic suicide. I hope our new administration is learning something from this, such as we need our own energy supply and that can not be just wind and solar, but actually offshore oil, clean coal as well as more natural gas. As I am a climate geek as kind of my hobby, I hope they also see that we are entering a new climate cycle and all that human induced global warming is hoax and just a normal, natural cycle.

One other thing that I find interesting is that natural gas is not a world commodity like oil, so our prices are not affected by something like this at all, as it is hard to transport liquefied natural gas. Natural gas prices in the USA are about half what they are in Europe, and not because of taxes like with gasoline. This makes this even worse for the Europeans and a better weapon for Russia.

Please feel free to comment.

Cheers,

Patrick