Most people expect that our signal of an impending reduction in world oil or coal production will be high prices. Looking at historical data (for example, this post and this post), this is precisely the opposite of the correct price signal. Oil and coal supplies decline because prices fall too low for producers. These producers make voluntary cutbacks because the prices they receive fall below their cost of production. There often are supply gluts at the same time.
This strange situation arises because prices must be high enough for the producers at the same time that goods and services made by oil (and other energy products) are inexpensive enough for consumers to afford. There is a two way battle taking place:
(1) Prices producers require tend to rise over time, because of depletion. The easiest to extract portion of any resource (such as oil, coal, copper, or lithium) tends to be removed first. What is left tends to be deeper, lower quality, or otherwise more difficult to extract cheaply.
(2) Prices consumers can afford for discretionary goods (such as cell phones and automobiles) tend to fall for a combination of reasons:
- Wages of many workers fall because of competition from lower cost labor in other countries.
- Some jobs are eliminated through the use of computers or robots.
- Young people are increasingly being required to pay for higher education (beyond that which is provided free), leaving many with loans to repay, reducing their discretionary income.
- Changes to US healthcare law (mostly starting January 1, 2014) lead to required health insurance premiums. While some citizens find cost savings in this approach, healthy young people often experience cutbacks in discretionary income as a result.
- Rents and home prices keep rising faster than incomes.
When the discretionary income of the many non-elite workers of the world falls, they buy fewer finished goods and services. Finished goods and services are manufactured using commodities of many kinds, including oil, coal, copper, iron ore, and fresh water. When discretionary demand falls, commodity prices tend to fall. This is the problem we are encountering now. It tends to cause the prices of many commodities to fall below the cost of production. Eventually, producers decide to quit because production is no longer profitable. This is the issue that leads to peak oil, coal or copper.
Figure 1. Illustration showing why falling affordability creates a conflict between supply and demand.
If the Affordability Price Clash Mostly Affects Non-Elite Workers, Does It Matter?
When I talk about non-elite workers, I am talking about workers who are in the bottom 90% of the wage distribution. Elite workers will always have enough income for the necessities of life. There are so many non-elite workers in the world that they, indeed, do make a difference.
Also, the forces that adversely affect non-elite workers tend to have several effects:
- They tend to send a larger share of wages to elite workers, as the economy becomes more complex and more specialized.
- They tend to send more unearned income to elite workers, through capital appreciation, because elite workers can afford to buy shares of stock and expensive homes.
- The wealthy spend their income differently from non-elite workers. Non-elite workers tend to spend the bulk of their discretionary income on devices made using commodities, such as cell phones and automobiles. The wealthy are likely to spend their discretionary income in less energy intensive ways, such as investing in shares of stock and buying services such as private college education for their children.
History shows that economies tend to collapse when wage and wealth disparity becomes too great. Collapse can take various forms, including revolutions by the disgruntled underclass, increased susceptibility to epidemics, or the financial collapse of governments. Wars become more likely, as one country tries to aid its citizens at the expense of citizens of other countries.
The world today seems to be approaching a crisis point with respect to wage and wealth disparity. Young people in particular are adversely affected. Figure 2 shows a chart indicating that wage disparity seems to be back to the level it was at the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This was also a time of low commodity prices and gluts of food and oil.
Figure 2. U. S. Income Shares of Top 1% and Top 0.1%, Wikipedia exhibit by Piketty and Saez.
Gluts tend to occur because commodity prices rise to a level where devices made with these commodities (such as cell phones and automobiles) become too expensive for non-elite workers to afford. Elite workers can still afford the devices, but there are not enough elite workers to make up for the shortfall in non-elite buyers of these devices, so industrial output per capita tends to fall.
Figure 3 shows the important role that the wages of non-elite workers play in generating adequate demand. If their wages are high enough, they can buy enough goods and services made with commodities to keep commodity prices high. With sufficiently high commodity prices, production can continue.
Figure 3: Chart showing the important role that the wages of non-elite workers play in maintaining energy demand. With adequate demand, prices can remain high enough for production to continue.
Why the Peak in World Oil Production Likely Occurred in 2018
If we look at recent oil data, we see a pattern of growing gluts in supply, as indicated by the red bars in Figure 4. Even in the most recent week, the week ending February 15, 2019, after all of the cuts begun by OPEC and other oil exporters, US crude oil stocks continue to build. This is not the impact a person would expect, if the production cuts are truly effective!
Figure 4. Brent average quarterly oil price (in January 2019$), with an indication of quarters when world crude oil inventories are building. Oil prices are Brent spot oil prices, adjusted using the CPI-Urban to January 2019 prices levels. World inventory build quarters are based on indications shown in US Short Term Energy Outlook reports of various publication dates.
This is precisely the kind of signal we would expect, if products made with oil (and using oil in their operation) are becoming increasingly unaffordable for the non-elite workers of the world. Note that these bars are becoming more frequent and are occurring at lower prices. This is the expected outcome of a clash between the falling discretionary income of non-elite workers and the rising costs of oil producers.
When prices fall too low, producers cut back production. OPEC reports its view of the effect of recent production cutbacks in Figure 5.
Figure 5. OPEC and world oil supply, in chart from OPEC Monthly Oil Market Report for February 2019.
Given the nearly worldwide problem of falling affordability of goods by non-elite workers, we should not be surprised if the peaks in oil production in October and November 2018 ultimately prove to be the maximum production ever recorded. In fact, it seems quite likely that the year 2018 will prove to be the year with the highest-ever oil production.
The cutback in production will appear to be voluntary. Once cutbacks start, they will tend to feed upon themselves. Unless oil prices really spike following the cutbacks (say, to $90 per barrel), exporting countries will find themselves worse off after the cutbacks, for a combination of reasons:
-
- The cutback in production will reduce the number of workers directly and indirectly employed by the oil industry. Their reduced spending will lead to a need for expanded government programs.
- Housing prices will fall in oil exporting countries. This is likely to ultimately lead to debt defaults.
- Tax revenue that governments of oil exporters can collect on the smaller amount of oil will be lower, even though the needs of the economy will be greater.
Ultimately, it seems likely that at least some governments of oil exporting countries will be overthrown, depressing oil production further. If the breakeven price for most OPEC members, including necessary tax revenue, was over $100 per barrel in 2014, it is hard to see how exporters can get along with much less today.
World Coal Production: Following a Similar Pattern to Oil?
One thing that most people don’t realize is that coal prices follow a very similar pattern to those of oil.
Figure 6. Sample world coal prices, based on information from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
In Figure 6, coal prices experience a major peak in 2008, followed by a lower peak in the 2011 period, which peters out by 2013. Prices recently are much lower than in the 2008 period, or in the 2011 to 2013 period. This pattern is very similar to the recent pattern in oil prices.
The similarity in the patterns of coal prices and oil prices makes perfect sense if prices of both oil and coal are based primarily on affordability, and this affordability depends heavily on the wages of non-elite workers. When countries, such as China, ramp up their debt, more non-elite workers can be hired at higher wages. These workers can make more computers, automobiles, steel ingots, and many other goods. They can also afford to buy more output of the world economy. This ramped up demand tends to raise the prices of both coal and oil.
For many commodities, China’s demand represents close to half of the world demand. China has become the world’s number one manufacturer of goods. China needs growing energy consumption to maintain its growth of manufactured goods because it takes energy to operate machines, even computers. It even takes energy to keep the lights on.
Unfortunately, with the recent lower prices for coal and oil, China is experiencing lower production of both coal and oil (Figure 7). Without growing energy supplies, China cannot meet the world’s growing need for manufactured goods.
Figure 7. China energy production by fuel, based on 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data.
The reason why China has recently reduced production of both coal and oil is the usual one: the rising cost of production conflicts with the low prices available in the marketplace, making production unprofitable for a growing share of producers.
How about China’s total energy consumption? Do imports make up for China’s lack of local production?
Figure 8. China energy production by fuel, with a line added to indicated it total energy consumption, including imports. Based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
Not really. China is the world’s largest importer of coal, oil and natural gas. It is also the number one user of wind and solar (included in the tiny orange “Other Renewables” portion of the chart). Even with these huge additions to China’s energy production, its annual growth in the quantity of energy it consumes (including imports) has plummeted (Figure 9).
Figure 9. China annual growth in total energy consumption. Based on 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data.
China reports that its real GDP growth rate is still very high (over 6%, net of inflation), but many observers are skeptical of this claim. Certainly, going forward, its coal and oil production cannot continue to decline, or the economy will encounter huge problems. The amount of goods China will be able to manufacture will fall, as will the number of new homes it can build. Without continued growth, China is likely to run into debt default problems. China is such a large country that its problems can be expected to adversely affect the world economy as a whole.
Figure 10 shows that China produces nearly half of the world’s total coal. If China’s coal production declines, world production is also likely to decline.
Figure 10. World coal production, divided into China and Non-China, based on 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy data.
The only way to prop up coal production, for either China or the rest of the world, is higher prices, indirectly coming from higher demand from non-elite workers. Businesses can perhaps use rising debt to hire these non-elite workers but, if there is not a sufficient supply of buyers who can afford the additional goods and services made by these workers, the final outcome will be debt defaults.
The Fundamental Problem Is a Physics Problem
The fundamental problem is that the economy grows for the same reason that hurricanes, ecosystems, stars, and plants and animals grow. They are dissipative structures that grow in the presence of energy flows. In the case of hurricanes, the energy comes from the heat in the warm ocean. In the case of the economy, the energy flows are of many different types, including (among others), human energy, energy of draft animals, solar energy, fossil fuels, and wind energy.
One key characteristic of dissipative structures is that they are not permanent. Permanent growth in a finite system is not possible. The laws of physics sets up the system in such a way that dissipative structures grow and eventually collapse. Over time, new dissipative structures form, each varying in a random way from previous dissipative structures. Those best adapted to the ever-changing circumstances tend to last the longest. This is the way that the evolution of economies takes place, just as the evolution of plants and animals takes place.
One characteristic of economies is that physics determines how much energy is needed to manufacture and transport a particular product. It also determines how much the mix of buyers can afford to pay for finished products using this energy. Thus, physics determines the potential profitability of a particular manufacturing process, with lower energy costs tending to make production more profitable. As energy costs rise because of diminishing returns, the system eventually reaches a point where it must collapse. The cost of production rises so high, relative to wages, that many non-elite workers cannot afford the finished goods and services made by the system.
The laws of physics also determine what wage distributions must look like, given the availability of energy and other resources. In general, if there are not enough resources to go around, some members of the economy tend to get “frozen out” by low wages. In addition, in a low-energy per capita situation, the energy that is available tends to rise to the top, to the high-earners of the economy, somewhat like heating water transforms it to its gas phase (steam), which rises to the top. With this structure, even with a severe energy shortfall, some members of the economy can be survivors.
With today’s worldwide economy, the survivors might be some humans and businesses within the world economy. The system would need to start over, building up smaller economies from pieces that managed to stay intact, but the system, as a whole, would not die out, unless the energy shortfall were to be severe.
Modeling the World Economy
One issue with academic research today is that it tends to be divided into many academic “silos.” Researchers tend to know more and more about their own field, but less and less about other fields that might be peripherally related. For example, economists tend not to keep up with the physics of self-organizing networked systems. Geophysicists understand the physics that governs the extraction of fuels, but they have no insight into the fact that the laws of physics might also affect prices and wage distributions.
Without understanding the forces that are causing the results that are being observed, it is very easy to create a model that is more misleading than helpful. For example, a simple model of the earth is the one each of us can see as we look around us.
Figure 11. Source: Edrawsoft.com
The model shown in Figure 11 is a flat map. This is a perfectly good representation of what the earth looks like, if a person is not concerned about what happens at a distance. Of course, to extend the map out, a person really needs to convert the model into a globe. A globe is a very different model.
Economic researchers tend to have some of the same modeling issues as illustrated by the flat map model. Economists favor fitting curves to past data to forecast the future patterns. Curve fitting tends not to be good for determining turning points. When dealing with energy and other resources, we are really interested in when a turning point will happen, forcing production of energy products and resources of many kinds downward.
Another model favored by economists is the standard two-dimensional supply and demand model (Figure 12). This model ignores the special role that energy products play because of the operation of the laws of physics. Energy products, as they work through the networked economy, affect both the supply and demand of finished goods and services, making the two dimensional model shown inappropriate.
Figure 12. This standard model does not consider the special role energy plays in the economy under the laws of physics, so is not appropriate for energy products.
With neither curve fitting nor the standard supply and demand model sounding an alarm with respect to energy prices not being able to rise forever, economists have tended to overlook this issue.
Figure 13. Economic models tend to give a false sense of security because they forecast that the future will be a continuation of the past.
Of course, policymakers are happy to hear happily-ever-after endings. Few policymakers question the reasonableness of the models. They do not consider the possibility that the falling discretionary income of non-elite workers around the world might choke off demand for goods made with energy products.
Even geophysicists who have looked at the problem tend to get the story only half right. They understand underground physics, but they tend not to understand that prices cannot rise indefinitely. This is a different, related issue, also associated with the physics of the situation.
“Climate Change Is Our Biggest Problem” Is a Corollary to Bad Modeling
If a person truly believes that energy prices can and will rise forever, then it is an easy corollary to assume that all fossil fuels that we can identify within the earth’s crust will eventually become extractable. There are no limits except for the limits imposed by climate change.
Of course, if we are really hitting price limits here and now, the situation is likely to be very different. These price limits will cause a very near-term decline in energy supply, which we essentially have no control over. Financial systems are likely to collapse; international trade will be scaled way back; world population is likely to fall. CO2 levels will, in time, adjust to this radically changed world.
I showed earlier (in How the Peak Oil story could be “close,” but not quite right) that the models used to “prove” that wind and solar can be helpful to the system greatly overstate their benefit to the system. As a result, we don’t really have evidence that wind and solar are even helpful to the system.
Consequently, we really have two false models working together to give an illusion that we have a huge problem which is fixable, if we just exert enough effort. Physics puts a cap on our efforts, however. The physics of the system makes the system collapse before policymakers can hope to even make a small fix.
Figure 14. Two false models work together to give the illusion that climate change is the greatest problem that humans have and that we can fix the problem with fixes to the fuel system.
The unfortunate problem is that policymakers are not really in charge: the laws of physics are in charge. Energy and other resources are no longer inexpensive enough to extract to allow the system to work. The proposed solutions (wind and solar) are not cheap enough to save the system either. We can temporarily hide the problem with more debt (indirect promises of future energy) at lower interest rates, but this does not fix the system.
Conclusion
Many of the problems the world economy is facing today seem to be the result of reaching the limits of energy extraction. Very few researchers understand how a self-organized networked economy really operates. As a result, the symptoms of economic health and economic illness have been confused. It looks quite possible that we have reached both Peak Oil and Peak Coal, approximately simultaneously. This is a frightening situation, because it could be an indication of collapse in the next few years. This would likely be much worse than the Depression of the 1930s.
Of course, even with these observations, we do not know precisely what lies ahead. Somehow, multicellular animals have lived on this earth for a very long time. Amazing coincidences have happened and may continue to happen, allowing economies to flourish. We humans do not have as much control over the current situation as we would like to think that we have. Fortunately, we cannot rule out the possibility of more amazing coincidences, perhaps even caused by a literal Higher Power behind the energy flows. Thus, the result may be different from what our models seem to suggest.
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https://i.redd.it/osvwwkjlh4j21.jpg
Oh no, here we go again…
(Bloomberg) — Toll Brothers Inc.’s new home orders dropped 24 percent in the fiscal first quarter, the steepest annual decline for the biggest U.S. luxury homebuilder since the depths of the housing crash in 2010. The company struggled to find move-up buyers in California, which is gripped by an affordability crisis.
Analysts expected a decline of less than 15 percent in new home contracts in the quarter, which ended Jan. 31. Instead, it was the largest drop since the 27 percent year-over-year fall in the third quarter of 2010.
An improvement in margins provided comfort for some investors, but they were based on contracts signed six or nine months ago, before the market began cooling, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Drew Reading. Orders fell 62 percent in California, where Toll has a heavy focus.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/toll-brothers-orders-plunge-california-144209405.html?bcmt=1
You mean housing for the rich and famous has peaked! Run for the hills….
Wow!
Jeff Bezos just gave a private talk in New York. From utopian space colonies to dissing Elon Musk’s Martian dream, here are the most notable things he said.
Ultimately, Bezos said he wants Blue Origin to enable a space-faring civilization where “a Mark Zuckerberg of space” and “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins” can flourish.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-wings-club-presentation-transcript-2019-2?r=US&IR=T
Wild! And to think that in 1957, the Rear Admiral Hyman Rickover gave this talk predicting peak oil to a convention of physicians. Times change!
That was amazing prescience; great speech indeed.
And the final part…never been deviated from.
‘One final thought I should like to leave with you. High-energy consumption has always been a prerequisite of political power. The tendency is for political power to be concentrated in an ever-smaller number of countries. Ultimately, the nation which control – the largest energy resources will become dominant. If we give thought to the problem of energy resources, if we act wisely and in time to conserve what we have and prepare well for necessary future changes, we shall insure this dominant position for our own country.’
Might be related to Keith
“Might be related to Keith”
It is. Jeff caught the space colony meme long ago. I was deeply involved in this as can be seen here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L5_Society
Space colonies require getting the materials from the moon or asteroids. However, there is the intermediate step of building power satellites that only requires reusable rockets that get the cost to LEO down to $100/kg. At that price, power from space undercuts coal and eventually may allow low-cost synthetic hydrocarbons.
The Chineses and Japanese are much more aware of this potential energy source than the Western countries.
For those few here who are not welded to doom-and-gloom, I run a Google group called Power Satellite Economics. It’s open to reading. If you want to post, you can ask to be made a member.
>>>For those few here who are not welded to doom-and-gloom
IMO, most here are realists…
>>For those few here who are not welded to doom-and-gloom
>IMO, most here are realists…
Those who think they know the future, are delusional. I can think of a dozen surprise events that would throw “realists” predictions into the trash can. A big volcanic eruption (like 536) is one, another would be a worldwide epidemic. On the upside is the development of cheap fusion or implementation of higher photosynthesis efficiency via gene manipulation or AI that could tell us how to solve problems. I am sure Gail would agree that an AI that let us understood economics would be an amazing advance.
Bravo to that! Let’s hope your visions prevail! But hope is not a stategy.
Some, like the 536 eruption I hope don’t happen. You are right on hope not being a strategy. I have worked for many years on ways to solve the energy/CO2 problems. When the cost of lifting cargo to LEO goes down to $100/kg, power satellites can undercut most other sources of energy. That’s close to happening.
You sound very experienced; have you made any significant progress? I think this one is a spoof from self-appointed ‘Prof’ Searl, but he has been going for many years and does alude to vacuum energy. Perhaps there is so much physics that we know not of – quantum etc?
http://www.searlsolution.com/indexbackup.html
“… where “a Mark Zuckerberg of space” and “1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins” can flourish.”
the real MZ of earth couldn’t have accomplished anything without the past and present existence of cheap FF…
even Einstein… without FF, he might have still come up with his genius concepts…
but none of his theoretical work could have been applied to actual construction…
anyone who reads OFW is much more informed than Bezos…
“anyone who reads OFW is much more informed than Bezos…”
Bezos might be wrong, but his ideas of tapping a lot more solar energy than the total that hits the earth fully answers the concerns Gail brings forward on OFW.
on intelligent application of fusion power on Earth eliminates the need for more solar energy from space. it’s also a lot easier and less energy intense.
” it’s also a lot easier and less energy intense.”
The only problem is that nobody knows how to do fusion on Earth. Unless I missed a major story.
The followiing reply to Keith was accidentally placed down the list.
James DeLuze thinks he can do it. see: http://www.fusionenergysolutions.net
“James DeLuze thinks he can do it.”
When and if he does it, I will be much impressed and the first to congratulate him.
If he can make really inexpensive power, most of Gail’s concerns about peak oil and coal go away.
Of course, he has been at it for 20 years, so it’s not really easy.
DeLuze has a medical background, not physics, so he has that disadvantage. He also refuses to accept federal government funds, because of fear of march-in rights. These aspects limit his funding chances to private investors willing to take a chance on his ideas and follow-through. He continues to pursue private funding of proof-of-concepts prototypes.
Well, Bezos is off his rocker as the owners of the system are encouraging him every day he really own those (real) hundreds of billions (pat him on the shoulder), and silly msm articles continuously rank him as the supposedly richest person. What a tool..
As I wrote earlier at least in comparison somewhat sane(er) Mr. Gates put instead modest money into breeder reactors which are going to be build in China, since the US has lost the competency to administrate long term such commitments.
Bezos–like all the rest of space dreamers. misses the point.
we can overcome gravity only through the use of exploding chemicals in different compounds
Which is exactly the same as the Wright brothers, cannonballs, or even Chinese fireworks in the 10th century
Which means that until someone comes up with something radically different, we just go on making bigger and bigger chemical rockets until we exhaust our means to do so.
Musk, Bezos et al imagine that ‘they’ will go on figuring out ways of getting off the ground, provided enough money is thrown at the problem—ignoring the reality that the world is now a vast industrial complex with a lifespan predicated on availability of earth fuel, not rocket fuel.
When our earth fuel runs out, we will not have the means to produce and drive any sophisticated mechanisms to lift us off the ground, let alone come up with anything that is different to what we have already
Assuming of course, that such a thing is possible within the laws of physics, So far, no such mechanism is even on the invention horizon, let alone under development.
So unless we get a visit from non-murderous aliens who are willing to show us how it’s done, I fear we are stuck here.
(and all that without touching on the space radiation exposure problems when you get out there)
Re, Musk, he’ll be having to up his sleeping meds to get any rest with this looming, I imagine:
“On Friday, close to $1 billion in debt comes due for Tesla, an obligation that will wipe out about a quarter of the company’s cash.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/tesla-faces-a-cash-crunch-with-a-920-million-debt-payment-due.html
Nope, that’s not how it rolls, after decade+ the cat is out of the bag already, TSLA is now on the deliberate exponential mode of production growth vs linear mode which is common to most industries. TSLA is structured for low millions of copies produced per year way before early 2020s. Luxury and upper middle class EVs is the only growing sub segment of the global car market, that’s why so many newcomers are rushing in to this tight spot of say up to 5-10mio cars per year, because that’s the place where the perennial demand is to be found no matter what.
So should there be real acute problem with funding they won’t let him go under and or other digital tycoon takes over it with “his own” money and credit line pronto..
Obviously, there could be real earth shaking moments of crisis to disrupt it all, not likely near term though.
I note your remarks about the traditional chemical solution to space travel (how to get off the ground). In my view, if research and funds were to be applied to the harnessing of gravity and the ability to do what ‘UFOs’ do we might actually get somewhere. Havea look a Prof Searle’s solution:
http://www.searlsolution.com/
It isn’t possible to solve problems by throwing money at them, money has to backed up by directed energy
no matter how much energy you direct at the gravity problem, we will still need reactive forces—and that (apart from maglev) means exploding chemicals. And even maglev is effectively the result of explosive forces generated elsewhere. (power stations)
Imagining anti gravity machines won’t deliver one
I did say—unless friendly aliens show up to show us how—(which was not meant to be taken seriously.)
we really can’t do what UFOs do—sorry and all that
Thanks Norman and I note your practical and logical view. I am of the mind that says nothing should be excluded – call me a dreamer!. History is replete with so many technical break-throughs and people saying it just won’t work. I will dream on!
Warsaw (Poland) after 29 years of independence:
(4 more towers are UC now.) (If you don’t like, you can delete. I’m drunk now :))
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/980/41332896014_34a2c113e8_h.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4674/39831520554_3f8566d7a0_o.jpg
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4758/39276564344_bf3c73b58b_b.jpg
https://farm1.staticflickr.com/952/28375047498_0c9242beac_h.jpg
I’m a History buff…remember reading about the Polish uprising during WWII and how Stalin ordered the Soviet armies to halt before Warsaw while the Germans destroyed the city. If I’m correct, Stalin intention as to weaken the Polish leadership to enable him to place his Communist cronies in after the end of the War.
Saw this video
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6rYrW0zcM7I
Remarkable the rebuilt city now. Much energy and fast resources applied not only here but throughout Europe. Doubt that could be undertaken again.
Footnote: Albert Speers son spoke that Hitler’s dream of rebuilding Berlin in a vast mega city was indeed accomplished in another part of the world…China!!!
Architect Sheds Father’s Legacy in China
https://www.dw.com/en/architect-sheds-fathers-legacy-in-china/a-1175173
Shanghai is often described as the biggest building site in the world. Architect Albert Speer, Jr., has risen to the challenge, and he’s put an uncomfortable family connection behind him on the way.
Successful primarily outside of Germany: Albert Speer, Jr.
The last decade has seen over 2 million people relocate to Shanghai as more and more ambitious building projects are realized. Innovations include some 5,000 gleaming new highrises, over 1,000 new streets, three subway lines, a new airport and an entire inner city highway infrastructure, complete with three mammoth bridges over the Huangpu River.
German planners and architects are among the many international experts flocking to Shanghai to help shape the future of the world’s fastest-growing city with diverse urban development initiatives.
Abert Speer Jr. Died in 2017
85% of Warsaw was destroyed during WW2, but it was long time ago. After Germans, we had 44 years of Russian occupation, which ended in 1989.
Yes, I am aware and I believe there is one building in Warsaw that the Soviets under Stalin constructed.
There has been no more pivotal a building constructed in Poland after 1945 than the Palace of Culture and Science – or to give it its full title: “the Palace of Culture and Science in the name of Joseph Stalin”. And none more divisive and controversial, either.
It’s a skyscraper 231 metres tall, the highest building in Poland, built in a mixture of then-compulsory Socialist realism with elements of Polish historicism. It stands for everything Poland tried to reject after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the swift crumbling of the Soviet Union, and better than any other building it epitomises the 44 years of the People’s Polish Republic.
The palace turns 60 this year: it was finished 10 years after the end of the second world war, which both destroyed and transformed Poland. What came after was the greatest challenge in the country’s history – to this day, people can’t decide whether it was a failure, or a success.
Started in 1952, the Palace was a cornerstone of the Warsaw to come, planned together with a majestic Parade Square. During construction it was still surrounded by post-war ruins, with people living in tenements cut in half by bomb craters, survivors of Warsaw’s razing by the Nazis in 1944.
The palace was a symbol of how strategically important Poland was to Moscow – and to Stalin
The Palace’s chief architect, Lev Rudnev, collaborated with a Polish team of architects, but – as a “gift” from Stalin – it was built by 3,500 Soviet workmen, who were housed in a special estate during the time of construction. It may have been Stalinist folly to build such an opulent palace while the rest of the city barely existed; but one can also imagine this new building bringing hope and inspiration to a city being transformed, not just physically but socially. Thousands of people poured in from across the devastated country to help rebuild the capital
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/may/08/warsaw-palace-of-culture-stalin-a-history-of-cities-in-50-buildings-day-32
The Soviets rejected the Marshall Plan, and went another route to rebuild. Sweat Equity!
I believe, correct my if I’m wrong, there was a big debate if this building was to be demolished because of it’s legacy?
From my readings, Prague was one of the few cities left intact and was spared bombing, thus rebuilding after WWIi.
Budapest in Hungary was also destroyed by 70%! Along with Berlin!!
Interesting article regarding Germany after WWII
HOW DID GERMANY REBUILD AFTER WORLD WAR II?
by The Aleppo Project on October 15, 2015
https://www.thealeppoproject.com/how-did-germany-rebuild-after-world-war-ii/
Thinking began rather early in part because prior to the war Adolf Hitler wanted to see many cities transformed. He wanted to open up large areas for political demonstrations. He wanted to see cities modernised with wide streets for automobiles and the construction of skyscrapers. So in many cities you had planners – not just in Berlin but in Hamburg and elsewhere – that were starting to think about these things before the war. When the bombing started they were thinking that it provided them with a way to implement modernisation plans in an easier way. That was not the way it worked out. Cities after the war said they needed planners to help them recover but they didn’t want planners who were in favour of Nazi ideas. They didn’t want planners from other cities telling them to transform their cities.
Another issue that makes Germany different from say Japan or the Soviet Union is that they didn’t have a national government in Germany until late 1948/1949 . So you didn’t have a situation where you had a national capital telling cities how to rebuild. That was the case in Japan and the Soviet Union. Often the attitude was that the national government would determine how reconstruction was done. They told cities: “If you do it in our way we will provide funding.” Many cities needed money to recover so they followed their national governments. In Germany there wasn’t a national government doling out instructions and money. They had to let local people rebuild on their own. For example, many churches rebuilt by raising money themselves from their congregations. That made the situation for reconstruction in Germany somewhat different.
It has become something of a cliché that the Marshall Plan paid for rebuilding but that was not true. The Marshall Plan did not come in until late 1948 and 1949. And the point of the plan was to rebuild economies and not cities. They did use some money to rebuild West Berlin and that was for political reasons as the Americans saw it as a statement — a capitalist city in the middle of the communist East. The Marshall Plan has become an international cliché whenever cities are damaged in war. But it didn’t apply to most reconstruction in Germany. Individuals borrowed money, often from relatives in the country, and that is where they also found building materials. It was never centrally managed
After the war the Germans also figured out how to organise and do things quite quickly. Huge numbers of women were organised to clear away rubble. Many men had been killed or were prisoners of war. Right after the war, local governments were encouraged by the occupying forces to require members of the Nazi Party to clear rubble….
It has become something of a cliché that the Marshall Plan paid for rebuilding but that was not true. The Marshall Plan did not come in until late 1948 and 1949. And the point of the plan was to rebuild economies and not cities. They did use some money to rebuild West Berlin and that was for political reasons as the Americans saw it as a statement — a capitalist city in the middle of the communist East. The Marshall Plan has become an international cliché whenever cities are damaged in war. But it didn’t apply to most reconstruction in Germany. Individuals borrowed money, often from relatives in the country, and that is where they also found building materials. It was never centrally managed
Great information.
Thanks you Artleads….makes me appreciate how resilient people really are in the face of collapse! Have to admire the common people that were placed in this horror and afterwards still had the fortitude and grit to pull out of it afterwards.
Of course, the next shock will be of a different order and as terrible, if not worse.
Wouldn’t mind coming back 100 years after and seeing how it all pans out.
Lots of cheap-to-produce energy supplies. While debt financing was used, the debt could easily be paid back with interest with the additional productivity that the energy added. The bombs made a good excuse to build new buildings to replace the old.
ABC News (Australia)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-27/construction-work-done-q4-2018/10852610?section=business
The title of this article is “Construction work stalls as the residential sector goes sharply into reverse.” Scary! Australia looks like it is headed into recession, if it isn’t there yet.
From a friend in perth:
Yep very eastern States focused – there is a big desert between us and them and unfortunately our media in the West is owned by the Eastern States so we get their negative news which is keeping our market down.
Towards the end of the year we will be leading the country out of our pull back hopefully but automation in the mines will have an effect as well as a Fly In Fly Out labour force whose earnings do not flow into our economy but are taken back home on their 4 x 4 or 6 x 6 shifts : 6 weeks in and 6 weeks off. They fly back overseas or to the Eastern States……. these are the 2 figures I am keeping my eyes on.
Other than mining work, there is not too much else that will create lots of job as the Government is making it very difficult to employ people in small business. Small business used to employ 84% of Australian labour but I do not think this is the case anymore. I cannot afford to employ anyone with the extra costs I have to incur over and above their wages which are not cheap….. at present they are paying down debt as fast as they can seeing the train coming down the track so retail spending is pretty low as well.
Yes, government seems to grow and grow. And in the Eastern States, electricity cost grows and grows. China is no longer sending as much business Australia’s way, either, in terms of home purchases or coal and other minerals purchased. China is many times Australia’s size, so Australia has no power over the situation.
If diminishing returns are the cause of the financial crisis (as I suspect they are) then, the question in my mind is can we as a society become even more complex? Complex in terms of building machines that have “artificial intelligence”. Complex in terms of fusion energy. Complex as in solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. I would argue that, no, we cannot become more complex once diminishing returns starts to affect our financial system. We can only unwind the financial promises that cannot be realized. To increase complexity in a regime of diminishing returns would be like increasing the speed of a car that ran out of fuel. Yes, we can run the car off a cliff. But, that is kind of what we are doing now with the financial system. It seems like the ending will be abrupt.
Hint:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Tainter
Or look at it as fork in path forward, former part alone continues to soldier along..
W vs E Roman Empire for almost 1k years after the collapse..
but the west and East Roman empire were self-sustaining
the world wasn’t locked into an energy crisis like it is now, of overpopulated
Much of the world was unknown then, and whatever the Roman’s did was of no consequence to anyone else.
Wit 7.6+ billion homo sapiens on a so overpopulated planet, with a diminished ecosystem—
Well, you know.
I think that there was likely an energy crisis of a different kind. Probably too many people and draft animals for the land to support, given the degraded/eroded state of the soil, and whatever increase in population that had taken place.
Over the last 200,000 years, homo sapiens have had a population of 1-10 million, with a near extinction about 70,000 years ago.
7.6+ billion ? Please—–
Thinking of the Roman Empire, reading one of the best travel books I have ever encountered, I came across the interesting observation that a general contempt for forest trees – so important in preventing soil erosion – seems to be ingrained in Greek culture: the author supposes that this stemmed from the desperate need for cultivatable land on the part of poor peasants.
Even though cutting down the trees leads in the end to almost total loss of fertile soils – a process that the Ancients were well-aware of.
The reason for this is not that greeks don’t love trees. The reason for this is that the state imposes surrealistic rules about trees. On the surface it might seem like there are strong legal protections for forest in the modern greek state, but the reality is that it sets all the incentives upside-down: if a tree of a not typically cultivated type grows on your property, you’re not allowed to cut or even trim it – the fines for this are so heavy as to be multiple times a typical person’s annual gross income, or multiple times the value of the property – and if enough trees per surface area grow to enough maturity (these critera are not defined anywhere, it’s up to the decisions of officials, which are of course reversible by higher ranking officials, all opaque) , then your land might be reclassified as forest for good. In either case you lose the effective use of your property. So , the moment a seedling might appear it is uprooted before it gets a chance to be noticed. Of course politically connected and powerful people can totally violate all those same rules, so you get big construction projects in theoretically protected areas and so on, but for average people, there is a strong incentive to keep any wild trees from ever growing on their land lest the land be effectively taken from them. If people were allowed to cut trees, theyd also not mind them growing, or theyd even plant them, and in the net there’d be a lot more trees!
Norman I hear you, but your point is not completely correct.
The very same area governed by E Roman Empire (Byzantium) was the same place where numerous civilizations collapsed prior that point as well, say at least to 2k BC, and likely even earlier.
You have a point on the JITs and inter-dependencies, now why are some countries now attempting some form of autarky and resilience..?
I am afraid you are right.
Freedom seems to be part of the easy energy fossil fuel era.
I agree. It takes a lot of energy to allow a government that permits individual freedoms. It takes a rich country to fund sex-change operations, and to even claim that everyone is equal.
https://desdemonadespair.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Freedom-House-report-2019-cover-1024×857.png
Yep—
Makes sense, that as it gets tougher for regular people to live a full life due to diminishing returns, leaders would reduce freedom out of fear of revolt. Controlling the masses will get more difficult though, as seen in France, Venezuela…
“A debt-fueled crisis is headed to Dubai, the trading hub of the United Arab Emirates…
“Despite Dubai’s diversification away from oil over the past few decades, the entire region is still dependent on energy revenues… the debt problems could sink the city.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/simonconstable/2019/02/26/multi-billion-dollar-debt-crisis-looms-for-dubai/#2478ffd537ab
I can believe this!
The overall game is played now about how to possibly bridge the following few decades of sheer instability in which fossil fuel/energy supply instability due to depletion would be revealed one way or another. That means in all aspects and at all plains that includes: global order, int payment and money-credit system, depleted biosphere at various regional intensities, demography .. etc.
In other words it’s about how to best transplant (hopefully from the old stakeholder perspective) the existing privileges into the future since it involves new game rules and pecking order. At this point only Russia and China*, possibly SKorea if they commit posses both the technology and overall socioeconomic realm to leapfrog into the future with breeder reactors (almost free fuel, little waste, good price vs coal/natgas).
—
*China runs both the entirely domestic (sort of the Russian-French concept) breeder program and was also recently selected to host that Gate’s US designed breeder-molten salt combo firstly in special demo and later also first commercial pilot plant there during 2020s
I am a little confused. Is this copied from an article?
?no what made you think that way?
Update: just learned that Gates small demo breeder reactor is under the Trump -> China sanctions currently, so another stoopid delay.. while the Russian experimental ran for ~35yrs, now the recently completed bigger* version ~.8GW has been connected to grid for past ~4yrs, they plan even bigger sized fleet deployment for late 2020s, because apparently in the meantime firstly continue mass production of latest 1.2GW VVERs, probably rushing to replace all the oldest graphite NPP designs left in the country.. and of course selling some hydrocarbons along the way..
—
* originally planned for mid ~1980s, stopped by that Gorbi mentally unstable character
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/27/indian-air-force-plane-crashes-in-kashmir-says-indian-police-official.html
‘Pakistan shoots down Indian jets, carries out airstrikes in Kashmir’
That comes on the heels of India launching attacks on Pakistan yesterday. Could it become a small or large scale war? Is this another sign of tension building up across the world due to diminishing returns?
According to former NSA spook John Schindler Pakistan can only fight a full scale war with India for a week before the regime collapses and will therefore have to make a decision on nuclear exchange within two days.
This is a disturbing thought. India could consider nuclear exchange with Pakistan in the very near term.
Modi is a typical Right-wing crank with delusions of grandeur/ omnipotence.
Below is a YouTube Video of a 90 year Norwegian woman in 1968 projecting into this time period; said “A nuclear war would begin in a way no one expected.” It was interesting from the standpoint that she described this time period very accurately, particularly in regards to the breakdown of morals between men and women (as compared to Norway in 1968). So it seemed like she gets a lot right, but whether that includes the nuke part, I guess we’ll find out.
Interesting! I have not run into this prophesy before. She may indeed have it right.
The German problem at the time of World War II was peak coal, just as the UK’s problem at the time of World War I was peak coal. There was not enough to go around. Someone had to be left out.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/52-peak-coal-in-uk-and-germany-led-to-world-wars.png
Now we seem to be coming to exactly the same “peak” problem again, but for coal and oil combined. Someone has to be left out. The Jews were the ones the Germans chose to leave out.
Somehow the system has to break down. War seems to have been a frequent outcome when there is not enough to go around.
My background is 100% Norwegian, through people who immigrated to the US from Norway. It has always been clear to me that God is somehow behind what is happening. The prophecy was made in 1968. 1968 is a special year for me; it is the year I graduated from St. Olaf College, a Lutheran College in Northfield, Minnesota, founded by Norwegian immigrants for their children.
“War seems to have been a frequent outcome when there is not enough to go around. ”
I have argued that it is downright mechanistic due to evolution. People are able to detect when the future is looking bleak. This turns up the circulation of xenophobic memes. In the stone age that eventually synched up the warriors for a do or die attack on the neighbors. Win or lose, the future was brighter after one of the groups was wiped out because there were fewer mouths to feed. There is lots more if you want to look it up. One place to start that may be easier to understand than the psychological mechanisms behind wars is here http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding
Fewer people is definitely one of the goals. The system reorganizes quite quickly around those who remain, even when brides were taken by force.
Imagine that the prices of goods fall due to technological innovation. The wages would be worth more. This is not impossible. already there are prototypes of houses printed in 3D and prices are expected ten times less. This could involve every technological sector. What do you think about it?
Prices of goods falling due to technical innovation is likely to imply that less human labor is involved in making these goods. Unfortunately, this is what makes the system collapse. You need actually employed workers who can buy they goods being produced. Producing goods with robots is often very cost effective, but it destroys the system.
To keep the system going, you want goods made with human labor, and lots of cheap to produce (using human labor) energy products. You don’t want a lot of metals and other depleting resources used. You also don’t want to be using crops, because they tend to deplete the soil and they require ever-more irrigation or other processes to allow production to rise with growing population. You also don’t want a lot of specialization or higher education required. Energy products that can easily be dug out of the ground (using minimally trained human labor and not much in the way of machines) are ideal, because they are basically “dig them and use them” products, not requiring a huge amount of support from from growing debt.
Unfortunately, Gail, what you are prescribing is not likely. Even such hard to automate jobs as picking fruit are going to robots. In my own sad experience, human workers in space have been displaced by robots before they even existed.
How to make an economy work when the value of labor falls to near zero is an unsolved but recognized problem. Supplemental income programs are being tried, but so far the results are not encouraging.
Part of the problem with highly disbursed work, such as picking up trash, is supervision. That might be offloaded to smartphones and programs.
A century ago, the “servant problem” was a major concern. Times change.
I read an article last week about the machines they are working for picking strawberries, I believe. Current state of the art is that they are able to pick 20% of the strawberries, and those they pick are too damaged for store sale in individual fresh packages. Also, the machines cannot distinguish good berries from bad ones. This does not sound like it is anywhere near ready for prime time. The machine also needs to be kept clean (safe from bacteria harmful to humans) and parts replaced as needed.
Machines are not some magical new force of nature. Machines are still subject to diminishing returns.
hk—can you begin to imagine the cost of putting/keeping a human worker in space?
> hk—can you begin to imagine the cost of putting/keeping a human worker in space?
It’s high. But the ratio of what they are producing to what they cost is very favorable. Even so, they almost certainly lose out to robots. Like the rest of the workers on earth.
Wouldn’t much smaller space machinery require much less energy to launch? Or if small enough, couldn’t they be launched from near-orbit balloons? And wouldn’t it be more practical to use space machinery strictly for visual analysis? For a much increased informational purview, rather to manipulate materials. The more useful information that could be gathered from minimally-sized and powered space machinery there is, the more purposeful could be the work of humans on earth. You could use a lot more human labor, a lot more energy per capita, increase debt more rationally…
> Wouldn’t much smaller space machinery require much less energy to launch?
Not if you want it to be useful. A 5 GW system has a mass of around 32,500 tons plus it needs around 11,000 tons of reaction mass to move it to GEO. If we are going to use power satellites to get off fossil fuels, it takes around 3000 of them. However, the energy to launch them is paid back in a couple of months, much faster than any other renewable source I know about.
> Or if small enough, couldn’t they be launched from near-orbit balloons?
No, just no. Balloons are no help to reach orbit.
> And wouldn’t it be more practical to use space machinery strictly for visual analysis?
That’s more or less what is being done now.
“If we are going to use power satellites to get off fossil fuels, it takes around 3000 of them. ”
Thanks. I have no idea about these subjects. But I was thinking of satellites not for supplying energy, instead, to give denser and perhaps more varied, systematic and sophisticated information back to earth, the only energy matrix that I’m concerned about. We simply have to govern the planet better. Short of that, I don’t see the use for any other source of energy than we currently possess.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCzS2FZoB-I
4000 dollars. Not a lot of metals and other depleting resources used.
Universal basic income is needed.
The difficulty is zoning and other local laws. People don’t want houses like these as their neighbors, because they fear that they will bring property values down. Also, governments will attach large charges based on their costs of water/sewer hookups, schools, and new streets, bringing the total cost up to far more than the cost of the printed house itself.
Governments don’t want housing valued that low which can’t have high property taxes extracted from it either.
Good point!
If you intend to LIVE in your home, not just fix it up & resell it, wouldn’t lower property values be a benefit to you?
Lower taxes for one, lower insurance payments, lower fees etc, higher property values means higher property TAXES & INSURANCE premiums.
If your on a fixed income & you’re aren’t going to roll over your home & sell it but just live in it, you get no benefit of having the price of your home rise, if anything, that’s how people get priced OUT OF THEIR OWN HOMES, TAXES they can no longer PAY!
Only those who’s home is just an INVESTMENT would want it’s value to rise so it can be sold at a PROFIT.
I see a confusion between keeping up places so as to protect property values rather than doing it because it’s the right thing to do.
Insurance values are based on the cost of rebuilding a similar-sized home in your area, I believe. They may also take into account low credit ratings of buyers, because these people tend to neglect upkeep on their home, and roll these problems into insurance claims. So I don’t think that insurance prices will follow home prices very closely.
Cities are unsustainable, as shown in the book by Rifkin ‘Entropia’. My mother, in Italy, has to spend 4000 euros just to repaint a house that is totally inefficient from the energy point of view and not recyclable. There are home prototypes in raw earth and printed in 3 D that guarantee optimal thermal insulation and can be easily recycled. The cost of materials is 900 euros.
https://tech.everyeye.it/notizie/gaia-casa-soli-900-euro-stampata-in-3d-utilizzando-terra-347766.html
Very interesting but with the obscenely high cost of land here, they are wasting way too much land around that little home. Low cost homes like that will be build cheek to jowl with little space between them. Instant SLUMS!
But that’s still much better than “living” in a shack build from trash that blows away with the first wind that comes along or “living” on the streets under newspapers.
With constant population growth, there is no way for everyone to have a home of any kind.
#1. priority is to STOP POPULATION GROWTH or anything else we do to help ourselves & the planet will be WASTED.
I have to question this. According to my practical experiments, I’d say you can build houses out of anything. It’s a matter of knowing how to do it, and that comes with design smarts. As to population: it could go down by itself if individualism didn’t get the upper hand (as it does now) over planned communities.
In this case the problem is not external to the system. (energy costs) but internal. It depends on the internal structure of the system. Could it be said that it is a cultural problem?
I think the issue is the physics of the system. The physics indirectly determines the culture.
Looking at the little homes, it seems to me that an apartment building would be a lot more practical solution. The units would be packed closely together, so much less heating and cooling would be needed. Less land would also be needed. In most cases, these would be built near other apartment buildings, keeping local homeowners happy.
I live in a rural village where there are no apartment buildings. Although there is an average level of education and a few house-flipper types, most people are more economically challenged than they realize. There are a few sheds left around from history that have more structural utility than is being realized. These, plus a much greater supply of habitable commercial sheds, could house the number of workers now challenged for housing…and more.
The village makes its income from tourism, so it’s historic appearance has economic utility. To create tiny housing for the village would require them to go behind the house and out of sight. It would be easy to create berms around the tiny structures to moderate their temps. These structures can generally be built or assembled by local people at modest cost. Apartments, despite their useful attributes in appropriate locations, would cost a lot more to build. They might not work too well here. (They might with highly sensitive location and a lot of agencies and individuals coming together to make it happen and work…likely a very hard thing to pull off.)
Septic is over capacity already, so I’d say folks would need to toughen up and start composting their waste in those tiny places. If the clueless community governance organizations can rouse themselves to see that composting is done adequately. Using roof water from the shed and/or the main house is a possibility.
People need to start moving closer together in existing housing. I know that we have an awfully lot of houses where children have grown up and left home. There are also an awfully lot of widows, widowers, divorced people, and never marrieds living separately. House sharing would free up a lot of housing. Or people could finish off part of their homes as apartments.
I advocate very actively for more density, more “infill,” in urban centers. I don’t see rural living as an “alternative” to denser urban living. It is merely an alternate reality based on existing infrastructure. It is NOT a proposal to go build more rural settlements. But if you’re part of a rural community with a few hundred residents, it’s easier to manage it optimally than it is to manage large cities, where all the unused (potentially usable) space is.
Read the previous debates first, it has been addressed numerous times already.
The scifi scenario you are painting about the combo of high wages and cheap plentiful goods has got the lowest probability, well actually almost zero.
What is going on today is either:
– universal basic income + gig economy with temporary quasi employment and some high tech goods availability, but otherwise usually everything shared, eco, and small
– neofeudal society without middle class
i can only print a document if there is sufficient ink in my printer to do so
i have to buy that ink–after somebody has packaged it, delivered it and so on
No doubt i could print a steak, or a house, but not unless stuff was in the printer reservoir to allow that
printers are not
repeat not
the same as lamps mass produced in Baghdad and marketed by Aladdin
Tea, Earl Gray! Hot!
The Leading Causes of Death in the World
As living standards improve, life expectancy is increasing and the most common causes of death have changed over time.
https://www.thestreet.com/world/leading-causes-of-death-world-14869811
. Cardiovascular Diseases
Number of deaths: 17.65 million
Share of deaths: 32.26%
2. Cancers
Number of deaths: 8.93 million
Share of deaths: 16.32
3. Respiratory Disease
Number of deaths: 3.54 million
Share of deaths: 6.48%
Respiratory diseases include deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, a disease of the lungs due to inhalation of dust
4. Diabetes, Blood and Endocrine Disease
Number of deaths: 3.19 million
Share of deaths: 5.83%
5. Dementia
Number of deaths: 2.38 million
Share of deaths: 4.36%
These are the deaths attributed to Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia
The others on order….lower respiratory infections, infants, diarrhea, road accidents, and liver diseases.
BTW, just reached that pedestrians and bicyclists outnumber for the first time auto occupants in road accident fatalities. Must be the smart phones drivers are always looking down at!😎
It seems to me that the diseases we die of today are caused by a form of over-nutrition. While people working outside all day long, and eating little processed food, could eat practically anything without it adversely affecting their generally fairly short life spans, the problem of “more calories in” and “less fiber in” than needed tends to add up over time. The more indoor work we do, the less we can tolerate a calorie dense diet. So we need more plant foods in the mix.
This brings to mind a program on NPR….the program study revealed that certain animals studied had a average number of hearbeats regardless that revealed an universal number of heartbeats of the order of @ one billion …the difference…the speed.
Seems nature has planned obsolescence built in the system.
My resting heartbeat is around 50 a minute, sometimes dropping to 45. When I was a young man, it was around 70.
Prognosis: I am either going to live a very long life or else the old ticker is going to conk out completely some day fairly soon.
100 beats per minute x 60 x 24 = 144,000 per day…
70 year life is about 25,000 days…
144,000 x 25,000 = 36,000 x 100,000 = 3,600,000,000
so we humans have advanced far beyond a “universal” one billion heartbeats in a lifetime…
I’m sure I have less than a billion to go…
Well, I found it on the web believe it or not…2007….that long ago!?
Compare an Elephant to a Teeny Shrew
Though big and little creatures look very different, below the surface there is a surprising unity. Biologists have compared the heartbeats of mammals and discovered that on average (this won’t apply to any individual, just to groups) elephants and shrews and most of the critters in between have a limit of about a billion and a half heartbeats in a lifetime and then they die.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12877984
The reason an elephant lives longer than a shrew is not because its heart beats longer. It’s because its heart beats slower. So it takes a few more years for the elephant to complete his or her up to one and a half billion beats.
Three scientists at the Santa Fe Institute, an interdisciplinary institute in northern New Mexico, took up this question a few years ago and discovered that if you compare elephants to lions to housecats to mice to shrews, you discover that heartbeats vary in a precise mathematical way.
Enjoy the read…see, I want making this all up….it’s based on Science!
i think i read somewhere that mammals have roughly the same number of heartbeats in a normal lifetime
ie a mouse and an elephant have the same number of beats, a mouse beats fast and lives 5 years, an elephant beats slow and lives 70 years or so
A doctor associated with nutritional company USANA said
“At the turn of the last century people were dying of infectious diseases, today people are dying from degenerative diseases.”
Hence the need for supplementation. Dr. Wentz to was shocked by some studies out of Russia studying cancer and mitochondria the conclusion by some very prominent experts in the field said we are eating rancid food.
Aramco CEO says oil industry facing ‘a crisis of perception’
Saudi Aramco’s chief executive said on Tuesday the oil industry is facing “a crisis of perception” and the views of some observers that the end of oil is near with the rise of electric vehicles are illogical and not based on fact.
Amin Nasser, CEO of the national oil company of the world’s top crude-exporting country, told an industry event in London that demand for oil is expected to increase substantially, driven mainly by the transportation sector.
“Important stakeholders believe that the entire world will soon run on anything, but oil. These views are not based on logic and facts, and are formed mostly in response to pressure and hype,” he said in a rare, strongly worded remarks.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/26/reuters-america-update-1-aramco-ceo-says-oil-industry-facing-a-crisis-of-perception.html
Little do those shareholders realize that the world can only function on oil and nothing else will replace it.
To a large extent, I think you are right. But it is possible (if you have enough of some other kind of energy) to make synthetic oil that is just as good as the natural stuff that comes out of the ground.
My car utilizes 100% synthetic oil 0/20 weight brand Mobile One. Believe this is derived from natural gas!
http://knowhow.napaonline.com/synthetic-oil-made/
How Synthetic Oil Is Made
Synthetic oil is made in the lab, thus each manufacturer takes different approaches. No manufacturer is about to share proprietary information about the process, but we can deduce certain facts about development without sounding like a chemistry professor in the process.
Full synthetic, or 100 percent synthetic oils, are usually extracted from crude oil or a byproduct of the same. In the case of Pennzoil, they have figured out how extract synthetic oil from natural gas.
For example, synthetic oil that is made from natural gas, via a gas-to-liquids (GTL) process, has even better high temperature oxidation stability and lower volatility, which is critical for both low viscosity and high performance motor oils
Just like conventional oil, synthetics are refined. From there, the differences become apparent as synthetic motor oil is distilled and purified, before it is reduced to its basic molecules.
Interesting stuff. Back in the day my cars conventional oil used 10w/30 weight oil or 10w/40 weight . O/20 weight is extremely “thin” lightweight” stuff. Modern car are produced in such close tolerences they require it to coat the parts I’ve read.
Unbelievable discussion about car oil on the web….don’t get me on that topic!
Gas to liquids processes raises the cost (probably uses a whole lot more energy). But natural gas in the US tends to be cheap compared to oil. Synthetic oil is still expensive. I don’t know what pollution issues are related to the gas to liquids process.
“Gas to liquids processes raises the cost”
It depends. On an industrial scale (billion dollar Sasol plant in Qatar) the capital cost is around $10/bbl. Making the hydrogen for a bbl takes about two MWh. *IF* you can get the cost down to $10/MWh, then you can make synthetic fuel for $30/bbl. (The cost to suck CO2 out of the air is low compared to the energy in the hydrogen.)
” pollution issues”
No worse than other refineries, probably better.
If you can get the cost down to $30 per barrel, you still will have governmental agencies wanting/needing to take twice that to keep their operations going, and providing subsidies to the army of people who cannot be fed on non-oil incomes.
Qatar has been supplying the natural gas at a trivial cost, I would expect. If you actually have to pay the full cost of natural gas elsewhere, I suspect the costs would be higher.
Lubricating oil is a really small use of oil. Critical of course, but small. Making synthetic versions from natural gas is by the 100-year old F/T process. It is very well understood.
Sure it is poasible to make synthetic lubricating oils. But, is it economic? Are the resources and energy that go into the Fischer–Tropsch economic? Natural gas being just one example. Natural gas is mostly a by-product of oil production. Therefore, natural gas is dependent on oil production. Is oil production economic? It is easy to throw around terms like F/T as if they are magical processes. It is also easy to say a process is “well understood” but, that doesn’t make it sustainable or even possible without fossil fuels. If fossil fuels are not economic to produce then, synthetic oils are not economic to produce.
Natural gas does seem to be more available than oil. Qatar is a place that seems to have a lot of natural gas, but not as much oil. Oil is a more valuable commodity than natural gas, so it can make sense to use quite a bit of natural gas to make an oil substitute, especially if it is a product that people are willing to pay a little extra for and isn’t used in great quantity. But whether it can be made economically outside of Qatar is an open question.
The general problem with natural gas is that it is horribly expensive to ship. That is usually the majority of the cost. The cost comes from one of the following:
1. Natural gas by pipeline. Pipelines shipping the natural gas from extraction, to processing center, to users.
2. Liquefied Natural Gas. Added to the above series (but taking away some of the pipeline distance) is (a) natural gas compression and cooling to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, (g) transport by ship, and (c) regassification.
3. Compressed natural gas is often used as a transportation fuel. Gas is only compressed (not chilled to a low temperature) and stored in large thick-walled containers for shipping. In this form, it is about only half as expensive as diesel or gasoline. (This may be partly lower taxes; I don’t really know.) It tends to be used where vehicles can come back to a home base for refueling.
Steel is required, regardless of which of these forms is used. It needs fossil fuels to be made.
> Sure it is possible to make synthetic lubricating oils. But, is it economic?
Yes. Even today.
> Are the resources and energy that go into the Fischer–Tropsch economic? Natural gas being just one example. Natural gas is mostly a by-product of oil production.
That’s not the case in the US or Qatar.
> Therefore, natural gas is dependent on oil production. Is oil production economic? It is easy to throw around terms like F/T as if they are magical processes. It is also easy to say a process is “well understood” but, that doesn’t make it sustainable or even possible without fossil fuels.
You have to assume a huge energy input source like power satellites or StratoSolar.
> If fossil fuels are not economic to produce then, synthetic oils are not economic to produce.
That does not follow from chemistry and physics. From the economics view, you don’t expect synthetic fuel unless there are compelling reasons to quit using fossil fuel. (Lube oil is a nit in this context.)
“Something has to “give” with the system”
That’s why i’m taking my early retirement next year. I want to at least get something back before the system breaks for good. I have a small business that helps fill in the void.
https://twitter.com/profwolff/status/1100451175953022976
Wolff is a classic.
Gave a speech at a rally we organized.
A bit left for our current MSM audience here.
Actually, way left.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-debt-unsustainable-path-192804468.html
Fed Chair Powell: ‘The U.S. federal government is on an unsustainable fiscal path’
“This year, there is very little sign of any engagement on major budget issues,” Joseph Minarik, former chief economist at the Office of Management and Budget during the Clinton administration told Yahoo Finance’s The Ticker (video above). “It looks like we’ll wait — as we have historically — we’ll wait until the last minute.”
The answer to this problem is much, much bigger tax cuts but this time for only the top 5 income producers. Those 5 billionaires will pay nothing, in fact the tax payers will gift them 1 trillion each. That ought to fix the debt problem because everyone at the bottom will then be able to afford 1 Kit Kat a year. It’s called the super microscopic quark trickle down effect.
We have all of the baby boomers retiring at the same time that young people are having trouble supporting themselves, much less children plus elderly parents.
Something has to “give” with the system, even if we didn’t know about the energy problem.
Ugo Bardi with a new blogpost about the meme Greta Thunberg.
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2019/02/winning-war-of-climate-communication-is.html
Greta Thunderberg has the same initials I do, and the last name ends with “berg.” At first, I thought he might be talking about something I said. Perhaps I should watch the news.
She—-
Or Bardi?
I meant Ugo Bardi. I know him fairly well. Greta was new to me.
She’s the new Malala—an MSM darling. There’s probably going to be a Nobel Peace Prize in it for her somewhere down the line.
She does call out our MSM clueless hacks.
At least firing on a few—– .
“Malala” is an adult now. We have to call her Yusufzai.
To her credit, Greata tells the truth about EVs. The sheer making of them is a non starter. But a society that has food on the table and emits no CO2. That might just remain a dream.
Define EVs, 1.7-3ton cars with 40-100kWh batteries per single occupancy vehicle don’t solve anything (as full scale 1:1 replacement), however scooters and bikes with 1/50th of it can.. but scaling down NOW from frivolous opulence trap voluntarily and orderly needs ~autarky leaning antsy like organisation or very smart median population – societies, and that’s what we don’t have nor even attempted to do long term..
Again, it’s not technology or energy problem, it’s humanoid’s lesser development status nature now hitting a ceiling of the possible within their rank. Not sure any future primates or mammals are going to solve it in future millions of years. Eventually, I’d bet on some family-clan type of tiny mammals having a chance at techno civ.
As expected the Lima Group summit hosted in Bogota, Colombia on Monday became a collective Venezuelan regime change strategy session following the weekend showdown over US humanitarian aid entering the country, which led to riots on bridges at border points Saturday.
Previously promising to announce at the meeting of the over 12 American states — most of which have recognized US-backed Juan Guaido as “legitimate” leader of Venezuela —”concrete steps” and “clear actions”, Vice President Mike Pence underscored that President Trump stands behind Guaido “100 percent” after a face-to-face session with the opposition leader, the first since unrest began. Predictably Pence unveiled new sanctions targeting Caracas while calling on allies to freeze all assets of its state-owned oil company PDVSA, and further called for the United Nations Security Council to act.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-25/pence-unveils-new-anti-maduro-sanctions-vows-return-every-last-dollar-opposition
I wonder where our leaders are getting their marching orders from? The usual places and people I would suspect.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/23/the-danger-of-president-pence
Just think of all that heavy black gooey oil just sitting there surrounded by socialists for the taking. They are going to be so glad to get some democracy they won’t know what to do with themselves with so much freedom.
No doubt W. Bush had it in for Venezuela as well but he already had his little self created quagmire to keep him busy.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2011/06/13/silly-sanctions-against-venezuela-boost-hugo-chavez/#65bcbc3158fb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOsABwCrn3E
I think you are right Gail – we need the spice to keep flowing and we need control of it. How far will it get us? I don’t think “us” are invited for the ride these people have planned.
Don’t hold your breath on a “regime change” in Venezuela.
You will probably die.
MSM has been notoriously wrong —–
Don’t hold your breath, and get in plenty of popcorn.
I notice that all the usual suspects on the left are up in arms about this Venezuela intervention, while on the right there is a chorus of people blaming two decades of socialist incompetence for the mess. Anything that John Bolton has his grubby paws on has always got to be viewed with suspicion, it goes without saying. At the same time, Uncle Sam can’t afford to let the Russians and Chinese get another a foothold in the Back Yard.
I’ve been wondering whether Maduro is a dictator or if he’s a national savior who is trying to continue Chavas’s plan to Make Venezuela Great Again. And I’ve also been wondering whether the Deep State, if they are successful in unseating Maduro, will attempt something similar against Trump, particularly if the US economy goes pear shaped. Or do they already have Trump on a fairly tight leash now?
You need more real time contacts.
Go there for a few months– you will learn something.
I spent quite a bit of time in Colombia.
Really, the MSM nonsense goes away.
People still read MSM?
Really, Tim?
Your reading it now.
Ah, I had a moment of Satori.
You are right.
🙂
Even if they don’t read the MSM, people still look at the pictures.
Uhm not quite.
There is an interesting development in terms of very long term political realignment taking place in the US. While most of the msm outlets try to portrait Sanders or Tulsi as the second coming of Lenin, increasingly the left spectrum tends to look through it and question their stance as limited hangout opposition, place holders of the legitimate political alternative choice, establishment puppets etc.
Such development takes decades, decades and few decades more inside total msm blackout (and distance from the effects of such extra territorial actions) as it was the case within the US. There were few early sparks around the rush into the Iraq war, but it was utmost marginal force. It grows very slowly. In fact Donaldo performed a bit of such icebreaker action on the right wing spectrum, although one could speculate it was largely just calculated not fully genuine position.
Jimmy Dore ran a critique of Sanders few days ago..
But going more to the problem at hand, lets recall this gem, although it is possible Prof. Sachs is just upper layer player for some elite faction, he had his mark previously in the 1990s on emerging economies but that aside..
Sachs is not the brightest porch light on the block.
I don’t know what to think. Obviously I see the importance to access and control of energy especially in a diminishing environment. On the other hand I am jaded from being lied to and our recent adventures in Iraq, libya, syria, etc.
The swamp creatures are all still there and beating the drum so I’m suspect.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/0bd9a97c699fe5987d5312aa3b11ef7e03ad74f12a29bbe5de484d2d0dc2bd9c.jpg
Then again:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/26/uk-hottest-winter-day-ever
Almost as if Earth’s climate system is a dissipative structure that is getting less stable as the energy flux through the system decreases with the Sun’s radiation output.
Weird.
And there is a poleshift going on too.
Weird or not, such unusual weather provides us with opportunities to think about and motivation to learn about what it is that makes our weather less regular and predictable that the average shallow-thinking person assumes it should be.
Not a lot of people are aware of it, but the oceans, with their powerful currents and their huge heat storage capacities, play major roles in determining the weather on land. For want of something snappier, it has been named “the hot water bottle” effect. Mention the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation to your drinking companions in the pub or, even better, to political candidates who knock on your door promoting green this, that and the other, and you’ll likely be greeted with blank stares or looks questioning your sanity.
And then there’s “space weather”, which as far as we know is largely the result of variations in energy reaching the earth from the sun due both to variations in the sun’s output and modulations caused by the position of the moon. You get very strange looks from ordinary people in the supermarket checkout when you mention “space weather” to them, but it’s solid science. Even NOAA has its own Space Weather Prediction Center.
Tis true. Nothing lasts forever. When the cl 1m ate chan ges – why do people get alarmed? Everything else does, over time.
because 4 bn people live on the edge of the sea
that’s why
This caught my attention….doubt it really will change anyone’s mind or actions
OSLO (Reuters) – Evidence for man-made gg has reached a “gold standard” level of certainty, adding pressure for cuts in grases to limit rising temperatures, scientists said on Monday.
“Humanity cannot afford to ignore such clear signals,” the U.S.-led team wrote in the journal Nature Clge of satellite measurements of rising temperatures over the past 40 years.
They said confidence that human activities were raising the heat at the Earth’s surface had reached a “five-sigma” level, a statistical gauge meaning there is only a one-in-a-million chance that the signal would appear if there was no wa.
Such a “gold standard” was applied in 2012, for instance, to confirm the discovery of the Higgs boson subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe.
Benjamin Santer, lead author of Monday’s study at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said he hoped the findings would win over sks and spur action.
“The narrative out there that scientists don’t know the cause of climate change is wrong,” he told Reuters. “We do.
It Won’t spur action…we NEED to burn fossil fuels to support 7.8 billion people on the planet. I agree with Gail on this topic. Cutting back means we must end BAU.
Most will not survive that transition….
We have absolutely nothing we can do to fix this problem, apart from dying off ourselves, as far as I can see. The model of how bad CO2 impacts will be is based on the assumption that the die-off won’t be near term. So we really don’t know what we are supposedly going to prevent.
The story does make it easier for politicians to impose carbon taxes, handicapping their own economies, to the benefit of others. Perhaps those of use who do not live in Europe should applaud this research, to the extent that it somewhat moves the inadequate energy product problem to Europe and other parts of the world willing to impose high carbon taxes.
The beautiful people love to stay in beautiful spots like….
Aspen airport’s overall carbon footprint up nearly 31 percent
The overall figures were broken down by category. For example, emissions applied to commercial airlines and private-jet operators account for 94.7 percent of the total, or 77,227 metric tons in 2017, a 32.5 percent increase compared with 2014. The figure also takes into consideration ground-support operations handled by the airlines, such as the vehicles that transport baggage between the terminal and aircraft, vehicles used for de-icing services and the like.
“The biggest increase is in aircraft emissions, and [that’s] attributable to jet fuel,” Dunkelberg said.
“We need to work closer with the airlines as well as corporate aviation to get as much of a reduced carbon footprint as possible,” Kinney said.
A few factors are influencing the emissions increase that relates to actual air travel, he said. Airport activity is on the rise, with more flights during peak and off-seasons than in 2014. The corporate jets flying into and out of Aspen have gotten bigger, he added, and the airport is seeing more long-haul flights than it used.
https://www.aspendailynews.com/news/aspen-airport-s-overall-carbon-footprint-up-nearly-percent/article_0665da8c-30df-11e9-ad32-e3fa8cf4c138.html#ath
Aspen is a lovely little town…lot of greenies/permaculture hipsters.
What is written here mirrors the whole Airline Industry..without it there wouldn’t be a global economy as it stands….long live BAU
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xAZkjmKAqD0
The backfire effect is probably what most people on here experience when trying to bring some reality to the conversation; this is particularly evident when talking about ‘green energy’…..I usually end up hearing ‘….but Tesla…blah blah blah’.
‘What should be evident from the studies on the backfire effect is you can never win an argument online. When you start to pull out facts and figures, hyperlinks and quotes, you are actually making the opponent feel as though they are even more sure of their position than before you started the debate. As they match your fervour, the same thing happens in your skull. The backfire effect pushes both of you deeper into your original beliefs’
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
“Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong.”
— Oscar Wilde
Must have been a rebel and or contrarian.
Wall Street Loses Faith In Shale
To Wall Street, the shale industry has lost a lot of its allure. A decade’s worth of promises have failed to materialize, and Big Finance is cutting some of its ties with smaller shale drillers who have not delivered.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the shale industry only saw $22 billion in new bond and equity deals, down by more than half from 2016 levels, which was a much worse time for the market.
The steep decline in new debt and equity issuance is a sign that major investors are no longer rushing to finance unprofitable shale drilling. It’s worth noting that this is a new development. For years Wall Street financed unprofitable drilling, holding out on the promise that rapid production growth would eventually pay off.
Shale wells suffer from precipitous decline rates, with as much as three quarters of a well’s total lifetime production coming out in the first year or two. After an initial burst of output, shale wells enter a steep decline.
Of course, this has been known since the beginning and Wall Street has long been fully aware. But major investors hoped that shale companies would scale up, achieve efficiencies and lower breakeven prices to the point that they could turn a profit.
However, that has not been the case. While there are some drillers that are profitable, taken as a whole the industry has been cash flow negative essentially since its beginning in the mid-2000s. For instance, the IEA estimates that the shale industry posted cumulative negative free cash flow of over $200 billion between 2010 and 2014.
Taking a step back, explosive shale growth was only possible because in the context of the post-2008 financial crisis and the response by the Federal Reserve to drop interest rates close to zero, something Bethany McLean argues in her book, “Saudi America.” Cheap money financed the debt-fueled shale revolution.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Wall-Street-Loses-Faith-In-Shale.html
Quote is from a friend: “He said the dairy market is collapsing. I asked why and he said feed prices had spiked and milk prices couldn’t keep pace. This didn’t affect him because his farm grows all its own feed. He said Northeast Pennsylvania is the smallest dairy area in the Northeast region of the US. Many of the dairy farmers quit the business after becoming wealthy from gas money. Fracking companies bought them out, or started paying them royalties. New York, and elsewhere in the northeast (possibly the New England area) have stricter anti-fracking laws, so this hasn’t happened there…yet.”
This is fascinating! It’s a small indicator for where the economic system might be heading. And the less the ramifications are thought through, the more mayhem can be expected.
Whoever gets caught in the middle seems to get squeezed. Under the circumstances, I doubt that young people want to go into the business.
“The ballooning edifice of corporate debt securities across the world is of ever lower quality and potentially more dangerous than it was at the outset of the Lehman crisis, the OECD club of rich nations has warned.
“Global issuance of company bonds has doubled to $13 trillion over the last decade and standards have deteriorated dramatically, raising the risk of “fire sales” and a self-feeding chain reaction in times of stress.
““In the case of a downturn, highly leveraged companies would face difficulties in servicing their debt, which in turn, through higher default rates, may amplify the effects,” said a detailed report by the OECD’s corporate finance division…
“The OECD suggested that the easy money climate of recent years may have flattered the ‘interest rate coverage ratios’ of companies and given investors a false sense of security. Higher real rates would expose the fallacy of this in short order.
“The report was written by the head of the OECD’s corporate affairs division, Mats Isaksson, a world expert on company debt.
“It is a meta-study of the known scholarship from central banks and universities across the world. It commands authority and will confirm the worst fears of global regulators.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/02/25/corporate-debt-bubble-could-spark-devastating-fire-sale-bonds/
“Be careful what you wish for. That’s the phrase haunting the world’s largest investment banks as they lick their wounds after a painful fourth quarter. For years, bankers complained that markets were too calm.
“But when bonds and stocks tumbled in the last few months of 2018, almost all trading divisions suffered. It doesn’t bode well for business if markets stay choppy.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-global-banks-breakingviews/breakingviews-investment-banks-have-a-problem-with-volatility-idUKKCN1QE202
And of course, pension funds and other investors depend on this debt. I expect that derivatives could be badly affected for a spike in defaults.
“Concerns that China had imposed an import ban [on Australian coal] flared late last week after a Reuters report said five harbours overseen by Dalian customs – Dalian, Bayuquan, Panjin, Dandong and Beiliang – would no longer allow Australian coal to be cleared. The report cited an unnamed official as the source of the information. Given coal is Australia’s biggest export earner, the news from Reuters sent the Australian dollar tumbling…”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/24/australias-trade-minister-raises-concerns-about-chinas-coal-processing-delays
If I were China, and my demand for coal was down as much as it seems to be, I would be cutting off coal imports as well. A drop in demand will tend to lower prices. Better they drop in Australia than in China.
Here’s a bit more about China restricting seaborne coal imports:
“In response to news on China’s Dalian port restricting seaborne coal imports, Wood Mackenzie’s experts provide the following commentary.
“Wood Mackenzie senior consultant Yu Zhai said:
““We estimate China’s seaborne metallurgical coal imports to reduce by 3 million tonnes (Mt) in 2019 as a result of China’s coal import restriction. The high quality of seaborne coal, and difficulties securing alternative coal domestically, should insulate coal exporters from much deeper cuts, despite strong signals from China. Australia would account for most of the volume reduction as it represented over 75% of China’s seaborne metallurgical imports in 2018. Australia exported around 36 Mt metallurgical to China last year, makign up 20% of Australia’s total exports.
“China’s seaborne thermal coal imports is estimated to reduce by 15 Mt in 2019, taking into account the risk of wider coal import restriction. Australia could also be most affected by a similar restriction.”
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/china-restricts-seaborne-coal-imports/
Australia is in for problems, I can see.
Excess steel a problem, too:
“China’s steel mills may have taken a wrong turn by adding millions of tonnes of new high-end capacity just as the country’s car sector, a key steel consumer, undergoes its first contraction in decades, cutting metal demand. Hot-rolled coil, steel that is heat processed into metal sheets used for car bodies and household appliances, was a steady profit driver for mills but orders are now slowing down, two major steel mills and several traders told Reuters.”
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/hot-rolled-mess–china-s-steelmakers-hit-the-skids-as-car-sales-slow-11294128
“As China’s economic growth falters, policy makers may have something else to worry about. Prices are falling in the industrial sector, raising the risk that deflation could take hold. In January, The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard on the Street” column highlighted the links between China’s stubborn industrial overcapacity and plunging price growth.
“Producer prices edged up only 0.9 percent in December from a 2.7-percent gain in November, it said. Iron and steel sector prices fell for the first time since 2006 despite several years of capacity cutting, while nonferrous metals dropped for the fourth month in a row, according to the paper.”
https://www.eurasiareview.com/27022019-china-fights-capacity-and-deflation-pressures-analysis/
Perhaps cranking up corporate debt-growth will ward off the deflationary spiral for a bit longer though:
“The mountain of debt encumbering China’s economy looks set to grow after private companies piled on leverage at the start of 2019. Having spent two years trying to de-leverage — reduce debt piles — in an attempt to rebalance its economy China appears to have changed its policy. Its a risky decision given the already staggering levels of leverage that exist in the Chinese economy.”
https://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-decision-to-re-leverage-its-economy-is-a-major-policy-u-turn-2019-2?r=US&IR=T
No kidding!
“Decades of subsidies have led to profligate overuse of oil and gas by Saudi Arabia and its neighbors. They’re trying to correct that now, but it’s not easy.
“Countries one through four on the list of the world’s biggest oil consumers in 2017 are pretty much who you’d expect them to be — the world’s four biggest economies. 1 No. 5 is something else:
“Saudi Arabia has just 33 million people, less than one-fourth as many as Russia, the country just below it on the list. Yes, it’s rich, but its gross domestic product ranks in the high teens worldwide, not fifth. By global standards, then, it clearly uses an inordinate amount of oil.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-25/persian-gulf-countries-are-having-their-own-oil-crisis
our peasant forebears had meat one/twice a year if they were lucky
now many people want/expect meat every day
all a matter of getting used to certain things
The Saudis lived with desert heat/cold as a matter of everyday existence. Then30 years ago they found they could have aircon. Now they are putting aircon in outside stadiums. Same applies to water supplies.
Look round the cityscape of every hot country and you see aircon units hanging from every window. They’ve been promised that it will last ‘forever’, same as all of us, with whatever we’ve got used to in the previous generation or two.
they burn oil like there’s no tomorrow—which there isn’t. But we all do that to a greater or lesser degree
all hell is going to break loose when folks find it’s not forever
True about peasants, – beans all the way, with a bit of pork in winter – but I have finally found an accurate statistic for meat consumption in a 16th c French town: two whole sheep per person per annum, with a little beef and unspecified amounts of pork. No stats on fish.
Quite respectable. However, it isn’t broken down by social class, so probably the richer citizens gorged, and the poorer were still stuck on beans…….
Another curious and surprising statistic: across Europe, about 60% of townspeople owned their own homes, even if they were more or less tiny shacks.
interesting comment on owning your own home
In UK prior to the dissolution of the monasteries, virtually all land was owned by either the king or the church
you paid rent to one or the other no matter what your status
China had little home ownership until recent years. Also little individual land ownership. As I under stand the situation, in recent years, local bureaucrats have been selling off former agricultural land for commercial/industrial use to get revenue for their government projects, without having to raise taxes. This keeps tax rates low but encourages over development.
Yet we Brits must still pay a tithe to the BBC – the so called TV licence fee. Don’t watch it? They won’t believe you.
bbc is unique
listen to bbc world service sometime
it has to be paid for
How much do the Royals cost you?
Stop sending them to NZ please….
“bbc is unique it has to be paid for”
Monopoly propaganda, don ‘t need it, don’t want, why should I pay for it?
maybe you’d prefer to be fed a diet from something like Fox news instead?
I’d prefer news that is unbiased and without an anti white cultural marxist agenda. I gave up supporting the BBC via the licence fee after watching Nick Griffin being set up on Question Time. The current demonisation of “far right” Tommy Robinson would have the same effect.
people like that don’t need ”setting up”
they set themselves up–then complain about being set up afterwards
I’d need to know what you mean by “People like that” before attempting a direct response. Nick was naive to go on Question Time, where the rest of the panel and the audience were primed to make him look bad, that’s for sure. However, I don’t know why you would say he set himself up.
All BBC interviews have a bias. Anyone who does not agree with the cultural marxist views of the BBC is given a torrid time by the interviewer. Anyone agreeing with BBC views isn’t.
As an example of BBC bias, take the issue of Brexit. Do you really believe the BBC gives unbiased coverage of this? UKIP is the party responsible (via the votes they were taking from the Tories) for the Brexit vote in the first place. Yet their leader, Gerard Batten, has been deplatformed. How many times have you seen him interviewed on BBC news? All we ever hear from are Remainers. When was the last time the MSM even informed us of the implications of May’s deal, by which the UK would remain bound by the rules of the EU but without any voting rights, i.e. we’d become a vassal state?
UKIP misses the point, as do all brexiteers. They want (and Ive heard this said personally many times) a return to ”what we used to be”— Times were ”good” back then. Somehow the thought of empire lingers on in the minds of those who cant see the world for what it is. (in a state of energy collapse). Somehow that is ”unconnected” with the Brexit nonsense
well, times have moved on. We’ve got no coal left and oil is is rapid depletion.
If we hadnt found oil back in the 80s the UK economy would have been on a level with Greece by now.
But that doesn’t matter to Farage and Co—Rees Mogg screams Brexit—and moves his finance company to Dublin. All grandstanding
the UK is a trading nation
all trade is a function of energy
the UK is in energy deficit—ie we import/use more energy than we produce. That condition can only worsen as time goes on.
We cannot feed ourselves, so must trade for our food imports. Solar panels and windfarms won’t produce food.
We currently exist (eat) on the trading profits we make between imports and exports (the ”energy trade” difference)
we get that by having open borders close at hand–food, goods, people and so on. I use hotels a lot—the EU staff are slick efficient and helpful—unlike the brits who are mostly rubbish at that. Our farms are EU run mostly.
there are pluses and minuses to this of course. We stay afloat currently by having more pluses. If we screw up our trading platforms we are likely to slip into the minus side. Europe will lose the incentive to trade with UK—costs too much and too much hassle at the borders.
Companies will up and leave here for the same reason. Factories now run on JIT—delays will stop that.
You cant have all pluses and no minuses–so of course the EU can be annoying. This has been magnified out of all proportion I think.
Nobody owes us a living.
We lose the advantage of our best trading assets, the English language and basic common decency–which still counts for something. We planted that around the world, but we can’t live on it.
Before you scoff at common decency, go live somewhere where it isnt so, try it for a while. Compare Canada with the USA–decide where you prefer to be right now. Or in the future.
Cross from the USA into Canada and you feel youve transported to another world.
Or maybe you prefer your laws to be made by bronze age gods.
You are correct that Brexiteers want a return to the old times. However, few are old enough to remember Empire. What they want is a return to the UK being a white country rather than a multi cultured one such as has been forced upon them. Brexit was about immigration more than anything. Most likely they are wrong in believing that Brexit would improve their lot, given white Brits would prefer to be surrounded by Poles rather than Pakistanis.
The main thrust of your argument contains two false dichotomies. The first is that the UK faces a choice between being a member of the EU and trading with Europe or not being a member of the EU and not trading with Europe. The second is that the UK faces a choice between trading with Europe or not trading at all. The British pound has already dropped twenty percent since the Brexit vote, meaning even if the EU imposed tariffs of twenty percent following Brexit our goods would return to the same relative price as they were three years ago. What tariffs we would place on European goods would be up to us.
We’ve got no coal left and oil is is rapid depletion.
Correct, and the energy situation is as bad or worse with the rest of Europe. Our energy imports do not come from Europe. Given that we operate a trade deficit with almost every nation in the EU, our trade with the EU must necessarily leave us with less money to spend on imported energy.
We currently exist (eat) on the trading profits we make between imports and exports (the ”energy trade” difference)
We don’t make trading profits, at least not with the EU. We trade at a massive loss with the EU. We do, however, trade at a huge profit with the rest of the world. So who needs who the most?
the EU staff are slick efficient and helpful—unlike the brits who are mostly rubbish at that. Our farms are EU run mostly.
Can’t deny there is some truth in this. We’ve always been barbarians compared to the civilised Europeans. Most of our farms are British run though, unless you are talking about fruit pickers. Our laziness compared to Eastern Europeans is due to our welfare state.
Before you scoff at common decency, go live somewhere where it isnt so, try it for a while. Compare Canada with the USA–decide where you prefer to be right now. Or in the future.
Cross from the USA into Canada and you feel youve transported to another world.
Now you are insulting Americans! I’ve not travelled to North America, but all the Americans I’ve met have been decent people. It would probably surprise you to know that the best friend I ever had was a (black) American and my best friend now is also an American.
Or maybe you prefer your laws to be made by bronze age gods.
I think you’re losing it.
some if not all of your response is debatable–too much to write up and argue about anyway
the last point isn’t
Right now I’m watching the unfolding Cohen saga. Trump is obviously all that Cohen says he is. that’s been proven before all this anyway
My comment did not insult Americans (though it might have been interpreted as such on re reading it.) Everyday Americans are of course decent people. I apologise for inferring otherwise
The lack of common decency centres on the man at the top—-in stark contrast to the previous incumbent of that office,
Though Trump had the majority vote, more or less, so they must think like he does.
Americans Ive met here are terrified (seriously) of the situation there, even too scared to go back
(quote: Here I feel safe)
(they prefer it here–EU or no EU)
If Trump is deposed, for whatever reason, Pence replaces him. I can only ask you to read up on Pence’s holy record concerning my comment on Bronze age gods.
We are pretty much agreed on this forum that the USA cannot sustain itself in its current indebted form. Only the date of collapse is debatable
Debt is a call on future energy supplies which will not be there over the next (decade at most?) Therefore there must be an economic collapse.
We cannot say exactly how that will unfold, only that denial of it will be universal, and Pence will tell everyone to pray harder (Trump will just wave his bible at the crowd)
When that doesnt work, the only recourse will be martial law to suppress inevitable civil disorder. There’s no other option.
With Pence as dictator. Or someone like him
You still deny bronze age gods? With 46% of population believing that the world is less than 10k years old?
In Pence’s head they are very real. He cannot be alone with another unrelated woman in case his virtue becomes tainted in god’s eyes? C’mon–check his thinking on gays etc—even Trump said he’d hang the lot if he could. (Handmaid’s tale looming?)
sleepwalking into a fascist state is very easy—all it takes is for good men to do nothing.
If i was the only one saying it—i’d shut up. But there’s people far cleverer than me saying the same thing about bronze age belief systems
The church or crown owning that much land was a pretty recent development in Tudor England. During the 13th-14th century a majority of land was held by yeomen.
i was under the impression that William the conqueror took it all and doled it out among his mates for helping him, and gave some to god to hedge his bets
not a subject Ive gone into deeply though
That did happen, but they had to sell most of it off to pay for maintaining their military power and the castles and churches they built.
Norman “The Voice of Reason” Pagett! 🙂
You have a way of cutting right thru it Norm, thanks!
lol–thanks Flipper
I try—but it does get me slagged off sometimes
truth hurts I guess
In fact, our primate forbearers didn’t eat much meat either. I post a link before to Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians published by the Scientific American. I think we are kidding ourselves about being able to change our diet as much as we have, toward much more meats and also toward more processed food. The diet change, as well as today’s lack of exercise, leads to a whole lot of health problems.
Primates have a completely different intestine anatomy than humans do, and they are able to ferment fiber into short chain fatty acids at a high rate, while the rate for humans is about 1-5%, varying between individuals. They possess a far larger colon as well as a full cecum, while the human colon is far smaller and the cecum is basically vestigial.
Plant foods that humans eat are predominantly cooked, so there is far less need for intestinal processing. Also, our intestinal biome helps process the foods we eat. But it doesn’t overcome all of the issues, particularly those of excessive meat and processed foods in the diet.
“Forks over Knives” is website promoting the eating of minimally processed (other than cooking) of plant foods. This is an article about the changes in medical claims observed, when an actuary sent out links to the website and books of recipes to 500 Medicare policyholders.
The big advantage that meat had in the diet was that it tended not to be poisonous, whereas plants were often poisonous. When a group of early people was on the move through unfamiliar territory, meat was a handy non-poisonous fallback. But when people were stationary in an area, (or migrated around within a known area), they learned which plants were good to eat and which ones were not. They could rely on plants to a much greater extent than those in new territory.
I am not convinced that a person’s diet needs to be 100% vegan, just that we are eating way too much animal products in today’s food mix.
The big advantage meat has is that it is more caloricly dense and nutritionally dense, as well as having chelates minerals with massively better absorption. Switching to a diet of primrarily fatty meat and fish was what allowed humans to evolve larger brains by both providing more calories and using fewer calories on a larger colon. The cooked food hypothesis you frequently reference has been falsified by archaeology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology.
No, cooking plant food allowed humans to evolve larger brains. Eating fatty meat and fish doesn’t “cut it.”
You may be wrong
Man goes off hunting—his girlfriend stays home in the cave with an armful of kids to look after
Man gets killed and eaten, his reversal of fortune so to speak, but that still leaves hungry kids at home
What’s a girl to do?
She scavenges for food that can’t run away or eat her—and the most nutritious food on her particular market is shellfish, of which there is an abundance. Not only does she gather lots of shellfish, but she starts using tools to open the shells. So evolution starts to kick off along the shoreline.
deep water is dangerous.
It’s well known that seafood is brainfood—the kids watch tools being used. Mom’s a genius!
Stop talking nonsense about meat.
The human body is mainly built for processing cooked plant based food and fruits.
Jumping the shark trying to motivatie your own bad food choices and tastes does simply not cut it.
The longest living people on planet earth with the least amount of lifestyle diseases eat mainly plant based diets.
Give Gail a break with your dietary misinformation.
Furthermore, if you look at more relevant recent evolutionary ancestors which are much closer to the anatomy of a modern human, such as neanderthals, their diet was predominantly meat:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=14&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwim-rL069ngAhUNNd8KHas8B_IQFjANegQIBxAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sciencedaily.com%2Freleases%2F2019%2F02%2F190219111704.htm&usg=AOvVaw2aYUSebW1zUd0hJKbiguUH
If you look at the health of most Americans, you will conclude something is drastically wrong, however.
Actuaries for Sustainable Healthcare https://www.actuariesforsustainablehealthcare.org have concluded that meat consumption needs to be scaled way back. Also, foods need to be much less processed.
Yes, something is drastically wrong: too many refined carbohydrates and sugars.
Restricting access to meat is and has always been a strategy for those in power to make their subjects / slaves weaker, less intelligent and more passive. This can be seen in Hindu India, Imperial Rome, modern Global Civilization, and countless other examples. The pseudoscience supporting it is post hoc propaganda to further this agenda.
“The pseudoscience supporting it is post hoc propaganda to further this agenda.”
It is no different from the religious scriptures in India justifying the restriction of meat to the Kshatriya caste.
If there is not enough land area and fresh water to raise animals for meat, they must come up with some way of restricting consumption of meat products. Religious rules are one way. I suppose other religious laws also held back on animal products, since a cheeseburger is not kosher.
“If there is not enough land area”
There is some land area that is only suitable for raising animals.
There was an interesting article on Huffpost today “Meet The Ostriches.” I looked up one of them and emailed him thus:
Subject Climate change does not matter
Dear Dr. Happer:
I don’t think people such as yourself have thought the fossil fuel problem all the way through.
Fossil fuels are a limited resource. If we want to continue our indulgent, high energy lifestyle, we have to replace them with other sources regardless of whatever CO2 may be doing (or not doing) to the climate.
Best wishes,
Keith Henson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Henson#Energy_systems
cc ourfiniteworld.com
I’m not a vegetarian but your claims seem to be spurious. If vegetarianism was in any way detrimental to human physiology it would manifest as such in current vegetarians.
Before modern foods, humans lived on everything from 100% meat and fat to corn and beans. I.e., they can and will eat a wide variety.
Now it is tricky to get what you need out of a purely vegetarian diet, but it can be done.
One sure thing is that most people like meat, as can be seen in the higher meat consumption that goes with an increasing standard of living.
If Saudi Arabia doesn’t want its government overthrown, it needs to provide some sort of subsidies to most of the 33 million people. Saudi Arabia’s population in 1950 was something like 3.9 million people. All of the rest are excess, without all of the oil wealth. In fact, the population may need to be lower that that.
i think pre oil saudi pop was only 1.5 m
a really unpleasant thought
I love their dates too—I guess theyll stop exporting them
“India Inc. is not doing well. The Business Standard reported that the declared corporate results have been unusually poor. The third quarter (Q3) profit results for the current year shows a pattern of slowdown experienced in other countries currently, marked by falling margins.
“In India, the moderation in economic activity manifested itself in lower air passenger traffic, low vehicles sales, smaller capital goods production and in general deceleration of industrial growth. IIP growth and export growth have both been lower than before recently.”
https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/india-economy-all-not-well-48474/
“Indian markets dived on Tuesday after the country’s military aircraft conducted air strikes on militant camps inside Pakistan, escalating tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
“The confrontation follows the Feb. 14 suicide bombing in Kashmir, when 40 Indian paramilitary police were killed by a Pakistani-based militant group. New Delhi blamed Islamabad, which denies having a role in the attack.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/india-kashmir-markets/update-1-indian-markets-slump-after-air-strike-on-militant-camps-in-pakistan-idUKL3N20L1VC
A person gets the impression that India is overstating its economic growth rate.
According to the article, food prices are low, so the income of farmers is low. The farmers are the backbone of demand, so it is low.
At the end the article talks about increased government spending in advance of elections. Sounds like more debt.
The article mentions that India has very poor infrastructure (such as roads, electricity transmission lines, pipelines). Adding a little intermittent electricity will do nothing for this problem. It may provide a little light for children to do their homework in the evening, but it can’t fix the structural problem.
I need a loan…WHO you Gonna Call?
Kushner Cos. Seeks Federal Loan in Biggest Deal in Decade, Sources Say
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law relinquished his management role at Kushner Cos. and divested from some assets in the family business when he became senior White House adviser. At that time the company held more than $500 million in loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Bloomberg
Jared Kushner’s family real estate business is seeking federal financing for a $1.15 billion real estate deal, Bloomberg reports.
Kushner Cos. has been in talks with federal lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac about backing for its purchase of more than 6,000 rental apartments in 16 properties in Maryland and Virginia from private equity firm Lone Star Funds, two sources told Bloomberg. It’s not clear how much money the company is seeking.
It’s the firm’s biggest deal in more than a decade, The Wall Street Journal reported
Kushner Cos. properties have been the target of several lawsuits. New York state is investigating charges by tenants that they were illegally forced out of their apartments in a Brooklyn building owned by Kushner Cos. so their homes could be sold as luxury condos.
Last year, New York City fined the company $210,000 for filing false construction documents claiming there were no rent-protected tenants in apartments the firm planned to sell
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kushner-company-federal-loan-115-billion-real-estate_n_5c7223c0e4b06cf6bb268c1d
President Donald Trump….”wE will NEVER be a Socialist Country”…the above seems pretty much social to me if you are on the receiving end 🤗.
I am sure that having connections helps, when you want a loan.
I was reading yesterday that rents are considered “services,” in the breakdown between goods and services. Buyers of rental housing have been trying to extract as much money from these renters as they can, knowing that they have few alternatives. Raise the rents by 4% per year, for example. Or, if it is possible, fix them up a bit and sell them as condos. The non-elite workers lose out in the process.
Some studies really provide ridiculous conclusions:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5579607/
Myth or Reality—Transdermal Magnesium?
“However, we cannot yet recommend the application of transdermal magnesium.”
And what is the secret of the spas? That you feel so relaxed after a bath in their waters? E.g. the mud spa Piestany in Slovakia where the mud deposits from the river Vah are used for the treatment of ilnesses:
https://www.sorger.sk/uploads/images/kupele-piestany/nove/kupelny-ostrov/kupele-piestany-liecive-bahno-1.jpg
The same process happened in the places of the birth of the first civilizations, where the rivers constantly supplied magnesium to the populations in the form of mud sediments.
If magnesium was in the mud, it probably got into the fruits and vegetables that grew in the mud. This is helpful for human health.
Trying to water plants with desalinated water leaves plants (and people) without adequate magnesium, unless it is added somewhere else along the line. Israel uses quite a bit of desalinated water. A December 2018 articles says, Deficiencies in desalinated water could lead to increase in heart attack deaths
Disagreements between the Health Ministry and the Water Authority have delayed implementation of a pilot to add magnesium, an essential mineral, to desalinated water for two years.
The proportion of desalinated water has increased since the study was done, so results may be worse, later.
I guess that such mud containing magnesium contributed to the development of the human brain and nervous system – the magnesium has got a crucial impact on them:
https://www.lifeextension.com/Magazine/2018/6/Reverse-Clinical-Measures-of-Brain-Aging/Page-01
I use transdermal magnesium as a supplement. It works great, much better than the oral sources (pills or powders).
I have a banana in my cereal every morning. Lots of magnesium.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47366718
India ‘strikes Kashmir militants in Pakistani territory’
“Credible intel [intelligence] was received that JeM was planning more suicide attacks in India. In the face of imminent danger, a pre-emptive strike became absolutely necessary,” he said.
More evidence of tensions rising around the world.
Not enough to go around!
this was an interesting passage in my latest link :
There is much insecurity in the food system—the world has 3 months of food supply, and when food stocks fall (after a crisis, or when biofuels are popular, for instance) price volatility increases. In addition, the next 3 billion people that will be added to the population will be born in food insecure places. So, while there is a drive toward increased local foods in some areas, this will not be possible in the 40 or 50 countries that cannot feed themselves. Change will be difficult if the subsidies in certain crops and fertilizer continue,
I just ate a delicious piece of dark chocolate…
what brand was it?
my gingivitis does not allow dark chocolate all i can do is dream about it
From a BTU (not net even) perspective world must have peaked a long time ago, right?
Google that idea, I was a practicing dentist for 41 years and never heard that one.
Dennis L.
This is what one website says:
https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=1&ContentID=4062
The Best and Worst Foods for Your Teeth (and gums)
The good guys:
Fiber-rich foods
Cheese, milk, plain yougurt other dairy products
Green and black teas
Sugarless chewing gum
Foods with fluoride
The bad guys:
Sticky candies and sweets.
Starchy food that can get stuck in your teeth.
Carbonated soft drinks.
Substances that dry out your mouth. (Alcohol and many medicines.)
plan b ? https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/19934IGS_in_DC_summary.pdf
The UN seems to have lofty goals for “sustainable development,” even though that is an oxymoron. A related goal is reducing inequality. Sounds like motherhood, apple pie, and more energy per capita.
Frackers Face Harsh Reality as Wall Street Backs Away
Key lifeline for smaller operators fades, as losses pile up and prospects dim for big investment return
The once-powerful partnership between fracking companies and Wall Street is fraying as the industry struggles to attract investors after nearly a decade of losing money.
Frequent infusions of Wall Street capital have sustained the U.S. shale boom. But that largess is running out. New bond and equity deals have dwindled to the lowest level since 2007. Companies raised about $22 billion from equity and debt financing in 2018, less than half the total in 2016 and almost one-third of what they raised in 2012, according to Dealogic.
The loss of that lifeline is forcing shale companies—which have helped to turn the U.S. into an energy superpower—to reduce spending and face the prospect of slower growth. More than a dozen companies have announced spending reductions so far this year, even as crude-oil prices have rallied more than 20% from December lows. More are expected to tighten budgets as they release earnings in coming weeks.
The drop in financial backing is especially being felt by smaller, more indebted drillers. But even larger, better-capitalized frackers are facing renewed investor skepticism about whether they can keep spending in check and still hit growth and cash-flow targets.
Shares of Continental Resources Inc. fell 5.4% Tuesday after the shale company, founded by billionaire Harold Hamm, disclosed that fourth-quarter spending was almost 10% higher than analyst expectations.
Wall Street support allowed shale companies to persevere through a plunge in oil prices that began in 2014, eventually helping the U.S. surpass Saudi Arabia and Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil, with 11.9 million barrels a day in November, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Banks have provided financing when producers spend more cash than they take in from operations, something that has happened every year since 2010. They also help companies hedge their future oil production to lock in prices and avoid market volatility, and provide them with revolving loans backed by future oil and natural-gas prospects.
But in 2016, federal regulators concerned about banks’ exposure to shale drillers tightened standards for lending to oil-and-gas companies after dozens went bankrupt amid the drop in commodity prices. The U.S. Treasury Department guidelines require lenders to regard loans as troubled if a company’s total debt reaches more than 3.5 times a producer’s earnings, excluding interest, taxes and other accounting items.
Many banks now prefer to keep operators below 2.5 times earnings, bankers and lawyers said. Still, 20 companies were at 2.5 times or higher in the third quarter, and the industry remained more indebted at that time than during the same period three years ago, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
“There was a frenzy back then to fund the next up-and-coming story,” said Scott Roberts, the head of high-yield investments at Invesco Ltd. , which has more than $800 billion in assets under management. “Too many people got burned, so the appetite for that is not there today.”
With U.S. oil prices at about $57 a barrel, even a modest increase in the cost of borrowing is enough to wipe out any potential profits this year for some companies. Many companies don’t have much wiggle room if they intend to meet investor demands for better profitability. And unlike a few years ago, shareholders have no interest in paying for unprofitable shale drilling.
While many shareholders have urged shale executives to live within their means—spending only the cash they generate from operations—they haven’t welcomed announcements of declining production, cash flows or growth.
Shares in CNX Resources Corp. , a small company that drills in Pennsylvania, are off more than 20% over the past three weeks after it announced spending reductions that some analysts predict will lead to output declines by the end of this year. A spokesman for CNX said the company expects production to rise as much as 6% from the fourth quarter of 2018 to the same period this year, as well as annually compared with 2018, even as it is cutting spending.
Concho Resources Inc., one of the largest operators in the booming West Texas region, fell more than 13% in the two days last week after it released earnings that failed to meet analyst expectations for cash flow. Concho also said it plans to cut spending 17% from previous guidance, a reduction that would lead to oil output growth of 15% from the fourth quarter of 2018 to the same period this year, instead of 25%.
The bond between U.S. producers and financiers doesn’t appear to be completely broken, and the strongest shale companies continue to attract Wall Street backers. Industry bellwethers such as EOG Resources Inc. have begun to generate free cash flow and don’t need outside funds. They also have locked up land for future drilling locations and have less need to pay out billions for new inventory, a significant source of capital demands in previous years.
“Late last year, the investment community had a more bearish outlook, even with great improvement in operating efficiencies,” said Tim Perry, global co-head of oil and gas for Credit Suisse AG . “Yet recently the industry has performed well relative to other sectors, so the beginning of a recovery may be happening now.”
Still, in the past six months, many companies have been punished after turning to capital markets to help pay for acquisitions or other strategic priorities. In 2016, such moves were welcomed by investors who favored expansion.
“We are seeing sources of funding dry up, with liquidity being harder to come by, particularly debt,” said Regina Mayor, who leads KPMG’s energy practice. “I don’t think they have that kind of get-out-of-jail-free card like they had last time.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/frackers-face-harsh-reality-as-wall-street-backs-away-11551009601?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=1
I agree that this is a good article. I linked to it above.
Breakingnews: Labour now allows the option of second referendum vote on Brexit, trollolol, haha.
So, now we have two completely self destructed political systems in two major countries (UK+FR), some would probably add Spain, Italy and Greece are somewhat poseur defiant yet wobbly, Slovakia is still in midst of color revolution attempt.. , ..
European dis-Union
You forgot corrupt-to-the-hilt Sweden. Hacked elections and govt orgs, SEC and DOJ breathing down the necks of the telecom and banking sectors. Govt + private debt in “top” #2 or #3 of the world.
+ Massive immigration to boost “growth” by more lending and fire sale of govt assets, scandalous taxation of the productive middle class to feed the bloated government and finance mass immigration.
What could possibly go wrong here? Apparently nothing, since it is exactly what the Swedes voted for.
It’s a proud and noble thing to be a Swede these days.
🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪🇸🇪
I think of Sweden as the home of the hope for the “circular economy.” This is based on the belief that everything can be recycled; we need relatively little energy to supplement the system. There was a 2014 workshop that I spoke at in Sweden that seemed to have that as a theme. Of course, this kind of belief is endorsed by quite a few outside of Sweden as well.
Circular economy? What is that? Does it even make sense outside the minds of brainwashed eco-hippies?
The Swedish govt environ-marxists clearly haven’t done even rudimentary economic, energy and thermodynamic accounting for.
The lunatics expects BAU to continue function once the US cuts the life/credit line. I kid you not, Their arrogance is limitless. I expect the Swedish currency to take a steep nose dive any time soon. Nordic Venezuela 2.0, here we go.
“The Swedish govt environ-marxists clearly haven’t done even rudimentary economic, energy and thermodynamic accounting for.”
here in the USA, the Green New Deal boosters also haven’t…
hopefully the American loonatics won’t get very far…
Luckily you got the fossil energy, tech sector, El. Trumpo and the MIC to counterbalance for the utopists delusions.
You guys got an empire to run and keep BAU:ing along. Not to sound like a complete sycophant, man I am glad the US can keep the worst excesses from the evil offspring of the Swedish nazi collaborators in my country at bay.
https://www.pinmart.com/assets/1/6/DimRegular/268front_1k_17.jpg
I’m not sure you have that 100% correct. I think of Swedish corruption as politicians that got double reimbursed for the EU apartment. But it is true that you can’t work yourself rich here. But then again your probably lucky just to be born here and not in India for example.
Or born as an Alien in a civilisation living in utmost bliss and utopia.
In the objektive reality, however, I was born in Sweden, because it is where I was conceived and then born.
Are you trying to hard sell Sweden back to me? 🙂
Then you yanks better put the hammer down on the corrupt govt, big businesses and politicos over here.
Can I haz direct democracy, the Swiss variant plz.
“Staten och Kapitalet”
https://youtu.be/P5vvrUrBuQQ
The circular economy seems to be a close relative of the perpetual motion machine. Sounds good, until you figure out how well it really works!
Yes, it’s a perpetual motion machine that circulates ever increasing amounts of garbage.
It is an eco-marxist garbage sorting slacktivist consumerist jihad circular “economy” of pure unadulterated trash we have going on here.
Pure comedy gold for the BAU end game show.
The EU is the Titanic and Greece was the Iceberg; that was the moment when the ugly inner workings of the Brussels brute-ocracy was ripped open for public viewing. Greece was not bailed out, the German/French/italian etc banks were and the proletariat (taxpayers) of the entire EU were left to pay the bills while the masters of the universe waltzed away; debt and penalty free.
George Carlin…you’re not in the club!
The EU doesn’t seem to be long for this world, does it? But exactly what events will cause it to fall apart are less clear. Brexit alone probably isn’t enough.
Our David being David is at it again….love it….
Trump a ‘Delusional Madman’ Who Will Destroy US Economy: David Stockman
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-delusional-madman-destroy-us-230112147.html
Donald Trump Will Not Make America Great Again
Speaking to Yahoo’s The Ticker, Stockman lambasts Trump as “delusional,” saying that when you have an “unhinged madman in the Oval Office…anything is possible.”
Just days ago, Stockman, who himself once frequented the White House, warned that investors should flee the stock market as an inevitable collapse and recession is imminent. A combination of economic headwinds and an “unhinged fellow” at the helm means that this time a recession can’t be held at bay by monetary forces..
How many Presidents has Mr. Stockman been warning us about….???
The Stock market should have caved in years ago…we are dealing with unknown mystical forces in the Universe….
In late stage capitalism, Crazy Donnie may be as good as we get.
Somehow, Trump’s intuition may prove to be close to right. Trump hasn’t added new wars, unlike most recent presidents. Increasing governmental debt using a big tax cut was quite possibly a good short term move. Also, Trump realized that continuing to raise interest rates in the fourth quarter of 2018 was not a good move. If Trump weren’t President, we would Mike Pence, and that would not be an improvement, IMO.
Trump may be waiting until just the right moment in his re-election campaign to start a war–presumably with Iran, in which case we are talking about air strikes and US-supported uprisings, not “boots on the ground.”
Don’t think so—
If you are observant, Iran hold way too many “trump” cards.
“… to start a war–presumably with Iran…”
no… obviously it’s setting up to be Venezuela…
Freedom!
uh…
(oil)…
I can’t imagine what effect a Venezuelan coup would have on the many many Caribbean island nations that now get subsidized Venezuelah oil. hOWEVER, NOBODY i SPEAK TO FROM THE AREA SEEMS TO BE IN ANY WAY CONCERNED. (cap-lock error). If you don’t count those who are rooting for a US-backed coup! I’m learning how incredibly stew pd nearly everybody is!
“As Iran marked the 40th anniversary of its Islamic Revolution, a white-turbaned Shiite cleric at one commemoration targeted President Hassan Rouhani, a fellow clergyman, with this sign: “You who are the cause of inflation; we hope you won’t last until spring.”
“Already lashed by criticism over his collapsing nuclear deal and renewed tensions with the US, the relatively moderate Rouhani faces anger from clerics, hard-line forces and an ever-growing disaffected public that now threatens his position.
““We need someone who creates jobs and firmly pushes the brake pedal on rising prices.””
http://www.evartha.in/english/2019/02/25/economic-crisis-irans-president-faces-calls-to-resign.html
Yep, a bankrupt 4 times guy, who has ripped everyone he has done business with, is probably better than Pence, a religious fanatic.
Yes, exactly…have they had this conversation yet?
Classic movie scene..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zZct-itCwPE
YES THEY HAVE
“Mein Fuhrer, I can walk!”
In my search I was never able to find one bankruptcy under his name
I was wrong– it was not 4 times.
It was 6:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2016/live-updates/general-election/real-time-fact-checking-and-analysis-of-the-first-presidential-debate/fact-check-has-trump-declared-bankruptcy-four-or-six-times/?noredirect=on
(Trump told Washington Post reporters that he counted the first three bankruptcies as just one.)
David Stockman doesn’t seem to have any understanding of our energy predicament. He seems to believe that 20 years from now, BAU can continue. Perhaps that is his problem.
David Stickman has been crying “wolf” for so long he’s looking like a wolf! Fur and all…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PrGTWAxY7lE
Of course, no one wants to face the ending of BAU….the cost is too high….
So, put it all on Credit Card until it blows up….hopefully after ones in the hereafter!😛
The financialization of everything, which will facilitate the flow of capital, energy, you name it to the top even faster than now, will help kicking the can for a long time.
https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/the-financialization-of-everything-how-finance-is-reshaping-the-rules-of-the-game/
The rentiers will have all the control. They don’t need too much resources to live on. The show will continue and it will mostly be non elite workers who will die.
But somehow the elite workers will need to eat, have fresh water, and cook part of their food. Keeping warm in winter would be nice as well.
That takes much less effort. Beside, without fossil fuels, they were still treated that way by human labor
Cannot see how the rent collectors will be able to collect much rent when the 99% are bust. “This sucker good go down” springs to mind, and possibly within 48 hours… Most rentiers carry debt obligations too.
Some will be paying rents to the end. The game is set up in a such way that even if 90% of the renters do not pay rent, the remaining 10% can make it up.
The rentiers run business like that – to reduce their tax burden they buy unprofitable business deliberately so the income is offset by the losses. So, in a pinch, the unprofitable parts could be quickly disposed off.
I don’t think the situation is anywhere near that extreme. If 10% don’t pay, perhaps the 90% can make it up. You exaggerate.
He is talking about fractional reserve banking. Just write off the worthless debt and BAU tonight baby.
But if 9 to 1, write-offs leverage against the bank’s capital used in calculating its Tier 1 capital ratio. If there is not enough in the denominator, the bank must cut back.
A SRSrocco REPORT issued last week analyzes ExxonMobil’s earnings.
https://srsroccoreport.com/exxonmobils-u-s-oil-gas-financial-train-wreck-producing-shale-is-destroying-its-bottom-line/
EXXONMOBIL U.S. OIL & GAS FINANCIAL TRAIN-WRECK: Producing Shale Is Destroying Its Bottom Line
With the move into shale in 2018, US capital expenditures have shot way up.
https://srsroccoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Exxon-US-Total-Oil-Production-vs-CAPEX-2016-2018-768×598.png
In fact, quarter by quarter, expenditures have shot way up:
https://srsroccoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Exxon-US-2018-Quarterly-Liquid-Oil-Production-vs-CAPEX-768×574.png
Now. ExxonMobil (with only 115,000 barrels per day of shale liquids production out of 551,000 barrels per day in US liquids production) is already spending far more in Capital Expenditures than in total US earnings.
https://srsroccoreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/ExxonMobil-US-Total-Earnings-vs-CAPEX-Spending-2018-Pie-Chart-768×477.png
If it weren’t for international earnings, ExxonMobil would be in terrible shape.
Did our previous Sec of State get to unload his ExxonMobile stock? That would be a benefit for putting up the trump. If he did he really slipped out in time.
Yep, saw that.
SRSrocco often gets bad press from the Peak community, but not always.
The WSJ has an article today that is extremely negative on future investment in oil and/or gas companies that use fracking.
Frackers Face Harsh Reality as Wall Street Backs Away Key lifeline for smaller operators fades, as losses pile up and prospects dim for big investment returns
The article goes on to mention a 2016 change made by federal government bank regulators.
This is one of the forces that is holding down lending to oil and gas companies drilling in shale.
Gail, I would love to see a version of BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy that has oil production figures that do NOT include ‘shale oil, oil sands and NGLs’. In the 2018 review, the only region that showed significant increase 2017-18 (exc. Africa due to recovery in post war Libya) is North America which does include a large volume of non-conventional oil. What would the graphs look like for conventional oil only?
there’s been almost no increase since 05
I’d like to hug that analyst who predicted in early 2000s that they are going to print and wrestle out of mother Earth all these sticky tight/alt oils and natgas onto some quasi make believe economic plateau till mid-late 2020s. He was correct, deserves throwing ‘fossil war hero’ celebration event in his name, lol.
I would still like to see analysis of the figures….
For what it is worth, this is a chart I put together a while ago regarding US crude oil production through 2017, with and without tight oil from shale. It will exclude NGLs, ethanol, refinery gain, etc.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/us-crude-oil-production-by-type-through-2017.png
Non-fracked US crude oil remained fairly level through 2017. US fracked oil in 2018 is up.
world oil is up since 2005, but I suspect almost all of the gain is the 4 million bpd of LTO that we see here in the US chart… oh wait…
US now is approaching 12 million bpd so the LTO gain is more like 7 million bpd since 2005…
amazing numbers…
of course this LTO is much more expensive to extract than conventional oil…
and surely even conventional oil is more expensive to produce than in 2005, because EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) has been necessary just to keep production level…
the bottom line is that the world is deeply into diminishing returns on probably almost all types of resource extraction, and Peak Oil is the most important diminishing return of all…
total world oil production may be up, but the net (surplus) energy is not up…
perhaps it is the net (surplus) energy in Natural Gas, which is growing a lot in production, that is keeping BAU limping along for now…
“renewable energy” is definitely not what is keeping BAU alive…
“the bottom line is that the world is deeply into diminishing returns on probably almost all types of resource extraction”
Art Berman likes to call it “Oil’s Retirement Party”.