Romanian Officials Say Russia Finances European Fracking Protests

HughPickens.com writes Andrew Higgins reports in the NYT that Romanian officials including the prime minister point to a mysteriously well-financed and well-organized campaign of protests over fracking in Europe and are pointing their fingers at Russia's Gazprom, a state-controlled energy giant, that has a clear interest in preventing countries dependent on Russian natural gas from developing their own alternative supplies of energy and preserving a lucrative market for itself — and a potent foreign policy tool for the Kremlin. "Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called nongovernmental organizations — environmental organizations working against shale gas — to maintain dependence on imported Russian gas," says NATO's former secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen. A wave of protest against fracking began three years ago in Bulgaria, a country highly dependent on Russian energy. Faced with a sudden surge of street protests by activists, many of whom had previously shown little interest in environmental issues, the Bulgarian government in 2012 banned fracking and canceled a shale gas license issued earlier to Chevron. Russia itself has generally shown scant concern for environmental protection and has a long record of harassing and even jailing environmentalists who stage protests. On fracking, however, Russian authorities have turned enthusiastically green, with Putin declaring last year that fracking "poses a huge environmental problem." Places that have allowed it, he said, "no longer have water coming out of their taps but a blackish slime." For their part Green groups have been swift to attack Rasmussen's views, saying that they were not involved in any alleged Russian attempts to discredit the technology, and were instead opposed to it on the grounds of environmental sustainability. "The idea we're puppets of Putin is so preposterous that you have to wonder what they're smoking over at Nato HQ," says Greenpeace, which has a history of antagonism with the Russian government, which arrested several of its activists on a protest in the Arctic last year.

Comments

Re:Maybe Putin could help

[ChrisMaple]

Faults build up stress until they break. The longer the stress builds, the bigger the earthquake. If fracking promotes earthquakes, that means they'll be more frequent, less damaging, and less deadly. I'd rather experience a Richter 4 daily than a Richter 7 every 20 years.

Re:Bullshit

[Xest]

Agreed, I don't think Putin is funding all or maybe even any anti-franking protests because like you I'm anti-fracking but also most definitely anti-Russian imperialism. However he IS funding the far-right in Europe. See here for example:

http://www.theweek.co.uk/europ...

al Jazeera has a decent article on the reasoning behind it here also:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indep...

There are other far right parties in the UK that Russia likely has a hand in funding but are much harder to prove. One example is UKIP in the UK. Some years back a Lib Dem MP in the UK, Mike Hancock got in trouble for having an affair with a young girl (less than half his age) because the security services warned she was a Russian spy and a Russian whistleblower (a general) outed her as such also. The MP in question was on a number of British security committees. The girl in question, Katia Zatuliveter, was allowed to stay in the UK because the courts ruled there was not enough evidence of her being a spy. Case closed, end of story. Right?

Fast forward a couple of years, and we get a news story that seems completely unrelated, UKIP announces that it's got a new donor that's defected from the Tories, he donates £100,000 to UKIP. The Tories state that they've no idea who this guy is and investigation into official finances show that the guy was bluffing about having been a major Tory donor, despite claims of having donated over £100,000 to the Tories it seems he'd only ever donated about £20,000. The guy responds by saying he's "offended" by the Tories belittling his donation and ups his UKIP donation to £1million. It seems odd that UKIP and this guy were willing to lie about the scale of relevance he had to the Tories in order to pretend it was a much more major coup than it was, but so what, who cares, what has this got to do with anything?

Well, this little known small fry Tory donor, Arron Banks, defecting to UKIP to become a major political donor is married to none other than a Katia Zatuliveter, the claimed Russian spy who he was married to before, during, and since she "cheated" on him with strategic defence knowledge filled MP Mike Hancock.

All a massive coincidence? Maybe. But given that we know Putin is overtly funding France's far-right national front it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to think he might be subversively funding similar far-right parties like UKIP (who have gone out their way to try and pretend they're not far right and are respectable even though their far-right nature shines through when they fuck up almost weekly) in the UK too.

So funding fracking protests? Maybe, probably not. Funding attempts to rip Europe apart? Well we know for a fact it is in some countries, we just don't know quite how far it reaches.

I wondered after the European elections why Europes elite didn't opt to listen to the eurosceptics, and opted to continue on a path of integration rather than giving the eurosceptic view the time of day in light of the amount of support the eurosceptic crowd had gained with it's well funded campaigns across Europe. It didn't make sense that they'd just ignore them altogether, but now I wonder if these guys know full well about all the Russian money being poured into far-right and eurosceptic campaigns then they may well recognise that much of the eurosceptic vote is simply Russian stirred dissent.

All those claims Russia made about the West stirring discontent in the Ukraine rather than it simply being a grass roots campaign for change that's been going on in the Ukraine since at least 2004 with their orange revolution? It seems that whatever Russia is accusing the West of doing, it is most definitely doing itself- even if you're willing to give the benefit of the doubt on some o

Re: "Turk Stream"

[WindBourne]

You might want to reread what is happening. Russia had no choice but to sell to china at fraction of the price.

Re: One should be careful on the logic here

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the seismic activity might be a good thing.

The link is basically that the fracking is weakening some structures that then drop below the strength needed to keep a quake from happening at current pressure. This causes a small quake. The alternative is to let the pressure build until it exceeds what the current structures down there can handle, this would cause a single large quake.

I'm not pro-fracking (I think the ground water contamination is bad), plus the cheap gas slows movement away from fossil fuels, but the increase is small quakes shouldn't be thought of as bad IMO.