Sonofgloin said;
please do not give me arguments based around infrastructure lead periods....

You just cannot airily dismiss the time to build CNG plants.
The US will not have the gas to export after it was built.
If they had the CNG plants now, they could export it.
But they don't, it is only the ignorant politicians and journalists
that think they will be able to export in the future.

It does now seem to be sinking in that a CNG plant will have no future.
You have got to understand that the oil companies sold the journalists
and the politicians a pup. You have heard the stories;
The US will be an oil exporter.
Saudi America !
US will be world largest producer.

They still import 40% of the oil they use.
The tight oil will start a fast decline sometime early after 2017.
If Wall Street gets twitchy and want higher interest on the tight oil
financing it will force a closedown.

Sorry, kids, back to topic :)

IF

IF Russia has supplied surface-to-air missiles to its hooligans in eastern Ukraine, it's irrelevant whether or not they made a 'mistake' in shooting down a civilian aircraft when they meant to shoot down a Ukrainian aircraft, over Ukraine.

IF this is true, then Russia has grossly interfered in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, by committing an act of war, and by intending to commit an act of war.

IF this is true, then there goes Putin's neo-Tsarist dream of restoring the old Russian Empire, once and for all. Russia is on the slide economically, demographically and, most certainly, politically.

Sanctions or not, Putin will become ever-more reliant on Chinese finance, nationally but more particularly in the vast East, six million square miles (whatever that is in kilometres) and barely thirty million people, half of them drunk half the time.

China wants to build pipelines from parts of Siberia into eastern and western China, at first for oil, but pretty soon pipelines taking water from the huge rivers in Siberia across China's north. Perhaps they will pressure Putin to allow them to finance dams on some of those rivers for hydroelectric power, which will be transmitted directly to China.

To do all this, China will demand that millions of Chinese workers are allowed to settle in Siberia. So vast areas of Siberia, the most productive areas, will soon enough, say ten or twenty years, have Chinese majority populations, restive to break away from distant Moscow's control.

Don't you just love it when the shoe's on the other foot ?

Wouldn't be dead for quids !

Joe

This, from the respected Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/23/mh17-ukraine-separatists-buk-missile-system

Well, there you go :)

Joe

Well spotted, and said, Loudmouth, I hadn't thought about the Sino-Siberian development thing before, but it's entirely consistent with China's behaviour elsewhere, as in Tibet for example.
It has a certain Sudetenland ring to it, doesn't it?
Oh, to live for another century and watch all this play out!
T'was not to be alas, but I suspect in times not all too far in the future our descendents will look back on these times as a sort of Golden Age, there's every chance our civilisation could bomb out at any year now, for any number of triggers and/or combinations of circumstances.

One of the sad things about this tragedy is the way that politicians are jumping on the band wagon.

One thousand, one hundred and ninety-three (1,193) people died on our roads in 2013.

Must have missed all the uproar over it.

Anyone hear Abbott's remarks on this?

Joe>> IF this is true, then Russia has grossly interfered in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, by committing an act of war, and by intending to commit an act of war.

IF this is true, then there goes Putin's neo-Tsarist dream of restoring the old Russian Empire, once and for all. Russia is on the slide economically, demographically and, most certainly, politically.<<

Joe, one can state issues that are on the face of it valid....but when you add context the travesty ends up as the status quo.......for all.

The cold war was 50 years of the Yanks and the Ruskies taking opposite sides on every struggle on the globe...they armed the second and third worlds this way....still do....so the travesty and immorality implied in the comment “committing an act of war” loses its severity.

America has active servicemen in over 150 foreign nations.........Russia has troops in 11.
Joe the Russian empire that you suggest Putin aspires to has a long long way to go....