8 thoughts on “Making Russia Pay For Ukraine”

  1. 8) Buy any and all radioactive ores available from anywhere. (Yellowcake, etc.) The entire energy sector is fungible. Having a large stockpile helps on the secure-the-sources fronts, and it also helps on the deny-your-enemies front. And we need not bother talking about the morons-with-dirtybombs front, because fearless leader swears they’re gone.

    9) Buy coal. Yes, coal. Having the government -buy- the coal for long-term stockpiling (a) keeps all the miners employed, (b) adds to the national energy stockpiles, and (c) still has the added moronic effect of “reducing CO2” … for now. If that floats your boat because you’re a reality denier.

    10) Aim the NSA, IRS, and EPA at the anti-fracking community. Ok, fine, yes, joke entry. Just having bureaucrats point out that the whole ‘burning tap water’ thing happened from undisturbed natural gas deposits in several places in Texas would be useful though.

    11) Refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. IIRC, we drew it down idiotically (again) to lower gas prices.

    12) Stockpile any other potentially crucial things. From neodymium through Atlas boosters.

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    This isn’t just useful for the Ukraine, it also puts us in a better position with China-Japan IMNSHO. One additional thing I would do for the China front is pass a law “Debt to nations that have declared war territorial disputes with our allies is considered null-and-void. It shall be -personally- illegal for anyone including all federal employees, agents, and assignees with sovereign immunity revoked up front to continue debt service on notes held by any hostile power at any moment of the hostilities.” Something to be said for a short, victorious war at that point. But, we’d still have the same leaders, so they’d manage to completely reverse things, again.

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    The Leftists love to point out that “All that is government action! You Love government, etc.” There’s a difference between taxing $250,000 to pay for a single $50,000 job as the stimulous and other “Just create jobs!” efforts do repeatedly and buying $250,000 of coal. (a)In the latter case, you’ve paid for five jobs in full. Only no one follows through with the accounting because that wasn’t the core goal, duh. (b) You’ve provided something strategically/logistically useful. ( c) There’s even the possibility you’ll get the money back later on. If you -have- to spend money, try -hard- to do it in sane fashions.

    1. The US stockpiled tremendous amounts of coal in underground storage seams, where it is efficiently and tightly sandwiched between layers of shale, sandstone, or limestone. Whoever was President during the carboniferous period was pursuing a long-term energy strategy of storing firewood. 🙂

      And speaking of China, I’m sure they’re watching the pretend punishments being handed out to Putin as they stare at maps of places they’d like to occupy.

    2. “Buy coal. Yes, coal. Having the government -buy- the coal for long-term stockpiling …”
      They did this for helium for awhile, for airships. Then they decided helium wasn’t a strategic resource anymore, started selling off the reserve, and crashed the production industry.

      “Refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.”
      The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is supposed to be a buffer to insure our military isn’t crippled by another oil embargo. Strong domestic production would be a better insurance policy.

  2. While we’re fantasising, I’d recommend stopping the nickel-and-diming to death of the coal industry in general. No fining companies to force them to shut down coal plants, etc. Since most of the coal usage is in the process of being replaced with natural gas usage, each coal plant shut down means a lot of natural gas that gets used for power and can’t be a) used to power cars and therefore replace imported oil, or b) exported.

  3. “Making Russia Pay For Ukraine”

    It’s a good thing no one is suggesting the reverse, because everyone knows Crimea doesn’t pay.

    1. Is that how it is going to be? Russia runs off with Crimea like a kid stealing their sibling’s toys and we get puns? Puns won’t get Russia to Putin Crimea back where they found it.

  4. The response was sort of what I expected from the US. The resources simply aren’t there in the region to provide a more muscled response. The US has been redeploying troops from Europe to the Asia-Pacific for quite some time now. The EU like I expected did a whole bunch of nothing. At least the US announced some sanctions and redeployments. Merkel did zip. Just empty rhetoric.

    There are a lot of answers to the problem. Investing in more nuclear power, granting fracking permits in the EU, building the pipelines to Turkey and extending the Algerian pipeline to Nigeria. These have been talked about for yonks. What has been happening is the opposite. More dependency on Russian energy resources as the Nord Steam pipeline gets online. Same crap as usual. Germany is fine paying for the gas but they don’t want to foot the bill of actually building anything. So the Russians fund the pipeline and then charge whatever they want. Its not like several US administrations haven’t been pushing the construction of the Nabucco pipeline since like forever. The thing is no one wants to fund the thing.

    If there wasn’t such a dependency on wind power we wouldn’t need as much natural gas to begin with. At least France doesn’t need Russian natural gas. So if trade to Russia gets nerfed they don’t stand much to lose in that front. The main problem is they have military collaboration projects ongoing like the sale of the Mistral class carriers. Fact is none of the major powers (military or economic) in the EU wants to rupture relations with Russia at this moment.

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