Bishop Hill Antifracking: the Russian connection
Jan 28, 2015 Energy: gas Foreign Via Instapundit comes an article from the Washington Free Beacon which reports that money is being funnelled to anti-fracking activists by a mysterious company in Bermuda with links to the Russian oil business:
A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
One of those executives, Nicholas Hoskins, is a director at a hedge fund management firm that has invested heavily in Russian oil and gas. He is also senior counsel at the Bermudan law firm Wakefield Quin and the vice president of a London-based investment firm whose president until recently chaired the board of the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft.
The findings are based on a report by the US Environmental Policy Alliance. I don't think a fire has been found yet, but the quantities of smoke are prodigious.
Bishop Hill
A little Googling shows that Hans-Joerg Rudloff, the chairman of Marcuard, a UK company named in the report, is a former director of Barclays Capital and a close associate of Suleiman Kerimov, who is a significant shareholder in Gazprom.
Reader Comments (20)
Anti-fracking enviros are not very succesful me thinks looking at the succes of the fracking industry ( until now) in the US. So, what happened with those tens of millions?
What helps is that Saudi Arabia is pushing the price down of oil, but that is exactly what the Rusky's don't want....
Lenin's (and Stalin's) phrase "useful idiots" shows its aptness yet again.
Oh what a web we sow ......... to deceive. The greens truly are a nasty bunch of browns.
It all sounds wacky, conspiracy theorist stuff but it's quite striking in Russia how heavily their news inveighs against fracking. You can get a glimpse of it on Russia Today sometimes. They cover anti-fracking demos in the UK as if they're an important mass movement.
It is not surprising that the hapless Greens have Russian associations. The anti-fracking movement would be the perfect cover. It wouldn't cost Russia very much money and hard to trace.
After all they could be effective weapons for Putin in damaging European economies and even intelligence gathering for the FSB.
One wonders why they are not properly investigated!
Shades of CND. But can anyone say they are surprised? And how pleasingly ironic, not least given the likes of Mann's splutteringly outraged attacks on professional fossil-fuel-funded denialists (yawn, yawn), that Greens are being funded by . . . fossil fuel interests.
- Putin was the one that accused the west of infiltrating Russia via NGOs
.. is he doing that with WWF, Greenpeace, and other billion dollar NGOs like Oxfam etc. ?
(By coincidence I originally made this comment at 6:22am)
The funding of anti-fraccing by GazProm and Putin (Russian Mafia) is essentially the same as funding CND by the KGB in the 1970s, cash to its then Secretary who ended up as EU Foreign Minister.
The modern scam involved buying Gerhardt Schmidt who, to satisfy his Green coalition partners, instigated the EU Windmill Programme. Whilst in Office he negotiated Chairmanship of NordStream, the Baltic gas pipeline. His protegé, Merkel, is doing the same for the Russians but her plan has been to use this to extend the EU to the Urals.
However, Putin is extending Imperial Russia to the Atlantic! The German power utilities have told their government that it must nationalise central power stations or the Grid fails. We are in a new, unpredictable phase of History with anti-fraccing essentially Nihilist Politics funded by Neo-Imperial Russia.
Charming Quark:
It could be because there are so many in the higher echelons of power within this country entangled within this web of deceit that they do not want such an investigation. One has to marvel at how few politicians there are who display any interests in furthering the progress of this country; all seem to be more interested in furthering their own progress in Euro-cum-world government, and the interests of the UK and the British citizens be damned.(Stephen Richards: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Not sure of its provenance, but I am sure someone will let us know, soon. The sowing was of the wind, with a whirlwind to reap – Biblical.)
It is unsurprising that this is happening. After all, "greens" and acolytes are being financed heavily from other sources, some of which are very open about it. It's fine, really. And, besides, most of the money is simply stolen along the way. Consider that some US billionaires have given hundreds of millions of dollars to the "cause". What has it been spent on? Not on the environment, that's for sure.
The "tangled web" quote is by Sir Walter Scott.
RR
Never attribute complex motives when simpler ones will suffice — Occam's Razor.
Are any of us any better? How often have we suggested that some Evil Empire or other is out to do us down only to be told by ordinary people (like what you find on this site(?)) that we're being paranoid?
The Russians (more especially the Soviets) have been running espionage and infiltration networks in the West since at least the 30s. We know this. Le Carré simply fictionalised what was already common knowledge.
There is more than sufficient circumstantial evidence that the KGB had either active agents or at least sympathisers in CND, several trade unions and possibly (probably?) the higher echelons of the Labour Party right up until the demise of the Soviet Union. Did I say demise? What is Putin's Russia but a cut-down USSR with imperial ambitions?
Why would they not be using the same methods to protect and further their own interests now?
Where we insist on getting it wrong (to continue my defence of the majority of MPs) is in assuming that everyone is corrupt. They're not. They're just no less stupid, blind or complacent than the rest of us. Even now there are perfectly sane individuals with no axe to grind, with no interest for or against fracking or Russia or politicians, reading the same articles as Andrew refers to in this thread and dismissing them as the ravings of paranoid American lunatics.
Yes, the Russians will do their best to protect their gas and oil interests. Yes, they will use methods that we upstanding, honest Brits will consider reprehensible. But their active supporters are a minuscule minority. The vast majority are well-meaning eco-idiots who have been sold a line they want to believe in and (like most of us at one time or another) haven't bothered to examine the product quite as carefully as they should.
By assuming the worst in people we are, in effect, assuming the worst in ourselves. Not a healthy state of affairs in any society.
hehehehehe...
And meanwhile we have this.
In over 40 years living in Scotland I got used to the ability of the Scottish Establishment (so-called) to shoot itself in the collective foot but this is in a class of its own.
To think that INEOS came within hours of shutting down Grangemouth and then they have to cope with this insanity. Will the last person to leave Scotland please remember to put the cat out.
OK - the Ivans are at it.
I'm surprised that the Venezuelans don't get a bit more press for their sponsorship of anti-fracking groups especially Josh Fox of Gasland frackwit catechism infamy. The Venezuelan heirs to Chavez have been busying themselves in this regard - and note - the Venezuelans have larger proven reserves of hydrocarbons than Saudi Arabia....
What do you expect of "watermelons"? Of course they will take money from Russia.
They are the recycled "Trots", "Militants" and SWP "rentamob" of yesteryear.
When the USSR collapsed they too "moved on" using the same entryist techniques into the Environmental movement that had served them so well with the Unions and the Labour Party.
Mike , I watched the SNP & Labour trying to outdo each other in sucking up to the Green on BBC Scotland tonight. It was a sick joke. No fracking in Scotland? Will somebody tell them they're about 40 years too late? Shut down Grangemouth? Yes! Er, no, er but yes. Fracking will destroy Scotland's tourist appeal! How exactly? Way less visible than all those wind turbines.
kellydown
Someone out there must have the figures.
What are the actual costs (mining, haulage, construction, infrastructure (roads, etc), and not forgetting an allowance for land use not available for other purposes) of a (say) 25-turbine wind farm together with the CO2 costs and what is the likely energy production from that farm over 15 years?
What are the same costs for a wellhead and its likely energy production over the same period?
The environmental damage caused by wind farms is enormous, never mind that it is always possible to find people who don't mind their ugliness (I love the Birmingham Canal network but I've never claimed it is in most of its parts a thing of beauty!). Planting half-a-dozen trees (aren't Greens in favour of trees?) would hide a wellhead. I doubt you could say the same for a wind farm.
So years ago, before the Ukie crisis, all those EU and UK politicians who were adamantly against fracking, shale oil and gas development, must all have been in the pay of Vlad the Evil Putin then... LOL
TomRude,
Putin is very much evil and it would be obvious that 'useful idiots' think otherwise. The scary part is, Putin's government taking part in this very discussion here.
They try to divert us to make us use Russian gas and oil. They are very good in it. They bought Merkel, they bought now ex prime minister Paavo Lipponen of Finland to support gas pipe through the Baltic Sea. They blackmail and bribe. They use Greenpeace and minor organizations. Their target is power. Vlad loves power.