January 04, 2006

La guerre du gaz

I wonder what this year will bring if the first major news story is about energy issues. The newspapers (in Europe, at least) have been reporting non-stop since Sunday about the gas conflict between Russia and Ukraine.
The French in Le Monde are calling it the first official war declaration of the 21st century and are talking about a 'guerre du gaz'.

After spending much of last year researching Russian energy issues from a Northeast Asian point of view these topics remain interesting.
It's good to hear that the conflict is solved, for now. And it has confronted much of Europe with the negative effects of being dependent on only a few suppliers.

As my paper put it yesterday, 'energy is politics'. It hasn't been part of economic policy for a while, it is now more and more about politics and strategy.

Accordingly, it's time to get my jobhunting going again... (but first I'm off to watch some penguins!)

2 comments:

Jules said...

I wanna hear about the penguins! Did you get photos?

machiruda said...

No photogenic penguins around in this part of the world.

We saw the documentary "The March of the Penguins". Beautifully shot, but the narration is absolutely horrible (except for the somewhat cute Flemish accent). Still, it's something else than the usual Hollywood-stuff.

The only penguins I've ever seen 'live' were in Australia. Very cool animals!