Why is it so difficult to make accurate long-term economic forecasts for the world economy? There are many separate countries involved, each with a self-organizing economy made up of businesses, consumers, governments, and laws. These individual economies together create a single world economy, which again is self-organizing.
Self-organizing economies don’t work in a convenient linear pattern–in other words, in a way that makes it possible to make valid straight line predictions from the past. Instead, they work in ways that don’t match up well with standard projection techniques.
How do we forecast what lies ahead? Today, some economists believe that the economy of the United States is in danger of overheating. Others believe that Italy and the United Kingdom are facing dire problems, and that these problems could adversely affect the world economy. The world economy should be our highest concern because each country is dependent on a combination of imported and exported goods. The forecasting question becomes, “How will divergent economic results affect the world’s economy?”
I am not an economist; I am a retired actuary. I have spent years making forecasts within the insurance industry. These forecasts were financial in nature, so I have had hands-on experience with how various parts of the financial system work. I was one of the people who correctly forecast the Great Recession. I also wrote the frequently cited academic article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis, which points out the connection between the Great Recession and oil limits.
Today’s indications seem to suggest that an even more major recession than the Great Recession may strike in the not too distant future. Why should this be the case? Am I imagining problems where none exist?
The next ten sections provide an introduction to how the world’s self-organizing economy seems to operate.
[1] The economy is one of many self-organized systems that grow. All are governed by the laws of physics. All use energy in their operation.
There are many other self-organizing systems that grow. One such system is the sun. Some forecasts indicate that it will keep expanding in size and brightness for about the next five billion years. Eventually, it is expected to collapse under its own weight.
Hurricanes are a type of self-organizing system that grows. Hurricanes grow over warm ocean waters. If they travel over land for a short time, they can sometimes shrink back a bit and grow again once they have an adequate source of heat-energy from warm water. Eventually, they collapse.
Plants and animals also represent self-organizing systems that grow. Some plants grow throughout their lifetimes; others stabilize in size after reaching maturity. Animals continue to require food (a form of energy) even after they stabilize at their mature size.
We can’t use the typical patterns of these other growing self-organized systems to conclude much about the future path of the world’s economic growth because individual patterns are quite different. However, we notice that cutting off the energy supply used by any of these systems (for example, moving a hurricane permanently over land or starving a human) will lead to the demise of that system.
We also know that lack of food is not the only reason why humans die. Based on this observation, it is a reasonable conclusion that having enough energy available is not a sufficient condition to guarantee that the world economy will continue to operate as in the past. For example, a blocked shipping channel, such as at the Strait of Hormuz, could pose a significant problem for the world economy. This would be analogous to a blocked artery in a human.
[2] The use of energy products is hidden deeply within the economy. As a result, many people overlook their significance. They are also difficult for researchers to measure.
It is easy to see that gasoline provides the energy supply needed for our cars, and that electricity provides the power needed to clean our clothes. What is missing? The answer seems to be, “Everything that makes humans different from wild animals is something that was made possible by the use of supplemental energy in addition to the energy from food.”
All goods and services require the use of energy. While some of this energy use is easy to see, other portions are well hidden. Energy used in manufacturing and transport is most visible; energy used in services tends to be hidden.
Governments are major users of energy, both for their own programs and for directing energy use to others. Retirees get the benefit of goods and services made with energy products through pension checks issued by governments; researchers get the benefit of goods and services made with energy products through research grants they receive. Wars require energy.
Medical treatments are possible because of the availability of medicines and equipment made with energy products. Schools and books, as well as free time to study in schools (rather than working in the field), are possible because of energy consumption. Jobs of all kinds require the use of energy.
One thing we don’t often consider is that if energy supplies are growing sufficiently, they permit an expanding population. In fact, expanding population seems to be the single largest use of growth in energy consumption (Figure 1). Growing energy consumption also seems to be associated with prosperity.
Figure 1. World energy consumption growth for ten-year periods (ended at dates shown) divided between population growth (based on Angus Maddison estimates) and total energy consumption growth, based on the author’s review of BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2011 data and estimates from Energy Transitions: History, Requirements and Prospects by Vaclav Smil.
[3] Prices of energy services need to be low relative to overall costs of the economy. Falling energy costs relative to overall GDP tend to encourage economic growth.
Most economists expect energy prices to represent a large share of GDP costs, if energy is truly important. The statement above says the opposite. There are at least two reasons why low energy prices, and energy prices that are truly falling when inflation and productivity changes are considered, are helpful.
First, tools (broadly defined) used to leverage the labor of human workers often require considerable energy to manufacture and operate. Examples of such tools include computers, machines used in manufacturing, vehicles, and roads for these vehicles to drive on. The lower the cost to purchase and operate these tools, relative to the benefit of the tools, the more likely employers are to purchase them. If energy costs tend to fall over time, it becomes progressively easier to add more tools to leverage the labor of employees. Thus, employees become increasingly productive over time, raising the economy’s output of goods and services. For a similar reason, rising energy costs, if not offset by efficiency gains, present a barrier to economic growth.
Second, if the cost of energy production is low, it is easy to tax energy producers and thereby capture some of the benefit of their energy for the rest of the economy. If there is truly a “net energy” benefit to the economy, this is one way it gets transferred to the rest of the economy.
[4] There is indeed an energy problem, but it is not quite the same one that Peak Oilers have been concerned about.
The energy problem that Peak Oilers write about is the possibility that as easy-to-extract oil supplies deplete, oil production will reach a peak in production and begin to decline. Once decline sets in, they expect that oil prices will rise, partly because of the higher cost of production and partly because of scarcity. With these higher prices, they expect that producers will be able to extract at least a portion of the remaining oil resources. They also expect that higher prices will allow portions of the remaining natural gas and coal resources to be extracted. With higher prices, expanded use of renewable energy is expected to become feasible. All of these energy sources are expected to keep the economy operating at some level.
There are several problems with this story. First, it tends to encourage people to look for high oil prices as a sign of an oil shortage. This is not the correct indication to look for. Prior to 1970, oil prices averaged less than $20 per barrel. Comparing pre-1970 prices to today’s oil prices, current prices are already very high, at $75 per barrel. The idea that oil prices can keep rising indefinitely assumes that there is no affordability limit. Furthermore, a loss of energy consumption can be expected to reduce demand (because of its impact on jobs, productivity, and wages) at the same time that it reduces supply. If both supply and demand are affected, we don’t know which way prices will move.
Second, my analysis suggests that part of the story is that total energy consumption is very important, including oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and various forms of electricity. All of the attention given to oil has drawn attention away from the economy’s need for a range of energy types to keep devices of all types operating. Deciding to reduce coal usage because of pollution issues, or deciding to shut down nuclear because it is aging, has an equally adverse impact on the economy as reducing oil supply, unless the shortfall can be made up with other energy products of precisely the type needed by current devices.
Third, my analysis suggests that energy consumption per capita needs to rise for the economy to function in the way that we expect it to function. If world energy consumption per capita is too flat, we can expect to see many of the symptoms that the world has been experiencing recently: more radical leaders, less cooperation among leaders, slowing economic growth and increasing debt problems. In fact, wars are possible, as are collapses of governments (as with the Soviet Union central government in 1991). The current situation seems to be more parallel to the 1920 to 1940 flat period than it does to the 1980 to 2000 flat period.
Finally, with low energy prices rather than high quite possibly being much of the problem, there is a significant chance that oil and other production will decline because producers do not make enough profit for reinvestment and because oil exporting countries cannot collect enough taxes to fund the many subsidies that citizens expect. This makes for a steeper energy decline than forecast by Peak Oilers; it also reduces the possibility that high-priced renewables will be helpful.
[5] Part of the world’s energy problem is a distribution problem; the world becomes divided into haves and have-nots in many ways. It is this distribution problem that tends to push the world economy toward collapse.
There are many parts to this distribution problem. One is the distribution of goods and services (created using energy) by country. Over time, this tends to change, especially as commodity prices change. Oil exporters are favored when oil prices are high; oil importers are favored when oil prices are low. The relative values of currencies can change quickly, as commodity prices change.
Another part of this distribution problem is growing wage and wealth disparity, as more technology is added. If there is too much wage disparity, low-paid workers often cannot afford adequate food, homes, and transportation for their families. Their lack of demand for goods made with energy products (because of their low wages) tends to work through the system as low commodity prices. This happens because (a) there are so many of these workers and (b) these workers tend to purchase a disproportionate share of goods and services that are highly energy-dependent.
[6] Debt-like promises play a major role in making the economy operate.
Taking out a loan allows an individual or business to purchase goods without saving for the purchase in advance. To some extent, taking out a loan moves up the timing of purchases. At times, it even permits purchases that otherwise would not be possible. For example, if a young person tries to decide between (a) working at a low wage until he has saved up enough to afford to go to college and (b) taking out a loan and going to school now, so his wages would be higher in future years, his optimal choice will often be scenario (b). The time would likely never come when the low-paid individual could save up enough wages to afford to go to college. If the young person strongly desires high wages, his optimal strategy would be to take the loan and hope that his future wages will be high enough to repay it.
If the goal of the economy is to produce an ever-increasing amount of goods and services, growing debt can very much help this growth. This happens because with more debt, more individuals and businesses can afford* to buy the goods and services that they want now. In a sense, debt acts like a promise of the future energy needed to make future goods and services with which the loan can be repaid. Thus, adding debt acts somewhat like adding energy to the economy.
Because of the way debt works, the economy behaves much like a bicycle, with growing debt pulling the system forward. If the economy is growing too slowly, the tendency is to add more debt. This solution works if a rapidly growing supply of cheap-to-produce energy is available; the additional debt can be used to create a growing supply of affordable goods and services. If energy costs are high, the goods and services produced tend to be unaffordable.
Figure 2. The author’s view of the analogy of a speeding upright bicycle and a speeding economy.
A bicycle needs to operate at a fast enough speed (about 7.5 feet per second), or it will fall over. Similarly, the world economy needs to grow fast enough, or it will not be able to meet its obligations, including repayment of debt with interest. If the economy grows too slowly, debt defaults are likely to grow, pulling the economy down.
[7] It looks like it should be possible to work around energy problems with improved technology, but experience suggests that this approach represents only a temporary “fix.”
There are two issues that make improved technology less of a solution than it appears to be. The first is diminishing returns. For example, if a business faces a choice between (a) paying a worker to perform a process and (b) adding a machine that can perform the same process, the business will tend to make the changes that seem to provide the largest cost savings first. At some point, as more technology is added, capital costs can be expected to become excessive relative to the human labor that might be saved. The issue of the diminishing returns to added complexity (which includes growing technology) was pointed out by Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies.
The second reason why added technology tends to be only a temporary solution is because it tends to lead to wage disparity. Wage disparity has a tendency to grow because of the greater specialization and larger organizations needed to coordinate the ever-larger projects. The reduced purchasing power of those at the bottom of the hierarchy can eventually bring an economy down because it can lead to commodity prices that are below the level needed to maintain the extraction of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are required to maintain today’s economy.
[8] Renewable energy has been vastly oversold as a solution. What is needed is an ever-increasing quantity of inexpensive energy in forms that match the energy needs of current devices.
The wind and solar story is far different from the story presented in the press. Essentially, wind and solar are extensions of today’s fossil fuel system. The evidence that they are truly beneficial to the economy is shaky at best. We know that if energy sources are truly transferring significant “net energy” to the system, they generally can afford to pay high taxes. The fact that wind and solar require subsidies raises questions regarding whether standard calculations are providing accurate guidance. The press rarely mentions the high tax revenue that high oil prices make possible, worldwide. Tax revenues largely support many oil exporting countries.
Furthermore, the share of the world’s energy supply that wind and solar provide is very low: 1.9% and 0.7%, respectively. They are shown in the almost invisible blue and orange lines at the very top of Figure 3. Fossil fuels contributed 85% of total energy supply in 2017.
Figure 3. World energy consumption divided between fossil fuels and non-fossil fuel energy sources, based on data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018.
[9] The world economy becomes very fragile as energy limits approach.
Energy limits seem to be affordable energy limits. Oil prices need to be high enough for exporting countries to obtain adequate tax revenue. In addition, oil producers need prices that are high enough so that they can make the necessary reinvestment, as fields deplete. At the same time, energy prices need to be low enough for consumers to afford goods and services made with energy products.
Much of developed world’s infrastructure was built when oil prices were less than $20 per barrel, in inflation-adjusted terms. A rising price of oil will lead to a higher cost of replacing roads and pipelines. If these were built using $20 per barrel oil, even a current price of $40 per barrel would represent a significant cost increase. The world has experienced high oil prices for sufficiently long that we have collectively forgotten how low oil prices were between 1900 and 1970.
Most people know that the earth holds a huge quantity of energy resources. The problem is extracting these resources in a way that is both affordable to consumers and sufficiently high-priced for producers. Falling long-term interest rates between 1981 and 2002 allowed the world economy to tolerate somewhat higher oil and other energy prices than it otherwise could because these falling interest rates permitted ever-lower monthly payments for a given loan amount. For example, if interest rates on a $300,000 mortgage would fall from 5% to 4% on a 25-year mortgage, monthly payments would decrease from $1,753 to $1,584. The lower interest rates would allow more people to buy homes with a given size of mortgage. Indirectly, the lower mortgage rates would permit additional new homes to be built and would allow more inflation in home prices. These benefits would at least partially offset the adverse impact of high energy prices.
Since the natural decline in long term interest rates stopped in 2002, the world economy has become increasingly fragile; the Great Recession took place in 2007-2009, when oil prices spiked and long-term interest rates were already low by historical standards. It was only when the United States’ program of quantitative easing (QE) was put in place that long-term interest rates could fall to even lower levels, helping the economy hide the problem of high energy prices a little longer.
The artificially low interest rates made possible by QE have problems of their own. They tend to inflate asset prices, including both real estate prices and stock market prices. Thus, they tend to create bubbles, which are prone to collapse if interest rates rise. Artificially low interest rates also tend to encourage investment in schemes with very low profit potential. Artificially low interest rates also encourage cross-border investments to try to take advantage of interest rate differences. If interest rate relativities change, the money that quickly would enter a country can almost as quickly leave the country, causing major fluctuations in currency relativities.
Regulators do not understand the role that physics plays in making the economy operate as it does. They assume that they, alone, have the power to make the economy behave as it does. They do not understand how important falling interest rates are in creating growing demand for goods and services. The economy, since 1981, has spent most of its time with falling interest rates; the most recent part of this decline in long-term interest rates has been made possible by QE. These falling interest rates have played a major role in disguising the world’s long-term problem of rising energy costs. These rising energy costs are taking place primarily because the cheapest-to-extract resources were produced first; the resources that are left have higher costs associated with them, for a variety of reasons, such as being farther away from the user, deeper, or needing more advanced extraction techniques. These issues have not been sufficiently offset by improved technology to keep extraction costs low.
US regulators now want to raise interest rates by raising short term interest rates and by selling QE securities. They don’t understand that they are playing with fire. If they can raise interest rates now, they will have the flexibility to lower them later if the economy should later slow excessively. They think that the higher rates will give them more control over the economy. They don’t understand how much of the world’s economy may really be a bubble, created by the decline in interest rates since 1981.
[10] The adverse economic outcome we should be concerned about is collapse, as encountered by prior civilizations when their economies hit limits.
The stories in the press have been so focused on oil “running out” and finding alternatives to oil that few have stopped to ask whether this is really the correct story. Instead of creating a new story, it might have been better to look more closely at history. Based on the historical record, collapse seems to have been associated with situations where populations have outgrown their resource bases. In other words, collapse can be considered an energy consumption per capita problem. The oil problem (and other fuel problems) we are facing today can be viewed as an energy consumption per capita problem, as well.
We know from research that has been done by Peter Turchin, Joseph Tainter, and others how collapse has played out in the past. The situation is different this time, however, because the world economy is very interconnected. Oil consumption depends on electricity consumption, and vice versa. Our financial system is also extraordinarily important. For these reasons, a collapse may occur more quickly than in the past.
Differences Between My View and the Standard View
One of the big differences between the way I see the economy and the standard view of the economy is the answer to the question of “Who is in charge?” The standard view is that politicians and economists are in charge. They have all of the answers. The dire collapse outcomes that afflicted early civilizations could not possibly affect us. We are too smart. We know how to adjust interest rates correctly. We can even make QE available to lower long-term interest rates. We can also add more technology and other complexity than has ever been added in the past.
The answer I see to the question, “Who is in charge?” is, “The laws of physics are in charge.” Politicians play a fairly minor role in directing the fate of economies. If there is not enough energy available of the type needed (inexpensive and matching the current infrastructure), the economy may very well collapse. It is nature and the laws of physics that call most of the shots.
Another big difference between my view and the standard view is the observation that a decrease in oil supply (or total energy supply) affects both the supply and demand of energy. Because both supply and demand are affected, we don’t know which direction oil and other energy prices will move. They may move erratically, as interest rates are adjusted by regulators. A more complex model is needed.
Climate change becomes less of an issue in my view of the future, for several reasons. First, humans don’t really have very much control over the direction of the economy, so talking about anthropogenic climate change doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. The laws of physics that allowed human population to rise are also allowing climate change to happen. Second, we seem to be limited in our ability to use renewables to fix the situation. Furthermore, the possibility of collapse in the near future makes the various scenarios that hypothesize the use of large amounts of fossil fuels over many years in the future seem very unrealistic. Perhaps efforts to fix climate change should be focused in new directions, such as planting trees.
Help from Others
The subject matter of this post requires the knowledge of information from a wide range of academic areas. I could not have figured out all of this information on my own. I have been fortunate to have been able to learn from of a wide range of experts. Quite a number of academic groups have seen my articles, and invited me to speak at their conferences. In particular, I have had a long-term involvement with the BioPhysical Economics organization and have spoken at many of their conferences. I have learned much from Dr. Charles Hall, although at times I don’t 100% agree with him.
I have also learned from the many commenters on OurFiniteWorld.com. They form a self-organizing system of people from a wide range of backgrounds. Earlier, my involvement at TheOilDrum.com as “Gail the Actuary” allowed me to get acquainted with a range of researchers, looking at different aspect of the energy problem.
In future posts, I intend to expand further on the ideas presented in this post.
*Here I am using the term afford loosely. What borrowers can actually afford is the current required monthly payments.
Training sessions are taking place in Michigan to help prepare in cases of mass violence
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/michigan/articles/2018-07-15/training-to-help-victim-advocates-assist-after-mass-violence
society has just collapsed—i demand justice!!!!
i like it
I saw this on my local news this morning..And its strange I have never heard of training for mass violence..And I looked on Google and I couldn’t find any other states doing this..Which is very strange..I was wondering if since Michigan is the motor state that maybe auto insiders have tipped off the local officials about the oil crisis coming..
i think it might be just another term for marriage guidance counselling
2016 was the hottest year recorded since recording began. 2015 was the second hottest. 2017 was the third hottest. This is not long term cooling. It is a downward blip in the warming trend.
Of course, a “black swan” event could reverse current global warming and put us into a global winter for years or even decades. Such a black swan event would be a super-volcano eruption or a nuclear war. A protracted economic great depression on its own could possibly stall warming though not cause imminent cooling. Even a depression might not stop warming now. Many reinforcing feed-backs, like tundra methane releases, have already started.
But, given business as usual and no major black swan events, then accelerating climate change is going to continue and associated events, hurricanes, tornadoes, storms, storm surges, floods, sea level rise, drought and fires (depending on region) will increase in intensity if not frequency.
The time frames for serious effects from resource crises and from regional climate crises now appear about the same. It’s probably not the case that one is more likely than the other. It probably is the case that both will occur and occur largely contemporaneously, reinforcing each others’ negative effects. Also, as Gail and others point out, the global economic system, social systems and people themselves will very likely react badly to these exogenous stressors and also go haywire and act irrationally. All of these issues will compound the mounting crisis.
I suppose part of the question is, “How many people will there really be, in 2025 or 2035?” If the answer is that world population is going to fall very precipitously for other reasons, the little remaining population could very well move to the more hospitable parts of the world. This seems to be the natural pattern.
All of the hysteria about climate change leaves out the point that the big population drop that is likely to occur is mostly for a totally different reason–too little energy consumption per capita, and collapsing economies. The remaining population will already be very stressed, and climate change will add stresses to it. But if it is necessary to start over, why not start over somewhere totally different? We know that hunter-gatherers moved over long distances, and worked around climate change, in the form of ice ages, no less. Why tell such a biased version of the story?
i think you’ve omitted the ‘deniers’ and ‘borders’
when populations migrated 20k years ago or whenever, the world hadn’t become ‘property’—now it is property. back then there was no concept of land ownership.
when siberians crossed into Alaska, it was done by one generation outgrowing the support of the previous generation, and moving on—not a 5000 k march to California. To them the ‘world’ was where they happened to be.
To us the world is what belongs to someone else. And we want it,
borders are now legally defined by mechanical devices, rather than as the edge of shifting territories.
people are migrating right now by 000s, but their destinations are already ‘full up’–which was not the case when climate last shifted people around—back then, nobody would have noticed,
now, we have mass movements in decades—20 years ago, you didn’t have people moving out of Africa on a massive scale, willing to risk death to reach Europe–why are they doing that?–too little energy per capita
Those migrants are met by ‘deniers’ who want them to go back home because there’s no room for them
few accept climate change as the reason for what they are being forced to do
And even fewer can accept the reality of a 90% population drop would mean—even diehard OFWorldsters
The migrants right now are getting out of africa, to avoid that where they live. Imagine the same thing on a world scale in a single generation
why a single generation?
because world pop is set to hit 9-10bn by mid century, which it cannot do. So by definition something will prevent it.
we dont know what, but the world will be full of people racing round in denial of the reality they face
Ive tried to sum it up here:
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/an-infinity-of-futility-5fb525fc610c
When there are enough fewer of us, and governments have collapsed, there won’t be ownership either.
Ownership of land seems to have come to some parts of the world sooner than others. The parts it came to, as far as I can tell, are the ones that planned to use debt. When land ownership was available, it greatly increased the available debt base. It also greatly facilitated hierarchical organization. There were (a) those who owned land, and (b) those who did not. Guess who ranked higher on the hierarchy? I am sure land ownership facilitated taxation as well. Bigger governments became possible. It was possible to support larger armies, especially if the land was quite productive.
i agree—but ownership will not be sustainable because ownership of anything requires energy input/output—the more land you had, the more power you had
but even with population collapse, the concept of ownership will remain, and so will the certainty of ”return to normal soon”
thats where denial kicks in. So the fight over ‘property’ will continue
if you ‘own’ a small farm and someone comes along and tells you things are going to be different from now on, and you have to give up what is yours—you will still regard that as a ‘political’ problem, not an environmental problem—it will be face to face, and on the spot conflict resolved by the one with the most energy available (muscle, bullets etc)
same applies to energy supplies—it will take a long time to sink in, that petrol stations are never going to reopen, and tyres are not going to be available again and supermarkets are going to stay shut—the certainty of a ‘fix’ will remain
Not so long ago, I’d have thought that my homeland’s government not owning the power company was an error. But now I’m relieved that it’s under private ownership. The trouble, politics, worry around running such a monster would be overwhelming.
owners expect profits to come before anything else
you can apply this to any enterprise, even coalmines today cut safety corners to that end
An incompetent political cadre and dysfunctional political system running a large energy system would be likely to incur hellish costs. So it loses income that the private owners get instead. But they lower government expenses too. There could be a win there.
Thanks Norman and Gail. I won’t say your posts make things clearer, but I think they would if I reread them a couple times more. The ownership part is interesting. A new thing, but one which depends on energy to maintain. Where I come from, the wealthier have long since fled the violence, and the homeless poor are taking over their lands.
if you own a house or a car—if you don’t keep inputting energy –ie maintenance—it eventually falls apart—the bigger the house, the more maintenance is needed—eventually you need a small army of people just to keep a roof over your head—which is why you have to feel sorry for our dear queen, poor old soul,–living on government handouts AND having to entertain the orange balloon as well.
if you don’t own those things, energy input is somebody else’s problem, but it doesn’t affect the outcome long term
“Against The Grain” by James Scott has some interesting ideas on land ownership, taxation and migration. It was a FE recommendation.
Dennis L.
Thanks! I will have to look for that information.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/nov/25/against-the-grain-by-james-c-scott-review
The cover image is that of humankind in its perfection. I note the necklace with its photo image tag. So, does the image depict a hybrid culture based on hunter gathering but conversant with industrial civilization? What about a reversal of this hypothetical situation: living in industrial society but casually conversant with hunter gathering culture?
Thanks for the link. I expect that the writer of the review couldn’t find a more authentic photo. On TheOilDrum.com, I once added a photo to a story some guest author wrote. It was supposed to be of a hunter-gatherer, but the person was smoking a cigarette. So my photo was clearly not really correct.
Farmers are to hunter gatherers as investment bankers are to farmers.
The only difference is that investment bankers are not killing farmers
now, we have mass movements in decades—20 years ago, you didn’t have people moving out of Africa on a massive scale, willing to risk death to reach Europe–why are they doing that?–too little energy per capita
Why indeed are they doing that? If I had to pick a single reason—and as we’ve discussed previously, reasons or causes are things we think up in order to try to explain effects—I would plump for population pressure. As for supplementary reasons, I would suggest, because they have more knowledge of the places they are aiming for, where the streets are paved—maybe not with gold, but at least they’re paved, and they have hopes of being helped by Soros-supported networks and also of being accepted in the destination countries rather being than sent back to where they came from or halted by the Libyans, Algerians, Egyptians or Moroccans.
Those migrants are met by ‘deniers’ who want them to go back home because there’s no room for them. few accept climate change as the reason for what they are being forced to do.
Quite seriously, Norman, what’s CC (as in anthropogenic CC caused by exhaust gases) got to do with it? A lot of these Africans hail from places that have the same climate they had a century ago and yet the local human population is many times higher than it was a century ago.
In 1920, Nigeria was the British colony with the second highest population after India. It had a population of approx. 16 million people. Today, it has approximately 196 million people. That’s 12 times as many people in the course of a century. Ethiopia had 14.5 million in 1920, which had grown to 50 million by 1991 (despite the famine) and is estimated at 105 million today—close to an eight-fold increase. And so on….
These figures are met by ‘deniers’ who are determined to ignore out of control African population growth as the single biggest factor in Africa’s entire ongoing catastrophe, either because to acknowledge it would be r**ist, or because it doesn’t suit their political agenda.
Strangely enough, a lot of our do-good policies to stamp out diseases and to provide better access to clean water and latrines have contributed to the population explosion. Also the ability to import food very cheaply has helped population explode. In fact, some of it has been given away free.
But the people in Africa do not have the huge fossil fuel investment that would be needed to allow them to have jobs that pay well. Education mostly provides jobs for teachers; there need to be jobs at the other end as well. It is the same problem with sending all of the young people in the US to college; without jobs at the other end, it is a dead end.
But with fossil fuel extraction costs rising, it is virtually impossible to make an economic system that provides the rising energy per capita that would be needed to give these people jobs and thus access to the things that they desire. This is an energy consumption per capita chart a made not too long ago, showing Africa’s energy consumption per capita compared to Italy’s.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/04/per-capita-energy-consumption-italy-vs-africa1.png
Unfortunately lot of these “do-good” policies were also directly applied in the pulling effect on this migration wave, namely “taxpayer” funded NGOs effectively providing smuggling services on the northern coast of Africa (above all mostly inside territorial waters not belonging to the EU!). It has been on the news Italy closed that money spigot already for good, although other streams are still gushing, namely German and Spanish chartered NGOs (as the staffers in them are diverse-cosmopolitan as usual)..
Lets see of what nature and where the migration vectors will be in next stages of this prosperity evaporating process..
agreed, a lot of places in africa have an economic environment which is just about livable, but the signs of it getting worse through CC are obvious—so it’s ”get out while there’s still time,”–whether that’s through cc pressure or pop pressure
in any event, if you have a smart phone, and your cousin in Paris or London has one, and he point it round the shelves of full supermarkets and at the car hes just stolen—what you gonna do?
move to where it’s at
massive methane release would knock us off in a decade—-then we could all say—toldya so
Don’t Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking G…lo…b..al Co….oling
Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA g….lo…bal te..mp..erature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, “g….lobal average temp…erat….ures dropped by 0.56 degrees C…elsius.” That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/c
li
mate-change-glo
bal-wa
rming-earth-cooling-media-bias/
Would it surprise you to learn the greatest global two-year cooling event of the last century just occurred? From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) g,,,lobal average te,,,,mpe…ratures dropped 0.56°C.
You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C—also during the gl,,,,,obal w,,,,,rming era. All the data in this essay come from GISTEMP Team, 2018: GISS Surface Te….mperature Analysis (GISTEMP). NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (dataset accessed 2018-04-11 at https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/). This is the standard source used in most journalistic reporting of global average temperatures.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/04/24/did_you_know_the_greatest_two-year_global_cooling_event_just_took_place_103243.html
If you google this … you will find NOTHING. Not a single MSM outlet has picked this story up. Not a mention of it… nadda … nothing ….
BUT… if there is a very hot day… or a hurricane… the MSM is all over it… screaming GGG WWWWWWW!!!!!
Think about it ,… re tar ded MORE ons….
Even winning the world cup can lead to chaos when a society is stretched by inequality…
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/989289/world-cup-final-france-vs-croatia-riots-Paris-French-celebrations
Wait until it does get serious!
Like many things in the world today, this world cup made no sense (though I admit I’ve lost touch with football current affairs lately). France vs Croatia?!
Well in times of tattoo and hairdo pre occupied British lads, what can you expect differently.. Societies, cultures, tend to swing on a curve, this time it was upswing for Croatia’s turn..
Attention DPs… familiarize yourself…. this is what is headed your way when the hordes realize the shops are not going to be refilled with Doritos…
They are going to cram what food they have… and head for where they believe food to be available… ‘
Be sure to light your solar powered beacons….
https://www.rt.com/news/433297-india-men-lynched-kidnappers-rumor/
https://youtu.be/JIZAwiY3jpI
That former spec-op guy (camera shy) in fresh tshirt standing by the riots and looking down is surely Maduro’s gov infiltrator ! Mark my words .. lolz
Meanwhile, there are a lot of angry people of all shapes and colors in Southern California.
https://youtu.be/lJaAfBOya6Q
The developer sold 44 of 45 flats at a North Point site on Sunday, varying from studios to two-bedroom apartments.
The prices ranged from HK$10.25 million ($1.3 million) to HK$21.87 million, based on the maximum discounts offered to buyers.
Sun Hung Kai’s Victoria Harbour apartment sale.Photographer: Anthony Kwan/Bloomberg
Lam’s tax, announced last month, is another attempt to cool a property market that’s risen more than 50 percent over the past five years, adding to the risk of a sudden bust.
The North Point sales show the challenge she faces: 286-square-foot studio apartments selling at HK$10.25 million set a record for the area, according to Midland Realty Services Ltd., and the developer has boosted the prices for the next 36 apartments to go on sale by an average of 10 percent.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-15/hong-kong-developers-speed-up-sales-after-vacancy-tax-announced
Perspective….
In the United Kingdom the recommended standard Parking bay size is 2.4 metres (7.9 ft) wide by 4.8 metres (16 ft) long.
Ah, this is music to my ears. Tim Groves is spot on. Fast Eddy replied before he read the link! He may repent at leisure(he is not called FE for nothing).
The $247 trillion global debt bomb
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-247-trillion-global-debt-bomb/2018/07/15/64c5bbaa-86c2-11e8-8f6c-46cb43e3f306_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.40fcdb8ce5e1
“The $314 trillion global debt bomb”
coming to a news headline near you, in 2020 maybe…
Debt will never be a problem given that we print money. The problem will be savings. Every “dollar” of debt becomes a “dollar” of savings. Private debt does limit aggregate demand and can lead to deflation. And government debt in foreign currency can be a problem, too. But the real problem is saving electronic points and thinking a social convention will stave off resource problems.
It’s more fun to talk about “debt” because we get to moralize people. But we have to “print” more money if we want the economy to grow (more goods and services).
Think of Venezuela when you write comments like this. How much has printing money helped Venezuela?
Venezuela has Uncle Sam at its throat. “Printing money” is the least of its worries
Exxon, Once a ‘Perfect Machine,’ Is Running Dry
CEO Darren Woods’s plan to make a comeback by spending more on fossil-fuel projects has so far proved unpopular
Darren Woods spent a year preparing an ambitious plan to return Exxon Mobil Corp. XOM 0.75% to glory.
Struggling with laryngitis, the oil giant’s chief executive stepped before a ballroom full of analysts and investors at the New York Stock Exchange in March and unveiled a strategy to spend more than $230 billion to double profits and pump an additional one million barrels a day of oil and gas.
As Mr. Woods walked away afterward and peered at his phone, he received an unwelcome surprise. Shareholders didn’t buy it. “Our stock is down 3%,” he said to another executive, looking exasperated.
Exxon faces a number of challenges, including investigations of its accounting and tax practices as well as lawsuits by cities and states seeking funds to pay for the effects of climate change. Its biggest problem is one the giant has seldom faced in its 148-year history: It isn’t making as much money as it used to.
Under former CEO Rex Tillerson, Exxon bet big hunting for oil in risky, expensive locales like the Russian Arctic. But as oil prices fell, those projects didn’t pay off the way Exxon had hoped. Now the $350 billion Irving, Texas, company is returning to its old ways: big, disciplined spending on prospects that make money at low oil prices.
The approach is a gamble in a new era of energy breakthroughs such as fracking and electric vehicles. Many of Exxon’s competitors are transforming their businesses to move away from oil exploration, and have begun to spend carefully and diversify into renewable energy.
Investors, who once looked past Exxon’s tendency toward arrogance and secrecy because of its good returns, aren’t sure they want Big Oil to get bigger.
“Most investors like Exxon, but they like other companies better,” said Mark Stoeckle, chief executive of Adams Funds, which owns about $100 million in Exxon shares. “The market is not willing to reward Exxon for spending today in hopes that it will bring good returns tomorrow.”
Exxon has been pledging to produce more oil and gas for years, but its output of about four million barrels a day is no higher today than it was after its merger with Mobil Corp. in 1999. Even if Exxon succeeds in doubling last year’s earnings of $15 billion (excluding impairments and tax reform impacts) by 2025, as Mr. Woods vowed in his eight-year spending plan, it would still be making far less than in 2008, when it set what was then a record for annual profits by an American corporation, at $45 billion.
In 2016, S&P Global Ratings stripped Exxon of the triple-A credit rating it held since 1930. It was one of only three companies to hold the distinction at that time, along with Microsoft Corp. and Johnson & Johnson . While Exxon once ranked as the world’s largest company by market value, it was 10th as of June 30, less than half the size of Apple Inc.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Woods declined to comment. Exxon declined to make other executives available for interviews. Exxon has denied wrongdoing related to the climate litigation and other probes it is facing, and insisted the lawsuits are the wrong way to deal with climate change.
The company traces its history back to Standard Oil, the name oil titan John D. Rockefeller gave to his powerful monopoly to signify control, order and uniform quality. The U.S. Supreme Court broke up the monopoly in 1911.
Exxon, the largest descendant of that monopoly, bears a resemblance to Standard Oil even now. While a powerful CEO sets the company’s direction, Exxon is ultimately run by a committee of a handful of executives, dubbed the “God pod” by employees. Much as it was in Mr. Rockefeller’s time, they divide oversight responsibility over Exxon’s vast reach, which now spans 51 countries and six continents and includes more than 70,000 employees.
It became the biggest public company in the world by revenue in 1975, and over the next 3½ decades it was often the most profitable, even when oil prices were low. Exxon excelled in coming through on budget and as scheduled in projects rife with political and engineering complexity.
The company’s process included a painstaking analysis of all decisions, major and minor. Projects were judged based on an assumed oil price often as much as 50% or more below current or forecast prices, according to more than a dozen former employees and executives.
Its leaders confidently steered the company through oil crashes, foreign conflicts and clashes with Wall Street. Lee Raymond, Exxon’s boss from 1993 to 2005, personified the swagger at the heart of the company’s ethos. He was notorious for making fun of or criticizing the questions of Wall Street analysts, often to their faces, and he was equally dismissive of some shareholders at annual meetings.
That style rankled some rivals and investors, but Exxon backed it up with best-in-class performance.
Exxon’s stock traded at a premium to its peers for decades, a trend that intensified after the company’s purchase of Mobil. Investors at times recognized twice the value in Exxon’s assets compared with rivals BP PLC, Total SA, Chevron Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC.
For years, Exxon “operated like a perfect machine,” said Uday Turaga, a former ConocoPhillips executive who now runs consulting firm ADI Analytics. “It is a process-driven, extremely disciplined organization.”
About a decade ago, Mr. Raymond was succeeded by Mr. Tillerson, a folksy Texan who came from the so-called upstream side of the business, which explores for and produces oil and gas, and who had a penchant for personally negotiating big oil-production deals himself.
As prices rose to all-time highs of almost $150 a barrel, Mr. Tillerson led the charge to chase more expensive prospects that could meet the world’s thirst for crude. He looked to Canada’s oil sands, natural gas fracking and even Russia’s Arctic, all of which required higher prices to be profitable.
Those efforts largely failed. Exxon’s production has declined in the past five years, and the company has delivered lackluster financial results. Today, oil prices are around $74 a barrel.
Mr. Tillerson, who left in 2017 for a short-lived stint as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of State, produced returns of about 6% a year during his tenure, including dividends—far less than the S&P 500 or rivals Chevron and Shell in that period, according to FactSet. Mr. Tillerson didn’t respond to requests for comment.
In need of a chief executive who could return Exxon to its prior glory—and who could help Exxon confront a multitude of critics and a new energy landscape—the board turned to the 53-year-old Mr. Woods.
A tall, white-haired electrical engineer originally from Kansas, Mr. Woods came up through the ranks of Exxon’s refining division, where profits come from squeezing pennies out of every barrel.
He is an enthusiastic believer in the company’s traditions. In one of his first public presentations as a top executive, given in 2015 to a labor conference in the Dallas area, he repeatedly praised the company’s risk and accountability methodology, known as the Operations Integrity Management System. He mentioned the wonky acronym, OIMS, 13 times in a short speech.
As he prepared to take the reins from Mr. Tillerson more than a year ago, he held a series of dinners with close advisers, according to people familiar with the meetings. At one dinner, he received a query: What if Exxon is wrong in its view of a bright future for fossil fuels? What if the greatest risk to the company is hubris?
Mr. Woods acknowledged the threat the company faces from shale drilling, electric vehicles and climate hawks, according to a person familiar with the discussion. Renewable energy opportunities weren’t yet profitable enough to compete with other Exxon projects, Mr. Woods said. When they are, the company will be ready.
For now, he added, the best way forward was for Exxon to do things the Exxon way.
His faith in Exxon’s process was one of the top reasons he was selected by the board to succeed Mr. Tillerson, according to people familiar with the decision.
Among the company’s recent challenges: Exxon wound up miscalculating the political risks of doing business in Russia, which came under U.S. and European sanctions in 2014, and walked away earlier this year from joint ventures with state-controlled PAO Rosneft to drill for oil in the Black Sea and Arctic waters. Last year, the company was forced to acknowledge that 3.6 billion barrels of reserves in Canada—from an oil sands project that cost more than $20 billion—were no longer profitable to produce.
Another blunder, analysts say, was the 2010 purchase of XTO Energy Inc., one of the pioneers of modern fracking. Exxon bought the company for more than $30 billion, when natural gas prices were higher than they would be at any point over the next seven years.
In the past two years, Exxon has written down the value of its U.S. natural gas assets, which include its XTO unit, by $2.5 billion, an unusual step for the company. In 2015, Mr. Tillerson told trade publication Energy Intelligence that at Exxon, “we don’t do write-downs.”
Exxon’s fracking prospects in the Permian basin in West Texas and New Mexico, developed by its XTO unit, remain among its most profitable opportunities, the company says. Still, its U.S. drilling business has lost money in 11 of the last 15 quarters.
Mr. Woods has taken several steps to shake up Exxon’s insularity, embrace new risks and jettison less profitable areas. People familiar with the matter said Exxon is weighing reducing its exposure to Canada, where it has operated for 130 years. Getting oil from Canada’s oil sands is expensive, and the prospect of reduced exposure has signaled to some advisers that the company may become more aggressive in seeking transformation.
The company is also developing a more robust trading operation with an eye toward using regional oil and gas price disparities in the U.S. and around the world to boost profits, according to people familiar with the process.
Still, the centerpiece of Mr. Woods’s turnaround effort is a major increase in spending, much of which is focused on drilling in Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Mozambique and Texas. In March, he said such opportunities are the best Exxon has seen since its merger with Mobil. They will make it possible for the company to produce an additional one million barrels of oil and gas a day, he said. Combined with existing production, that would equate to five million daily barrels, a record for Exxon.
Next year, Exxon is set to spend $28 billion, 45% more than in 2016. That’s a marked difference from rivals such as Chevron, which is holding investment levels flat this year and 18% below 2016 levels.
Shareholders haven’t responded with enthusiasm. The price of crude is up about 60% in the past year, but Exxon shares are up less than 5%.
Earlier in the year, analyst Paul Sankey, then of Wolfe Research, said clients were calling for an activist investor to force the company to take more “radical action.” The unrest has calmed somewhat with oil’s rally, analysts say. But shareholders are still looking for big change.
“Darren Woods is turning the Exxon Mobil supertanker, but the scale of the challenge is giant,” said Mr. Sankey, now an analyst at Mizuho Energy. Exxon is poised to rebound in three to five years, but other companies are better bets for now, he said.
Investors are favoring smaller, nimbler competitors. ConocoPhillips, which has seen its shares rise 60% since last year, shed a number of businesses and promised to distribute much of its excess cash to shareholders in coming years rather than reinvesting.
From January to March, EOG Resources Inc., the biggest American shale producer, reported higher per-share profits than Exxon, a company five times its size. EOG’s stock is up 84% in the last five years. Exxon is down about 10% in that time.
Meanwhile, rivals such as Shell, BP and Total have diversified outside of fossil fuels.
“Through the ups and downs of oil prices, Exxon always had very high returns, but that has changed,” said Jonathan Waghorn, a portfolio manager at Guinness Atkinson Management Inc. It sold out of its Exxon position last year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/exxon-once-a-perfect-machine-is-running-dry-1531490901
Well, there it is – portfolio managers opting out of Exxon. So, without energy what else is there to “invest” in? May as well throw it all away.
you ‘invest’ in expectation of a cash return, but money is a token of energy exchange, therefore all investments are in energy, there is literally nothing else available
it’s just that they are a few times removed and not immediately obvious till you strip away all the layers.
Just more confirmation of peak oil.
Make Coal in America Great Again
Exxon has to do a BP … Beyond Petroleum… remake ….. bawahahahaha
‘Never underestimate human stupidity,’ says historian whose fans include Bill Gates and Barack Obama
Harari expressed concern about the ability of populist leaders — a group he described as “selling people nostalgic fantasies about the past instead of real visions for the future” — to solve today’s biggest global problems.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/never-underestimate-human-stupidity-says-historian-and-author.html
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined..
Yuval Noah Harari,
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“… Harari said the three biggest “existential” problems faced by the world today are global in nature: Nuclear war, climate change and technological disruption.”
this statement makes Harari sound like he’s part of the “human stuupidity”…
let’s not underestimate his lack of knowledge about the actual major problems faced by the world today…
I could write a book on the stupidity of Bill Gates and Barack Obama, thinking that we actually have sufficiently inexpensive energy supplies, in sufficient quantity, to promote the politics that they advocate. Globalization is something whose time has come and gone. Trying to raise the health standards in Africa is iffy at best, if the country has a huge population problem already.
deniers come at every level
Perhaps they are correct.
Unabomber Ted Kaczynski continues to fret over technology, doesn’t regret years of spreading fear
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/unabomber-ted-kaczynski-continues-to-fret-over-technology-doesn-t-regret-years-of-spreading-fear/ar-AAA4xP2?ocid=ob-tw-enus-677
Kaczynski is a fascinating person.
Obviously his violence is questionable and disturbing.
However, reading his philosophy, one gets a uneasy feeling that he is on track.
Not a popular view, I confess, but most have not read his views or content.
the fact that I know anything at all about a man named Ted Kaczynski is due to modern technology…
isn’t it ironic?
hint: yes…
Some folks reckon that Ted Kaczynski is yet another psyop from the same people who brought us Charles Manson. (These two crazies have the same crazy hair and crazy eyes, doncha know?) Miles Mathis, in particular, offers some quite persuasive observations about the Unabomber case.
As on so many things, I reserve my opinion on this one. Although just because the lyin’ cheetin’ fakestream Ted Baxter mockingbird media covered the story does not in itself prove that it happened as reported or that it didn’t, discerning news consumers should be aware by now that there is an entire industry devoted to producing fake events and narratives to keep the population entertained and corralled.
http://mileswmathis.com/unabomber.pdf
https://extra-capsa.com/2015/09/12/unabomber-gematria/
perhaps those of us who are OFW Optimists are part of the same psyop industry…
I’ll never tell…
We could all be Manchurian candidates….
It never made sense that someone would try to destroy BAU with a few pipe bombs… one would know that was futile … and that it would only lead to incarceration …
I call ho ax.
I’m not the only one:
https://orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/
Caution! More than three paragraphs.
Ted is evidence that even very intelligent people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#High_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski#Harvard_University
…. can hold DelusiSTANI citizenship…..
If he had succeeded in his Koombaya Mission …. we’d all be long dead.
I think he is aware some/most/all humans would die if deindustrializing.
It is obvious none have read K—-
But that was expected.
Oh, some of us read his manifesto at the time, and heavy going it was. Still it’s a good read and it will be well worth a an hour of your time. Ladies and Gentlemen, the person writing this manifesto 20 years ago could have been any one of you. I’ve made many of the same points Ted did and independently of reading his work, and so have most of you, and that, I think, is the whole point. Others in the environmental movement today are mouthing many of the same arguments that Ted made against industrialization.
The “K” character is that of the delusional greenie who was/is prepared to put his bombs where his mouth is and give substance to his delusions. He has basically done for environmentalism what Osama Bin Ladin did for Islam and Charles Manson did for hippydom. The message to be taken away from this one is that anyone, no matter how academically adept they may be, who wants to hug a tree, close a power plant, or prevent an oil well being dug, is a potential terrorist. So don’t go there boys & girls.
http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
I have read some of what he had written. If I remember correctly a little dying was a small price to pay for liberating The World and humanity from IC.
Don’t you think Ayn Rand is “literature”?
(I’m trying not to laugh)
Atlas Shrugged… is Motivation …
I guess we live in different worlds.
Sometime a simple, delusional world works—
You like Disneyland I bet?
Eddy is certainly no more delusional than you, Duncan, and possibly quite a bit less. I wouldn’t know as I am so wedded to my own delusions that it’s difficult to see past them.
What I think we all have in common is that we tend to put out our views with a lot more confidence than we hold them, almost as if we are trying to convince ourselves that we have a handle on reality. All of us apart from Gail, that is. After all, she’s the teacher.
Women are allowed to change their minds.
The closest I have been to reality (at least I think)… was when I took a bit too much of a sniff of ketamine…
Disneyland for me is on a ski hill or ice rink.
My world is one where you either have killer instincts or you fail… i try to employ as few people who think like you do … otherwise … I fail.
These instincts have served me well…. I did not enjoy poverty… I prefer not to work for anyone … and the challenge of trying to annihilate the opposition ….makes live worth living.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Twitter this morning accused British diver Vern Unsworth of being a pedophile, after Unsworth criticized Musk’s proposal to use a small submarine to rescue a trapped soccer team in Thailand.
Unsworth was instrumental in the rescue of the boy’s soccer team, but lambasted Musk’s submarine plan in an interview published by CNN Friday. Among other comments, Unsworth said the submarine “wouldn’t have made the first 50 meters into the cave” and was “just a PR stunt.”
Musk, responding to further criticism from professor and New York Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, wrote this morning that he “Never saw this British expat guy who lives in Thailand (sus) at any point when we were in the caves.” By “sus,” Musk may have meant “suspect,” implying that a British person living in Thailand is in itself dubious.
Musk went on to dispute Unsworth’s claim that the submarine concept was unworkable, saying that “we will make [a video] of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.”
You know what, don’t bother showing the video. We will make one of the mini-sub/pod going all the way to Cave 5 no problemo. Sorry pedo guy, you really did ask for it.
http://fortune.com/2018/07/15/elon-musk-thai-rescue-diver-pedo-guy/
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333471
John Kelly of IBM says 50 years of technology progress driven by AI.
Don’t Tell Anyone, But We Just Had Two Years Of Record-Breaking Gl0000bal Co0000ling
NASA data show that global temperatures dropped sharply over the past two years. Not that you’d know it, since that wasn’t deemed news. Does that make NASA a gl0000bal w0000rming de…nier?
Writing in Real Clear Markets, Aaron Brown looked at the official NASA gl0000bal tem…perature data and noticed something surprising. From February 2016 to February 2018, “gl…obal average temp…eratures dropped by 0.56 degrees Celsius.”
.That, he notes, is the biggest two-year drop in the past century.
“The 2016-2018 Big Chill,” he writes, “was composed of two Little Chills, the biggest five month drop ever (February to June 2016) and the fourth biggest (February to June 2017). A similar event from February to June 2018 would bring glo…..bal average temperatures below the 1980s average.”
Isn’t this just the sort of man-bites-dog story that the mainstream media always says is newsworthy?
In this case, it didn’t warrant any news coverage.
In fact, in the three weeks since Real Clear Markets ran Brown’s story, no other news outlet picked up on it. They did, however, find time to report on such things as tourism’s impact on cl….imate cha….nge, how glo…..bal war……ming will generate more hurricanes this year, and threaten fish habitats, and make islands uninhabitable. They wrote about a UN official saying that “our window of time for addressing cli……mate cha……..nge is closing very quickly.”
Reporters even found time to cover a group that says they want to carve President Trump’s face into a glacier to prove cl……imate ch……..ange “is happening.”
In other words, the mainstream news covered stories that repeated what cli…….mate change advocates have been saying ad nauseam for decades.
How do the groopies feel about this …. is the egg cracking?
Remember what I said — if Al Gore came clean and explained the grand ho ax…. he’d be villified by the groopies… accused of being the pay of big oil…
So I do not expect the above will change the grooopies feeble minds…
In fact if a glacier were to cover Toronto in the next 5 years… they’d still pound their drums
You are confusing weather and climate. 2 years is still a weather event.
F789 off. The weatherman does not give a forecast 2 years out. The KKKKLimate is getting colder.
Oh did you notice if there is a SINGLE DAY of abnormally hot weather — we are reminded that this is yet another signal of kkkk ccchhhhhhange….
Or if there is a hurricane … likewise
How f789ing stewpid can you be?
I do find it funny that you consider me an optimist if I believe things are going to start breaking down in around 12 years give or take.
Basically, I don’t follow too many comments, internet news or blogs, the swirl of activity that gives the hallucination of a backfiring into collapse. Rather, I think in terms of demographic and material trends. Basically, the limits to growth model.
We are still not at the point of resource shortage combined with high middle age/elderly population and low young population. But we are slowly getting there. Once we hit that peak, after that it’s all downhill when it comes to materials and workers. Supply of everything will increase to a maximum extent, and then plummet permanently. There’s nothing we can do, it’s built in to the global dynamic now. Well, we can always turn to weed and hollywood movies and world cup football and the like.
“I do find it funny that you consider me an optimist if I believe things are going to start breaking down in around 12 years give or take.”
Things do get strange, don’t they. We have not understood the system very well so far. It is hard to be certain we really have the story 100% correct now.
I also have been taking the long view. I see maybe one or two decades before the SHTF. We are already starting to see noticeable signs in the breakdown of the ecosystems and Miami which is about 4 hrs from where I live has been dealing with sea level rise the last 5 years or so.
I don’t see humans around by 2100 but as the saying goes: “first you go broke little by little then all of a sudden”.
Larry, tidal station gauges have been in existence for a century now, and as I mentioned earlier, the measured rate of sea level rise has been quite constant, about 18 cm per century. We can also get some picture of temperature and sea level changes over past millennia by looking at melting shrinkage rates of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
This can be determined by noting how much its “grounding line”, the points where it makes contact with the underlying land mass, has receded. Unlike floating sea ice which doesn’t influence sea level when it melts, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is part of the land mass. When it melts, it adds to sea level just as melting glaciers do.
The end of the last Ice Age 18,000 years ago caused the sea level to rise by a huge amount…about 400 feet. This change happened rapidly at first, caused primarily by the melting of huge ice sheets covering North America and Eurasian land masses which disappeared about 8000-5000 years ago.
The West Antarctic Ice sheet began to melt at that time also, but at a much slower rate, and that melting continues today. We might expect this melting to continue until it is gone in another 7,000 years or so… or until the next Ice Age, whichever comes first. Other smaller ice sheets that once existed in the Antarctic are already gone. The oceans will continue to rise, despite anything President Obama may attempt in order to stop them.
Much much more…. https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/09/24/alarmists-are-in-way-over-their-heads-on-rising-ocean-claims/#76d6404e1194
Our sustainability problem is that we are being squeezed from all sides. Let’s take issue with these one by one. I don’t pretend this is a comprehensive list but these are some of our main problems.
1. Growth – While populations and economies continue to grow then we are simply using up limited resources faster. The earth is finite as Gail correctly points out. Endless growth in a finite system is impossible. That is axiomatic according to all the known and dependable laws of physics meaning those laws relating to energy, entropy, matter and space-time.
2. Resources – Resources are finite in stock or flow terms as each particular limiting case may be. We can regard oil and coal reserves as stocks. There are no new oil and coal reserves being geologically created on any time scale which would assist our civilization.
Fresh water presents a mixed picture. Some fresh waters are stocks on our timescale. The very important Ogallala Aquifer in the USA is mostly a stock on our timescale. Annual inflows are small compared to current annual use. The depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer is going to have a significant impact on USA’s food production. Other waters are flows, reliable rivers being the obvious example.
With a stock, use it once entirely and it’s gone effectively forever on any human timescale. With a flow, the highest use rate possible is governed by the flow. Indeed, well before you use all of a stock or all of a flow you start creating other problems. Removal of ground water can cause subsidence, creeping desertification and so on. Use of entire rivers can cause lakes, inland seas and wetlands to dry up. There can be many negative ecological effects (like dust bowls and dust storms) which make life harder.
Insolation (solar energy coming in to earth) is a flow. For our purposes it is essentially an endless flow as the sun will most likely shine for billions of years yet. However, sunshine is an intermittent flow (night, dark cloudy days) but even more importantly it is a fairly weak or slow flow per unit area in energetic terms relative to modern power needs. It takes many hours and many square meters of solar panels to gain significant amounts of energy. These solar power limitations then go to the issues of the material and energetic feasibility of the solar panel build-out itself and also the issue of whether the net EROI will be sufficient to power modern, complex civilization.
3. Ecosystem services and planetary boundaries – These issue are not canvassed so much on Gail’s blog but they are also very important. Ecosystem services are what the biosphere and the total web of life or ecology on earth do for us. Plants take up CO2 and give off oxygen. Without this ecoservice, animals including humans could not survive. Winds and weather circulate water for clouds, rain and rivers. If the climate changes, winds and weather change. It’s worth looking at the Ecosystem services entry on Wikipedia.
As humans change and pollute the land, seas and atmosphere we are tampering with and seriously damaging many of these ecosystem services. So, as our growth continues we are reducing the world’s capacity to carry us. It’s like burning a candle at both ends.
Up to ten important planetary boundaries have been identified. We have already crossed into the danger zone on three, namely Climate Change, Biodiversity and the Nitrogen Cycle. The Phosphorous Cycle is also close to dangerous limits. Ocean Acidification is halfway to the danger limit and Chemical Pollution while not yet fully quantified yet is probably getting to dangerous levels. Look at the levels of plastics and micro-particle plastics in the oceans. This is becoming very damaging.
I see that many on this site do not rate Climate Change as a real threat. The dependable science says Climate Change is indeed a real threat. I sense I will get some push-back about this issue on this site. This surprises me. The science is strong. I am not sure why people accept science on finite resources and then deny atmospheric science.
With climate change the main dangers are sea-level rise and climate destabilization. Storms and rain events increase in intensity. Overall, extremes are exacerbated. Drought and heatwave events are worse and high rain events are worse leading to more and worse floods. Wildfires and floods are already increasing in severity around the world. Food production will be seriously affected by these developments.
4. Summing Up – I am trying to paint a picture here of a complex of difficulties assailing us simultaneously from many directions and hitting us in many different ways where we are vulnerable. The effect is a compounding one.We keep growing our population. We keep cultivating more and more land, though less and less good land is left. We keep losing topsoil to dust storms, run-off and floods. We keep needing more and more fossil fuels to run this system but they are getting harder and harder to obtain. We try to create a new energy system (solar power) but it is uncertain that the net EROI would be high enough. We need a great deal of current energy to make an energy transition whose results are uncertain… or we baulk at this attempt, maybe wisely maybe not, and accept our downward spiral as inevitable.
We are caught between a rock and a hard place. If we burn all our fossil fuels then climate change will destroy us. (I know that statement will be controversial on this site.) If we transition to solar power (if that’s even possible) we probably will not even be able to maintain current population levels and civilizational complexity. What are our realistic options?
The only realistic option I see (and even that isn’t pretty) is regional selfishness. Some regions may be able to continue sustainably albeit at much lower populations levels and considerable decline in civilizational complexity. Other regions are pretty much destined to decline back to a sort of medieval age and some maybe even a stone age.
Going on ecological footprint analysis, the only regions which can survive (without invasion or nuclear war) are Russia, Australia and maybe parts of South America surprisingly. However, the theory of “offensive realism” suggests to me that Australia (where I live) will be invaded and destroyed by many millions of refugees from S.E. Asia and Asia. Russia will survive (unless there is global nuclear war). The USA can survive too. By “survive” I mean survive at maybe a 1900 standard of living with the elites doing quite a bit better. The USA will have to use the entirety of the Americas for its ecological footprint under this scenario. There will be little or no attention paid to the rights of the peoples of the rest of the Americas. Africa, Western Europe, China and India will collapse completely. They are totally unsustainable.
These are cruel scenarios but living nature is the struggle for existence against the elements and the intense competition for survival among species.
I agree that ecosystem services are an issue. We are cutting down too many forests and putting roads through too many places, so that habitats are cut off. We are using land that wild animals should have.
Climate change is a threat, but I do not see anything (other than perhaps planting trees) that we can do about it. It gets emphasized way too much.
The EROEI of solar is clearly wrong. If intermittency is corrected for, it appears to be an energy sink.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/solar-pv-eroei-graham-palmer.png
Can someone dig up what sort of batt type scenarios he puts into the analysis?
Dated as Springer (2013) it could not be relevant anymore as not looking – extrapolating the phase in of contemporary (new stuff back then)..
Nevertheless it would be likely still sub ~10 EROEI anyway.
Ikonoclast, yes, unfortunately the owning class does not want to close the borders. Time to deal with the owning class.
It brings up the notion that if we were still living the hunter – gatherer lifestyle we would be able to look forward to another 200,000 years without collapsing the planet. Instead we have compressed it all into 10,000 years or so.
I really doubt it.
When I look up interglacial cycles, this is what NOAA says:
Hunter-gatherers were already adversely killing off the top predators, as they burned down forests. I think we are kidding ourselves. Natural cycles may very well win out.
We have virtually nothing we can do to fix the problem, so the question is only of academic interest.
“These are cruel scenarios but living nature is the struggle for existence against the elements and the intense competition for survival among species.”
yes, we do project cruelty onto reality…
the end game for humanity is extinction…
we can imagine many scenarios that will end there…
I think much of what you imagine will indeed become reality…
If only the dinosaurs and all other extinct animals… had set up doomsteads… they would still be around …..
https://us-east-1.tchyn.io/snopes-production/uploads/2015/06/spielberg.jpg
They’re still around. The Zionerati secretly breed them for their game hunts.
Sure! I am certain photoshop was used in this picture.
this is behind the scene of Jurassic park
Many of their close relatives are still are around—as birds, crocodiles, newts, lizards and the like. My back yard lacks crocks, but in other respects it’s like a miniature Jurassic Park.
Lest we forget, the dinosaurs flourished for over a hundred million years when the planet was much warmer than today and the carbon dioxide levels were around 2,000 ppm, about five times what they are today. Apparently, the big ones died out after a bunch of ratty little guys calling themselves the mammal justice warriors launched a successful campaign to persuade them to stop burning coal to run the huge air conditioners they needed to keep cool during the Cretaceous.
Dinosaurs weren’t related to reptiles. They were, and are, birds.
Good one Tim I am going to steal it MJWs
Caught a new one at work using hot water to rinse out plastic containers…Another stream so moar and different trucks.
I wondered who she is related to and if she understood that she just started the AC.Complained anyway just for the entertainment value.
Thanks for the effort summing it up.
I’d only add that it might be useful to work with the climate change in full spectrum, e.g. Jancovici mentioned billions of deaths for both scenarios (can’t recall which was worse), be it rapid cooling (climate reset to inter-glacier) as well as case for traditional meaning of increased temperature.
cross out the (inter) of glaciation period, my bad..
5. People are becoming elder, sillier and sicker, in other words: less producitve!
This is the ‘biggest bubble in the history of mankind’ and it’s going to burst, Ron Paul says
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/13/this-is-the-biggest-bubble-in-the-history-of-mankind-and-its-going-.html
I thought sharks were bad.
“100,000,000 sharks are killed a year for seasoning for soup. The fins are cut off live sharks. The sharks are then dumped back into the ocean to die. Soon there there will be no more sharks.”
But we humans are just disgusting creatures.
The Trump Putin summit will take place in our capital Helsinki tomorrow. Nukes will be directed towards us just in case if something happens. It’s small chance…but better than nothing…
I heard about that in the news sometime ago. I forget if it was the Japanese who are behind the demand for shark fin. Quite wasteful if they are killing the shark for just the fin. You’d think they would kill it for the meat. There are parts of the world already where professional fishermen are having trouble finding enough fish to sell to their local markets. I see this problem as only getting worse.
I also read that we may have ONLY one northern white rhino left in the world and that’s a big MAYBE because we were too busy killing them for their horns.
I also read that we may have ONLY one northern white rhino left in the world
that northern white rhino is dead now
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/sudan-northern-white-rhino-death/556058/
Yes people believe humans MUST survive the end of BAU.
WTF
Key facts about the Global Shark Trade:
Hammerhead, oceanic whitetip and blue sharks are preferred for shark fin soup whereas dogfish, mako and tope sharks are preferred for meat
From the country of production to the country where the products are consumed, shark products are often imported and exported much more than three times
The vast majority of shark fins are destined for consumption in a relatively small selection of countries and territories in East and Southeast Asia. The world’s largest consumers of shark meat are found in South America and Europe
Markets for shark meat are much more diverse and geographically dispersed than those for shark fins. European and North American markets such as the USA, Italy and France show a preference for dogfish species
Between 2000 and 2011, the annual volume for shark fin imports has decreased by 5% while the annual volume for shark meat imports has increased by 42%
Shark meat markets have expanded considerably due to a combination of demand growth and finning bans intended to encourage the full utilization of carcasses
The world’s major shark fin exporting producers are Spain, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Japan
Hong Kong is not a producer, and essentially the entirety of its outgoing trade consists of shark fins that have been imported from shark-catching countries or regional traders and then re-exported
https://www.projectaware.org/news/new-infographic-busts-myths-about-global-shark-trade
I must admit, I have killed many sharks.
Its just after one has eaten a large yellowfin (-$200), and has a kona head worth $60.00 in a mouth full of sharp teeth, one hears “bring me the bang stick”.
Asa practicing Jain, I try very hard not to kill even a nat or chop up a worm when digging my veggie plot. If I had an overweening ego, it would make me feel extremely morally superior, but basically I avoid killing out of a probably misplaced sense of compassion for our creepy crawly cousins.
As for killing sharks, I take as dim a view of that as David Attenborough does about clubbing baby seals!
https://youtu.be/xTnxWf8-koU
Those f**king baby seals needs a good clubbing!
We are on a small rock in universe and we are horrible…well…I know…we are just trying to survive.
i am a atheist and behave in exactly the same way
when a wasps nest established itself in my eaves–i let them do their thing, i didnt bother them, they didn’t bother me–though they might have gone off and bothered other people for all i know–people thought i was weird for not calling pest control
once a swan approached me at the lakeside with a fishing line in its throat–which i was able to extract–i thought nothing much about it
but then it happened a second time months later, in a different location which made me stop and think
do critters know stuff i wonder?
Same here… We have a wasp hive right above our front door. They fly in and out all day long but never bother me. Wasps are not interested in stinging us.
Horse-flies on the other hand…
Critters come to you, Norman, no doubt because you have a kind face. St. Francis of Assisi was like that too.
I also try to leave the wasps alone, although if a single wasp starts a new nest early in the season near a door that we have to use, I am not above knocking it to the ground, which is usually enough to make the wasp give up and go elsewhere. But once the colony is established and the only way to get rid of them is chemical warfare, I prefer to let them be, even if that means avoiding the area for the rest of the summer.
I have been attacked by a swarm of quite vicious wasps when I was grass cutting on a neighbor’s land as a favor to him. It’s the last time I try to be helpful in that way. My bush cutter came too close to their nest and I was stung about 15 times on my left arm and a couple of times on the left leg. I dropped the cutter, no bothering to cut the engine, and did my best Carl Lewis impression. The arm swelled up to the size of a leg and took a week to get back to its normal size, and it was as itchy as hell. It’s not an experience I would care to repeat.
You will be pleased to know that Enron Musk is launching a brush cutter with a built in flame thrower…
It just makes sense to combine them…
Eddy, I find it hilarious that you both believe in Jewish cabals and also follow Ayn Rand (Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum), but I suppose you’re just a complex guy who contains multitudes rather than someone who doesn’t have an internally consistent worldview…
I also think Ayn Rand was a crazy old bat…. with a message that if followed…. will get you ahead… in this meritocracy that has been established by the El ders…. in which people who strive to be the best that they can be … no matter what they do …. succeed.
I suspect the likes of Obama and Blair and Clinton …. and so on …. have views that line up with mine.
I suspect Putin does not … but then he has a nuclear arsenal… and a lot of oil and other resources… so he can rock the boat…
I do not have a school tie… my name is not Smith…. I like the current system…
As for Trump…. I am still not sure what Trump is…
Is he an entertainer… delivered to distract?
Or is he teamed up with Putin … and perhaps China… (as the front man representing other interests in America) seeking to end an empire…. and the Fed is wringing its collective hands because if they off him (a la Kennedy) all those tens of millions who are struggling … and looking to Trump to MAGA…. burn down the house….(and the parasites lose their power base…)
I have to pause for thought when Republicans attack just as rapidly as Democrats…. one of their own…. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/07/16/republican-lawmakers-call-trump-putin-meeting-shameful/788752002/
Both parties ultimately take orders from the Fed…. the Fed has a full court press with both sides ganging up on one…. why would they do that?
i would prefer more than just critters coming up to me and demanding attention
i think i have more in common with the birdman od alcatraz than st francis of assissi
perhaps word as gotten out about those helpful manuals you’ve written?
Our current system is very fragile. Subsistence farming is declining worldwide, digitalisation increases the dependency on a single technology and its requirements. I agree on the point of view that politics cannot undo the physical conditions of energy shortage – but they are obliged to moderated transitions. In the old times cultures could leave their communities and join another competitive culture. Or they were taken over by their enemies with a different technology. But how could that be the case in this global context? Our fossile centric approach erodes the soil, pollutes water and makes huge areas inhabitable with highly radioactive waste. For coming generations who are not able to gain such high levels of education and technical production it might be difficult simply to understand the concept of radioactivity. From my point of view we should use the still high technological standards and energy supply to develop resilience and alternative procedures. We have a lot of knowledge about simple and independend procedures – but this knowledge is hidden in some academic studies only little people have access to. It will very likely not survive any major crash. I want to mention one example: We know that people of the stone and bronce ages stored crop in earth pits. We also know that crop needs a maximum of 14% of humidity to stay stable. But who knows how ancient man was able to measure this humidity? If the grain is dried artificially in order to be on the safe side it would not be usable as seeding material in the next year. Wouldnt it be interesting to develop an easy to handle method? There are a lot of things we could do! Just think of simple medical procedures. It is obvious that the carrying capacity of several areas is declining. Still we are not able to prepare for different times, to start test sites or respective research. The ability of man to use ratio and to shape his own fate seems to me very overestimated.
I think you meant, “The ability of man to use rationality to shape his own fate seems to me to be very overestimated.”
I agree. Spell checker seems to mess up what we type now, too.
Way back when, it seemed to me that we should be figuring out which combinations of kinds of foods could be grown in each area, given the climate and needed contribution to a balanced diet. We should then start figuring out how we would actually do it–what kinds of tools, what kind of training, would storage be needed, how would it be transported, etc. We would have to set up a new chain of learning for everyone at every step involved. Of course, these people would still need to earn a living at their old jobs. It becomes very difficult. Also, how does one afford to buy (or even rent) land for such an operation?
“There are a lot of things we could do!”
yes… we could burn more FF and create more prosperity…
after FF, there will be almost nothing that “we could do”…
Planning how not to lose the knowledge base to handle radioactivity seems mighty important. Your point is well taken.
Um….. you need electricity … and high tech equipment and replacement parts… to be able to handle spent fuel ponds….
And yes of course training….. but training is of no use without the other two …
Yes we are living in denial. The solutions we come up with are more layers of complexity, not less. We are wired for growth and seeking rewards, not hunkering down and settle for less. If someone goes for the latter they fall prey to the former.
Although this is rocket chamber burn via multi GPU simulation, it’s obvious this ultra fast prototyping will be sooner or later (today? well this is old video) used in other sciences namely nuclear engineering; therefore I’m afraid fusion or at least something like next gen breeders of more abundant material for mox fuels is just going to happen massively pretty soon.
I’m not happy about it, actually it’s pretty sad given “legacy” human nature, therefor we would be heading into very nasty dystopia as this will be used to tweaks in human genome, and nature in general. Actually, expect “the Elders” and their top lieutenants live hundred +years with * “3D printed up” replacement organs and lately even perhaps several hundred yrs by offloaded/uploaded mind and personality..
One doesn’t have to think hard what’s next, they will pretty soon eliminate the useless eaters one way or another..
* accidentally also just found this is already existing stuff on industrial scale and they are only fine tuning the list of organs suitable for such method, eventually doing everything.. (might comment on it with video in another post eventually)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txk-VO1hzBY
(rewind to ~34min)
note: large GFC could wipe us out, but I doubt it now, it will be periphery stripping event at best..
means we are going in blade runner type of earth
yep, the direction definitely smells like that.. with bit of sulfur on top of it 🙂
I would not hold your breath.
It’s a scenario, which has been recently boosted up in probability, nothing is guaranteed.
If you have not look at it, try at least from ~40min mark, they clearly show easy example of massively paralleled computation for ~11-60 indiv species in chemical reactions. What that means is low or no waste product in everything be it biomedicine, batt storage (sourced from ~cheap minerals), nuclear reactions and what have you..
Obviously, this is all approximation even in tiny detail, there will be always dead ends in industrial designs and human errors, but the core message is enabling accelerated prototyping in many fields by several factors.
This was in fact one of the areas, which plagued next gen NPPs since the 1960s/70s-2000s, back then the French would you for such computer and algorithms happily rented Paris for 50yrs and gave southern coast as a bonus. It would be breeders based country by now with significantly negligible thirst for oil..
Please do not hold your breath!
At the very least, stop holding your breath if you turn purple.
What this would mean would be that there would be enough high-quality reliable energy on tap to keep the industrial system chugging along, but there would also be a lot of surplus people that the system would not need and it would not be enthusiastic about feeding or providing jobs for.
Imagine no possessions, it isn’t hard to do….
Imagine decimation, it’s easy if you try….
Imagine low population, it’s something we can do
Imagine there were no humans…
Give peace a chance… exterimate all humans
++++++++++++++++
Yes, Elon is very competent at computer programming, nit so much at working with ordinary humans.
as Norman often says, you need a reason to travel someplace. it can’t just be a joy ride.
Yes it’s potential travel out of energy bottleneck as described, rapidly prototyping known concepts, but getting it done sooner and or on smaller budget. Interestingly, we will know soon enough who will capitalize on such development. I’d single out SKorea, as nuclear research even on strictly private biz base seems knee-caped within the US, but obviously it doesn’t have to mean much in a crunch and elevated priorities..
“Actually, expect “the Elders” and their top lieutenants live hundred +years with * “3D printed up” replacement organs and lately even perhaps several hundred yrs by offloaded/uploaded mind and personality.”
well, I think it’s total nonsense and nothing to “expect”…
but if “they” want to live 100s of years into The Collapse and experience the disastrous worldwide poverty that will follow the depletion of FF…
well, go ahead and try…
key word to all of the above: “nonsense”…
I’m sorry to hear your are not up to speed on this topic. Stem cells growth on 3D printed mesh is a reality today (replacement organs), and they are probably not using such full computational power yet as described above. Similarly, fast prototyping of high energy physics, fluid dynamics, nuclear chemistry is exactly the very field where this stuff shrinks years/decades of R&D into months.. I’m not guaranteeing anything, just forwarding a possible scenario, which has got sort of spiking probability. And it’s worrying me since mankind has got some peculiar drive for weaseling out of bottlenecks.. No future for me or you personally is different subject, which has been also briefly addressed above at thread start.
Moreover, in terms of existing application of this stuff, it has been revealed some time ago, that gaming industry GPUs (parallel computing) are massively used even by ~2.5th world powers nowadays in guided reactive artillery shells, cruise missiles, and energy sector. In other words even the “Northern Kim Industries” is surely using some older revision of it, hence the swift progress in their ballistic missiles and nuclear program, same applying for Iran, Pakistan, ..
It’s obvious this is bread and butter in Russia, China, SKorea, France, (US mentioned above), ..
“Although this is rocket chamber burn via multi GPU simulation, it’s obvious this ultra fast prototyping will be sooner or later (today? well this is old video) used in other sciences namely nuclear engineering; therefore I’m afraid fusion or at least something like next gen breeders of more abundant material for mox fuels is just going to happen massively pretty soon. ”
My friend who does CGI for a ubiquitous studio has had the same home setup of 6 SLI-ed GTX 780 TIs since 2015. He hasn’t mentioned being contacted by “them” on the subject of nuclear fusion, yet.
The problem is that hard physical limits exist regardless of data. Also on 3d printed organs, the only advance I’ve heard of is that some Indian IPO created a 3d printed liver replica, but even that was basically done by injecting stem cells into the printed “scaffolding” and hoping it develops properly. Actual organs can’t be 3d printed.
Artificial organs> that’s what I already wrote in the follow up, stems cells on 3D printed mesh.. and it’s being taken by US investors and their existing facilities state side..
CGI friend in bolly/hollywood cave> don’t know what you mean by such off topic comment, as clustered CPUs and GPUs have been used for decades in R&D prototyping, only the recent “hockey stick” in multi core GPUs computational power put it in overdrive as shown on that SpaceX clip particularly showing also potential for running chemistry reactions..
Physical limits has nothing to do with it, mox fuel breeders and (likely) fusion NPPs have been within boundaries of already known science for decades, only the engineering implementation refinement was lacking, France and Russia solved it on some crude first, second gen phase already. Nevertheless even more efficient and rapid build up would need such accelerated prototyping, that’s all I said..
“as clustered CPUs and GPUs have been used for decades in R&D prototyping, only the recent “hockey stick” in multi core GPUs computational power put it in overdrive”
That was my point. GPUs have been “multi cored” for a while, i.e., stacked multiple units not multiple cores on one die. I know they’re used in prototyping but it doesn’t follow that the technologies you mention will suddenly become feasible.
Breeder reactors are feasible, but fusion has huge (literally) issues just in construction let alone stability. In either case, neither can power much of anything without FF-based inputs including global JIT infrastructure.
Again breeders already exist on industrial scale, future revisions (and or scaling up) is what these fluid dynamics simulation could accelerate.. As I wrote like almost 10x times already, prior none or basic availability of such tools hampered development on this front, that’s not my idea but citing the guys working on it..
FFinputs/JITs> you sure know there are countries heavily biased to NPP on their grid network (so could happen elsewhere too), but it doesn’t stop there e.g. offshore smaller NPPs (on a barge) to move temporarily or for longer periods electricity closer to FF extraction-reprocessing sites..
“prior none or basic availability of such tools hampered development on this front, that’s not my idea but citing the guys working on it..”
Sure, but these tools have been commercially available at least since the 90s. Purely performance wise (mrender) a 7 yo card can compete well with latest gen equivalents.
Any countries with NPP-based grid are still wholly dependent on the larger FF economy. Some small-scale local industry/infra can run with them, but nothing remotely close to the scenario you describe.
Interesting stuff, but I have a hard time seeing this come together. You need stable society and energy conditions for the years of R&D plus not having other superpowers ‘intervene’ (bomb you).
The best we can hope for is that some humans have a ‘radiation immunity gene’…
You mean hope that we should hope the no humans have a gene that allows them to survive radiation — right?
This is the Earth’s opportunity to cure her cancer… why are you hoping the cancer survives?
Trump just declared Europe as enemy number 1 to America.
🙂
Europe is a big oil user, after all. They don’t produce much oil, and they import a lot. If a country wants to play king of the mountain, both Europe and Japan look like energy weaklings. In some sense, they don’t deserve all of the imports that they are getting, especially if there is not enough to go around.
again and again
we will fight over what’s left
that fighting will take many forms before we reach the bloody kind—but we will get there
It looks like you are right. The Pope and Putin has said on few occasions that we are very close to a nuclear holocaust.
Well, we import about 5 million barrels a day. Goes by the definition of ” a lot”.
France consumes about 1.6 million barrels a day– I’m sure you can do the math.
The U.S is I believe crude neutral today. The refineries in the U.S import a lot of crude and then export refined fuels. The U.S crude production equals the U.S final consumption of refined fuels.
No, the US is still a big importer of crude oil. This is something a lot of people have the wrong idea about.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/us-imports-of-crude-oil-through-april-2018.png
We also export some crude oil (different types), but not nearly as much. This PDF gives an idea of the breakdown. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec3_3.pdf
For the year 2017, we consumed 19.9 million barrels a day of oil products. Our production was 13.1 million barrels a day, including natural gas liquids. Ethanol and refinery gains both helped some. Our net imports were 3.7 million barrels a day.
During the first 5 months of 2018, our average daily production including natural gas liquids was 14.4 million barrels a day, and our consumption was up to 20.2 million barrels a day. Our net imports averaged 3.1 million barrels per day. Net imports seem to be up significantly recently, which is probably related to the fact that prices are rising.
Did you mean to say net imports are down?
I meant that April and May seem to be up, compared to earlier in the year. Maybe I shouldn’t have said significantly. Sorry!
The US has been getting a lot better on its dependence on net imports. I can see how someone could come to the conclusion that in a few years, the USA + Canada could entirely support themselves with the energy supplies they produce.
Please, inform yourself.
Not even close– add millions of barrels just to break even.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Truth-About-US-Energy-Dominance.html
Europe is importing a lot oil, natgas and coal.
European multinationals are spread around the world and they consume a lot of oil, natgas and coal as well.
Trump’s tariffs on China are in fact targeting multinationals from Europe, Japan and South Korea that operate in China.
Europe is an enemy…in a world that has reached the limits.
We Japanese (see, I’m a bloody immigrant here and even I’m doing it!)… We undeserving Japanese are just doing our bit to keep up demand and stop the wheels of BAU from coming off.
Well, deserve it or not, we’re paying through the nose for it at 150 ~ 160 yen a liter for gasoline—that’s about US$5 per gallon. And all you deserving Americans are moaning when you pay $2.50 for it! As a nation, we’re the oil industry’s best customers.
We’re about USD6.00 per gallon here in Otago…. BUT … if I buy enough stuff at the Pak N Save… I can get up to .35 off per fill up!!!! Must buy MOAR!!!! MUST CONSUME MOAR!!!
I do like the Pak N Save concept though — they provide boxes …. I particularly like the wine boxes… they are the perfect size… I fill them up with COAL…. then shove them through the hole in the Rayburn…. it makes burning COAL so much more fun .. without all the mess.
I am close to a circular economy … buy stuff… pack in cardboard boxes… fill up with petrol… burn boxes full of coal… return to shop buy more stuff…. perpetual motion machine….
One of the best quotes I came across:
“Government is the entertainment division of the Military Industrial Complex”
– Frank Zappa
Who take their orders from the El ders…
But zappa… nor anyone else… dare to go there….
This Tiny Moon Has More Oil & Gas Than Earth
Imagine a place with hundreds of times more natural gases and other liquid hydrocarbons than all of the known oil and gas reserves on our bountiful planet. As it turns out, that place is a comparatively small, smoggy and perpetually drizzly moon in our very own solar system, happily orbiting around Saturn.
On Titan, the largest of Saturn’s 62 moons, hydrocarbons naturally rain down from the skies in a “dreary drizzle” and collect in the form of vast lakes and dunes. This has long been known or at least surmised, but now we have proof and quantitative data thanks to NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.
Whereas the majority of the earth’s surface is covered in water, the greater part of Titan is covered in lakes, seas, and flooded river valleys full of liquid methane and ethane, while the dunes are made up of not sand, but likely of tholins, a category of organic materials formed by carbon-containing compounds (CO2, methane, ethane, and more) and solar ultraviolet irradiation or other cosmic rays. These materials do not form naturally on earth, but they’re carbon-rich treasure troves of carbon-based organic matter that can explode into prebiotic life in the presence of water. In fact, tholins likely played a role in the origin of life on Earth.
Scientists can surmise the depth and volume of Titan’s lakes based on their pitch-black appearance on radar and by comparing with depth averages exported from our own planets statistics. These observations are based on findings in the northern polar regions of Saturn’s largest moon. Cassini has only viewed the southern reaches of Titan once with their radar technology, but few lakes were immediately visible.
NASA’s Cassini craft has used radar to map about 20 percent of Titan’s carbon-rich surface. Just within this fraction of the moon’s surface, NASA has been able to observe hundreds of lakes and seas, several dozen of which are estimated to contain more liquid hydrocarbons than all of Earth’s oil and gas reserves combined in each lake in and of itself. And those tholin-filled dunes? Those likely contain enough carbon-based organics to amount to hundreds of times the quantity of the Earth’s dwindling coal reserves.
These numbers are pretty astounding, especially when you consider that Earth’s natural gas reserves, dwarfed by Titan’s, are not too shabby either. On our humble planet there are proven reserves totally 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting. But this is nothing compared to what we’re seeing on Titan–dozens of Titans’ hundreds if not thousands of lakes each individually contain at least this much energy potential, all pooled, cooled, and ready in the form of liquid ethane and methane.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/This-Tiny-Moon-Has-More-Oil-Gas-Than-Earth.html
mr trump sent your space force to titan /s
when sun will become red giant and destroyed earth
this where will next life will start
but the difference will be it will based methane based life
hydrocarbons have no use until they are burned
unless you count vaseline
We use an awfully lot of products from hydrocarbons that are not burned. Asphalt is an oil product, for example. Plastics are made from hydrocarbons (and other things). https://plastics.americanchemistry.com/How-Plastics-Are-Made/ Nitrogen fertilizers are made using natural gas or coal. https://marketrealist.com/2017/01/overview-phosphate-fertilizer-cost-drivers-production-flow
i used the term burned as a concise description
oil is separated out to its constituent components by heating, to the point of vaporisation
if it doesn’t go through that process, it might as well sit in the earth
not entirely up to speed on every aspect of the oil production business, but that’s my understanding of it
The trick is figuring out cheap, abundant, and non-polluting energy sources.
We can’t get a person to Titan, let alone figure out a way to extract resources and bring them back efficiently. Pollution is another issue.
Record Breaking Number of neo-Nazis and White Nationalists Running for Office in the U.S.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/record-breaking-number-of-white-nationalists-run-for-office-in-u-s-1.6272263?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Your article started saying the human economy can’t be successfully modeled at this time. All the believers of the “man made CO2 will cause catastrophic climate change” have only models of future climate change to base their “beliefs” on as they believe the “science is settled”. So man made CO2 is the only driver of (from what I think is natural climate variability) for the recent climate change to slightly warmer. In climate terms recent is the last 100 years. Where I have lived for the past 30 years the plant growing region has changed from 6a to 6b. This is nowhere near the change from the change from the medieval warming period to the Little Ice Age. Indeed, it seems just a continuation from the warming that ended the Little Ice Age. Or the change 6 thousand years ago that changed the Sahara region from a place with lakes and rivers (with tribes of fisher peoples and nomad herders) to the desert it is today. None of the above climate changes have causes that are known – only speculated about.
To get back to models – if the human economy can’t be modeled how can the models of the climate (of which human activity is a very small subset) be counted on for predictions from which we can make prudent choices for present and future activity
“Predictions are hard, cause, you know, they’re about the future” Yogi Berra
You are correct, the models that climate modelers have put together have problems. They don’t do a good job of estimating what will happen. The other part of the problem is that even if we “know” that CO2 is the problem, pretty much any solution we might think we have would kill off human population pretty quickly. This might a bit of a deterrent to using such a solution.
++++++++++++++++++
The human population evolution by The American Museum of Natural History
//www.ultimedia.com/deliver/generic/iframe/mdtk/01667468/src/uf8z5r/zone/1/showtitle/1/
« Modern technology and medecine bring faster growth »
And energy ? Who cares about energy ? Men need energy aka food.
They say the first leap was agriculture a few thousand years b.c. Can we say that farming is a way to grab much more energy from the sun than just gathering what was just provided by the wild ? The fields were (are) the first solar energy plants.
We also could store the energy for winter : the energy was stored in the grains. No battery problem !
The second leap (much bigger) is IC.
They say “modern technology” : it starts with the steam machine, right, but no machine without fuel : it’s also the beginning of industrial coal mining. It starts in the 18th century. Then population increases faster in the 1930s : start of oil industrial exploitation I’d say?
It is also surprising that the 14th century plague had a noticeable but “minor” effect on the world population. As for the 2 world wars, and the Spanish flue, it seems to be nothing … What is it the life of a man ? “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
For most of our 200,000-300,000 year existence as homo sapiens, our population has been 1-10 million, with a close extinction about 70,000 years ago.
7.6 billion?
(Don’t laugh)
The downfall of US nuclear power
“We’re asleep at the wheel on a very dangerous highway,” said Ahmed Abdulla, co-author and fellow at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego. “We really need to open our eyes and study the situation.”
https://www.rt.com/business/433140-downfall-of-us-nuclear-power/
If nothing else, the huge fleet of nuclear power plants that will be retired over the next 20 years (or perhaps much less) represents huge electricity generation that will be lost. We don’t have good options for replacing it.
In addition to my comment above about energy and the difficulties of the solar power transition (post still in moderation) is this further issue. There is a world-wide sand shortage! Yes, it is hard to believe but you can look it up. There is not an absolute shortage of sand (there is a great deal in deserts) but there are shortages of the sand types necessary for construction, filtration and other industrial uses. Desert sands are not useful for these purposes. Desert sands are the wrong grain size (too small) and the wrong shape (too smooth and rounded). All sands are not created equal by nature and only certain grades of sand are useful for industrial purposes. If you made concrete with desert sands it would be too crumbly and crush-able (poor strength in compression) for constructing buildings and bridges.
I wonder if the sand grades for silicon for solar panels are also in short supply? The internet returns results, even recent results, for poly-silicone shortages. Wikipedia tells me, “Polycrystalline silicon, also called polysilicon or poly-Si, is a high purity, polycrystalline form of silicon, used as a raw material by the solar photovoltaic and electronics industry. Polysilicon is produced from metallurgical grade silicon by a chemical purification process, called the Siemens process.”
Okay, the hint here is that we need metallurgical grade silicon for the process. “Silicon of 96–99% purity “metallurgical grade” is made by reducing quartzite or sand with highly pure coke (from coking coal). The reduction is carried out in an electric arc furnace.” Lots of energy use there. Of course, we need to know quantitatively how much energy is used in every stage of the process of making solar panels. And how much energy do solar panels pay back over a lifetime of use?
I suspect the EROI of solar panels and their whole supply chain plus the storage-buffered grid for solar power is still positive but is it at least 10:1 when the all-manufactures-required embodied energy is counted? 10 to 1 is about the minimum EROI we need to maintain (not even grow) our current complex economy. Will we or will we not encounter other material shortages in a massive solar panel build-out? Build-out means enough solar panels to power the entire world economy. Of course, there’s enough SiO2 in the world. It’s superabundant but much of it is mixed up with and sometimes chemically combined with many other materials. Is there enough high grade quartz for SiO2 crushers and enough high grade coking coal for the next stage? The less pure inputs are, the more energy it takes to make industrial processes work. I really wonder if someone has made an attempt at calculating all these input streams, the qualities of minerals available, the quantities available at each quality level, and the energy required relative to mineral quantities and qualities?
Can we scale up to the necessary solar panel build-out? I used to think so. Now, I wonder. Just because the first 2% of the build-out has been economically and energetically feasible, this does not mean the next 98% will be feasible. Just like ever-harder-to-recover-oil, we will encounter ever harder to recover quality SiO2 and coking coal for the polysilicon process.
Concrete doesn’t last, anyway. If the pyramids had been made of concrete, they’d have eroded long since.
and now for joke of the day
India expected to be $10 trillion economy by 2030: Economic.affairs secy
NEW DELHI: Indian economy is on a stage of “take off” and is .. and is expected to be the world’s third largest by 2030 with .. with GDP worth $10 trillion,
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/india-expected-to-be-10-trillion-economy-by-2030-economic-affairs-secy/articleshow/64987666.cms
rather than listen this bullshit
i rather listen some good indian meditation songs
https://youtu.be/g_LNp8xY1YM
I’m actually familiar with some Hindu philosophy and mythology. In this respect I sometimes do seriously think we’re in what the Hindu thinkers call the Kali Yuga, the Age of Darkness, when everything is basically going south.
Perhaps the darkness will just have to be allowed to run its course. And perhaps at the end of the darkness, a new dawn will arise — if not in this world, then perhaps in another one…
According to Puranic sources,Krishna’s departure marks the end of Dvapara Yuga and the start of Kali Yuga, which is dated to 17/18 February 3102 BCE
here is the list of Prophesied events during the Kali Yuga
Rulers will become unreasonable: they will levy taxes unfairly.
Rulers will no longer see it as their duty to promote spirituality, or to protect their subjects: they will become a danger to the world.
People will start migrating, seeking countries where wheat and barley form the staple food source.
“At the end of Kali-yuga, when there exist no topics on the subject of God, even at the residences of so-called saints and respectable gentlemen of the three higher varnas (guna or temperament) and when nothing is known of the techniques of sacrifice, even by word, at that time the Lord will appear as the supreme chastiser
gods have been promising to show up for 000s of years—the reasoning behind that is ver simple—
man says he’s god
man dies
but gods cannot die
therefore he will return ”at some time in the future to fix things” (priests need jobs too)
it’s in all mythologies
as have all the other points you bring up—i’m only a trainee genius and part-time knowitall,—and i figured all that out years ago
good for you that know figured all that years ago
but for 23 years old guy like me
i am still learning this world
i am happy to pass on all i know
in fact you can have my brain when ive finished with it—wont be long to wait–they should fiix brain transplants soon
be gentle with it—you’ll have the weirdest memories
Well, your brain will be fully formed shortly (24-25).
Probably won’t be up for going on the battlefield with the still emergent humans.
The fast food, football, and Ford F-150s still exist, enjoyed without a care in the world by the overfed, apathetic, and ignorant masses.
“therefore he will return ”at some time in the future to fix things” (priests need jobs too)”
In the religion of techno-fixit, the priests are scientists, IPOs, transhumanists, prime ministers etc. Just keep giving them moar money and/or power so they can usher in the singularity.
yup—jesus definetly likes cash in advance
no refunds in the event of product dissatisfaction
very bad ratings in tripadvisor too
Jesus Saves– at Bank of America.
Lots of records and historical documentation were the norm in the so-called “holy lands” of Jesus time period. However-
1. No verified records of Jesus anywhere
2. Jesus never wrote anything ever
3. His followers never wrote anything about him
4. His followers never showed up at his trial
5.The followers of parallel religious groups never wrote anything about him
6. His enemies never wrote anything about him
7. The pharisees never wrote anything about him
8. The roman occupiers never wrote anything about him
so
9. The first writings about Jesus showed up several generations after his death and were based on just a bunch of rumours and legends which had been passed along by word-of-mouth for nearly two centuries.
And what is this supposed to prove?
Perhaps this is all an invention of PR men….. just like
Someone or a group of people called “Satoshi Nakamoto” was always associated with the invention of the cryptocurrency, but nobody knew who was behind the name. In 2014, Newsweek said that the bitcoin creator was a 64-year-old Japanese-American living in California named Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto
Jesus appears to be just bad fiction.
I’ve never been that interested, but others have pursued it.
I absolutely agree that “total energy consumption is very important” and indeed crucial to the economy. I also agree that EROI is crucial. A certain minimum EROI would be needed indefinitely simply to maintain our current levels of population, technology and production. This would be true even without further attempts at growth and without significant impacts from the general deterioration of the environment. I will come back to the minimum EROI issue. I had hoped that solar power would enable a successful energy transition to a steady state economy if we were to attempt this transition. So far, no serious attempt has been made. However, I now think the solar power hope is dubious. I would like to see attempts at quantifying a solar power transition. The difficulties surounding quantification require some elaboration as below.
First, this article is worth reading for background;
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-new-economic-science-of-capitalisms-slow-burn-energy-collapse-d07344fab6be
The fourth graph in the article is centrally important. It graphs Total Factor Productivity (TFP) percentage growth over time and identifies IR1, IR2 and IR3. Essentially IR1 is the original industrial revolution (coal powered), IR2 is the oil and gas powered revolution of production and IR3 is the information communications technologies (ICT) revolution.
We can associate the steam engine with IR1, the internal combustion and electric engines with IR2 and essentially no new engines with IR3 but a new power technology namely solar PV. However, much of the (again temporary) TFP% boost from IR3 came not from a new energy source but from relative (not absolute) energy savings from ICT. The dotted line labelled “The Great Wave”, graphs the trend in TFP % growth. We can see it is now trending back to zero.
One conclusion (by Bonauiti) is that “advanced capitalist societies (the US, Europe and Japan) have entered a phase of declining marginal returns or involuntary degrowth in many key sectors, with possible major detrimental effects on the system’s capacity to maintain its present institutional framework.”
The data of Victor Court and Florian Fizaine broadly suggest that the declining “EROI of all fossil fuels will hit 15:1 by 2060, and decline further to 10:1 by 2080.” This would presume, I think, no deliberate moves away from fossil fuels to prevent dangerous climate change. If we are to prevent dangerous climate change then a large proportion of remaining fossil fuel discovered reserves should be left un-burnt. In practice, in an energy desperate world, this will not happen unless solar power proves to be of sufficient EROI and rapidly scale-able by 2030 to 2040 to produce ALL our power. This seems highly unlikely on a number of fronts.
Court and Fizaine’s work also suggests that continuous economic growth (if that were possible and there we no other limits to growth) requires a minimal societal EROI of 11. Let us assume a steady-state economy battling with long-term amelioration problems from already baked-in climate and environmental damage. If these issues subtracted and added needs respectively, at the same quantities then we would still need an EROI of 11 to run the steady state economy. Could solar power alone (or with some wind power) deliver this?
However, there are further problems. There is the problem of the energy funding of the transition. To energetically fund a rapid and total transition away from fossil fuels (to save the climate) much energy would need to be dedicated to the solar power build-out (even if it is feasible in relation to all other materials resource requirements). For a time, a large slice of fossil fuel power and all solar power would need to be dedicated to rapidly building out the solar power infrastructure.
One would suspect in this case an energy and materials shortage for certain other economic activities. One would suspect, at a minimum, that the global economy would need to be re-tooled and re-directed away from its heavy military spending, from all or most of its automobile spending, and much of current wasteful consumer spending and then towards an austere low-consumption, mass transit and solar power build-out economy. Only the most dirigiste government could achieve this by a war-effort-level command economy with nation-wide rationing. This level of effort seems pragmatically and ideologically unlikely in the late modern context. Even if all pragmatic and ideological obstacles were overcome, would it be energetically feasible even then? And all this incorrectly presumes there are not many other economic and planetary limits or boundaries which we are close to.
This seems to be from a new Nafeez Ahmed article.
I don’t see that the “boundaries” of intermittent renewables create a calculation that gives any useful information. We hear all the time about how cheap wind and solar are, if the intermittent power is purchased. EROEI calculations are similar–how cheap the intermittent power is. The catch is that the system cannot really use intermittent power without balancing. The EROEI calculations on this basis aver very misleading.
I see intermittent renewables like leaches. They gain a significant part of their energy by uncounted subsidies from the rest of the system, the way a leach drinks the blood of its host. EROEI calculations (as well as comparisons based on cost and many other popular calculations) ignore the direct and indirect subsidies required from the rest of the system. If the subsidies are simply ignored, wind and solar look like they might be at least somewhat scalable.
If we look at the bigger picture, we need energy costs (including electricity costs) to be falling, not rising (relative to GDP costs), in order to keep the economy from collapsing.
To put wind and solar on a level playing field, we need to get electricity from wind and solar 100% up to the quality level the system needs, before it is added to the system. It needs storage close to where it is generated, perhaps in quite large quantities. If it needs extra transmission lines that are lightly used, because it in a distant location, these are part of the cost as well. It needs to compete in its sale of electricity to the system on the same basis that the other providers compete. It cannot get first access to the grid.
Ikonoclast and Gail, both wonderful posts. I would like to see a calculation of the cost per gallon to methanol from PV.
I you get the calculation for methanol from PV, be sure to add a big “tax” layer as well.
Yes, all of those points are valid in the systemic sense. In the case of my personal home,
even though I live in the sunniest locale available within the continental US, I declined Progress Energy’s (D@&$) offer of a one time 40% subsidy for a new 7kw system. This is because I don’t use enough electricity to justify even the discounted construction cost as the utility will buy back excess electricity only at wholesale pricing.
However, customers just north of me in the Gainesville region get excess grid tie electricity credited to their accounts at retail rates. I would be all over that. This point is central to any solar system and the utilities know it. If solar was commercially viable there would be solar farms all over the state, unfortunately it isn’t and there ain’t.
From Wikipedia:
D@&$ Energy is building a 20-acre solar farm in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head.
That tells you all you need to know. Should D@&$ Energy ever offer a covenant to solar grid tie customers guaranteeing retail rates for excess power, people would install solar panels very quickly, and the company would probably fold because utility stockholders like the 1$ dividend check they get every three months. The company knows solar, wind, biomass, etc. are a joke, exploitable only as propaganda tidbits for gullible muskovites. Hell, they used to sell cigarettes and when found out they just changed the company name. Ha Ha.
The D@&$ company is hugely behind the “Cap and Trade” scheme, so they must have figured out it’s a money maker. Maybe the bitcoin scam was part of some psychological operation to prepare the public mind for “carbon credits”. I don’t know.
I was at a meeting this week in which someone was trying to pitch electric cars, because of the big subsidies available. The same group is happy with big subsidies for solar. Ouch! You can’t run an economy that way!
Hi Gail, I have been reading your post for more than two years. I have been trying to prepare for the worst to come. I’m not sure if i being too pessimist as my group of friends talk of the market being great, investing in real estate. And me on the other hand I’m trying to prepare myself and my family . I would like to know based on your previous experience what time range would you think of recession happening. Thanks
The system self-organizes in ways that are hard to understand. This makes predictions difficult. We were already headed down the slippery slope badly, when I made my forecast in late 2007 that 2008 would see a very bad outcome. It seemed to take several months for the bad outcome to play out.
At this point, it is easy to seem many parts of the system that look like they are getting ready to “snap,” but it is hard to know when. The benefits of the Trump tax cuts are expected to be lost by the beginning of 2019, so this could lead to a major recession starting about then. Oil supply and prices are indeed some of the issues involved. So I might say that my best guess would be early 2019, but it could be a different date.
oopps forgot the link
http://www.baystreet.ca/stockstowatch/4095/Is-This-The-Oil-Tech-Breakthrough-Of-The-Decade
“The company can produce oil for as little as $28 per barrel, they’re already set to produce 1,000 bpd by the end of this year and 5,000 bpd by the end of 2020.”
Please, comedy is not usually part of the blog.
Even if they can produce oil for $28 per barrel, they certainly cannot sell it for $28 per barrel. Taxes are a very big cost, for example.
Don’t know if anyone has heard or talked about a new company called petroteq but it seems they have invented a new tech that can extract clean oil from the oilsands?
Is This The Oil Tech Breakthrough Of The Decade?
“Heavy Oil” is basically a dirty word in the energy world.
But that’s all about to change.
Tech company Petroteq Inc. is using a new proprietary Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) system that could completely revolutionize oil sands extraction. This technology just might be the key to unlocking the next wave of the energy boom leading to domestic energy independence.
Through a closed-loop system, Petroteq’s EOR can extract 99 percent of all hydrocarbons without releasing ANY greenhouse gases.
At their Asphalt Ridge property in Utah, Petroteq (TSX:PQE.V; OTC:PQEFF) is sitting on a contingent deposit of 86 million barrels…and their extraction facility is now fully operational.
The grand opening, according to CEO David Sealock, “was the culmination of two years of hard work by our entire team…as well as the harbinger of value creation to come.”
The company can produce oil for as little as $28 per barrel, they’re already set to produce 1,000 bpd by the end of this year and 5,000 bpd by the end of 2020.
The Big Picture– Scattered throughout Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming are oil sands deposits equal to 1 trillion barrels. There are trillions more locked away in deposits around the world. And Petroteq’s proprietary oil tech can get to it. The company is filing patents around the world, and the licensing opportunities for its EOR closed-loop system are enormous.
Petroteq’s secret is its technology. The patented Liquid Extraction System is the first successful method ever tested that can extract the heavy oil sands of Utah in an environmentally safe and sustainable manner.
The method extracts 99 percent of all hydrocarbons, generating zero greenhouse gases and requiring no high temperatures or pressures.
The company’s deposit at Asphalt Ridge could be worth $6.2 billion at today’s prices, and cost of production is as low as $28 a barrel.
The company plans to ratchet up production to 30,000 bpd from reserves. But that’s not even the biggest opportunity here.
The licensing opportunities for Petroteq’s proprietary technology are staggering. Heavy oil drillers around the world will likely be lining up to use their methods, which could unlock trillions of barrels of heavy oil locked in oil sands worldwide.
I know nothing about the technology but I did see this at
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/07/breaking-new-tech-just-unlocked-a-trillion-barrels-of-oil.html
They had a better headline “…a trillion barrels of oil…” in the US alone with more trillions world wide. Suuure sounds good.
Declining mental health among disadvantaged Americans – PNAS June 18, 2018.
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/06/13/1722023115
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-sac-skelton-recycling-problems-california-20180709-story.html
Eric Potashner, a government relations official for Recology, a curbside hauler that sorts San Francisco Bay Area trash for recycling, says, “There’s no market for a lot of stuff in the blue bin. What we can’t recycle we take to a landfill.”
Daily reminder to never take *anything* Elon Musk says at face value.
https://i.imgur.com/o8THl7c.png
I was down at the ice rink last night to watch the local team play Auckland… there was a bench brawl …. and I observed the full house go absolutely berzerk …. some people were screaming kill him kill him!!!!
And I am standing next to the glass calmly observing all of this … and I am thinking …. this is our true nature … this is a glimpse of behind the curtain…. this is what we are capable of…
Rip that curtain off — and starve this beast that is sated on fossil fuels…. and the vicious animals that we are … will be on the loose…. their will be no police to enforce the rules of civilized behaviour …. in fact there will be no rules… and anyone who tries to live by pre end of BAU rules… will be the first to have their throats slit…
The veneer is wafer thin….. and getting thinner by the day
I must admit… a good fight on the ice does get the adrenaline flowing…. it does induce the Call of the Wild….
Or this was just a hockey game. Some group of people expect to act this way at a hockey game. The penalty for fighting is very low. It is almost as if they want to encourage it. (That was what my son and I figured out, when we went to one game. It, of course had fighting.) People go for the show, and plan to participate themselves somewhat in it.
Hockey has cleaned up its act quite a bit … and in NZ there is not culture of extreme violence in hockey at all… it is more like the European leagues where fighting almost never happens… the players involved were booted and will be given suspensions
So it was interesting to see how people would react to an incident that was not expected…
They were loving it!
I prefer wrestling.
Much more homoerotic.
There is no real system…..all countries will stay tied to the U.S dollar because it is a manipulated currency and the U.S has shown that it will keep other countries barley alive with their fake currency. I don’t know ho going forward we can say anything is real pricing because it is all manipulated on and on…..I was shocked that they have been able to keep the “system” going as they have but then what choice does anyone have? Can things be manipulated indefinitely ? If you are printing currency all the time I think we are heading to massive inflation ….we are trying to rationalize a system that does not work in the realm that we are thinking. This can easily go on for another 10 years!
I predict our current system will last until 2030s, breakdown 2030s to 2050s, and 2050s and beyond will be the permanent return to reality.
That schedule has cheered me up no end!
But what makes you such an optimist, Dolph?
It revolves basically around the same throughout history: only the most vicious, mad like, blood thirsty nasty piece of bloke, able to scheme and murder with the same intensity abroad as well as home becomes ultimately the top dog over any situation. The rest of players out of real or imagined fear stay self sub-jugged, while the very few “competitors” try rather evade direct confrontation as long as possible. help to plant traps if desirable, and wait in the corner for their moment. You see this in a way BAU extension formula in itself..
Given the preponderance of evidence we are surely almost two decades already into heightened state of pre-crisis mode and on general bouncy plateau since 1970s. So many surprises to the plot already one could not deny the scenario of yet more ~15yrs.. although with likely higher amplitude of chaos and periphery falling into abyss for good.
Protests have now spread to Iraq. After a week of protests there are now reports of clashes with militia that have opened fire and killed and injured protesters.
Drought, heat, energy cuts, unemployment, poverty, lack of social services and government corruption have fueled anger among the people in Iraq.
The U.S has a trade deficit with Europe, but it has a positive current account balance with Europe.
Europe in not only shipping away its goods to America, we are also shipping away our money.
America is still not satisfied. What more can we do for our master?
Buy expensive LNG that will ruin the European economy?
Buy more U.S weapons so that we at least can kiII our selves when Europe collapses?
Sure. Why not? A grand final European war might just be a proper way to end Europe.
Hint– continue to get your cheap gas from Russia, try and maintain a educated populace, (unlike the US), and keep making really high quality goods.
Germany can pay its workers a top wage, and still out compete cheap goods from the rest of the world.
It’s not that clear cut situation, Germany is managing a ring of protectorates-colonies around, where lot of sub assembly or even complete work is done at ~1/4 wage levels, obviously the added value stays in Germany, in similar vein they leverage and outsource the energy, water, pollution issues per item produced over there.. Un / fortunately enough recent and past mistakes such as swelling unproductive migrant influx (“educated pop” highly approved until very recently hah) drags this whole system down. And the credit-reserves recycling scheme lifeline to “PIGS” is not helpful for the overall balance of the system in the long term either.. All this increasingly ricochets into wider EU instability..
Hence the recent little illustrative gem of deeply rotting structures as completely wasted and immobilized EU head Claude “Cognac” Juncker at public venue was smirked upon by relatively fit Donaldo demanding his ~2-4% defense budget hike for NATO.. They are all mafiosi to some extent but weakness even among thief cartel is usually to be smelled at great distance, this is perhaps one of the last chances of extending BAU by drowning the Europeans a bit for a while.
USA is a European country, but on another continent, just like Australia.
True. All Americans speak English, after all.
Happy Bastille Day Comrades!
We got rid of the Kings and Queens (kept a few symbolically ), but were captured by Capitalism, which is failing as our ecosystem is in collapse.
A fossil fuel based economy is a more basic category than both capitalism and socialism. A good read: https://www.amazon.com/Foragers-Farmers-Fossil-Fuels-Values/dp/0691160392
I discovered that quite a sizable piece of this book is available through the “Read More” part on Amazon.
Arghh… its not on Audible… and I have shrunk my brain to the point I am unable to read a print book
True– Its just capitalism’s dominance, and its business model that ceases to function without expansion– but any system based on a vertical, hierarchal structure will eventually get taken over by sociopaths (or, currently in the US, psychopaths)
It is not just capitalism that has a problem. The population keeps rising. So the quantity of goods and services has to rise.
Economies of scale are helpful for any business, whether it is a government operated one or capitalistic one. Diminishing returns assures that greater investment will be needed over time, just to stay even. This is true, regardless of the business model.
Paying everyone the same wage has a huge problem with actually getting anything accomplished; goods and services made. That no doubt contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Agree Gail–
I blame Haber. But capitalism has provided the age 16 go for it all, Ayn Rand world.
What’s wrong with Rand’s message that no matter your position in life … you should do your best… whether a lowly janitor or the CEO of a major corporation?
That was the message I took away from Atlas Shrugged… which should be required reading for all high school students…
which should be required reading for all high school students…
Well Rand does have some appeal when you are 16.
Being a hero for being a complete a hole does work at 16, and is encouraged.
However by the time you are 18, the simplicity and ignorance becomes obvious—-
It still has appeal to me at 53… you might be able to get away with half assed effort in most endeavours… particularly if you work for the govt …
But if you run a business (or are in a high paid position as an employee) — you have sharks coming at you every single day wanting to knock you on your ass…. you bring your A game and hope that it is enough to fend them off…
Or you end up in a busted heap of bones on the floor….
If you reject the message of Rand when you are 18… then you’ll be mediocre at best…. in fact these days… as the pie shrinks.. competition is even more fierce…. you’ll probably end up as a pizza delivery boy
Paying the same wage…. regardless of the effort hours and ability…
Didn’t work so well in the USSR or China… production plummeted….
I guess this might appeal to the indolent, stuuuuupid, and useless…
Capitalism is no more rational about resource allocation than communism. Without ownership and useless activity rewarding each other and denying labour its share, economies of scale are impossible.
The fact global state-corporate capitalism will take ~40 years more to fail than global state capitalism proves nothing either way.
Capitalism has been around for a whole lot longer than communism… if communism had overtaken the world 100 years ago … BAU would have been long dead by now.
I thought you insta-doomers were supposed to have transcended such petty distinctions? But I guess you just cherry-pick what you believe like everyone else. Anyway, capitalism and communism can only exist in an industrialised and interconnected world, and all industrial economies are some combination of both.
You said 40 years… I am not cherry picking…. capitalism has been around in some form for a very very long time…. as you may be aware markets were in existence from the time that humans established permanent settlements…
Communism is an attempt to upset the self organizing system….
Note that the only when countries attempted this follow… they had to resort to EXTREME brutality to attempt to subvert the self organizing system … i.e. it attempted to thwart human nature….
Therefore it was bound to fail.
There are no countries that are a combination of both — you are either one or the other. Social programs are not communism… and if you take social programs to far … you are messing with the self organizing system… and your system will collapse.
“Communism is an attempt to upset the self organizing system….”
This is an example of cherry-picking: redefining self-organisation as capitalism. Self-organisation is in no way related to capitalism, and certainly doesn’t preclude “EXTREME brutality”.
Likewise, to label any system before industrialism either capitalist or communist requires redefinition. To the extent an industrial activity requires state intervention or investment (i.e. all of them), it is communistic.
Are you so sure?
Late comers to this development anyway, China and USSR went on industrialized hockey stick in their authoritarian socialist past till late mid 1970s, then the Soviets hit the oil shock/per capita energy plateau few years later after the West, and then during mid late 1980s disintegrated in botched transition by Gorbi (aided by ext/int coup). While the West went on supercharged debt explosion, firstly taking over duped former Eastern bloc markets, and secondly and more importantly ($trillion scale) since 2000s leveraging of the SARs to all China’s market, inducing their second (or upper stage if you will) hockey stick stage of industrialization, now under mixed model, largely biased to the crony capital side obviously..
Besides cooperatives thrived back then and now prosper in the West too, and no they don’t (did not) pay the same wages.. We could debate how the high taxation and subsidies (agriculture) helping, enabling that in the Western content.
You can’t have it both ways, either the msm lies about everything important or you go along the way of their cheesy propaganda on economics and development as well as you see fit..
Between 1978 and 1984 Chinese crop yields increased by 61%
These impressive gains followed the adoption of a system stressing individual responsibility in place of communal decision making……
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1832191?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-rEu-1OlqNIY/UJ_PtNtmb2I/AAAAAAAAMX0/ONkwamgDEZ4/s1600/famine.JPG
So there was a famine in China and Russia till 1978?
Besides you only confirm my point Chinese started flirting with mixed econ model sooner than Soviets, which later enabled their SARs inspired by chine$e in Hong Kong, and others Taiwan, Singapore, SKorea..
Let me put it this way — i know traders in Hong Kong who were doing business in Shanghai … in 1991 when I met them they moaned about having to travel to Shanghai … it was a shit hole of rutted roads and shitttty hotels…
Just a few years after that it had all changed.
That is what a free market economy does… it lifts all boats….
Communism guarantees poverty — Lada cars…. and no more than 5 items in the shop when you want to buy something.
Communism is an attempt to kill human nature … and that is why it failed.
When I visited Cuba, the common description of the problem was, “We pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us.”
When everyone gets the same low pay, absenteeism is rampant. People come in late. Initiative is low. It works very poorly.
The armchair communists on FW don’t seem to get this ….
It’s all koombaya for them … they like to attack Fast Eddy the hard core capitalist pig….
But they all want their salaries raised… every year.
Which system do you think would have been better?
It’s only because of capitalism that it’s possible to ask this question. Under any system, whether it involves working for the Inca, the Pharaoh or the Dear Leader, or as a member of any of a thousand Kumbaya cults, the question would be trivial and the answer a totally predictable: “This is the only way for decent people to live!” It’s only under capitalism that the average drone is given leave to allow their thoughts to wander at least a little way off the reservation without being accused of treason, heresy or some other variant of thoughtcrime.
It’s ironic how both you and Fast Eddy are essentially right wing loonies masquerading as doomers, which makes you the SJWs of this blog. The subject of collapse is just a means to the end of convincing everybody why your loony opinions about other things are correct.
It’s a point of view, Jupiviv. Not one I would concur with, mind you—as loonies wax and wane in phase with the moon while we are as constant as the Northern Star—but you’re welcome to hold it, just as you’re welcome to hold all the numerous IMHO often inane, simplistic, demented and predictable bits of piffle on a host of subjects that you’ve picked up from dubious sources and taken personal ownership of over the years.
You’re welcome to hold these views, but if you must insult the intelligence of other people by regurgitating them in public, you are bound to get called on them occasionally, and when this inevitably happens, making personal attacks on the people who embarrass you by revealing the depths of your ignorance, naivety and brainwashing is no substitute for owning up, growing up and smartening up, now is it?
In case you haven’t realized it, Eddy and I, among others, are feeding you to make up for your woeful lack of a decent education in the realities. Not that we expect any thanks for our unpaid efforts.
The claim that capitalism per se engenders freedom or even prosperity is false. It is doubly false if the contra- examples provided are Pharaohs and ‘kumbaya cults’, in other words anything but a ‘traditional’ western example which would after all undercut the premiss of this trud of an argument.
You’ll notice I don’t have problems with anyone on this blog who openly advertises their political affiliations whatever they may be. The people who pass me off are the ones who use the context of collapse to proseltyse their respective ideologies, and quelle fracking surprise that those are precisely the insta-doomers! Insta-doom after all is the solution to everything – from liberal impudence to anarcho-socialist hunter-gatherer communities.
I hope that was educational. If not, keep waiting for the glorious insta-doom.
Jup, we could go around in circles sniping at each other, calling each other silly names and trying to score points without to bothering to explain what we’re trying to assert until the cows come home. Again, that’s no substitute for clarifying and substantiating the points we want to make in way that even those who might tend to disagree with them can at least be given a chance to grasp them.
What I read far too frequently in your posts, and also in those of Our Mutual Friend Duncan, are snap judgements and strong assertions, often entirely unsubstantiated, and delivered in arrogant, supercilious and even condescending tones. If I were a social justice warrior, I might be offended. Instead, I tell myself that the reasons you two irritate me are that I am uncomfortable with your conversation style. But it goes deeper than that. To lapse into my best Mark Twain voice, you both think you know a lot of things for sure that just ain’t so, and you both have this annoying habit of turning nasty on people who disagree with.
I would be quite happy to talk about the demerits of capitalism and how other economic systems may be more workable (or many other subjects), and I’ be happy to have my own ignorance pointed out and to be educated and learn new things from people who posses genuine knowledge, but I’m unlikely to get the chance to learn anything substantial from people who are more interested in posing as know-it-alls, whose store of knowledge is delivered like a load of bombs in an air raid mixed with put downs, and who make a habit of straw-manning, misconstruing and over simplifying the words of the people they are trying to bomb.
One of the biggest drawbacks of Internet communication is that it allows people to bring out the worst in their behavior. Compared to the general state of the cesspit, OFW is an oasis conviviality and gentility in that respect. But even here, cesspit habits creep in.
I could spend time taking apart and rebutting every item of misinformation, mischaracterization and nonsense you’ve said about me, but what would be the point? You’d just come back with something else equally obnoxious. You wouldn’t apologize. You wouldn’t acknowledge the validity of any of my points. You would just twist anything I said into some grotesque caricature in order to attack that.
But I will mention one thing. For some reason, you’ve characterized me as an insta-doomer, when all I’ve ever been is an agnostic on the subject of doom. You may have confused me with some of the other posters here. or more probably you are displaying a symptom of the Tyranny of the Dichotomous Mind, where the unfortunate victim sees the world in terms of binary opposites and tars all their adversaries with the same brush. If you would update that card index or whatever it is you use to keep track to read “TG is neither an insta-doomer nor an SJW” you could improve your aim when launching future put downs. Less embarrassing for you in the long run.
.
You need to get out of the shallow end where they wade.
You understand.
I fly with no wings…..
In premodern China the Confucian scholars formed a class which significantly moderated the excesses of the ruler. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it did work to a degree. Some of the said scholars were prepared to place their lives on the line in the name of justice, and continue to be celebrated as heroes today. Not all premodern societies were that devoid of choice and independent thought.
Contrariwise, modern capitalist society for the most part merely gave the illusion of choice. How much weight, after all, is the opinion of the common man as opposed to that of the corporate leaders?
Even if modern capitalist society did provide us with any genuine pluses, the fact is that they’re all about to be negated by a big, fat minus. And that after a mere 200 years. The pluses are no compensation to me, sorry.
It’s very doubtful that any pre-modern Chinese scholar would have gotten away with the sort of things Meryl Streep or Robert Di Niro have said about the current POTUS. And the talking heads of CNN would very soon have been been rolling heads had they been this cheeky to the the Emperor, the Pope, the Mikado, the Khan, the Shah, the Sultan, the Mogul, the Tsar, the Emir, or even the Grand Vizier.
Basically, if you were living in a pre-modern society that was ruled over by a king who was considered a living god or appointed by heaven, you wouldn’t have lasted long had you made a habit of publicly criticizing the bloke’s hairstyle, lack of manners, lack of intelligence, or body language.
I can see your point about the ancient world—at some times in some places—being a better place for people to live in than today’s world. But none of us has a choice. We can’t go back and we can’t even remain here. We must go forward with the flow of people and events, because for those who haven’t noticed, we are the equivalent of pieces of flotsam carried along by the stream of humanity, which in our day has swollen into a raging torrent.
Someone is drowning down there in the flood
This river will dry by tomorrow…
https://youtu.be/c_uG4-4MeOw
Which is better, a severe injury from the impact of some physical object, or a slow, wasting disease that spreads through your body without you knowing it?
I think they both suck.
A tap on the head has been known to cure water on the brain. 🙂
But all this talk of which system works best is so last century. We are currently stuck with our current ramshackle oil-based economic system until we find out how to run it on something else or, far more likely, until it breaks down completely. After that, any survivors—if there are any—who can tolerate the background radiation levels will be able to have a go at hunter gathering or homesteading or fishing for a living or building their very own Bartertown with it’s very own Thunderdome. And depending on population level and environmental conditions, new civilizations with their own forms of exploitation may arise.
Life on earth will go on for a long long time yet, and even human life may well go on a lot longer than most commenters on this blog seem to think it will. Our remote descendants will have as little in common with us culturally as we do with our remote ancestors. Richard Dawkins has talked about “my cousin the chimpanzee” stressing our close genetic relationship with our fellow primates, but Richard Adams pointed out that we don’t often invite these distant relatives to tea parties. We humans might survive as a species but not in a form that we contemporaries would recognize as human.
The point is the earth is the only observed planet that can reverse entropy. The geological life of the planets core creates ores. Without that there would be no development on earth. It is completely paradoxical because the laws of thermodynamics preclude this from happening. Since planets are created from star dust they should be so diffused that no ores would be available.
Because of geologic life the earth has also concentrated fossil fuels. It shouldn’t happen but it does. There is no scientific explanation for it. There is also no scientific explanation for free oxygen which is also not observed on any other planet and can not be accounted for by biological respiration alone. Of course we are free to ignore the implications. Just as the majority ignore the present collapse. But it doesn’t change the facts does it. Perhaps it’s best expressed 1900 years ago.
They are in darkness mentally and alienated from the life that belongs to God, because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the insensitivity of their hearts. Having gone past all moral sense, they gave themselves over to brazen conduct to practice every sort of uncleanness with greediness
What makes you think that the creation of ores is an example of reverse entropy. JT?
Look at the earth a huge cauldron of star dust confined by gravity that is boiling away because of the high pressure in its deeper recesses and the heat generated from the fission of radioactive elements. As a sphere of molten material, there is bound to be convection and fractionation with lighter materials tending to rise and heavier ones tending to fall, and with different materials solidifying at different temperatures creating a non-uniform crust that becomes more complex over time.
For a simpler and more accessible example, look at how rivers and floodwaters take up sand, mud and gravel and then deposit particles of different sizes in different places so that it creates layers of silt on some place, sand in others, small stones or pebbles over here, and large ones over there. The power source doing all this “sorting” is solar energy warming the earth and evaporating water, which forms clouds and raindrops, which fall under gravity until they reach the ground, forming streams or torrents that then flow downwards, again under gravity, pushing and transporting the solid particulate matter that they come into contact with on the way back to the sea.
When analyzed in detail, there is no violation of the laws of thermodynamics involved in any of these processes. How could there be, when the laws of thermodynamics were formulated after taking these types of process into account?
I’m not saying God isn’t involved in tinkering with His Universe. Where He is or isn’t is beyond my knowledge. I’m only saying that there are “scientific explanations” for most things that go on in the natural world.
Scientists are very good at coming up with “scientific explanations”, even when those explanations prove to be wrong or even nonsensical. And some people, in rejecting the idea of a God of Creation, instead put their faith a God of Science; they blindly assume Science—represented by its priesthood, the scientists—even though it can’t create everything, can explain everything and anything, and also that it is a pure and noble enterprise.
I think the availability of concentrated ores is very important. I hadn’t realized the association with plant life. I had wondered about how this had happened. It is one of a long series of strange “coincidences” that allowed human life on earth to form.
Another strange coincidence is the fact that (1) life seems to have started as early as it did, relative to the beginning of the planet, and (2) the climate of the planet stayed sufficiently hospital for life over billions of years, even as sun’s output grew over that period. Any model put together by humans would suggest that the earth should have warmed greatly over this period.
Ugo Bardi in his book Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet talks about the mystery of concentrated ores as well as the mystery of the climate staying relatively hospitable over a very long period.
Something that may be related is discussed in a document a fellow from India sent me (which he wrote himself) called the Human Energy Experience. Some of it seems to me to be very insightful; other parts seem to need more research, so I would be cautious about taking it as “gospel.” He talks about the importance of “anabolic growth” in leading to the changes that set the earth apart. He also sees connection with God or a Higher Power.
A few quotes from it:
My head is spinning. Just can’t figure out how to absorb and make sense of all these things. What can we eliminate just to keep life manageable?
ourselves Art
This link shows that land shrinkage was known about in the 1840s
http://www.greatfen.org.uk/holme-fen-posts
“Another strange coincidence is the fact that (1) life seems to have started as early as it did, relative to the beginning of the planet, and (2) the climate of the planet stayed sufficiently hospital for life over billions of years, even as sun’s output grew over that period.”
The fact that both you and I have only one nose, and not more or less, is a strange coincidence by that definition. Yes, the earth and the life on it is very unique and a strange coincidence, but relative to what? We just don’t know enough about the universe yet to determine what “coincidental” or “strange” would mean within its context.
I suggest you read Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe.
If every unique or wonderful phenomenon points to a higher power or truth, then its influence only extends to those few things and not all of the ordinary and mundane things. Therefore, why is it a higher power?
Thanks for that suggestion Gail..I will be reading that one next!
I find that reading quality books… helps me cure my Du.nce Kruger tendencies
What little I have read on this topic says that all the heavy elements available at original forming of the planet were drawn down to the core. Apparently there is enough gold there to cover the Earth’s surface 300mm thick. So where has the crustal gold come from? The theory says all the heavy elements have been brought down in subsequent meteor strikes. It’s not far fetched.
Ain’t that the truth!
Gravity creates order and structure in the universe?
There goes recycling. Once again proves that it is uneconomical to try to concentrate high entropic resources.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-12/mountains-trash-piling-us-shores-after-china-stops-taking-it
Wind and solar are the same. Won’t work because it can’t work.
Entropy is times arrow. What time is it?
All of these things are subsidized. If there isn’t enough oil for the world to make all of the goods and services it needs, using subsidies to allow the transport waste materials around the world doesn’t sound like a good use of oil. On the other hand, the shipping containers would probably be coming back from the US empty, without the subsidy allowing the recycling. Removing it may lead to higher freight rates, even at the same oil price.
D.C. already pays $75 a ton for recycling vs. $46 for waste burned to generate electricity.
“There was a time a few years ago when it was cheaper to recycle. It’s just not the case anymore,” said Christopher Shorter, director of public works for the city of Washington.
“It will be more and more expensive for us to recycle,” he said.
Europe is again disobeying America.
Europe will continue doing business with Iran by leaving the dollar in trade with Iran. The European Investment Bank has greenlighted trade with Iran.
John Kerry warned that leaving the Iran deal would end the dollar as the world reserve currency.
Trump will have to go to war. Iran is perhaps the easiest target at this point. Bomb Iran and take the oil. Trump has just made a statement that there might be some escalation between the U.S and Iran.
Iran will not be easily defeated, if at all. It’s far bigger than Iraq and has more than twice Iraq’s population. The US gets easy money by having all the world’s commodities priced in US dollars. Those days are coming to an end,
Iran is not going to be invaded. This is not 1953 (one the biggest mistakes in US foreign policy). Iran could bring down the world economic system in 15 minutes.
Land invasion out of the picture, more sanctions first and then pummeling some “key” infrastructure from the air – very likely, relatively soon..
as ive said before
the end of oil will come not with lack of it but by fighting over whats left
Norman for an interesting history lesson go here
The Oil Super Empires
https://thesaker.is/the-oil-super-empires/
Kerry’s turn at spilling the beans out there (2min):
https://youtu.be/dgZ0G3y-Fkw?t=121
Iran is imploding. I’m not sure if Iran actually is the nation to end the dollar.
Europe sure finds hopeless nations to switch our trade to from the U.S.
That’s not what Kerry said (for whatever reason he brings it up) in 2015, he clearly alludes to, confirms, aka spills the bean on already pre-existing long drawn situation (grave condition) of cumulative effect, where the last domino piece to disorderly switch could be ~smallish Iran; which in fact controls Iraq, and also shares with Qatar that big natgas field..
USD might merrily continue afterwards as domestic-regional currency, but the purchasing power, trade balance, and domestic liabilities situation would be quite different. The rest of the world goes on some sort make shift energy for goods derived credit-reserve system.
Also, the worry for many lays elsewhere, namely that some crazies of the crazier faction inside the states might loose it out of this sheer weight of humiliation and push the button, sending MIRVs flying in response.. So, in ~5-10minutes it would be all over, at least for the majority of people living in urban areas around the globe.
Some will arrive in 5 minutes but give it 30 minutes for a conclusion.
I guess it could lead to some kind of chain reaction.
A political and economic rift between the U.S and EU could perhaps come out of this. Russia and China might exploit this rift and suggest trade in euros, rouble and yuan. Russia is already trying to exploit this.
Russia and China have two aims: To end Nato and to bring in Europe into a Eurasian Union.
Kerry has of course more information to base his prediction on than we have.
China needs Iranian oil. China will pay to defend Iran.
It is part of the Chinese co-prosperity sphere.
About the book “Against the Grain” posted by Crazy Eddy, I haven’t read it but reading the wiki article about it the author – like many others – seems to have posited an anarcho-socialist “God of the gaps” using hunter-gatherers. While that lifestyle was/is more sustainable than extensive agriculture, people who needed to move often while maintaining their numbers are unlikely to have been very individualistic or egalitarian in the modern sense. Moreover, many societies probably engaged in both lifestyles to various extents, or alternated between, so the distinction between them was nowhere near as sharp as is seemingly assumed.
Ultimately, the reason why agriculture won out is wonderfully summarised by Steve from Virginia’s First Law of Debtonomics:
“The cost of managing any surplus increases along with it until it ultimately exceeds the surplus’ worth.”
The surplus food gained from agriculture had to be “managed” somehow, hence the emergence of governments, property, demographic and geographical expansion etc. Of course, there is no reason any surplus should be managed at all, but human nature disagrees. Managing surpluses is what got us to BAU. Without it we would still be following some mixture of farming and hunting-gathering.
Agriculture offered a steadier and more guaranteed supply of food, and that is why people “chose” it. If it had to be forced upon all/most humans, it would never have spread beyond the original centre/centres, which were minuscule compared to the rest of the human-inhabited world.
The problem or point of discourse here is that in fact “surplus” is absolutely key factor to all that dominating macro fauna/flora on this planet. Animals, flora. insects are meant to perform that “surplus dance” in order to smooth the cycles procreation, seasonal weather/enviro spikes etc..
That leads us to “bad/good” or “high/low/(good enough?)” surplus musings and definitely to concepts such as can the so-called permanent agriculture based human civilization exist long term.
Some say, we have demonstrably blew it so many times already, examples abound, it’s impossible. Plus the path dependency and aggregate damage burden of past trials/failures.
Others don’t agree, the path has been revealed on several instances,
recently mentioned here W.C. Lowdermilk and F.H. King among several others, incl. later coming hands on practitioners. The stuff works, rapid soil build up, terracing, keeping water/moisture, .. , etc. ; however most likely the devil is the detail of adapting the methods for each specific region and climate, that needs time and effort, and overall decentralization, which we don’t have as of now.
The first thing that alerted me to the fact that he was some kind of Anarcho-communist ideologue was the mention that “capturing women into the patriarchal family” was part of civilization forming when we know that hunter gatherers in more harsh climates rather than tropical ones already had pair bonding and nuclear families (see Eskimos, etc).
And not just Eskimos/Inuit either—as far as I know, North American native tribes pretty much all practiced marriage and had nuclear families as part of a clannic structure, though I don’t know to what extent they also practiced polygamy (but the Middle Eastern civilizations he’s writing about also tended to be polygamous).
My impression was that African economies were often matriarchal in form.
Turchin and Nefedov in Secular Cycles mention that population can grow much faster in if men are allowed several wives. This happens because rich men can often afford several wives, poor men cannot. In fact, many of them are too poor to ever be able to afford children. Warm areas of the world have more solar energy; they likely can absorb population more quickly. They are also exposed to many microbes that can kill them before maturity. Multiple husbands for wives seem to be more the norm in those places.
The North was poorer until fossil fuels became available. Even the rich could afford only one wife.
Yes, exactly. Climates/geographies that permitted different social structures to thrice thus developed them. But the academic tendency to universalize and ignore the particulars of a given culture’s evolutionary environment lead to absurd conclusions and generalizations and theories that are completely removed from reality.
“The North was poorer until fossil fuels became available. Even the rich could afford only one wife.”
Technically the norm was monogamy within extended family structure for the vast majority of men and their wives. The elite in all societies practiced some form of polygamy, for the reasons you stated.
For a fuller discussion of the reasons why polygamy is surprisingly common in the less developed countries, read this fascinating article by evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber.
Polygamy: a bird’s eye view
There are three basic reasons for polygyny in birds. First, there may be a scarcity of adult males. Second, some males may have much better genes than others which is particularly important for populations where there is a heavy load of diseases and parasites to which resistance is genetically heritable. Third, females do better by sharing a mate who defends a good territory (with plenty of food and cover) than they would by opting to be the single mate in a bad territory.
So much for birds! Do humans choose polygamy for similar reasons?
My research on 32 countries where polygamy is practiced by at least five percent of married women yielded answers (2). Polygamy increased where there was a scarcity of males in the population (first reason for birds).
Countries having a heavy infectious disease load had many more polygamous marriages (second reason for birds.) Women in disease-prone countries may prefer highly disease-resistant (i.e., physically attractive) men to father their offspring leaving less desirable men without mates. There is independent evidence that women care more about physical attractiveness in these countries and have a higher sex drive (3).
Having economic resources facilitates polygamy for humans consistent with resource-defense polygyny in birds (reason number 3). Thus, there were more polygamous wives in countries where men could monopolize wealth whether in terms of earned income or farm land (analogous to animal territories.) My findings were not new: they corroborated earlier research but used better data.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-human-beast/201210/the-three-reasons-polygamy
I recall one study that claimed that a rather low percentage of the men in the world, historically, have fathered most of children. It seems like this was a gene study. This would seem to point to the same kind of situation.
Women prefer husbands who are not drug addicts and who do not have serious disabilities. They prefer that they are physically attractive, and that they can (and do) hold down a job that pays reasonably well. It seems like these preferences cut down the pool of parters for women quite a bit.
You people on this micro thread must be at the top of the brilliance list of a very brilliant community of FW commenters. It takes a strain off those, less capable, who struggle less successfully to grasp some essential truths of the current world. Hunter gatherers must have made their religion (if you can call it that, THE PLACE. The place comes before the people, for it supports the people and not the other way around. So culture must neither have been anthropocentric nor individualistic. The place must have come first, since it was the sole means of survival. Infanticide must also have been a practical matter of group survival.
From growing up in a rural third world environment, I too am convinced there was mutuality between different cultural styles up to my time. And peasants who clog up urban shanty towns today haven’t lost all connection to cultural styles that could even be compared with hunter gatherers’.
Africa, because food grows year around, had less need to store up food reserves, and less need for government. The main offsetting force is all of the microbes that can kill a person in Africa.
Steve from Virginia makes a good point,
“The cost of managing any surplus increases along with it until it ultimately exceeds the surplus’ worth.”
The author suggests that the lack of enough … paved the path to sedentary farming …. and of course that put us on the treadmill to the hell that is imminent … when farming began to approach the Malthusian trap … we upped our game and used petro chemicals to produce more (killing our soil in the process)…
And now — we get to pay the piper —- we will not be going back to organic farming…. because that is impossible.
Oil … love it … hate it.
There seems to be some talk of Hunter gatherer versus agrarian life styles. I’m currently half way through “The Patterning Instinct” by Jeremy Lent. If you haven’t already read it, I’d suggest doing so, it’s a fascinating insight into how our brains have evolved.
Thanks! I notice that the Amazon ratings are very favorable. I ordered a copy.
Yes, I have read the book, and I agree with you. He becomes quite delusional about finding a solution to our predicament at the end, however. But the historic part is great, compering the different mindset and cognitive structures in different cultures. But I have one question for him: he points out that the chinese abstained from conquering and expoiting Africa, like the Europeans did – he retells the story of admiral Zheng He – and explains this holding back as rooted in the chinese cultures emphasis on harmony, which could have been seriously disturbed through «adventures» the western way. But did not the chinese indifference towards the african continent also reflect the fact that they already had to their disposal the resources their expeditions found there?
The author probes our current crisis of unsustainability and argues that it is not an inevitable result of human nature, but is culturally driven: a product of particular mental patterns that could conceivably be reshaped.
https://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/The-Patterning-Instinct-Audiobook/B075G216F2?qid=1531607362&sr=sr_1_1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&pf_rd_r=2N4ZWJATFG35YXS31NTR&
That is putting me off….
Sounds like it will sell better the way it is.
The Valley floor is sinking, and it’s crippling California’s ability to deliver water
TERRA BELLA
Completed during Harry Truman’s presidency, the Friant-Kern Canal has been a workhorse in California’s elaborate man-made water-delivery network. It’s a low-tech concrete marvel that operates purely on gravity, capable of efficiently piping billions of gallons of water to cities and farms on a 152-mile journey along the east side of the fertile San Joaquin Valley.
Until now.
The Friant-Kern has been crippled by a phenomenon known as subsidence. The canal is sinking as the Valley floor beneath it slowly caves in, brought down by years of groundwater extraction by the region’s farmers.
Along a 25-mile stretch of Tulare County rich with grapevines and pistachio trees, the canal has fallen so far — a dozen feet since it opened in 1951 — that it has lost more than half of its carrying capacity downstream from the choke point. Water simply can’t get through like it’s supposed to.
“It ponds up; you lose capacity and that ability to move water through the system,” said Douglas DeFlitch, chief operating officer at the Friant Water Authority. The authority operates the canal for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Central Valley Project.
Although subsidence has been a problem for decades, it accelerated as groundwater pumping expanded during the recent drought. Now it’s reaching a crisis point on the Friant-Kern, and California voters are being asked to fix it.
A proposition on the November ballot would raise billions of dollars for a variety of water projects around the state, including roughly $350 million to repair the Friant-Kern.
Proposition sponsor Gerald Meral, a prominent environmentalist, said it’s in Californians’ interests to ensure the flow of water to the east side of the Valley. The Friant-Kern brings water to the city of Fresno, numerous small towns and 17,000 farmers.
“Keeping 1 million acres of land in the Friant service area (in production) is a public good,” said Meral, a former deputy secretary of the state Natural Resources Agency.
So far no organized opposition has emerged to Meral’s proposition.
The Friant-Kern’s woes illustrate the enduring nature of California’s water problems. The epic five-year drought is officially over, but not everywhere. Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2017 declaration ending the drought omitted four counties where groundwater has been severely depleted: Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Tuolumne. The stricken canal serves two of those counties, Fresno and Tulare, along with Kern County.
It’s a problem that feeds on itself. If the canal can’t do its job, farmers downstream likely will pump more groundwater during dry years. A 2014 state law, the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, requires farmers to rein in their pumping, but the restrictions don’t fully kick in until 2040. Because farmers use some of the water from the canal to replenish groundwater, fixing the Friant-Kern would help coax the aquifers back to health.
During the drought, groundwater became a lifeline in this part of the Valley. Friant area farmers normally get water from the San Joaquin River, stored behind Friant Dam, but reservoir levels fell so low that the Central Valley Project didn’t deliver a drop of river water to Friant farmers in 2014 and 2015.
Desperate to keep their crops alive, farmers in Fresno County drilled 763 new wells in 2015 alone, according to the Department of Water Resources. In Tulare County, the number of new irrigation wells hit 1,069 that year. Overall, Valley farmers removed enough groundwater during the drought to fill Shasta Lake seven times over, according to a study last year by researchers at UCLA and the University of Houston.
A few inches a year
Depletion of groundwater causes subterranean layers of clay and gravel to gradually compress. The earth’s surface drops, usually a few inches a year.
Over time, that translates into serious troubles, especially for gravity-fed systems. The Friant-Kern has no pumps; its concrete chute is supposed to ride a gentle slope that runs downhill 6 inches every mile, just steep enough to deliver water the full 152 miles from behind the Friant Dam near Fresno to a spot just north of Bakersfield.
The canal already had sunk several feet since the 1950s. The drought simply made the problem that much worse. At a point 100 miles south of the dam, just west of the tiny community of Terra Bella, the canal dropped about 2 feet between 2015 and 2017. That created a choke point that has left canal operators unable to deliver 60 percent of the water to farms and cities along the last 50 miles or so of the canal’s low spot.
The Valley’s well-drilling frenzy has abated as overall water conditions in the state have improved. Farmers drilled a total of 366 wells in Tulare and Fresno combined last year. Subsidence, however, persists. The ground continues to sink in some spots beneath the Friant-Kern, worsening the canal’s troubles.
“We’re still seeing some degradation,” DeFlitch said.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article214631455.html
look like California is in deep trouble
Annoying. I get my pistachios from California. They very more-ish. Best solution: euthanise the Calfornians to put them out of their misery, then use AI to genetically engineer easily growable pseudo-pistachios with the right taste.
25% of food growing in the US comes from California (and not that subsided grain that comes from the Midwest).
Might get ready to lose some weight? Of course, you could just drink beer and eat fast food– oh, that is already the plan– never mind.
This is additional infrastructure that needs to be repaired over time. The Friant_Kern Canal construction began in 1949 and was completed in 1951. Thus, it was a post World War II project that was made possible by cheap oil. Now we need to repair it with expensive oil.
California — the new Yemen
Good article. One small point however – would you agree that “self-organization” is basically just another word for cause and effect? That is to say things are caused by other things, which are caused by still more things etc.
instant connection is the problem
when ghenghis khan was heading our way in the 13th c there was no mass panic because until the point where he showed up on the other side of the english channel there was no need to
it was doubtful if more than a few hundred people in england had heard of him, if that
now the concept of chinese hordes rampaging into europe would have a drastically different effect
now everybody knows what everbody else is doing
I agree with what you said, but don’t see how it’s related to my point, i.e., self-organisation is just a fancy way of describing cause and effect.
BTW Genghis only got as far as Persia before either getting bored or tied up in the problems of governing a massive ad hoc empire. The Mongols conquered Russia, the Baltic and Bulgaria after he died, but not for long. If Genghis himself had reached the Channel you can bet the English would have heard of him!
i made the connection at the start—”instant connection” means instant response and reaction
we react to trumps insanity because it affects us all
if it didnt we wouldnt care
Genghis Khan was merely a simple illustration, how far he got is irrelevant—its doubtful if more than a few hunfred chinese cared about rome’s expansion or knew about its collapse either–to them Europe was a barbarian backwater.
I did say–‘until he showed up on the other side of the english channel”
now we panic because the chinese won’t take our rubbish any more.
The Chinese hordes are under cutting the Mexican hordes in the construction industry in New York City. A friend who does construction in NYC describes the Chinese approach. A van drives up, thirty Chinese get out and go into the building. At the end of the day they come out and get in the van.
No. Self organization is an emergent phenomena of complex systems. It’s a type of math or physics problem. There is no single cause and no predictable repeatable effect.
I found Eric Choisson’s book, Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature interesting.
This is a chart of the type found in the book. He shows a trend to ever more complex, energy dense systems. What he calls “society,” I would call the economy. It is at the very top of the hierarchy.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/13-chaisson-trend-is-toward-more-complex-energy-intense-form.png
I think self-organization is more than cause and effect. It is in some ways related to the way iron filings line up in magnetic fields. It leads to truly strange behaviors at times.
Well, we can’t know *all* the causes of anything. Cause and effect is infinitely complex and interactive, but we only perceive an infinitesimal slice of the whole. That “slice” is what appears as self-organisation.
here is visualization of 5 mass extinctions
https://gfycat.com/HopefulWigglyEft
and now we are living in sixth mass extinction
btw readers of ofw which is yours favorite mass extinction
my favorite is Permian–Triassic extinction event which made
earth inhabited for almost 10 thousand years
Excellent, I like the Arctic way closer to the Equator, seems not that long ago.. 🙂
Two Big “Russia! Russia!” Stories Released Days Before Trump-Putin Summit
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2018/07/14/two-big-russia-russia-stories-released-days-before-trump-putin-summit/
Follow Caitlin. She’s good!
Don’t like “Anthropogenic Climate Change” ? How about “Economogenic Climate Change”, or “Human Metabolic Climate Change”, to extend the concept of “Industrial system metabolic rift” that continues its multiple disruptions of several of earth system physiologic cycles. “Economic Climate Change” for short, since our global systems value the Economy more than we value a stable Climate and stable Planetary Physiology.