The climate change story is true in some respects: The climate is indeed changing. And CO2 emissions do seem to affect climate. Burning fossil fuels does indeed make a difference in CO2 levels.
The problem I have with the climate change story is that it paints a totally inaccurate story of the predicament the world is facing. The world’s predicament arises primarily from too little affordable resources, especially energy resources; climate change models tend to give the illusion that our problem is one of a superabundance of fossil fuels.
Furthermore, the world economy has no real option of using significantly less energy, because the economy tends to collapse when there is not enough energy. Economists have not studied the physics of how a networked economy really works; they rely on an overly simple supply and demand model that seems to suggest that prices can rise endlessly.
Figure 1. Supply and Demand model from Wikipedia.
Attribution: SilverStar at English Wikipedia CC BY 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
The quantity of energy supply affects both the supply and demand of finished goods and services. History shows that the result of inadequate energy supplies is often collapse or a resource war, in an attempt to obtain more of the necessary resources.
Climate scientists aren’t expected to be economists, but have inadvertently picked up the wrong views of economists and allowed them to affect the climate models they produce. This results in an over-focus on climate issues and an under-focus on the real issues at hand.
Let’s look at a few issues related to the climate change story.
[1] Growth in energy consumption and in world GDP are very closely linked. In fact, energy consumption seems to be the cause of GDP growth.
If we look at the relationship between World GDP and energy consumption growth, we see a close correlation, with energy consumption increases and decreases often preceding GDP growth changes. This implies a causal relationship.
Figure 2. World GDP Growth versus Energy Consumption Growth, based on data of 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy and GDP data in 2010$ amounts, from the World Bank.
The reason why this close relationship exists is because it takes the “magic” of energy consumption to make the physical changes we associate with GDP growth. It takes energy to transport goods. It takes energy to heat goods, whether to refine metals or to cook foods. Refrigeration is similar to heating, except that heat is moved out of the space that is to be cooled. Electricity, of course, depends on energy consumption.
We cannot expect the relationship to be as close at an individual country level as at the world level, because service economies tend to require less energy per capita than manufacturing economies. If a government sees that energy supplies are running short, it can direct the economy to become more services-oriented. This workaround can keep the local economy operating fairly close to normally, at least for a time.
Longer-term, an economy that has been hollowed out by a lack of energy supplies is likely to find that a substantial share of workers are earning only very low wages. With this reduced buying power, many citizens cannot afford to buy expensive goods like homes and cars. This lack of purchasing power tends to hold down commodity prices of all kinds, since finished goods are made with commodities. It is this lack of purchasing power that tends to hold down oil prices and other energy prices.
[2] There are two very different views of our energy future, depending upon whether an analyst believes that oil and other energy prices can rise endlessly, or not.
Figure 3. Two Views of Our Energy Future
There is substantial evidence that the second view is the correct view. Nearly every time the price of oil rises very much, the US economy has tended to head into recession. And forecasters tell us that while some countries (oil exporters) would be winners with higher prices, on average the world economy will tend to shrink. Oil importers, especially, would shrink back in recession. Figure 4 shows a recent chart by Oxford Economics with the conclusion that oil prices cannot rise very much without adversely affecting the world economy.
Figure 4. Chart by Oxford Economics on their view of the impact of oil prices reaching $100 per barrel. Chart shown on WSJ Daily Shot, April 25, 2019.
Climate change modeling has inadvertently incorporated the opposite view: the view that prices can be expected to rise endlessly, allowing a large quantity of fossil fuels to be extracted. Of course, if fossil fuel prices are expected to rise endlessly, then expensive renewables such as wind and solar can become competitive in the future.
[3] To date economists and their policies have had pretty close to zero success in reducing world CO2 fossil fuel emissions.
Figure 5. World Carbon Dioxide Emissions for selected groupings of countries, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data. Growing Asia is my grouping. It is BP’s Asia Pacific grouping, excluding Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. It includes China and India, among other countries.
A popular view of economists is, “If every country limits its own CO2 emissions, certainly world emissions will be reduced.” In practice, this does not work. It simply moves emissions around and, in the process, raises total world emissions. A carbon tax sends high-carbon industries to Emerging Market nations, helping ramp up their economies. The country with the carbon tax on its own citizens then imports manufactured items from the Emerging Market nations with no carbon tax, aiding the Emerging Market countries without a carbon tax at the expense of its own citizens. How reasonable is this approach?
When Advanced Economies transferred a significant share of their industrial production to the Growing Asian nations, the growth rate of industrial production soared in these countries, at the same time that it stagnated in Advanced Economies. (Sorry, data are not available before 2000.)
Figure 6. Percentage increase over prior year for Industrial Production, based on data of CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis. Advanced Economies is as defined by CPB. My Growing Asia grouping seems to be very similar to what it shows as “Emerging Asia.”
This soaring production in the Growing Asian nations led to a need for new roads and new homes for workers, in addition to new factories and new means of transportation for workers. The net result was much more CO2 for the world as a whole–not considerably less.
If we calculate the savings in CO2 between the date of the Kyoto Protocol (1997) and 2017 for the US, EU, and Japan (the bottom grouping on Figure 5), we find that there has indeed been a savings close to 1.0 billion tons of carbon dioxide over this 20-year period. Unfortunately, Figure 5 shows:
- Growing Asia added 9.0 billion tons of CO2 between 1997 and 2017
- Middle Eastern oil producing nations added 1.1 billion tons of CO2 in the same period, and
- The Rest of the World added 1.5 billion tons of CO2.
So, what little CO2 savings took place in the US, EU, and Japan during the 20 year period between 1997 and 2017 were dwarfed by the impact of the ramp up of industrial growth outside the US, EU, and Japan.
[4] Probably the single most stupid thing world leaders could have done, if they were at all concerned about CO2 emissions, was to add China to the World Trade Organization in December 2001.
In looking at world CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, we can see a distinct bend occurring in 2002, the year after China was added to the World Trade Organization.
Figure 7. World CO2 Emissions with Trend Line fitted to 1990-2001 data, based on data from 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
The fitted trend line shows that emissions were growing at about 1.1% per year in the 1990 to 2001 period. Once China, with its huge unused coal reserves, was added to the World Trade Organization, both China’s coal production (Figure 8) and its coal consumption (Figure 9) soared.
Figure 8. China energy production by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data.
Figure 9. China’s energy consumption by fuel, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
With the extra “demand” from China for roads, homes, airports, and new factories, oil and other energy prices soared in the 2002 to 2007 period. Energy prices were again high in the 2011 to 2014 period, after the Great Recession was over. These higher energy prices (see Figure 10 below) encouraged drilling for new oil and gas, such as that from shale formations in the United States. This further helped raise world fossil fuel consumption and thus world CO2 emissions.
Figure 10. Historical inflation-adjusted oil prices, based on inflation adjusted Brent-equivalent oil prices shown in BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
[5] One way of seeing the truth of the close tie between the growth in energy consumption and economic growth is to observe the dip in world CO2 emissions at the time of the Great Recession of 2008-2009.
If a person looks at any of Figures 5, 6, 7, or 8, it is easy to see a clear dip in CO2 emissions at the time of the Great Recession. What seems to happen is that high prices lead to recessions in oil importing nations. These recessions lead to lower oil prices. (Note the dip in prices in Figure 10.) It is the fact that high prices lead to recessions in oil importing countries that makes the belief that energy prices can rise endlessly seem absurd.
[6] The European Union is an example of a major area that is fighting declines in nearly all of its major types of energy supplies. In practice, energy prices do not rise high enough, and technology does not help sufficiently to provide the energy supplies needed.
Figure 11. European Union energy production versus total energy consumption, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
In the chart above, the colored amounts in the lower part are the amount of energy produced within the European Union, shown in layers, based on BP’s evaluation. The black line at the top is the amount of energy consumed by the European union. The difference between the black line and the colored part is the amount that must be imported from somewhere else.
The problem that the European Union has had is that nearly all of the energy types that the EU has been producing have been declining in spite of higher prices and improving technology. Coal is the EU’s largest source of energy, but it has been declining since before 1965. Oil, natural gas, and nuclear are also declining. Hydroelectric isn’t very significant, but its supply is staying more or less level.
The only category that is rising is “Other Renewables.” This category includes biofuels, wind and solar, and wood and trash burned for fuel. Except for the wood burned as fuel, these are what I would call “fossil fuel extenders.” They are only possible because we have fossil fuels. They help reduce the size of the gap between what is produced and what is required by the economy, but they come nowhere close to filling the gap.
There is controversy regarding how wind and solar should be counted in equivalence to fossil fuels. BP data treats the output of wind and solar as if they replace somewhat less than the price of wholesale electricity (worth about 3 to 5 cents per kWh). The International Energy Agency treats wind and solar as if they only replace the fuel that operates power plants (worth about 2 to 3 cents per kWh).* In practice, the IEA gives less than half as much credit for wind and solar as does BP. In exceptionally sunny places, solar auction prices can be low enough to match its value to grids.
It would make sense to treat wind and solar as replacing electricity, if the systems were set up to include substantial storage capacity. Without at least several days of storage capacity (the situation today), the BP method of counting wind and solar overstates the benefit of wind and solar. Thus, the value of Other Renewables to the EU tends to be overstated by the BP methodology used in Figure 11.
[7] There are huge differences in CO2 growth patterns between (a) countries whose governments have recently collapsed and (b) countries that are growing rapidly.
Government Collapse Related Countries. Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine are all countries whose central government (the Soviet Union) collapsed in 1991. Romania was “only” a country that was dependent on the Soviet Union for imported oil and other trade. These countries all saw a major fall in industrialization after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Ukraine has been especially hard hit because it has never been able to replace the industry it lost with new industry.
Figure 12. Selected countries with falling CO2 emissions since 1990, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
As I see the situation, the Central Government of the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 because the Soviet Union was an oil exporter, and the price of oil had fallen too low for an extended period of time, leaving inadequate funding for investment in new productive capacity. Russia was able to recover better than the other countries shown because once the price of oil rose again, it was able to again ramp up its oil production and exports, supporting its economy.
Examples of Rapidly Growing Countries. If we consider the CO2 patterns of a few growing Asian nations, we see very different patterns than those of the countries attempting to recover from the collapse of the Soviet Union’s central government. The CO2 emissions of the Growing Asian Countries have been rising rapidly, relative to 1990 levels.
Figure 13. CO2 Emissions of Selected Asian Countries, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
China’s flattening CO2 emissions since 2013 are an indication that much of its cheap-to-extract coal has been mined out. It has been difficult for China to maintain its level of coal production (see Figure 8, above), given the low level of coal prices in recent years. This problem of low coal prices seems to be parallel to the problem of inadequate prices for oil producers.
[8] Unfortunately, the real story about economies is that they are governed by the laws of physics. Like plants and animals, and like hurricanes, they are dissipative structures that grow for a time and eventually come to an end.
We know that over the ages, many, many economies have grown for a time and then collapsed. But the study of how and why this has happened has been divided among many fields of study, including physicists and historians. Economists, who tend to be hired by politicians, seem to be among the last to understand collapse. They simply model the future as if it will reflect a continuation of past patterns. With such models, economic growth will continue forever.
But growth forever isn’t what really happens. Eventually, growth in population outstrips growth in resources. Various workarounds are tried, often requiring growing specialization, bigger businesses and governments, improved technology and more international trade. This additional complexity tends to lead to too much wage disparity. The problem with wage disparity is that it tends to lead to a large number of workers with very low wages.
The low wages caused by increased wage disparity tend to harm the economy. These low-paid workers cut back on their purchases of discretionary goods–for example, they delay buying a new car or visiting restaurants. These cutbacks lead to what look like “gluts” of commodities such as oil and metals used in making finished goods. Commodity prices tend to fall instead of rise, in order to clear the gluts.
As wage disparity grows, low-wage workers become very unhappy. They may elect radical leaders, or they may try to overthrow a king. With the many low-wage workers, it becomes difficult to collect enough tax revenue. Governments may collapse for lack of tax revenue. Sometimes, governments will attack other economies to try to solve their low-resource problem in this way.
[9] Climate change modelers have not understood that one of the things that they should be concerned about is near-term collapse. The rising wealth disparity in recent years is a major indicator that the world economy may be headed toward collapse.
Economists and politicians model the world as if business as usual will continue forever, but this is not the way the real situation works.
Meteorologists and other climate scientists have closely examined historical climate situations, but when it comes to future patterns of energy consumption, they are far outside of their field. They miss the likelihood of near-term collapse. With the assumption of economic growth forever, it is easy to arrive at projections of growth in fossil fuel consumption almost forever. This, of course, leads to growth in CO2 pollution and a very concerning rise in temperature.
In fact, with the story of economic growth forever, climate change becomes the most serious problem the world is facing. People believe that 100 or 500 years from now, the economy can be expected to operate as in the past. One of our biggest problems will be rising oceans and the need to move our cities back from them. Also, weather changes will be of huge concern.
[10] If the world economy is headed toward near-term collapse, climate change shrinks back in the list of things we should be worried about.
Most of us remember what happened in the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Collapse of the world economy would likely be far, far worse than this recession. It would involve debt defaults as the economy stops growing fast enough to repay debt with interest. It could perhaps involve collapses of governments, similar to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. If low oil prices are again a problem, collapses could especially affect oil exporting nations. In some cases, the use of fossil fuels could fall as quickly as the decline in CO2 emissions for Ukraine (Figure 12).
I often think that the concern about climate change comes from the fact that it can be modeled as if nothing else changes in the future. Surely, if researchers were modeling the overfishing in the sea, they would come to a correspondingly bleak view of how the sea might operate 50 to 100 or 1000 years from now. Similarly, if researchers were modeling our problems with soil erosion, they would come to a correspondingly bleak view about soil conditions, 50 or 100 or 1000 years from now.
One of the problems with the climate change model is that it overlooks the huge number of limits we are reaching simultaneously. These issues will surely change how the economy functions in the future, in ways that are not reflected in today’s climate models.
[11] The great draw of wind and solar is that they seem to solve problems of any type: either too much fossil fuels or too little.
Very few dare talk about the real problem we are facing–a huge number of limits coming at us from many directions at once. World population has risen too much relative to resources. Wage disparity is too great. Aquifer levels are being drawn down, far more quickly than they are being replaced. Pollution of many types (not just CO2) is becoming a problem. Microbes are mutating more quickly than we can find new antibiotics to fight them.
There seem to be plenty of fossil fuels in the ground, but there is a mismatch between the prices consumers can afford and the prices producers need in order to be profitable. It is not just the price of gasoline used at the pump that is important; the prices of finished goods made with energy products (such as homes and automobiles) are just as important. Young people are especially being squeezed with all of their educational loans.
If our problem can be framed as a problem of “too much,” rather than “too little,” we have a situation that is much more salable to the average consumer. People can easily believe that prices will rise endlessly, and that the economy will continue to grow forever. If economists have faith that this can happen, why not believe them? In this context, potential solutions such as wind and solar seem to make sense, even though, with adequate storage, they tend to be high-cost.
[12] Wind and solar, when analyzed without the need for energy storage, seem to help reduce CO2 emissions. But if substantial electricity storage needs to be included, this CO2 benefit tends to disappear.
Most analysts (such as those doing Energy Returned on Energy Investments calculations) have overlooked the need for electricity storage, if penetration is to ramp up. If the direct and indirect energy costs of storage are considered, the expected climate benefit of wind and solar tends to disappear.
Figure 14. Slide by author referencing Graham Palmer’s chart of Dynamic Energy Returned on Energy Invested from “Energy in Australia.”
This is only one estimate. More extensive calculations are needed, but the indications of this example are concerning.
Conclusion: Ultimately, the climate story, as it tends to be quoted in the news media, is misleading.
The climate story we hear tends to give the impression that climate change is a huge problem compared to all the other resource and environmental problems we are encountering. Furthermore, a person gets the impression that simple solutions, such as wind, solar, carbon taxes and voluntary cutbacks in fossil fuel use, are available.
This is a false picture of the situation at hand. Climate change is one of many problems the world economy is facing, and the solutions we have for climate change at this time are totally inadequate. Because an increase in energy consumption is required for GDP growth worldwide, even voluntary cutbacks in fossil fuel usage tend to harm the economies making the reductions. If climate change is to be addressed, totally different approaches are needed. We may even need to talk about adapting to climate change that is largely out of our ability to control.
The benefits of wind and solar have been greatly exaggerated. Partly, this may be because politicians have needed a solution to the energy and climate problems. It may also be partly because “renewable” sounds like it is a synonym for “sustainable,” even though it is not. Adding electricity storage looks like it would be a solution to the intermittency of wind and solar, but it tends to add costs and to defeat the CO2 benefit of these devices.
Finally, IPCC modelers need to develop their models more in the context of the wider range of limits that the world is facing. Perhaps it would be worthwhile to model the expected impact of all limits combined, rather than limiting the analysis to climate change. In particular, there is a need to consider the physics of how an economy really operates: Energy consumption cannot be reduced significantly at the world level without increasing the probability of collapse or a major war.
Footnote:
*Island economies and other remote economies sometimes burn oil to produce electricity. In this case, the cost of fuel consumption for electricity generation will be much higher than the $0.02 to $.03 cents per kWh quoted in the text, so the economics will be different. For example, if diesel is selling for $3.00 per gallon, the cost per kWh of fuel for electricity from diesel will be $0.24 per kWh, based on EIA efficiency estimates. With this high cost of fuel, substituting wind or solar for part of the diesel generally makes economic sense.
The “catch” is that whether the remote economy powers its electricity with oil or with oil plus wind/solar, the price of electricity will remain high. If the remote economy is primarily operating a tourist trade, high electricity prices may not be a major issue. But if the remote economy wants to sell goods in the world economy, its cost of finished goods can be expected to be high compared to the cost of goods made elsewhere, because of its high electricity cost. The high cost of electricity is one of the reasons for the economic problems of Puerto Rico, for example.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Oil-Prices-Plunge-As-US-China-Trade-War-Escalates.html
‘Oil Prices Plunge As U.S.-China Trade War Escalates’
I don’t know if plunge is the right term, but they are down a bit.
“Two tweets on Sunday threatening new tariffs on China as of this Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump shattered market calmness and sent equity and commodity markets sharply lower as investors and traders started to panic over a possible significant global economic slowdown and pulled money out of riskier assets such as oil.”
My opinion is, as the country in the process of passing the US in various metrics, timing of collapse aside, China’s leader cannot bend to Trump or he will lose face with his people. So this trade war escalation will have significant impact on worldwide trade numbers. It’s not like world GDP is robust and can handle getting whittled down a bit, it’s thin to begin with, so it’s not inconceivable this developing situation will likely have a negative impact. And just like the Chinese leader, my opinion is Trump will not back down. Two rams rutting away but no solution necessarily on the horizon. Good luck with this one.
We should be expecting this, if there really aren’t enough resources to go around. We either have a cold war or a hot war.
Think this pretty much explains the human population…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wYe_taCemrw
Gail also has made the same in more modest expressions.
I am struck that most people I’m in contact with outside this forum expect TPTB “to come up with something”. Suppose “Divine Providence” will intervene and save the human race.
Or maybe the plan is already in place, for the chosen few, aka FE.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mzddAYYDZkk
Several hundred thousand, it has happened before from a previous comment.
“Human activity is threatening one million species with extinction
“Biodiversity, which humans depend upon for their existence, is declining faster than at any other time in human history, according to a new report
“Natural ecosystems have lost about half of their territory, and about a quarter of the animal and plant groups that were assessed are under threat, according to the report from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). ”
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/613497/human-activity-is-threatening-one-million-species-with-extinction/
But, what will happen to HUMAN populations with the demise of fossil fuels?
when the population of any species expands on the support of a sole source of energy, it follows that removal of that energy source will result in the collapse of that species.
That is the NP law of humankind, and it seems to fit our current circumstances.
If there’s another one, I’d like to know of it.
around 1700-ish, there were 1 bn humans
Then we invented the steam engine, tapped into 300 m years of fossiled sunshine, and boosted our numbers x 7+.
Now we’re scrabbling around trying to find more energy sources.
there are none.
the conclusion seems painfully obvious:
Without some as yet undiscovered energy resource, 6 bn of us don’t have much of a future
But where to run and hide, Norman, where to run and hide? Your island is looking to me to be an exceedingly poor place to ride out the bottleneck what with the sky high population, depleted resources, and heterogeneous inhabitants from all parts of the old empire. Probably only the haggis shaggin Scots have got a chance. Not that the eastern US where I live is much better. Perhaps the Canadians will have the best chance?
Don’t bring Mr McGibbs into this
He’s got his own island lost in the mists off my island—he refuses to give me his GPS—I think he is just a myth of the Norse Gods
Kirk Douglas is still looking for it between bouts of oar walking
Aye, ’tis true. I am but a mirage conjured by the weak northern sun playing at just the right angle on a conducive blend of mist and whisky fumes.
Initially the hockey stick started to energize with lot of charcoal burning in giant furnaces for iron smelting (way before steam engine – steel beam era) and it was powered by wood, human and animal power, hence the big shift into ever green forestry ~200+ yrs ago..
We can eventually revert to ‘ideal balanced spot’ mid ~1700 – early 1800ish existence.. it’s low tech enough, but still with decent leverage on some surplus, obviously via distributed farmland pop, smaller-tiny cities. But the downstairs corridor voyage to get there won’t be pretty..
my own thoughts on it are that we will go farther back than that
a–because we will burn everything in sight to fool ourselves we can go forward forever
and b—as it becomes obvious that we can’t, we will begin to kill each other to prove the laws of physics are wrong
The killing won’t stop until there’s too few of us to matter, and no means to continue.
If you think that’s exaggerated, our resources wars started in 40s. They are still going on.
Every aspect of those wars has had some kind of faith driving both sides in the name of righteousness. (god is always on our side)
You can date that fallacy as far back as you want to go. We have always killed to disprove the laws of physics.
The American way of life is non-negotiable, comes under the same godbanner. (the laws of physics being wrong again you see)
People believe it because that all they have left to believe—so they tack god and Trump on the end of it. When Trump becomes dictator, he will be cheered as a saviour.
Then he will cleanse the land of apostates.
There will be no shortage of helpers.
Hitler had nothing with to do with killing people till he blew his own brains out.
Perhaps, perhaps not.
There seems little doubt that lots of people need to “go away.” But attrition can do a bunch of that. All you have to do is take away the Baby Boomers’ pensions and other benefits, and they will be gone in less than a year.
Other generations may voluntarily exit. I know that sounds incredible, but according to Dmitry Orlov, it happened at the fall of the Soviet Union. It wasn’t by some Herman Woukian (Lomokome Papers) scheme of people going to volunteer death centres, because of Tzulawis’s Law Of Reasonable Warfare. No, it was by self-medication: alcohol.
Voluntary exit is already happening, minus one generation, by refusing to procreate. Japan seems to be leading the way, with many young people just not having children — or even relationships.
Of course, there will be killing, starvation, and plague. But those might not even be the biggest drivers of population reduction. None of us really know for sure, do we?
starvation, pestilence, lack of sanitation => cholera, typhus, TB, etc.
Yes, attrition is a fitting term I tend to lump it up under the general concept of triage..
Some specific demographic and social groups could diminish-vanish astonishingly fast.
In some locals, namely NA, it’s likely that armed violence would score high as well..
the question you have to ask is:
will pop reach and sustain 10 bn by 2050 ish
if not, then something really big has to stop it.
I mean really big
not the 3 bn difference, but the people producing those 3bn–ie the parents as well over the next 30 years.—or those left will start reproducing again
It can’t be gradual, it must be sudden to have any real impact on the imminent crisis. It must be universal, not piecemeal or regional
the debate remains open as to what it might be,
Opioid crisis = voluntary exit
I think here in Canada we’re even opening up the door (a wee bit) to assisted suicide / euthanasia?
Anyone who wants to leave the party should be allowed to do so. Hell, the rest of us should be grateful to them for bowing out so graciously…
Cheers,
-GBV
Well, the demise of fossil fuels will have to happen fast or there won’t be much of any wild kingdom left.
That seems to be being arranged through low prices.
I think we all have an idea of how the human animal will fare as it’s essential resources decline below what we need.
I also think there will be much anger & disbelief as they are forced to accept that “renewables” cannot replace fossil resources.
There are many ways this could play out & I’m sure we all have our “favorite” scenarios.
On the upside, which is rare for me, “my” swallows, which haven’t had a successful nesting season for four years are building a nest!
I wish them the best & hope they will succeed this season & I will once again have the thrill of seeing them & their newly fledged young swooping & diving in the sky before their long flight back to the tropics.
We have to take our life one day at a time & not spend too much time worrying about the future, it’s already set in stone.
YAY!
But nest building is just the first step towards fledging. We’ve seen nests come down, rats climb into them, baby birds fall out — there must be only about 10% survival rate!
The violet-green swallows arrived last week. The barn swallows are just starting to show up this week. We have lots of out-buildings, and typically have 4-6 nests. They are working on one in the house gable, just ten feet from where I’m sitting!
I saw a pair of Violet greens a few days ago looking for a nest site, I didn’t see them today.
As for those RATS, I’ll put a plastic milk carton split down one side on the pole with the bottom end facing down & the narrow neck taped to the pole, the rats won’t be able to get past it. That simple trick worked very well to keep the rats & racoon from the feeders hanging from a pole.
They have commercial barriers but we don’t have those here so I had to improvise, I improvise a lot!
A fast crash is certainly preferable than a slow, drawn out collapse & it could keep many other animals & plants from going extinct.
The sooner those “sheeple” see the truth about those so called “renewables” & their “free” energy, the better. I still can’t understand why otherwise smart people still can’t/won’t get that you cannot replace declining resources with a resource dependent technology?
This is as simple as I can explain it & I’m no Einstein.
All I get back is – but their cheaper than coal now, their more efficent now, I’m only paying $XX on my electric bill now, I LOVE my Tesla 3, the batteries are getting better all the time etc etc etc, they just can’t or won’t get it!
They will eventually, nature always bats last!
I think perhaps we could bootstrap renewable energy with the last gasps of fossil fuel.
That is how we should be spending the fracked tight oil that, for some strange reason, people seem to think will last forever. But instead, we’re squandering it on SUVs and airline vacations.
If every fracked barrel of oil went exclusively toward manufacturing renewables — along with the infrastructure to switch the manufacture of renewables to renewable energy itself — I’d think that A Good Thing™. But it isn’t happening that way, and we’re just steepening the downslope.
That’s okay. I’ll just continue planting trees and milking goats until I’m no longer able — which on some days, doesn’t feel like very long from now. (I’m currently milking one-handed, because while attempting to catch a goat, my finger got twisted in its collar and it dragged me by my middle finger for some distance before I got free. In other words, the goat gave me the finger.)
Mr Steinman, you still DON’T GET IT! “Renewables” are just a RESOURCE DEPENDENT TECHNOLOGY, they are TEMPORARY & once you have used up our fossil resources building them then what? You won’t even be able to “kick the can down the road” a little longer, they are too weak, too intermittent, too expensive & they CANNOT REPLACE FOSSIL RESOURCES! TECHNOLOGY IS NOT A RESOURCE!
They are a false hope fit only for IGNORANT DUPES!
Building those expensive solar panels & wind turbines is a WASTE OF RESOURCES & MONEY, we would be much better off FIGHTING AGAINST GROWTH especially POPULATION GROWTH!
In any case, it hardly matters anymore what we believe, it’s too dam late, there are too many of us, our resources are in decline & we are headed inevitably for collapse.
Go ahead & supply yourself with solar panels & wind turbines, get a EV, then you can starve to death along with all the others, the difference for you will be you might still have your lights on as you starve.
Sheila, what characteristics would it take for renewable energy sources not to depends on fossil fuels?
“Renewable” energy sources would have to be able to produce RAW MATERIALS like a energy dense liquid fuel & long chain hydrocarbons in order to have the ENERGY NEEDED for processes that need long periods of high temperatures like steel, glass & aluminum production.
“Renewables” produce NO raw materials whatsoever but they NEED raw materials for their production & their energy production is intermittent & weak & because they cannot produce a energy dense liquid fuel, they cannot power heavy machinery like mining equipment, farm machines or commercial aircraft.
Batteries are just a low density storage system that pound per pound, have only a small fraction of the energy found in fossil fuels.
I am aware that a solar powered aircraft has reciently flown around the world in stages, it carried only two skinny passengers, that will not support commerce.
What people keep overlooking when praising the potential of “renewables” is that they produce NO RAW MATERIALS like OIL, COAL & NATURAL GAS does but we all know that these fossil RESOURCES are on their way out & without them, this civilization & most of us cannot survive.
Like I have said many times before, you may be comfortable in your energy efficient house powered by solar panels, drive a nice, fun EV but you won’t be eating very much once oil is out of the picture, you might still have your lights on & your fridge humming but it & you will be empty of FOOD!
For every calorie of food we eat, it took 10 calories of OIL got it there!
“Renewables” also produce NO FERTILIZER, no pesticides, no herbicides, no medicine, no plastics, no synthetic fibers, no adhesives, NOTHING BUT ELECTRICITY & while electricity is essential to most of us, we still can’t eat it or grow our food with it.
https://srsroccoreport.com/germany-death-of-renewable-energy-bring-on-the-dirty-coal-monsters/
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2013/08/13/the-green-dream-in-europe-turns-black-as-renewable-energy-fails/
http://thebulletin.org/myth-renewable-energy (renewables not “renewable”)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
This next link is especially important because it details the processes needed to produce those solar panels, it takes far more energy for a longer period of time than those “renewables” can generate. They can only tap into a DISPERSED, LOW DENSITY source of solar energy at an efficiency rate of only 20% so most of the energy that falls on those panels is WASTED.
http://sunweber.blogspot.com/2015/04/solar-devices-industrial-infrastructure.html
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3797-end-the-green-delusions-industrial-scale-renewable-energy-is-fossil-fuel
“Renewables” wouldn’t even exist without OIL! I wish that wasn’t so.
““Renewable” energy sources would have to be able to produce RAW MATERIALS like a energy dense liquid fuel & long chain hydrocarbons”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process
That is exactly what the Fischer-Tropsch process makes. The existing plants are mostly fed with CO and H2 from reforming natural gas, but *if* you have a lot of electric power, it is no big deal to make hydrogen from water and combine it with CO2 from the air to make CO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_process#Carbon_dioxide_reuse
“in order to have the ENERGY NEEDED for processes that need long periods of high temperatures like steel, glass & aluminum production.”
You can make steel and glass just fine using only electric power for heat. About half the steel made in the US is arc process. “Electric arc furnace steelmaking is the manufacture of steel from scrap or direct reduced iron melted by electric arcs.” (Wikipedia) Direct reduced iron can be made with hydrogen from water and electric power so the entire steel making process can be powered with electricity.
Aluminum _requires_ electric power to reduce it from the oxide, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9roult_process
‘“Renewables” also produce NO FERTILIZER, no pesticides, no herbicides, no medicine, no plastics, no synthetic fibers, no adhesives, NOTHING BUT ELECTRICITY & while electricity is essential to most of us, we still can’t eat it or grow our food with it.”
I won’t go into details unless you ask for them, but all these can be produced from electricity, water, and air (CO2 and nitrogen). As an example, a recent issue of Science has an article in it about making feed stocks for plastics out of CO2 and water. They make the case that 4 cent per kWh power will make feed stocks at competitive prices to those made from oil.
I don’t know if you have the background to understand industrial processes, but if you do, the information is easy to find. Wikipedia is a fairly good starting point.
Boy, whole lot of future-tense verbs in there. Future verbs make me tense.
The devil is always in the details.
Right, but in this case all the pieces you need (except a source for cheap electricity) exist, some of them like F/T at enormous scale.
The only thing I see that stands in the way of economical power satellites is getting the lift cost to LEO down to $100/kg. While it looks like this can be done, it could also turn out to be impossible.
I think we’re in heated agreement. 🙂
I’m sorry Jan, I didn’t intend to sound “heated” in my argument. It’s just frustrating to see otherwise intelligent people not see the problems with “renewables”, their tied to oil.
I do use solar panels but only for small applications like my shockwave watch & a solar, crank & battery powered radio, there is no way most of us could survive with only “renewables” providing nothing but electricity some of the time.
I know I’m doomed as oil depletes, there is no way I could grow enough food to feed myself, my soil is very poor thanks to the 80″ of rain we get each season & I’m OLD & FEMALE, I’m also alone.
I do hope some of us make it through the bottleneck, I would hate to see homo sapiens become extinct.
Just concentrate on our art, music, architecture, our scientific advances other than our killing machines, we are the only animal that has a complex language to transmit knowledge, we are the only animal that makes art & music.
Without fossil resources, we won’t be able to do the damage we are doing now, we will be forced to live WITH nature instead of trying to dominate it.
It seems most of us won’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone.
Sheila, you are severely underestimating Jan’s prepper spirit.
No doubt he has several decades’ supply of canned sardines, and a spare can opener hidden at the back of the root cellar. 🙂
This is why I don’t consider myself a “prepper.”
You can’t store yourself out of a dilemma. With some luck, you can learn your way into imagining a way out. With some luck, learning, imagination, and practice, you may make it through the bottleneck.
Unless you believe the Guy McPherson story (whom many pillory here), someone is going to get through the bottleneck, right? It might as well be you — the lucky, learned, imaginatory, and practiced person already living on low energy.
We do have a Mormon’s supply of food stored, mostly pulses. But we could get by on what we grow if we had to. The first thing we’d have to do is begin eating (and growing) meat again. Vegetarianism and veganism are artifacts of a high-energy civilization. But until that time, I’m happy to be drinking their milk and eating their eggs, and mostly not killing them.
The return on human labor is higher from growing animal food than plant food, especially in cold areas where the animals can wonder outside. In cold areas, with short summers, it is hard to produce enough plant food during the summer if a person wants to. Storage gets to be energy-consuming as well.
All in all, the swallows have done very well out of their relationship with humans.
If we all disappear and our buildings collapse and rot, there will eventually be far fewer safe nesting sites for them.
We need to keep up the good fight and give no quarter to this namby-pamby defeatist talk about human extinction, for the swallows’ sake!
Actually Tim, they might be better off, think of all those EMPTY BUILDINGS they can now occupy & without us spewing the environment with POISONS, more insects can survive for them to eat. Think of all those hollow trees we won’t be cutting down as “waste”, think of all those empty farms full of “weeds” that aren’t being poisoned any more!
As our empty buildings rot & fall down, trees could replace them so over all, the birds & all other living things will be much better off without us.
I with the best for Jan & his prepping, who knows, he might still be around getting fatter while the rest of us starve in our homes, streets, cars, SUV’s or bunkers.
“My” swallows are building a NEST! They haven’t done that for the last 2 years!
Now if only our weather would co operate by bringing us some SUN & WARMTH.
On the downside, the farmer across the road is preparing his field for another crop of useless lilies!
I see his soil blowing away as he scrapes off the “weeds” in preparation for planting & POISONING THE SOIL! AARRRGGGG!
I think most will go to the grave (early) not knowing what caused their society to crumble.
Best wishes for your Swallows!
Another credit event is coming…like the last one in November – December?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D6ANly4WAAEgybq?format=png&name=900×900
I am trying to figure out what this is about.
CDX NA IG seems to be an index of 100 equally weighted single company credit default swaps, representing the entire universe of investment grade credit. The index value is at an unusually low value now, indicating that few are very worried about a near term credit event.
The index has fallen from a high level at the beginning of the year, but very recently, it has started to inch up above where the trend line indicates it should be. If it reverses itself, toward the end of the year, we will be back where we were last November- December, perhaps.
I also notice that projection are that the US will start hitting its debt ceiling about October. In fact, it expect to start slowing payments where it can, even before October. This cannot help any financial situation.
It is dangerous to apply the “forward expectations” theory to derivatives, especially when the payoff from a derivative is binary (default happened and you got paid, or not). For example, bonds are interest rate derivatives. Yield curves are almost always rising, yet rates have almost always been falling over the last 40 years.
CDX are even more complicated than bond yields – complex nonlinear functions of default risk, interest rates, equity, the volatility and correlation among these elements, over a very specific time scale. While CDX often “sends a signal”, it is difficult to be confident about what that signal actually means.
Thanks. This is an area I am not very familiar with. In other words, what you are saying is that the situation could get worse a whole lot more quickly than it improves. Expecting a mirror image is not reasonable in this situation.
The result is similar to the Seneca Cliff of fossil fuel supply. Just because it goes up slowly doesn’t mean that it will go down slowly.
My main idea was that CDX do not give us reliable insights about the future.
But your point is both accurate and perhaps more direct: when a crisis does materialize CDX can move in a very dramatic and leveraged way with very little forewarning. It will definitely tell you when the fire is raging, but it may have utterly and completely ignored the smoke in the room beforehand. It can go from green to red with no yellow in between.
“The European Union yesterday halved its growth prediction for the Germany economy as it forecasted lower growth for the Eurozone as a whole, laying bare the extent of the bloc’s economic challenges before a leaders’ summit in Romania this week…
“Official forecasts, released by the European Commission (EC), said Italy’s budget deficit will balloon to 3.6 per cent of GDP in 2020 – breaking the EU’s three per cent limit – in a development likely to cause further rows between Rome and Brussels.”
http://www.cityam.com/277252/eu-slashes-its-forecast-german-growth-predicts-eurozone
“…the chief risk officer for Credit Suisse, Lara Warner, expressed concern over a European contagion. She warned that German and Italian recessions, Italian political instability, and rising European debt could all lead to a collapse of the European economy. That, in turn, could spill over into US markets.
““I do worry that we are in a period where small earthquakes can lead to large tsunamis. It [Europe] seems to be the place that is the most fragile.””
https://www.ccn.com/stock-market-faces-gloomy-decade-as-economic-tsunami-looms
Of course, if interest rates are very low, we should expect stock and bond values to be inflated.
The prediction of Germany’s growth for 2019 went from 1.1% to 0.5%. Both of these are pretty low, in my view.
China is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea…
“China’s debt-fuelled plans to prop up economic growth could push its already high debts up to dangerous levels, raising the chance of a painful crunch for the global economy, the Bank of England fears.
“A further fall in China’s economic growth risks making its debts “significantly less sustainable” with serious implications for markets, Deputy Governor Sir Jon Cunliffe has warned.
“The world’s second-largest economy has debts amounting to more than twice its entire annual GDP, which Sir Jon said was the level at which countries such as the US, Japan, Denmark, Thailand and Spain had suffered crises in recent years.
“China’s authorities tried to rein in debts to minimise this risk, but a slowdown made them change tack. The stimulus package has helped stop the slide in global growth, shoring up GDP and bolstering financial markets. But it comes at the cost of extra debt in an economy, which has already ramped up borrowing sharply in recent years.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/05/07/chinas-runaway-stimulus-risks-new-debt-crisis-bank-england-deputy/
“This year is shaping up to be the biggest by far for defaults in China’s $13 trillion bond market, highlighting the widening fallout from the government’s campaign to rein in leverage.
“Companies defaulted on 39.2 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) of domestic bonds in the first four months of the year, some 3.4 times the total for the same period of 2018, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The pace is also more than triple that of 2016… The trend is clear: unless something changes, 2019 will be the new high.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-defaults-hit-record-2018-210000459.html
“China’s exports surprisingly shrank in April after a short-lived recovery as fears of an escalating trade war with the United States clouds the economic outlook for the world’s second largest economy. Exports fell 2.7 per cent last month compared with the same period in 2018…”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3009307/chinas-exports-suffer-surprise-fall-april-amid-heightened
Exclusive: China backtracked on nearly all aspects of U.S. trade deal…
“The diplomatic cable from Beijing arrived in Washington late on Friday night, with systematic edits to a nearly 150-page draft trade agreement that would blow up months of negotiations between the world’s two largest economies, according to three U.S. government sources and three private sector sources briefed on the talks… The document was riddled with reversals by China that undermined core U.S. demands, the sources told Reuters.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-backtracking-exclusiv/exclusive-china-backtracked-on-nearly-all-aspects-of-u-s-trade-deal-sources-idUKKCN1SE0WJ
No wonder Trump retaliated with his tweet to impose tariffs.
Wow!
The American Petroleum Institute (API) reported a build in crude oil inventory of 2.81 million barrels for the week ending May 3, coming in over analyst expectations of a 744,000-barrel buildup in inventories.
https://d32r1sh890xpii.cloudfront.net/tinymce/2019-05/1557263634-o_1daa2ahee1bpffidq981e2ggqa8.jpg
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Oil-Falls-After-Third-Consecutive-Crude-Build.html
I do not pay any attention to API crude oil builds or draws, which come out on Tuesdays. The EIA publishes their numbers on Wednesday. Looking at one of the report it puts out, https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_sum_sndw_dcus_nus_w.htm
crude oil stocks, including the SPR, dropped from 1,119,154 to 1,114,321 thousand barrels. This corresponds to a 4.8 million barrel drop in crude oil supplies. Thus, the API announcement is in the wrong direction (yet again).
If you can show that total greenhouse gas emissions from industrial civilization can be reduced to around that of the 16th century, then, yes, climate change won’t matter.
How can that happen, without crashing the economy and consigning billions to an early death?
We need to stop worrying about alarmist stuff like CC and instead focus on not destroying the oceans with garbage, plastics, toxic chemicals and radioactive waste water from Fukushima.
Exactly. But they took the gods out of the trees, rivers mountains and oceans and put them as a single deity up in the sky. Similarly, they took the power out of our hands to do achievable and meaningful things and promoted the single narrative of CC. Its centralisation to the centres of power and immobilisation of the periphery of people.
I get and like you’re point, M Rynn.
If you can reduce total greenhouse gas emissions from industrial civilization to around that of the 16th century, then, yes, climate change won’t matter because at least seven billion of us will be dead.
If you are worried about climate change, then you are not paying attention.
Sorry if this has already been posted here.
The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/05/06/the-reason-renewables-cant-power-modern-civilization-is-because-they-were-never-meant-to/#47311fc0ea2b
The article you link to is a very interesting article on Germany’s renewables push, which is now being scaled back significantly. It hasn’t been successful in reducing CO2, among other issues. The article is well worth reading.
This is a link to an article from Der Spiegel, in English, called A Botched Job in Germany
The conversion of the German energy system lacks power plants, grids and storage. The state has wasted billions.
WOW
“But then, starting around the year 2000, renewables started to gain a high-tech luster. Governments and private investors poured $2 trillion into solar and wind and related infrastructure, creating the impression that renewables were profitable aside from subsidies.”
“Impression” is the correct word.
I thought that this was an interesting quote in an article by Brian Davey writing at Faesta called Great Thunberg, PR and the “Climate Emergency”.
Fantastically said
The great transformation occurred in the two or three years after the UN Rio Earth Summit of 1992.
During that period I was working as a translator and editor (sometimes paid, sometimes volunteer) for several large Green organization in Japan, and suddenly the main emphasis in their campaigns went from protecting or saving important ecosystems and rare species to fighting globbly wobbly.
I queried the management of several organizations about this change of stance and voiced my concerns that it was by no means clear that globbly wobbly was a serious threat, and in each case they admitted to me that they were doing it for the practical reason that there was UN funding involved for their organizations for getting with the program and pushing the message. Quite simply, they were co-opted. And none of them expressed any scruples about being bought off in this way, as for all they knew it might be true.
I also used to work for Amnesty International, and I noticed their focus switched at around the same time from simply trying to get “prisoners of conscience” released from jail and protesting torture to supporting events such as promoting a tour by a Hong Kong pop group on the grounds that it was singing about “human rights”. Also, as far as I was concerned, they crossed the line into overt political bias at that time, effectively deciding that there were good prisoners of conscience such as Chinese dissidents and Iranian or Iraq opposition figures who were worthy of their support and bad ones such as “Holocaust deniers” who they were happy to leave to rot without a word of protest.
If we think about it, the United Nations has two basic constituencies:
(1) Developed Economies that are in the need of more cheap-to-extract resources and more markets for the goods that they have to sell.
(2) Emerging Economies that would like the higher living standards that the Developed Economies seem to have.
Pushing on the Global Warming story helps both of these constituencies (or at least did, up until recently). If carbon taxes are added to countries in the Developed Economies, it tends to send manufacturing to countries with more cheap-to-extract resources. It allows Emerging Economies to believe that they will soon have higher living standards, because of all of the debt financed projects that investors from the Developed World are willing to sponsor.
Of course, the debt financed projects tend to skim off most of the profits that the Emerging Market would make. And countries in Emerging Economies lose many of their historical farming jobs, as cheap imported food is substituted for the more nutritious locally grown fare. Furthermore, eventually, the supplies of mineral resources get depleted in the Emerging Economies.
Now we are getting to the point where the Emerging Economies are almost as badly off as the Developed Economies. There is not enough to go around. Shipping more goods overseas uses up oil supply, without necessarily corresponding benefit.
Now, the UN agenda is making a lot less sense.
Also, the lack of energy consumption growth is starting to hurt the world economy in subtle ways, particularly growing wage disparity.
True, was struck by a woman who was leaving on a flight at the airport who was on an ocean cruise. She was wearing a shirt that indeed was given by the Cruise line as a gift and the logo also promoted the WWF…World Wildlife Fund. Also, noticed that the Sierra Club also promotes green products and the like. Remember reading a long while back funding is funnelled to mail stream enivormental organizations by corporate sponsors to keep them on their side of the issue.
Many corporations provide funding to environmental groups and the level of funding has been growing. As Steve Goreham says, “We’re talking big dollars here. Corporate funding of environmental groups amounts to hundreds of million of dollars per year. In 2007, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and Coca-Cola announced a multi-year partnership worth over $20 million to WWF. Home improvement retailer Lowe’s contributes more than $1 million each year to The Nature Conservancy for conservation projects in North America. In 2013, Wells Fargo bank provided $21.8 million in grants to nearly 500 environmental nonprofits. The Nature Conservancy received millions in contributions from oil giant BP. Boeing, Chevron, Clorox, ExxonMobil, Monsanto, Shell, Starbucks, and Walmart are just a few of the global corporations partnering with environmental groups. Saving the world has become big business for environmental NGOs, courtesy of contributions from corporate partners
https://canadafreepress.com/article/questionable-funding-for-environmental-groups-and-what-they-do-with-it
This has been going on for a long, long time. Doesn’t surprise me at all
I think the ultimate problem is that we are dealing with complex questions. We are also dealing with many groups with lots of money to put toward “causes” that further their own financial interests. When those two factors are put together, we end up with consumers being deluged with information that tends to be biased toward the financial interests of the best-funded groups.
The article starts out:
Greenpeace, the largest environmental organization in the world, will take in more than $10 million this year to support its US operations. The group has an organizational membership of more than 3 million and offices in more than 40 countries. This is the organization lobbying against every form of energy except wind and solar. They oppose GMOs. In fact, they are perhaps the world’s leading opponent to of ‘golden rice,’ the genetically engineered miracle food that can prevent debilitating deficiencies in millions of children worldwide. The have led the global campaign against the pesticide DDT. Hundreds of thousands now contract the malaria DDT could prevent.
The problem is that there are two sides to almost every story, sometimes three. A person can understand the reasoning behind golden rice. The American Council on Science and Health says “An insufficient supply of vitamin A, especially in children, can lead to blindness and death, as well as increased susceptibility to and death from diseases such as measles.” In fact, all of our food is to some extent bioengineered, starting at the time of early agriculture and before. But bioengineering can be used to allow more herbicides to be sprayed on crops, something that quite a few people are opposed to.
With respect to using more DDT, one of the world’s biggest problems is rising population. Should we really be doing anything to raise human population? In fact, we could probably raise populations even more by sending newer pesticides that would kill certain other undesirable pathogens or their insect carriers. Except, of course, the ecosystem needs those insects.
There is just so much that could go wrong right now. After a record bet on low volatility, the VIX has now broken out and is spiking as the stock markets are falling.
Credit default swaps (CDX NA IG) on investment grade bonds could spike as well.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D5-NBjwW4AAt0l_?format=jpg&name=medium
Everybody is betting that the Fed will come to rescue and fix everything?
The government will start a war to ignite the economy?
U.S has moved air strike carriers and B2 bombers to the Persian gulf as tensions with Iran are rising.
I don’t think even Fat Boy is stupid enough to attack Iran.
The world economy is gone, in 15 minutes.
I see that the stock market is headed down today. -569 recently. Should aid the rising VIX.
Vix
20.47
+5.03(+32.58%)
All interesting and correct and real evidence based, but we are only half true also, as yet. Fossil fuel consumption and emissions are yet to fall in total. It was extra cost to move so much manufacture to new locations in China. I can see all those empty new cities in China, in the graphs. Debt money creation aims to keep fossil fuel prices low, in order to keep energy inputs cheap for most other activities of industrial economies. Paying real production costs + profit, plus a carbon price, plus environmental rectification impost, would be too expensive to power the rest of industrial civilisation. May the cheapest inputs to capitalism win. May the lowest cost manufacturer win.
As net energy inputs decline, the beneficiaries of fossil fuels and main consumers of its more expensive products are likely to become fewer and further up in the income distribution mountain, while the rest of us drop back into the twilight age. That is the thing, you have national statistics, but within each nation there is a distribution of classes, geography, natural wealth, & victims of industrialisation. Can you imagine a situation where fossil fuel production decreases, but at a slow rate, shrinking into those classes and areas where production and emissions continues, for the super upper middle class masters of the world? Who also supplement manufacture & mining energy costs with renewable energy? How much adaptation and change is going to be as uneven as the world already is?
I don’t think a scenario is possible where fossil fuel production shrinks back slowly, and somehow, the wealthy are able to keep part of the system going, perhaps with renewables.
I am afraid that too much of the adaptation won’t really be adaptation. We won’t be able to handle a low-energy world.
David Korewicz’s stuff on supply chain contamination should really disabuse anyone from believing that high technology and complexity can survive in some smaller envelop either geographically or demographically.
Sorry, David Korowicz, spelling mistake.
“When Deutsche Bank’s Crisis Becomes Our Crisis”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-06/when-deutsche-banks-crisis-becomes-our-crisis
Wow! I didn’t realize that European banks could just “extend and pretend” with their bad debt. Now, the problems are becoming too big for the EU to bail out. According to the article:
This would seem to be likely contributor to our world financial collapse scenario. Also, I cannot imagine that the retirement and unemployment benefits will be payable, to the extent they have been promised, in a country with way too many elderly relative to those of working age.
Then we have China’s problems and Japan’s problems as well, besides those of oil exporters, to add to the European problems.
We have a lot of “working age” people but half of them aren’t working. This is because of disabilities or not enough JOBS for those that want jobs.
Most of our unemployment isn’t even being counted, the gov cooks the books by not counting the homeless, those who gave up looking & those trapped in part time, temporary “jobs” when they need full time employment. If they work just ONE HOUR a week, their “employed”, if their homeless & unemployed, their also not counted as “unemployed” because they don’t have an address. I think we will need to triple the “official” unemployment figures to approach the truth.
The government claims there are a lot of unfilled positions but I have looked at some of those jobs & most require experience & education that the unemployed don’t have & can’t get, other “jobs” are just temporary, part time, dead end jobs that pay too little for a person to survive on.
Too many of our jobs have been outsourced to third world sweatshops or automated, how can we change that? It it too late?
The world stock market has broken down from its rising wedge…as the global economy slows down with USD 230 Trillion in debt…we are now hanging in the air.
Are we also at peak oil?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D59HqD4WwAAjyfz?format=png&name=large
Yoshau, Hanging in the Air!? Much like having the feeling of this guy doing his first hang gliding flight UNATTACHED with instructor (the Federal Reserve).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dLBJA8SlH2w
We’ll see what injuries are incurred at impact this time around.
If we are still alive!🙄
We will just have to try to hang on for our dear lives…until we hit the ground!
Got a helmet?
I know it’s wrong, but haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
I am a little confused. Is Cndl a derivative that follows the world stock market, or what?
I said earlier in a post that I thought we were likely at Peak Oil. Quite possibly at Peak Coal as well.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/02/22/have-we-already-passed-world-peak-oil-and-world-peak-coal/
Cndl is a tag denoting candlestick chart. I can’t tell what has been charted.
CNDL is the ticker for Candlewood Hotels, and not what it depicted in the chart.
I think that he (Alastair Williamson) has done this chart him self with on day candles.
I don’t know where he gets the info….maybe Bloomberg?
I guess we are at peak oil now.
Depends on the continued funding of shale companies. When those funds dry up, we will be on the downslope.
“Two days before Zimbabwe celebrated 39 years since independence in April, citizens received an unwanted early birthday present: the cost of a loaf of bread doubled. It was yet another sign the country is sinking into an uncontrollable financial crisis that the relatively new president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, appears unable to solve.”
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mugabe-has-gone-but-the-zimbabwean-economy-is-perilously-close-to-the-edge
“The trigger for the demonstrations that brought the downfall of [Sudan’s] President Omar al-Bashir in April was the trebling of the price of bread last December. It came after a major devaluation of the Sudanese pound in an effort to make the official rate for the pound drop to that of the black market.”
https://theconversation.com/how-sudans-economic-crisis-had-a-role-in-protests-that-toppled-al-bashir-116405
Governments seem to fall when things to badly for a country. The big problem seems to be:
Part of the problem is the loss of South Sudan and its oil; part of the problem is the low price of oil. Imported food costs a lot more now that the currency has fallen. The government can no longer afford to hide this cost increase.
Those lower oil prices similarly problematic for Nigeria:
“In a world of cheap and abundant money, Nigeria has been among the big beneficiaries of a global hunt for yield… Increasingly, however, analysts are raising questions over the proceeds of bond sales…
““They have borrowed quite a bit, but where is the money being spent?” asks Andrew Roche, Managing Partner of Finexem, a Paris-based financial consulting firm.
“He expressed worry that the government had been using borrowed cash to patch up holes in budgets, rather than investing in infrastructure or industry, or in efforts to diversify the economy from a heavy dependence on oil.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a8140736-6db2-11e9-80c7-60ee53e6681d
Thanks! But how does a country diversify the economy without adequate energy supply?
“Prices for industrial metals are slumping, renewing investor concerns that pockets of weakness remain in the global economy.
“The declines, which began as early as mid-March for aluminum and in April for other base metals, accelerated last week after disappointing manufacturing data in the U.S. and China. The figures raised worries that Beijing’s stimulus efforts haven’t kicked in as quickly as investors had hoped and that strong U.S. growth in the first quarter could prove transitory.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/metals-slump-spurs-growth-concerns-11557144001
Low price problems again!
“Companies with large amounts of debt are borrowing more money at a breakneck pace, prompting the Federal Reserve to flag the trend as one potential risk in the financial system.
“Loans to companies with large amounts of outstanding debt — known as leveraged lending — grew by 20 percent in 2018 to $1.1 trillion, according to the Fed’s twice-annual Financial Stability Report. The share of new, large loans going to the comparatively risky borrowers now exceeds peak levels reached previously in 2007 and 2014.
“Defaults on these loans remain low, but the Fed warned that could change if the economy faltered.
“Risks associated with leveraged loans have “intensified, as a greater proportion are to borrowers with lower credit ratings and already high levels of debt,” according to the Fed report, released Monday. “Any weakening of economic activity could boost default rates and lead to credit-related contractions to employment and investment among these businesses.”
“…the central bank is not sounding especially confident about the fallout should an economic hiccup ripple through the leveraged lending sector.
““It is hard to know with certainty how today’s Collateralized Loan Obligations structures and investors would fare in a prolonged period of stress,” the report said.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/us/politics/federal-reserve-risky-corporate-loans.html
“Among credit funds, a crop of shady operators are employing “manufactured defaults,” wherein buyers of credit-default swaps—securities designed to profit if the issuer misses an interest payment—persuade the debtor to halt payments, triggering a default and a windfall for the fund. It’s almost like buying insurance on a neighbor’s house and burning it down.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2019/05/06/how-hedge-funds-became-the-villains-on-wall-street/#60d128cbd236
“Big banks have complained for years about a key feature of the Dodd-Frank overhaul requiring them to keep billions of dollars of cash in reserve. Some are trying to find a way around it.
“Commercial banks including Wells Fargo & Co. have been dangling higher rates over the past year to attract deposits from Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and other government-backed lenders, according to industry executives. The goal is to replace one type of funding banks use to manage their daily finances, overnight loans, with another, deposits.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-banks-seek-to-liberate-billions-of-dollars-in-funds-11557135001
“Major banks [such as Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and Citibank] enabled fraudsters to steal billions of pounds of public money through VAT scams, allege documents obtained by the Bureau [of Investigative Journalism]. A decade later, tax authorities are still chasing the money through the courts.
“Traders in London facilitated the so-called carousel fraud by organised crime gangs in 2009, which involved the trading of carbon credits, permits which allow a country or organisation to emit greenhouse gases. The gangs imported millions of carbon credits from outside the UK without paying VAT on them. They sold them on to traders adding 20% to the bill as if they had paid VAT. ”
https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2019-05-07/how-major-banks-turned-a-blind-eye-to-the-theft-of-billions-of-pounds-of-public-money
I see the sale of carbon credits as another form of complexity. Clearly, based on the figures I show in this post, the sum of all of the programs have had less than zero benefit. The sale of carbon credits makes for high income for a few traders, but with doubtful benefit to the system. The complexity of the system invites fraud.
The thing I don’t understand is why the big increase in Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac deposits is occurring. This is what is reported:
Are these agencies somehow getting cash that they lending out much more slowly than in the past? Or is this cash that is here today, gone tomorrow, because whatever caused the increase goes away?
Furthermore, default levels on this leverage lending have been rising, but the interest rate spread for these high risk loans has’t risen much yet, according to other articles I have read.
im looking forward to the slow collapse imagine the 20 kgs we will all lose being on a vegan diet early bed-time due to conservation of electricity lots of fresh air as most of our days will be spent gardening no more job i cant wait
I’m right there with you on that attitude, Adonis, lol. I’m doing some gig out of town in a big spread out city, with people driving like its NASCAR racing, being told to meet an unrealistic timeline because they finalized the contract later than expected, thinking I wouldn’t mind collapse starting right now. like they said in the sci-fi movie dark city, shut it down!
A vegan diet lacks essential vitamins like V12 & minerals like iron & when this unsustainable economy goes down, we won’t have the SUPPLEMENTS we need to replace what a vegan diet can’t supply. Not every area of the world can grow the foods necessary for a healthy vegan diet & plant based “meat” needs a high energy, advanced civilization to produce & that’s going away.
Becoming a vegetarian is much safer, available & healthier.
Vegans will be dying from dietary deficiencies if they eat no animal product like milk, cheese or eggs after the collapse.
I understand that animals are now getting their B12 from supplements, because their original source was from microbes on dirty food. I suppose that if the economy goes down, industrial farming will disappear. Animals raised the traditional way, living outdoors and having access to grass and dirty food will no longer need B-12 supplements. Humans will need B12 from animals, or from growing food and not washing it too well.
Right on Gail, that’s why I’m not all that “fussy” about being “clean,” a little dirt is good for us!
By staying too clean, we deny our immune system the “excersize” it’s needs to fight off infections. A little dirt keep it alert!
Our poor abused factory farmed animals won’t be factory farmed much longer so they won’t need those supplements.
I noticed in a video about how some disease are infecting pigs in China & Chinese pigs have more space to move around in their pens with DIRT FLOORS than our poor pigs that are raised in pens so small they can’t even walk or turn around.
Everything will be better off when most of us are GONE!
The powers that be or the elders whatever you want to call them are in the know about our predicament and they have a plan after connecting the dots the plan is simple de-growth or a slow collapse this report by the Finnish researchers was all pre-prepared by the elders and brought out just in time for the final collapse of our current financial system
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g54L094JGZQJ:https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43pek3/scientists-warn-the-un-of-capitalisms-imminent-demise+bios+finnish+researchers&hl=en&ct=clnk
I don’t think the elites know as much as you think, and if they do, they aren’t too concerned. Most are probably boomers on their way out as it is, so it’s ‘not my problem.’ There are obviously lots of war-party proponents in and around Washington DC that want to ‘get the oil’, but they probably wouldn’t propose changes of our economic system, so it seems like a pointless and cruel strategic ideology.
The other element is the Signal-to-noise. As long as the delivery trucks are racing around on the roads and the stawk market hits new highs instead of stair-stepping down into the abyss, there’s a reassurance that everything is clunking along. As mentioned a few posts up, BAU will probably be maintained with great struggle until the bitter end. I’m hoping for another 50 years, personally, then I can say ‘not my problem’ before slipping into my mushroom coffin pajamas.
This is Nafeez Ahmed’s post from August 28, 2018 called Scientists Warn the UN of Capitalism’s Imminent Demise
A climate change-fueled switch away from fossil fuels means the worldwide economy will fundamentally need to change.
The article points out that adding all of these renewables would mean a transition to a lower EROI (higher cost) types of energy. I don’t think it works, period, because prices can’t rise enough. Nafeez talks about a transition to a lower energy future.
A lower energy future implies (in my mind) a lower standard of living.
A very minor critique, their not just “fossil FUELS” they are fossil RESOURCES.
They are essential raw materials for millions of products & energy for millions of services.
These fossil resources is what has made our high energy, high consumption civilization possible. Calling them “fuels” limits the importance they play in our way of life.
Found this to be a great summation of our predicament. A very concise presentation by Dr Sidney Smith.
The title is, How to Enjoy the End of the World.
I watched the whole hour-long presentation, something I rarely do. It is very good. He starts near the beginning talking about dissipative structures. He then transitions to talking about EROI, pointing out that adding batteries wind and solar would increase the cost of everything made using this form of energy by more than an order of magnitude, relative to current fossil fuels by more than an order of magnitude. The price of food would need to rise to 10 ten times its current price, as would the price of all energy consuming products.
He lays out four ways that we might get around our energy problem, showing that none of them are feasible in practice.
He even talks about the financial situation. He points out that the funny money that the billionaires all have cannot really be used to fix the plight of the many poor people around the world. The funny money doesn’t represent real resources.
One thing I would have a quibble with is the obligatory happily ever after ending. We are not exactly facing the same situation that his grandma faced during the Depression.
Dr. Sid Smith is a Math professor at Hampton-Sidney College. I found this page giving contact information with respect to Dr. Smith. http://www.hsc.edu/sid-smith
I agree with the reference to “funny money” that the billionaires have. It is interesting to note all the talk about how all the “wealth” is concentrating in the upper 0.5% of society. That doesn’t really mean much today as we are becoming resource scarce. Monetary wealth no longer is fungible with real resources and is thus excesses of money is becoming essentially worthless to society. Now if resources were abundant and cheap, I suspect that the concentration of wealth would naturally reverse and prosperity would return. The concentration of wealth is symptom of the disease of resource scarcity.
“The concentration of wealth is symptom of the disease of resource scarcity.” It’s good that you can express tings so clearly.
so you’re saying that the billionaire could withdraw a large sum of money as cash, then try to buy 10,000 hamburgers at $5 per burger, but will be told he/she cannot buy that many, because there are only enough ingredients to make 1000. so the real buying power for hamburgers, for the billionaire, is actually $50 per burger, or higher? i smell hyper-inflation.
Nope, upper caste of billionaires is inflating some collectibles like valuable art, and price of contractor work on their bunkers and bolt hole rural estates – manor houses..
The hyper inflation you refer to occurs afterwards in second or third tier wealth group where the ‘also ran lesser millionaires and billionaires” destroy at some point by their panicky moves the financial system, and only after that the ‘hyper inflation’ occurs for the family guy in the street as well..
It’s a sequence, it could go through all steps within years, months, weeks, days, perhaps hours, who knows.. (likely on the quicker end of the spectrum these days..)
Or the bank collapses.
Thanks for this. And I see he references OFW in one of his replies.
You are right. I hadn’t thought about looking at the responses and his replies to the video. He makes a nice plug for OurFiniteWorld.com in one response. Someone asks if he has a blog, and he does. bsidneysmith.com It is not an energy blog, however. Some essays and some recipes.
I mentioned that some days ago!
Sorry, I didn’t understand what the video was about from your earlier comment. And I had no idea who Sid Smith was.
I sometimes look at posts in just the text version. In that way, I see the text of the youtube link, but I don’t see what the video is about.
Me too!
It would be very nice if people who post videos would include a brief summary. Otherwise, I just say, “Next!”
Good presentation, but he says a few things that I think are very pertinent.
1. He drives a 20mpg truck compared to the 12mpg truck his dad used to drive. He suggests this is fuel efficient. He’s not being a hypocrite as he’s not advocating everyone buy a Prius, but it does seem odd to me that a very simple solution and a quick win is to mandate better MPG fleet figures (regardless of the energy vector). This would maintain production of vehicles at current levels. A 40MPG fleet average would for example double the useful life of crude used for fuel. My oldish diesel hatchback regularly did 50mpg+. There’s no reason that cars can’t be far more efficient than they are now. This is purely down to politics; the technology is there.
2. He mentions rationing but dismisses it out of hand with no further comment. Why? He admits that the future may be similar to a war-like scenario of shortages in basic food and fuel needs, so rationing will for sure be implemented. How effective this is I don’t know, but the UK used rationing throughout WWII and for several years after, and people accepted it as necessary. Rationing will extend the useful life of raw materials.
3. Jevon’s Paradox. True, and you see this in vehicles. A modern car has a far more efficient engine, uses lighter, stronger materials and is better designed/engineered. A modern car ought to be lighter than an old one. In fact a modern VW Golf weighs about twice what the early models did. Why? More gadgets and motors and other items consumers demand for entertainment, safety and comfort. Are most of these absolutely necessary? Probably not, so we could mandate (as in point 1 above) more efficient vehicles that do away with a lot of the mod cons we are used to. I guess it becomes a choice between having some form of personal transport, or none at all.
4. He’s dismissing all possible technical fixes. Again, their long term efficacy is yet to be proven, but as I mentioned in a post elsewhere. the UK is on track to have 30GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030. This is for a country with an average demand of about 32GW. For sure this will need to be supplemented by other sources, but if a relatively industrialised nation like the UK can manage this, then it might be replicated elsewhere. The argument that it’ll be to expensive only works up to a point. Yes energy bills will go up, but then maybe people will not replace a $1000 iPhone every 2 years and instead buy a $50 phone that does just as well? The cost of upgrading the energy grid is ultimately born by the population. If given the choice, I’d prefer to have more expensive electricity and cut back on other non-essentials, than not have intermittent electricity supply. Looking on Amazon, there seem to be quite a few inexpensive solar power kits available that could power at least lighting in an average house. The cost (in the UK) of an unsubsidised solar system is no longer that great and is affordable.
5. Going back to point 2 on rationing, massive savings could be made by reducing meat consumption. 1 kg of meat requires 10kg of grain. I did a quick calculation some years ago using available data on the total calorific value of harvested grains. The calories available from industrially produced grains is about 50% more than the required per capita globally. Cutting back on meat will greatly increase the available calories for no extra cost. In a crisis situation, I’m sure meat consumption will be rationed
So while I’m not overly optimistic about the future, I think there are some fixes that would at least extend the useful life of fossil fuels without adding too many costs.
A few comments on your views:
Rationing is basically “thinking backward” relative to the problems we should expect to be facing. Our problem is too much wage disparity and too little demand. There are likely to be gluts of a lot of things, including food and oil. The problem will be lack of demand, and governments without funds to do much of anything. It will be like the Great Depression, and the worst part of 2008.
Governments may indeed start wars, to try to ramp up demand and find jobs for the unemployed. If they win, then they will have a chance at the resources.
I do agree that cutting down on meat consumption would be a great idea. Discouraging the ownership of meat-eating pets would be a great idea as well. Humans and their animals are a big cause of the out of balances in this world.
Also, we are seeing more and more that wind and solar are not fixes, regardless of what your impression may be. They really require a lot of batteries and transmission. When these costs are included, as well as the intermittency issues they cause, they are more of a headache for those installing them. We seem to be hitting “peak installation” of renewable energy devices.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/iea-renewable-net-capacity-additions.png
From: https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/bad-news-for-renewable-energy-capacity-addition-becomes-flat-for-the-first-time-in-17-years/69202562
“Our problem is too much wage disparity and too little demand. There are likely to be gluts of a lot of things, including food and oil. ”
A GLUT of food & oil???? With conventional oil in decline & fracked oil soon to follow, that should also cause a decline in our ability to produce food so I doubt that food & oil will have a oversupply, more likely shortages.
Rationing would reduce the amount of fuel & other resources that the rich waste so abundantly. With lower demand from the rich, perhaps the lower income people could then afford some of those resources.
I don’t know how we can reduce wage disparIty without higher taxes on the uber RICH or taxes on goods coming in from slave wage countries especially if their produced by “american” corporations who have dumped their more expensive american workers for foreign slave labor or machines.
“I do agree that cutting down on meat consumption would be a great idea. Discouraging the ownership of meat-eating pets would be a great idea as well. Humans and their animals are a big cause of the out of balances in this world. ”
EXACTLY! I can’t count how many people here not only drive HUGE 4X4 TRUCKS & MOTOR HOMES, they also have HUGE DOGS in the bed! CATS must have meat, they can’t digest grain & veggies like a dog can so they eat even more meat per pound/kilo than a dog does.
I eat very little meat, far less than I did when I was working, I just don’t need so much, we are omnivores not carnivores.
“Also, we are seeing more and more that wind and solar are not fixes, regardless of what your impression may be. They really require a lot of batteries and transmission. When these costs are included, as well as the intermittency issues they cause, they are more of a headache for those installing them. We seem to be hitting “peak installation” of renewable energy devices.”
Again, RIGHT ON! Your one of the few people who “get it” about those so called “renewables”, their just a technology & they produce none of the essential RESOURCES we need.
Too bad I can’t get Robert Scribbler to see that “renewables” can’t replace declining energy resources & Tesla 3 isn’t the future & it looks like Tesla is in deep economic trouble, his Tesla 3 are gathering dust in vast parking lots & his sales are way down since his compitition from the big automakers has ramped up. Most of us can’t afford LUXURY EV’s.
Most of us also can’t have solar panels because most of us are RENTERS & for those of us who do own our own homes, many don’t live in places where solar is useful or they can’t afford such systems. We don’t even have a solar panel dealer here, no demand on the foggy, rainy, low income, coast.
Love your blog Gail, I wish more people came here, they could learn a lot from you & from the other knowledgeable bloggers here.
Think about the Depression of the 1930s. The situation then (as now) was a lot of wage disparity. Prices of both food and oil fell, because a lot of people were low paid, and could not afford end products made with food and with oil.
There was an oil glut in the 1930s, just as there was recently. Prices were quite low both times.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/us-ending-stocks-of-crude-oil-_01-02_2016.png
Recent glut shown below.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/weekly-ending-stocks-of-crude-oil-through-jne-22-2018.png
Low oil production occurs because of low prices. Producers (such as Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries) reduce their oil production in the hope that shortages will drive prices up. We can see in 2019 that this strategy is not working well. Oil prices are still quite low. The problem both times is a lack of buyers of end products of oil, because of wage disparity.
We can see some of the same situation on the food supply end of things. There are lots of articles about how poorly US farmers are doing, because prices for food products remain low. Farmers don’t have enough funds to invest in new equipment. Part of the problem is that China is cutting back its purchases from the US. I imagine that there are other countries (particularly oil producers that used to purchase grain from the US, but can’t afford to buy as much grain given the low price of oil) that are also cutting back on their purchases. The lack of buyers produces food gluts.
The problem is a lack of cheap-to-produce oil. If producers would willing to produce oil at the (low) price consumers can afford to pay, their would be no problem, because buyers could afford the end products. As the price rises, there is an increasing change that consumers will buy fewer cars and computers made with oil. The lack of affordability produces the gluts of oil.
“There was an oil glut in the 1930s, just as there was recently. Prices were quite low both times.”
Yes, that’s true for now but fracked oil is a bubble, and looking at your graph, it’s starting it’s decent, how long that will last depends upon the price they can get for their oil & for them to keep extracting expensive fracked oil, they need higher prices.
If they don’t get prices high enough, “production” in those fracked fields will decline & over 60% of the growth in oil is from those quick to deplete fracked oil wells.
Too bad I can’t add the graph I found at the Srsroccoreport report but you can see & read it here https://srsroccoreport.com/global-economic-growth-in-serious-trouble-when-u-s-shale-oil-peaks-declines/
When it declines, it will be fast & the world will lose about 60% of it’s oil growth. That will end the oil “glut” as there are other important oil fields that are also entering decline including ghawar. Conventional oil has been in decline since 2016, fracked oil filled in the gap – so far.
From srsroccoreport –
“Of the 9.6 million barrels per day (mbd) of global oil production growth 2008-2017, the United States supplied two-thirds or 6.3 mbd of the total:”
Some of the conventional oil growth is actually oil “equivalence”, I think that why figures can show both oil in decline since 2016 & continued growth from that oil + oil “equivalence” like natural gas liquids that wasn’t always a part of conventional oil “production”.
The problem farmers are facing now can only get worse, as oil declines it will rise in price until demand falls then prices drop & there will be shortages.
Adding to those farmers troubles will be climate disruption, flooding, drought & extreme heat will cause a decline in food production & higher prices.
“I imagine that there are other countries (particularly oil producers that used to purchase grain from the US, but can’t afford to buy as much grain given the low price of oil) that are also cutting back on their purchases.”
Venenzualia comes to mind here when the price they could get for their oil dropped 80% & they got 97% of their income from oil sales.
Because they lost so much income, they could no longer import enough food & the prices for food skyrocketed & many Venenzualians went hungry.
Trumps China sanctions caused our soybean exports to drop & farmers here were left with soybean crops they couldn’t sell, the result, a glut of soybeans & a drop in price.
Thousands of oil wells in Canada were abandoned by their owners, the company went bankrupt.
This oil “glut” will be short lived.
Note that the graphs I show are not graphs of production, for shale oil or anything else. My graphs are relate to inventory of crude oil awaiting processing. They reflect an excess supply of crude oil for demand for output, at that price.
Most people’s knee jerk reaction regarding what happens when there is inadequate supply for demand supply is “high prices.”
If you look at past history, high prices come when there is truly an excess of buyers in the marketplace, relative to the amount of oil being sold. It occurred when lots of women were being added to the workforce in the 1970s and when a number of different world economies (US, Europe, Japan, Soviet Union) were ramping up their economies simultaneously.
When peak coal was being reached, the outcome seems to have been war, in particular World War I and World War II.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/52-peak-coal-in-uk-and-germany-led-to-world-wars.png
In fact, an outcome even before official war was increased tariffs. This is a type of cold war.
Now, China seems to have reached peak coal. This is a huge problem for China, because without it, it cannot keep its production of exports up. China would be in trouble, with or without Trump’s tariffs.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/china-energy-production-by-fuel-to-2017.png
Without higher prices, China is also past peak oil. China is having trouble because many of its buyers of export goods are themselves not in very good shape. In particular, Western Europe is doing poorly, as it attempts to substitute wind and solar for fossil fuels. Japan’s economy is limping along. To try to keep CHina’s coal consumption up, China has been limiting coal imports from Australia. It also has put limits on Chinese people moving to Australia, holding up Australia’s economy. With so many limping consumers, China cannot charge the price it needs on exports. Its businesses are experiencing poor financial results. China keeps adding more and more debt to stimulate the economy. China’s energy problems are causing it difficulties.
Oil gluts may be short-lived, because they may lead to financial crashes, followed by governmental crashes. As economies fall apart, there will no longer be a way of even measuring oil gluts. There will not be banks holding people’s life savings. It will become almost impossible to pay workers their wages. Our picture of what is ahead is too narrow.
Dam wordpress, it DELETED MY POST even as I was writting it!
Thank you for clairifying the situation. Our view of the future may be narrow but what little we can see is horrifying!
Indeed our “glut” will be short & temporary & the “consumers” are in trouble buried in debt, with rising expenses & declining jobs that pay a living wage.
So our greedy corporations made a killing moving our jobs to countries that have no worker protections, no environmental protections, no regulations & pay poverty wages then got filthy rich shipping their goods to countries that have workers that do have such protections, until now.
Now their “consumers” are flat broke & buried in debt, large businesses are closing by the dozen each day, thousands have closed in the last few years. Their short sighted actions are coming home to roost.
Fuel prices will have to rise but for how long?
Not long as you said & when they fall again, more frackers will be pushed into bankrupsy & fracking will decline. Already a Canadian extractor has abandoned thousands of oil wells & just walked away, broke. More will soon follow him & depletion of available oil will increase.
What will happen to peoples savings in our banks, where will all that money go?
Should people instead invest in land, gold, silver or food? Is there no way for us to protect what little assets we might still have?
Perhaps we should all “invest” in a quick way to off ourselves when TSHTF. If we lose all our savings, lose all our income & there is no way for us to support ourselves, I see no other option.
I wonder how people will react when they are finally forced to admit that “renewables” were a scam & could not live up to their hype?
But for some, they were PROFITABLE & that’s all that really mattered!
I just read that some oil tankers have been set on fire off Yemen, I smell a “Gulf of Tonkin” false flag event again & John Bolton looks like a likely suspect behind it. He’s just drooling for war with Iran, what a FOOL he is!
Iran has allies & a modern army & it will get support from Russia & China.
We don’t need ANOTHER DAM ILLEGAL, UNJUST OR IMMORAL WAR!
“My graphs are relate to inventory of crude oil awaiting processing. They reflect an excess supply of crude oil for demand for output, at that price.
The levels might also reflect the maintenance shutdown of refineries. California has had several recently both scheduled and unscheduled.
Yes, but refinery shutdowns seem to have much smaller impact. Every spring and fall there is a seasonal blend change requiring some shutdowns.
Damnit, wish I thought of that!
https://www.bbc.com/news/48140812
Would you get buried in a mushroom suit like Luke Perry
The firm claims to have found a better way to reduce the body’s toxic pollutants, including lead and mercury, which are often released into the environment during decomposition and cremation.
Made from organic cotton embedded with material from specially cultivated mushrooms, the firm says its infinity burial suit “delivers nutrients from body to surrounding plant roots efficiently”.
Jae Rhim Lee wore an early version of the suit during a Ted Talk in 2011 in which she explained her research.
“Some of our tastiest mushrooms can clean environmental toxins,” she said, “so I thought maybe I can train an army of toxin-cleaning edible mushrooms
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc
Wow, and I was hoping to be toss out with the kitty litter!
More on ethanol and eating.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-06/heartland-heartache-hits-record-mississippi-river-major-flood-stage-41-days
Large tragedy for Bettendorf might be the gaming boats on the levee, too much water to access if the river overflows the levee, gaming revenue is a serious source of income.
Mother’s day is more or less a start date for planting around here(MN), earlier is better, later means snow at harvest time is an issue. Some land is wet, some is dry, some is just right, ask a farmer and it is either too wet, too dry, too cold, too hot, etc.
Could food be an exception to inflation as eating less is more difficult that driving less?
Dennis L.
Remember what happened during the Depression of the 1930s. Food prices dropped too low for farmers who were not highly industrialized. There were gluts of food, because people could not afford it. Food was thrown away. I expect the same thing again.
The physics and technology and possibly the economics will let us move energy production to space on a time scale about equal to the fossil fuels running out.
For that matter, we can move the population into space habitats, though that will take a while.
Will uploading into virtual reality or moving into space come first? In any case, they both will take a lot of energy, perhaps more than we use now.
Note that I don’t discount a collapse/dieback as a possible future. Besides the many human and biological factors, a large volcanic eruption could kick off a world-wide famine.
What if it is all a simulation and God simply presses the reset button? Serious people are starting to think our lives as the matrix is really real.
Denns L.
I might be the source of the current speculation about this being a simulation. Google “pigs in cyberspace” to see one of the links.
The physics and technology and possibly the economics will let us move energy production to space on a time scale about equal to the fossil fuels running out.
The delusion is quite amazing—-
Late stage capitalism is always interesting, and humorous, if you are able to put things into a small enough box.
I think the problem with fossil fuels is that they leave us because of low prices, not that they “run out.” If our problem is low prices, that makes the problem of importing fossil fuels even more problematic.
I agree Gail, that is the fundamental problem. Energy extraction has to be profitable or it ceases.
“The delusion is quite amazing—-”
If you have worked out a business finance case, I would like to see it. Otherwise, how can you say it is delusion without even looking at the numbers?
What numbers are those Keith? That it still costs over $20,000 to launch a kg into space?
SpaceX is below $2000/kg, be fair
I don;t think we’re seeing the true picture, as SpaceX’s operations are heavily subsidised by the U.S. taxpayer.
Why do you state costs as dollars when the real cost is in terms of energy and pollution. Space is getting crowded and resources are becoming scare. More dollars doesn’t solve those problems.
As Ed pointed out, SpaceX is around $2000/kg, a fall to one tenth.
But that’s not close, the cost to GEO needs to fall to $200/kg.
The levelized cost of electricity for power satellites works out as capital cost/80,000 to give you cents per kWh. So for 3 cent power, which Gail thinks is about as high as consistent with economic growth, you can afford to spend $2400/kW of installed power. Roughly $200/kW goes to the rectenna cost, around $900/kW for the parts and the remaining $1300 is what you can spend on lifting the power satellites to GEO.
There might be lighter designs, but the current consensus is for 6.5 kg/kW. That allows a cost of no more than $200/kg to GEO. Analysis indicates that half the cost is in the lift to LEO, so a LEO cost of $100/kg makes power satellites an economic solution.
At high flight rates, the proposed Skylon rocket plane is projected to go under $100/kg to LEO.
It is also very likely that reusable rockets can hit this figure at meaningful flight rates. The one thing that needs to be done with rockets is to see what damage they will do to the ozone. (Skylon, being a hydrogen burner looks like the ozone damage is tolerable even at a power satellite construction rate of 2 TW/year.)
Incidentally, 3 cent power would make synthetic fuel at $70/bbl.
I don’t know if this will be done. It looks much more likely that the Chinese will do it than the western countries. But the point here is that there does seem to be a path out of the energy swamp.
I have not considered the debt increase for building power satellites as positive, but in Gail’s view it is, and for certain it would be huge.
the cost of energy into space isn’t the point
it’s what you do with it when you get there.
The Apollo program brought back rocks—knowledge yes, but essentially rocks in practical terms. Those rocks have revealed nothing of significant value—If they had, commercial interests would have been back there decades ago. The fact that they haven’t should tell you something.
the reason NASA hasn’t been back to the moon is that there is no return on energy invested—the same will apply to Mars or wherever.
Spaceflight consumes, it does not produce.
The Chinese have yet to find that out:
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/mission-to-mars-d57055fa6f34
they are exercises in national prestige/domination, they have no other ultimate function. A few years on Mars would drive you spacenuts.
Space colonies will gobble up energy to support themselves. There is no Kryptonite. A ton of something mined on an asteroid will have an astronomical cost—far too high to be of practical use.
Elements are common throughout the universe, There are very few ”free” elements in the universe that are any use to us.
And whatever it is would have to be converted into something else
And that conversion requires energy—which we are running short of. Our economic model is making buying selling. Spaceflight doesn’t contribute much to that..
We cannot sustain a civilisation that is itself devoted to the endless development of energy resources to the exclusion of all else.
The current rough plans for power satellites have all the materials hauled up from earth.
oh
that’s ok then
never thought of that.
Then what happens?
“Then what happens?”
I don’t know. It will take a decade and a half or two decades after getting started to build out power satellites till they *could* replace fossil fuels.
But there are other things going on. If technological progress continues into the nanotechnology and AI world we get “the singularity” that Vernor Vinge has written about. I have written about post singularity days in a fictional context. http://www.terasemjournals.org/GNJournal/GN0202/henson1.html
The backstory was that so many people uploaded that the physical state population crashed to around 1%. Uploading is something that nanotechnology would allow. Would people do it? I don’t know. I do think (for marketing reasons) that uploading would have to be bidirectional so people could try it.
well
everyone is entitled to their belief system. my own is derided by many, justifiably so probably.. One has to learn to live with that I guess
So when thinking of lifting stuff into earth orbit, I think something more than a container with arrows on the side, with the word UP stencilled underneath them, might be a good idea
Other than that, your lifeskills intrigue me:
electrical engineer, proto-transhumanist, and writer on life extension, cryonics, memetics, and Evolutionary psychology.
Electrical engineer I can relate to–(personally wiring a uk 3 pin plug can be life threatening as I’m colour blind)
the rest loses me I’m afraid
—but what is an evolutionary psychologist?, or a proto trans humanist?
“but what is an evolutionary psychologist?, or a proto trans humanist”
In reverse order, I was involved in activities, space colonies, life extension, memetics, cryonics and the like before they became part of the transhumanist/Extropian background. There is a list of people who are identified as such here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_transhumanists and here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:British_transhumanists Of the American group I think 4 have died, and three of those are in cryonic suspension.
Evolutionary psychology is the recognition that human psychological traits and behavior have been shaped by evolution. Example here: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding I wrote a couple of papers on the subject (“Sex, Drugs, and Cults. An evolutionary psychology perspective on why and how cult memes get a drug-like hold on people, and what might be done to mitigate the effects,” and “Evolutionary Psychology Memes and the Origin of War”). More than a decade later are still being downloaded a few times per month.
just an afterthought
how rough is rough?
“how rough is rough?”
There are two questions that need to be answered. Do power satellites make economic sense? And how deep into the hole will the project have to go before breaking even?
The answer to the first is definitely, provided the cost to LEO can be reduced to $100.kg.
The second question is roughly bracketed by $30-60 B but that needs more work.
These are crazy pipe dreams, they’ve been debunked many times. Just the environmental impact of this many rocket launches per day to construct these things would be astonishing enough. Like fracking on hyperdrive.
“environmental impact of this many rocket launches”
A few years ago years ago I had this exact concern. I asked people at NOAA to look into the potential ozone damage from up to a million Skylon flights per year. There is no point in solving the carbon and energy problem with power satellites if the cost is a billion cases of skin cancer.
They put a lot of effort into modeling the problem, hundreds of hours of supercomputer time on the models, writing a paper and getting it through peer review. I really appreciate what they did.
The paper “Global atmospheric response to emissions from a proposed reusable space launch system” is available online at
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016EF000399
Short answer: the damage to the ozone is not a showstopper, at least not for the hydrogen burning Skylon. Hydrocarbon rockets still need to be analyzed.
Keith, It is interesting you use dollar values when the very thing that give dollars their purchasing power is the burning of finite fossil fuels. What I gather from your comments is you feel we as a society can bootstrap a process (using fossil fuels) that will become self-supporting at some point without further inputs of fossil fuels. I cannot help but feel that this attempt to build such a system is akin to building a perpetual motion machine.
“akin to building a perpetual motion machine”
Power satellites are no more a perpetual motion machine than a tree or for that matter, any facility that makes power out of sunlight. They do take a substantial investment both per power satellite and in the transportation infrastructure to build them. But that’s not different in kind to building a dam.
I guess what you are after is how long it would take for power satellites to completely replace fossil fuels. The installation pace we have investigated (“we” here includes Reaction Engines) is 1.5-2 TW/year. At that rate it would take ten years to replace 15 TW. (See cubic mile of oil in Wikipedia) Of course it takes about ten years to ramp up to that rate.
If most power was electricity from space, the energy mix would be different. Where we really need liquid fuels, like aircraft, we would make them out of water, CO2 and electric power. The cost would not be much different from the current.
It’s all straightforward physics, chemistry, and economics.
“They (space solar panels) do take a substantial investment both per power satellite and in the transportation infrastructure to build them.” – And re-investment, rebuilding, disposal, replacement, repair and maintenance in both the panels and the supporting infrastructure they require to be useful/useable. It is not a one time upfront cost of resources. But, a continuous stream of resource extraction, recycling and energy consumption to keep these things operating. That is the “perpetual motion” machine aspect of this. It doesn’t kickstart itself like fossil fuels did with respect to industrial civilization. You seem to be expecting to build these things then capture unlimited amounts of energy from the sun. It doesn’t work that way.
“And re-investment, rebuilding, disposal, replacement, repair and maintenance in both the panels and the supporting infrastructure”
Rebuilding, disposal, replacement are assumed to reuse the material in orbit.
“panels” I think thermal type power satellites will be more cost effective. Probably supercritical CO2 for the working fluid. They look to be about half the area of a power satellite using PV panels. (40% efficient vs 20%.) Startup issues need to be addressed.
The cost of maintenance in space is included in the levelized cost of power.
The largest part of the infrastructure is building replacement Skylons (one is only good for about 1500 flights). This requires growing the aerospace industry by a substantial amount (I don’t remember the exact number).
“capture unlimited amounts of energy from the sun. It doesn’t work that way.”
Think of a power satellite as like a hydroelectric dam. High cost to build, relatively low maintenance, no fuel cost.
GEO is not unlimited. There is room for around 17,000 power satellites, 3000 will provide about the same energy as all the fossil fuels we use.
As I was just looking at Tom Murphy’s posts:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/03/space-based-solar-power/
One thing that strikes me is that Tom Murphy doesn’t understand why intermittent solar electricity is not equivalent to a steady supply. Intermittent electricity is a never-ending problem for earth-based systems to use. The more that is added to the grid, the more problems it creates. It sort of replaces fuel, except that fuel is “well-behaved” and intermittent solar electricity is not. It is necessary to add an impractically large array of batteries to fix the intermittency problem. In this post, CAISO Data Highlights Critical Flaws In The Evolving Renewables Plus Storage Mythology, John Peterson says:
Tom Murphy’s other comments may be worth considering, however.
It may well be that, whatever electricity there is post-bottleneck, will all be “intermittent.”
This is not a huge problem in the Third World. Many places are used to having electricity for only a portion of the day, or at least they don’t count on it being continuously available.
I agree that intermittent renewables are a huge problem for “the grid.” But in a world where everyone is living at third-world standards? Perhaps not so much a problem.
As long as we can only imagine a continuation of our current access to energy, lack of access is a “problem.” Only when we break free of that, do some possibilities become viable.
One thing that strikes me is that Tom Murphy doesn’t understand why intermittent solar electricity is not equivalent to a steady supply.
I think Tom does understand this, but it’s not really part of his arsenal in debunking space based solar, because he assumes that the electricity generated by a space based solar array will be constant.
His opening paragraph:
A solar panel reaps only a small portion of its potential due to night, weather, and seasons, simultaneously introducing intermittency so that massive storage is required to make solar power work at a large scale. A perennial proposition for surmounting these impediments is that we launch solar collectors into space…
and later on
any serious talk of solar power in space is based on geosynchronous orbits
and that
Being so far from the Earth, the satellite rarely enters eclipse. When it does, the duration will be something like 70 minutes. But this only happens once per day during periods when the Sun is near the equatorial plane, within about ±22 days of the equinox, twice per year. In sum, we can expect shading about 0.7% of the time. Not too bad.
i.e. a solar array in geosynchronous orbit will generate a constant electricity supply over 99% of the time. I suppose the fact the electricity generated can’t be ramped up at periods of peak demand could be a problem in itself.
When I have talked to the issue space solar folks, they have talked about the possibly of overbuilding the supply of constant electricity, and using the excess to make liquid fuels. The overbuilding would be used to cover the spikes, assuming the system ever gets large enough to supply close to all of our electricity.
The loss of electricity at midnight in the spring and fall could probably be worked around. That is a low demand time to begin with.
The wings are getting wobbly.
Air France-KLM proposed voluntary redundancies.
https://simpleflying.com/air-france-klm-redundancies/
Rising fuel prices are again a problem! What a surprise!
«Capitalism as we know it is over. So suggests a new report commissioned by a group of scientists appointed by the UN Secretary-General. The main reason? We’re transitioning rapidly to a radically different global economy, due to our increasingly unsustainable exploitation of the planet’s environmental resources.
Climate change and species extinctions are accelerating even as societies are experiencing rising inequality, unemployment, slow economic growth, rising debt levels, and impotent governments. Contrary to the way policymakers usually think about these problems, the new report says that these are not really separate crises at all.
Rather, these crises are part of the same fundamental transition to a new era characterized by inefficient fossil fuel production and the escalating costs of climate change. Conventional capitalist economic thinking can no longer explain, predict, or solve the workings of the global economy in this new age, the paper says. Those are the stark implications of a new scientific background paper prepared by a team of Finnish biophysicists. The team from the BIOS Research Unit in Finland were asked to provide research that would feed into the drafting of the UN Global Sustainable Development Report (GSDR), which will be released in 2019.
For the “first time in human history,” the paper says, capitalist economies are “shifting to energy sources that are less energy efficient.” This applies to all forms of energy. Producing usable energy (“exergy”) to keep powering “both basic and non-basic human activities” in industrial civilisation “will require more, not less, effort.”«
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/scientists-warn-the-un-of-capitalisms-imminent-demise-a679facac985
Nafeez Ahmed gets part of the story. Using renewables to try to solve climate problems will lower average EROI (raises costs). Nafeez comes to the conclusion that the world will have to get along with less energy, because we cannot afford to extract the same amount with higher costs (lower EROI). I don’t think that the financial system can handle this. The world economy is likely to go into a downward spiral with falling energy per capita. Lack of energy consumption per capita affects available jobs and wages of workers.
“There is bad news for the global renewable energy sector. After nearly two decades of strong annual growth, renewables around the world added as much net capacity in 2018 as they did in 2017, an unexpected flattening of growth trends that raises concerns about meeting long-term climate goals.”
https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/bad-news-for-renewable-energy-capacity-addition-becomes-flat-for-the-first-time-in-17-years/69202562
Wisdom of OFW has started showing results!
This is the chart of new renewable energy additions by the IEA that appears in your linked article.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/iea-renewable-net-capacity-additions.png
It looks like pretty much every type of renewable energy is having difficulty. BP data will be out in June. I expect it will show similar trends, in detail that it is possible to analyze.
By the way, I ran into an interesting battery article today that may explain part of the problem with using batteries for offsetting more than short term intermittency. It is called, CAISO Data Highlights Critical Flaws In The Evolving Renewables Plus Storage Mythology. The article says:
(CASIO is the California electric power regulator.)
US Oil Exploration Drops by 95 Percent
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-05-03/us-oil-exploration-drops-by-95-percent/
Posted out of interest in the Deep Carbon Observatory’s scientific and technical work which I have been following since its inception:
https://deepcarbon.net/index.php/rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuels
Nothing here negates OFW’s analyses about the nature of our planetary crises. Their work and story is interesting and specially with regards to life origins and the obvious implications that the cosmos may be teeming with life.
This is an interesting article pointing out that quite a bit of natural gas seems to be of abiotic formation. I was aware that natural gas was being formed all of the time–it is a byproduct of decay of the plant matter, for example, when a dam in formed or in a garbage dump. It seems to come from other reactions as well. We don’t know much about how this is all formed. It may have played a role in early life on the planet.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html
Asked about this at one of the ASPO meetings, didn’t fit with the story, more or less blown off. Is it possible hydrocarbons came before dinosaurs? Or did the dinosaurs travel to Titan and die. Yes, I know dinosaurs are not the accepted precursor to hydrocarbons; but if hydrocarbons came first, do we still call them fossil fuels?
With that volume of hydrocarbons on Titan, it would seem possible they were also on other planets. Long chained hydrocarbons are hard to form on earth in refineries, how are they formed?
Dennis L.
The earlier linked article just talked about the natural gas part, I believe.
The NASA article says:
I am not impressed by the statement, “Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire United States uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting.”
US proven reserve for natural gas amount to about 12 times the US’s annual production of natural gas, according to BP (both at 2008 and now). On a world basis, natural gas reserves amounted to about 56 times world’s natural gas production in 2008 and to about about 53 times the world’s natural gas consumption in 2017. I would not count on the accuracy of the world natural gas reserves; they are not audited amounts for many countries. Why would we care about a comparison of world natural gas reserves to a portion of the US’s natural gas consumption? Also, if the prices don’t stay up high enough, the reserves cannot really be extracted.
I can’t imagine importing natural gas or other hydrocarbons from Titan.
You have a member working on an elevator for that
No argument Gail, I have always wondered why a different explanation for the origin of hydrocarbons on what appears to be a lifeless moon and earth, or which came first, the hydrocarbons or living organisms.
Somewhere I came across a paper regarding exponential use of any fuel from perhaps the beginning of the industrial age to present; were that usage to continue at current growth rates the surface of the planet becomes very warm, this article ignored CO2 and looked at ability of earth to radiate so much heat. Can’t find it with Google. Some of your readers may have come across it, I want to say it was written at MIT but that is sketchy.
Dennis L.
Dennis
Possibly you are thinking of one of Tom Murphy’s posts from his Do The Math blog. This is one I found quickly:
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/
“Alright, the Earth has only one mechanism for releasing heat to space, and that’s via (infrared) radiation. We understand the phenomenon perfectly well, and can predict the surface temperature of the planet as a function of how much energy the human race produces. The upshot is that at a 2.3% growth rate (conveniently chosen to represent a 10× increase every century), we would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.”
Well, at least they’re already liquid, saving the energy needed to liquify natgas! 🙂
Good point. Importing a gas would be a huge problem. There would then be a gasification problem once they got to earth. Where to store all of this natural gas?
“Proven reserves of natural gas on Earth total 130 billion tons, enough to provide 300 times the amount of energy the entire UNITED STATES uses annually for residential heating, cooling and lighting.”
I might not be “impressed” by that statement but I am ANNOYED!
NASA seems to be implying that all of the earths natural gas belongs to the UNITED STATES!
I’m hearing Jimmy Carter saying all over again “That’s our OIL over there!”
NO it’s not NASA or Carter, it’s THEIR NATURAL GAS & it’s THEIR OIL!
The USA doesn’t OWN the worlds natural resources just because it has the MIGHT TO STEAL IT!
After they have wrecked our planet cutting, burning, drilling, fracking, mining & KILLING for PROFIT, what is plan “B”?
“Long pig”? is that what “survival” will come down to? NO THANKS!
To all my right wing friends here on OFW…say what!?
The Fed is a socialist organization.
• Fed To Give Banks A $36 Billion Taxpayer-Funded Subsidy (Middleton)
Before 2009, the Fed did not pay interest on banks’ excess reserves held at the Fed. This practice was introduced as a taxpayer-funded subsidy to the banks during the crisis (taxpayer-funded because the Fed turns over any profit at the end of the year to the Treasury). After beginning this practice, the Fed’s chief trader, Simon Potter, realized it could be used to raise interest rates without expelling excess reserves from the Fed, by sucking liquidity out of the short-term markets. In fall 2015, it began raising the interest rate on excess reserves, with the anticipated effect. At a current rate of about $36 billion a year, this is a cost to the Treasury that is indefensible. This amount is about half the budget for food stamps, for example, which politicians want to cut. There is no provision for these funds ever to be paid back. It is welfare for the bankers.
What’s 36 billion among friends? But I’ll tell you those welfare mothers ….
Thank you to the Automatic Earth …Debt Rattle May 5, 2019 for posting it
Coming from the insurance industry, rather than the banking industry, I am less aware of the ins-and-outs of the banking industry. Giving the bankers more interest would seem to be a work-around for the spread between long-term interest rates and short-term interest rates being below historical averages (as these amounts all headed downward). Thus, in a sense, the interest on excess reserves might be considered an offset for low interest rates that is given to bankers, but not to insurers, pension plans, or ordinary citizens. In that sense, it is not fair to the rest of the system. Perhaps the intent is to prop up banks to a greater extent than insurance companies and pension plans.
For my Conservative friends here on OFW…my favorite fella explaining it to the choir..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hYzX3YZoMrs
And for others here, Michael Ruppert point blank…What is 💰 Money
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=W5yfTAFzYz4
Ruppert was a brilliant teacher and was able to explain things that were difficult to grasp and break it down so that anyone could understand it.
I agree, miss him so much, makes me cry watching this goodbye by his friend and confidante, Abby Martin. Warning: do watch if you do not have tissue paper to wipe away your tears.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nWXbKOAHANQ
Abby Martin’s documentary-driven Empire Files program is closing in on 150,000 YouTube subscribers plus thousands more website visitors.
http://theempirefiles.tv
I remember watching that the day it aired on RT. I was a big Ruppert fan. His movie “Collapse” should be shown to every High School student before the graduate. He also said he didn’t make a whole lot from the movie as it was pirated more than it was sold but true to Michael as a person he was OK with that because he knew it was more important for him to get the word out.
China’s Nasdaq is down 8 percent…so far.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D53QYUqXsAAjM07?format=jpg&name=medium
Ouch!
Hopefully a temporary ouch. I still need more time to get my ducks in a row before the ship lists and starts to sink.
You will NEVER have enough Ducks to prepare for what’s heading our way. That’s why I quit worrying about the future, not a whole helluva lot anyone can do about it.
Brent 69.45
WTI 60.55
last month WTI hit 66… perhaps it will be the 2019 high?
it could make people wonder why OPEC doesn’t do something…
like maybe lower their output?
I propse you reread the article… The supply-demand model is no longer working in a constrained world. I was also saying once that lowering the output should increase the price but I learned that this is not true (Gail’s main issue I guess)
Lowering output has two bad outcomes:
1. Low demand is also coming from a too high price, so “increasing the price” will not automatically increase demand. Deflationary death spiral
2. Lowering output reduces overall global economic activity (vessels, refineries petrochemicals, labour etc) so this trend goes for even less demand. Deflationary death spiral
The OPEC+ has been recently preoccupied how to deal with the ‘severity’ of new anti Iranian sanctions, as reported even Gulfies and Saudies show ever increasing willingness to sit at the table with others and without the US..
U.S. runs largest monthly budget deficit on record in February 2019 – Deficit for first five months of FY 2019 hits $544.2 billion, up 40% from FY 2018
https://desdemonadespair.net/2019/04/u-s-runs-largest-monthly-budget-deficit-on-record-in-february-2019-deficit-for-first-five-months-of-fy-2019-hits-544-2-billion-up-40-from-fy-2018.html
But, if you have been bankrupt 6 times, who cares?
under Obama, the deficit went up about $8 trillion in 8 years…
it looks like Obama didn’t care either…
We need more debt to keep the system going. It is hard to criticize an approach that adds more debt.
The system of adding debt that Trump chose tended to favor existing businesses above others. Some of the very “green” proposals would use the debt, instead, for investment in green energy approaches and/or greater income for people with little or no income.
An ever growing part of our major institutions’ functions is the cultivation and maintenance of three sets of illusions which turn the citizen into a client to be saved by experts…The first enslaving illusion is the idea that people are born to be consumers and that they can attain any of their goals by purchasing goods and services. This illusion is due to an educated blindness to the worth of use-values in the total economy. In none of the economic models serving as national guidelines is there a variable to account for non-marketable use-values any more than there is a variable for nature’s perennial contribution.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EzEzIBHuUmU
Us men don’t like told the truth….we need illusions.
Too many people believe, “He who dies with the most toys wins.” This is not really true.
If your wife gains weight, or gets cancer, divorce her and find a new younger, prettier model (especially if you are well-off).
Yes, so true, but Aristotle Onassis was reported to have said, “If it weren’t for women, we wouldn’t need money.” It has worked for Donald, any of you guys have a more beautiful wife(s)? How about your private jet? If you are single does the woman size up your house, car, job, etc? Gail is a woman, sees the men, we as men know the game, work ourselves to death chasing women, so it has been, so it will be. Those of us who lose have no descendants, those of us who win have some. Biology does not care about BAU, biology cares about more biology.
Dennis L.
Back before jobs that pay well were common for women, the matching between men and women was different from what it is now. When few women worked outside the home, the variability of the family’s income depended almost entirely on the husband’s income. So, of course, women were very interested in finding men with good incomes.
Now, with many women with good incomes, these women with good incomes still want to have husbands with at least reasonably good incomes. The men with low incomes have a hard time finding wives; they tend to find live-in girlfriends instead. Or their marriages don’t last very long.
Some of the women with high incomes ditch their husbands, if they discover the husband is more of an impediment to their careers than a help. Also, husbands with drinking problems and girl friends on the side are not well tolerated.
In the end, US families now have more wage disparity. The couples that stay together tend to be families with at least moderately high incomes, often from both partners. The tax law tends to penalize low-income families in the US. Taxes are more favorable if a woman can file taxes as a “female head of household with dependent children,” rather than “married filing jointly.” The tax law, by itself, discourages low-income couples from marrying.
So high incomes are still important for men. But with the world’s increasingly skewed wage distribution, it becomes harder and harder for men to be in the high-income group that attracts women. The skewness of family incomes becomes even greater than the skewness of individual incomes, with more high-paying jobs for women and the tax law.
It isn’t just resources that attracts women, though.
There’s a theory that since resources are no longer primary draw for women, that Sexual Dimorphism is more important in attraction. Hence the growth of cosmetic surgery and fitness. The growth in fitness programs is not JUST due to burn excess calories from an industrial food diet consisting of processed food or a sedentary lifestyle, but it is also due to the need for people to signal genetic fitness in order to attract desirable mates.
Thoughts, anyone?
“The tax law tends to penalize low-income families in the US. Taxes are more favorable if a woman can file taxes as a “female head of household with dependent children,” rather than “married filing jointly.” The tax law, by itself, discourages low-income couples from marrying. ”
As far as we know, this has impacted those of African descent the most.
because Africans tend to self-organize into matrilineal societies.
In Africa,Many African societies are matrilineal.
Because food was available year round, women did not need men to provide as much and were more independent and men evolved were more aggressive and had to develop other display of fitness to women aside from being a resource provider:
When the patriarchal organization of American society was changed in the 1960s, many but not Africans reverted to a matrilineal organization , The tax code did not just provide an incentive but encourages a natural tendency.
In short, it seems like everyone, in America, is being subject to the evolutionary pressures that exist in matrilineal societies, where men who pass on their genes have to do more than being a provider. (average worker bee),
Ah, Illich. My favourite:
Planted dozens of peppers and tomatoes today, by hand. Then spent an equal amount of time looking for a misplaced tractor part.
Who is the slave, and who is the master? I think the term “energy slaves” may well be a malapropism — we are the slaves.
The stuff we buy, in some sense, owns us.
People who live in an area of the world where housing can consist of a hastily constructed shack without electricity or plumbing are, in many ways, less bound by all kinds of demands than we are. These parts of the world are the ones where birth rates are still high.
“Possession Possesses. — Only up to a certain point does possession make men feel freer and more independent; one step farther, and possession becomes lord, the possessor a slave. The latter must sacrifice his time, his thoughts to the former, and feels himself compelled to an intercourse, nailed to a spot, incorporated with the State — perhaps quite in conflict with his real and essential needs.”
a hastily constructed shack without electricity or plumbing pretty much guarantees a short life expectancy
or nice warm/cool homes, with everything delivered, keeps us in good health
and overpopulates the world too of course
has to be a snag somewhere
This made me consider what I know from experience. Without research to back it up, I’d say that people can live quite well in the Tropics in “hastily built sheds,” but these might preclude privacy and social supports that would maximize life span. But without specific research it’s not easy to figure out, and too easy to mischaracterize.
i agree—“in the tropics” If you are fit and healthy yes. But you can’t have any kind of civilised existence in a shack somewhere
but unfortunately, we moved out of the tropics a long time ago
added to which the tropics are looking more and more unlivable.
“…but unfortunately, we moved out of the tropics a long time ago…”
Too broad a statement, I’m afraid. As Gail says, population is growing such that it must surely be livable. The Tropics I come from seems to be enjoying the life of Riley. There’s water, prevailing winds, considerable beauty and greenery. So much so that people appear to be doing their level best to abuse them and make them go away.
When my father lived in Madagascar many years ago, contagious diseases were a huge problem. Even now, with antibiotics and a few types of immunizations, they are still a real problem. If the world economy goes downhill, I expect that contagious diseases will become more of a problem everywhere, including Africa.
For example, if we can’t spray for insects that carry diseases, even in the United States contagious disease are likely to rise. Of course, in general we need the insects we are spraying for.
all hail to Gail
for saving me the trouble of pointing out the obvious
But “WE” are not moving away from the Tropics. In fact, as it stands, plenty of these WE’s are moving in. Quite a problem for the non WE’s.
Nice quote!
In my view, possessions can even make family members (like mothers) slaves.
For example, my children didn’t have cell phones in high school, even though their friends did. They would ask, “But how can we call you, if we have a problem?” I told them that I didn’t want them to call me if they had a problem. If it was a real emergency, someone from the school would call. We lived four blocks from the school. They could walk the four blocks home if they needed/wanted to. In fact, I encouraged them to do this, even though there were not good sidewalks between our house and the school, and the roads were pretty busy. A school bus would pick them up and take them to school, if they wanted to ride the bus.
Somehow, they succeeded without cell phones. Cell phones were less ubiquitous then, also.
Besides the “too much reliance on mom” issue, there was a cost element involved. My husband didn’t have a cell phone either, at that time, because the only time he was willing to take calls was when he was not teaching in class, and his office phone number worked perfectly well for calling him then.
It is amazing at what we choose to call “indispensable.”
I’m a long-time cell-phone resister. I’ve never had one, although I have borrowed one now and then.
I think people are going to need to adopt the “Great Depression” attitude. Those of us “of a certain age” remember grandparents or parents who lived through the Great Depression. My grandparents saved old clothing to repair, and old bits of fabric to repair them with. They saved nuts and bolts, and actually fixed things, rather than throwing them out and buying anew.
But this is a habit one cultivates and develops, not something one “takes up” the day after the crash.
It’s like disposable cups. If I’m out and about, and get thirsty, and don’t have my travel mug, well, I decide I wasn’t really that thirsty.
the whole point of possessions for men is to attract women.
didn’t the #metoo movement expose this reality.?
It is the main reason why men “work hard”.
The other reason is to make sure their children and kin are “taken care of”.
Not sure what motivates women to work hard.
Children?
(the first quote was Nietzsche)
“The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern eco- nomic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment”.114 But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.
[….]
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” “
– Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
That is a great quote:
This problem today makes it hard for a person who is trained in a lucrative career to change to one with smaller financial rewards, even if there are aspects of the lucrative career that make that career unsuitable.
This is so true!
I took an intermediate step: I “made my living” for five years as an artist. If there’s anything that is good training for farming, it is trying to make money from your own art — without working for an ad agency or similar.
After that experience — which tapped my savings more than made me money — farming was like welfare! At least I got to eat while I watched my savings go away!
Seriously, I don’t claim to be some genius, and I managed to figure out that a lucrative career was not in my own long-term best interests. But a lot more people seem to know this than are willing to actually do anything about it!
http://crudeoilpeak.info/wp-content/uploads/World_crude_production_1994-Dec2018.jpg
http://crudeoilpeak.info/latest-graphs
http://oil-price.net/
I don’t think the graphs yet show the decline in world oil production. As oil production declines, we should expect a contracting world economy. There may be a few local spikes in prices (say, for diesel in Europe and gasoline in California), but the overall price level will tend to fall, not rise.
It seems like local economies that must rely on imports of energy products are the most interested in “being green,” and the least aware of the pitfalls of relying on (1) local green energy plus (2) whatever energy products can be bought from the world marketplace.
We have a quite cold May in Central Europe, which now resembles rather November. Maybe the solar cycles have greater influence than we think:
“The Solar Grand Maximum is finished, we are now moving into a Solar Grand Minimum. The Earth heats up after a Solar Grand Maximum, lagging a bit after the peak. With a Solar Grand Minimum now on its way, a “global cooling” is on the horizon—a natural oscillation occurring in much longer solar cycles. See “Solar Cycle #25 predictions” and the coming Mini Ice Age on the main Solar Cycles page.”
https://www.lunarplanner.com/SolarCycles-climate.html
Maybe not.
I note that the cite you reference appears to have a strong anti-AGW bias, so it is in their interest to introduce implied distractions.
As a radio frequency design engineer and lifetime amateur radio operator, I have been closely aware of the so-called “solar” (sunspot) cycles since I was ten or so, listening to shortwave radio and getting an amateur radio licence at about thirteen.
Sunspots influence the degree to which the ionosphere reflects radio waves, and notably, the “Maximum Usable Frequency” (MUF) for long-distance, “skip” radio communication.
I have never seen any evidence that sunspot numbers influence weather or climate. The energetic output of the sun is not really altered by the increase of charged particles striking the ionosphere. The ability of the ionosphere to admit or reflect energy is only different in a fairly narrow band (7 to 50 megahertz or so) of radio frequencies — frequencies for which the Earth receives very little energy to start with. The only significant thing besides radio communication that is affected by sunspots are the auroras, which are more intense at solar maximum.
#ICallBS
I won’t call BS, but I will give you my call sign. AF5LQ. Now, can you help me with my Dragon SCS 7800 Pactor 4 Modem, and for that matter, answer a question that no one, I mean no one, will answer on any other forum: Is there a SDR /program /modem out there that would let me type messages like this and encode into CW, or PSK, FSK etc and transmit? (I am unable to learn CW-too old and too lazy) I know that rigs like my Elecraft KX3 and sidecar plus can receive and decode signals, but can I encode into CW from text and transmit? (Gail, if too off topic I won’t be offended if you delete post.) But if we are talking about energy, I can transmit and receive signals across the continent with only 5-10 watts.
Why CW? There are lots of programs available to turn text into FSK, for example, particularly if you have an IBM PC and a standard sound card interface. (It’s tougher finding software for the Mac.)
Requisite on-topic content: many amateur radio operators excel in emergency communications, and get regular practice through Simulated Emergency Test (SET) events, hosted by the Amateur Radio Emergency Service (ARES). They have a disciplined manual protocol for passing “traffic” that was one of the models for the TCP/IP protocol that runs the Internet. They may be the only ones communicating over long distances after the bottleneck. I have a “Field Day” setup and can “work all bands” with one solar panel, pretty much indefinitely. Although since we’re near the minimum of Solar Cycle 24, it may be limited to 7MHz or so, until SC25 kicks in.
de N7JDB
https://www.lunarplanner.com/SolarCycles-images/sunspot-23-24-alignments.png
There are surely some cycles of warmer and colder periods caused by the activity of the Sun or some other external forces. Heating the planet via burning fossil fuels is not the only factor that plays the role in (todays) temperature changes.
If we have cold months of May like this one we have now in Central Europe, we can not lower fossil fuel emissions, we must heat our homes, production facilities etc.
Yes, now we are heating the planet, but in response to the cold.
I don’t disagree. There are surely many long-term solar changes that affect it’s energy output. Someday, it will swell to a red giant, and consume at least the inner two planet, and possibly Earth, as well.
What I see no evidence for is what was asserted in the link posted: that the eleven-year sunspot cycle has anything whatsoever to do with weather and climate.
That assertion seems to simply be a weak attempt to divert attention from the fact that human pollution is affecting the weather and climate.
The trade war deepens.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/05/trump-says-tariffs-on-200-billion-of-chinese-goods-will-increase-to-25percent-on-friday.html
Sounds concerning. As I recall, they were going to be applied earlier this year (March 1?), and then got put off. Tariffs shouldn’t be too surprising, when there is an issue of “not enough to go around” in some real sense.
I see this headline:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/05/traders-brace-for-sharp-sell-off-on-trumps-tariff-threat.html
This headline now reads, Dow futures drop nearly 500 points as China considers skipping trade talks after Trump threat.
seems there are some decent people left in politics after all
https://twitter.com/Alex_Verbeek/status/1125006250171875329
If he had any “decency” he would have left the GOP while George “War for Oil” Bush was in office. It is one thing to take offense at Trump’s words but actions are more important than words and Bush’s actions as president were far worse than anything Trump has done.
The Bush Regime was more effective, as they had effective people planning the operation for 20 years (New American Century).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century
Trump is a 6 times bankrupt scammer from Queens, and has employees who are of similar qualities. BushCo was much more effective.
At this points I judge politicians by their entertainment value. AOC, Donald, Slapsy Maxi, Gravel….
Then again—
1818 — Germany: Communist theorist, philosopher of labor, capitalist critic, Karl Marx lives, Trier. Nemesis of Michael Bakunin.
“WE have nothing to lose but our bricks.”
What the British conserved, the Tanzanians and Chinese are hell-bent on destroying in the name of development.
It is arguably the Empire’s greatest legacy to conservation, the outrageous vision of a British poacher-turned-naturalist whose misanthropic cussedness would shape Africa’s largest wildlife sanctuary.
Stretching across a swathe of woodland savannah four-fifths the size of the Republic of Ireland, the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania is among the world’s biggest protected wildernesses, home, until Africa’s latest poaching frenzy, to one of the largest elephant concentrations on the continent.
For much of its 123-year history, the Selous has been threatened, coveted by prospectors and industrialists who saw in its untouched vastness the possibility of equally vast wealth.
Until this year the profit-seekers had been held back.
That is about to change, with work beginning on a development that will forever change the Selous’ landscape…..
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/05/africas-last-great-wilderness-jeopardy-autocratic-president/
The thing about BAU NOTHING is Protected….NOTHING….these National Parks, Nature Preserves, Protected Rainforests, Public Lands, are there waiting to be developed.
By a stroke of a pen by whatever power in charge can negate this legal standing.
Here in Florida, that is exactly happened!
ENVIRONMENT
Trump wetlands rule rollback makes about 6 million acres in Florida unprotected
The EPA’s own figures show the rolback of Obama-era regulations will leave 51 percent of the nation’s wetlands unprotected. Florida has 12 million acres of wetlands, more than all but one other state
A new definition of federally protected wetlands that the Trump administration unveiled this week would make an estimated 6 million acres of Florida’s wetlands vulnerable to developers and other interests that seek to wipe them out, according to figures from the Environmental Protection Agency
https://www.tampabay.com/environment/trump-wetlands-rule-rollback-makes-about-6-million-acres-in-florida-unprotected-20181213/
Wonder Why this was done? Oh, maybe because of this…this is why!
On May 1 the House of Representatives voted 76 to 36 to approve SB 7068. See how your representative voted. On April 24 the Senate voted 37 to 1 to support the bill. This damaging legislation to direct the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) to build three new toll expressways through Florida’s largest remaining swaths of agricultural and undeveloped land now goes to Gov. DeSantis for his signature.
God Bless BAU!🤑 in America …showing the rest of the world how it’s done!
Españoles marchan en apoyo a Maduro y contra golpismo de EEUU
https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/fotos/427680/espana-venezuela-golpismo-eeuu-marcha-bilbao
For our Spanish speaking friends.
This would not be on a MSM site in the US.
Google translate says:
Spaniards march in support of Maduro and against US coups
The Spaniards take to the streets of the Basque city of Bilbao to express their support for the Government of Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, May 4, 2019.
The demonstrators, while waving flags of the Bolivarian country, shouted slogans like “Come on, Venezuela! No to the coup d’état! “To condemn the coup efforts of the opposition Juan Guaidó, who has the support of the United States.
Last Tuesday, the Venezuelan opposition resorted to a coup to get to power, but failed. In recent days, the US authorities have threatened the Caracas government several times with the war.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has ordered his country’s armed forces ready to face possible US military intervention on Saturday.
while the coup in Ukraine in 2014 (enabled by the Obama administration) seems to have been a disaster for that country, I think these Spaniards are misguided in their support of Maduro…
“According to The New York Times, Maduro’s administration was held “responsible for grossly mismanaging the economy and plunging the country into a deep humanitarian crisis” and attempting to “crush the opposition by jailing or exiling critics, and using lethal force against antigovernment protesters”.
it’s a complex and fluid situation, but my opinion is that VZ will have a slightly better future if and when Maduro gets on that plane to Havana…
my sympathies to the citizens of VZ…
NYT’s= MSM
They were sure Maduro was to be gone in 2014.
I’m sure the Venezuelan govt knows all about Operation Condor and how that lost the entire South American continent a generation of its best people and degraded its progress and development.
They will not be taking that path this time.
Venezuela is dependent on very high oil prices–likely up in the $150/barrel and up range. Such high oil prices make extraction of oil, even heavy oil, economic and leave a reasonably large layer for taxation by the government.
Madura spent far more than the actual funds available from cash transactions for selling oil, by pre-selling some of its oil supply to the Chinese, as a form of debt. If oil prices had risen higher and higher, this pre-sale would not have been a problem. It would have been sort of like other governments of the world issuing more and more debt, assuming that the economy would grow and grow.
But lower oil prices distinctly harmed the economy of Venezuela. This makes it clear that, in retrospect, Madura’s policies look like mismanagement. But they are not all that different from the policies of countries that use added debt to stimulate the economy, and then try to get those funds down to the lives of individual citizens.
Another issue is that people will work a whole lot harder to take care of an apartment that they are paying for themselves than they will for something given to them. Because of this, his uses of the funds, in retrospect, look like mismanagement as well. He really needed to use his added debt for fund new industry of other types. This is the same issue Saudi Arabia is up against. But it is hard to do this, without a cheap source of energy to supply the other industries.
Something weird is going on here in California. Fuel is 4.25 a gallon and been going up a lot lately, and I mean everywhere in this state! It is so much higher than the rest of the country it’s not funny. I smell a rat. I think the governor or maybe through deregulation of prices, a green light has been given to raise price to incentivize people to switch from petrol to electric vehicles. I don’t have a link yet, but I’m working on it.
https://ktla.com/2019/04/09/4-gas-is-becoming-a-reality-for-many-in-california-heres-why-prices-continue-to-rise/
I couldn’t copy/paste from the above article, but essentially its saying the hike in price is due to unplanned refinery maintenance and there are fewer refineries out west.
Another issue is lack of ethanol to blend in the gasoline:
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/databases/article229130359.html
According to Fox news: https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/california-high-gas-prices-mystery-surcharge
I wonder, too, if the low number of refineries in California has to do with Californias very negative stance on CO2 emissions. A 2006 article says, “Officials Reach California Deal to Cut emissions.” https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/31/washington/31warming.html?n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fB%2fBarringer%2c%20Felicity
Citizens of California will begin to see what the effect of its CO2 emissions reductions efforts really are. Electricity prices have been a problem for a while. Now oil prices are as well.
I read that the farmers are getting slaughtered. Don’t know how much is accurate but put it out there for consideration. Other concerning anecdotal posts about the erosion of top soil. One poster on Zerohedge blamed the financial straits being due to the low price for oil, which was made from 10%ethanol which is derived, quite inefficiently on an EROEI basis, from corn production. corhttps://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-01/boon-times-auction-houses-american-farmers-go-bankruptn.
Eg., from poster “Frank the crank”:
Since I live in farm country and know people in the ethanol business I can tell you what the real problem is–the price of ethanol is waaaay down and so is the price for corn because of it. The price of ethanol is pegged to gasoline. The lower the price of gas, the lower the price of ethanol. Every farmer and their son went into the corn for ethanol business and got rich off of it–till they didn’t. Over supply, over produced, lack of demand. Now that the government price supports are gone, they are having trouble.
All of which is just fine with me. I hate ethanol. The price of land to produce it went through the roof and the price of food went up because of it. So much corn was going into ethanol production that wheat production went down (raising its price) and beef went up because there were years ranchers couldn’t get enough (used to fatten and tenderize the beeves before market) to maintain the heads and sold them off.
This is a good turn, in the long run.
Link didn’t go through
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-01/boon-times-auction-houses-american-farmers-go-bankrupt
Obviously, time is always precious substance, but I’d wait a bit more for ‘the final’ farm land price slump in the US and elsewhere (as many in/direct subsidies are still pouring down into the sector), but don’t be greedy, don’t wait till the utmost bottom as it takes several years to jump start degraded land-ecosystems again, and that requires BAU-JITs to some extent.. at least in the sense of doing it with initial leverage as quickly as possible..
Not to mention jump-starting the farmer!
If you have no ag experience, waiting for land prices to drop could be fatal.
If it is your plan to provide for yourself by farming, and you have no experience, start now. You don’t have to buy land to do so. Garden around your house, if you have a lot. Or rent a community farm plot. Join a garden club. Do not rely on reading books or watching YouselessTube.
There are going to be a lot of inexperienced dead farmers who got the idea that growing food was simple, and so they waited for the last minute to start learning.
It is rather clear when a person reads about the pattern of increases and decreases in the prices of food sold by farmers that these prices follow the general “demand” curve that comes from debt growth, eventually leading to wage growth, and this wage growth (especially of non-elite workers) determining the quantity of goods and services sold. The link you provided gives this description:
This sounds very much like the oil prices pattern most of us are familiar with. Also, I used to post charts showing the correlation between oil prices and food prices (as calculated by the FAO for internationally shipped food).
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/food-and-oil-prices-are-correlated.png
Jan, thanks for the well meaning advice. I’m aware of it, my comment was geared more towards general audience and the ever elusive timing question, also it’s not only about starting in the first place but also about taking the plunge and acquiring more.. and for that it’s still not the best time, perhaps with some specific regional exceptions. On the whole the situation still stands as described unless the farming subsidies (many forms) vane-vanish for whatever reason the land price bottom support remains to stay..
Btw. the fun part is that nowadays ‘youtuber’ farmers might have better chance in survival vs. settled farming families stuck for past 2-3x generations in the circle-loop mentality of buying inputs and under selling in bulk etc..
You have a point.
Industrial farmers at least have some knowledge of the land, over that of cubicle-farmers.
But yea, I agree that someone who simply uses whatever latest chemicals and techniques that Monsatan tells them to use is going to be nearly as bad off as those who depend on their steady output of commodity food. Especially if they are mortgaged to the hilt, which seems to be the way to do things these days.
My parents had exactly one mortgage in their lives, and they paid it off completely in five years, making double and triple payments whenever they could. I went to school with patched clothing, but the farm got paid for.
I printed out this ethanol price chart this morning:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/ethanol-ten-year-price-chart-business-insider.png
It is not “zero-based,” so it makes the problem look a little worse than it really is.
What this chart shows is that ethanol prices follow the same general price pattern of all commodities. If debt growth and falling interest rates are not sufficient, prices fall too low, and because of this, prices stay very low.
I looked at some other pieces of the ethanol situation recently. The corn crop in the US was lower in 2018 than previously, holding down the amount of ethanol. I imagine part of the reason for the low corn crop was chronic low corn prices–why plant so much corn, with all of its fertilizer needs, if it is not really profitable? The other thing that hurt was that exports of ethanol were up last year. So the total amount of ethanol sold in the US is down.
At the same time, we can see efforts to ramp up demand for more ethanol usage. There are E85 pumps popping up, in response to legislation allowing 15% ethanol sales year-around. This seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to get ethanol prices up.
It is not really working. It is leading to lack of ethanol availability. California is sort of at the “end of the line” when it comes to shipping ethanol. It is a long way from the Midwest to California. If there is not enough ethanol, it gets shortchanged. (It is like the Boston area, when there is not enough natural gas coming in pipelines from Texas.) When there is not enough ethanol, California has to cut back on the total amount of gasoline it makes. It is this ethanol-induced shortage of gasoline that sends the price of California gasoline up. It is not that ethanol is high-priced; it is that it is not available period, because of its low-price. This is the problem we start reaching as we reach limits.
Farming has never been an easy business and if farming runs just in time and there is a crop failure it could be a long wait for dinner until the next crop is planted and harvested. Farmers need a way to have a steady source of income and ethanol plants are a business where the farmer can sell his crop and have it turned into a much more easily transported commodity than raw corn.
For those of you so inclined,
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtKUW8LJK2Ev8hUy9ZG_PPA seems like a nice over view of pea, bean, and wheat farming,
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=mHarvest is an overview of farming in MN.
It is an incredibly capital intensive business with narrow windows for planting which in turn affect harvest time which in MN is a race against the snow depending on when the crop matures. These time windows are one of the reasons for very large, fast machinery.
Dennis L.
In my area which is SW Florida, regular unleaded is $2.80
California requires ethanol in gasoline; I don’t think that this is the case elsewhere, such as Florida. That requirement, plus being far from the center of distribution, handicaps refiners. And there aren’t many refiners, because of the anti-CO2 legislation California has implemented over the years. California is basically “reaping what it sowed.”
Last week’s issue of Science has an article in it about making what are now petro chemicals out of CO2 and electric power . They note that the numbers make sense if the cost of power gets down to 4 cents/kWh and the conversion efficiency is 60% or better.
A kindred spirit?
not all locked up yet
These miscreants are busy assembling their idea of freedom- an authoritarian religious state which is constantly at war against non-christians.
Here is Gary North- an influential recontructionist christian-
“The goal of Christian Reconstruction, as the name implies, is to reconstruct the United States, and eventually the world, into a theocracy based on the Old Testament laws from the Pentateuch and added laws in the New Testament. In order to accomplish this they need to infiltrate and take over the government or to eliminate the institutions of secular government altogether. As highly influential Recon theologian Gary North wrote in his book Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism:
“The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly…must be denied citizenship.” Gary North via Mother Jones (2005)
Christian Reconstructionism began with Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony. In 1973 he published Institutes of Biblical Law which is 800 pages of analysis and commentary on the Ten Commandments and the Biblical “case law.” Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists, are believers that everything is based on God’s Laws as put forth in the Bible, have no love for democratic, secular, civil law. ”
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/infernal/2018/07/christian-reconstructionism-the-template-for-modern-american-theocracy/
I suppose that there is an advantage, in any one “state” or “nation,” to have uniformity of beliefs. Governments try to impose such uniformity by getting rid of all religious beliefs. The other way of getting to the same effect is to demand that some religion be the religion of all people within the state or nation. Typically, the leaders are then the same for both the religious entity and state.
he’s just not the same without tammy faye by his side.
Sid Smith with a recommendation to this blog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8&feature=youtu.be
Hi Jeremy! Thank you for your question. You are correct that the present system will do everything possible to maintain itself, including resorting to wars and authoritarianism. The question of exactly when the system will nonetheless collapse (as it must) is an open question. One’s expectations should be informed not only by the physical limits of growth (including sink-costs like climate change), but also by the nature of complex systems. That was the insight (really, a comparatively recent one for me) that led to this presentation at VT in March. It was not the talk I was expecting to give when I was invited by the Greens at VT last fall. I thought I’d be offering a fairly standard account of resource limits forcing a change-or-die scenario. But as I began to review the available research on civilizational collapse it became clear that there was a bigger picture to be seen.
Unfortunately we tend to think in terms of dramatic moments. But while it is conceivable that there could be a sudden collapse from the present order into a barbarous dystopia, I think it is far more likely that there will be a kind of ratcheting down, and in fact this has already begun. The physics of the situation is the governing factor. As the energy inputs to the present system decline (I should say, as they continue to decline), the economic-and-social structure becomes insupportable. I expect that the series of financial corrections we’ve already seen, starting in the 70s, accelerating in the 80s through the 2000s, and most dramatically in 2007, is the lead-up to a massive deleveraging that will look kind of like 1929 on steroids. It will be like the Great Depression only without the enormous energy that was then available to re-establish the industrial economy; so basically, a permanent Great Depression. It might not have a single, one-day blowout like happened in October of ’29 (although it might), but I think it inevitable that a massive and permanent decline in economic activity will unfold. It could start at any moment, but we may have a few years yet. It is impossible to know.
In the United States we face a special situation, the flip-side of our special prosperity these last 70 years, based first on the Bretton Woods agreement, and since 1971 (when we defaulted on our currency) on petrodollar hegemony. At some point that system of economic imperialism will fail. (I like the idea of the sudden overthrow of the Saudi regime, on whose cooperation petrodollar hegemony depends, but it could also be a gradual loss of the tug-of-war over the global oil market with Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela.) However it happens, Americans will suddenly have a valueless currency. While there is likely to continue to be a deflationary period, at some point most analysts anticipate hyperinflation. The social stresses will be extreme, and it will be a time of great danger for the U.S. It is for this reason that I caution people about attacking or undermining our institutions. We’re going to need them for stability. Without them, some form of totalitarianism will be the only bulwark against complete social breakdown.
So, the tl;dr is this: The efficient cause of collapse isn’t going to be climate change or resource depletion, although these will continue to play a role. In fact they will contribute to the precipitating crises. But the efficient cause will be a final unraveling of the economic system. Capitalism can’t function without growth, and we don’t have an economic Plan B. The IMF/World Bank/Devos crowd are about out of tricks. Now’s a good time to work on becoming as resilient to Depression-era conditions as possible.
P.S. Gail Tverberg at ourfiniteworld.com is an excellent resource for this kind of analysis. Her most recent essay addresses this question specifically.
Bill,
Your post reminded me of a YouTube video by David Korowicz I watched several weeks ago…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=264&v=A4nAL4HHloA
It’s a testament to our collective insanity / ignorance that we focus so strongly on climate change when so many other immediate threats are staring us right in the face…
Cheers,
-GBV
Yes, as I stated in another response we should be focusing on stuff we can actually to something about RIGHT NOW and make a positive impact. Such as quit dumping garbage and toxic chemicals into the ocean. Stop dumping plastics into the ocean by eliminating single use plastics so marine life are not eating it and having it work it’s way up the food chain, which eventually it winds up in our stomachs if we eat seafood.
Getting the best and brightest to help Japan get a handle and control the still ongoing disaster known as Fukushima where they are dumping radioactive, toxic wastewater into the Pacific ocean. Planting more trees instead of cutting down rainforest.
That would have a far greater impact on the environment rather than all the drive by claims about what AGW or CC is going to happen 20-50-100 yrs out and they hyperbole sea level rise that each year increases. In another 2-3 yrs someone will probably make another wild claim that in another 50-100 yrs the Earth will be completely covered in 100 ft of water. 😉
Discarded plastic containers in walls provide air space for insulation and keep vast amounts of plastic out of the waste stream. But that’s too simple for anybody to understand.
“Ok guys, stop hammering and walk along the roads and find any discarded empty plastic containers to fill these walls with instead of using rolled Owens Corning pink (code approved) wall insulation and easy to install a whole house in one day with a hammer tacker.”
“That’s funny, boss!”
Well we know our public is mentally challenged.
Something else too simple for our mentally disabled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTRUCVUO3aw
Growing your own vegetable in your yard.
In Brooklyn, yet!
Didn’t know you could eat okra raw. But I very much dislike the blender dependency. And the food preparation would turn most people off.
Gail, do you know Medeas? It’s a European project that tries to modelize possible pathways of our socio-economic system’s along energy transition, on a regional and global basis. It takes into account about 4000 variables, and uses a system dynamics approach to integrate feedbacks between economy, energy, resources, land use, social and environment impacts. Its formal results are about to be published, and I think they will be of great interest for you and your blog readers.
Related to this post, i think Medeas will show a more precise view of climate change because their authors focus on fossil fuel limits, renewable sources EROEI related constraints, etc.
https://www.medeas.eu/
In my opinion climate change is a complex problem, and I agree with you that IPCC models are greatly misleading. There is little doubt, as I see it, that energy scarcity will is our first threat, but severe environmental disruption is likely unavoidable by now, even if you consider energy related impacts. Society collapse will result in a direct carbon emissions decline, but what if we respond to energy scarcity multiplying deforestation? what if we look at permafrost thawing and other climate system feedbacks?
No, I am not familiar with Medeas. I note, however, that the front page of the site talks about “Guiding the European Economy to a Low Energy Future.” With this as an objective, those putting together the model clearly don’t understand the underlying physics problem. A low energy future is not compatible with maintaining anything like the current population level, never mind the other things that we take for granted, like transportation and clothing.
Gail, as far as I know, at least some of Medeas’ researchers are rather familiar with the underlying physics of our predicament. I think their most important problem might be the difficulty to modelise a situation that in most of scenarios results in a steep collapse, and other “formal” isues related to this fact, so I think some controversial findings should be read between the lines. For example, the “optimal” renewable transition scenario they propose is not “maximum” renewable transition scenario, probably because the latter -if possible- leads to a low-EROEI driven collapse. Bad news is that even the sooner hits key resource limits (eg lithium) in a few decades from now. Another key finding is that Europe economy is headed to a terminal recession whatever scenario you choose.
Thanks for your post Gail. For anyone interested in Medeas:
Haven’t looked at this yet. The solar array put me off. I very much believe in a low energy future, but think it’s mostly an issue of urban and rural planning and massive, organized (third-world-oriented) decentralization. Anything to inflame the “solar is the solution” passions of the mainstream I would want to avoid.
I agree with you, Artleads, but I don’t think Medeas team are in the “solar is the solution” party, e.g. the following paper suggests that CSP might be an energy sink: https://www.medeas.eu/news/scientific-publication-concentrated-solar-power-actual-performance-and-foreseeable-future-high
US stock markets end the week at record highs…
did the rich get richer?
meanwhile, WTI is at $61.86
it was $66 about 10 days ago…
the overall economy (for the 90+ percent of us) continues to be too weak to push prices higher…
Which is why Gail continues to be proven correct.
It’s widespread consensus here that the PTB will continue to pump up the bubble until the day of destruction.
What choice do they have?
“What choice do they have?”
It’s either slam into the mountain at 500mph or fall off the edge of the grand canyon like Wile E. Coyote. Either way it’s going to hurt, biggly.
I don’t fear for myself. I’m growing old and weary, but I do fear for my children.
I am happy I have no grand children.
Well—-
http://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/675815-1.jpg
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
“The Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
Dune 424
Cf. the (unproven) Tleilaxu theorem cited in “Dune Messiah”:
“Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray, or countermand any conscious intention of the collectivity.”
(I memorized this in high school.)
I love the whole six book series. Spoiler alert … it has a happy ending.
CRISIS, WHAT CRISIS?
Ah, the good old days of the winter of 1979 in Merry Olde England…
Found on YouTube…coming back again soon to where you reside soon…promise…honest
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=V0TYvzAHzwo
Nice piece of propaganda
It is the world economy that is too weak. Europe, Japan, China and a number of smaller countries are not doing very well.
Trident Energy abandons 4700 oil wells in Canada. No profitability. Shareholders get nothing and bond holders get nothing. They just walked away because they don’t even have the funds to orderly shutdown 4700 wells. Could economies of scale give way to collapse of scale?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-03/canadian-oil-driller-abruptly-shuts-down-abandons-4700-wells
That’s a huge peak oil story! 4700 oil wells represents huge energy infrastructure outlays.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QGkOGZubQ
I imagine part of the problem is that the operators expected oil prices to rise, and they didn’t. This may also have been compounded by expected existing wells to produce more oil for longer, than they did. If the government didn’t get money (or some kind of guarantee from a responsible party) upfront for closing down these wells, as they were being drilled, the local government is going to be left with the cost. Otherwise, the wells will not be shutdown.
I don’t know exactly what impacts the leaving the wells without shutting them down could have. It would seem like methane (a gas that contributes to global warming) would leak from the wells.
I looked up a little more about abandoned wells. They seem to be a major problem around the world, especially when oil and gas prices fall.
https://www.americangeosciences.org/critical-issues/factsheet/pe/abandoned-wells
The major issues that seem to come up are methane leaking from the wells into the atmosphere; oil, gas or salty water can contaminate local water supplies; also the soil around the wells may be contaminated with these things.
The way the funding for abandoned wells is usually bonding programs. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2018/07/09/why-orphan-oil-and-gas-wells-are-a-growing-problem-for-states
One problem is that the required bond limits are set too low. Another issue (which I would see) is that the bonding organizations are set up to handle occasional, small bankruptcy situations. If there are many simultaneous bankruptcies, the bonding agencies themselves will not have adequate funds.
Here are a few things we need to worry about which are a greater threat than climate change because they are more immediate threats : the spread of nuclear weapons, erosion of irreplaceable topsoil, depletion of oil and gas which are in finite supply and for which we have no affordable fuel substitutes, antibiotic resistant bacteria, collapse of the $242 trillion global debt bubble destroying the banking system, social media spreading divisive misinformation over the Internet, aquifer depletion, and the spread of totalitarian governments protected by artificial intelligence combined with automated facial recognition. Google, ‘Uyghurs in China’ and do a little reading. The second largest economy in the world is doing that. And they will soon be the largest economic power.
When it comes to worrying about climate change, remember the phrase, in the long run, we’re all dead. Climate change won’t kill you directly, but most of the things in that list can kill billions of people a lot quicker than a warmer planet will. We need to apply resources to the greatest immediate problems.
And I would expect too great an effort to reduce energy consumption, or any attempt to radically reduce greenhouse gas emission by substituting a higher cost form of energy for fossil fuels, to cause major economic problems, with a complete economic collapse a distinct possibility. With the amount of debt at record levels, the financial system in quite unstable. That is why a small increase in interest rates sends the stock market into an immediate downturn. Higher interest rates make it more difficult to make the interest payments on all that debt. It makes refinancing existing debt more expensive too.
Well said Bill!
I did all my climate change worrying last century. These days I just like to enjoy the weather and worry about the human race’s collective insanity in continuing to climb up the slope of socioeconomic complexity like a flock of lemmings, sorry, walruses, driven inexorably toward the cliff edge in their insatiable urge to escape having to undergo a selfie with David Attenborough.
https://www.blazingcatfur.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Attenborough-Walrus-400×225.jpg
“We need to apply resources to the greatest immediate problems.”
but will we?
noooooooooooooooooooooooooo…
human nature seems to guarantee that we will continue BAU FULL THROTTLE, BABY! until we no longer can…
that sounds good to me…
Dennis, seriously Uyghurs in China? You actually believe the Chinese are resorting to even a fraction of the tactics that have defined U.S. imperialism since the Spanish-American War?
Because you learnt this off the mainstream media and the authorities who are non-stop liars and mind manipulators? You haven’t learnt anything, anything at all, from the Yugoslav War, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and all the other illegal wars, regime changes, support of brutal dictators (it’s ok if they’re on “our side”), and genocide that the U.S. and it’s lackeys, err allies, have committed just in the past 20 odd years?
You’re just going to fall into the same trap as before, re Venezuela, Russia, Iran, China. Really, anyone who opposes U.S. hegemony, and imbibe this smoking pile of b.s. lock, stock and barrel?
With apologies to Dennis…
US imperialism is the best because its the biggest!
Imperialism on Earth is a socioeconomic analogue to those whirly things on Jupiter. The little ones merge together (consolidation, merger and acquisition) and eventually form a Great red Spot. The US is the current Great Red Spot on Earth. It was formed by a coalescence of initially small economic actors and it got big by drawing more and more economic actors into its orbit.
Recently China has transformed into a second Great Red Spot that is challenging the US for the position of Greatest Red Spot, or in other words, Global Hegemon. But one planet cannot support two Great Red Spots so one of them is going to eat the other or die trying.
I agree that the mainstream media and the authorities who are non-stop liars and mind manipulators, but that doesn’t mean that the current Chinese government hasn’t been brutal and authoritarian in its treatment of people living within its borders. Up to now, it hasn’t had much opportunity to do so beyond its borders, not because it is benign but because it has been too weak. A strong China bestriding the world like a colossus might be just as brutal abroad as a strong US has been.
I find conditions in China and the US equally shocking although for different reasons. What the two share in common is the tendency for the non-stop lying and mind-manipulating authorities and mainstream media to force people into compliance with whatever policy they are currently pushing.
To close, let’s feast our eyes on WIkipedia’s (partial) list of historical massacres and genocides in China, several of which resulted in over a million deaths in a single “incident.” And these were not all ancient history. The 1947–1951 landlord purges killed up to 4.5 million people and the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries killed 1.2 million. And the miserable occupation of Tibet and the destruction of its culture which resulted in half a million dead Tibetans and decades of misery for the rest—that isn’t even mentioned on this list.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_China
And what’s scary is that at the back of their minds, the Communists in the US are wet dreaming of coming to power and then meting out the same sort of justice to reactionary imperialists and people who rent out condominiums there.
“A strong China bestriding the world like a colossus might be just as brutal abroad as a strong US has been.”
China was a pretty big colossus during the Ming Dynasty, and bestrode much of the ocean world under the Yongle emperor, thanks to Admiral Cheng Ho. There is no record of any major brutality, but a lot of monuments to trade, friendship, and the exchange of ideas.
In Malacca, the locals even put his statue in a Buddhist temple as a mark of their respect. I have seen it.
I never said the Chinese were saints. What they do with dissidents is their own affair. Look at how we treat ours?
But the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in concentration camps is propaganda, and people keep falling for it.
Now tell me, when was the last time China bombed, invaded, overthrew, destabilised, or bullied another country?
How about Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Russia?
Not fake stuff. You know, like the black cat in the dark room, that is the so-called “Russian invasion” of Eastern Ukraine. But unequivocal situations where the battle flags of these countries were visibly displayed in aggressive wars?
Now compare that to America’s and the West’s record.
Uh, hello from Taiwan?
The above post seems to be from a Chinese 5-mao (“Fifty-Center”) troll. Yes, they do send them to sites like this. Caveat lector.
Really? Taiwan was invaded by fleeing Chinese nationalists.
And who are you to call me a troll? I’ve been on OFW years before you ever turned up.
A comment from a supporter of the Kuomintang, who brutally suppressed the native Taiwanese and their leaders? 照镜子, look in the mirror
You mean me? I’m pan-Green, but like the New Power Party best. The KMT is pro-PRC these days.
The Uygur thing is very real (I was there a few years ago), and covered in reputable news sources. As for China’s belligerence towards its neighbors, I count Tibet but they claim that’s been part of China since “time immemorial”–just like the South China Sea, East China Sea, Arunachal Pradesh, etc. (all claimed but not yet controlled by China). Once they get those, they’ll probably take aim at Okinawa or Outer Mongolia or something.
I never said the Chinese were saints. What they do with dissidents is their own affair. Look at how we treat ours?
Are you using the royal “we”? Do we on this site have the pleasure of addressing the president of the US or the prime minister of the UK, by any chance? Or are you one of the little people like me, whose principal links to national governments pertain to the payment of taxes and the issuing of passports?
By proposing that “what they do with dissidents is their own affair”, I hope you realize that you’ve washed your hands with respect to any atrocity any “they” performs on anybody with their own borders, so in order to be consistent you can no longer criticize anything any Western state does to its “dissidents.”
Yes, let’s look how the West treats its dissidents. In the US they ban them from social media. call them rude names, or ruin their careers, while in Europe they bang them up for really serious crimes such as H***** Denial. And people who really threaten the powerful have a tendency to die of unnatural causes.
Now tell me, when was the last time China bombed, invaded, overthrew, destabilized, or bullied another country?
As I said, they have been lacking in opportunities, due to the presence of an even bigger bully, but they invaded Vietnam in 1979—a country one 20th their size, severely weakened by around 40 years of almost constant warfare, and only recently emerged from colonialism. How much more bullying can a country get?
That little skirmish, that most people today seem to have either forgotten or never to have heard about, caused the deaths of tens of thousands of troops on both sides, injured tens of thousands more, resolved nothing, and was totally unnecessary apart from as an attempt by China to play the local hegemon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War
OK, so China attacked Vietnam in 1979. That’s one time in the past 40 years. The war lasted 3 weeks. Ho hum.
How many millions, yes millions, has the U.S, and its lackeys killed during that time in all the illegal wars, regime changes, sanctions, and other acts of brutality committed, and still being committed? How many years has the U.S. been in Afghanistan? In Syria? In Iraq? All illegally.
A nation of war criminals!
With regards to so-called atrocities perpetrated in China. Yes, as they are sovereign, even if I don’t like what they’re doing, tough. I can complain about it, but have no right to intervene against them.
There is no right to protect (R2P) in the relations which have guided countries since the Treaty of Westphalia, and later the U.N Charter, which cemented notions of state sovereignty.
R2P is just a fig leaf invented in the last thirty years (since the collapse of the Soviet Union allowed a free hand) to legitimise the carrying out of illegal acts against countries WE (as in the West) don’t like, because they won’t tow the line (submit to U.S. hegemony), or they have something (usually oil) that we want.
Atrocities committed by friendly forces (ones that submit to U.S. hegemony, or are useful as a battering ram against non-compliant countries), by brutal dictatorships, terrorist organisations, and even democracies are OK though, because the actors doing it are on “our side”.
But if a country stands up for itself. If it wants to decide its own fate, outside the control of U.S. hegemony, it’s demonised or sanctioned at best (Russia), and invaded at worst (Iraq).
Pathetic hypocrisy.
Sure, there is a lot of hypocrisy in the west.
And for the record, you won’t find me waving no Stars and Stripes.
Whenever I watch a US team playing an international game, I always root for the opposition.
I fully endorse this message.
https://youtu.be/JxKBRVGnfWM
You missed one of the most important symptoms of human stupidity, the collapse of the INSECTS!
Without enough insects, there would be NO FLOWERING PLANTS, no land birds, no freshwater fishes, no lizards, no amphibians, no fruits, veggies or nuts, no wildflowers, no domesticated flowers & dam little food.
Can humans survive on just wheat, maize, rice & oats?
NO we cannot!
The beautiful red Nomura maple tree in my back garden is being attacked by ants. They are attracted by the maple syrup it produces and have set up a “mining” operation. If not stopped, they will continue milk the tree until it dies, probably taking about five years to kill it completely.
Should I buy a packet of “Ant Killer” powder feed it to them by sprinkling it around the base of the tree, or should I let nature take its course and let them kill the tree?
http://www.uetoh.co.jp/blog/images/nomura-thumb.jpg
It’s a dilemma on a par with the one faced by Emma Thompson over whether to fly first class or kayak herself back and forth across the Atlantic.
How do you know this? Have you had an arborist look at it?
In my experience, ants rarely kill trees. From an evolutionary point-of-view, ’tis a poor parasite that kills its host!
It’s also rare that a healthy specimen succumbs to such an attack. Insects are drawn to ailing plants, rather than healthy plants. There might be something else wrong with the tree that cause it to attract the ants.
If you are certain the ants are going to kill the tree, you might try to provide a sugar-rich “trap crop” to divert them. If you love the tree enough, you could even buy bags of cheap sugar and spread it in a circle around the tree!
I find Gail’s analysis to be more simplistic than the conclusions reached by those she criticizes. She makes too many assumptions, hypotheticals, and errors with facts. For instance, she speaks of “expensive renewables such as wind and solar,” which is no longer true. Their cost is now dramatically lower and highly competitive; that, not the climate change story, is the main reason why eight trillion dollars have now been divested by major institutions from financial instruments on the stock market that are heavily invested in fossil fuels, because the latter are becoming the big losers. With Gail’s lead of “the true feasability of moving away from fossil fuels,” she telegraphs her bias in favor of fossil fuels. She strikes me as a stealth defender of them, ignoring the stark warning that if we fail to take major action by the 2030 tipping point, our planet will pass the point of no return. We mustn’t be deceived by Gail’s over-intellectualizing and obfuscations with graphs.
Bias in favor of fossil fuels. Of course there is a bias in favor of fossil fuels. It takes fossil fuels to build wind and solar. Fossil fuels built the entirety of industrial civilization. Without fossil fuels there would be no “renewables”.
What kind of assumptions has Gail made? Are you saying proponents of wind and solar don’t make assumptions? Isn’t referencing the year 2030 as a “tipping point” an assumption?
Your post seems ill conceived. The reality is fossil fuels are much more energy dense and dispatachable forms of energy whereas “renewables” are intermittent and much less energy dense. Just facts. The way it is. Simply put, solar panels and wind turbines cannot produce solar panels and wind turbines (completely without the aid of fossil fuels) from the mining of the resources to transporting the finished panels to the site of installation. That is the bottom line. They never will. They are a treadmill to nowhere and continue to consume fossil fuel energies and create pollution.
Those that complain about CC being the main problem that can be addressed by renewables (or for that matter peak FF) always fall back on the COST of renewables falling over the last 2 decades and push that same curve into the future.
They never bother looking at how much energy it would take to produce the green future.
Let’s look just at the numbers put up by the Energy Watch Group from the other day….
http://energywatchgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/EWG_LUT_100RE_All_Sectors_Global_Report_2019.pdf
According to them 63,400Gw of installed solar will provide 69% of all power needed in 2050 and beyond. Instead of using dollar cost, let’s look at the energy and resources needed.
Assuming 25 years to do their solar build-out of 63,400 Gw build out, would equal about 2,536Gw of capacity built.
Given solar EROEI of about 10, then we can easily work out how much energy is created by this solar, and the approximate energy in building it.
1Kw of solar X 6 hrs/d X 365d/yr X 25 (life of panels) = 54,750Kwh of electricity produced over it’s life.
With a EROEI of 10 then the 1Kw of panels costs about 5,470Kwh of electricity to build and has an energy payback of 2.5years, all around the average numbers we can find on the net.
1w of panel = 5470w in it’s construction. Multiply by the 2,536,000,000,000 needed each year gives 13,871,920,000,000wh of energy. That is 13,871Twh of energy
Worldwide total electricity production from all sources is around 20,000Twh, so just on 70% of all electricity produced to build the solar panels needed for this solar transformation, leaving just 30% of currently produced electricity for ALL other purposes.
The alternative is to increase current world wide electricity production by 70% to provide the build-out of enough solar panels.
Basically the ‘answer’ to get get to a renewable future is burn more FF to produce the electricity, to build the panels. In other words a nonsense, just like using 70% of current electricity for this one purpose.
The there is resource use. It takes about 5.5 tonnes of copper for every Megawatt of solar built.
At 5.5 tonnes X 2,536,000 = 13,948,000 Tonnes of copper every year for 25 years, just for the solar panels and their local connections/wiring.
Considering the world currently produces around 22,000,000 tonnes/yr, it means we need to direct 65% of all copper produced just for this purpose. Yet more copper will be needed for all the EVs, their charging stations, plus everything else that will have to run on electricity.
Then there is the minor detail that the current average grade of copper mined is around 0.6%, down from about 1.2% just over 20 years ago. As you halve the grade of copper mined, the energy nearly doubles to recover it. Future average grades will be lower, so mining an extra 70% (more like 100% taking all other uses into consideration) at ever decreasing grades, will multiply the energy needed in mining copper. Again most of the current energy for this comes from FF.
As it takes such a huge percentage of current resource use to build a ‘renewable’ future, it means CC is totally irrelevant as we either crash the economy (reduce energy use) or burn much higher amounts of FF in the attempt to get to the green future.
I am a believer in CC but none of these ‘green’ think tanks have the slightest clue on what it means to get to a ‘green’ future. Civilization crash is the only real way to stop CC.
How to get to a green future? Been thinking about this for a better part of a decade. And the surprising fact is that the only way to get to a green future is to have a lot more advanced technology than we have now.
Going far to the future here. And not talking about Keiths space solar here. But talking about gene technology to manufacture bacteria that eat CO2 and produce hydrogen. Nanotechnology. AI. Fusion.
Because none of the current solutions are actually solutions, or even sustainable. There is nothing we have, that can solve our predicament.
Circular economy = does not work, recycling uses resources
Reuse, reduce, recycle = does not work, slowing down is not even an option, this comes from David Korowicz. BAU must continue
Solar and wind = are not an energy transition
All other so called solutions = are not actually solutions or even sustainable
Green think tanks can not produce solutions, because at current technology level, this predicament leads to extinction.
And truly, David Korowicz tells us that we either have antibiotics and low infant mortality rate, or we have nothing. The global economy is interwoven. We can not choose and pick one thing. Either we have an global economy that is growing. Or we have nothing. Extinction.
The only thing that has me worried (after coming to grips with the predicament as it is) are the Greta Thunbergs of this world.
We can not have any sort of breaks on our global economy. The only small chance of avoiding extinction is to have BAU rolling for as long as possible. These Greta Thunbergs are cogs in the wheels of progress. The true existential threats at this moment are the Greta Thunbergs.
But the green groups, Greta Thunbergs, 350 org, Bill McKibben, Deep Green Resistance, hipsters and Tesla drivers, they dont see themselves as the worst existential threats our civilizations has. They see themselves as saviours and messiahs to us ordinary folks. But the way I see it, they themselves are currently the biggest threat we have. They are the worst existential threats to the survival of earth itself, in the history of history
If one had an logaritmic scale of moral virtue. Life and the continuation of life as the scale. On one end we have Gandhi, who is good. Then we have Hitler who is evil. Currently the threat that Greta Thunberg poses to the continuation of life on earth, makes her ten times more evil than Hitler..
“And the surprising fact is that the only way to get to a green future is to have a lot more advanced technology than we have now.”
I think you have that right.
“Going far to the future here. And not talking about Keiths space solar here. But talking about gene technology to manufacture bacteria that eat CO2 and produce hydrogen. Nanotechnology. AI. Fusion.”
Nanotechnology. AI, and Fusion are all possible. The first two are probably enough to bring on the technological singularity. While that is not magic, it’s close enough for most people. Bacteria that eat CO2 and produced hydrogen are probably not. Enough hydrogen to make a barrel of synthetic fuel takes about two MWh of power.
Nanotechnology and AI make an interesting world. I have written about this for decades. Here is a fun one from 1991. https://www.alcor.org/cryonics/cryonics9101.txt (go down to page 13)
The problem is _when_. But I think if we get either, the other will be along shortly.
Humans figured out long ago that “added complexity” is the way to work around problems. There are diminishing returns to added complexity, and it tends to lead to wage disparity. But if added complexity can be made to work, it always historically has been the solution. No wonder added complexity looks like it might be the solution. We can’t provide it won’t work, until we explore what the options really are.
And yet, Joseph Tainter (The Collapse of Complex Societies) seems to think increasing complexity is the problem, not the solution.
Tainter makes a convincing argument — backed my many examples throughout history — that human civilizations add more and more complexity in attempts to solve problems, that they eventually spend all their resource simply maintaining that complexity, leaving insufficient resources available for providing goods and services to their citizens.
If complexity really sinks civilizations, it would seem ours is overdue!
I agree that added complexity ultimately what brings an economy down. But for a time, it seems to be a workaround. For example, irrigation adds more food. Or deeper mines provide more metals. And international trade with China increases world fuel supplies at the same time it reduced average cost of those fuel supplies. But at the same time, it adds wage disparity and pollution of many kinds.
Ultimately the wage disparity brings the system down, because of diminishing returns to complexity. I think we are close.
Apart from the Hitler bit, ++++++++++
Bringing Hitler into any argument at this point in time is probably going to create a lot more heat than light.
My own preferred solution would be shrinking human beings down to roughly the size of toy poodles. This would give us effectively ten to twenty times as much world to play with, complete with megafauna such as rabbits and badgers, and it would allow us to live like hobbits and fly around on winged bicycles.
“My own preferred solution would be shrinking human beings down to roughly the size of toy poodles. This would give us effectively ten to twenty times as much world to play with, complete with megafauna such as rabbits and badgers, and it would allow us to live like hobbits and fly around on winged bicycles.”
Dead on. As long as we’re going to dream about impossible technological projects that just require adding more complexity, we might as well dream big (small)!
Interesting idea! Getting rid of meat-eating pets and 80% of animals raised for food (including farmed fish) would do somewhat the same thing, it would seem like.
Then we have Hitler who is evil.
Yes, beware of vegetarians who abolish vivisection and the ritual slaughter of animals immediately on achieving power. Such persons clearly are the epitome of evil.
I think that there are lots of different directions that don’t really work. The advocates of each direction seem to think that their direction can save the world.
Hitler was facing peak coal in Germany and, because of this, not enough food to go around. He tried one approach to working around this situation. Ultimately, World War I followed.
When there is not enough energy supplies to go around, this situation is not apparent to outside observers. They come up with all kinds of proposed solutions, most of which don’t work. Surprisingly enough, World War II really did lead to a fairly long-range solution to the lack of coal (more oil). Eventually, adding China to the World Trade Organization brought more coal back into the mix again. But now, we seem to be facing a general problem of not being able to keep prices up high enough for any kind of energy product, even food. We end up with a lot of proposed solutions.
“David Korowicz tells us that we either have antibiotics and low infant mortality rate, or we have nothing. The global economy is interwoven. We can not choose and pick one thing. Either we have an global economy that is growing. Or we have nothing. Extinction.”
I am afraid that David Korowicz is correct.
The other path is to lower the number of humans to 80 million. This is mother natures path. I do not see human creating a different path soon enough.
Thank you mother nature, a bad solution s better than no solution.
Frankly, Gail, knowing your usual patience with this sort of naivete, someone will have to say it for you… Fitz-Gerald’s comment is just plain rude. Recent discussion has pointed out the impact of requiring storage to give comparability with fossilfuel when comparing with renewables costs within Eroei calculations. This is supposedly simplistic over-intellectualising!7
The climate brigade arrives gung-ho and sanctimonious…oblivious to the years of debate on the blog
Time out, It’s hard to see the false in the true and the true in the false…much confusion n the the realm of CC and it is difficult to dissect and examine and reform to realize what we face. We are conditioned to believe that we can accomplish anything only if we apply ourselves. Gail has astutely pointed out we are really not in control. We like to think we are so, but the guiding forces of the cosmos shows otherwise.
Forgive Fritz for his post, I was there at one time until I saw the light.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLlw8p1usg4
One must take the time to digest OFW, it does not occur in a flash
Thanks for your vote of confidence. Also, why aren’t people singing about “finding the light” any more? The songs are different now. All of the stories we are being told are not really about finding the light.
Gail, by and large you are perceptive. Fortunately, there are exceptions and the group, Hillsong, provides some amazing performances.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-4-vsL4WZyc
Doubt the general public will get the capacity to see what is actually happening. The blame game is likely to be broadcasted, and as you pointed out in a past comment. “It’s not you fault”. Unfortunately, that does not alleviate the suffering of those affected.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uoOfJCPOK08
Better to laugh than cry..
Hillsong +++++++++++++++
will not even play the devil’s video
Solar panels and wind turbines are non renewables.
In order for something to be renewable, it needs to capable of renewing itself or be constructed of or using renewable materials. Neither is the case for wind turbines or solar panels. They are built by humans using finite, depletable, non renewable mineral resources – including a lot of coal, oil, and natural gas.
In addition to their being non renewable, they add to global warming. Part of their contribution lies in the burning of fossil fuels in the process stream of their manufacture, and part of it lies in their operation. Thanks to Thermodynamics, every time that anybody or anything does anything, energy is converted from one form to another. Anytime that such a conversion occurs, a portion of that original energy form is converted into waste chaotic heat. That heat flows from the system of greater energy density to the adjoining system of lesser energy density. Therefore, as wind turbines convert wind kinetic energy and solar panels convert solar radiation energy into electrical energy, a portion of the wind kinetic and solar energy is converted into heat energy which then flows out into the surrounding environment.
Add the non renewable nature and global warming additional factors of wind turbines and solar panels to the material waste they generate when reaching the end of their useful operational lives (recycling is not one hundred percent effective or efficient and requires further resource input including energy), and solar panels and wind turbines are also not environmentally friendly. Add that to the relatively low EROEI and it only makes sense to use them in particular circumstances where it is not practical or possible to use fossil fuels or sources – they are otherwise an irresponsible waste of finite, depletable, non renewable mineral resources.
Gail may be a little softer on wind turbines and solar panels than I am, but her analyses are good enough to be useful and interesting.
“… they are otherwise an irresponsible waste of finite, depletable, non renewable mineral resources.”
yes… but they are an available and affordable option to those who have the wealth to contribute to this “waste”…
richer people and/or richer countries have been and will continue to build up renewables…
excess wealth allows them to do this…
for a while longer anyway… until creeping diminishing returns degrade the economy to the point where long term investments (which renewables are) will have to be abandoned…
perhaps in a decade or so…
until then, the fact that these devices use “free fuel” will continue to hypnotize many people into investing in more of them…
And please, sir, tell us of your background? Your education? Are you an English major perhaps, postmodern deconstruction?
Please give reference regarding 8 trillion divested from energy companies. Andarko: Warren was willing to invest 20 billion, how are you doing at investing?
“telegraphs” so quaint.
If wind and solar worked, both would be made via either solar or wind and would make endless amounts of energy which would allow oil, uranium and even gold from seawater.
Dennis L.
If the man had an impressive CV, would that make his opinions and claims any more credible?
We only need authorities to explain things to us if we are too ignorant, stoopid or lazy to work them out for ourselves—which most of us are a lot of the time—or if they are deliberately made so complex and esoteric that they defy the commonsense of anyone outside of the cognoscenti. Like this bloody smartphone I just bought!!
“All professions are conspiracies against the laity,” as George Bernard-Shaw pointed out.
This is where economic cost and energy cost get confusing methinks. Although the retail cost of solar and wind may have lowered, my guess is that the energy/material/complexity costs have remained largely unchanged.
Retail costs may have lowered via subsidy, via improved manufacturing procedures, via lowered environmental standards and perhaps through subsidised/joint venture type installations.
But have the real costs lowered; energy cost of material inputs, energy costs of manufacturing processes, energy cost of storage/intermittency, the real costs of disposal/recycling, or finally, the consequences that mal-investment in these systems will incur.
I use to drive heavy machinery in a variety of isolated forestry operations. Hard to see how anything other than diesel can power a 50 tonne excavator. Would be great if we could.
The Green-deal is loaded with hot air and hope and youthful energy. Pity we can’t build anything substantial with these.
Intermittent renewables (such as wind and solar) are something that are very confusing.
One of the big questions is, “What are wind and solar replacing?” The easy (but wrong) answer is that they are replacing retail electricity, at the rates we usually pay for it. In fact, they affect the electrical system in many ways, including both adding extra costs, such as more transmission costs, and reducing fuel costs for other electricity providers. Quite a few fixed costs stay the same. Retail electricity costs a whole lot more than wholesale electricity, which in turn costs more than fuel. “Net metering” is terribly unfair to electricity providers, because it gives the owners of home solar credit as if it replaces retail electricity costs. The cost of fuel that is saved would be much less–likely no more than one-fourth as much.
Early modelers thought, “Surely all of this variability will cancel out, once we get more of the intermittent renewables.” Now we have had enough experience to know that this is not the case. They don’t. They also cannot be counted on when you need them. And they also mess up the pricing system, when you give intermittent renewables first access.
The first little bit of intermittent electricity can perhaps be added without too much adverse impact on the rest of the grid, but the variability and the pricing problem gets worse the more you add. Once the variability becomes too much of a problem, batteries or some other type of storage are needed, driving up costs. The cost, with the batteries plus the rest of the system, rises too high. There is no particular CO2 savings in this situation either.
Fossil fuel companies are big losers now in the stock market because fossil fuel prices have not risen high enough to really cover all of their costs, including the cost of drilling new wells and the interest payments on their debt. The belief at one time was that fossil fuel prices would rise very high, and that renewables would suddenly become competitive. There are a few places with very good resources (very windy places like Texas or very sunny places like Saudi Arabia) where wind and solar may make economic sense, in the quantities that they can be added without large battery backup.
Solar cells become covered with dust reducing output, in MN going north along 52 they become covered with snow. Not sure about Spain but an issue with the solar towers is dust on the mirrors as I recall and the cost of cleaning those mirrors not to mention certain light levels associated with putting people in front of the mirrors with a bottle of Windex.
Again, if it works, build a solar cell factory, run it entirely on solar, it will make excess energy, build more solar cells, rinse and repeat, endless, “free” energy. It would be a money machine, so far it hasn’t been done. Spain should have a great deal of excess, cheap energy with their solar efforts, their economy says something different.
No easy solutions it would seem although in some media mention is starting about the denominator of your per capita meme. For the record I don’t care to be part of the capita solution nor do I know anyone who does.
Dennis L.
A company name Solarex did this in Frederick, Maryland. in the early 1980s. They covered their factory in their own panels, and claimed they generated enough electricity to make the panels.
I believe when Reagan struck deals and threatened countries and brought the price of oil down, Solarex was purchased by British Petroleum, who subsequently dismantled the factory.
I think you’re right that there is no current solar-powered solar power factory. But Solarex at least claimed to do so about 40 years ago.
Generating enough electricity to make solar panels isn’t the same thing as running a plant entirely on solar, is it?
In principle, it should be possible to run an electric arc furnace entirely and exclusively on solar power, but currently I would expect it to be a lot cheaper, simpler more convenient to use a stable supply from a dedicated FF power plant or from your friendly local electricity utility.
And then there’s raw material mining and component sourcing, processing and transportation. In order to make endless “free” energy, all these activities would need to be solarized too.
As an ideology, he Green movement does have one thing going for it, though.
It runs on pure wind.
There are three places large amounts of energy are needed in solar panels.
1) making the super pure silicon crystals, silicon must be melted and frozen in many passes, the impurities prefer the liquid phase and so can be driven to the end of the bool.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process
2) making the aluminum for the frame
3) making the glass for the cover
The solar panel factory only assembles these external input. Little energy is need to screw and glue the parts together.
We also have to pay the installers, and the installers need to buy gasoline for their vehicles. Interest needs to be paid to the bondholders, and the bondholders use the output to buy goods and services made with energy. Needless to say, the government needs to play a big role the making of roads and their upkeep. These roads require a great deal of oil consumption in their making and upkeep. Without roads, solar panels don’t get installed.
Furthermore, whether the solar panels are to be used with batteries or on the electric grid, there is a whole lot more energy consumption needed either (1) to make the batteries, and replace them as needed or (2) to make and provide upkeep on the electricity transmission lines.
If the solar panels are only to used when it is sunny out, then grid/batteries are not an issue. (Winter becomes a big problem, however.)
I hope I did not create the impression that I believed Solarex was actually using solar energy for the entire mine-to-dump life-cycle of PV electric panels.
Having watched this segment for some 30 years, I was only saying that Solarex was the only company that I know of who even made the claim that they were “making solar panels using solar energy.” And they don’t even exist any more. That would be “damning with faint praise.”
Thanks for clarifying your intentions, Jan.
I had jumped to the conclusion you were praising them with faint damns.
And thanks to Ed for pointing out where the bulk of energy is needed in making solar panels. I learned something there.
“An economist is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” (I paraphrase). The “cost” that matters is not the money cost, but the energy cost. And that is measured by the fossil fuel usage, which is massive and increasing as the product becomes more sophisticated. And the energy cost of the fossil fuels is also inevitably increasing as the EROEI falls. Gail’s argument that we need fossil energy to construct the “renewable” platforms, and that this cost is insupportable, is spot on.
“If we fail to take major action …” is political double speak, because the alleged “major action” is impossible. Not to coin a phrase, Nature Bats Last, and the Second Law of Thermodynamics has a batting average of 1.00.
I completely agree, with the possible exception that the EROEI measuring tool is flawed. EROEI calculations make intermittent wind and solar look better than they really are.
Hi Gail,
A related suggestion is to view Nate Hagen’s Earth vs The Amoeba , if you haven’t already.(H/T to Ilargi, The Automatic Earth)
Thanks for your continued efforts to better inform all.
I looked at the first few minutes of the video; I need a little more time to look at the whole thing.
This is an Earth Day talk Nate gave just a few days ago.
In the first few minutes, he points out just haw badly the animal kingdom is degrading. He also makes the point that there are two predominant views of our current situation: (1) Let’s solve all our problems by going 100% renewables, right now; and (2) Business as usual will solve our problems.
He says that neither of these is right–something which I, of course, would agree with.
The one thing I didn’t agree with, in the first few minutes, was something that suggested that if we just make a few tweaks, we might be able to solve our problems by 2050.
I correspond with Nate from time to time. There is a moderate amount of overlap in what we are saying.
Thank you, Gail. I agree also, which is why I referred only to the EROEI of fossil fuels, which I consider pretty accurate. The figure for renewables is far too optimistic, because it typically does not consider the energy cost of connectivity, energy storage for intermittents, and maintenance.
Timing is also another issue that EROEI does not handle right, in part because there is an energy cost that goes with having to pay interest on debt.
It seems to me that EROEI should correspond to same thing that is a limit in the Limits to Growth model, but it doesn’t really. The energy payback has to come soon enough, or the system fails. Trying to build a lot of devices (including nuclear devices) with long time future paybacks doesn’t really work, unless the devices are very, very cheap at the beginning. The economic system has to have enough energy to perform its functions each year. Promises of future energy aren’t really substitutes for immediate energy.
“Green Deja Vu, Repeating Ontario’s Green Folly”
From an article posted in Canadian Free Press…
“The Ontario GEA called for priority and obligatory purchase of green energy projects and streamlined regulatory and approval processes of green energy projects. By comparison the Democrat GND calls for “massive mobilization … complete phase out of fossil fuels, fracked gas and nuclear power … replacing non-essential individual means of transport … eliminating fossil-based fertilizers … it will be necessary to electrify everything else, including transport, heating, etc.”
The radical Democrats also call for massive social engineering. Justice warrior mania runs through it: “corporate takeover … exploitation … people of color … just transition … human rights … harm on communities of color … WWII-scale mobilization … WPA-style public jobs program.” The Democrats piggyback on the UN IPCC report demand for “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society … a mandate that connects the dots between energy, transportation, housing and construction, as well as health care, living wages, a jobs guarantee, and the urgent imperative to battle racial and gender injustice.”
“The Ontario Province debacle has led to a debt of CAD $345 billion (US $257 billion), larger than 146 countries. Every Ontarian is saddled by a CAD debt $23,000+ and climbing. Not all of the debt burden is energy related. Fifteen years starting in 2003 of Liberal Party rule were marked by large yearly deficits, bookkeeping chicanery, blunders and scandal. But the Ontario Auditor General pins the costs of going green at CAD $170 billion over 30 years. The Ontario Debt Clock keeps on ticking.”
“The political Opposition grossly underestimated the looming disaster, saying that rates would increase a catastrophic 15%. Not even close. The off-peak and on-peak electricity rates were 4.2 & 9.1 cents per kilowatt hour in 2009 and doubled to 8.7 & 18.0 in 2016. As for job creation “mostly short-term subsidized jobs for workers installing wind turbines and solar panels … while the few jobs that have been created are mostly temporary, the high prices it foisted on consumers are permanent.” GEA resulted in hundreds of wasteful energy contracts, baseless claims about job creation, low energy yields and the necessity of dumping power on the export market at financial loss.”
There seem to be lots of sad stories around the world.
At low prices, perhaps it won’t be quite as bad. But the errors in pricing that occur because of giving wind and solar grid priority should be a major concern. They tend to drive backup electricity providers out of business. Even when plans are made to subsidize other producers to get around this problem, people who are certain that wind and solar will save us are vehemently opposed to these subsidies.
“While the failings of Eskom are well documented, the [South African] government calls on industrial energy consumers to commit to maintenance as optimizing their practices could ensure that they limit any unnecessary electricity use.
“While much of the emphasis with load shedding and drives to reduce usage has targeted household consumers, a 2017 report prepared for Eskom shows that residential usage accounts for just 23% of total electricity usage.
“Mining and manufacturing make up 60% of energy usage, despite only accounting for 22% of GDP. It is obviously in the best interest of the environment, and everyone involved, that we are more prudent about our electricity usage.
“However, the real problem is that not enough capacity has been planned to sustain the current economic activities in the private sector let alone a growing one.”
“Fuel distribution workers in Tunisia began a three-day strike on Thursday to demand higher wages, leading to long queues and empty pumps at petrol stations across the North African nation.
“The government is facing rising public demands for more pay as price rise, with inflation at about 7 percent. It is also contending with pressure from international lenders to cut the public wage bill and other spending to shore up state finances.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/tunisia-strike/strike-by-tunisian-fuel-workers-leads-to-queues-and-empty-pumps-idUKL5N22E3QC
“Turkey’s energy sector has $12-13 billion worth of loans that require restructuring, out of a total of $70 billion, lender Garanti Bank’s deputy managing director Ebru Edin said on Thursday. Last month, Finance Minister Berat Albayrak unveiled a plan to transfer some of the banking sector’s problem loans to off-balance-sheet funds…”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/turkey-economy-energy/update-1-turkeys-energy-sector-has-12-13-bln-of-problem-loans-garanti-bank-executive-idUKL5N22E6DU
I see the report says:
“More than half of the loans were given to renewable energy projects, Edin also said adding that with state-guaranteed energy purchases the problems with these loans were much more limited.”
Somebody is going to have to deal with all of the non-economic renewable energy projects, whether they are dumped on the government or taken off balance sheet. EROEI calculations overlook way too many details. These projects need to pay back their cost quickly. (This is one thing that became clear to me when I looked at how the Limits to Growth model works. Any EROEI calculation must really reflect a simultaneous payback.) Renewable energy projects can’t raise costs to the consumer, or they become unaffordable. Renewable energy projects have interest payments and other payments that need to be paid. Without batteries, intermittent wind and solar only replace fuel, which is not worth very much. But researchers doing the calculations inadvertently have made a lot of optimistic assumptions, such as “timing doesn’t matter.” It matters a lot!
Very well put Gail. In my country, the Netherlands, electric vehicles are sponsored through taxes; 4% of the vehicles price added to your income (company car) as we speak. Gas/diesel 22%.
Laughable. Said to a collegue; its sponsored. He said, no, not really; you have to pay less taxes on your company car….
So, that’s where we are. The masses don’t have a clue. And they won’t within our lifetime. There’s some humor in it though, i see wheelchairs in Mc Donalds paying with Facebookcoin for fake cheese.
Another wage disparity problem!
I don’t think people realize how much of energy consumption is commercial and industrial. This is especially the case in “Emerging Markets.” One figure I read for China put 90% of the energy use as industrial and commercial. This article talks about residential usage of electricity being 23% of electricity usage, meaning that 77% of electricity use is commercial and industrial.
People get so caught up in what they see and hear, which is mostly residential, those percentages you posted Gail, I’m sure would be a shock to most people. How about oil usage? Most people probably think in terms of passenger vehicles when actually that’s just part of the use of oil, but I don’t recall the percentage – do you have that?
Based on BP data for 2017, on a volume basis, worldwide gasoline consumption amounted to 26% of total oil consumption.
In the US, because we have so many big private passenger cars, nearly all powered by gasoline, 47% of oil consumption (by volume) is from gasoline. Of course, some of those private passenger cars are police cars, ambulances, taxis, sales people, workers driving small trucks, etc. If these were subtracted, it would bring the personal use down. Furthermore, gasoline is less energy dense than most other oil products. If this were also taken into account, it would bring the percentage on an energy basis down further.
In India, the percentage gasoline relative to total oil is 12%. (India powers some vehicles with natural gas, however.)
In Japan, the percentage gasoline relative to total oil is 22%.
In China, the percentage gasoline relative to total oil was also 22% in 2017. (China seems to power a lot of commercial transport by electricity from coal, however.)
Africa shows a percentage of gasoline relative to total oil of 27%.
The Middle East shows the percentage of gasoline relative to total oil of 19%.
The EU, with all of its diesel private passenger vehicles, shows its percentage of gasoline to total oil of 14%.
Central and South America (with not as much industry) shows the percentage of gasoline to total oil of 30%.
Does anyone know how many fossil resources the US MILITARY BURNS?
I bet it’s a lot more than what their cars, SUV’s & trucks burn!
Their dam illegal, unjust & IMMORAL WARS NEVER END!
They just EXPAND & KILL even more innocent people, destroy livelihoods & destroy infrastructure.
No one can stop the USA – yet.
Over 100 million barrels per year.
(I love how the “Union Of Concerned Scientists” advocates that the military turn to “greener” forms of destruction. Evil feckers.)
When the economy finally caves, these adventures will cease, and their assets will be stranded. One can easily see that despite all its illegal activity, the U.S. military is really not that effective, although it does cause a lot of death and destruction along the way.
Although as the empire continues its spiral down, it may resort to more brazen actions to stave off collapse. The U.S. has not taken its decline very well.
AAARRRRGGGGG! That’s TERRIBLE! 100 MILLION barrels a YEAR!! I also know that some of those vehicles burn several gallons of fuel for each mile/kilometer they travel!
I also noticed that the Union of Concerned “Scientist” have drunk the “cool aid” about “renewables”, I thought they were suppose to be SCIENTISTS!
What don’t they get about how you cannot replace declining RESOURCES with a RESOURCE DEPENDENT TECHNOLOGY?
What technology can we use to replace WATER?
What scientific voo doo can we develop to replace FOOD?
So they have found that hybred vehicles can go further on less fuel so they can MURDER MORE PEOPLE per gallon/liter, but their STILL DEPENDENT ON FOSSIL RESOURCES, those hybreds couldn’t exist without FOSSIL RESOURCES!
As Einstein once said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe & human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.” Indeed, there is NO LIMIT TO HUMAN STUPIDITY!
Wages way up ….U.S economy doing well ? I don’t get it….the estimates that have been made here don’t seem to be coming true. It seems like you may be incorrect on that front.
“… the weaker aspects in the April U.S. payrolls report, brushing aside stronger-than-forecast hiring and a drop in the jobless rate to the lowest in more than 49 years.
The modest 0.2% monthly pace of wage growth and the drop in the job participation rate…”
but the reality is low wage growth…
the 3% GDP growth in Q1 may be real and not fake… but I think we can be fairly certain that most all of that gain went to the top 10%, and possibly just to the top 1%…
the story continues to be true: the declining net (surplus) energy has ended growth for most people, and there seems to be no way forward to change that, so wage inequality will only get worse…
and this entire scenario places IC near the edge of a cliff…
it could collapse in a day or a week or a decade…
the timing is unknown, but the destination is certain…
In MN FF restaurants, e.g. Wendy’s shut down when someone calls in sick. Convenience stores cannot get help and when someone calls in sick there is often one person in the store. Perkins or something similar was reported to have closed in Rochester due to inability to hire staff. Menards advertises in store, on their website and on receipts for help with I believe a $3.00 differential for weekends. The trades are reportedly short of skilled workers, billboards along 52 advertise for help as well as business in electrical, HVAC. Mc donalds is recruiting the blue hairs to work their restaurants.
Homeless? We have destroyed our families, our values with fairy tale visions from Hollywood, endless drugs, endless sex, romantic visions of living on the street and a reported 25% incidence of herpes in young women. It doesn’t work. Some stars major in rehab, going on the cover of the People style magazines when going in and again when coming out, and again when going in, all the while airbrushed to look fabulous.
I dropped in the UMN bookstore, looked at the math books. College level calculus reads very easily, very thin books compared to 1964 Madison; quality of education is falling based on a scan of the bookshelves.
The other position is major companies no longer require a college degree, tests of competence, IBM, Google, etc. Gates didn’t graduate, no problem.
Top 10% or so pays virtually all the taxes except probably payroll taxes.
Nothing is certain other than death and taxes and as they say, I am not so certain about death.
Dennis L.
Don’t believe what the US CORPORATE media tells you, THEY LIE!
If the US economy is so “great” why are the numbers of HOMELESS GROWING?
If the US economy is so “great” why are thousands of large busineses CLOSING?
“They” claim we add thousands of jobs each month but is anyone considering what KIND of jobs those are?
Their mostly low wage, part time, temporary jobs with no future & no benifits OR their jobs that require higher education, experience or training most of us don’t have, can’t get or afford.
Shiela,
Name 10 large business closing in the US
See above posts, there are jobs in the trades, you gals can lift large concrete forms just like a man, right? Swing a 16 pound sledge and drive a spike with a single blow? Wire an airconditioner after climbing a 40 foot ladder to the roof carrying your tools as easily as mixing a latte?
Higher education, see Youtube, Coursera, MIT etc. You can get an incredible education on the internet. Google will hire you without a college degree.
Technical college is free for some income levels in Rochester as well as I assume the rest of the MN technical schools. Skip the subjects that don’t teach you to meet people’s needs, skip the fancy lounges, coffee shops and try the library on for size, become useful and it is amazing how many jobs are available.
Menards has career paths, not sure what a store manager earns, but well into six figures. Purchase a small house, get a discount on materials, form a stable relationship(that is marriage for real, not well I will give this a try and dump if it doesn’t work), fix it up, try a simple life, skip the large pickup truck and purchase a van, they are cheap and carry plywood. Fix up a bedroom first, a bathroom and rent the best out, rinse and repeat with the house, raise the rent with each improvement. This is America, people are swimming, walking, flying and perhaps teleporting to get here. If you are here, opportunity is all around you. Menards is not temporary, they train, they have good health benefits, good dental benefits and a retirement program, there are others I would guess. How do I know? Talked with a “mature” man in building materials, he had prostate cancer and Menards insurance was taking care of it, minimal out of pocket, not the media story, man on the floor next to drywall mud. Now, that is a lousy job, slinging mud, I am redoing my own study, know what I mean Vern?
I am old, mature as they say, maybe past pull date, but I look around and all I see is opportunity. My parents had the depression, not a recession mind you and WWII as well as the Korean whatever, my grandmother lived with us as her husband was killed on Christmas day helping out a friend on the railroad, talk about no benefits; my dad worked in a grocery store to feed his mother, brother and sister, got a job as a cop and then some clown with a funny mustache in Europe started a war. Now, those guys(my aunt went ashore as a WAC nurse at Normandy, splendid, charming little beach) really needed health insurance or life insurance. My father didn’t like the cold climates so he visited some islands in the Pacific, funny how all the palm trees were broken at ground level. Come on, life is good, it is all around us.
Dennis L.
“Name 10 large business closing in the US.”
How about 22 that have closed shops so far just this year, they all once employed people.
The jobs replacing them are either low wage, temporary, part time jobs or their jobs that require more experience, education or training that the unemployed don’t have or can afford.
That’s why the homeless population is growing.
Finding this list took me only a few seconds.
Payless ShoeSource, 2500 stores
Gymboree, 805 stores
Family Dollar, 390
Shopko, 251 stores
Chico’s, 250 stores
GAP, 230 stores
Performance Bicycle, 102 stores
Charlotte Russe, 520 stores
Sears, 70 stores
Destination Maternity, 42-67 stores
Victoria’s Secret, 53 stores
K-Mart, 50 stores
Abercrombie & Fitch, 40 stores
Christopher & Banks, 30-40 stores
J.C. Penney, 27 stores
Beauty Brands, 25 stores
Henri Bendel, 23 stores
Lowe’s, 20 stores
Macy’s, 9 stores
J.Crew, 7 stores
Kohl’s, 4 stores
Nordstrom, 3 stores
Just for “fun” I looked at our local, twice weekly paper to see how many jobs I could have done in my working days, only the few jobs that were minimum wage, part time, temporary jobs & I couldn’t have paid RENT on those wages & I also wouldn’t have had health insurance.
I was quite strong for my size & gender, I lifted 20 lb DOORS in a stack into a large belt sander machine all day long, I could lift my Suzuki 3 cylinder MOTORCYCLE with it’s fiberglass faring & bags up from downhill, I could LIFT & CARRY my at least 80 lb grandmother, I could lift & carry stuff other females could hardly even move, I can still lift a heavy 10 lb log splitting ax to split wood & I’m 78 yo!
But I didn’t have MONEY or the energy to go to school after a grueling day at work walking & lifting patients all day long.I have a slow heartbeat & a low metabolism so while strong, I had no endurance.
The opportunities that might be available depends upon your GENDER, LOOKS, AGE , EDUCATION & ABILITIES & if your not attractive & if your a FEMALE & too short, too fat, too ugly, finding a job gets much tougher if you live in a small town there are few jobs anyhow & no education opportunities.
Back in the day, there were no computers, no internet, no job training in the trades for GIRLS, we were BANNED from taking those courses, only the BOYS could get trade or skill training & only the BOYS could get driver training, they told us girls that your husband could teach you how to drive. GIRLS were stuck on the ‘MOMMY” track, we learned to cook, sew, make beds & other “useful” trades for HOUSEWIVES!
Sure “Silicon valley” HAD a lot of jobs at pretty good wages but the HOUSING was unaffordable unless you were a skilled worker in demand. I lived in a rented, single wide TRAILER & I always lived in fear that the park would be bought out by a developer leaving the tenents with no home & no place to go.
Thanks to a unexpected inheritance, I now live in my own small home in a small town on the Oregon coast, right in the TSUNAMI ZONE! YIKES!
You should look at water usage – In my neck of the woods it’s 170 gallons per capita – In 10 years we won’t have what we do now.
Folks don’t realize that 1/2 of the US is a desert of some flavor. We are pumping the bejesus out of the aquifers.
When you speak of industrial output one needs to keep in mind water goes along with energy.
Folks don’t realize that 1/2 of the US is a desert of some flavor.
I had to check out a claim like this, and… it’s not true (at least according to the generally accepted definition of a desert and assuming rainfall has not dropped significantly since 1990).
https://eldoradoweather.com/climate/us-states/us-average-rainfall.html
A desert is generally defined as an area receiving less than 10 inches annual rainfall (red and dark orange areas on the map). This is clearly less than 10% of the total land area of the contiguous US. Maybe as little as 5%.
I checked your work and having to disagree. I’m posting from one of the cheapest phones known to mankind and cannot get my links to paste.
I specifically stated a desert of some kind. There are true deserts as defined by what you found of 10″ or less of precipitation and semi-desert of 20″ or less.
50% may be a tad high but of all the maps and land areas of ecoregions certainly puts it around a 1/3 well north of 5%.
I’ll post the links when I have better access.
A desert of some kind?
According to most Europeans, the entire US is a cultural desert, so you have a point there Dan. 🙂
I’ll happily read any links you post, but simplest would be if you state the criteria you are using in order to classify land as a “type of desert”.
I’m classifying it at 20″ or less of precipitation per year.
I wonder what portions of China, India, and Australia would be deserts with a below 20 inch definition of desert. I am sure that India would do better than the other two, but annual reliability of the quantity of rainfall is a major issue.
Other countries that might be interesting are Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, and Iran.
Europe is an unusually wet part of the world, it seems to me.
I’m classifying it at 20″ or less of precipitation per year.
So, if we accept that a semi desert is a type of desert (like a semicircle is a type of circle), and that 50% is almost the same as 33%, I suppose you are correct that 50% of the USA is a type of desert. Hmmm…
I’m classifying sows ears’ as silk purses, too!
Geography and meteorology textbooks disagree with you, but hey, if calling it whatever you feel like calling it is your thing, I’m sure there’s a job in the Trump Administration waiting for you!
A lot of that is driven by government.
In order to get a building permit in rural areas here, you have to be able to provide 350 gallons per day to the new household.
Canadians in general use about what your neighbours do, about half the mandated 350 G/D. And in the minor islands of BC, the usage is half that, or about 80-90 G/D. And authorities are constantly chiding us to conserve more water. And yet, you cannot build a house unless you can supply it with 350 G/D.
This sort of disconnect with reality is disconcerting. We are seeking a variance that will allow us to build housing that has only 150 G/D supply per household.
Here in Japan, in rural areas where urban planning rules don’t apply. A landowner can build a house without any planning permission. If the site doesn’t have water or electricity or road access, that’s the owner’s problem.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=ULFs%2bRBh&id=9B14C6CE6E575E5D5412A21B2532F1EF5963AC45&thid=OIP.ULFs-RBhBSje1rf1WVGAUgHaEc&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2fwater.usgs.gov%2fGIS%2fbrowse%2fnhd_ppt30yr_mrb.jpg&exph=1800&expw=3000&q=usgs+rainfall+map+of+us&simid=608004442630262351&selectedIndex=6&qpvt=usgs+rainfall+map+of+us&ajaxhist=0
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=jqN0Ev3y&id=92FC874E9D0B600D7E79C860747B9B6F1A66F4EE&thid=OIP.jqN0Ev3yaCmKz2dQw_deGwHaFj&mediaurl=http%3a%2f%2fwww-das.uwyo.edu%2f%7egeerts%2fcwx%2fnotes%2fchap17%2fus_precip.gif&exph=720&expw=959&q=usgs+rainfall+map+of+us&simid=608014694749569284&selectedIndex=0&qpvt=usgs+rainfall+map+of+us&ajaxhist=0
https://ajgarci5desert.weebly.com/semiarid-desert.html