Guest “Cold War jingoism” by David Middleton

Day 7 of America Held Hostage by CHICOM-19

OPEC secretary general invites Texas RRC’s Sitton to Vienna meeting

By JOE CARROLL, GRANT SMITH AND RACHEL ADAMS-HEARD on 3/20/2020

HOUSTON (Bloomberg) –One of the most powerful officials in the biggest U.S. oil state has been invited to OPEC’s inner sanctum in June in a rare rapprochement between two historically antagonistic crude powers.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton said Friday he was invited by OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo to attend the group’s summer meeting in Vienna. But even as the surprise announcement reverberated across U.S. and international petroleum circles, Sitton’s proposal to curb Texas crude output for the first time since the 1970s ran into opposition from his own agency.

“While I am open to any and all ideas to protect the Texas Miracle, as a free-market conservative I have a number of reservations about this approach,” Wayne Christian, chairman of the Texas commission that oversees the oil industry, said in a statement. If Texas cuts supply, “there is no guarantee other nations, or even states will follow suit.”

[…]

“We all agree an international deal must get done to ensure economic stability as we recover from Covid-19,” Sitton said in a tweet after his conversation with Barkindo.

Although it remains little more than one man’s radical proposal at this point, the potential consequences of an OPEC-Texas agreement are hard to overstate. The cartel’s primacy over world crude markets is unrivaled; Texas pumps more than 40% of U.S. oil and as a standalone entity gushes more than every member of the cartel except mighty Saudi Arabia.

Such a tie-up would also confront Russian President Vladimir Putin with a formidable and heretofore unimaginable foe in using petroleum as a geopolitical weapon.

[…]

World Oil

While it would be a violation of anti-trust and a host of other laws for oil companies in the US to act as a cartel, and the Federal government has no authority to limit oil production… The Texas Railroad Commission does have rather broad powers to limit oil & gas production at the individual field level, although they have not wielded that power in decades.

Interesting, if nothing else.

Funny thing: The Texas Railroad Commission may have been the blueprint for OPEC.

A Few Notes

To anyone offended by the jingoistic tone of this post:

To anyone who doesn’t know what “jingoistic” means, get a dictionary.

• I am totally fed up with the debate over what to call the virus/disease, so I will henceforth refer to it as CHICOM-19.
• I don’t give a rat’s @$$ that the Soviet Union ceased to exist nearly 30 years ago. Stalin is a fracking Putinist… Or is it the other way around?
• My “America Held Hostage” clock started on Monday, when I started working from home in Dallas, about 3 days before the company strongly urged and then more or less required it.
• Furthermore, we had to make some very difficult decisions over the past week. And…

Hahahahaha! pic.twitter.com/U2rn49XJzI

— Laura Ingraham (@IngrahamAngle) March 13, 2020

We have 19 more packages of toilet paper… Looking to trade all but one for a Lamborghini… Or one of those new Jeep Gladiator pickup trucks, all tricked out like Bill Murray’s in that Super Bowl commercial.