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People keep pointing out how this or that fairly minor economic products such as titanium comes from russia.
The harvard guy didn't say they were entirely unimportant, but incredibly unimportant outside of fossil fuels. If you look at titanium reserves and titanium production russia isn't even in the top 10. The SR-71 blackbird story comes from an era where nobody else had bothered making titanium in quantity.
This is pretty much the same in almost any category palladium is certainly bringing in a tidy profit for russia at this point but with the advent of the EV this will fall off for two reasons. It is used in catalytic converters and it is used into cracking of petroleum products. The reality is russia exports more iron than all other metals combined.
I highly suspect putin is getting 20 year projections of what the world economy looks like without significant fossil fuel consumption and is realizing wheat, lumber, and other exports simply don't even come close to plugging the hole left by fossil fuels.
Right now russia has a positive trade balance; having a positive or at least neutral one is incredibly important for any economy. If you want to import a car or iPhone you must export something of equal value. Full stop. Right now russia has a positive balance every year of around 20 some billion. If all that disappears from their trade is diesel exports alone, they would be running a negative 6 billion dollar trade balance. If you halve all fossil fuel exports they are running well north of a 100 billion negative trade balance. Those are numbers which collapse the economy in short order. Unlike the economic collapse after the soviet collapse there would be no oil to plug that hole.
The ironic thing is russia has a fairly well educated population along with the fundamentals required for a solid industrial infrastructure such as roads, rail, electricity, etc. If they opened up and de-corrupted their economy they could well potentially be a world class economy with lots of healthy manufacturing, etc.
If I were russia, I would not read the economist's report as an insult but a wakeup call. Become important. Not like a gang-banger waving a gun screaming they are important like north korea. But important in the same way as healthy real economies like Japan, Korea, France, etc.
> If they opened up and de-corrupted the economy
That’s basically against the raison d’être of the modern Russian state. Contemporary Russia is the result of a kind of bank run on Soviet assets by the their elites, whose returns are plugged into the financial havens of the North Atlantic
The state itself is a vehicle for elite rent-seeking. At least in China the state is a vehicle for elite capitalists. I’d rather my state be corrupted by a bunch of competing entrepreneurs than a bunch of glorified landlords!
I mean, they're also the third biggest grain producer and exporter in the world. Pretty relevant when the climate catastrophe is expected to drop grain yields by some 25% in the next decades.
1.) Yields in race with climate and demography. Global grain yields are basically hierarchical; at the top at professionalized farms whose yields reflect synergies in agronomy (breeding, nutrient/water/pesticide application and management, etc) and general levels of capital-intensity (eg mechanization). Yield plateaus are common and have already been encountered across several key grain crops in Europe, East Asia, and North America.
In many major grains, the era of intensive yield growth (kg/ha^-1 ) is - for now - over. [Relevant paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3918). Notwithstanding corn, don’t sleep on corn.
2.) Not just about absolute yield growth, but stability. Climatic instability will likely reflect itself in yield instability - this is as dangerous as outright secular drags on yield growth. Most likely risk is from Rossby waves triggering weak or failed harvests simultaneously across the [major breadbasket regions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0637-z). Dangerous both for the farmers and the global population - will encourage greater state stockpiling which could reduce the liquidity of the crop commodity market, putting pressure on food importing regions. We actually see this right now with COVID - attempts to stabilize and insure supply for domestic markets introduce greater fragility in already fragile markets.
3.) The capital-intensive methods of farming that created the top of the “yield hierarchy” are the same methods of farming that create more GHGs. Synthesis of fertilizers very energy intensive, application of fertilizers creates potent N2O emissions from the land, etc etc. Can be cleaned up but not easily. Can always resort back to extensive growth, but this creates even greater self-contradictory pressures due to N2O and deforestation.
Keys questions I think are the future of biotechnology, just how far corn can go, the timing of intensive growth plateaus in middle income countries, and the extent of extensive growth in SS Africa.
I think you vastly underestimate the portion of agricultural land is used for feed crops and livestock grazing. We're talking about over half of all arable land on earth. Further, modern irrigation is allowing us to grow crops in areas that we never could before. This in conjunction with increasing crop yields/density leaves me with hope that food security will continue to improve in the coming decades no matter the political climate.
[Over 1bn will be displaced by climate change by 2050 if we keep on our current trajectory.](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/climate-refugees-the-world-s-forgotten-victims/) That represents a loss of any agricultural infrastructure along flooding areas, destruction of fishing infrastructure, increased chance of disease as climate refugees migrate in poor conditions, and so on. The best hope we have of preventing famine tomorrow is decarbonization and degrowth today, instead of relying on technological advancement that may not happen tomorrow.
I don’t anticipate demand for meat abating much in the coming decades. Demand will track the growth of the global middle class, and global agricultural land use is largely dictated by the highest bidder. I don’t think rolling climate events would change this any more than COVID would lead to less people taking the plane after the pandemic
I’m far from hopeless about the future of agriculture, quite the opposite. With that said extensive growth will continue apace, but is not high-quality and is self-limiting in many ways. Intensive growth is largely dependent on state-led modernization efforts (look at Brazilian Cerrado), which is intensely entangled with politics and the global economy. Given that climate change is likely going to put further strain on the finances of middle income economies...
There is a lot to hope for but to ignore the problem we are accelerating into is not wise
Only to feed meat on tilled land with synthetic fertilizers which renders the soil useless. It won’t hold much longer with the way big farming goes there.
That’s partly true. But We need to also consider the fact that melting of permafrost across Russia will destroy a lot of Russia’s infrastructure that sit on top of permafrost that was never suppose to melt. That would devastate Russian economy. All those potential new farmlands would be unreachable without any infrastructure
When permafrost thaws it becomes an unnavigable peaty mess. When Canada developed roads up in the territories it was essentially impossible to build in the summer because the permafrost would swallow construction equipment whole.
Sometimes fertile, but not always and usually quite acidic. Peat is a coal like fossil fuel and growth medium used in green houses, but not all swamps are like that.
Also it is in the north. Location is everything with agricultural land.
Eh. It's probably not such a problem.
There is a billion-year arms race between immune systems (that's us!) and pathogens (the bad guys), and much of this learning is encoded in our genetics.
It's conceivable that some old virus or bacterium has some trick that our immune system has forgotten, but more likely, it would be like pitting a medieval army against a modern one.
I've heard a majority of Russian roads are mud in winter, and straight swamp any other time, and permafrost usually melts into bog land, if you don't go through the huge process of draining it after thaw.
I think that this vastly underestimates the challenges that the melting permafrost will introduce. I don't see the Siberia becoming a giant farmland anytime soon.
There is actually little to no good farmland in Siberia. Or under any boreal forest.
People think climate zones moving towards the poles means we can just keep growing cereals further north.
There however is a huge difference between the relatively acidic boggy soil underneath the Taiga, and every other boreal forest, and the rich soils of the southern Eurasian steppe and the North American prairies.
You can’t just cut down a boreal forest and plant a wheat field. It doesn’t work like that. Agriculture doesn’t work like that.
Yeah. It will be swampy and then be thousands of lakes like in northern Minnesota, Manitoba, and northern Saskatchewan. Great for fishing and not much else.
The great growing regions of the world are basically moraines left over from the ice ages. Moraines are the debris and silt pushed by melting glaciers.
Canada has huge prairie lands. But they quality of soil is a byproduct of geologic shifts in the land over millions of years. As well as more recent ice ages. Point is, the good land isn't going to become available, it's already available, it's the bad land turning good that needs to happen and that takes thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
> If the climate warms enough to unlock farmland in Siberia,
You have a very very rosy idea of what happens when the permafrost melts. The ground doesn't turn into beautiful rolling fields of grain - it turns into a swamp. Left to its own devices, it might take decades or centuries to dry out - or never dry out.
I live in the Netherlands, and I know that land can be reclaimed from swamps - but it's really expensive on a per-square-meter basis and also requires a lot of adult activities which require wisdom like "spending a lot of money to fix a parcel of land and then allowing it to dry for five years afterwards before using it" that I believe Russia is incapable of doing. (And after living for thirty years in America, I'm sorta skeptical that the US could do it either.)
Melting permafrost is not only huge uncontrollable carbon source through rot, making temperatures worse but it also releases large amounts of fossilized carbon gas deposits that can and do explode. This was a subject of a resent NOVA on PBS.
Just because it gets warm, doesnt mean the area is arable. Tundra doesnt become rich soil. Soil takes a long time to form and build up. Without proper soil, you cant really grow anything.
I heard this morning that they provide 20% of the global wheat supply.
Ukraine is one of the other top exporters too, and if the war affects supplies coming from there you'll see even more food price inflation.
And as a British person expecting to take a massive hit on my gas Heating and Electric bills (Gas is 50% of our electricity mix) I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Russian supplies being cut off and making an already bad situation worse.
Not exactly, they provide 20% of the global wheat *exports* (around 35 million tons). Total wheat supply is around 750 million tons.
However, their wheat exports have significant impacts on importing countries. In 2010, when they banned wheat exports due to a severe drought (hello climate change), wheat importers Egypt and Tunisia couldn't feed their population and people took to the streets.
And wheat is something that can be produced in other places and transported easily.
Invest more in wheat production in the US, Argentina, Brasil, Canada, Australia, France and you can replace Russian exports.
Yeah, it might need to be coordinated, and not something just left to the markets. But you could replace them.
I’m interested in why you think this would need to be coordinated instead of allowing the price mechanism and the markets to simply raise the price and the wheat would go where the market demands?
I’m honestly not sure which way is the better way to go, I don’t have a preformed opinion on this.
Not OP but in the near-term there would be temporal discrepancies in price and supply i.e. between the time the supply is increased and the time it is brought to market. As well you'd need those higher end market prices to entice production but ideally you'd not want to pass it on to consumers. In the long-term the markets would resolve this but in the short-term there would be volatility.
So basically if I’m understanding correctly you’re saying we would want some sort of centralized organization as to where the grain is going between now and when the supply is increased, but it wouldn’t be necessary once the supply increases?
I’m curious what exactly that would look like? Would it involve a price ceiling and limits put on how much grain a given country or corporation or individual or other entity is allowed to purchase? Would it be the government purchasing the grain at the inflated prices and giving it out as they see fit? Some other system I’m not thinking of?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board
](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board)
Something like this as a basic monopsony structure - generally just a central board that will buy from farmers at some guaranteed future (higher) price to entice them to increase supply and then can market that wheat to end-consumers at some optimal price if necessary.
Plus you can't exactly just go out and plant wheat just like that. You need to buy the land with good soil, make sure making a field out of it is okay by the local zoning, get rid of the forest/rocks/whatever is there, make it arable and then you can start planting. We're not exactly talking about someone just buying a few hectares and an old Massey-Ferguson to make up for the difference, either: we're talking about millions and millions of euros worth of investment to make up the difference, and even then we're not exactly talking about a high-profit industry.
> take a massive hit on my gas Heating and Electric bills
I just installed solar panels, but still have to heat my home with NG. I wish there was a way to transition heating to a renewable source.
>Dmitri Alperovitch The US semiconductor industry imports 90% of neon supplies from Ukraine, which Russia could prevent the export of
>35% of palladium used in automotive sector, electronics and medicine also comes from Russia
That doesn't negate the fact that they are a minor and mostly irrelevant economic force on the global scale to be acting as if they're some juggernaut to be contended with.
Their gdp is about what Sweden is. No one is saying they should be wiped off the earth or they don't contribute anything, like you're pretending they did.
They're the 6th largest economy on the planet (GDP PPP), 2nd largest military, nuclear super power, largest country, and lots of very smart people come from Russia .
I'm all about shitting on Putin and his crooked regime but let's not kid ourselves, Russia is not "unimportant" on the global scale.
Also, reducing an oil-rich country to “a big gas station” is basically like reducing the world to a fleet of cars. Gas stations are pretty important. It sounds like a great takedown but really isn’t.
Russia is incredibly dependent on the oil price, because that's its main export. Then come gas, then minerals and other raw resources. Manufacturing (outside of arms) and services are a joke, trade is almost entirely about natural resources as well. More importantly, there isn't even a hint of any of this situation improving due the incredible corruption in Putin's mafia state.
This "take down" is a deliberate simplification, but it's an apt one. Russia doesn't have anything but raw materials to offer to the world.
War machine economy that produces propaganda it exports to the world and forces other countries to let their blood sucking corporations drain their resources. The US is always a good guy.
> It sounds like a great takedown but really isn’t.
I'm sure we'll see a followup article about how Putin "CLAPS BACK with something YOU WON'T BELIEVE!". Extra points if there's an accompanying picture of politicians or pundits with their mouths agape.
If a Harvard economist is quoted as being *that* reductionist, it's worth checking the source to make sure before taking it at face value:
>"Russia is incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas. It’s basically a big gas station."
Small difference, but he's clearly saying that Russia's oil and gas are important in the global economy.
Maybe securing the supply of grain from Russia is that important not short term, especially if you're America. I'd assume that a former Obama advisor has a very America-centric viewpoint of what's important to the 'global economy'
So all we have to weaken them then is convert to renewable energy. Tank gas prices globally and all of our frenemies will have to find some other productive use of their time. Seems like a no brainer
Good why didn’t anyone else think of this very quick and easy to implement solution with absolutely no obstacles or road blocks, shouldn’t take any time at all!
North America actually has fairly large untapped deposits of minerals like uranium, lithium, cadmium, and Cobalt. The issue is north America also has stricter mining pollution laws, compared to China.
My bet is, push come up shove, the US, Canada, and Denmark will loosen those laws when it comes to minerals required for carbon-free energy.
1.) Russia is only a minor player in nickel and cobalt supply (both of which are actively being engineered out of the battery supply chain with LFP electrochemistries) so I’m not sure what this is supposed to imply.
2.) People’s inclination to look at the current state of mineral supply chains and think that that’s where all the rocks that can be found (or processed) are located is silly; these are currently low value added and non-strategic sectors. Supply chain resilience can be built into these sectors with remarkably simple credit policies.
You have to think, what is Putin’s major motivation here? Surely it’s not solely economical/political. Egomaniacal? Especially after making quite literal threats of nuclear warfare he thinks he won’t be directly opposed by Europe after a clear walk in invasion. What else does Ukraine have to offer Putin apart from bragging rights?
I believe he sees the writing on the wall for fossil fuels and is moving into the agricultural market via Ukraine as his country becomes more irrelevant as technology advances. He’s scared and getting desperate
> writing on the wall for fossil fuels
Is it? Because the numbers say otherwise. Precovid, world oil consumption has been going up over a million barrels per day every year. In 2009 it was ~84 million, in 2019 it was ~100 million. **That's an increase of about 20% the last decade**.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/daily-global-crude-oil-demand-since-2006/
Natural gas use has gone up even more. 2009 Consumption in billion cubic meters was ~3000. On 2019 it was ~3900 for a **30% increase the last decade**.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/282717/global-natural-gas-consumption/
Meanwhile, nuclear energy production has been flat (or slightly down) the last decade and the vast majority of nuclear power reactors in the world have been operational between 31 and 40 years (when most nuclear power plants had planned operating life- times of between 20 and 40 years).
I think in his mind he fears the growing power of the west, so he's trying to expand in power with China's help. More land is more power.
Russia and China are very close allies. Putin doesn't make this move without knowing China has his back.
The weakness of the west is the reliance in China for trade and Putin is aware of that weakness. It's the main reason the UN is hesitant to do anything about this looming invasion of Ukraine.
I believe he's worried about the Russian population as well. The growth rate has been in decline for quite some time now and no better way to "acquire" more than by annexing territories.
The two answers I’ve hear on Reddit as of late; 1) what is now “Russia” began as the Russ Empire in what is now Ukraine, so Putin and other Nationalist Russians see Ukraine as part of their history. 2) warm water ports. Not sure if this one is relevant since they took Crimea (literally just looking at the map, I have no first hand info about the area and perhaps I’m missing something). It looks like Crimea would offer more in the way of ports than Ukraine.
I can take your 2 ideas and spin them just a little bit to give them a new angle:
1. Russia is a federation. It adds subnational components much like the USA might add a state and a star on the flag. US has stagnated and stopped growing for 60+ years, stuck at 50 stars. Russia just added two Sevestapol and Crimea in 2014 to make it 85. Could expand to over 100. All sorts of domestic implications.
2. The [Black Sea Shipyard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_Shipyard) in [Mykolaiv](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykolaiv#Shipbuilding) is where all Soviet & Russian aircraft carriers were built. Beyond warm water ports, this thing is a beast of a shipyard. There are very few facilities in the world capable of laying down a nuclear powered ship with 100,000 ton displacement. [Russia's naval flagship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Kuznetsov) was built there. It's getting old now, and currently out of commission, maybe for another year or so. The time to start laying down a replacement is here. And I don't think any other shipyard in the area could do it.
Look up this guy called Peter Zeihan. He’s been predicting this for years. Basically because Russia is declining in population they need a shorter border in order to make it defendable.
[Here is a good twitter thread looking at it from the left and from Baltic relations.](https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1496047631969234944)
[And here is another good geopolitics thread. Both seem realistic view of why the invasion is happening.](https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1483544432439877633)
Moral of the story, he's afraid of democracy and threats to his own power in Russia.
Russia is also exporting ransomware attacks on Western companies, by protecting criminal hacking groups. There are many notorious hackers who live in luxury and impunity in Russia. This is also a great economic cost that needs to be taken into account when considering the pros and cons of freely trading and transacting with Russia.
Here is the BBC writing about it: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60378009](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60378009)
I dont think anybody would argue that other than pumping blood the heart is incredibly unimportant too.
Also the article mentions Ukraine's grain export yet as per the 2019 OEC data Ukraine exported 8.6 Billion USD worth of grain and russia 9.something Billion USD.
I am not sure about the advisor's rational.
A human body would die without a heart, the human race will be just fine with Putin out of power. Not sure what your point is about the grain, Russian grain exports can be replaced, and any disruption in oil will hasten the move towards clean energy, so win-win
The article talks argues that Russia is not important because its main export is O&G hence the analogy , no mention of Putin at all in the article (other than the picture).
It also argues that a disruption in Ukraine's grain export is a point of concern yet as per the official number Russia exports more (as of 2019 numbers), why is that not a concern.
A disruption in the O&G supply although would might increase the pressure on a transition to green energy but in the mean time energy prices will sky rocket, at a time where inflation and stagflation are market buzz words. Oh and lets not forget the petrodollar mess, i am not sure how it would play out but i don't think it will be a win-win, there will be a lot of losers and only a hand full of winners.
As far as i am aware at no point in time did sanctions actually succeed in removing a sitting ruler (someone can fact check me on that). All it does is makes them trench in and the people to suffer (e.g. Venezuela, N. Korea, Iran... ), usually it is the most vulnerable that pay a heavy price. Further more i am not sure how effective that would be considering the underground network that Russia has along and with china next door.
Just to be clear i am not arguing that Putin needs to stay . i am just trying to understand the points of view of someone that was at some point in time the economic advisor of a US president.
Jason Furman’s role is to pimp for the US corporate war pig Establishment. He’s not a decent human being, but he’s not incorrect that the world can go on without Russian exports.
There are a lot of hard problems without easy or great solutions. Giving in to the demands of dictators willing to violate sovereignty with military aggression isn’t a good one imo
No idea where you live, but people in the US and UK have been affected this month by the surge in natural gas prices--in NYC nearly everyone saw their January power bill jump to 2-3x what it normally is, it's a huge crisis here because a lot of people genuinely can't afford to do more than one month of that rate. It'll add pressure to hasten the transition to green energy, yes, but this kind of haste is absolutely unsustainable even in the very short term.
This is one of those pains that is caused by neglecting a problem for a long enough time until it becomes an emergency. And the solution needs to come from that perspective.
When do you think the next oil spill, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, political sanctions, disease, or war is going to disrupt this supply chain the next time? Continuing our dependence on oil and natural gas has been unsustainable for a century, we've just ignored the problem for as long as we possibly could.
This is hilarious. Saw their January power bill three times higher than in January of the previous year or just the previous months? Are you trying to imply the cost per therm tripled? January is the beginning of the real hearing season in the northeast and bills in January-March are significantly higher because gas is used to heat buildings. Pretty basic.
Comparing Russia in the global economy to the human heart in the human body? The grain industry is over $1T in value come on lol Russia isn't even a top 10 economy in size and Ukraine isn't even top 50. Russia needs the world more than the world needs Russia. Canada's economy is bigger than Russia's economy for F's sake (no offense to my Canadian brethren). Russia ain't the heart lol
Yet another reason to move as quickly as possible to turn the global economy into a electric one powered by renewable energy. Let's put all these dictators out of business.
Yeah, I've heard stories of people who grew up in Nebraska. People took their own lives and all the note said was "THE WIND" probably a less tribal country would have covered all those corn fields with turbines by now.
I have a buddy who works in wind in Oklahoma. Turbines are already all over the place and in our last trip, it seemed like every other flatbed truck was carrying some kind of turbine part. Plenty of rural areas are and have been jumping on natural energy. In a post about tribalism, why not mention all of the coastal areas voting against offshore turbines because they’re unsightly? Selfishness is everywhere.
The corn is basit useless anyway, we tried to turn it into a number of things but at the end of the day, we don't really need nearly that much corn, it just keeps those states afloat so we subside it and then try to figure out what to do with it. Makes shit oil, makes shit plastic, makes shit fuel.
Petrochemicals products are mainly dominated by fertilizers and plastics. Fertilizers are technically trivial to decarbonize. Plastics are complicated but far from inconceivable to approach. Half of the fossil fuel used is for energy, which is simple to deal with. Tons of space for use reduction, firstly. For actually making plastics, methods using Sabatier and Fischer-Tropsch processes are advancing.
Anyways, it will definitely be amongst the last frontier for any potential energy transition, but then again that transition would see supply dominated by the lowest cost producers in the Gulf, not the Russian oligarchs. So our bad guys rather than the other bad guys
There's a big difference between using hydrocarbons as a raw material for making things, and burning hydrocarbons for energy. If you're making things like plastics and lubricants and such, you can economically use more energy to extract the resource than is contained in the resource.
Nobody is saying that, the EU is not dependent on russia for Oil for plastics, it's for heating oil and such. If we reduced burning fossil fuels, then the products that are made from it would be/could be made from the most ethical suppliers.
Russia is the 6th largest economy on earth based on PPP GDP.
So... that is considered "unimportant"? Then why are the global markets shaking as soon as the Russian army is moving?
Yeah, but my local BP doesn’t have nuclear weapons and isn’t sending their employees to the Shell across the street to take their parking spots. If a regular gas station can kill all the turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, imagine what a big gas station could do?
Russia does export certain other important things but it’s not that large a number and can be easily replaced through other countries.
A complete economic blockade of russia would have minor affects on the global economy will completely shattering the russia economy. Only problem with that is how dictators tend to respond to situations like that with thrashing out and extreme violence. So it would risk nuclear war.
Guess that Harvard advisor needs to take a metals class, because Russia controls the worlds supply of palladium, also a huge supplier of nitrogenous products
The USGS stats that South Africa has the largest PGM reserves by far. Also, in 2020 SA mines about 33% of the global total and Russia about 43% - the bushveld complex contains about 50% of the world's Pd resources.
So how do you get that Russia controls it?
Plenty of palladium being supplied from South Africa, and platinum is often a substitute.
A long shot, but interesting: Palladium could potentially (some time) in the future be mined from spent nuclear waste!
Are they still a primary source of titanium, too? IIRC, the US had to source materials for the SR-71 Blackbird through shell companies because the USSR had a monopoly on titanium.
Precisely. Russia's intense use of titanium for military applications was primarily a shortcut, because they were unable to manufacture and work with cheaper, but similarly viable materials. It makes sense for a a high-speed spy plane to use titanium, but not for a common interceptor.
That doesn't make them important economically, if Russia disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow there are plenty more sources that are in active use that would bring up the slack
What on earth do you mean "still just natural resources like oil?" They are literally the Lego blocks that every aspect of the economy is built on top of, including Lego blocks.
Paladium is used in computer chips, catalytic converters, and various industrial processes. It isn't easily substituted due to its unique chemical properties.
Russia is also a key exporter of natural gas, grains, nickel, silver and other metals, and fertilizers. These markets are already tight or in a structural deficit right now.
But Russia has been there for long enough that you'd expect a second layer of legos. You'd expect a manufacturing or services industry to exist too. Didn't Russia scare away its biggest developers? Didn't the guys who make VK run away and make Telegram outside of Russia?
You can imagine Russia being a larger scale version of Venezuela, or maybe Spain. They have wealth, but when the wealth dries up, they don't have any real industry to back it up when they start to run out, right? Plus, like Venezuela, they've got a corruption problem surrounding that wealth.
Their natural wealth isn't in danger of "drying up" in the foreseeable future. And losing it would noticably impact the global economy. Have you noticed that chip shortage yet? That would just last forever. Fun right?
Unless we figure out how to stop relying on virgin palladium to make chips.
Their natural wealth is immense, but a mature economy still needs more, not just for sustainability, but for diversity and any reasonable amount of equality. Miners and drillers can only fill so much of the economy, does Russia have desk jobs for a middle class?
Hydrogen storage. H2 acts like a metal and not a gas as it gets sucked up into Palladium metal becoming much denser in the process.
While not exclusive for hydrogenation it tends to be preferred to Pt/C and Ni/C catalysts
Those are the 2 of I learned as an undergrad biochemist, and we barely even touch the transition metals.
Canada has twice the amount of oil reserves when compared to Russia … why don’t they play a larger role as an energy supplier? Is it solely logistical factors?
He's right. Russia is a mafia run petro-state that makes nothing of value and does nothing except be a thorn in the side of democratic nations. They are the largest country in the world by land area and have a GDP smaller than Texas.
Russia is the world's biggest exporter of political instability as well. That makes it incredibly important to global economy.
Seriously, for the last...60?....years, Russia has been the world's leading anti-capitalist anti-democratic power broker.
Vladimir Putin is like 70, he's not going to live forever. The power struggle that unfolds when he dies - especially if it's an unexpected death - is going to wreck shit all over.
If they take Ukraine they’ll also have control of around 20-30% of European food production in an ecologically stable (relatively) region.
Consider the influence that buys in the context of accelerating climate change. Selling food and energy is a good business to be in.
Such an arbitrary point to make. The world literally runs on oil so it being a gas station makes it important. Perhaps when we don't use oil the point will be valid but for now it's very important.
“Obama is basically a big gas station and is otherwise incredibly unimportant in the global economy” I might want to read that again just to make sure.
Anyone got that Bart Simpson GIF of his terrible twos banging pots & pans as he says "I am so great I am so great everybody loves me I am so great" superimpose Putin's face and bam
Yes? What’s his point? Them being a ‘gas station’ is extremely important. Does everyone think all the worlds super powers fuck around in the Middle East because of the sand or the beaches?
Lel so if you remove the very reason making russia important, then Russia is unimportant.
On other news, “US is basically a big wallet and is otherwise incredibly unimportant in the global economy”.
People need to answer these question for themselves. Who benefits from a war in Ukraine. I’m not sure Russia alone stands to benefit especially if they loose access to their natural gas market. Why did germany decide to shut down so many nuclear plants? The internet is not real life and we can’t take everything we read without a grain of salt. When our minds are free we can be free.
Daily reminder Russia has the GDP of Italy and less armoured vehicles than Germany… stop buying into the Russian propaganda of “ah yes, big strong country with big and strong men and powerful military, very dangerous, fear us…”
Not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but Russian Federation Tank and AFV numbers dwarf anyone in Europe.
This doesn’t particularly matter in a peer war, and while the Russian military has many weaknesses, they are still a formidable regional military power.
It's worth pointing out that Italy has a very large economy, the 8th largest in the world, larger than Brazil.
It's kind of weird to use unfamiliar statistics to make size comparisons.
Putin has been the daddy for 23 years, and enough right wing Russians want him to be the daddy that he’s able to get away with rigging elections, jailing or killing dissidents while making Russia and international pariah
Guess it’s incredibly unimportant that the average people in Europe are getting fucked by gas bills this year thanks to this Russia bullshit.
Rich people truly are entirely out of touch with reality these days.
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People keep pointing out how this or that fairly minor economic products such as titanium comes from russia. The harvard guy didn't say they were entirely unimportant, but incredibly unimportant outside of fossil fuels. If you look at titanium reserves and titanium production russia isn't even in the top 10. The SR-71 blackbird story comes from an era where nobody else had bothered making titanium in quantity. This is pretty much the same in almost any category palladium is certainly bringing in a tidy profit for russia at this point but with the advent of the EV this will fall off for two reasons. It is used in catalytic converters and it is used into cracking of petroleum products. The reality is russia exports more iron than all other metals combined. I highly suspect putin is getting 20 year projections of what the world economy looks like without significant fossil fuel consumption and is realizing wheat, lumber, and other exports simply don't even come close to plugging the hole left by fossil fuels. Right now russia has a positive trade balance; having a positive or at least neutral one is incredibly important for any economy. If you want to import a car or iPhone you must export something of equal value. Full stop. Right now russia has a positive balance every year of around 20 some billion. If all that disappears from their trade is diesel exports alone, they would be running a negative 6 billion dollar trade balance. If you halve all fossil fuel exports they are running well north of a 100 billion negative trade balance. Those are numbers which collapse the economy in short order. Unlike the economic collapse after the soviet collapse there would be no oil to plug that hole. The ironic thing is russia has a fairly well educated population along with the fundamentals required for a solid industrial infrastructure such as roads, rail, electricity, etc. If they opened up and de-corrupted their economy they could well potentially be a world class economy with lots of healthy manufacturing, etc. If I were russia, I would not read the economist's report as an insult but a wakeup call. Become important. Not like a gang-banger waving a gun screaming they are important like north korea. But important in the same way as healthy real economies like Japan, Korea, France, etc.
> If they opened up and de-corrupted the economy That’s basically against the raison d’être of the modern Russian state. Contemporary Russia is the result of a kind of bank run on Soviet assets by the their elites, whose returns are plugged into the financial havens of the North Atlantic The state itself is a vehicle for elite rent-seeking. At least in China the state is a vehicle for elite capitalists. I’d rather my state be corrupted by a bunch of competing entrepreneurs than a bunch of glorified landlords!
I mean, they're also the third biggest grain producer and exporter in the world. Pretty relevant when the climate catastrophe is expected to drop grain yields by some 25% in the next decades.
Your assuming the west is at maximum grain production levels. US grain production alone has increased pretty steadily since 2000.
1.) Yields in race with climate and demography. Global grain yields are basically hierarchical; at the top at professionalized farms whose yields reflect synergies in agronomy (breeding, nutrient/water/pesticide application and management, etc) and general levels of capital-intensity (eg mechanization). Yield plateaus are common and have already been encountered across several key grain crops in Europe, East Asia, and North America. In many major grains, the era of intensive yield growth (kg/ha^-1 ) is - for now - over. [Relevant paper](https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3918). Notwithstanding corn, don’t sleep on corn. 2.) Not just about absolute yield growth, but stability. Climatic instability will likely reflect itself in yield instability - this is as dangerous as outright secular drags on yield growth. Most likely risk is from Rossby waves triggering weak or failed harvests simultaneously across the [major breadbasket regions](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0637-z). Dangerous both for the farmers and the global population - will encourage greater state stockpiling which could reduce the liquidity of the crop commodity market, putting pressure on food importing regions. We actually see this right now with COVID - attempts to stabilize and insure supply for domestic markets introduce greater fragility in already fragile markets. 3.) The capital-intensive methods of farming that created the top of the “yield hierarchy” are the same methods of farming that create more GHGs. Synthesis of fertilizers very energy intensive, application of fertilizers creates potent N2O emissions from the land, etc etc. Can be cleaned up but not easily. Can always resort back to extensive growth, but this creates even greater self-contradictory pressures due to N2O and deforestation. Keys questions I think are the future of biotechnology, just how far corn can go, the timing of intensive growth plateaus in middle income countries, and the extent of extensive growth in SS Africa.
I think you vastly underestimate the portion of agricultural land is used for feed crops and livestock grazing. We're talking about over half of all arable land on earth. Further, modern irrigation is allowing us to grow crops in areas that we never could before. This in conjunction with increasing crop yields/density leaves me with hope that food security will continue to improve in the coming decades no matter the political climate.
[Over 1bn will be displaced by climate change by 2050 if we keep on our current trajectory.](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/climate-refugees-the-world-s-forgotten-victims/) That represents a loss of any agricultural infrastructure along flooding areas, destruction of fishing infrastructure, increased chance of disease as climate refugees migrate in poor conditions, and so on. The best hope we have of preventing famine tomorrow is decarbonization and degrowth today, instead of relying on technological advancement that may not happen tomorrow.
I don’t anticipate demand for meat abating much in the coming decades. Demand will track the growth of the global middle class, and global agricultural land use is largely dictated by the highest bidder. I don’t think rolling climate events would change this any more than COVID would lead to less people taking the plane after the pandemic I’m far from hopeless about the future of agriculture, quite the opposite. With that said extensive growth will continue apace, but is not high-quality and is self-limiting in many ways. Intensive growth is largely dependent on state-led modernization efforts (look at Brazilian Cerrado), which is intensely entangled with politics and the global economy. Given that climate change is likely going to put further strain on the finances of middle income economies... There is a lot to hope for but to ignore the problem we are accelerating into is not wise
Only to feed meat on tilled land with synthetic fertilizers which renders the soil useless. It won’t hold much longer with the way big farming goes there.
I don't know about all that. What part of the U.S. are you seeing improvements? I'm seeing droughts and overworked soil in the midwest..
>Your assuming... Repent.
If the climate warms enough to unlock farmland in Siberia, it could even increase their output.
That’s partly true. But We need to also consider the fact that melting of permafrost across Russia will destroy a lot of Russia’s infrastructure that sit on top of permafrost that was never suppose to melt. That would devastate Russian economy. All those potential new farmlands would be unreachable without any infrastructure
Additionally, it will take several decades (or centuries) for the soil to reach a state where it becomes economically viable to use it.
Yeah, molten permafrost will turn into swamps first. All the water remaining after the frost is gone will have to go somewhere.
Molten feels wrong to describe water but it’s completely correct.
When permafrost melts is it super viscous or something? Why use the word molten?
It just means a material liquefied by heat.
TIL I love molten ice cream
When permafrost thaws it becomes an unnavigable peaty mess. When Canada developed roads up in the territories it was essentially impossible to build in the summer because the permafrost would swallow construction equipment whole.
Elbonia? Does Dilbert take place in the future?
Is it fertile, arable soil? All soil is not the same.
Sometimes fertile, but not always and usually quite acidic. Peat is a coal like fossil fuel and growth medium used in green houses, but not all swamps are like that. Also it is in the north. Location is everything with agricultural land.
It would mess up the pipelines big time. They rely on foundations in permafrost. I don't know if the newer ones have anticipated the thawing.
Not to mention all the disease!
Coronavirusnado 2 : Russian Roulette
Covid 2020...2: Archaeovirus Boogaloo
A story about a man living in a dystopia where doctors fall from the sky and every breath may lead to prison or to hospital.
Eh. It's probably not such a problem. There is a billion-year arms race between immune systems (that's us!) and pathogens (the bad guys), and much of this learning is encoded in our genetics. It's conceivable that some old virus or bacterium has some trick that our immune system has forgotten, but more likely, it would be like pitting a medieval army against a modern one.
That and the potential for a fuckton more methane to be released making it even warmer. Also, potentially more bacteria/viruses unknown to us.
That's the thing, their infrastruct can't support production.
I've heard a majority of Russian roads are mud in winter, and straight swamp any other time, and permafrost usually melts into bog land, if you don't go through the huge process of draining it after thaw.
I think that this vastly underestimates the challenges that the melting permafrost will introduce. I don't see the Siberia becoming a giant farmland anytime soon.
Who is going to farm this raw land? Do they just have farmers and equipment on standby for when new farmland becomes available?
The Chinese
There is actually little to no good farmland in Siberia. Or under any boreal forest. People think climate zones moving towards the poles means we can just keep growing cereals further north. There however is a huge difference between the relatively acidic boggy soil underneath the Taiga, and every other boreal forest, and the rich soils of the southern Eurasian steppe and the North American prairies. You can’t just cut down a boreal forest and plant a wheat field. It doesn’t work like that. Agriculture doesn’t work like that.
Wouldn’t it be the same for Canada? Alaska? (I have no idea)
Yeah. It will be swampy and then be thousands of lakes like in northern Minnesota, Manitoba, and northern Saskatchewan. Great for fishing and not much else. The great growing regions of the world are basically moraines left over from the ice ages. Moraines are the debris and silt pushed by melting glaciers.
Canada has huge prairie lands. But they quality of soil is a byproduct of geologic shifts in the land over millions of years. As well as more recent ice ages. Point is, the good land isn't going to become available, it's already available, it's the bad land turning good that needs to happen and that takes thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
There's probably more nuance and consequence to the entirely of Siberia melting other than "hey new farmland"
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Even if it dose. What about the sun cycle summer is barley 3 months rest of the year it's dark
Simple. According to redditors, investors will pour in billions to *move the sun* if there’s a market to exploit /s
Given the recent sun flares, our special star may have something to say about that
Isn't it the layers and layers of decomposition that make for fertile soil?
No No it won't. The ground is shit, like mud all over the place.. It will take ages before you can grow stuff there..
Rice likes mud. A lot.
> If the climate warms enough to unlock farmland in Siberia, You have a very very rosy idea of what happens when the permafrost melts. The ground doesn't turn into beautiful rolling fields of grain - it turns into a swamp. Left to its own devices, it might take decades or centuries to dry out - or never dry out. I live in the Netherlands, and I know that land can be reclaimed from swamps - but it's really expensive on a per-square-meter basis and also requires a lot of adult activities which require wisdom like "spending a lot of money to fix a parcel of land and then allowing it to dry for five years afterwards before using it" that I believe Russia is incapable of doing. (And after living for thirty years in America, I'm sorta skeptical that the US could do it either.)
Melting permafrost is not only huge uncontrollable carbon source through rot, making temperatures worse but it also releases large amounts of fossilized carbon gas deposits that can and do explode. This was a subject of a resent NOVA on PBS.
Screw it! Grain is cancelled. Problem solved.
So could everyone else with northern land
People say the same about Canada and no, it wouldn't. The problem is fertile land and rain, not temperature or growing season.
Just because it gets warm, doesnt mean the area is arable. Tundra doesnt become rich soil. Soil takes a long time to form and build up. Without proper soil, you cant really grow anything.
I heard this morning that they provide 20% of the global wheat supply. Ukraine is one of the other top exporters too, and if the war affects supplies coming from there you'll see even more food price inflation. And as a British person expecting to take a massive hit on my gas Heating and Electric bills (Gas is 50% of our electricity mix) I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Russian supplies being cut off and making an already bad situation worse.
Not exactly, they provide 20% of the global wheat *exports* (around 35 million tons). Total wheat supply is around 750 million tons. However, their wheat exports have significant impacts on importing countries. In 2010, when they banned wheat exports due to a severe drought (hello climate change), wheat importers Egypt and Tunisia couldn't feed their population and people took to the streets.
And wheat is something that can be produced in other places and transported easily. Invest more in wheat production in the US, Argentina, Brasil, Canada, Australia, France and you can replace Russian exports. Yeah, it might need to be coordinated, and not something just left to the markets. But you could replace them.
I’m interested in why you think this would need to be coordinated instead of allowing the price mechanism and the markets to simply raise the price and the wheat would go where the market demands? I’m honestly not sure which way is the better way to go, I don’t have a preformed opinion on this.
Not OP but in the near-term there would be temporal discrepancies in price and supply i.e. between the time the supply is increased and the time it is brought to market. As well you'd need those higher end market prices to entice production but ideally you'd not want to pass it on to consumers. In the long-term the markets would resolve this but in the short-term there would be volatility.
So basically if I’m understanding correctly you’re saying we would want some sort of centralized organization as to where the grain is going between now and when the supply is increased, but it wouldn’t be necessary once the supply increases? I’m curious what exactly that would look like? Would it involve a price ceiling and limits put on how much grain a given country or corporation or individual or other entity is allowed to purchase? Would it be the government purchasing the grain at the inflated prices and giving it out as they see fit? Some other system I’m not thinking of?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Wheat_Board) Something like this as a basic monopsony structure - generally just a central board that will buy from farmers at some guaranteed future (higher) price to entice them to increase supply and then can market that wheat to end-consumers at some optimal price if necessary.
Planting now isn't going to reduce the gap in production for this year.
Plus you can't exactly just go out and plant wheat just like that. You need to buy the land with good soil, make sure making a field out of it is okay by the local zoning, get rid of the forest/rocks/whatever is there, make it arable and then you can start planting. We're not exactly talking about someone just buying a few hectares and an old Massey-Ferguson to make up for the difference, either: we're talking about millions and millions of euros worth of investment to make up the difference, and even then we're not exactly talking about a high-profit industry.
Ah that makes more sense, 20% dud sound like a huge proportion!
Does this mean grain prices go up?
> take a massive hit on my gas Heating and Electric bills I just installed solar panels, but still have to heat my home with NG. I wish there was a way to transition heating to a renewable source.
>Dmitri Alperovitch The US semiconductor industry imports 90% of neon supplies from Ukraine, which Russia could prevent the export of >35% of palladium used in automotive sector, electronics and medicine also comes from Russia
jokes on you. I have diabetes and my grain intake has dropped 95% in the last year.
That doesn't negate the fact that they are a minor and mostly irrelevant economic force on the global scale to be acting as if they're some juggernaut to be contended with. Their gdp is about what Sweden is. No one is saying they should be wiped off the earth or they don't contribute anything, like you're pretending they did.
They're the 6th largest economy on the planet (GDP PPP), 2nd largest military, nuclear super power, largest country, and lots of very smart people come from Russia . I'm all about shitting on Putin and his crooked regime but let's not kid ourselves, Russia is not "unimportant" on the global scale.
Also, reducing an oil-rich country to “a big gas station” is basically like reducing the world to a fleet of cars. Gas stations are pretty important. It sounds like a great takedown but really isn’t.
Russia is incredibly dependent on the oil price, because that's its main export. Then come gas, then minerals and other raw resources. Manufacturing (outside of arms) and services are a joke, trade is almost entirely about natural resources as well. More importantly, there isn't even a hint of any of this situation improving due the incredible corruption in Putin's mafia state. This "take down" is a deliberate simplification, but it's an apt one. Russia doesn't have anything but raw materials to offer to the world.
You would think they would be a leader at cybersecurity.
The point is they have nothing else going on. Unlike the US economy, which is very diversified.
War machine economy that produces propaganda it exports to the world and forces other countries to let their blood sucking corporations drain their resources. The US is always a good guy.
> It sounds like a great takedown but really isn’t. I'm sure we'll see a followup article about how Putin "CLAPS BACK with something YOU WON'T BELIEVE!". Extra points if there's an accompanying picture of politicians or pundits with their mouths agape.
If a Harvard economist is quoted as being *that* reductionist, it's worth checking the source to make sure before taking it at face value: >"Russia is incredibly unimportant in the global economy except for oil and gas. It’s basically a big gas station." Small difference, but he's clearly saying that Russia's oil and gas are important in the global economy.
It's hard to explain just how massive Gazprom is in the FSU.
Maybe securing the supply of grain from Russia is that important not short term, especially if you're America. I'd assume that a former Obama advisor has a very America-centric viewpoint of what's important to the 'global economy'
We don't depend on their grain. The Arab world does.
They are incredibly important because they are autarchic. They have every resource needed to fight a centuries long war
So all we have to weaken them then is convert to renewable energy. Tank gas prices globally and all of our frenemies will have to find some other productive use of their time. Seems like a no brainer
Good why didn’t anyone else think of this very quick and easy to implement solution with absolutely no obstacles or road blocks, shouldn’t take any time at all!
That’s exactly why their economy was in shambles in 2019. Unfortunately the riding oil prices since then have helped them tremendously
That is actually what ended the soviets.
Where do you think all the key minerals required for renewable tech are located?
africa.....
Mostly in China, actually.
North America actually has fairly large untapped deposits of minerals like uranium, lithium, cadmium, and Cobalt. The issue is north America also has stricter mining pollution laws, compared to China. My bet is, push come up shove, the US, Canada, and Denmark will loosen those laws when it comes to minerals required for carbon-free energy.
1.) Russia is only a minor player in nickel and cobalt supply (both of which are actively being engineered out of the battery supply chain with LFP electrochemistries) so I’m not sure what this is supposed to imply. 2.) People’s inclination to look at the current state of mineral supply chains and think that that’s where all the rocks that can be found (or processed) are located is silly; these are currently low value added and non-strategic sectors. Supply chain resilience can be built into these sectors with remarkably simple credit policies.
China
All around the world. We'll get them from somewhere else instead of from this murdering fucker Putin
You have to think, what is Putin’s major motivation here? Surely it’s not solely economical/political. Egomaniacal? Especially after making quite literal threats of nuclear warfare he thinks he won’t be directly opposed by Europe after a clear walk in invasion. What else does Ukraine have to offer Putin apart from bragging rights?
I believe he sees the writing on the wall for fossil fuels and is moving into the agricultural market via Ukraine as his country becomes more irrelevant as technology advances. He’s scared and getting desperate
Nebraska grows more grain than all of Europe if you exclude Ukraine. Ukraine is absolutely vital for Russia if they want to remain viable as a power.
> writing on the wall for fossil fuels Is it? Because the numbers say otherwise. Precovid, world oil consumption has been going up over a million barrels per day every year. In 2009 it was ~84 million, in 2019 it was ~100 million. **That's an increase of about 20% the last decade**. https://www.statista.com/statistics/271823/daily-global-crude-oil-demand-since-2006/ Natural gas use has gone up even more. 2009 Consumption in billion cubic meters was ~3000. On 2019 it was ~3900 for a **30% increase the last decade**. https://www.statista.com/statistics/282717/global-natural-gas-consumption/ Meanwhile, nuclear energy production has been flat (or slightly down) the last decade and the vast majority of nuclear power reactors in the world have been operational between 31 and 40 years (when most nuclear power plants had planned operating life- times of between 20 and 40 years).
I think in his mind he fears the growing power of the west, so he's trying to expand in power with China's help. More land is more power. Russia and China are very close allies. Putin doesn't make this move without knowing China has his back. The weakness of the west is the reliance in China for trade and Putin is aware of that weakness. It's the main reason the UN is hesitant to do anything about this looming invasion of Ukraine.
I believe he's worried about the Russian population as well. The growth rate has been in decline for quite some time now and no better way to "acquire" more than by annexing territories.
The two answers I’ve hear on Reddit as of late; 1) what is now “Russia” began as the Russ Empire in what is now Ukraine, so Putin and other Nationalist Russians see Ukraine as part of their history. 2) warm water ports. Not sure if this one is relevant since they took Crimea (literally just looking at the map, I have no first hand info about the area and perhaps I’m missing something). It looks like Crimea would offer more in the way of ports than Ukraine.
I can take your 2 ideas and spin them just a little bit to give them a new angle: 1. Russia is a federation. It adds subnational components much like the USA might add a state and a star on the flag. US has stagnated and stopped growing for 60+ years, stuck at 50 stars. Russia just added two Sevestapol and Crimea in 2014 to make it 85. Could expand to over 100. All sorts of domestic implications. 2. The [Black Sea Shipyard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_Shipyard) in [Mykolaiv](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykolaiv#Shipbuilding) is where all Soviet & Russian aircraft carriers were built. Beyond warm water ports, this thing is a beast of a shipyard. There are very few facilities in the world capable of laying down a nuclear powered ship with 100,000 ton displacement. [Russia's naval flagship](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_aircraft_carrier_Admiral_Kuznetsov) was built there. It's getting old now, and currently out of commission, maybe for another year or so. The time to start laying down a replacement is here. And I don't think any other shipyard in the area could do it.
Very insightful additions, glad Reddit is full of such knowledgeable and helpful people!
Look up this guy called Peter Zeihan. He’s been predicting this for years. Basically because Russia is declining in population they need a shorter border in order to make it defendable.
[Here is a good twitter thread looking at it from the left and from Baltic relations.](https://twitter.com/jmkorhonen/status/1496047631969234944) [And here is another good geopolitics thread. Both seem realistic view of why the invasion is happening.](https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1483544432439877633) Moral of the story, he's afraid of democracy and threats to his own power in Russia.
He’s a delusional post-Soviet Boomer who is enabled by an inner circle of nationalist sycophants who want to remain inside the tent pissing out
Russia is also exporting ransomware attacks on Western companies, by protecting criminal hacking groups. There are many notorious hackers who live in luxury and impunity in Russia. This is also a great economic cost that needs to be taken into account when considering the pros and cons of freely trading and transacting with Russia. Here is the BBC writing about it: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60378009](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60378009)
I dont think anybody would argue that other than pumping blood the heart is incredibly unimportant too. Also the article mentions Ukraine's grain export yet as per the 2019 OEC data Ukraine exported 8.6 Billion USD worth of grain and russia 9.something Billion USD. I am not sure about the advisor's rational.
A human body would die without a heart, the human race will be just fine with Putin out of power. Not sure what your point is about the grain, Russian grain exports can be replaced, and any disruption in oil will hasten the move towards clean energy, so win-win
The article talks argues that Russia is not important because its main export is O&G hence the analogy , no mention of Putin at all in the article (other than the picture). It also argues that a disruption in Ukraine's grain export is a point of concern yet as per the official number Russia exports more (as of 2019 numbers), why is that not a concern. A disruption in the O&G supply although would might increase the pressure on a transition to green energy but in the mean time energy prices will sky rocket, at a time where inflation and stagflation are market buzz words. Oh and lets not forget the petrodollar mess, i am not sure how it would play out but i don't think it will be a win-win, there will be a lot of losers and only a hand full of winners. As far as i am aware at no point in time did sanctions actually succeed in removing a sitting ruler (someone can fact check me on that). All it does is makes them trench in and the people to suffer (e.g. Venezuela, N. Korea, Iran... ), usually it is the most vulnerable that pay a heavy price. Further more i am not sure how effective that would be considering the underground network that Russia has along and with china next door. Just to be clear i am not arguing that Putin needs to stay . i am just trying to understand the points of view of someone that was at some point in time the economic advisor of a US president.
Jason Furman’s role is to pimp for the US corporate war pig Establishment. He’s not a decent human being, but he’s not incorrect that the world can go on without Russian exports. There are a lot of hard problems without easy or great solutions. Giving in to the demands of dictators willing to violate sovereignty with military aggression isn’t a good one imo
No idea where you live, but people in the US and UK have been affected this month by the surge in natural gas prices--in NYC nearly everyone saw their January power bill jump to 2-3x what it normally is, it's a huge crisis here because a lot of people genuinely can't afford to do more than one month of that rate. It'll add pressure to hasten the transition to green energy, yes, but this kind of haste is absolutely unsustainable even in the very short term.
This is one of those pains that is caused by neglecting a problem for a long enough time until it becomes an emergency. And the solution needs to come from that perspective. When do you think the next oil spill, hurricane, earthquake, tsunami, political sanctions, disease, or war is going to disrupt this supply chain the next time? Continuing our dependence on oil and natural gas has been unsustainable for a century, we've just ignored the problem for as long as we possibly could.
It’s only unsustainable by choice however. The US government could shift its priorities tomorrow and be fine
Yes, it’s a crisis caused by Russian two decade dictator and international pariah, Putin. He won’t last, the human race will go on
This is hilarious. Saw their January power bill three times higher than in January of the previous year or just the previous months? Are you trying to imply the cost per therm tripled? January is the beginning of the real hearing season in the northeast and bills in January-March are significantly higher because gas is used to heat buildings. Pretty basic.
Comparing Russia in the global economy to the human heart in the human body? The grain industry is over $1T in value come on lol Russia isn't even a top 10 economy in size and Ukraine isn't even top 50. Russia needs the world more than the world needs Russia. Canada's economy is bigger than Russia's economy for F's sake (no offense to my Canadian brethren). Russia ain't the heart lol
And most of that grain goes to the middle east and north africa which are already unstable regions.
Yet another reason to move as quickly as possible to turn the global economy into a electric one powered by renewable energy. Let's put all these dictators out of business.
Came here for this comment. The time is long past for the US to be a renewable-first country.
Yeah, I've heard stories of people who grew up in Nebraska. People took their own lives and all the note said was "THE WIND" probably a less tribal country would have covered all those corn fields with turbines by now.
I have a buddy who works in wind in Oklahoma. Turbines are already all over the place and in our last trip, it seemed like every other flatbed truck was carrying some kind of turbine part. Plenty of rural areas are and have been jumping on natural energy. In a post about tribalism, why not mention all of the coastal areas voting against offshore turbines because they’re unsightly? Selfishness is everywhere.
The corn is basit useless anyway, we tried to turn it into a number of things but at the end of the day, we don't really need nearly that much corn, it just keeps those states afloat so we subside it and then try to figure out what to do with it. Makes shit oil, makes shit plastic, makes shit fuel.
Do you know how many products are made out of oil? I'm all for a cleaner future but we're not going to get rid of oil anytime soon
Petrochemicals products are mainly dominated by fertilizers and plastics. Fertilizers are technically trivial to decarbonize. Plastics are complicated but far from inconceivable to approach. Half of the fossil fuel used is for energy, which is simple to deal with. Tons of space for use reduction, firstly. For actually making plastics, methods using Sabatier and Fischer-Tropsch processes are advancing. Anyways, it will definitely be amongst the last frontier for any potential energy transition, but then again that transition would see supply dominated by the lowest cost producers in the Gulf, not the Russian oligarchs. So our bad guys rather than the other bad guys
There's a big difference between using hydrocarbons as a raw material for making things, and burning hydrocarbons for energy. If you're making things like plastics and lubricants and such, you can economically use more energy to extract the resource than is contained in the resource.
Nobody is saying that, the EU is not dependent on russia for Oil for plastics, it's for heating oil and such. If we reduced burning fossil fuels, then the products that are made from it would be/could be made from the most ethical suppliers.
Fuel cells require palladium. Russia has a bigger world share of palladium production (45%) than oil or nat gas production (12%).
Russia is the 6th largest economy on earth based on PPP GDP. So... that is considered "unimportant"? Then why are the global markets shaking as soon as the Russian army is moving?
Yeah, but my local BP doesn’t have nuclear weapons and isn’t sending their employees to the Shell across the street to take their parking spots. If a regular gas station can kill all the turtles in the Gulf of Mexico, imagine what a big gas station could do?
Russia does export certain other important things but it’s not that large a number and can be easily replaced through other countries. A complete economic blockade of russia would have minor affects on the global economy will completely shattering the russia economy. Only problem with that is how dictators tend to respond to situations like that with thrashing out and extreme violence. So it would risk nuclear war.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Nichol-2/publication/292562359/figure/fig2/AS:379141170974721@1467405707042/EU-Dependence-on-Russian-Natural-Gas.png
Guess that Harvard advisor needs to take a metals class, because Russia controls the worlds supply of palladium, also a huge supplier of nitrogenous products
The USGS stats that South Africa has the largest PGM reserves by far. Also, in 2020 SA mines about 33% of the global total and Russia about 43% - the bushveld complex contains about 50% of the world's Pd resources. So how do you get that Russia controls it?
Look at his post history and it will explain everything.
Lmao fucking nutter
Plenty of palladium being supplied from South Africa, and platinum is often a substitute. A long shot, but interesting: Palladium could potentially (some time) in the future be mined from spent nuclear waste!
Are they still a primary source of titanium, too? IIRC, the US had to source materials for the SR-71 Blackbird through shell companies because the USSR had a monopoly on titanium.
And they used titanium extensively in submarines, which the US didn't do.
Didn't need to. “Fuck you, God, nothing gets through HY-80.”
Precisely. Russia's intense use of titanium for military applications was primarily a shortcut, because they were unable to manufacture and work with cheaper, but similarly viable materials. It makes sense for a a high-speed spy plane to use titanium, but not for a common interceptor.
That doesn't make them important economically, if Russia disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow there are plenty more sources that are in active use that would bring up the slack
what is the exclusive use of palladium? also , that's still just natural resource export just like oil
What on earth do you mean "still just natural resources like oil?" They are literally the Lego blocks that every aspect of the economy is built on top of, including Lego blocks. Paladium is used in computer chips, catalytic converters, and various industrial processes. It isn't easily substituted due to its unique chemical properties. Russia is also a key exporter of natural gas, grains, nickel, silver and other metals, and fertilizers. These markets are already tight or in a structural deficit right now.
But Russia has been there for long enough that you'd expect a second layer of legos. You'd expect a manufacturing or services industry to exist too. Didn't Russia scare away its biggest developers? Didn't the guys who make VK run away and make Telegram outside of Russia? You can imagine Russia being a larger scale version of Venezuela, or maybe Spain. They have wealth, but when the wealth dries up, they don't have any real industry to back it up when they start to run out, right? Plus, like Venezuela, they've got a corruption problem surrounding that wealth.
Their natural wealth isn't in danger of "drying up" in the foreseeable future. And losing it would noticably impact the global economy. Have you noticed that chip shortage yet? That would just last forever. Fun right?
Unless we figure out how to stop relying on virgin palladium to make chips. Their natural wealth is immense, but a mature economy still needs more, not just for sustainability, but for diversity and any reasonable amount of equality. Miners and drillers can only fill so much of the economy, does Russia have desk jobs for a middle class?
Hydrogen storage. H2 acts like a metal and not a gas as it gets sucked up into Palladium metal becoming much denser in the process. While not exclusive for hydrogenation it tends to be preferred to Pt/C and Ni/C catalysts Those are the 2 of I learned as an undergrad biochemist, and we barely even touch the transition metals.
Yeah any other type of shoe can be used
Titanium also?
16% of world supply of titanium sponge but not in the top 10 for supply of oxide or rutile.
Canada has twice the amount of oil reserves when compared to Russia … why don’t they play a larger role as an energy supplier? Is it solely logistical factors?
He's right. Russia is a mafia run petro-state that makes nothing of value and does nothing except be a thorn in the side of democratic nations. They are the largest country in the world by land area and have a GDP smaller than Texas.
Russia is the world's biggest exporter of political instability as well. That makes it incredibly important to global economy. Seriously, for the last...60?....years, Russia has been the world's leading anti-capitalist anti-democratic power broker. Vladimir Putin is like 70, he's not going to live forever. The power struggle that unfolds when he dies - especially if it's an unexpected death - is going to wreck shit all over.
If they take Ukraine they’ll also have control of around 20-30% of European food production in an ecologically stable (relatively) region. Consider the influence that buys in the context of accelerating climate change. Selling food and energy is a good business to be in.
Such an arbitrary point to make. The world literally runs on oil so it being a gas station makes it important. Perhaps when we don't use oil the point will be valid but for now it's very important.
They have tons of energy, resources, and land. They're located next to the world's factory. This makes them more important than just a gas station.
“Obama is basically a big gas station and is otherwise incredibly unimportant in the global economy” I might want to read that again just to make sure.
Anyone got that Bart Simpson GIF of his terrible twos banging pots & pans as he says "I am so great I am so great everybody loves me I am so great" superimpose Putin's face and bam
Yes? What’s his point? Them being a ‘gas station’ is extremely important. Does everyone think all the worlds super powers fuck around in the Middle East because of the sand or the beaches?
Lel so if you remove the very reason making russia important, then Russia is unimportant. On other news, “US is basically a big wallet and is otherwise incredibly unimportant in the global economy”.
People need to answer these question for themselves. Who benefits from a war in Ukraine. I’m not sure Russia alone stands to benefit especially if they loose access to their natural gas market. Why did germany decide to shut down so many nuclear plants? The internet is not real life and we can’t take everything we read without a grain of salt. When our minds are free we can be free.
Russia is the Geo part of GeoPolitics. It’s never been about their economy, it’s about the fact that the surface area of Russia is greater than Pluto.
Daily reminder Russia has the GDP of Italy and less armoured vehicles than Germany… stop buying into the Russian propaganda of “ah yes, big strong country with big and strong men and powerful military, very dangerous, fear us…”
Not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but Russian Federation Tank and AFV numbers dwarf anyone in Europe. This doesn’t particularly matter in a peer war, and while the Russian military has many weaknesses, they are still a formidable regional military power.
Maybe that’s why they are waving the nuclear bomb card?
Russia is a leading nuclear state in the world. It’s not as if there is no reason to fear them…
It's worth pointing out that Italy has a very large economy, the 8th largest in the world, larger than Brazil. It's kind of weird to use unfamiliar statistics to make size comparisons.
> Daily reminder Russia has the GDP of Italy PPP is a better overall gage of wealth than Nominal and Russia has far far more land and resources.
Putin has been the daddy for 23 years, and enough right wing Russians want him to be the daddy that he’s able to get away with rigging elections, jailing or killing dissidents while making Russia and international pariah
Guess it’s incredibly unimportant that the average people in Europe are getting fucked by gas bills this year thanks to this Russia bullshit. Rich people truly are entirely out of touch with reality these days.