What Right Has Britain to Seize an Iranian Tanker Off Spain?

What Right Has Britain to Seize an Iranian Tanker Off Spain?

http://www.counterpunch.org

by GARY LEUPP

JULY 16, 2019

Photograph Source: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden – CC BY 2.0

 

“We have reason to believe that the Grace 1 was carrying its shipment of crude oil to the Banyas Refinery in Syria. That refinery is the property of an entity that is subject to European Union sanctions against Syria.”

– Fabian Picardo, chief minister of Gibraltar

“[Praise for Gibraltar and the British marines] for this bold move to enforce Syria sanctions [that deny] valuable resources” to the Syrian government.

– British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt On Twitter

The EU has banned the sale of oil to Syria. Very well, but what has that to do with Iran, or its sales of oil to Syria? Tomasz Wlostowski, a lawyer who specializes in EU regulations, says there is no legal basis in EU sanctions law to take such action.)

– Tomasz Wlostowski on Twitter

What gives the UK the right to seize on July 4 an Iranian oil tanker in Spanish territorial waters, force it to Gibraltar, interrogate its four-man (non-Iranian) crew, and arrest its captain and chief officer?

Why, the request of the U.S. of course.

The Spanish government has stated that the British marines and Gibraltar port authority operated at the behest of Washington, after Trump threatened then called off airstrikes against the Islamic Republic. (Gibraltar authorities deny this.) The piratical act was naturally denounced by Iran, which threatens to seize a British tanker if London does not return its vessel. The Brits respond that they might return the ship if given assurances it was not headed to Syria; indeed, Foreign Minister Hunt had a “constructive” phone call with his Iranian counterpart Javad Zarif.

Iran for its part denies that the ship was heading to Syria, but what if it was? What is wrong with any country selling oil to Syria, whose government is recognized by many large powerful countries and needs oil to recover from its horrific civil conflict?

The EU has slapped sanctions on Syria since the Arab Spring protests and outbreak of war in Syria in 2011, in compliance with the U.S. decision to effect regime change through aid to armed rebels, and a concerted U.S.-Israeli campaign to isolate Damascus. The premise is that the U.S. determines a government’s legitimacy; when it withdraws it, Europe must go along.

And when Europe tells Iran it must not sell oil to Syria, Iran must go along. Despite Iran’s extraordinary patience in the face of Trump’s provocations, its determination to stick to the JCPOA, its willingness to discuss with France some changes to the deal, it remains a pariah in Washington’s eyes.

Despite the fact that Trump himself is deplored by world leaders generally and the U.S. has lost prestige in the world since his election, Britain still does its bidding. The British ambassador to Washington has been obliged to quit his post after the leaking of diplomatic cables accusing Trump of ineptness and incompetence, but still, London marches almost lock-step with Washington in foreign policy.

Britain might have told Washington: “We don’t have any right to seize a commercial vessel in foreign waters engaging in legal activities. And why would we want to cooperate with you in exacerbating tensions with Iran?” Instead the British Marines act as Trump’s buccaneers.

The U.S. press does not problematize the ship seizure itself. It reports on attempts to “violate sanctions” as though the sanctions are themselves proper and worthy of observance. China, Russia, India, South Africa, many countries do not sanction Syria or buy the U.S. interpretation of Syrian realities. It is not the “international community” that wants to punish Syria, or cut its ties to Iran. It is the U.S., which seems of late to be testing its lingering clout with its allies.

The UK was on board the Iraq War-based-on-lies, but has not committed to a U.S.-Israeli-Saudi war on Iran. Perhaps the favor of the tanker seizure was designed to deepen London’s involvement in the U.S.’s long-term regime-change projects in both Iran and Syria. As Trump tries to woo the UK away from Europe, the “special relationship” acquires new meaning, even as an ambassador departs for candidly noting the Trump administration’s ineptness. The seizure looks to me like a loyalty statement. Britain remains the U.S.’s poodle.

More articles by:GARY LEUPP

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

Russia to Continue Trade With Iran Regardless of US Sanctions Against Tehran – Envoy to EU

© Sputnik / Vitaliy Ankov

Source

sputniknews.com

July 9, 2019

 

BRUSSELS (Sputnik) – Russia will ignore US sanctions against Iran and continue to trade with the Middle Eastern nation without creating any special mechanisms, Russian Permanent Representative to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov told Sputnik.

“Our colleagues here [in Brussels] sometimes ask why Russia and China do not create their own INSTEX [Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges]. To that we answer with the question: why do we need it? We have Finland already traded and will trade without paying any attention to US sanctions,” Chizhov said.

The day before, the Finnish government said that it was considering joining a trading system that core EU members set up to bypass US sanctions on Iran.

Last year, the United States reimposed sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy sectors that were initially waived under a 2015 nuclear deal.

In January, France, Germany and the United Kingdom set up INSTEX in order to ease non-dollar trade with Tehran in the wake of these sanctions. Following a meeting of the Joint Commission of the Iranian nuclear deal in June, the mechanism became operational and available to all EU member states.

Trudeau Should Cut His Losses on the Trans Mountain Pipeline

Source

Justin Trudeau is in over a barrel. In 2015, he made a deal with Alberta. He would get an oil pipeline built to a coast if the province joined his pan-Canadian climate plan. After his election this past April, Conservative Alberta Premier Jason Kenney ripped up Alberta’s side of the bargain and declared war on Trudeau’s climate plan.

What should Ottawa do now after being jilted by Alberta?

Should the Liberal government maintain its side of the bargain, and proceed with the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to the Vancouver area and lose credibility as a climate warrior? Or should it kill the pipeline expansion now and say this was a bargain gone bad?

In the long run, the latter course would save Ottawa lots on further subsidies. But there’s that little short-run thing – the looming federal election on or before Oct. 21.

How could Trudeau explain taking a big loss of taxpayer money on a pipeline that no private sector investor would touch last year? Either choice will look bad. No good options is a predicament.

Kicking the can down the road beyond the federal election is one way out. But Natural Resources Minister Amarjeet Sohi promised a decision by June 18.

Remember Justin Trudeau’s grand entry onto the world stage at the Paris Climate Summit in November-December 2015? Canada is back, my friends. That was just six weeks after his stunning electoral upset, leapfrogging his party from third to first place, winning a solid majority.

In Paris, Trudeau and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna promised to catapult Canada from environment laggard under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper to a global climate leader. While most rich countries at the Paris talks aimed to limit global warming to a 2 C rise above pre-industrial levels, Canada joined low-lying island states to champion a stricter 1.5 C global limit.

Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline, Civil Society to Justin Trudeau: “The Time for Investment in New Fossil Fuel Infrastructure Is Over”

How then did Trudeau get stuck with a pipeline that makes no environmental or financial sense?

The pipeline is not going to change the fundamental disadvantages of Alberta’s oilsands. At $90 a barrel for new projects, their break-even cost is among the highest in the world. And their emission intensity is through the roof. Environment and Climate Change Canada scientists found that CO2 emissions were more than 60 percent higher than industry had calculated.

The sands are in a remote part of a remote, landlocked province. Their main market – the U.S. – where 99.9 percent of Canadian oil exports now head, is now their main competitor. The U.S. produces cheaper, lower-emissions oil.

The idea that the Trans Mountain expansion would open new markets in Asia is illusory. The price of heavy, sour crude oil in the Far East is $1 to $3 a barrel lower than on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Transport costs via the Trans Mountain line and tankers will be at least $2 a barrel higher to Asia. China does not have the capacity to refine bitumen. Besides, the world is swimming in light crude oil.

In recent years, only a few oil tankers have left Vancouver harbour. Most of that oil has gone to the U.S., not China. So the premise behind the Trans Mountain pipeline is faulty. The pipeline expansion will likely be a white elephant, owned or subsidized by taxpayers.

The pipeline expansion could cost up to $10 billion, in addition to the $4.4 billion purchase price that the auditor general said was $1 billion too much.

If by some miracle the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion is built, gets filled to capacity and finds markets, it would encourage the production of 590,000 barrels a day more oil from Alberta’s sands. That would add another 13 to 15 megatonnes of carbon pollution.

So it doesn’t make environmental sense either.

The Trudeau government got a special exemption in the new NAFTA (USMCA) to enable it to subsidize the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Why would a government so publicly committed to climate action throw more good money at a dodgy pipeline expansion, especially when Alberta has torn up its side of the climate understanding? Better to cut your losses now.

Gordon Laxer is a political economy professor emeritus at the University of Alberta and author of the Council of Canadians report “Billion Dollar Buyout. How Canadian taxpayers bought a climate-killing pipeline and Trump’s trade deal supports it.”

Featured image is from Canadian Dimension

The original source of this article is The Star (Opinion)

Copyright © Gordon Laxer, The Star (Opinion), 2019

A Tale of Two Probes: Khashoggi Murder and MH17 Downing

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Finian Cunningham

June 24, 2019

A UN special rapporteur issued a damning report this week on the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. There is “credible evidence” to implicate the Saudi state at the highest level in perpetrating the gruesome killing of the dissident writer.

The UN expert on extrajudicial killings urged international sanctions against Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) who is personally implicated for ordering the assassination last October in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul.

Special rapporteur Agnes Callamard also censured the United States and other Western states for not doing enough to put pressure on the Saudis over the murder.

Saudi Arabia has maintained that Crown Prince MbS is innocent and that the killing was done by a team of rogue Saudi agents who overstepped their mission to apprehend Khashoggi and return him to Saudi Arabia to face prosecutors over his public criticisms of the monarchial rulers. Khashoggi had been self-exiled to the US where he was granted a legal residence status while working as a columnist for the Washington Post.

The damning conclusion of the UN report this week confirms an earlier assessment by the American CIA which assigned responsibility for the assassination to the Crown Prince. Despite that CIA finding, President Donald Trump has maintained MbS and the Saudi regime as a close ally. Trump has repeatedly sought to downplay accusations against the regime over Khashoggi’s killing.

Recently, Trump bypassed a ban imposed by Congress on selling weapons to the oil kingdom. The arms deal was priced at over $7 billion. Trump cited the “emergency” of supporting Saudi Arabia against “Iranian aggression” as the reason for bypassing Congress.

Trump’s indulgence of the Saudi monarchs has at least two reasons, apart from arms sales. He needs the Wahhabi regime for his anti-Iran “maximum pressure” policy. The Saudis are also key to the White House in selling its anticipated “Deal of the Century” on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The stark, brutal reality is the Trump administration has no interest in sanctioning the Saudi rulers – even though its own intelligence agency and the UN report this week have laid responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder on the state at the highest level.

Amazingly, too, European governments have also let the Saudis off the hook. Earlier remonstrations against Riyadh have since subsided. Western media have also largely let the murder of the journalist fade from the condemnation it deserves. No doubt the lucrative business of selling arms to Saudi Arabia by Britain, France, and Germany is just too good to let the state-sanctioned murder of a journalist get in the way.

Contrast that with the Western reaction to the Dutch-led probe into the 2014 downing of Malaysian MH17 airliner over eastern Ukraine. This week the investigation upped the ante of blaming Russia for the disaster in which 298 people onboard were killed. It names four individuals who are accused of embodying a link between Russia’s military and the Ukrainian separatists whom the Dutch-led investigators claim shot down the Boeing 777.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad got it right when he denounced the latest report by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) as a “politicized” stunt aimed at scapegoating Russia for the disaster. “We are very unhappy,” said the premier about the report. “We want proof of guilt, not hearsay.”

The JIT has spent the most part of five years propagating innuendo of Russian wrongdoing. It has relied on “classified information” from NATO intelligence sources, which it says it is not permitted to disclose. The JIT has also relied on a NATO propagandist blog site, Bellingcat, to claim as “evidence” that Russia supplied an anti-aircraft missile system to Ukrainian rebels to shoot down the MH17 passenger plane.

None of the Dutch-led probe has conformed to the slightest standards of criminal investigation and due process. The Malaysian authorities have been denied full access to findings, while the Ukrainian state has, even though the latter should be treated as a suspect party given the circumstances of the airliner being shot down over its territory.

Russia, which has been continually accused since the very beginning even before plane wreckage was examined, has also been denied participation in the investigation. Russia’s own independent findings have produced significant evidence implicating the military forces under the command of the authorities in Kiev. One such piece of evidence is that the Buk missile fragments indicate the munition dated from 1986 as part of the Ukrainian military’s inventory.

The JIT report, which is due to continue for several more years, is flawed from anti-Russia prejudice and unsubstantiated “evidence”. It is, as the Malaysian premier said this week, based on hearsay and innuendo. This is a travesty of legal standards and criminal investigation.

Yet the JIT’s unsubstantiated allegations against Russia and its collection of reports have lent political impetus for the US and its European allies to impose economic sanctions against Russia which have cost the country billions of dollars in disrupted trade.

By contrast, the UN report this week confirms serious allegations against the Saudi rulers for their role in the barbaric murder of a journalist. Jamal Khashoggi was kidnapped inside a consular premises, drugged, murdered and his remains dismembered, never to be found. As the UN special rapporteur asked this week: where are the Western sanctions against the Saudi regime?

The hypocrisy and double standards of the US and its European allies just goes to show their cynical expedience. It is expedient to sanction Russia over slanderous innuendo concerning the death of 298 airline passengers. It is, however, commercial and geopolitical good business to turn a blind eye to Saudi state complicity in murder.

The Planned War Against Iran

Source

eventhorizonchronicle.blogspot.com

Richard Sauder

Sunday, June 23, 2019

In reality, the war against Iran has already been underway for quite some time, at least since 1953 when a CIA coup d’état against the legally elected government of Mohammed Mosaddegh brought to power the ruthless dictator, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who in his turn was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1979.

Of course, the game then, as now, revolved around the fact that Iran sits atop a vast reserve of petroleum. Today, more than ever, the USSA covets Iranian petroleum reserves. The fundamental reason is quite simple: the global power and influence of the USSA empire is rooted in its issuance of and global use of the petro-dollar, so-called because it is based on petroleum and the global trade in petroleum, and also secondarily in other commodities, goods and services, much of which are also directly or indirectly petroleum based or reliant: automobiles, plastics, airplanes/aviation, public transport, agricultural goods, fertilizers, etc.

The problem for the USSA is that more and more nations are abandoning the petro-dollar in international trade, increasingly relegating the petro-dollar to irrelevance, or at least much less relevance, such that its status as the global reserve currency is being called sharply into question.

For instance, three weeks ago, China and Russia signed an agreement todevelop bilateral trade in their respective national currencies, the ruble and the yuan, effectively bypassing the dollar. Given that there are already existing agreements for several hundreds of billions of dollars worth of Russian petroleum exports to China, this is not an insignificant step.

And two weeks ago, Russian and European Union (E.U.)  officials announced that they want to “quickly extend” use of the euro and ruble in payments between Russia and the E.U., effectively phasing out the petro-dollar from their bilateral commerce.

The writing is on the wall. The petro-dollar is destined for a rapid, quick decline. China, Russia, the E.U.: these are major global powers.

The power of the USSA Empire is based on global use of the petro-dollar. If the globe abandons the petro-dollar, then the entire phony-baloney edifice of global, imperial control based on the petro-dollar will come crashing down. That day is hard upon the USSA and its ruling elite knows it.

This absolutely is a huge factor in the ongoing political, diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Venezuela and Iran, which sit atop two of the largest known petroleum reserves on the planet.

A petro-dollar based system that has no petroleum to sell and/or trade, that has no petroleum that it controls, is meaningless, a contradiction in terms. It’s simply a historical footnote in global political-economy, nothing more. Whence the aggressive maneuvers against both Venezuela and Iran, the transparent objective being to acquire outright ownership of, or at least indirect control over, their respective huge pools of petroleum, to ensure that they are sold and traded on the global market in petro-dollars.

The half-century of global, petro-dollar dominance is rapidly drawing to a close. The USSA is very quickly being forced into a situation where it will have to use its vast military machine to enforce global, petro-dollar supremacy, or risk seeing the petro-dollar crash and burn, as the world increasingly abandons the petro-dollar in international trade. As the props are kicked out from under the petro-dollar, the huge, multi-trillion dollar, financial house of cards erected on the value and (presumed) global dominance of the petro-dollar will come crashing down, and fast.

We are to that point right now. The supremacy of the USSA is all about to end. It can end peacefully, with a dignified surrender of the USSA to the new, global realities; or it can end hyper-violently, if the USSA decides to lash out militarily, to impose its will by crushing martial force on other nations.

It appears that the USSA has chosen the second option, the route of military force. In recent weeks we have seen a small spate of attacks against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman region. The Israelis are the most likely culprits in these false flag attacks, which have been wrongly blamed on Iran.

False flag attacks have been used for centuries to provoke war, sometimes very large and extremely ruinous wars.

See for example, the following list of scores of false flag attacks that have been employed or planned over the centuries:

Read THIS Before Cheering the Next War 
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-21/read-cheering-next-war 

Nothing would surprise me less at this juncture than to see a flagrant, notorious false flag attack, designed to outrage public sentiment and fan the flames of war against Iran. That appears to be the way that current events are trending, and both Israel and the USSA have a lamentable history of employing false flag attacks to further their policy objectives.

As it happens, Donald Trump has methodically surrounded himself with war criminals and warmongers; they are his personal appointees. The way the geo-political-economic-diplomatic-military wind is blowing it certainly looks like the USSA has opted for war.

At this point, the Empire shows no signs of dying quietly or peacefully. It has a global war machine and it looks like it intends to use it. Barring benevolent, divine intervention, the USSA shows every indication of prosecuting a war against Iran, by hook or by crook (and also potentially against Venezuela, Russia — which also has huge petroleum reserves, China, North Korea and more).

This is madness. Hell on Earth lies down the path that the USSA appears determined to pursue.

If the USSA persists in its folly, the geo-political-economic-diplomatic-military trajectory that it is currently on cannot possibly, and absolutely will not, end well.

Donald Trump announced a couple of days ago that he called off an imminent military attack against Iran, because one of his generals told him that 150 Iranians would likely be killed.

Translation: one of his generals, perhaps General Joseph Francis Dunford, Jr., the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told him that if it were attacked, Iran would fight back fiercely, and that USSA casualties could amount to some 150,000 troops in the Middle Eastern-Central Asian-Indian Ocean theatre, as well as the loss of maybe $100 billion or more in military matériel such as ships, airplanes, helicopters, munitions, warehouses, trucks, tanks, artillery, missiles, military bases and military ports. In other words, an attack against Iran would entail tremendous, retaliatory battle losses that would far exceed anything in USSA military history. It would make Chancellorsville and Antietam look like Sunday school picnics.

After watching how the USSA and NATO have savaged and ravaged Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and Korea in the 1950s, the Iranians will assuredly go all out in defense of their people, culture and national territory.

The Iranian military and political leadership have repeatedly, clearly and publicly announced their determination to annihilate all USSA forces and bases in the region, if they are attacked. They have also made abundantly clear that they will level Tel Aviv and Haifa in Israel.

Please understand that Iran can do all of that with ballistic missiles and conventional munitions; nukes are not even necessary. The general public does not appreciate the power of modern thermobaric weapons, the effects of which are ghastly beyond belief, and which can extend over relatively large areas. Ten large thermobaric warheads delivered on Diego Garcia, for one instance, would cause holy hell and could effectively put the base out of commission. Can the Iranians do that? I wouldn’t bet against it.

They certainly have missiles that can take out any aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman region, or any USSA military base within 1,000 miles of Iranian territory.

I know all of this and I’m not even a military man. In sum, if the USSA does go to war against Iran, expect mass mortality of USSA military personnel, and many billions of dollars worth of losses in USSA military matériel, on just the first day of the conflict.

Yes, you say, but what if the Israelis or the USSA use nukes against Iranian cities? In that case, you can expect Israeli and USSA cities to be targeted for destruction.

Sure, you rejoin, but what if the Israelis or the USSA destroy Iranian nuclear facilities? Similarly, expect nuclear hell to come to Israel and the USSA.

The saner policy, by far, would be to not attack Iran and to remove the economic sanctions that the Trump regime has imposed on Iran.

However, Donald Trump has announced that tomorrow, on 24 June 2019, the USSA will impose even more restrictive economic sanctions on Iran.

As I have said above, if the Trump regime’s current policy trajectory remains unchanged, then the situation cannot possibly, and will not, end well. Not for Iran, not for Israel and certainly not for the USSA.

I would counsel peace, were I in an influential policy-making position; but I am not, and the warmongers who occupy those positions of power are hell-bent on war. Therefore, if nothing changes, war is likely to be the outcome.

CANADA’S TRUDEAU DECLARES CLIMATE EMERGENCY… THEN APPROVES MAJOR OIL PIPELINE

Source

http://www.blacklistednews.com

SOURCE: OIL PRICE

By Nick Cunningham

June 19, 2019

Canada declared a national climate emergency on Monday. The next day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave the greenlight to a massive oil sands pipeline.

The House of Commons, with strong support declared climate change a “real and urgent crisis.” A week before, Justin Trudeau proposed a ban on single-use plastics, which, if implemented, would be the latest in a growing number of bans on plastic that could put multibillion-dollar bets on plastics and petrochemicals by the oil industry at risk.

But Trudeau has never really stood in the way of Canada’s oil industry, despite years of platitudes about addressing climate change. That was clear on June 18, when he gave the approval to the Trans Mountain Expansion (not for the first time), a $4.5 billion twin pipeline that would run along an existing line from Alberta to the Pacific Coast in British Columbia.

The Trans Mountain Expansion is one of a few high-profile pipeline projects that have run into serious trouble. Trudeau first gave the greenlight in 2016, but the project ran aground amid legal challenges from First Nations and environmental groups. Last year, Kinder Morgan, the original owner of the project, headed for the exit, threatening the cancel the project altogether.

Desperate to keep it alive – and the clearest example imaginable of how much the Canadian government depends on the oil industry – Trudeau moved to nationalize the project in mid-2018, buying it off of Kinder Morgan’s hands. A year later, here we are, with Ottawa once again trying to push it forward.

“This isn’t an either/or proposition. It is in Canada’s national interest to protect our environment and invest in tomorrow while making sure people can feed their families today,” Trudeau said on Tuesday. Despite Trudeau’s plea, many see it precisely as an either/or proposition. Faced with a binary choice, Trudeau could either anger the oil industry, or anger First Nations and environmental groups. He chose the former, even though that was mostly expected.

The approval comes as no surprise—the federal government owns the pipeline after all,” Scotiabank’s Rebekah Young wrote in a note. The Canadian government has vowed to build the project with a Crown corporation, then turn it over to private investors or some other company.

But the next step is unclear.

The approval from Trudeau’s government is a “positive step” for the project, but “project execution risk remains elevated,” Goldman Sachs wrote in a note to clients. The investment bank said that while the government plans to begin construction this year, Goldman is not factoring the project into its base-case forecasts, “given prior uncertainty in the outlook of this project.”

“Today’s decision is a positive development for Canada’s western oil sector, but it will have little impact on short term production,” Rebekah Young for Scotiabank said. The expansion will triple the pipeline system’s current capacity, taking it up to 890,000 bpd. “However, with the earliest completion date only by 2022,” Young added.

Still, commencing construction on the project would be seen as a breakthrough for Canada’s oil industry. “We would also anticipate that reaching surety in construction of TMX would provide oil sand producers confidence to commence re-investing in production growth, given the capital constrained budgets most companies are now operating under,” Goldman analysts said. “That said, we continue to see pipeline shortages until at least 2022…and during this period from now until then, see light-heavy differentials wider than pipeline economics.”

The inability to build a new pipeline had diminished production growth in Canada’s oil sands, and could limit output in the long run. The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) just released its 2019 Crude Oil Forecast, and lowered its estimate for production growth to 1.44 percent annually through 2035, less than half its prior estimate from 2014. “Pipeline constraints, a lack of market diversity, and inefficient regulations are largely responsible for holding back Canada’s oil sector,” CAPP said.

Oil forecasts aside, the Trans Mountain Expansion will still run into stiff resistance from First Nations and environmental groups. “The Trudeau government does not have the right to put a pipeline through unceded Secwepemc land,” spokeswoman Kanahus Manuel said, according to Reuters. More lawsuits and protests are inevitable.

Moreover, the pipeline needs permits from British Columbia, where the government has opposed the project.

“[T]he project still faces significant political, regulatory, and judicial challenges, and ultimately we see a tremendous amount of execution risk up until the oil starts flowing,” Gavin MacFarlane, a VP with Moody’s Investors Service, said in comments circulated to reporters.

Meanwhile, the other pipeline that could potentially add takeaway capacity from Alberta – Enbridge’s Line 3 replacement – hit another snag. State agencies in Minnesota said on Tuesday that they would not issue permits until a revised environmental review was completed, following a recent court order that said the state had failed to adequately assess the potential impact of an oil spill. In short, permits could be delayed longer than expected.

If Line 3 fails to move forward for any reason, that increases the stakes and importance for the Trans Mountain Expansion as the only route left for new pipeline capacity. And vice versa.

Israeli Submarines Suspected of Sabotaging Shipping in Gulf of Oman. In Case of Conflict with Iran, Oil Prices could Double Overnight

Israel should definitely be placed on the top list of who could have done this false-flag operation.

Source

It is known that the US has for long had a comprehensive and combined plan with Israel to attack Iranian targets with huge, non-nuclear, bunker-busting, 10 ton, GBU-43  air-blast bombs capable of destroying the deepest underground  installations – these are the most powerful non-nuclear ordnance pieces ever produced – but first the Trump-Netanyahu war-plan needed a credible excuse.

It is also known that the Israeli military have been an integral part of that US plan to first cripple the Iranian economy with global oil sanctions and then to initiate an air and sea attack against the Iranian state and its people.

But first, a credible excuse was required.  That excuse was orchestrated jointly by a belligerent Trump and Netanyahu, this week, when two oil tankers were structurally damaged by limpet mines, off the coast of Oman – subsequent to a similar action the previous week – and the sabotage immediately blamed by US Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, without any evidence whatsoever, upon Iran.  However, the state actor concerned was, almost certainly, not Iran but very probably the Israeli navy with its state-of-the-art, German-built, nuclear-armed submarines, covertly patrolling the deep waters of the Gulf.

Israel Driving Trump White House to Catastrophic War against Iran

Iran, of course, unlike Israel, has no nuclear weapons of mass destruction but does have a nuclear-power program and it is these non-military installations that the combined forces of the US and Israel are determined to destroy at any cost in order to further cripple Iran’s civil infrastructure in addition to enforcing a global ban on its oil so as to decimate its economy and to force, yet another, regime change.

The deliberate sabotaging of four shipping tankers in the Gulf and the too obvious accusations against Iran, indicate that US-Israeli plans for a combined attack against the Iranian state are now fairly imminent. And that fact should make the world take notice because such unwarranted and unprovoked aggression against a sovereign state could very easily escalate into a global conflict.  These are very dangerous times, indeed, with an unpredictable and unstable US President determined to instigate a war in the Middle East with a committed partner who has long wanted to destroy Iran in its own bid for regional dominance.

If the conflict materialises and there is an attack against Iran by combined US-Israeli forces, then oil prices could double overnight with devastating global consequences upon all but America who is self-sufficient in oil. That would be reflected in stock-markets worldwide and could lead to a global economic recession in which Europe would suffer disproportionately.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom government should carefully reconsider and recalibrate its response. Much of its future could depend upon it, and its rushed endorsement of unfounded US-Israeli accusations might well prove, in hindsight, to have been unwisely premature.

*

Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Hans Stehling, Global Research, 2019