Nearly everyone wonders, “Why is Donald Trump crazy enough to impose tariffs on imports from other countries? How could this possibly make sense?”
As long as the world economy is growing rapidly, it makes sense for countries to cooperate with each other. With the use of cooperation, scarce resources can become part of supply lines that allow the production of complex goods, such as computers, requiring materials from around the world. The downsides of cooperation include:
(a) The use of more oil to transport goods around the world;
(b) The more rapid exhaustion of resources of all kinds around the world; and
(c) Growing wage disparity as workers from high-wage countries compete more directly with workers from low-wages countries.
These issues can be tolerated as long as the world economy is growing fast enough. As the saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
In this post, I will explain what is going wrong and how Donald Trump’s actions fit in with the situation we are facing. Strangely enough, there is a physics aspect to what is happening, even though it is likely that Donald Trump and the voters who elected him would probably not recognize this. In fact, the world economy seems to be on the cusp of a shrinking-back event, with or without the tariffs. Adding tariffs is an indirect way of allowing the US to obtain a better position in the new, shrunken economy, if this is really possible.
The upcoming shrinking-back event is the result of too little energy consumption in relation to total world population. Most researchers have completely missed the possibility that energy limits could manifest themselves as excessive wage disparity. In fact, they have tended to assume that energy limits would manifest themselves as high energy prices, especially for oil.
The world’s networked economy doesn’t work in the simple way that most researchers have assumed. Too much wage disparity tends to lead to low energy prices, rather than high, because of increasing affordability issues. The result is energy prices that are too low for producers, rather than too high for consumers. Producers (such as OPEC nations) willingly cut back on production in an attempt to get prices back up. The resulting shortage can be expected to more closely resemble financial collapse than high prices and a need for rationing. Trump’s tariffs may provide the US a better position, if the world economy should partially collapse.
Let me try to explain some pieces of this story.
1. Energy is needed to power the world economy. This fact has been missed by politicians and most economists.
Economist Steven Keen recently developed a graphical explanation of the role energy plays in the world economy. In his graphic, he shows that workers need food (an energy product) just as machines need some sort of energy product to operate. In Steve Keen’s words, “Labor without energy is a corpse: capital without energy is a sculpture.”
Figure 1. Graphic by Steven Keen, depicting the role of energy in the economy. Energy in the form of food is necessary for human labor, just as energy (in one of its many forms) is needed for physical transformations that make the activities underlying GDP possible. These physical transformations necessarily lead to both the desired products and multiple types of waste.
In fact, there is a physics reason why energy consumption is needed in the economy. Energy “dissipation” is needed for the physical actions underlying GDP. For example, transportation requires a physical movement of people or objects. This can only happen with the use of energy. Even the use of heat or of electricity requires energy dissipation.
2. China’s huge growth in energy consumption since it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001 is truly amazing. It has changed the world order in a few years.
China’s energy consumption ramped up very quickly after joining the WTO in late 2001. At the same time, the energy consumption of the US and the EU stagnated, as manufacturing moved to China and other Emerging Markets.
Figure 2. Energy Consumption for the United States, China, and European Union, based on data from BP’s 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
As the shift in energy consumption occurred, jobs shifted elsewhere. Also, the competition with China and other low-wage countries tended to hold down wages of workers whose jobs could be shifted overseas. When we look at labor force participation rates for the US, we see that these seem to have turned down about the same time that China joined the WTO. This suggests that workers started leaving the workforce about the time competition with China ramped up.
Figure 3. US Labor Force Participation Rate, in chart prepared by the Federal Reserve of St. Louis.
3. China is now facing a problem with Peak Coal. Its level of coal production is barely sustainable because of depletion and low coal prices.
Figure 4. China energy production by fuel, based on BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018 data. “Other Ren” means Other Renewables. This includes wind, solar and other renewables, such as wood burned for fuel.
If China is to manufacture goods and services for the world economy as well as its own people, it needs a growing supply of cheap-to-produce energy. China’s largest source of energy is coal. China’s coal production hit a peak in 2013 and has been on a bumpy plateau, or falling, since. The problem has been a combination of (a) a higher cost of coal production, because existing mines are depleting, combined with (b) coal prices that do not rise high enough to make production from these mines profitable.
Of course, if coal prices were to rise higher, China would have a different, but equally serious problem: The cost of finished goods created for the world marketplace would be quite a bit higher, making it difficult to export them profitably. If customers’ wages rose at the same time coal prices rose, there would be no problem. The problem could be described in some sense as growing mining inefficiency because of coal depletion. Unfortunately, the world economy does not reward a shift toward inefficiency.
4. With Peak Coal occurring in China, it makes little sense for the United States, the European Union and others to depend as heavily on China as in the past.
The economy of every country today is built on debt. If the world economy is growing, this debt pile can rise higher and higher. If interest rates can be brought ever lower, this also helps the pile of debt rise higher and higher.
China’s economy also uses increasing debt to sustain its economic growth. If the economy of China should slow down or start shrinking because of energy limits, debt defaults could start overwhelming the system. Uprisings from laid-off workers might become difficult to quell. The situation could easily spiral out of control.
Economies around the world depend on China for many manufactured goods. In fact, for many minerals, China’s usage amounts to over half of the world’s consumption. This arrangement doesn’t really make sense because (a) China cannot really be depended on for the long term because of coal depletion, (b) jobs that pay well in Advanced Economies are being lost to China and other Emerging Markets, and (c) the level of concentration of manufacturing in China puts the world system at risk if China has any kind of adverse shift in its economy.
5. The whole idea of buying fuels from other countries only works as long as there is enough to go around.
Many people are of the opinion that if there is not enough fuel of a particular kind, fuel prices will rise, and the market will continue to operate normally. There are at least two reasons why this doesn’t make sense:
Reason #1. The issue underlying rising costs of fossil fuels is nearly always depletion. For example, with coal mines, the coal closest to the surface in the thickest seams is extracted first. As this is depleted, deeper coal in thinner seams can also be extracted, but the cost tends to be higher. When depletion takes place, it is nearly always possible to extract more of the given fuel if some combination of more human labor and more technology (powered by energy) is used. Of course, adding labor and/or technology leads to a higher cost of production.
But the prices of commodities are not determined based on the cost of production; prices are determined in the marketplace. They reflect the quantity of finished goods and services made with these commodities, that consumers (in the aggregate) can afford. Extracting coal or another fuel in what is essentially a less efficient manner doesn’t add to what consumers can afford. The combination of flat prices and higher costs leads to unprofitable producers–precisely China’s problem. Producers tend to cut back on production.
We can see that higher energy prices don’t lead to higher wages by looking at what happened when oil prices rose a few years ago in the US. We see that higher oil prices led to lower average wages because of recession.
Figure 5. Average wages in 2017$ compared to Brent oil price, also in 2017$. Oil prices in 2017 dollars are from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018. Average wages are total wages based on BEA data adjusted by the GDP price deflator, divided by total population. Thus, they reflect changes in the proportion of population employed as well as wage levels.
Reason #2. If we look back at the timing of Peak Coal in the UK and in Germany, it looks very much as if depleting coal supply was one of the causes of both World War I and World War II. Governments know that energy supplies are required to operate their economies. If they cannot get enough energy products internally or through trade, they will fight other countries for access to supplies.
Figure 6. Image by author.
Economists, sitting in their ivory towers, have not stopped to think through the obvious. Their standard supply and demand curve does not work for energy because an adequate supply of cheap energy is needed for both the demand for goods and services (coming from wages workers earn) and the supply of goods and services. Once affordability becomes a problem, because too many people have low wages, the prices of fuels stop rising. It is the fact that prices don’t rise high enough that causes the “peaking” of oil, natural gas, and coal production. Extraction stops, even though there seem to be plenty of resources still available with current technology.
6. A major energy issue today is the fact that China and India have run through their own energy supplies and now need to import energy from outside their countries to supplement domestic supplies.
As shown in Figure 4 (above), China’s coal production stopped rising in 2013, keeping the total amount of energy it produces close to flat. To compensate for this shortfall, China has started to import oil, coal and natural gas. The difference between the thick black line and the top of the “stack” of types of energy produced in China (in Figure 7 below) represents the quantity of fuel that it has needed to import. Clearly, this quantity has been increasing.
Figure 7. China energy production by fuel plus its total energy consumption, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy data.
India’s coal supply is not yet decreasing, but it is running into a similar problem. It needs to import more and more energy products from abroad, as its energy consumption (thick black line) rises above its energy production “stack.”
Figure 8. India’s total energy consumption compared to its energy production by type, based on BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy. “Other Ren” includes wind, solar, and other commercially traded renewable types of renewable energy, such as geothermal.
7. Worldwide, there is a growing need for imported fuels of many kinds.
Figure 9 shows the imports needed for five major areas of the world. In this analysis, the European Union is treated as a single unit. Thus, in this analysis, the imports it receives are only those from outside the European Union, taken as a whole.
Figure 9. Required energy imports for five major areas of the world, based on the difference of energy consumption and energy production shown in BP’s 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy.
We can see from Figure 9 that the European Union and Japan have been major importers of fuels for a very long time. India and China have only in recent years become energy importers. At the same time, the US is becoming more and more energy sufficient with its own fuel production.
Figure 10 shows the ratio of imported energy to total energy consumption for these five areas.
Figure 10. Percentage of energy imported in 2017 in Japan, India, the EU, China, and the US. Imports calculated as the difference between Total Energy Consumption and Total Energy Production based on data from BP 2018 Statistical Review of World Energy. The European Union is treated as a single unit. Thus, energy imports are those from outside the EU.
The US is clearly in a better position than other countries/groups shown, with a smaller share of energy imported in Figure 10 and a declining trend in imported energy in Figure 9. Japan, the EU and India are all subject to substantial risk if available imports should fall.
8. The ramp up of “clean energy” to date has proven to be a major disappointment. The quantities added are far below what the IEA believes is needed.
Partial confirmation of this statement can be seen by observing the tiny orange “Other Ren” bands on Figures 4, 7, and 8 for China and India, which include wind, solar, and other non-hydroelectric renewables. China is the largest user of wind and solar in the world, yet its use of these devices provides only a tiny portion of its total energy consumption.
We have known since the 1950s that fossil fuel supply would eventually become a problem. Academics, with their focus on making models, have been able to come up with hypotheses regarding what might act as substitutes. But these models tend to miss a lot of things, including the following:
- Adverse events, such as Fukushima for nuclear.
- The need for electricity storage and extra long distance transmission lines, as wind and solar usage are ramped up. The cost-benefit analysis is much less favorable with these added.
- Issues that affect only some installations, such as workarounds to keep long-distance transmission lines from starting fires in dry areas, or the high cost of underground transmission lines.
- The best sites are taken early.
It is not until the actual experience arrives that we see how these substitutes are working in practice. If we think back, the nuclear promise of producing electricity that was hoped to be “too cheap to meter” hasn’t really panned out. In fact, many Advanced Economies are cutting back on their use of nuclear.
With respect to “renewables,” (including hydroelectric, wind, solar, and others) the amount of new generation added each year seems to have hit a plateau. It may be that the additional need for storage and transmission lines are already slowing the growth of renewables.
Figure 11. IEA Renewable Net Capacity Additions as of May 2019. Source: Chart from India Times.
The IEA has started pointing out that far more energy investment is needed if sustainable development goals are to be met–about 300 GW per year, instead of the current 177 per year in additions, on average, between 2018 and 2030.
9. Donald Trump and his advisors have sensed that the current economic system is not working because of too much wage disparity. If the economic system is destined to break in one way or another, Trump can influence which way the break will occur by the imposition of tariffs.
Trump and his advisors no doubt recognize the importance of a cheap, available energy supply. They also realize that energy is an important enough factor of production to fight over. Furthermore, many past wars have been resource wars. Tariffs are, in some sense, a step toward a resource war.
One of the immediate problems at hand is too much wage disparity. Strange as it may seem, excessive wage disparity can be a sign of inadequate energy supply because in a networked economy, high prices of commodities and low wages of workers are almost “mirror images” of each other. High commodity prices tend to cut off consumption of commodities (such as oil or coal) by prices of finished goods that are too high for consumers.
Excessive wage disparity works in reverse: It sends prices of commodities (such as coal and oil) too low, cutting off production because prices fall too low for producers of these commodities. Production falls because producers cannot make a profit. When wage disparity is very high, a large share of workers have very low wages, leaving them unable to purchase more than a small amount of high-priced goods (such as cars and homes) made with commodities. It is this low “demand” that holds down commodity prices.
Figure 10 shows that wide income disparities were issues both at the time of the Great Depression and in recent years. Commodity prices have been relatively low each of these times. The problems didn’t look like shortages; they looked like gluts because of issues related to lack of affordability.
Figure 12. U. S. Income Shares of Top 1% and Top 0.1%, Wikipedia exhibit by Piketty and Saez.
The US has raised tariffs in the past. One time was immediately before the US Civil War. Tariffs were again raised in 1922 and 1930, when wage disparities were at a high level.
Unfortunately, there is a significant chance that major parts of the world economy will start collapsing, with or without Trump’s tariffs and the trade war, because energy supplies worldwide are not growing sufficiently. In fact, some of these energy supplies are purposely being removed by producers, such as Saudi Arabia, because prices are too low.
By putting tariffs on some goods, Trump is providing a substitute for the missing high oil prices needed to slow the growth of globalization, if the issue of ever-increasing wage disparity is to be solved. The tariffs tend to raise the value of the US dollar relative to other currencies, making the cost of commodities (including fossil fuels) cheaper for US consumers than for other consumers around the world. The tariffs tend to encourage new investment in US production of many types, at the same time that they make investment in other countries, such as China, less appealing.
All of these changes indirectly give the US an advantage if there should be a partial collapse of the world economy. With the benefit of the tariffs, perhaps the partial collapse would leave some combination of countries, including the US and Canada, mostly unaffected. There might be other groups remaining as well. Weak economies, such as Venezuela, Cuba, and Haiti, would likely be pushed aside. Even Europe and Japan would likely have major problems.
Conclusion
Most observers have missed the point that excessive wage and wealth disparity can be a sign of serious energy problems, just as high prices can be a sign of short supply. They have also missed the point that coal supply is very important, just as oil supply is very important.
In the real world, when there is not enough to go around, wars are a definite possibility. A trade war is a somewhat reduced version of a war. Trump and his advisors, whether or not they understand the real situation, seem to be trying to guide the US to as good an outcome as possible, in the current situation of excessive wage disparity.
The underlying issue is likely the Limits to Growth problem modeled in the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, by Donella Meadows, et al.
Figure 13. Base scenario from 1972 Limits to Growth, printed using today’s graphics by Charles Hall and John Day in “Revisiting Limits to Growth After Peak Oil,” with dotted line added corresponding to where I see the world economy to be in 2019.
As resources become depleted, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain economic growth. Industrial output per capita (for example, the number of new cars or number of smartphones per 1000 people) starts falling. The 1972 computer simulations did not consider wages or prices, only physical quantities of various items.
Now, as we can see how the limits are playing out in the real world, it appears that the most prominent manifestation of the world’s low resource problem is excessive wage disparity–an issue most people have never considered as being related to shortages of resource supplies. Few people have stopped to think that goods made with energy products are equally unaffordable whether the problem is prices being too high, or wages of most people being too low.
Kunstler was calm and to the point today. ” Alt-energy just doesn’t pencil out money-wise or physics-wise. ”
I prefer his over the top polemics.
Yep, and back to the main theme of Gail’s article, this trade war might get even more serious, as the top Chinese signaled – clearly hinted at the rare earth metals embargo possibility, that’s basically a nudge nudge to the techie-Davos folk you better dethrone – derail him ASAP or your biz ends momentarily..
For kicks I just replayed some of the recent Bannon’s msm circuit appearances, and the whole situation is really puzzling. So, it’s either about some crazy underdog faction splinter group getting Trump into office in 2016 against all odds to topple the dominant Davos clique or it’s something more sinister and ‘6th dimension chess’ like en-devour.. using this opportunity just as a plausible decoy vehicle to turn around the multi-decade US policy..
Well, knowing the actors and the real vitriol gushing everywhere it’s most likely the former. Simply an underdog faction realized now it’s the opportunity to go ahead, it’s better to be king in soon to be balkanized world (and the US), then just some also ran ~rich class prisoner of lower pecking order.
There are rare earths here in Australia. Right now we chose not to mine them as China is wearing the environmental consequences, But if China takes itself out of consideration no doubt mining here would start.
But only if the cost of extraction, including whatever pollution control steps are taken, is low enough. High-cost rare earth minerals don’t work any more than high-cost fossil fuel extraction. The prices don’t rise high enough so the producers can make money.
Sure, but when the time comes, if it does, the costs will be factored in to see if it flies. I’m sure a premium will be added on. A friend of mine told me he doesn’t care how much petrol/gas costs, he will pay it, [just use it less].
The catch is that whether it is fossil fuels or it is rare earth elements, these elements and compounds are used so widely in so many applications that “how much petrol/gas costs” is not the issue. The question is how much the machines your employer uses will cost, and whether you will have a job. The question is how much housing will cost, and indirectly, how much rent you will pay. These costs get buried so deeply in everything we buy, and in fact, in our paychecks, that there is nothing we can do to avoid them.
We cannot tell if any work arounds for these questions will be able to come on line. It depends on whether the next crash is something like the last one and therefore manageable or whether it is to be a much worse. Anything that depends on money, like debt, is manageable, as money is just a token and debt is numbers in red ink. What really matters is if the crash is due to some physical event, some resource that is unavailable suddenly, some disease like the 1918 flu where money cannot help.
I think that you are confused about (1) where the lack of buying power exists that causes the crashes and (2) the extent to which government money printing of money can fix this lack of buying power.
In the 2008 crash, the lack of buying power was primarily in the “rich” world. High prices of energy products were too much for consumers of many types, including workers living on their paychecks, individuals getting retirement funds from governments and others, businesses whose sales were being cut back, and local governments that could not afford to build roads, schools, and other infrastructure. Also, banks and insurance companies had sold debt and derivatives that would lead to large “paper” losses.
These rich countries could indeed hide the large paper losses with printed money. They also could use their printed money to buy up bonds, and thereby lower interest rates. These lower interest rates were the big thing that got the system going again, because then monthly payments for homes, cars, and theoretically factories, and industrial development were lower. Spending could be higher, because of the great debt the system as a whole incurred.
The next time around, the big difference is that in addition to the same losers, we will have a lot of losers that are not from what we think of as the rich world. Venezuela is clearly a loser. Iran is a loser. Syria is a loser. Saudi Arabia is a loser, and will be more of a loser if oil prices drop even lower. Furthermore, China will have a lot of debt to bail out, including a lot of very flakey peer-to-peer lenders who should never have been in business previously.
The questions is, “Who is going to bail out all of these countries?” Will the world allow each of these countries to print unlimited money to get more of the resources of the world? Or will the fall in their currencies more than offset?
I think that your money printing view is at most a very limited solution of a few very rich nations. What really needs to happen is that buying power needs to get to the hands of all of the consumers (including business consumers) of the world. This generally happens through lower interest rates. But governments around the world cannot get their local interest rates down, without their currencies falling greatly relative to other currencies. India, for example, cannot lend to their citizens at a 2% rate, without their credit rating going even lower than it already is, and their relativity to the US dollar falling lower. Bangladesh and Pakistan are in a similar or worse position.
Your thinking is too “US centric.” And it misses the real role of lowered interest rates. These cannot be implemented further (to any significant extent) because we are reaching negative interest rates in too many places in the world.
Yes, probably a bit too US centric, but I believe it is the key country. I don’t think “printing money” is an answer, [it has to buy debt to exist in the first place]. What is more likely is the “debt jubilee” option. I’m not alone in thinking this, BTW. Steve Keen and David Graeber both think this. Michael Hudson says often that debts that cannot be repaid will not be paid. There is an unknown sum in shadow banking circles. Estimates go from 800Trillion to 1.4 Quadrillion dollars all in derivatives and insurances. That will be entirely “jubilee-d”. It’s all “in house’ anyway.
As I mentioned before there are two possible basic scenarios; 1], a manageable crash like 2008 and 2] a chaotic destructive crash. In so far as money can be a cause it pales into insignificance compared to possible real events and as you say, every nation will suffer. There will be no bailing out. it will be every one for themselves.
If there is space for 1], a reset then deficit spending will answer most issues. Nations that are not monetary sovereign will find that difficult, such as members of the Eurozone. It will have to give way on spending. Deficit spending is where the currency comes from, [you cannot just print money as the currency has no value without a debt base] Steve Keen thinks a bonus to compensate those who have already paid down their loans is an option. House values will be reset at half [?] their current value, even less. Banks can write down their books, but will survive. It all depends on resources.
We’ve been through this money stuff before. You don’t yet understand it. MMT explains it if you care to read up [only use source material!!] but mostly it is common sense accounting. Governments of monetary sovereign nations don’t have real debt, only bank speak debt. [i.e., your deposit in your bank is the bank’s debt, etc]. Deficit spending eliminates its debts while simultaneously creating the currency. Non MS nations are users of foreign currency and only a write down will solve it. There are still myriad problems you could write a book on, so I cannot answer all of them here, not even guess at.
JHK today also:
“That current is the one telling nations quite literally to mind their own business, to prepare to go their own ways, to strive somehow to become self-sufficient, to finally face the limits to growth, to simplify and downscale all their operations.
Alas, the US and China — and everybody else — will apparently be dragged kicking and screaming to those transformational recognitions. (Thus, the agonies of Brexit.)”
sounds like the past couple of days in the EU…
he begins it all with:
“The race to economic collapse is an international competition sparking threats and tensions summoning the specter of war. The imploding center of this collapse is that of industrial technocracy based on fossil fuels. All the nations will go through it on differing schedules. It has been playing out slowly, painfully, and deceptively — hence, my term for it: the long emergency.”
key word there is “long”…
collapse could be in 10 days or 10 weeks… but more likely in a 10 year range, give or take a few…
This is a link to Kunstler’s post today.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/rumors-of-war/
I like this blog post. There are very definite echos of my recent post. But he has a lot of fancier ways of saying things than I do.
I liked this analogy of JHK’s:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48417744
‘European elections 2019: Power blocs lose grip on parliament’
“The big centre-right and centre-left blocs in the European Parliament have lost their combined majority amid an increase in support for liberals, the Greens and nationalists.”
That exactly fits with ideas of peak oil, as surplus energy declines, with a resulting move away from globalization to localization. If the process continues unabated, people will end up concerned about what happens in their post collapse commune; just one of many tiny specks on a future world map. Imagine how disappointed the generation will be that are born just after the oil age ended.
“Ok kid, grab a shovel and pick. It’s your turn to help prepare the soil for planting.”
“Don’t we have a better way of doing this?”
“Not anymore, and remember, no hard labor, no food for you.”
It’s difficult to know exactly what happens next. Do we get more centralisation for a while at least until things start to fall apart? Or are we already decentralising in many ways?
What people usually refer to when they point to decentralisation more than often still requires a fully functioning centralised national and international infrastructure.
Sure, more people have moved to cities in search of this and that. But I also see many city dwellers escaping to the countryside to live a better life.
In the end, I don’t think it matters where you happen to be when things go south. Food and oil trucks have to deliver to all of these people wherever they are and the trucks can stop running at any time.
It seems like in Argentina, the stories we heard when they were undergoing a sort of collapse a few years ago was that the countryside was worse, because there was no law and order.
Yet more farming, AI and a very long extension cord. Connect to solar panels and farm when the sun shines. JD probably is aware of the issues.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/17/john-deere-unveils-an-autonomous-electric-tractor-with-a-really-long-extension-cord/
It would seem I need to install a great number of solar panels, convert solar into row crops and continue the process. Not sure of the efficiency, the main issue is the short window of time for so many farm operations. A plus for this system would be use of grid tie electricity in off hours as well as being able to use the tractor 24 hours/day. Today it is raining, fields were sprayed yesterday, now the fields will need to dry for three days before they could be sprayed.
I never knew the importance of getting things done in the relatively short window required to achieve a long enough growing season in the northern latitudes.
Yes, another complex solution, but power plants are local and transporting electrons seems much less problematic than transporting oil from the ME, etc. Now, someone is going to ruin my day by telling me coal is past peak and one can’t eat coal.
Somewhere there must be a ray of hope.
Dennis L.
Better batteries!
Seriously, why is anyone talking about ev farm vehicles.
Think people. Farm vehicles and other industrial vehicles are at the very end of the line. At the other end of the spectrum when it comes to electrification of vehicles.
For the sake of argument, you start by attempting to electrify or hybridise personal use vehicles since they are by far the largest number of vehicles and the heaviest users of liquid fuels.
You do not attempt this gig by starting with farmer Joe’s tractor for heavens sake. Or shipping. You can plan for those at some point if you really wish but start with the cars and at the same time try to implement more efficient ways of moving people back and forth.
I would point out that gasoline is from a different part of the barrel than diesel, lubricant oils, and many other products we need and use.
Even if the batteries could remove 100% of the private passenger auto use of gasoline (which they certainly cannot), our problem with keeping commercial operations going much more relates to diesel fuel, lubricants, and the heavier part of the oil barrel. We can make lighter products, but we can’t make heavier products. So even if ethanol and batteries fixes the private passenger auto usage, we still needed diesel for maintaining roads and electrical transmissions. Also, we use diesel in today’s farm equipment.
At this point, diesel seems to be in shorter supply than gasoline. Europe make the bad decision a few years ago to encourage the sale of private passenger autos using diesel. Commercial vehicles, which tend to be heavier, use diesel around the world. While diesel is efficient, there is not enough of it for very many to make such profligate use of diesel fuel as Europe has encouraged. Now European leaders realize that cannot ramp up diesel usage; they must cut back. What they are advocating is electric, but I can’t imagine that it will be available in the future either.
just my take on the oil supply problem
but if you removed the petrol diesel kerosene volumes from the oil market, wouldn’t that make the rest of the oil based system non viable?
‘European leaders’ bastardized the auto industry consumer already.
Effectively, nowadays, there are mandates in place for small displacement 3cylinder turbo engines and other “efficiency” crap, which would average american never considered even for a lawn mower..
That being said diesels are still on offer across the various car segments but slowly yet surely moved up the scale to heavier/luxurious/low-er volume market segment only..
I’m reading these mails several days behind and this may already have been mentioned …
Diesel was v good because people only thought about CO2 but now the regulators think NOX and nasty pollutants for the city dwellers so diesel bad.
Small 3 cylinder engines can provide remarkable power but not match new emissions regulations.
In effect the car market in the EU and likely China and India is being regulated to go electric. Indeed everything is being regulated to go electric for new products within 10 years.
It’s likely to be interesting watching the so called ‘law makers’ trying to best each other every day in the race to be most ‘planet saving’.
Virtue signalling seems to completely out of control.
“a different part of the barrel ”
That’s less true than it was pre-WW II before catalytic crackers and all the related processes in refineries.
“can’t make heavier products.”
Usually, the demand is for molecularly lighter products. Sasol’s plant in Qatar makes long chain wax which is then cracked into diesel range products.
You may think the demand is for molecularly lighter products, but the big complaints I have been hearing recently have to do with diesel. Will Europe be able to get enough of it.
Years ago, in the United States, diesel was a much cheaper fuel than gasoline. I imagine that was the result of so much of our fuel use being gasoline. I understand that in the early days, more of the farm equipment ran on gasoline, for example. It is now diesel.
One of my sons bought a diesel car in 2001, thinking that was the cheaper fuel option, because (1) it was quite fuel efficient and (2) diesel at that point was not much more expensive than than gasoline, and had historically been cheaper.
So you are probably right, going back to about the 1995 and prior period. But once everyone got on the diesel bandwagon, and ethanol production ramped up, gasoline was cheaper.
This cord powered tractor is absolutely silly. The voltage loss on the cable must be tremendous! The lifetime of the cord could be measured in a year or two before requiring replacement. The infrastructure cost of all the plug in crap out the roof. The limitations on what the tractor can be used for are enormous.
Really, this kind of development is a bone thrown out for the green religion.
Completely laughable concept.
this has got to be a windup in every sense of the word
the heat in that cable coil must be enough to self combust!!
Many years ago I worked at one of the John Deere plants programming and installing computers, interface gear to coordinate measuring machines and the like. I got to know a number of JD engineers. I am certain that they kept the power loss in the cable reel low enough so it would not get hot enough to catch on fire.
Whether or not electric tractors make sense is another question. Probably for some crops.
I don’t think any future is a sure thing. There are long-range developments that could really surprise people. For example, a bunch of AIs that are a lot smarter than we are. It might be worth considering under what circumstances the human race would do OK in addition to the idea that we are doomed.
There is not a single AI on the planet that is smarter than the average intelligent human.
“AI on the planet that is smarter”
For the sake of argument, let’s stipulate this.
Is AI getting better? I think it would be hard to argue against this. If that is the case, then at some point in the future AI will be smarter than we are, assuming continued progress.
diminishing returns on almost all human economic activities guarantee that any AI progress will collapse in the next decade or so…
I wonder how you know this?
Because all the techno tech technicians will down their techy tools and go home to sharpen machetes when they realise there’s no food in the shops and no gas trucks making deliveries.
That’s how he knows Keith.
When the SHTF… playing with your latest tech toys will be the last thing on peoples minds.
I am at least mentally prepared for what happens next if things go south. Could be more physically prepared but better than the average self propelled stomach waddling around.
At the moment, things appear to be quickening towards collapse. There’s always a big “if” question mark hanging over the future but all we have to go on is what we see in front of us now. Extrapolating along some extremely thin thread decades or centuries ahead is equivalent to wishing for aliens to “save us” or praying to the gods to whisk us off to another realm.
But yeah… anything could theoretically happen.
I have often suggested here that a branching off could occur from human activity leading to a completely new species if low cost energy was guaranteed. Of course you get boooed back into oblivion because we’re not allowed to be positive here. Apparantly it’s not realistic.
“That’s how he knows Keith.”
That implies certainty about the timing of future events. If the AI breakthrough happens before the collapse, there is a good chance the collapse will not happen at all. (Assuming intelligence is useful that is.)
“we’re not allowed to be positive here”
I am not certain about the future and freely state that things could go very bad indeed. We have historical examples, Easter Island is my favorite. There an ecological crisis took down a society with as high as 95% of the population dying off and then, with the much lower population, they recovered somewhat (before the disaster of European contact got them).
But none of us know how the future will unfold. There seem to be paths that will take humans beyond the fossil fuel era, tapping the sun and even moving off the planet.
I am not the only one who thinks about such a future. https://youtu.be/GQ98hGUe6FM
the entire industrial complex that now envelops our planet, and makes it run, is the peak of 250 years of industrial combustion.
All other ‘inventions” are subject to that single word—combustion
Remove our means of combustion and we have literally nothing other than muscle power, either from animals or ourselves.
We have at best 20 years worth of combustible materials left—yes yes–I know theres a Trumps worth of oil still down there.
That is irrelevant. We are already fighting over that. 60 years ago we were not fighting over it.
Why?—because everyone had enough for their needs.
Now our oilbelt is tightening, just at the point where China is wanting to get fat.
So conflict is inevitable.
Irrespective of whether sun-energy is a feasible proposition, remember the industrial complex to do it has not yet been invented, let alone constructed.
as oilwars intensify, there will be no industrial capacity to construct any new complex industry at all—we will not be able to sustain the industries we have already, feeding ourselves will be difficult enough
“single word—combustion”
Come on, that’s not realistic. Hydro is not combustion, neither is nuclear fission. Solar power from space (if we build it) is not combustion. There are future problems with resources, but please try to keep the story accurate and don’t oversimplify.
think
think
then think some more
(I am genuinely amazed at having to explain this btw)
you cannot deliver any of the ”alternatives” mentioned without equipment of various kinds that is the creation of the process of combustion in one way or another
my stock in trade has always been simplification—strip away all that is superfluous until you are left with a core factor that cannot be further reduced.
when that has been properly done, then explanations are minimal and easy to understand—unless the blankets of complexity are pulled back up to explain stuff that has no business there.
I used to work to a golden rule—allowing 50 words to explain core subjects—100 words at a push if some things had to be spelled out as a legal requirement
Try to imagine constructing a dam without machinery running on combustion
then fit it out on the same basis.
When you’ve managed that—try to think of a single use for the electricity delivered that does not utilise machines that are themselves the products of combustion.
You mentioned being realistic I think?????
Norman is right on this and absolutely grounded in reality.
Chinese solar satellite by 2050. That’s a long way off Keith. Even fusion has better prospects than that. Commercial fusion now only perpetually five years away instead of twenty. We’re getting somewhere.
And still in 2020 we mostly power the world with combustion of coal, gas, and oil. It would take another twenty years at least to make a dent in that equation with something like evs.
And coal, gas and oil are having lots of problems right now, not in twenty years time. The most powerful nations may struggle within years to keep afloat. How on earth are they going to continue with extravagant space projects?
How intelligent is the average human?
I hear the average has been going down recently.
we couldn’t produce an AI smarter than a honey bee or an ant (for instance)
get born from a universal mother, go out, find resources, bring it back to a central point, convert it into food
Use no resources other than renewables. maintain the species for 50 m years or so.
maintain the colony for the good of the colony.
no ambition other than that, collective concentration on the universal good of all
die off when required
Pretty miraculous, when we think about it. The whole self-organizing way the universe operates is pretty miraculous, in my view.
the entire universe—has nothing to do with miracles, just the self organisation of elements based on physical basic laws.
Sprinkle iron filings on a piece of paper, pass a magnet under it and the iron filings self-organise.
humankind thinks it’s totally different
we have organised ourselves (or tried to) into a self-belief system that says those laws do not apply to us.
We invented gods to agree with us, then wrote down what those gods said to men we appointed as god listeners.
Just like economists, the god listeners told us what we wanted to hear, which was that the universe was constructed just to bring us joy and plenty, and we could take from it what we wanted—forever.
which is exactly what we did.
So that right now, we are engaged in a struggle to prove those god listeners were right, and the doomsayers are wrong.
The struggle is real and it is messy.
We know it as a resource war—in which people get killed or starve to death on the one hand, while those with the means to grab resources thrive and prosper on the other.
This is just the transition phase of course.
Eventually, resources will run out for everyone, and the planet will go on spinning without us.
Somehow, these basic physical laws came into being. So did all of the energy and flows of energy. An awfully lot of coincidences have to take place to get to where the universe is now.
the “coincidence” is a construct of advanced thought processes —ie ourselves.
The concept of physical laws is also an abstract process of our thinking
gods are a process of abstract thought.
We are the only species engaged in the process of abstract thought—though, for example, migrating animals use the actual result of those processes without knowing about or caring about them.
They just “are”.
A migrating swallow or whale isn’t concerned with ‘why’
So in the last few centuries, we became aware of such things, and because we became aware, it became essential to find reasons.—usually to “prove/disprove something”.
500 years ago it was certain that the sun went round the earth, to say otherwise was blasphemous. Millenia of gods had cemented the certainties of our “why”. Doubters were executed, because god decreed it so.
It’s only been 100 years or so since we proved the universe was 14 bn years old, so now we must ‘prove’ beyond that.—
At 14 bn years we seem to have run out of proofs for the moment, but we cannot self-inflict that which constrained Galileos mind in the 15th c
So we’ve “proved” the Universe is 14 billion years old, have we?
Some of you atheists are as dogmatic in your certainty as the most fanatical of Bible bashers.
I think Jacob Bronowski said it best, even though he did so in a Polish accent and rolled his “R”s.
https://www.idlehearts.com/images/science-is-a-very-human-form-of-knowledge-we-are-always-at.jpg
“all” the sciences seem to cohere pretty well in giving us a timetable of the evolution of the universe…
astrophysics, geology, paleontology, biology, genetics… as far as I know, their theories fit together well…
though in a real sense, we have to “believe” these scientists who propose that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, since most of us can’t verify the data ourselves…
Estimates of the age of the Universe are still being made by scientists based on wide ranging data (and the occasional bishop looking at passages from the Old Testament). That isn’t at all the same thing as the age of the Universe having been “proved”.
A proof is a logical argument that establishes, beyond any doubt, that something is true. It’s possible to “prove” mathematical propositions because numbers and other mathematical objects are precisely defined concepts, and not objects in the physical world, and the entire foundation is grounded on axioms that are assumed to be written in stone.
There is no such precision and precious few such unquestionable axioms in the physical Universe. For one thing, we can’t know whether the laws of physics are constant over the aeons. We can’t even be sure that time ran at the same speed back then as it does now or that the gravity was the same strength. But we need to make certain assumptions in order to be able to make estimates.
Moreover, the origin or the Universe was so long ago that nobody was around to observe it and leave behind an unambiguous clock signal to let us know how much time has passed since the beginning. The best that even the best scientists can do is to try to calculate the probable age by making use of observations, ingenuity and assumptions.
A century and a half ago,Lord Kelvin, who has a temperature unit named in his honor, was upset when Darwin suggested that the Earth must be at least 300 million years old based on certain assumptions about the speed at which chalk erodes, and started feud. He insisted the planet was no more than 100 million years old based on assumptions that it began in a hot liquid state and had been cooling ever since. Later, in 1897, based on new measurements of rocks, His Lordship insisted the Earth was no more than 20 million years old. And the older he got, the more confident he grew that he KNEW.
In December 1941, Edwin Hubble, who had earlier discovered the famous “red shift” of distant galaxies, reported that results from a six-year survey with the Mt. Wilson telescope did not support the expanding universe theory. According to an LA Times article reporting on Hubble’s remarks, “The nebulae could not be uniformly distributed, as the telescope shows they are, and still fit the explosion idea. Explanations which try to get around what the great telescope sees, he said, fail to stand up. The explosion, for example, would have had to start long after the earth was created, and possibly even after the first life appeared here.” Hubble’s estimate of what we now call the Hubble constant would put the Big Bang only 2 billion years ago.
As recently as 1977, researchers at the University of Chicago, making assumptions about the radioactive decay rate of Ruthenium, estimated the time since the Big Bang as up to 20 billion years. As far as I know, they didn’t claim to KNOW, but were just having fun trying solve part of the crossword puzzle the Universe is setting us.
https://d.justpo.st/media/images/2016/11/06/i-would-rather-have-questions-that-cant-be-answered-than-answers-that-cant-be-questioned-1478412524.jpg
we think that humankind has evolved the power of reason, above and beyond that of other species
we can reason that the earth is round, reason that it is one of billions of earths and suns, all interlinked by forces which are part of our collective evolution. We know how most of those forces work and interact. We know the elements of which we are made, and know that those elements are constant throughout the universe.
From this it can be assumed that forces that govern us must govern the universe. Debating the age of it by a billion or two years seems irrelevant. One of those things it’s good to know I guess.
we have ‘reasoned’ that all this must be due to a higher power—because we have the ability to look upwards and call that higher power into our own unquestionable reality.
Arguments rage on for and against this reason—some say god–others say no god.
Only the godfollowers seem willing to kill for their beliefs. Such is the place that reason has delivered us. To rip apart the only home that can shelter us in the name of certainty and infinite progress and the instructions of a higher power we know not of.
Which is a weird kind of reasoning and intellect—if that is what we must call it.
The swallow can reason its way from here to Africa and back—spawning salmon can do the same thing. Bees can reason where nectar is without destroying the source of the nectar.
Only humankind seems to have to urge to destroy. So, as we have the power of reason, we can only conclude that our particular gift of reason has evolved itself so that humankind must end its tenancy of the Earth, to make room for a species that will take better care of it.
Only the godfollowers seem willing to kill for their beliefs.
Do I have to remind you that Mao, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, and Joe Stalin were all professed atheists? And than none of them were godfollowers and all of them killed on an industrial scale for their beliefs?
Well clearly I do. Because clearly you have a huge blind spot that prevents you from either seeing or else acknowledging that fact. Not that I blame you. It probably comes from overdosing on the skwarkings of Dawkins and the bitchings of Hitchens.
And if I were you I would be much more worried about being killed by young gangsters getting turfed out of a pub at closing time than by a bunch of vicars stepping off the platform after taking the last train home from a a trip to Canterbury or York Minister
Actually, I shouldn’t be too hard on Dawkins. He moderated his stance against Christianity when his allies were damning it to hell along with Islam for causing all the world’s problems. I agree with the sentiment he expresses below.
http://media.breitbart.com/media/2016/01/Dawkins.jpg
I wrote what I wrote in expectation of the Stalin-Pol- pot –Mao reply. It came back right on cue.
They did not kill in the NAME of atheism, they killed in furtherance of their own twisted doctrine, and to keep themselves in positions of misguided authority. It had nothing to do with religion per se. Though religious faiths were swept up in the general mayhem obviously
Throughout the Judeo Christian/Islamic era however, religion has been the motivating force behind numerous homicidal episodes—crusades, inquisitions, witch/heretic burnings–all with the central mantra of being told by god to do –whatever–.
even now, millions of people do as the bible/torah/koran tells them to do.
Millions send money to outright swindlers to buy favours with god—just what Martin Luther tried to put a stop to. They are blatant charlatans, yet their adherents choose not to see it.
There are no atheists asking for money to promote atheism to the godly.
It might be wrong or right, but we don’t blame misfortune on a higher being or look to a higher being to provide good fortune.
We sinners try not to sin too much, or at least not get caught sinning. We don’t think there’s anyone watching our sins other than ourselves.
500 years ago it was certain that the sun went round the earth, to say otherwise was blasphemous. Millenia of gods had cemented the certainties of our “why”. Doubters were executed, because god decreed it so.
Have you any “proof” that anyone was ever executed for saying the earth went round the sun, Norman? Well, bring it on, man. I hope you have more success than Lot did finding a good man in Sodom.
There were plenty of ancient Greeks and medieval Arab scholars who proposed heliocentric universes. And the man who came up with the Copernican system was a priest. And while Galileo was being tried for all the naughtiness he was accused of, Jesuit priests—officials of the Catholic Church no—were teaching heliocentrism in China.
they were all wrong of course. The sun isn’t the center of the Universe either, and the earth doesn’t go around the sun, but around the barycenter of the solar system, which gives it a helical motion around the the barycenter of the milky way galaxy, which gives it a who-knows-what-course around the next level up barycenter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno
posted this once but it vanished–apologies if it appears twice
Only humankind seems to have to urge to destroy.
Have you never witnessed a fox in a henhouse? Or a cat hunting birds or mice? A pair of orcas playing catchball with a seal? A group of polar bears driving a herd of walruses off a cliff? Or a boar digging up a vegetable patch? The latter will destroy every last cabbage plant in an urge to find out if there’s a juicy worm wriggling around in the soil below. No etiquette, no delicacy, and no consideration for us poor farmers whatsoever!
I made the (wrong) assumption that my take on the subject would be seen to go beyond the instinct that all species have in order to eat
Norman, when I posted that challenge, I expected you would come back with Bruno. And I had to chuckle when you did so with almost Pavlovian consistency.
Let’s have a quick look at his case. Starting in 1593, Bruno was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition on charges of denial of several core Catholic doctrines, including eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary, and transubstantiation. Bruno’s pantheism was also a matter of grave concern, as was his teaching of the transmigration of the soul. The Inquisition found him guilty, and he was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori in 1600. After his death, he gained considerable fame, being particularly celebrated by 19th- and early 20th-century commentators who regarded him as a martyr for science, although historians agree that his heresy trial was not a response to his astronomical views but rather a response to his philosophy and religious views.
Got Anyone else? Just one person burned by Our holy Roman Church specifically for saying the Earth goes around the Sun?
See:
Michael J. Crowe, The Extraterrestrial Life Debate 1750–1900, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 10, “[Bruno’s] sources… seem to have been more numerous than his followers, at least until the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revival of interest in Bruno as a supposed ‘martyr for science.’ It is true that he was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, but the church authorities guilty of this action were almost certainly more distressed at his denial of Christ’s divinity and alleged diabolism than at his cosmological doctrines.”
^ Adam Frank (2009). The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate, University of California Press, p. 24, “Though Bruno may have been a brilliant thinker whose work stands as a bridge between ancient and modern thought, his persecution cannot be seen solely in light of the war between science and religion.”
^ White, Michael (2002). The Pope and the Heretic: The True Story of Giordano Bruno, the Man who Dared to Defy the Roman Inquisition, p. 7. Perennial, New York. “This was perhaps the most dangerous notion of all… If other worlds existed with intelligent beings living there, did they too have their visitations? The idea was quite unthinkable.”
^ Shackelford, Joel (2009). “Myth 7 That Giordano Bruno was the first martyr of modern science”. In Numbers, Ronald L. (ed.). Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. p. 66. “Yet the fact remains that cosmological matters, notably the plurality of worlds, were an identifiable concern all along and appear in the summary document: Bruno was repeatedly questioned on these matters, and he apparently refused to recant them at the end. So, Bruno probably was burned alive for resolutely maintaining a series of heresies, among which his teaching of the plurality of worlds was prominent but by no means singular.”
you asked for one
i provided one—I had never heard of him.
If the godbotherers burned one for heresies, there were many many more
researching them all for 21st c argument is a waste of thinking time.
Next you’ll be insisting that the inquisition was a branch of freemasonry in different coloured clothes
I made the (wrong) assumption that my take on the subject would be seen to go beyond the instinct that all species have in order to eat.
Humans are predators, and humans have an instinct to eat, and there are plenty of predator species that kill for sport. In what sense do our habits “go beyond the instinct to eat” in a way that the similar habits of other predators don’t?
Surplus killing, also known as excessive killing and henhouse syndrome,is a common behavior exhibited by predators, in which they kill more prey than they can immediately eat and then they either cache or they abandon the remainder. The term was invented by Dutch biologist Hans Kruuk after studying spotted hyenas in Africa and red foxes in England. Some of the animals which have been observed engaging in surplus killing include zooplankton, damselfly naiads, predaceous mites, martens, weasels, honey badgers, wolves, orcas, red foxes, leopards, lions, spotted hyenas, spiders, brown bears,American black bears, polar bears, coyotes, lynx, mink, raccoons, dogs, house cats, and humans.
In other words, we are in good company as natural born killers.
Look out little furry folk
He’s the all night working cat
Eats but one in every ten
Leaves the others on the mat
And the mouse police never sleeps
Waiting by the cellar door
Window box town crier
Birth and death registrar
https://youtu.be/88yEF__2xpE
Nicely put Norman.
I will add… The God Listeners of the Ages were doing copious amounts of halucanegenic drugs which would certainly explain so much of the whacky creative writing.
And it’s not getting any better…
Many geo-political decisions are based on this or that interpretaion of said whacky creative writing to this day to the amazement of standers by.
Evolution – imagination – mind altering substances – True Believers. What an explosive combo!
The Horned Beast Cometh
The Magical Prince that was Promised
Angels and Virgins in Paradise with Daddy Issues – Season 2985
Who writes this stuff? It’s Game of Thrones level.
We seem to still be doing it today, but today we call it a game.
“Pretty miraculous, when we think about it. The whole self-organizing way the universe operates is pretty miraculous, in my view”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You said volumes there Gail. I so agree
It’s all rules based, even the stuff we don’t understand, and never will. You don’t need a supreme being in the mix to complicate things.
But whatever gives people comfort, at this stage, its’ all good.
How did the rules form or unfold from a single point?
I prefer to see everything emerging from an informational field that exists beyond space and time. It’s always there so no need for the argument for something emerging from nothingness which doesn’t make any sense.
The “nothingness” is informational and eternal. No need to attach a name to such a thing as many have attempted to do. Just accept that it’s the only logical explanation for why there is something (whatever this is) rather than nothing. The state of nothing cannot exist, has never existed. The something (whatever it is) is always there.
Time for a lollipop!
Why do you suppose there was just this universe? I’m sure there were plenty of false starts, before the right set of rules formed.
Yep, I like that.
The Multiverse Testing Ground bubbles up from the Informational Field.
An infinite amount of testing can take place with an infinite number of results.
The Informational Field – if it is conscious in any way – may view this iteration as a mistake and delete it tomorrow.
If consciousness is an emergent property of this iteration then maybe you can breathe a sigh of relief. We can relax until it naturally implodes back to its resting state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DIl3Hfh9tY
Ironic that those humans who claim to represent the good of all and to have special insight into it are mostly mass murderers directly or indirectly…..
And we hand over all our power to those people after a few photo ops and some boxes full of paper get counted.
What a truly funny species we are.
I was sat on an election table the other day. So I’m a bit sore still.
Humans and pre-humans continued through the ice ages, so we should expect that at least some small percentage of humans can continue through quite adverse conditions.
At 7.7 billion humans, however, the planet is seriously overloaded with humans and that animals that they raise for food and companionship. The number of humans on earth would seem to need to be seriously reduced for the earth’s ecosystem to stay in balance.
“Humans and pre-humans continued through the ice ages, so we should expect that at least some small percentage of humans can continue through quite adverse conditions.”
Absolutely. People are tenacious, aggressive, relentless.
And delusional optimists.
The glass is always half full, right up until we hit the last dregs.
5 months of all cannibal diet and we’re below 500M.
Sound of sharpening machetes…
Now that we have an actionable solution, when do we officially get the ball rolling?
And which end do we start at?
“The number of humans on earth would seem to need to be seriously reduced” I do love the dry understated Norwegian.
I have a book of Norwegian humor that includes a joke about a Norwegian man, Ole, loving his wife so much that one time he almost told her so.
Gail, I’ll bet it is a thin book!
When we imagine the earth’s ecosystem in balance, we shouldn’t imagine that it is static and unchanging. There is arguably a certain amount of homeostasis going on (with living things collectively working to perpetuate their biosphere like what goes on inside individual organisms but to a lesser extent) as Lovelock argued; but there is also a dynamic equilibrium in which living things respond to changes in the environment and either have to get tough or die. I call this the Boy Named Sue hypothesis. 🙂
During glacial periods (up to 90% of the past million years), the land biosphere may have been only 50 to 70% as active as it is now. I’m just guessing at the figure because I’ve never seen it calculated. And before the Northern Hemisphere glaciations began around 3 million years ago, there may have been 20 – 40% more biological activity than now in terms of the sheer biomass of plants, animals, fungi and bacteria doing their thing. These aren’t even ballpark figures. I have no idea of the true percentages. But in general there is more activity when it’s warmer and wetter and there’s more CO2 in the air and less when its colder and drier.
Burn More Coal…
Yes, the (temporary) cycles within cycles are fascinating.
The (inter)glaciations in the North evidently worked like giant terra forming agent on the upper (sub) soil levels, our development and acquired leverage (namely farming) would be impossible or not developed in the scale and way it did. Also in coastal areas the swings where pretty profound sea level oscillating +/- many dozens (or more) meters.
Now lets imagine the glaciation cycle never ever returns, the Earth cascades into another path with other type of inner cycles from then on and so on.
Change is necessary to prevent stagnation.
Embrace the chaos!
Yes, I believe the citizens of the City of Rome were changing that line
Embrace the Chaos….as the Barbarians were at the Gates of the Eternal City!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UONR0k4H1YM
Can’t wait for our turn….
Imagination is a powerful drug.
A bunch of AIs that are a lot smarter than we are… don’t exist.
Unless you’re referring to the ancient alien tech in the deep underground Antarctica base? That’s been there for millions of years? And is set to be revealed to the whole world as part of The Disclosure Project?
And then we’ll all be floating around in anti-grav pants waving zero point light sabres at each other?
Where is the evidence for these long range developments?
For the past fifty years, the global suicidal death cult of environmentalism has been pushing windmills and solar panels to their gullible base as the way to Save the Planet.
Why? Because it will most definitely lead to die off, but in the meantime keeps people from getting depressed so they can continue to buy useless junk.
It’s a living. Until it’s not.
My policy is… I will believe in the “miraculous” solution when I see it.
” don’t exist.”
Yet.
There are a lot of very smart people working on AI. It is possible they will fail, but I would not count on it.
All they got to do is figure out how to program imagination.
Someone told today,”it’s all good”.
WhatEver.
I don’t see how AI can solve our energy and economic problems any more than the “very smart people” working on solving the problem of AI.
Why don’t the “very smart people” work on the energy problem directly? Surely that would be the smarter thing to do.
“I don’t see ”
I don’t either. But we are talking about AI systems that are a lot smarter than the people who made them. If people were smart enough to figure out what they can do, there would be little point in AI.
“work on the energy problem directly?”
AI people seldom have the skills needed to work on energy problems. What they are doing is making a general purpose tool for solving problems.
It would be really interesting to see if an AI system would come to the same conclusions Gail has about the economic effects of intermittent energy.
The smart people will need to be smart enough to make the AI device smarter than them AND have enough ability to think through the creation of new things for purposes it may consider unnecessary. So it would need to be A-logical.
It would need to be able to ensure that all of its decisions clearly protected the task of creating electricity until it found a substitute. If it failed to do that it would itself fail.
Motivation!
Do we really know what we are doing!!??
Frankenfood can already been killing us!
After Reading This Article About The Danger Of GMOs, You Will Probably Never Want To Eat Genetically-Modified Food Again
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/after-reading-this-article-about-the-danger-of-gmos-you-will-probably-never-want-to-eat-genetically-modified-food-again
In the end, it all comes down to greed. Four giant corporations have a virtual monopoly on the seed market today, and billions of dollars are at stake. So an enormous amount of time and energy is spent trying to convince the American public that there is nothing to be concerned about, and massive amounts of money is poured into the campaigns of politicians that support GMO food
BAU BABY….Permmie Preppies think they can isolate themselves in a bubble to shield themselves from harm!! HAHAHA….I DONT THINK SO.
Genetic drift will seek you out and we all know from FE about Mister and Misses DNA…
Except that all of our food has been genetically modified from the original, by selecting the plants that deviate in the desired direction from others, if not more modern techniques. Some of the modifications, such as resistance to certain diseases, seem to be very helpful.
For example, we might be able to have bananas that are resistant to the virus that is a problem now.
The problem is both the rate at which we introduce changes, and the fact that traditional “genetic modification” was always within within species, or between closely related species.
The things modern technology allows us to do have never occurred, such as putting the genes for spider silk into a goat, or firefly genes into tobacco, or insecticidal bacteria genes into corn.
Under traditional “genetic modification,” achieving such things (should they be doable at all) would have required a huge number of generations to accomplish, and many of them would have “self-selected out” due to co-incident changes.
Scary thing: essentially all bananas of commercial value are clones with the same genetic information! This means that, should some pathogen evolve to exploit the Cavendish Banana, the entire world banana production could be eliminated in a fairly short time! (Well, there are a small number of different cultivars, but they all are reproduced asexually, and thus are subject to attack of entire populations.)
After reading the article, I can see the point that some genetic modifications are problematic. But aren’t there plant species that are naturally resistant to a particular plant problem, which can be encouraged? I think the term “genetic modification” perhaps needs to be defined a little more specifically. Simple cross breeding should not be a problem, for example.
Gail, thank you for taking a second look. Maybe much worse than we could imagine.
Once out in the ecosystem cant put back in the lab. Not the first time new technology hazards were downplayed as exposed by author Jerry Mander
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=98VUPh33NDs
BAU demands it..Growth at any price
I once went to a presentation saying that the various additives to food (coloring especially) have not been tested in large enough quantities, over a long enough period, to say that they are safe. Supposedly, the testing was done before the rise in very bright colored frostings and even ketchup. The chemistry of humans is a little too close to that of all of the chemicals we are using in our foods.
So what are we to be allowed to die from?
Perhaps not eating rather than eating?
Or before that perhaps dehydration rather than drinking untreated sewage in supplies as around 8 billion people in a collapsed social system discover that their water supplies are more at risk than ever before?
The ‘developed’ world would likely be at special risk having little or no resistance to the rapidly extending problems of tainted natural supplies and inoperative water treatment plants.
Reducing the population significantly should not take very long.
“Reducing the population significantly should not take very long.”
That depends on how poor the government involved and other governments respond. You would think water treatment plants and the power to run them would be high on the list. But that does not seem to always be the case.
There are some places where things may get amazingly bad. Venezuela and South Africa are countries where water and energy problems could kill a high fraction of the population.
Venezuela – cost of oil extraction and of needed taxes way too high, relative to what the market will bear
South Africa – experiencing peak coal
Any country is susceptible to water supply problems.
I would suggest that the higher the current water quality standards are the harder any problems will hit.
Social dissatisfaction related to water or energy supply problems might turn out to be more of a challenge than the apparent shortage.
If the scale of the problem covered many countries the social response would be more difficult to contain than seems to be the case in Venezuela so far.
How long Venezuela takes to either collapse or recover may be a good basis for planning.
With human population of 7.7B and in massive overshoot of resource use, exactly how is this ‘bad’ if effecting humans in the same way??…………
“When GM soy was fed to female rats, most of their babies died within three weeks”
“The GM-fed babies were also smaller, and later had problems getting pregnant.”
“Mice fed GM corn in an Austrian government study had fewer babies, which were also smaller than normal.”
“Cows and bulls also became infertile when fed the same corn.”
Sounds like a solid plan to me.
Mice fed on GM corn may get smaller, but humans fed on it just keep growing and growing.
Must be the GMO Soy milk poured on the GMO Corn Flakes, followed by the GMO Veggie burger….not to mention the half gallon of Been and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey Ice Cream!
Haha!
the EU weakens:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/26/eu-election-results-greens-and-euroskeptics-gain.html
“The EU Parliament will be much more fragmented over the next five years with the established centrist bloc failing to gain a majority at this week’s election, early results and projections show.”
of course, that assumes the EU will remain intact for the next 5 years…
I’d guess a 25% or so chance it falls apart…
Que será, será
Whatever will be, will be
The future’s not ours to see
Que será, será
What will be, will be
she was a s-h-i-l-l for the elites, making that song popular with the clue-less masses.
Doris Day was a kind and gracious person. I miss her.
The election results are creepy and revealing in some sense.
What TPTB lost (old coalition) they gained by successes of other related parties: Liberals, Greens etc..
Don’t forget the most pervert form of gov is not tyranny, duopoly or what have you but coalition daily hell form of gov where at mature point of the system (~now) usually the smallest actor could force itself in and drag much bigger parties within broader coalition to act in certain way..
Hence, these EU – Parliament elections are merely a little ‘flash wound’ indeed stressing the wobbling zombie body but not yet meant as fatal final blow.
that’s what i tried to explain here—just so obvious
https://medium.com/future-vision/the-european-union-was-a-construct-of-infinite-prosperity-7a401c225171
Well, according to latest news: the Greens are just officially announcing intent to enter the old ruling coalition in EU Parliament, therefore securing the majority rule of this coalition into the next cycle again.. lolz.. So, basically nothing happened in these elections.
Nevertheless, these greenie quasi BAU lackeys would now push for more batteries/EVs, and that’s a ‘good thing’ for us older selfish guys, as there will be parts for self produced juice in another few more decades.
Few more decades? How long do you folks think international trade in its current form is going to hold up? Will you have funds to pay for repairs to the whole system? If the financial system crashes, how is this going to work? I think you are being optimistic.
Optimistic?
Can you say delusional?
To be fair…
Worldof has been using “a few more decades” as his outro for as long as I’ve been reading here.
For a longest time, he was the counter argument to Fast Eddy’s “Noone is gonna eat turkey this christmas!”
Only one of them has been utterly wrong so far. As far as timing goes.
Personally, I think that when it goes it goes. There’s not a lot you can do to hold things together and keep things going. At least not anything resembling industrial civ.
Broken supply chains, tipping / breaking points, structural weakness in the system, leads to irreversable events and relatively sudden collapse of BAU with most people standing around scratching their heads wondering what just happened.
That’s when the alien gods decloak and roll on the floor laughing, pointing at the gullible humans that fell for their latest planetary reality tv prank.
Tsubion, thanks for your durable memory in keeping score for these exciting sport activities over here.. In fact, the stubbornness of FE/TM character to reject other scenarios – time lines – sequencing into discussion was after a while not to his advantage. Yet, the writing was on the wall as triage seemed to intensify in Central/South America, ME/Syria, .. that there are still more places to be sacrificed on the altar of BAU extension. Now, since then the time worm turned a bit further and as the examples of France and Italy, possibly UK, show that the situation even within IC hubs seems deteriorating relatively fast nevertheless.
So, if there was any serious bet to be taken he might lost only by few years or decade+ eventually..
For me though, was most puzzling (if legit) his claimed and chosen bolt hole in NZ, which he to his credit openly regretted as very rushed and completely stupid idea, as there are much better places in the northern hemisphere for large spectrum of activities. And he was not of the upper upper caste anyway to have funds for the ‘complete protection’ package meaning: get away private jet/ocean vessel, mercenary army, gov grade bunker and supplies, etc.. for theoretically weathering the worst scenarios there, lacking these that destination is a nice tiny trap island only, full stop.
Worldof… have always enjoyed your comments!
Projected time window for braking serious global threshold ~2025-35 within at least some of the IC hubs, plus ~15yrs sort of guaranteed longevity of the gear since date of purchase during that envelope, hence this equals bordering on ~2050 upper limit for the most optimistic (lunatic) case. Obviously, one has to count more on the opposite — sooner – side of the spectrum as the default realistic scenario, so perhaps a decade or two from now depending on other intervening factors (war-chaos, forced expropriation, ..). It’s a sheer lottery as in some regions-countries baseload grid might work on domestic coal for some extra time as large part of the frivolous output economy (demand for energy) folds down, coal would be enough.. although sporadic blackouts inevitable before the final and last one. In such cascade of sequencing different modes of spending would more desirable than on said batteries.
I think that the economy works on the something that I would call the average EROI of the mix. (For renewables, it is a lot lower than the published EROEI, because the calculations for renewables are not right.) Once this average EROI gets too low, the system tends to crash. It is not possible to get out what looks like the rest of the coal. It is only an illusion that it is available.
I don’t think that there is anything we realistically can do about CO2.
I hope your right, but I think your dismissing the current danger. There are Damocles’ swords everywhere, or that Jenga stick that no one knows that causes cascade and contagion. Anything that causes mass absenteeism in a major economy(s), and it’s over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEPYG6MaT2I
Also, I googled Tad, and he has a vid on that same channel that fits well with that farming thread.
Political structures and institutions can go on for far longer than anyone actually believes in them anymore – countless empires prove this, as will the EU and its Potemkin-facade parliament.
Nah. That was before Da Internet!
The EU’s goose is cooked. Charred even.
It’s one building in Brussels. And a bank in Germany.
European nation states will be Russo-Chinese serfs soon.
Half of China (and India) would move to Africa tomorrow if they could just find a way to brush aside the local residents…
Reminds me of europeans replacing the natives in North and South America not so long ago.
Disease appears to do the trick without the need for too much hand to hand messiness.
It would seem to make it more difficult to find a common “middle ground.”
The European ‘Project’ is not really dependent on national or supranational politics.
But we are encouraged to think that it is and is therefore a democratic process. Whatever that really means.
Juncker the Drunker is not my emperor!
Weaker Car Sales in the USA in 2019 (Q1)
In March 2019, light vehicle sales in the USA were down 2,2% while sales contracted by 2% to just over four million cars for the first quarter of the year. As before, traditional passenger car sales were the weaker with sales down 7% while light trucks (including SUV and crossover) sales increased by 1%.
Weaker Car Sales in India in 2019 (Q1)
New passenger vehicle registrations in India contracted by 3% in March 2019 to drag the market down by 2% during the first quarter of 2019. This was the fifth consecutive contraction in the Indian new car market. The election cycle in India is also likely to weigh against a stronger market in the next few months.
Weaker Car Sales in Japan in 2019 (Q1)
After a solid start to the year, new passenger vehicle registrations in Japan contracted by 5.3% in March 2019 to just over half a million cars. For the first three months of 2019, new car sales in Japan were 2.1% weaker than during the first quarter of 2018.
Weaker Car Sales in Europe in 2019 (Q1)
In March 2019, new passenger vehicle registrations in the European Union (EU) and EFTA countries contracted by 3.6% to 1,770,800 cars. All five largest car markets contracted: Germany -1%, France -2%, Britain -3%, Spain -4% and Italy -10%. Somewhat worrying for April figures is that Easter weekend was partly in March in 2018 and that may put additional pressure on April 2019 numbers.
During the first three months of 2019, new car sales in Europe contracted by 3.2% to 4,146,200 cars.
Weak Car Sales in China in 2019 (Q1)
Car sales in China, the world’s largest single country market by far, contracted by another 7.3% in March 2019 – the ninth consecutive month of lower car sales.
However, the contraction in March was less severe than in January and February meaning the decline in new car sales during the first quarter of 2019 were down 13.8% to 5,164,100 – over 800,000 cars fewer than at the start of 2018.
Anyone see the trend?
Wow! By the way, we also know auto sales in April, at least for some places.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-autos-caam/china-auto-sales-fall-14-6-on-year-in-april-10th-month-of-decline-idUSKCN1SJ0FO
China auto sales fall 14.6% on year in April, 10th month of decline
http://www.autopunditz.com/news/april-2019-car-sales-snapshot/
India: The Passenger Vehicle sales saw a dip of -16.7% in Apr’19 v/s Apr’18 – This is the highest fall the Industry has seen in recent times.
https://www.marklines.com/en/statistics/flash_sales/salesfig_usa_2019
U.S. auto sales slide 1.7% in April
With one extra selling day compared to the same month in 2018, U.S. new vehicle sales of 1,331,671 units for the month of April represented a decrease of 1.7% from April 2018, and a decrease of 17.2% from March 2019.
Feeding a small household with a couple acres of gardens, a couple pigs, chickens, and some sheep for meat and wool production isn’t that difficult. Foraging skills and a good memory for location and seasonality of wild foods helps. Bad weather conditions, insects and fires make things more difficult but they always have. Learning the skills required takes years however and the knowledge base of what skilled elders can pass along is important. My fears are that those elders and the skills they posses are already in short supply and very little of that knowledge base will be around soon because those generations that lived a rural lifestyle are dying away. Those places in the world where poverty and rural lifestyles persisted into the 21st century are probably better set to making the long step back than any modern civilized society. We are lazy, dumb and too entitled for the most part to survive what is coming.
Exactly. See my comment to Xavier above. If I could upvote you, I would.
“Those places in the world where poverty and rural lifestyles persisted into the 21st century are probably better set to making the long step back than any modern civilized society.”
the more “uncivilized” tribes of humans do not have long steps back if and when the BAU of IC collapses, so yes, they have a long term advantage, though I wouldn’t trade my BAU for their BAU right now…
“We are lazy, dumb and too entitled for the most part to survive what is coming.”
yes, it’s great… running hot/cold water, heat/AC, refrigeration…
but no one, even in the most isolated tribes, will survive…
it’s too solid of a fact to even discuss, thus it is quite uninteresting, but nevertheless, we’re all dead relatively soon, even the preppers and the uncivilized isolated peoples…
I just don’t get the angst about any looming collapse…
Certainly, none of us live forever. But it humans and prehumans made it through ice ages, I don’t see a reason why humans might not make it through the next bottleneck.
Of course, over the ages, the vast majority of species have gone extinct. It could be our turn at some point as well.
Bruce, your approach and assumptions remind me of “Little House on the Prairie” and Kunstler’s “World Made By Hand” novels. They might work, after the coming bottleneck is cleared, and assuming not too much of the remaining resources get trashed or are out of reach.
Noone talks about the spent fuels pools anymore.
I kinda miss them.
Well the good news is everyone is in the same boat – the bad news is we are all going to die.
I don’t think any of us are immortal, so I expect all of us will die, with or without collapse.
Perhaps it was not a well thought out threat in terms of probabilities.
Since as long as there is some form of ‘oppressive gov’ – meaning ability to force security-emergency matter type of decision on general pop the situation would be dealt firstly by allocating top priority – resources of the grid to cool these ponds and at the first day of possible movement out just dump them raw even without sealed containers in the nearest deep enough old granite mining site. Problem and case closed.
Obviously there are tail ends when this is not feasible or possible at all, various hard large scale day-to-day insta crashes of natural of human made origins, but these are small %prob, especially if we are talking about all such sites at single moment.
Back to Farming: the proletariat and keeping things working without bread riots.
Respectful question, how does permaculture replace farming on this scale which is in large part for wheat our daily bread? Certainly this requires a great deal of diesel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-i5F0CY9Vw
To my knowledge we do not farm on this scale in MN, although I have heard a neighbor has perhaps 10K acres in various sites. Apparently one of his dryers which runs off of natural gas cannot be run if the weather gets too cold as it causes supply issues for a neighboring city of about 5K people. I have not checked this directly, knowledge is second hand.
Dennis L.
Firstly, speaking of ‘beyond organic/permaculture/shallow or no till/..’, forget about these gargantuan mono cultures on chem fertilizer lifeline. The farmer of the future is like the one of the distant past, meaning instead of specialization rather doing everything at once: grazier, veggies, orchards.. all intertwined and matched for the particular biome, climate zone. Abrupt transition, steep learning curve indeed, few heritage material to work with, yet not impossible to feed some form and level of civilization, most likely on very distributed pop footprint.
Sounds good. But the abrupt transition might be the rub. I believe that centralized transition is also out of the question. And here’s a devilish paradox. Decentralization into manageable pods that are conducive to cohesion (the local meme) has to be matched by a seeming opposite trend. All the do good single issues fail. I think that’s because they are unaware of how tightly interconnected the global system is. It might be necessary to practice and extreme of localism that is matched by an extreme of “globalism” (the global meme) The latter is what social media enables. That requires large amounts of electricity that must be obtained in some novel way. This “globalism” must also substitute place for race. Places–like, say, all the world’s coasts can be working systematically to ensure better fishing or better wetland regeneration that would, respectively, feed more people and create better climate resilience. Water sheds are a god way to organize the world, as well, and works both locally and globally….
The catch is that there are not a whole lot of goods and services that can be made with only the resources in a single water shed. Trying to keep electricity going worldwide seems like it far about what can really happen.
A world on this basis, with today’s depleted resources, can’t support very many.
Art,
If I understand correctly, this farm family in the video has been in business for 117 years, and shows the Welker family helping a neighbor with planting, it has been a tough year to plant. Welkers were done, a neighbor needed help and two very large tractors with planters showed up to join with his two to get the job done. In the beginning the large trucks seen contain seed.
Those not involved in farming often do not understand how deeply those of us who own the land appreciate its value and the balance between making it work financially and having it there for the next generation. My land is farmed by 4th and 5th generation farmers and metaphorically when they speak my response is “Yes sir.” There is an intensity of fairness among us, getting the best of a neighbor means what goes around will come around.
It is difficult for me to put into words the feeling I get when driving onto my land, watching the crops grow and then harvested, the land resting until the next year. Even then, there are no guarantees something will come up, wind, hail, pests, weather affecting planting and harvesting are no small matters. A decreasing number of people are remaining who understand the process and among those I speak with they often express of the importance of the life style, there is a closeness to the land which takes a bit of time to appreciate. To successfully farm one needs to be bright, hard working and most importantly lucky. To make it through the hard times takes a team, neighbors and relatives with similar, simple goals without a great number of abstract ideas other than a rare bond between people. I have no idea how it will work with ever smaller plots so favored by many of the current, abstract thinkers, after about ten years of being around this group, I see very little evidence of extremism of any kind. In the end how those who farm the land will determine how many of us eat and how many do not. Moses seems to have understood that idea sometime ago.
Dennis L.
You shared some encouraging thoughts elsewhere about the more hopeful side of our nature. it suggests being absolutely trusting and truthful. Nothing to lose. Which is why I don’t see why we shouldn’t be sharing Gail’s major points to all and sundry. Just use Facebook as a way to plant (mental) seeds. Then of course people suggest that you do this and do that in order to succeed. But if we’re dealing with a single globally networked system (a self organizing system), then I guess you broadcasts your subliminal messages, not try to “succeed” too much by oneself, and trust that human group sense to kick in if or when it is ready.
broadcast
Correct estimate, that is clearly the only workable longer-term future model one can envisage after a few desperate and hopeless attempts have been made to maintain somehow the current high-energy and hi-tech system.
Hamlets and villages, some small market towns, and constant low-level violence between tribes and clans: think of the endemic feuds and cattle-rustling of Ancient Ireland. Very high mortality too, above all of infants and mothers, and young warriors. Some literacy might just be possible, but not essential.
And Vegans will have to face the fact that livestock will be necessary for their hides, wool, bones and sinews, hauling and carrying power as well as meat. And most of all for the fertiliser they will provide, which will be the new gold.
But due to the depredations of the industrial agricultural model, there is almost no heritage to draw upon: old breeds of livestock and draught animals are mostly too small in number to work with, and the craftsmen have all long gone now, in most regions.
Back in the day was into folk crafts and found this series of books
For over 40 years, high school students in Foxfire programs have helped to gather and publish information about their Southern Appalachian heritage. Best known for the best-selling Foxfire Book series, the series and the other topical titles were all grown from interviews gathered for The Foxfire Magazine. The success of the student-driven program led to professional research that generated the Foxfire Approach to Teaching and Learning and its support materials for use by other educators hoping to achieve similar levels of student involvement and create life-long learners.
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Collection-Anniversary-Editions-Anniversay/dp/B00MRH3RYU
And Roy Underhill of the PBS long running show Woodwrights Shop and he issued a number of great books on the subject.
https://www.uncpress.org/woodwright/
We do not give credit to the talent and insight our ancestors in their understanding of local materials to create necessary implements for living.
Way back attended a week long Windsor Chair workshop in North Carolina by Drew Langser…. unfortunately he is old now and closing down
https://www.uncpress.org/woodwright/
And another long timer also retired…Michael Dunbar
http://www.thewindsorinstitute.com/
Recommend both for books.
Don’t know if their knowledge will be past along after BAU
It’s not clear whether the resource (wood, tools), population and time crunches will support a meaningful return to those old crafts. Maybe a triage moment like ours requires discarded materials put together by kids and low-skilled people.
There are some books showing weird and wonderful things that Russians cobbled together after the collapse of the Soviet Union, pretty inventive.
I’m making garden furniture out of scrap wood at the moment: if anyone wants to steal that they are welcome to it! It’s amusing watching people trying to be polite about it: ‘That’s er, really,er……… different !’ is the usual comment.
The joy of only paying for nails and screws!
Xabier, nice to learn about another eccentric designer in the group. Visitors at the art fair yesterday probably thought that about my drawings, all on found cardboard and “framed” with tape, But I’m going to keep working on them till they look good. We need to win people over through aesthetics, I believe.
Agreed!
Without enough of the old breeds of livestock, it is not clear that even this much can be done. The result may look closer to hunter-gathering, or perhaps planting a few seeds hear and there, and coming back later in the year to see what has grown.
Your remark about the disappearance of craftsmen/women is the biggest issue with regard to relocalization. Here in Poland and probably in many other European countries people still remember how to farm small scale. Even where I live, I still see guys plowing with draft animals occasionally. The problem is though that nobody know how to make shoes, hand tools, soap, etc. There is at most 1 remaining generation with practical experience in these areas, but they don’t practice anymore and kids aren’t interested in learning the trade. Why bother making soap? We can just go to Tesco and have our choice of 50 brands.
The transition to local is going to be tough. In a few places it will succeed, most likely in non-first world countries (Sorry kids, but all I ever knew was selling insurance, so we are doomed). Remaining hunter-gatherer societies may have a survival edge as they never depended on commercially produced stuff to live. But even that is a crap-shoot if the environment gets too iffy, too fast.
I hope I have a few more years left to watch this unfold (getting old).
Very good to read about the draught animals still in use in Poland: maybe sufficiently healthy genetically to breed from on a larger scale?
Craft awards simply make me laugh: wonderful people, and well-intentioned, but there are only a handful of them, and they are selling only to the rich on the whole.
The chain of transmission in crafts is everything, and you really have to start as a boy or girl to establish the right habits.
I was looking at a 10th-century illuminated book in the museum here the other day, which is quite moving as I’m in a direct line of instruction from those monks. But who am I going to teach? No one. I had to tell a brilliant student to forget about as it, as prospects looked poor and uncertain, and I did them a favour as things turned out. He’s now a house-husband kept by his wife!
The last hand-forger of axes in the Basque Country can’t find one young man to learn, despite the high unemployment – they want shorter hours and long holidays and, probably, don’t want to get their soft hands dirty and calloused. They don’t want to give themselves to learning how to master something, they can’t see the satisfaction of transforming materials into something that lasts, the best you can make it.
I took this photo in China in 2011.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/man-with-water-buffalo.jpg
It is not very long ago that China farmed with water buffalo. In fact, they may still farm with water buffalo in some rural areas.
We had water buffalo in Guam in 1970’s.
“maybe sufficiently healthy genetically to breed from on a larger scale?”
Larger scale?….do you realize how long it takes to reproduce one horse?
The Amish will provide draft stock, and there are smatterings of it left around the US.
Smallfarmersjournal.com
I believe that we would need different types of draft animals for different parts of the world as well. I saw one presentation saying that in Finland, only the smallest types of draft horses would work in the climate, because others would require too much feed. I imagine the amount of work that such a small horse can do is reduced as well, because of less muscle mass. The bit water buffalo are only for quite warm, wet areas.
Within the entire EU it seems Poland has got the one of the smallest acreage plots under cultivation per farmer. Seemingly ‘scale in-efficiency disadvantage’ near the peak output of everything but very useful trait when the megatrend pendulum swings the other way around.. now-soonish..
That also favorably translates into many related areas, e.g. it implies support-demand for low power machinery and implements (near unobtanium elsewhere), besides obvious enviro benefits stemming from lot of diverse plots in the country not large scale mono-cultures..
The problem is that lower power machinery and implements may be just as unobtainable as high power machinery and implements. Also, fuel to operate these will not be available, unless you can supply them yourselves. Just going back a “step” doesn’t work, as far as I can see. Without a financial system, for example, it becomes impossible to purchases anything from a distance. You can perhaps put together a local system (to pay local workers with among other things), but that doesn’t go very far.
Going pre crash mode – It’s more like running a parallel process or track (having that option ready) than simply going back a step. For example, If I’m not mistaken US manufs almost non of the low power implements and machines, although they enjoy having animal powered machinery stateside and obviously the conventional big agriculture stuff industries and so on.. In contrast some countries don’t have any options at all on this spectrum available, and yet some others have different combinations of strengths and weaknesses on this plane.
Even before we get into understanding our situation, you have a hellish time online getting neighbors not to go ba.sh.t crazy about little disagreements. One might harbor the dream that we have to get beyond tribal wars in order to survive. (I believe we do.) But you have people behaving tribally NOW, even before getting into the hard stuff. If we can’t change the tribal behavior now, what chance do we have later?
Art,
Human beings are very resilient and even though we often talk about only the lesser sides, we are a very communal group; we do help each other out, it is when it is not reciprocated and begins to be seen as unfair that things seem to get nasty. One has to wonder if perhaps the ideas or reciprocation are different among groups and that might cause friction.
We are at a point where it is not an easy time, many of us here have a foot in two different cultures, the BAU which is truly wonderful, and the end of BAU which promises to be more of a challenge than most of us appreciate.
We live in interesting times.
Best,
Dennis L.
I lived in Big Sky Montana.
That is not Big Sky.
http://www.bigskytowncenter.com
I like it, nothing like roughing it in the old west.
Dennis L.
“how does permaculture replace farming on this scale which is in large part for wheat our daily bread?”
It doesn’t. If you have ever been on a farm, (an actual working farm) then its painfully obvious.
From everything I have seen, permaculture pretty much skips grains.
Yep, or their role is minimized and dealt with differently via NO / (very shallow) till practices.
Pintada probably meant to visit industrial (outside inputs over-dependent) model farm, prevalent today, non existent in the future..
Dennis, have you looked at Restoration Agriculture, by Mark Shepard?
In his formal comparison, he shows that perennial polyculture can out-perform massive corn/beans monoculture rotation.
Of course, the devil’s in the details, and I think it took Shepard more than ten years to get to that point, and it is much more labour-intensive.
But in the face of the rising wage disparity that Gail notes, it may well be that the labour-intensive nature of sustainable agriculture will not be an impediment to those who find it necessary to eat.
Personally, I’m less worried about corn and beans than I am hay. We use about three times as much land in hay as we use grazing, but that includes the share-cropper’s cut. Still, I’ve hayed an acre entirely by hand; that’s not going to scale up well.
Mark had hit (intentionally & luckily) a sweet-spot of climate zone, terrain, depreciated enough land price (previous intensive conventional management), relatively close access to favorable markets etc. This system is indeed somewhat reproducible elsewhere but not with such same level of abundance output or economic viability.. as you can’t stack up so many agriculture tweaked biology with human labor in other harsher climates from his (both hotter/colder varieties) in sustainable manner.
I agree with your and Gail’s observation that -labor intensity- returns kind of in default, understood way, out of necessity anyway though..
Bund 10 year rate is minus 0.119%
something is severely wrong over in Germany…
meanwhile…
Boris?
Farage?
Prime Minister, anyone?
who is it going to be next?
I remember a cool Literature teacher in my High School, Mr. Hall. Kind of looked like Mr. Hand in the Sean Penn movie way back. To mess with our lizard minds he dared us non achievers with a Fast Eddie Challenge. He would give out multiple guess tests and claimed if one of us were able to get every one WRONG on the test he would issue an A grade!
His reasoning, of course, to do such he were either very lucky or knew all the answers!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JxPBDWjp1qM
I suppose we ate at that phase in human development…in order to succeed one has to be a total fckup….hence negative interest rates!
Well, the fallen PM was quite weepy on the cameras yesterday, fairly unusual for British circles.. One can not wonder was it just personal trait at moment, or rather given the preceding desperate moves (well coordinated with Brussels) she knows her name would be (‘unjustly’) solidified in history as the threshold for further debasement of UK or mere England into way lower in-significance..
her upper lip was definitely not stiffened. time to go.
She was refreshingly human then. I felt compassion for her, for once. Our modern way of life allows no taint of weakness or emotion to flow through. We are all alienated from life, ourselves and each other.
Well, even treasonous – treacherous characters may eventually have sincere emotions.
I’m not sure about the compassion (to her) part though, I gather that’s too much in this case.
Bund 10 year rate is now minus 0.141%
Dang straight there is something wrong in Germany – they are in a recession and they aren’t coming out of it anytime soon (ever). China has basically been running a cash for clunkers program for 2 years and it is beginning to wind down. China is mandating that they begin transitioning to EV’s https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/how-china-raised-stakes-electric-vehicles leaving German auto manufacturers in a bind along with their 800,000 workers.
The only thing keeping the US afloat is low interest rates (to go lower along with more QE when necessary) and that we pumping 1.3 trillion dollars of debt into the ether each year and growing.
The head winds are becoming too much to ignore at this point.
Just saw that the US auto sector isn’t looking so rosy either https://www.marketwatch.com/story/auto-industry-cutting-jobs-at-the-fastest-pace-since-the-financial-crisis-2019-05-21
Even the low interest rates cannot get people to buy cars / trucks – they’re broke. Historically when the auto companies start laying off then recession and more layoffs are on the horizon.
Not looking good at all.
I agree that car sales are getting to be a problem around the world. In 2008, it seems like there was a big downshift in the building of homes, more than just inside the US. This time, the big downshift that seems to be happening is in automobiles. Also, the new downshift seems to be close to worldwide, not just in “Advanced Economies”
I read the link to the blog about China’s mandate to transition about from ICE toward electrics. The article made it sound like China’s motive was to save the climate.
My view is that China’s intent is to make the cars dependent on electricity from China’s coal, rather than from imported oil. There may have also been a desire to hold pollution within China’s cities. A third goal would be for China to become a leader in electric cars, if they are to be used worldwide. I don’t think that the expected impact with respect to climate change ranks highly in their real listing of objectives, except if perhaps it will help sell more cars overseas.
Strategic Tariff Aided Resource Wars… main theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_D0ZQPqeJkk
because this is what human beings do…
Can’t wait for the paper our FE will publish on his multiple experiences in his back to the land ventures….probably read something like this…
Be Receptive to the Good Earth”: Health, Nature, and Labor in Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Settlements
Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in how humans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approached their concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering arguments that suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, the countercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly American practice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter to the urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on notions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producing a healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandon American consumer practices and take up a “primitive” and down-to-early pastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, the greater movement’s ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used the consumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in a growing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in the connection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identity helped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24176258_Be_Receptive_to_the_Good_Earth_Health_Nature_and_Labor_in_Countercultural_Back-to-the-Land_Settlements
Getting back to Mother Nature without BAU ain’t no fun at all!
Read the manuscript and tales to put shivers up ones spine regarding the drudgery and hardship to exist in harmony with nature. This translated in not nice behavior to ones fellow community members. FE was right, nawing on a turnip and some bitter greens, along with a couple of crab apples will try ones nerves after enjoying the bounty of BAU.
BAU, BAU, Long live BAU!
This article is actually from 2008. I am sure that if someone looked at the many groups that popped up a little before then, they would have found a similar pattern, or worse.
“Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes.”
this is what survivors of The Bottleneck can expect to face…
so, if BAU ends and IC collapses, remember that it is better to not survive…
“BAU, BAU, Long live BAU!”
yes! BAU FULL THROTTLE, BABY!
One has to be born a peasant and embedded from birth in a traditional way of life: it’s just not something one can opt into, dropping in from Mars as it were.
I also suspect that the personality types who see themselves as ‘counter-cultural’ are not the optimum for making a stable rural community.
In a traditional peasant community, the defective personalities are either controlled by peer-pressure from the well-adapted, or quite simply eliminated: they ‘go to the bad’ and starve, or are expelled, or even executed for crimes.
The selfishness and narcissism of consumer culture translates very badly to a real agricultural community.
On another note, long while!e ago read a title regarding communities, such as, the Shakers that were successful for a time, as well as, other intentional communities, such ax, Twin Oaks. The common thread of each was each was capable and lucky enough to establish trade relations with the outside economy with a product, be it furniture, seeds, or service to enhance their living. Outside jobs for members with a skill or profession were prized.
There are a number of reflective studies on the web that are fascinating to read about them now. One such is a thesis by a Sangdon Lee, entitled Commune Movements in the 1960s and 70s in Britain, Denmark and the United States.
https://www.google.com/search?q=commune+movements+in+the+1960+and+70s+in+britain+dennmark+and+united+states+lee&oq=commune+movements+in+the+1960+and+70s+in+britain+dennmark+and+united+states+lee&aqs=chrome..69i57.33487j0j8&client=tablet-android-lenovo&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Not sure if the link above works….
Ten years ago went to a newly established intentional community in the Black Mountains of North Carolina, Earth Haven, based on Permaculture.
http://www.earthaven.org/
From I remember they sought outside support from a variety of sources.
Not sure of the Ecovillage movement….in Boston and Charlotte remember several being established and the topic stressed was making a living. Happiness is Positive Cash Flow!🤑
Buying used things cheaply seemed to be an important part of this system. This only works if there are new things being made, somewhere in the system.
Yes, given the available tech miracles such as hv farming nets, and using all kinds of second hand farm equipment out there, it’s very ~easy to produce lotsa healthy food in permaculture style these days for NOW.. This favorable ratio would necessarily drop severely (to ~mere subsistence and very little marketable surplus) when spare parts and fuels are unobtanium and or low tech replacements are the only way forward, btw just for illustration a pro hedge laying guy tops ~5-15m per day only, so to parcel out even smallish 20ha estate would take insane amounts of time and resources (to pay / feed him). Nevertheless to stay in (euro) cities while caliphate or (north amerigo) gangs take over is not better option either..
Very good points!
I simply can’t imagine any SJW millenials working the fields. They would want overseer positions and time off to die their hair purple. They’re very well adapted to telling others how they are doing something the wrong way. (ninnying)
We could always engineer a generation of neo peasants complete with hunchbacks and clawed hands to solve the problem. Will that do?
Hmm.
Brave New World.
That has such people in it?
Actually, there’s no need to engineer those sorts of deformities.
Decades of back-bending and back-breaking peasant labor will tend to do that to a body.
Indeed but I was thinking more of Huxley’s book and selective breeding for function purpose via mechanised systems.
The objective today seems to be to bypass the need to breed and go straight to robots. Or, possibly more dangerous to humanity in the long term, artificially intelligent machines.
Scratch Mexico from my list to be an expatriate!
Gone baby GONE….No retirement for YOU, so sorry!
Americans’ Life Savings Disappear From Mexican Bank Accounts
Americans say money they had at Monex is gone and the bank isn’t helping them.
The transfer didn’t happen. Juan didn’t show, Zavala didn’t return calls, and Kathy and Jim Machir discovered that their nest egg was gone. When the Machirs and other San Miguel expatriates met with Monex officials in early January, the bankers told some of them that about $40 million was missing from as many as 158 accounts, many belonging to English-speaking Americans. A dozen people interviewed by Bloomberg News say that bank statements Zavala sent them purporting to show full accounts were apparently falsified. Most say the bank has told them little since they filed complaints, and some say Monex tried to settle for far less than the balances owed. “When they told us we had 6 pesos [32¢] in our accounts, I just felt sick to my stomach,” Kathy Machir says. “Since then, they have not dealt with us in good faith.”
Mexican authorities try to prosecute these cases but often aren’t successful.” In 2018 there were 7.3 million complaints of fraud involving 18.9 billion pesos, about $1 billion, according to Condusef, Mexico’s consumer protection agency. That’s more than double the number of claims in 2014.
Next step…here in the United States…by a stroke of a pen….bye, bye, $$$….but we will issue stock in it’s place…ha,ha🤗
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/expats-millions-in-life-savings-disappear-from-mexican-accounts
Boy, these folks are S.O.L….Uncle Sam will not lift a finger and Mexican authorities have gringos on the bottom of the help list!
Mexico has recently tipped over from being a net exporter of oil to being a net importer…
that’s the proverbial handwriting on the wall…
lawlessness seems to be increasing, and Creeping Collapse is on the way… a la VZ…
this will be an increasing problem for the US…
perhaps an effective wall should be built on the US southern border…
Love the bit about the authorities ‘trying’ to prosecute the cases: while the public prosecutor is having a drink with the crooked bank manager, his first cousin, no doubt.
In a time of Collapse, don’t be a despised – and rich – foreigner in a fundamentally corrupt, clan-and gang-ridden culture: simple isn’t it?
Why people can’t see that I don’t know.
‘Oh, but the place is so sunny,and the people so smiley, and it’s so cheap……..’
When it’s fiesta time in Guadalajara,
Then I long to be back once again
In Old Mexico.
https://youtu.be/9nm3IzCT088
Can I say clan and gang ridden, drug fueled, greed driven culture… is all we’ve ever had.
All that appears cheap and shiny will end up costing you a fortune!
Or something like that…
How much will it cost to clean up and filter all the micro plastic from our environment? Oh wait, no need to worry, our lungs are doing a stellar job. Carry on.
As a recent resident of Mexico, one just needs to pay attention.
Mexico is not for everyone– but if you get it, much freer than The States.
Coming back to the US border is a drag.
Are you suggesting that the exceptionally trustworthy mainstream media… exagerates?
If you don’t live there, you haven’t a clue.
You didn’t get shot then?
I’m trying to understand what you mean when you say… “but if you get it”
What do you have to do specifically to “get it”
And not get shot.
You mean life is normal unless you wander off the beaten track or down a dark alleyway?
Same as everywhere else?
As few days ago Rodster posted here link to Martenson, there was also linked recent presentation (or newest ver? Q1/2019) of his take on geologic and human scale timelines. It resonates a lot with the discussion here and at Surplus of the past days and weeks..
https://youtu.be/TnrfqXGUrig
Obviously meant Prof Patzek’s presentation inside..
Another ver of this talk with slightly hilarious Q&A at ~52min mark..
It is just a new way of presenting what Meadows et al told us about nearly 50 years ago in ‘The Limits to Growth’.
Instead of heeding warnings we go on a merry way like yeast in a bucket of sugary water until we run out of food or poison the environment or both.
Yep, but there are few treasured snippets and hinted links in his presentations and Q&A rounds, which might be of interest to seriously interested into these matters. Patzek seems as serious near-mid term doomer.. as my recollection of him from mid 2000s are not that spectacular. Also, his recent tenure as teaching Gulfie kids (and advising govs) wider depletion issues raised some eyebrows when announced some years ago. The fact he must gently cover it – balance the message by the call for joint UN action is secondary, tertiary for us..
Well, yet another heavy bullet into the skeleton of ‘TPTB must fly by night blindly’ theorists..
Well, yet another heavy bullet into the skeleton of ‘TPTB must fly by night blindly’ theorists..
Exactly!
The blind think everyone is blind.
Thanks for posting, at 1:06 he issued a bus ticket to Deluistan, but in a very kind way. lol
Interesting! I see he comes to the idea that the world might be sustainable wiht a population of 1 billion people. He evidently doesn’t understand the problem of a shrinking population and a shrinking economy in general.
The planting of corn in the US Midwest had been significantly delayed by wet weather. Window closing for Midwestern corn farmers to plant crops amid persistent wet weather. Also, in the WSJ, Floods Swamp US Farm Belt.
It is not clear how this will play out in practice. The WSJ points out loss of sales of seeds, fertilizer, and even equipment.
Grains are stored from year to year, so even if there is a poor crop year, it may not make a big difference. If the total corn crop is reduced, a person might guess that exports would be affected. Mexico is the biggest export recipient of US corn, at about 25% of the total.
Ethanol production could theoretically be affected. If ethanol is blended into gasoline, it raises the “octane” of the gasoline and and also makes the fuel somewhat cleaner burning. The US uses more ethanol in gasoline than other countries. The ethanol blending percentage in the US could be scaled back in many places and still comply with laws (or laws could be changed).
Also, exports of ethanol could be reduced. Exports accounted for 10.4% of US ethanol production in 2018 according to EIA data. The US produces about 58% of world ethanol production. Imports of ethanol, in any significant quantity, seem unlikely.
Also, the farmers sitting in their homes are not using much diesel fuel.
WTI
A breakdown from trendline…a retest…a rejection…and now comes the crash?
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D7QPsaAWsAE7p-A?format=jpg&name=large
You have studied these patterns more than I have. Clearly, prices are not going back up to the high prices we had in the past. Some people think everything is fine. But the big drop a couple of days ago was an eye-opener.
Crude oil stocks have been rising since March 15, which is over two months ago, suggesting that the price needs to fall further. China has even more problems than it is telling us about. Its private passenger auto sales have been down over the previous year for 10 months, now. April 2019 sales were down 17.7% from a year earlier. Year to date sales through April were down 14.6%.
Chinese independent refineries are losing USD 8 on each barrel of crude as gasoline inventories are rising and demand for gasoline is falling.
The resent rise in crude prices wasn’t followed by an equal rise in gasoline prices.
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-05-23/brimming-oil-tanks-forcing-china-s-teapots-to-cut-their-losses?__twitter_impression=true
I understand that something similar happened in the US, when refiners tried to refine Canadian crude to make the diesel that the ships could use under the new maritime law. They discover that the price difference didn’t work, between the price for crude and the selling price for the diesel. They lost money on every barrel.
Refiners buy fuel at market rates. They sell products at the price consumers can afford (at least sort of). The refiners get squeezed when costs rise too high relative to selling prices.
will the USA have to nationalize the refiners?
Good question!
that’s a cool graph… it looks like the “lower highs” scenario for future oil prices…
“A breakdown from trendline…a retest…a rejection…and now comes the crash?”
so $76 last October is on the trendline, and $66 in April is below the trendline, and $59 now is even further below…
no certainty at all, but this suggests that $66 will be the high for 2019…
but the past doesn’t guarantee the future… global events, the big players on the global stage, a big black swan… Resource Wars, more/bigger tariffs, Currency Wars… there are many scenarios where the oil price could spike…
but the OFW scenario lately is proving to be the closest to reality…
any spike will be brief, and prices will drop again…
Is there an OFW scenario?
I mean I’m trying to see where I fit on the curve between Fast Eddy and Keith Sattelite…
Beautiful technical setup! Have you shorted it?
Preppers….this is what you will have to deal with….
Have a car not too old 2013, 33,000 miles on it. Needed to drain and fill CVT fluid, no problem and $15 quart and did it 2 times because of of the torque converter.
Anyway, thought all was well, ounce of prevention. … Week later something unrelated happened,
A vigorous leak from a hole in fin/tube of the radiator sprung and good thing noticed it in the parking lot! Made it back home after buying 2 gallons of water.
No way to repair, not a hose or radiator cap…the radiator is PLASTIC and Aluminum…no way to fix..
Replace and good luck finding one right away.
Went on the internet and ordered one with fast delivery for about $100.00.
So, just one part goes bad the car is useless, battery, starter, tires, brakes, spark plugs or wires and many other parts.
I already had 2 batteries and tires recalls to reprogram the computer.
High technology will not save use post BAU….no way, Jose!
What you say seems to be too true. For an example watch Welker Farms on YouTube replacement of a transmission on one of their old tractors, it is an off the shelf truck transmission, they seem to farm 10K plus acres in Montana. Modern technology is optimized to the point where it can only be made in a few factories in the world and hence not repairable. New technology is incredible while it works, comparison of my Camry Hybrid with a 1960’s car proves the point although the older cars had distinctive style.
Modern technology has also eliminated the redundancies in labor, there maybe only a handful of designers who understand various parts and assemblies where previously there were a roomful at drafting tables with no chance of ransomware charged on the prints. FEA is now done in real time during design as opposed to a mechanical engineer with a sliderule.
If one can be found, an old Dodge with a Cummins mechanical diesel sells at a higher price now than when new. A Toyota Tacoma does most jobs as well(yes, sometimes a large heavy truck is needed), with less maintenance and cheaper fuel while it works, when it stops, a computer is most often necessary to repair.
I live in the present, enjoy technology, believe Gail is correct, it is a tough place to live, not something discussed with friends as it disaffirms many lifestyles.
Best,
Dennis L.
Few people consider the long term cost of complexity. Worse still even fewer consider the lack of functional redundancy in complexity in software systems.
A modern car, for marketing purposes presumably, has an ‘infotainment’ system that computer controls just about everything. Very nice, I suppose, if one’s road systems or incident recovery strategies mean you will be spending many more hours in the vehicle going nowhere because roads are closed but totally pointless for basic A to B travel needs.
However as integrated system there is every chance that having a hardware failure of some sort in, say, the vehicle’s internal ambient lighting system might result in a system shutdown due to poor software design and have the vehicle go into limp mode (or worse.)
The fix might be a new computer unit – especially once the software release is no longer supported (probably for marketing reasons á la the Apple approach to operating systems) – and suddenly the vehicle becomes uneconomic to repair.
Once upon a time this was known as planned obsolescence and was generally driven by people’s desire to have the latest and greatest status symbol since other than looks nothing much changed technically for years and the maintainable vehicles could pass down through the earnings pyramid providing utility to justify the initial cost of the build labour and materials. Until rust or an accident or a major mechanical failure due to poor maintenance eventually led to their demise.
Back in the late 70s and early 80s the manufacturers were driven, inter alia, by changes in safety legislation and the consumer’s desire for a longer lasting product (especially in areas where rust was a problem) to use better materials and more of then for added strength. But also greater impact protection through deformable structures.
So manufacturers started to build vehicles that, with minimal care, had metal bodies that would last for 20 years rather than 5 on rust zones and engines and transmissions that would last 250,000 miles (or much more in some high mileage usage cases) instead of 50,000 miles. A far better use of mined metals and the energy that went into creating and distributing the vehicles than had previously been the case since ‘modern’ vehicles came into being in the late 1940s and and the 1950s through 60s.
The only downside, from a economics perspective, was that the safety regulations meant that even some quite minor damage could result in a vehicle being assessed as uneconomic to repair and therefore the utility of the net energy savings possible via longer life spans was not always achievable.
As safety demands moved on this situation developed and the concept of now claiming on insurance for accident compensation, paid through ever increasing insurance premiums reflecting the greater risk of vehicle replacement rather than repair, now meant that roofs were cut off vehicles, making them trash, any time someone answered “a little” to the question “Do you have any neck pain?”
The manufacturers were not averse to seeing their vehicles chopped apart so readily. In a small way it would help them replace the complexity of long term spare parts supply by selling the story of “continual improvement” and so regular changes to components – especially electronic components – that would make long term spare parts logistics an expensive problem.
Much of the continuous development work was forces upon them by regulation – either for safety or for engine emissions and then latterly the demon CO2/Carbon ‘pollution’ challenge. Yet more complexity required for the technical solutions to those socio political problems.
So as vehicles are regularly updated and sold around the world in ever greater variety of con figurations to suit local regulation, what do you do about making spares inventory for the long term?
If you think an electronic component will last about 8 years but your constant development means it’s life in manufacturing is less than a year, what do you do about making extra boards during the manufacturing run in order to set them aside (accepting storage costs) for 8 years and then hoping that there are enough vehicles out there with enough failures to justify the stocking costs?
Or do you simply hope that a small quantity of the component with a high retail price will be enough to either make some profit or drive the problem away and perhaps allow you to sell more new ‘boxes’ aided by the constant flow of regulation driven technical changes?
Once you have a business model that offers a 20 year product for marketing purposes but only a few years of realistic support for maintenance needs it is quite easy to change management policies away from ‘make them last for long term profit from maintenance activities’ (where keeping things maintainable and the same for as long as possible would be desirable) to ‘we are just selling a box and letting go as soon as out warranty expires’, the underlying philosophy is likely to change.
So all of the gewgaws are added to make the ‘box’ attractive at an emotional level no matter what that might add, or how it might add it, to maintenance complexity or cost and the chances of functional redundancy.
So the problem with adding complexity is that it, in effect, reduces the return on the energy expended to build the product and brings forward the point at which replacement and the use of energy to make the replacement is necessary. Also the cost of disposing of what might well be perfectly usable but ‘too expensive to risk repairing’ items.
It should be really interesting when those manufacturing concepts reach the home construction industry perhaps leading to the life span of a property being less than the period of loan required to buy into it. One could envisage the value of caves increasing rapidly …
Thanks for your very fine comment.
I would point out that those who calculate inflation will try to claim that there is no real inflation, if all kinds of complexity is added which somehow sort of benefits the system. Certainly, fancy entertainment systems and fancy braking systems have added value to the customer, so are not inflationary. The poor customer, whose wages don’t rise in inflation-adjusted terms, finds vehicles increasingly unaffordable.
Thanks for the new article, Gail. Just the following section is a bit unclear to me: «By putting tariffs on some goods, Trump is providing a substitute for the missing high oil prices needed to slow the growth of globalization, if the issue of ever-increasing wage disparity is to be solved. The tariffs tend to raise the value of the US dollar relative to other currencies, making the cost of commodities (including fossil fuels) cheaper for US consumers than for other consumers around the world. The tariffs tend to encourage new investment in US production of many types, at the same time that they make investment in other countries, such as China, less appealing.»
I think i get the point, but will the mechanism you describe, by which the US can grab a larger part of the energyresources, «solve the issue of ever-increasing wage disparity» (in the US.)?
I am not sure that the tariffs can do very much, but the tariffs are in the direction of making the US more independent. Part of what they do is move the value of the dollar higher, and this by itself tends to make energy products relatively more expensive for other countries.
Our current economy is so complex it is difficult to see that without the supply chains from everywhere in the world any country can do very much. For example, with respect to rare earths, it is not just that China is extracting them; China is also processing them. Trying to keep pollution down in this process is likely to be expensive, too. In China, looking the other way would be an option. Here, that is less likely. There would be a whole lot of hurdles to overcome for the US to extract and process the rare earths sufficiently.
Debt for all of this new investment might be an issue as well. Of course, when people see what appears to a new opportunity, they are likely to see a huge “growth” opportunity and invest there.
IIRC, one of the reasons that the REE mines in California were shut down was because of environmental issues. China has really trashed the region where they extract and process the REE. It may never be remediated. That is always an issue with mining when the economics goes south. Unfortunately, it is a universal problem.
I read the same thing a few years back, CA was once a source of REE, environmental concerns moved it off shore. Add in the cost of remediation and it would appear renewables are less renewable.
Dennis L.
Out of sight; out of mind. And cheap, too. We can even label them “green”!
I’ve been looking at ‘Forces TV,’ which as far as I can gather tells British soldiers. their families, and the general public, what to think: incredible titles to some videos, eg ‘(Unit X) On the Russian Front Line’.
Russian front line? ! ! Is this a time slip, are they really the Wermacht in 1942?!
That phrase would properly describe a position taken during a real campaign, not deployment to a ‘frontier region’ (itself an interesting turn of phrase) which is at peace. It is not a ‘front line.’
Another video shows Scots soldiers pleased as punch to be training for a proper fight rather than ‘various missions throughout the world’. A proper fight with….? Well, they don’t say explicitly in that one, but frontiers are mentioned again…
Well, there you are: whatever is happening on the energy front, the propaganda front is lively.
Sounds like plots for a video game. Forget the real world.
Let the games begin!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TN68sp-vIw
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russia-says-it-can-shoot-down-hypersonic-missiles-58922
The missile supposedly can hit targets above 300,000 feet, which would give the weapon potential to hit orbital satellites. And it supposedly can intercept multiple ballistic missile warheads descending through the atmosphere at Mach 20. “The S-500 is expected to able to detect and simultaneously attack up to ten ballistic missile warheads flying at speeds of over 4 miles a second,” said Sputnik News.
There go your orbital power satellites Keith!
The real question is why have nuclear weapons not been used in conflict since the end of world war 2?
Korean war, vietnam war, the middle east. Supposedly nukes are deterrent, last resort. But if a nuke attack can be absorbed as stated above then there goes your deterrent.
Communication sats can be neutralised too so there goes your eye in the sky. All the fancy tech only works under perfect conditions against a weak defenseless nation. Russia is doing its best to support these weak defenseless nations (allies) with anti threat defenses but in the end Russia will be weakened too.
America’s power grid can be crippled long term by sabotaging transformers.
Subsea internet cables are relatively easy to sabotage too with robotic subs.
Very easy to get conflict going with false flag attack if you have nothing left to lose.
We conveniently added all of the cute little smart meters on the sides of people’s houses in the US (and some other places) so that utility companies don’t need to send out meter readers. They can also cut off service, if a person doesn’t pay. Or create rolling blackouts, if there is not enough to go around. But hackers can quite possibly affect these systems as well.
We now have all kinds of Internet control of our electricity system in general. For example, I would expect that the integration of intermittent electricity to the rest of the grid is done basically over the internet. How secure is this system?
Oh we have them here in spain too. Cute little red lights on them at night. Very creepy.
5G is next. Even though it makes zero economic sense to roll it out so quickly. Think about how much infrastructure (all the antennas) and work this requires.
There is a reason all of these systems are being forced into place. But if I explain it people would just call me a conspiracy theorist. Even though the plans are all there for anyone to see in their literature.
A global digital coin or coins is coming. The central banks will pretend to be against it but they are the ones that developed it. Once enough people are on board and the most popular coins are made user friendly, then the central banks will have everyone where they have always wanted them.
All transactions at all levels will be recorded and taxed like never before. But people will love the convenience. One button purchases, send money anywhere anytime in the world, raise money for your projects, take donations etc without having to go thru paypal, youtube, patreon which are basically middle men taking a big slice.
Remember, income tax started at very low rates then increased gradually to where we are now. So it will be with the new transaction methods until people are locked in.
I think more people are coming to understand how vulnerable the whole system is, ususally from the perspective of their own industry.
For example, most people thought they were protected behind a firewall or a password etc. Now we know that most computers on the internet are vulnerable at the hardware level (intel chips) (nvidea chips) (huawei) and that governement agencies and big tech have always been the biggest hackers.
Passwords are near enough useless and only a few people bother to use two factor authentication. The systems being prepared go beyond simple biometric recognition which isn’t really good enough. They combine two or three factors that will be infallible.
This level of identity security works both ways. Now everyone knows who everyone else is and noone can be anonymous. Noone can play outside the system. Everyone is locked in. Non compliance with the system will activate an immediate red flag.
China is very far along in implementing this kind of system. America and EU have them too but they are a bit more subtle. All activity is monitored. Anything unusual activates a red flag. Most humans are far more predictable than they think they are. Most humans police themselves because they are terrified of being unusual.
And of course… all of this requires more energy than you can shake a stick at!
If there are some remaining groups of countries working together, I can almost imagine a single currency for all in a group. But thinking about how poorly the Euro has worked, I really think that this is a pipe dream from a higher-energy period. A single currency works well when there are surpluses to share. It works a whole lot less were when there isn’t enough to go around. Or when one of the members starts failing, and the others need to bail it out.
Dysfunctional, totally a tribute to Neo-liberal policies , and that is why it will fail and why Brexit is a good idea, to be followed by Italy. When that happens the Eurozone will have to change or crack up.
Computer security, now that a whole lot of things are stored in the cloud, seems more and more iffy.
And as you say, it all requires a whole lot of energy. It is not clear that it even can be scaled up.
Gail, yes, exactly. I have no idea how a global currency is supposed to work. It’s so far removed from what we actually need. Everyone managing their own currency worked very well for a long time.
What we do need to remove are all the middle men that claim their pound of flesh. They are being replaced by algorithmns.
I agree with John Doyle that the monstrous entity known as the EU should never have been allowed to exist. What nation state in their right mind hands over soveriegnty and currency control to a dictatorial supranational group that would make H.itler blush.
Not to worry. I think the EU is in the process of falling apart. The thing is, the remaining nation states will also find it harder to manage their own affairs with many of them falling apart too.
The plan is to blame the collapse on the new nationalisms so that a new wave of global socialism can rise. At this point, I just don’t see how any of that can hold together. As Gail says, it will become harder for centralised organisations of any kind to manage everything.
Hardly any British forces left these days – I can’t imagine how they can justify a TV station.
Quite. The British task force shown in training in the film to terrify that evil dictator bent on conquering Europe, Putin, is only 350 men…….
Dad’s Army!
“Almost One In Ten British Troops Are ‘Clinically Obese’
“According to latest figures, almost 18,000 members of the British armed forces are clinically obese.”
https://www.forces.net/news/almost-one-ten-british-troops-are-clinically-obese
I seem to recall some articles about extremely fit and muscular professional athletes – Rugby players from memory – who rate as clinically obese as measured by the system used for the calculations.
On the other hand when a relative was in hospital for a few days recently for a planned operation on a foot problem I could see, with no need for measurement or calculation, that something like 80% + of the nurses were clinically obese by any measure.
One might think of it as an age related thing but from observations even the youngest were affected. Having been in the profession long enough to be fully qualified at some level seemed to be the only criterion.
Well, either that or the definition by which we categorize individuals.
Wow!
Magnesium and energy supply in brain:
“Conclusions
Our study suggests that local energy supply plays a critical role in controlling the density of functional presynaptic terminals, demonstrating the link between energy supply and efficacy of synaptic transmission.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504454/
I am afraid the article is a little beyond me. Would taking magnesium supplements perhaps be helpful, if magnesium is involved with energy in cells?
Yesterday and today I again met the people who complained that they have a diagnosis of high blood pressure or magnesium defficiency or some initial problems with memory. So I again searched for some studies regarding magnesium supplementation. Based on the experience with an elderly person in my family and my own experience I can confirm that elevating brain magnesium levels enhances memory or the use of transdermal magnesium in a bath can lower the blood pressure.
This energy connection in the given study seems to me very interesting: without the magnesium, the plants or the humans become zombies, as their energy generators (mitochondria) cease to function.
“These studies provide the mechanistic understanding of how elevating brain Mg2+ concentration can prevent age-related memory decline in old rats [62], reverse cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) model mice [71] as well as ameliorate cognitive decline in subjects with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) (GL et al. manuscript in submission).”
Mitochondria Need Magnesium
https://drcarolyndean.com/2018/06/mitochondria-need-magnesium/
Thanks! So it looks like magnesium is good both for the brain and for keeping calcium in the bones.
Erythrocyte intracellular Mg2+ concentration as an index of recognition and memory
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4890594/
“Discussion
In the present work, for the first time, we found that endogenous Mg2+ level, which was represented by the RBC [Mg2+]i, was correlated with recognition memory and spatial memory in rats. The possible mechanism for this phenomenon was: the RBC [Mg2+]i represented the brain ECF [Mg2+] level, the latter affected the density of Syn-(+) puncta and ultimately regulated memory. We also confirmed the aging associated endogenous Mg2+ deficiency, and found that compensation of RBC [Mg2+]i deficiency by exogenous Mg2+ administration rescued the memory decline in aged rats.”
Regulation of structural and functional synapse density by L-threonate through modulation of intraneuronal magnesium concentration
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390816302040?via%3Dihub
MAgnesium is the central element in chlorophyll (makes plants green) that powers photosynthesis. Without it most plants are dead.
And leafy greens are way the best source if they are properly grown. If you have not much room/time, just growing a few leafy greens in actual soil is a good plan.
One word, banana.
Even better : dark chocolate ! … and almonds.
I eat all these things regularly! Hooray, I must have healthy photosynthesis.
I’m going to try to eat some dark chocolate every day for the next 40 years… if I can, I think I will live to be 100…
just checked my multivitamin bottle, and it contains only 25% of the RDA for magnesium… I have been taking a separate magnesium for many years… a multivitamin with 100% magnesium would be a (relatively) huge pill…
anyone who goes the multivitamin route should know this…
and noticed the B12 in the multivitamin is 500%…
I’m no health expert, but I suspect that a daily multivitamin is a plus…
I think the cost is about 10 or 15 cents per day…
cost of health products are a factor…
Dark chocolate and almonds is my favorite!
Magnesium deficiency.
Magnesium deficiency everywhere!
When you do battle with magnesium deficiency, you’d better be armed with something a bit stronger than a bunch of bananas, a box of chocolates and a bag of cashew nuts, although the certainly help.
Carolyn Dean is the Gail of Magnesium
She’s well worth listening to.
https://youtu.be/OvHlrYOu5rA
Thanks! I did start taking magnesium a month or so ago, thinking it might help my bones.
I’ve been using a magnesium oil spray on my legs for 10 years now.
Carolyn Dean somewhat downgrades magnesium l-threonate
https://drcarolyndean.com/2019/03/magnesium-crosses-the-bbb/
but, the impact of l-threonate and magnesium on brain in combination is clearly unique:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30829204
“Assessment of behaviors in elevated plus maze (EPM) test and forced swim test (FST) showed that MgT more significantly improved memory of rats and decreased depression-like symptoms in healthy rats as compared to controls.”
And as already mentioned above regarding L-threonate:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0028390816302040?via%3Dihub
She clearly advertises her product (ReMag) over other forms of magnesium and is not completely objective regarding various impacts of various forms of magnesium, which combine magnesium with various substances (e.g. already present in human body). One must be aware of that.
Well, well it looks like Chris Martenson is finally coming around towards reality. Can’t say he wasn’t warned.
“Collapse is in the cards” https://www.peakprosperity.com/theyve-stolen-our-future-2/
Thanks for link.
In the comments I found this;
How to enjoy the end of the World, a speech by a mathematician talking about how easily complexity is disrupted.
He is a reader of OFW, I understand. He wants to do a write-up of his talk, but it isn’t done yet.
He does a nice job of condensing stuff (that OFW has been unpacking in depth) into a one hour seminar.
Brutal summary is that the financialisation of the economy is a sure sign of collapse as the real economy can’t absorb the funny money being created.
Like a Jenga game we see the wobbling of our financial system, and know it is unsustainable, but can’t be sure of the when or how of collapse. He dismisses any other way that BAU can be unwound.
We have a climate action strike by school students here in NZ today. No doubt they all have smartphones, hope to have an overseas holiday, and believe that solar panels, windmills, and 5G/high tech will save the world. I drove past in my 30 yr old 4WD which I consider a very eco-friendly due to its simplicity and recycling potential, but try telling that story ha!
Pingback: Why it (sort of) makes sense for the US to impose tariffs – Olduvai.ca
Hello Gail. At the beginning you talk about the cooperation of the countries, but that cooperation is very unequal. The employees of third world countries have very poor salaries.
Part of what is such a mess with the current level of cooperation is the fact that the low wages of third world countries are tending to hold down the wages of many workers in so-called Advanced Economies. Also, these low-wage workers cannot really afford to buy many of the products that they collectively are making, holding down “demand” for these items.
It is very difficult to attempt a realistic comparison of ‘wealth’ values between people in the same country let alone in different countries.
Many people discuss the concept of ‘social mobility’ with the implication that everyone’s life can be enhanced although no one ever indicates the direction of travel they are really talking about.
It’s interesting that nuclear power makes up such a small (almost negligible) input into China’s energy mix, although things are meant to change
http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/china-nuclear-power.aspx
One very interesting quote
“2015 electricity demand growth was only 0.5%, corresponding with a 6.9% growth in GDP, showing a marked decoupling of the two metrics, though this is partly due to subdued economic conditions.”
Can you REALLY have REAL 6.9% economic growth with ONLY 0.5% growth in electricity demand?
2015 was a low year for electricity consumption growth in China. BP puts it at 2.9%, however. Most other years are a whole lot higher. I agree that 0.5% would be ridiculously low. I do not go to the World Nuclear Organization for second hand information about other types of generation. They may or may not be right.
I think that China’s published growth rates are highly manipulated. We don’t really know what they are.
Any time someone gets this excited it would seem you are winning.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-23/china-responds-bannon-turning-us-economic-fascist-country
Somewhere I read a hedge fund operator make a comment, “Trump’s ideas just might work.”
Some are concerned they may sell their US bonds, to whom?
Dennis L.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-22/rand-corp-how-destroy-russia
The conclusions of the latest confidential report by the Rand Corporation were recently made public in a « Brief ». They explain how to wage a new Cold War against Russia. Certain recommendations have already been implemented, but this systemic exposure enables us to understand their true objective.
Force the adversary to expand recklessly in order to unbalance him, and then destroy him. This is not the description of a judo hold, but a plan against Russia elaborated by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank in the USA. With a staff of thousands of experts, Rand presents itself as the world’s most reliable source for Intelligence and political analysis for the leaders of the United States and their allies.
Rand analysts estimate that Russia’s greatest vulnerability is that of its economy, due to its heavy dependency on oil and gas exports. The income from these exports can be reduced by strengthening sanctions and increasing the energy exports of the United States. The goal is to oblige Europe to diminish its importation of Russian natural gas, and replace it by liquefied natural gas transported by sea from other countries.
This is the future that is planned out for us by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank of the Deep State – in other words the underground centre of real power gripped by the economic, financial, and military oligarchies – which determines the strategic choices not only of the USA, but all of the Western world.
Interesting!
Europe scewed both the RAND and the U.S.
We do have sanctions imposed on Russia…but not the ones you expected us to have. We are in energy business with Russia…even tighter than before…after we got the U.S out from Russia through U.S sanctions on Russia.
The U.S knows though and is about to impose sanctions on Europe over Nord Stream II.
Someone is going to lose bigly!
I can see China imploding. Probably the worst inorganic growth and management possible. EU will fall apart. Russia could dominate if US backs off and manages its own affairs. Requires revolution in america towards common sense solutions.
Looking forward to watching it all unfold.
It’s fascinating: much to be reflected upon when pruning the roses….
The U.S has no competition. You have the the military force, technology, the multinationals, the banks and the dollar.
We Europeans will do what ever we can to stay alive…
Russia is a third world nation…with nukes…
And the nukes are not real!!
Jusk kidding. There’s a lot of that going around online.
The idea is that nuke missiles don’t actually work. Just a fraud set up to use fear to maintain semblance of world peace.
There are claims that hiroshima and nagasaki were fire bombed much like dresden and korea.
Who knows what the truth is.
But what is a military force without a constant supply of energy?
What is an army without a constant supply of food and clean water?
I’ve read reports that china’s national water supply could be sabotaged.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/huawei-usa-campaign/
Mike Burgess, the head of the signals directorate, recently explained why the security of fifth generation, or 5G, technology was so important: It will be integral to the communications at the heart of a country’s critical infrastructure – everything from electric power to water supplies to sewage, he said in a March speech at a Sydney research institute.
Read this speech from 1957 if you haven’t already. It points out from a military point of view how important energy was considered back in 1957, and how much was known about the issue back then.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predicting-peak-oil/
Can never figure out why people need speeches from ”experts” to state the obvious
The battle of Waterloo in 1815 and lasted a day
The battle of the Somme. in 1915 lasted about 5 months
Both battles took place in the same region, why the difference in extent?
The colossal difference in energy availability and input
I’m amazed that someone has to give a lecture on the critical importance of energy input in warfare
In ww2, the Germans and Japanese had no indigenous oil, the Americans were awash with the stuff.
WW2 was decided by who ran out of fuel first.
Good point. Also Germans and Japanese were short on coal, as well. It was the coal/oil double problem that was an issue. The US had both coal and oil.
the germans had plenty of coal—they turned it into gasoline.
The South Africans did the same thing later
but it wasnt enough to fight a sustained war with.
Germany’s quantity of coal (at least the black coal) was going downhill pretty badly.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/52-peak-coal-in-uk-and-germany-led-to-world-wars.png
As I look at the coal production for South Africa, it appears that South Africa has recently reached peak coal. There is lots of coal left; the problem is that the price won’t rise high enough to allow its extraction.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/south-african-coal-production-in-million-metric-tons-oil-equivalent-bp-data-plotted-by-ceic.png
This is a chart of South African coal production. It is made by CEIC using BP data. I could have plotted the data myself. I note that coal production has not rising for several years and is now lower. We have been seeing lots of reports about how expensive their electricity made from coal is, and how this is a huge problem. This article from March 2019 is headlined, No end in sight for South African power cuts.
This election gave of the erswdf stark origin reminder.
Sounds plausible: just by watching developments over the last few years one could have worked that out as the plan. The drive to humble and fragment the somewhat resurgent Russian Federation is remorseless.
Ageed.
Russia appears to be playing a good game but everyone has an achiles heel and the game is about to get real dirty. Lots of hair pulling and scratching.
The new (German) leader of the European people’s Party “Weber” will try to cancel North Stream II when elected. Oh my god, the germans are so brave stupid to the USA.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-20/russian-oil-sales-to-u-s-on-steroids-amid-venezuela-sanctions
Usually pipeline gas is a whole lot cheaper than LNG, especially if the pipeline doesn’t need to go too far. This is why North Stream II would seem to have an advantage. Of course, it may be hard to get the price of US LNG to stay high enough for exporters to make a profit.
Tesla taking a bath in the Trade War….
Bloomberg) — Tesla Inc. dropped 4.4% in U.S. pre-market trading as analysts at Loup Ventures and Morgan Stanley gave increasingly bearish commentary on the U.S. electric-car maker.
Loup Ventures co-founder Gene Munster wrote in a note that Tesla will probably miss its 2019 delivery target range as sales shrink in China amid a trade war between the two countries. The analyst cut his estimate for Tesla’s full-year global car sales by about 10% to 310,000 vehicles, versus the minimum 360,000-unit target the manufacturer set in March. The shares are poised for their seventh day of losses and are down 27% over the past month.
“We are lowering our numbers as a precautionary measure related to two unknowns,” including China’s probable imposition of tariffs on Tesla car imports as well as other impediments such as new regulations on sales or a potential consumer boycott of U.S. goods, Munster said. Loup’s pessimism on the import fees is a “minority view,” discounting most investors’ expectation that Tesla will remain exempt because of its investment in a Chinese battery factory, he said.
Elon best fly to outer space with Bezo and start a New Age of Living with Keith.
Don’t worry: the ever-loyal Drogon will pick the – stabbed-in-the-heart – economy up in his gentle claws and carry it off to Volantis, where Kinvara, the Red High Priestess of the God of Light, will revive it, only improved and wiser.
Quite as likely as Techno-Utopia,or ‘renewed real growth’, or the Green New Deal, or whatever tripe they are trying to sell us (and themselves); so you only have to believe…… 🙂
The US stock market has been down about 400 points today, and WTI is a little above 58. Things don’t look to be doing too well!
The symbolism is certainly all there in tv shows and recent movies – sometimes blatantly so – if one has their eyes open.
Game of Thrones – The wheelchair bound end up ruling the world. The male hero cries a lot and is banished to the wilderness. The Big Bad Zombie Threat ends up being a nothing burger that a teenage girl can single handedly eliminate with a few gymnastics.
The Walking Dead – zombie apocalypse (collapse of BAU and industrial civ) – very accurate in some ways – ends up shifting to medieval fanstasy land. Survivors farm, shoot bows and arrows and ride horses again etc etc. No mention of spent fuel ponds.
Avengers Endgame – Big Bad Guy Thanos wipes out half of population. Then threatens to wipe out everything and start again. We are saved by quantum time travel blah blah.
Themes upon themes upon recurring themes. End times. People want it because they believe the messiah will come or return depending which team you back. The more you promote The End the more it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
Dissipation is a biatch!
How true: the emotionless cripple boy as the best – AI? – ruler; uploaded consciousness, ‘the memory of mankind’……
It may be that the World Soul knows what is coming to us.
Interesting take. AI – all seeing, all knowing boss? Could be, could be.
To be fair… the other contenders were all a bit pint sized. But that never stopped a tyrant I suppose. In fact it could be the cause of all our problems.
I’ve read some very interesting comments here this morning. It’s really all about entropy. The intelligent people who post here know what’s happening. The gov. and the economy have died, but the reality has not set in for most. How long “they” can delay our fate is the question. There’s a decent chance to survive the wipeout, but it won’t be easy, or inexpensive. Most will perish. It’s just a cycle folks.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-steel/british-steel-risks-collapse-with-25000-jobs-threatened-idUSKCN1SR0N2
Customer service automation is coming and that’s a much bigger number of employees worldwide.
Retail automation next and that’s the biggest sector.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-21/americas-busiest-port-prepares-full-automation-stay-competitive
A new wave of investments in automation could stimulate the economy after the next recession. By 2030, automation may eliminate 20% to 25% of current jobs (equivalent to 40 million displaced workers), crushing the bottom 90% of Americans the hardest. Some of these investments include the automation of shipping terminals, reported Bloomberg.
At Pier 400 in Los Angeles, North America’s largest shipping terminal, about 1,700 diesel vehicles pass through the facility daily. The terminal is managed by APM Terminals, a segment of A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, is expected to replace diesel and gasoline engines with electric, and use autonomous software to replace the workforce.
… Not only would the human element be eliminated from the equation, but also 65,000 miles driven by diesel motors would be replaced with electric engines.
Where would the electricity come from, by the way? I presume someone would keep paving all of the roads and building electric transmission lines. Also adding recharging stations.
I have no idea how all these global corporations intend to provide sufficient electrical energy for all these changes that they expect to make.
I am assuming that they all have very smart people in high places that know what they are doing and have researched everything sufficiently to make these claims.
Otherwise, something is very wrong with the whole picture.
It may be that all of these companies have been promised better batteries etc. and they are all making plans based on these developments. Do you really think that they are all wrong?
Gail, you don’t need that much oil to maintain roads etc compared to the amount of oil that is burned every day in vehicles. Surely you can understand this? This is a non problem.
Electric transmission lines don’t require much maintenance once they are built. And maintenenace vehicles would be electric if that’s what you are referring to.
I am also assuming that all of these corporations intend to make use of whatever energy mix makes sense going forward. I would think that to be obvious. But it looks to be mostly electric. Again, argue with the engineers. They seem to think it’s possible.
I honestly don’t know who is right or wrong about all of this. I prefer to wait and see how things pan out.
If nukes are mentioned, then nukes are trashed. Noone wants them.
If renewables are mentioned, then they are trashed. No way they can work.
If natural gas is mentioned, then it’s trashed. No way it can replace other sources.
Coal is dirty but got us this far. Oil is practical but reaching peak.
What are we supposed to do? Twiddle our thumbs while Rome burns?
I don’t mind people trying anything and everything to keep things going in any way possible. I commend them and wish them the best.
Actually, coal and oil are about equally problems, as far as I can see. The Peak Oil people just talk louder. The whole system seems to go down, pretty much simultaneously, so all the talk of shifting to electric makes no sense to me.
The problem is wage disparity, and it affects energy supply of all kinds, including both coal and oil.
There is a lot of very misleading modeling being done in the world.
It has been discussed here few months ago, that the whole battery industry is moving into next generation of production model with just fraction of the machines needed per capacity (kWh of storage) produced. This will make production of few millions of EVs per year plus some renewables battery storage possible. That’s happening now. Is there any new leapfrogging on the horizon beyond that like true solid state cheap batteries and such, the answer is perhaps yes (tech lab talk), but given the upcoming investments in retooling the currently available latest generation the production of such promising next gen tech is at least a decade away.. And the ‘best doomer intel’ tells us this sucker is going down in ~2025-35 anyways at least in some core hubs of IC, so that’s likely too bad too late for any meaningful retooling in terms of today’s civilization footprint.
Agree. If conditions allowed for tech to do its thing and evolve as it always has done then there wouldn’t be too much of a problem.
Solid state batteries are about three to five years off but intermediate improvements are fine until then. Cheap mass produced graphene is also likely which helps change the materials space.
The problem appears to be that our current model of banking and consumption requires consumers to be able to consume beyond basic necessities. This model is unsustainable due to resource depletion and saturation. Once people have enough they don’t tend to want more unless they are filthy rich.
Population growth has slowed down since the 1970s so I would expect that to continue and become a non issue if everything else could pootle along.
Everything has reached peak and we are entering stagnation phase. If humans are unable to change the way they live and reorganise their power structure then we will just hit a brick wall and all the fancy new stuff will have the plug literally pulled.
You could say, we are reaching peak frustration too.
Eventually all of this automation will make many human jobs redundant What would happen if those good paying UPS or FedEx delivery.jobs were made extinct? Here’s what Ford Motor Company is working on: With all of the forthcoming automation and robotics and drones in the coming decades will there be any jobs left for humans to pay their bills and keep the economy functioning?
“Ford Is Working on Package-Delivering Robots That Fold Up Inside Self-Driving Cars”
https://jalopnik.com/ford-is-working-on-package-delivering-robots-that-fold-1834960235
I agreed with Fast Eddy on most everything except Robotics and AI. That is the real threat going forward.
It really makes you wonder what kind of world these people think they’re building. A reduced unemployed unsociable population of recluses that have everything delivered to their front door. If they have a front door.
The question is what is it we are trying to achieve? And do we really have any choice in the matter? It is evident that a preplanned agenda is unfolding. But why is it unfolding? What does it achieve? Rise of the Machines? Population control? Noe of it really makes any sense.
At one point people didn’t know what smartphones were and now everyone has one and can’t imagine living without it. People have become addicted to devices and programs. What is the programming attempting to achieve?
And how are people going to earn a living to afford even the basics if whole swathes of jobs are being automated, offshored, or made obsolete?
“It really makes you wonder what kind of world these people think they’re building.”
IMO, I don’t think they care, really. It’s all about corporate profits, patents and selling those ideas to whoever wants to use it. Humans tend to think “short term” because we don’t live very long but that usually and invariably gets one painted into a corner. Elon Musk, Stephan Hawking and others have warned about the grave dangers of “Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. But Man can’t stop there. No, they are now working on General Artificial Intelligence (GAI) which is what humans use and they are developing Super Artificial Intelligence (SAI) where a Robot can learn the entire history of man within a few days. Then it can to develop ways to think for itself which will lead it to seek survival with the end result being able to realize that humans are blocking it from gaining “immortality” so it decides man must be eliminated.
The Robot “Petman” developed by Google and Boston Dynamics was one example where the Robot Petman began to teach himself how to avoid obstacles. Then the same two companies developed robotic dogs that learned as a team to solve a puzzle.
If this sounds too much like X-Files, it’s not because that’s what many of the opponents such as Musk and Hawking have been warning us about.
All we need to do is figure out how to make all of the machines buy and sell from each other. Humans will be totally unnecessary. But so will food, clothes, homes, and a lot of other things.
“All we need to do is figure out how to make all of the machines buy and sell from each other.”
Exactly but those running the BIG companies just see profits and progress without realizing it could lead to the demise of humans !
They don’t care is right, roadster. There is no consensus about the future.
All I know is I can’t do what this guy does…
“All I know is I can’t do what this guy does…”
Just wait till ‘THAT GUY’ is packing weapons and has learned Super Artificial Intelligence (SAI) and decides you are a threat to him. It will become like the movie, Terminator 2.
I just read the link. That’s one of the problems I thought they wouldn’t be able to solve with home delivery autonomous vehicles.
Oh well. It appears there’s a solution for everything.
How would it handle opening gates and doors? Not every property is open at the front.
How would it handle dogs? Seriously.
How would it handle stupid kids messing around with it? Kicking, shoving, trapping, tripping, spraying the sensors, etc etc?
Yep, it would be a favorite past time of disenfranchised youth, messing with autonomous units. And since all this automation leads to more of the former via fewer non-elite jobs, it’s a non-starter really.
There is no grand scheme at work here. It is just that every business unit is looking after ways to increase their profits in the short run. But for every employee a company replaces with a robot, several other companies lose a customer each. It is the tragedy of the commons, just with A.I.
Yes. I like that way of seeing it.
All the individual increases in profit – the profit seekers – are doing their own thing but collectively lead to a paradigm shift which can be observed from the global perspective.
Like a field of flowers.
Every individual flower is seeking “profit” and attracting insects without knowledge of the other flowers doing the same. Each in their own little bubble of existence.
Then the field collectively dies off and there’s nothing left for the insects to harvest and they die off too.
Still… as the observer… it’s ok to appreciate the field when it’s in full bloom knowing that it may never come back.
“Based on working with banks and bank regulators for three decades, what keeps me up at night now? 19 consecutive quarters of rising household debt! American households now hold mortgage, auto loan, student, and credit card debt of $13.7 trillion which is $1 trillion above the 2008 peak.
“This level of indebtedness is the equivalent of about 68% GDP as opposed to an equivalent of 86% in 2008. Yet, we are so indebted at every level, that is, municipal, national level, corporate, commercial real estate, and at a household level. The more money banks lend especially at this late stage in the credit cycle, the more they increase their operational risk exposure. They let go of their underwriting standards, and they ignore controls.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2019/05/22/the-weakening-of-big-bank-regulations-under-trump-is-the-seed-for-the-next-financial-crisis/#105344174f4c
“Encouraged by insanely low interest rates, US businesses have taken on record amounts of debt that funded hiring, acquisitions and generous rewards to shareholders… the next recession will expose Corporate America’s debt problem…
“”A highly leveraged business sector could amplify any economic downturn as companies are forced to lay off workers and cut back on investments,” Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned in a speech on Monday night.
“Those laid-off workers would then cut their own spending, creating a cascading effect through the rest of the economy. And investors that enabled the business borrowing will retrench, making it harder for other companies to get financing.
“”The pain that investors are going to feel will be quite enormous,” said Gayeski.”
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/05/21/investing/corporate-debt-recession-powell/index.html
…because of massive entitlement promises plus huge debt, “the entire developed world is insolvent.””
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-great-government-debt-bubble-11558471734?mod=hp_opin_pos1
“Federal Reserve officials trying to shore up their arsenal to defend the economy in the next U.S. recession received a warning about one approach they have been considering.
Plans to hold more short-term bonds to prepare for a downturn could create risks of its own, Fed staff told policymakers, according to minutes from the Fed’s April 30-May 1 meeting that were released on Wednesday.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-balancesheet/fed-officials-get-a-warning-about-a-possible-approach-to-fight-the-next-recession-idUSKCN1SS2YB
If it is not one problem, it is another!
It is good that someone is pointing out that negative interest rates still don’t work. To keep propping up economies, there is a need to keep lowering interest rates. The catch is that negative interest rates don’t work. It is the big energy importing economies that seem to have the negative interest rates, suggesting that all of the energy importing isn’t working, either.
“The Icelandic krona is continuing its slide against a basket of currencies midweek as the bankruptcy of a budget airline has triggered a recession, prompting the central bank to spring into action. The latest financial crisis comes roughly a decade since the island nation was on the brink of insolvency following the collapse of several major banks that contributed to the global catastrophe.”
https://www.earnforex.com/news/2019/05/22/icelandic-krona-crashes-as-wow-air-bankruptcy-triggers-recession/
We don’t need more countries in financial crisis!
“Japanese manufacturing activity swung back into contraction in May as export orders fell at the fastest pace in four months, highlighting why policy makers and investors remain anxious about the growing economic impact of a bruising Sino-U.S. trade war…”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-economy-pmi/japan-may-flash-pmi-snaps-back-into-contraction-as-sino-us-trade-war-escalates-idUSKCN1ST02B
“Euro zone business growth accelerated a touch this month but not as much as expected, bogged down by a deepening contraction in the bloc’s manufacturing industry which is increasingly affecting service firms, a survey showed.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eurozone-economy-pmi/euro-zone-may-business-growth-weaker-than-expected-pmi-idUSKCN1ST0RG
“German business confidence in May was the weakest in more than four years amid an escalation of global trade tensions that are weighing heavily on the economy. The drop in the Ifo index was bigger than forecast and takes the closely-watched gauge to its lowest since November 2014.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-23/german-economy-emerges-from-stagnation-as-consumers-step-up
“Faced with less demand from customers and a flareup in U.S.-China trade tensions, American businesses grew in May at the slowest pace since before President Trump was elected, a pair of new surveys show.
“An IHS Markit “flash” survey of U.S. manufacturers fell to a nine-and-a-half year low of 50.6 this month from 52.6 in April. Manufacturing conditions have been soft for months.
“Even more ominous, the firm’s survey of U.S. service-oriented companies such as banks and retailers slipped to a 39-month low of 50.8 from 52.7. Service companies employ about four-fifths of all U.S. workers. Until recently they’ve been expanding rapidly.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-firms-grow-at-slowest-pace-since-before-trump-election-amid-china-trade-tensions-ihs-markit-survey-finds-2019-05-23
“Oil plunges 5% as US-China trade dispute heats up.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/23/oil-market-middle-east-tensions-opec-supply-cuts-in-focus.html
“Enforcing whatever the two countries [China and the US] agree to with respect to Intellectual Property Right protections was always going to be the most difficult part of the trade negotiations. There are no easy ways to accomplish this goal without substantially changing behavior, but the U.S. seems to have chosen a path that is unlikely to work…
“…the negotiators on both sides are truly between a rock and a hard place.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackperkowski/2019/05/23/the-u-s-china-trade-war-enters-uncharted-waters/#44da4c20122f
“Panasonic has joined the growing list of companies to sever ties with Huawei by announcing that it will stop supplying some components to the Chinese technology conglomerate after a US ban over security concerns. The decision by the Japanese firm on Thursday sent Asia Pacific shares falling again…”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/23/huawei-markets-slide-as-panasonic-joins-list-of-firms-cut-ties
“Recent trade war escalation showed how sensitive to adverse events Chinese companies are… debt in China has enormously grown and we are concerned that over time China may not be able to deal with it, which will result in an extreme downturn. Such a situation will strongly affect the whole world because China’s share in global GDP is significant.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4265826-china-crushed-debt
“The world’s second-largest economy was already slowing before the US-China trade conflict erupted. DW explores how different sectors of the Chinese economy are affected, and how tariffs could exacerbate the slump.”
https://www.dw.com/en/chinas-slowdown-how-its-being-felt-across-the-country/g-48818080
This starts out with saying China’s private passenger auto sales for the first 4 months are down by 21% compared to a year ago. This is utterly amazing, and terrible. Also:
and
and
That stat re car sales is mind-boggling. Thought this was an interesting development, too:
“Chinese regulators are preparing to open up trading of bond futures to domestic banks, as the government seeks to increase hedging tools…”
https://www.ft.com/content/f888af02-7c88-11e9-81d2-f785092ab560
I am sure that nothing could go wrong!
I found a more reliable source of automobile sales. It says that China’s private passenger auto sales are down by a little under 15% year to date. That is bad, but not nearly as terrible as -21%.
We should be careful about relying on secondary sources. They may not be right.
Don’t expect it to be felt by American Families!!!! Sure…..
Most smartphones, tablet computers and other electronics are assembled in China. But Chinese manufacturers typically use U.S., Japanese or Taiwanese microchips and other components.
The United States has squeezed Chinese companies by threatening to shut off supplies of those key components. The Trump administration issued an order last week that will curb or end Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies Ltd.’s access to American chips and to Alphabet’s GOOGL, +0.12% GOOG, -0.99% Google, which provides the Android operating system and services for Huawei smartphones.
A similar export ban almost put the Chinese telecom firm ZTE Corp. 763, -5.73% out of business last year. The U.S. charged that the company had violated sanctions by selling equipment to Iran and North Korea. Eventually, ZTE escaped the export ban by agreeing to pay a $1 billion fine and to replace its management team.
In Washington, members of the House Financial Services Committee pressed Mnuchin on Wednesday on the costs of the trade war with China. Mnuchin said he’d spoken to Walmart and other firms about how to limit the effect of higher tariffs on American consumers. “I don’t expect there will be significant costs on American families,” he said.
This may just be the Black Swan event we’ve all been looking for!
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trade-standoff-between-us-china-may-be-settling-in-for-the-long-run-2019-05-22?siteid=yhoof2&yptr=yahoo
There are an awfully lot of interdependencies!
Lets be honest here…
If China wasn’t the cheapest source of near slave labor for the past twenty years would anyone really want to do business with them?
It baffles me that America – Land of the Free blah blah – would want anything to do with the human rights violating totalitarian communist one party nightmare squatting on China like Jabba the Hutt. It makes zero sense. A match made in hell.
Export manufacturing and jobs to your major rival. Yeah… that really makes sense in clown world. But you have less pollution under your noses and feel all proud about it. Yay! Winning!
Now China is being made to look like a bunch of chumps. They had it coming. Manufacturing can be set up anywhere relatively quickly. Look at the Tesla factory. Yeah, how did that work out for you Elon?
Many voices say Africa is the future of the world. I know they mean that Africa will be next in the development schedule once the chains are removed. But I’m seeing a different interpretation unfolding. One that involves machetes. Lots of machetes…
https://www.machetespecialists.com/buying-guide/best-machetes/
You need cheap energy for manufacturing, not just low-cost labor. Part of the problem is finding enough cheap energy to do this. The other part of the problem is financing. Most would-be investments are not very profitable. Interest rates have been driven lower and lower. The amount of debt has become overwhelmingly high. Past investments are not paying back well enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_in_South_Africa
Cheap energy. Cheap labor.
They are still having problems with the electricity being too expensive, however.
Details. Details. /s
Hydrogen made from water by electrolysis powered by wind, solar and cheap electricity would be practical for running heavy trucks on Hydrogen Highways. Maybe too little, too late.
Hydrogen won’t work, for lots of reasons. If you’re going to use electricity to make it, why not just use the electricity, instead? Hydrogen is also a difficult energy carrier, and is explosive. Ammonia (from nitrogen) would be less explosive, but it’s dangerous, as well. These ideas come up with energy resources in remote regions, like tropical seas for OTEC electrical production, needing an energy carrier to get the produced energy to markets.
Exactly.
Meanwhile… in La La Land…
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/05/tusimple-testing-self-driving-trucks-for-us-postal-service.html
Note the discussion is all about refueling which is obviously not the issue. People tend to go off on tangents looking for problems where they don’t exist.
Take all transportation. Most of it runs on oil. Chip away at the largest segment of vehicles by making them electric. Now you have a few sectors left that can make do with the remaining oil. Some shorter range commercial vehicles can be electrified next and so on.
Mention evs and people tend to jump to the other extreme. How will Rio Tinto mining trucks and other heavy machinery run on batteries? How will airplanes be electric? etc etc instead of looking at the vast majority segment that is personal transportation.
If things go as predicted… then we won’t have large commuter traffic problems anyway. Unemployed people tend to stay at home and walk places. They don’t buy stuff. And that shuts down more and more areas of industry as companies go bankrupt.
Problem solved.
the critical factor about oil, is that we get it relatively cheap because of the vast quantities we all use
if usage dropped, till it was only used for specialised applications, then the cost would rise so much that no one would be able to afford it
Different to a wood, say, where the trees are still there if you decide to cut down only 5 a year instead of 50, and may even expand in area. They just carry on growing within the natural cycle – although proper management would still be necessary to get the best growth and extend the lives of the trees.
Cut back too far in energy consumption, on the other hand, and the whole complex structure of extraction, processing and supply ceases to function economically, whether fossil fuels or hi-tech pseudo- ‘renewables’.
Eventually, mankind if existing at all, must return to a biomass culture, bound by natural cycles.
Speaking of trees, this is a depressing vignette of life in the UK of 2019, Xabier:
“Tens of thousands of trees planted to mitigate the environmental impact of the High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) route have died following the UK’s 2018 summer drought. More than one-third of saplings planted in 2017-18 had to be replaced a year later, bosses admitted, as they said putting in new plants was cheaper than keeping the old ones alive.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/hs2-trees-dead-drought-water-woodland-environment-a8925501.html
I wonder how many more times they will need to be replaced.
Also, are the high speed-trains living up to their projected benefit? They seem like a big boondoggle to me. They depend on large number of people willing to pay pretty high prices to get from one place to another quickly. If people are poor, slow and cheap is a better option. I can’t imagine that high speed trains are easily repairable, either, without parts from around the world.
Gail, exactly!
My experience with high speed trains leads me to believe they are a huge waste of money, resources and time.
They are always rolled out to great fanfare. But unless there are vast distances between hubs they can never really reach the advertised speeds. And if the routes include several stopping points then it’s even worse.
The solution was to run a regular train without stops say once or twice a day and the rest of the day trains that stop at every station on route.
Maybe in the US it would make sense with such huge distances but people got used to planes and that was that.
The sheer scale of infrastructure remodelling that has to be done to scale mountains and valleys is mind boggling since the trains need to follow a relatively straight line.
Barcelona ran into so many problems because they wanted the new line to run right into the city causing structural problems with local architecture. And all for what?
The money would be better directed to building out new dc power lines where necessary and plenty of energy storage modules.
Yes but the price of oil has not gone up. It has remianed in the goldilocks zone and will do so until something breaks.
Gail has mentioned very often here how price does not behave as expected when you reach limits.
Lets say you have a billion barrels of oil in reserves and most of that was going to be burned in vehicles. But now you’ve switched to electric. The remaining barrels of oil are still there ready to be used for all other purposes. Does the price go up? Or do we make sure that that oil is still affordable for the remaining uses. What’s the storage time for oil and how costly is it to store surplus?
I don’t think the same rules apply equally for each separate industry. Semiconductors probably become unaffordable if custom made per use but other things not so much.
Now if one of the pillars holding up all other activities were to crumble and couldn’t be quickly replaced….
Any news medium you read or watch, any good blogs you read, all financial press; and worse still, the physical world you see around you, all just confirm one simple thing: there are really no solutions left; the collapse has already begun, and this is what it looks like in its early stages.
What’s starting to amaze me is the speed at which this realisation is beginning to dawn on the average individual. Just 10 years ago very few people were willing to entertain notions of an impending collapse, or of man made climate change, and predictions of doom were brushed aside.
Not so much anymore. The penny is dropping, but not yet the realisation that we can do nothing to prevent it. By the time that realisation dawns, I think we’re going to be in very deep trouble.
At one time it looked like we could get to 2050 before things really went down the slope, but now everything looks much closer. It’s looking a lot to me that 2030 is the new 2050.
This US election is quite fascinating. Few, if any, platforms of the candidates make much sense, or are not riddled with contradictions. It’s amazing that they seem quite unable to grok this, but again it could make sense if you accept that we are railing against the collapse, but still in denial of what is happening to us.
we all remain convinced that it will happen to someone else first, somehow leaving more for those left—or something like that
but you are quite correct about the speed at which it is happening
A game of musical chairs?
A Game of Thrones?
A game of Russian Roulette with blindfolds on?
All bets are off?
This is where things get interesting. Let the Games begin!
It was said we can’t collapse next monday because we have to know who wins the throne game first.
Now we know.
I actually think that’s why this last season was hurried up a bit. Creepy.
Donald Trump has filed bankruptcy 6 times, and stuck bond/stock holders for almost 1.5 billion dollars. In the process, he got very wealthy. He’s a con artist, and I don’t need his business advice.
He cheats on his wives, and makes me sick with his gigantic ego and narcissism. He may be $$ rich, but he’s morally bankrupt in my opinion.
Whom of all the Presidents’ isn’t a w.a.r criminal/morally bankrupt?
Isn’t it a prerequisite?
Lastcall- Sadly, it appears so.
“After all, it’s just physics – maybe there’s a merciful butterfly somewhere that is just about now flapping its wings.”
Trump is in a class by himself—- but we may need a psychopathic 6 times bankrupt scammer as president– seems like the perfect position.
Late stage capitalism was never going to be fun.
So what?
He’s just a puppet. Like all presidents of corporations.
The central bankers are the biggest frauds and con artists of all time. But I don’t hear you whining about them.
Obama bombed people, Bill and Hillary bombed people, the Bushes bombed people. All with tax payer money. Blood on hands. All for resources and central banks.
But I don’t hear you whining about them.
But the Don has an irksome personality that rubs certain people the wrong way. And they go crazy over it.
Gimme a break.
my his own admission, the don has more than an irksome personality.
Having to settle $25m lawsuit before taking office is more than irksome.
his behaviour is childlike, to be generous
his intention, at best, is to loot the country while he can
at worst to take power and become dictator with theocratic overlay with his jesusfreak buddies if the opportunity (economic collapse) presents itself.
He openly supports extreme right wing behaviour (its all on video record.
He is obviously in a state of mental deterioration. (more than most politicians)
Pence sees his opportunity to take over and put god in the WH
pompeo is waiting to be raptured
You’ve bought into a lot of guardian and bbc propaganda just like most people on the left. It’s quite sad really. You’re all victims of a very clever mind job and you’ve all lost your minds and mope about like victims.
Please, for your own sake, get over it and move on.
I do agree about the religious aspect rising. Tens of millions of christian zionists in the US are also being played for the benefit of Israel and their middle east plans.
Trump is just another compromised asset doing the bidding of these agencies. Try to understand how people like Trump and even Pompeo, Pence, and Bolton etc etc are just following orders. The conflict between left and right is a sham set up to fool people like you.
There is only top and bottom. A hierachy. Look up and see where the money flows and who runs things and sets the rules. It ain’t Trump. Or Xi. Or Putin. They are 100% expendable if you are a central banker. Plenty more eager puppets where they come from.
There is a narrative in play whether you choose to believe it or not. Secret societies run the world. Some of them want to rule the world. Some of them want to destroy it. Some of them are setting the scene for the Return of the King and rebuilding of the Temple if you get my drift.
You can call them crazy but they’re certainly not slackers.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-20/xi-sends-trump-message-rare-earth-export-ban-coming
Would an interruption like this interfere with the new green utopia of 5G, EV, and spook the Tech bubble supporting the stock market?
I see Tesla is struggling, and I have always seen its demise as a ‘The Empe.ror has no Clothes’ moment for the ‘tech will solve it /save us’ myth.
Lets face it, we are well into cutting the nose to spite the face territory.
At what point do governments and central banks stop propping up the blatant attempts at hopium such as Tesla? Would Space X be next?
What about Jeff bezos’s hopium projects? What about china’s goals? Will there be an uprising in China possibly after a downturn to kick the one party to the kerb? And will it really make any difference in the end if things are winding down anyway?
https://phys.org/news/2019-04-alternatives-ease-demand-scarce-rare-earth.html
Rare earth minerals may not be as vital if things were able to continue to the point where materials science moves on to pastures new.
But all these proposals take time (decades) and continuous breakthroughs under stable conditions where labs and flow of funds are generous.
The whole world is working on better batteries, solid state batteries, cheap mass produced graphene and other wonder materials, genetic engineering that wipes out disease and continues to improve food production even in the worst environments, new methods of desalination and on and on.
Population would be relatively easy to manage with continuing improvements in quality of life. The problem is the banking system which was set up specifically to parasitically suck all wealth to the top of the pyramid. It’s designed that way. It could be designed a different way that favors the general public and not the top 0.01%.
So either that happens or the elite continue to get away with building a breakaway civilisation. Which again, probably breaks down because of economies of scale breaking down.
If the world could function with a minimum level of everything then that would help. I have used the cheapest chinese smartphone for years and not needed an upgrade in that time. If social status did not exist in human culture – problem solved. But it does. And so does fractional reserve banking and piling on debt to the sky in a tower of babel until the foundations crumble and we hear much waliling and gnashing of teeth.
I sense that we are close now to a turning point. It may be possible to break up resource management and manufacturing into regions. A kind of winding down to soften the blow. But again, this is like trying to peddle backwards on a bicycle.
By the way… tech has always saved our bacon and allowed us to continue this escapade for thousands of years. I don’t understand why so many here have such a revulsion to this concept. Are you all luddites and technophobes? Do you not enjoy using your laptop? Or a shovel? Or a cooker? Or a pair of glasses? Or trousers?
I really don’t understand.
Greater technology seems to lead to greater wage disparity, including more people replaced by machines. From an overall systems point of view, it tends to bring the system down. In fact, we seem to already be struggling with this issue.
Oh absolutely! The system is breaking apart at the seams. I can’t keep up with tech. I don’t know how anyone can. We’re moving closer to the dystopian reality outlined in novels a hundred years ago.
Very young people have not experienced the world that we grew up in where we had time to think or get bored. I mean there was tv but it was limited. Now babies have a smartphone shoved in their hands from day one, games consoles, laptops etc. They very rarely get time away from screens and can’t wait to get back to them as soon as possible. Studies show that brains don’t develop fully with all the screen time.
I honestly think the machines are being trained to replace most humans. The useless eaters will be discarded and die out.
Successful marriage of technology progress and human society would eventually produce social structures resembling of UBI, however it did not happen. So people are either still too imprinted with the atavistic animal social order-pecking genetic drive force or the technology progress due to the resource extraction treadmill was merely a short bumpy road, now likely near its conclusion. By the way the early social critics-communist theorist scholars meant it when they categorically stated their utopia must firstly take place in the most advanced hubs of the IC.. not on periphery..
Again, it did not happen, at best in the richest parts of the world we got only the perverted caste based quasi UBI, for example if you soldier on for ~two decades as pro warrior, politician, sport entertainer, or foster mother for immigrants you can retire youngish and then pursue whatever to your liking and interests next..
If you with UBI mean money för nothing we have had it for 50 years.
But it will never be more than scraps. And soon you wont be able to live on scraps.
I think it was on a video someone posted here where a speaker explained how food or energy could suddenly be ten times more expensive.
That would certainly put a dent in the lives of the bottom 90%.
America has a huge welfare state and hands out food stamps to people with jobs.
I see a lot more homeless people crapping on the streets in the future. Hope there’s enough Fentanyl to go around.
Except you are describing the problem in the same backward way as everyone else.
Energy consumption is buried in everything you pay for–your internet service, your taxes, your car payments, you name it. It is also a big part of the ability of your employer to give you a job.
Without enough energy, jobs tend to disappear, especially good paying jobs. It isn’t the fact that the prices of food and energy prices rise; it is the fact that you have virtually nothing to spend on anything, whether it is internet service, or food, or car payments.
Prices of virtually everything actually fall too low, driving many companies out of business. Or fixed costs become to great as businesses need to shrink. There will be a few people with high paying jobs who still are able to buy everything. This will make other people very unhappy. It is the wage disparity problem that brings down the economy.
It was the speaker who said that.
I kind of understand your version of things even though most of us are not used to thinking that way.
There are a whole lot of weak points in the system, aren’t there?
this unholy muddle over energy misinformation is partly cleared up by Gail, which is good. Here in Australia we [apparently] are supposed to have the cheapest natural gas supplies but the total[?] production is being exported and somehow we now pay a high price for our domestic consumption [4x the price in the USA]. I don’t know whether it is political incompetence or wilful dealing that is behind this discrepancy. Any thoughts?
This is completely normal in today’s world though..
For example, large part of Europe is subsidizing German intermittent ‘renewables’ through elevated domestic energy pricing (curiously as exporters with industries already paid for), prices which are set by mandarins on trading parlors and more likely in the backstage in the Brussels nexus, global bankers – CBs, not mentioning domestic oligarchs having hand in the pot as well and so on.
Not meant this to be disrespectful but your Australian case simply shows similar signs of yet another example of forced vassalage imposed by guys just playing in the bigger league of their own.
Yes, played for suckers is extremely likely. It’s happened often enough when dealing with the USA.
Residential customers have picked up more than their share of the subsidy, however.
The gas that is currently being extracted is high-cost-to-extract gas. Shipping it as LNG adds further to the high costs. If cheap-to-extract gas had been available, Australia would have extracted it.
US gets natural gas two ways:
(1) As a (mostly unwanted) byproduct of oil production.
(2) By drilling for natural gas, specifically.
The only way the United States gets by with the current low prices is through the low prices through the unwanted byproduct route. The natural gas only producers have very poor debt ratings. One report I read said that they could not expect any improvement in their bond ratings until prices rise. All of the talk about exporting US natural gas seems to me to be an effort to try to get natural gas prices up higher. The crazy way of pricing other types of electricity when intermittent wind and solar are added to the grid contribute to natural gas’s chronic low-priced problems in the US.
Prices that are too low for producers are chronic around the world, because buyers cannot afford high-priced energy products. Australia is dealing with its own version of this.
If I were Australia, I would stick with electricity from coal.
Would third World War solve anything, then? If so, who should it be with?
The question is whether such a war could avoid killing everyone off. Even a cold war may have the effect of killing everyone off. Or network sabotage.
Regarding who is at war with whom, right now it is the United States versus China. These are the two big powers and there are not enough resources to go around.
And dear old Russia is sitting quietly on the sidelines… watching everything like a hawk…
Hello and thank you for the new write up. Gail stresses that young people aren’t doing well…
This comfirns it..
The underemployment rate for recent college graduates is higher today than it was in the early 2000s. More people are working in jobs they’re overqualified for in order to make ends meet, taking jobs that don’t require a college degree. That’s despite a decade of low unemployment and economic growth and stock market highs.
As of March, the underemployment rate for workers aged 22 to 27 stands at 41.3%, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
More people who are entering the labor force today have a college degree compared to those who did back in the 1990s, making it harder for workers to distinguish themselves simply by having one.
“That’s becoming the baseline,” says Chamberlain. “That’s part of the reason why we’re seeing this higher [underemployment] rate.”
Colleges have also been slow to match the skills employers want as every field becomes more technical, says Chamberlain. In order to overcome the challenge of transitioning from school to a well-paying white-collar job, young graduates are compelled to start out underemployed.
“That’s often the way careers go for young people,” says Chamberlain. “You just do anything to get in the door, and then once you’re inside you have a chance to informally network and find your real job inside the company.”
With about one million people defaulting on student loans for the first time each year, being underemployed carries real risks for workers if they’re not earning enough to make their monthly payments. “Student loan defaults are almost always caused by people…not being able to get a decent-paying job after school,” Chamberlain says. “Being underemployed would be one of those reasons.”
From Yahoo News
The problem is that the skills needed are changing rapidly. In the good old days, a person could have any old degree, and businesses would train you. If you go back far enough, a high school diploma was enough.
Now, the expectation is that the young person will pay for the new skill. Of course, these skills keep changing, making a constant treadmill. The young person isn’t earning enough to begin with. Expecting the young person to keep getting retrained is ridiculous. It requires expending more of the person’s energy than the benefit he/she gets back!
Gail, thanks for the article, and the willingness-openness to discuss concepts such as partial collapse and shrinkage, irrespective of how short lasting these mere stages might eventually materialize during deeper collapse scenario.
I see figure two as telling. China has passed the US in energy consumption by a significant margin. China is now an enemy in a finite world.
You are right about Figure 2. China is way ahead by a big margin. The world economy needs China to keep growing, if the world economy is to grow. But with China’s coal problem, it is hard for China to really keep up growth. There have been some cutbacks that haven’t been too obvious to the rest of the world so far, but it is likely to have to get worse.
China cut back on its recycling business in a big way at the beginning of 2017. (In fact, India has cut back as well, and there is some sort of wider agreement to require Advanced Economies to get permission from Emerging Market Economies before dumping material to be recycled at their doorstep.)
China is reported to have cut back on its use of cement. This, of course, is used in building buildings and roads. We saw some reports of very shoddy construction recently.
Also, China seems to have been a big exporter of urea made with coal, and has cut back on that.
We know that China cut back on the amount of solar it would install in 2018. That is the reason the world solar installation amount is flat. There were at least some stories saying that the reason China was installing so much solar was because China had overproduced. Allegedly, the government was trying to help companies out by buying what they couldn’t sell abroad. One public official was fired for graft over this issue, according to one story.
Gail
Your overall argument seems very strong.
Just a thought about electricity, especially where generation, even China’s small slice, is buffered by hydro. Two thirds to half of all that coal (China) is dissipated as ‘waste’ heat at the power stations, whereas renewable electricity has relatively little loss. China has been able to afford new UHVDC long distance connectors (low losses) to both feed and stabilise the regional AC grids. Of course electricity is costly when it is used to produce local heat, but for machinery electric motor-energy efficiency is much better than that of a diesel drive. Admittedly if batteries are needed, then overall efficiency drops significantly, but cable-linked drive, for example, trains, trams, trolleys make better use of the energy than if they are driven by ICE motors, or batteries. My point is that the graph possibly underrates the value of renewable electricity. That big chunk of hydro confers (will confer) an efficiency on the intemittent sources?
A further thought, China (and Russia) seem to be able to afford nuclear power and to now export the technology. The ‘equations’ may work better in China. It does not seem clear yet whether America can afford shale light-tight oil, even when mixed with heavy oil from Canada and Venezuela. The EU? Prosperity has been very unevenly spread these last decades and ‘growth’ has ceased to ‘raise all boats’, and Germany looks as though it will not afford its renewables ‘Energiewende’. The balance of advantage globally looks set to shift, as you suggest.
best
Phil
The data I am using in the graphs I show are from BP. Both BP and EIA “gross up” the electricity from wind and solar, so that their value is given as the amount of fossil fuel energy that would have been needed to be burned to produce that much electricity. So I wouldn’t worry about my figures being too low. (IEA uses the other approach however. It makes life confusing.)
I think that there was graft involved in the big Chinese installation of solar. I am not sure I could find the article(s) now, but the allegations were that China overproduced solar, and at least one public official took bribes to install the non-salable solar in China. This official was supposedly fired.
With respect to heat in China, they have been big users of co-generation. The Chinese would put coal-fired power plants in the middle of cities, and pipe the waste heat to homes and businesses. There would be set start dates and cutoff dates. (I know when I was there, the cut-off date was March 15. If you were using co-generated heat, you didn’t have a lot of control over the quantity. The classroom I taught in went from too hot to too cold literally overnight.)
From what I can figure out, China has been trying to cut back on the cogeneration to try to help with the smog problem. The substitute is building electric power plants at a distance, running cables to the city, and having the people heat their homes with heat pumps. This sounds like a great solution, but it is very much more expensive for families because the prior cost was close to zero. It was waste heat. Now it has to be generated. Efficient, but not in comparison to the prior approach.
Gail
I did not know that about BP and EIA data!
Thanks.
Do you have a link for the way they do this?
The required multiplication factor varies from country to country and on the particular preponderance of primary energy source – NG for example with more efficient generation averages about 50% of the energy coming out as electricity, whereas for coal it can be as little as 25 – 30%?
The use of district heating (DH) schemes piping the waste heat has been advocated in parts of Europe where it has historically been neglected. The old Soviet-style apartments had it of course – with lttle or no user-control.
I have seen advocacy for DH schemes to be connected to large heat-pumps drawing on deep bore-holes cutting down total capital costs, The idea is to reduce costs by adapting legacy DH structures as well as integrating with new-build at relatively small initial cost. This depends very much on the kind of city you live in!
I still maintain my point that fundamental advantage and disadvantage will play out differently in different places. I have been amazed at what China has been able to afford over such a short time, a lot of it apparently very inefficient; whole under-used cities have been quoted.
China has a large emerging internal market with a population 4 to 5 times the size of the USA, and ‘economies of scale’ can still reduce unit-costs, even ‘energy-costs’ per unit. The ability, however, for a large firm to expand into other markets that can afford its product, which it can make in vast bulk, has been at least until recently a profitable strategy. We will see what happens to Huawei for example if they get seriously hemmed in! (A Trump strategy). And life gets strange in connected markets – here in GB for instance https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/may/05/the-huawei-incident-points-to-a-deeper-lesson-for-great-britain
best
Phil
The way BP and EIA counts electricity, as well as the way IEA counts electricity, is something I have worked out from various reports, by comparing amounts to converted amounts. The EIA shows its calculation and conversion factors. BP gives enough information so that a person can back into them. IEA’s approach varies with the type of electricity but, again, this is something a person figures out from its reports. I have heard talks about the issue, and have needed to make adjustments to make one report comparable to another for a very long time.
By the way, the practice of throwing away the waste heat after electricity generation is something we in the US have used in the US for years, but it is not the practice that has been used in China. As I mentioned before, they have been using cogeneration, so they actually use the waste heat for other purposes. (This is sort of a “communist” approach, which we in the West tend not to use. Sweden uses it to some extent. It is a very efficient approach.)
Clearly, if a country wants to be as efficient as possible, cogeneration is the way to go. The multiplier factor that EIA and BP use make reasonable sense in the US, if a person thinks wind and solar really replace electricity. I believe that without battery backup, intermittent wind and solar only replace fuel. Thus, the multiplier overstates the benefit in the West.
When we go to China, we have a different situation. There, the waste heat (at least historically) has been used for heating homes and businesses, rather than being thrown away. The new intermittent generation only replaces the fuel that would be used to create this generation. The multiplier used by BP and EIA greatly overstate the benefit of wind and solar in China. In fact, without the multiplier, the comparison would already be high. All that happens is that the coal fired power plants need to be run for fewer hours per year. They still need the same staffing. They need to be ramped up and down more often, so that parts wear out more quickly. It is only a savings in coal that takes place. More electrical transmission is needed. It is this comparison that makes wind and solar look like a waste of time and money (except as an export industry for China).
The article you linked to reminded me of the huge cutback in manufacturing that took place when interest rates were raised in the UK as well as the US (and elsewhere) in the 1980-1981 era.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/3-month-and-10-year-interest-rates-through-march-27-2019-1.png
It was this run-up in interest rates that made new investments and purchases so expensive. It pushed down quite a few industries around the world, including, as the article mentions, those in the UK. Japanese autos were helped, because they were smaller and more fuel efficient. Nuclear power plants were helped (especially when they were cheaply constructed). With the changes around the world, the high interest rates pushed down oil consumption and oil prices. It is my belief that the resulting lower oil prices ultimately led to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991, because it was an oil exporter hurt by low oil prices.
Countries with other, cheaper fuels have been able to ramp up industries using those fuels. The UK had oil and natural gas exports for a time, but now is without them. It has only been able to ramp up services. The financial services industry is based on the view that growth can continue forever. Energy extraction can continue to grow forever. It is based on false promises. But until it collapses, which is likely very close to the time of the overall collapse, it can make money on false promises.
i don’t think the don is bright enough to work out all this stuff—unless he’s an OFW lurker of course—always a possibility
others may be advising him though
certainly taking out Iran from the oil market jacks up the revenue for his buddies
he certainly seems to be convinced that infinite growth is possible, and his actions prove he cares nothing for what might happen to people in general as a result of his actions
he is also convinced that the USA is self-sufficient in every respect
like many others, he remains convinced that money will proof him personally against all misfortune.
The founding fathers wrote in a brilliant set of checks and balances, they could never have foreseen
a—resources reaching a finite limit + 7.5bn pop.
b— a sociopath as POTUS at the same time.
c religion overwhelming common sense and scientific reality
Remove “a” from the equation, and b & c don’t matter.
Factor in collapsing resources/infrastrucure, and B and c become critical
What if religion achieves the desired outcome by accident?
I don’t personally advocate for this method but rabid head-chopping can reduce the population considerably and the cost of machetes is fairly reasonable compared to other methods of population reduction.
The universe has never cared about common sense or anthropocentric concerns, only scientific reality.
Humans developing strong imaginations and mythmaking skills leading to modern day religions deciding our collective future are just as much a part of scientific reality as reptiles performing ritualistic dances for each other.
Embrace the madness Norman!
The more mad you are, the better everything gets. Trust me!
Actually, “scientific” models have become today’s new religion. People think that they have found the truth when they put together a model based on what little they understand of a process. This is a nice way of creating myths to base your religion on.
Thank you! Thank you, Gail! I’ve been saying this for the past 20 years, but everyone I say it to looks at me as if I need to be put in a straight jacket and given an enema. Its such a relief to know that somebody else understands. 🙂
I ran across this today. It seems to be closely related.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/definition-logic_cup.jpg
Agreed!
Computer models predicting what will happen in a hundred years time requires a leap of faith that I’m not prepared to make!
but would anyone notice?
Notice what?
The head-chopping?
Or that you’ve gone mad?
Norman, you may very well think you can see inside Trump’s head, and your diagnoses may be correct. But to his base…
https://i.imgflip.com/2yojrh.jpg
the don always falls back on the sanity clause
everybody knows that
On the other hand, Norman, as a Brit, I absolutely wince when I see these barnstorming rallies—beginning with the opening music. But you’ve got to admit the Don performs brilliantly at these events—better even than Reagan. It’s standup comedy, self parody and rallying the troops all rolled into one.
https://youtu.be/GGigXmUIgro
And yet when the economic collapse comes along Tim, you’ll be right there with them, as it is in your interests to do so.
Very true, Frank. I can see why these people are such enthusiastic supporters of Trump and I don’t blame them for it. A generation of politicians sold out American workers on the altar of globalism, remember?—that rising tide that lifts all boats. They’ve been left on the beach as the economic tide has gone out, taking their prosperity and their self confidence with it. Most of them are not expecting miracles, but they are hoping against hope for a change of direction that finally benefits them and their communities and puts the breaks on that downward slide so many of them have grown accustomed to.
This article has my thinking going in multiple directions. The basic message seems to be that any sort of change from previous policy is constructive for those countries that can keep going. I agree that Trump likely has no idea that his policies have the implications posited in the article. Parts of the world will lose early, others later.
Very sad that this is the route we are taking. It will cause enormous suffering.
There are a lot of things we don’t understand. Historically, there have been a very large number of collapses that affected some part of the world. Economies were not as interconnected as they are today, so a collapse mostly let other areas expand. They also allowed soil in an area to rest, if it had had its nutrients depleted. More jobs were available for a new generation, after epidemics led to the death of a lot of older workers. Recently, the biggest collapse we have had has been the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to reduce the pressure on energy prices, essentially until China joined the WTO in 2001.
With our highly complex economy, it is not clear to me that there really can be economies that are survivors. For example, there is too much dependence on computers today, and these require very complex supply lines from around the world.
We know that the tendency of economies is to self-organize to dissipate as much energy as possible. How this will happen in the future is not clear. Maybe there are some parts that can continue to operate in a reasonable manner. We are fighting against micro-organisms as much as anything else. Dense urban populations seem like they would be problematic, especially if sanitation cannot be maintained. There are many of these issue that perhaps need to be considered.
https://www.semiconductors.org/global-semiconductor-sales-down-15-5-percent-in-first-quarter-of-2019/
Do you think that the chinese (fake) economy will collapse soon under the pressure of a weak global economy (fairytale castles in the air)?
Micro-organisms are killing the citrus trees around here to the point where they are no longer sold in the garden centres. Some kind of fungus causing curled leaves with raised bumps and white patches on the wood.
Whenever heavy fog rolls in from the sea, all the local plant life takes a hit. There’s a metallic smell in the air. I wonder if it’s sea pollution evaporating.
There are lots of different kinds of air pollution; some natural and many others that people have created or aided. I remember there was a story of a strange metallic smell wafting past the Houses of Parliament in London last autumn, and it wasn’t from Guy Fawkes Night fireworks.
Let me related a personal story. Over 30 years ago I was living in a condominium in central Osaka, where smog from road traffic was and still is a major problem. I bought a flowering plum tree and tended dotingly it in a big pot on the balcony. For three years, early each spring it put out fresh baby leaves and a few flowers, but by May or June these mostly shriveled and died, not due to drought but due to something in the air. It was miserable to see it. The tree barely clung to life and didn’t grow any larger during those three years of balcony life.
But the story has a happy ending. I moved to the countryside far from the urban smog and several miles from the nearest main road, and planted this tree in the back garden. It immediately began growing at a brisk pace and these days is three times my height, provides a beautiful display of off-white blossom every March, hundreds of little plums about now, and ample summer shade for the plantain lillies. The only problem is I have to prune the thing every year to stop it growing into a monster.
The Greys are terraforming the planet to suit their needs. It’s not fungus. It’s nanotech terraforming dust. Soon planet earth will look like the Greys home planet and they’ll be sipping pina coladas by the pool and giving each other high fives on a job well done.
We had our chance… but in the end we were just too dumb to realise what was really going on.
Good to hear that your tree is doing well.
Another fascinating article, Gail.
Huawei is taking a beating in the news today:
“In the latest event in the quickly moving saga that is Huawei’s technology export blacklisting by the United States Government, the BBC has published a report this morning claiming that IP vendor Arm has “suspend business” with Huawei and its subsidiaries. If this is correct, then it would represent a massive setback for Huawei’s hardware development efforts, as the company and its HiSilicon chip design subsidiary rely heavily on Arm’s IP for its products.”
https://www.anandtech.com/show/14373/report-arm-suspends-business-with-huawei
“The BT-owned mobile operator EE will turn on the UK’s first 5G network on 30 May in six cities, but has dropped Huawei phones from its launch plans. Britain’s largest mobile phone network said it would switch on 5G initially in London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, Belfast, Birmingham and Manchester.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/22/ee-drops-huawei-phones-from-5g-network-launch-lineup
And insufficient commodity prices plus competition from China have just killed off British Steel:
“British Steel has been placed into compulsory liquidation, putting up to 25,000 jobs at risk.
“The insolvency process, first revealed by Sky’s City editor Mark Kleinman, followed a failure by British Steel’s owners, Greybull Capital, to secure additional funding from the government.”
https://news.sky.com/story/british-steel-insolvency-plan-places-thousands-of-jobs-at-risk-11726024
And the wage disparity problem hurting demand for cars in the US (and indeed globally):
“The US auto industry has announced 19,802 in workforce reductions this year through April.
“That’s more than triple — up 207% — than the 6,451 jobs cuts announced during the same time last year, and the most for the first four months of a year since 101,036 cuts were announced through April of 2009, according to data provided by Challenger, Gray & Christmas.”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/auto-industry-cutting-jobs-at-the-fastest-pace-since-the-financial-crisis-2019-05-21
The tariff war is really part of the “inadequate energy for everyone” war. Many of the losers will be through insolvencies.
The winners (assuming there are real winners) will have low-cost energy supplies. High-cost electricity is a deal-killer when it comes to the world marketplace.
This is great news, Harry. It will certainly help to further decrease the UK’s carbon footprint.
Let joy be unconfined, Tim. 😉
The whole 5G Network strikes me as an expansion that can’t really happen. Perhaps my impression is wrong, but this change gives greater capacity and speed at higher cost. There are a few users who truly need this, but there are a lot of users that don’t need the higher cost.
We have a “tapped out” set of general customers who cannot tolerate a higher charge for a faster network. If it were free, fine, but it is not. I am sure the more dollars pays for fossil fuels and various other things. But the amount customers can afford is based on wages and on wage disparity. Unless a way is found to only charge those who truly need to 5G capcability (autonomous car owners, with their subsidized cars), I think this upgrade will never go anywhere.
The cost of the upgrade does not seem to match with what the general public can afford to pay. In a sense, internet access is a commodity. People will not pay for a high-priced commodity if they cannot afford it.
I agree and the phone companies will start having problems if people aren’t buying their upgrades. It’s likely they will stop supporting older technology to try to force people forward but will likely find people dropping out and changing to prepay and simpler contracts.
High tech can easily go beyond what people can afford. Just think of the US healthcare system!
Households today are certainly more heavily burdened with monthly bills and subscriptions and taxes than ever before.
The only trend that I think might make this switch to higher network cost possible is the ditching of other services that have been and continue to be made obsolete by the newer systems.
For example, people may drop their expensive cable subscription and a few other dedicated services in favor of a 4G or 5G package that includes all their desired services through the internet.
More and more, everything we use and pay for becomes wireless data and therefore a basic smartphone will be able to handle most requirements by tethering to bigger screens and keyboards when necessary. At least, that’s the idea.
I can see how households would reduce other expenses in favor of maintaining the latest and greatest communication technology. This has now become something seen as preferential to other activities.
With the current situation unfolding, the ideal would be for every country to roll out their own infrastructure and systems but alas, we live in a global marketplace, and I don’t think it’s possible to go back.
I am seeing 5G antenna on electric poles around town. Here 100 miles north of NYC.
I really haven’t read much about 5G at this time. From what little I have read, it looks a lot like a “build it and they will come” story, when the cost is too high for the benefit for 90% of users.
Part of the back story is that the cable manufacturing and installation industries have to keep rolling along, not to mention the concrete utility pole industry. We can’t simply close these industries down simply because we already have a large enough cable network. One solution is upgrading the world from G3, to G4 and then G5, with each new network requiring years of fruitful work.
According to the Internet… 5G is to fry our brains and testicles.
And the Internet is always right.
The other day I was thinking to myself with all of the huffs and puffs of this so called tariffs war is that if China really wants to get back at the US all China has to do is tell Apple they will have to find another mfg for their gadget toys. Then I read the same idea in a couple of tech websites.
There are already growing backlash in China with people not wanting to buy Apple products. This whole Huawei BS has little to do with security and much to do with the US realizing that it’s now on the back foot of 5G technology. If the Government wasn’t so busy spending $1 Trillion on it’s war machine maybe they could have spent money just like the Chinese government on building their high tech sector.
And really the US claims it’s about China stealing American jobs but they never admit that it’s US Corporations that have screwed over the American worker just to pad their profits. Apple is the biggest offender. So China was just there to oblige, now the US is crying foul. Too damn bad.
“The Boycott Begins: Chinese Company Orders Employees To “Stop Using American Products, Eating At KFC”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-22/stop-using-american-products-chinese-company-bans-employees-using-iphones-and
We will not doubt see more of this, I expect. Don’t expect US businesses to expand in China.
China would be hurt too, if it stops making Apple’s toys. I suppose it could happen. We will have to wait and see how this works out.
For about 20 years now I’ve been chuckling when I read on the packaging of Apple products that this PC, iPhone, keyboard, etc., is “designed in California and made in China.” I always suspected this relationship would end in tears and recriminations one day.
The way things are going, in another 20 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Chinese owned Apple and its products were made in California and designed in China.
There is another factor. We have enough uranium to last 125,000 years at least. (250,000 years by other estimates, I cut it in half.) Nuclear should have replaced coal and oil by now. But fossil fuel interests have fought nuclear since the 1950’s, starting with Rockefeller’s backing of the linear no threshold (LNT) standard for radiation. (Which has long been established to be wrong.) Standard Oil gave a $200,000 grant ($1.2 million in today’s dollars) to David Brower to start “Friends of the Earth” (FoE) which Brower used to take over the Sierra Club and reverse its stance on nuclear power. in the present day, we have Mark Z Jacobson at Stanford who has been entirely funded for his career from oil money given through a cutout non-profit.
In addition, by curating stories, and helping to instill an anti-nuclear bias in the the journalism profession, needless regulations, over-regulation, endless legal challenges, slow-walking of everything to draw out processes, and political opposition has raised the cost of nuclear power tremendously. (By the way – I wrote a book on radiation and how to treat its biological effects. All physicists I know of, and even many physicians are ignorant of what radiation does, and how it affects us.)
Germany (Energiewende) has implemented the exact program of the “Green New Deal” for almost 20 years now. That program has been trumpeted, and articles have been regularly placed breathlessly saying that solar in Germany is producing more than Germany requires. (In peak of summer, but they don’t say that.) The fossil fuel industry in Germany has shut down nuclear plants so that with all the huge subsidy of solar and wind intermittent power supplies, Germany has not cut its CO2 production over the last 15 years. With the most recent shutdown, CO2 will rise. Germany has opened new coal mines to meet demand for coal. And electrical power rates have risen 50%.
The USA, with all of its subsidies to solar and wind, has done exactly the same thing. Just like in Germany, politically, it has been the putative “liberal good guys” the Democrats, who give lip service to global warming that have shut down nuclear. As a result, there is zero decrease in CO2 production for all that money spent on renewables. Liberal legislators install “renewables” language into law, forcing the law to not allow CO2 production to be taken into account.
What I am getting at here is that fossil fuel fighting tooth and nail to keep its market share by killing nuclear power is creating the incipient crash in multiple ways. It is creating a near future economic emergency. And it is forcing the global warming machine to continue to roar forward unabated. It is lining politicians pockets with cash so they can get elected again and again. And so the machinery rumbles on into crisis.
Our problem isn’t running out of fuel, it is keeping prices high enough. Uranium has had a low-priced problem for a very long time.
Intermittent electricity and the strange pricing for intermittent electricity seems to me to be a big factor that has been driving down the prices of all types of electricity production, including nuclear. Fossil fuels are doing poorly as well, because of low prices.
A big issue with nuclear is that it cannot be a stand-alone fuel. For one thing, nuclear power plants are designed so that if they go down, they need a charge from outside to restart them. For another, the whole system of building them, dismantling them, and also building and maintaining transmission lines requires fossil fuels. So nuclear is just an add-on to fossil fuels. Fossil fuels seem to be leaving us, so nuclear may not be an option, even we could overcome other hurdles.
To be fair…
You wouldn’t need that many fossil fuels to keep the nukes online and they could be produced as a side benefit of the electricity made.
If most transportation became electric then there would be suplus oil for all the other uses. The higher cost could be subsidised to keep things going unless of course the cost became so prohibitive that all oil extraction ceased.
This is where cheap enough production of synfuels would help even the balance.
The problem remains consumers being able to afford the output of the economy. 25,000 steel industry workers in UK set to lose their jobs. How do you keep consumers in the money if they’re all unemployed? How do you keep the economy growing when the goal is to automate most jobs?
What does it take to build a nuclear plant? 5 years for the decision, 5 years for the building (and 5 years for the delays).
Nuclear now provides 4% of global energy.
What an investment to scale up nuclear to 50% or 100% or 100+% (we need growth!). And it takes about 10 years before the first plant starts paying off.
(And by investment I don’t mean printed money.)
You are right. It takes a whole lot of cement and rebar and other things to build the huge nuclear plants. Then you need to keep power supply available from outside indefinitely, so that the power plants can ramp up again, if they go down. You need to keep uranium supply available, and you need to figure out what to do with the spent fuel. You can theoretically reprocess it, but this is an energy-intensive process as well.
All of the fossil fuel supples needed to support these efforts must be taken away from other uses, such as growing food, heating homes, and building schools. The Limits to Growth model predicted that a major factor pushing the economy toward collapse was the fact that there would not be enough resources to use both for (1) all of the new resource investment (including energy, cement, iron, copper, etc.) and (2) other functions needed to sustain the still-growing world population,
I wonder what uses up more cement and rebar…
A new nuclear power plant?
Or a new tunnel for high speed rail?
Or a million bases for new wind turbines?
Or a few more ghost cities in China?
Or another record breaking hydroelectric dam?
The requirements for a nuclear power plant are puny compared to these but I guess if you need thousands of them to save the world then it kinda does throw a spanner in the works.
Would you rather we build lots more coal and gas plants using lots and lots of concrete?
Lets just wait for Keith to finish crunching numbers so we can throw up some sats and breathe a sigh of relief.
I still believe it is not a 50-year old oil company conspiracy, but problem is a large upfront investment, long time (several election cycles) until it even starts paying back, politically impopular.
And not very fun: blowing enormous amount of (other peoples) cash on a bridge, new city, olympic games, space project etc is a monument over yourself, building a nuclear plant just makes half population hate you.
Good comment.
Realistically, and taking into account the inertia from all the anti nuclear propaganda of the past hundred years, how long do you think it would take to roll out enough nukes to replace coal and oil?
Looking at the above graphs, renewables and nukes hardly make a dent in the energy mix at present. One has long been demonised and the other is being pushed as our saviour but it doesn’t really make any difference to the overall picture.
I feel that world leaders will have to reach much higher levels of emergency before any drastic measures are taken or changes in energy mix are made if even possible.
The problem I think is keeping things functional long enough for practical, rational solutions to be implemented. This doesn’t appear to be happening. Quite the opposite in fact.
This isn’t some conspiracy against nuclear perpetrated by fossil fuels. Nuclear is a fossil fuel extension. It merely adds efficiency but doesn’t replace fossil fuels. As Gail brings out nuclear can’t exist without fossil fuels. One very big problem is Natural Gas combined cycle is so cheap and efficient that nothing can compete unless heavily incentivized. As a business person where would you put your money in an industry fraught with regulations and popular dis approval or install a couple cheap gas turbines with quick pay back. Nuclears day is behind us it’s two complex and the system needs simple.
Industry should obviously go with the cheapest option taking into account the full cycle from extraction to managing waste.
Do you think natural gas could replace coal plants in the near future?
Gail has mentioned previously that the same problems would start to be experienced with natural gas if it became the primary source.
Natural gas has a low price problem (relative to what producers need) right now. The natural gas that is co-produced with oil comes almost free, but gas produced by itself (often from Eastern shale) does not. The bond ratings of gas companies are pretty poor today, and not projected to get any better unless natural gas prices go up. The exporting to other countries plan is a plan to try to create a shortage, and in that way force prices up. I wouldn’t count on it to work. The price of transporting gas is LNG to other countries makes LNG an inherently inefficient way of transporting gas. It also tends to release methane into the atmosphere, aggravating the global warming problem.
Of course, natural gas is only available in good supply in the US and Russia (and this, for only as long as the whole economic system stays together). Don’t count of India or China to go to natural gas. Natural gas can be expensive because of the large amount of pipeline needed to transport it; the actual plants for burning it are cheap. Natural gas prices tend to be terribly unstable, because it is hard to have enough of it year around, without a lot of storage. I would think this by itself would discourage widespread use.
This is an IEA graph of world electricity generation by source for the year 2016. Nuclear was 23.1% of the total then, compared to 38.3% for coal. Natural gas has a whole lot of growing to do to make up for coal, on a worldwide basis.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/ies-world-electricity-production-by-source-2016.png
http://energyskeptic.com/2019/book-review-of-jaczkos-confessions-of-a-rogue-nuclear-regulator/
any comment on all these issues?
I saw that article, and was going to send it to someone who enthuses about nuclear power; but meh, it won’t change his (engineer) beliefs, so why bother.
Yep. Silly.