The reasons why the Green New Deal won’t really work are fairly subtle. A person really has to look into the details to see what goes wrong. In this post, I try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.
[1] None of the new renewables can easily be relied upon to produce enough energy in winter.
The world’s energy needs vary, depending on location. In locations near the poles, there will be a significant need for light and heat during the winter months. Energy needs will be relatively more equal throughout the year near the equator.
Solar energy is particularly a problem in winter. In northern latitudes, if utilities want to use solar energy to provide electricity in winter, they will likely need to build several times the amount of solar generation capacity required for summer to have enough electricity available for winter.
Figure 1. US daily average solar production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Hydroelectric tends to be a spring-dominated resource. Its quantity tends to vary significantly from year to year, making it difficult to count on.
Figure 2. US daily average hydroelectric production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Another issue with hydroelectric is the fact that most suitable locations have already been developed. Even if additional hydroelectric might help with winter energy needs, adding more hydroelectric is often not an option.
Wind energy (Figure 3) comes closest to being suitable for matching the winter consumption needs of the economy. In at least some parts of the world, wind energy seems to continue at a reasonable level during winter.
Figure 3. US daily average wind production, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.
Unfortunately, wind tends to be quite variable from year to year and month to month. This makes it difficult to rely on without considerable overbuilding.
Wind energy is also very dependent upon the continuation of our current economy. With many moving parts, wind turbines need frequent replacement of parts. These parts need to be precisely correct, with virtually no tolerance for change. Sometimes, helicopters are needed to install the new parts. Because of the need for continued high-technology maintenance services, wind energy cannot be expected to continue to operate for very long unless the world economy, with all of its globalization, can continue pretty much as today.
[2] Depending upon burned biomass in winter is an option, but we already know that this path is likely to lead to massive deforestation.
Historically, people burned wood and other biomass to provide heat and light in winter. If biomass is burned for heat and light, it is an easy step to using charcoal for smelting metals for goods such as nails and shovels. But with today’s population of 7.7 billion people, the huge demand for biomass would quickly deforest the whole world. There is already a problem with growing deforestation, especially in tropical areas.
It is my understanding that the Green New Deal is focusing primarily on wind, hydroelectric, and solar rather than biomass, because of these issues.
[3] Battery backup for renewables is very expensive. Because of their high cost, batteries tend to be used only for very short time periods. At a 3-day storage level, batteries do nothing to smooth out season-to-season and year-to-year variation.
The cost of batteries is not simply their purchase price. There seem to be several related costs associated with the use of batteries:
- The initial cost of the batteries
- The cost of replacements, because batteries are typically not very long-lived compared to, say, solar panels
- The cost of recycling the battery components rather than simply leaving the batteries to pollute the nearby surroundings
- The loss of electric charge that occurs as the battery sits idle for a period of time and the loss related to electricity storage and retrieval
We can get some idea of the cost of batteries from an analysis by Roger Andrews of a Tesla/Solar City system installed on the island of Ta’u. The island is in American Samoa, near the equator. This island received a grant that was used to add solar panels, plus 3-day battery backup, to provide electricity for the tiny island. Any outages longer than the battery capacity would continue to be handled by a diesel generator. The goal was to reduce the quantity of diesel used, not to eliminate its use completely.
Based on Andrews’ analysis, adding a 3-day battery backup more than doubled the cost of the PV-alone system. (It added 1.6 times as much as the cost of the installed PV.) The catch, as I pointed out above, is that the cost doesn’t stop with purchasing the initial batteries. At least one set of replacement batteries is likely to be needed during the lifetime of the system. And there are other costs that are more subtle and difficult to evaluate.
Furthermore, this analysis was for a solar system. There seems to be more variation over longer periods for wind. It is not clear that the relative amount of batteries would be enough for 3-day backup of a wind system, or for a combination of wind, hydroelectric and solar. The long-term cost of a solar panel plus battery system might easily come to four times the cost of a wind or solar system alone.
There is also the issue of necessary overbuilding to make the system work. On Ta’u, near the equator, with diesel power backup, the system is set up in such a way that 40% of the solar generation is in excess of the island’s day-to-day electricity consumption. This constitutes another cost of the system, over and above the cost of the 3-day battery backup.
If we also eliminate the diesel backup, then we start adding more costs because the level of overbuilding would need to be even higher. And, if we were to create a similar system in a location with substantial seasonal temperature variation, even more overbuilding would be required if enough capacity is to be made available to provide sufficient generation in winter.
[4] Even in sunny, warm California, it appears that substantial excess capacity needs to be added to avoid the problem of inadequate generation during the winter months, if the electrical system used is based on wind, hydroelectric, solar, and a 3-day backup battery.
Suppose that we want to replace California’s electricity consumption (excluding other energy, including oil products) with a new system using wind, hydro, solar, and 3-day battery backup. Current California renewable generation, compared to current consumption, is as shown on Figure 4, based on EIA data.
Figure 4. California total electricity consumption compared to the sum of California solar, wind, and hydroelectric production, on a monthly average basis. Data used from the US Energy Information Administration through June 30, 2019.
California’s electricity consumption peaks about August, presumably due to all of its air conditioning usage (Figure 5). This is two months after the June peak in the output of solar panels. Also, electricity usage doesn’t drop back nearly as much during winter as solar production does. (Compare Figures 1 and 5.)
Figure 5. California electricity consumption by month, based on US Energy Information Administration data.
We note from Figure 4 that California hydroelectric production is extremely variable. It appears that hydroelectric generation can vary by a factor of five comparing high years to low years. California hydroelectric generation uses all available rivers, so any new energy generation will need to come from wind and solar.
Even with 3-day backup batteries, we need the system to reliably produce enough electricity that it can meet the average electricity generation needs of each separate month. I did a rough estimate of how much wind and solar the system would need to add to bring total generation sufficiently high so as to prevent electricity problems during the winter. In making the analysis, I assumed that the proportion of added wind and solar would be similar to their relative proportions on June 30, 2019.
My analysis suggests that to reliably bridge the gap between production and consumption (see Figure 4), approximately six times as much wind and solar would need to be added (making 7 = 6 +1 times as much generation in total), as was in place on June 30 , 2019. With this arrangement, there would be a huge amount of wind and solar whose production would need to be curtailed during the summer months.
Figure 6. Estimated share of wind and solar production that would need to be curtailed, to provide adequate winter generation. The assumption is made that hydroelectric generation would not be curtailed.
Figure 6 shows the proportion of wind and solar output that would be in excess of the system’s expected consumption. Note that in winter, this drops to close to zero.
[5] None of the researchers studying the usefulness of wind and solar have understood the need for overbuilding, or alternatively, paying backup electricity providers adequately for their services. Instead, they have assumed that the only costs involved relate to the devices themselves, plus the inverters. This approach makes wind and intermittent solar appear far more helpful than they really are.
Wind and solar have been operating in almost a fantasy world. They have been given the subsidy of “going first.” If we change to a renewables-only system, this subsidy of going first disappears. Instead, the system needs to be hugely overbuilt to provide the 24/7/365 generation that backup electricity providers have made possible with either no compensation at all, or with far too little compensation. (This lack of adequate compensation for backup providers is causing problems for the current system, but it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss them here.)
Analysts have not understood that there are substantial costs that are not being reimbursed today, which allow wind and solar to have the subsidy of going first. For example, if natural gas is to be used as backup during winter, there will still need to be underground storage allowing natural gas to be stored for use in winter. There will also need to be pipelines that are not used much of the year. Workers will need to be paid year around if they are to continue to specialize in natural gas work. Annual costs of the natural gas system will not be greatly reduced simply because wind, hydro, and water can replace natural gas usage most months of the year.
Analysts of many types have issued reports indicating that wind and solar have “positive net energy” or other favorable characteristics. These favorable analyses would disappear if either (a) the necessary overbuilding of the system or (b) the real cost of backup services were properly recognized. This problem pervades studies of many types, including Levelized Cost of Energy studies, Energy Returned on Energy Invested studies, and Life Cycle Analyses.
This strange but necessary overbuilding situation also has implications for how much homeowners should be paid for their rooftop solar electricity. Once it is clear that only a small fraction of the electricity provided by the solar panels will actually be used (because it comes in the summer, and the system has been overbuilt in order to produce enough generation in winter), then payments to homeowners for electricity generated by rooftop systems will need to decrease dramatically.
A question arises regarding what to do with all of the electricity production that is in excess of the needs of customers. Many people would suggest using this excess electricity to make liquid fuels. The catch with this approach is that the liquid fuel needs to be very inexpensive to be affordable by consumers. We cannot expect consumers to be able to afford higher prices than they are currently paying for fossil fuel products. Also, the new liquid fuels ideally should power current devices. If consumers need to purchase new devices in order to utilize the new fuels, this further reduces the affordability of a planned changeover to a new fuel.
Alternatively, owners of solar panels might be encouraged to use the summer overproduction themselves. They might set the temperatures of their air conditioners to a lower setting or heat a swimming pool. It is unlikely that the excess could be profitably sold to nearby utilities because they are likely encounter the same problem in summer, if they are using a similar generation mix.
[6] As appealing as an all-electric economy would seem to be, the transition to such an economy can be expected to take 150 years, based on the speed of the transition since 1985.
Clearly, the economy uses a lot of energy products that are not electricity. We are familiar with oil products burned in many vehicles, for example. Oil is also used in many ways that do not require burning (for example, lubricating oils and asphalt). Natural gas and propane are used to heat homes and cook food, among other uses. Coal is sometimes burned in making pig iron and cement in China.
Figure 7. Electricity as a share of total energy use for selected areas, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Electricity’s share of total energy consumption has gradually been rising (Figure 7).* We can make a rough estimate of how quickly the changeover has been taking place since 1985. For the world as a whole, electricity consumption amounted to 43.4% of energy consumption in 2018, rising from 31.2% in 1985. On average, the increase has been 0.37%, over the 33-year period shown. If we assume this same linear growth pattern holds going forward, it will take 153 years (until 2171) until the world economy can operate using only electricity. This is not a quick change!
[7] While moving away from fossil fuels sounds appealing, pretty much everything in today’s economy is made and transported to its final destination using fossil fuels. If a misstep takes place and leaves the world with too little total energy consumption, the world could be left without an operating financial system and with way too little food.
Over 80% of today’s energy consumption is from fossil fuels. In fact, the other types of energy shown on Figure 8 would not be possible without the use of fossil fuels.
Figure 8. World Energy Consumption by Fuel, based on data of 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
With over 80% of energy consumption coming from fossil fuels, pretty much everything we have in our economy today is available thanks to fossil fuels. We wouldn’t have today’s homes, schools or grocery stores without fossil fuels. Even solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and modern hydroelectric dams would not be possible without fossil fuels. In fact, for the foreseeable future, we cannot make any of these devices with electricity alone.
In Figure 8, the little notch in world energy consumption corresponds to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. The connection between low energy consumption and poor economic outcomes goes back to many earlier periods. Energy consumption growth was unusually low about the time of the Great Depression of the 1930s and about the time of the US Civil War. The vulnerability of the financial system and the possibility of major wars are two reasons why a person should be concerned about the possibility of an energy changeover that doesn’t provide the economic system with adequate energy to operate. The laws of physics require energy dissipation for essentially every activity that is part of GDP. Without adequate energy, an economy tends to collapse. Economists are generally not aware of this important point.
Agriculture is dependent upon fossil fuels, particularly oil. Petrochemicals are used directly to make herbicides, pesticides, medications for animals and nitrogen fertilizer. Huge quantities of energy are necessary to make metals of all kinds, such as the steel in agricultural equipment and in irrigation pumps. Refrigerated vehicles transport produce to market, using mostly oil-based fuel. If the transition does not go as favorably as hoped, food supplies could prove to be hopelessly inadequate.
[8] The scale of the transition to hydroelectric, wind, and solar would be unimaginably large.
Today, wind, hydroelectric, and solar amount to about 10% of world energy production. Hydroelectric amounts to about 7% of energy consumption, wind about 2%, and solar about 1%. This can be seen on Figure 8 above. A different way of seeing this same relationship is shown in Figure 9, below.
Figure 9. World hydroelectric, wind and solar production as share of world energy supply, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Figure 9 shows that hydroelectric power is pretty well maxed out, as a percentage of energy supply. This is especially the case in advanced economies. This means that any increases that are made in the future will likely have to come from wind and solar. If hydroelectric, wind and solar are together to produce 100% of the world’s energy supply, then wind and solar, which today comprise 3% of today’s energy supply, will need to ramp up to 93% of energy supply. This amounts to a 30-fold increase in wind and solar between 2018 and 2030, based on one version of the Green New Deal’s planned timing. We would need to be building wind and solar absolutely everywhere, very quickly, to accomplish this.
[9] Moving to electric vehicles (EVs) for private passenger autos is not likely to be as helpful as many people hope.
One issue is that it is possible to mandate the use of EVs, but if the automobiles cost more than citizens can afford, many citizens will simply stop buying cars at all. At least part of the worldwide reduction in automobile sales seems to be related to changes in rules that are intended to reduce auto emissions. The slowdown in auto sales is part of what is pushing the world into recession.
Another issue is that private passenger autos represent a smaller share of oil consumption than many people would expect. BP data indicate that 26% of worldwide oil consumption is gasoline. Gasoline powers the vast majority of the world’s private passenger automobiles today. While an oil savings of 26% would be good, there would still be a very long way to go.
One study of EV sales in Norway suggests that, with large subsidies, these cars are disproportionately sold to high-income families as a second vehicle. The new second vehicles are often used for commuting to work, when prior to the EV ownership, the owner had been taking public transportation. When this pattern is followed, the savings in oil use from the adoption of EVs becomes very small because building and transporting EVs also requires oil use.
Figure 10. Source: Holtsmark and Skonhoft The Norwegian support and subsidy policy of electric cars. Should it be adopted by other countries?
If one of the goals of the Green New Deal is to level out differences between the rich and the poor, mandating EVs would seem to be a step in the wrong direction. It would make more sense to mandate walking or the use of pedal bicycles, rather than EVs.
[10] Wind, solar, and hydroelectric have pollution problems themselves.
With respect to solar panels, a major concern is that if the panels are broken (for example, by a storm or near the end of their lives), water alone can leach toxic substances into the water supply. Another issue is that recycling needs to be subsidized, to be economic. The price of solar panels needs to be surcharged at the front end, if adequate funds are to be collected to cover recycling costs. This is not being done in the US.
Wind turbines are better in terms of not being made of toxic substances, but they disturb bird, bat, and marine life in their vicinity. Humans also complain about their vibrations, if the devices are close to homes. The fiberglass blades of wind turbines are not recyclable, and many of them are too big to fit into standard crushing machines. They need to be chopped into pieces, in order to fit into landfills.
Adding huge amounts of 3-day battery backup for wind turbines and solar panels will create a new set of recycling issues. The extent of the recycling issues will depend on the battery materials used.
Of course, if we try to ramp up wind and solar by a huge factor, pollution problems will rise accordingly. The chance that raw materials will prove to be scarce will increase as well.
There will also be an increasing problem with finding suitable sites to install all of the devices and batteries. There are limits on how densely wind turbines can be spaced before the output of one wind turbine interferes with the output of other nearby turbines. This problem is not too different from the problem of declining per-well oil production caused by too closely spaced shale wells.
Afterword
I could explain further, but that would make this post too long. For example, using an overbuilt renewables system, there is not enough net energy to provide the high salaries almost everyone would like to see.
Also, the new renewable energy systems are likely to be more local than many have hoped. For example, I think it is highly unlikely that the people of North Africa would allow contractors to build a solar system in North Africa for the benefit of Europeans.
Note
*There are two different ways of comparing electricity’s value to that of total energy. Figure 7 uses the more generous approach. In it, the value of electricity is based on the amount of fossil fuels that would need to be burned to produce the electricity amounts shown. In the case of electricity types that do not involve the burning of fossil fuels, these amounts are estimated amounts. The less generous approach compares the heat value of the electricity produced to the total heat value of primary energy sources. Using the less generous approach, electricity corresponds to only about 20% of primary energy supply. The transition to an all-electric economy would be much farther away using the heat value approach.
The first time in its history the people took out from the government-sponsored mortgage firm (the German word for it is Bausparkasse) in Slovakia more money than they deposited into it.
https://e.dennikn.sk/1617620/stavebne-sporenie-by-sa-zacalo-potapat-aj-keby-neprisla-kauza-beres/?ref=be
In July 2008, a similar situation took place in the US. Total mortgage amounts outstanding started to fall. So did credit card balances outstanding.
Very interesting article.
What I’m missing is Power to Gas (p2g) as a storage option.
Would be quite interesting to see the analysis with hydrogen as a storage tech, especially with efficiency gains and cost reductions we saw for solar or wind over the last 10 years for the hydrolysis part.
Gas plants are a mature tech, so we should not see much gain there, but the cost for the plants should be calculated on the low side since top efficiency is not a priority for what is basically a backup plant.
“While some analysts are eager to write off [US] manufacturing weakness as inconsequential… “there’s a reason why indices of leading economic indicators rely on manufacturing. It’s because there’s a multiplier effect from the sector that filters through to others,” Liz Ann Sonders chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab told MarketWatch.
“That manufacturing weakness has also coincided with falling business investment is also a concern. “Manufacturing weakness often tips over into the consumer side,” she said.
“There are signs that this might already be under way, she warned…”
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/something-has-to-give-how-long-can-the-american-consumer-shoulder-the-global-economy-2019-10-14
“ProPetro Holding Corp this month cut about 150 workers, people familiar with the matter said on Monday, the latest sign of growing trouble in the oilfield services sector as U.S. shale producers reduce drilling.
“The job cuts reflect slowing shale activity due to weak prices for oil and gas, and producers exhausting their spending budgets for the year, one of the people said.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-propetro-layoffs/oilfield-services-firm-propetro-cuts-almost-150-workers-sources-idUSKBN1WT2DA
“Freight shipments and expenditures declined on a year-over-year basis again in September according to the latest Cass Freight Index Report. According to the report, shipments declined 3.4% in September, the tenth straight month of year-over-year declines…
“With the continuation of the declines in the shipments index, Broughton said “we see a growing risk that GDP will go negative by year’s end.”
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/cass-says-data-continues-to-point-toward-economic-contraction
We have not seen job cut announcements earlier, that I am aware of. These come late in the cycle.
Also, the energy sector underlies the manufacturing sector. It is necessary to have strength in these bottom layers.
“The R-word, recession, is stalking the land. This is not a British thing, or a European or American one – or a Chinese or Indian threat. It is a global one…
“…on Tuesday, the IMF produces its next World Economic Outlook, its twice-a-year overview of what is happening to the world economy and its forecasts for the coming year. It is most likely to cut its previous projection for 2019 from 3.2 per cent to below 3 per cent, the slowest growth since 2009.
“I have two main worries. One is the impact of the ultra-easy money policies of the past few years. The other is a more general lack of confidence about the future across the developed world.
“An awful lot has been written about the first: the limits of monetary policy to stimulate economies, the damage done by zero (or negative) interest rates, the impact on wealth inequality, and so on. I’m not sure there is much to add on this, except to note opposition to the European Central Bank’s latest bout of QE, and its policy of negative interest rates, is mounting even within the ECB staff.
“Put crudely, if Germany is going into recession when interest rates are already negative, what makes anyone think that making them even more negative is going to help? The problem is lack of overall demand, not the cost of credit.
“So the widespread view that monetary policy cannot help much either to forestall a recession, or to help us out of it, makes sense.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/us-china-trade-war-recession-economy-imf-a9153971.html
“…the Fed is being forced to again add liquidity while markets are at near-record highs and unemployment at fifty years lows is very problematic.
“A prolonged contraction in the flow of new credit in any economy or a contraction in business investment is a key factor that often leads to a recession.
“Much of the problem the Fed faces is that low-interest rates have not created the financial environment they had hoped it would.”
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4296341-qe4-necessary-liquidity-injections-prevent-chaos
Your conclusion could be better stated as “Inventions made so far in renewable energy systems are not sufficient for the systems to replace fossil fuel use.” Tomorrow’s inventions might.
Timing is a major issue, however. We seem to be hitting limits now.
If it’s not one thing it is another.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/35-billion-uk-faces-huge-loss-electric-vehicle-adoption
Dennis L.
Big surprise:
“The think tank recommends implementing taxes on EVs soon, as car owners are becoming used to avoiding these duties on their fuel. New motoring taxes should reflect distance driven and vary according to when and where the trips take place in the vehicle. A flat-rate tax per mile driven could be another taxation model used, according to the study.”
The UK budget can’t get along without the taxes on fossil fuels.
Nobody talks about the rising debt burden. The debt itself is not a problem. The problem is to fullfill the increasing amount of promises which are represented by the debt. Do they feel like 35 billion pounds will be enough in 30 years?
MG, I think you are spot on. Government debt is a promise to deliver real wealth, but no such wealth exists. This is not a new phenomenon: Philip IV of France was in debt up to his eyeballs, which is why his only recourse was to steal the wealth of the Knights Templar (and massacre a lot of them in the process). Louis XIV followed the same path, by robbing the French nobility; a tragic error that ultimately led to the fall of the monarchy.
Britain was more fortunate: she settled much of the debt incurred in the Great War by repudiating the War Loan bonds she had issued. (Be a patriot, get robbed: which is perhaps one reason there was so little patriotism in the 1930s) France solved the same problem by a military occupation of Germany’s coal rich Ruhr valley.
But today the promlem seems too large for any feasible resolution.
Exactly: but what we will no doubt see is the rapid rise of Redistributionist politics -certainly in Europe, including the UK – as competing sectors struggle over a share of the ‘wealth’ which, in effect, isn’t really there any more, being based on no more than GDP manipulation and fantasy valuations of assets.
“Spain’s Supreme Court has sentenced nine Catalan separatist leaders to between nine and 13 years in prison for sedition over their role in an independence referendum in 2017.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-49974289
Well, I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition. But Sedition? In 2019?
Why not add Heresy and Treachery?
What kind of world are these judges living in?
This judgement looks like desperation on the part of the Spanish State. It’s virtually guaranteed to stir up pro-independence sentiment to fever pitch in Barcelona.
That does sound like a strong reaction to starting an independence movement!
Actually, it was quite moderate in a way, (for Spain) as they weren’t convicted of ‘rebellion’ as many feared -that would have entailed much longer sentences. And a few weren’t even sent to jail, quite mild really. Spain is Spain: a kind of Turkey in Europe…..
Really, they were asses, messed up the whole thing, deluded themselves, believed the EU would save them when it was clear it wouldn’t, and deserve what they get: don’t beard the lion in its den, it bites……. What they did was so dumb, given the way things are, that it almost hurts to think about it.
It has all been something of a distraction from the real story, which is that new elections are being held in November as the King has refused over the last few months to accept a radical Left-wing party (Podemos, essentially Marxists) as part of the new government which could have been formed after the last elections, with the Socialists.
Also, the independence parties (Basque, Catalan) got too many votes the last time round and they want to correct that.
So, back to the polls! Great democracy.: Eternal Spain, never changing…..
Modern Spain is a dictatorship that self-transformed (the dictatorship was not overthrown) into a monarchy, with a veneer of very limited democracy. To understand that is to understand all.
Spain’s Supreme Court has just destroyed the Spanish monarchy, and probably the Spanish state also. Hubris will be followed by Nemesis.
This whole issue started in 2006, when Spain’s “Constitutional Court” struck down the compact that gave Catalonia self rule. That document described Catalonia as a “nation”, which meant she was under international law a High Contracting Party, and the Court’s ruling was therefore ultra vires, and null and void.
All subsequent efforts to repair the damage foundered on the simple observation “fool me twice, shame on me”. The Catalonia independence movement is now unstoppable.
I take your points, all true, but it is as well to remember that this sort of nonsense has been going on for more than a hundred years.
It’s just the same old same old, without any killing this time, thankfully: the vested interests behind the monarchy -the real Spanish Establishment – are very strong indeed. ‘Two Spains’ as ever. The supporters of the monarchy don’t believe in it, but it suits them……
Spain is a semi-African’Arab state, that has to be borne in mind; the rules are different. It is not and never has been fully European since Rome. Compromise, the essential for a constitutional state and democracy, is not an Iberian quality. Personally, if things pass off without bloodshed, I’m delighted.
The fools who challenged Madrid should have known all that. Actually, when they realised they had got in too deep, and the EU wasn’t going to mediate, they tried to back-track, but far too late. Their sentences were inevitable…..
Xabier, all valid points, and well taken. Spain is still a prisoner of her history, of the Reconquista and the Catholic hegemony. She had to adopt the political philosophy of the Moors of Al Andalus in order effectively to fight them.
But Catalonia was, and remains, an anomaly. It was part not of Iberia but of Septimania, more akin to Provence and Liguria than to Aragon, until conquered in 1229 by James I. And so yes, you are correct: it held onto much of the legacy of Rome even as Iberia fell under Moorish despotism, and then Christian despotism.
Their reliance on the EU to speak up for them was, I agree, stupidity and folly. For all their talk of democracy, the oligarchs of Brussels regard the former nations of Europe as their satrapies. Their response to Catalonia was the same as the response of the Persian kings some 2500 years ago to the revolt of the Ionian Greek cities. (And, of course, their response to Britain in these sad times)
This is perhaps a good time to be an old man.
Spain is the most fascinating of countries.
As for Brussels, they are putting pressure on ‘populist’ Hungary and others in Eastern Europe for not towing the line on accepting migrants en masse under a quota system, under the pretext of ‘having concerns about democracy’ while they have always turned a blind eye to how Spain is run.
It’s beyond bizarre, on one hand EU is not willing nor able to enforce legally codified common borders, actually NGO-smugglers and frontier violators of any kind are popularized in msm and politics, attempts to do enforce borders are penalized (e.g. Salvini). And on the other hand the push for relocating such openly supported influx of illegal migrants is forced upon Hungary, Poland, and other CEErs in the EU.
There are only the two major explanations possible for such situation:
– the migration (at any cost) is deemed necessary for reasons of aggregate demand (not labor factor anymore) hence faking synthetic GDP charade for few more yrs
– the migration (at any cost) is deemed necessary for reasons of instigating wider chaos at future-final GFC_ver_xy, which would help certain faction to regroup and force their agenda (likely some sort of gloves off feudalism) at desired point of time
worldof:
Yes indeed.
There is so many reasons wanting more immigration.
Businesses wants cheaper labor.
Politicians wants voters.
Depopulating places wants population.
Businesses wants consumers.
Government wants GDP.
Manys entire work depends on immigration.
Some just want confirnation they’re the Good Decent Persons.
Only if you look at it on a systematic level you realise what a drain it is.
Spain is a semi-African’Arab state, that has to be borne in mind; the rules are different.
Catalans I have spoken to about the quest for independence have always made the point that culturally Catalonia is European and Spain is not, and that’s one reason why they want to separate. They sound a bit like the Serbs dissing the Macedonians in that respect.
Possibly these sentences were inevitable given the nature of the terrain and the offenses. But they are bound to inflame the situation and virtually guarantee violence down the road.
“The Catalonia independence movement is now unstoppable.”
I think you are right, but how it plays out will be messy.
Contrast that with the UK, where no one ever questions the legitimacy of Scottish, Welsh or Irish nationalism as a political opinion, even if they consider those opinions to be absurd.
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-failure-on-the-road-to-a-renewable-future-a-1266586.html
“Germany’s Federal Court of Auditors is even more forthright about the failures. The shift to renewables, the federal auditors say, has cost at least 160 billion euros in the last five years. Meanwhile, the expenditures “are in extreme disproportion to the results,” Federal Court of Auditors President Kay Scheller said last fall, although his assessment went largely unheard in the political arena. Scheller is even concerned that voters could soon lose all faith in the government because of this massive failure.”
Enegiewende, if I understand it correctly, was basically the same as the GRD.
T2M
“…wayward feral pigs have stoked concern that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s reclusive state is hiding an African swine fever disaster… unofficial reports indicate that the disease is spreading out of control.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-12/kim-jong-un-may-be-hiding-a-hog-apocalypse-from-the-world
I think this is critical:
“The virus is extremely destructive as people are now unable to make money through raising pigs.”
Farmers on individual farms will have trouble affording to buy food for their families.
“A slide in China’s exports picked up pace in September while imports contracted for a fifth straight month, pointing to further weakness in the economy and underlining the need for more stimulus as the Sino-U.S. trade war drags on.”
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-trade/china-september-exports-imports-in-deeper-contraction-as-tariffs-bite-idUSKBN1WT07P
“…[China’s] problems aren’t just cooling global growth, but also more sluggish domestic activity, reflecting both anemic production and demand. This has ignited hopes for a forceful economic stimulus package from Beijing, as the world has relied on during previous periods of weakness over the past decade.
“But this time, it appears such hopes are in vain.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-facing-slowdown-still-unlikely-to-push-for-more-stimulus-11570971601
I am willing to bet that there are a lot of former pig farmers in China who are doing poorly, after their pigs were killed because of the virus. Also, less job growth because of the end of much of the recycling, because it was noneconomic. Also, its auto sales problems are huge. The country picked a terrible time to try to upgrade emission standards in cities, for example.
The WSJ is reporting: China’s US Exports Tumble as Tariffs Bite.
Chinese shipments to the U.S. slumped nearly 22% in September from a year earlier, accelerating from a 16% decline in August, data from the General Administration of Customs showed Monday. The U.S. decline was a major factor, along with a slowing global economy, in the 3.2% drop in total exports in September. That compared with August’s 1% decrease and was slightly worse than economists’ expectations.
“Global authorities gathering in Washington this week must stand ready to address emerging risks including a global economic downturn and Brexit, the leading body for global financial stability has warned.
“The Financial Stability Board – which was formed after the 2008 banking crisis that brought the financial system to its knees – said that while much has been achieved in the past decade, its job was “far from complete”.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/13/financial-leaders-must-prepare-for-risks-such-as-brexit-says-regulator
“Investors are flocking to the relative safety of money market funds at the highest level since the financial crisis-era collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/12/investors-flock-to-money-markets-at-highest-rate-since-the-crisis.html
“Analysts at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are comparing current global financial conditions to the types of conditions that sparked the global financial crisis of 2008 – a crisis that stemmed from the US mortgage market.
“The report shows that US-induced vulnerabilities are still present, representing a widespread economic threat.”
https://dailyhodl.com/2019/10/13/imf-researchers-spot-fragility-indicators-in-global-banking-system-as-us-dollars-spread-funding-shocks/
The report itself is available from this link. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/GFSR/Issues/2019/10/01/global-financial-stability-report-october-2019#Chapter6
One point it makes is that part of the problem is increased European regulation of liquidity requirements for banks, starting in 2015. At the end of each quarter, especially, there seems to be a mass dash for suitably liquidity. The size of the spike gets progressively larger. (My interpretation of Figure 5.4 of that report.)
“The global economy has entered a period of “synchronised stagnation” with weak growth in some countries and no growth or a mild contraction in others, according to research by the Brookings Institution think-tank and the Financial Times.
“Headline economic indicators have slipped to their lowest levels since the spring of 2016, with real activity in both advanced and emerging economies losing momentum, compounded by falling economic confidence, the latest update of the tracking index has found.
“Only relatively strong performance in financial markets stopped the index from falling further into negative territory.”
https://www.ft.com/content/7e412720-ec3a-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061
“The world’s finance ministers and central bankers will be in Washington this week for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank amid growing concerns that the global economy is heading towards stagnation.
“Predictions of a sharp downturn fill policymakers with anxiety, knowing that job losses and lower tax revenues can only lead to social unrest.”
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/12/kristalina-georgieva-imf-washington-climate-crisis
“Oil short-selling has more than doubled in three weeks, with attacks on oil facilities and tankers unable to push prices higher for very long…
““Investors are more worried about the global market and the poor outlook on demand,” said Stewart Glickman, an energy analyst at CFRA Research Inc. “I don’t think that one attack on a tanker in the Red Sea is enough to turn the tide.””
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-11/it-may-take-more-than-a-tanker-attack-to-quell-oil-short-selling
I see prices are back down 2% this morning. WTI at $53.39. The Iranian oil tanker problem seems to have become less of concern.
“…the [crude oil] market reacted with skepticism to the partial agreement achieved in the ongoing US-China trade dispute.”
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/101419-crude-oil-futures-down-despite-us-china-trade-agreement-brent-at-5937-b
It seems to be too transparent a fudge with a temporary truce in tariffs failing to conceal the still unbridgeable chasm between China’s position and that of the Trump administration.
Brexit negotiations are looking dicey again, too, as it seems there is no deal the EU will agree to that can realistically pass through the House of Commons. There goes my fleeting optimism. 😀
China and Trump dont agree on anything about trade. China will never agree to enforceable intellectual property trade. Trump will never cut a deal without it. They both let up the pressure a bit as the world economy heads to the sewer. NO DEAL.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/14/us-china-trump-pretend-trade-deal/
Self-organizing systems have the ability to act in strange ways, such as producing “synchronized stagnation.” Sound like the economy has decided to “make a smaller batch.”
That is a nice, easily digestible way of putting it. I was reflecting that less than two years ago everyone was welcoming in a new era of larger batches:
“Nearly 10 years after the financial crisis brought the global economy to its knees, conditions have finally improved enough to crystallize my conviction that synchronized global growth is currently underway.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/11/20/synchronized-global-growth-may-have-arrived/#22bee0a37f32
Global PMI was at a 78-month high:
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960×0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Fgreatspeculations%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F11%2Fcomm-global-manufacturing-pmi-at-78-month-high-in-october-11172017-2-e1511215072904.jpg
That kind of disappeared.
Change comes from within.
“The universe is not like a puzzle-box that you can take apart and put back together again and so solve its secrets. It is a shifting uncertain thing which changes as you consider it, which is changed by the very act of observation. A powerful man is not a man who dissect the universe like a puzzle-box, examining it piece by piece and measuring each piece with scientific precision.
A powerful man has only to look upon the universe to change it.”
— Technomagos Gaelos, Warhammer 40,000
Change comes from the physical world. All species are puppets for what it provides. Words are imaginary.
“Let us repeat the two crucial negative premises as established firmly by all human experience: (1) Words are not the things we are speaking about; and (2) There is no such thing as an object in absolute isolation.”
― Alfred Korzybski
Don’t worry Old folks…BAUalive and well for the foreseeable future!😆
The world’s largest investment banks have provided more than $700bn of financing for the fossil fuel companies most aggressively expanding in new coal, oil and gas projects since the Paris climate change agreement, figures show.
The financing has been led by the Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase, which has provided $75bn (£61bn) to companies expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration, according to the analysis.
The New York bank is one of 33 powerful financial institutions to have provided an estimated total of $1.9tn to the fossil fuel sector between 2016 and 2018.
The data shows the most aggressively expanding coal-mining operations, oil and gas companies, fracking firms and pipeline companies have received $713.3bn in loans, equity issuances and debt underwriting services from 2016 to mid-2019.
Other top financiers of fossil fuel companies include Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.
So, regardless of the little girl Greta and the Scientific Community….
BAU FULL Throttle BABY….the only way.is up or a crash to the ground…
BURN MORE COAL…as our former Fast Eddie would chant.
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/13/top-investment-banks-lending-billions-extract-fossil-fuels
Banks can figure out what usually works. We likely will be dead before climate risks materialize.
Yes, us “Old Timers”, more than likely will be gone in the spirit world, unless CC causes a massive crop failure worldwide….all bets are off!🍳
UN AGENDA 21
One world government is one of the goals of Agenda 21. I can see that this won’t work, without infinite energy.
One world government?! Well good luck with that. Let them start by establishing a single government for, say, Syria.
My response to the post (which was on Facebook)
Although my information has it that energy will be in crisis by 2030, and that will limit the control of central governments. It would strengthen the control of the local don or strongman, however. In that case, we might need to hold on to as much government as we can? And if you make your living by being on a scenic route, having a do-as-you-please land use could work against your local economy?
I suspect you are right, Artleads: loss of control by central or regional governments invariably leads to rule by mafias, a corrupt alliance of gangsters, army, police and politicians.
Total collapse would be far better than waking up one day to find oneself in a kind of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or the wilder reaches of the Eastern Bloc after the collapse of the Soviet empire……
Extortion and kidnapping would run riot, Nice house? A gangster might want it for himself, his mistress, or just as part of his ‘legitimate’ property empire, etc.
Living in high densities, human beings need firm government, which is why certain kings were praised in their day as ‘Just’ or ‘Good’ : people knew the reality of anarchy then and how vulnerable they could be without a strong government that kept criminals down and literally hanged them up or cut them to pieces.
People in the West who want government to disappear simply don’t know what they are wishing for.
Even today, with severe cuts in funding and the withdrawal of local police units, life is pretty nasty in some suburbs of London and elsewhere as the African, Asian, E.European, Irish, gangs struggle for power, mostly at night but increasingly during the day. Even in this small city the police can’t control the drug and robbery problem in one suburb. Criminal gangs own legitimate businesses throughout the city: hairdressers, barbers, cafes, restaurants, 24/7 shops, etc.
In effect, every well-organised criminal gang, prepared to kill, is just waiting to become the local government if official authority weakens.
I see today that there is an article about the United Nations possibly running out of money because countries (including the US) are not paying their dues.
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/struggling-with-230-million-deficit-un-may-run-out-of-money-by-end-of-month-antonio-guterres-1607132-2019-10-08
I can’t say I feel too bad.
German car production has now dipped to GFC levels.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGrErvDWwAIav4j?format=jpg&name=large
Absolute number of new cars seems to be about the same as during the GFC. Is this all because of the carbon rules?
There are some companies, one with their HQ in Bothell WA for instance, who claim to be recycling fiberglass and specifically include wind turbine blades so yo may need to adjust your comments regarding that issue.
Do you have any links?
This is a page that describes the supposed benefits of the company’s fiberglass recycling: https://www.global-fiberglass.com/benefits. There is no mention on the site that I could see of a cost advantage in using recycled vs. virgin fiberglass. This suggests to me that recycling fiberglass is more energy intensive than producing virgin material. More than anything, this company’s business model seems to rely on customers’ desire for greenwashing virtue signaling.
I think you are right. Recycling fiberglass is for those who wish to greenwash their use of fiberglass.
People have getting the idea that recycling is cheaper, but a large share of the time, it is more expensive. It tends to use more resources, including fossil fuel resources, than mining new resources.
“Growth, even the modest levels of growth seen over the past decade, can only be achieved through the accumulation of dangerous amounts of debt and a reckless disregard for the future of the planet…
“If ever there was a time to give helicopter money a whirl then this is it.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/13/with-growth-this-tepid-is-it-time-to-give-helicopter-money-a-whirl
He might resign as an economics columnist at The Guardian, as there are, as far as one can see, no sensible economics to discuss anymore……
I’m seeking the intercession of the Virgin Mary (invoked officially by the last conservative government in Spain to solve unemployment!) which makes quite as much sense as ‘helicopter money’……
It does seem like helicopter money might be helpful. We are running out of alternatives.
I bet a lot of people could use some super low interest helicopter, long term loan money to pay off existing debt at high interest rates. Would probably give the economy a jolt in the right direction.
Good point, Chrome. The problem is that what is being proposed isn’t really “helicopter money” given away to all. As always, it is given to those already nominally rich, in the hope it will trickle down or through.
What then happens is that the rich use this fake money to steal items of real value from the poor, their labour for instance. Which feeds the inequality and simply makes the overall problem worse.
My suggestion? Not gold this time; not even the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Rather, a debt jubilee: cancel 5% of all outstanding debts every month, until the national finances are sound again.
Not always given to the rich. President Bush’s 2003 “tax rebate”, went to all tax payers. Not that the result was any better.
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/Bush-signs-1-3-trillion-tax-cut-bill-300-600-2913184.php
“For Republicans, the most politically beneficial moment may come this summer, when most of those who paid income taxes for last year begin to receive their rebate checks: up to $300 for single filers, $500 for single parents and $600 for joint filers.”
T2M
Why not $x to everyone each month, for those in debt (almost everyone here) automatically to pay of debts.
I think thats fairer, of course depending on what people have become indebted over.
DJ, thank you, and I agree.
What does cancelling all of this debt do to banks? Insurance companies? Pension funds? Government receipts?
Money is a form of debt of governments. Do governments cancel their outstanding money, the way India called in all of its larger denomination bills? How about payments for Social Security and Medicare? These aren’t considered debt, but they are sort of obligations of the government. Insurance of bank accounts is another obligation of governments, but there is virtually nothing backing it up, other than the ability of governments to tax citizens more. It is not like the FDIC or the FPGC (for pensions) has a big pile of anything to make payments with.
I think you mean something like, “Debts of private citizens must be cancelled, and be offset with more government debt.” I don’t think that this works.
Helicopter $ is like a medicine that kills you in the long run. They will use. They cant let things plunge. But they will use it with discretion. Unless a bernie type gets in.
If we increase our debt at a faster rate to provide a standard of living. I cant think at some point there will be a spontaneous move from reserve currency. So far as our precarious situation becomes clear there has only been a move to $ . The rock of Gibraltar.
When things dissolve how do you sell off if the medium of exchange is dissolving too?
“If ever there was a time to give helicopter money a whirl then this is it.”
then these are desperate times…
it’s crazy enough to have negative interest rates…
helicopter money would be crazier…
I occasionally try to imagine what the next (crazier) stage of the economic endgame will be, and helicopter money could be the winner…
but who knows, when CBs get desperate…
“Barely noticed in a corner of the financial markets, leveraged loans originally worth about $40 billion are staging their own private meltdown…
“Energy is the hardest-hit sector on the list, with more than $12 billion of loans falling more than 10 cents on the dollar.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/a-40-billion-pile-of-leveraged-loans-is-battered-by-big-losses
As ratings fall, some owners are forced to sell these stocks, because of requirements regarding the ratings of the bonds they hold. This adds to the problems.
Gail mentions often there being no way back. I can attest that in my part of the farming country there is very little old scrap left, it is all gone, salvaged. Again, a quote from Ecosophia:
“Abandoning a farm from an energy standpoint requires leaving capital behind. The machinery is useless except for those tasks. And the energy to move it was unprofitable in a situation of despair.
It is like the soul leaving the body behind. It is purpose built for a task. Energy is infinite but locally configured so to say. You can play a bit but must return the toys afterwards.”
A second quote, same source: “Many, many once prosperous family farms left lots of abandoned farming machinery, old steel tractors, haying cutters and drying rigs etc…. in the fields surrounding the old ghost farmsteads.
My friend said there was a whole industry starting back when the collapse of the family farm took off, of people stealing these old farm tools, usually at night, to sell as scrap steel. The entire mid-west has been ‘mined’ for for the last several decades of any metal objects not nailed down and sent to China.
Old railroad track pulled up and cut up, corrugated steel roofs, metal fence, you name it, it’s all gone.
Now pause a moment and consider the EROEI of strip mining the entire mid west of pretty much all metal. The steel that was once in that entire region represents an enormous historic energy investment, from mining the iron ore in the Upper Minnesota iron range, transporting it in iron boats across the Great Lake to steel smelters, to steel fabricators (I-beams, railroad rail etc…) to transporting the finished steel to manufacturers to then selling it to the now long gone farmers.”
There is very little old, easily maintained equipment left. The fields are meticulous, rows straight to fractions of an inch, but there is no old equipment left to speak of, it has already been salvaged.
Modern farm equipment is driven by joy stick not unlike Airbus and the displays are not gauges but touch screens with linkage to multiple combines and grain carts pulled by 400 hp tractors which weigh the grain as it is added from the combine while moving down the field at 5 mph. On the latest machines the cart tractor can position itself without operator assistance next to the combine for off loading. Think of salvaging a modern computer and one gets the idea of recycling current farm equipment.
Dennis L.
Fine post, thank you. I’ve never been very convinced about post-Collapse scavenging.
There are a few poems from the early 20th century about the ploughman and his team, seeing out the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires in a life determined by the seasons: they are long gone, and with them the only durable foundation for civilization.
Absorbing agriculture fully into the techno-industrial complex was one of the last nails in our coffin, but we were too distracted by all the fun going on in the cities to hear the banging of the hammer.
Having said that, I hope everyone has a pleasant and peaceful Sunday! Every day this hangs together is a cause for relief and celebration…….
scavenging an object and reworking it into another object requires heat in proportion to its purpose.
a universal law that is almost universally ignored
Norman,
There needs to be something to scavenge, modern machines appear to be incredibly efficient hence fewer of them. Without electronics I suspect it would be impossible to make them run. The metal is gone off the farms, we cleaned some that had been discarded on site and it is going in a dumpster for recycling. There are few if any barns, there are few if any old machines sitting in the few remaining barns, the country side is dark at night as there are fewer and fewer people in the country. In our area the railroad was turned into a bike trail, the road bed is still there as are some of the bridges but all the infrastructure, rails, signals, etc. is gone. To quote Gail, “There are no ladders back down.”
Dennis L.
Fine observations, on a personal note took a trip to southern Minnesota along the the Mississippi River bluff region several years ago. The reason was to recheck the area sustainability and a small property being sold by a Lady outside of Winona that was certified organic and her self constructed owner built tiny house.
The Seed Savers Exchange organization is nearby and State College and private University.
I can verify that the surrounding fields are void of houses and an array of large machinery line the property. Furthermore, along the edge of farmland witness creeping housing developments gobbling large tracts of acres.
No way that this landscape will be resettled anytime soon by independent Family Farmers.
Did see a number of Amish or Mennonite horse and buggy trotting the roadways.
Perhaps these folks will have a better chance.
Beautiful region, but was COLD, even in early Springtime. Doubt there is enough of biomass to keep oneself from freezing with the population levels there now.
Visited the City museum in Winona, Mn and the nice local gave me a tour of it.
Remember him pointing to a wagon and telling me that families would give the youngest Son one to venture out West to find their own homestead, if he couldn’t get employment in the Lumber company there.
Yes, we should be grateful for everyday that is BAU…..afterward ain’t going to be pretty!😍
My uncle during the depression left the family farm in WI and headed west on the train, he traveled in style, in a boxcar; he ended in CA. Picture you and your wife saying good bye to your son, knowing he will be out of touch for some time, not knowing if he is safe, not knowing where or how he will land, not knowing how he will feed himself and horror of horrors, no smart phone with which to tweet. In La Crosse, WI, where he caught the train, my aunt who had a factory job gave him money she had saved for a new coat, $10-20 for the journey, there was no money on the farm. Tough Norwegians. This is now happening all over the world and for many this is BAU.
Dennis L.
In a way the best and most hardy people emigrated from Old Europe to the US (with a smattering of desperate failures and ‘black sheep’ of course) and so were best placed to deal with the awful events of the Great Depression. Breeding always counts…….
‘He either fears his Fate too much
Or his deserts are small;
Who puts it not unto the touch
To win, or lose it all. ‘
Reminds me of the Vikings giving a sword to a son , saying ‘This is all I have to give you: use it well!’
Maybe it’s well to remember that we are descended from people like that.
Reminds me of the Spartan women, sending their sons into battle: “Come back with your shield, or on it”.
Bellum est ultima ratio regum.
I am afraid you are right. Old farm houses have been removed, too.
Plenty of cities of suburbs with plenty of metal left. Currently. Also hid in many buildings too.
have you tried getting the rebar out of concrete?
By hand?
I suspect you’re both right. You’d be able to find more metal than wood to rework it.
Ah, not by hand, Norman, but it looks pretty easy using 50 ton excavators with claws and large machines to separate the concrete from the steel. On reflection JMG missed this in his Ruinmen series, he assumed there would be something to salvage, we have gotten pretty good and efficient at recycling, until this thread I never really thought about that.
Dennis L.
if you look at high-res. photos of the Collosium, there are evenly-spaced holes in the rock where scavengers removed the steel plates used by the Romans to hold the pieces together. they took a lot of them, but the structure remains. i think it was over-engineered.
not quite that simple
if you fix iron into stone, you have to make an oversized hole, then fill around the hole and iron with lead otherwise you get rapid corrosion. They wouldnt have used steel plates, too expensive at that scale
when the building falls into disuse, its easy to remove the soft lead, then the iron is loosened and can be removed without trouble.
Also, back then they didnt have mixed uses for ferrous products—ie you didnt have a food can as a mixture of steel and tin, or a soft steel motor panel which wasn’t much use for anything else.
also the blacksmiths forge was more or less the only source of metal goods, no we expect metal goods in infinite variety which can’t be produced that way
Not lol. smiling out loud. Guess im SOL 🙂 pun intended.
Steel is like a witch who has used sorcery to make herself a beautiful girl but the spell wears off.
Steel always returns to iron oxide. Ore. well sort of. hey im on a roll… 316 excluded. sort of…
Steel is a classic example of fossil fuel sorcery. we think its forever but then, im melting.
One of the tragedies of Europe is that one can now visit any number of abandoned villages and hamlets, which supported life for literally thousands of years, but which no longer made economic sense in the 20th century (and which governments actually wanted to empty to provide a workforce for industry).
I can’t get over the sense of waste standing in a farmhouse some 300 years old, above all by the great stone fireplaces. All the wasted effort, the craftsmanship……
They were, unlike the shoddy real estate which counts towards GDP, built to last – for centuries – and were just tossed aside.
They should have been the places some people, fit and strong, could have retreated to from the cities as they collapsed.
Even those who have clung on to their family farms are now being destroyed, as subsidies which kept them going are being reduced significantly in the EU.
all settlements of whatever size establish and grow through commercial/military purpose
ie london was the lowest point on the thames that could be bridged
Stoke on Trent grew because clay and coal were available in the same place—harbours followed the same rule—usually fish and or shipbuilding
same applies to individual farmsteads
uk has lots of wool-towns. they are now viable only because they are within commuting distance of, say, London
remove the core reasons, and settlements die unless artificial subsidy supports them (eg cheap transport to and from London or wherever)
that subsidy cannot last indefinietly
That is a good point!
Just noticed this and fits the topic here..
California power lines spark wildfires and prompt blackouts. Why not just bury them?
Janet Wilson, Palm Springs Desert Sun
USA TODAY
Why can’t California’s fire-prone power lines be buried underground, out of harm’s way?
That was the question many were asking this week as hundreds of thousands of customers lost power in the Sacramento and San Francisco areas in preemptive shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric. Further south, another 200,000 customers of other utilities faced warnings that they too could lose power due to high winds.
Experts say the answer is simple: money.
“It’s very, very expensive,” said Severin Borenstein, a UC Berkeley professor of business administration and public policy who specializes in energy. Borenstein was speaking through the crackly static of a cellphone outside his darkened home in the San Francisco suburb of Orinda on Thursday evening. The Berkeley campus was shut down and his home had lost power, too, after PG&E instituted a mandatory “de-energization” across nearly 40 counties due to high fire threats.
It costs about $3 million per mile to convert underground electric distribution lines from overhead, while the cost to build a mile of new overhead line is less than a third of that, at approximately $800,000 per mile, according to a section on PG&E’s website called Facts About Undergrounding Power Lines.
……..At a cost of $3 million per mile, undergrounding 81,000 miles of distribution lines would cost $243 billion. PG&E has 16 million customers; distributing that expense equally would amount to a bill of more than $15,000 per account.
“It’s very expensive,” said Constance Gordon, a public information officer with the California Public Utilities Commission. “The utilities don’t want to pay for it out of their pockets, so ratepayers would have to pitch in, and people don’t want to pay for that.”
….What about solar panels and batteries?
So if you can’t bury your power line outside your front door, what about going “off the grid” with batteries in case of power outages?
Borenstein said that for most people, it’s out of reach. A Tesla-produced Powerwall — a big battery that can store energy produced by solar power on a home rooftop, or electricity sucked from the conventional grid — starts at $6,000. There are additional expenses for installing a switch to “island” a building’s electric system, isolating it from the grid.
……Earlier this month, Newsom signed into law over 20 wildfire-related bills.
One example: SB 584, introduced by Sen. John Moorlach, would require electrical corporations to invest funds for overhead to underground electrical infrastructure conversion projects by July. The projects would be partially funded by grants from the Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. But the bill has languished on the floor.
Borenstein agreed that vegetation management and hardening transmission and distribution lines are better, more easily implemented alternatives than burying 100,000 miles of lines.
“That means mowing, cutting trees, perhaps replacing wooden poles with concrete poles, and all the rusted transmission towers,” he said. “They’re trying to do these things, but they have a huge backlog of work.”
Other possible measures include insulating exposed lines or installing sensors, including cameras or devices that can detect a spark or a short and even shut down a line automatically.
Seems our infrastructure is overwhelmed to adapt to the changes …
I have read that Germany is burying some of their new power lines, and the cost is very expensive, more than four times the overhead line cost. They are often dealing with urban areas, and this no doubt raises costs.
There is a reason that this line is in there:
“Borenstein agreed that vegetation management and hardening transmission and distribution lines are better, more easily implemented alternatives than burying 100,000 miles of lines.”
Look at pictures, topographical and geological maps, for the areas where these power lines go. A lot of rocky knife edge ridges, with deep narrow areas between. I marvel that people were able to place the poles/towers. 45+ degree bare stone slope. Cost to bury them would be … no clue what phrasing to use. Even a relatively few miles of high risk lines would be … . A few frost and freeze cycles. I am not even sure buried wires would last long before it failed. Especially now that the surface has been disturbed.
Notice the lack of success for Germany’s North/South connectors to get wind power to the industrial south. Mostly stalled by “not in my backyard”. I infer that burying is not being contemplated for long distances, though I may be wrong. Assumptions and all that from thousands of miles away.
T2M
AESTHETICS AND ENERGY
Do aesthetics reflect ecological, social and energetic efficacy? Do benign aesthetics affect them in the direction of sustainability and survival, and malign aesthetics affect them in the opposite fashion? Gail makes the compelling point that ideas of aesthetics coincide with and reflect respective contemporary needs to dissipate energy. Aesthetic signify the concern, the preoccupation, with beauty; it is not a formula for beauty, although there may be some universal indicators of beauty.
Since the mass production of Fords predate that of other cars, it’s possible to look at Ford models distributed 20 years apart, starting in 1910, and with different energy regimes. I still don’t understand the business of energy having to be dissipated, but I try to check out how it might work with car design.
1910 Ford
https://search.aol.com/aol/image?p=1910+ford&s_it=img-ans&v_t=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&fr=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Frmsothebys-cache.azureedge.net%2F9%2F8%2F5%2Ff%2Fb%2Fb%2F985fbb702c05b0f55ce2a26d2465439aba443ad3.jpg#id=3&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Frmsothebys-cache.azureedge.net%2F9%2F8%2F5%2Ff%2Fb%2Fb%2F985fbb702c05b0f55ce2a26d2465439aba443ad3.jpg&action=click
1930 Ford
https://search.aol.com/aol/image?p=1930+Fird&s_it=img-ans&v_t=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&fr=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2F00%2Fs%2FMTA2NlgxNjAw%2Fz%2F1dcAAOSw3xJVcFL9%2F%24_32.JPG#id=1&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fi.ebayimg.com%2F00%2Fs%2FMTA2NlgxNjAw%2Fz%2F1dcAAOSw3xJVcFL9%2F%24_32.JPG&action=click
1950 Ford
https://search.aol.com/aol/image?p=1950+Ford&s_it=img-ans&v_t=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&fr=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fst.hotrod.com%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F21%2F2014%2F06%2F1950-ford-coupe.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fst.hotrod.com%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F21%2F2014%2F06%2F1950-ford-coupe.jpg&action=click
1970 Ford
https://search.aol.com/aol/image?p=1970+Ford&s_it=img-ans&v_t=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&fr=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fst.hotrod.com%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F21%2F2014%2F11%2F1970-ford-torino-parked-closeup.jpg#id=0&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Fst.hotrod.com%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F21%2F2014%2F11%2F1970-ford-torino-parked-closeup.jpg&action=click
CA:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-10-12/column-steve-lopez-california-power-outages
Column: What the heck has gone wrong here in California? From owning the future to blacked out.
“To be honest, it’s kind of embarrassing…
But we’ve got tent villages up and down the state, a shameful rich-poor gap, three homeless people dying daily in Los Angeles County, and, in the midst of a housing shortage, homes going up in flames by the hundreds.
And we’re not very good at fixing any of these things.”
sounds like basic population overshoot…
the good news for California is the serious butt covering by PG&E is exposing it (their buttocks) for all to see. it’s like when Dorothy’s little dog Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the man pulling the cords to animate the Great Wizard of Oz. moment of truth time.
I disagree on the population overshoot.
Sounds more like a VERY distraught and angry person with no understanding of cause and effect. Oh yeah and a healthy case of “not my/our fault!”. Despite the last line in your quoted material.
Isn’t PG&E a public owned regulated utility? Where was the oversight to ensure maintenance is done? Why is this not a problem in any of the other western states? Is there a magic line at the Arizona, Oregon and Nevada borders?
A link to derail my rant. Remember this is a CEO so believe as much as you think prudent.
https://energynow.com/2019/10/chevron-ceo-mike-wirth-bemoans-california-home-while-praising-texas/
T2M
here’s the Wall Street Journal on PG&E:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/11/wsj-blame-environmentalists-for-california-blackouts-wildfires/
“For years the utility skimped on safety upgrades and repairs while pumping billions into green energy and electric-car subsidies to please its overlords in Sacramento. Credit Suisse has estimated that long-term contracts with renewable developers cost the utility $2.2 billion annually more than current market power rates.”
so could it really be that they skimped on safety issues so they could Go Green?
“oversight” is the right word…
where were the politicians who allowed PG&E to behave so?
was/is the problem PG&E or the authority above them?
“was/is the problem PG&E or the authority above them?”
*All of them!* No blame game, they all are at fault. Other places have managed this type of event.
Like any accident, it is a ladder climbing to an end result. Remove any of the rungs and the accident doesn’t happen.
Bad corporations/people exist. Bad politicians exist. Bad bureaucrats exist. Silly (and/or “cost averse”, short sighted) voters/customers exist. When the ladder is complete … Bad things happen. Break a rung …
Or we can just assume it is just bad luck, god’s will, climate, weather, … or whatever each person picks his own hobby horse.
Though from what I have heard of PG&E and the excuse PG&E gives in your cite … I’ll spare everyone my rant.
T2M
I think this is what Gail is talking about, it is from Ecosophia comment section.
“From sunny California, a big problem with their electric lines being so old and under-serviced that they’ve sparked some of the largest forest and wildfires California has ever seen. Rather than service the lines, they’re just cutting off electric service during the windy period.”
It seems to me that this is very consistent with what has been discussed regarding electrical service. No matter who’s to blame, there are not the funds to support the infrastructure.
Dennis L.
My wife and I are in a pickle. We live in CA, and this latest outage was the 2nd this year. When the power goes out we can’t use the plumbing, because an electric holding tank when near full pumps up to the sewer under the street in front of our house. Obviously we are on a hillside. So not only is our life businesses interfered with by an outage but no plumbing is a real difficulty.
The pickle is, if we spend approx. 12 thousand on a Generac backup system hardwired into the E panel, then to justify that expense the number of days it comes on during an outage need to be divided into the cost to determine a daily cost. So this year we’ve been out 6 days, so if we have spent that much our days with outage would have cost $2,000. each. Now if there are more days outages in future years, the cost comes down.
But what I’m figuring is the whole power outage bit by PG&E is an attempt to get CA’s government to make it so any downed power line that causes a fire is an act of God, to exonerate the utility company, and that way PG&E doesn’t turn off power in anticipation of rough weather that may cause a fire from a downed line.
So we are waiting to see if CA’s government does something like that, and if not by next Spring, then we’ll have to bite the bullet and get an expensive backup system wired in.
Just as an aside, I noticed our portable back up generator that runs on unleaded, did not run the frig as well as grid power. It hummed, but did not get as cool. As soon as power came back on and I plugged it in, it kicked on with an audible sound it doesn’t from the generator. I’m not sure what the difference is, but we do have an energy saving frig.
It could be that the gauge of wire in the ext. cord was too low. I’ll try a higher gauge and shorter cord next time.
Scrap that – lower gauge is thicker, which is what I meant.
Off topic so not the right place. Without more specifics hard to tell. Do a Duck Duck Go search.
That said and ignoring it. 🙂 You may also want to check if the generator is putting out out a modified sine wave or true sine wave. Modified can cause issues with some things, according to what I have read.
T2M
Leave California sooner rather than later?
Or dig a compost-toilet and spend your 12k on hedonistic pursuits instead?
Delighted to hear that.
Cynicism is so corrosive.
Simple faith and trust in our leaders will not be proved wrong (as long as they have access to document shredders)… 🙂
“India’s solar and wind boom is fizzling
“India has been a bright spot for solar and wind growth, driven by government policies and ambitious targets. But new projects have stalled.
“The background: India had aimed to install 175 gigawatts of renewable generation by 2022. But the Mumbai rating agency CRISIL now predicts the country is going to miss those goals, coming up more than 40% short.
“What’s happening? One state simply stopped paying developers in a strong-arm effort to force them to slash rates. Meanwhile, state-owned distribution companies have pushed down prices for proposed projects to the point where they’re often not financially viable. These have chilled investment, and stalled projects.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/f/614539/indias-solar-and-wind-boom-is-fizzling/?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_download.unpaid.engagement
Of course, the emphasis of this piece is on the implications for “climate change”, not on the continuing non-existence of any AC power grid in the world which gets even nearly half its energy from IRE (intermittent renewable energy — wind, solar, tides, etc.), or on the necessity of fossil fuels to keep the whole techno-state-ist infrastructure going in the first place.
It seems like there have been a huge number of countries that have come to a similar conclusion after they added a certain amount of wind and solar. China, Germany, and Spain have all gone this route. It seems like countries need to figure out for themselves what the costs and benefits are before they decide to cut back substantially.
I suspect in many cases people don’t really want to know things will not work no matter how good the intentions. Is it possible that we have too much empathy in our political life? Could this be related to the increased number of women in politics? Merkel is a physicist , Germany does not have a great deal of sunlight, she should easily understand the underlying science yet there was a huge build out of solar. Some of these decisions are not pleasant and physics can defy the “if we can all only believe it will all work.” The underlying structure of our society seems to be tearing itself apart which may make all the other issues moot, or worse. There is so much anger it is hard to find actual solutions in many areas.
Dennis L.
The issue with Merkel is that she was trained both science and political organizing, and at some point of her career she spent in aggregate 2-4-6x more time already as acting scheming pro politician than scientist.
Even conformist msm biographer would agree with the realistic observation certain (most) type of political leaders are just preoccupied with cleansing the HR area near and around them to make it void of any direct competition to themselves. Now the gov transition looks quite shaky in Germany because the *replacement candidates are very substandard material.
On the other hand a true statesman nurtures the system by helping to prop up promising talent to any key position, advise on any early mistakes and consults correction and yes also mercilessly eliminates disorderly elements. That’s just proven 101 lesson of history, this very often makes or brakes empires, war effort or any important gov turnaround maneuvers.
—
*in the same way that’s large part of why the “Orange Jesus” survived so many attacks from the swamp so far, basically the system got so ineffectual due to ever recycling cadre of substandard players for decades that incoming minority faction could have gone so far on teflon shield only
Interesting thought, I keep recalling Shakespeare and others, it seems it has always been thus, your comment about the HR department was clever.
Dennis L.
My step-mother is an MP and regional organiser for her (social-democratic) party in Spain, and it’s nearly all infighting and ideological wrangles, and, of course, photo ops and marches.
Recently, she has tried to clean up corruption in internal voting, together with two other senior members, and it looks as though they will be disciplined and booted out of the party by the faction rigging the votes.
I did warn her it would likely be a disillusioning experience……..
As for background and preparation for politics, they are all former school teachers, lawyers and some with degrees in Political Science or Trade Union Studies – a very poor talent pool for a technological society in crisis!
The other route for ambitious people who want to live off the public purse is NGO’s dealing with fashionable topics – helping migrants ‘integrate’, gender stuff, etc. You don’t even have to stand in an election…..
From an old book whose title I forget:
“To make change happen, find out what will cause the change, and do it. Then find out what is preventing the change, and undo it.”
It should by now be blindingly obvious what is preventing the change to large scale renewables: the grid. But nobody seems willing to face the problem square on.
That’s like my wife being 200 pound overweight and finding out from the doctor that is she doesn’t lose the 200 pounds she will be dead in a year. “But my husband never told me I was fat, he lied to me and said I look good. He lied to me and let me eat whatever I wanted.”
The rank hypocrisy and externalisation of blame are tiresome.
And why on earth would anyone imagine the onus was solely on energy companies to flag up the climatic impacts of their own products when we all use them and the debate has been in the public domain for decades?
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://m.youtube.com/watch%3Fv%3DMSW8UeMp2kU&ved=2ahUKEwiW4NKco5flAhWOXRUIHfSbCz8QwqsBMAF6BAgHEAc&usg=AOvVaw0_cQSZeovmuBuhqrR7b3J6
Quite: it’s becoming a pseudo-religious narrative, requiring a scapegoat to carry the sins of all.
What happens when the believers and fanatics don’t get their Promised Clean Green Land?
“Promised Clean Green Land”
+++++++++
You’re all missing the main point.
Look at Jane.
Look how cute and beautiful she still looks despite her age.
Apart from a few wrinkles, she still has that celebrity sparkle and a touch of that Barbarella ambience.
And on top of that, she’s now doing something that gets her attention and makes her relevant, at least in Hollywood circles.
Meryl Streep must be purple with envy.
With poise and aplomb, and impeccably clad in haute couture, Jane Fonda gracefully joins the climate crusade!
I know that it’s scary for a lot of people. I know that it seems vast and overwhelming. The Green New Deal, for example, is what I’m talking about. But (raising her finger) the reason that we have to do so much so quickly is because thirty years ago the fossil fuel industry lied to us. If they had told the truth we could have started thirty years ago and have the transition be much more moderate, much more incremental. So if we’re having to do things that appear radical, it’s because they lied to us and we’ve lost so much time. Our carbon budget has become very narrow and our time.. We have eleven years, and that’s it, you know. And when I say “that’s it”, I mean a tipping point will be reached when it will be too late. Systems will start to disintegrate and there’ll be nothing we can do about it It will affect every aspect of our lives; even those rich guys who think they’re above it all. They won’t be because the economy is gonna be shocked, health will go, health will go, mass migrations by the tens of millions. It’s gonna be a chain effect..
https://youtu.be/20_A524970o
Lot’s of people who don’t understand the real situation. Sounds good to those who haven’t looked into the situation.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/10/11/watch-jane-fonda-arrested-at-climate-change-protest/
the elderly will lead us!
the children will lead us!
we will stop the climate from changing!
Oil replacement ratio dips to the lowest in decades
https://www.rystadenergy.com/newsevents/news/press-releases/all-eyes-on-the-Caribbean-as-replacement-ratio-dips-to-the-lowest-in-decades/
As simple as this (sic!):
Michael Mann, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, said the findings shone a light on the role of fossil fuel companies and called on politicians at the forthcoming climate talks in Chile in December to take urgent measures to rein in their activities.
“The great tragedy of the climate crisis is that seven and a half billion people must pay the price – in the form of a degraded planet – so that a couple of dozen polluting interests can continue to make record profits. It is a great moral failing of our political system that we have allowed this to happen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions
The is the story we keep reading. Of course, without fossil fuels, nearly all (or perhaps all) of us are dead.
From the article……
The Guardian approached the 20 companies named in the polluters list. Eight of them have replied. Some argued that they were not directly responsible for how the oil, gas or coal they extracted were used by consumers. Several disputed claims that the environmental impact of fossil fuels was known as far back as the late 1950s or that the industry collectively had worked to delay action.
Most explicitly said they accepted the climate science and some claimed to support the targets set out in the Paris agreement to reduce emissions and keep global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
All pointed out efforts they were making to invest in renewable or low carbon energy sources and said fossil fuel companies had an important role to play in addressing the climate crisis. PetroChina said it was a separate company from its predecessor, China National Petroleum, so had no influence over, or responsibility for, its historical emissions. The companies’ replies can be read in full here.
Of course this point can’t be overlooked…
He added: “Even though global consumers from individuals to corporations are the ultimate emitters of carbon dioxide, the Climate Accountability Institute focuses its work on the fossil fuel companies that, in our view, have their collective hand on the throttle and the tiller determining the rate of carbon emissions and the shift to non-carbon fuels.
Non carbon fuels??? As Gail has pointed out time and time again, not looking at the complete, total picture of so called “clean energy”.
Of course, in the end the Atmosphere will heat up to the point where human nation states can no longer support itself.
Or not. Human nation states may be long gone, by the time the alleged warming problem takes place. Without understanding the trajectory of human population growth, one can’t say much at all. Climate models use nonsense projections of future fossil fuel consumption. Also, future population growth.
Well, in the end we really don’t or won’t know the material contributing tipping point factor.
Probably a combination of all that have have been addressed here and elsewhere.
The ignorance of Guardian reporters generally surpasseth all understanding: ‘non-carbon fuels ‘ is delightful! Are they thinking of rush lights dipped in pig fat, and bundles of twigs gathered by hand in ancient forests?
The idea that in this system the ff companies have ‘their hand on the tiller’: oh my……
I wonder how much ff was expended, how much concrete poured and steel inserted, when The Guardian moved its HQ from the old building in Farringdon Road – still standing – to their swanky new King’s Place building in a distinctly more fashionable district of London?
Or was it perhaps built by solar-powered elves?
This requires fearless investigative journalism!
I remember when the Manchester Guardian was a trusted and respected newspaper. Today’s Guardian is close to being the nadir of gutter journalism.
Their reporters might be aware that pig fat contains carbon, as do bundles of twigs. But they are clearly unaware that we passed the 1.5C threshold at least five years ago. The only reason it does not show on our thermometers is the dimming caused by industrial pollution. They also seem unaware that nations responsible for 80% of the world’s carbon emissions either did not sign the agreement or have subsequently failed to act on it.
And, by the way, the first warning about the possible climate effects of manmade carbon dioxide was issued in 1896, by Greta’s relative Svante Arrhenius.
But Guardian reporters don’t care about facts; all they have are agendas.
As if the ff companies were just like a Mexican drug cartel, and could be rounded up and shut away…….
Michael Mann is a fraud. He lost a seven year court case in Canada a couple of months ago because he refused to provide details of how he calculated the temperatures that went into his famous “hockey stick” temperature graph. Back in 2011 a Canadian climatologist called him out on his misrepresentation of global temperature history and so Mann sued him for libel. After stalling and blocking for seven years, Mann lost the case and was held in contempt by the judge for refusing to provide details of how his data were derived. This was the biggest scientific court case of the 21st century and no one is talking about it.
Of course, we know about a huge amount of unconventional oil that could be extracted, if it were possible to get the price up high enough.
With Brexit looking potentially soluble and Trump reaching a “preliminary agreement” with the Chinese trade delegation, one dares to hope that the global economy might sputter on for a few more years – a terminally ill patient enjoying enough temporary respite from his symptoms to cross off a few more items on his bucket-list.
How is Brexit looking soluble? The Trump and China Deal will break down; there have been no papers signed yet. Also without a stimulus bill in the U.S all signs point to an economic slowdown..And that is not going to happen with the current state of Washington .It is already happening all around the world without added debt there is no growth. Also one black swan event brings all the cards down can anyone say war in the middle east? Iran is being squeezed hard just like the U.S did to Japan before pearl harbor they will eventually strike most leaders don’t want to end up like Gadaffi so hold on to your seat…your comment few years might be adjusted to “few Months’?!
It is certainly true that any trade truce would be a temporary fudge, designed to delay problems in the US until after the election next year. China not sounding convinced:
“The latest trade war negotiations between China and the United States were “constructive” but there remains a great deal of uncertainty as the two sides seek to find a long-term resolution to their dispute, Chinese state media said on Saturday.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3032639/beijing-warns-more-uncertainty-trade-war-negotiations-despite
Re Brexit, there has been a sudden and rather baffling sea change in the timbre of negotiations, which have swung from abject pessimism, with a no-deal all but guaranteed, on Monday to this:
“The European Union and Britain will step up Brexit discussions over the coming days, following a breakthrough in talks between top EU and UK negotiators on Friday.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/brexit-eu-uk-get-go-ahead-to-intensify-talks/a-50793872
A sceptic might wonder if the plan all along has been to terrify everyone by taking this to the wire, so that a reheated version of the deal Theresa May thrice failed to get passed into law might wash safely through the Houses of Parliament on a wave of relief.
One might indeed suspect that, Sr Harry, were it not for the absolute confidence we can all have in the utter probity – and cast-iron integrity – of our ‘leaders’ in the UK and EU.
Such corrosive scepticism may safely be banished away!
You have set this deeply cynical soul straight, Xabier. I am grateful and chastened in equal measure.
Reading the recent Brexit news, the image I have in mind runs along the lines of “Bravely bold Sir Boris, rode forth from Camelot….” I just can’t get it out of my head.
I will believe an agreement when I see one. The most I would expect is kicking the problem down the road a bit farther.
As far as the overall picture goes, you won’t find many gloomier prognosticators than me but the global economy has already confounded me with its resilience.
There is good evidence that we are already in a global recession, which we can loosely define as global GDP growth below 2.5%, and the major central banks have very limited ammo to pull us out of a downturn, should it get more serious. There are worsening environmental pressures, too, of course.
But who knows? Perhaps we have a few more years of inventive stimulus allowing an economic ‘bumpy plateau’ accompanied by increasingly eye-popping socio-political dramas before the whole thing craters. I hope so – I’m enjoying watching my boys grow up and I like my creature comforts.
‘Just an inch of steel to kill a man, a charming Olde Englishe proverb.
Well, a perfect insertion in a vital artery will lead to a quick bleed-out and death; but a man can take many dozens of stab wounds in non-vital places and survive.
Or suffer a much slower death, from infection: I suggest we are at the stage of lying feverish and raving while the surgeon shakes his head, but tries ‘just one more thing.’
The energy flows sufficient to sustain global trade and societal hyper-complexity look fairly good for at least another 5-10 years,and I am sure financial matters can be patched up adequately enough while impoverishment of the ordinary citizen spreads…
Redistribution of our (fundamentally illusory) wealth will become the great political issue, we can be sure – certainly in Europe/UK.
Five to ten years… I would settle for that in a deal with the devil.
You’ll be going to Heaven to eat delicious things to the sound of drums and golden trumpets, not the Other Place; unless life is more decadent and sinful on that island of yours than one has ever imagined. Maybe that’s why you moved there? 🙂
I wish. 😀
Harry, do the locals build a wicker man on Islay?
Or am I getting it mixed up with some more backward part of the Hebrides?
Tim, if they do, they haven’t told me… Oh, wait – I think I hear Britt Ekland banging on my bedroom wall…
“… one dares to hope that the global economy might sputter on for a few more years – a terminally ill patient enjoying enough temporary respite from his symptoms…”
yes, we can barely hope…
the patient is ill because of the flat or decreasing energy supply… not enough healthy low cost energy to feed on…
the symptoms are many, and getting weirder year by year…
too low energy prices, negative interest rates(!), fast rising prices of cyber currencies, tariffs/trade wars, stealth QE…
CBs and economists must think those are the illnesses, but they are just symptoms caused by the weakening energy supply of the patient…
how long can the CBs etc keep the symptoms under control before something causes the patient to fall down?
Quivering away like Merkel, but still on out feet…..
For the patient to keep going on there needs to be 0 black swan events….How likely is that? It will just take one to make the fire go like crazy…and because of the amount of tinder you will not be able to stop it. And by “you” I mean the Federal Reserve…..every day it looks like it is going to happen sooner than 2 years….too much debt is coming due
debt, interest rates, forex, derivatives, tariffs, hyperinflation, deflation…
there are lots of financial places where a black swan could arrive…
as long as the black swan doesn’t arrive in an area of real energy supply/production, such as the Saudi drone strikes on 9/14 but much worse, then it will probably be in a financial area…
in which case the real physical base of the world economy will remain intact…
in which case the world CBs will have the task of keeping the economy from crashing after being struck by such a financial black swan…
as others have been saying, the world is probably already in recession…
this should be declared officially in 2020, and as a wild guess, I would say it will be very severe… down 5 to 10%… with no full recovery to the previous level, before the next recession in a few years…
the new normal for the 2020s will be a series of recessions…
unless we get The Collapse… which still remains at a low probability…
They seek them here, they seek them there: those damned derivatives are….everywhere!
Talk about digging your own grave since 2008……..
“More than 7 million Americans are already 90 or more days behind on their car loans, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and serious delinquency rates among borrowers with the lowest credit scores have by far seen the fastest acceleration.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1WQ1AP
“More U.S. households are struggling financially, especially among lower-income consumers, signaling that a growing number of borrowers could fall behind on their debt, according to UBS.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-10-08/u-s-consumer-finances-are-getting-worse-ubs-survey-says
Sounds pretty much like QE to me:
“The Federal Reserve on Friday (Oct 11) announced a new program to boost liquidity in the US financial plumbing and allow the central bank to better manage interest rates, but without changing monetary policy.
“In the new program, the New York Federal Reserve Bank will buy about US$60 billion a month in short term US Treasury debt through the second quarter of next year to ensure “the supply of reserves remains ample,” according to a statement.
“However, the changes are “purely technical” and “do not represent a change in the stance of monetary policy.””
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/business/us-fed-unveils-new-steps-to-boost-liquidity-manage-rates-11993212
Somehow this deals with the post about aspects of the Green New Deal … well I guess people buying Tesla’s aren’t that badly affected. Though …
Not to mention you need to get a better feed. The story is over 6 months old, though your article isn’t.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/02/13/us-debt-rate-auto-loan-delinquencies-record.aspx
Updated April 26th Originally dated Feb. 13th
Quote
Among the more troubling facts from the report is the record 7 million Americans who are 90 days or more behind on their auto loan payments. It’s a signal, economists say, that Americans are struggling to pay bills despite other indications of a strong economy and low unemployment. Approximately 6.5% of all auto finance loans are 90-plus days past due.
End quote
I don’t think it is good news by the way.
T2M
It deals with financial limits, which are themselves an expression of energy and resource limits. ‘Non-elite’ consumers are getting tapped out even under the status quo. A transition to dilute, intermittent energy sources is unhelpful from this standpoint.
Here is a quote from the latest report:
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/interactives/householdcredit/data/pdf/HHDC_2019Q2.pdf
Quote
Aggregate delinquency rates improved in the second quarter of 2019. As of June 30, 4.4% of outstanding debt was in some stage of delinquency. Of the $604 billion of debt that is delinquent, $405 billion is seriously delinquent (at least 90 days late or “severely derogatory”, which includes some debts that have previously been charged off although the lenders are continuing collection attempts). The share of credit card balances transitioning into 90+ day delinquency has been rising since 2017, and continued to do so in Q2. Meanwhile the flow into 90+ day delinquency for auto loan balances has risen more than 70 bps since 2012 and experienced a slight seasonal decline this quarter. Student loan delinquency transition rates remain at high levels relative to other types of debt, and increased this quarter; 9.9% of student loan balances became seriously delinquent in the second quarter (at an annual rate).
End Quote
It is a 45 page PDF with a lot of information. with an actual history back to 2003 by quarters.
Like I said a lot of information. I am not sure which data was important. 30 day delinquent, 90+, transition rates. Number of loans, to which credit scores. It is going to take me some time to digest.
T2M
Looks like we are knocking on Recessions Door….
Rising old used car prices help push poor Americans over the edge
By Nick Carey
ReutersOctober 11, 2019
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rising-old-used-car-prices-100638131.html
More than 7 million Americans are already 90 or more days behind on their car loans, according to the New York Federal Reserve, and serious delinquency rates among borrowers with the lowest credit scores have by far seen the fastest acceleration.
The seeds of the problem are buried deep in the financial crisis, when in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, automakers slashed production. A decade later, that has made a relative rarity of used 10-year-old vehicles that are typically more affordable for low-wage earners.
According to data provided to Reuters by industry consultant and car shopping website Edmunds, the average price of that vintage of vehicle is $8,657, still nearly 75% higher than in 2010 despite some softening in prices over the last year. The average new car, in contrast, has seen a price rise of 25% in that same time period.
“This is pinching people at the worst point possible,” said Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ senior manager of industry analysis. “If you need basic A to B transportation, you have to get an older car that needs more repairs and has more wear-and-tear issues…
Weak lending standards in recent years are partly to blame for the rising delinquency rates, which Warren Kornfeld, a senior vice president on Moody’s financial institutions team, said are approaching record highs despite a solid economy.
Auto lenders are belatedly tightening lending standards, but it may already be too late, he said
Sorry for the double-post, GetHappy – didnt see yours.
Dear Sir, you can double list me anytime. Thank you ever so much for your contributions to our comment section, Harry.
In that light, perhaps a song… naturally,
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VGk3tY4yP7k
BTW, the movie Judy with Renee Zellwenger is thumbs up👍
You are very welcome, GetHappy – a splendidly upbeat moniker and song for these ominous times.
Gail may like this article. Lots of charts and graphs on energy
This climate problem is bigger than cars and much harder to solve
Low-carbon options for heavy industry like steel and cement are scarce and expensive.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/10/10/20904213/climate-change-steel-cement-industrial-heat-hydrogen-ccs
Climate activists are fond of saying that we have all the solutions we need to the climate crisis; all we lack is the political will.
While it’s true enough as policy goes — we certainly have enough solutions to get started and make big changes — as a technical matter, it is incorrect. Truly defeating climate change will mean getting to net-zero carbon emissions and eventually negative emissions. That means decarbonizing everything. Every economic sector. Every use of fossil fuels.
And actually, there are some sectors, some uses of fossil fuels, that we do not yet know how to decarbonize.
It’s not just not knowing…….
Thanks for linking to this article. It helps fill in part of my knowledge gap. I know that there is a lot of direct use of fossil fuels in China to make cement and steel (actually, the pig iron preceding the steel). The questions is how to substitute away from fossil fuels for very high temperature applications. These are two charts from the article:
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/industrial-heat-requirements-icef.png
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/generic-cost-comparison-for-heat-options-cgep.png
As far as I know, these processes today are largely being done in China today, by burning coal. Their cost is likely less than the gray 3.5 cents per million Btu cost for natural gas line shown on the second chart. I cannot see any way costs can be raised above this line, without the end products becoming unaffordable. Any substitution is much more expensive.
This is one of the big reasons that the Green New Deal won’t work. It doesn’t fix the need for concrete in quantity and steel in quantity. Without fossil fuels, we also don’t have asphalt. We end up with a situation of not having either roads or commercial buildings. All we have is wooden buildings that burn down easily. Or they get attacked by termites.
Wooden buildings aren’t all that hopeless. There is a Japanese age old tradition of changing out and replacing parts of wooden buildings over centuries. And in our time sprinkler systems can guard against fire. A surprising number of them where I come from have hung around for a century or two without sprinklers, by far the biggest danger to them being the meme that they can’t last, are not economical, will burn down, don’t represent progress. But wooden buildings aren’t the only alternative to concrete (and in fact, given depleted forests are not too appropriate for new construction). There is wattle and daub, which use minimum amounts of wod, and mud. But there is paper pulp that can substitute for mud. The latter depends greatly on BAU, which, as far as I can tell, will need to endure, but with commonsense changes along the way.
Constructional paper as used in Japan and Korea is simply extraordinary!
I had a dreadful day looking at lots of new housing developments from a train window: I can hardly credit just how low the art of architecture has fallen.
I’m not sure which is worse and more of an assault on the eyes; the low-rise (3-5 storeys) ‘eco-high-density- block; or the individual ‘luxury ‘houses.
I’m so please to have ended up in a basic, working-class house of 1949, so much better and well-designed. And solid – all-brick. Built at a rare moment in the history of housing design in Britain. Just hoping that roof holds up!
80% of the energy used in a building over its life is from heating or cooling compared to the embodied energy used in the building materials. The largest energy reductions come from living in smaller houses and houses that have areas that can be allowed to go cold in a cold climate while having separately insulated rooms that are heated and lived in.
According to Robert Riversong the most “sustainable” buildings are straw bale followed by double stud or modified larson truss using cellulose insulation( wall design.)
Wood trusses are by far the most efficient roof structure.
The alternative “thermal mass” designs earthship or earthbag add very little value in cold climates but are useful in warm climates (oak ridge laboratory, univ of waterloo studies).
They require A LOT of labor (calories) that often involves lots of laborer travel and usually a lot of heavy equipment for berms. They usually use a lot of concrete for packout and bond beams as well as a lot of wood as no truss roof and lots of big posts.
Dont try to grow food in your house. High humidity not good for houses. you need overhead glass not just south facing anyway..
IMO it is very hard to beat a conventionally built small house with minimal footers built with stud walls. truss roof, and minimum wall insulation of 40 and ceiling of 60 from any conservation evaluation that is unbiased. thermal bypass by studs and rafters should be eliminated by one design or another. passive solar should be incorporated using glass(very high embodied energy).
But as Gail mentioned in a earlier post location is everything. Many places we live now may not be inhabitable without fossil fuel energy inputs. Food not housing may indeed be the big limiter in the future at some point so it is debatable whether any building effort is justified. The “greenest” choice is not to build. Well insulated small buildings with passive solar will certainly be more preferable in cold climates. you cant eat 2x4s.
“The “greenest” choice is not to build.” I certainly agree. I expect that a similar statement is true about buying a new vehicle, especially if a person doesn’t drive it much. It takes a long time to pay back the embodied energy. With fairly flat population in developed countries, there really is little need for new building.
In the US, it seems like we have followed the same pattern with homes as with cars. New homes have gotten bigger and bigger, as insulation has gotten better. Year to year natural gas consumption by the residential sector has been essentially flat since the 1970s, despite more large homes being built. At least until 2005, electricity consumption by the residential sector was increasing, however. Then came LCD screens and LED light bulbs.
I had to look up “truss,” And then wondered whether that could relate to the hip roof, where the hip is a triangle, with the apex at the ridge point of a roof. If so, how this might affect hurricane preparedness would be good to know.
As to the best insulated walls, I would have thought thickness alone would dictate the degree of insulation. Some southwest adobe buildings have 4 foot walls.
A truss is a simple concept. All it is a bunch of triangles holding the roof and being held together by the roof. But like all simple concepts in use it gets, complicated. I’ll leave more in depth explanation to an architect or a structural engineer. But more or less you tailor it to the expected environment.
If you want to build to survive “CAT5 guaranteed” structures, people are going to be living in tents, Nobody could afford housing. Code specifies requirements for expected risks. With a feedback loop see Hurricane Andrew. Structural engineers figure what is needed to hold the roof on and up in those conditions to pass code.
Thickness alone does add insulation value. Again, complicated, what percentage of people want to live in the equivalent of a hobbit hole or fort. Imagine the difficulty designing useful windows for 4 foot walls.
Adobe works wonderfully in that environment. Not only is it insulation but a marvelous thermal energy storage to assist when the daily highs are a 100+ F (38+ C) and the lows are 50 F(10 C).
In Florida where daily summer highs tend to be 90s F(32 C) and the low 80s F(27 C) the value of that thermal mass is significantly reduced. Not to mention what happens when massive wind and rain starts impacting your painted mud bricks for days. just the humidity will be a challenge. Thinner means more living space for a given amount of material and building space.
An example of something not covered is a flat roof(no trusses) and 5 or 10 feet of snow. Life is complicated most people never bother to think what makes it possible. Just their little piece. Light goes on, water stays outside, clean water, inside toilets, …
T2M
I dont know what a hip roof is. all i am familiar with is king post and howe truss types. Earth has a r of 1for one FOOT. Thermal mass only wors in moderate climates where the temperature rises above desired temp then falls below it. Adobe works in arizona. It fails in Montana. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/earthship-hype-and-earthship-reality. poly iso foam has a r of about 6 per inch.. It has its own problems Dense pack cellulose has a r of about 4 per inch. Fiberglass has a r of about 3 per inch.
They all have pluses and minuses
convection is the biggest loss of heat. re blower test. now provide ventilation…
Warm climate design is totally different from cold climate design. Vapor drive is reversed so the stacks are too.
T2M
I enjoy reading this, since it confirms much of what I believe. Codes are truly stifling, and we need better ways to make building decisions. We really need more of a one for all/all for one local culture. I am in the process of seeing how light and cheap of a structure I can build (so no 4′ walls for me, although there are situations where they work). So anything that can rip or lift has to be well reinforced at the vulnerable points, mostly edges. Building decisions should be calibrated to the given space to be “built” on, not to some one-size-fits-all formula. Very glad to learn more about the truss. Ideal in hurricane country.
The hip roof…The triangle of the hip may or may not be a truss. If anyone is clear about that, please share. I imagine that if it’s facing strong winds, the hip will offer less destructive resistance to the wind force.
https://search.aol.com/aol/search?s_it=webmail-hawaii1-basicaol&q=hip%20roofs
“I am in the process of seeing how light and cheap of a structure I can build” assuming u want strong too. assuming its on the ground not on wheels. assuming decent load bearing soil Studs can be found on craigslist for a buck. 16′ truss roof. 12×12 footers. 2 0r 3 #4 rebar continuos 24″ overlap. Studs and trusses 2 foot on center. studs under rafters. double upper sill plate. proper headers over openings. Shear strength from osb. No shear strength stucture fall down go boom like hard rock. inner walls with osb for cross brace shear no windows at corners. fiberglass insulation off craigslist. Get it CHEAP. double felt stucco over 2″ of polyiso exterior. Recycled brick floors. Brick is usually free if you haul. drywall interior.
Use people who do it full time. dont try to do it all. it will take 10x as long cost 2x and be half as good if you do.
not an engineer. all structures should be engineered.
nothing else even comes close. thats why 99 out of 100 houses are built like this.
People think there is something better. earthship. eartbag. monolithic dome. tire bale. underground post beam. geodesic domes. barrel vault. ive built them all. They may be aesthetically better.
people get sold an idea. that idea doesnt match the physical world.
straw bale might come close to beating framed… Everthing is a compromise. Aesthetically material wise. sustainablity. labor. straw bale probably beats framing. dry climates only.
i like tensile strength under my roof and in my walls for wind shear.
light strong and cheap. . wood is a incredible material. it has tensile strength. it holds fasteners. the ability for a easy connection between wall and truss is huge.
get on a framing crew. even if you get fired in a day you will learn a bunch. then get on that nail gun. if you can just make good cuts on the ground fast you wont get fired and learn.
life is too short to pack tires.
yurts may beat framed too…
Namke, you’re a fountain of practical knowledge. You’d be appalled by the things I try, but I love your spirit. 🙂 Really though, if you could bear to deal with people coming out of the left field, you could help them enormously with very specific issues they might be up against. (Not their general approach.) I don’t know if you have the patience for that, however. 🙂 Right now, I’m trying to make my own pop-up art exhibition booth. One month ago when I tried one, it was a disaster. (I’m fine with such disasters when I’m still here to talk about them). The parts of the booth have to be light enough for this senior to manage, and they must fit in my compact car for a single trip. But I’m trying not to depart the scene before making something similar that can withstand the strongest category hurricane. If I can do that in my own way, it’s up to the crowd what to do with it. I use cardboard.
One positive thing about houses which burned down was perhaps the elimination of accumulated dirt and disease.
Certain Neolithic cultures in Central Europe deliberately burnt their houses down -the whole settlement , it seems, every 70 years or so.
I knew a guy got so frustrated trying to build his own house he lost it. Got drunk and fired it up. was there watching it burn when the fire trucks and police showed up. not a insurance scam just sick of it.
2 years federal penitentiary.
Long those lines, we are in a forced blackout here in ca. My wife last night saw a product for sale – a box w/batteries that uses solar panels or plug in before an outage. I said to her, “yeah but that generator we’ve been using puts out 3500 watts and it maintains that level the whole time it’s running. It runs the frig a light even a toaster or coffee maker – that e box will start losing power as soon as it starts getting used. The generator was 400, the e box is 2000. Their big selling point is no carbon monoxide. But that’s why we have the generator outside. So she says the generator puts out 3500 watts?! I said yeah and constantly as long as it has fuel.
It’s the age old argument between e & oil bi-products.
The e box is 1500 watts max.
Curious, and probably off topic. What does this e box cost and what is the energy storage (WattHour)?
Or just a link I am unable (back to being not so smart) find one.
Thank you in advance,
T2M
buy your good lady a bike and connect it to a dynamo.
i am sure she will appreciate your resourcefulness
Rather ironically, an Iraqi friend was brought up among black-outs in wartime Baghdad: she’s recently moved to California to work for Warner Bros; must seem like old times……
Genset beats any battery system for emergency use. Batteries leakage requires constant battery charging. Maintaing a PV system just for emergency use very wasteful and not cost effective. Perhaps a good idea to reduce energy consumtion a tad when grid out rather than to try to sustain high energy consumption… get a catylitic propane heater and a cooker.. Really all you need is some lithium batteries for lighting and propane to cook at heat if you dont have a freezer full of meat.
If water pipes freeze when it gets too cold out, you likely will need a moderate amount of propane for heat to keep from damaging your home with broken water pipes.
Quite right Gail. Im afraid i take the understanding that water being kept functional is high priority. Its nice if that is by design. A small house designed for low energy usage with separate insulated spaces both bathroom and kitchen come up into the core super insulated space. This is the “great room” of earlier times when it was understood that energy was limited and it was only common sense that multiple people shared heated quarters in winter.with modern pex piping water distribution thee is no reason that water cant be kept in warm areas and drained in freezing areas. rv non toxic antifreeze can also be used in areas that go cold. pex takes freezing much better than older more rigid piping not that its optimal. if you understand how water is distributed in your house there is no reason valves can not be installed. wherever water enters the house has to be the great room. If that is far from kitchen and bathroom that is indeed unfortunate in cold climates.
The cheap propane on demand chinese water heaters generally work well. Certainly well enough for emergency use. They must be vented . CO
On demand saves energy by not storing/heating water when it is not in use. Water freezes in pipes because it is not flowing(mostly). Simple trick is to let the taps trickle(has issues, how much flow is enough?). Water supply pipe house is below the freeze depth, obviously. Pretty inefficient as well.
What about toilets? Don’t forget the vapor trap.
T2M
“not yet know how to decarbonize.”
Can you name them? I can’t think of any that are ruled out by chemistry. Economics is another story, and we will have to come up with energy. (Like 15,000 reactors or 3000 power satellites.)
The world economy is unfortunately ruled by physics, and that is what puts an end to our use of high-priced energy products. Physics sets market prices.
So, even if the chemistry looks good, it is the physics that makes the system not work as we would hope it would work. Chemistry is easier to see, but that doesn’t mean that that it is all that is important. Quite a few peak oilers have assumed that prices are simply man made. We can change the system if we like. It doesn’t really work that way, though.
“Dubai’s 900 MW solar tender sees lowest bid of $0.0169/kWh”
I presume this is without a subsidy.
It takes about 2 MWh or $34 worth of power to make the hydrogen needed for a bbl of synthetic oil. If the capital can be brought down to $10/bbl, then we are talking about unlimited synthetic oil at around $44/bbl.
“… around $44/bbl.”
which brings to mind the Tim Watkins quote that was posted here two days ago:
“This is the real peak oil demand in action. Not the techno-utopian fantasy of a world that no longer needs oil; but the stark reality of a world that can no longer afford it.”
sure, $44 is more affordable than today’s oil prices, but as the world’s net (surplus) energy decreases, which will soon be the actual Physics behind the world economy (net could be about flat now but it is probably impossible to measure exactly)…
then in the coming years, $44 will become less and less affordable to the average person…
it’s the unstoppable Physics of the situation that will bring “peak oil demand” if it hasn’t already (11/2018 looks like the peak of oil)…
$44 would only be good for a short while…
and anyway, WTI and maybe Brent looks likely to be that low in a year or so…
No problem, gubbermints can tax all that synthetic oil and use the proceeds to fund a universal basic income so that even non elite workers will be able to afford to buy the oil and its products. There must be an app for it somewhere.
The ability to make solar energy for this low a cost is limited to desert areas near the equator. I expect that such areas will be lacking in other resources, including fresh water and locally grown food. Such areas will charge you a high tax for constructing these solar panels on their land. After all, they need some way of getting taxable income to support their population with imported food and perhaps imported water. These high taxes will raise the cost far above $44 per barrel. I would expect that if solar panels were added, they would really want them for themselves. The country would certainly have some costs associated with the solar panels. Some of this tax would be needed simply to try to keep the solar panels safe from those planning to harm them, because they are jealous.
Saudi Arabia no doubt plans to use the output of the solar panels as an offset to making electricity 24/7/365 by burning natural gas and oil. It would be especially helpful for keeping oil consumption down, so it can be sold as an export.
Just because there is a fire sale on a commodity doesn’t mean realistic manufacturing plans can be forecast on that price. Actually the opposite. When there is a fire sale you can pretty much bet that source will end. The dubai infrastructure is in place and will probably produce energy for some years however. I wouldn’t bet on someone ponying up the capital for a manufacturing facility being built next to it to produce synthetic oil anytime soon. What cost do you use for constructing and maintaining the manufacturing facility to support your numbers? At your forecast of cost for the facility what would be its production capacity and estimated profit?
” What cost do you use for constructing and maintaining the manufacturing facility to support your numbers? ”
The ten-dollar per bbl capital cost was taken from the Sasol plant in Qatar. The cost was a billion bucks, the capacity 34,000 bbl/day.
” At your forecast of cost for the facility what would be its production capacity and estimated profit?
Never got that far. I have been working for the last ten years to get the cost of power satellites down to 3 cents per kWh. Power from space is more desirable than ground solar because it is not intermittent. How much is the question? For _this_ application, you can store the hydrogen during the day and run the rest of the plant full time. So only the electrolyzers would be oversized,
You need very large storage to have enough stored up in the summer for winter, however. That has to be part of the cost too. Any problems with this storage (such as leaks, explosions) need to be considered too.
“You need very large storage ”
Hydrocarbons are energy-dense. Plus we have lots of depleted oil wells that could be pressed into service.
Also, reasonably near the equator, the electricity output of the solar farm should not vary that much with the seasons.
Perhaps I should work out more of the math. At 34,000 bbl/day and 2 MWh/bbl, the plant would need a feed of 68,000 MWh/day as hydrogen. This amounts to 2.83 GW steady feed. it should take around 5 times for the nameplate to average conversion. That would require about 14.17 GW of nameplate PV farms. If you assume 147 MW/km^2, that would take 96 square km or close to 10 km on a side. For Qatar that would be about 1/1000 of its area.
Hmm.
This would take more work, but the combination of GTL technology and really inexpensive solar power just might be one of the technologies that would let us get off fossil fuels to less expensive synthetics. This would give a more or less unlimited supply of diesel, jet fuel and (with more processing) even gasoline. It is one of the few uses of renewable intermittent energy where you don’t care that much about the intermittency.
How about the nitwit journo-operatives at Vox start by decarbonizing themselves?
““For now, Japan’s problem is unique, but if low rates are prolonged, which I think they are likely to be, this will be a serious challenge for the U.S. and other nations,” says Masaaki Kanno, who worked at the BOJ from the 1970s to the 1990s and is now an economist at Sony Financial Holdings Inc.
““The bottom line is that the global economy is facing the question of how we are going to live” without interest income on safe assets such as government bonds, he says.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/this-is-japan-s-latest-bold-desperate-monetary-policy-experiment
“More than half of central banks are now in easing mode, the biggest proportion since the aftermath of the financial crisis… Only three out of 41 countries raised rates in the third quarter.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/b8709ca4-e8f8-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061
“With the slumping world economy already forcing the Fed and European Central Bank to lower borrowing costs, policy makers are primed to do more.
“Yet they are also aware that at some point they will have to stop using that tool as stimulus for fear of hitting the so-called reversal rate, at which cheap money turns contractionary…
““Negative rates have diminishing marginal returns in terms of expectations for inflation and incentivising investment and spending,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/m.economictimes.com/markets/stocks/news/central-banks-are-nearing-reversal-rates/amp_articleshow/71513561.cms
It is also difficult to imaging a pension plan or insurance company being able to invest in negative yielding bonds. They would need to sell assets to pay interest, when it became due.
Do you see any immediate dangers to major life insurance companies secondary to these interest rate policies?
Dennis L.
I think the financial system in general is at risk. It is hard to know which pieces have the most problems. Last time around, the US government bailed out AIG. AIG had a lot of life insurance policies. I know that both my parents and my husband’s parents had annuities from AIG that were favorably affected by the AIG bailout last time.
GE has been having a lot of problems recently, relating to the long term care policies that it has on its books. We don’t think of GE as being a life insurer, but quite a few of its risks are financial risks similar to those of some insurers. So the financial risk is spread around.
Derivatives are likely to especially be a problem this time around. I am not sure where all of these derivative problems are hiding. It may be that some of them are in insurance companies, in addition to being in the big banks.
“The Federal Reserve is easing restrictions imposed on banks following the 2008 financial crisis, giving a victory to the banking industry and President Donald Trump.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/guid/3507D1AE-EBA3-11E9-A823-8685FFEC074C
“The Federal Reserve Bank of New York added $88.1 billion to the financial system Thursday, using the market for repurchase agreements, or repo, to relieve funding pressure in money markets.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/fed-adds-88-1-billion-to-financial-system-in-latest-repo-transaction-11570713324
“Investors are growing increasingly worried that a major recession — and an accompany market crash — is coming, according to a recent study by Allianz Life.”
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/investors-getting-increasingly-worried-next-recession-market-crash-allianz-survey-2019-10-1028591855
“Based on their fears of a potential recession, 17% of Americans have started hiding cash in their home, according to a new poll from MetLife of over 8,000 U.S. adults over the age of 18.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/10/10/almost-1-in-5-americans-hide-cash-in-their-homes-fearing-a-recession.html
“Investors pulled cash from stocks and risky corporate debt over the past week, funnelling it into the perceived safety of higher quality bonds…
““The warning signs are growing,” Paul Christopher, head of global market strategy at Wells Fargo said. “We are increasingly cautious and removing risk where we think it is appropriate.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/c49fa4a0-ebac-11e9-a240-3b065ef5fc55
Investors see that likely problems are ahead.
The big question is what happens, if the Federal Reserve Bank tries to take its foot off the pedal. This seems to now be scheduled for the end of October/beginning of November. My guess is that its activities will need to be extended.
I think of Dodd Frank as adding inefficiency to the system. It is hard to see how it is really beneficial.
“Amidst the ongoing economic crisis, India’s passenger vehicle sales dropped 23.7 per cent in September, a data released by the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) said.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.india.com/business/amid-economic-slowdown-passenger-vehicle-sales-drops-23-7-in-september-11th-month-of-decline-3801768/amp/
Can’t find China’s overall figures for auto sales in Sept but US manufacturers still struggling:
“Ford Motor Co’s (F.N) July-to-September vehicle sales in China fell 30%, as the U.S. automaker continued to lose ground in a prolonged sales decline in its second biggest market.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1WQ0QW
“General Motors Co’s (GM.N) July to September vehicle sales in China fell 17.5%…”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1WP0L0
“Consumer powerhouses India and China have all but stopped shopping… and the effects of the double slowdown are rippling out across the world.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/a-third-of-the-world-s-consumers-are-suddenly-nervous-to-spend
I think that the loss of the rapid growth from India and China is key to our current problems.
Isnt Doomberg part of MSM anymore?
That’s $3.2T should this go daily for a year, so not much in the great scheme of things and given past action. I guess next proper GFCver_xy must attempt to print in dozens T per each major industrial hub, so lets say unless we see ~ $60-100T global print fest nothing major is happening out there..
oops, should belong to the 88.1B article bellow, sorry..
So GFCver_xy means printing fest where separate printing operations would be of amounts comparable to the global word product… Financial markets would be unrecognizable. How wouldn’t this lead to panic on main street?
GFCver2 seems to be coming in 2020. There will likely be a printing fest, though likely not of the magnitute you indicated. My guess is that some parts of the world will have to lose like China and Europe. This enables the USA to take a greater part in the global resource stream. USA will perhaps need the border wall.
Did the “world money” panic in the 2008 aftermath as the major global IC hubs printed ~10T+ in aggregate.. ? Nope.
Now, lets perform mental time travel and imagine trying to explain someone in 1980-90s that in two-three decades QEing Ts and setting effective negative rates would be part of normal toolbox..
I am wondering what happened to China’s September numbers. Are they really embarrassing? Or will we see them in the next day or two?
I found a new article about China’s auto sales in September. (Just slow in being published!)
https://www.apnews.com/0da86434c8584c62a49e8955718b4062
China auto sales sink in September as economy cools
Yes, tightening lending controls will lead to fewer automobiles sold.
Thanks, Gail. Perhaps they should have kept those figures secret after all.
About 1.2 to 1.3 million Indians die from pollution every year, mainly because of car emissions. But to an economist, fewer needless deaths is an economic crisis. By contrast, about 450,000 die from malaria. Perhaps the World Health Organisation should stop killing mosquitos and start killing motor cars.
How many Indians die from the effects of cooking over biomass stoves?
I have no idea, but according to the Clean Cooking Alliance:
Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires – the primary means of cooking and heating for nearly three billion people in the developing world – causes more than 4 million premature deaths, including more than 1.2 million deaths in India, every year.
Robert, this latter figure is close to the figure you quote for pollution deaths in India, but the Clean Cooking Alliance is blaming them all on dirty cooking. Of course, they have an agenda…
Thank you, Tim. I tend to doubt their claim. Back in Africa we cooked over wood stoves, and I don’t recall any health problems. Gee, all you need is a chimney; the hot gases will rise into it by themselves. And you can make a cheap but effective one out of two layers of aluminium foil.
Likewise in the US we knew many people who had regular barbecues, no chimneys but in the open air, and they weren’t dropping like flies.
The problem with car pollution is that it contains chemicals far more dangerous than anything given off by burning wood or charcoal. And there is no cost effective way of scrubbing them out, which is why the German car makers had to cheat on the emissions tests.
Possibly useful reference:
https://nextbillion.net/stupid-stoves-clean-cooking-alliance-problems/
I thought that part of the problem with burning wood was the black soot that results and gets carried are far as the poles by wind. (Coal would have the same problem.) This black soot settles on ice and causes it to absorb the sun’s rays more quickly. Thus, burning wood leads to shrinking polar ice caps. I suppose this is the case regardless of the shape of the stove used.
I agree with you, Robert.
Still,I expect that many Indians are combining open air stoves with tobacco smoke, vehicle emissions and living at high density with lots of nearby neighbors doing the same thing.
I’ve read that living in a big First World city is about as bad for the lungs as smoking 20 cigarettes a day, mostly due to the automobile exhaust. There are lots of stories about this online. Breathing in some of the Chinese cities is equivalent to smoking 60 ciggies a day.
Roughly speaking, both smoking tobacco and breathing polluted city air will raise one’s risk of developing lung cancer and emphysema, but doing both simultaneously will multiply the risk to the point where you can no longer put the damage down to “bad luck”. So if you absolutely must smoke, you should seriously consider moving to the sticks.
Wow!
There is an unappreciated point about hydroelectric power which is that it is not a renewable resource. Dams silt up and require huge amounts of energy to clear.
“Professor K. Mahmood of George Washington University in Washington, DC, “roughly estimated” for a 1987 World Bank study that around 50 cubic kilometres of sediment – nearly one per cent of global reservoir storage capacity – is trapped behind the world’s dams every year. In total, calculated Mahmood, by 1986 around 1,100 cubic kilometres of sediment had accumulated in the world’s reservoirs, consuming almost one–fifth of global storage capacity. ”
Good luck removing 50 cubic kilometers of soil every year to counter this effect + 1100 to get back to square one.
https://www.internationalrivers.org/sedimentation-problems-with-dams
Good point! I don’t think that we have an electricity-only approach that will fix this either.
California Hit By Dual Shock: LA Gas Prices Spike Above $5 As Residents Learn Solar Panels Don’t Work In Blackouts
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/california-hit-dual-shock-la-gas-prices-spike-above-5-residents-learn-solar-panels-dont
Merely grid-tied type doesn’t work in blackouts.. And off grid is not 100% solution either, because it will be eventually confiscated either by (quasi) govs or gangs.
As they say, a picture is better than a thousand words. What really happens, when an economy tries to depend on electricity and solar panels, is now becoming apparent. It couldn’t happen to a more appropriate state than California! They were the home to electricity crises in the 2000-2003 period as well. Their many schemes to get around actually producing their own electricity, at the true cost of production, are backfiring.
“California is the state with the largest population and the largest economy in the United States. However, it is second in energy consumption after Texas. California’s energy consumption per capita are some of the lowest in the United States as a result of a long term policy of energy efficiency.
Energy consumption in California is dominated by transportation, due to high number of motor vehicles and long commutes. California also is responsible for about 20% of total jet fuel consumption in the United States. The second largest energy sector is industry. Energy consumption of the state’s residential sector per capita is lower than that of any other state except Hawaii thanks to relatively mild climate.[2]
California has large energy resources, being among the top producers of oil, hydroelectricity, solar, biomass, and geothermal energy in the United States.”
I think that I would say, ” California’s energy consumption per capita are some of the lowest in the United States as a result of a long term policy of outsourcing industrial processes, and not counting the energy cost of these outsourced processes. California is a major importer of energy in many ways.”
I think it’s called ‘Living high off someone else’s hog’?
It’s nice work if you can get it.
http://blakesnow.griffio.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2008/02/designed-by-apple-in-california0.jpg
Here in no. Ca theres a forced power outage by pg&e and so people are using back up generators, many of which run gasoline. I just went this am to fill up a 5 gallon container and all fuel stations in our area are empty/closed. So I have enough in a 2nd container for today but then will have to siphon from our 2 vehicles. I’m just running the generator during the day until 10 pm, local noise curfew, then moving ice from the freezer to refrigerator until the next day, rinse, repeat. The fuel situation will reach a point in which people can’t even make it to work.
The weird thing is it’s in the 40s at night & mid 70s in the day, humidity is low and winds lightly breezy. How is that a fire hazard? Since peloton& schiff are from ca. I’m wondering if this is. A trump hit job. A bit conspiratorial but it fits.
Thanks for the at-the-site update.
Fuel stations operate using electricity, so if the electricity is off, the stations cannot pump gasoline or diesel. If electricity is off, both people with gasoline powered cars and electric cars are soon in trouble.
If a situation should arise when only gasoline was not available (hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico causing temporary pipeline outage, for example), then it would only be the gasoline powered cars in trouble.
With the conditions you describe, especially if it is windy, there might be overproduction of wind and solar during the day that needed to be taken away. This could cause fires, just like importing electricity could.
Based on service station response to South FL hurricanes, not a long term problem gas station buys a generator(they really are not that expensive, relatively. Not as efficient. But this is the first time. There will be a lot of lessons learned. First thing I did last month fill the fuel tanks.
The point of ports and rigs is very valid, want fuel open wallet. Oh, if it goes on long enough not available. Though for fire avoidance (a somewhat localized thing) not an issue diesel powered truck makes delivery from the refinery that is out of the affected zone.
The power lines are already de-energized(out-of the-loop) which is the problem. Wind and solar curtailment is already done. CAISO has already curtailed close to 800,000 MWH this year.
T2M
Schiff?
You mean THE Adam Schiff?
https://www.newswars.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Adam-Schiff-Cult-Lunatic.jpg
Can we please keep unnecessary political statements out of this blog? There is plenty of ammo against Trump, but most of us aren’t letting it fly. This is about economics and resources.
So economics and resources are not political? Interesting!
Well, there’s plenty of “ammo” against everyone in public life. And this being the case, wouldn’t your comment be better addressed to Chrome mags, who speculated without apparent irony that the PG&E power outages may be the work of President Trump—an absolutely unnecessary, slanderous and disrespectful political statement?
Perhaps you would care to explain why Chome mags should be allowed to make unnecessary and uncalled-for political statements of a derogatory nature while I should not be allowed to exercise the same privilege in response?
And while we’re at it, perhaps you would consider a similar interjection against every commenter who makes unnecessary political statements in these comments and not just the one’s you personally disagree with. There has been a steady trickle of sophomoric ones aimed at Mr. Trump ever since he was elected, in case you haven’t noticed.
Thanks in advance.
In a way i agree with Merrifield. Way to much polarity and hate out there. IMO generated by identity politics. Now from my perspective the hate and propaganda being created by the left and identity politics is far more destructive and untruthful.
If you hear a hate message against trump it has many consistencies. The major one is the idea that trump is a dictator. A racist. unlawful. These things are so despicable that dialogue is ended. Purpose served. Conflict with no hope of resolution created. But overall the more consistent message is emotional. Justified hate. Very disturbing.
Whenever i hear an appeal for moderation i certainly agree. But can there really be moderation without respect? There can not be respect when there is hate.
Moderation is finding the middle ground. This comes from dialogue. Dialogue can not occur without respect. Moderation can not manifest from a place of hate. Appeals for moderation without genuine willingness for dialouge are merely attempts to suppress.
I can well understand why PG&E feel the need to turn off the power. Those 4 MPH winds can be deadly! Especially as decades of tree-hugger supported legislation prevents Smokey Bear from doing controlled burns.
But more than that, the power companies are now facing the risk of class action suits every time there’s a major wildfire.
Still, it’s a bit of an own goal installing all those wind turbines if you need to turn off the power every time the wind blows. It’s amazing people are not rioting about this in CA. Simply amazing.
The huge amount of long distance transmission in California is partly to support all of the use of renewables, including hydroelectric imported from Washington State. As more wind and solar are added, more transmission to these relatively small installations, often away from cities, is needed.
People who looked at the EROEI of wind and solar ignored all transmission-related issues. First, it is necessary to build a lot more transmission lines that are on average, lightly used, because the wind and solar are available only a small part of the day/year. Then, it is necessary to service these lines, or they cause huge amounts of fires, especially in a dry area like California. (Venezuela’s outages also seem to relate to fires relating to wires from its hydroelectric facility, bringing electricity to major cities. Those wires had not been properly maintained either. Texas has problems with fires too. Germany is burying some transmission underground, at great cost. )
Greece now selling negative-yielding debt. 😀
“Greek debt, viewed as poisonous just years ago, is now in high demand as investors seek stable assets amid a global economic slowdown – and a possible recession.
“The country joined the list of negative-yield eurozone nations Wednesday after its latest bond offering.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/next-recession-greece-joins-negative-yielding-euro-nations-bond-sale-2019-10
Maybe 100 year negative-yielding debt from Greece. The only thing more ridiculous.
if I understand this correctly, Greece is asking investors to pay for parking their funds in their government bonds, which supposedly they will repay after some set period, after taking some of the principal as fee for the “rental space” in their “safe haven”. sounds shaky to me.
That is not the case according to a banker friend of mine. He says what is happening is, anticipating money printing and lower interest rates, bond speculators are bidding up existing bonds, speculating. This is the last man standing game where somebody at the end of the line gets stuck with a bond they paid a lot for, with little, or zero, or even negative interest ( based on the coupon value and the price they paid). Governments are not issuing bonds at negative rates.
I found a site that explains what happens with negative yields. Bonds are sold for more than their par value (available at maturity). For example:
but it’s a safe investment…
guaranteed to ONLY lose 1.6%…
this is the 2019 new normal stage in the economic endgame…
what will be the next (weirder) stage?
would it not be better to buy fiat, gold or silver and keep it in a fire-proof safe at home? maybe diamonds, rubies, emeralds? you can bolt safes to the floor or wall these days. add some lead bricks for extra weight. those can be converted to bullets or fishing weights, as needed.
Maybe they have ‘agreed’ to buy at neg 1%, in the expectation of it going to neg 2% before they have to pay.
Its a short-term ‘investment’ based on negative expectattions for Greece?
Or am I misunderstanding the dynamic?
Bitcoin jumped ~500bucks, so all is jolly good on this LaLa Land Planet of the Apes of ours..
“…August figures show that global air freight demand contracted by 3.9 percent in August, marking the 10th consecutive month of year-on-year declines.
“Capacity growth also outstripped demand growth for the 16th consecutive month.
“The figures are worrying because the global air freight industry is seen as a bellwether indicator of the health of the global economy.”
https://www.airlineratings.com/news/air-freight-decline-now-global-financial-crisis-levels/
“German exports fell by more than expected in August, data showed on Thursday, reinforcing expectations that a manufacturing slump is pushing Europe’s largest economy into recession.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN1WP0LP
“Steepest drop in Japan machinery orders for five years raises recession worries.”
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/10/10/business/economy-business/japans-machine-orders-slide-recession/#.XZ9oVcPTU0M
“The World Bank has joined the parade of international organisations and market institutions cutting their forecasts for China’s growth rates for 2019 and 2020…”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3032335/chinas-growth-outlook-cut-world-bank-us-trade-war-continues
“Hong Kong is facing its first recession since the global financial crisis, with little prospect of an immediate recovery as the city confronts its most violent protests in decades.”
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/hong-kong-is-sinking-into-a-recession-with-no-recovery-in-sight
As others have said, China really needs Hong Kong because of the Hong Kong dollar, for trading purposes. The article talks about adding stimulus programs. Whether such programs can really work is a question.
Do we really believe even these forecasts?
And this is before the higher consumption tax became effective October 1.
Dyson has scrapped its electric car project
The firm, headed by inventor Sir James Dyson, said its engineers had developed a “fantastic electric car” but that it would not hit the roads because it was not “commercially viable”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50004184
“The global economy is careering headfirst into an economic crisis, and unlike the 2008 recession, there’s not much of a safety net.
”
That is according to the World Economic Forum (WEF), which published its annual Global Competitiveness Report.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ccn.com/the-next-global-recession-will-have-no-brakes-claims-world-economic-forum/
It is hard to lower interest rates, when they are already negative in quite a bit of the world.
Hi Gail,
A couple of points:
1. in Australia, coal power is very unreliable because of the aging fleet. While renewables are ‘intermittent’, they are at least predictable. Our coal power stations have a bad habit of failing at very short notice when we need them most
2. Jinko solar (a major PV manufacturer) is planning to power it’s factories with 100% PV power by 2025. If this happens, it will be a watershed achievement
3. Agreed that it will be expensive to switch to 100% renewables with the grid as it currently exists. However, many assumptions about grid operation are based on inflexible “base-load” power (eg. discounted rates at night because coal power can’t switch off easily). This has never been what we really want (hence the discount), and what we really want is dispatchable power — renewables plus storage do this better, and potentially more cheaply, than does coal (eg https://reneweconomy.com.au/us-energy-giant-says-renewables-and-batteries-beat-coal-gas-and-nukes-78962/).
Whether or not renewable price advantage remains true as we get higher proportions of renewables in the grid remains to be seen (I don’t think anyone really know what will happen). Personally, I think that demand management will be come important in a renewables dominant grid, but I think price signals *could* be used to achieve this. South Australia has about 50% renewable, and our supply is very solid (though we do sometimes import a small amount of electricity from an adjacent state):
https://opennem.org.au/energy/sa1/
I’m not really disputing what you’ve written, but I don’t think you can *know* that you’re right either. This is all conjecture (though _useful_ conjecture 😉 ). Also, I’m aware that I’m talking about electricity here and that doesn’t cover liquid fuels. I’m not a big believer in electric cars as the path forward — I think we need smaller lighter transport + public transport. While I think it’s feasible to electrify trains and freight, I think air travel needs to become a lot more costly.
Cheers, Angus
The Brown Outs in South Australia are now definitely a thing of the past? Never to recur?
From you first link the allegedly wonderfully cheap renewable supply is something that is yet to be tested as the the article points out.
The chap being quoted is not so sure about effectiveness above about 40, maybe 50% Therefore presumably not about the economics either. He seems espcailly keen to suggest that about 70%, other than for short outages which may be OK for househ0ild appliances in the middle of the night but not so good for any businesses reliant on perpetually available good quality supplies to avoid major systems crashes and costly recovery operations, may be as good as it gets. He then goes on to talk about “demand management”. Sound like he’s try to get to a point where people accept supply failure and a prompt for them to adopt demand management.
I note the writer mentions the scale and size of the company and so glazes it with some sort of credibility by existence.
As I recall Enron was perceived in a similar light at its height.
Time will tell. It sounds like there may only be a short wait. I’m going to guess that the man being interviewed will not be around by the time his 20130 predictions can be assessed. It’s the way things are these days. Talk up the money and run.
The problem is one of renewables not providing enough energy in winter, especially. The system really needs to pay fossil fuel providers for providing backup services, especially for the part of the year that renewables can’t provide enough. The batteries that they are adding are puny batteries. They talk about 2 or 4 hours of batteries, which is not much. They smooth out the electricity during a particular day. Demand management does something similar.
The problem is seasonal intermittency, and year to year variability. This chart is a chart of US energy consumption by time of year. I have shown the three big pieces: electrical, transportation, and “all other.” A large part of all other is home and commercial business heating using natural gas. It also includes oil products used for farming, and natural gas and oil used by industry. Obviously the seasons are the opposite of those in Australia. You will notice that in total, the peak season for energy use is winter.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/us-energy-consumption-by-month-of-year.png
In the US, we use a lot of natural gas to heat our homes and businesses in winter. Electricity tends to be used to operate air conditioners. This is a major reason that electricity use is somewhat higher in summer than winter.
Solar energy has a very distinctive pattern to it. In the US, its production peaks in June, and its production is low in winter. (You would have the revere. It cannot be used to provide very much of the total electricity, because its pattern is quite different from what is needed by consumers, especially if you plan to get heat from the system (and year around electricity for industry), not just air conditioning.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/us-average-daily-solar-production.png
Wind varies a lot by part of the world. It tends to be quite variable. Before you count on it, you should check into what pattern it is giving you, in South Australia. This is what the US wind pattern looks like.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/us-average-daily-wind-production.png
Hydroelectric tends to be already built out, most places. US hydroelectric tends to come disproportionately in the spring (not in the winter, when you need it worst).
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/us-average-daily-hydroelectric-production.png
Adding renewables to the grid tends to drive away backup electricity providers (such as coal) through too low rates. They can’t keep their systems in good repair, without fairly high rates. Subsidies for renewables, such as allowing them to go first, tend to depress the rates for backup electricity providers. Renewables can indeed provide what little they have, but without backup providers to provide the rest, especially in winter, you are likely to be in a heap of trouble.
Matt Mushalik has detail data for Australia. Without looking closely at it, I would not get exited about tiny amounts of batteries and inadequate amounts of wind and solar doing very much. All they may do is drive away the producers you really need.
“2. Jinko solar (a major PV manufacturer) is planning to power it’s factories with 100% PV power by 2025. If this happens, it will be a watershed achievement”
no, it won’t be a watershed achievement…
there will still be massive fossil fuel usage to get the raw materials out of the ground (and processed) and onto the receiving dock of the factory…
and then major FF usage to get the products out the door and delivered and installed…
that middle part where the processed raw materials are assembled into panels is not insignificant, but it’s only part of the story…
I expect that the solar that Jinko solar uses will only be a quantity of solar energy, theoretically available from various times, not solar energy actually generated when it is needed. The problem, of course, is that solar energy doesn’t generate energy when you need it, only when it happens to be available. Grid management lets this basically undesirable form of electricity onto the grid, and forces other types of energy providers to fill in around when it happens to be available. As an increasing amount of intermittent solar and wind are added, this approach becomes more and more impossible. Other providers need to ramp up and down more frequently, wearing out their system more quickly. They need to make many payments (such as debt and insurance payments) the same as they always would, whether or not their services are used as previously. They need to pay their staff members for essentially a full year of service, even though some months their services will be needed very little. The backup providers are not paid adequately for all of the services they are providing.
This one goes out to the computer savvy preppers getting ready for instacollapse:
“’Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. The operating system is designed to work with ubiquitous, easy-to-scavenge components in a future where consumer electronics are a thing of the past.”
Yup, it can run on basically anything that contains more than a couple of transistors.
“Collapse OS is a new open source operating system built specifically for use during humanity’s darkest days. According to its creator, software developer Virgil Dupras”
https://www.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/ywaqbg/collapse-os-is-an-open-source-operating-system-for-the-post-apocalypse
🙃
The new bottom feeder budget Nokia smart phones (traditional keypad + small “size lcd) have some alt OS option as well already.. enough for online/offline browsing and multimedia. Basically we have reached a point thanks to small powerful cpu/boards at which ~near PC capability could be placed at “no cost” into consumer appliances from fridge to car, tv set, wearables, or throw away kiddie phone..
That’s all I need. Having my home entertainment and kitchen appliances joining forces with the local supermarket cash register to spy on me and telling the gubermint how much butter and milk I’m consuming and when.
I can see it coming:
‘We regret to inform you, Xabier, that our data shows that you’ve eaten far too much butter, milk and chorizo, washed down with an awful lot Spanish wine and cider despite all admonitions from your fridge, cooker and kitchen cupboards.
Too many naughty ladies -with the same bad habits – have visited your studio, all too often ending up somewhat undressed -and don’t say it was ‘Art’! We have images and audio!
No pension, healthcare or other state services for you, except immediate disposal in the eco-friendly state sludge pit (death is mercifully quick) which will render your pitiful remains suitable for spreading on the fields, benefitting better citizens than you……
How are you supposed to boot this?
Writing a tape loader is not that hard but before use you must have those 2-300(?) bytes in memory. In the 80s burnt into ROM.
It’s not like you could find an 80s gaming console on the dump and reprogram it without specialised hardware.
The “OS” is the least problem.
Steve Kopits posted an article indicating that perhaps US’ electric vehicle sales are peaking at less than 2% of auto sales. From what I could see, Kopits put together a chart, based on tables of sales statistics compiled by a site called Inside EVs.
Are US Electric Vehicle Sales Peaking?
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/usevsales-kopits.png
It could be or not.
The waiting lists are still in effect in many places, annoying the would be clientele, also lot of people waiting it out for more practical SUV/CUV model Y (model 3 with hatchback) or the VWs upcoming models etc.. Up to this point the market has been dominated by mostly quasi luxury segment only (or ~scams e.g. Nissan cutting corners on batt protection). South Koreans even increased prices recently on some models. lolz..
It’s a tricky moment, either the industry manages to properly and fluidly enter the lower-middle class segment or not.. and in that case the stagnation – saturation theory would be correct.
Besides hybrids are falling long term because of the preferred – desirable EV option and the saturation of corp/taxi fleets.. It’s not serious job to lump hybrid and EV sales together..
Here in New York State the speed limits keep getting lower and lower. What used to be 55 is now 30. Has anyone else seen this? Make driving so unpleasant you 20s 30s don’t really want a car???
Cognitive dissonance, Ed.
As “safety” regulations require ever more materials, energy use and complexity in car designs adding weight an size (perhaps more obvious outside the USA?) the manufacturers have designed and manufactured ever more powerful vehicles (at least as Halo models) only to be restricted by ever slower default speeds over ever wider areas of the road network.
It is of little surprise, perhaps, that the younger generations seem to be moving away from the traditional desire of young people to seek freedom and independence through interpersonal social interaction and readily available local travel on demand.
They seem to save it up for parts of the world to which they travel to tick a box whilst going completely against what many of them would claim to be “green” leaning credentials.
It would be interesting to see how things eventually turn out.
Lowering speed limits= lowering the bar for triggering speeding violations= higher revenue from speeding tickets.
(Will be driving trou PA and NY on my way to Albany, NY this weekend.
That’s absolutely a major factor. Although on the other side of the scale, lower speeds reduce the severity of accidents and increase fuel efficiency.
Last week a friend of mine was caught not stopping before proceeding at a temporary stop sign (not a traffic signal but a sign by the side of the road and some white lettering on the asphalt) on a road with no oncoming traffic in view by a policeman waiting in ambush. Result, a ¥7,000 yen fine and the loss of their precious “gold” license status for the next three years.
http://ks-yamanashi-std.sakura.ne.jp/sblo_files/ks-yamanashi1/image/ichijiteisi.jpg
The same thing is happening with restrictions on speed, parking, street access and registrations here in NZ. I believe a brand new starry-eyed generation of ‘Town Planners’ are making their mark. Targeting ICE users is part of the educational matrix.
‘Millennials represent less than 25% of the total U.S. population, but they are over 40% of the working-age population defined as ages 25 to 65. Millennials are quickly becoming the generation that drives consumer, economic, market, and political decision making. Older millennials are in their prime spending years and quickly moving up corporate ladders, and they are taking leading roles in government. In many cases, millennials are the dominant leaders in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, social media, and alternative energy.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/coddled-monetary-manias-millennials-myopic-view-market
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2019/10/08/peak-oil-demand-is-now/
The link you provide is to a great post by Tim Watkins. Watkins is a British observer who says a whole lot that parallels what I say.
One quote I liked:
I don’t remember hearing the term “precariat” before. It seems to be closely related to the word precarious. These are the people whose lives are marginalized by the unstable labor market today. This is a link to a story about the issue.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/precariat-global-class-rise-of-populism/
Another quote I liked was this one:
Those of us in the US get less of this effect, because part of the problem is changing currency levels. When the Euro drops relative to the dollar, energy prices become more expensive for Europeans.
The term “precariat” has re/surfaced in the 2010s, recently has been more circulated thanks to the “pop star” euro socialist-marxist scholars like Zizek, Piketty and others..
Funnily enough, the (third) guy who wrote the eponymous book – published it in the company, which refers in its name Bloomsbury to the pre WWII situation with the British elitist intellectual group I talked above with Xabier, it included the economist Keynes among others etc.
What a nice circle around, and around..
These guys will continue QE in all unimaginable forms till the last drop of bodily fluids..
They will certainly continue with some form of QE; and we should bear in mind that a state can exist as a kind of shell, while ordinary lives collapse, for quite some time.
And the masses will be lectured as it all goes down, as Macron likes to do: ‘You’ve nothing to complain about! And you, study and get a job before you talk politics!’ He is the authentic voice of those in charge.
I suggest would should all think of ourselves as ‘ being part of the ‘precariat’ – much more realistic.
During the 2016 Bilderberg-conference one topic discussed was:
Precariat and middle class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Bilderberg_Conference
Among the attendees: Christine Lagarde (future president of ECB), Ursula von der Leyen (new president of European Commission)
I noticed Kissinger on the list, too. You and I weren’t invited.
The Four Tims of the Apocalypse: Watkins, Garrett, Morgan, Jackson.
https://www.facebook.com/dialog/share?app_id=87741124305&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DMkmHZrnQmXM%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded&display=popup&redirect_uri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Ffacebook_redirect
Sorry, this link is not working for me. Could you find a link directly to the you tube video, not to a facebook share?
Sorry about that. If this doesn’t work, then I don’t have a solution. I posted it on FB, since it seems basic and easy to grasp for people who don’t think about the system they live in. I suggest they listen to the first 10 and last 10 minutes. First 5 and last 5 minutes minimum.
This version works. Thanks!
https://peakoil.com/production/russia-dumps-u-s-dollar-countrys-top-oil-producer-chooses-euro-for-all-future-deals
I always understood that the more in demand your currency was, the higher its value. And since the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency of choice, then for the USA deficits truly shouldn’t matter, as Dick Cheney had it. But elsewhere others tell me no. Here is one response, for instance, from another forum:
“As I understand it, euro/dollar exchange rates run at a lot less than 0.5% for big players, and any profits do not go exclusively to the US gvt by any means (as against seigniorage on paper which in some circumstances is near 100% profit for the Fed). So while there surely is some kind of profit to be got from getting your currency preferred when prices are quoted, you do not quantify the cash value of that preference, and I suspect it is quite small in practice.”
Who can give me a definitive answer on this issue and explain the technicalities? I always understood that when Saddam Hussein spoke of pricing Iraqi oil in euros instead of dollars, he sealed his fate and more or less made invasion by the neo-cons inevitable.
There are couple of issues, firstly Russia announced it for future deals, and they are preferably long term deal country anyway (existing deals run as signed), so the full effect of it will be delayed. That’s partly a reason it made little news few days ago. Secondly, it’s true “the world” is trying to get out of it, China-Russia-India-(+) are aiming to slash USD priced deals bellow 50% of their totals relatively quickly.. Nowadays, they (+ other junior partners) seem to have enough leverage finally to sort of force such outcome near-mid term, but this is obviously not the end of the international status of the USD, only the advanced beginning on this path. So, again the attempted relapse into block structure on the global scene emerges..
Isn’t the question whether the dollar-based selling price will still underlie the price, whether it is priced in rubles or something else.
When you talk about reducing USD priced deals below 50%, I am presuming you are talking about a quantity of a certain type of transaction change, not a difference in price. If I am right, prices won’t be hugely affected.
Yes, I should have stated it more clearly.
And to your first question as Dennis also hints it’s the issue of the whole int USD nexus,
in the world where the global flows are divided between various “reserve” currencies the DoD won’t be able so to spend so easily ~10x more than top adversaries and so on..
the ”value” of any currency can float around for a while on the collective beliefs of governments and speculators.
that is short term
long term the value of any currency is specifically tied to the energy availability within the country whose currency it is
thus the USA acquired the dominance of the dollar because the combination of ww2 and oil volumes conspired to make the dollar the safest stable world currency
before that the british pound held top position because we had the biggest energy production–coal, together with a vast navy to hold our empire together
when the coal ran out, the the military was unsustainable and the empire collapsed. We had a 50 year denial phase.
right now, the USA is in the denial phase (all the cheap oil has gone) people are reluctant to recognise that the dollar will collapse. becase that will collapse the world economic structure.
But nevertheless the dollar must collapse because its underpinning energy resource is no longer there. Fracked oil is too expensive to support “the American dream” (not enough surplus energy available) The USA wouldnt be in the middle east if there was enough oil available on home territory
The oilwars are really denial wars. Trump is a denial president. All part of the same problem. The unthinking masses have nothing left to believe in, so they voted for Trump.
When he fails there will be civil unrest—again–part of the denial phase.
We can only hope that the denial phase isn’t too unpleasant. In a fully armed country, hope is all there is.
Yes, and about the peculiarities of post mature – early collapsing empire (British) it’s good to study these kind of folks – I guess you know that better than most but lets put it here..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurens_van_der_Post
The British Empire was always very pragmatic, rather than ideological, and never developed a militaristic culture (unlike Germany, Russia, etc) , and so was better placed philosophically to back down more or less gracefully, although hitting out hard enough when directly challenged with force by freedom fighters, or hurried along too quickly by nationalists, eg Aden, Kenya, Egypt.
As to American psychology, I can only look on and wonder: one hopes the US generals and the MIC are reasonable as their very comfortable gravy train comes to a halt……
I would think Bush the 2nd and Obama were much more denial presidents than is Trump, at least as far as being involved in the middle east is concerned. Look at the track records of the former two versus the latter, so far.
oil denial began after 1970, when us oil peaked and went into decline
The only one who tried to tell the truth was Carter—he was booted out of office because no one wanted to hear it—in any event North Slope came on stream, so he was ”obviuosly lying’
the decline-collapse phase seems to be around 50 years or so—ie from 1970 until now.
The common opinion on collapse seems the early 2020s. Energy depletes from excess to deficit. The result is certain.
Trump seems to be the final manifestation of the denial problem. After him the godbotherers will take over, and blame it all on lack of prayer and the sinful ways of all of us.
I do not jest. There will be no options left.
That will be the foundation of your next fascist dictatorship. (Denial and desperation added together if you like.)
we still have the same problem as with Carter. Presidents now tell lies because they have no option, they fight oilwars because they have no option.
While each leader promises ‘forever’.
without oil the US economic system collapses and the nation itself collapses and secedes into separate nations, each with its own take on the problem, none admitting what the problem really is. Each fighting to prove itself right.
I would like to congratulate and applaud the present POTUS for finally having the temerity, the gumption and the guts to say “Enough with this nonsense regarding war.” If the issue of Syria and how the Deep Staters are going berserk does not tell you that Trump is doing something right, then nothing will.
But of course, Norman, if your analysis is correct, and it may well be—I can’t put my finger on any flaws in your prediction that everything is going to collapse and all is kaput—then we might as well all party like its five minutes to the Day of Judgement and lay in a large stock of cyanide capsules for when the hangover starts to hit. We could pass them around to friends and neighbors for when the time comes.
But before we bite into our pills, lets give this great president his due. He has been under considerable pressure to fight new oil wars and intensify ongoing ones, and so far he has resisted the pressure to do so for close to three years now. By comparison, President Peace Prize only got two years and two months into his reign before he was bombing Libya back into the dark ages.
I know it is difficult for people to remember or absorb inconvenient facts, but Obama—just like Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Bush the Younger—was a war maker, even if he didn’t come across as a war monger. Trump, for all his faults, has so far refused to follow his predecessors in this respect. No wonder he is so hated by the war-profiteering elite and so loved by ordinary decent people the world over.
https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/05/22/Libya_Coalition_Sorties460.jpg
there might be some sense in your points
but with the don, I think we are dealing with someone who is lacking in mental comprehension of world affairs
the fundamental problem is the oil reserves of the middle east, on which the global economic system pivots, whether we like it or not
if /when that goes down, we all go down.
since 1945 the overall thrust of world affairs has been centred around that inescapable reality–from Roosevelt onwards. Each president has been tasked with maintaining the status quo—ie keeping the oil flowing.
You can track all major political problems back to that.
Oil provides employment/wages/taxes/stable government.
There wereno oilwars until USA peaked in 1970—we have had endless oil conflict since then.
(yes I know the German/japanese fought over oil supply, but that wasn’t a terminal shortage)
Trump has convinced himself that USA can pull up its drawbridge and carry on forever with fracked oil and gas, while the rest of the world crashes and burns. Somehow he will be immune to it all if he is rich enough. America first!! We have enough oil/coal for 400 years!!
This reveals his mental defects.
A string of his utterances shows the man to be off his head or in senile decline.
Take the latest:
Why should we help the Kurds. They didn’t help us in WW2.
What further proof do you need that the man is mentally ill? You really want this guy in charge of the nuclear codes? Trump makes America distrusted now.
What happens when he’s either impeached or voted out? He’s going to be screaming fake and doing as much damage as he can until he is physicallt dragged out of the building
People like him always gather lunatics around them to carry out crazy orders—and they do, eagerly. Millions think he’s god’s messenger. They are all equally dangerous people.
They will eagerly lend a hand to run the fascist state before the final crash
It is not oil reserves that are important, but prices that are high enough to make it worthwhile to get the oil out. It is low prices that are sending production down. The attack on Saudi Arabia occurred on September 14, or about half way through the month. Saudi Arabia’s oil production per day was reported to be down by 1.28 million barrels per day in September 2019, compared to August 2019. The reduction to Saudi Arabia’s oil production might be as much as 2.5 million barrels per day in the second half of the month.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/opec-oil-production-through-the-sept-2019-secondary-sources.png-.png
With these new figures, OPEC’s World Oil Market Report for October is still showing world peak crude oil production in October-November 2018.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/opec-total-crude-oil-production-and-opec-production-through-sept-2019.png
I checked the EIA’s international data through June 2019. It shows a similar pattern. The peak month is November, 2019. World crude oil production is down 2.94 million barrels a day between November 2018 and June 2019. In fact, total liquids production is down 2.25 million barrels between November 2018 and June 2019, using the EIA International data.
That is another way of making more or less the same point I think
Oil reserves back in the 30s-to 60s were in such cheap abundance that they delivered mass employment, either through wars or consumer economics. The more fossil fuels we burned, the more jobs we created. (or people killed).
Oil not only delivered employment. it accellerated the market year on year because a way had to be found to use the stuff.
a barrel of oil only acquires tangible value through the act of converting it into something else.
That ‘something else’ has to be bought and sold to sustain our economic infrastructure. One might be ten times removed from a barrel of oil, but the stuff it produces passes through our hands cconstantly as ‘surplus energy’. The ultimate result of that is a population 7x what it would otherwise be.
So a growing population (itself oil driven) has to be found fresh employment (as well as life support growing up) As long as cheap oil was available, and other raw materials linked to oil consumption, then employment could be thought of as ‘infinite’—the stupidity of such a concept could be conveniently ignored.
As long as oil was cheap in production terms, we had colossal surpluses by which we employed ourselves.
Now oil is no longer cheap in production terms, so the surpluses are no longer available to create jobs, and to support those 7bn people.
The oil is still there, but it costs us too much to get hold of, relative to the benefit we get out of it.
Which is another way of saying we can no longer afford the stuff. But of course crazed politicians tell us we can.
We believe them because the alternative is just too awful to take in.
Why should we help the Kurds. They didn’t help us in WW2.
Trump isn’t a professional politician, thank the Lord. He bumbles and rambles and doesn’t have the smooth delivery of an Obama or a Clinton, or even a Reagan. And the Deep State and the media lackies work overtime to try to make sure the public gets the most negative impression possible of the man.
But the record is clear. He hasn’t started any new wars yet and he’s doing his best to stop existing wars. I think that’s commendable, given that the US is controlled by a warmongering elite that is avid for mass bloodshed. I think that you too, find this commendable, although for some reason you find it difficult to enunciate because you’ve made a vow of sorts to the devil sitting on your left shoulder never to speak good of Trump. 🙂
I have a generally favorable view of Trump because I listen to his own speeches and press conferences all the way through and what I see is someone who is trying to do his best under difficult conditions. And then I see his sorry pack of political opponents focusing all their efforts on trying to prevent him from doing the things that need to be done in order for the US to cope with these difficult conditions.
I don’t like everything Trump does—and I can see how he may judged a mental defective by some standards—but with the opposition he has I am afraid to criticize him because I don’t want to give his opponents any support whatsoever. Because if Trump falls or is not re-elected in 2020, the real crazies will take over.
Yes, Trump is the peace president. He has my vote again.
looking in from the uk—i need some serious help here
Politicians, by the nature of the job, must be a bit nuts to take the job on
but the don, by the words he utters on a daily basis, is clearly in some kind of mental decay, advancing senility, or plain crazy
“the Kurds weren’t with us on the beaches of Normandy”
seems to defy any level of sanity, even by his standards.
If I’m missing some high level political point here, I would seriously like to have it explained to me by folks closer to the action, so to speak
It is pretty simple. Ignore his tweets. Seem to be red flags and bulls type thing.
Pay attention to what actually happens. If you can figure out much of the way our Federal Government works(other than poorly, it was designed that way) you are way ahead of me. We have added more employed in the last year than Civilian noninstitutional population. According to bls.gov(https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.a.htm) anyway, if I read their numbers right.
But generally I do not consider myself all that smart, certainly not enough to figure the whos, wheres, whys, hows and when.
T2M
the kurds at normandy was part of a recorded speech
My mistake. Figured it was another twitter thing.
Again what is he accomplishing.
Who really believes what a *US* politician says(their lips are moving)? Flub a silly line that really means nothing. After all one them(paraphrasing) said the US had 57 states, Guam was going to tip over, the US national debt was just a silly accounting trick (my favorite he was my representative even though I didn’t vote for him), …
President Trump flubbed a line. Still I will not get worked up about it. People spend entirely too much effort on the inconsequential. I know I have said some obviously stupid stuff in my day. Including some real bonehead basic math stuff that cost me money on bets. Listen to some audio books some time after you have read the book. Paid story tellers screw up. Sometimes VERY spectacularly!
T2M
People who read and write too much confuse the real world with symbols and representations ultimately end up as complex ignorants.
As T2M states, stop caring about verbal and written diarrhea and start perceiving what is actually happening in the world, perhaps even reconsider long held beliefs.
considering that in 2011 i wrote that ”a trump” was inevitable by 2016 or 20 at the latest, i think the stuff i read now only serves to confirm my long held certainties
one can now ignore written stuff, and listen to it direct from its original sources, albeit still in disbelief that someone in high office could utter an endless stream of lies and drivel
unfortunately that drivel-stream has a direct effect on world affairs which we cannot ignore, because it affects all of us
the driveller in chief has it fixed in his orange head that he can run the country on mafiosi rules. I won’t say principles because he has none. I want to be proved wrong on that btw—seriously. the don is now fitting himself into his own name
Diplomacy has become a shakedown, and seems to be drifting into a straightforward protection racket. The idea seem s to be that the USA is to withdraw into itself, sufficient unto inself, with no awareness of how world infrastructure functions.
If UK leaves the EU, then we too will get ‘deals’ with the USA on mafiosi rules—ie the shakedown. The world is either part of the crime family, or against it. Then you’ll get turf wars over resources.—which effectively are happening now.
Take a long look at the map—you have two massive continental blocs.
Those blocs tell you what world politics is going to be.
Dear Norm, I voted for Trump, yes, I’m a deplorable, white, late middle aged woman. We got 2 choices for president, thanks to political machinations. Trump, and that psycho woman. It was obvious that Trump was supposed to lose, we were told so every day by the MSM, because he was a “bad white man”. So we deplorables basically said, “frack it, I’d rather see DC burned to the ground than reward that vicious hag the seat in the oval office. So here we are.
You need to go back to the stone age to understand how stressed humans respond.
In those days population growth led to resources being stressed. Due to evolutionary selection, humans have psychological mechanisms that lead them into wars with neighbors. This *always* solved the problem of too many people for the resources, but due to taking the young women of the defeated tribe, the genes for this behavior were conserved.
One of the psychological mechanisms leftover from those days is that irrational leaders become attractive to a stressed population. The current US situation is not unique. Consider what happened in Germany in the 1920.
While the worldwide economic stress increases the chances of war, it might not happen.
for once we are in complete agreement Keith
https://medium.com/@End_of_More/you-are-a-hunter-gatherer-6ef20013ae9e
Why Germany of the 20’s. No hyper inflation *at the moment*, low unemployment. Heck I read a FBI 2018 UCR violent crime is down year to year, property crime down year to year, robberies are seriously down year to year, number of homicides is down for the first time since 2014(IIRC), not much but …
Why not England & France of mid 30’s. Or the 20’s for that matter
Whole thing started with throwing “allies” to the wolves(which also happen to be allies but it is way more complicated than that). More like Mexico and Poncho Villa, I think.
That way more of a limited pie got ate at home. Seems to fit to me. But then again I am not knowledgeable of English and French history.
But all of this part of the discussion is for some other place and if our gracious host feels this post should go away, I mostly agree. If she feels I should go away, I gotta say I mostly agree, I enabled this whole diversion screwing up answering a question. Worse, apparently I am unable to stay away from it.
Which leads to a Joke(stolen of course, I really am not that smart), You know how to save on Christmas presents bring up politics at Thanksgiving Dinner.
Just saying,
T2M
Keep in mind that 90% of the media goes out of their way to paint the worst possible picture of him that they can. He produces a lot of talk and if you’re only getting your sound bites from the MSM then you’re going to get a very biased sample.
Do you remember Obama’s “57 states” flub? Yet the media loved him, so they covered for him. Trump gets the opposite treatment.
As someone below said, focus on his actions and the summary-punchlines of his policy statements, not some random sound bites.
I’ll translate it for you: “they weren’t with us on the beaches of Normandy” = Trump’s version of “what have they done for us lately (or ever)?”
Which isn’t insane at all. It’s a tongue-in-cheek way of pointing out the only reason the US has a relationship with the Kurds is because of 30 years of US meddling in the middle east. Outside of that there is zilch in common. It’s an artificial alliance of convenience…and he’s saying he’s over it.
There’s a simple connection between resource availability and behaviour that you’re missing Norman. If there’s greater scarcity, leaders become more blusterous- this is absolutely necessary to their constituents because the people recognise they’re in a less secure position than they were. If you’re struggling day to day and the talking heads on the news disparage people like you for ‘priveledge’ you’ve never experienced, you’re hardly going to vote for a ‘right on’, ‘say all the right things’ progressive. I don’t understand this Orange Man Bad attitude of yours when it’s clear the whole process is deterministic and inevitable.
it is certainly inevitable
i am the first to admit that
and the don is certainly the symptom not the cause of this mess
” the whole process is deterministic and inevitable.”
That’s what evolutionary psychology will tell you.
Only it may *not* be the case if we understand what is leading up to war and can figure out how to work around the problems.
My advice to everyone is not to get into arguments with family, friends, colleagues or even online acquaintances over how bad or evil or mentally subnormal or fiendish or devious or maniacal or mentally ill or demented the current POTUS is.
After all, he’s probably going to be in the job for another five years and then he’s going to ride off into the sunset, or maybe go back to building buildings. And that’s a long time to be arguing and possibly permanently damaging some good relationships.
So let them rant and carp and snigger and snipe and snide and condemn, or whatever they feel they have to do in order to cope with Trump as President, and try to remain amiable and non-confrontational.
To avoid rubbing people up the wrong way and guard one’s own reputation, Jane Austin’s characters were advised when meeting people at church or for dinner parties to talk about the weather. But these days I can’t recommend that with my hand on my heart, as your acquaintances may take this as an opportunity to wax apocalyptically about globbly wobbly!! But try to stick to safe subjects—if you can find any.
Of course, I don’t often take my own advice in this matter. But I should. I really should.
I do tend to keep quiet about politics. And ask endless unknowledgeable questions, often about “Who is he?” (some associate or appointee of Trump.)
“quiet about politics.”
Evolutionary psychology connects economics to politics thus.
Over a time frame plenty long enough for genetic selection to take place, human groups responded to a resource crisis by the development of xenophobic memes against neighbors and supporting irrational leaders who would take them into war. Win or loose, this always worked to get the population back into balance with the resources. Because the winners took the young women of the loosers, the genes for this psychological mechanism were positively selected at about 40% per generation. I can post the math analysis if someone wants.
Most of this selection took place well before “economy” replaced “human ecosystem.” But we are left with hard economic times tripping off the psychological mechanisms that were selected in the stone age.
If you want an EP example where the selection is easier to understand try http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Capture-bonding
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Oh, come on Tim. Some controversy never hurts. Wear that cap with pride.
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/D552/production/_102401645_tv031779980.jpg
😎
But what if this “make it great again” trend spreads to Italy? https://cdn2.kontraband.com/uploads/image/2019/2/22/preview_3e590c17.jpeg
The Roman Empire was huge at one time, but things change.