In what some are calling the first "Green War," the European Union imposed antidumping levies on imports of Chinese solar panels, and Beijing responded with an antidumping and antisubsidy probe into imports of EU wine. Seems Europe and China will test whether a meal without wine is like a day without sunshine panels.
To no one's surprise, the French president called for a special EU summit to discuss the escalating trade war that threatens €546 million in wine exports to China. China imported 430 million l. of wine last year, primarily from the EU. France alone shipped 170 million l.
Germany and other export-dependent EU members oppose higher tariffs on Chinese solar panels, but the EU Trade Commission declared it necessary "to give life-saving oxygen to a business sector in Europe that is suffering badly." Commissioners said China commands 80% of the European solar-panel market. The EU's initial duty on imported Chinese panels is 11.8% but could jump to 47.6% by Aug. 16, pricing China out of the European market.
Troubled green programs
Many see the tariff as a misguided attempt by the EU to prop up a failing green energy program.
Solar-energy companies on the continent are struggling to survive as financially strapped economies cut expensive subsidy programs.
Simultaneously, Europe is awakening to the economic benefits of shale gas, forcing opponents to reappraise development programs, hydraulic fracturing technology, and government bias for renewable energy. While the European carbon market has virtually collapsed, carbon emissions in the US are falling faster than in other industrialized nations because of the shale gas boom.
The Energy Information Administration reported global shale gas resources jumped to 7,299 tcf in 137 formations in 95 basins in 41 countries including the US. That amounts to 32% of the world's gas recoverable with current technology, up from 6,622 tcf reported in 2011.
Sing out
A sure sign shale oil and gas have captured public attention is a song by the rock band Dr. Dog from Pennsylvania that mentions Marcellus shale. Their tune "Vampire" says: "There's a black mask in shadows behind your veil/You're as tempting and savage as Marcellus shale." Not sure what that means, but it sounds ominous.
Strangely enough, there are not many popular songs about the oil and gas industry. The auto industry has "One Piece at a Time," Johnny Cash's last No. 1 hit single about a Detroit assembly line worker secretly building his own car, and there are thousands of songs about railroading. Miners load "16 Tons." Truckers spend "Six Days on the Road." Rodeo riders compete in "Amarillo by Morning." Exploited migrant farm workers are remembered in "Deportee." But where are the odes to oilmen? Sure, the "Ballad of Jed Clampett" from the Beverly Hillbillies TV series was the top country single for 3 weeks back in 1963, but it's about a royalty owner whose mineral rights were worth more than the family farm.
Some recently have written knowingly of the oil field. J.W. Cooper Jr.'s "Sunshine on the Water" and Mike Dean's "7 and 7" speak eloquently of offshore workers, and Wes St. Jon's "Bein' a Worm" and "Redneck Roughneck" catches the oil patch spirit around the globe.
But the closest to a hit song about a real oilman is Guy Clark's ballad of an aging hero—"a drifter and a driller of oil wells/And an old school man of the world." In "Desperados Waiting for a Train," he recalls, "I'd play the Red River Valley/And he'd sit out in the kitchen and cry/And run his fingers through 70 years of livin'/And wonder, 'Lord, has ever' well I've drilled run dry?'"
Those who have spent a lifetime in the oil patch can identify with that.