War in Ukraine Expected to Trigger Higher Fuel Prices

Washington — 

As Russia moves troops into the Donbas region of Ukraine, experts warn that the prospect of a shooting war erupting in Europe, combined with heavy sanctions on Russia, is likely to cause instability in the energy market, possibly translating into significantly higher costs for both gasoline and natural gas.

Because Russia is one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas, disruptions in its output, whether as an unintended consequence of military action or as a response to international sanctions, can have a profound effect on energy prices.

Global oil prices are extremely sensitive to supply disruptions, said Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston.

“Russia exports about four and a half million barrels (of oil) a day, in a global market that’s roughly 100 million barrels a day,” Hirs told VOA. “If a million barrels gets pushed aside, either for the war effort or because sanctions cut off delivery, or there’s a catastrophe with the Russian oil fields as the war progresses … we’d expect to see the oil prices increase by 20% to 25%. That would mean the retail price of gasoline would go up 50 cents to 75 cents a gallon.”

Sanctions levied on Russia

As tensions have increased in Ukraine over the past few months, oil prices, in particular, have responded to widespread uncertainty by rising sharply. On Tuesday, the price of Brent Crude, which is commonly used as a benchmark, was above $96 per barrel, up from under $70 in early December.

On Monday and Tuesday, leaders in the United States and Europe began announcing a list of punitive measures being imposed against Russia. Most of the sanctions targeted banks and wealthy individual Russians, and were not a direct move against Russia’s energy sector.

FILE – Pipes at the landfall facilities of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipline are pictured in Lubmin, northern Germany, Feb. 15, 2022.

The one exception was the announcement by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the German government would not allow the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would transport natural gas directly from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea, to open.

As the pipeline has never been operational, that announcement had no effect on current energy supplies. However, a senior administration official Tuesday hailed the decision to suspend the approval of the pipeline as an important step in breaking Europe’s dependence on Russia for natural gas, and said that the U.S. would continue to ramp up shipments of liquefied natural gas to Europe to compensate for any loss of supply from Russia.

Biden addresses fuel prices

In announcing the U.S. sanctions targeting Russia, President Joe Biden on Tuesday warned that they would have consequences for Americans in the form of higher fuel prices. “Defending freedom will have a cost for us, as well, here at home,” he said. “We need to be honest about that.”

He said that his administration would “take robust action to make sure the pain of our sanctions is targeted at the Russian economy, not ours.” He promised to lead a coordinated effort involving major oil producers that would “blunt” the impact of supply disruptions on fuel prices.

“I want to limit the pain the American people are feeling at the gas pump,” he said. “This is critical to me.”

Markets already stressed

As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, energy markets were already significantly disordered, even before Russia began massing troops on the border of Ukraine last year.

FILE – A section of an oil platform operated by Lukoil company is seen at the Kravtsovskoye oil field in the Baltic Sea, Russia, Sept. 16, 2021.

In the early phases of the pandemic, global demand for oil and gas plummeted as lockdowns kept people from driving and using public transportation. At one point in April 2020, there was such a supply glut that the price of oil plunged into negative territory, meaning that producers were having to pay buyers to take supply off their hands.

One consequence was a major decrease in production, as many high-cost extraction operations became economically unsustainable and were taken offline.

Demand has largely recovered, according to Gregory Upton, an associate research professor at Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. However, Upton told VOA, oil production remains slightly below pre-pandemic levels, which has added upward pressure on prices.

Markets will compensate

Upton told VOA that if supplies of Russian oil and gas are significantly curtailed as a result of war in Ukraine, that would encourage oil producers to reactivate some of the production facilities that were shut down during the pandemic.

“If sanctions are put on Russian oil and/or natural gas, and that reduces that supply to the global market, that will put upward pressure on prices,” Upton said. “Markets will respond. Upward pressure on prices will incentivize people to go drill more wells … and it will move that market back into equilibrium.”

That doesn’t mean that there will not be disruptions, some potentially significant, in the near term. But, as of Tuesday, Upton said futures markets continued to predict that, in the medium term, oil prices will fall.

Conspiracy Theorists Fuel Bump Extremist Killings in US

Newer strains of far-right movements fueled by conspiracy theories, misogyny and anti-vaccine proponents contributed to a modest rise in killings by domestic extremists in the United States last year, according to a report released Tuesday by a Jewish civil rights group.

Killings by domestic extremists increased from 23 in 2020 to at least 29 last year, with right-wing extremists killing 26 of those people in 2021, the Anti-Defamation League said in a report first provided to The Associated Press.

The ADL’s report says white supremacists, antigovernment sovereign citizens and other adherents of long-standing movements were responsible for most of the 19 deadly attacks it counted in 2021. The New York City-based organization’s list also included killings linked to newer right-wing movements that spread online during the coronavirus pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s presidency.

The ADL concluded that roughly half of the 2021 killings didn’t have a clear ideological motive, fitting a pattern that stretches back at least a decade.

The group’s tally included a shooting rampage in Denver by Lyndon James McLeod, who killed five people in December before a police officer fatally shot him. McLeod was involved in the “manosphere,” a toxic masculinity subculture, and harbored revenge fantasies against most of his victims, the ADL report notes.

Right-wing conspiracy theorists killed five people last year in two incidents, both involving “troubled perpetrators,” the ADL report says.

In August, California surfing school owner Matthew Taylor Coleman was charged with killing his two young children with a spear gun in Mexico. Coleman told an FBI agent that he was “enlightened” by conspiracy theories, including QAnon, and believed his wife had passed “serpent DNA” on to his children, according to a court affidavit.

A Maryland man, Jeffrey Allen Burnham, was charged with killing his brother, his sister-in-law and a family friend in September. Charging documents said Burnham confronted his brother, a pharmacist, because he believed he was poisoning people with COVID-19 vaccines.

“Prior to the coronavirus, the anti-vaccine movement in the United States did not have a particular ideological leaning and contained both left-leaning and right-leaning activists,” the ADL report says. “However, the politicization of the coronavirus and other factors have created many new anti-vaccine conspiracy adherents and given the anti-vaccine movement a distinctly right-wing tone it did not previously have.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory has been linked to other acts of real-world violence, including last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol. In June, a federal intelligence report warned that QAnon adherents could target Democrats and other political opponents for more violence.

FILE – A man in a QAnon shirt confront US Capitol Police in the hallway outside of the Senate chamber at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.

A core idea QAnon promotes is that Trump was secretly fighting a Satan-worshipping, child sex trafficking cabal of “deep state” enemies, prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites. QAnon hasn’t faded away with Trump leaving office.

Mark Pitcavage, a senior research fellow at the ADL’s Center on Extremism and author of Tuesday’s report, said the QAnon movement is still evolving and increasingly overlapping with other extremist movements, including vaccine opponents.

FILE – Jacob Anthony Chansley, who also goes by the name Jake Angeli, a QAnon follower, speaks to supporters of then-President Donald Trump outside of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office, in Phoenix, Nov. 5, 2020.

“Could it sort of dissipate into those or could it find some sort of new focus or new life? Or could it just hang around if Donald Trump is elected again in 2024 and take a new form then?” Pitcavage said during an interview. “It’s difficult to predict the future of those movements, so it’s difficult to predict whether they will continue to have this sort of similar effect on people.”

A dearth of mass killings in 2021 meant that last year’s tally was far lower than the totals in any year between 2015 and 2019, when killings by domestic extremists ranged from 45 to 78.

In other respects, the ADL data for 2021 mirrors long-term trends.

Right-wing extremists have killed at least 333 people in the U.S. over the past decade, accounting for three-quarters of all extremist-related killings, the report says.

The ADL distinguishes between killings that it considers to be driven by ideology and those that it found to be non-ideological or lacking a clear motive. Its report says the numbers for each category have been close to even over the past 10 years. The ADL concluded that 14 of the 29 extremist killings in 2021 were apparently motivated at least in part by ideology.

The ADL attributed 13 killings last year to white supremacists, three to antigovernment extremists, two to Black nationalists and one to an Islamist extremist.

The group didn’t count the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, as an extremist killing. Sicknick collapsed and died hours after he was attacked by rioters who stormed the Capitol and interfered with Congress’ certification of President Joe Biden’s electoral victory. In April, the Washington, D.C., medical examiner’s office ruled that Sicknick suffered a stroke and died from natural causes.

“Although it is clear that the Capitol attack could have contributed to, or even precipitated, the strokes that felled Sicknick, it cannot be definitely proven that he was murdered by a Capitol stormer,” the ADL report says.