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Alan W. Dowd is a Senior Fellow with the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes on the full range of topics relating to national defense, foreign policy and international security. Dowd’s commentaries and essays have appeared in Policy Review, Parameters, Military Officer, The American Legion Magazine, The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, The Claremont Review of Books, World Politics Review, The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Jerusalem Post, The Financial Times Deutschland, The Washington Times, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Examiner, The Detroit News, The Sacramento Bee, The Vancouver Sun, The National Post, The Landing Zone, Current, The World & I, The American Enterprise, Fraser Forum, American Outlook, The American and the online editions of Weekly Standard, National Review and American Interest. Beyond his work in opinion journalism, Dowd has served as an adjunct professor and university lecturer; congressional aide; and administrator, researcher and writer at leading think tanks, including the Hudson Institute, Sagamore Institute and Fraser Institute. An award-winning writer, Dowd has been interviewed by Fox News Channel, Cox News Service, The Washington Times, The National Post, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and numerous radio programs across North America. In addition, his work has been quoted by and/or reprinted in The Guardian, CBS News, BBC News and the Council on Foreign Relations. Dowd holds degrees from Butler University and Indiana University. Follow him at twitter.com/alanwdowd.

ASCF News

Scott Tilley is a Senior Fellow at the American Security Council Foundation, where he writes the “Technical Power” column, focusing on the societal and national security implications of advanced technology in cybersecurity, space, and foreign relations.

He is an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. Previously, he was with the University of California, Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, and IBM. His research and teaching were in the areas of computer science, software & systems engineering, educational technology, the design of communication, and business information systems.

He is president and founder of the Center for Technology & Society, president and co-founder of Big Data Florida, past president of INCOSE Space Coast, and a Space Coast Writers’ Guild Fellow.

He has authored over 150 academic papers and has published 28 books (technical and non-technical), most recently Systems Analysis & Design (Cengage, 2020), SPACE (Anthology Alliance, 2019), and Technical Justice (CTS Press, 2019). He wrote the “Technology Today” column for FLORIDA TODAY from 2010 to 2018.

He is a popular public speaker, having delivered numerous keynote presentations and “Tech Talks” for a general audience. Recent examples include the role of big data in the space program, a four-part series on machine learning, and a four-part series on fake news.

He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Victoria (1995).

Contact him at stilley@cts.today.

US Sanctions on Russia, Anti-Oil Policy Give Competitive Edge to China: Economist

Monday, June 20, 2022

Categories: ASCF News Energy Independence

Comments: 0

Source: https://www.theepochtimes.com/us-sanctions-on-russia-anti-oil-policy-give-competitive-edge-to-china-economist_4543692.html

A customer prepares to pump gas into her car at a Chevron gas station in San Rafael, Calif., on May 20, 2022. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Throttling the oil industry while cutting off Russian oil is putting American businesses at a serious disadvantage to those that now buy Russian oil and gas at a discount, namely China and also India, according to an expert on environmental and energy policy. Worse yet, this situation appears to be baked into the geopolitical cake for the foreseeable future.

After Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, Western nations tried to punish Russia with a slew of economic sanctions, including by cutting purchases of Russian oil and gas. That made Russia “a distressed seller” forced to accept penalty prices, noted Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario.

“They’re now shipping much more of their fossil energy to China and India, who are willing still to deal with Russia,” he told The Epoch Times.

Russian oil now sells at a more than 30 percent discount by some estimates.

Meanwhile, Western governments have throttled investment in the oil and gas industry in a quest to “decarbonize” their economies, leading to a tight supply and a market unable to deal with rising demand.

“We’re entering a phase where we will have structurally very high energy prices for years to come,” McKitrick said.

“China and India are buying energy at a deep discount so they will have a structural cost advantage and I think you’ll see that begins to affect trading patterns, manufacturing costs, energy-intensive production costs in the years ahead to our detriment—entirely avoidable, too.”

America’s average gas price has been around or above $5 a gallon for weeks and diesel has already crossed the $6 barrier in many areas.

The economic impact is far-reaching because energy is “very fundamental,” and when its price goes up it makes it “more costly to do everything,” McKitrick said.

Some economists now see fuel prices as the dominant factor in inflation, which reached 8.6 percent in May.

Amid an already tight labor market, tightening credit, and margins eaten away by inflation, another competitive disadvantage is the last thing American businesses need.

A U.S. small business optimism survey recently recorded its lowest ever reading in its 48-year history.

“Small business owners remain very pessimistic about the second half of the year as supply chain disruptions, inflation, and the labor shortage are not easing,” said Bill Dunkelberg, chief economist at the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group that runs the survey, in a June 14 release.

There are no longer any easy solutions to the problem as the Biden administration has made a series of policy mistakes that have led to this point, an oil investment expert previously told The Epoch Times.

It’s not just the domestic oil production that is now lacking, but also the refinery capacity to process it.

“No one has built a new oil refinery in the U.S. for decades. Nobody’s willing to invest in expanding refinery capacity because the outlook from everything that the government has said is you won’t get the approvals,” McKitrick said, noting that the same problem exists in Canada, where “companies have wasted billions of dollars just trying to get pipelines built and at the end of it they can’t because environmental policy makes it impossible.”

The government would need to not just take its boot off the oil industry’s neck, but actually give the industry guarantees that new projects would be expeditiously advanced through the regulatory hurdles.

“This would take a massive policy shift on the part of the government,” he said.

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