Good move President Biden! Russia wants the pipeline and Germany wants the pipeline. Ukraine doesn't. Why? Well, when the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine ended up controlling pipelines that transported Russian gas to Europe. The Ukrainians overcharged for transport and syphoned off gas from the pipeline without paying for it. So Gazprom, the Russian gas company, was compelled to build the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to the north and pipelines to Turkey to the south to bypass Ukraine. This is wasteful as hell, but it's what happens when people get greedy.
Gazprom, Shell, and consortium of German, French and Austrian companies dropped about $11 billion on building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and just when it's about to be completed, we pull the rug out from under them. That's wasteful as hell too, we want them to just walk away and abandon $11 billion.
Now if Joe were just similarly enlightened when it came to the interests of the American people and American businesses. If his ban on drilling on federal offshore leases and federal lands sticks, we'll be walking away prematurely from hundreds of billions of dollars invested in infrastructure and exploration. Then as Bambino's article rightly noted there's the Keystone Pipeline, which Biden pulled the plug on. And how about Gretchen Whitmer's plan to shut down the Enbridge pipeline, which will throw the refining industry in the Midwest into turmoil? My question, if Germany should be entitled to pursue its aims of an affordable, secure energy supply, then why shouldn't the United States too?
Bambino's second link was interesting too:
https://twitter.com/emeraldrobinson/...532542977?s=21
Why should the U.S. have backed off on Nord Stream 2 after Russian hackers "kidnapped" the Colonial pipeline? Well, maybe it makes sense to lower the level of tension with Russia. The damages and ransom extracted by the hackers was peanuts compared to the $11 billion Gazprom et al have sunk in Nord Stream 2. As Trump rightly noted, there's no reason why we and Russia have to be at each others throats.
