NEW YORK, June 12 (Reuters) - Crude oil prices (click here) spiked on Thursday on worries over supply as violence escalated in Iraq, while a global stocks index edged down after Wall Street ticked lower.
Crude jumped after Iraqi Kurdish forces took control of the northern oil city of Kirkuk, in the face of a triumphant Sunni Islamist rebel march towards Baghdad that threatens Iraq's future as a unified state.
Brent crude futures rose 2 percent, the most in four months, to $112.12 a barrel, the highest since early March. U.S. crude added 1.4 percent to $105.86, its highest since September. Prices could rise further as events unfold in Iraq. The Thomson Reuters/Jefferies CRB index rose the most in two months.
"There are no immediate oil export implications in as much as the latest news is about Kirkuk ... and that has a limited impact because the northern pipeline has been down for months already," said Gareth Lewis-Davies, a strategist at BNP Paribas....
It just happens to be true. The Keystone XL pipeline does not increase energy security to the USA. It increases the threat to national security both directly through sabotage and poisoning farmland as well as adding to the climate crisis. All it takes is one time and the farmland may as well be nothing but tar sands itself.
By Andy Tully
Sun, 08 June 2014 00:00
It just happens to be true. The Keystone XL pipeline does not increase energy security to the USA. It increases the threat to national security both directly through sabotage and poisoning farmland as well as adding to the climate crisis. All it takes is one time and the farmland may as well be nothing but tar sands itself.
By Andy Tully
Sun, 08 June 2014 00:00
...A new report says the proposed Canada-U.S. Keystone XL pipeline (click here) would be an easy target for a terrorist attack that could create an environmental disaster.
David M. Cooper, a retired command master chief of the U.S. Navy SEALs who conducted the vulnerability study for NextGen Climate America, told The Huffington Post that it would take only a few terrorists with some basic hand tools and a small amount of explosives to conduct “a coordinated attack along just a few key nodes along that pipeline in the span of just really minutes.”...
...Cooper, a decorated 25-year veteran of the Navy’s special forces, shares the latter view. “That's an Exxon Valdez-level oil spill right in the middle of America,” he said.
The U.S. State Department is in the process of deciding whether the pipeline would be in the U.S. national interest. It has repeatedly postponed making a decision while it waits for legal challenges to the pipeline’s route through Nebraska to be resolved....
