I was recently asked to give a talk called, “The Approaching US Energy-Economic Crisis.” In other words, how might the United States encounter problems that lead to a crisis? As we will see, many of the problems that could lead to a crisis (such as increased wage disparity and difficulty in collecting enough taxes) are issues that we are already beginning to encounter.
In this talk, I first discuss the connection between energy and the economy. Without this connection, it doesn’t make sense to talk about a crisis arising with respect to energy and the economy. I then discuss seven issues that could lead to a US energy-economic crisis.
Economic Growth Is Closely Tied to Energy Consumption
If we look at world data, it is clear that there is a close tie between energy consumption and economic growth.
Slide 2
On an individual country basis, there can be the belief that we have reached a new situation where a particular country doesn’t really need growing energy supply for economic growth.
Slide 3
For example, on Slide 3, the recent nearly vertical line for the US suggests that the US economy can grow with almost no increase in annual energy consumption. This rather strange situation arises because the standard calculation misses energy embodied in imported goods. Thus, if the United States wants to outsource a great deal of its manufacturing to China, the energy consumption used in making these goods will appear in China’s data, not in the United States’ data. This makes the country that has outsourced manufacturing look very good, both with respect to energy consumption and CO2 emissions.
Buying imported crude oil from elsewhere (such as Saudi Arabia) is also helpful in keeping down energy consumption, because it takes energy of various types to extract oil. If oil extraction takes place in Saudi Arabia, using steel pipes from China, the energy used in extraction will appear in the data of China and Saudi Arabia. Neither China nor Saudi Arabia obtains as much economic growth, relative to its energy expenditures, as does the US. In order to make sense of what is happening, we need to look at the world total.
Slide 4
We see that the pattern of world energy consumption growth follows a pattern not terribly different from that of China. Its growth is not “straight up.” It does take growing energy supply to create additional goods and services. We are getting a little more efficient in this process over time, but energy is very much needed in many areas of the economy:
- By businesses, to create goods, such as food, and services, such as vacation travel;
- By governments, to create roads, schools, and other public services;
- By individual citizens, to cook food, to heat homes, and for transportation.
The World Economy Is Organized Based on the Laws of Physics
There are many self-organized systems that seem to grow of their own accord in the presence of available energy supplies (that is, in thermodynamically open systems). Plants and animals are examples of growing self-organized systems. Hurricanes, ecosystems, and stars are also such systems. Economies also seem to be such systems. The name given to such a system is a dissipative system.
Slide 5 – Source: http://www.rinusroelofs.nl/structure/davinci-sticks/gallery/gallery-01.html
I visualize the world economy as being somewhat like a child’s building toy. It consists of many different elements, a few of which are listed on Slide 5. An economy is self-organized in that new businesses are formed when some entrepreneur sees an opportunity. Consumers decide which product to buy based on which product best serves their needs and based on price. Governments decide on changes to laws and tax levels, depending upon how the economy is functioning at a given time.
This system gradually grows over time, as more businesses and customers are added. As new products and new businesses are added, products and businesses that are no longer needed are taken away. For example, when the private passenger automobile was invented, there was no longer a need to feed and house a large number of horses to be used for transportation purposes. Thus, the system self-organized to eliminate the services needed to care for the many horses used for transportation.
Even if we wanted to get rid of cars and go back to horses, we really could not do so now. In some sense, the structure shown on Slide 5 is hollow, because prior capabilities that are no longer needed tend to disappear. The hollow nature of the economy makes it almost impossible to go backward if we somehow lose our existing capabilities–not enough oil, or an electricity problem, or an international trade problem, or a financial problem. Instead, we will need to build new systems that will function in the new context: depleted resources, a very high population level, high pollution levels, and degraded soils. The existing self-organized system is likely to collapse back to only the part that can be sustained.
Slide 6
Slide 6 is a preview of where this presentation is headed.
Slide 7
Slide 7 describes the issue most people are concerned about: oil prices will rise too high for consumers. In fact, we clearly have had problems with high prices in the recent past. The high prices in 2007 and early 2008 seem to have punctured the debt bubble that existed at that time, as I discuss in an academic article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
Shortly before oil prices started to turn back up again in late 2008, the United States instituted a policy of Quantitative Easing (QE), in an attempt to bring interest rates down and thus encourage more debt. Additional debt at low interest rates can “pump up” the economy in several different ways:
[1] Some of this low interest debt can be used by governments to provide funding for unemployment benefits and projects such as road building.
[2] Some of this low interest debt can be used by businesses to open new factories, and thus hire more workers.
[3] Some of this low interest debt can be used by individual citizens to purchase a home, a car, or a college education.
It is the pumping up of the economy with low interest debt that seems to stimulate the economy in a way that raises oil prices. When the US discontinued its third and last phase of QE in late 2014 (shown as “End US QE3” in Slide 7), the pumping up action began to disappear, and oil prices again fell.
Slide 8
The figure in Slide 8 may seem a little exaggerated, but I wanted to make a point. Our wages can roughly be divided into three pieces:
[1] Essential goods whose prices are very much influenced by the price of oil, such as food and gasoline. Besides food and gasoline, the cost of replacing a road, particularly with asphalt, very much depends on the price of oil. Higher costs for roads will be reflected in taxes that we are required to pay. Almost any kind of product that is shipped is affected by the price of oil, because oil is the usual transport fuel. Oil is typically used in the extraction of metal ores, so the price of metals used in making cars, appliances, and other goods is affected by the price of oil. Thus, an oil price increase indirectly leads to inflation in the cost of a wide range of essential goods and services.
To make matters worse, fluctuations in the price of oil can be very large. Between 2000 and 2008, we saw monthly average oil price fluctuate from under $20 per barrel to over $130 per barrel. Thus, while the growth in the food and gasoline segment is somewhat exaggerated, the impact of price changes is much larger than a person might expect, looking only at the impact of higher gasoline prices for a consumer’s vehicle.
[2] Repayment of loans, such as mortgage payments and auto payments. Loan repayments of these types tend to make up a large portion of most people’s spending. If people don’t own their own home, they have rent payments to make. These rent payments are in some ways similar to loan payments, because they indirectly cover the cost of someone else’s mortgage. These costs tend to be fixed, even if the price of oil goes up.
[3] Everything else. These are the non-essential items that we cut back on when budgets are too tight. Examples include charitable contributions, visits to restaurants, and vacation trips.
Looking at Slide 8, it becomes clear that if a government wants to “counteract” high oil prices, it needs to lower interest rates. This will tend to make car payments, mortgage payments, educational loans, and even rents somewhat more affordable, at least for people whose loans are affected by the new low interest rates. Often, homeowners are allowed to refinance, to take advantage of the new lower interest rates.
The plan this year is to raise, rather than lower, interest rates. Needless to say, this has the opposite effect; it tends to reduce the size of the “everything else” segment of our income. This effect tends to be recessionary.
Slide 9
Monarch Air is a British airline that failed recently. It boasted very low fares. One of the problems leading to its failure was a falling pound relative to the US dollar, raising both the price of oil and the price of new airplanes.
Today, the price that oil producers need, including adequate funds for (a) reinvestment and (b) the high taxes that governments need to continue their programs, is likely $100 per barrel or more. Such a price would likely cause recession, because purchases in the “Everything Else” category on Slide 8 would be squeezed.
Slide 10
Most people don’t think about the possibility of oil prices falling too low for producers, but this is a major problem today. When prices are too low, oil companies need to borrow money to continue to operate. They are likely to cut back on developing new extraction sites. With low prices, the tax revenue that the governments of oil-exporting countries are able to collect tends to fall too low, leading to cutbacks in government programs and a need for more debt. Saudi Arabia is running into this difficulty.
The problems that arise from low oil prices can be hidden for quite a while, because investors are likely to see the low prices as a great opportunity. They think, “Surely, oil prices will rise again.” So investors are eager to buy more shares of stock, and banks are willing to issue more debt. At some point, the situation becomes unsustainable, and no more loans are offered.
It has now been about three years since prices fell to a level that is clearly too low for oil producers. It cannot be many more years before something has to “break.” Venezuela is an oil exporter that cannot collect enough revenue from oil exports to afford needed goods, such as food. Other oil exporters may eventually encounter similar problems.
Slide 11
A major reason for falling oil prices is growing wage disparity and the resulting loss in purchasing power for the bottom 90% of workers. In the United States, the bottom 90% obtained about 62% of total income as recently as 1992. In a 2016 Federal Reserve survey, only 49.7% of total income went to the bottom 90%.
The reason why wage disparity is important is because the wealthiest 1% (or even the wealthiest 10%) can’t purchase very much of the goods created using oil. The wealthiest 1% can’t eat very much more food than everyone else. They can only drive one car at a time. In order to have adequate demand for oil, the bottom 90% must have adequate purchasing power for goods such as homes and cars. If young people live with their parents longer, and aren’t able to afford homes, this holds down demand for oil. So does transferring manufacturing to countries where wages are so low that few people can afford cars and other manufactured goods.
Slide 12
Slide 12 shows the Federal Reserve’s graph of the share of families who own (as opposed to rent) their primary residence. There has been a drop in homeownership from 69% in 2004 to less than 64% in 2016. This is a period when wage disparity has been increasing.
Slide 13
Wind and solar are intermittent sources of electricity. They work adequately well in applications where intermittency is no problem, such as charging a cell phone that has a battery, or powering a desalination plant that is not expected to operate around the clock. Most analyses of the benefit of wind and solar are suitable only for these limited situations, because they omit any estimate of the cost of mitigating intermittency.
Intermittency becomes a major problem when wind and solar are added to the electric grid. Wholesale electricity prices may drop to very low levels when both wind and solar electricity are available. At times, prices may become negative. Electricity generation that is designed to be used most of the time (such as coal, nuclear, and even some types of natural gas generation) cannot survive without subsidies to offset the artificially low prices the system produces. The need for subsidies for backup electricity providers is really an indirect cost of adding intermittent types of electricity to the grid, but today’s pricing does not reflect this.
A different workaround for intermittency is to add a large amount of battery backup or other type of storage. In theory, batteries could be used to store electricity generated in the summer for use in the winter, when heating needs are greatest.
Another approach to intermittency is to greatly overbuild intermittent renewables, with the idea of using only that portion of electricity generation that is really needed at any point in time. Yet another approach is adding extra (lightly used) long distance transmission, to try to smooth out fluctuations.
Any of these approaches tends to be expensive. Academic papers estimating the benefit of wind and solar nearly always overlook the cost of mitigating intermittency. Thus, they suggest wind and solar can be solutions, when, in fact, their high cost is likely to lead to the same damaging economic effects as high oil prices. (See Slide 8.)
Slide 14
The dotted line on Slide 14 shows the downward trend in German wholesale electricity prices, as more and more intermittent electricity has been added to the grid. At the same time, total residential electricity prices have risen to higher and higher levels. The countries with the greatest use of wind and solar tend to have the highest retail rates, as shown in Figure 1 below (not in presentation).
Figure 1. Figure by Euan Mearns showing relationship between installed wind + solar capacity and European electricity rates. Source Energy Matters. (Image not part of presentation.)
Slide 15
As we discussed earlier, the “standard” workaround for high oil prices is low interest rates, because of the relationship shown in Slide 8. At some point, however, interest rates fall about as low as they can go.
Slide 16
The interest rates shown on Slide 16 are those for 10-year treasuries. These typically underlie mortgage rates. These rates have been falling since 1981, helping to prop up prices for homes, land, farmland, and other assets purchased with long-term debt. Low interest rates make monthly payments more affordable than high interest rates, so more people can afford to buy such assets. With greater demand, asset prices tend to rise.
Also, with all of the talk about the US continuing to raise interest rates, those owning bonds realize that rising interest rates will cause the selling price of bonds they hold in their portfolio to fall. Thus, pension funds and other organizations that are making a choice between buying bonds (which are certain to fall in selling price, as interest rates rise) and buying stocks, will choose to “overweight” stocks in new purchases for their portfolios. This will tend to push the price of stocks higher, regardless of the earnings potential of the underlying companies.
One thing I didn’t mention in the presentation, but is probably worth pointing out here: Short-term interest rates have been rising since late 2014, even as 10-year treasuries have been holding fairly steady (Figure 2, below). These shorter-term interest rates affect payments on other types of transactions–adjustable rate mortgages and auto loans, for example.
Figure 2. Chart showing 3-month, 1-year, and 2-year interest rates. Chart created by St. Louis Federal Reserve.
These short-term interest rates have been creeping upward, indirectly making certain types of goods less affordable. The increase in short-term interest rates will, by itself, push the economy in the direction of recession.
Eventually, the bubble in asset prices can be expected to collapse, as it did in 2008. Perhaps this will happen when corporate profits fall too low; perhaps this will happen when the economy hits recession. The prices of many types of assets, including shares of stock, prices of homes, and prices of businesses can be expected to fall. There are likely to be many debt defaults in the governmental, business, and personal sectors of the economy. In such a situation, banks may fail.
Slide 17
The goods and services that are delivered each year require the use of physical resources such as oil, coal, natural gas, metals from ores, and wood. In the past, the quantity of these physical resources has grown, year after year, as illustrated in Scenario 1.
In a finite world, we cannot expect the amount of physical resources to grow, indefinitely. At some point something will go wrong, and the amount of resources extracted each year will start becoming smaller, as in Scenario 2. In a sense, the people of the world can expect to become poorer, because the quantity of goods and services that can be made with these resources grows smaller, instead of larger, and each person’s share of the world output becomes smaller.
Standard economic theory says that resource prices will rise, as the quantity of resources falls, but this view does not take into account the way a networked economy really works.
A more likely scenario is that as the quantity of resources falls, wage disparity will increase. As a result, the incomes of many of the lower-wage workers can be expected to fall. The problem is that jobs that pay well require the use of resources; if there is a decrease in resources available, some jobs are likely to be eliminated. Today, such job elimination may come through added technology, eliminating what were previously low-paid jobs. Studies of past collapses support the view that falling wages for the working class played a major role in these collapses. (See Secular Cycles by Peter Turchin and Surgey Nefedov.)
With greater wage disparity, a smaller share of people will be able to afford to buy homes and cars. Scenario 2 in Slide 17 will occur, not because we “run out,” but because too few people can afford to buy goods made with oil, gas, coal, metals and wood. Market prices will fall below the cost of extracting the necessary resources, and companies in these businesses will fail. Governments of oil exporters may collapse, because they cannot collect sufficient tax revenue at the low price available on world markets.
Slide 18
If there are physically less goods and services available, who will get the benefit of these goods and services? I see the situation as almost like musical chairs. Will it be pensioners who lose out, as bonds held by commercial pension programs default, and also as governmental plans are cut back? Or will it be the wages of the less skilled workers that are cut, as more processes are automated, and only managers and highly skilled workers are needed? If this happens, won’t commodity prices fall even further? We really need to have adequate wage levels for a wide range of workers, if we expect to have enough buyers for the goods produced.
Historically, when collapses have occurred, governments have lost out in the game of musical chairs because they could not collect enough tax revenue. The problem was that the bottom 90% of workers became poorer and poorer, and so less able to pay taxes. This brings us to our next potential US problem area.
Slide 19
In January 2017, the US Congressional Budget Office made a projection of how federal debt held by the public would grow, based upon the information available at that time. Their forecast was that the debt would grow to amount to nearly 150% of GDP. This would be a much higher level than during World War II, World War I, or the Civil War (Slide 19).
Slide 20
Since January 2017, more information has become available. We now know about three hurricanes, plus fires in California. Citizens affected by these events need financial support.
We also know about proposed legislation to reduce taxes, especially for businesses and high-income individuals. These proposals are likely to increase after-tax wage disparity, and increase the amount of the deficit. If corporations choose to return any of the benefit of the tax cut, it will likely be through dividends to those who are already wealthy. With respect to corporate tax rates, we are only trying to catch up with tax havens, so it is difficult to believe that the tax change will result in much more US investment.
Slide 21
We don’t think about the internet as being important, but it has become an essential part of our interconnected world economy. The internet helps facilitate all of the just-in-time deliveries needed to operate today’s economy. All of the fancy workarounds for the use of intermittent electricity on the electric grid assume that the internet will be available to transmit information back and forth quickly. Banks make use of the internet to get information to approve loans and to clear checks with other banks.
In the United States, we seem to hear one story after another about the internet being hacked. The most recent story involves a major hack of the data collected by Equifax for the purpose of determining the credit-worthiness of individuals in the US. If this data gets into the wrong hands, it can be used for “Identity Theft.” An impostor can apply for a new loan in the name of someone else, or can steal an income tax refund intended for someone else.
A different hacking situation in the Atlanta area recently led to the theft of a large number of checks intended for direct deposit in teachers’ bank accounts being stolen. They were instead direct deposited to an impostor’s account.
If the internet is truly not secure, no matter what we do, this by itself could cause major problems for the system we now have in place. We don’t have a “Plan B” available, either. Trying to start over with “snail mail,” for example, would be a problem. This is another illustration of the difficulty involved in going back to an earlier technology.
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Clearly this list of potential problems is not complete. Hopefully, this list gives an idea of the wide range of issues we are facing.
Billionaire hedge funder David Einhorn says Tesla is putting ‘inadequately tested and dangerous products on the road’
Greenlight also took issue with Musk’s leadership. “While the CEO makes bold claims about TSLA’s superior prowess, continued production shortfalls, defects and product recalls disprove him,” Greenlight wrote.
http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-stock-price-slammed-by-david-einhorn-greenlight-capital-2017-10
It doesn’t look to me as though Tesla’s stock price has been doing all that well recently. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/tsla/interactive-chart?timeframe=1y&charttype=line
This is a recent Seeking Alpha article, saying that Tesla is now confined to direct leasing, with no help from its leasing partners (such as US Bank), because Tesla will not make any (or a high enough) residual value guarantee, among other things. With direct leasing, it seems to lose the benefit of the $7,500 tax credit. It also has to borrow the money itself to fund the operation, limiting how many cars can be leased.
This is another article concerned about Tesla’s balance sheet going forward.
I cannot see how Tesla survives the onslaught of the real auto companies rolling out money losing vehicles…
WASHINGTON, May 21 (Reuters) – Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne has a request for potential buyers of the automaker’s Fiat 500e electric car: Don’t buy it. He’s tired of losing money.
Speaking at a conference in Washington on Wednesday, Marchionne said Tesla Motors Inc was the only company making money on electric cars and that was because of the higher price point for its Model S sedan. Decrying the federal and state mandates that push manufacturers to build electric cars, Marchionne said he hoped to sell the minimum number of 500e cars possible.
“I hope you don’t buy it because every time I sell one it costs me $14,000,” he said to the audience at the Brookings Institution about the 500e. “I‘m honest enough to tell you that.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/chrsyelr-ceo-evs/fiat-chrysler-ceo-please-dont-buy-fiat-500e-electric-car-idUSL1N0O71MS20140521
My money is the the established players in the DelusiSTAN Grand Prix.
The Formula DelusiSTAN next race is coming up: http://www.fiaformulae.com/en
The narrative may be that Telsa will fail and will deserve to fail because they are homophobic bigots.
https://www.i-want-to-break-free.org/tesla-faces-lawsuit-for-anti-lgbt-threats/
Given the progressive profile of the average Telsa Motors enthusiasts, all it takes is one bad PR disaster for the ponzi scheme to crash.
I don’t think a PR disaster would make a whole lot of difference.
I think what will bring Tesla down is
(1) Not being able to crank out a quality product, quickly.
(2) Values of cars that drop quickly after resale, making leasing terribly expensive if true costs are passed on. Also, banks won’t want to touch these leases.
(3) Inability of Tesla to borrow enough money, cheaply enough, to lease the huge number of cars to the public itself.
(4) Running out of critical minerals for batteries, such as cobalt.
(5) Running through its allocation of $7,500 tax credits for first time buyers.
That is the story, but not the one that will be sold to the public.
The narrative may that Telsa will fail and will deserve to fail because they are bigots.
https://www.i-want-to-break-free.org/tesla-faces-lawsuit-for-anti-lgbt-threats/
Given the Progressive (politically correct) profile of Telsa Motors enthusiasts, I’d say a PR disaster could be what causes the deck of cards called Telsa Motors to come tumbling down.
Rather ironic considering Elon is a hermaphrodite with a little Martian blood in him
This is the problem:
Tokyo’s debt said to be twice the size of the economy, which suggests they can’t really afford this level of infrastructure for long.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/climate/tokyo-floods.html?_r=0
Tokyo’s big concern seems to be jobs for everyone. Any excuse for government debt is a good one.
I thought Japan was going to make all their workers college graduates and specialize in high tech. What happened to that plan?
Japan, like China, built its growth on rising debt levels. Once private debt stopped rising fast enough, governmental debt took off.
I don’t think that there are enough high tech jobs for any society to specialize in high tech. The government can create debt to make jobs, (more roads, more homes, more devices to keep the shoreline from eroding, more ladies serving tea to tourists), but it is hard to get real growth. China can manufacture goods more cheaply. The demographic pattern means that they really don’t need any more new cars, homes, or much of anything else, except to replace what wears out.
Or ban the cars they have so people have to buy more.
Harvey Weinstein
Ms. Perkins declined but said Weinstein would frequently be naked in a hotel room and ask her to stay while he bathed.
“This was his behaviour on every occasion I was alone with him,” she said. “I often had to wake him up in the hotel in the mornings and he would try to pull me into bed.”
But she initially put up with the harassing behavior because, as his assistant, she was able to sat in on meetings with huge Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Gwyneth Paltrow.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-24/weinstein-victim-breaks-nda-speak-out-about-former-bosss-harassment
Ms Perkins really does define the sickness that is America… in a way she is even sicker than Harvey….
It could be argued that Harvey is not sick at all — the fact that people like Ms Perkins worship fame … the fact that people will do anything to get fame… well … they enable people like Harvey….
+++++++++
I see Harvey as the child who wanted to sample all the candy in shop and who discovered that because of his position, he was able to get away with it much of the time, and as a result he metamorphosed into this guy.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/38/b5/0b/38b50b11df22d02b55293f1dc8193cd7–jabba-the-hutt-christmas-dinners.jpg
There are stories of Hollywood male stars being sex addicts….
But isn’t every male a sex addict? It’s a question of availability of the drug….
Without thousands of police, guards and executioners, Stalin was nothing. Same with Weinstein.
So true… so true…
The so called sane and good people of this earth should be stomping on all the filth and running things themselves but unfortunately… too little too late. We are too comfortable in our bubbles.
I agree, the cycle of harassment must work like a ponzi scheme too. The more people that were pulled into Weinstein’s indiscretions the more it emboldened the players. In a way the whole scheme legitimizes itself until it is too big to contain and it collapses. Peak Weinsteiin.
I have a strange feeling that Harvey started out as a normal guy who turned into an asshole because there were no negative repercussions for his actions.
Harvey is an example of power corrupting someone. Some people think they would never allow power (which comes from money) to change them and they are probably wrong.
The rare person who would not let power corrupt them is the same person who would never try to seek it in the same place. People who avoid seeking power are people who avoid seeking status and they tend to be asocial or ascetics
In social terms most people would classify asocial people or ascetics as losers.
because to many people the purpose of life is to accumulate status and power, either by commerce or through relationships.
Harvey either pissed off the wrong person or he was starting to lose some of his wealth and could not afford to keep paying people to keep quiet. Since many people knew about his misconduct, perhaps he’s modern society’s version of a human sacrifice. A human sacrifice for what? I don’t know. All I know is that no one is talking about the Las Vegas shooting with no apparent motive anymore.
All I know is that no one is talking about the Las Vegas shooting with no apparent motive anymore.
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What’s one lamb when you’ve killed 500k babies in Iraq … gassed women and children in Syria … and shot down an airliner over Ukraine…
And I am sure that there are those among the eld ers who were envious of the volumes of assss that harvey was getting
I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Putting up with sexual harassment or worse in exchange for career opportunities has been an open secret in the entertainment industries for a long time.
I think it may have gotten worse in recent years.
There are three ways to break into the entertainment businesses.
1. Talent.
This is something that used to be valued but is largely being done away with in the name of egalitarianism.
2. Nepotism. I’m told that a large percentage of new faces in the entertainment industry are relatives of other entertainment industry.
3. Wealth. Wealthy people can generally buy a music career or make their own movies.
4, Prostitution for career opportunities.
I’d like to list wealth as a factor but wealth does not lead to critical success or financial success. Politics is very important, but I think it falls under nepotism.Nepotism tends to sort people into groups where people have the same socioeconomic backgrounds and the same political views.
Since #1 is being devalued daily, as the industry uses technology in to increase productivity, talent plays less of a role than it used to. Marketing (a.k.a. propaganda is much more important) The simplest form of marketing is using large amounts of capital to saturate a market with an idea.
4. I believe 4 is happening more than in the past because of cultural changes that made Hollywood have to be less fearful about any public backlash so they aren’t doing as much as they did–back in say —1952 to hide situations where people were exchanging sex for a foot in the door. believe 3 is happening more than in the past because of how much talent is being downplayed, The less talent someone, particularly, young and female has, the more likely she may have had to perform sexual favors to get a shot.
The late 1990s and 2000s was known for female entertainers who used their sexuality to make money more than their talent. Many music videos for young females music stars became borderline erotica.
If an untalented young but attractive woman did not get into entertainment due to nepotism, or has wealthy parents, it is very likely she did something she wasn’t proud of to get in.
For the most part, I think the vast majority of people in the entertainment industry are in it because they are wealthy enough that they can dedicate themselves to entertaining. The stories about talented “artists” holding down 40-50 hour day jobs while making music on the side until they “get discovered” is the exception to the rule.
If one is wealthy, it is easier to network and socialize with other wealthy people to find out about opportunities.
Consider this…
Well in excess of 99% of all Hollywood movies are utter garbage… garbage plots … garbage acting
Think Jennifer Aniston…. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Aniston#Filmography
There are literally thousands of VERY HOT young women wanting to break into the movie business.
Since very little talent is required for most roles…. a very significant number of these HOT WOMEN would have sufficient acting skills to make the cut.
But there are nowhere near enough roles to go around.
So if you are the one with decision making power (Harvey…) how does a girl stand out from the crowd… so to say….
Of course one has to put on a ‘performance’…. has to show what she can do beyond the pathetic acting requirements….
e.g. Cameron Diaz…. I would bet big money that she who red her way to fame…
e.g. Lucy Liu — I KNOW that she is a filthy thing…. because I know people who know her… and I know that Colin Ferrell is a cross-dressing freak …. and I know that Oliver Stone … when he visits Bangkok (regularly) …. smokes a lot of dope….
I doubt Harvey had to pressure many of his conquests… they understood going in that a little filth goes a long way
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/24/news/economy/saudi-arabia-mega-city-neom/index.html
Saudi Ahabia is investing their wealth fund in a new mega city powered by regenerative energy. And without women driving any vehicles.
I can’t wait to visit a new Saudi entertainment hub…/sar
hey Rob…
just imagine the camel races!
With robo jockeys!
“NEOM will be constructed from the ground-up, on greenfield sites, allowing it a unique opportunity to be distinguished from all other places that have been developed and constructed over hundreds of years,” the fund said in a statement.”
Fully funded idiocy.
What does this possibly mean, “Plans call for the city to be powered entirely by regenerative energy”?
Does it mean that when people put their feet on the brakes of their cars, the energy that can be stored from when the car slows will somehow go to power the city? I am missing something.
I was taken aback by that myself. Instead of individual small vehicles maybe we’re talking trains and other large systems. I still don’t see how that balances out between the overall input required from solar and wind, possibly nuclear and energy lost. Maybe something to do with buildings returning all surplus energy to the grid but I don’t see how that’s regenerative.
http://www.industry.usa.siemens.com/drives/us/en/electric-drives/ac-drives/ac-drives-apps/power-regendrives/pages/power-regenerative-drives.aspx
It could be just about anything connected to the grid. Nothing specific. Just a means for returning surplus energy instead of wasting it as heat, and by so doing reducing the need for active cooling systems and brakes.
Simply dump the energy/inertia of a large AC motor onto the grid.
I can’t tell if he’s trolling or not.
Maybe regenerative is just an euphemism for renewables. Just like claymate chang is to glowball worming…
That thought crossed my mind.
“Regenerative” is a mistranslation in the sense that we don’t normally use the term “regenerative energy” in this context (yet!) in English. We would say “renewable energy”.
Chinese: 可再生能源 (kě zàishēng néngyuán)
Japanese: 再生エネーギ (saisei enerugi)
English: Renewable energy
The Chinese characters 再 + 生 (again + life/live) literally mean “return to life”, but their actual intended meaning varies according to the context of the sentence.
再生 (saisei) in Japanese is used with the meaning of rebirth, regrowth, reproduction, regeneration, reclamation, resuscitation, reincarnation, renewal, or even playback (as in audio or video reproduction).
I have very little knowledge of Chinese, but the Google translation tool says that
再生 (zaisheng) in Chinese is usually rendered as “regeneration” (noun) or “regenerate” or “revive” (verbs).
So… renewable then. Ok… got it.
Just thought it might have been putting brakes on giant flywheels or something…
It’s kinda like how they changed ggggllllloooobbbbaaaalll wwwwarrrrmiingg to Klllllimmmmate CCCChange…. because the wwwwaarrrmmmingggg models were totally wrong…
Perhaps people are catching on to the fact that solar panels are made using coal and do not last all that long … and generate no nett energy (they are batteries…) ….
So they change the catch word to regenerative… understanding that it will take some years for the stuuuupid humans to figure out what that actually means… and begin to question that…
Duuuumb as stuumps… Humans
Thanks!
http://www.newsweek.com/healthy-bacon-scientists-engineer-skinny-pigs-low-body-fat-691703
Ok, so this article is explaining how Crisper was used to modify pigs to have 24% less fat, more meat and improve internal body temperature (to reduce losses). What this shows they say is the Crisper method of gene splicing works, so my question is why aren’t they using it to improve human intelligence? It’s a valid question because with so much R&D going into improving AI intelligence, shouldn’t we at least be trying to stay ahead of the game? (Sure, I know collapse is coming so why bother with all this, but until collapse actually occurs – it’s game on).
“Crisper method of gene splicing works, so my question is why aren’t they using it to improve human intelligence?”
What makes you think they are not?
Perhaps because MSM don’t report anything about it?
https://orig00.deviantart.net/7a1e/f/2010/291/e/b/omg_wink_sonny_i_robot_by_velocity50-d312496.jpg
I agree, there are a lot of unknown black ops programs. As Donald Rumsfeld will attest: there are known knowns and unknown knowns and known unknowns out there.
“What makes you think they are not?”
Because people are still ok with tax cuts, 90% of which are for the top 1% without making any kind of fuss, that will just increase the deficits/debts. When they have the brains to complain and insist on a different strategy then it’s possible they’ve gotten a tad bit brighter (because of crisper).
Ever thought that they [the elite] probably first “enhance” themselves and their offspring to gain an advantage over their peers?
F$CK the hoi polloi!
If anything we are being dumbed down. Studies show that increased screen time etc etc turns humans into drooling fools.
I will admit that while there appears to be a program of deliberate harm towards the human herd there is an equal and opposite force at work. Humans in general are living longer and better than ever. Health may not be managed in the most efficient way but the patches are keeping people alive and relatively comfortable. We’ve had threats of modern day epidemics that came to nothing. We are living in a grace period that is counting down to some major shift. Escape pods are being prepared but it may be that they will remain unused. Timing is everything.
In the US at least the herd is well armed too. Dumb and armed. Wonderful combination. If that was by design, the designers failed.
You… are not the game.
Intelligence unhindered by biology on a more resilient substrate is the game.
Thing is.. the closer we get to limits in nanotech the more we respect and grovel at the feet of biological superiority. So why not just use what we already have and play engineers with that. Both approaches are happening simultaneously and often cross over into hybrid territory. I personally don’t see the boundaries that clearly. As I’m typing this I’m aware that I am somewhat in a preliminary and rather clunky state of fusion with the communication device. Future iterations would eliminate any such clunkiness I presume.
To be honest, it wouldn’t really matter how things go down as long as intelligence and whatever values you hold dear are conserved. The holding container itself has been changing its form for the past millions of years whilst simultaneously passing on whatever encoded information it deemed useful for survival. The rest was allowed to wither.
It may be that you can safely genetically engineer humans with embedded nanotech from the get go if that was desirable and provided some advantage. Or machine intelligence could stand on its own upon achieving self sustaining capabilities. It could develop in ways that drop all human values or it could maintain humans and their values in a hybrid system in some way. The need to cater to biological lifeforms seems to be the dealbreaker to me. Like keeping pets… it can be a hassle after a while… and the vet bills…
I think criticism along the lines of machines would be fried by solar flares, emp and such is shortsighted and the problems easily managed if made a priority. And only their needs would be catered for. Legacy humans would be put out to pasture. It just makes sense.
I agree. However, most readers/posters here have no clue about the capabilities, possibilities, in state of the art technology.
“To be honest, it wouldn’t really matter how things go down as long as intelligence and whatever values you hold dear are conserved. The holding container itself has been changing its form for the past millions of years whilst simultaneously passing on whatever encoded information it deemed useful for survival. The rest was allowed to wither.”
Exactly!
This human/life chauvinist begrudging narrative can be quite deafening here in Collapsternik Marxism-Leninism Central.
Just because YOU and your genes/offspring won’t make it to the other side does not imply that everyone else should go extinct as well.
And trust me, if you’d feel inclined to try out the “revolution” thingy to topple the elites, I’m pretty sure nukes would fly. Make no mistake: You ain’t gonna rape the owners with those communist plans of yours. Ain’t gonna happen.
NOPE!
http://www.toptenz.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/tsarbomba-nukes.jpg
You get a little crazier by the day…..
Also… why aren’t they using it to reduce human obesity? I’m sure that’s the idea but you’d have to know what the side effects of messing with your genetics are. There are places in China etc where they probably already know.
This is pretty long, but it gives important info on Niger’s uranium supply, as well as the complex geopolitical turmoil over African oil.
https://www.democracynow.org/2017/10/24/expansion_of_imperialist_us_war_on
Regarding uranium it says,
I would deduce that this means that this means that the Niger uranium company is a big one, and that its output pretty much goes to France for its reactors.
Thanks Gail for actually taking the time to read articles that are linked to here and summarising them.
7.5 percent is a lot but it also means that 90+ percent of global uranium supply remains if Niger went belly up.
Also why did France go all in with nuclear when they did and are they not jumping on the renewables bandwagon like everyone else? I’ll look into it but off the top of my head I’m wondering what their spent fuel pond situation is.
Sixteen countries depend on nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity. France gets around three-quarters of its power from nuclear energy, while Belgium, Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ukraine get one-third or more.
Nuclear Power Today | Nuclear Energy – World Nuclear Association
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/…/nuclear-power-in-the-world-today.aspx
France does not have an indigenous supply of coal, oil or natural gas, so in a way was like Japan. France took the nuclear route the same time everyone else did, starting in the early 1960s, and continuing to add. In fact, they continued to add capacity until 2005. The US followed a similar pattern. In the US, in the more recent years, the capacities of existing facilities were expanded; I am not sure if France followed this or another approach.
France had a huge number of colonies and protectorates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_possessions_and_colonies About 1960 when this all started, France still had a strong affiliation with its then-colony, Niger. It decided to plan on importing uranium to operate its nuclear power plants. I believe that it also does some recycling.
Recently, France has been having a lot of trouble with its nuclear power plants. Its nuclear production was down in 2016. It is now talking about intermittent renewables, even though they do not produce nearly as good a form of electricity.
What sort of issues have they been facing? Is it just that their plants are outdated, or is it something else?
France’s EDF fixing pipe problem at 20 nuclear reactors – Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/…france-nuclearpower/frances-edf-fixing-pipe-problem-at-2…
Oct 11, 2017 – French utility EDF is repairing pumping station pipes at 20 nuclear … fresh uncertainty over French nuclear power supply in the weeks ahead.
French nuclear power in ‘worst situation ever’, says former EDF …
https://www.theguardian.com › Environment › Renewable energy
Nov 29, 2016 – French nuclear power in ‘worst situation ever’, says former EDF director …. “Identifying the problems facing France and the UK this winter only …
France’s Nuclear Storm: Many Power Plants Down Due to Quality …
http://www.powermag.com/frances-nuclear-storm-many-power-plants-down-due-to-quality...
Dec 1, 2016 – The discovery of widespread carbon segregation problems in critical nuclear plant components has crippled the French power industry.
Flamanville fiasco: The story of France’s nuclear calamity – The Local
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170209/flamanville-frances-own-nuclear-nightmare
Feb 9, 2017 – France’s world renowned prowess in the nuclear industry is being … power anytime soon after being hampered by a litany of problems and …
How long till the next chernobyl….
Part of the problem is indeed old reactors, and upcoming decisions regarding whether to make the necessary refurbishment to keep these reactors operational for another 20 years. For example, this Forbes article is called France May Cut Its Nuclear Energy Fleet, Which Is Core To Its Economy
Part of the problem is that the whole plan for world nuclear generation has been upended, after the Fukushima accident in 2011. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/safety-and-security/safety-of-plants/fukushima-accident.aspx This is still not really resolved. Many planned reactors have had changes made to them, retroactively, to try to make them safer. The cost of these upgrades has been very high, and has at least partly been borne by the companies manufacturing the reactors. Westinghouse, a subsidiary of Toshiba in Japan, filed for bankruptcy in early 2017, indirectly because of this issue. There have been rumors that Toshiba would need to file for bankruptcy as well.
French nuclear companies (which are mostly government owned) have been having financial problems as well. Areva provided services outside of France, and difficulty providing services at the estimated cost no doubt entered into its problems. Now French nuclear companies have been restructured, and capital infused, so that they can at least keep operating. http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx
There has also been a scandal about manufacturing flaws and a coverup of these manufacturing flaws at Arveda, affecting both nuclear reactors in France and outside France. Some nuclear power plants in France have been temporarily shut down, while investigation took (or takes?) place. For example, see this WSJ article, Coverup at French Nuclear Supplier Sparks Global Review: Inspectors say Areva unit’s files suggest manufacturing flaws in critical parts were covered up for decades
Now, with other countries trying to make wind and solar work, some people in France feel like it is time to try something with fewer problems.
US shale investors tire of ‘growth at any cost’ model
https://www.ft.com/content/4284769a-b5a7-11e7-aa26-bb002965bce8
“It’s like the George Clooney movie, The Perfect Storm,” he says.” You realise it’s going to end badly if you continue like this.”
oops Rob Bell already posted
The GAO does not agree with the increasingly bizarre ranting of Fast Eddie. How can that be?
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/extreme-weather-climate-change-costing-taxpayers-billions/ar-AAtXZCi
The GAO says that the government has subsidized the fossil fuel companies. These numbers of course do not include the trillions spent by the military to guarantee the flow of FF (hint: that money is NOT spent to support democracy). The token tax payments that the oil companies make pale in comparison.
“In addition to the $205 billion spent directly on disaster relief over the past decade, the government has spent $90 billion for crop and flood insurance, $34 billion for wildland fire management and $28 billion for repairs to federal facilities, according to the report.”
If I was a brilliant woman trying to explain why this civilization must crash in the near future, I would not be ignoring the costs of the runaway global warming now being experienced.
I didn’t say that my list was complete.
Good answer.
Thanks for the MSM lies and disinformation.
I posted some of that yesterday — did you see my post about Japan’s DARING Money Experiment?
It was just as useless as what you just posted.
Because the person who wrote it is not a journalist — they are a regurgitator of edicts passed down from the Ministry of Truth.
If they were a journalist they would ask questions — look for explanations.
For instance – why is more money spent on disaster relief?
First of all – are those figures inflation adjusted? Ah — the ‘journalist’ does not ask that question.
Second — the global population is growing rapidly —- we are building more structures in areas that are prone to flooding and other disasters.
Example:
How Houston’s Growth Created the Perfect Flood Conditions
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/05/opinion/hurricane-harvey-flood-houston-development.html
Houston’s flooding shows what happens when you ignore science and let developers run rampant
https://qz.com/1064364/hurricane-harvey-houstons-flooding-made-worse-by-unchecked-urban-development-and-wetland-destruction/
You see — the MSM is kinda like advertising … something I know a little bit about ….
With advertising there is the axiom ‘I know half my ad spend is wasted – the problem is – I don’t know which half’
With the MSM 99% of it is outright lies and/or disinformation … and 1% is useful — the problem is trying to work out which 1% is not a lie.
I reckon the two articles above are part of the 1%.
Now we cannot leave without making a comment about your intellectual capacity.
What is someone who reads the MSM — without questioning it … without stepping back and saying hang on … this does not sound right to me …. am I being lied to?
Is that person child-like? Is that person Stuuuupid? Is that person a More On? Should that person be crowned with a Duuuunce cap?
You tell me Pintada….
What is wrong with you that you are unable to question? Unable to understand? Unable to think?
What is lacking in your that makes you unable to see what is so obvious to me?
Did you ever get in touch with Ferenc re the spent fuel ponds? http://www.miis.edu/academics/faculty/FDalnokiVeress/node/23025 How did that go?
I agree, a lot of flooding in Houston is due to overpopulation pushing developers to build in flood plains. The more we change the landscape with asphalt and concrete the more flood issues we are going to have.
Allow me to let you in on a little secret: When it rains 40-50 inches in an area within a short period of time, it doesn’t matter what was built or not built there, it’s going to flood really badly.
If you build nothing in a flood plane …. and the area floods badly…. then you will not incur any costs to repair damages…
And I doubt the ‘news’ would lead off with:
And today after heavy rains marsh land off the coast of Houston was flooded causing no damage whatsoever.
Authorities said there will be no funds allocated to damages to the march land because the flooding did not cause any damage.
The mayor issued a statement saying ‘it’s a good thing we have not built anything in those areas that are prone to flooding because if we had we would be facing a bill of hundreds of millions of dollars to repair infrastructure and buildings’
And next up …. evidence emerges that confirms Putin is the devil….. stay tuned.
Not necessarily if the drainage is good. There are many areas of Houston that did not flood despite all the raiinfall. But, finding areas to build where the drainage is that good in Houston is impossible because all the good spots have been taken.
I would say da noos is mostly anaesthetic by now. Go to sleep little child. Nothing to see here.
Occasionaly the collective noos system gives you a jolt when their masters want you to pay attention to something. Thing is most people are so zombified that even the jolts have little effect. The more comfortable people are the less they want to rock the boat. Passivity is the new philosophy.
So you are quoting the GAO from an article from one of the MSM shills. Now the GAO is definitely an outfit I would believe will not give me the truth. Considering that FF has powered our industrial/technological civilization, yea, a thinking man would think that there has been quite a bit of interaction between, say, government policy and big oil. DUH!
Hey Pintada, think of everything you eat, drink, touch, buy, ride in or fly in…and realize it is ALL because of OIL!
All of it stupid. Everything.
All the technological advances. all of the computers. All of the smartphones is because of oil. Nothing can be done without it. Trillions upon trillions of societies wealth has been enabled by oil.
I am concerned with your increasingly bizarre ranting Pintada. Like FE, I can’t believe there are stupid idiots like you.
Pintada should change his name to Pinata…. he’s so fun to bash with a stick….
I understand why he takes issue with the One Know as Fast Eddy….
It is because Fast Eddy is destroying his (irrational) beliefs….
First there was the spent fuel pond issue …. and now it is the gggeerrbally werrbally…
Here is the free analysis of your condition Pinata:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d7/5e/f5/d75ef5db8e5eaa0772f5c16184392d25.png
http://i.123g.us/c/gen_youarewelcome/card/308641.jpg
http://media.meme4u.com/ecards/thank-you/you-are-welcome/1826-you-are-welcome.jpg
It’s was my pleasure? What’s your native language?
It appears that even memes are made in china now.
The Government Accountability Office? That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one.
How do you know that the weather you are experiencing now is runaway global warming?
How do you know it isn’t just good old-fashioned weather?
How do you know the increasing cost of flood disasters isn’t due to individuals, companies and governments building more infrastructure on flood plains, and that of fire disasters isn’t due to a combination of more people building homes in the woods and changing forestry practices?
When this civilization crashes it will be due to the failure of one or more mission-critical capabilities (as the techies say), such as the capability to keep taking on more debt or pay its bills, the capability to keep most people fed, the capability to keep the lights on, and the capability to avoid fighting another world war.
Your comment, Pintada, was born of understandable exasperation with the direction you see the world heading in. I don’t criticize you for being exasperated. But quite honestly, runaway global warming is not happening now and it is unlikely to happen. It’s not the huge issue we’ve been led to believe it is. We do, however, have a massive mess of real problems to confront just a little way the road.
When is the GAO going to hold the government accountable for allowing so much real estate development to go ahead in areas historically known to be susceptible to flooding or for enforcing laws that have prevented the proper maintenance of woodlands in regions prone to forest fire?
Anyone with anxiety over Gggebbelly weeemmye… needs to read this …
Ccclimmmmmate countdown: Half a trillion tonnes of carrrrbon left to burn
To avoid dangerous cccccllllllimate channnnnnnge of 2C, the world can only burn another half a trillion tonnes of carrrrbon, cllllllimate chaaaaaaaange experts warn
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/29/fossil-fuels-trillion-tonnes-burned
After reading you will experience a brief moment of relief….
But then — if you have an IQ of 80+ you will likely then experience a very severe panic attack…
When you realize that the problem that we are facing has nothing to do with heat… and everything to do with the fact that we are just about out of them there cheap to extract fossil fuels….
Think about the starvation … the violence… the disease… the spent fuel ponds….
Oh NO!!!
Better to think about the gge weebil — solar panels and tesla cars for all…. there is a future in that
Well obviously instead of whining it’s time to build the largest flood walls ever built around all the dodgy real estate development.
There… two birds – one stone. Bosh bosh, time to get your hammers out. Economy and flooding solved. Next!
I mean if Chiiiina can build islands…
This is such a great article… https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/apr/29/fossil-fuels-trillion-tonnes-burned
Why?
Because it was not run in the Daily Mirror or Mail or Forbes or The National Enquirer.
Nope.
It was run in none other than The Guardian — the site that asks for a contribution on every article — to help them continue to be the leader in saving the planet.
And because of that the story cannot be impugned with comments like ‘ha – it’s Forbes – right wing garbage that supports big oil’
The real kicker is the use of the word EXPERTS. Now if the EXPERTS say we have only have way to the ‘danger point’ then how can that be challenged?
They are the same EXPERTS who have been telling us we are going to burn up…. they are the same EXPERTS who are quoted ad infinitum by the MSM when it comes to this issue…
So how can they be wrong? And if they are wrong on this – then we connect the dots and ask – what else are they wrong on?
A slippery slope …. a very slippery slope indeed…. and notice how everyone is keeping away?
https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2696/4485728970_c6a52d367e_b.jpg
Of course beneath the surface anger is boiling away … but what can one do about it when faced with The Article.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I33R6cFiHXs/UTtKzIVTLgI/AAAAAAACBUI/bBoBp7GxQWk/s1600/tumblr_mh3gjpQ4uU1rmbi3wo1_1280.png
The ‘sweet spots’ fueling the US shale oil boom ‘will not last forever,’ Saudi Aramco CEO says
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/saudi-aramco-ceo-says-he-doesnt-worry-much-about-booming-us-shale-oil.html –
TV interview was hilarious “Shale oil has barely offset demand. Not too mention there is a natural decline…”…Cut….LOL
So why even watch TV?
It’s obviously not intended for you?
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/57/25/b6/5725b6ae61b603a167e5bea018559b85–george-carlin-public-health.jpg
Carlin is right.
https://frinkiac.com/meme/S01E11/831876.jpg?lines=+HOW%27S+THAT+FOR+FREEDOM+OF+CHOICE%3F
The ‘sweet spots’ fueling the Saudi Arabia oil boom ‘will not last forever,’ OFW CEO Davidin100years says.
US shale investors tire of a growth at any cost model- Financial Times
“US exploration and production companies raised $34.3bn from share sales in 2016, making it a record year, but just $5.7bn in the first nine months of 2017, according to Dealogic.”
https://www.ft.com/content/4284769a-b5a7-11e7-aa26-bb002965bce8
Perhaps people aren’t buying into the hype.
But I don’t understand something. If Americans are getting ready to belly up to the bar for more trickle down economics with the latest proposed tax cuts for the top 1% then why aren’t they lining up for more investments in shale oil? I mean, trickle down that doesn’t work has been going on much longer than fracking, so what gives? How could they possibly smarten up as to understanding they weren’t making what they expected on shale oil investments.
I know someone who was putting quite a bit of cash into shale plays…. he was a financial analyst for many years … then went off to start a small tech company … so he understands the investing world….
I recall pointing out that the info on shale was all hype… all fake…. he basically had no comment…
No doubt he made some cash …. but when shale took a hit when oil dropped … he would have lost money….
My point is… that investing is not about being right necessarily … it is about identifying and jumping on the wave (or shall we call it the bubble) and riding it….
Now any fool can ride a wave….
You need to be a very lucky fool to get off the wave before it smashes into the rocks….
Nothing new with this — was it Taleb who said that when you have thousands of professional finance people making predictions … inevitably some will get it right some of the time… and they will ride the wave of appearances on CNBs and Bloomberg… and make big money
Remember Meredith Whitney — made her bones with the Citi call — then called for Muni’s to default…
She will be right on the Muni call – eventually… https://seekingalpha.com/article/4080743-defaults-mount-loom-may-time-dust-meredith-whitneys-analysis
And where is Meredith now…. https://www.wsj.com/articles/meredith-whitney-shuts-her-hedge-fund-1433976677
Lucky once….
Yep – shale is not different than any other investment option …. everything is ‘fake’ in that everything is dependent on CB stimulus….
Maybe part of the problem is that banks are smartening up, and not giving enough more loans. And stock prices have not been soaring lately either.
I thought nationalization of US oil companies would be the solution.
others pointed out that zero interest government loans could do the trick.
somehow, these essential companies will continue operations.
Obama bailed out a car company or two, didn’t he?
the 2020’s will be a very interesting decade.
and this decade, like, I mean, right now…
BAU tonight, baby!
Exactly, we still have another couple of years before we hit the 2020’s. Every year feels like an eternity right now. Time is relative depending on your circumstances. It is said that time flies when you’re having fun. Maybe as we get more and more miserable time will grind to a halt… which in effect buys us more of it?
Maybe we will at least be more aware of the time we have.
Anyone who wants to stretch life out to the limit…. should spend their days locked in an all white room — with nothing else.
Nationalizing businesses seldom works out, better offer infinite credit.
Moon colonization – many lava tube caves, water and high amounts of titanium
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/moon-colonization-many-lava-tube-caves-water-and-high-amounts-of-titanium.html
The space colony thing is infinitely amusing ….
Of course the ‘journalists’ never ask the question – why do this — when we have plenty of caves on earth… and to boot there is also water and air!
For instance — I have been here http://www.ngaruacaves.co.nz/ It’s not too far away …. If I wanted to – or had to – live in a cave…. why would I go to the moon… or Mars….
Yet people really do believe this sh it….. they have seen Hollywood movies about it…. it’s all gonna happen… some day….
The MSM is very powerful. It is very convincing… for those who do not refer to it as The Lies.
Now here’s a f789 up that I would like to share…. I ordered a box of capsules for my coffee machine — because I am intent on destroying the environment by throwing them in the bin after use (ya there is a recycling box for capsules in the town but I can’t be bothered with that…)
And in the box was one sleeve of decaff capsules….in a moment of weakness I must have been thinking that a snowflake might visit and ask if I had decaff….. anyway…. I forgot about that…. and for the past few days I have been using those 10 caps not realizing they were decaf ones — and not getting a buzz… and wondering why….
I just noticed that the remaining 2 of 10 have dots on the ends which indicates decaf….
And I am absolutely livid….. because that means I have wasted the enjoyment to be had in 8 cups of coffee full caff….. Those are 8 cups I can NEVER get back…. 8 moments of joy lost forever….
And that is god damn important when you never know if tomorrow might be the last day …. in a decades shortened life….
I am thoroughly disappointed with myself…. the despair is so deep…. where can I get some Oxycontin to numb the pain of this utter utter disaster?
I understand your pain FE. It’s sh&t like that that can send me into a tailspin. And no… I don’t recycle either. But mainly cos my neighbour stole the big yellow bin which now sits behind her house and I can’t be bothered to start what could be a feud for the remainder of BAU. The bin men don’t seem bothered either and when a man with a clipboard came round once to quiz me on the service he didn’t seem to pleased when I vented about having to pay three times as much as before to do their job for them.
On the space colony thing you’ll note that the comments are all about trying to shift rocket loads of nitrogen from earth to the moon cos well… you would need it. Then someone stepped up their game and said why shift the nitrogen… lets just move all the air.
That made a lot of sense to me. No sense in mucking about with half measures.
Remember the project The World in Dubai…. just before the 2008 crash … I recall a clip of the developer who was asked about the extreme heat… and he suggested that they would air condition the street…. (if I recall it had street facing shops… not a mall)…
So we should not rule out bringing air to the moon colony.
Man is very ingenious….. look at how far we have come with renewable energy … it’s just a matter of spending trillions…. and incentivizing
How’s your cable to the sun coming along? I thought you had it made with that one.
I take it strapping sheep to the genatalia of windmills didn’t work out?
‘It’s looking very promising’
‘Another 20 years and I will perfect the techology’
https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/41j2cgEKFbL.jpg
Better 24 by 7 all conditions vision for self driving cars
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/better-24-by-7-all-conditions-vision-for-self-driving-cars.html
So ZIS, would you agree that the humanoid automatons will be replaced in the not too distant future? 😉
https://heiscomingblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/robots-and-jobs.jpg
In your future, will the robots have human owners or robot owners?
In THE future, mankind will have evolved.
Transhumanism my Swedish friend. Transhumanism!
The end game is nigh.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b-k6ndNA3ow/maxresdefault.jpg
Oh no, a kurzweilian
Oh yes, a collapsenik!
🙂
Same end result, everyone I know will be dead.
That will add one more letter to the end of LGBTQ—what is the world coming to?
I am guessing that Smite’s version of the future is that the “Elite” (whomever they are) will own the robots and the useless humans will be destroyed. Robots will mine, process, and distribute luxury goods to the elite. I do not think this will work.
It is already in effect.
Now watch the end game unfold for the humanoid automatons.
https://static01.nyt.com/images/2012/08/19/business/JP-ROBOT-1/JP-ROBOT-1-jumbo.jpg
(spot the human) 😉
Well who designed the robots? Where did the resources come to build the robots? Who assembled the robots? Who maintains the robots. You have to have education system for those designing, building and maintaining the robots. That takes a lot of infrastructure overhead just for the education system. The elite won’t want to do the work. The elite want to just spend money and enjoy luxury goods. The whole AI / robot thing makes no sense to me. What happens when resources become scarce? Who fights the war over resources. If you say robots will do all of the above…you are crazy.
Well, [very few] engineers design most of the electro/chemical/hydraulic/pneumatic/mechanical masterpieces out there of course. That’s our job – for now.
The resources are being extracted, using machinery, from earth and then processed by machinery – machines that engineers design. The machines are produced in factories, built and paid for by the Capital/Owners, with almost no human intervention, so called Lights-out Manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
Just because the inevitable irrelevance of mankind does not make sense to you isn’t a proof that this process is unreal.
http://cdn.ifixit.org/files/2012/02/adaptationdemotivator.jpg
The transition of humans to robots to support the super wealthy/powerful is already underway. The only reason we don’t get up in arms about it, is because it’s occurring incrementally. It’s like ageing. You don’t really notice until someone shows you a pic of yourself in your twenties. Once the situation has reached a certain point we’ll need to see a movie to remember how things use to be.
Think about it for a moment. Whenever there is R& D in technology it eventually perfects whatever it’s intended to do. For example no one thought they would actually be able to make permanent genetic changes, but crisper is now allowing just that. Also, the tech is already there for computers and artificial limb movement, so it’s just a matter of time until they have walking, talking, thinking, assimilating robots. They are programmable – we are not. They have to coerce us and put up with a lot of ancillary emotions, but with a robot they won’t, so they are aren’t going to stop until those robots exceed our capabilities. They’ll still keep some of us though to put insulation in attics and other slave type labor that would be injurious to the robots.
“The transition of humans to robots to support the super wealthy/powerful is already underway. The only reason we don’t get up in arms about it, is because it’s occurring incrementally.”
They own MSM too, just sayin’. 😉
“They have to coerce us and put up with a lot of ancillary emotions, but with a robot they won’t, so they are aren’t going to stop until those robots exceed our capabilities.”
Reading just a few rambling semi-marxist posts here in collapsenik central probably makes the elites crank that AI R&D lever all the way to 11.
“They’ll still keep some of us though to put insulation in attics and other slave type labor that would be injurious to the robots.”
Yep, you don’t want to ruin expensive machinery when there is plenty of humanoid trash to waste.
Well at least the robots could smile as they fire you.
They are smiling. You certainly dont want to see them pissed off.
FYI! It is time to ditch the marxist ramblings and then split in a hurry when their eyes turn red:
https://www.unilad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/robots6.gif
If my ramblings are Marxists then certainly that imagery your projecting with AI and robots is techno-fantasy. Robots are good at menial repetitive and precision jobs. But, they still take energy, resources and maintenance to function. The energy and resource problem is already well established. And your elimination of the human element will impact the ability to build and maintain these robots. The elite sure as hell don’t want to do any work.
Not only your ramblings. It is a common theme here. Get prepared for when techno-reality hits you and your offspring. At least I’ll be cheering.
Yes, they consume finite resources, energy, as I have previously stated. The laws of nature applies to robots too.
That being said. Their productivity for each unit is staggeringly higher. No humanoid drama and marxist/leninist revolution on the elites backs with mechanical minds running BAU.
Below is a quote from FANUC:
“Robots are building other robots at a rate of about 50 per 24-hour shift and can run unsupervised for as long as 30 days at a time. “Not only is it lights-out,” says Fanuc vice president Gary Zywiol, “we turn off the air conditioning and heat too.”
Now let that piece of information sink in.
Now, let’s have a look at KUKA’s lights out factory. Robots building robots without human intervention.
https://www.kuka.com/-/media/kuka-corporate/images/press/industrie-4-0/industrie-4-0-ktpo.jpg
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160810/internet-of-things/lights-out-manufacturing-tag31-tag99
https://www.autodesk.com/redshift/lights-out-manufacturing/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
Our problem is that we need workers who are earning good wages and can buy the output of the system.
I don’t think that these robots are good at earning a decent living, and buying homes.
Your sane Greg, smite would make a good cult leader. That aside, it’s good to explore the imagination/perceptions, but take it from an acid head, reality gets in the way. 😉
“Not only your ramblings. It is a common theme here. Get prepared for when techno-reality hits you and your offspring. At least I’ll be cheering.” – First, I have no offspring. Second, I have 100% complete confidence robots will only hasten the collapse of industrial civilization. Why? Because they will collapse the financial system as robots don’t buy the output of the economy. Your robot/AI techno fantasy future is an example of a circular economy. If you were more well read you would understand why a circular economy does not work.
“Their (robots) productivity for each unit is staggeringly higher. ” – For what purpose Smite? Why would you need high productivity if all these robots are being built to service a handful of wealthy elites? Your logic seems flawed.
Each robot depends on a supply chain which spans millions of companies. So to robotics everything would take millions of robots. They have a ways to go.
There are already millions of robots. Most of the productive companies and trust me; they wouldn’t be around otherwise, in the supply chain, utilizes robots and other computer controlled machinery.
Number for [industrial] robots in China only.
https://ifr.org/downloads/press/Operational_stock_industrial_robotics_China_up_to_2016.jpg
Spoilsport!
And we were doing so well with our little fantasy.
I do agree that there is a little problem called the endless supply chain and almost infinite and unfathomable interaction between all the elements that make up human activity. That said… we may be looking at a sizeable reduction to the bloat. No more mouths to feed. No more houses to build. No more cars to manufacture. Just the infrastructure required for progress in AI and robotics.
“Just the infrastructure required for progress in AI and robotics.” Wow. Folks really don’t grasp how much of the periodic table and long supply chains is needed for this robot/AI techno fantasy world. “Just” is such an easy word to use. I “just” need one billion dollars. I “just” need one more barrel of oil. Geez. Think about what your asking for when you say “just the infrastructure required for progress in AI and robotics.” – that alone suggest that pretty much everything we have right now must stay in place. Why? Because, robot and AI are at the top of the complexity pyramid.
erm
when did you last see a robot in a car showroom buying a car—or a hardware store buying whatever, or a supermarket buying groceries, or a barbershop getting a haircut?
Robots might make stuff but they dont buy stuff
That’s why a fully automated society cannot function.
And another thing…
A robot cannot remain operational if you feed it meat and vegetables and fruit and water…
Two robots cannot shag and create new robots…
Robots require fossil fuel energy to make new robots… they require fossil fuels to operate.
So this AI thing is nonsense…
Robots are even more hopeless than humans… because as we know we are not going to be able to extract oil shortly … because the amount of energy required to do so will not allow us to continue…
So the robots are even more f789ed than we are
Anything can happen and will. That’s for sure.
ARPA-E funding safer and lower cost nuclear energy
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/arpa-e-funding-safer-and-lower-cost-nuclear-energy.html
I have run into Brian Wang of Next Big Future for many years now. Years ago, on The Oil Drum, he was projecting that nuclear would “take off” in the near future.
I would wonder what all of these controls would do, when electric power is down–the system is down, and outside power is down. I would also wonder how prone the system is to hacking.
Admittedly there are problems with only manual controls, but there are also problems with only electronic controls.
The additional complexity leads to less wages for humans as well.
Ok… you made me do it…
Gail “Problems” Tverberg
You do realise Gail that if everyone had your outlook on life nothing would ever have been made… ever. And we wouldn’t be here.
But maybe that is your core message… that we shouldn’t have even harnessed fire, or made flintstone tools, or bows and arrows as each and every invention has only lead to PROBLEMS. And those problems require solutions that create more problems and on and on and on and on…
Is that it? Are you saying that we never should have existed?
I believe there are limits in a finite world. And I agree with Gail we are reaching them. There are limits to growth. There is a time and place for optimism; that time is past. Misplaced optimism is delusion.
Or in our case, suicidal.
http://www.binaryoptions.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lemmings-off-a-cliff.gif
Not really.
Humans’ “purpose” seems to be to dissipate energy, either directly, or through offspring who can dissipate energy. We shouldn’t feel guilty about this–this is the purpose of all dissipative structures.
Our problem is that we are getting to the end of the energy we can dissipate, in a cost effective manner. It is hard to see that we can do much more than make the best of the time we have left. We shouldn’t feel guilty about “causing” climate change. The forces that allowed people to exist also created changing climate. The Earth will take care of itself, through its built in feed back loops. Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that humans will be around 100 years from now. No type of plant or animal has a guarantee regarding the future.
From a big picture perspective I see things exactly the way you described them.
From the perspective of an individual human, I demand that all our problems be solved by next Tuesday at 10am… whatever it takes.
My survival instinct is fully functional. I will continue to search for that tiny crack in the cave wall so that I can suck a tiny stream of air through it and live another day. I thought everyone else was the same. Apparrently not.
Air-Breathing Aqueous Sulfur Flow Battery for breakthrough ultralow cost energy storage
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/air-breathing-aqueous-sulfur-flow-battery-for-pumped-hydro-costs-for-energy-storage.html
This about a new proposal from the new “technology will save us” journal “Joule.” The hypothesis is that if it only uses lithium and sodium, it can be produced very cheaply in very large quantities.
“technology will save us”
Might as well… what other options do we have. The more you push something in a certain direction the more likely the breakthrough. The same applies to economic issues.
Even if this would work, it would be like holding an iPhone on the Titanic on the morning of April 15 1912 . Awesome technology but not very timely.
Because?? You are expecting the economy to implode tomorrow??
Hmmm… looks like there’s a lot more propping up to be done. Well beyond what anyone could imagine possible.
“With further development, a new ultralow-cost electrochemical storage option may become available to support the growth of intermittent renewable generation and decarbonization of the world’s energy systems.”
Sounds like he is ready to apply for the next round of funding. I wonder what the long term problems are….they are always troublesome. What could go wrong….it sounds so perfect.
Anything that even has a whiff of keeping BAU going a while longer (even in its more rarified form of hopium) I’m willing to back all the way and unless you are suicidal you should too.
The only use of hopium technologiy (like wind, solar, batteries, EV’s etc) is to lure ignorant investors to pour money into it. This is the only way these new hopium technologies are helpful to BAU. They are not long-term solutions to the long-term problems we face.
It seems to be part of the way our self-organized system works. People have to have faith in something.
That said…
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/money/dam/assets/131025095317-tesla-stock-1024×576.png
Perhaps the bright minds who funded this …. might step in to take that idea to the next level
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/01/the-tech-start-up-that-made-a-700-juicing-machine-has-shut-down.html
Virgin should make suborbital flight by the end of 2017
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/10/virgin-should-make-suborbital-flight-by-the-end-of-2017.html
HAHAHA! Very funny stuff.
Glad you liked it!
From the comments…
“Branson does sound chastened by the accidents and setbacks. “I felt the company would be unlikely to survive another accident,” he writes of his feelings after the 2014 crash. “If I hadn’t owned the company, I think the program would have been knocked on the head some years ago. On the day we started, if I had known it was going to take twelve years I suspect I wouldn’t have gone ahead with the project either—we simply couldn’t afford it.”
It will probably become profitable when orbital flights reaches a certain industrial scale, just as with EVs…
That’s it… I’m assuming every comment has sarc tags, satire tags or some other tags on it from now on… including my own!
So like… never.
‘Billionaire Richard Branson has said that he will be disappointed if he is not reaching space in the next six months.’
Time must really be short….
Finding cheap workforce in the retail sector is more and more difficult. Tesco in Slovakia started to advertise its jobs directly on the shelves with the goods, together with the offered wages:
https://ekonomika.sme.sk/c/20678887/tesco-hlada-novych-ludi-nezvycajne-priamo-na-pulty-pise-plat.html?ref=njct
https://m.smedata.sk/api-media/media/image/sme/1/28/2854791/2854791_300x200.jpeg?rev=4
714.9€ (per month?) and the wine costs €2.19.
I’m not sure the situation is much better in Sweden. Salary is x3+ higher here, but the wine is at least x3 more expensive.
Prosperity Index = how much cheap wine can you buy from taxed income.
I remember back in the “tech bubble” of the late 1990s getting placemats in restaurants/fast food places advertising jobs availability.
It wasn’t too much later that the bubble burst.
I remember during this period … some mostly bald guy with a rat-tail pony tail out the back of his head… trying to sell me advertising on the walls of bathrooms…above the urinals… it didn’t happen.
“Shares in the UK’s biggest car dealer have plunged by 17% after a surprise profit warning which also raised further fears over consumer spending.
“The alert from Pendragon, which trades under the Evans Halshaw and Stratstone fascias, and sold 275,000 new and used cars last year, is the latest in a raft of profit warnings issued in recent weeks by UK companies blaming worsening consumer confidence.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/oct/23/shares-in-uks-biggest-car-dealer-pendragon-fall-by-17
Thanks! I cannot imagine other dealers are doing a whole lot better. It is hard to think of a way to make purchasing (or really something more like leasing) cars cheaper than the use of personal contract plans. If interest rates on them go up, the price will no doubt be higher–in fact it may already be higher, if US short term interest rates are any indication.
Resale value of cars may very well be taking a hit as well.
Surely the UK can fix this by following China’s lead?
Oh …. right… my bad…
China is following the UK’s lead….
http://www.baldingsworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Slide3.jpg
Now I am laughing…
This is the lead off to the Guardian article…. then a quick skim … and there is absolutely nothing to support this assertion
As expected… what does Brexit have to do with this — and air pollution – so what — people decided to ride bikes instead of buy cars?
Alas Humans are Stuuupid beasts. They will be gathered about the trough repeating this to each other endlessly….
‘Brexit uncertainty and air pollution plans hit cars sales as company says decline will continue into 2018’
Electric self-driving bikes?
LOL!
IF energy use MUST continually increase in order to maintain world growth, and IF the current source of fossil fuel energy will eventually prove to be insufficient (as was wood in the past), and IF renewable wind and solar can never fill the gap, then what are options for the NEXT world energy source — nuclear ?????????? Possibly liquid thorium fluoride reactors ????
thorium reactors!
yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
of course!!!!!!!!!!
then we will have second homes in a moon colony, and take long vacations to Mars!
because…
as you imply…
there MUST be a “next” world energy source…
it can’t be that FF are the last source of cheap abundant energy…
can it?
growth must continue!
right?
isn’t Progress a gift given to us by Reality?
aren’t we headed to the stars?
there can’t be a return to hunter/gatherer poverty…
I mean, there can’t, right?
Infinite Progress… it’s part of the Universe…
isn’t it?
David, Almost Infinity,
Another way might be to reduce world population to under one billion, perhaps 500 million, by whatever means. You could volunteer to start.
Two choices:
> read some of the historical articles and comments on FW… and arm yourself with knowledge
> run… as fast as you can…
Because at the moment … you position is not significantly different from that of this guy….
http://amayberrystateofmind.com/attachments/Image/gomer16.jpg
….if he were to be dropped into a Caracas slum
https://cloud.visura.co/65452.story_x_large.jpg
No BAU tonite?
“then what are options for the NEXT world energy source — nuclear ”
Nope, same as today – just [a lot] less people.
Less people – less strain on the finite resources.
Ahh, not a human automaton in sight.
Makes me all smiles! 🙂
https://hw.infowars.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/robot-labor1.jpg
And a precautionary note for those feeling the keyboard itch:
Those cars will be for the owners, the elites, for those people that run this system. They are not for joe average and his pointless existence and frivolous consumption.
“Those cars will be for the owners, the elites, for those people that run this system. They are not for Joe Average and his pointless existence and frivolous consumption.” – That sounds good on the surface. However, what makes modern transport work is the fact that the true costs are hidden by economies of scale. Without millions of drivers, those cars will cost millions of dollars each. Likewise, the roads and bridges will cost the elites billions of dollars per year to maintain. Money does not equal energy and resources so someone will have to continue mining for those things too. What happens when the elite burn all of their money trying to pay for all this? Does the Fed just print more for them? Talk about pointless existence!
Let’s define a meaningful existence on the basis of Joe Average’s frivolous consumption, shall we? Or, perhaps, now that I happened to waste 10 brainpowers thinking about it!
NOPE! Let’s not do that!
I think you should drop that Marxist narrative and realize that being able to frivolously consume finite resources is a privilege given to us by the owners of this show.
They ARE the capital, they create the money from nothing. What part of you having owners don’t you understand?
“They ARE the capital, they create the money from nothing. What part of you having owners don’t you understand?” – We are owned by this planet. No one creates resources and energy. Not even the elite can print resources. They elite most certainly are NOT capital. They are (as are we all) beholden to this planet.
Nowhere did I claim that the elites are exempt from the laws of nature and the constraints of this planet.
That being said.
They ARE the “capital”, they own it, distribute it and control it. Once resource limits hit, make no mistake, they will make you suffer first, a long, long, long, long time before they will feel any ill effect from the effects of resource depletion.
Is it clearer now?
If not, I recommend you to go watch that George Carlin YT clip again.
“Being able to frivolously consume finite resources is a privilege given to us by the owners of this show.” – The owner of the show is planet Earth. All consumption beyond hunting and gathering can be seen as frivolous. So, elites driving cars is just as frivolous as Joe Average driving a car. You must think wealthy people are Gods. Planet Earth and eons of time has gifted this plane (not you or me or the elite) with abundant resources. Humans have squandered these resources to live large (some humans living larger than others) for a brief period of time. That is all there is to it. Nothing more. The fires of industrial civilization will be very very brief for the rich and poor alike.
Let me explain to you a thing called evolution, or darwinism:
In a planet of finite resources there will always be a struggle for accessing them. Do I need to explain further?
Do you think the hunter-gatherer tribes didn’t fight for resources? Hey, ask the neanderthals what their opinion of (the hunter-gatherer) humans are. Oh, yes, I forgot, they went extinct. I wonder why. 😉
And how come you even own a computer or anything resembling the luxuries of BAU when you very well are aware of the poverty and misery in other parts of the world? Spouting those grand Marxist Utopian cliches while willfully ignoring the suffering and struggle of millions (billions perhaps) poor people.
http://www.motifake.com/image/demotivational-poster/1107/robotic-facepalm-facepalm-robot-fail-epic-demotivational-posters-1311733642.jpg
There will always be fighting over resources, that is another reason I just don’t think there will be just a few elite serviced by an army of robots. The resources will run out and the elite will want a war. Who will fight the wars? And someone has to be educating people on how to build and maintain the robots. The whole AI thing makes no sense.
Look at that assembly line and think about how much R&D went into that – why? Because management hates dealing with people.
Yes Don, that is the one million dollar question. What comes next?
The big issue is the long transition. Also the fact that our infrastructure is adapted to many forms of energy–liquid, gas, electricity as a carrier. We have much a greater need for energy for heating than for cooling, so our big energy need is in winter.
This is why the situation looks rather dire. An awfully lot of people have looked at the situation and said, “We have to come up with something.” The most recent somethings were nuclear and wind and solar. Nuclear was supposed to give us electricity “too cheap to meter.” Clearly none of these things have worked as planned.
Using more biomass is not helpful either. It interferes with ecosystems. Using more crop area for ethanol and oil for vehicles makes it hard to keep up food supplies, and likely contributes to degradation of the soil. The number of insects is now way down, for many reasons, including mono cropping, use of insecticides, and the removal of the lower level trees in forests, for the use of their wood.
I agree Gail. We seem to be playing Whack-A-Mole with all the problems that keep cropping up from past “solutions”.
It seems extremely unlikely, if not impossible, that LFTR technology (or some other Thorium variant) can save the day. At the moment, there is no viable mass producible design, and although the technology looks promising, it could take years/decades to roll it out, which we don’t seem to have, if indeed it is even possible to do so and there isn’t some hidden showstopper than is not currently visible. We would then need to build 50 reactors a year for 50 years (and we just canceled 2 reactors being built after spending 10 billion on them and they were halfway built…) just to get the energy we need today, let alone the energy we will need tomorrow.
And even if we did somehow, starting today, go into a full Global Command Economy mode, and in a short time frame, come up with a usable design and build out hundreds/thousands of reactors quickly to enable a (somewhat) smooth transition away from oil, we would just kick the can down the road. Something else would do us in, shortly, it would seem. Ocean acidification, topsoil runoff, aquifer depletion, mass methane release (which would make the current (or not) GW look like a brisk fall day), super antibiotic resistant disease, etc etc, we would run into some other limit on this planet. Unless we live within the carrying capacity of our finite planet, we follow the standard overshoot model. But because the systems we have built are so complex, when our overshoot goes into collapse we would not be able to service the fuel ponds. I have searched and have yet to find a rebuttal to this apparent impending disaster. Now if we could use some of the Thorium energy (in this hypothetical example) to encase all current and future radioactive waste in glass or burn it up in said reactors, maybe that could be a game changer. It would be truly telling if there was a way out of this situation, even this late in the game, but because we seem unable to work together for the common good for long term goals, we were unable to achieve it. Maybe some sort of super intelligent hive mind, like some kind of human-ant hybrid, would be able balance the scales better than we seem to be able to do, but it appears our super intense individualism is going to do us in in the end…
And of course the icing on the cake, by the time enough people realize this problem is for reals and are willing to try and solve the issue, it will be too late.
However, I am starting to believe this may go on for a bit longer than some here believe, but not as long as others do. Is it possible we could enter some sort of super global great depression, and stumble around for a while trying various things to try and get things going again instead of instant full collapse? Could the 1st world countries slip into 3rd world status and the 3rd world go down a notch or two into 5th world state? Perhaps we could have a minor mass die-off that would allow the survivors to struggle a bit before the end? Life seems to be nothing if not resilient. Perhaps a debt jubilee will allow things to continue on for a bit longer than might otherwise be expected? Interesting times, for sure.
I can’t go down to 3rd world status on account of my being allergic to grinding poverty!
I got a note from my mum.
Been there done that for half my life (it’s all relative of course)….. it has no appeal.
And real poverty …. I’d choose to OD on Oxycontin over this
I wouldn’t say the third world has to go downhill, but that the first world needs to rush to adapt third world cultural styles. In a way which supports industrial production of some sort, nuclear management of some sort, vast decentralization within a managed global order. The third world wants whatever it is or can be convinced is a better life. To help them get it would be chicken feed for western countries.They don’t need extravagant consumption, and are also still close enough to to sparing consumption as to manage it better than the west. The trick for the west is to make that sparing consumption sexy, so that the third world will buy in to it. .
Nice. I’m with you for most of it and especially trying to imagine how a Global Command Economy would function for any length of time. If the need arose – and it looks like that should have been apparent by now – then much of the manufacturing required would have to follow a custom approach to fill any gaps in the supply chain. I’m wondering how high costs could go for specific parts and large numbers of them without becoming an achiles heal for the system.
As someone mentioned elsewhere (Smite?) if only the 1% need be catered for in a command economy until things restructure (if possible) then cost can go through the roof – i.e. they can all live like kings – more resources to go around and be custom fashioned into whatever is required. At least in principle.
What was possible for elites before – custom made machines and goods sometimes using scarce materials – seems like it should be possible now until we start talking about microchips. To be honest, it’s the only thing I can think of that may not be feasible on a smaller scale. Maybe someone can enlighten us on this.
What we would need to understand is whether it is at all possible to manufacture sophisticated machinery / tools on a small scale for say 1 billion or less “survivors”. Something along the lines of the pop of China or that of the US – would that be enough to maintain an economy of scale of sorts taking into account the enormous savings from not having to worry our little heads about the damned?
I don’t think food would be an issue at lower demand levels. Enough personnel would be on hand to manage the spent fuel casking etc. Mining requirements would be greatly reduced and selective. The world of work would all be geared towards solving these problems and not frivolous activity.
Of course any talk of control economies requires that the world as it is remains stable for long enough while all the planning takes place and even as most of the population are triaged – essentially turning our backs on them.
Hard to imagine any of this unfolding in an orderly manner. I suspect any attempts at control will be met by an extremely savage response as Mr DNA kicks in. No amount of Force can hold back a torrent of starving angry people. Well… at least at first. There is a window of opportunity. Beyond that… the masses would be too weak and disorderly to care.
I believe that, if there is a wide scale human die-off, the whole living system would collapse. From the shock and disorientation, if not from disease or radiation. What we need is order and intelligence. We have neither right now. And there is no replacement or alternative for them.
Regarding unwinding in an orderly way, check out Rob Bell’s photos from Sears Canada stores.
I find ruins to be strangely beautiful…
https://www.google.es/search?q=ruins&client=firefox-b-ab&dcr=0&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-7qzP447XAhUJM8AKHYFZBlwQsAQIvgE&biw=1366&bih=635
Meaning the chaos is quick… like an avalanche… and the new state of equilibrium settles down usually for long periods of time.
Firms that burn up $1bn a year are sexy but statistically doomed
Five outliers – Chesapeake Energy, Netflix, Nextera Energy, Tesla and Uber – have collectively lost $100bn in the past decade
https://www.economist.com/news/business/21730446-five-outliers-chesapeake-energy-netflix-nextera-energy-tesla-and-uber-have-collectively
Thanks! The article is generally very good. At the beginning though, it becomes clear he has the same beliefs about energy that many others do:
How in the world are they supposed to “adjust to a recent plunge in oil prices”? It is over three years ago now. Diminishing returns don’t go away.
We need another article on the billion dollar cash flow losses in the energy sector.
Fracking isn’t looking so great for the world’s biggest fracker. Halliburton CEO Defends Fracking Business as Margins Disappoint -Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-10-23/halliburton-profit-jumps-amid-north-american-fracking-comeback
The article says,
The spin sounds good. It could also mean, “Funds for additional drilling are down, and that is all our clients could afford.”
Keeping in mind Bloomberg is a publisher of endless lies about everything … then you are almost certainly correct
I was a pump operator for Haliburton on a fracking job in Colorado in 1978 and we used lots of all sorts of stuff including sand. But it didn’t break into any new zones. Haliburton is an oil service company so they make money on fracking even if it doesn’t gain one ioda more oil. So obviously they are going to defend the practice.
Fracking is the same as EVs … nobody makes money…..
The B2B suppliers of goods and services surely makes a buck or two on futile enterprises.
I know that in the oil industry, the companies operating drilling rigs have had to lower their rates and take big charge offs.
I suppose the question is whether the companies are futile, but rapidly rising, or futile, but collapsing downward already. If they are like Amazon, they could enable the sale of goods at lower prices. Uber and Lyft aren’t helpful to the sales of cars, or much of anything else that I can see. It is hard to see how Facebook would enable much of anything, other than the transfer of advertising from paper circulation to internet. I know I keep seeing ads over and over for things I actually bought when I first searched on a link. It is hard to see how beneficial this advertising is.
One thing is for sure, someone made/is making a buck on this shale/tight oil bonanza.
Über and Lyft isn’t a B2B supplier, neither is Amazon.
New cars can’t be shifted because most people are quite useless and providing them with cheap wheels will only accelerate resource depletion with no discernible increase in productivity for the capital. Thus; it is a futile and self destructive enterprise.
For sure, the marketing/advertising has moved online together with the demographic that it’s directed towards. It’s a natural cause of progression.
I didn’t mean to imply that Uber and Lyft were B2B suppliers. Uber and Lyft allow people (hired by Uber and Lyft) to use their personal cars instead of forcing the person needing transportation to rent a car, or buy their own car. This indirectly cuts down on the total number of automobiles sold, and thus on the need for business to business transactions in the auto supply business. Existing cars will be used more intensively
“Existing cars will be used more intensively”
Indeed. And. Thus.
Causing them to wear down and become replaced with new cars.
If motoring becomes more available to the average person not inclined to own or posses a driving license, then it also can be reasoned that vehicle manufacturers will benefit from that.
But since people are pretty much useless anyway, they won’t be needing to go anywhere to spread their ineptness. Neither with their own cars, nor with some other transportation service.
So it is all a natural progression of technological advancement. Humans just can’t keep up with it and will be relegated to the sidelines by a nice firm kick in their a$$es, as they get booted out of the BAU train.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/lowres.cartoonstock.com/business-commerce-business_productivity-robot-robotic-mechanised-mechanical-cwln214_low.jpg
If only you could program the robots to buy cars. And then give them salaries. Maybe they even could afford homes! I sense another housing bubble brewing here…
Everything looks like a futile enterprise to me right now. I’m trying to figure out if there is any purpose to any human activity beyond replicating and eventually dieing out. It is apparent to me that for some time we have been paving the way for whatever comes next. Maybe that is our purpose without realising it. Natural selection is selecting as always and it’s selecting “them” not us.
N.b. “them” could certainly be a hybrid of human and machine activity taking on whatever form is required for continuation of this branch of evolution. The future organism could be so different to human life as we know it as to be unrecognizable.
Most evolutionary paths are a dead end. Most likely you are a dead end.
Don’t be too sad, everything ends sooner or later. There doesn’t have to be anything more than this, that is just your “growth mentality” speaking.
Hybrid human and robot does not seem likely to me, in any time frame.
DJ,
Oh absolutely I’m a dead end. Maybe something to do with the fact that I don’t have kids?
I just think it would be nice if something about humanity continued instead of nothing at all.
I don’t have an inate hatred of humanity or other intelligent life as demonstrated by others here but from a big picture perspective we are probably just another bug in the system.
“I just think it would be nice if something about humanity continued instead of nothing at all”
Indeed, most sane people probably want humanity to evolve. If it is possible is highly doubtful thanks to the current state of affairs.
However, with a sufficient reduction in the humanoid automaton bloat. It’s just too much unproductive frivolous consumerists floating around in the systems these days.
Gail… that’s your opinion. My aunts and uncles are practically cyborgs!
Pacemakers, hearing aids, knee and hip prosthetics, artificial retinas, brainchips to control parkinsons, all kinds of pharmacology to modulate their physiologies.
But then I see all of our technology as external prosthetics – everything from glasses to nuclear power plants. When you ride in a car or train at high speed we are one with the machine not separate from it.
Smartphones are brain extensions that can connect with anyone on the planet and are soon to be replaced with the next improvement.
Why is it so difficult for you to see the gradual replacement of one substrate with another? Is it too slow motion for you even though the pace is rapidly increasing?
True, FE, but we do need the oil. EV’s – not so much.
Shale is all that stands between us and The Nightmare….. I am all for Drill Baby Drill…
EVs… just another flavour of hopium
We desperately need all the hopium we can get to keep confidence and the markets afloat so that we can keep drilling baby drilling and extracting minerals to make more EVs and solar panels so that hopium stays at maximum levels thereby keeping confidence and the markets afloat so that we can keep drilling baby drilling….
I looked at Halliburton’s stock price, and it indeed has stayed fairly level. It continues to pay dividends of about 1.7%.
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/sdrl/stock-chart?intraday=off&timeframe=10y&splits=off&earnings=off&movingaverage=None&lowerstudy=volume&comparison=off&index=&drilldown=off
Seadrill on the other hand went bankrupt. So it seems to depend.
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/sdrl/stock-chart?intraday=off&timeframe=10y&splits=off&earnings=off&movingaverage=None&lowerstudy=volume&comparison=off&index=&drilldown=off
The Cobalt Cliff Will Cap Tesla’s Model 3 Production Capacity At 250,000 Units Per Year
There’s nothing Tesla can do to build cathode material supply chains that will permit production of more than 250,000 Model 3s per year in the foreseeable future. In short, Tesla is a dead-end company .
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4115479-cobalt-cliff-will-cap-teslas-model-3-production-capacity-250000-units-per-year
Great article!
Indeed cobalt is a problem. This is the same problem we run into if fusion were to be economic. We would soon run out of other resources. We are at the limits to growth. And, it really seems like many things are reaching limits simultaneously – not just energy supplies.
When approaching a limit we substitute or conserve, coming closer to another limit. It seems reasonable that when breaching a limit we will be close to many others.
“When approaching a limit we substitute or conserve”
Or abandon the paradigm altogether.
Tesla, LCD screens, houses, bread – it doesn’t matter what. What matters is dissipation of energy by world’s economy. As long as dissipation rate increases, everything is OK, but when we won’t be able to increase the rate of dissipation, then it’s game over.
For you, indeed. 😉
Although, for the owners and their computers running this epic show…
Not so much!
https://bizlockerroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Wink-Wink.jpg
What’s up Smite? Couldn’t you get a photo of an android making such an inane pose? Perhaps there are still a few uses for humans after all. 🙂
The author of the Tesla article is someone named John Peterson, who has over 51,000 followers on Seeking Alpha. He has been writing about the cobalt problem for Tesla for quite a while. https://seekingalpha.com/author/john-petersen/articles#regular_articles
One of his articles is, PV Solar, Increasing Everybody’s Electricity Costs.
His major points in the PV solar article are
gutting tesla …
Tesla’s Gigafactory Will Not Manufacture Better Or Cheaper Batteries
Wed, Aug. 30TSLA958 Comments
Tesla’s First Decade Of Battery Pack Progress – Much Ado About Nothing
Fri, Aug. 25TSLA845 Comments
Tesla’s Semi Truck: Too Much Weight And A Decade Too Late
Sun, Apr. 23TSLA625 Comments
Cobalt: The Weak Link In Tesla’s Supply Chain
Fri, Apr. 7TSLA695 Comments
What Does Lazard Think Tesla’s ‘Integrated Sustainable Energy Solution’ Will Cost?
Dec. 21, 2016TSLA289 Comments
A Deeper Dive Into Tesla’s Evolving Cobalt Nightmare
Dec. 13, 2016TSLA170 Comments
GE And Tesla Motors, Cynically Promoting Renewable Snake-Oil
Editors’ PickDec. 9, 2016GE392 Comments
Tesla’s Gigafactory Is A Sickly Shadow Of The Gigavision
Dec. 6, 2016TSLA533 Comments
Tesla’s Subsidy Shuffle: Big Public Costs With No Public Benefit
Dec. 3, 2016TSLA527 Comments
Tesla’s Evolving Cobalt Nightmare
I highly recommend his articles. https://seekingalpha.com/author/john-petersen/articles#regular_articles
John Petersen sounds like another Scandinavian, but I don’t know much about him other than what is shown in his biography.
John is a lawyer and accountant with over three decades of corporate finance, due diligence, M&A advisory and related legal services for manufacturers, innovators and investors in the energy storage and renewable energy sectors.
Over the last eight years John has earned a global following for his articles on the energy storage and alternative energy sectors. He has contributed to AltEnergyStocks, Seeking Alpha, The Street, NASDAQ.com and Batteries International Magazine and InvestorIntel.
John is a 1979 graduate of the Notre Dame Law School and a 1976 graduate of the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. He was admitted to the bar in 1980 and licensed to practice as a CPA in 1981. John’s diverse experience in corporate finance, natural resource development and energy storage give him a unique and sometimes unsettling perspective on the technical, economic and supply chain challenges of the battery industry.
A quote from one of his articles;
‘Everybody understands that PV Solar is almost as reliable as a part-time employee with a drug habit.’
and…
‘The perverse outcome of widespread PV deployment is that huge capital investments in PV solar result in under-utilized conventional resources, which increases the unit cost of all conventional power.’
https://seekingalpha.com/article/1934751-stationary-energy-storage-pipe-dream-or-lead-pipe-cinch?page=3
People don’t understand that PV solar has to be an add-on to the current system, not a replacement for it. All of the modeling assumes that it is a replacement, which of course it is not. This is why subsidies are needed for the current system.
Your absolutely right Gail. Coal and natural gas fired powered power plants work. They provide millions of homes and businesses with 24/7 flows of well regulated electricity @60Hz. The current state of the art of solar PV and wind turbines cannot do that. It is like you have an orchestra of finely tuned music then added a car horn to it. It is just out of place. Solar PV and wind on the grid make zero sense.
I agree. “It is like you have an orchestra of finely tuned music then added a car horn to it. It is just out of place. Solar PV and wind on the grid make zero sense.”
The take away from that article for me is that EV’s do not scale.
The same can be said about ICE powered cars.
Most people on this planet can not afford a car at all.
It’s not a question of whether growth can continue forever. It’s a question of whether a particular civilization at a particular point of time can artificially engineer infinite growth. And the answer to that question is yes.
Really understand that none of this matters anymore. The debts are not going to be paid back, you and I will be dead, and the folks in 50, 100 years time will just be surviving on whatever they can.
We long ago passed the point of no return, it’s been decades. Don’t prepare, don’t overanalyze, and certainly don’t wait for collapse. Just get whatever income you can, and spend it on whatever you are able to. You have absolutely no control over the dynamics of global industrial civilization. Zero. Neither do governments, and that’s the whole point. The control was already handed over to networks of private banks and corporations. They run this show for private profit, and that’s it. That’s the endgame.
It amazes me the one could consider accumulation of something as virtual as money as “profit”. Surely everyone cannot “profit”. And the “profit” will largely disappear concurrently with energy availability. So the way I see the conclusion is that when growth stops, profits become worthless.
David,where are you? BAU forever!!! Ofw has gotten so incredibly predictable and boring. See ya all later.
wise one slowdoomer says:
“Really understand that none of this matters anymore. The debts are not going to be paid back, you and I will be dead, and the folks in 50, 100 years time will just be surviving on whatever they can.”
yes!
true!
indubitable!
in 100 years, we all will have entered the nothingness of eternal death.
so…
drum roll, please………………………….
BAU tonight, baby!
Profit? At the top its all about dominance. Most productive/lethal/skilled human/machine capital ”wins”. Money and profit are for losers. The petty little dirty stuff the gopherminds deal with.
It’s all a game played out on the Internet enabled electronic chessboards on planet earth. A game mostly steered by the output from predictive systems, neural nets and mathematical models running on the hottest supercomputer hardware.
For now it is dominance and growth. We get Amazon and Facebook and Twitter. Also Uber and Left. But they don’t really make things–just grow by agreeing to lower profit, and ignoring inconvenient laws. This still collapses the system.
It’s just fluff floating on top of the Internet. As a tech inclined person I can not fathom how they seem to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
The MSM truly are in control of the narrative and it’s even playing out here in collapsenik central.
Freakin’ Amazon, Facebook, Über, Tesla and the rest of the semi scam smoke and mirrors “businesses” of today.
There will be no collapse, people will be thrown off the BAU train to maintain the momentum towards an ever tighter computer controlled techno feudalism.
I don’t think that a few owners can continue very long either. They cannot keep up oil production and electricity delivery by themselves, for example. Also, even stored food supplies run out. Fresh water likely needs to be replaced. And they are not immune to problems from spent fuel ponds.
It’s only a matter of ditching the frivolous consumerists.
Then this joint will be lit until the end of the century – without a hitch!
https://wolfstreet.com/2017/10/23/wall-street-piles-into-cryptocurrencies-others-speak-of-biggest-scam-ever/
Maybe governments get in on the network a bit as well. But those of us ordinary people don’t have much of a chance.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/10/23/politics/trump-dmz-north-korea/index.html
‘Trump visit to DMZ unlikely, White House says’
Ah, the poor baby’s gotten cold feet. You’d think after engaging in such raucous rancor Trump would be itching to do a Moon job over across the DMZ to NK. But I suppose harsh rhetoric via Tweets is one thing, but actually standing in harm’s way is another. Ha!
Bloomberg headline :
World’s Most Daring Monetary Experiment Is Set to Continue
Hmmm … daring … how about insane… desperate… crazed…. mad.. Frankenstein….
Well I would say it is a mandatory experiment seeing as there is no alternative outside of
collapse.
Experiment? It’s the plan.
Wait for key tipping points and execute the next step in the “style” of Asimov’s Foundation series.
not an experiment and not a plan…
it’s a reaction to declining net energy…
“they” didn’t know the decline was coming, and perhaps still don’t know about it.
their reaction is merely a year by year guessing game…
if indeed they are in the dark, they are blindly moving forward with their so-called plans.
Surely a bunch of Internet ragtag collapseniks know more than the owners of this system.
After all the LTG study have been around since the 70’s funded by the same elite that run this circus.
https://img00.deviantart.net/d671/i/2009/110/f/4/joker_laughing_by_hkcko.jpg
I think the Club of Rome has evolved over the years. At first it wanted to find out some dimensions of the current problem. Even at that time, I understand that Dennis and Donella Meadows believed that the world could be saved. They were very young and idealistic, hardly out of graduate school. They thought that limiting new births to the number of projected deaths would be no problem, for example.
More recently, the book 2052 is pretty close to absurd in my opinion. Joergen Rangers, the author of the book, was an undergraduate at the time of the early report, and has not been involved in energy work since then.
Of course the study was and still is relevant, influential, whatever they are thinking and doing today.
Yep.
Google Searches for “WW3” & “Prepping” are at all time highs!
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=prepping
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=ww3
You should have warned us “Shocking news alert”. We on OFW are a sensitive group and news like this could be alarming…especially to FE. LOL
I’m sure there are all time highs as well for this:
BAU tonight, baby!
IDEA!!! Ringy dingy dingy….
I need to set up a consultancy company — get a web site in play — buy Ad Words on Google to get me to the top of those searches…. and charge $100 to explain to people why they are wasting their time….
Private Jet…. here we come!
I was chatting with a friend who has a masters degree in finance yesterday. He claims that growth can continue forever. When confronted with facts like: infinite growth in a finite world is impossible, the response is something like this: “It doesn’t matter Debbie Downer, there are always growth opportunities.” There literally must be a huge disconnect in the minds of economists between resources, energy and the economy.
If a person doesn’t understand how the system works, it seems to be possible to believe anything.
“There literally must be a huge disconnect in the minds of economists between resources, energy and the economy.”
Greg, most people just don’t have much of a notion regarding energy. If you are with someone do this; move your arm and ask them where the energy came from to move your arm. Some might be able to answer it, but most won’t.
Even better just ask someone ‘What is Energy’?
Most people I have found can’t even answer that question…Oh and the answer is “It’s what causes motion”
HAHA, that is a great tip. I’ll try it next time I see the financial genius.
Janet Yellen says Fed’s extraordinary policies may be needed again – Associated Press
https://apnews.com/000308d932ea4b96b59a1c3f7441c08e/Yellen-says-Fed's-extraordinary-policies-may-be-needed-again
Well if Yellin wants to keep here promise of no “recession” on her watch then, extraordinary policies will be needed.
“But Yellen said the Fed likely will have to turn to bond purchases again — even in a downturn that isn’t as bad as the 2007-2009 Great Recession, which was the worst since the 1930s. She said that’s because economic forces have driven short-term interest rates to unusually low levels. That means the Fed will have less room to cut rates to spur economic growth in a recession, leaving few alternatives but to buy bonds again.”
From your linked article, Rob, is that excuse for buying bonds again if necessary. The situation is that The Great Recession opened a Pandora’s box of desperate tools the Fed now feels compelled to use if necessary. Actually, I would say it’s more like finding new gears on a bicycle. Once you become familiar with a new, wider range of adjustments, it’s pretty hard to resist. The trouble is it never lets the economy ever achieve that state it had before so many adjustments were considered available or needed.
In other words the Fed may need to buy bonds because the patient is still on life support, and that’s because ever since 08/09 the idea the whole shebang could come tumbling down was not so clear (or had been forgotten since the Great Depression), and now it’s like Yellen Is a panicked pilot in a heightened state of coherence at the ready to start flicking switches as needed in a desperate attempt to keep BAU flying.
Many people think this will at some point lead to QE4, doling out dough to average joe’s to pump up the volume of the economy, but at the risk of hyper-inflation.
“Yellen Is a panicked pilot in a heightened state of coherence at the ready to start flicking switches as needed in a desperate attempt to keep BAU flying.” – That pretty much nailed it. (Leslie Nielsen pokes his head into the cockpit: Good luck Yellen – we’re all counting on you!)
““Yellen Is a panicked pilot in a heightened state of coherence at the ready to start flicking switches as needed in a desperate attempt to keep BAU flying.” – That pretty much nailed it.”
Oh, it is perfect! Let us all together imagine Yellen in the pilot’s seat!!!??… o_O
I am enormously impressed by the sheer imagination and wit of this fantastic metaphor!!!!??!!”#!!!
NOPE!
Let’s have a look at a modern aircraft, and then draw the conclusion if the pilot actually is in control of what goes on, shall we?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a4/Airbus_A380_cockpit.jpg
Janet freakin’ Yellen flying metaphorical aircraft…
Mundane and boring collapsenik drama at it’s finest.
https://www.theterminatorfans.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Disapointed-Terminator.jpg
The Federal Reserve actually does seem to have some power. They were the ones that raised interest rates before the 2007-2009 recession, collapsing the US housing subprime debt bubble. They talked at their meetings about the rising cost of oil and food, and decided that raising interest rates was the way to “fix” the problem. The collateral damage was high.
Of course, the bubble would probably had burst of its own accord at some point. The Federal Reserve hurried it along.
See my article, https://ourfiniteworld.com/oil-supply-limits-and-the-continuing-financial-crisis/
And just like a modern day pilot, she only sits there watching the autopilot doing it’s job. The last time the fed attempted to steer the economy by applying economic dogma, just look how it went.
It is all run by computers these days – just like the stock market.
Rows and rows and columns of super computation.. Running BAU..
http://cdn.cnn.com/cnnnext/dam/assets/120228064444-supercomputer-1-horizontal-large-gallery.jpg
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/10-most-powerful-supercomputers/
I a struggling to accept this 3% GDP print…. mega problems with retail and autos… reversal on the interest rate increases….
These are symptoms of major problems in the economy…. not good growth…
Ahh, That’s too Bad…
Americans Are Retiring Later, Dying Sooner and Sicker In-Between
U.S. life expectancy is declining, new calculations show
The U.S. retirement age is rising, as the government pushes it higher and workers stay in careers longer.
But lifespans aren’t necessarily extending to offer equal time on the beach. Data released last week suggest Americans’ health is declining and millions of middle-age workers face the prospect of shorter, and less active, retirements than their parents enjoyed.
Here are the stats: The U.S. age-adjusted mortality rate—a measure of the number of deaths per year—rose 1.2 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to the Society of Actuaries. That’s the first year-over-year increase since 2005, and only the second rise greater than 1 percent since 1980.
Peak Golden Years…LOL
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2017-10-23/americans-are-retiring-later-dying-sooner-and-sicker-in-between
Almost one in three Americans age 65 to 69 is still working, along with almost one in five in their early 70s.
Walmart here I come…
This sad story has been going on for a long time. The United States is doing much worse than other developed countries. This is a chart I put up a while back:
The above chart shows how US life expectancy has been falling, relative to that in other countries. It seems to me that part of the problem comes from moving toward having animals eat grains rather than grass. This reduces omega-3 fatty acids and also Vitamin K2 in the food supply. There are other problems as well: too much sugar and sugar substitutes in food; too many additives, including food colors; GMO foods and foods with chemical on them; over-processing of food; oversize servings; too little exercise; medical community maximizing their own income, rather than focusing on how much that they can do to improve healthcare, at low cost.
Let’s add one of those bubble captions to the images below…. I fill the bubbles with:
Boo hoo boo hoo….
Maybe I can donate some of our country’s resources to support America? If I sold another daughter into the wh.ore house might that help America in some way? Maybe America could come and blow us up and steal something from us to help there suffering Americans?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-9BTukfD-3sQ/U1N_zDmgM1I/AAAAAAAAOWg/mIxOlQdRtdk/s1600/kt20.jpg
https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2017/03/06/02/mosul-citizens.jpg
Relative to those other countries is not good, but forget about the gray dots for a moment and just look at the red dots. They are going up, so life expectancy even in the US is rising.
Perhaps we should say “was rising.” The most recent data point was down by 1.2% as I recall from the new link.
The change in the position of the US relative the other countries life expectancies is due to the massive program of Induced Impairment by the Inner Party. Gayle’s list covers a lot of their programs. Some will say that these practices are just the result of seeking greater profits, but the chart above shows another result of those practices.
Check graph above.
Form Follows Function.
The contamination and alteration of the food and water supply creates dis-ease. Then people want to feel better so they go to the Dr. and he says their problem is not one of toxic overload and lack of essential nutrients but that it is a deficiency of a particular patented chemical. That chemical creates more dis-ease. So they go back to the Dr. and he gives them prescriptions for more patented chemicals.
The patented chemical are very expensive for the sick person.
So how is this system working out?
Check graph above.
A prime enabler of the Induced Impairment programs is all of the Medical Privacy Regulations. Many, if not most American health facilities, have data reporting networks that record every interaction between the patient and the health care worker. It would seem that a gold mine of data such as this would clearly show us what works and what doesn’t but that information is strictly confidential. I don’t know what options are open for Epidemiologist to consider the effects of our current health care practices under the veil of the HIPPA medical privacy statutes but.
Check graph above. Sick people don’t fight back.
I have had some involvement with healthcare all of my life. My father was a physician; my mother was a medical technologist (but didn’t work outside the home after I was born). When I worked in actuarial work, I did quite a bit of work with medical malpractice and with workers compensation (which pays for work-related injuries). I would generally agree with you. I, too, try to stay as far away from the healthcare system as possible, and try to take care of my own health. The coverage I buy is from Kaiser Permanente, with the thought that at least they do not have the same motivation for over-treating as most US healthcare providers.
Regarding data collected by health care providers, the problem in the US is that each health care provider has its own system. (There are also horribly complicated coding standards, mandated by the government, that keep doctors and dentists from spending as much time with patients.) Countries with single payer system seem to do a much better job of collecting data and analyzing it.
Also, Kaiser seems to do pretty well in looking at their data, and trying to take proactive steps based on the prior history of the patient. They tend to contact the patient directly with recommendations (tests, vaccines, emergency medicine to have on hand, precautions to take), rather than waiting for the patients to necessarily take the lead. The contact is a nurse calling, or a voicemail message, or a test package sent in the mail to use and send back in.
Spot on Gail, also check out when Norman Borlag’s modified wheat took over the wheat market and you’ll see it fits nice with your chart. Personally the removal of wheat and dairy and sugar from my diet and the addition of grass fed meat has made amazing improvements to my health.
“grass fed meat”
Gotten that colonoscopy just yet? 😉
http://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
Let’s check out what the longest living humans of planet earth eats, and from there draw our conclusions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ff40YiMmVkU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Zone
I hadn’t thought about Norman Borlag’s modified wheat. He received a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in 1970. I will have to look at actual wheat crop amounts to see when it likely had an impact.
I know a woman who stopped eating wheat products because of digestive issues and discovered that her migraine headaches went away at the same time. It is hard to know what causes what.
Australian Energy Policy – an open letter to the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition
In this post I publish an open letter submitted by seven retired Australian scientists and engineers to the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition in Australia (h/t to Jimbro). It captures quite succinctly many of the burning questions posed on this blog.
The inset image (left) says “Replace Hazlewood, Australia’s Dirtiest Power Station with RENEWABLE energy” and comes from Climate Action Moreland. This is fairly typical of Green propaganda that is being effectively promoted by growing numbers of activist groups. The question is why governments the world over are listening to this scientifically illiterate advice?
Begins
We are a group of retired scientists and engineers in Queensland, and we are alarmed at the direction our country is being taken through your respective policies, which are virtually identical, on renewable energy. Our names are listed here. We have studied this issue for years now, and we have here outlined the serious defects in your energy policy, and asked some questions which have thus far remained unanswered.
Energy Policy. By far the greatest risk to Australia’s electricity supply is the false belief that renewables (wind and solar) can be a like-for-like replacement for dispatchable fossil fuelled generators.
They are not, and can never be.
A One- MW wind or solar plant does not replace a One- MW coal plant. Not even close. Solar plants will produce electricity on average at 20% of their installed capacity. They produce power for little more than eight hours per day and none at all at night or on rainy days.
Wind plants can be expected to produce electricity on average 25% to 30% of installed capacity, but output can be as little as 2% or as much as 70% with little warning.
http://euanmearns.com/australian-energy-policy-an-open-letter-to-the-prime-minister-and-the-leader-of-the-opposition/
!!!!!!
Reading that leaves on shaking one’s head and murmuring … What the F789.
Held by censors… try this http://euanmearns.com/australian-energy-policy-an-open-letter-to-the-prime-minister-and-the-leader-of-the-opposition/
Thanks! I left a comment on the website of the original letter, pointing out the pricing problem and directing them to my post: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2017/07/22/researchers-have-been-underestimating-the-cost-of-wind-and-solar/
Thanks FE…that really convinced me. From the letter…
Carbon dioxide is an essential plant food through photosynthesis, and life on Earth could not exist without it. The latest information from the IPCC shows that the actual temperature increases are only a small fraction of those predicted by the climate models
Statements, like the above, by Scientists and Engineers from mining and Chemical field are somewhat convincing.
We have a problem with results crossing too many fields at one time. The group of scientists isn’t really equipped to say what is happening in the field of climate change. At the same time, the impact on wholesale electricity prices is something they have never considered.
We have all kinds of modelers putting together models of little parts of the system. They don’t understand how bad their models really are. I think that the point that needs to be made in Australia is that results do not seem to be coming out well. Australia will need a reasonably large amount of natural gas to balance its wind and solar. Yet, recent investments in natural gas in Australia are not profitable, and cannot be unless natural gas prices are a lot higher. http://www.smh.com.au/business/energy/lng-200b-worth-of-australian-projects-probably-not-breaking-even-20150906-gjggi0.html But there seems to be little chance that natural gas prices can rise sufficiently to encourage more drilling.
Just thanking you for all this insight. It’s SO out of the mainstream, where it needs to be. Maybe there could be a “ladder” of communication. Someone can break this down one degree toward mass acceptance. Then someone else could break that down further, and so on. By the time it get out there to Walmart, we’ll need a different language. Something so simple that we can’t even imagine it now.
I am trying to figure out a way to write an article (perhaps “Correspondence” rather than a regular article) for Energy Policy trying to outline a few issues. Currently I am considering framing the issue as overlooked side effects of intermittent renewables added to the electric grid.
“Currently I am considering framing the issue as overlooked side effects of intermittent renewables added to the electric grid.”
This sounds really good. That’s a straightforward issue, and most people are totally clueless about it. I’m trying to focus on one single, key (KEY) issue at a time, trusting that these will open doors to bigger and more diverse ones.
Something else on Atlanta
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2017/10/95404-atlanta-ordinance-would-require-electric-vehicle-charging-stations-new-buildings
Georgia is no longer a major market of EVs however, now that the state subsidy went away.
https://www.planetizen.com/node/83394/who-killed-electric-car-georgia
I wonder if it will really pass.
Trying to capture and convert intermittent sunshine and wind to electricity will never replace dispatchable sources of energy. They are by nature, two different things that cannot be compared. But, it doesn’t stop people from trying to get 1+1 to equal 4.
Yeah, that math is supporting the global debt market.
Why do governments listen? Because generally when people find that the gods aren’t answering their prayers they find new idols instead of dealing with reality. Sustainable development is our modern version of throwing a sacrifice into the volcano – with the hopes that BAU can continue.
At some point it doesn’t matter how much you play around with numbers, reality will catch up. More and more people without jobs or are in jobs that amount to slavery. Less and less food and water. Plummeting quality of life. Rising energy costs. You can pretend it isn’t happening for a while but eventually it’s shtf time.
Exactly ! Regardless of how much we may delude ourselves that Black Swan is hovering ominously just waiting for the moment everyone’s head is turned the other way to come crashing into the Potemkin Village we’ve created bringing the whole thing down like a string of dominos lined up on a table . The only valid question being ; What form will the Black Swan take this time ?
Just came from Walmart. Shocked to see they had no grapefruit in bags, and no oranges at all. Single (puny) grapefruit cost $1.24. Clementine in bags that should cost $3 were around $6. And Walmart is supposed to be a convenient and inexpensive place for poor people to shop!
http://grist.org/briefly/hurricane-irma-wiped-out-half-of-floridas-citrus-crop/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/florida-orange-groves-greening-citrus-tree-killing-bacteria-disease/
This is not good for those of us who eat oranges on a regular basis. Nor for the incomes of people in Florida.
“At some point it doesn’t matter how much you play around with numbers, reality will catch up.”
true.
on top of the actual real everyday economy of goods and services, there is a secondary layer of finance and economics.
this secondary layer has some essential aspects, such as money and debt, but much of it is bogus manipulation which adds almost nothing to the 99% of us.
so the 8+ year rising US stock market is a giant flashing sign that something is seriously WRONG with the economy.
near zero interest rates are another sign of imminent big trouble.
these numbers are real, but they are becoming detached from the actual primary economy.
I watched an interesting movie last night that gave me some hope that humanity will survive whats coming although with some assistance from an unusual source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUr_TF9o7sY
Research what happens to unmanned nuclear reactors and spent fuel rod pools. Our proverbial goose is already cooked.
What if .:. BAU can limp along long enough to decommision enough of the nuclear plants and fuel ponds?
Creative accounting or not, WWS seems to really hurt nuclear.
If BAU can limp along, like it’s already doing, then all focus will be thrown at making more plastic doodads and babies. Trust me.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/global-capacity.jpg
Average age of reactors about 30 years.
Fertility rate in the developed world below replacement.
Last I heard, there was only one world. And it’s putting on the equivalent of another Germany every year (80+ million). So you can stick a fork in any feeble hopes you might have for some sort of interplanetary intercession. Lol.
When/if the west stops immigration the need for nuclear might diminish further no matter if one billion new africans are born.
Seriously, who’s going to decommission all those things? Where’s the money and resources going to materialise from to even try? How long will it take? Decades? What will political stability even be like by then? Especially if the world population is still growing at around a billion people a decade, stripping the planet like locusts in a vain attempt to stave of inevitable die-off. Little green men sure ain’t.
If it doesn’t make economic sense to keep them operating they will be closed. Also possible they will be closed anyway.
“If it doesn’t make economic sense to keep them operating they will be closed. Also possible they will be closed anyway.”
Yes, and just like everything else in the enabling machinery of IC.
When no longer deemed productive, it will be left for dead. Humans, machines, oil fields, windmills, solar panels, you name it.
https://media.giphy.com/media/oDVEOoeMYr5TO/giphy.gif
I agree Psile, we have a history of two modes: complacency and panic.
Nuclear cannot deal with very low and negative wholesale electricity prices. They cannot make enough money, with the rates that are available. The amount of wind, water, and solar added are not nearly enough to make up for the amount of backup that will be sent into bankruptcy, without subsidies. I think that the problem also “leaks” into fuels. The price of uranium falls too low, as does the price of coal and natural gas.
I think nuclear would be more hurt by WS than hydro or fossile fuels. Nuclear are base load not load following.
Coal is badly hurt as well, because the plants can be used a smaller percentage of the time. Also, the wholesale price tends to trend downward, even as depletion gets to be a greater problem.
Natural gas is hurt as well, also because the plants can be used a smaller percentage of the time, and the wholesale price tends to trend downward.
If one type of electricity generation is subsidized, essentially all types of electricity generation need to be subsidized. We can’t even measure the extent of the subsidy for wind and solar, because it comes in so many ways (mandates, credits that help those with high taxes, need for subsidy for backup, need for batteries and other mitigation, need for overbuilding and use of only a portion of the intermittent supply; need for neighbors to cut off unwanted electricity or offer to take the electricity only at negative rates).
All dispatchable sources could be compensated for providing load following.
Nuclear, generating x W continously doesn’t have much to offer, especially if W/S gets priority AND subsidies.
(I don’t question W/S drives up consumer prices.)
Gail, as you pointed in reply few comments above, yet another scheme for debt growth must be eventually found after this post ~2008 period runs eventually into a dead corner. And this time it would likely take form of openly supporting the energy system, namely keeping the baseload grid system operating, no matter what. For example, issuing debts above ~1000% GDP, full or partial nationalization, war economy footing, again whatever it takes..
Grasping at straws, aren’t we? May as well join the church of Scientology.
Ben Bernanke Is Worried, Maybe We Should Be
Now he fears that, should another sharp recession occur, the Fed won’t be able to contain it.
http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2017/10/16/ben_bernanke_is_worried_maybe_we_should_be_102921.html
Gail. It seems Smite is winning against you.
Drones can fly for a very long distance.
http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-spy-us-missiles-consequences-south-628045
North Korean drones regularly fly 150 miles one way to spy on South Korea’s facilities. For one which gets crashed, there should be many more which returned safely.
Tech has advanced much farther than what you expect, and frankly speaking, we can go back to the pop of 1913 and still maintain the same standard of living we have now , or actually better since the need to feed billions would have disappeared.
Even the North Korean “drones” can zip around spying from the skies of South Korea.
And the US sent a man to the moon in the 60’s. At OFW people are still pondering about the ‘impossibility’ of replacing humans with machines.
The economy needs consumers, “everybody” knows that!!!!!??
How about: NOPE!!!! 😉
“They” [the owners] don’t need your frivolous consumption and marxist narrative, all they need is a bunch of brain power, human or computation and of course machines to get the job done.
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/robot-working-factory-d-rendering-monitor-90929221.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/Sweetheart_gynoid_berkley.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/hxMi5me.jpg
You like the granny version? Interesting….
It’s yours, mine is from SRF.
Nothing significant can be allowed to fail
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-22/bank-japan-buying-bonds-scandal-hit-kobe-steel
Somehow, I can believe this. This is a Reuter’s article, Japan’s Kobe Steel say violated statutory standards, losing customers
The story seems to get worse by the day. According to the article, “Kobe Steel has an extensive role in global supply chains – the company produces engine valve springs found in half the world’s cars, according to its website.”
If seems to have been cutting corners everywhere.
The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market’s move since 2008: Analysis- Yahoo News
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-fed-caused-93–of-the-entire-stock-market-s-move-since-2008–analysis-194426366.html
I think the high correlation with GDP growth in the first period went along with rapidly growing supply of cheap oil. Once the oil wasn’t so cheap, and quite so available, different forms of debt growth had to be stimulated.
Got to love the sweet justice here. One Ponzi is impacting another. Desperate times desperate actions.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-10-20/renewable-energy-threatens-the-world-s-biggest-science-project
Another shining example of the role of the media …
I could push that steaming pile of lies into a deep hole…. but why waste time and effort. Where would one start – when it’s rubbish beginning to end
Not a single challenge – just statements tagged with brands like Oxford U — and the masses gobble it up….
I will believe fusion when I see it. My bet now is that the funding doesn’t really come together.
If man were meant to fly, he’d have wings. Man will never walk on the moon. Oil, that stuff is useless. Electricity is too dangerous to be of any practical use. What use are these huge clunky computers to the average person?
I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss fusion. It is worth pursuing. It might not work, but dismissing it out of hand sounds a lot like the above.
I actually don’t have any doubt that at some point in time continuous net energy fusion will be possible, but will it be economical? We have gotten so use to easy, abundant energy that some monstrosity like the ITER that has taken so many years to construct and has so many different parts it seems unlikely as our energy future. The other thing I don’t like about it is it gets back to centralized power distribution and utility companies with shareholders always wanting more money.
“It might not work” – define work? Fusion does “work”, the sun proves it. By “work” do you mean salvage BAU for another 10, 20 or 100 years? If by “work” you mean population levels can continue to grow then I have to disagree that fusion is any solution to anything.
Increased prosperity – population growth slows, even declines.
You should know this.
Population overall is still growing, even in countries which have a high standard of living like Australia, where even amongst the native Aussies (non-indigenous), the birth rate has been rising due to “prosperity”.
Nuclear fusion has a very bright future ahead. And it always will have…
-Dennis Meadows
Ha ha, don’t confuse the delivery of energy via electricity with the energy delivered by oil. Vastly different things. Furthermore our entire nitrate fertiliser industry is based on fossil fuels not to mention the very finite phosphate mines.
Fusion is not categorically needed for the “immediate now”..
Industrial scale recycling of nuclear fuel + breeder reactor cycle has been already solved, I wrote about it in detail numerous times already. That’s quasiBAU extension for at least many decades to come, if not more, as you can also in the mid future perform “XTL”, essentially cooking the very low quality oils to get at least some liquid fuel. Apart from the present – near future frontier, arctic oil which will help in part offset the profile of depletion likely making notable presence since early mid 2020s..
The political, tech-economic and cultural moods in the West are now such, that the nuclear segment likely won’t be re-applied in near-mid term future. Hence we can expect instead continued trend overbuilding the capacity of renewables, backed largely by natgas and coal, plus the dragging effect of overall lower consumption through stagnating-falling industrial and consumer economy, demographic cliff, social unrest etc.
How is this dichotomy going to affect the global system is unclear, crazies might push the button any time. The most likely scenario from now on is again coexistence of two larger power blocks with authoritarian, near command like economic structures. The West will likely deteriorate faster though and the new escape wave of people hoping for “better life” would reverse guard to previous cold war era direction of East to West flow.
Again, this is big conceptual painting, there might be reasonably well positioned smaller enclaves in the West as well.
The concept of the need for baseload generation is fading away,” said Paolo Frankl, who heads the renewable power division of the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based institution advising nations on energy. “Technically, you could run a system 100 percent on renewables and even 100 percent just wind and solar.”
This is why he is the head of this agency. He can say anything to get more funding.
Yes they are funny. He forgot to mention how you replace the most expensive and complicated system on earth to cater for the la la land of solar panels and windmills.
Gail:
Very short article FYI (re trail in Atlanta).
https://www.planetizen.com/news/2017/10/95421-atlanta-beltline-acquires-major-piece-future-eastside-trail
Thanks! The folks I know who actually live in Atlanta will be especially interested.
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Tesla workers claim anti-LGBT threats, taunts, and racial abuse in lawsuits
“Soon after he started working on the assembly line at Tesla, Jorge Ferro said he was taunted for being gay and threatened with violence. “Watch your back,” a supervisor warned after mocking his clothes for being “gay tight”, Ferro said.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/19/tesla-factory-workers-discrimination-claim-race-lgbt-elon-musk
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Can hydrogen solve the energy crisis?
Recently, Ballard hosted the Fuel Cell Electric Bus Conference Event in Copenhagen, Denmark in partnership with Nel Hydrogen, Hydrogen Valley, the Danish Hydrogen Association, and Solaris Bus & Coach.
After the event, we had the opportunity to sit down with Jacob Krogsgaard, Head of Nel Hydrogen Solutions to discuss Nel’s role in the current growth and future of hydrogen technology.
Nel Hydrogen Solutions is an organization dedicated to providing optimal production, storage, and distribution solutions for hydrogen made from renewable energy. Mr. Krogsgaard is also one of the co-founders of H2 Logic.
Q & A with Jacob Krogsgaard on the Latest Developments in Hydrogen Distribution Technology
What is Nel Hydrogen’s reason for being?
Nel’s ambition is to make hydrogen fuel that is both zero-emission and zero-compromise. Zero-emission is the standard by which all future vehicles should be designed. True zero-compromise means the hydrogen is produced from renewable sources. That’s what we are doing in the majority of the projects we are involved with.
Can you tell us about the hydrogen products that Nel offers?
Nel focuses on producing electrolysers and hydrogen stations. Naturally these two products go hand in hand. Electrolysers take electricity and produce hydrogen out of it. Hydrogen stations compress, store, and control gas before it gets fuelled into cars, buses, trucks, or trains.
Nel is the world’s largest manufacturer of electrolysers. We typically include and build them right next to the renewable energy sources or connect them to the electrical grid, where they can operate when the grid has electricity.
An example of this is a 20-megawatt electrolyser we are working on in Denmark that will be grid connected. The Public Service Obligation (PSO), a national entity that is in charge of balancing the electrical grid, will be sending signals letting us know when to turn the electrolyser on and off depending on how much wind power there is in the grid. Basically, that is the greenest you can do it.
How can hydrogen help address the availability and efficiency challenges of wind energy?
In Denmark, almost 50% of all electricity comes from wind power. However, the energy that can be captured from wind fluctuates throughout the year. When the wind is blowing, there can be more than 100% availability but much of that energy might not be captured, resulting in an inefficiency in harvesting it.
When the wind is not blowing, we have a deficit, and we then have to buy the energy from our neighbouring countries. Having the possibility of taking the surplus electricity, converting it into a green fuel as energy storage, and then using that zero emission fuel to power transportation and industry creates real value to the existing infrastructure.
That is exactly what we are doing.
If someone installs a hydrogen system, are there limitations to the capacity that you can provide in a day?
Yes, of course there are limitations to the system. A fuel cell is rated for the number of kilowatts per hour. Our fuelling stations are typically rated in a number called kilograms of hydrogen produced per day. You have different sizes of fuel generation stations depending on what you need them for.
What is the capacity of a system you would install at a transit system fuel depot? How many buses or vehicles can it support?
That would be on a kilogram per day basis, and that converts to buses. Somewhere around 20 to 30 kilograms per bus multiplied by the number of buses. The smallest unit we have for transit agencies is for fleets of 10+ buses per day and then we scale up from there.
To some extent, it also depends on the fuelling protocol of the bus operator. If they want to fuel all of the buses one after another, they would need a bigger station. If they are able to have a gap of 15 to 20 minutes between fuelling, a smaller station would work out.
The way it works is that you have a station with compression, cooling, and control. You can imagine that whenever you are done with a fill, there is a buffer that needs to be refilled.
The compressor is running to fill the buffer and the quicker you need bus number two to arrive, the quicker you need your buffer to be filled and that increases your capacity. That is the simplified version but there are many more details behind it.
What changes need to occur in the industry to make hydrogen more viable as a fuel?
To enable hydrogen technology to become more viable, we need to:
Make large scale, centralized electrolysers
Distribute the fuel from the electrolysers to the points where hydrogen stations are located
Fuel the hydrogen into a fleet of fuel cell electric vehicles.
To make this possible, we will also need to achieve ‘fossil parity’. In the solar industry, they use the term ‘grid parity’. This is the point where solar energy produced will be on-parity with the price of the electricity accessed from the grid. The big question is: “How can we hit fossil fuel parity?”
This happens when hydrogen fuel has the same cost per kilometer as diesel and/or gasoline. Currently, the fossil parity cost is five euros per kilogram of hydrogen in Europe – and this is exactly what Nel Hydrogen Solutions is aiming to achieve.
What are some of the challenges you are encountering as this technology gets built out?
The greatest challenge is not the technology, because that is proven. The fuel cells, fuelling stations, and electrolysers are all proven. The issue is the volume. What we are missing is the scale for business – we need to scale and convince partners.
Demonstration is fantastic, but we need to step out of the shade beyond demonstration and into commercialization. We need to talk about buses in the 100’s, not in 10’s. This will change everything.
The H2 Mobility and Consortium has a plan to build a German-wide network of hydrogen refuelling stations by 2020. Can you speak to this initiative and how other jurisdictions can learn from what they are doing?
What they are trying to do is share the burden. Building a network of hydrogen stations while not yet having cars on the market is a costly process.
All the parties realize that it is costly. No one wants to be a first mover, because the first movers are at a disadvantage when they invest in infrastructure that is not currently being used. They need to find a way to share the burden. To do this, oil retailers, gas companies, and Mercedes have joined forces to work together in developing the infrastructure.
What other jurisdictions are establishing standards for the hydrogen economy?
What we see happening in California is very encouraging. The policy makers have implemented a zero-emission vehicle mandate. The OEM’s receive penalties if they are of a certain size and don’t provide zero emission vehicles. That is a policy that is working and actually the OEM’s are also investing in the infrastructure.
Is the same type of policy happening in Northern European Countries?
In Northern Europe, tax exemptions are available for cars. Currently, traditional gas and diesel-powered cars in Denmark and Norway have around 150% tax.
That is a lot for these types of cars, but there is actually no tax on fuel cell cars and very little tax on battery cars. However, this is still not moving the sale of cars as the manufacturers are still selling them at too high of a price.
What advice would you give to a policy maker about building out a hydrogen network, other than tax incentives at the vehicle level?
I would advise them to start putting penalties on the vehicle manufacturers, to not just talk about policies but walk the talk, like they are doing in California, Japan, and Korea.
In some places, like Ohio, there is a reasonably active fuel cell network for buses and they are actually sharing the fuelling stations with the local community of hydrogen fuel vehicles.
Getting such an infrastructure up and running then has a domino effect on the car side.
Basically hydrogen will be available and the station owners do not need to wait for a long time, because stations are utilized for cars and you can potentially use the same stations for both cars and buses.
We are building two of those right now:
In Riga, Latvia for both buses and cars.
One in Troindheim, Norway for trucks, cars and forklifts
And as hydrogen technology evolves, we are going to see increased demand, more vehicles, and hopefully the network will become further developed. When we get to that point, we will be happy. Competition will start, and the right market forces will come into play. We can then stop bugging politicians to get support and will be able to run a commercialized business. That’s where we all want to get.
Your future is in the hydrogen economy. What are your predictions for the growth of your company and growth of the hydrogen market?
So we have talked about fuel cell cars, and that’s all fine, but that’s not what’s going to make the business grow. What will is the heavy-duty industry – buses and trucks. Because there we can have sufficient volume and quantity that can make the business fly much faster.
By focusing on heavy-duty vehicles, especially buses, we can hit critical mass. We have bus manufacturers that are motivated to run, not just in Europe, but in Asia and to some extent in the US. Some of these are city buses that drive in the inner cities, where we have issues with emissions and particles. So that is actually putting the efforts where they are needed the most.
Any final thoughts?
We have known Ballard for more than 12 years, and we are completely aligned on what we are doing. We are dedicated and hydrogen is our business – not that there are many of our kind of company around.
Ballard wants to make fuel cells and fuel cell systems work, along with the vehicles, while making them as cheap as possible to further commercialization. And Nel does the same with fuelling. While we have recently joined forces, we can see that together we are thinking big, not small. Think big and the hydrogen business will work. Think small, and the hydrogen business will die.
Saludos
el mar
Denmark is a tiny country. The intermittent wind is not self-supporting, but has been driving other producers out of business. The whole system requires a lot of subsidies.
I would be very surprised if the hydrogen system doesn’t require a whole lot more subsidies.
Simple answer to your question is no. Hydrogen isn’t a source of power it is a net energy sink.
Hydrogen needs a lot of external energy for its containment. Fossil fuels can be stored very easily, i.e. with low costs.
Methanol is more viable than hydrogen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol_economy
https://phys.org/news/2016-01-carbon-dioxide-captured-air-methanol.html
However, as we deplete the uranium, which has got the highest energy density as energy storage material, the storage using methanol would be much less effiecient.
http://carbonrecycling.is/george-olah/2016/2/14/worlds-largest-co2-methanol-plant
Also, there seems to be a high dropout rate between (1) Ideas people come up with, and (2) Ideas that can be installed in an economic manner, in a reasonable timeframe.
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
– Voltairehttp://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-21/first-amendment-under-serious-assault-order-stifle-anti-israel-boycotts
There was another story about a bill proposed in Congress recently which would impose both civil and criminal penalties against citizens supporting an Israeli boycott. The sponsors of the bill were not aware of the penalties proposed, up to $1MM in fines and some jail time on the criminal side.
So where to invest?
Well, dance lessons are one area, FE various bucket lists are another. FE should be ecstatic now that NZ is going completely carbon free/neutral, we are saved. So for those of us who are mature and not in carbon free NZ, consider MN, good old USA where on a space available basis at any of the state schools including UM we can take classes for $20/credit! Take math, take physics, take engineering, there are always openings. So many opportunities, so little time.
AND, Minneapolis has a light rail line, goes right down the street from a little place we have to make walking to dance lessons easier, us older folks can take a carbon free light rail to class. So dance(art), science and a carbon free lifestyle right here in the good old USA. Combine that with medicare(we seniors want the government to keep there hands off our medicare) and it is a wonderful life.
Maybe a bit light hearted, but no sarcasm, it is still a beautiful world. If you are young there is the greatest gift of all, time. If it does end, so what, you will have wonderful memories of a life well lived.
Dennis L.
Also, there are a lot of people of Norwegian background in Minnesota. I have quite a few relatives there, and went to college there.
Swedes too, I too, got relatives over there.
As the WSJ notes, this latest backdoor bailout:
“It is a sharp illustration of China’s economy under President Xi Jinping and the economic challenges he will face as he renews his 5-year term at a twice-a-decade Communist Party Congress that opens on Wednesday.”
Rosealea Yao from Gavekal Dragonomics, who was also quoted above, wrote that “the government’s creativity in coming up with new ways of supporting the housing market is impressive—but it’s also an indication that it still depends on housing for growth.”
While traditionally, China’s government used to build homes for families who lost theirs to development or decay, last year, local governments, from the northeast rust belt to the city of Bengbu with 3.7 million amid the croplands of central Anhui province, spent more than $100 billion to buy housing from developers or subsidize purchases, according to Gavekal Dragonomics.
In other words, the reason why China no longer has ghost cities is because the government is buying them in just as concerning, “ghostly” transcations.
The underlying structure is yet another typically-Chinese ponzi scheme:
Underpinning the strategy is a cycle of debt. Cities borrow from state banks for purchases and subsidies, then sell more land to developers to repay the loans. As developers build more housing, they, too, accrue more debt, setting up the state to bail them out again. The burden on the state rises, as does the risk of collapse.
What is astounring, is that while the government has tried other ways of filling apartments, such as offering cash subsidies to encourage rural migrants to buy in urban areas, the program is the first large-scale case of the government becoming a home buyer itself. In May, Lu Kehua, China’s deputy housing minister, said the program has “played a positive role in steady economic growth,” and called for a push to clear housing inventory as early as possible, according to an article by the official Xinhua News Agency.
Well, of course, it’s played a “positive role” – when the government itself is buying half the units it bought (see chart above), what can possibly go wrong? Well, pretty much everything if the housing market is once again headed lower and with the explicit backing and funding of the Chinese government.
Some more fascinating details on how China fooled the world into believing back in 2014 that its recently burst housing bubble had “smoothly landed” and was again recovering:
Three years ago, Bengbu’s housing prices were falling. Housing inventory in 2014 would have taken almost five years to fill at the pace of sales at the time, said Shanghai-based research firm E-House China R&D Institute. Around the same time, the Bengbu government began to gobble up homes, and it has continued to do so. The city said it bought nearly 6,000 apartments from developers last year.
Housing stock in Bengbu was down to four months in September, a city official overseeing the government program said in September. Home prices had increased by 15% in August from a year earlier. That exceeded the 8.2% growth across a benchmark of 70 cities compiled by the national statistics agency.
Beijing and Shanghai residents are used to such price surges, but it is unusual in a smaller Chinese city lacking any particular tourism or job-market appeal.
Naturally, China would rather not have details of its latest bailout program spread too far:
Bengbu officials are wary about publicizing its hand in the market for fear of driving up prices and speculative buying. “We don’t mention it as much now as in the past two years,” the city official in charge of the program said. “Prices have been fluctuating a lot, and it’s a little bit out of control.”
Since the launch of the program, which is an explicit subsidy to Chinese real-estate developers who are directly selling to the government, things have predictably normalized. In fact, the outcome has been a little too frothy:
In 2015, groups of families on government-organized apartment tours started showing up, said Ding Qian, a planner at the developer, Bengbu Mingyuan Real Estate Development. By October 2016, the developer had sold 20 blocks of finished apartments, about 10% of them paid for with government funds, Ms. Ding said.
“We have run out of apartments to sell,” she said. The developer has sped up construction of 42 new blocks, about 4,000 apartments, and has raised prices by 40%.
All thanks to the government, which is lending to local governments to avoid the impression it is directly involved in bailing out China’s “wealth effect”:
The Bengbu official in charge of the program declined to disclose details about the city’s apartment purchases, but said the city had borrowed 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) of the 19 billion yuan of available credit extended by China Development Bank for housing purchases and subsidies.
Local governments in 2016 borrowed 972.5 billion yuan from the bank, the government’s main housing lender, nine times the level three years earlier, according to E-House China R&D Institute, which compiled data from official bank and government websites. More than half of last year’s loans went to purchases or subsidized buying, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The rest of the loans funded housing projects built by the government.
What is most firghtening, is that despite the decline in property sales, the government’s role in the housing market continues to grow according to the WSJ, and here is a stunning statistic: Of all the residential floor space sold in China last year, 18% was purchased by government entities or with state subsidies, E-House China determined from official government data. The share could reach 24% this year, the firm said.
To paraphrase: Beijing is now the (covert) marginal buyer of a quarter of all Chinese real estate. That, in itself, is a mindblowing statistic. What is scarier, is that despite this implicit backstop, property sales are once again declining after 30 months of increases.
One can only imagine the epic crash that would ensure at this moment, if – for some reason – the government bid were to be pulled, and just how spectacular the ensuing global depression would be as the rug is pulled from below the middle class of the world’s fastest growing economy.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-21/unprecedented-housing-bailout-revealed-china-property-sales-drop-first-time-30-month
CBs are buying up everything …
As the companies are not able to borrow and pay back, so the CBs simply create capital as needed.
But can there be capitalism, when there are no profits?
In Slovakia, the state used to give the flats for free to the energy poor Roma people. As they had no money for heating, the first thing they did were burning the parquetry flooring.
The need for heating of the empty flats in the cold areas to preserve them from damage will make the scheme of the state bought apartments tumble down.
Of course you have to remove the parquet floor – how could you otherwise grow potatoes?
Potatoes could be stolen from the farmers fields, but surviving the winter is the biggest challenge…
Gahaha… Roma prejudices worse than our ahab prejudices :/
No prejudices, it was and even is the reality of the life in the eastern part of Slovakia. When somebody does not have money for firewood or food, the only way he can get them is to steal… And Roma populations just did not catch with the technological advances, so they remained mostly manual workers that are not so much needed anymore due to the low purchasing power of the same populations they are part of or they are poorly paid…
Roma version of coppicing?
I can’t imagine our romas doing anything like that. It seems like an awful lot of work.
Thanks! I thought I had read that even a higher percentage of homes than 24% was being purchased by the Chinese government. Whatever it is, it is huge. These people will need jobs, paying high enough wages, in order to afford these homes.
Democracy can not survive overpopulation. Human dignity can not survive it. Convenience and decency can not survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. It doesn’t matter if someone dies. The more people there are, the less one individual matters.
-Isaac Asimov
Worlds Largest Mining Company BHP is Exiting U.S. Shale
https://www.upi.com/Energy-News/2017/10/18/BHP-Billiton-exiting-US-shale/3571508318297/
Perhaps they see the writing on the wall. From the article, it doesn’t look like they were a big player.
THE SECRETIVE FAMILY MAKING BILLIONS FROM THE OPIOID CRISIS
You’re aware America is under siege, fighting an opioid crisis that has exploded into a public-health emergency. You’ve heard of OxyContin, the pain medication to which countless patients have become addicted. But do you know that the company that makes Oxy and reaps the billions of dollars in profits it generates is owned by one family?
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin/
We just get our dopamine hits in other manners in our Consumer fantasy world of BAU.
https://youtu.be/norgGck1LfM?t=1h6m50s
Richard Sackler is seated at a dinner party and the guest next to him says — so what do you do?
Well — basically I make billions by addicting millions of people – and unfortunately killing some of them — to a heroin derivative product called Oxycontin — perhaps you have heard of it? And then I donate some of the money to various initiatives that carry my family name and provide me with an aura of respectability.
Oh how wonderful!
This is one of the places where things went wrong (according to your link):
“In 1986, two doctors from Memorial Sloan Kettering hospital in New York published a fateful article in a medical journal that purported to show, based on a study of thirty-eight patients, that long-term opioid treatment was safe and effective so long as patients had no history of drug abuse. Soon enough, opioid advocates dredged up a letter to the editor published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 that suggested, based on a highly unrepresentative cohort, that the risk of addiction from long-term opioid use was less than 1 percent. Though ultimately disavowed by its author, the letter ended up getting cited in medical journals more than six hundred times.”
Everyone assumed it was safe, but it really wasn’t.
Gail, here’s an interesting stat. It will take approximately 2 million tonnes of silver to create 7,000 gigawatts of PV.
https://kingworldnews.com/silver-shock-energy-watch-group-believes-a-staggering-2-million-tonnes-of-silver-will-be-needed-for-solar/
Wonder how much more silver will be needed to convert all the transportation infrastructure to electric?
The first (and thanks God) only wind park in Slovakia, put into operation in 2003, that I could see today from a different perspecitve from the oposite hill, visiting the wedding of my relatives:
http://www.obeccerova.sk/wp-content/uploads/IMG_06851-1024×682.jpg
Our problem is not how much wind turbines or fotovoltaic panels can be installed, but how much energy can be stored. Anyway, we could charge our batteries even from lightnings:
http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/Documents/lightning-wpod.jpg
The storms with lightnings are now more common, also during the spring or autumn, as was not usual before. So, why not use the klima change for our benefit?
yes, and those very high voltages could provide the means to bring life back into dead tissue. worked once, a long time ago out your way.
Lightning is like supercharger – we just need the batterries… JUST…
Hey, Elon, where are you? Are you just solving the biggest problem, namely, that you are not able to produce batteries for your Tesla Model 3 fast enough?
That is an idea! If we don’t need constant energy, let’s just use lightening bolts!
http://78.media.tumblr.com/565e50305c7375bd6e38c371a5ad6d39/tumblr_oxwt5nxcR51u1sr1lo1_500.jpg