From the editor: War in Ukraine raises oil prices; does it solve a St. Mary mystery?

While the horrific events in Ukraine seem far away, those events have touched St. Mary in a very real way. And Russia’s invasion may have solved a 7½-year-old St. Mary mystery.
As this is written Monday, oil contracts for West Texas intermediate crude oil are going for $118 per barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, pushed up first by recovering demand from COVID shutdowns and then by sanctions levied against Russia.
That’s the highest price since May 2014, just before the beginning of a long slide in prices that hammered St. Mary’s economy.
The higher oil price means we’re paying more for gasoline, which will have economic consequences of its own. But we can hope the higher price will reverse some of the damage sustained since 2014.
The slump
Our parish makes ships and grows sugar cane, so we can’t say the local economy is completely dependent on the energy industry. You’re not absolutely dependent on having a left leg, either.
But we developed a noticeable economic limp when St. Mary’s employment fell from more than 27,000 in summer 2014 to 18,500 as of December 2021.
Those are Great Depression, “Grapes of Wrath,” “Brother, can you spare a dime?” numbers. Truth be told, we muddled through. Local governments budgeted conservatively, and services continued at close to pre-plunge levels. Oil prices started heading up for real about the time COVID-19 struck, and worldwide recovery in demand for energy has been pushing the price up more or less steadily since late 2020.
And, although there has been real economic pain for local people, the employment numbers exaggerate the effect on St. Mary.
We can’t assume 27,000 St. Mary people were working in 2014 just because 27,000 people were working in St. Mary. The Census Bureau says that in the five years before COVID-19, an average of about 53% of St. Mary people 16 and over had jobs.
That means the number of people employed in St. Mary exceeded the number of St. Mary people with jobs by something like 8,000. Not all the impact fell on people who live here.
The world energy market has already gotten a shock from the decision not to open the Nordstrom 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. More sanctions targeting Russian oil and gas may be coming.
Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of oil at about 10.5 million barrels a day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. That’s just less than Saudi Arabia. The United States is comfortably in first at 11.5 million.
At home, conflicting federal court rulings have delayed federal offshore energy lease sales.
We’ll have to see whether the higher price and whatever lease environment that develops will lure back the kind of Gulf of Mexico exploration and production that led to that pre-drop heyday in 2014.
Meanwhile,
in Ukraine ...
Ukraine was one of the subject “republics” in the Soviet Union. After the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukraine became independent and was rather proud of it.
Sometime around 1991, I covered a Lafayette gathering of state government officials and representatives of the pre-born Ukrainian nation. I weaseled my way into an interview with one of the visitors and asked what hopes he had for the Ukraine.
No, no, no, he answered. Not “the” Ukraine. Just Ukraine — an independent country.
He was serious about it, and so were his fellow countrymen, who began almost immediately to create trade and political ties with Europe.
Sadly, the new nation was dogged by corruption. Russia meddled at every chance. The Ukranians had to invent their own economy from scratch with no scratch. Their elected leaders were a mixture of incompetents, true reformers and Russian lackeys.
Ukranians rose up. They took to the streets in the Orange Revolution of 2004 and succeeded in getting a fraudulent presidential election overturned and rerun.
They were back in the streets again in the winter of 2013-14. The president elected in 2010, Victor Yanukovych, shut down work on a trade and diplomacy deal between Ukraine and the European Union. The blockage was seen as caving in to Russia, and by now, Ukrainians had all the Russia they could stand.
So thousands spent that long, cold winter in a Kyiv square called Maidan. They were bullied, shoved, shot and beaten, but they weren’t defeated. By spring 2014, they succeeded in forcing Yanukovych to flee to Russia. (There’s a great documentary on those events, “Winter on Fire,” on Netflix.)
In Russia, Vladimir Putin, who has tried desperately to keep the break-away republics closer to Russia than to the rest of Europe, was not amused. It was after Yanukovych’s retreat that Russia seized Crimea and intensified fighting in the southeastern Ukrainian region that was the flashpoint for the Russian invasion.
And that’s where St. Mary comes in. Maybe.
Mystery solved?
On Sept. 11, 2014, just months after the end of the Maidan protests, some St. Mary people received emergency text alerts warning of an explosion at a carbon black plant in Centerville.
The text warned of a “toxic fume” release. Social media posts began showing fake screen captures, made to look like CNN and newspaper websites, reporting on the incident.
The company that owns the plant where the explosion supposedly took place quickly stepped up to squelch the report, as did Duval Arthur, who is now the Berwick mayor but was then the parish’s homeland security director.
In 2015, writer Adrian Chen of the New York Times Magazine linked the St. Mary hoax to the Internet Research Agency, a government-linked hacker operation in Russia. Chen called it an organized disinformation campaign, complete with thousands of tweets from fake accounts and a YouTube video showing men in Middle Eastern clothing claiming credit for the terrorist attack that never happened.
Special counsel Robert Mueller obtained a 2018 indictment against the Internet Research Agency, accusing the group of trying to tamper with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Even so, there was no obvious connection between a bogus St. Mary explosion and the presidential election. So the question remained: What were the Russians doing in this parish?
The answer may be that they were practicing.
Before the Russians began their invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration warned that Moscow would rely on misinformation. And Moscow did, with some of the same tools used in the 2014 hoax.
There was a fake YouTube video showing the allegedly decrepit condition of the Ukrainian military. Fake CNN social media posts “reported” that actor Steven Segal was on the ground in Ukraine, and that an American activist had been killed there.
We’ve grown used to the idea that we live in a world where nations trade with and depend on one another. Sudden shocks in the oil economy are nothing new.
But it is strange to think that our largely rural parish might have been the testing ground for a new weapon in a war thousands of miles away.
Bill Decker is managing editor of the Morgan City Review.