Economists, including Ben Bernanke, give all kinds of reasons for the Great Depression of the 1930s. But what if the real reason for the Great Depression was an energy crisis?
When I put together a chart of per capita energy consumption since 1820 for a post back in 2012, there was a strange “flat spot” in the period between 1920 and 1940. When we look at the underlying data, we see that coal production was starting to decline in some of the major coal producing parts of the world at that time. From the point of view of people living at the time, the situation might have looked very much like peak energy consumption, at least on a per capita basis.
Figure 1. World Energy Consumption by Source, based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects (Appendix) together with BP Statistical Data for 1965 and subsequent, divided by population estimates by Angus Maddison.
Even back in the 1820 to 1900 period, world per capita energy had gradually risen as an increasing amount of coal was used. We know that going back a very long time, the use of water and wind had never amounted to very much (Figure 2) compared to burned biomass and coal, in terms of energy produced. Humans and draft animals were also relatively low in energy production. Because of its great heat-producing ability, coal quickly became the dominant fuel.
Figure 2. Annual energy consumption per head (megajoules) in England and Wales during the period 1561-70 to 1850-9 and in Italy from 1861-70. Figure by Wrigley
In general, we know that energy products, including coal, are necessary to enable processes that contribute to economic growth. Heat is needed for almost all industrial processes. Transportation needs energy products of one kind or another. Building roads and homes requires energy products. It is not surprising that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, with its use of coal.
We also know that there is a long-term correlation between world GDP growth and energy consumption.
Figure 3. X-Y graph of world energy consumption (from BP Statistical Review of World Energy, 2017) versus world GDP in 2010 US$, from World Bank.
The “flat period” in 1920-1940 in Figure 1 was likely problematic. The economy is a self-organized networked system; what was wrong could be expected to appear in many parts of the economy. Economic growth was likely far too low. The chance for conflict among nations was much higher because of stresses in the system–there was not really enough coal to go around. These stresses could extend to the period immediately before 1920 and after 1940, as well.
A Peak in Coal Production Hit the UK, United States, and Germany at Close to the Same Time
This is a coal supply chart for the UK. Its peak coal production (which was an all time peak) was in 1913. The UK was the largest coal producer in Europe at the time.
Figure 4. United Kingdom coal production since 1855, in a href=”http://www.davidstrahan.com/blog/?p=116″>figure by David Strahan. First published in New Scientist, 17 January 2008.
The United States hit a peak in its production only five years later, in 1918. This peak was only a “local” peak. There were also later peaks, in 1947 and 2008, after coal production was developed in new areas of the country.
Figure 5. US coal production, in Wikipedia exhibit by contributor Plazak.
By type, US coal production is as shown on Figure 6.
Figure 6. US coal production by type, in Wikipedia exhibit by contributor Plazak.
Evidently, the highest quality coal, Anthracite, reached a peak and began to decline about 1918. Bituminous coal hit a peak about the same time, and dropped way back in production during the 1930s. The poorer quality coals were added later, as the better-quality coals became less abundant.
The pattern for Germany’s hard coal shows a pattern somewhat in between the UK and the US pattern.
Figure 7. Source GBR.
Germany too had a peak during World War I, then dropped back for several years. It then had three later peaks, the highest one during World War II.
What Affects Coal Production?
If there is a shortage of coal, fixing it is not as simple as “inadequate coal supply leads to higher price,” quickly followed by “higher price leads to more production.” Clearly the amount of coal resource in the ground affects the amount of coal extraction, but other things do as well.
[1] The amount of built infrastructure for taking the coal out and delivering the coal. Usually, a country only adds a little coal extraction capacity at a time and leaves the rest in the ground. (This is how the US and Germany could have temporary coal peaks, which were later surpassed by higher peaks.) To add more extraction capacity, it is necessary to add (a) investment needed for getting the coal out of the ground as well as (b) infrastructure for delivering coal to potential users. This includes things like trains and tracks, and export terminals for coal transported by boats.
[2] Prices available in the marketplace for coal. These fluctuate widely. We will discuss this more in a later section. Clearly, the higher the price, the greater the quantity of coal that can be extracted and delivered to users.
[3] The cost of extraction, both in existing locations and in new locations. These costs can perhaps be reduced if it is possible to add new technology. At the same time, there is a tendency for costs within a given mine to increase over time, as it becomes necessary to access deeper, thinner seams. Also, mines tend to be built in the most convenient locations first, with best access to transportation. New mines very often will be higher cost, when these factors are considered.
[4] The cost and availability of capital (shares of stock and sale of debt) needed for building new infrastructure, and for building new devices made possible by new technology. These are affected by interest rates and tax levels.
[5] Time lags needed to implement changes. New infrastructure and new technology are likely to take several years to implement.
[6] The extent to which wages can be recycled into demand for energy products. An economy needs to have buyers for the products it makes. If a large share of the workers in an economy is very low-paid, this creates a problem.
If there is an energy shortage, many people think of the shortage as causing high prices. In fact, the shortage is at least equally likely to cause greater wage disparity. This might also be considered a shortage of jobs that pay well. Without jobs that pay well, would-be workers find it hard to purchase the many goods and services created by the economy (such as homes, cars, food, clothing, and advanced education). For example, young adults may live with their parents longer, and elderly people may move in with their children.
The lack of jobs that pay well tends to hold down “demand” for goods made with commodities, and thus tends to bring down commodity prices. This problem happened in the 1930s and is happening again today. The problem is an affordability problem, but it is sometimes referred to as “low demand.” Workers with inadequate wages cannot afford to buy the goods made by the economy. There may be a glut of a commodity (food, or oil, or coal), and commodity prices that fall far below what producers need to make a profit.
Figure 8. U.S. Income Shares of Top 10% and Top 1%, Wikipedia exhibit by Piketty and Saez.
The Fluctuating Nature of Commodity Prices
I have noted in the past that fossil fuel prices tend to move together. This is what we would expect, if affordability is a major issue, and affordability changes over time.
Figure 9. Price per ton of oil equivalent, based on comparative prices for oil, natural gas, and coal given in BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Not inflation adjusted.
We would expect metal prices to follow fossil fuel prices, because fossil fuels are used in the extraction of ores of all kinds. Investment strategist Jeremy Grantham (and his company GMO) noted this correlation among commodity prices, and put together an index of commodity prices back to 1900.
Figure 10. GMO Commodity Index 1900 to 2011, from GMO April 2011 Quarterly Letter. “The Great Paradigm Shift,” shown at the end is not really the correct explanation, something now admitted by Grantham. If the graph were extended beyond 2010, it would show high prices in 2010 to 2013. Prices would fall to a much lower level in 2014 to 2017.
Reason for the Spikes in Prices. As we will see in the next few paragraphs, the spikes in prices generally arise in situations in which everyday goods (food, homes, clothing, transportation) suddenly became more affordable to “non-elite” workers. These are workers who are not highly educated, and are not in supervisory positions. These spikes in prices don’t generally “come about” by themselves; instead, they are engineered by governments, trying to stimulate the economy.
In both the World War I and World War II price spikes, governments greatly raised their debt levels to fund the war efforts. Some of this debt likely went directly into demand for commodities, such as to make more bombs, and to operate tanks, and thus tended to raise commodity prices. In addition, quite a bit of the debt indirectly led to more employment during the period of the war. For example, women who were not in the workforce were hired to take jobs that had been previously handled by men who were now part of the war effort. (These women were new non-elite workers.) Their earnings helped raise demand for goods and services of all kinds, and thus commodity prices.
The 2008 price spike was caused (at least in part) by a US housing-related debt bubble. Interest rates were lowered in the early 2000s to stimulate the economy. Also, banks were encouraged to lend to people who did not seem to meet usual underwriting standards. The additional demand for houses raised prices. Homeowners, wishing to cash in on the new higher prices for their homes, could refinance their loans and withdraw the cash related to the new higher prices. They could use the funds withdrawn to buy goods such as a new car or a remodeled basement. These withdrawn funds indirectly supplemented the earnings of non-elite workers (as did the lower interest rate on new borrowing).
The 2011-2014 spike was caused by the extremely low interest rates made possible by Quantitative Easing. These low interest rates made the buying of homes and cars more affordable to all buyers, including non-elite workers. When the US discontinued its QE program in 2014, the US dollar rose relative to many other currencies, making oil and other fuels relatively more expensive to workers outside the US. These higher costs reduced the demand for fuels, and dropped fuel prices back down again.
Figure 11. Monthly Brent oil prices with dates of US beginning and ending QE.
The run-up in oil prices (and other commodity prices) in the 1970s is widely attributed to US oil production peaking, but I think that the rapid run-up in prices was enabled by the rapid wage run-up of the period (Figure 12 below).
Figure 12. Growth in US wages versus increase in CPI Urban. Wages are total “Wages and Salaries” from US Bureau of Economic Analysis. CPI-Urban is from US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Opposing Force: Energy prices need to fall, if the economy is to grow. All of these upward swings in prices can be at most temporary changes to the long-term downward trend in prices. Let’s think about why.
An economy needs to grow. To do so, it needs an increasing supply of commodities, particularly energy commodities. This can only happen if energy prices are trending lower. These lower prices enable the purchase of greater supply. We can see this in the results of some academic papers. For example, Roger Fouquet shows that it is not the cost of energy, per se, that drops over time. Rather, it is the cost of energy services that declines.
Figure 13. Total Cost of Energy and Energy Services, by Roger Fouquet, from Divergences in Long Run Trends in the Prices of Energy and Energy Services.
Energy services include changes in efficiency, besides energy costs themselves. Thus, Fouquet is looking at the cost of heating a home, or the cost of electrical services, or the cost of transportation services, in inflation-adjusted units.
Robert Ayres and Benjamin Warr show a similar result, related to electricity. They also show that usage tends to rise, as prices fall.
Figure 14. Ayres and Warr Electricity Prices and Electricity Demand, from “Accounting for growth: the role of physical work.”
Ultimately, we know that the growth in energy consumption tends to rise at close to the same rate as the growth in GDP. To keep energy consumption rising, it is helpful if the cost of energy services is falling.
Figure 15. World GDP growth compared to world energy consumption growth for selected time periods since 1820. World real GDP trends for 1975 to present are based on USDA real GDP data in 2010$ for 1975 and subsequent. (Estimated by author for 2015.) GDP estimates for prior to 1975 are based on Maddison project updates as of 2013. Growth in the use of energy products is based on a combination of data from Appendix A data from Vaclav Smil’s Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects together with BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015 for 1965 and subsequent.
How the Economic Growth Pump Works
There seems to be a widespread belief, “We pay each other’s wages.” If this is all that there is to economic growth, all that is needed to make the economy grow faster is for each of us to sell more services to each other (cut each other’s hair more often, or give each other back rubs, and charge for them). I think this story is very incomplete.
The real story is that energy products can be used to leverage human labor. For example, it is inefficient for a human to walk to deliver goods to customers. If a human can drive a truck instead, it leverages his ability to deliver goods. The more leveraging that is available for human labor, the more goods and services that can be produced in total, and the higher inflation-adjusted wages can be. This increased leveraging of human labor allows inflation-adjusted wages to rise. Some might call this result, “a higher return on human labor.”
These higher wages need to go back to the non-elite workers, in order to keep the growth-pump operating. With higher-wages, these workers can afford to buy goods and services made with commodities, such as homes, cars, and food. They can also heat their homes and operate their vehicles. These wages help maintain the demand needed to keep commodity prices high enough to encourage more commodity production.
Raising wages for elite workers (such as managers and those with advanced education), or paying more in dividends to shareholders, doesn’t have the same effect. These individuals likely already have enough money to buy the necessities of life. They may use the extra income to buy shares of stock or bonds to save for retirement, or they may buy services (such as investment advice) that require little use of energy.
The belief, “We pay each other’s wages,” becomes increasingly false, if wages and wealth are concentrated in the hands of relatively few. For example, poor people become unable to afford doctors’ visits, even with insurance, if wage disparity becomes too great. It is only when wages are fairly equal that all can afford a wide range of services provided by others in the economy.
What Went Wrong in 1920 to 1940?
Very clearly, the first thing that went wrong was the peaking of UK coal production in 1913. Even before 1913, there were pressures coming from the higher cost of coal production, as mines became more depleted. In 1912, there was a 37-day national coal strike protesting the low wages of workers. Evidently, as extraction was becoming more difficult, coal prices were not able to rise sufficiently to cover all costs, and miners’ wages were suffering. The debt for World War I seems to have helped raise commodity prices to allow wages to be somewhat higher, even if coal production did not return to its previous level.
Suicide rates seem to behave inversely compared to earning power of non-elite workers. A study of suicide rates in England and Wales shows that these were increasing prior to World War I. This is what we would expect, if coal was becoming increasingly difficult to extract, and because of this, the returns for everyone, from owners to workers, was low.
Figure 16. Suicide rates in England and Wales 1861-2007 by Kyla Thomas and David Gunnell from International Journal of Epidemiology, 2010.
World War I, with its increased debt (which was in part used for more wages), helped the situation temporarily. But after World War I, the Great Depression set in, and with it, much higher suicide rates.
The Great Depression is the kind of result we would expect if the UK no longer had enough coal to make the goods and services it had made previously. The lower production of goods and services would likely be paired with fewer jobs that paid well. In such a situation, it is not surprising that suicide rates rose. Suicide rates decreased greatly with World War II, and with all of the associated borrowing.
Looking more at what happened in the 1920 to 1940 period, Ugo Bardi tells us that prior to World War I, the UK exported coal to Italy. With falling coal production, the UK could no longer maintain those exports after World War I. This worsened relations with Italy, because Italy needed coal imported from the UK to rebuild after the war. Ultimately, Italy aligned with Germany because Germany still had coal available to export. This set up the alliance for World War II.
Looking at the US, we see that World War I caused favorable conditions for exports, because with all of the fighting, Europe needed to import more goods (including food) from the United States. After the war ended in 1918, European demand was suddenly lower, and US commodity prices fell. American farmers found their incomes squeezed. As a result, they cut back on buying goods of many kinds, hurting the US economy.
One analysis of the economy of the 1920s tells us that from 1920 to 1921, farm prices fell at a catastrophic rate. “The price of wheat, the staple crop of the Great Plains, fell by almost half. The price of cotton, still the lifeblood of the South, fell by three-quarters. Farmers, many of whom had taken out loans to increase acreage and buy efficient new agricultural machines like tractors, suddenly couldn’t make their payments.”
In 1943, M. King Hubbert offered the view that all-time employment had peaked in 1920, except to the extent that it was jacked up by unusual means, such as war. In fact, some historical data shows that for four major industries combined (foundries, meat packing, paper, and printing), the employment index rose from 100 in 1914, to 157 in 1920. By September 1921, the employment index had fallen back to 89. The peak coal problem of the UK had been exported to the US as low commodity prices and low employment.
It was not until the huge amount of debt related to World War II that the world economy could be stimulated enough so that total energy production per capita could continue to rise. The use of oil especially became much greater starting after World War II. It was the availability of cheap oil that allowed the world economy to grow again.
Figure 17. Per capita energy consumption by fuel, separately for several energy sources, using the same data as in Figure 1.
The stimulus of all the debt-enabled spending for World War II seems to have been what finally encouraged the production of the oil needed to pull the world economy out of the problems it was having. GDP and Disposable Personal Income could again rise (Figure 18.)
Figure 18. Comparison of 3-year average change in disposable personal income with 3-year change average in GDP, based on US BEA Tables 1.1.5 and 2.1.
Furthermore, total per capita energy consumption began to rise, with growing oil consumption (Figure 1). This growth in energy consumption per capita seems to be what allows the world economy to grow.
I might note that there is one other exceptional period: 1980 to 2000. Space does not allow for an explanation of the situation here, but falling per capita energy consumption seems to have led to the collapse of the former Soviet Union in 1991. This was a different situation, caused by lower oil consumption related to efficiency gains. This was a situation of an oil producer being “squeezed out” because additional oil was not needed at that time. This is an example of a different type of economic disruption caused by flat per capita energy consumption.
Figure 19. World per Capita Energy Consumption with two circles relating to flat consumption. World Energy Consumption by Source, based on Vaclav Smil estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects (Appendix) together with BP Statistical Data for 1965 and subsequent, divided by population estimates by Angus Maddison.
Conclusion
There have been many views put forth about what caused the Depression of the 1930s. To my knowledge, no one has put forth the explanation that the Depression was caused by Peak Coal in 1913 in the UK, and a lack of other energy supplies that were growing rapidly enough to make up for this loss. As the UK “exported” this problem around the world, it led to greater wage disparity. US farmers were especially affected; their incomes often dropped below the level needed for families to buy the necessities of life.
The issue, as I have discussed in previous posts, is a physics issue. Creating GDP requires energy; when not enough energy (often fossil fuels) is available, the economy tends to “freeze out” the most vulnerable. Often, it does this by increased wage disparity. The people at the top of the hierarchy still have plenty. It is the people at the bottom who find themselves purchasing less and less. Because there are so many people at the bottom of the hierarchy, their lower purchasing power tends to pull the system down.
In the past, the way to get around inadequate wages for those at the bottom of the hierarchy has been to issue more debt. Some of this debt helps add more wages for non-elite workers, so it helps fix the affordability problem.
Figure 20. Three-year average percent increase in debt compared to three year average percent increase in non-government wages, including proprietors’ income, which I call my wage base.
At this time, we seem to be reaching the point where, even with more debt, we are running out of cheap energy to add to the system. When this happens, the economic system seems more prone to fracture. Ugo Bardi calls the situation “reaching the inflection point in a Seneca Cliff.”
Figure 21. Seneca Cliff by Ugo Bardi
We were very close to the inflection point in the 1930s. We were very close to that point in 2008. We seem to be getting close to that point again now. The model of the 1930s gives us an indication regarding what to expect: apparent surpluses of commodities of all types; commodity prices that are too low; a lack of jobs, especially ones that pay an adequate wage; collapsing financial institutions. This is close to the opposite of what many people assume that peak oil will look like. But it may be a better representation of what we really should expect.
my Some predictions of 2018;
1. gfc 2 will start after fed increase interest rate to two percent
2.sears usa will become bankrupt
3.one of the biggest city in south africa will have no water http://www.howmanydaysofwaterdoescapetownhaveleft.co.za/
4.lebanon will have war with israel
5.hsbc report will be correct on oil prices that it will go to 75-80 dollar
Oil production also was flat during the 1920s. That suggests to me that oil was nowhere near as disruptive as you claim it was.
Correct, the coal story as presented by Gail is the historical reality, each industrial site (big, medium, even smaller ones) usually had rail connection via own dedicated cargo track to the wider “scheduled” national rail network, this mostly disappeared in later decades thanks to build up of the oil based highway system and cities growing past former industrial sites. Personal cars and lorries were still in their infancy as possibly dominant mode of hauling stuff before and early post WWII decades..
the status quo—ie medieval peasantry was disrupted when a fire was lit under the first steam engine boiler
when that fire is finally extinguished, then we will return to the status quo that was
Excellent short summary.
Now in next step, it’s not that hard to figure out where to copycat historically better chances to bolt down for the rough times ahead, given knowledge about past collapses and abrupt socioeconomic reshuffles. I repeat merely increasing chances against the more unfortunate, no guarantees obviously, this is likely species extinction time, but even that takes several generations to proceed..
How could we take several generations to self extinct?
If IC collapses we lose it forever.
Without IC we can’t self extinct.
We have to self extinct before IC collapses.
Can we drag this out several generations without collapsing and without deindustrialising?
deindustrialisation will happen without our conscious efforts
it will happen when there’s nothing to drive it forward and keep it going
Yes, and if it happens quickly maybe we get Eddys nuclear pond thing, or some great leader decides to take everything down with him.
All other paths should lead to a die-off between 80 and 99%, leaving the survivors incapable of restarting IC.
I’d only add that it began a little bit earlier, there was enormous leverage shift in late Medieval – Renaissance period thanks to metallurgy-mining advances, that’s when agriculture/forestry/pre industries started to take off albeit slowly (per capita) with many of the same effects later seen through much larger leverage applied during the steam engine age….
civilisation functions by converting explosive force into rotary motion
strip away all the windowdresing, and that’s all there is i’m afraid
industrialised civilisation that is
Oil was also very low priced in the 1920s, suggesting that the “demand” wasn’t there yet. Farmers were so poorly compensated, they could not afford new machinery, even if it became available.
oil is useless until it is put to work
ww2 was the ultimate use for oil
Something that I think is missing from the peak coal depression narrative is the fact that coal lost its place as a transportation fuel. Correlation is not causation. By introducing oil as the new transportation fuel it gutted the coal industry. Oil also has a very high EROEI compared to coal particularly at that time. It also has a lot more energy per pound which compounds the value by comparison.
The last US navel ship constructed to burn coal was commissioned in 1914 and was converted to oil in 1925.
So deceptively gross energy flat lined during the 1920-40 period but not necessarily net energy to the end user. Oil was at 100:1 ratios at the time. However the destruction of coal demand devastated the general economy that had been built on it. Plus the efficiency gains that oil afforded agricultural and transportation crushed prices because of over production.
Rather then an energy crisis there was a hangover created by the overheated roaring 20s.
That is a good point about oil replacing coal as the transportation fuel, although I think the replacement mostly came later. You can see that oil production did not rise to offset coal until later. This was especially true in Europe. Biofuel use (wood) was dropping rapidly during this period; coal was to a significant extent replacing this use of wood. Rising coal use would likely still be needed to stay even, even apart from the transportation, I expect. I would need to look up more detail on when autos and trucks were used. I know my brother-in-law posted a photo of a tractor that became popular during the 1930s. I expect it partly replaced steam engines, especially in the US. I think Europe used horses later.
I don’t think you mean “Oil has a very high EROEI compared to coal at that time.” I think that you mean, the cost of transportation services, when provided by coal was less expensive than transportation services provided by coal. This is basically the issue I am showing in Figure 13. EROEI is a very specific calculation that leaves out a whole lot of important things–it also equates a whole lot of very different things. It tells you nothing at all about the cost of transportation services. At most, it tells you something about the cost of energy (a different line on Figure 13).
But a drop in coal usage could lead to a drop in price, and that by itself could “mess up” the economy.
By the way, Charlie Hall does not support the 100:1 EROEI figure for oil at that time–says it only was from “finding” the oil, or some other limited aspect of oil. He thinks a standard calculation would be lower.
The efficiency of tractors in the 1930s were part of what killed jobs for farmers. There were not sufficient non-farming jobs for farmers to for them to take. The lower prices of food caused huge wage disparity. I expect the situation may have been somewhat different in Europe and the US though. In a way, the story is like adopting self-driving trucks, and putting a huge numbers of truck drivers out of work.
My simple point is oil was a disruptive technology like Amazon is to retail. The transportation of it and the delivery of it was far less energy intense than coal. The fact that the gross energy was flat doesn’t mean net was. That is a wrong assumption. Because of of efficiency gains productivity overshot demand and never return until the destructive capacity of WWII absorbed the surpluses.
“My simple point is oil was a disruptive technology like Amazon is to retail.”
Disruptive, absolutely. The problem with what has happened with Amazon (prime) is primarily one of greater efficiency than non-elite workers. The same will occur to trucking and cabbies, but also in many other areas of business robotics/automation will replace so many jobs something has to give because there won’t be enough employment for everyone. It’s at the stretching point now, and only because of low wage service jobs are people still working, but not making the kind of wage they need.
My wife and I were discussing this with another couple and the futuristic vision they had was people will need to receive a guaranteed income per month, something being tested in a couple of EU countries. However, my argument against that was we have in the US the R’s who believe that it should be a winner take all form of capitalism. Either you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps or you die in the gutter of life. That suggests the vast majority of Americans will no longer be needed. What happens then? Well, if the R’s have their way they have to die. Then the question becomes how? That’s left to speculation, but my point stands and in part because as we can see from all these discussions there are only so much energy resources. Once just a few incredibly super wealthy people own the country by way of representation in DC via lobbying, they will do a quick calculation and realize they need a strategy to get rid of most people. I don’t see a way around it. Does anyone else?
I thought even US had guaranteed food, housing, education and health care?
JH, I think that if we find ourselves (actually when we find ourselves) with robots doing work and too many poor without work, if our republic will survive, there will have to be means to help those people. Our system of elected prostitutes (both sides of the aisle) will have to deal with the damage technology is doing to jobs. Taxes on robot industries, tariffs on robotic products produced offshore etc. Especially if the entire cheap energy equation is changing. My take is that we are all in for a wild ride as things get rough.
It is hard taxing multinationals, they just move. You have to tax the remaining work force.
There is not enough “profit” in the system for everyone to get a share. That is part of what the U.S.’s lower tax rates now for corporations as about.
It is impossible to tell which products were made partly or entirely by robots. I am sure many cars today are made partly by robot. It would be impossible to obtain enough tax revenue to make up for all of the lost jobs.
If automation could replace workers on the scale and scope you suggest without any negative consequences except ‘Rs are evil’, it would have started at the beginning of this decade. Hell Amazon was around in 2010 with more or less the same tech as we have now.
The view that some scary tech will destroy everyone is based on the exact same premise as the view that some amazing tech will save everyone, viz magic.
this maybe explains the future of robotics
https://extranewsfeed.com/robots-cannot-survive-automation-f45605a58ad7
Right! They tend to collapse the system.
But AI are smart – they don’t need humans — they will simply run everything — they will replace the engineers and other skilled workers who operate the mines and smelters and factories — that are required to make new robots and replacement parts ….. they will explore the earth for new mineral and oil deposits…. they will carry out the R&D that creates new and improved robots…. and so on and on and on and on…
What we will have is a world without humans — operated by robots — for robots.
Obviously this is nonsense — to anyone with half a brain — and in any event if it were not nonsense… physics still gets ya…. when there is not enough nett energy out the back end of the energy production line — it becomes impossible to manufacture robots
We must bring an END to the discussion of AI. It is MORE on ic.
The big drop in food prices came in 1921, immediately after World War I. I can look at this more closely, but this was before oil use started ramping up very much, especially in Europe. Wage disparity was very high by 1929. It had been very high earlier (1921?) as well, according to Figure 8.
Britain clearly had permanent peak coal. This by itself was a major problem that it exported to other European countries. World War I likely was an energy-related war (as was World War II).
Oil was disruptive, but was it disruptive in Europe? I would have to look at the timing more clearly. Germany was busy using coal to liquid in World War II. If they had plenty of access to oil, would they have been doing that? Would German farmers have gotten access to oil before the German military? I don’t think so. If oil was disruptive, it was primarily disruptive in the US, at least in the early periods you are talking about.
I am putting this here as it seems as good a place as any. You are very well trained in actuarial science and thus correlations. I submit for consideration the following paper:
https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2755%20/
I referenced it earlier in this post, one of the conclusions is inflation can only be predicted 30 days in advance and that in data there are more correlations than first thought . The problem is the ease of finding meaningless patterns. There seems to be more correlation that is due to chance than one would like. Well, this is the interpretation of a so so mathematician.
Dennis L.
From your linked article, Norman:
“AI is a temporary aberration in our collective job market — -ultimately self-destructive because AI and robotic systems can only produce. It is a system with no means of consumption.”
All this means is there will be less need for so many people. Less people means less resources used. More automation means fewer people are able to benefit from a growing supply of AI and a dwindling population of people. AI is what puts downward pressure on population.
If these things are true, AI tends to cause deflation, because there are fewer buyers for goods created. With deflation, it is hard to keep the financial system from collapsing, because debt becomes much less payable. With these issues, AI pushes the economy toward collapse.
agreed up to a point.
but you cannot have nations populated by a majority of robots
why?
because robots must have purpose–ie producing something, and that something must be useful to us—robotics cannot exist within a system where they produce to sustain each other (which is what humans do ultimately)
that would be the ultimate in futility and foolishness—because production requires input of raw material at an elemental level–iron copper and so on.
and elements cannot be manufactured, that is a basic law pf physics
Robots cannot depress populations per se—but we can choose (ultimately) not to increase our numbers.
Unfortunately those numbers are still on the upward trend, set to hit 9 – 10 bn before declining. We cannot feed that many so our numbers must crash.
But robots will have nothing to do with that
AI won’t put downward pressure on population before the welfare state is gone.
Kids are not supposed to take harm because their parents are poor so kids get proportionately more welfare.
If you are on the bottom you can average up your income by having kids.
This can be observed in welfare states, workers have 1-2 kids, “rich” could have 3-4-5 or more, and never-will-workers have a bunch also.
I am having trouble reading the article without subscribing.
World Class Koombaya!
http://bnmag.greenschool.org/green-lead/2017/10/18/future-of-education/
http://bnmag.greenschool.org/green-lead/2017/11/20/green-school-at-astechnova-energy-conference/
Rich parents (20k per year tuition) flying into Bali (business class of course) to check on their toss pot vermin who are learning to build a world out of bamboo….
It really does not get more insane than this!
http://bnmag.greenschool.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Middle-School-Activity-1-e1508225614970.jpg
Makes you want to freaking kill yourself.
I have a friend who put his kids in this school for a year — then pulled them out —- he refers to it as a cult. BTW – the founders fly frequently – always business class of course.
Champagne Environmentalists…
“Cult” is a pretty good description. This is one of the new religions replacing the old religions.
if i convince 10 people to believe in some crackpot theory —it’s a cult
when 1 million people believe, its a religion
can somebody tell me where one become the other
Everyone has to believe something. People pick some story with a happy ending, whether from a traditional religion or from, “Technology will save us,” and “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Every political party puts together a happy ending, to go with their beliefs.
Hi Norm, there is an additional dimension to add.
Destructive cults practice shunning those who leave or fade. Family and social network of those inside the cult is lost. Scientology and JW’s some prime examples.
We have a fairly narrow view of what happens worldwide.
I was reading an article about how Japanese teachers are taught to teach uniformity in all of their pupils. The article gave various examples. One was how to draw falling raindrops. The technique illustrated was to make all of the drops perfectly round. If any child turned in a paper drawing the raindrops in a different manner, their papers were singled out for ridicule. Students with autism are expected to fit in, or be excluded. Children moving in from another area (Fukushima in the example), are are often excluded, because they do not do things correctly. It is teachers who “pick on” non-conforming student.
The Green religion is an extreme religion …
Don’t agree – then try this.
Drive up to your local Koombaya Organic Coffee Shop …. after drinking 6 or 8 beers…. and engage the DelusiSTANIS in arguments …. with the following talking points:
> Monsanto is a great company because it is what stands between 7.5 people and starvation
> EVS are far more polluting than ICE vehicles and should be banned
> Elon Musk is a jack a ss
> solar energy is a complete waste of money — they produce no nett energy — are made using fossil fuels — and other toxic materials
> Goebbels Werrming is a hoax aimed at diverting attention away from the fact that we are out of cheap oil
> recycling is stuuuupidity and should be banned because more resources are used collecting and separating stuff — than would be used to make the stuff from scratch.
I suggest you bring along some tear gas….
Do I detect a tiny note of envy and sour grapes in that cup of whine?
“Do I detect a tiny note of envy and sour grapes in that cup of whine?”
These are the same kind of people who think we should increase foreign aid but scoff at paying more taxes locally to help the local poor, because the local poor are not deserving of any more help.
And … they would be the people who insist on receiving massive subsidies on their Tesla cars… and home solar installations.
They are at the forefront of saving the planet!!!
IF…. I am able to parlay my World Champion status into the position of Global Dictator post BAU…. these vermin would be wise to hide….
We will be looking for Teslas in driveways… and solar panels on roofs…
https://listverse.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/feature-d-vintage-guillotine-118415991.jpg
Oh?
What you should detect is my hatred for DelusisTAN and DelusiSTANIS.
And this thing is the breeding ground for DelusiSTANIS. It is Kult Central.
When I lived in Bali and decided to sponsor two kids to attend international school there…. we did the rounds … and I had to show my face at this place as I know some of the people involved….
And the ‘marketing person’ was extolling the virtues of how they put no pressure on kids — we let them be what they want to be —- and I am thinking yep — a whole generation of eco-pizza delivery boys and girls will be graduating from this dumb a.ss place.
I guess that is ok if mummy and daddy are willing to subsidize little Drake and Abigail with a fat trust fund when they are launched into the real world singing Koombaya while banging on a drum….
Alas they could not survive without their organic avocado on whole grain fair trade toast….
As someone put it to me who had a kid there for a year — of course the kids love it — it’s like summer camp – all f789ing year round….
The only trust fund I do … is the one that funds my End of the World Tour…. so needless to say… we did not choose DelusiSTAN High.
I met a graduate from Green School last time I was in Bali — I mentioned that I had heard great things about the school including that it was like an awesome summer camp!!! That did not elicit much of a response — she was 3 years out and still had no job….. and was not continuing her education …
Maybe she was planning to be a Go-jek driver… once the trust cash runs out?
If you want turn a child into a MORE on — enroll them in DelusiSTAN High.
You want more????? I give you more!!!!
Another acquaintance had his kids in DelusiSTAN School…. I was having drinks at his place and one of the kids was struggling with trying to think of a Halloween costume….
He wanted to dress as a vampire with some blood on his mouth….
Apparently DelusiSTAN School had costume rules — fake blood not allowed …. no military outfits or anything involving a theme of violence — definitely no fake guns…
The LASKAR boys will no doubt enjoy their time with the precious Koombaya flower child girls of Koombaya High post BAU …..
http://www.smh.com.au/world/the-dark-side-of-the-sun-20140803-3d2x2.html
“I guess that is ok if mummy and daddy are willing to subsidize little Drake and Abigail with a fat trust fund when they are launched into the real world singing Koombaya while banging on a drum….” There are enough parents that can do this that there are entire economies that depend on their spending. They are often expensive urban areas with very high real estate values, a cluster of colleges and high-tech firms. When their kids graduate out of college, they can pretty much walk into a white collar job, albeit a low-paying one while Mom and Dad help pay the rent. The whole rise of the bohemian hipster is based around this phenomenon.
Of course, there are probably hipsters with real jobs and pay their own rent without the help of their parents and several roommates.
Oh they need these in their library
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Come on, a great Class gift guys
Where is ISIS when you need them?
And they will all grow up to start 1. Non-profits, work for the government….I mean serve people, or go to work for a “green” investment fund.
Better than working for a drug pharmaceutical that distributes opioids, gouging the Federal coffers and hooking the public as addicts
In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed — that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread — aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
JOE RANNAZZISI: This is an industry that’s out of control. What they wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die
Joe Rannazzisi is a tough, blunt former DEA deputy assistant administrator with a law degree, a pharmacy degree and a smoldering rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. His greatest ire is reserved for the distributors — some of them multibillion dollar, Fortune 500 companies. They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-dea-agent-opioid-crisis-fueled-by-drug-industry-and-congress/
60 minutes segment, worth watching
Jim Geldhof says his investigations were getting bogged down too. He was looking into one mid-sized distributor that had shipped more than 28 million pain pills to pharmacies in West Virginia over five years. About 11 million of those pills wound up in Mingo County, population 25,000. Suddenly, he said, he ran into roadblocks from one of attorney Jonathan Novak’s bosses.
JIM GELDHOF: “I spent a year working on this case. I sent it down there and it’s never good enough. Every time I talked to this guy he wants something else. And I get it for ’em and that’s still not good enough.” You know? And this goes on and on and on. When this– these roadblocks keep– get thrown up in your face, at that point you know they just don’t want the case.
You were saying about working for the Government?
I heard someone say that the Afforable Care Act to some extent enabled the crisis, by providing funding for many of these drugs. I am not certain whether this is really true. Does anyone have first hand knowledge of the situation?
Merry Christmas, Gail, looked up your request and found this regarding the expansion of medical coverage and the opioid crisis..
http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2017/oct/23/matt-gaetz/no-evidence-prove-medicaid-expansion-fueling-opioi/
Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz shared this factoid on Twitter on Oct. 17: “Opioid crisis the worst in ObamaCare expansion states!”
Gaetz’s claim quoted a Tucker Carlson tweet that questioned if “big pharma” is responsible for Congress’ inaction toward the opioid crisis.
Information supplied by Gaetz’s office rests on the notion that patients in states that expanded Medicaid through Obamacare have more access to legal prescriptions that fuel the opioid epidemic. Experts said the theory ignores critical facts and does not take into account the other factors that have led to an increase in opioid deaths.
“It is important to avoid confusing association with causation,” said David A. Fiellin, a professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine. “Just because one event (Medicaid expansion) occurred during a period of increasing opioid deaths, many from illicit sources doesn’t mean that it caused the increase in deaths.
Republican U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz shared this factoid on Twitter on Oct. 17: “Opioid crisis the worst in ObamaCare expansion states!”
Gaetz’s claim quoted a Tucker Carlson tweet that questioned if “big pharma” is responsible for Congress’ inaction toward the opioid crisis.
Information supplied by Gaetz’s office rests on the notion that patients in states that expanded Medicaid through Obamacare have more access to legal prescriptions that fuel the opioid epidemic. Experts said the theory ignores critical facts and does not take into account the other factors that have led to an increase in opioid deaths.
Our ruling
Gaetz said the “opioid crisis (is) the worst in ObamaCare expansion states.”
Gaetz is isolating on one year’s worth of data that, by itself, is flawed. The CDC data at the heart of this claim includes drug overdoses from illicit drugs that are not prescription opioids. And by ignoring a larger window, Gaetz misses the fact that the Medicaid expansion states he’s talking about had an opioid problem before the health care legislation took effect.
Experts were universal in saying that the evidence that Medicaid expansion is somehow fueling the opioid crisis doesn’t exist. In some ways, it’s not much different than saying that the opioid crisis is worst in states in the eastern time zone. You wouldn’t blame a clock.
We rate this claim Mostly False
From what I have read, several different things went together to fuel the crisis:
1. The desire of emergency rooms and hospitals to get better patient ratings, (and with this, more funding, and perhaps more patient referrals).
2. The adoption of the pain scale rating of 1 to 10, asked endlessly of patients. If patients report any pain at all, some pain prescription is given (hopefully, making patients happier, so hospital and ERs will get better ratings).
3. As long as a patient continues to report fairly high pain levels, it is easy to get a doctor to rewrite the prescriptions.
4. Opioids were advertised to doctors as being free from causing addiction, when, in fact, we did not really know this to be the case. I believe there was a single letter in a journal somewhere, saying something like, “unless the patient already has an addiction problem, it doesn’t cause addiction.”
5. Lack of very good alternatives to opioids, except at very high cost, which insurance companies would not pay for.
6. The availability of better insurance for poor people, so that they could get these drugs.
Of course this was planned … and allowed…. opium keeps away pitch forks
Toss pot vermin??????
I can believe that bamboo might be a good building material. It grows like a weed in Atlanta. But how is used cooking oil for school buses possibly sustainable? You have to have an awfully lot of leftover oil (from restaurants), which you then collect and process. This doesn’t sound at all sustainable. And keeping school buses running, and roads built, are additional challenges.
Bamboo is actually not a very useful building material at all ….
If untreated, bugs will get at it and it falls to pieces…. the treatment involves soaking it in borax.
And if it is exposed to the rain and elements — it does not last very long….
At best a structure made of bamboo will last around 10 years — and will within that period require significant maintenance.
Bamboo is used for flooring — BUT….
Bamboo primarily comes from China. In China, many mature forests are being clear cut to make way for bamboo plantations because there is such a high demand for bamboo from the American market. These plantations are not being implemented in a sustainable way because bamboo is becoming a monoculture.
Erosion is another environmental concern. Some manufacturers sell bamboo as a green product so much so that they claim that because it has a broad root structure, it helps to stabilize the soil and prevent erosion. In fact, erosion is an intrinsic natural process and is healthy for certain ecosystems. Even if this is the case with more mature plants, this is actually not a good thing! However, this is actually a false claim. Most forest lands are on hilly and mountainous terrains with steep slopes. When they clear cut a forest to plant bamboo, they are actually increasing erosion until the bamboo becomes fairly mature.
The glue that most of the bamboo flooring manufacturers use is a urea formaldehyde resin. Most bamboo floors will emit gas. This is a known carcinogen and a serious air pollutant. Many people get headaches and sometimes even nosebleeds from the fumes that bamboo floors emit. This is really toxic stuff.
https://www.woodfloordoctor.com/the-truth-about-bamboo-flooring/
Bamboo is basically a rubbish building material — masquerading as eco-friendly
I suppose if you want a never-ending set of jobs rebuilding temporary bamboo huts, bamboo might work as a job-generating device. The homes would need to be almost tent-replacements–that simple.
I think our climate is similar enough to CHina’s that if it gets started, it tends to grow beyond its intended bounds.
I agree that flooring made from bamboo is not at all sustainable, and not very good for you either, if it is held together with material that emits formaldehyde.
Gail and Fast, there are numerous varieties of bamboo, each having certain attributes.
Can not classify it as one type of plant.
Anyone interested, here is Adam Turtle introducing his collection at his bamboo nursery in Summer town, TN….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PVG4jwuLO8I
It is a remarkable plant, some types can crack concrete, a monster
https://i.redd.it/uh2qdcvh6p501.jpg
https://www.facebook.com/tefpoe1/photos/a.363318320397314.85936.162256490503499/1279352632127207/?type=3&theater
Very well rendered.
https://scontent-dft4-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/15355809_1279352632127207_7912040155737587065_n.jpg?oh=0a3ea243d799cde6f72039dcab419f75&oe=5AC0C0D3
Some predictions 2018;
– Emperor has no clothes moment for Teflon Musk
– Major epidemic affecting global trade and travel; antibiotic resistance ratchets up..tipping point?
– The Trump has assar-nation scare, false flag event used to increase Nato spend
– Populations in economically deprived nations/states become increasingly ungovernable
– …therefore exploding mass refugee movements
– Websites having controversial material targeted by search engines
– more intrusion into private lives
– more private security
– safe haven real estate values continue to rise
– Political correctness gets more absurd/dysfunctional/disconnected from real world
– Stock markets and financial institutions continue to receive massive welfare
– Oceans continue downward trajectory with plastics/pollution/acidity/jellyfish population explosion
– Santa won’t show up again…hasn’t since I was 5!
… that will do.
Merry Xmas etc etc, and thanks to Gail for the full range of idea’s, opinions and suggestions that inform, amuse and terrify in equal measure on here.
How I managed a chuckle, I don’t know. Must be gallows humor.
Equanimous as always Lastcall
Thanks!
According to the HSBC study 2017 we need to discover and bring online 5 1/2 new Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil at the least just to keep supplies meeting demand by 2040…
https://www.scribd.com/document/367688629/HSBC-Peak-Oil-Report-2017
5 1/2 new Saudi Arabia’s? Is this real life? Hello? Is this thing on?
We know about a huge amount of ver heavy oil. Another option would be to figure out how to extract that oil economically.
There are very good reasons for leaving heavy crude in place. For one, it barely flows through reservoir rock and not much better through pipe. Lots and lots of refining and an inferior end product.
But it is good for producing diesel, something that we use in quantity. The question is whether companies can figure out cost-effective ways of producing this oil. There have been a number of approaches suggested–in Canada–burn some of the bitumen in place, to provide the heat. When prices were high, it looked like it might make sense to produce such oil, but with persistently low oil prices, these seems much less likely to be the case.
More energy = more food = population increases — and more people who can afford more food including meat:
China’s 1.4 billion people are building up an appetite that is changing the way the world grows and sells food. The Chinese diet is becoming more like that of the average American, forcing companies to scour the planet for everything from bacon to bananas.
But China’s efforts to buy or lease agricultural land in developing nations show that building farms and ranches abroad won’t be enough. Ballooning populations in Asia, Africa and South America will add another 2 billion people within a generation and they too will need more food.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-feeding-china/
Bloomberg not correct about the ballooning pop, demographic slump for the most consuming age bracket is apparent on every continent and on track as predicted. Look at Econimica blog for detailed graphs..
But the populations ARE ballooning. Hambone is focusing on working age population, which peaks before population.
Even old people have to eat, but they probably not need bigger houses and more stuff.
81,000,000 nett new rats… I mean humans…. have joined us this year
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
We have added a new Germany 🙂
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/germany-population/
I predict for 2018:
Spring Equinox March 20
Summer solstice: June 21
Autumnal Equinox September 23
Winter solstice: December 21
100% Certainty;
All other predictions on OFW are not worth the electrons that were sacrificed to make them.
I predict that your predictions will make the list of the Most Boring Predictions of 2017…
also…
some of us consider that OFW has a high amount of entertainment value…
it’s not just about the rock solid analyses of the predicaments facing humanity in the coming decade…
after all…
this is just discussion…
it’s unlikely that any of this will change the course of history…
though it should!
but hey…
happy BAU holidays!
You might be right!
Summary
In March of 2016, I unearthed a cobalt supply and demand dynamic that will kill the long-range electric vehicle, or EV, and destroy Tesla in the process.
Cobalt supplies will be sufficient to accommodate growing EV battery demand for three to five years, but will then reach a tipping point where sustained growth becomes all but impossible.
Over the last 21 months, my thesis has been confirmed by every analyst that rigorously studied the issue. In fact, the only difference in their conclusions is timing.
While the Cobalt Cliff is 21 months closer, Tesla’s stock is 50% higher, political support for hare-brained ICE bans is growing and unrestrained EV happy-talk is pandemic.
Denial is understandable among fanboys, bloggers and politicians, but it’s inexcusable among investment professionals with legal obligations to minimize exposure to known risks that will give rise to Enron-class losses.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4133264-tesla-cobalt-cliff-kubler-ross-model-denial-river-egypt?isDirectRoadblock=false&utoken=ebdb04b81c96ecd337dc2eaed2021aa1
The only thing I’ve found is confirmation as one major player after another awakens to the grim realities of a double coyote ugly cobalt market where brash and colorful executives like Robert Friedland of Ivanhoe Mines (OTCQX:IVPAF) talk trash about shorting Tesla and miner’s revenge and more restrained executives like Ivan Glassenberg of Glencore (OTC:GLNCF) freely disclose talks with Tesla, VW and Apple while describing the supply challenges as very difficult and insisting that floating price contracts are the only possible path forward.
While Glencore plans to double cobalt production over the next two years as its Katanga Mine in the DRC is brought back online, that 34,000 TPY increase is little more than a drop in the bucket compared to Glencore’s expectation of 106,000 TPY of incremental cobalt demand from the EV sector by 2024 and 313,000 PY of incremental cobalt demand from the EV sector by 2030.
To quote Mr. Glassenberg, “The world will have to find a better solution.”
Let’s get real folks. The CEO of the world’s biggest cobalt producer is effectively saying “We can sell all the cobalt we can produce at prices our stockholders will love, but we can’t possibly satisfy demand growth of the magnitude we foresee.”
As pointed out previously —- the more EVs that are produced — the HIGHER the sale price will need to be…..
So here is one for all you predictors. “New Scientist – Physics and Math” issue 2755 April 7, 2010.,Article entitled “Enter the matrix: the deep law that shapes our realty.” If this is to believed, inflation for example can be predicted only one month in advance. It is your basic random matrix theory, interesting stuff.
Enjoy,
Dennis L.
I tried to find the article Dennis. It was not there.
I planned to retire years ago; A sobering preview of the U.S. without pensions
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/ct-us-without-pensions-20171222-story.html?utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Contentutm_content=5a3f113304d30145e60aad69utm_medium=trueAnthemutm_source=twitter
yes…
this will get progressively worse through the 2020s…
but elderly workers with limited incomes is better than The Collapse…
better than living in Venezuela or Syria or Yemen or North Korea…
tell those populations how tough it is in the USA…
What the fjsh are 73-79 year olds doing working unqualified jobs when AI have done labor unnecessary?
They are living their lives and doing their jobs with some dignity and self respect. It is hard but it is doable and each day they do it again and again. Perhaps a belief in Jesus gets them through it all; is it not better than the culture that permeates say Baltimore with its random acts of violence and nihilism? Could it be that Nietzsche with all his brilliance was not right, maybe Gail is right and God is not dead?
Merry Christmas,
Dennis L.
Many of those who make up culture that permeates say Baltimore with its random acts of violence and nihilism actually believe in God. Most of them are Christians.
They just think God will forgive them for every homicide they commit .
God, the big pushover. whodathunk?
“doing their jobs with some dignity and self respect. ” You have no idea of how many murders happen over “perceived disrespect” in gang infested areas.
Disrespect is a huge motivation for violence.
Please provide data on church attendance/stated belief in God. Define “Most”, give an actual number. How many of those accused of homicide have you interviewed to verify claim, can you site any data at all?
Self respect is directed inward, disrespect is perceived lack of respect from those other than self. There is no continuity of ideas in this paragraph.
This is not ad hominem but a concern for less than careful thought.
Dennis L.
I’m going by anecdotal experience. Most black people are Christian, including people in the neighborhoods where gang activity happens. I think the burden of proof is falls on you who made the correlation between a lack of belief in God, a lack of self-respect, nihilism and a high homicide rate. It’s nothing but conjecture.
Self respect is something one projects outward as well. Someone with a healthy level of self respect will work hard to maintain a certain reputation. In the case of Baltimore, there are people there with self-respect who are working hard to maintain a violent reputation.
Think religion makes society less violent? Think again.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1101-zuckerman-violence-secularism-20151101-story.html
Religion is a very weak agent of control…..
The main agent is brute force — exercised by the police, the courts and the prison system
People in poor countries tend to have faith in “standard religions.”
People in rich countries have a new set of quasi-religious beliefs:
(1) The government will save me. It will provide a retirement income for me and my family.
(2) Technology will allow the economy to provide even more goods and services in the future.
There is no need for violence in most of the rich countries, because most people have at least what they need. If there is a problem, they do not need to attack their neighbor, either in revenge, or to try to get more.
been saying that all along
the nations of Europe fought each other for 000s of years, the suddenly get to be big buddies via the EU
why?
because everyone was prosperousand there was no need to go to war
Now the EU is breaking up because that prosperous era is over
Exactly!
And the Democrats, with their belief that we can somehow prevent climate change by ending fossil fuel use, are out of power. World trade is less of sure thing, because countries are no longer as prosperous. Oil exporters are in especially bad shape now, because the revenue they are getting is not high enough for their needs. Oil importers, like the US, are doing somewhat better.
‘And the Democrats, with their belief that we can somehow prevent kkkklimate change by ending fossil fuel use, are out of power’
The scum rises to the top … i.e. the faction that works best within the self-regulating system ensuring BAU has the greatest chance for continuation …. wins.
‘Renewable’ energy is acceptable as a palliative (RX hopium) …. and that can be helpful in stopping panic — which would be bad for BAU — but when taken too far…. it can tear down BAU…
Hi ho hi ho – it’s back to coal we go …. TINA
and following on from that
the usa held together through the prosperity brought by cheap oil
as oil vanishes, the usa must secede into smaller autonomous regions
Probably true, if the economy can keep operating in smaller pieces as we lose foreign trade, the financial system, electricity, and the oil system. Or perhaps the smaller pieces become very much smaller—groups of 100 to 150 individuals.
People who working after normal retirement age seem to have better life expectancies. I am sure part of this is the fact that people who retire include some who are in poor health. I expect that there are other issues as well: no real purpose in life, nothing to look forward to, depression.
DJ thinks that there are no more labor jobs. It simply has to be a joke, right? If so, very droll. Good job.
Meanwhile, Dennis L. thinks that poor people in Baltimore are not Christians. Again, a joke? Obviously. Or maybe, he noticed that they are not white.
Of course, he is correct about God. Garuda is very much alive, and still working to foster communications while trying his hardest to not eat any brahmin. Praise God.
Sorry, trying to learn some HTML that is compatible here. no luck so far.
Try just putting up the link to the image, as a separate line of code in your post.
Often, it will start with “http:” and end with “.jpg”
There are an awfully lot of jobs that are part time and low wage. They typically have irregular hours as well. In the US, there generally is not public transportation; if there is, it does not run at the strange times when it is actually needed. The cost of vehicles make vehicle ownership prohibitive for someone with such low wages. If a person cannot walk or bicycle, it becomes difficult for anyone to take these jobs. The only workaround might be having three part time jobs, and trying to use the wages for all of them to pay for the vehicle. (or having a family member with a car, who can provide transportation).
I was refering to other part of this thread claiming AI had automated away labor.
I am not sure the 79 year old is working because he is a christian or just need the money.
I am not sure the baltimorian (black?) is not working because he is lazy, he can’t get a job or just is incentivised into not working.
Merry christmas
Black Americans, by and large, aren’t willing to work for low wages as much as other groups because of the whole slavery thing and because they are native.
They think society owes them much better salaries.
It’s humiliating, I think, for a lot of black men, to accept low wages jobs.
I suppose they get a welfare check in the same neighborhood as the low wage job? They are being rational.
It’s really women with children who I see getting and using food stamps.
The welfare programs aren’t designed to help people get out of poverty or even save money because they are thrown off out these programs if their income starts to rise (from multiple people working) or there is too much money saved in the bank.
Once kicked out of welfare programs, for making too much money, former welfare recipients have to be able to afford market-rate rents, if they do not get Section 8 housing.
The low wage job might be close or a couple of miles away. In some parts of the U.S., it makes no sense for anyone to travel to a job that pays below the median income but that is sometimes where opportunity is–far away.
This is what Oxycontin is for.
If I understand you you confirm it is the government that causes black single mothers and unemployed absent fathers.
The tax code to some extent influences who gets married and who does not. So does the availability of jobs that pay well. If we had an economy that provided jobs that pay well for all males, and that encouraged marriage, I expect that we would have far fewer single mothers (of whatever race) and far fewer unemployed absent fathers, than we do now.
But we need more cheap energy, as a foundation for the many jobs that pay well. Not going to happen.
I see a fair number of older people work for businesses. When I ask them why they are working, these seem to be the two most popular answers.
(1) I was bored staying at home all day, every day.
(2) I needed some extra spending money.
He said that value menus are likely to be popular with cash-strapped consumers who are getting squeezed by wage stagnation and the ever-growing costs of housing and healthcare
http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/news/companies/fast-food-dollar-menu-wars/index.html
Restaurants won’t make much money off the actual discounted items, said Hottovy, especially in the face of food inflation. But he said the dollar menus serve as a lure for higher-priced items, or bundles of items, and that’s where they could profit.
“The goals of these, with any kind of value platform, is to drive traffic to the restaurant,” he said. “You go into there to buy the dollar cheeseburger but then you start adding on fries and the drinks.”
“Fast food competitors are gearing up to combat this new value effort from McD, setting up 2018 as a potential year for intensive discounting in the fast food space, particularly in the first part of the year,” said Credit Suisse analyst Jason West in an industry report
The grunt workers are being squeezed… Fast food is not cheap any more if you order the extras.
True, here in South Florida rents are sky high, car insurance is very unaffordable and there is a steady influx of newcomers every day to keep it that way. With Puerto Rico and Venezuela collapsing and other Caribbean States in recession, more people will try to come.
Not sustainable . All South Florida needs now is a major hurricane direct hit to push it over the edge.
If you thought Subway was rubbish already … imagine how poor the ingredient quality must be on something like this … I understand the ‘bread’ is made from grinding up used Styrofoam containers… and adding some melamine for texture:
https://www.eater.com/2017/12/15/16780370/subway-5-dollar-footlong-backlash
I’ve been trying to get involved with one Caribbean state. All I can pick up from anyone is how much better off and cocooned everyone is. But then I absolutely can’t get anyone who lives there to use the ‘free’ technology of the internet to respond to ANYTHING. They don’t read what you write. Most of them in turn, can’t write (and just use symbols and gibberish) to communicate between themselves. I have no idea, despite trying to find out, what’s going on there.
Prediction for 2018
We will experience a massive oil shortage and oil shock due to peak oil around the second quarter…It will cause mass public hysteria and worldwide panic…
And here is some evidence (Unlike all the other predictions made so far)..
https://www.alternet.org/environment/economic-oil-crash-around-corner
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-25/citi-says-get-ready-for-an-oil-squeeze-than-an-opec-supply-surge
https://www.scribd.com/document/367688629/HSBC-Peak-Oil-Report-2017
“And here is some evidence (Unlike all the other predictions made so far)…”
um… the “evidence” for the next 365 days is the activity of the previous 365 days…
so…
there’s a huge amount of solid evidence that 2018 will be very similar to 2017…
happy BAU holidays!
Trying to predict the future by looking through the rear view mirror (last year). Usually works unless the road has a sharp curve ahead…And just remember David a calm surface is exactly what Black Swans love to land on…So keep your ears pricked for the sounds of wings flapping! 🙂
No doubt things will continue to bump along as they have since 2008…. then suddenly BAU will collapse… like it almost did in 2008…. this time I doubt we will get weeks of drama … it will just happen….
no doubt in a year or two BAU will almost collapse… again…
then in the 2020s, it will almost collapse… again…
then, about 2030, it will almost collapse… again…
then, finally, after many near misses, it will collapse…
no doubt…
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/62529759/complacency-complacency-everywhere.jpg
https://www.glengarrywines.co.nz/images/v9/bottles/91247.png
https://www.finewinedelivery.co.nz/content/products/300/25782.jpg
com·pla·cen·cy
/kəmˈplāsənsē/
noun
1.
a feeling of smug or uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one’s achievements:
“the figures are better, but there are no grounds for complacency”
synonyms:
smugness, self-satisfaction, self-congratulation, self-regard, gloating, …
oh, yeah…
The Collapse didn’t happen in 2017…
I was absolutely correct… hooray for me…
in 2018, no more than a 1% chance…
the odds rising exponentially in the 2020s…
and, I know my fans want to see it…
BAU tonight, baby!
My predictions for 2018 are:
1. Every single day Trump will find something to mess with that shocks us all.
2. WTI oil price will fluctuate between 49 & 54 dollars
3. Rich people will get much richer while poor people will drop another notch.
4. Kim Kardashian will get bigger
5. We won’t hear from Paris Hilton
6. New music will get even more boring and repetitive
7. Food products will cost the same but get smaller
8. Elon will not run out of wild new technology to wow us with
9. Increasing amounts of salsa on burritos will increase their heat,
But increasing amounts of See Oh two & Me th ane will not increase world temps.
10. More people but less potable water
11. Schools will dummy down curriculum to keep pace with reduced attention span
12. Mueller will have the goods on Trump but R’s will vote to keep him anyway
Ukraine grateful for US weapons, Russia voices outrage
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ukraine-grateful-for-us-weapons-russia-voices-outrage/ar-BBHb0Qd?ocid=ob-tw-enus-677
I’d like to see Ukraine heat up …. someone needs to knock down some more commercial flights…
As I currently am feeling slightly un-entertained…
We need a big event.
How about another mass-shooting — where one guy shoots 600 people…..
Perhaps something big for NYrs Eve?
I demand chaos. Excitement!
It’s been very quiet since the railway town of Debaltsevo was lost to Kiev in 2015, apart from daily shelling on the part of the Ukrainians on the residents of the breakaway republics, in direct contravention of the Minsk II agreement. Sometimes the NAF fires back, but they are restrained by Moscow, which has always seen their backs, with materiale, if not manpower.
However it won’t be long I feel before full war breaks out again between the two sides. The NAF is a highly effective and motivated army now, far removed from the militia it was when it first defeated the Ukraine back in 2014. It won’t take long for them to defeat the Ukrainians again, and press a much harsher peace treaty, one which will probably spell the end of the Ukrainian unitary state.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/War_Flag_of_Novorussia.svg/1200px-War_Flag_of_Novorussia.svg.png
Be assured that when that shooting does occur, all video tapes of the event will be confiscated by the FBI, never to be seen again, the public will be force fed a “story” before evidence can be obtained but rather is quickly disappeared, that shady operatives with “secret” and mysterious lives may be involved…likely linked to alphabet organizations work but of course cannot be proven, that government agency personnel may coincidentally be “around” when it happens…perhaps even doing a training exercise, that witnesses to the event will most surely disappear, be disappeared, or die in freak accidents, that weird….fake looking false actors will appear on TV interviews talking it up,that videos and picts will not resemble “real” wounds and deaths…in fact may look very fake, that dead or injured perps or victims may not show evidence of any blood, and the left will immediately come out and demand gun control
This routine is getting well worn.
Welcome back ctg!
My predictions
1. FE will post 15 times a day.
2. FE will predict the end of the world constantly.
3. FE will chase off all the dilusistan nuts(this is a good thing).
4. Bitcoin to 25,000.
5. Dow around 28,000.
6. No brexit.
7. India has catastrophic economic collapse.
8. No war with Korea.
9. Trump has a pretty quiet year.
10. Gail continues to write great articles!
Happy holidays everyone!!!
wow!
9 out of 10 ain’t bad!
er, that #7, could happen, but unlikely, though Creeping Collapse is heading their way in the 2020s…
Only 15?
http://www.euronews.com/2017/12/23/bolivian-health-professionals-continue-to-protest-against-new-criminal-code
Doctors rioting(!) in the streets of La Paz after a new law that increases punishment in malpractice cases. Can now get up to 9 years in prison and confiscation of assets! Interesting way of decrasing inequality!
Having worked in the field of Medical Malpractice while in actuarial consulting, I know that the number of adverse medical outcomes is very high; there are even a very large number of adverse medical outcomes caused by negligence. There are a lot of things that go wrong. So I can see the concern of the doctors.
I personally try to stay out of the care of doctors to the extent possible. I try to eat healthy foods and exercise enough. Not having to go to the doctor in the first place is the best way to prevent malpractice, IMO.
This post makes me wonder how far European medicine has really advanced since the Middle Ages when medical practice was more of an art than a science.
My wife is a physician, and I am a personal injury attorney. I promise You, modern medicine is d amn near magic. Mistakes and negligence occur, of course. A lot of what people want to blame on malpractice is just the normal risks of surgery. The body is a living system, and surgery is more complicated than swapping parts in a car. In America, nobody wants to accept that a bad outcome might be because of bad luck, bad genetics, or bad lifestyle choices. They want to blame someone. (And thank God for it, people shaking down insurance companies is my bread and butter, even though I handle P&C claims and not med mal).
“nobody wants to accept that a bad outcome ”
Welcome to OFW 😉
+++++++
Can’t agree more. Can you please visit for Christmas tomorrow and shout this in my whole, extended family’s ears until they go deaf?
I have a doctor friend making more than $400L/yr. He put a solar system on his house between fed and Austin Energy credits…it was virtually free. Best of all…it powers his POOL.
Theres your green policy in action…benefitting the elites.
There are (at least) two kinds of solar: solar thermal, used for heating water with sunlight; and solar photovoltaic, used to create intermittent electricity. Solar thermal has different uses. One of them is for heating water used inside the home; another is for heating swimming pools. It seems like this might be the kind of solar used. Still, the need for others to subsidize heating of home swimming pools seems sort of far-fetched.
This article says that home swimming pools are normally excluded from subsidies. http://ecosolarpools.net/solar-pool-heating/
The same article says that in California, commercial pools can still get subsidies. There may be programs like this elsewhere.
A solar system (cells not heating) will power any circuit o the home distribution panel. His powers his pool pumps running virtually all the time.
I hadn’t thought of that application.
Dear Slow Paul;
You said, “Interesting way of decrasing inequality!”
Well, it might decrease inequality in that the Drs will not earn as much, but it also means that a Doc will not ever take a case that might go wrong. I can see people dying in the waiting rooms of hospitals because no doc in his right mind will risk 9 years in prison just to be helpful.
Try to get an OB in California for example. If you do not have insurance and deep pockets, anything but a perfectly normal birth one has to do more or less without help, and that is just with the existing malpractice settlements. I can’t even imagine the lack of care one will see in Bolivia.
When Obama and the Democrats and the RINOS passed Obamacare I new it was fake because they did address tort reform. Seems too many lawyers contributing to Obama and Congress’ pockets.
Everyone loves tort reform until they get hurt. Then it’s the end of the world, and the compensation is stingy……..funny how that always works that way. Anecdotally, I have one client in my 11 years of practice that I would trade the compensation for the injury.
sorry….meant did not
I was especially thinking about the “confiscating assets” part. If you are rich and get in trouble with the law, they can take your stuff.
This is totally inline with Calhoun;s rat experiement
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-22/japan-births-plunge-lowest-level-ever-recorded-celibacy-syndrome-takes-its-toll
I wonder if something similar isn’t happening among US well-educated young adults. Our well-educated young people aren’t having children, either. They realize the world is too crowded; they are doing what they can do to fix the situation. The economy really does need to grow, however, so the combination does not work well; hence, Japan’s problem.
“They realize the world is too crowded; they are doing what they can do to fix the situation. The economy really does need to grow, however, so the combination does not work well; hence, Japan’s problem.”
There’s a big problem trying to explain this to average people. We can get that the world is crowded, and that having children is not the best way for women to gain self actualization. But then growth is difficult. We don’t understand money, banks or debt, which are very abstract concepts that don’t greatly affect poorer third world people living at the margins of the global economic system. It seems merely to be a human perversion not to do the work needed to keep civilization going…for enough reward to maintain spirits, education and energy? Why do they need to be rich? And if it never has worked that way, why can’t it change and work so now? Every species has evolved when facing barriers. Why can’t humans do the same now?
And even if you educate us to understand that growth is necessary for the world not to implode, we wonder why growth has to be so destructive.
“I don’t have the irrefutable talking points about energy and why a) we have to max out on it (without any concern for what it destroys) I’m stuck with trying to stop the destruction while not knowing how that affects the ‘BAU’ economy.
For instance, I can see ways to drill for oil that would halve the destruction drilling does to the land. In fact, Bush I said something about caribou nestling up with pipelines that SOUNDED reasonable at the time. If the issue is to keep BAU going as long as possible, why can’t it be done while losing as few as possible of the natural/cultural resources that are after all needed in some way too.?
To what extent is it that people who disregard preventing breakage while doing BAU simply do not KNOW the value of what is being broken or how to reduce such breakage?
And why is the economy created around reducing breakage (tourism, conservation, etc.) not valuable along with other aspects of BAU that cannot be worked around?”
There’s a lot of this going on among the better schooled young people:
https://news.yale.edu/in-focus/giving-back-yalies-service-communities-around-world?utm_source=YNemail&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=yn-alumni-12-11-17
How amusing…… we rape and pillage — then we toss a few coins in the charity box at the check out store — or we send a few yuppies over to put band-aids after blowing off the limbs of children….
And we feel so good about ourselves…. aren’t we the cat’s a ss! Aren’t we so kind and giving.
Don’t get me wrong — I am all for blowing children to bits — because of TINA….
But let’s call it what it is…. rapists don’t send flowers…
Can’t argue with you really. But people base their beliefs on what everyone around them thinks. I’d like to change what everyone around me thinks (based on my best understanding). And then see what that looks like. The situation needs to be broken down to them in small increments. A major part of the incremental breaking down has to do with land use. If you want to see what people don’t understand, just look at the land use decisions politicians/developers/DOTs make in the jurisdiction where you live. To not get the craziness of it, is also to miss the point.
I think it has less to do with welfare of the world and more with building a career and living somewhere where you can’t afford the time or money to have two kids or more.
The desire to have children is connected to the awareness of scarcity and death. When that awareness dissipates, so does the desire for children. The other reasons people give for or against having children are generally just rationalisations.
Did you just said feeling of abundance caused people to NOT have children?
I think abundance makes people believe they will live forever, so they don’t bother with children. When they realise that abundance won’t last forever, they want children (so they can live forever).
Most young people in the west do jobs that produce – directly or indirectly – none of the things they need to survive or even live in a modern society. As far as they are concerned, those things are a basic reality and as such not relevant to their status or livelihood. Hence, no awareness of scarcity and no desire to pass on their genes.
Most of what you say make sense. Maybe most for childless couples.
But if you have had one child your reasoning doesn’t apply but my (not enough time/space/money for more children).
Many women are probably also looking for the appropriate father and career.
Anyhow … most probably realise they will die, but humanity or our descendants will live forever. Among the stars.
I tend to think it’s a combination of first world women focusing on careers until the fertility window closes, and plain ol’ narcissism. My wife and I both have careers and had to consciously limit our hours (and hence “success”) to have a family. I did this even knowing about our predicament, because I’m not a quitter 😀.
I worked “part time” for many years, because of my family. Of course, if full time was 60 hours a week, part time could still be quite a few hours.
@DJ, even people who have one child probably do so because they gain an awareness of scarcity/death with age and its accompanying miseries and disappointments. After all, these people usually have children a bit late in life.
There are exceptions of course, but overall I think it makes evolutionary sense that the more copies of your genes you make during scarcity, the more likely it is that at least one of them will make it out of scarcity.
I have children, and the desire to have them was visceral. I’m more aware of world movements than the average, but did not connect the wish to have children with either scarcity or the lack of . It’s more of an unexplainable sense that if I didn’t have children something of existential importance about me would be lost. It had more to do with ego, perhaps.
When I think of children I think of this
https://media1.britannica.com/eb-media/69/93369-004-69D2BEEF.jpg
How about, just brainstorming … most of us are members in The Church Of Progress.
With DNA reprogramming, artificial insemination, fetuses outside the womb, cloning, cryogenics, uploading etc it seems like a lot of work for nothing (noone gets to transfer THEIR genes) to have kids.
at the moment of begetting them, thoughts of global overcrowding don’t exactly come into one’s head
the genetic force to reproduce self is at its most powerful when the means to rear and sustain children is likely to be available–ie in your 20s.
if you fail, nature shrugs and moves on to motivate that force in others.–there’s no shortage of volunteers—wanting babies is a girl thing, boys are just the means to an end in genetic terms.—hopefully they can be persuaded to stick around for 20 years to see it through
which of course results in more babies.
nature is brutally indifferent to our current situation of overcrowding i’m afraid
If we want to have younger people to help us when we get old, we have to have children. People lose sight of the fact that this is even true when governments are providing benefits.
Of course, we also need resources, including energy resources. The fact that cheap resources are becoming scarce is behind the relatively lower wages of today’s young people. The whole system stops working without both a growing supply of cheap resources and a growing population of young people.
I have no children therefore the end of BAU will be a good thing… there will be nobody to abandon me to one of those facilities that smell of p iss and sh it to fester until I die.
If they want higher birth rates, they will have to reduce educational opportunities and make their economy depend more on human labor of men than technology and capital.
The education of women has been used worldwide as a form of female contraception.
In theory, the opposite should be true.
Seasons Greetings and Merry Christmas to all my friends in the digital world. I have read all the comments here but did not post. Basically agreeing to all the comments from the regulars (many of them here). Like FE said in an earlier post. Physically, we don’t meet anyone whom we can engage a very great conversation with but in the digital world, at least we have one meeting place.
It will be a very interesting 2018 and I certain wish everyone a great year ahead. Great to the very end. Whatever it may be, let us live our life to the fullest. I don’t consider it a curse to “see the big picture” but a blessing so that I live my life to the fullest.
To rehash for those who did not see my earlier posts – our present predicament is like a small paper boat at the end of the bathtub. When the plug was pulled, some will realize that it is moving, some not. Sometimes it goes faster and sometimes slower but it is certainly moving faster and faster. It will accelerate as it gets closer to the plug and then it will just plop!.
best wishes to all….
Thanks!
Gail
Best wishes to you CTG — and here’s hoping we will still be Burning More Coal at this time next year!
Let the Orgy continue!!!!
https://i.redd.it/w6u51tbdap501.jpg
Too bad that we cannot really afford Medicare and Social Security. This is the nature of the collapse we are facing.
The politicians tried to be honest about the situation but the public didn’t want to hear
“we can’t continue to fund these entitlement programs”
A significant portion of the public think funding these programs are cheaper than wars. and that if the defense budget was reduced, there would be plenty of money left to fund entitlement programs.
Entitlement programs are very expensive. And if the number of young workers drops, the situation gets all that much worse.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/11/58/14/115814390d2de6050e8f0c3b4b0ca720.jpg
Well said. So are you coming to terms with reality?
The Canadian plan for healthcare would result in huge layoffs.
Social Security money was stolen now it is pay as you go. Canada has Means testing and a surplus. Also it is mandatory for all to pay in.
Pretty much every government retirement program ends up being pay as you go. (Funds collected from current workers go to pay for benefits of those who currently retired).
The US Social Security program intended to do some pre-funding, because of the known bulge in retirements as baby boomers retired. The “catch” is that the US government is pay as you go (as are pretty much all governments). So the money that was collected in advance got spent on other government programs (including “defense”), and Social Security was left with non-marketable US debt. So the funding is simply debt funding.
Oil discoveries are at an all-time low — and the clock is ticking
http://www.businessinsider.com/oil-discoveries-fall-to-lowest-since-1940s-2017-12
Discoveries depend on price. You can’t expect to have oil discovered when the price is too low to extract it.
Discoveries depend on price.
They depend on geology and knowledge. The current price is more than double its post WW2 average of 25 dollars a barrel (Inflation Adjusted). An even when the price of oil was over 100 dollars a barrel they didn’t find hardly anything.
https://imgur.com/a/DVSNt
The cost of extraction tends to rise over time. The price available needs to be compared to the cost of extraction. Clearly today’s price is too low to justify a whole lot of exploration.
Top Marine general: ‘There’s a war coming’
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/366174-marine-corps-commandant-theres-a-war-coming
American’s don’t seem to scared of North Korea..Scary what they might do to get everyone to fall back in line..
I am Happy to report that the bird is in the oven, and tonight the family dines on (early) Christmas Turkey! I’m taking next week off to celebrate not starving to death or dying of spent fuel pond irradiation in 2017. Then back to burning moar fossil fuels in 2018. Merry Christmas you sullen bunch of Doomers!
with that, I predict record fossil fuel burning in 2018.
and the trick is to be a not sullen Doomer…
it’s easy if you try…
goes something like this…
BAU today, baby!
doom is a sullen topic, once recognized.
sul·len
/ˈsələn/
adjective
1.
bad-tempered and sulky; gloomy:
“a sullen pout”
synonyms:
surly, sulky, pouting, sour, morose
antonyms:
cheerful
actual doom ie The Collapse would be quite gloomy…
far-off-in-the-future doom is not so gloomy as of now…
predictions of doom can be quite hilarious…
gotta differentiate between reality in the present and talk about reality in the future.
“doom is a sullen topic, once recognized.”
Could be, although some get quite giddy just at the thought of collapse, so not sure what that is. Maybe excitement at the idea this runaway experiment that has gone wrong in so many ways might just have an expiration date like a carton of milk. But the trouble is we’re all still alive and that means our only option is to push BAU just a tad farther into the realm of burning more FF and procreating more babies screaming for sustenance and more politicians giving away tax cuts to get your favor (in spite of ballooning deficits). Just keep that pedal to the metal folks.
Ever been in the middle of two rioting groups of people intent on killing each other? The adrenaline rush is intense — and you want more….
In that respect the end of days will be similar — the adrenaline will be surging — it will be the most exciting thing that most people have ever experienced….
Then once you realize that you are not a onlooker … but instead one of the participants… that your life is directly under threat….
Then it will all become very real… and that will be the moment that Bernanke reference when he stepped down and said ‘when you see why I have done what I have done — you will thank me’
true…
perhaps some persons have that super schadenfreude where they want the entire human population to take the hit…
also, and not unlike me, persons want to be right…
I want to be exactly right about The Collapse…
in the 2030s…
This is the moment every organism on earth has been waiting for…. the moment when … as a result of our actions since we harnessed fossil fuels …. that we extinct ourselves.
Go Stuuuupid Humans Go!
Go Stuuuupid Humans Go!
Go Stuuuupid Humans Go!
Go Stuuuupid Humans Go!
http://healinghandsmassages.com/wp-content/uploads/cheer-squirrel.jpg
I don’t know about that…
I think that rats will miss humans…
“hey, Ratsy, where’s all the garbage gone?”
“don’t know, Ratso, but might have something to do with the extinct humans.”
By June 2018 there will be a fatal lack of confidence (caused by an axial stress breakage) in the global financial system, causing cascading collapses around the world overnight that will not be able to be restarted. Global supply chains stop. Nobody goes to work.
Governments around the world will clamp down in a fierce removal of human rights in areas that can still be attempted to govern. Ungovernable areas will be violent. Faux economic systems will be put in place while attempting to restore old systems (or a similar excuse) while exhausting emergency energy.
By August 2018, most governments will have collapsed, over 4 billion will have perished and growing exponentially, the majority being caused by disease, and there will be widespread radiation in the northern hemisphere.
December 2018, global population at less than 1 billion. Birth rates plummet to near zero due to radiation/environment problems.
Looks like I picked the wrong year to quit drinking. 🙂
in other words…
a happy new year!
Why would the financial system just collapse without any causes?
Too little energy (per capita) is the cause of collapse. What happens is that we get too much wage disparity, and it is not possible for the many people who are earning little or nothing to afford the output of the economy. Commodity prices collapse, and debt becomes un-payable. This is what we should expect “peak oil” to look like–not the silly high-price stories told by “peak oilers.” It is possible that there will be brief price spikes, but that is all.
The system is based on confidence. 2008 credit markets froze, that time confidence was restored, next time, maybe not.
Attention Doomie Preppers
The death toll from a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia hits 100 on this day in 1793. By the time it ended, 5,000 people were dead.
Yellow fever, or American plague as it was known at the time, is a viral disease that begins with fever and muscle pain. Next, victims often become jaundiced (hence, the term “yellow” fever), as their liver and kidneys cease to function normally.
Some of the afflicted then suffer even worse symptoms. Famous early American Cotton Mather described it as “turning yellow then vomiting and bleeding every way.” Internal bleeding in the digestive tract causes bloody vomit. Many victims become delirious before dying.
The virus, like malaria, is carried and transferred by mosquitoes.
The first yellow fever outbreaks in the United States occurred in late 1690s. Nearly 100 years later, in the late summer of 1793, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, 100 people were dying from the virus every day.
Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in face of the raging epidemic.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/yellow-fever-breaks-out-in-philadelphia
THE ELIMINATION OF URBAN YELLOW FEVER IN THE AMERICAS THROUGH THE ERADICATION OF AEDES AEGYPTI
http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.53.1.7
It will be back — and there will be no eradicating it this time……
The hammer blows will keep on coming … cholera… dysentery… malaria… dengue…. scarlet fever…. yellow fever … hookworm… and much more.
There are quite a few of these disease that will be back, quickly, I expect.
And, that epidemic was brought in by an immigrant from Santo Domingue (which we call haiti now).
Some things never change.
“By June 2018…”
Or is it by July 2020, or August 2023 or December 2029 or February 2054?
In the year 2525, if man is still alive
If woman can survive, they may find
In the year 3535
Ain’t gonna need to tell the truth, tell no lie
Everything you think, do and say
Is in the pill you took today
In the year 4545
You ain’t gonna need your teeth, won’t need your eyes
You won’t find a thing to chew
Nobody’s gonna look at you
In the year 5555
Your arms hangin’ limp at your sides
Your legs got nothin’ to do
Some machine’s doin’ that for you
In the year 6565
You won’t need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
In the year 7510
If God’s a coming, He oughta make it by then
Maybe He’ll look around Himself and say
Guess it’s time for the judgment day
“In the Year 2525” is a 1969 hit song by the American pop-rock duo of Zager and Evans. It reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 for six weeks commencing July 12, 1969.
they were way too optimistic about 5555 and 6565…
of course they had no clue about declining fossil fuels…
from a 2017 perspective, that song could wrap up by the year 2125…
but padawan, wait…
the year 2017, we are living in, and…
BAU, baby, tonight is…
You are pretty ambitious in your forecasts. Maybe you need to keep drinking.
On your advise, I will keep drinking lol.
After all, forecasts are what could happen, not what you hope will happen. If a hurricane is forecast and turns away, we say “phew”.
Might as well make a few predictions myself:
>US stock market crash or amazing new highs.
>Bitcoin either in the gutter or wafting about in Hyperuranion.
>New Game of Thrones season and book release or no new Game of Thrones releases whatsoever.
>Trump achieving the Reaganification his supporters always knew he would achieve or topping Bush in unpopularity.
>Higher oil prices.
>Chinese economy shows undeniable signs of weakness (possibly infirmity).
>European economy ditto.
Soused as I am, that’s all I am able or care to think of for now. Merry Christmas all!
No new GoT ever.
No new GoT season until early 2019.
So no collapse before summer 2019, earlier would be unfair.
I concur wholeheartedly. GoT will be looked back upon as the most accurate expression of the spirit of our age – glamorous, confused, affectatious and solipsistic. I’m not going home (if you will) until I get to see ALL the dragongirl nudie scenes interleaved with pointless battle sequences that I, a respectable member of BAU, am entitled to.
Superhero movies are just CGI. There are no themes or values behind them. They just happen to be the only thing Hollywood can sell internationally.
” topping Bush in unpopularity.” I think we are long past the age of the Popular politician.
Increasing social complexity and declining effectiveness of most legislation suggests that the next president will be just as divisive as Trump.
In other words, there are so many different kinds of ugly babies to kiss, each kind with their own custom on how to proceed with the kissing , that it will not be possible for one President to satisfy all their demands. There is not enough time in the day for all that. There will be ugly babies that will remain unkissed.
People are stuck in the past . They think there is a wider American society that politicians serve. In that vein, they think the policies they favor will benefit everyone.
You know this is going to sound kind of weird, but I’m starting to get into the Trump presidency. I mean where else can you go to have your guts churned in a roiling cauldron of caustic acid as he does ever single thing the R’s ever wanted to do, from slipping ANWR into the tax code for drilling, to claiming all Haitins have Aids to claiming all people from Nigeria live in huts, to massive tax cuts for Corporations at the expense of major entitlement cuts to come in 2018, to claiming Obama was born in Uganda as a form of racism, to working with the Russians hand in hand to get elected (to Russia’s advantage), to getting out of the Paris Climate Accord by rejecting the data scientists have so carefully compiled and graphed, to planning war with NK, to elimination of safeguards for turtles and dolphins caught in fishing nets, to whatever he does next, I’m starting to get into it. The reason why is because if this is what the American people want, then I guess I need to belly up to the bar and join in. If you can’t fight em, join em.
If you cannot afford all of the “stuff” that Obama has promised, you need some kind of excuse to back out. So that is part of the explanation for what we are seeing. The world needs to “shrink back,” and not help every do-good cause that we have been convinced is possible to support.
The only things that might temporarily save us is more debt; a tax cut for businesses and the rich gives us more debt. I doubt the the proposed later increases in taxes for most people will ever take place.
to getting out of the Paris Climate Accord by rejecting the data scientists have so carefully compiled and graphed
According to this klimate scientist… compiled = faked:
The article reported on claims made by Dr John Bates, a kkkkkliiimate scientist formerly employed at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about a paper published in the journal Science that suggested that there had been no ‘pause’ in ggggllllobal waaaaarming in the 2000s. Dr Bates had published a blog criticising the way the data used for the paper had been analysed and archived. The article detailed at length the complainant’s concerns with the data; it then characterised them as demonstrating ‘irrefutable evidence’ that the paper had been based upon ‘misleading, unverified data’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-gGGGGGlobal-WWWWWwarming-data.html
to getting out of the Paris Clllllllimate Accord by rejecting the data scientists have so carefully compiled and graphed
According to this klimate scientist… compiled = faked:
The article reported on claims made by Dr John Bates, a kkkkkliiimate scientist formerly employed at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), about a paper published in the journal Science that suggested that there had been no ‘pause’ in ggggllllobal waaaaarming in the 2000s. Dr Bates had published a blog criticising the way the data used for the paper had been analysed and archived. The article detailed at length the complainant’s concerns with the data; it then characterised them as demonstrating ‘irrefutable evidence’ that the paper had been based upon ‘misleading, unverified data’.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html
Whether or not the data is correct, there is nothing we can do about it. Any steps we might take would only crash the economy. They are pointless.
Predictions for 2018, this is a fun game.
The price of Brent crude will go to $70.
I’ll suggest global car sales (petrol & diesel) will be as high as they ever have, hybrids will see some take up and all electric sales will remain disappointing.
Brexit will be watered down.
Bitcoin will not crash.
The stock market will not crash.
Large scale flooding across Western Europe.
It will be one of the three warmest years on record.
Man City will be top of the Premier league by some distance this time next year.
I think it’s impossible to guess what NK and Trump might do. Let’s hope they just keep sabre rattling.
Not much will happen, and the people here will be saying the same thing like now.
and you will be saying the same things, like now?
good reasonable list…
so, will Brexit actually happen in 2018?
Brexit won’t happen for a good while yet, they are already settled on a transition period of a couple of years after the negotiation period. The negotiations are ongoing and the Tory remainers have begun to flex their muscles a bit, winning the recent vote but more importantly the Tory party seems to be commited to an open border with Ireland which will mean ‘alignment’ which basically means the UK shadowing what the EU does. A classic gooey fudge.
At the moment it looks like Brexit is remain in all but name, that stance might change but not next year, those discussions are kicked down the road.
This is so funny and it came US News and World Report
Trump Resort in Ireland Will Build Seawalls to Protect Against Climate Change
President Donald Trump’s golf resort will build two seawalls to protect three holes on the golf course from rising sea levels and water erosion
In the first application, Trump cited “global warming and its effects,” including rising sea levels and water erosion, as reasons for the wall, Politico reported, despite his statements calling global warming and climate change “a total hoax.”
https://www.usnews.com/news…
Oh well, without burning fossil fuels no one would go to his golf resorts!
Carry on.
Here the Guardian discusses the documentary “Mirage Men”:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/aug/14/men-in-black-ufo-sightings-mirage-makers-movie
First the military and then the CIA became interested in UFOs, and then they attempted to simulate the antics of the latter, in order to test the effects on civilians. Such psy-ops can sometimes be put to good use in war time. When using secret exotic technology, the authorities would stimulate the belief that it was down to UFOs and ETs, to put people off the scent. The documentary “Mirage Men” looks into this behaviour.
Extract from the old Guardian article: ‘As Mirage Men discovers, central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they’d conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground “nuclear fracking”. Test pilots for the military’s experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians.’
Nuclear fracking? It’s the first time I’ve heard of that. For the record, I do accept that there are inexplicable UFO events, but I do not subscribe to the “flesh and blood creatures in nuts-and-bolts craft” theory. I go more for the psycho-social and interdimensional theories of John Keel and Jacques Vallée. Both are modest enough to admit the limits of their theories. It also makes perfect sense to me that the military would want to simulate the effects of UFOs as part of their psychological operations – which of course muddies the waters terribly, but it goes with the terrain.
It is a more sensible approach, in my opinion. There is nothing else we really can do.
The most important thing is that labor is no longer required, and the Elites can use robots, AI, etc to do most of their stuffs. The few things needing human labor could be done with very little expenditure by hiring cheaper Eastern Europeans.
We basically don’t need Labor anymore, which means economy can shrink significant,ly, oil use being reduced to follow the suit and basically downsizing, which was not feasible 10 years ago but is a reality now.
The economy collapses if wages aren’t quite even. Hiring cheaper Eastern Europeans only works for a while.
k writes “We basically don’t need Labor anymore…”
so tell “us”, how rich are you?
hey, Elites love to travel…
are airports run by AI and robots, or are they crawling with workers?
hey, Elites love to eat out…
are restaurants not crawling with workers?
and supply chains?
seriously, tell me that AI and robots do the work for the massive global supply chains that provide the necessary resources to run airports and restaurants.
How many with an iq above 110 and no serious mental illness is unemployed?
None involuntarily?
Quite a lot. I have seen ex professionals being unemployed. Since their cost is too high and there are cheaper alternatives from Asia.
i’d like to reply to this but i need to know you’re serious
LOL. I was unwilling to say that.
I am serious. Now, about 90% of the entire pop of the world is not relevant in economic terms. Just like the days before the Great War.
erm—
seems weird to have to spell this out, but the population as a whole requires energy input on which to function
our primary source of energy is, and always will be—food
food comes from the earth–that requires labour input
pre ww1, 80% or thereabouts of the population was required to produce food for the other 20%
go back another 100 years and the figure was around 95%
Just how do you figure they were irrelevant?
Now the proportion is 2% actually producing food, but only by using oil
Using income as proxy for resource consumption, the bottom 90% doesn’t consume that much.
https://cdn.80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/00005-768×701.jpeg
if 90% of pop is occupied in food production, then there’s little time left over to spend money consuming anything.
they walked everywhere, ate what they produced and had sufficient only to buy cheap clothing and housing—very cheap
nevertheless, remove their support and the top 10% would have died
‘We basically don’t need labor anymore’ That reminds me of Robert Solow.
Robert Solow wrote a series of esoteric equations and declared that ‘In effect,the world
can get by without natural resources.’ Solow received the Nobel Prize for Economics,
which reveals nicely how disconnected mainstream economics is from physical reality.
N.Georgescu-Roegen was contemptuous of Solow and his absurd conclusions.
Herman Daly also ridiculed him,stating that if Solow was correct,a baker would not need
more ingredients to make a larger cake,he would only need to beat the same ingredients
faster.
But, labor can be replaced by automation while resources can’t.
Automation requires resources as well.
Labor is necessary to have “demand” for the system. Without enough demand, prices fall too low.
and what do you think provides the energy necessary to allow automation to function?
Less people, more energy to spare. By the time that energy runs out, energy from space will come online one way or another.
“Energy from space” — we have been chasing after solar energy for a long time. I cannot imagine energy from space happening.
this is a ”hole in my bucket” discussion
but being a masochist—i will perservere
you cannot build new forms of industrialisation (energy capturing/conversion and stuff) without a big population that has a massive supply of SURPLUS energy—that is energy over and above that necessary to sustain themselves
That’s where the industrialisation of the 19th/20th c came from. Not merely energy—but SURPLUS cheap energy
prior to that era, energy availability was sufficient to sustain people at a minimum level, but no more
If you have less people, there cannot be enough input to exploit energy resources
Example—the Inuit peoples were sitting on the Alaskan north slope oilfield. They did not have the means to exploit it.
Indeed, and there are already built megastructures for capturing energy for centuries ahead. It is called hydropower. No space needed.
When the hot air castles kept afloat by the fiery furnaces of our oil burners inevitably comes collapsing down, left will be the super wealthy controlling the enabling capital powered mostly by hydropower and the remaining productive FF resources.
Deluded are those who think they are dependent of the enabling machinery for the well being of the hoi polloi. If anyone want to counter this statement, you might ask yourself why more than 50% of the earth population are not a part of IC and living in quite miserable conditions. Then ask yourself if they are needed or not.
I view the oil age as a little gift for the time being. Once the things start to get rough. Let’s see who will prevail, you or the real capital keeping this little castle in the air afloat.
Hydroelectric requires replacement parts, and digging away of soil that his filled in behind the dam, or it will fail within a period of years. Electricity distribution systems seem to need replacement parts every time a storm hits. All of this requires that business as usual continues.
If redistributing a barrel of oil is required to make BAU crank along by repairing hydro dams and transmission lines, then a barrel of oil it will be even if will require the condemnation of a hundreds to even more unimaginable suffering – just like today.
The useless eaters and consumerists aren’t providing any spare parts anyhow. What is needed is relevant manufacturing machinery, sufficient amounts of energy, computers and competent people – just like today.
Now that I think about it. BAU will be kept running exactly as it is today – except with more poverty and misery for the hoi polloi as the cheap energy depletes.
And so it will continue until either we hit the stars or all that is left will be a barren wasteland of toxic industrial waste.
Interesting post. Complex systems that can not be fully understood have a lack of transparency. The narrative stories we tell ourselves on the cause of an event like the Great Depression are therefore incomplete or over simplified so we can think that we understand them. Cause and effect relationships are difficult to understand due to multiplier effects, feedback loops, and unknowns. Energy is always a factor, it is a major factor, perhaps the major factor in any and all ecological systems. Your analysis helps our understanding of the important role that energy plays in human history. Even so, your analysis, due the very nature of the complexity of the system being studied will be incomplete.For example the view that wind was not a major energy source back in the day is perhaps erroneous. In Europe there were at least 8,000 wind mills, perhaps 12,000 back in the early Industrial revolution, most cranked out 40 to 50 horsepower each. These persisted through the 1800’s and early 1900’s. At 750 watts per horse power over an 8 to 10 hour shift for that many wind mills…….. not insignificant, yet I rarely see it mentioned. Historical data sets are often very incomplete, wind power used in shipping is not represented in data sets that I often see. Biomass is only estimated. Perhaps per capita energy use was higher than what is often represented during the period leading up to the 1920’s. Energy will always be a master resource and you point out the need for more sociologists and economists to pay more attention to it!! good for you..
There are two different kinds of energy (actually more): Mechanical and heat. Water and wind energy provide mechanical energy; burning biomass provides heat. There is a question of how to “add up” these different kinds of energy. If they are converted to heat energy, water and wind energy tend to come out very badly.
When wind and water were used, they were both very intermittent. This meant that workers had to live nearby, and be able to work when the wind or water was available. For pumping water out of canals in the Netherlands, this was done by having families live inside the wind mills. (I saw one, and went inside, to see the living conditions). The families living inside had farming jobs as well, to provide more income. The return from that the windmills provided wasn’t very good; this is why they needed second jobs. The people living inside had to adjust fabric covering for the wind mills, based on how hard the wind was blowing and how much pumping action was needed. Thus, it involved quite a bit of regulation.
Clearly, grain mills operated by water only operated when water was available for them. Workers had to live nearby, making it inconvenient if they wanted to live in a city.
I can only believe the charts put together by people like E. A. Wrigley in Figure 2. Because wind and water were so limited in what they could do, and so inconvenient, they never amounted to much. We now have a faith-based belief that we can make something out of them that they have never been before.
I should also mention that there are studies that include animal power. You can see the breakdown in Figure 2. In know that Robert Ayres and Benjamin Ware have also investigated this area. It doesn’t amount to a whole lot.
The IEA tries to include burning animal dung in its energy sources (waste and biofuels). Of course, those burning animal dung would greatly prefer more modern fuels. Vaclav Smil also tries to include a broad range on energy types in his energy amounts that I have used in some charts. The great interest in fossil fuels came because they were so much superior to the “renewable” alternatives. Also, there has been, and continues to be, a problem with deforestation. Encouraging people to cut down more trees is crazy, IMO.
I have seen more recent data, and the deforestation continues to get worse. The countries with the greatest problem with deforestation are the poorest countries. The richest countries tend not to have a problem; they outsource their deforestation.
One of the consequences of deforestation is the loss of topsoil via erosion and farming. Topsoil has/had enormous quantities of carbon sequested in it.
This is why planting trees is no short-term solution to C-diox levels. Its the remediation of soils that matters.
Burning of fossil fuels has added to C-diox levels, and so has biomass loss. But Topsoil carbon depletion (humus etc) has been enormous.
I predict for 2018…
slightly higher oil prices…
Saudi Arabia will be doing better, but England will be feeling the early stages of Creeping Collapse…
Trump will still be POTUS next December, and Kim will still lead NK…
there will be no war with NK, but possibly “surgical” strikes to take out some of their missile capability…
a hurricane will cause great damage somewhere…
there will be a few fires in California…
a formerly temperate area will be in drought…
another temperate area will experience massive floods…
Elon will still be running Tesla next December…
he will have announced some awesome breakthrough that will actually be nonsense…
no human will travel into space via any private company…
fusion will be predicted by someone for 2040…
Mars colonies will be predicted by someone for 2040…
Bitcoin will hit $1 million…
I don’t take this seriously unless you own a few bitcoins.
how dare you not take me seriously!
😉
I believe that emojis have been banned on ofw.
😮
🙁
stock markets slightly higher by next December…
gold and silver about the same as now…
slightly higher number of mass shootings…
a few more mass murders by van or truck…
Syria will be rebuilding, but no mention in western news outlets…
more spreading of black plague in Africa…
a hundred million babies will be born…
a hundred million people will die…
Bitcoin will hit $1 million…
Syria will have difficulty rebuilding. It has a peak oil exports problem.
okay, this is where fact outweighs opinion.
We live in a post-fact world.
I just learned the term, today.
Some 20-something journalist probably recently figured out that people distort the truth for personal gain and he/she/it/them/us is now living a post-fact world.
“We can never be certain of anything”
“how do you know you’re right?”
“We must act on the expediency of the moment…”
Reality is an illusion. How can you be sure Syria is running out of oil? Perhaps, the opposite is happening. Who really knows? Certainly, not you. You’re just another human caught up in the deception of reality.
I think we can be fairly certain that Syria is in terrible shape financially because it has no oil to export. It is where things look fairly good that a delusion is likely.
I’m not sure there even was a Syria war. I havent seen it with my own eyes. Maybe just an excuse for all-inclusive ski vacation in Sweden.
It’s destined to be a hub for future Iran-Qatari natgas pipeline bound to ClubMed int export port.. The idea is that the received provision could be leveraged to other industries and economic sectors (tourism, agriculture, some light industries, ..)
Well, that’s the stated plan for the local actors (within broader umbrella Russia-China alliance). Not sure how it is going to eventually materialize in reality though.
Syria is in a strategic location and has an important client with lots of natural resources (Russia). It will be rebuilt, not with expensive material and labor from the west, but with inexpensive material and labor from Russian and China.
It has some oilfields…ISIS made a handy buck exporting some of it through Turkey.
“Trump will still be POTUS next December”
I concur, but also predict he will be president for at least the full four years, because even if Mueller has the goods on him, the R’s aren’t about to vote to impeach. Might be difficult to not have him for a 2nd term too, because of tampering with voter logs to eliminate as many voters as possible that might vote against him and electronic voting machine hacking. Also keep in mind Trump will use every conceivable ploy to upend a competitor even to the point of claiming stuff like the person is a murderer or some other salacious accusations. He could also just have the person arrested on falsified charges.
It might not be too easy to do these things with a Bernie Sanders. But I agree, it will be hell to pay.
Don’t overlook 2018 midterm elections. R’s have slim margin and this is Trump we are talking about.
Trump’s health may be an issue as well. I expect that someone of someone his age, with his type of diet, has a significant chance of dying in the next four years.
then Pence will bring in the jesusfreaks!!!!
How is is so easy to use such terms on one group and exclude others from similar sarcastic comments. Western Civilization has not been all bad and many who built it did believe in Jesus. Is Pence not going alone to a lunch meeting with a single woman such a bad thing? What have you accomplished in life that compares to his being VP? If he does become POTUS, he will be in the history books, where will you be? A very condescending remark on your part at best.
Dennis L.
solar freeeks…. tesla freeeeeks… Geeboo Weebooo freeeeks… essential oil freeeeeks…
A planet filled with freeeeeeks of every stripe.
Nihilism is the only ism … that is logical
it wasn’t meant to be sarcastic
in every era in history, the dominant religion has established itself by brute force (and ignorance)
Yes–a few side branches of christianity have presented themselves as benign and non-vindictive, but in the main they have not.
the same is true of other faiths.
given the means they conquer in order to inflict a viewpoint and subvert all others.
Only since the age of enlightenment in the 1700s has this ceased to be so—an era that coincided precisely with the advent of cheap surplus energy, and with it, scientific reality that the world was not created 6000 years ago
I think you will find that Pence disagrees with that–he goes along with 46% of Americans who remain convinced of ”young earth creationism”.
And this is the level of intellect that you want in a POTUS?
Where fact is subverted by faith?
Pence’s attitude to those who do not fit his views on ”normality” are well documented. Even Trump said as much.
He is no different those who burned heretics at the stake 500 years ago. Remember he believes in the bible—literally–. Remove the laws of civilised society, and read what the bible offers as punishments for wrongdoers. He believes in the absolutism of holy writ.
There are many like him in high off.
(Check Inhofe for instance on Climate change and other godstuff)
Check what christians did to the native peoples of the Americas who refused to convert.
If Pence got to POTUS, he would be convinced that his god put him there, to do gods works.
There are enough godbotherers around to help him.
Bear in mind that the belt buckles of the Wermacht had “Gott mit Unz” stamped on their belt buckles. Don’t be so naive as to think it couldnt happen again. WW2 was a resource war, irrespective of belt buckles.
We are facing an unknown future where cheap surplus energy is going to leave us, and that—I guarantee—will result in civil disorder and societal breakdown on a mass scale. None of us can survive without cheap oil—therefore we will look for salvation elsewhere.
Pence and his ilk will be glad to oblige
When (not if) that happens—I guarantee, you will have the introduction of martial law. (there will be no alternative)
With a jesusfreak POTUS, or the current crackpot, that will mean ‘god” being invoked to justify every kind of unpleasantness you can imagine—and a few you can’t.
For no better reason than we sinners have invoked god’s wrath—hence god is wreaking vengeance on us all—So cleanse the world of sinners, once and for all!
In god’s name, you will see dictatorship established, because the majority will not be able to think of an alternative—so will vote for it, unaware of the real reason for their misfortunes.
and those who built western civilisation needed a source of cheap surplus energy (as above)– the bible said slavery was OK—so they used slaves.
Slavery ended and commercial oil production began in the same decade
Interesting coincidence don’t you think?
And what have I done in my mini-life.?
I have refrained from inflicting my opinions on others in the name of faith that has no basis in truth or fact
I have a hard time getting as excited about the erroneous views of Trump and Pence as you are. I can think of a lot of equivalently erroneous views of Obama. Over the centuries, most leaders around the world have had some sort of narrow views. This is sort of, “The way it is.”
When an economy can no longer afford to have a government run by a large number of elected officials, it is helpful to leaders if there is some sort of belief that God appointed them. So from that point of view, I can see a possibility of religion and state again being merged. Everyone is expect to believe in the state religion. So perhaps there is some truth to what you are saying.
On the other hand, if the economy collapses to an even lower level, then I think we are essentially in a world where we collapse to a leaderless situation. Someone charismatic has to exert a leadership role, or the situation deteriorates further.
The wide disparity of views we have today reflects the wide gap between today’s rich and poor. Somehow this gap must be fixed, before we can expect the views of the rich and poor to be alike.
Given the cream always rises to the top i.e. we get the system that is best suited for the times…. then if Pence is in play at some point with a hard core religious regime — then that is the best system for the times…
If that does not happen — then we can assume that this system is not the best suited for the times….
you often find scum on top of the cream
Let’s change that to ‘the scum always rises to the top’
i think that when a government that has had a large body of elected officials, can no longer afford those officials, they tend to go self employed…..they certainly do not disband themselves.
the wacky views of polticians are largely irrelevant in a growing economy, this is why ww1 and 2 didnt dent economic progress—folks just picked themselves up and started over because there was continual energy input—germany and japan have rebuilt themselves so now there are no war scars visible.
imagine if energy depletion had kicked in around 1950.
then there would have been no rebuilding, and nations would have crashed and gone tribal—there would have been no alternative.
So fast forward to today.
We ARE heading into terminal energy depletion, but in a state of denial. The majority are convinced that prosperity can be voted into office—denying absolutely that we have an energy problem, certain that we live in an economic system that is a function of money.
The expectation is that political leaders will somehow ”fix” things, but they know no more that the rest of us in any real sense. Trump represents Mammon—Pence represrents righteousness. Both have clear ideas on what this means, and are bent on inflicting it on everyone else. In no way will trump attempt to fix the disparity between rich and poor—quite the opposite. Pence has made his views very clear.
In a collapsing economy, policians will try to hold on to power as long as they can (they always do), and will use any means at their disposal.
In WW2, numerous german generals knew hit-ler was a lunatic, but they fell in behind him, as did the rank and file, it became a form of mass hysteria if you like, He found no shortage of helpers in his schemes for world domination.
Had he not run out of gas—he would have succeeded .
300 years ago, rising energy inputs cleared out the godnuts, you can be sure they will be back as energy inputs decline.
Democracy was the child of prosperity—poverty makes it an orphan
interesting that Trump and Kim both have overweight issues.
the big difference is that Kim is apparently the only overweight human in all of NK.
those healthy North Koreans!
who knew?
ps: Venezuelans are also getting thinner and “healthier”.
Kim is also half of trump age..That is sorta a big difference as well.
true…
I wonder who will live longer?
I’d say about 50/50 either one.
When a person looks at statues in museums, it was the generals and other high ranking officials who were overweight. Others could not afford to eat that much.
And it was a sign of status back then. Those bellies on the statues were probably exaggerated by the artist.
JHK writes “I will be busy preparing the perhaps more interesting forecast for the year to come…”
that means his post on Monday morning.
I sure enjoy his twice weekly rants… often great writing and highly entertaining… but his yearly predictions are infamous for their poor timing on the Doom to come.
I predict 365 more days of this BAU in the core countries and Creeping Collapse elsewhere…
and Bitcoin up to $1 million… ha ha…
more predictions coming soon…
gotta be ahead of JHK…
There’s a oil shock coming, maybe next year. Maybe in two years – but it’s coming. Can your hear the rumbling?
But it may not look at all like an oil shock. It may look like a finical collapse, and an outcome much worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. It may look like the election of radical leaders.
Imagine a salamander that grows a big brain over geologic time. That little guy is very well adapted to the swamp. He eats that fu&*ing swamp up … defeats it. He goes on and in just 4000 year goes from the swamp to burning FF and building the prettiest swampy cities his wet little planet has ever seen. But, in only 4000 years, he is still thinking like a salamander. Can he figure out that the easiest and best FFs have already been mined out? Can he figure out that when his swamp is too warm he won’t be able to make it?
No. He still thinks like his ancestor that slithered around in the mud, and he makes a bunch of stupid mistakes.
That is why there are no aliens visiting the earth. No species can evolve fast enough to keep up with the technological change available to the species with lots and lots of cheap FF. And conversely, if there isn’t a sufficiency of FF, the species never gets off their planet. Don’t believe me? Just re-read Kurzweil, “The Singularity is Near” with the foregoing in mind.
It isn’t the salamanders (the apes) fault. Its just the way it is.
Dear Pintada;
More dope! Less booze.
Please make a note of it,
Pintada
You are on an epic roll! Don’t stop now and don’t alter your meds.
The lower your social class, the ‘wiser’ you are, suggests new study
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/lower-your-social-class-wiser-you-are-suggests-new-study
Sounds like more made up lies from a pseudo-study conducted by the Church of Sociology
The Most Expensive Weather Year Ever
Economists are tallying the damage from the fires and the hurricanes, and finding their true costs immeasurable.
“It now seems a near certainty that 2017 will be the most expensive year in American history in terms of natural disasters—and a preview of the trillions of dollars of costs related to climate change yet to come.
The effect is perhaps clearest in terms of property damage, in the United States’ territories as well as in the states, with governments, insurers, and individuals counting up the losses from torn-apart homes, flooded cars, downed bridges, destroyed electrical grids, and shuttered hospitals. Early in the fall, Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico, which had already suffered a decade-long recession. The government there has asked for $95 billion to rebuild the electric grid, infrastructure, and homes, and the storm caused an estimated $85 billion in insured losses. The credit-rating agency Moody’s puts the estimate of the storm’s damage at $40 billion in lost economic output and $55 billion in property damage, in a region with a GDP of about $100 billion a year. The numbers are similarly devastating in the Virgin Islands, which were hit by Hurricane Irma.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/12/expensive-weather-storms/548579/
I have no idea how society is going to afford to keep doing this. It would be cheaper to get ahead of these unavoidable events instead of rescuing folks which we spare no expense (for now?) and repair & rebuild and not everything is getting rebuilt. Seriously, it can’t go on like this forever. Clock is ticking on adaption-preparation-protection. Ahhh no bigge. It’s just the well being of the kids and grandkid future. Hell, we have already left them the most insane level of debt in world history, so why not a trashed biosphere that wants to kill them too?
I suspect that Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands will have to be “written off.” Puerto Rico needed subsidies before; it is a question of how much subsidies now can be afforded. We have to either move residents out of these countries to areas that are more self sustaining, or let the people there adapt to the much lower standard of living possible with very limited electricity and difficulty in competing in international marketplaces.
Yup.
“I have no idea how society is going to afford to keep doing this. It would be cheaper to get ahead of these unavoidable events instead of rescuing folks which we spare no expense (for now?) and repair & rebuild and not everything is getting rebuilt. Seriously, it can’t go on like this forever. Clock is ticking on adaption-preparation-protection. Ahhh no bigge. It’s just the well being of the kids and grandkid future. Hell, we have already left them the most insane level of debt in world history, so why not a trashed biosphere that wants to kill them too?”
sure…
you know, it was so great, before 2017, when the weather in the world was absolutely perfect and lovely, and there were never any storms.
too bad for the kids and the grandkids…
“we” found lots of beautiful lovely cheap fossil fuels to use, but there isn’t much left for them.
You forgot to mention this though…. don’t you just hate when the facts mess with your attempt at logic?
U.S. Has Gone a Record 142 Months Without a Major Hurricane Strike
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/record-142-months-without-major-hurricane-may-be-coming-end
But this article originated on August 24, 2017- the day before Harvey made landfall?
Fewer but more of a punch…just like wild fires….oh well, too bad we can’t have billions of two legged ones on the planet without burning fossil fuels…
And that award is for both 2017 and 2018… just in case we don’t make it to the end of 18… and because you deserve it
Maybe you have to take very long run averages. I saw on actuarial study a while back that concluded that on some basis, hurricanes were decreasing from a period long ago (perhaps the 1950s). There is so much hysteria on this subject, it is hard to get any rational discussion.
Yes children – but let’s put our thinking caps on — if you are going to claim that a few hurricanes over a certain period are evidence of the geeby weeby — then what would it mean if there had been no hurricanes at all for a 142 months before that?
Don’t shout out the answer you little sons of B itch es — I have told you before — you put up your f789ing hands if you want to answer.
Apneaman
If we could just get all those cows to stop farting all day. Then maybe we could get a handle on Gloobball Warrrrming!
If we could get humans just to eat plant food, we wouldn’t have to disturb the ecosystem nearly as much. We could get rid of a whole lot of domesticated animals, and we could stop overfishing the oceans.
Gail, I’m afraid it would only allow the people to breed more, raising human overshoot numbers. What, projections have us reaching 10 billion from current 7.5 billion.
Looks like we may be doing just that, grazing on grass.
We can’t graze on grass. You are right, though. If we did eat a more vegetarian diet, it would only allow the total population to rise.
My HMO just hit us with a -$40 added payment each due the first of each month. Just out of the blue. No warning. Written on the cheapest paper ever seen. We eat meat, although not red meat. But to compensate for that HMO addition, I’m suggesting that we stop with meat altogether. Do beans really supply adequate protein?
Artleads, do yourself a favor avoid animal fat. Yes, beans with a combo of brown rice will be a whole protein. BTW, as a grown adult you need for protein is not real much, comparer to a growing adolescent. Plus, your body can not store protein, so whatever is not used is flushed out. If you don’t eat dairy you may need a vitamin B12 supplement.
The best sources of Vitamin B12 include: eggs, milk, cheese, milk products, meat, fish, shellfish and poultry. Some soy and rice beverages as well as soy based meat substitutes are fortified with vitamin B12. To see if a product contains vitamin B12 check the Nutrition Facts on the food label
I’ve avoided meat for 4 decades with no adverse health issues, actually, am very healthy, and attribute it partly to this diet and exercise, along with clean living.
Reassuring. Thanks!
if we could just change human nature… you know?
so many of us love how tasty and satisfying red meat is…
it seems to me that beans are usually disguised with other ingredients because…
well…
just doesn’t taste as good as red meat.
but, I hear you on the increasing cost of living…
life comes at us fast.
Beans, nuts and seeds have a lot of lectins – not the best for your leaky-gut health. And humans didn’t get large brains from eating plants (sorry), but from eating meat, particularly cooked meat. Compare liver vs broccoli nutrients oz for oz… No comparison.
Ruminants turn grass into fatty acids and amino acids via a fermentation gut. Human guts are more like wolves (acid based), we can NOT turn vegetation into fatty acids in any appreciable amount, and not into amino acids in ANY amount – – and so we should get most of our nutrients via eating ruminants (or fish/seafood), much like bears or wolves. That’s how we evolved, and at some point (12+ million years ago?) slowly traded a fermentation gut for a larger brain via eating meat (and cooked meat sped the process). Other primates have at least some form of a fermentation gut (larger GI tract with lots of bacteria to support fatty acid & amino acid production).
How many vegetarians do you know that look like this hairless chimp? Bananas and greens do NOT make humans look like this…
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BSjcJv-eLxM/maxresdefault.jpg
Nor does eating grass make a human look like a well-muscled bull.
But vegetarians (and those who eat vegetables, grains, and fish) tend to have longer life expectancies than meat-eaters.
I wonder to what extent vegetarians are healthier (if they are) because they are vegetarians and to what extent because they care what they eat.
Eating meat is the default mode. And the default mode is eating crap.
Studies of Seventh Day Adventists who don’t eat meat show longer life expectancies.
Of course, Japanese with their heavily seafood diets (plus rice and vegetables) have long life expectancies.
I still don’t like correlation studies. Comparing some oxy chewing McDoo eating smoker with someone who actually cares what they eat is not the same as comparing two identical persons one who eats some quality animal products and one who don’t.
Beans and rice. Very popular dish and a complete protein.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/351077-the-protein-in-rice-beans/
Beans and anything. Beans are low in methionine and high in all other amino acids. Just about anything else vegetarian may be lacking much but at least have methionine.
Peas are the most complete vegetarian protein.
I have heard, but not verified, oatmeal and milk contains all you need.
Unless you need to make a point or is very poor you eat 100g meat a week and get all amino acids and B and K you need.
During the creeping collapse you have to learn how to get cheap calories and complete the nutrients.
Also the Lykow family and a couple of million irish lived almost exclusively on potatoes.
Potatoes being easy to grow and store and taste not to bad. Among the most area effective crops taking about 200 m2 per person and year.
You eat a blend of different kinds of vegetables–beans and corn are a common combination. Over the period of 24 hours, a person gets quite a lot of different amino acids.
There still may be some issues–a lack of B12 is one that is sometimes mentioned. I know my husband takes B12 pills, I don’t. I have been eating some dairy, because our doctors keep talking about the importance of calcium. There are a whole lot of people in the world with better bones than we have, who don’t eat dairy however.
Gail – Love ya and want to see you live well. Please read Vitamin K2 and the Calcium Paradox. Also look into the Weston Price Foundation and/or the Ancestral Health Youtube channel for solid health-span nutrition guidance.
Lots of good info in the above.
And for the meat-haters (veggie-lovers?) above please note that a 2.5g dose of Leucine triggers mTOR in Humans, which up-regulates positive nitrogen balance, which is of long-term importance as higher levels of LBM are the best predictor of health-span the world over.
Stronger people are harder to kill (disease, accidents, murder, etc). Eat meat.
I had a full health check about 6 months ago — I mentioned that I have been eating very little red meat for years now …. and asked about protein issues… the doctor said all that stuff about having to mix and match foods to get complete proteins has been debunked….
Unless you are a performance athlete then I would see no issues in trying to get enough protein in your diet without eating meat….
I eat have eggs from time to time and some sort of seafood maybe 3 times per week. Red meat maybe once per month….
I have not wilted away to skin and bone….
You should get a Calcium Score… Might not be on the road to finishing up your bucket list.
Top 10 Calcium Rich Foods
1) Raw Milk. 1 cup: 300 mg (30% DV)
2) Kale (cooked) 1 cup: 245 mg (24% DV)
3) Sardines (with bones) 2 ounces: 217 mg (21% DV)
4) Yogurt or Kefir. 6 oz: 300 mg (30% DV)
5) Broccoli. 1 ½ cup cooked: 93 mg (9% DV)
6) Watercress. 1 cup: 41 mg (4% DV)
7) Cheese. 1 oz: 224 mg (22% DV)
8) Bok Choy.
I am good… and have great POWER… feel it
Yes, doctors are diet experts.
now that you mention .. she was a fat p ig.
But then we get Gerbel Warmers who are living fat on coal and oil … telling us what to do as well
They are also authorities on global warming.
Calcium Score… Not high calcium foods, old man.
http://www.umm.edu/programs/diagnosticrad/services/technology/ct/cardiac-calcium-scoring
A CT scan of your heart that will “score” your calcification level – calcification caused largely by high insulin, which abraids your blood vessel walls, which then causes calcium deposits to “fix” the damage. One of very few current health indicators worth a damn.
They never say what the cost associated with this procedure is.
If you have been following a healthy lifestyle, your change of a good score are quite good. If you have been eating the traditional American diet, you very likely have a poor score, especially if you are 55 plus.
I would be willing to bet that lower cost countries would not run this test much.
Or institute “The Lottery”?
https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf
Some early civilizations intentionally reduced population to keep a better balance between resources avalable and population.
Collapse for cattle!!!
as prof lovelock said in one of his gaia books—
man is a hunting carnivore, not a gentle gardener
Or a hunted gatherer, at least while still on the savannah.
humankind out-hunted everything else
we are not ready to start gardening just yet
Man is a super-omnivore. Opportunistic, highly adaptable. Able to hunt, gather, and if necessary – to garden!
We know that other primates eat mostly plant food. 98%?
That should give us a clue that we don’t need a whole lot of animal food in our diet.
Humans have bigger brains and smaller bellies than other primates. At least some do.
And smaller teeth. Cooking some of the food seems to be a major cause for these changes. Vegetables especially benefitted from cooking, because of the cell walls.
Yes, we are basically adapted to meat and potatoes, both cooked. beer is optional.
Women are the gentle gardeners. They have often provided more than the men’s hunting.
more reliable that’s for sure
Our generous and beautiful host says, “If we could get humans just to eat plant food, …”
Yes indeed. If people were not people, but some other species.
Yup, we would have seen the facts when they were first expressed by LB fu%^king J in 19 F%^king 68. But no, we are not some other species and so we have killed ourselves … our entire stupid f%^&king species.
If we were not people, we would eat no meat.
If we were not people, we would face facts.
If we were not people, we would take logical/reasonable action 50 years ago when we first knew about AGW.
If we were not people, we would have noticed that the cheap oil was finite.
But, no, we are in fact human beings, the naked ape.
I dont hate us unless my whiskey to dope ratio is out of whack, and stupid flatlanders piss me off.
I personally eat very little meat–mostly seafood when I eat animal products. It seems to be good for health. I also stay away from sweets, mostly.
Women don’t need very much meat because they didn’t evolve to do a lot of heavy labor. The calorific needs of women are lower than that of men, who were expected to do more physically demanding labor. A man on a low-protein diet will not have as much muscle mass, and will not be attractive or respected as one who consumes a moderate amount of protein.
Besides, wasn’t it you who said that a vegetable and protein diet does not provide enough calories for humans in a low-tech setting?
*edit: wasn’t it you who said that a vegan diet does not provide enough calories for humans in a low-tech setting?
I don’t think I said that. Nuts provide a lot of calories, for example.
I must confess to being one of the people that eat very little meat. I greatly prefer rice and beans. Or just beans.
Still, back when I worked hard, I occasionally “had to” indulge in a nice greasy steak or hamburger. I would just get really hungry.
Back further, in my coding days, I was talking with one of my Indian co-workers. He went on and on about how he could not play cricket at the same level as an american because he just couldn’t get enough food to perform athletically at that level. I believe him.
He probably has a fast metabolism which means he would have to spend most of the day eating to keep the appropriate amount of muscle mass, energy, etc.,
I was checking out some seals on in Tauranga Bay earlier today …
And was wondering what the rules are on eating them (the pups look tantalizing)…. they are protected so I will not put one in the pot for dinner tonight…. (so disappointed LOL)
I found this :
Recent DNA information indicates the New Zealand sea lion is a lineage previously restricted to subantarctic regions. Somewhere between 1300 and 1500 AD, a genetically distinct mainland lineage was wiped out by the first Maori settlers,[6] and the subantarctic lineage has since then gradually filled the ecological niche.[7][7] It has been inferred from middens and ancient DNA that a third lineage was made extinct at the Chatham Islands due to predation by the Moriori people.[8][9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinct_animals_of_New_Zealand
The Maori population was less than 100k when this was occurring https://teara.govt.nz/en/taupori-maori-maori-population-change/page-1
http://archive.stats.govt.nz/~/media/Statistics/browse-categories/people-and-communities/pacific-peoples/pacific-prog-demography/fig1-1.png
Who was suggesting that there would be plenty of seal meat to eat post BAU on the east coast of Canada?
Ha ha ha…. well good luck with that! The Maoris did not have high powered rifles… and there were not many of them …. yet the decimated the seal population in no time
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/19/politics/summer-of-hurricanes-broke-fema-weir/index.html
‘Hellish summer of hurricanes smashes FEMA’
“But the man in charge of answering all those pleas is sounding his own cry for help. FEMA Administrator Brock Long, chosen by Donald Trump to be the nation’s top emergency manager, wants everyone to understand three fundamental truths:
1.FEMA is broke.
2.The system is broken.
3.If this is the new normal, Americans can’t rely on a federal cavalry when disaster strikes. They will have to take care of themselves.”
Long says. “I didn’t come up here to do status quo, I’m ready to change the face of emergency management.”
This is all code for: You people just have to understand that tax cuts from 35% to 21% for corporations means you people that have trouble for any reason including outrageous weather will just have find your own way. Otherwise deficits will rise too high.
“He explains how FEMA has to order, build, install and inspect each manufactured home at a cost of $200,000 to $300,000 before they go to a family for a temporary lease of 18 months. “And then when it’s done, I’m not allowed to reuse that trailer. I can’t refurbish it and reuse it. We have to dispose of it,””
Lets make GDP great again!
Maybe running up debt works a bit. But we could not make Puerto Rico a “working” territory before the hurricane struck; we certainly can’t fix it now. There are going to have to be a lot of things we have to assume are unfixable.
The only way we can possibly avoid collapse of the overall system (for a short time) is to let pieces of the overall system collapse early on. Puerto Rico is likely a piece that has to collapse. So is Syria. Perhaps Venezuela. Hurricane, flood, and fire damaged areas within the US may need to be “let go” as well.
Local communities and states can find their own way just fine. FEMA is not needed. It is a big fed welfare program created by the Feds want everyone to believe only the feds can solve problems.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/20/exclusive-us-making-plans-bloody-nose-military-attack-north/
Not sure how accurate this news leak is but according to that article, the US is planning a ‘Bloody Nose’ attack on NK. The idea is to get them to understand the seriousness of the situation. However, I think anyone in their right mind would know that such action would cause NK to launch artillery at Seoul, SK and missiles at various nearby countries like Japan. The other possibility is they leaked that idea to get NK to the bargaining table or to let them know when the brief attack does take place, its not a full on war. Or it’s just plain fake news like a lot of news recently.
China would also be at war, since it’s NK’s ally in the instance where it is attacked first.
True, but what Trump may be trying to do is make it sound to China like it’s just a little bit of military action, nothing to get too responsive about. But Trump also knows the tiniest little something is going to be like jabbing a hornet’s nest, then Trump will say something like, “We can all see from NK’s response that something had to be done to stop them. The World should be thankful to me and our great military for having wiped this regime out.”
There’s no such thing as a “little war” on the Korean peninsula.
The Russian region of Primorskiy Krai borders on NK too.
Subway Is Bringing Back the $5 Footlong — But Not Everyone Is Happy
Plus, Taco Bell promotes its $1 menu, and more food news
https://www.eater.com/2017/12/15/16780370/subway-5-dollar-footlong-backlash
The consumer is broke
Read the article, much more to Subways decline than the broke consumer.
Over expanded locations, stale menu and less than fresh veggies. Also, relied on $5 footlong campaign with a prev Jared Fogle, that tarnished their name.
To be honest, when I got a sandwich there, seemed to be premade meats of low quality and skimp on the toppings with a thinner roll. Never like what they shown on their TV commercials. Generally, the counter people were nice and clean. No problem there.
Would always leave a tip, because they didn’t get paid enough. Had a buddy that was forced to work there as a survival job. When he reached 40 hours in one location, sent him to another to pay him a separate cheque in order not to pay overtime!
Don’t know if this was legal, but left a bad taste in my mouth. The fast food industry is brutal.
it didn’t help when the news came out that their foot-long subs are only 10 or 11 inches…
is that inflation or deflation?
There are some true things, and one of those is … there is little time, and much growing to do. You are here to wake the F#$k up. So terribly few have or ever will.
sure… we are here to wake up…
oh, look, I’m awake, and oh, I’ve been born into a Reality where all humans live for a mere blip of time and then enter the nothingness of eternal death…
but, wait!
It doesn’t have to be this way!
oh, wait, yes it does…
bummer…
well, at least it’s BAU tonight, baby!
https://i.imgur.com/M7Jg3rZ.jpg
So, that’s where we got the trickle down idea? Great pic, thanks!🎅
This is what the stuuuupid goyim deserve….
Instead of moaning and complaining about it …. do something about it….
Easier to moan and complain… and accept it.
Rescuing folks and cleaning up after all these AGW Jacked disasters is getting mighty costly indeed. All that money/energy could have done something useful. More to come and many want to rebuild in the exact same spots.
Thomas fire within 500 acres of becoming California’s largest wildfire on record
“As of Friday morning, the blaze was 65% contained after burning 272,800 acres, eclipsed only by the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, which burned 273,246 acres.
This year is already the most destructive fire season on record in the state. In October, a series of fires in wine country burned more than 10,000 homes and killed more than 40 people. Those blazes, along with the Thomas fire, were fueled by dry conditions and intense winds.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-thomas-fire-size-20171222-20171222-story.html
Records have been tumbling like crazy the past 5 years – they will all be broken again and again.
Dec 8th – A historic U.S. and California fire season in 2017
According to the National Interagency Fire Center, 2017 ranked in fifth place as of November 30 for the most U.S. acreage burned by wildfires in a year (since 1960), at 9.2 million acres. This week’s fires in California have added another 157,000 acres as of Friday morning to that total, putting 2017 into third place on the all-time list. Currently, the top five fire years for U.S. acreage burned since 1960 are:
1. 2015 10.1 million acres
2. 2006 9.9 million acres
3. 2017 9.4 million acres
4. 2007 9.3 million acres
5. 2012 9.3 million acres
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/snowy-south-fiery-west-whats-happened-our-moisture
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/500x/76788795/dj-hamas-morning-fire-2017.jpg
“This year is already the most destructive fire season on record in the state. In October, a series of fires in wine country burned more than 10,000 homes and killed more than 40 people.”
Exact number is 8889 structures lost, which includes homes.
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Wine-Country-fires-destroyed-8-889-structures-12328007.php
But your point about this costing a lot is certainly true. Presumably these kind of stats will translate into greater urgency for the transition to renewables.
If I pay you money … will you leave FW?
Lol, I will!
you would have to pay me in Bitcoins…
SF Gate is fake news JH..Try the San Fran Chronicle instead.
JH Wyoming, just in response to your comments about renewable energy taking over from FF. you need to look at the real numbers, not the $cost often referred to. For example take copper as a resource and the amount needed.
Currently the world uses about 175,000Twhs of primary energy per year (from Wikipedia)
Assume no intermittency problem, say a world wide grid. (A whole new set of problems by itself)
If we built out 2000Gw of solar panels in the deserts, where we get an average of 6 hours/day of sun, each year, then the amount of copper needed to do this at the average of 5.5t/Mw of solar, just for the cabling, would be 11,000,000 tonnes/yr. If we did this over 20 years, then we would get to 50% of current World energy use, or about 90,000Twh.
11,000,000 tonnes is about 50% of current world production of copper. We then would need more copper for all the electric cars,trucks,buses, boats, trains, tractors, inverters, transformers, etc,etc. In other words enough to double the amount of copper needed just for the solar panels, so let’s make that 22,000,000 tonnes per annum of EXTRA copper needed.
The problem is that current copper average grades mined have fallen from around 1% to about .6% over the last 20 years. We have already mined the best resources and are now getting the lowest grade resources, with only ever lower grades available. Some of the largest available not yet developed copper resources, like Pebble in Alaska, have an average copper grade of less than .4%. Extracting the copper from these large low grade resources takes lots of energy.
Basically to mine all the extra copper we need to make a renewable future, means using a lot more the energy to do do so!!
So the overall currently used energy of 175,000Twhs needs to grow to produce TWICE as much copper from ever lower grades available!!
All the talk about having a renewable future always talks about the DOLLAR cost, never the resource cost. Simply working out the real numbers in terms of resources and energy instead of DOLLARS, is what showed me that a fully renewable future is just not possible.
Using simple economics, it is very easy to see that to have a total of over 40m tonnes of copper mined each year, instead of the current 20m tonnnes, means the price of copper would have to rise by a lot to make the low grade resources economic. The price would probably have to triple to get to a production of 40mt/yr, but still take a decade to get there. A tripling of copper prices would raise the cost of solar, not lower it, yet all the talk of renewables I have ever read shows that solar continues to get cheaper due to economies of scale.
I’m afraid the economists that work on these numbers and theories, always assume the energy available will continue to get cheaper, when in fact the opposite is true as we reach resource limits.
The mining and benification of the raw copper ore, takes about 40-60Kwh/t, so a 2% grade of copper needs about 50 tonnes of ore, or around (taking 50Kwh as average) 2500Kwh of energy to separate the copper from the waste. At .4% ore grade, 250t of ore are required to make 1 tonne of copper, so about 7500Kwh of energy for the same amount of copper.
This copper is a concentrate that then gets transported and smelted, then refined to make the copper needed for manufacturers.
As we get into ever lower grades of copper and higher prices, then as all the easy to get copper is used, what is left is lower grade and usually more remote, so more energy needed in liquid form to get it, and transport the concentrate.
The renewable will save us argument is literally to dig deeper and bigger holes in more remote places, using MORE energy to do so.
This is just an example of the copper needed. If you take all the other resources also needed to make the solar panels, wind turbines, geo-thermal etc etc, it would require a book to go through all the calculations.
However just the copper content needed is enough to show how impossible the task really is, along with the sheer size of how much energy is currently used. The price of copper is already rising again, now about $3.20/lb, because of the current increased demand by EV’s and electrification, yet we are only installing about 70Gw of solar panels/yr (at 5.5t/Mw = 385,000t copper, just for the panels cabling). It is currently a tiny amount.
The newer copper mines are often very remote, so totally rely on liquid fuels. The argument for renewables really is about using a LOT more energy, just to make it happen (and keep existing civilization going).
Where does all this extra energy come from???
Think about where we are now with renewables.
If we are current at about 1% with wind and solar, how much would we have to scale them up? Biofuels and waste includes branches and wood used and fuel; also ethanol and dung burned as fuel. It hasn’t increased as a percentage of the total since 1973.
Hi Gail, exactly correct, we are still nowhere with renewables, yet the price of Copper and Nickel (batteries) is already starting to rise.
Renewables are the “Great White Hope” of keeping BAU going, not just because of GW but also using the last of the cheap FF, plus the last of the cheap metals.
My example of the copper usage is to show those that believe in Renewables is just not possible, by giving the absolute best case scenario (solar panels in Deserts, a world wide grid, so no internittency etc). Yet even with the perfect scenario, it does NOT add up.
In the real world we actually have, copper use would be much higher, as most solar is on the roof of buildings in cities, where the capacity factor comes down to an average of 4 hours or less per day. Plus there would need to be added storage etc because we do not have a world wide grid.
The real world would probably double the amount of copper needed again from my earlier figures, ie 20,000,000 tonnes/yr for 20 years just for the lack of efficiency in isolated grids, battery or pumped hydro storage, inverters everywhere etc. Then add another 10,000,000 tonnes for the electrification of everything, on top the the currently produced 20mt/a.
Given the following graph of the reduced grades on average mined, and the increasing energy for each tonne of copper, zinc,lead,nickel etc mined, it is an easy conclusion to draw that 50mt/a of copper for a ‘renewables led future’ just is NOT possible!!
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0fb2/3ed97e4675abcf94f6b3debc8a49acc60e50.pdf
One of the numbers mentioned by ‘futurists’ is the 720m tonnes of ‘reserve’ copper mentioned by the USGS. These economically recoverable reserves make an assumption of continued cheap and plentiful fuel/energy.
It is a catch 22 on the numbers, more expensive energy, makes more expensive commodities, which make cheap renewables impossible to cover FF use.
People need to see the numbers to believe, 50mt/a of copper mined for 20 years to give just a possibility of 50% of current FF use by solar, is totally out of reach!!
“It is a catch 22 on the numbers, more expensive energy, makes more expensive commodities, which make cheap renewables impossible to cover FF use.”
this is a deep truth that is missed by Cornucopians…
we live in a world of networked resources…
more expensive energy makes more expensive commodities, which in turn makes for more expensive extraction costs of energy resources etc…
in other words, long live fossil fuels, or else we get caught by Creeping Collapse.
Or maybe not so Creeping Collapse. Just plain Collapse.
And even a ww grid in the desert doesn’t work because the demand curve is not flat.
We still need either overproduction or a lot of storage.
I suppose you could analyse global demand and try finding a patch of desert that matches that time. Still between latitudes 45 north and south there is much sea.
We need an awfully lot of heat energy in the winter. Storage from summer to winter is likely to be problematic.
You are right; all of the resources we will need for the various grand plans become a problem. Even if the problem isn’t copper, it is silver or lithium or something else.
I just pretended, like HideAway, we would build a global grid.
Panels in Sahara, Texas, Australia and China could heat europe around the clock in the winter, for a “small” transmission loss.
But STILL it would require storage.
Don Draper has an answer for this … he has answers that counter all logic…. and these answers are believed by the stuuuuupid humans….
All he has to point to is how quickly computing power increased…. or how rapidly the internet became ubiquitous…. when our backs are against the wall — we will do it!
Humans are capable of anything…. do not count them out!!!!
(Don is clever — he will never point out all the failings of humans…. focus on the positives only)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
https://pm1.narvii.com/6541/b98ef906b0363a4c21915907f68874fa0ac40181_hq.jpg
Someone recently send me this rubbish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0&feature=youtu.be No need to waste your time watching — in a nutshell — humans are awesome — we will be able to quickly scale up renewable energy including storage and we are saved…
No mention of the fact that this is impossible due to the scale required — no mention of how around half of oil is the main ingredient in everything from fertilizers to plastics — no mention of how we are running out of just about all cheap resources….
Anyway – I sent this back — the response — ‘I am not in a position to evaluate these findings’
WTF???? How F789ing difficult can it be???? An average 7 year old could look at this and say – ya that makes sense — renewable energy is NOT going to be possible.
Renewable energy ‘simply won’t work’: Top Google engineers
Two highly qualified Google engineers who have spent years studying and trying to improve renewable energy technology have stated quite bluntly that whatever the future holds, it is not a renewables-powered civilisation: such a thing is impossible.
Both men are Stanford PhDs, Ross Koningstein having trained in aerospace engineering and David Fork in applied physics. These aren’t guys who fiddle about with websites or data analytics or “technology” of that sort: they are real engineers who understand difficult maths and physics, and top-bracket even among that distinguished company.
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.
All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.
In reality, well before any such stage was reached, energy would become horrifyingly expensive – which means that everything would become horrifyingly expensive (even the present well-under-one-per-cent renewables level in the UK has pushed up utility bills very considerably).
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
Where is my Xanax????? Before another gasket blows…..
Nice job HideAway.
Love the post good reasoning and math.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the transition to renewables. Renewables do nothing!
I think someone here referred to them as “intermittentbles”. Let’s go with that, shall we?
“Rescuing folks and cleaning up after all these AGW Jacked disasters is getting mighty costly indeed. All that money/energy could have done something useful.”
Like mining bitcoins? Or building intermittables? The self-organizing system does what it does, it dissipates resources. If the houses burn down, we get to dissipate some more resources as long as we live in a wealthy province, i.e. california and not puerto rico.
The only way to come anywhere close to mitigating the AGW crisis is to STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS.
The only way to stop burning fossil fuels is to stop burning fossil fuels. Its funny, but to make the idea simple, I have to make it a truism. It is too obvious to actually put into words.
No, you cannot burn more fossil fuels to burn less fossil fuels.
No, you cannot burn natural gas which is a fossil fuel to stop burning fossil fuels
No, you cannot burn fossil fuels to build solar panels.
No, you cannot burn fossil fuels to build wind mills.
NO. I do not like green eggs and ham. Sam f$%*ing, Sam I am.
And no, reaching 3C of warming is not OK. No, reaching 2C is not OK.
2C gets you 3C because of the melting permafrost. And 3C gets you 4C because of the methane clathrates, and 4C gets you 12C because of those 3000 – 6000 billion tons of methane hydrates.
And yes, AGW exists even if you know there is no solution!
F$%#King stupid people!
Good rant!
But do you understand that “stop burning fossil fuels” is totally unrealistic?
If the answer to that question is yes, why are you acting like you can make a difference, touting AGW to doubters?
I just want you to be happy, you know. Merry christmas!
I have asked Santa for a massive block of coal — for Christmas…. which I intend to burn (TINA)
https://previews.123rf.com/images/baloncici/baloncici1209/baloncici120900116/15416893-big-block-of-black-anthracite-coal-ore-Stock-Photo.jpg
if only Nature was never destructive…
why, imagine!
with Benevolent Nature, no human construction would ever have to be rebuilt or even repaired…
yes!
that’s the Reality that I want…
not this stinkin’ Real Reality where fire and winds and rain and floods cause so much damage…
it’s not fair!
sarc/on…
David, but in the future, with solar covering the globe to take the heat out of those hot oceans by covering them with solar panels, then desalinating huge quantities of seawater for irrigation in many marginal areas, we will control the weather and climate, while living in a pollution free nirvana.
The huge wind turbines will calm the fierce winds so we have our utopia.
sarc/off
People are ditching Subway and franchisees expect a wave of store closures
http://www.businessinsider.com/subways-closes-stores-spirals-downwards-2017-12
Consumers spent their savings in November.Savings rate plunges to lowest level since 2007
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/consumers-spent-their-savings-in-november-2017-12-22?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
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About that Tesla battery re J H Wyoming’s response which I noticed earlier today but didn’t have time to respond to:
“Tesla’s Powerpacks are connected to a wind farm in Hornsdale, owned by French renewable energy company Neoen. Jay Weatherill, a politician and current Premier of South Australia, says it’s the first time the state has been able to reliably dispatch wind energy to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was possible, of course, to capture this energy resource before — the problem has been controlling when, and how much of the resulting electricity is fed back into the grid. With a 100MWV battery farm, the state can now power more than 30,000 homes, regardless of the weather.”
I searched for “south australia hornsdale wind generation” and discovered a great website which provides an interactive monthly wind generation graphic for *all* of Australia:
http://anero.id/energy/wind-energy/2017/december/1
Also, from Hornsdale’s website, total planned capacity of Hornsdale is 105×3 MW:
https://hornsdalewindfarm.com.au/overview/
You can fiddle around with the chart widget in the first link to only show the Hornsdale output. Just uncheck everything else except HDWF-1 & 2. Date can be selected with the calendar in the top right corner. After doing some fiddling around myself, I discovered that low output periods in July and November lasted between 2-5 days, so let’s say an even 3 days on average of about 20 MW output/month. Aneroid only gives data for 215 MW or two substations, so I’m assuming high output periods at 200 MW. That means that at 215 MW capacity there will be a 12960 MWh shortfall/month. Musk’s battery has a storage capacity of 130 MWh.
It will take around 100 130 MWh Big Beautiful Batteries to completely backup Hornsdale for what seems to be an average month. And this is just one wind farm in South Australia. Given all this, I would very much like Premier Weatherill to elucidate his assertion that “it’s the first time the state has been able to reliably dispatch wind energy to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week”.
Euan Mearns have good stuff on this. Example:
http://euanmearns.com/australia-energy-storage-and-the-blakers-study/
3 000 000 MWh storage would cover australia provided some overgeneration. Elons battery is 129 MWh. They need 24 000 batteries.
Exactly DJ, the batteries just don’t scale up to what is needed. It just takes twice the “renewable” infrastructure (or more) just to try to keep up with fossil fuels. We already cannot maintain what we have. This “renewable” thing just isn’t gonna work.
I read that the 130MWh Tesla battery cost is a secret. Rumoured to be less that $200 million. Maybe $199 million LOL. From the EIA the average cost of natural gas generators installed in 2015 was $696/kW. So, to build a natural gas power plant with a 130MW capacity would cost $83 million. Why bother with a stupid battery you have to replace every 7 to 10 years when you can just build a dispatachable NG power plant for nearly 1/4 the cost of the battery?
“They need 24000 batteries.”
The better question to ask is; Was the installation of batteries in South Australia economically advantageous? If so, then it’s just a matter of scaling up production of batteries, and if the resources for that become scarce, then develop a different kind of battery in which resources are less expensive and more plentiful. 30,000 homes probably has an average of 4 people per household, so that 120,000 people that are living with a viable renewable energy source that’s working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, smoothly. It all doesn’t have to be done instantly, but over the years to come. So get busy people. This is no time to give up.
as i think i said before
it’s not the power consumed by the ”household”
its the power consumed by the environment in which the house sits—which is 50 or 60 times as much
Yep, it’s not a problem today to get for example cogeneration unit (burning wood or gas) made in DE/AT, which will heat the home and produce some electricity from that waste heat usually bellow 1kW for smaller private non industrial site installation, plus it could be even paired with PV and batt pack as well in colder climate for solid 24/365 performance.
Now as you said, however, the problem is elsewhere in the environment encapsulating the whole current civilization. As such rich guy’s toys with limited lifespan can’t be scaled up to replace all the existing (path dependent) food chain industries, factories, govs services, utilities etc.
Elon can do it!
I think it is really Roger Andrews, writing on Euan Means site, who came up with these calculations. I think they generally do quite good work.
Shame they do not have any coal….Oh wait
LOL 24 000 batteries
What’s exciting the pro Tesla crowd is the response time of the battery, not how long it can carry the load in the event of a blackout.
http://reneweconomy.com.au/tesla-big-battery-outsmarts-lumbering-coal-units-after-loy-yang-trips-70003/
This is a really nice graph
http://reneweconomy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/HPR-frequeny-fig-2-copy.jpg
As I wrote elsewhere I don’t have an opinion whether the battery is an improvement over keeping coal plants spinning as a backup, but even if one or two Tesla batteries would be advantageous for load balancing in the seconds-minutes time scale it can’t out the daily variation.
They want to change the pricing mechanism so batteries like this can take advantage of intermittency.
To bad that would pull the rug out from beneath wind and solar, eliminating the need for the battery.
2017 Oil Discoveries At Lowest Point Since The 1940s
That echoes the repeated warnings from the IEA, which recently predicted that despite the expected massive growth from U.S. shale over the next decade or so, shale won’t be able to carry the load all on its own.
Shale “cannot increase indefinitely,” the IEA said in its 2017 World Energy Outlook. The IEA also noted that about 2.5 mb/d of supply is lost each year due to depletion, a gap that must be made up with new projects. And the impact of “near-record lows of new conventional oil projects receiving approval in recent years has yet to be fully seen.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Discoveries-At-Lowest-Point-Since-The-1940s.html
As M. King Hubbert (1962) shows, Peak Oil is about discovering less oil, and eventually producing less oil due to lack of discovery.
Or perhaps because the oil price does not rise high enough, to allow the production of what has been discovered.
Be careful about assuming that “Peak Oil” theories are true!
Low oil price definitely reduces the amount of oil discovered. No one goes out to discover oil that is clearly too expensive to extract.
Low oil price?
The oil price is more than double its post WW2 average of 25 dollars a barrel (Inflation Adjusted). And if you subtract the few years of the 70’s oil shocks it averaged around 19 dollars. It’s currently 58 dollars..
https://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Inflation_Rate/Historical_Oil_Prices_Chart.asp
https://oilprice.com/oil-price-charts/block/1
…low oil prices relative to what is needed to extract with a profit.
The oil price is way too low for producers. But it is still expensive for consumers.
Whenever the price goes down, a lot of “book value” disappears. This never runs though GDP, except as lower spending for consumers. Some debt may become un-payable. We are going through this period now. Today’s times are not very different from the “roaring 20s,” preceding the 1929 crash. Everything looks good, because a lot of debt is hiding a lot of problems.
I do assume peak oi theories are true. Just like i assume gravity theories and evolution theories are true.
A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be repeatedly tested, in accordance with the scientific method, using a predefined protocol of observation and experiment.Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
Well, sort of.
https://www.npr.org/2015/08/28/435416046/research-results-often-fail-to-be-replicated-researchers-say
That is not a very good example because psychology is mostly junk science…Since there is so much we still don’t understand about how the brain and the body works.
A lot of people would say “peak oil” is junk science, as well. There are pieces of it that are true. But it is very easy for a researcher (Hubbert and others) to think that they know more than they do. I think that Hubbert explained “one corner” of a very large, complex problem. A lot of misstatements were made by others, based indirectly on his work, and also on the work of economists (another type of “junk science”). There are an awfully lot of peak oilers who think that oil supply will “run out.” They think that the amount of oil (coal or natural gas) in the ground is the determining factor is deciding how much will be extracted. They expect that prices will rise higher and higher. They expect the decline rate to be relatively slow, based on the Hubbert Curve and total resources of a type. They expect rationing will be helpful. They often think that EROEI is helpful in determining what to extend supply with. In fact, beliefs such as these have encourage the climate activists, who think we have huge amounts of fossil fuels left to extract. Peak oilers think that shortages will be obvious to all. Nothing could be more untrue.
Hubbert described a very local phenomenon: extracting a resource, when the economy is functioning normally, and a particular extraction site or mine is one of many, each of which can continue to operate, to keep the economy functioning as previously. In this very limited situation, what Hubbert said was perhaps right. But an awfully lot of the extensions were based on “junk economics” and other wrong ideas. Hydrocarbons come in many different forms. Singling out liquid oil discoveries is interesting, but doesn’t necessarily say very much.
One thing a person quickly learns: scientific papers make a huge number of mistakes. In that sense “Peak Oil” is a scientific area of inquiry, just like a lot of others.
Did you just use the word “assume”? 🙂
Shale wells deplete faster than conventional oil wells. This is fact. It takes more to get less. Diminishing returns.
Shale only makes up around 5% of total world supplies. And there is no way in hell shale on its own can make up for all the worlds declining conventional legacy fields. According to the HSBC study we need to discover and bring online 5 1/2 new Saudi Arabia’s worth of oil at the least to keep supplies meeting demand by 2040…
https://www.scribd.com/document/367688629/HSBC-Peak-Oil-Report-2017
ALL-TIME LOW FOR DISCOVERED RESOURCES IN 2017: AROUND 7 BILLION BARRELS OF OIL EQUIVALENT WAS DISCOVERED
https://www.rystadenergy.com/NewsEvents/PressReleases/all-time-low-discovered-resources-2017
Greg —Meh, new technologies will be invented. Don’t be such a nervous Nellie. /s
I am aware that shale is a retirement party. I am not nervous.
5 1/2 new Saudi Arabia’s? Is this real life?
Hello? Is this thing on?
Shale oil has a higher ERoEI, not that that means much around here.
So little Johnny does not get a new pair of Reboks for Christmas because the money that would have been available as papa’s wages was spent instead on 40 more feet of steel casing in that lateral well somewhere out in the Eagle Ford play in West Texas.
oops, I meant to say lower ERoEI.
No! Tight oil from shale has a higher EROEI than other oil. It is “lower cost” to extract than quite a bit of other oil. It is also fairly simple to refine. It’s problem is that it doesn’t have enough of the heavy fractions that are needed by the diesel machinery around the world–but that is a totally different problem. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544215014917
There is something that EROEI papers analyze that is called “oil shale” that has very low EROEI. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.361.4561&rep=rep1&type=pdf This is “kerogen” that must be melted a high temperatures for a long period to produce oil. It is not generally used, because it is so high cost to produce. The reason that oil from shale is called “tight oil” is because the name “shale oil” was already taken by a very different product. There are endless wrong papers (some peer reviewed) that reference the EROEI of the wrong product. I notice this paper was sited 62 times, even though it belongs to a product that is almost never used.
Gail, I’m surprised to learn that shale oil has a higher ERoEI than conventional oil. I’m not surprised that oil shale (kerogen) has a lower ERoEI. I’m guessing that the simpler refining makes up for all the expense of lateral drilling, slotted steel casing, hydraulic fracturing, sand and chemical cocktail additions, and the faster decline rates of these wells. Amazing that this could be so.
There are too many beliefs that EROEI must always go down. The price of energy services needs to fall over time, if the economy is to grow. Part of what happens is rebalancing to use more coal. But even this does not seem to be working as a solution now.
I am also not convinced that EROEI tells us a whole lot. Too many apples to oranges comparisons.
Some people who have worked with EROEI call it a “very blunt tool.” But once a researcher starts down one road, the temptation is to go farther and farther down that road, regardless of whether it is very helpful.
Doom, as a Texan I can assure you that the Eagle Ford play is in southeast Texas….at least 500 miles from west Texas. You were probably thinking of the Permian Basin play.
Well, I’ve messed up my Texas geography. Eagle Ford is located in what I would call South Central Texas, see: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2011.11.03/EagleFord.gif
Yes, the Permian is in West Texas. Thank you for pointing that out, Jesse. I have many relatives in SE Texas, so I know the area, having visited there many times. I truly love Texas.
Of course, the steel casing was made with coal in China.
That is what M. King Hubbert thinks. A lot of people would think a lot of other things are more important. For example, debt levels, how high oil prices can rise, technology changes, what other oil types of oil besides “light, free flowing oil” can be used as fuels in uses where light free-flowing oil was used in the past.
I presume you are aware that oil discoveries are adjusted after the fact. So a small discovery 50 years ago can be adjusted upward, to a much bigger amount, as technology changes, and as oil prices rise. Are we certain that the most recent oil discoveries aren’t always the lowest amounts?
As M. King Hubbert (1962) shows, Peak Oil is about discovering less oil, and eventually producing less oil due to lack of discovery.
https://imgur.com/a/DVSNt
https://imgur.com/a/5hpQu
IEA Chief warns of world oil shortages by 2020 as discoveries fall to record lows
https://www.wsj.com/articles/iea-says-global-oil-discoveries-at-record-low-in-2016-1493244000
Peak Oil Vindicated by the IEA….
But this doesn’t really mean that either of them are correct, in the sense that this is the way the scene will play out.
It could very well look like economic collapse. I wouldn’t trust the IEA on any of its forecasts.
Murders in Chicago, St. Louis and Indianapolis are rising at a pace not seen ever
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/big-cities-possess-worlds-violent-prosperous-51909041
I am not surprised. Violence in Baltimore is said to be on par with or worse than Venezuela. Off the top of my head one could add Baltimore, Cleveland, Birmingham, Detroit and Los Angeles to the list too.
‘RISING KILLINGS, SINKING INCOME’
We are seeing how humans react … to the end of more…..
The end of more has not reached any of us… yet…. but it will….
Do you think you will be able to kill? Can you pull the trigger? It is going to come to that….
The Battle to the Death Over the Can of Beans.
Bitcoin now 7500. Any thoughts Gail? Ki
Sorry. The cut off part should have been ‘Killcam on?’ referencing FPS multiplayer chat jargon.
I am sure quite a few people will see this as a “buy” opportunity.
One born every minute.
Peeps on my Facebook feed were gleefully buying at 12k…
Smart peeps
Yeah, if they cash out before the bubble pops. But most won’t. It’s the way with manias – always.
Puppet Master, are you’re new here? Give us your two cents worth on life, love and the future, whilst you’re at it…
Buy the dip!
7500 what? I thought daily low (this far) was above $11k.
How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America
“The boomers inherited a rich, dynamic country and have gradually bankrupted it.”
https://www.vox.com/2017/12/20/16772670/baby-boomers-millennials-congress-debt
I agree. Our generation ruined it. Millennial’s have to live in it.
Don’t blame me, I voted for Ralf Nader!
Ralph Nader is an American political activist, author, lecturer, and attorney, noted for his involvement in consumer protection, environmentalism, and government reform causes
Nader’s activism has been directly credited with the passage of several landmark pieces of American consumer protection legislation including the Clean Water Act, the Freedom of Information Act, the Consumer Product Safety Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. He has been repeatedly named to lists of the “100 Most Influential Americans”, including those published by Life Magazine, Time Magazine, and The Atlantic, among others. He ran for President of the United States on several occasions as an independent and third party candidate, using the campaigns to highlight under-reported issues and a perceived need for electoral reform.
After graduating from Princeton, Nader began studying at Harvard Law School, though he quickly became bored by his courses. While at Harvard, Nader would frequently skip classes to hitchhike across the U.S. where he would engage in field research on Native American issues and migrant worker rights. He earned a LL.B. from Harvard in 1958
He has lived in Washington, DC since the 1960s, but is domiciled in Connecticut, where he is registered to vote
Personality and character traits
Nader has been described as an “ascetic … bordering on self-righteous”.[81] Despite access to respectable financial assets, he famously lives in a modest apartment and spends $25,000 on personal bills, conducting most of his writing on a typewriter.[82] According to popular accounts of his personal life, he does not own a television, relies primarily on public transportation, and over a 25-year period, until 1983, exclusively wore one of a dozen pairs of shoes he had purchased at a clearance sale in 1959. His suits, which he reports he purchases at sales and outlet stores, have been the repeated subject of public scrutiny, being variously described as “wrinkled”, “rumpled”, and “styleless”. A newspaper story once described Nader as a “conscientious objector to fashion
5] Nader said he owned no car and owned no real estate directly in 2000, and said that he lived on $25,000 a year, giving most of his stock earnings to many of the over four dozen non-profit organizations he had founded.
A lot of people would consider Nader to be a nut. They expect a crusader to be like Al Gore, flying around from mansion to mansion, talking about their causes.
Hi Gail, my post was in jest…..Ralf (sic) is still hooked in BAU, line and sinker all the way.
It would be amusing to see an alternative history if either him or All Gore won the Presidency rather than Duby, Seems a quirk a chap like Trump sqeaks in too, maybe there is a cosmic joker having a bit of fun?
Bitcoin Tumbles Below $14,000 as Investors Face ‘Reality Check’
Bitcoin fell as much as 15 percent on Friday, extending its loss from its intraday high this month to more than 30 percent.
The digital currency dropped to as low as $13,048 before trading at $14,079.05 as of 12:07 p.m. in Hong Kong. Bitcoin, which peaked at $19,511, is still up more than 1,300 percent this year.
Investors are having a “reality check,” said Stephen Innes, head of trading for Asia Pacific at Oanda Corp. “At the heart of the matter was a frenzied demand for coins with limited supply has now led to unsophisticated investors holding the bag at the top.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-22/bitcoin-plummets-toward-13-000-down-more-than-30-from-record
This is what happens …. when you believe that something can go up forever — particularly something that is based on …. nothing… produces… nothing … is worth…. NOTHING.
Imagine having bought into this hype at the height of the market…..
https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/d-skeleton-his-knees-pits-despair-render-holding-arms-aloft-total-67137653.jpg
I would just write a paper explaining why one should btfd.
http://www.dack.com/web/bullshit.html
http://ponziworld.blogspot.com/2017/12/bitcasino-bear-market.html
i made my forecast about bitcoin only a few days ago, and it’s hit already
sometimes i amaze me
Humble as always.
humility is my only fault
oh—and modesty—i almost forgot modesty
People are cashing out before christmas probably. Come January it will go above 20k, you read it here first!!
wouldn’t surprise me.
This is a symptom indicating that the end of days is on final approach:
http://rs954.pbsrc.com/albums/ae30/pooommme/A%20day%20at%20the%20Museum_Patan/DSCN0142.jpg~c200