From: Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com>
To: Viridian List <viridian@fringeware.com>

Subject: Viridian Note 00168: Energy Kleptocracy

Key concepts: Romania, Ukraine, Los Alamos, Greenhouse
disaster, public corruption, theft, energy policy, missing computers, nuclear disasters

Attention Conservation Notice: Concerns deepest darkest Eastern Europe. Grim to the point of Kafkaesque comedy.

Source: Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Newsline
http://www.rferl.org/newsline

(((With Chernobyl purportedly shutting down soon, one might wonder how the Ukraine will manage to obtain useful energy. The answer? Steal it from Russian pipelines!)))

"UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT LAMBASTES CABINET FOR ENERGY POLICY. Leonid Kuchma on 8 June criticized Viktor Yushchenko's cabinet for failing to regulate the situation in the fuel and energy sector, Interfax reported. 'No use has been made of the 11,000 directives from the government committee on reforming the fuel and energy sector and from the Ministry of Fuel and Energy,' Kuchma noted (...). He added that Ukraine has illegally siphoned off 13 billion cubic meters of Russian gas from pipelines crossing its territory. Russia has the right to take Ukraine to an international court over the issue, he commented. Ukraine's lucrative energy market is widely believed to provide huge revenues for a few powerful oligarchs who sell Russian gas at inflated prices."

(((Rumania is suffering intense drought this summer. Irrigation would bring some relief, but in a marvelous variant of the Wexelblat Disaster, relief is impossible because the pipeline infrastructure has been stolen.)))

"ROMANIAN DROUGHT, THEFT DECLARED 'SECURITY THREAT.' Romania's Supreme Council of National Defense on 13 June called for 'the immediate and energetic intervention of the government' to deal with the effects of the drought that has affected 40 percent of agricultural land in the country. Damage is estimated at more than $200 million. President Emil Constantinescu said that the damage is due not to the drought alone but also to 'generalized theft.' Many irrigation pipelines have been stolen as well as oil pipelines, resulting in the threat of a 'large-scale ecological catastrophe.'"

(((Meanwhile, in luckless Los Alamos, "the Kremlin of the Southwest," that enormous Greenhouse wildfire has apparently caused them to discover the loss of == wait for it == Russian nuclear accident files. Stolen? Lost? Pawned? Sacrificed for a Napster hub? Who knows?)))

"RUSSIAN NUCLEAR SECRETS MISSING FROM LOS ALAMOS. Citing the Website of 'The New York Times,' Western agencies on 12 June reported that the FBI is searching for two hard drives missing from the Los Alamos nuclear research laboratory that include classified U.S. and Russian nuclear information as well as other sensitive data. According to the newspaper, the hard drives were discovered to have gone missing from a vault at the laboratory, which had been evacuated for five days in mid- May during nearby wildfires. Energy Department officials first learned about their disappearance at the beginning of this month. The New York daily also reported that the hard drives contained data used to respond to nuclear accidents and terrorist threats as well as information about Russia's nuclear weapons program."