The Great Reset
Guest Post by David Daniel and Leo Giangiacomo
I am blessed to have a lot of friends who forward me posts and newsletters and sources of contemplation. Rather than me rewriting them with different words… if I don’t have a differentiated take, I prefer to share the source directly. This note comes from a weekly oil and gas note from David Daniel and Leo Giangiacomo. It was a great historical overview and summary of the evolution that brought us today and the impending energy and food crisis. As I said in my post yesterday, I am deeply concerned we have lost the forest for the trees when Antonio Guterres, the UN’s Secretary General, prioritizes climate over food and energy. Seems like a total miss and truly insane:
“the fallout from Russia’s war in Ukraine risks upending global food and energy markets, with major implications for the global climate agenda.
Countries could become so consumed by the immediate fossil fuel supply gap that they neglect or knee-cap policies to cut fossil fuel use. And this is madness: addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.
IPCC, UN, WHO, WEF…. I know it sounds crazy but I mean… is it?
I want to hear what YOU think because somedays, I just don’t know anymore.
In July 1944 delegates from 44 countries at the UN Monetary and Financial Conference in Bretton Woods, NH agreed that gold was the basis for the US dollar and other currencies were pegged to the US dollar’s value, establishing the dollar as the global reserve currency. Gold was valued at $35 an ounce. This was called the Bretton Woods Agreement.
In 1972, the debt from the Vietnam War had pressured the US financial system to the point that President Nixon decoupled the dollar from gold. He then persuaded Saudi Arabia to sell oil only in dollars in exchange for US military protection from their geopolitical enemies, mostly Iran and Shia Muslim governments. The dollar would be backed by the strength of the US economy and the dollar would remain the global reserve currency. This became known as Bretton Woods II and created the Petrodollar.
During the following decades, Japan captured the electronics and auto manufacturing industries from the US. China’s low-cost skilled labor force gradually captured the large chunk of remaining US manufacturing.
US presidents slowly dismantled the financial regulations that were put in place in response to the Great Depression, and they increased regulations on manufacturing and industry. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2007 and the Covid pandemic in 2020 prompted the US government to create tens of trillions of dollars to inject liquidity into the financial system, greatly weakening the dollar.
With gold now near $2,000 an ounce, the dollar is worth less than 2% of what it was in 1972. Since the events of September 11, 2001, the security relations between the US and Saudi Arabia have gradually eroded. A US agreement with Iran on nuclear weapon development (JCPOA) was seen as a betrayal by Saudi Arabia. The injection of large volumes of liquidity during the 2008 financial crisis funded a US shale oil and gas development that caused oil prices to drop and inflicted great financial pain on Saudi Arabia.
Recently Saudi Arabia has been considering selling oil in Chinese yuan, signaling the end of the petrodollar and severely weakening the dollar’s tenuous position as the world’s reserve currency. Inflation now threatens to increase the interest cost on the huge debt and has the potential to collapse the dollar completely (Editor’s note: Russia made a brilliant strategic move for “unfriendly” countries to buy natural gas in rubles. Which means Europe must convert to Euros or USD to rubles at the price set by the Russian bank and to get the currency to settle the trades. More on this in a different post but strategically brilliant to support their currency).
German economist Klaus Schwab and his organization, The World Economic Forum (WEF), have been using climate change to usher in a new world order devoid of fossil fuels. Michael Rectenwald penned an excellent summary for Imprimus on this subject. Schwab’s plan is called The Great Reset after he declared at the 2014 Annual Davos Meeting, “What we want to do in Davos this year…is to push the great reset button.” On June 13, 2019, the WEF signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the UN to form a partnership to advance the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It promised to help finance the UN’s climate change agenda and help meet the needs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including providing assets and expertise for “digital governance.”
Since 2014, we have seen the rising emphasis on climate change. This was to be the method by which the WEF would seize control of the energy industry and then the global economic system. But the realities of an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables have slowed down implementation of the Great Reset. Schwab is already 83 years old. Especially in the US, small businesses and individuals refuse to accept the climate agenda, and must be controlled, as Schwab describes in his book “The Great Narrative”. He advocates for state control to bring this resistance under submission.
In May 2018, the WEF collaborated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security to conduct CLADE X, a simulation of a national pandemic response of a novel strain of a human parainfluenza virus. In October 2019, the WEF collaborated with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on another pandemic exercise, Event 201, which simulated an international response of the outbreak of a novel coronavirus. Two months later the COVID outbreak started in China. In June 2020, Schwab and Malleret published their book on COVID-19: The Great Reset as a guide for anyone wanting to understand how COVID-19 disrupted our social and economic systems. So, this book was ready to go in June 2020 … Most US states had not even had their first cases until March 2020 … but this “guide” was ready to go to print when the scope and scale of this was still a mystery. Or was the book already written waiting for the right time to be released? The book declared that COVID represents an “opportunity that can be seized”; that “we should take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world.” Sooo, all that sounds a lot like a crazy conspiracy theory that makes for intriguing reading and rampant speculation … We haven’t been in the hooch … really … The dates and the pre-COVID collaborations are of record. New (& used) copies of Schwab and Malleret’s book can be ordered right now on Amazon. Up to you to decide if you think these things lining up are coincidental in nature … or something that has no randomness whatsoever ...
The Great Reset is known by terms such as “stakeholder capitalism”, “corporate socialism”, and “communist capitalism”. It is the basis of the popular ESG movement in big corporations. It aims to squeeze non-woke corporations and businesses out of the market and use a social credit score to control ownership and control of production away from the non-woke or non-compliant. It is based on the Chinese Communist Party’s system of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.”
The movement involves economic and governmental resets as well as technological resets and involves the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or 4-IR, which encompasses the merging of big data, AI, machine learning, quantum computing, genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The goals of the Great Reset depend on the obliteration not only of free markets, but of individual liberty and free will. It is also a direct threat to any activity, especially religious conviction, criminal enterprise, and dictatorships, that oppose its central control.
The war in Ukraine is part of the Great Reset. It is amplifying the supply chain disruptions that COVID started. It is causing more economic chaos that is further reducing the workforce. Energy shortages and high prices are designed to drive faster implementation of renewable energy that can be centralized and meted out to those most deserving. Food shortages are setting up a transform of the agricultural sector to synthetic proteins, along with beans and insects, as a sustainable alternative to famine.
Russia’s sanctions may be the trigger to collapse the world’s reserve currency status of the dollar and usher in a new government digital currency. The sanctions have violated the rules-based international order that has guided international commerce since the Cold War, and lost the trust of all but the US’s closest allies.
Digital currency and digital ID are a central core to the implementation of the Great Reset. Ukraine is the only country other than China to have implemented this digital ID system when, in 2020 they launched Diia, an application that brings together identity card, passport, license, vaccination record, registrations, insurance, health reimbursements, and social benefits into a single digital ID. Putin’s corrupt economic system would not be tolerated under the Great Reset system unless he cedes control to the elite European technocrats, or, as he calls them, Nazis.
Over the last few years, climate change, a war on oil and gas, an opening of US borders to the free influx of drugs and violent criminals, nonsensical adoption of impossible sustainable energy goals, a global COVID pandemic with absurd government reactions and a very real threat to all of our lives, and now a war in Ukraine that may have nuclear consequences, have driven our lives and are all elements of Schwa’s Great Reset. Maybe this paints a clearer picture of the framework of this war, not only on Ukraine, but on the energy industry and all of humanity. Wake up and be not woke. This is what drives oil and gas today.
For this and tons of weekly oil and gas news, email David Daniel at dcdtexas@gmail.com to get added to the newsletter.