Does LNG have a Hamas Problem?

Qatar is the world's leading LNG player, but also a state funded source for Hamas and home to Hamas leadership.

The shipping industry embarks on a new frontier. As part of the UN led Net Zero 2050 goals and Sustainable Initiatives, the shipping industry is forced to reckon with top-down regulations and cultural initiatives.

This was on display at the recent shipping Conference in Cyprus, where mother hen Michelle Wiese Bockmann was in attendance as the cultural enforcement liaison. Michelle’s profile states that she is a “senior analyst oil and shipping at Lloyd’s List”. With 12.1k followers on X, she does not have a verified profile, which we assume is a slight / protest against X owner Elon Musk.

Ms. Bockmann spoke at Marine Money in June where she went through her list of ship owners Lloyd’s List was tracking for sanction evasion. She wrote about the event in great detail, but like her public internet presence, the article was more about the cultural alignment of the maritime industry than the markets, assets, or geopolitical issues.

In her piece from Marine Money, she scolded the key-note speaker for not agreeing with the Net Zero timeline and the importance of transgender representation on the Board of Directors. Our favorite was her referring to the creator of multiple public entities with billions of dollars of value as a side-kick (and a dinosaur).

At other conferences, she scorns the panels that do not meet her cultural guidelines. In what borders neo-Bolshevik behavior, Ms. Bockmann claims any panels without sufficient women to be “manels”. These Tweets do not garner much engagement, especially for someone with a following of her size.

This week in Cyrpus, Ms. Bockmann was appalled to learn that the Net Zero initiative (fantasy?) may not be as practical as envisioned. Claiming that to be “outrageous”. Granted we didn’t listen to the panel, so maybe the comments were!

We do not wish to singularly highlight her account. Tradewinds is also in a similar boat, dedicating an increasingly larger portion of their coverage to cultural and energy transition items - it is the future after-all. Granted they have been at it a long time, in this 2002 CNN article Lloyd’s List and Tradewinds editor Julian Bray discussed how it was inappropriate to refer to ships as She. At the time, it was expected to call ships It, we suspect now it may be They / Them.

Industry leaders also are strong advocates of decarbonisation taxes and requirements. We have written before that Trafigura loves carbon taxes, but only now that they have a large Carbon trading business! This is a smile of a man who makes millions trading that carbon and mining those batteries.

Atleast they are honest about it. On their website they say how the changes they demand benefit their business.

While we are tempted to write a whole article on this, that is not the point. Net Zero and Cultural Board programs are ‘times are good’ issues.

This weekend, we saw a gruesome attack against the Israeli people by Hamas. This reminded us of the horrors that can make our jobs and market updates seem meaningless.

While we do not need to recount the situation in Israel, it has greatly impacted the shipping community. Israeli maritime start-up Orca AI put out the following LinkedIn post.

So what does this have to do with Qatar? Well Qatar is the largest backer of Hamas. The leader (ex-leader?) of Hamas currently resides in a 5-star resort in Qatar.

He also called for Friday to be a global day of ‘protest’. Very normal stuff from the largest LNG player in the World and home of the World Cup.

The former leader of Hamas has issued calls for Muslims across the world to "take to the streets" in a global day of protest against Israel on Friday.

Khaled Mashal, who was the leader of Hamas for three years from 2014-2017 and is now based in Qatar, issued a statement to Reuters early today saying that this was a "moment of truth" for the Arab world.

We were curious if the social arbiter of the maritime sector had weighed in. While there were no Tweets or posts on the attack in Israel, Hamas, or Qatar funding, we did note that Lloyd’s List (and many others in the shipping industry) are large supporters of Qatar.

This makes sense given the country’s massive wealth and natural gas reserves. Just yesterday, Total signed a 27 year deal with Qatar for LNG.

We do not expect anything to change. There will be no Russian / Iran style sanctions against Qatar. Money talks. Global politics is a very complex arena. The United States just gave $6Bn to Iran the other week, another large supporter of Hamas. The DOJ dropped charges against a US General, head of Qatar backed DC think-tank Brookings Institution, for secretly lobbying.

Coming down on Qatar does not seem to be on the agenda. Many Western nations now even have large blocks of support for Hamas, or Palestine perhaps, as witnessed by large crowds celebrating / protesting in New York, London and elsewhere. As they say, one mans terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. We would argue freedom fighters don’t gun down innocent people at music festivals though.

In an industry where we provide energy and prosperity to humans, we must continue to keep our perspective on the relative importance of things.

Yes a ‘manel’ at a conference might exist when you have 20 panels. But in the grand scheme of things, there are more real issues in the World. Families will never be the same after this weekend’s attacks and humans across the whole region from Gaza to Israel and the bordering countries will feel the impact for years to come.

Let us keep our perspective.