FASTER, PLEASE: The Badly Needed EastMed Pipeline Awaits Approval.

“Financial and political support by the EU can facilitate the final investment decision-making process by the private entities that are considering their participation in the project,” Michalis Mathioulakis, an energy expert at the ELIAMEP think tank, said recently, adding that the significant rise in natural gas prices in Europe favors the economic viability of the pipeline.

It was all the more surprising, therefore, when in January, the United States, in a complete policy reversal, unofficially communicated to Israel, Greece and Cyprus that it no longer supported the pipeline. Then, on April 6, US Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland made it even clearer that the US was officially killing off the EastMed project. As the final feasibility report on the project is still underway, the US decision seemed to come out of the blue.

During a visit to Greece, Nuland said in an interview with the newspaper Kathimerini:

“We don’t need to wait for 10 years and spend billions of dollars on this stuff. We need to move the gas now, And we need to use gas today as a transition to a greener future. Ten years from now we don’t want a pipeline. Ten years from now we want to be green. So we’ve got to use LNG [liquefied natural gas] and we’ve got to use electricity connections that we can do more quickly.”

Nuland’s comments came across as remarkably tone-deaf at a time when the US has actively been seeking to lower oil prices worldwide by appealing to dictatorships such as Saudi Arabia to increase oil production and even courting Venezuela. If anything, oil is even less “green” than natural gas, and the projected time during which the EastMed pipeline can be built is probably not ten years, but significantly less. Furthermore, natural gas is likely to be relevant for decades to come. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that there will be enough renewable energy to cover European energy needs within the next decade. Fossil fuels will most likely still be needed for the foreseeable future to manufacture those electric cars and fly those airplanes. The greatest beneficiaries of the US and the West closing down their energy industries will be Russia, Iran and other countries set to make a windfall selling their fossil fuels.

So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.

“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”