Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Washington would be happy to see New Delhi continue to buy oil from Moscow at a price above a G7-imposed price ceiling set to take effect next month. The announcement came after India declared it would buy oil from Russia and ignore the price cap.
Yellen made the remarks in India on Friday. Russian oil “is going to be selling at bargain prices and we’re happy to have India get that bargain or Africa or China. It’s fine,” she said. Yellen believes the price cap will allow India, China and African countries to buy Russian oil at a discount.
Yellen provided further details to Reuters. India and private Indian oil companies “can also purchase oil at any price they want as long as they don’t use these Western services and they find other services." Yellen added, "[A]nd either way is fine.”
The price cap was designed by Yellen to cut Russia’s energy revenue without driving up prices. However, analysts believe oil could climb to over $300 per barrel if Moscow responds to the cap by curbing production.
It’s unclear how the price cap will function. The G7 has yet to announce what will be the highest price a country or company can import Russian oil without facing sanctions. The policy requires Russia to make agreements with shippers, insurers, private companies and governments to sell oil at below-market prices. The Kremlin says it will not export oil to any country or company that adopts the Western price cap.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the US and its partners have attempted to "cripple" Moscow’s economy. The economic war has largely backfired, with rising prices in the West leading to protests against sanctions on Russia. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has found partners in India, China, Turkey and Africa to replace the shrinking energy imports to Europe. In September, New Delhi imported 23% of its oil from Moscow, up from two percent before the war in Ukraine began.
Yellen’s comments come after New Delhi announced it has no plans to curb its Russian energy imports. On Tuesday, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said, "As the world’s third-largest consumer of oil and gas, a consumer where the levels of income are not very high, it is our fundamental obligation to ensure that the Indian consumer has the best possible access on the most advantageous terms to international markets," he said, adding "we have seen that the India-Russia relationship has worked to advantage. If it works to my advantage, I would like to keep that going."
Kyle Anzalone is the opinion editor of Antiwar.com, news editor of the Libertarian Institute, and co-host of Conflicts of Interest.
Dictating to everyone in the name of freedom. “The free world” is more authoritarian than those they slander as authoritarian. Maybe it’s time for the world to sanction western service providers until their fees are satisfactory to Russia and the rest of the world that believes in the free market.
I think much of the world is simply going to go its own way and increasingly ignore or flout the US-promulgated “rules” (as in “rules-based order”).
That’s really never not been the case.
The US happened to come out of World War II comparatively almost entirely unscathed among world powers due to its distant location from the fighting and from airfields with bombers that could reach it, but it never possessed anything remotely approaching hegemony. The Soviet Union was a counterweight, and there were always non-aligned regimes.
The time since 1991 has been the story of the US constantly trying, and constantly failing, to exploit the collapse of the Soviet counterweight and achieve hegemony even as its own empire is also in decline.
Concur. The US has been able to project the most violence and make the biggest mess since WW II but the idea of US global dominance was always delusional and making it the goal guaranteed failure.
In this case though, they seem to be dictating to the EU “though shalt not buy cheap Russian oil.” Everyone else apparently is good to buy all the cheap Russian fuel they can afford.
This such a monumentally-stupid scheme that I keep thinking that the West will wake up and back off.
Not yet.
Probably not until oil is $300 a barrel for quite awhile, exactly the price I consider appropriate. Our government won’t do much to get us off fossil fuels if the only reward is a survivable future, but if it’s about US global dominance and beating those nations that don’t follow our rules into submission, suddenly our officials are full of ideas and any cost is worth risking, including nuclear war.
Exactly! I was hoping idiot capitalist warmongers would inadvertently crash the automobile based culture of fat brainwashed TV watchers an disappointed when the price dropped.
Crashing the auto-based culture, where that culture prevails, would wreck the economies of those places and simultaneously wreck the lives of the car-dependent folks living there.
Replacing that culture (in relatively densely-populated areas, the only places where it’s practicable), requires major redesign and reconstruction of the built environment. That takes time, money, energy and other resources and, crucially, changes in the mindset and expectations of populations.
You are correct in a perfect world where political parties of representative democracies are not committed to faster and faster growth to infinity and human extinction.
It is important to keep in mind that 70% of the food reaching the table is raised on 25% of the land by peasant agriculture. Thirty percent is raised by inefficient mechanized chemo agriculture.
I don’t think most of the people will miss corporatized auto cultures and surely more will survive economic collapse of the auto culture than climate collapse or nuclear war. The collapse of automobile based culture would happen slower than nuclear destruction and maybe people would wise up and create real democracy that can focus distributed intelligence.
Almost anything will be better than what exists.
That claim has been floating around for quite a long time, but it is suspect. When I tried to trace it to credible sources, some time ago, I found this exchange:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Smallholder_farmers_produce_70_per_cent_of_the_worlds_food_Whats_the_source_for_this_number
The inefficiency of western agriculture is not just something floating around on the internet. Should you wish to begin some serious research on this topic, Timothy Wise is a good person to start with. Amartya Sen also has keen insights into famine and the meaning of justice. Start here ≈ttps://www.iatp.org/future-of-food
Grain by Grain, Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle may surprise you as much as it did me.
The inefficiency of western agriculture is not just something floating around on the internet. Should you wish to begin some serious research on this topic, Timothy Wise is a good person to start with. Amartya Sen also has keen insights into famine and the meaning of justice. Start here ≈ttps://www.iatp.org/future-of-food
Grain by Grain, Bob Quinn and Liz Carlisle may surprise you as much as it did me.
I didn’t write one word questioning “the inefficiency of western agriculture.” I questioned a specific claim, one frequently made in recent years and repeated here by you, and provided a link to show you that evidence supporting that claim is not easily found, if it exists.
I’ll take a look at the suggested sources.
Timothy will find it for you. He’s a highly respected agricultural science practitioner.
Again: “city folk” talk.
Humans aren’t meant to live in concrete jungles, stacked atop one another like cordwood. And this is the only situation in which the abolishment of the “auto-based” culture would be possible.
Personally, I believe we’d all be better off if we lived like the Amish (minus the religious aspect), raising our own food and using horses for transportation. Now, THAT would make a difference.
Yes, but now the gov’ment here in freedom loving U.S. is going after the Amish for growing their own food.
Stack your long pie pumpkins like cordwood, not people. I like that.
Correct. It is a Frankenstein monster. There are millions of jobs tied into fossil fuels ans the automobile. Millions. There is no way to convert all of the jobs, unless UBI becomes a consideration, along with Medicare for all. Otherwise, forget it. It is too late.
You are right about much of that, but car culture can be replaced everywhere including suburbia. Cars have only been common for 100 years, business got done before that and will again. Mega consolidation has dismembered what must be rebuilt: truly local economies that don’t discount the real costs of transportation.
Ahem.
I am neither fat, brainwashed, nor much of a television watcher. What I AM is a woman living in a rural area.
The nearest public transportation is 15 miles away from me.
When I was employed at my last job before I retired, my work was about 12 miles from my home. Would you have me ride a bicycle ( or my horse) that far and then be expected to do the hard physical labor required by my job?
You city folk 🙄
Walk 12 miles to work? Of course not. You and I both live in automobile cultures where a commute is normal.
My point is the automobile culture and twelve mile commutes with one person per car dead ends at climate collapse, plastic molecules in mother’s milk and world war three.
If there is no way out, that’s the way extinction goes.
Is the alternative to return to a pre- 1900 lifestyle?
Personally, that would suit me fine, as long as the social injustices of that era remain more or less corrected as now.
And I could still wear jeans everyday 😉
Yep. And there’d be antibiotics if you needed them and space nuts could still go to the moon. I don’t think we have to give up much except supermarkets and cars. Sheep farmers would still need to truck their meat to town.
People need to get together and figure this out. Governments are not doing that great.
I would suggest that anyone who has the opportunity familiarize themselves with horses. HORSES are “man’s best friend”; no other species has served humankind more than the horse.
If it ever came down to the demise of the automobile, I’d support myself by running a livery. Caring for horses is , to me, such a labor of love.
A return to a simple lifestyle would suit me just fine 😊
We will live closer to where we work. Alternatively, we might work closer to where we live.
Or become self-sustaining, NH!
Energy prices like that, for very long, would crush the world economy, with disastrous consequence for the poor everywhere. And a transition to renewable sources would more likely be impeded than enhanced, because that process is dependent upon affordable fossil fuels at every step of the way.
Those are serious issues. A gradual transition would be a lot smoother, but a collapse would work too. And Biden’s relentless dumping of the strategic petroleum reserve is yet another big step away from being resilient to shocks.
I’m thinking that any radical changes toward sustanability will end up like the attempts in Sri Lanka https://fee.org/articles/sri-lanka-crisis-reveals-the-dangers-of-green-utopianism/#:~:text=Over%2090%20percent%20of%20Sri,percent%20in%20just%20six%20months.
Better to make incremental progress then foist it all at once upon the populace had have the entire project collapse like a soufflé
Souffle is good… 🙂
“a grim preview of what can result from distorting markets in the name of utopian priorities.”
Sure, sudden changes can have shocking effects. Markets are tremendously distorted from any kind of freedom, and utopianism is far from the main culprit. Good scapegoat though. I also take issue with the sustainable ag practices I follow being dismissed as simply “primitive”. Getting off cocaine is painful too I hear, but that’s hardly a good argument not to do it.
Just the headline is hilarious. The idea of a monopoly price fixing scheme that excludes close to half the planet from the start seems too ridiculous even for the government, but of course there’s no such thing. If we’re going to meekly accept the government seizing absolute power we should at least find some masters who aren’t transparent nitwits.
No mention of the oil that we are stealing from Syria.
Totalitarian occupation forces of the US are stealing Syria’s oil and also impoverishing US citizens.
“”The price cap (on the price of russian oil) was designed by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen””
hilarious, check this out = a stranger on the other side of town has decided how much my drug dealer down the street from me can charge me for drugs, and he drove all the way across town and told me that with a straight face.
[India and private Indian oil companies “can also purchase oil at any price they want as long as they don’t use these Western services and they find other services.” Yellen added, “[A]nd either way is fine.”]
What Western services is she referring to? insurance, credit, shipping, refining, sales & marketing, …?
How big hearted
the hegemon is for allowing india and China to take advantage of low priced Russian oil. They really know how to turn lemons into lemonade