The world today has a myriad of energy policies. One of them seems to be to encourage renewables, especially wind and solar. Another seems to be to encourage electric cars. A third seems to be to try to move away from fossil fuels. Countries in Europe and elsewhere have been trying carbon taxes. There are also programs to buy carbon offsets for energy uses such as air travel.
Maybe it is time to step back and take a look. Where are we now? Where are we really headed? Have the policies implemented since the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 had any positive impact?
Let’s look at some of the issues involved.
[1] We have had very little success in reducing CO2 emissions.
CO2 emissions for all countries, in total, have been spiraling upward, year after year.
Figure 1. Carbon dioxide emissions for the world, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy.
If we look at the situation by part of the world, we see an even more concerning pattern.
Figure 2. Carbon dioxide emissions by part of the world through 2018, based on BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy. Soviet Empire is an approximation including Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, based on the BP report. It would not include Cuba and North Korea.
The group US+EU+Japan has been able to reduce its CO2 emissions by 5% since 2005. Emissions were slowly rising between 1981 and 2005. There was a dip at the time of the Great Recession of 2008-2009, followed by a downward trend. A person might get the impression that CO2 emissions for the EU tend to rise during periods when the economy is doing well and tend to fall when it is doing poorly.
The “star” in emissions reductions is the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites. I refer to this group as the Soviet Empire. Emissions fell around the time of the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. This big decrease in emissions seems to be related to huge changes that took place at that time. Instead of one country with a single currency, the individual republics were suddenly on their own.
The high point in CO2 emissions for the Soviet Empire came in 1990, the year before the collapse of the Soviet Union central government. By 1999, emissions had fallen to a level 37% below their 1990 level. In fact, even in recent years, emissions for this group of countries has stayed low. Much industry collapsed and has never been replaced.
The group that has more than doubled its emissions is what I call the Remainder Group. The group includes many countries, including China and India, that ramped up their manufacturing and other heavy industry in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the World Trade Organization added members. The Remainder Group also includes many countries that suddenly found new export markets for their raw materials, such as oil, iron ore, and copper. The Remainder countries became richer; they became more able to pave roads and build more substantial homes for their citizens. With all of this GDP-related activity, CO2 emissions increased rapidly.
[2] Population growth has followed a pattern that is in some ways similar to CO2 growth.
Figure 3. Population from 1965 to 2018, based on UN 2019 population estimates.
In Figure 3, we see that population has been virtually flat in the former Soviet Empire (2% growth between 1997 and 2018). With the economy not doing well, young people emigrate to countries that seem to provide better prospects.
Population in the US+EU+Japan Group grew by 11% between 1997 and 2018.
The group that is simply outstanding for population growth is the Remainder Group, with 35% growth between 1997 and 2018. A big part of this population growth comes from improved sanitation and basic medical care, such as antibiotics. With these changes, a larger percentage of the babies that are born have been able to live to maturity.
It is hard to see any bend in the trend lines, which would indicate that recent actions have actually changed the course of activity from the way it was headed previously. Of course, the trend is only “linear,” implying that the percentage growth is gradually slowing over time.
This rapidly growing population feeds into the CO2 problem as well. The many young people would all like food, homes and transportation. While it is possible to obtain some version of these desired products without fossil fuels, the version with fossil fuels tends to be vastly improved. Most people prefer homes with indoor plumbing and electricity, if given an opportunity, for example.
[3] Deforestation keeps growing as a world problem.
Figure 4. Chart showing World Bank estimates of share of world forested by economic grouping.
High Income Countries keep pushing the deforestation problem to the poorer parts of the world. Heavily Indebted Poor Countries are especially affected. Worldwide, deforestation continues to grow.
[4] With respect to fossil fuels, there is a great deal of confusion with respect to, “What do we need to be saved from?”
Do we have a problem with too much or too little fossil fuel? We hear two different stories.
Figure 5. Author’s image of two trains speeding toward the world economy.
Climate modelers keep telling us about what could happen, if indeed we use too much fossil fuel. In fact, the climate currently is changing, bolstering this point of view.
It seems to me that there is an equally great danger of collapse, accompanied by low energy prices. For example, we know that energy production in the European Union has been declining for many years, without the countries being able to do anything about it.
We also know historically that many civilizations have collapsed. The Soviet Empire collapsed in 1991, illustrating one type of collapse. The Soviet Union was an oil exporter. Its collapse came after oil prices were too low to allow adequate investment in new oil fields for an extended period of time. The Great Recession of 2008-2009 offers a much smaller, temporary version of what collapse might look like.
Another example of low prices accompanying collapse comes from Revelation 18: 11-13, warning of possible collapse like that of ancient Babylon. The problem was inadequate demand and low prices; even the energy product of the day (human beings sold as slaves) had little value.
11 The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore— 12 cargoes of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls; fine linen, purple, silk and scarlet cloth; every sort of citron wood, and articles of every kind made of ivory, costly wood, bronze, iron and marble; 13 cargoes of cinnamon and spice, of incense, myrrh and frankincense, of wine and olive oil, of fine flour and wheat; cattle and sheep; horses and carriages; and human beings sold as slaves.
What we have been seeing recently is falling prices and prices that are too low for producers. Such a result can lead to collapse if too many energy producers go bankrupt and quit.
Figure 6. Inflation adjusted weekly average Brent Oil price, based on EIA oil spot prices and US CPI-urban inflation.
If we are in danger of collapse from low prices, renewables would not seem to be of much assistance unless they (a) are significantly less expensive than fossil fuels and (b) can be scaled up sufficiently rapidly to more than replace fossil fuels. Neither of these seems to be a possibility.
[5] Early studies overestimated how much help renewables might provide, especially if our problem comes from too little energy supply rather than too much.
Renewables look like they would be great from many points of view, but when it comes down to the real world situation, they don’t live up to the hype.
One issue is that while wind, solar, hydroelectric, geothermal, and other devices for capturing energy are called “renewables,” they are really only available through the use of the fossil fuel system. They are made using fossil fuels. If a part breaks, or if insects eat away the insulation on wires, replacements need to be made using the fossil fuel system and transported using the fossil fuel system. At best, renewables should be considered fossil fuel extenders, using less fossil fuels than conventional electricity generation. They are also dependent on other resources, which may eventually deplete, but which are not a problem at this time.
A second issue is that it is extremely difficult to do a proper cost-benefit analysis on renewables because they can only be used as part of a larger system. They tend to look inexpensive, when viewed in isolation. But when total system costs are viewed, they often are quite expensive.
One difficulty in a proper cost-benefit analysis is the fact that renewables are often sited at quite a distance from where electricity is to be used, leading to the need for a significant number of long distance transmission lines. Furthermore, if renewables provide intermittent power, they need to be sized for the maximum output, not their average output. All of these long distance lines need to be properly maintained, or they tend to cause fires. In some instances, burying the lines underground at significant cost is the only solution. Somehow, these higher costs need to be recognized as part of the cost of the system, but this is rarely done.
Another difficulty in a proper cost-benefit analysis is the fact that renewables’ intermittency must be overcome, if the electricity is to be of benefit to a modern economy that requires electricity 24/7/365. In theory, we could greatly overbuild the renewables system and the transmission. This might work, but we would end up with a large percentage of the system that is not used most of the time, greatly adding to costs.
Batteries can be added, but the cost tends to be high. One commenter on my site recently observed:
EIA reports the average cost for utility scale battery systems to be about $1500 per kWh. At that rate the batteries needed for backing up a solar or wind facility for three days cost around 30 times as much as the RE facility. But wind is often unpowered for more like seven days, during huge stagnant high pressure episodes. Thus the backup battery cost is more like 100 times the wind farm cost. Batteries are not feasible.
The major intermittency problem is season-to-season, especially saving up enough for winter. We do not have a way, today, of storing energy from one season to another, short of making it into a liquid (such as ammonia), and storing the liquid from season to season. This would be another way of driving up costs of the overall system. It has not been included in anyone’s cost calculations.
For the time being, we are forcing nuclear and fossil fuel to provide backup electrical services to intermittent renewables without adequately compensating them for their services. This tends to drive them out of business. This is not an adequate solution either.
A third issue is that renewables really need to be “economic” to work. In other words, they need to generate a profit for their owners, when comparing the unsubsidized costs with the benefits of the system. In fact, their owners need to be able to pay fairly substantial taxes to governments, to cover their share of governmental costs as well. If renewables truly were providing substantial benefit to the system, their use would tend to “take off” on their own, because they would be providing “net energy” to the system. Instead, renewables tend to act like “energy sinks.” They need endless subsidies. They can never substitute for fossil fuels. In fact, they can’t even pay their own way.
A related issue is that, because of the high total costs (as well as their lack of true net energy benefits), it is almost impossible to ramp up the quantity of renewables such as wind and solar very high. The EU has been a big supporter of renewables other than hydroelectric. Figure 7 shows a chart of the EU’s own energy production, together with its energy imports.
Figure 7. EU energy by type and whether imported, based on data of BP’s 2019 Statistical Review of World Energy. Renewables are non-hydroelectric renewables such as wind, solar, and geothermal.
After at least 20 years of subsidies, the EU has been able to increase renewables (other than hydroelectric) to about 10% of its total energy supply. The EU’s oil imports are roughly level, and its natural gas imports have been increasing. Even with rapid growth in non-hydro renewables, the EU has been experiencing a decrease in total energy consumption.
[6] Looking at the actual outcomes, a person might ask, “What in the world were policymakers really thinking about?”
We are told that the reason policymakers made the decisions they did was because they thought that they could reduce CO2 emissions in this way. Really? If a person really wants to reduce CO2 emissions, it is easy to see how to do it. A person simply has to take steps in the direction of reducing global co-operation. One step would be to reduce international trade. Another would be to get rid of umbrella organizations such as the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the European Union. In fact, within individual countries, the top level of government could be removed, leaving (for example) the provinces of Canada and the states of the United States. In other words, policymakers could push economies in the direction of collapse.
Another way collapse could be encouraged would be by rapidly raising interest rates or cutting off credit. With less purchasing power, the world would be pushed into recession.
At the time of the Kyoto Protocol, policymakers moved in precisely the opposite direction of pushing the economy toward collapse. They moved in the direction of adding international trade and more debt to enable the growth. The countries with greater trade had huge coal resources that had not been used. With the help of this coal, the world economy was able to continue to grow. This approach only made sense if the real problem at the time of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 was too little energy resources, not too much. The economy needed the stimulation that more low-cost energy and more debt could provide.
It is now more than twenty years later. The coal resources of China are starting to deplete. Coal is also causing serious ground-level pollution problems, both in China and India. Without growing coal production, world GDP growth starts slowing. We are again facing low oil prices and other commodity prices–a problem similar to the one present when the government of the Soviet Union collapsed. The world economy seems again to be headed toward having some of its governmental organizations collapse from inadequate energy. Political parties are becoming more extreme; countries are enacting new tariffs. If we go back to Figure 5, the concern should again be collapse, on the left side of the figure.
[7] The scenarios considered by the IPCC climate model need to be revisited.
A climate model looks to the past and tries to forecast what would happen in alternative “scenarios.” The concern I have is that the scenarios evaluated are not realistic. To get to the level of CO2 that would produce the most extreme scenarios, coal production would need to continue at a high level for many, many years. This seems unrealistic because world coal production has been fairly flat for several years, and prices tend to be lower than producers require if they are to stay in business. The likely direction for coal production seems to be down, rather than up.
Figure 8. World Energy Consumption by Fuel, based on data of 2019 BP Statistical Review of World Energy.
In order for coal production to grow as much as the higher emission scenarios assume, there needs to be a major turnaround in the situation. World coal prices would need to rise substantially. In fact, coal in very difficult locations for extraction, such as under the North Sea, need to become profitable to extract. This situation seems very unlikely.
It seems to me that climate modelers should be considering more realistic scenarios regarding CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. One scenario which should be considered is the possible near term collapse of several governmental organizations, such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the governments of several oil exporting countries.
[8] The push toward renewables makes little sense without a firmer foundation than currently exists.
Early studies looked only at the cost of renewables themselves, without the cost of extra long-distance grid transportation and battery storage. Such an estimate makes renewables look far more valuable than they really are.
We now have enough experience that we can see what goes wrong. A hydroelectric plant that operates during the wet season in a tropical country may be of little practical use, for example, if there is no fossil fuel energy available to provide backup electricity production during the dry season. The total cost of the overlapping systems needs to be taken into consideration, including the need to hire staff year around for both the fossil fuel and hydroelectric facilities. Electricity transmission will likely be needed for both types of generation.
There are many other real-world examples that can be examined, before blanket “use renewables” recommendations should be issued. If renewables are not truly very inexpensive (around 2 cents per kWh or less), without subsidies, they are likely not to be long-lasting. Subsidies become more and more difficult to maintain, as a system scales up.
I found Fast (plutonium rod big d**k) Eddy.
He’s in Hong Kong.
https://twitter.com/i/status/1196187408183840768
“The high price raised eyebrows in bond markets. Investors had refused to lend to Greece at any price during the eurozone’s 2009-2015 debt crisis, leading to three sovereign bailouts. Now, they are paying Athens to look after their cash.
“”…the Greek bond sale is only the tip of an enormous global debt iceberg.
“After an almighty bond rally this year, about $11.5tn of debt — more than a fifth of total debt issued by governments and companies around the world — trades at negative yield. This means investors who hold it to maturity are guaranteed to lose money.
“The rise of sub-zero yields turns standard economic logic on its head…
““Greece selling at negative yields is absurd,” says Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz and former boss of bond investing giant Pimco. “It shows you the extent to which markets are distorted. One by one, things that seemed impossible a few years ago have happened.”
“Bond prices have soared as central banks have responded to a slowing global economy with increasingly aggressive easing measures. These have included negative interest rates and huge asset purchases in Japan and the eurozone…
“With global yields at record lows, many investors question whether markets can rally much further. If they cannot, investors buying today are guaranteed to make a loss…
“If there is a pushback, says El-Erian, it will come from the primary market, where investors buy new debt from countries and companies. “That’s where the really big investors get their allocations…
“”If you get a buyers’ strike it will be a sign that people have lost faith in the effectiveness of central banks. Things will get messy very quickly.””
https://www.ft.com/content/004ffbc2-f4e4-11e9-bbe1-4db3476c5ff0
“The plunge in interest rates since the financial crisis is wreaking havoc on pension funds…”
https://www.ft.com/content/c95deea4-03e2-11ea-9afa-d9e2401fa7ca
“The slowdown in dividend payouts by the world’s biggest companies continued in the third quarter as waning profit growth hit shareholder payouts.
“Investors are bracing for further headwinds in 2020 as the global economic picture darkens.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/11/18/dividend-payouts-hit-global-headwinds/
China (and the rest of Asia) are in terrible shape:
“Investors in Asia suffered a 1pc year-on-year fall in underlying third-quarter dividends. Almost half the Chinese companies in the index cut their payouts reflecting the turmoil caused by the slowing Chinese economy.”
Pension funds depend on high interest rates.
When a central bank prints and floods the economy with money: the value of the currency falls, inflation goes up, interest rates and yields rise.
The banks thrive in this environment.
This did happen when the Fed did QE.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EJge-nyWwAAZWPP?format=jpg&name=large
For some reason the ECB can’t even accomplish this with QE.
The Fed soaked in “speculative capital” in previous time from all around the world.
A bit different situation with the “regional only” ECB..
Nowadays, there is a faction forming out of dissenting IC hubs, specifically arranging for their own SWIFT system, non USD settlement etc.. The stated plan being sanctions ready and more importantly hoping for next GFC_ver_XY protection as well.
How realistic is that plan? The global system can indeed fork into block or multiverse arrangement again. The demand destruction from the West could be to some degree replaced by other (third world) aspiring consumers, but it’s obviously much shallower market for high end/pricey goods at least. And most importantly another vendor credit system would have to be arranged for it anyway.
Plus the EU’s underlying economy has overall been weaker than that of the US.
The Eurozone is of course weaker.
The ECB did at least manage to weaken the euro. The QE probably helped to avoid deflation. Rates and yields might have been even deeper into negative territory.
This time the Fed and the ECB are doing QE together. The problem is probably worse now.
Negative interest rates make sense for negative growth.
Good point!
Western Europe, including the UK , is moribund, and about to develop gangrene in some limbs, requiring amputation…..
In a decade since GFC I, nothing has been done to address the appalling high/insecure unemployment, low- pay crisis of the young outside the favoured Germany-Belgium- Holland -Austria zone.
“Western Europe, including the UK, is moribund, and about to develop gangrene in some limbs, requiring amputation….”
Good. The nation states of Europe have become parasites, consuming the substance of the people for no good purpose. Let Catalonia recover her historic independence, stolen from her by the Aragonese in 1258. And Burgundy, stolen in 1477. And Bavaria, stolen by Prussia in 1871, an Anschluss made permanent after the suspicious demise of Ludwig III in 1918.
Oh yes, and the “united kingdom”. May England become independent from Scotland, which for over three hundred years has done little except spend our money and spit in our face.
The trend of cascading back to regional-local fiefdoms kind of patchwork is very likely, already can see some precursors on the horizon..
A pox on all nationalisms, incubators of hatred and delusion, fed by myths and generally led by self-interested career politicians of naked ambition who stoke up the self-pity o he electorate. Some rare exceptions, of course.
.
On the other hand, as we decline and regress, myths will be necessary, and nationalism might do as well as any other to help societies cohere. But in a multi-racial Europe?
The Era of Irrationality dawns once more, as it did a hundred years ago; and just look what that gave us in Europe.
But waving your own flag, however emotionally satisfying, won’t change the physics of the situation, as they will find out….
the USA represents the transposition of all the European races, together with their particular insanities and traits..
Some good, some bad, obviously.
But they are still the partisan bunch that left Europe, and now they want their regions to themselves–hence north-south, east vs west, which will be accentuated by resource shortage and climate change. (the 2 essential hoaxes)
So the USA must devolve, because nations can only hold together if there is sufficient energy in the system, which there obviously is not.
And then we must add in the other essential hoax which is that the world is more than 10000 years old.
Europeans transposed the worst of their religions to the New World. Denial of the laws of physics being the ultimate insanity. Nevertheless it is there and growing out of control. Today, Pompeo (while awaiting the rapture) has announced that Israeli annexation of Palestinian land is now legal. This brings forward the time of christ’s return of course.
More conflict there is now certain, because the current crop of USA leaders seem to be collectively certifiable
for entertainment purposes only:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/18/morgan-stanley-says-global-growth-should-recover-in-2020.html
the word “energy” does not appear in this article…
“The firm projects global economic growth of 3.2% next year, compared to 3% in 2019.”
file this under Propaganda…
China has signalled that coal power will be a top priority within national energy policy as the government prepares its next Five Year Plan (2021-25).
On 11 October, Premier Li Keqiang chaired a meeting of the National Energy Commission in Beijing that emphasised China’s energy security and coal utilisation and downplayed the importance of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels.
https://www.chinadialogue.net/article/show/single/en/11642-Is-coal-power-winning-the-US-China-trade-war-
I am not surprised at the change in emphasis. China has figured out how poorly renewables work, first hand.
I saw a video a while back showing that China is in the process of developing some new coal mines. I am not sure if they are ones in Inner Mongolia or elsewhere. If I recall correctly, the plan is to burn the coal at the location where it is mined, and send the electricity by long distance transmission to points where it is needed. That saves the expense of hauling the coal long distances. It also keeps the pollution out of cities.
It seems like China was also working on a plan to hold down the amount of water required in electricity generation from coal. Often, lack of water is the limiting factor with respect to coal fired power plants in a desert area.
Yes we discussed it in detail few weeks ago, they are moving the coal based electricity production to western deserts, where “cleaner” low(er) sulfur deposits are available. Moreover they employ special technologies like passive heatsink cooling towers (for lack of water). Plus the multi thousand km long HV links to connect it with eastern provinces..
It’s not cheap, but in today’s crazy world of hyper debt and negative rates, perhaps at least something tangible.. an extension if you will, buying time, to hope for other yet another “step up miracles” to possibly come about like in next gen nuclear area etc.. before ~2030-40..
Be careful what you wish for. Inexpensive, limitless. clean – for a while – energy would promote irresponsible decisons.
We hope that all of the long transmission lines do not cause fires either. The film showed incredibly large transmission wires. Hopefully, they will keep the temperature of aluminum low enough.
I am presuming that China is not using copper transmission lines. I have read that besides being very expensive, copper is too heavy. It would need a lot more supporting structures to hold the transmission lines up.
Peaked Conventional vs Unconventional (Fracked) Oil –
There is a lot false hype in the media about US energy independence. The US is not energy independent with respect to crude oil. Regarding crude oil, the US produces 11M barrels per day (see page 18) and consumes 20M barrels per day (see page 20). The US is still significantly dependent on crude oil from other sources around the world.
Crude oil is “king” of all energy sources since it powers the world’s economies and the world’s militaries. As the world runs short of crude oil going forward, climate change will take a back seat as the world’s populations fight over remaining crude oil resources.
It seems obvious that we have reached “PEAK CONVENTIONAL OIL”, and the fracking shale oil situation is the proof. Otherwise, why go after expensive, nasty, poorer quality and very short lived (up to 70% depletion per year) unconventional fracked oil, if there is more conventional oil to be found.
See: BP’s – “Statistical Review of World Energy” for 2019.
bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2019-full-report.pdf Since 1951, BP has annually published its “Statistical Review of World Energy”, which is considered an energy industry benchmark.
I am not sure that I would 100% agree with you. Some things I do agree with you on. We certainly have reached “peak conventional oil.”
The world has quite a few kinds of unconventional oil. Besides the shale oil that is fracked, there is also very heavy oil (often from Canada or Venezuela) and oil from below the salt layer, under the ocean, such as that from Brazil.
With respect to dependence upon other countries for energy supplies, in some sense the United States is doing very well, especially compared to Europe and Japan. The US is a net exporter of coal and of natural gas. Its net imports of oil and oil products keep falling, and are close to zero. This is a monthly chart from the US Energy Information Administration, showing this situation. I am not quite sure what you are looking at. It used to be true that the US was a big net importer of both oil and natural gas.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/eia-us-net-imprtos-of-crude-oil-and-petroleum-products.png
The US is actually doing quite well, in the whole scheme of things. This is a major reason that the US economy is farther from recession than Europe or Japan.
There is the issue that all countries are quite interdependent. Also, even “renewables” are often dependent on imported parts, too.
Some people talk about Europe breaking up (likely) and the states going to war again as they did for centuries.
The question must be : ‘Where would they actually get the resources to do so?’
Europe is energetically dependent on other regions now, totally exhausted as far as the needs of a complex economy -and war machine -are concerned.
Not to mention depleted agricultural soils …….
Perhaps Macron’s apparent change in policy towards Russia is a recognition of this.
the battle of Waterloo lasted a day
I imagine future European conflicts will be much the same, and for the same reason—too few resources to do anything else.
18 June 1815. The battle was opened up by the French artillery at 1134; very late because the ground had to dry out ofter a lot of overnight rain. The Prussians encountered the French at Plancenoit at 1530, some 8km east of the main battle. The frontal attack by the Old Guard was broken at 1930, ensuring Wellington’s victory, and it was all over by 2030.
Made into a gripping movie in 1970, with Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington. Also made into a railway station in 1848.
Hi Gail and thanks for the reply.
My main point is that we have reached “peak conventional oil”. The ramifications of this are enormous in my opinion, especially in the face of all of the peak oil deniers.
The stats I refer to are detailed in BP’s – “Statistical Review of World Energy” for 2019, as noted in my post.
Thanks for all of your great work.
hi Pat…
“Regarding crude oil, the US produces 11M barrels per day (see page 18) and consumes 20M barrels per day (see page 20).”
these facts are probably close to correct, though the production is now over 12M per day, I think…
what you are missing is that it is US refineries that “consume” about 20M per day and then export 5M+ of “petroleum products”… (I don’t know the current number for exports…)
the US only internally uses a net amount that is about the same as the production amount…
so you are sort of right in a partial understanding, AND the graph that Gail posted is correct…
hope that helps…
We are not at peak oil.
That happened in November of 2018, worldwide.
We are at about 1 million barrels a day below that.
Possibly could catch it again in 2020, we will see.
The USA uses 5-7 million barrels a day of imported oil.
We are not even close to producing enough oil for ourselves,
the USA refines 5-7 M barrels a day of imported oil, and refines about 12M+ barrels a day produced domestically, which is the 20M per day that Pat refers to…
then the USA exports about 5-7 M barrels per day of “petroleum products”…
that is why the graph that Gail posted shows that the USA is close to zero net imports per day…
the graph is correct… net imports are close to zero…
that is NOT net imports of crude oil…
yes, the USA imports a lot of crude oil, and net imports of “crude oil” are 5-7 M…
but after refining this, it exports 5-7M of “petroleum products” which is refined crude oil…
if anyone wants to ignore 5-7M barrels per day of exported “petroleum products” then go ahead…
you will not understand the full picture if you ignore these exports…
Where do the 5-7M barrels of exported finished product go?
This is a chart of US exports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products. In total, exports of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products are running about 8.5 million barrels per day. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTEXUS2&f=M
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/us-exports-of-crude-oil-and-petroleum-products-through-august-2019-eia.png
This is a chart of US exports of crude oil, by itself. It has been averaging close to 3 million barrels per day. The difference of about 5.5 million barrels per day is recent exports of oil products.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/us-exports-of-crude-oil-through-aug-2019-eia.png
Regarding which products are sent overseas, the biggest category seems to be “Distillate fuel oil,” which I would call diesel, which runs close to 1.5 million barrels a day. The second biggest category is “Liquid propane,” which is about 1.0 million barrels per day. The third biggest category is “Finished Motor Gasoline” which amounts to about 0.7 million barrels per day. There are many other categories as well. “Petroleum coke” and “residual fuel oil” together amount to about another 0.7 million barrels per day. They are “bottom of the barrel” products. Petroleum coke is used as a fuel to make cement, lime, brick, glass, steel, and fertilizer as well as many other industrial applications.
By country, the crude oil goes to Canada, South Korea, China, India, Netherlands, UK, and a variety of smaller destinations.
The biggest recipients of diesel seem to be Mexico and Brazil. The US can produce low-sulfur diesel; Mexico does not have this kind of refinery. Brazil may have a similar problem.
Propane goes to Japan, Mexico and South Korea.
Mexico is by far the biggest importer of US finished gasoline. Basically, Mexico sends the US crude and the US does the refining on Mexico’s behalf. The US charges for this service.
Some statements in this article are inaccurate. Battery storage is almost 1/10th cost stated. Solar in some areas us already $0.02kw and solar plus battery in some regions us already cheaper than Nat gas plant.
The transition to Renewables will accelerate over the next few decades, but even then we’ll still be using Fossil fuels – hopefully only half the amount we do today by 2040.
The issue is the huge quantity of storage needed, if a person is going to try to overcome a reasonable share of the intermittency problem.
There are indeed wind and solar with “some” batteries, but these are wind and solar with at most a few hours of batteries. These would indeed be cheaper. The battery walls installed Tesla provide only short backups––enough so that the “duck curve” when everyone drives home from work and wants dinner at the same time is not a problem.
The big intermittency is seasonal. In particular, it is storing summer solar and wind, particularly to provide heat and industrial electricity in winter. This is incredibly difficult to do. A person almost has to take extra electricity collected in summer and use it to make a liquid fuel (such as ammonia). The liquid fuel can then be burned in winter.
https://electrek.co/2018/09/24/tesla-powerpack-battery-australia-cost-revenue/
The worlds most famous battery seems to have cost $500/kwh. Which batteries cost $150/kwh?
Yes indeed. $66 million for 129 MWh is $500 per kWh, near enough. Can you say “diseconomy of scale”? More interesting is that the current is 100 MW, which means it can power South Australia for just 78 minutes. That’s the science; the article’s take on the money is frankly unbelievable.
I can imagine it is possible to use a battery to daily buy cheap and sell high a small fraction of the production, to earn SOME money.
Add another battery and it has to buy higher and sell lower
Add a few more and it cant turnover daily.
How could you compensate a battery owner for holding electricity for 8 months?
Battery ownership very quickly becomes non-economic.
Assuming they charged the battery 100% every day and discharged it 100% every night.
They would have needed to make $.72 / kwh after expenses to generate $17M in 6 months.
DJ you get one 100% discharge then your battery is dead as in take it to the landfill dead.
I’ve got a 7200 watt nickel iron battery that I only allow a 25% discharge so I can hopefully get a 10 to 15 years of life. So generally take the batteries total capacity and you can only use 25% of that. I get 2000 watts usable enough to run a 24 volt pump for 10 days – now that is expensive power!
I believe you, just wanting calculate lowest possible price.
For comparison, the prices of electricity in South Australia (the highest price in the country) is A$0.50 per kWh. That is about US$0.34. So the Tesla battery boondoggle would have charged more than double the base price to achieve the result claimed. As I said, impossible to believe.
Easy to believe Robert if you understand the wholesale market pricing mechanism here in Australia. There are a few hours here and there where the wholesale price of electricity goes above $14,000/Mwh. That is not a misprint, I’ve seen it on the AEMO webpage when it happened, usually on very hot summer evenings just on sunset when solar production falls off a cliff, and everyone arrives home to turn on the air conditioning.
Most of the time wholesale rates are around $30-60/Mwh and sometimes negative.
The net effect is to drive backup electricity producers out of business. This is a disaster over the long-term, but it looks like a cost savings in the short term.
If one is to accept that truth is a product of consensus we have truly returned to the dark ages. In fact had that thinking continued there could not have been a period of enlightenment.
Case in point when Columbus sailed to the new world the majority thought the earth was flat.
When Hubble discovered the red shift most thought the universe was static.
Truth stands outside of consensus. It can’t be voted into office or voted out.
For this reason science itself is in crisis because true true science requires reproducibility. However 50% of what has been accepted as fact can’t be reproduced.
https://m.phys.org/news/2017-03-science-crisis.html
Science as well as economic science has become a religion, a system of belief. Not truth not discovery. The vast majority of people in University today are primarily interested in getting a passing grade. To do this they must determine the answer the professor will accept. This is not education this is indoctrination. It is quite similar to the theological seminary’s of the dark ages.
So the question remains if everyone is jumping off the bridge will we? Will we be guided by critical thinking based on a foundation of proven scientific evidence? Or will we join the majority?
Perhaps we’ve confused politics and science.
As has been stated Democracy is the pathetic belief the collective intelligence of individual ignorance.
That sounds like religion to me.
That truth is the product of consensus was firmly established by the Council of Nicaea in 325AD. Of course, they meant the consensus of all “true believers”; much like the consensus around climate science today. Your remark about people jumping off the bridge reminds me of a rather old joke:
Human: “I have often wondered why you lemmings keep jumping off cliffs”
Lemming: “And I have often wondered why you humans do not”
The motto of the city of Oxford, my home for many years, is “Fortis est Veritas”. But I prefer the following paraphrase:
Here, in this little Bay,
Full of tumultuous life and great repose,
Where, twice a day,
The purposeless, glad ocean comes and goes,
Under high cliffs, and far from the huge town,
I sit me down.
For want of me the world’s course will not fail:
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
(Coventry Patmore, 1823 to 1896)
Touche’
“The truth is great, and shall prevail,”
quite often, but not always…
Oh yes, David, always. Remember that Time is the mother of Truth:
Now his wars on God begin;
At stroke of midnight God shall win.
(William Butler Yeats, 1865 to 1939)
A small addendum. Even in the Middle Ages, there were “gadflies” who challenged the consensus. One was Robert Grosseteste (1175 to 1265), who made a perfect nuisance of himself at the Council of Lyons. And his pupil, Roger Bacon, “Doctor Mirabilis” (1219 to 1292), who emphasised that the best way to God was through Nature, a doctrine with which I as a Pantheist have much sympathy.
And my favourite: Ramon Lull (1232 to 1315) (if the single ‘L’ was good enough for him it is good enough for me), who first used the term “Conceptio immaculata”, still commemorated annually on 8 December.
Peer Review
I’m certain Gail isn’t concerned with peer review considering most of her peers can’t understand what she’s posting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/pdf/0178.pdf
Perhaps the madness of crowds is a better description.
Galileo certainly didn’t need a peer review to determine his science was right. But it was because of peer review his science was rejected.
Let’s postulate for a moment. If fossil fuels are no problem than how many grants would science receive to study a nonproblem? So it must be a problem. When a persons livelihood is directly connected to not understanding a problem they will not understand the problem.
I submit mainstream economists as evidence of this self evident fact.
JT your argument is nonsense.
Actually it’s historical.
“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.” – John Kenneth Galbraith
That is great!
Most “science” is nonsense.
https://www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes/quote-it-s-amazing-how-difficult-it-is-for-a-man-to-understand-something-if-he-s-paid-a-small-john-c-bogle-64-25-09.jpg
100 % correct JT and why have these economists gotten economics so wrong it is because they have been saturated by too much information about economics Gails message is simple the diminishing returns of fossil fuels will lead to the dark ages in the not to distant future which could wipe out all life on earth .
Galileo may not have needed a peer review, but he certainly got one: in 1616, when the Qualifiers of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (Congregatio pro Doctrina Fidei) was asked to comment on the heliocentric theory. They were against it. Film at 11.
But they could not deny the facts (being more honest than many modern peer reviewers), so the accepted alternative became the Tychonic model, in which all the other planets revolved around the Sun, but the Sun revolved around the Earth. (It had been proposed in about 140 BC by Hipparkhos of Nicaea, but alas mostly forgotten.) This model was strongly backed by Christopher Clavius, and with good reason, because it explained the revolutions of the celestial spheres, and until the publication of Kepler’s Harmonia mundi of 1619, there was no way to disprove it.
We may mock the learned men of the Holy Inquisition (as we now call it), but they were honest to a fault. Misinformed, perhaps; misguided, perhaps; but by the standards of their time, standards more strict than those of today, they did the best they could. Clavius earned his lunar crater, and it will long outlast the Pyramids, as it should.
Peer review, in a way, comes through the comments. Parts of this post were put together under difficult circumstances: while I was traveling, in a hotel room with poor internet service. I have made a few changes to it based on comments people have made. The advantage of a blog is that whatever a person writes in not “written in stone.” A person can go back and edit it later.
My experience with reading peer reviewed academic journal articles is that the peer review process doesn’t really encourage new thinking. Rather, it tends to perpetuate wrong old thinking. But even this it doesn’t do very well. A lot of unintentional mistakes creep in.
Gail, I have read many articles on the subject and yours did a fine job of summarizing and synthesizing the debate on decarbonizing. Actually few articles have discussed societal and economic collapse as the other side of the coin but clearly this would be one impact of drastic decarbonization – anarchy and government collapse. The Greens and promoters of a FF free world have a utopian vision which is free from historical perspective and engineering realities, and do not carefully consider how critical FF are to our world. I highly recommend any of Vaclav Smil’s lectures which are available on YouTube and provide a reality check on energy transitions.
Yes, I like Vaclav Smil’s articles as well. He points out that previous transitions took a very long time, as much as 50 years, if I remember correctly. There is a need for mines and factories to be built to accommodate the new approach. In every case, the new approach is added to the old approaches.
In order for a new energy approach to be added, there has to be a clear benefit, at least for some applications. Temporarily being subsidized by the government is not a very good reason for adding a new approach. It will last only as long as the subsidies last.
Biology and Climate Change
One of the common claims by the Climate Denier group of scientists is that biological flourishing is promoted by higher levels of CO2. I have looked at the very warm Earth and the flourishing plant life and wondered about it. Those plants laid down the fossil fuels we are burning today. And the answer is: humans weren’t around during those times. Those conditions may have been good for dinosaurs, but impossible for humans. After all, an extremely high percentage of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. There is no reason to believe humans are exceptions.
More generally, biology frequently involves balancing acts. Plants, for example, benefit from warm days with plenty of CO2, but also require cool evenings…and CO2 raises nighttime temperatures more than daytime temperatures. Scientific American posed the question:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/
Climate change’s negative effects on plants will likely outweigh any gains from elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide levels
“Even with the benefit of CO2 fertilization, when you start getting up to 1 to 2 degrees of warming, you see negative effects,” she says. “There are a lot of different pathways by which temperature can negatively affect crop yield: soil moisture deficit [or] heat directly damaging the plants and interfering with their reproductive process.”
So, for example, a greenhouse with artificially increased CO2 but also with air conditioning to control temperature might grow fabulous plants…but at what cost?
As another example of the slippery nature of biological functioning:
David Sinclair, at Harvard, has pointed to the commonly used diabetes drug Metformin as a key supplement which would help ordinary people live to be 150. But within the last couple of weeks a new study was published:
Metformin supplementation prevented gains in lean muscle mass in healthy people 65 years and older who engaged in resistance training.
“Although metformin is a safe and effective treatment for type 2 diabetes, these findings underscore concerns about the possible negative effects of metformin use in healthy older adults.”
So, although Metformin does help with blood sugar regulation, it also produces weaker old people. And weakness plays out in falls and hip fractures and other reasons why old people die. Time will tell whether Sinclair was overly optimistic looking at Metformin as a magic elixir to avoid aging.
The moral of this story is not to try to sort through all the details of CO2 and plants or of Metformin and aging, but to simply point to the fact that scientists invented peer-review and publication in order to bring some order out of the chaos of looking at isolated factoids. Unless one is an expert, one is probably well-advised to take the consensus view seriously. Which doesn’t mean that the consensus will never change. Life has risks. But the last I heard, Dr. Happer has never published a peer reviewed article on climate…which is a biological event as it affects us.
I do agree that ignoring water vapor has been a mistake. The explanation I have heard is that while everyone agrees that water vapor is a warming gas, nobody knew how to influence it. Same considerations relative to the carbon cycle and the soil…a small change in deposition could offset fossil fuel emissions. Carbon Farming is now getting some belated attention, perhaps out of desperation. And there are some Europeans pushing action on water vapor.
I agree that the political ‘rush to judgment’ in terms of making emission control the ONLY solution was likely a mistake. But it is also a mistake to blame the politics on the climate models. It’s also a truism that we have not been able to invent a world which operated without politics.
Don Stewart
Don mentions dinosaurs and purports to know when man did/didn’t exist, thus I feel compelled to share these:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okMOfYcbdI8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ut0KH3h7JVs
If these theories are even partially true, it forces us to re-examine what we think we know about the age of the Earth when/where various species of flora/fauna actually existed (as well as any theories / opinions we’ve built off our false understanding of Earth’s history).
Cheers,
-GBV
I think we understand Earth’s history quite well. Why are you promoting these theories? Do you have an agenda? Please don’t waste our time on nonsense. Thanks.
Agreed. We have unearthed lots of dinosaur remains, enough to estimate both their strength and their weight. First point: they were lighter than you might think; even the largest, at 30m long, weighed only about 35 to 40 tons. That sounds like a lot, but it’s just three elephants. The main reason is that their skeletal structure was more like that of birds than that of mammals, with air sacs and lighter tissue both in and around the skeletal and muscular structure. This should come as no surprise, because after all they were the ancestors of today’s birds.
Second point: we have the major bones that supported these creatures, and we can measure directly their strength. Four legs on a brontosaurus have to support about 8 tons each. Well, when an elephant rears up on its hind legs, each leg is supporting 6 tons. So we are nowhere near an impossible situation.
Bt I do love a dose of crank science in the morning, as long as it is not about “climate change”.
Apologies for replying to myself, but this is a kind of postscript.
The crazy “big dinos = low gravity” idea seemed vaguely familiar. It was. It is taken from a science fiction novel “End of an Era”, by Robert J Sawyer. Gravity in the Mesozoic was one half today’s; the work of “slimy blue creatures from Mars”, which at least makes some kind of sense. If memory serves, the dinos were killed off when the Martial antigravity satellites were shut down.
Do we understand the Earth’s history quite well?
If you think we do, then that’s you happy.
I’m old enough to remember when continental drift was considered “nonsense” or even “sheer nonsense” according to some eminent geologists.
This changed virtually overnight only 51 years ago in 1968 when Bryan Isacks, Jack Oliver and Lynn Sykes of Columbia University published a paper entitled Seismology and the New Global Tectonics
As geophysics papers go, it’s a truly epoch-making mold-breaking tour de force! And you can read it here:
http://www.mantleplumes.org/WebDocuments/Isacks1968.pdf
So it seems the Earth does move in more ways that previously thought. And nowadays, of course, the theory that the continents don’t move relative to each other over millions of years is characterized as nonsense. Some folks just love characterizing ideas they don’t agree with as “nonsense”.
Wegener’s theory of continental drift was published in 1915. It was almost universally denounced, not because the evidence was flawed (it was, of course, correct) but because “Wegener didn’t have a good model to explain how the continents moved apart.”
Yes, friends, 1915. If you thought that facts came first, and models were devised to explain the facts, think again. As it has been for over a century, this is the pernicious flaw of “peer review”; it demands explanations first, and without an explanation the facts become Charles Fort’s “damned things”.
When did science lose its Sense of Wonder? A long time ago, I fear. Perhaps when Newton propounded his theory of a mechanistic universe, and we forgot the psalmist’s words, Caeli enarrant gloriam Dei (Ps xix:1).
Right,
There is no such thing as “established” science, nor is there any concept of “consensus” as a means for qualifying a theory as accepted. Only experiment have that power.
If a rouge scientist claims that the earth is indeed flat, then it is for him to prove his claims by testing his hypothesis with experiment. We should concern us with nothing else then looking at the hypothesis, the experiment and the outcome from the experiment.
It is one of the largest achilles heels of modern cosmology and climate science. Try to devise an experiment from a hypothesis that spans the temporal and spatial scale of the planetary system and the immensity of the universe.
Those “scientific” fields is nothing more than speculation and some wild guesses intermingled with models that have an enormous parameter space which can be tweaked, fiddled and tuned to fit any data whatsoever proving everything and nothing at all. However, trying to disprove the processes of evolution and the laws of thermodynamics. Well, good luck with that endeavor.
“The motive power of heat is independent of the agents employed to realize it; its quantity is fixed solely by the temperatures of the bodies between which is effected, finally, the transfer of caloric.”
–Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot
https://thelogicofscience.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/flat-earth-turtle.png
The moral of this story is not to try to sort through all the details of CO2 and plants or of Metformin and aging, but to simply point to the fact that scientists invented peer-review and publication in order to bring some order out of the chaos of looking at isolated factoids.
Don, most government funded science, like most government funded everything, is institutionally corrupt, even though a great many workers by hand and brain who are paid by government may be honest and ethically pure.That’s not an isolated factoid; its an essential fact that helps explains why peer review is not functioning as it should.
Hence:
Most clinical research findings are false. As for the few studies with results that are true, well, here’s more bad news. Most of those findings are useless. These are but two of the bold statements made by Dr. John Ioannidis in a recent paper in PLoS Medicine.
“I have long been frustrated in seeing that much clinical research seems to be losing its purpose, and it does not really help humans,” Ioannidis, director of the Stanford Prevention Research Center at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said in an email. “I am very optimistic that we can do things better.”
And:
In the past few years more professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.
Dr. Horton recently published a statement declaring that a lot of published research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.
“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”
Actually, I think you are mistaken about peer review. Institutions invented it to keep individual scientists in line, not to bring order out of chaos but to maintain order in the ranks and thereby control the enterprise as well as the narrative that accompanies it.
Good point. Peer review maintains control of people’s minds.
Water vapor is actually well known and avoided
H2O
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=frAOwAQcSyI
CO2
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TBTNUTnv1vY
Perhaps Don can explain what he means by “Climate Denier”? I think meaning does matter and this term is all to frequently tossed out with no clarity on its meaning. As to atmospheric CO2, clearly there are benefits for plant life, and if temperatures continue to rise some plant species will benefit and others may not.
As to respect for consensus based on theoretical climate models, it would be great to see more transparency and have greater intellectual debate on where these models work and where they don’t – and include scientists from across the political and scientific spectrum.
It would also benefit everyone to drop the “denier” defamation as this only causes separation not cooperation.
I have run into way too many young people who say, “I am pursuing a career related to climate science because that is where the money is.” The government wants models showing that some small parts of the “Renewables will save us” story is true. So, researchers take some of the grant money and put together absurd models that seem to prove some parts of the story. Taken together, the gullible believe that the models prove whatever those providing grant money want proven. The situation is sad.
Perhaps the opposite of “Climate Denier” is “Climate Gullible.”
Samuel Johnson got it right, some 250 years ago:
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred pounds a year.
And that which was proved true before, prove false again?
Two hundred more.
But that was “religion for hire”, when your benefice depended on what you said from the pulpit. By the way, two hundred pounds was fifty troy ounces of gold, or about USD 75,000. Comparable to a modern research grant. The more things change, …
Hi Gail, and thanks for the outline on policies.
Just recently I’ve had to rethink where we are going. I still think we will run out of diesel fuel before the world can get enough nuclear fusion in place to make a meaningful difference, ie before 2070. That does make the Extinction Rebellion protests somewhat redundant, if not something of a distraction.
That also pushes the LTG peaks later and higher than in the BAU model, hence steeper declines with no alternative source of energy. And BTW, uranium is not infinite either.
Perhaps of more interest in the short run is finance. You may want to look at what happens when fiat economies stop increasing government deficits and begin to balance their budgets. Greece would be a good place to start.
I expect that collapse will look like financial collapse. In some ways it will like the 2008-2009 Great Recession, before the collapse takes a turn for the worse.
The problem with diesel fuel is that governments keep pushing down demand by putting into place higher mileage requirements. At times they encourage cars powered by electricity, except that electric cars tend to be too expensive for most citizens, when total costs are included. Recharging costs and taxes needed for road upkeep are two important parts that tend to get left out of analyses.
If we look at diesel demand of China, compared to its gasoline demand, we see that China’s diesel demand has very much leveled off, presumably because of the slowdown in coal extraction and the resulting cutback in heavy industry. China’s flat demand for diesel should help with diesel availability for Europe.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/06/chinas-gasoline-and-diesel-consumption-patterns-are-quite-different-2018.png
Europe has had low demand growth for diesel for a very long time.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/diesel-gasoil-consumption-for-selected-areas.png
I believe that Ugo Bardi posted an incorrect analysis by some European person whose name I didn’t recognize, claiming that world diesel production was down significantly. I think that the author was using a database incorrectly. This is BP data that I would tend to believe.
Thanks for setting out these graphs. I’ve found this data really hard to pin down. IIRC, half of each barrel of crude oil is refined into diesel and gasoline fuels. The rest goes for various purposed including repairing roads. (The Fossil Fuel burn is only half the story).
IIRC in the UK, our refineries were set up to produce the balance of diesel to gasoline that the market demanded. Then something changed and the government pushed diesel cars, the refineries had to change.
Then as the North Sea ran out, it was cheaper to buy in refined fuels and at least one refinery was decommissioned and shipped off to Pakistan.
I seem to recall that in the 1920’s diesel fuel was the target of the refineries. Gasoline (petrol) was a waste product hence the degelopment of the auto industry to use the cheap fuel.
Different types of oil produce different mixes of gasoline, diesel, asphalt, and other products, without special “cracking,” to make long molecules into shorter molecules. If prices are high enough, it makes economic sense to (for example) make asphalt into diesel.
Generally, refineries do not try to make short molecules (like natural gas or even gasoline) into longer molecules, even though the longer molecules sell for a higher price. The cost of conversion is too high.
On a world basis, the distribution has stayed close to 25% gasoline, 25% diesel , and 50% all other products. Actually, diesel has grown, as it made increasing sense to refine some of what would be asphalt into diesel. When prices fell, refining asphalt to make diesel made less sense, so the percentage dropped somewhat.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/world-oil-consumption-by-type.png
The EU seemed to be willing to buy diesel on the world market. It is hard to see that any local refinery could produce the strange mix it wanted. Needless to say, when the world’s percentage of diesel started drop a little (probably because the lower price of oil made “cracking” long molecules less cost-effective) it squeezed the EU’s plan to use diesel much as possible.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/eu-oil-consumption-by-type.png
I have always wondered what in the world the EU was thinking about. Maybe they thought that the world market would always be well enough supplied that they could purchase whatever mix they preferred.
“I have always wondered what in the world the EU was thinking about.”
That one falls into the “my brain hurts” category.
A few days ago I listened to Yanis Varofakis relating his negotiations with EU Finance Ministers. It went something like this: YV “Economic science says this cannot work.” EUFM “Just give us a number.”
That may explain this:
https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2019-313-eu-bank-launches-ambitious-new-climate-strategy-and-energy-lending-policy
quote/
Activist global warming strategies have now caused the European Investment Bank to ban its fossil fuel project funding. After more than a year of internal and external lobbying by several EU member states and an ever-growing list of activist NGO and pressure groups, the EIB has decided to cut its financial support for all new fossil fuel projects by 2021. It will also support €1 trillion of investments in climate action and environmental sustainability. This is meant to force European countries to put an end to new gas-fueled power projects and keep in line with the Paris Agreements and EU CO2 emission targets. EIB VP Andrew McDowell stated to the press that the EIB’s new energy lending policy, seen as a landmark decision, has been approved with “overwhelming” support. He reiterated that it will bar investments or financing for most fossil fuel projects, including those that employ the traditional use of natural gas.
/unquote
When things make no sense, somenting else is happenig.
The EU is assuring that it will be one of the parts of the world economy that collapses. We (outside the EU) should be happy that the EU has chosen this role for itself.
Greece is now a non monetary sovereign State, like all those using the Euro. It’s an entirely different kettle of fish compared to MS states like the USA, Japan, Canada,Australia etc.
Greece’s mistake illustrates the fundamental flaw in the eurozone and that will kill it.
The mistake that Greece made was to believe the “European” mirage. When things got real they got punished as a cnation instead of supported as europeans.
The point I make is that if a country decides to reduce its fuel consumption, any of the present governments need only reduce their spending (subsidies) and increase taxation generally to cause activity to fall quite quickly. It’s complex and too long to discuss here.
After 30 years, the cars are cheaper, but the homes are more expensive in Slovakia:
https://spravy.pravda.sk/ekonomika/clanok/532928-od-neznej-30-rokov-zarabame-viac-auta-zlacneli-byty-zdrazeli/
The article does not mention it, but the point is, that the homes and the cars need to be more energy efficient. The production of cars is more automated thanks to robots, but we need more workforce and special materials for individual homes due to their higher complexity.
It is harder to automate home production than car production, you are right.
In the US, autos are said not to be more expensive, but the value comes from more required features that not everyone can afford: better bumpers, anti-lock brakes, better audio systems, electric systems to open and close windows, fancier paint.
Imagine that the EU adopted the directive that prescribes building only passive houses after 2019, which is gradually implemented by the member states.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2010/31/oj
This means more workforce which is already in short supply for meeting other EU requirements which are in force.
The system will be collapsing because of the lack of the people for performing energy saving measures. The costly energy is useless. There will be a constant oversuply of energy like oil, but the declininy numbers of the people who can consume it.
Why we need climate models:
See Dave Pollard’s current post at:
http://howtosavetheworld.ca
Take a look at the emissions chart.
Spoiler…no we can’t save the world.
But my main point is this: In my lifetime (80 years), emissions have increased by a factor of 10. But it is obvious that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have NOT increased by a factor of 10 (if they had, none of us would be here to question it). Which leads us down the path of realizing that we need to have climate models to help us understand the effects of the emissions. Such as: where are the emissions going if they are not all going into the air? Into the oceans? Outer space? Back into the land?
It is also clear that the model is not likely to be primarily about modeling the supply of CO2 (and other greenhouse gases which can change climate), but instead about the intricate relationships which connect CO2 levels in the air and water and land and how those levels generate measurables such as ocean acidification and temperatures and air and land temperatures.
Blaming the climate models for failing to generate one’s favorite projection of fossil fuel consumption is a failure to understand the problem.
Don Stewart
“Blaming the climate models for failing to generate one’s favorite projection of fossil fuel consumption is a failure to understand the problem.”
Those putting together the future scenarios have completely wrong ideas about what is possible in the future. The IPCC creates “assessments” that have impossible scenarios embedded in them. These assessments give the idea that we can walk away from fossil fuels. We cannot. Fossil fuels leave us through low prices and collapse. In fact, we seem to be at the edge of fossil fuels leaving us.
A primary reason of the assessments seems to be to get us not to fear “Too little fossil fuels.” Instead, we are expected to embrace the hope, “Renewables” will save us.” This is a false promise, however.
Gail
We have had plenty of models predicting consumption of fossil fuels, especially oil. We can go back to Hubbert’s original work, up through Robert’s work around 2005, and your work and the work of many others.
All of these fossil fuel models essentially ignore the potential for climate change. That is, they do not consider that the world might collapse ecologically and all of the humans die and therefore don’t consume any fossil fuels.
Given the realities of modeling, it’s not fair to criticize Hubbert for failing to take into account the potential of climate disruption to change the direction of fossil fuel use. Similarly, the climate modeling project was specifically set up and funded by politicians who wanted to control how things were approached. It’s not fair to criticize the climate modelers for failing to also model fossil fuel production.
One can plug any value of future fossil fuel consumption one believes is likely into the models and they will generate forecasts of polar temperatures, average land temperatures, ocean acidification, ocean temperatures, etc. More models can take polar and ocean temperatures and predict events such as ice sheet melting and sea level rise, partly as a result of CO2 already produced melded with some forecast of future CO2 production.
It is fair, in my opinion, to criticize the political use of emissions. For example, the political uses have steadfastly emphasized the need for renewables and efficiency, while preserving growth or achievement of the UN developmental goals. There have been zero prominent politicians (to my knowledge) who have acknowledged that renewables and efficiency will not generate the GDP required to both preserve the standard of living in the rich countries and also achieve the developmental goals in the poverty stricken countries.
So your attack should be directed at the political use of the models…not the models themselves. Of course, ‘political use’ can involve scientists and business people and journalists and NGOs, as well as politicians.
So far as I understand it, a big shortcoming of the models is their vagueness in predicting the effect of all the CO2 which has gone into the oceans. Will the oceans stop acting like such an effective sponge? Will some of that CO2 come back out of the ocean and into the air? What about the frozen methane? These are existential questions, which may not have really good answers from the models.
Don Stewart
The problem I’m seeing in climate science is that it is similar to economic science. The climate is far more complex than people realize. The same is true with the economy. Gail has done a good job shedding light into how the economy actually works. It’s isn’t just a supply demand driven system.
The climate is the same. CO2 is an element of our climate but it isn’t the only one and it isn’t the largest one. Water vapor is a much larger driver than CO2. The other problem is CO2s warming affect is nonlinear because of the percentage of radiation it reflects is linked to it’s molecular frequency. This is never considered in the climate models. So in simple terms if going from 200 to 400ppm results in 2deg warming the next 2deg would require 800ppm and the next 1600ppm.
So it maybe for good reason that Hubbert and LTG never pointed to pollution as the limiting factor. Rather they both pointed to energy scarcity.
However the fear generated by CO2 has had very significant benefits to politicians and businesses.
The following is a Princeton professor explaining CO2
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=M8iEEO2UIbA
This is a good way of describing the climate situation.
“So your attack should be directed at the political use of the models…not the models themselves.”
Don, I am sympathetic to that viewpoint, and at one time agreed with it. Until I dug deeper, and discovered that many of the “models” were not built up from the science, but rather built down from a prior political goal, so that they could be used to enable that goal. In other words, “science for hire”, just like the science that told us smoking did not cause cancer, and the science that tells us the same about glyphosate. All bought and paid for by big business and big bureaucracy.
So I rather tend to ignore the models, and judge the politics.
Repeat after me Abiogenic oil production.
Thank you for the comment. I’m familiar with the idea. Abundant oil exists deep within the Earth, where the temperature is so great a barrel of oil would last for about ten seconds before being reduced to methane and steam. And even if it did exist, it is far too deep to reach. Not, I fear, a saviour of BAU.
“In fact, we seem to be at the edge of fossil fuels leaving us.”
Yes!
But, lets pretend its the other way around.
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Super article, thanks. I liked your juxtaposition of collapse vs climate change – and which one are we at the most danger of experiencing?
To my simple thought process we are going to get them both, and both will arrive full force some time this century.
Fossil fuels look like they must run out at around 2050 or even sooner – they don’t need to disappear, there just needs to be too few of them to sustain BAU . Whether they go out in a bang of high prices or low prices is a really interesting point, but academic in the end. The fact is that their depletion ends BAU.
The biggest problem with BAU is that it requires exponential economic growth to sustain the illusion of debt repayment. Once this penny drops we will have some form of global financial collapse.
This need for exponential growth is driving the rape of the Amazon and other forests, the depletion of fisheries, and the exhaustion of all manner of natural resources. This includes the 6th mass extinction and the destruction of the ecosystems that sustain all life. BAU has been great to experience, but it totally carries the seeds of its own destruction.
In climate, the last time co2 levels were as high as they are today trees were growing near the South Pole, sea levels were 20 metres higher than now, and global temperatures 3C-4C warmer. Forget about climate models, the historical record suggests our goals of staying under 2 degrees are just another piece of magical thinking. The climate is already gone, and we just have to wait for the inertia and feedback loops to kick in.
What you seldom hear in the arguments is the realisation that the 8bn people on earth have got here in the climate of the past 50 years. This is the Goldilocks zone that might sustain a population of 8bn. Three degrees hotter will definitely not. And three or 4 (even 5 or 6) degrees looks like it’s locked and loaded. There is no sign of any reduction in our output of co2, and no plausible path to its reduction on a worldwide scale in the next 10 to 20 years – and this is a path guaranteed to destroy our climate.
Another thing you seldom hear in the arguments is what happens after 2100. Okay, the timeline of everyone currently alive pretty much ends then, but what about the future generations of all life forms, and the terrible loss of our ecosystems. BAU does not have custodianship of the planet as a high priority. Just ask Donald Trump.
So, faced with these awful realities, what do we do? Magical thinking seems to be the answer.
Renewables will let BAU continue indefinitely. We will find ways to sequester co2 from the atmosphere on a global scale. We’ll manage to save our forests, turn all land over to agriculture, but still keep our wildlife and insects. Sustainable this and sustainable that (as if BAU is sustainable) , zero emission this and zero emission that. Oh, and clean coal too.
Anyway, it seems crystal clear that the world will fight like mad to defer the collapse. This is the path we’ve chosen. But ultimately that’s all it is. We’re kicking the can down the road into a terrible future.
The earth’s systems are non-linear. There are a lot of feedback loops. One of them brings about collapse when resources per capita fall too low (or perhaps, simply fail to rise). For this reason, our simple view of what is ahead for other species is not really right. There may indeed be die off for species other than humans (and in addition to humans), but this is simply clearing the deck for new ecosystems. No economy is permanent. No climate in permanent. Everything keeps changing, in a finite world.
Part of our problem is that we fail to understand how much change is baked into the way a finite self-organism system operates. Yes, the climate will change. It has all along. Yes, which species are dominant will change. That has happened before. We don’t have to feel like we are in charge and can change the situation. We can’t, even if we would like to. We are taking guilt, when there is no need to feel guilty. This is the way the system is designed to operate.
A good analysis, richard b. But you omitted to mention the elephant on the planet. The ultimate driver of exponential growth is the exponential growth of the human population. And there is no way out of that predicament that people are willing to contemplate. Not even Thomas Robert Malthus, who urged “moral restraint” as the solution, overlooking the fact that the immoral would then outbreed the moral into extinction.
Ukraine For Dummies:
https://www.opednews.com/articles/Ukraine-For-Dummies-by-Ray-McGovern-Crimea_Ignorance_Intelligence_Media-191114-285.html
Some may learn something.
A very fair and unbiased account of events in Ukraine. Not a single politician could affirm those events without being called a putin asset. Why is that?. Shiff starts his impeachment inquiry with a lie. First sentence.
Is this not curious state of affairs? We are lied to. People worked up into a frenzy. unable to have civil discussions about the facts.
Instead of the above accurate account of the shenanigans in the Ukraine what do we hear in every mainstream press and talking head. russia invaded ukraine. russia did this russia did that. Trust you alphabet soup agency. How can we trust when we are openly lied to.
Russia is certainly a competitor with the USA. Why is anything but hate for Russia considered traitorous? You dont hate competitors. You compete and win.
I consider the hallmark of facism hate using lies War propaganda. a media united in their lies. Fascism is a word thats thrown around a lot lately. The people accusing it are demonstrating textbook fascist behavior..
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/08/interview-dr-paul-craig-roberts-challenge-ruling-ideology-called-facists-herland-report/
Yet people continue to be channeled into left vs right polarity. Why? Any dialogue outside of approved talking points is hated on.
The impeachment inquiry is ridiculous. What should be investigated is how and who was involved in overthrowing a democratically elected government in the Ukraine and bringing The USA to the brink of war. What trump did is bad as that? What Bill Clinton did with Monica is bad as that? I could care less what party they belong to. This the big sham. Dont betray your team. Repeat talking points. Dont think. I dont care about Bills exploits. I dont care about trump and stormy Daniels. None of my business. I dont care if the president has a penchant for hermaphrodite martian midgets. None of my business. I do care about being lied to for war.
True progressives value the truth. True progressives are against war if not attacked.. True progressives dont pull on there boots and use truncheons to quell opinions not in line with talking points. Both partys are corrupt. Republicans wouldnt allow Ron Paul. trump would be gone if he didnt support defense deficits.
You wonder why trump is going to be impeached then reelected. Now you know. No its not Russian bots. Seriously? I could be wrong. There was something very human about obama. While i certainly didnt agree with a lot of his viewpoints i dint think he would have me beaten with a truncheon because of it.
Tulsi Gabbard reflects all of the traditional values of the Democratic party. IMO she could defeat Trump easily. But she is not even a contender. Why is that? . Its not that whoever runs the democratic party doesnt understand that Hillary was defeated because she was the queen of warmongers. They know that. That they are unwilling to abandon that demonstrates how integral it is to the creature formally known as the democratic party. No more Obamas allowed. Not facist enough. Neo left uber alles. God help us.
okboomer, I confess to having little interest in the coming disintegration of the USA. But I firmly agree with you about Tulsi Gabbard. As Shakespeare said, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world ” (The Merchant of Venice, Act V scene 1)
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/15/world/middleeast/iran-gasoline-prices-rations.html
Iran raised fuel prices 300% and protests erupted.
Iranians are very attached to their cars, possession of one is seen as a mark of modernity, normality and status, even though Teheran would be much more pleasant and less polluted if they simply got out and walked.
And the mass of people are well aware that the corrupt elites – the mullahs, big business, the army – live very, very well indeed, so are little inclined to accept any such decline in their own living standards while the rich glide by.
They should have raised fuel prices a long time ago – and scrapped income taxes and suchlike
Excellent work as always. There are a few efforts at modelling the interplay between peak oil and global warming, such as this report from NASA
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/peakoil.html
It shows it is difficult to get past 450 ppm of carbon dioxide as a peak level in coming decades, enough to make life more difficult in a world with declining net energy but not the apocalyptic scenarios projected by 2100 under never ending growth scenarios.
Thanks! I don’t remember seeing the NASA study before.
Louis de Sousa and Euan Mearns put together an analysis in 2008 (same year as the NASA study) over at TheOilDrum.com. They came to a similar conclusion. It was difficult to get atmospheric CO2 much about 450 parts per million, using estimates was on what was at that time believed to be available to extract. (I expect if I were to model what would happen with collapse, the amount to be burned would be lower, and thus the maximum CO2 would be lower.)
http://theoildrum.com/node/4807
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/WEO2008_CO2Concentrations.png
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Iran gas price increases. 33% for the first 60 liters per month . 300% for all gas after that in the month. Yikes!
https://www.rferl.org/a/outrage-in-iran-over-gas-price-hike-as-economic-woes-worsen/30274458.html
When prices were high, most oil exporters sold oil to local people at their own cost, or even at a price somewhat lower than their own cost. Now they cannot afford to give local citizens such low prices.
If you look at the actual prices, they still sound very low. Even with the 300% increase, the price is less than $1.00 per gallon ($.254 per liter).
of course, to poor people, $1 is a lot of money…
isn’t this international wage disparity?
The current UK price of gasoline is $6 a US gallon
Most Iranians are very poor, many can only keep going by taking bribes – it drives my friends mad when they go back, always the hand out for a bribe.
Last week Rouhani announced the discovery of a new 50 billion barrel oil-field, found by “brilliant Iranian engineers” and described it as a gift to the Iranian people. I thought it smacked of crazy desperation at the time.
Pakistan and South Africa are other economically troubled nations that have made similarly bombastic announcements.
Unsurprisingly the truth about the Iranian discovery was not quite so impressive:
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Truth-Behind-Irans-Massive-Oil-Find.html?fbclid=IwAR29DT_l8IXMElDQ7FSpYkXZ3bu8tacUeqkxjIoEJdyceWVb_iiL-ovfoWo
Thanks Harry – I did wonder how they had a spare super giant waiting to be discovered after all these years.
As unconvincing as David Cameron’s promise of cheap natural gas for Britain produced by fracking, which has now fizzled out…..
I’d forgotten about that. Seems they never did find that 100 billion barrel oil bonanza in Sussex either.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-32229203
The Pakistani find has totally failed to materialise, I see:
“Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan’s hopes to be self-sufficient in oil production were dashed as the expected oil and gas reserves in the Arabia Sea were not found.”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/gulfnews.com/amp/world/asia/pakistan/hope-of-finding-oil-and-gas-in-arabian-sea-in-pakistan-dashed-1.1558254382047
Not good for Pakistan!
According to the link:
This is a big part of what is confusing. There is a huge amount of heavy oil available. If prices are $200 or $300 per barrel, we would likely have no trouble extracting it. But at $60 per barrel, such oil is generally not economic.
They can just drive Teslas. Elon to the rescue!
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Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
“Utopia,you are standing in it! Celebrating humanity’s flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law”
capitalism and the rule of law are parts of a secondary layer that has produced “humanity’s flourishing”…
the primary layer is the harnessing of the energy in fossil fuels…
without FF, capitalism would have been unable to lift the billions of us to lives far above poverty…
your theme is weak in that it does not acknowledge the primary layer of IC…
Without human ingenuity, all the FFs in the world wouldn’t have gotten us out of the stone age. So I would make that primary, FFs secondary, and capitalism tertiary.
Added to that, necessity is the mother of invention. Ingenuity need necessity to goad it into action. We are a tropical species that wouldn’t survive very happily very far outside the tropics without heating, clothing and housing. Although we are adaptable.
On the other hand, the Yaghans, natives of Tierra del Fuego, used fireand shelter, but managed to live without clothes at the Southern tip of South America, apparently quite happily until disturbed by European contact, so their pristine existence considerably weakens my assertion.
Even the traditional Eskimos wore fur coats and used fire in their igloos. By the way, and not a lot of people know this, some of them also made use of fossil fuels.
On Quora, I saw this:
There is an area of the Arctic called Paulatuuq (“place of coal”) and there is a vast underground coal fire there which has been burning for thousands of years. Apparently, people in that area would go to the Burning Hills, get some fire, and bring it home:
https://www.quora.com/How-did-an-Eskimo-Inuit-create-fire-in-the-first-place
Be sure to click on “more” in the quora link.
There is a link in this reference to a book from 1890 on fire making methods. https://archive.org/details/firemakingappara00houguoft
“We are a tropical species that wouldn’t survive very happily very far outside the tropics without heating, clothing and housing. Although we are adaptable.”
This comment is simply ignorant of human biodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaghan_people#Adaptations_to_climate
Human groups have been in various climates long enough to have adaptations to them all, pointing to the fact that 80,000 years ago we all came from tropical regions in Africa / MENA has little to do with the realities of various groups and adaptations that exist across the spectrum of human biodiversity.
I should add that that group is just a particular extreme example; eskimos and saami and Scandinavians and various other groups also have cold adaptation but not quite so extreme as to not wear clothing.
Perhaps, but I doubt that population would have grown as much as it has, without heating, clothing and housing.
Utopia through the spread of Capitalism, is downright stupid. As practised in the USA it is a predatory capitalism which makes everyone a competitor and values winners devalues losers anf is massively continuing to destroy the USA we all used to laud, until 40 yearsago.
If you want to know more about Utopia, read this book by Rutger Bregman,
“UTOPIA for REALISTS and How We Can Get There” An eye opening book!
Very true, of course, for the mass prosperity post-WW2 ; but the rule of law was in fact vital to pre-FF prosperity, enabling people to keep the rewards of their labours rather than seeing it simply snatched away by the local bigwigs, leaving them with random scraps according to the whims of their rulers. The rule of law gave certainty and security, without which no commercial endeavour is worth the trouble.
But yes, generally, with regard to energy, we are fish who don’t see the water we have been swimming in all these years……
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“A climate model looks to the past and tries to forecast the future. When the IPCC models were put together, the scenarios about which concerns are raised are based on the assumption that fossil fuel use can grow practically indefinitely.”
Sorry Gail but this is profoundly wrong.
The climate model(s) of the IPCC do not care at all about the fossile fuels resources, not even about the emissions rates.
The climate models of the IPCC are purely physical models, that is modeling how the climate will respond to variations in the atmosphere contents and other parameters (ocean acidity, etc).
That is, the IPCC climate models are a “black box” representing the earth system, and how it will respond to CO2 and other gases variations (typically regarding the radiative forcing induced by green house gases).
So the ressources aspects or even the emission rates are not part — at all– of these models.
Then of course there is the use of these models with various inputs regarding projected emissions.
But his is a very specific part of the IPCC reports and not part of the modeling per se at all.
And on this I fully agree that the most extreme scenarios (the 8.5 or something) are not realistic at all. However the “climate model” is exactly the same, whatever the input scenarios.
The fact is that there is no equivalent of the IPCC for the resources (stocks) and ability to extract them aspect. The IEA would be the closest thing regarding that, but they clearly dropped the ball years ago.
And of course with the resource aspects, there is also all the economics around it , EROEI etc.
Personnally I agree that the resources aspect is currently a higher risk that the climate aspect, and that there is a tremendous communication deficit on it compared to the climate one. I also agree that the resources constraints may very well manifest themselves not through high prices, but through low prices.
However it is clearly not the “climate models” that predict infinite ressources or continued emissions growth.
Unfortunately, the scenarios illustrated under the model depend heavily on how much fossil fuels are burned in the future. The CO2 must come from somewhere. It indirectly comes from inputs to the model. These scenarios are basically non-sensical; they cannot occur. You can argue that they are not part of the model, but this is the output real people and policymakers look at.
The whole idea that different scenarios can occur, including some in which the world economy continues to operate in the future but generates less CO2, depends hugely on assumptions, which you may choose not to call “model assumptions.” But they really are model assumptions. In the real world, all of what we have that are called “renewables” (except for picking up dung and biomass from the ground) are simply extensions of the fossil fuel system. Without the fossil fuel system growing, there is no way that today’s economy can continue.
The publications of the IPCC cannot distinguish between the model and the non-sensical scenarios that it chooses to publish.
You might consider it “being picky”, but no , they are not model assumptions at all. Take somebody that works on these models, his/her problem is not at all what CO2 is going to be emitted (in the context of working on the model).
Again, for me there is clearly a tremendous communication deficit between resources aspects and climate aspects, however saying “the climate models predicts infinite continued emmissions growth” isn’t for me the right way to address the “issue”, and regarding climate modeling I would say the IPCC is doing a fine job (I’m not talking about the scenarios aspects, it is not their core job at all).
In fact you can download climate models, and feed them with the ressource depletion/emmissions scenarios of your choice, for instance :
http://wiki.magicc.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
(and not forgetting that we also have quite a bit of ressources left to burn).
Somebody needs to take responsibility for the absurd scenarios. The IPCC cannot say, we put together a model, and someone else handed us some scenarios. This is what our model would say, if these scenarios could actually occur. The point is that these scenarios cannot occur based on the laws of physics. People may think that they can occur, because they fervently believe that Business as Usual will go on forever. But that is not how a finite world operates.
Garbage in garbage out.
Posted an answer, disappeared ?
Note : the IPCC publications very clearly distinguish the climate model and scenarios aspects
I changed Section 7 to make it clearer that it is the scenarios that need to be revisited. The model itself is another issue. I don’t have an opinion on whether adjustments to the model are needed.
Ok 🙂
But again, very clearly the IPCC should be taken for the science part of it (and resulting model), for the emissions scenarios, they use the “official economics forecast” of the world bank/FMI or whatever, with a BAU having some growth up to whatever.
The energy forecasts that go into the scenarios come from the International Energy Agency. They are far higher than the amounts implied by the IEA’s Annual Energy Outlooks that they publish, unless oil prices (and corresponding coal prices) rise to $300 per barrel and stay at a corresponding high level. This is why researchers who use different future energy estimates get very much different indications regarding future warming expectations. For example, look at these two reports done in 2008. Both of them use much lower estimates of future fossil fuel emissions and come to far lower CO2 emissions.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2008/peakoil.html
http://theoildrum.com/node/4807
This is a link to the major chart from TheOilDrum report.
http://www.theoildrum.com/files/WEO2008_CO2Concentrations.png
Of course, the World Bank and other organizations assume that Business as Usual can continue to 2100. To do this, we indeed would need to pump out a lot more fossil fuels. Where the story goes wrong is (a) assuming that BAU can continue to 2100 and (b) harassing people with the expectation that they can fix the situation by using less fossil fuels. We don’t really have renewables that work well enough, when all costs (including storage and transmission) are included. Renewables are tremendously dependent on the fossil fuel system themselves. They also cannot be scaled up sufficiently to make a major difference. Renewables also have pollution problems, so under any circumstances, they are not solutions.
The IPCC gets its funding indirectly from the UN. It has a hidden agenda of “helping the poor countries.” If a person realizes how important population growth is to our overall growth problem, a person sees that this agenda is counter-productive.
Gail, the flaws in the IPCC work run very deep. To begin at the beginning: the models are not based on physics, or hard science in general; they are based on curve fitting to experimental data. That can model effects, but not causes, and so any claims that event “X” causes climate problem “Y” are specious.
Worse still, many of the models are based on woefully insufficient data. The authors of the infamous “hockey stick” graph used data from exactly twelve trees in one small region of Siberia, and those twelve were cherry picked from a couple of hundred that did not provide the data they wanted. When you have a model that claims to capture change over time, a standard practice is to run it *backwards*, to see whether it can explain data in years prior to the data used to build the model. As I have pointed out more than once, when subjected to this test, their models fail spectacularly.
The response by the IPCC researchers was to pretend the data did not exist. So there was no “mediaeval warm period”. Oh, maybe there was, but it doesn’t count because it was not “global”. First, how do they know? Where are the temperature measurements from the Americas, Africa, Australia or Antarctica in the tenth century? Or for that matter, from the 65% of the Earth’s surface that is ocean? And secondly, are we really supposed to trust data taken from twelve trees, all of the same species, all in a region you can walk around in a couple of hours, as a good sample of “global” climate?
Finally, the original IPCC summary, the one written by politicians, talked about scenarios, and mentioned models only to buttress the claim that the scenarios were “doom or else…” Indeed, the whole thrust of their work was, and still is, about scenarios; or, rather, the things we must all do to cede all control over our lives to these intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, whose sole mission is to save us from ourselves, while they continue to enrich themselves and expand their carbon footprints.
I am not a climate change skeptic. But I am a scientist, and can recognise political posturing, buttressed by fake “science for hire”, when I see it.
Thanks for your views. I am 99% sure that you are right, but I don’t want to try to fight the battle, “The model is wrong,” at least at this time. I changed Section 7 of my post to clarify that what I am saying is that the scenarios that provide the high global warming impacts are impossible. We need to be looking at different scenarios. It is quite possible that we need a different model as well. The current one seems to be the outcome of a political process designed to help the careers of those involved in the forecasting process as well as those involved with “renewables.” With its funding connection to the United Nations, it also is designed to help the “Remainder” countries.
There is a huge amount of funding, directly and indirectly, that takes place because of the IPCC Assessments and the IEA recommendations based on the IPCC Assessments. Careers of many types are advanced based on government subsidies, mandates, and grant funding. In many ways, this is a way of ramping up a whole sector of the world economy as well as advancing the careers of politicians who base their views on these assessments.
I would feel more charitable toward this group if I saw some benefit from the whole process. The big benefit has been to push manufacturing to China, India, and coal-producing countries. This is not the benefit that those depending on the assessments expected, but it is the way a self-organizing system works. If local companies move away from manufacturing and other CO2 intensive businesses, those in less developed countries will ramp up their economies in response.
But the problem here is much more the IEA than the IPCC, the way I see it (and for many years) is :
– The IPCC should be the expert group on climate science and model : to me this is ok
– The IEA should be the expert group on energy production/consumption/security, and in this scope, especially on the fossile ressources and reserves : ***this is not the case at all ***
Indeed the IEA scenarios are more “demand based” than “offer/realistic ressources based”, so more “classical economics” based than physical ressources based.
And this is the true issue.
And on this we must remember the story of the 1998 IEA report, as exposed by Lionel Badal :
https://www.lemonde.fr/blog/petrole/2010/05/18/how-the-global-oil-watchdog-failed-its-mission-13/
Which resulted in the IEA team being fired, Fatih Birol (current IEA “chief economist”) being the only one spared in this story …
That is, in 1998, the IEA tried to base the report on realistic reserves level, they got slapped, and since then the reserves aspect is more or less hidden/not adressed in the reports.
So currently, if the IPCC can be qualified as a scientific body regarding the climate modeling, but the scenarios aspect of it, is clearly not scientific at all, –and does not pretend to be–, the scenarios are basically “storyline” on CO2 emissions growth (or not) in the future, and in fact described and named as their end forcing level in 2100.
But one could also say that if it is “easy” for the climate modeling part of the IPCC to be scientific, having a scientific approach on the reserves and future fossile fuel extraction rates and burning is clearly much more difficult, as it mixes geological data (that are hidden some times), but could potentially be “scientific”, to plenty of parameters such as available technology, policies (including monetary ones), etc..
By the way, below a recent doc that I find quite intereting from Patrick Brocorens (ASPO Belgium) :
http://www.aspo.be/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Peak_Oil_wagralim_2019_final.pdf
With in particular, quite impressive images of how North Dakota would look like if the wells and associated pipes were “in the air”, taken from :
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/24/upshot/nd-oil-well-illustration.html
“To begin at the beginning: the models are not based on physics, or hard science in general; they are based on curve fitting to experimental data.”
“Indeed, the whole thrust of their work was, and still is, about scenarios;”
etc
Sorry but this is totally wrong, have you ever looked at one of their report, even quickly ?
Most probably not at all.
Not to mention that the IPCC is not a research organisation in itself, it is a group of researcher synthesising research results.
And the bulk of the work is the model.
Feeding future emissions to it is not their core job at all.
“Feeding future emissions to it is not their core job at all.”
The problem is “Garbage in: Garbage out.”
Indeed, but if you feed it Lahererre fossile extraction forecast for instance, you are around the RPC4.5 scenario I think (have to recheck a paper from Lahererre and Bernard Durand on that), below for instance :
https://aspofrance.org/2019/08/30/are-there-enough-fossil-fuels-to-generate-the-ipcc-co2-baseline-scenario/#prettyPhoto
This link to LaHerrere’s report that worked for me:
https://aspofrance.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/ipccco2rcp.pdf
This is Jean LaHerrere’s chart showing expected fossil fuel burning patterns under various scenarios. U = 1600 is his own estimate.
https://gailtheactuary.files.wordpress.com/2019/11/laherrere-fossil-fuel-co2-in-ipcc-scenarios.png
I personally believe that the 2.6 degree scenario is a whole lot more likely than Jean’s ultimate, because of the likelihood of near-term collapse. I cannot imagine emissions going negative at any point, unlike the ideas of the IPCC. Jean LaHerrere’s U = 1600 Gtoe selection seems to imply high FF extraction until 2040 or so. This looks like wishful thinking to me.
For what it is worth, there is a completely different model of climate change that has nothing to do with CO2 levels. It is based on “long-term oscillations of the solar background magnetic field associated with double dynamo waves generated in inner and outer layers of the Sun.” This model forecasts that we are headed into lower temperatures until 2055, in a “Modern Grand Minimum.” This model seems to explain historical ups and downs of temperatures, since the Roman warm period (400 to 10 BC) over a very long period. See this recent article in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-45584-3
The IPCC does not seem to give any weight to the double dynamo waves approach. I view the IPCC as being primarily a political group. The small country members of the IPCC have a great deal to gain if they influence today’s high CO2 countries to outsource their industry to them.
Hello Gail,
About climate change/science and CO2, personnally I consider the science (and scientist working on it) seriously, and of course the sun is a major part of it.
But the fossile fuels economy is basically based on chemical reactions of the type : CnHm + O2 –>> Energy + CO2 +H2O.
and without even talking about température and climate, the curves regarding the rise in CO2 concentration are very clear.
As to the IPCC being a political group, I don’t think it is the case at all, again the IPCC mandate is to synthesize the research done in various academics institution/universities. After of course yes, with the COP meetings there is a lot of politics, but this is not part of the IPCC per se.
And once again, the IPCC has no mandate about “predicting future emissions” or evaluating fossile fuels reserves, if one organisation has this mandate, it is the IEA, and for me it is clearly the one to be blamed regarding the non realistic aspect of some IPCC projections.
After as to whether the finite resources aspect is a higher risk than the climate consequence of burning them for the current “BAU”, for me it clearly is, but it does not mean that the climate consequences are not there…
The two different schools of thinking on climate change are producing diverging forecasts in the next few years, so maybe we will get to see for ourselves who is correct.
Gail:
Just a word to say that your various studies are greatly appreciated.
Bob
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>
You are very welcome. Many readers on this blog are familiar with the February 2005 “Hirsch Report.” Its official title is “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, and Risk Management.”
We all build on the work of others.
“Hawaii protests show why wind energy can’t save us from climate change
” … Mike and Tanya Lamb are among the Iowans who oppose more wind development. Noise from turbines recently built near their home in Adair County — the closest turbine is less than 2,000 feet away — is disturbing their sleep. ‘There’s no peace and quiet at our home anymore,’ Mike Lamb told me. People think ‘green energy is great. But if you have to live by wind turbines, it’s not so great. It’s pure hell, is what it is.’ ”
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/469870-hawaii-protests-show-why-wind-energy-cant-save-us-from-climate
Of course, their focus is on climate change.
“There’s even a German word for it, Verspargelung, roughly translated as pollution with giant asparagus sticks.”
To replace fossil fuels (impossible) it will be asparagus for dinner tonight and every night. Fine by me. A total loss of property value next to any wind farm i would imagine. Hard to sound dampen vibrations in the earth.
Thanks! This story doesn’t get told very often.
In the Middle Ages, people not only lived near windmills, they sometimes lived inside them. Noise is inefficiency, but when your green nonsense is funded largely by subsidies, who cares. I think one other factor that will doom our absurd “green revolution” is that it is being built with the same fossil fuel mindset that gave us our grotesquely inefficient BAU, which still believes in saving money, not energy. And has yet to realise that in the last analysis, modern money is backed by energy. Or else backed by delusion.
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I’m certain you are already acquainted with the MEDEAS model by the spanish CSIC. It accounts for the lose of EROI of energy resources, and the cost in energy and materials of the implementation for renewables, population growth, technological advancement and everything is dynamically modeled, meaning that the forecast for population growth is reevaluated in every time elapse with whatever expected values the other variables happen to be at that time.
It seems really sound, and fits perfectly with your message.
https://medeas.eu/#home
The model doesn’t give much hope, though. It expects the global temperatura raise no greater than 2ºC. That might be the only positive thing.
Interesting. Kind of like one of those build a society games. The EROI given for renewables is not given that i could find on the website. I like my assumptions and relationships transparent not hidden in magical unicorn software. The program might have some value or not. Without access to its base assumptions it amounts to a magic box. It might be a worthy effort at understanding our situation. Without transparency of its methodology it is unknown.
“The hope that China’s economy had put the worst behind it was dashed on Thursday by a series of disappointing economic figures that rounded off a miserable week for policymakers in Beijing.”
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3037731/china-yet-hit-bottom-economic-downturn-plumbed-new-depths
“China’s home-price growth slowed for a fifth straight month in October, suggesting the property sector may weigh on expansion in the world’s second-largest economy, already buffeted by trade tensions and subdued domestic demand.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-15/home-price-growth-in-china-is-the-weakest-since-march-2018
“China’s central bank extended 200 billion yuan (£22 billion) through its medium-term lending facility on Friday, the second time it has done so this month, while keeping the lending rate unchanged.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-china-economy-mlf/china-central-bank-injects-200-billion-yuan-to-boost-liquidity-keeps-rate-unchanged-idUKKBN1XP0CB
“Reports of a spate of bank runs and regulators scrambling to contain the mess underscores the stresses in the world’s largest banking sector as slowing growth, weak exports and crimped cash flows pressure the ability of borrowers to service China’s very large mountain of debt…
“Jitters about the financial health of banking minnows in the provinces of Liaoning and Henan are just the latest data points highlighting the pressures on China banks.”
https://www.afr.com/markets/equity-markets/great-wall-of-worry-looms-over-china-s-banks-20191114-p53akj
“…emerging markets now take a far bigger share of total global debt than they did even before the Asian crisis.
“Tightening liquidity in emerging markets, along with a strong dollar and weak emerging currencies, therefore combine to spell potential serious problems, particularly if the trade war cannot be steered to a safe conclusion.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2019-11-15/china-s-fear-of-minsky-moment-is-key-for-emerging-markets
Then these markets are not “emerging”, are they? They are dissolving.
Price growth was at 0.1% in first tier cities. It doesn’t have far to go from there to shrinkage. People buy these homes expecting appreciation. If shrinkage occurs, I can imagine loan defaults. There has been talk about adding a property tax in 2020. If this happens, it will likely push property prices down.
“Despite the sell-off in the bond market since September, yields are still showing caution….
“The Institute of International Finance came out with its quarterly look at the mountain of global debt, concluding that it rose by about $7 trillion in the first half of the year to a record of just more than $250 trillion.
“That increase is more double the $3.3 trillion expansion for all of last year. It pegs global debt, which it sees expanding to $255 trillion by the end of the year, at a lofty 320% of global GDP. It’s no surprise that the world is awash in debt, but yields show there seems to be a dearth of it for the public because of massive purchases by central banks.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-14/bonds-aren-t-believers-in-a-synchronized-upswing?srnd=economics-vp
“Two decades ago, total government debt was estimated to sit at $20 trillion. Since then, according to the latest figures by the IMF, the number has ballooned to $69.3 trillion with a debt to GDP ratio of 82% — the highest totals in human history.”
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/69-trillion-of-world-debt-in-one-infographic/
“…The global economy is showing few signs of rebounding from its slowdown… recent economic data suggest the diminished risk of a major rupture in the world trade system has yet to lift the outlook for 2020.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/growth-in-economic-powerhouses-starts-to-diverge-11573730840
It doesn’t matter. It’s not a very meaningful statistic, Official “Government Debt” is “other people’s money”. In the US case Congress mandates selling bonds to match the deficit, about $22Trillion. But it could be any sum. It never pays for spending anyway, Buying the deficit does that. But to keep us guessing the debt idea is effective, Government spending for a monetary Sovereign nation pays off a new debt authorised by Congress, so by the time the government debt sum is ready the debt has already been eliminated. So the bonds just sit idle in the Fed until maturity.Then the account is recredited to the investors[plus interest] Remember too that the +and- signs are reversed in the federal government sphere. A bit like your bank calling your deposits there a debt
Governments have been defaulting on their debt since the beginning of time. What makes this time different? Do you think the governments will be able to stay away from collapse this time?
Default will depend on resources, not money. Money is just numbers in accounts representing debt or assets. Governments USED to use metal money rather than Fiat money. They can default. You cannot default in your own FIAT currency, It is infinitely available [depending on resources for sale] You don’t need to possess money if you are sovereign. Governments like that have no debts, except for the interval between receiving and paying the invoice,30 days? It’s a PAYG operation. Forget about “Government Debt” it is other peoples money held as bonds in the Fed. Welfare for the wealthy.
The federal government is Unlike every other form of government. the usual + and – signs are reversed. A minus sign in government means a + sign in the community accounts, to the dollar.
“You cannot default in your own FIAT currency”
The Emperor Diocletian thought exactly that. He was wrong. Look up “chrysargyron”.
John Law thought the same. He was wrong. Look up “French Revolution”.
When a government refuses to accept in payment of debts the very currency it has issued, that is default. Now look up US Executive Order 6102.
No. You are confusing fiat currency with intrinsic valued currency. Nobody is saying they refuse to pay.. You say that. It’s wrong. The truth is that they can always pay, Ask Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who both say the government can always pay whatever is owed in its own currency. The USA can never default. The limit is that there are always resources available for sale in its currency.
How do you define Venezuela’s currency? What is its problem? Should it issue more currency? More debt?
Venezuela is basically at war, invaded by the USA via sanctions etc. Venezuela is Not monetary sovereign. Venezuela has been in the firing line by America’s “War on Disobedience”. The moment it shifted from a right wing government it has been a target. Look at Bolivia today. Remember the original “9/11”? That was in 1973 in Chile. Few remember that today. The Americans never have to face consequences. Their architects of chaos are celebrated figures like Kissinger, George Bush and his killings in Iraq, John Bolton etc. No need to win, Chaos is good enough. It keeps armaments flowing.
Venezuela gave up any pretence at monetary sovereignty when it pegged its currency to the US dollar. NAFTA also impoverished it by undercutting its corn production. Terrible moves. Argentina did the same. It’s a recipe for disaster. Venezuela survives because Russia and China are there. The sacrifice of Assange did not save Bolivia. No left wing government is acceptable for long, especially if they have oil to exploit. or lithium in Bolivia’s case
If there is a finite “batch” of goods and services that the global economy has the energetic capacity to create each year, then nations that have the economic credibility to get away with this kind of accounting chicanery are in effect just stealing a larger share at the expense of weaker nations.
Ironic, given that MMT is beloved of socialists.
Agreed! This is what helps the rich nations to keep stealing from the poorer nations, like Venezuela.
I don’t see the irony.
DJ, because on an international basis it facilitates predatory capitalism.
“When we start to understand the correlation between the price of Oil and the expectations throughout the global market, we must immediately focus on the income expectations of nations that rely on oil as the main source of income. If our ADL predictions are correct, Oil will begin to plunge to levels near $40 (possibly below $40) over the next 3~4 months.
“How will foreign nations react to this loss of income and who are the most dependent nations on Oil revenues?
“… the economic, social and future strains this creates for many nations become even more severe – at a time when an economic contraction is taking place. This type of commodity price collapse could lead the world into a chaotic economic mess if it is prolonged.”
http://marketoracle.co.uk/Article66121.html
“In 2014, oil prices fell once again. At the same time, Western countries began introducing sanctions to push back against the Russian government’s actions in Ukraine, which further deterred investors.
“Unlike the other crises, this one was not followed by a rapid recovery. Oil prices remained low, sanctions only became more severe, and investors from Russia and the rest of the world alike directed their funds elsewhere.”
https://meduza.io/en/slides/five-years-later-russia-still-hasn-t-recovered-from-its-2014-economic-crisis-these-graphs-explain-why
“Almost all the oil and gas exporters in Central Asia and the South Caucasus devalued their currencies following the oil price slump in 2014.
“Azerbaijan’s devaluation was particularly painful; the central bank was forced to devalue the manat twice in 2015. Kazakhstan was forced to do the same. Uzbekistan initiated a 50 percent devaluation in September 2017 at the start of its economic reforms.”
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-Oil-Nations-That-Still-Havent-Recovered-From-The-2014-Crash.html
“Waves of violent protests have engulfed Baghdad and Iraq’s southern provinces, with demonstrators chanting for the downfall of a political establishment that they say doesn’t prioritize them.
“Fueling the unrest is anger over an economy flush with oil money that has failed to bring jobs or improvements to the lives of young people…”
https://www.voanews.com/middle-east/iraqs-protests-raise-question-where-does-oil-money-go
“Mexico’s central bank cut the benchmark interest rate in a split vote among board members after inflation slowed to target and growth stumbled.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-14/mexico-cuts-key-rate-third-straight-time-as-consumer-prices-ease
“Bolivia’s center-right interim president Jeanine Anez named a new hydrocarbons minister as part of a “technical” cabinet meant to tide the country over until new elections take place next year.
“Former senator Victor Hugo Zamora Castedo took the helm of the hydrocarbons sector, in place of Luis Alberto Sanchez who was named by leftist former president in exile Evo Morales.
“Among Zamora’s first challenges is stabilization of natural gas production…”
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2016387-bolivia-ushers-in-new-hydrocarbons-team
This is what happens when infrastructure is destroyed by conflict.
heartbreaking.
Decide carefully when arguments are made for war.
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/600181520000498420/pdf/123631-REVISED-Iraq-Reconstruction-and-Investment-Part-2-Damage-and-Needs-Assessment-of-Affected-Governorates.pdf
I find fascinating you find in the Bible similarities with the “low-prices” collapse you are expecting and explaining on this blog.
I think the low-price collapse being warned about may have been something at an earlier time, not necessarily now. Or maybe this was a phenomenon that was well enough known, the people of one time warned people of other times about them.
Another generally sound post, Gail, but I think you’re still misrepresenting climate models. However, it’s all been said now.
So, do all these provisos ruin the possibility that we can get a viable system of renewables up to the point we can rely on a useful contribution from renewables. It’s not looking workable and if the external costs blow the equations out the window, we are going to have some expensive white elephant infrastructure?? .
Subsidies encourage the building of what will ultimately be white elephant infrastructure. I think that is happening again here.
With the price of oil so low continued extraction would seem largely dependent on credit debt. Isnt continued debt credit for oil extraction the real energy policy with everything else just part of the illusion of fossil fuel civilization? I would include policy among that illusion. While policy may pretend and extend (and I am thankful for that!) in the end resource depletion is the reality. The real question is of course whether the dept credit financial system fails before actual resource extraction at a reasonable EROI does. Im sure my thoughts are overly simplistic … Imo what allows the credit debt system to function is a reasonable EROI. AS Gail has educated me its clear that a energy source with a EROI far in excess of 10 is needed to keep any semblance of what we have now functioning.
Politically there seems to be a lot of anger out there. Its very odd from my perspective why when we have it so good? Our species seems to have a penchant for destruction. If angry people act in senseless destruction this may well be the end before financial failure or resource depletion. Our culture always assumes endless energy for rebuilding after the senseless act of war or revolution. Rather humorous if we destroy what the lions share of the planets energy took to create only to find we have ended any chance of continued creation by doing so. IMO the real motive is a seemingly endless appetite for destruction – was that Ozzy? no matter just musing as usual.
IMO real justice will not be at human hand regardless of ideology but by the planet.
Thinking about the future is always problematic as there are so many imponderables. But it is an ingrained habit among humans (possibly in the DNA, and certainly in the culture) to think short- to medium-term and let the long term look after itself. Also, as a general rule, poverty and deprivation place a necessity on short-term thinking. Only the more comfortably off have the luxury of doing things for the long-term future.
Then again, these days power and technology are often in the hands of utilitarians who don’t recognize the value of things that are of no practical use, corporate types who are obsessed with the bottom line, and over-stressed people who worry themselves to distraction so that they can’t appreciate the taste of good food or the immense beauty of the natural world.
As the Welsh bard W.H. Davies put it:
https://fndandmecom.files.wordpress.com/2017/02/leisure-what-is-this-life-if-full-of-care-we-have-no-time-to-stand-and-stare-no-time-to-stand-beneath-the-boughs-and-stare-as-long-as-sheep-and-cows-no-time-to.png?w=736
+++++++
“Also, as a general rule, poverty and deprivation place a necessity on short-term thinking. Only the more comfortably off have the luxury of doing things for the long-term future.”
It would be hard to think of a poorer society than Western Europe in the year 1000, and for a couple of centuries after. Yet they had the courage to build our great cathedrals, found our great universities, begin the long, laborious rescue of the great thinkers of Antiquity, and create the legal institutions that were the basis of our modern world, and the financial institutions that generated the city states of the Renaissance.
Their purse was poor, but their spirit was great. Our modern world is in a far worse plight: rich in purse, but desperately poor in spirit.
And this is captured explicitly in the famous line “infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible.” A counterexample sits on my bookshelf, a compact volume of 1100 pages that captures over eight hundred years of continuous growth. It’s name? “The Oxford Book of English Verse”.
Quite so: I was fascinated and a little surprised to trace one branch of my family tree to some townspeople who moved from Old Burgundy, in SE France, to the Kingdom of Navarre, in what is now SW France and N Spain, sometime between 900 and 1100 AD.
Directed by advisors from the Church -mostly French in origin, it being a more advanced region – , the king had invited settlers so long as they were craftsmen, literate or innkeepers (!) to turn his kingdom of small farmers and shepherds into a proper state as the Muslims retreated and he faced intense competition from neighbouring rulers. Simultaneously, great monasteries were established, and cathedrals and castles built.
At that time, even the journey down the Rhone valley was rather dangerous, and the energy they must have had is impressive to contemplate. Just like the later Normans in England.
One of the towns they built was Estella, famous for its beauty and wealth from trade (‘Estella la Bella’), now a festering dump full of the wrong kind of immigrants – E European gypsies, the unskilled and semi-criminal. All invited to address the 21st century demographic crisis, but in fact causing a social one……
Why were innkeepers so important as immigrants in the 11th century? Because you couldn’t attract international merchants without a good, safe, network of inns. Even so, it remained a hard and dangerous journey.
Interesting to note that even in 900-1000, parts of Europe such as France had a surplus of skilled, bourgeois, people able to – quite literally – build a new kingdom, and a beautiful one. I often feel we underestimate that Age.
Xabier, if you haven’t seen it, check out Kenneth Clark’s “Civilisation”.
It’s all available on youtube, but the second episode, “the great thaw”, exactly illustrates your thesis. It’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Rn4CRu9pa4
The short-termism of the very rich today is ‘I want my huge profit this year!’ Obviously , financialisation meets their wishes perfectly.
The early bankers and merchants worked on business cycles that lasted years – because trade was slower, and manufacturing was by hand.
So maybe 5 years from buying raw wool in England to selling all the stock of finished cloth in Spain or Italy.
Of course, they were still very rapacious people, but phsyical and geographic limits could not be evaded.
“appreciate the taste of good food or the immense beauty of the natural world.” Im afraid I am guilty of getting caught up in things that i choose to spend my time on instead of feeling the beauty of nature. Thank you for your comment. Good reminder. The truth is it is my choice. Live in appreciation of beauty or the rest…
I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.
Nature I loved, and, next to nature, Art;
I warm’d both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.
Walter Savage Landor ( 1775 to 1864)
Ultimately, the planet will decide the outcome. Our politicians would like us to believe that they are in charge and have solutions, but this is not really the case.
People do rebel when they feel that they aren’t getting a fair share of the economy’s output. This is why the top layer of organizations are so vulnerable.
According to Umair Haque it is the 1% that are revolting not everyone else. The rest in the USA at least are too cowed by job uncertainty etc.to rock the boat.
https://eand.co/how-social-darwinism-destroyed-america-from-the-inside-7909acc6e099
There is not a single aspect of that article i agree with including the premise conotated by the title. A garbage handler in the USA has a better standard of living than a brain surgeon in New Delhi. Rewarding productivity with compensation is not without flaw but it certainly does provide a good standard of living for those willing to work. Arguments that it does not are simply not true.
As we encounter resource depletion their is less to go around. No system of compensation can overcome this. Attributing less wealth to anything else than resource depletion incites anger. Anger. hate and the actions it creates will not change this.
Well I think it is well founded. The winners and losers are the issue here, aided and abetted by rampant Capitalism. This system is the MOST EXPENSIVE economic system second perhaps only to a dictatorship. Because capitalism doesn’t add in the external costs it avoids understanding that it is so expensive. I read the UK government found that the external costs of 1 homeless man per year as 30,000 pounds and it want up to 400,000 pounds in extreme cases.
But the US spends more money on the poor than any government in history. “Mandatory” spending is now 2/3 of the federal budget, and it has been increasing for 70 years. An odd form of social darwinism.
No: the problem is “entitlements”, which encourage people not to save (Social Security will pay), not to stay healthy (Medicare / Medicaid will pay), not to support even their own children (AFD will pay), and not to practice prudence and thrift (the plastic card will pay).
And perhaps the most pernicious effect is that this system not only discourages philanthropy, it demonises it. The filthy rich of the past, from George Peabody to Andrew Carnegie, practiced the latter’s “Gospel of Wealth”, and its mighty influence lasted well into the twentieth century. Until government bureaucrats decided charity should only be done with other people’s money.
i just rebuilt my “renewable” energy system’s inverter. the unit had gone 9 years since the last failure, which was 6 years after the 2004 installation… so an average of 7.5 years between servicing. this is fairly typical of what i saw when i worked in the industry. this past summer the charge controller also had problems which necessitated repair. the batteries should be good for another 14 years.
the circuit boards were $850.00. the replacement charge controller was $450.00. as a retired solar pv system designer & installer, I am fortunate i could do the repairs myself, avoiding the labor charges to hire this done.
once again this illustrates that “green” power is 100% dependent on the underlying, unsustainable, hydrocarbon powered industrial infrastructure… and it is expensive and onerous to maintain.
What batteries are you using that get that life?
surrette FC420, flooded lead calcium.
made for float service as in a grid tie with battery backup application. rated life is ~25 years.
Thanks for sharing your personal experience.
And of course, even if you can keep up your own solar system, the rest of the economy needs to keep operating to make spare parts and to give you a job so that you can afford to buy spare parts.
exactly gail, which is why i do not consider these top of the technology pyramid systems “renewable”. i do have spare parts to buffer that liability, as backup power is vital for our summer garden irrigation needs.
That’s why I didn’t take up solar, as I could foresee the cost of maintenance might be rather high, being unable to do any of the work myself.
I almost fell for it, though!
What I most fear is having it imposed on me by legislation in some ridiculous Green New Deal 2nd Industrial Revolution scheme.
Apart from anything else, solar panels look hideous.
My preference with our newbuild was for an oil tank, given that Gail’s articles had clued me in to the ultimately irresistible downward pressure on oil prices, but the council wouldn’t permit it, so I had to install an air source heat pump at a cost of circa £12k. Most tiresome.
Heat pumps are the future, according to the Labour party ‘New Green Deal Second Industrial Revolution’: we are proud of you Sir Harry, pathfinder to the the stars!
Seriously, that’s a simply horrendous-sounding cost, and what’s the likely spare-part situation for you on your island should it prove to be engineered to fail after a few years?
I hope heat pumps are, if not the future, at least a good idea. They heat my home. Four boxes on the roof and my rooftop patios, and four smaller boxes in key rooms. Their main advantage is that most of the heat comes from the air outside, not from the energy that drives them. I had them installed last year; this winter will be their real test. But a small one is now keeping my study hall at a balmy 22C, and in a couple of hours an even smaller one will keep my bedroom warm.
No, I’m not carbon neutral, but the physics says I am heating my home at one third the cost per room, and by keeping only one room at a time warm I am saving over 90% of the CO2 that central heating would require. Your mileage may vary, but for me at least, science trumps propaganda.
“Apart from anything else, solar panels look hideous.”
++++++++
The biggest challenge in an off-grid situation.is lights! With an oil lamp or candle it is possible to move around, find a jacket or the door, but no work is possible. Even playing the guitar is hard. Cooking, cleaning, ironing, knitting, woodwork, medical care, even teaching is impossible. The basis of a self sufficiency situation is a wood driven stove providing warmth, hot water and ironing (hygiene), cooking, conservation and bread. It is possible to improvise it with stones and mud. Without metal pots and a top metal plate, ceramics close to the fire, air is getting polluted making lung deseases more likely. A setting like that requires lots of work (believe me!). What you will be missing badly is light. The dark also gets you tired. If you look to the history of light this has never been solved and the large jumps of productivity came with the aladdin and gas lamps. It even paid electrification after the bulb was developed. Prepys say you only have to survive 3 months longer. I strongly recommend a good stove and a small off-grid solution for light at your hide-away place! A portable solution might be helpful if you think you wanna hide more deep in the wilderness. Remember that it might be a problem to reach that wild spot, especially with screaming kids, a cast-iron stove, solar batteries and panel and your 3-month-food-storage at your back! Never heard of solar batteries lasting 15 years. Do you clean the plates somehow and fill new acids?
Skylights might be helpful, if the skylight can be kept 100% leakproof. Living at the equator helps, too, because there you have equal days and nights. I am sure that the winter gets to be really dark, without lights, near the poles.
A minor puzzle. The Valley of the Kings contains at least 63 tombs for Ancient Egyptian royalty. All of them are windowless and cut deep into the rock. Most were lavishly decorated with wall paintings. They must have taken years to construct. Yet none of them shows the slightest sign of smoke from a burning torch. So how did those workmen light their way, three thousand years ago?
Four possibilities that I can think of:
1. The artwork was done prior assembly.
2. They used tech from previous/earlier more advanced civilizations
3. They used florescence
4. Aliens gave us a helping hand
Thank you; interesting suggestions. I don’t believe #1, because the artwork was painted directly on the wall. And space aliens is a stretch, in spite of the History Channel series.
My best guess is indeed fluorescence; more specifically, bioluminescence, which the Egyptians certainly knew about.
Illumination with torches would have been a certain death sentence from asphyxiation.
5. The use of polished metal mirrors to focus and reflect light down the passageways.
http://www.unmuseum.org/burning_mirror_demo.jpg
Thats how they did in the fifth element.
This is why people told stories around the fire, ate and drank, and had sex. Not much more is possible.
Hard to get meaningful statistics on this, but I worked out that the wax candles to light a modest evening dinner party in the 18th century would have taken the whole month’s wages of a decently-paid worker.
Puts our easy, brightly-lit, lives into perspective, doesn’t it?
Thats different from my thoughts. With LED light sources being what they are… 18650 batteries are readily available and cheap. They power a variety of lighting sources. 10 watts puts out a lot of light nowadays. Solar chargers can be had cheap. Heating and food not so easy. $50 buys a lot of reliable bright light.
The problem is keeping industry operating. A bit of light is nice, but food and water are even nicer.
“That’s why I didn’t take up solar”
you are a smart man…
the only reason why i continue to pour time and money into maintaining these “top of the technology pyramid” systems, is because we are dependent on pumped irrigation water for our gardening/ food production needs… but they are in no way clean, green or renewable!
Don’t believe you on the batteries. Give details or you are blowing smoke.
My guess is he has nickel iron batteries as I do. Thomas Edison invented them over 100 years ago and they do last (depending on draw down) about 15 years then you replace the electrolyte and you’re good for another 15 years. Our local election car club had a 1915 electric car powered by these batteries that were 100 years old that’s why I chose them.
Jarvis, I believe you are right. With an Ni/Fe battery, the energy comes from the electrolyte, not the electrodes, and so the battery can be very long lived. Just refill it from time to time. The energy density is not too good, but if you want a car that will take you to the farmers’ market, rather than drag race on the highway, it is quite good enough.
RE nickel iron. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ The rolls 5000 LA is a high dollar battery to me but they are cheap comparatively. I saw a set of rolls boiled dry and left uncharged for two years. A guy got them filled them with distilled and .. He is still using them. Some commentary on Nickel Iron.
https://www.solarpaneltalk.com/forum/off-grid-solar/batteries-energy-storage/ni/7007-nickel-iron-battery-nrel-test-results/page4
these are flooded lead calcium wet cells, the power plant and telco industry workhorse for their backup power needs. old and very reliable technology. C & D makes them as well as Surrette. mine are the Surrette FC420.
https://rollsbattery.com/wp-content/uploads/batteries/FC-420.pdf
Gail, It would be helpful to read your views on the expansion of Nuclear energy as a ‘low cost’ energy alternative. A look at the available numbers would be very interesting.
Thanks for the idea. Right now, in most places, nuclear cannot be competitive because of the crazy pricing scheme that gives wind and solar priority when they are available. This causes the price paid to other providers to fall to a level that is too low to cover their costs. In fact, prices fairly often become negative. Nuclear cannot quickly (or economically) shut down. In some places, there are payments made to try to offset this problem, but they are rarely enough.
This is just one hurdle that nuclear is up against. It would be helpful if I could do a more complete write up, as you say.
Gail, nuclear cannot be shut down at all. The basic radioactive decay is intrinsic, and according to quantum theory cannot be stopped. As we found out at Three Mile Island. But that aside, the output of a nuclear reactor is hard to control, because the generated heat feeds three cycles of heat exchangers, all of which have shutdown problems. I accept that this mechanism is feasible with a continuous power output, but changing that power level dynamically in response to demand simply will not work.
I agree that it doesn’t make sense for nuclear to ramp up and down in response to wind and solar. I have run across a little ramping up and down in the French nuclear fleet, however.
https://energytransition.org/2017/05/does-the-french-nuclear-fleet-ramp-to-make-space-for-solar-and-wind/
Ramping down is unusual, however. Sometimes one unit is taken off line for some reason or other. At Christmastime, when demand is low, output maybe reduced. The author remarks,
One commenter says:
The commenter later corrects himself:
The term “Third World” originally referred to what you call the “Remainder” countries. It consisted of those states which did not align themselves either with the US bloc or the Soviet bloc (hence the “non-aligned” countries). Of course language evolves, and the term soon took on meanings well beyond what was originally intended (as happened later with the BRIC / BRICS grouping).
My Remainder Group is sort of like the Third World grouping, but not exactly. My Remainder Group includes Canada, Australia and Norway, for example. These countries had mineral resources that had not been fully developed, so in many ways they acted a little like the Third World countries, with faster growth. Norway didn’t need to join the EU, because it was in “better shape” than the EU countries, with its oil, gas, and hydroelectric.
Annual CO2 emissions have been either declining or stagnating only when there were oil crises
http://crudeoilpeak.info/global-warming/co2-emissions-and-oil-crises
Even without a revision of IPCC reports we’ll face further temperature increases which will screw us up.
NASA climatologist James Hansen:
Climate response time. The ocean has great thermal inertia, which delays the
global climate response to a climate forcing. Thus even fast feedbacks are slow in
developing, because they come into play in response to temperature change, not in
direct response to climate forcing. Ocean-atmosphere models indicate that only
about two-thirds of the equilibrium temperature change is realized 100 years after
the forcing is introduced. The remaining one-third of the surface warming is still
‘in the pipeline,’ a result confirmed by Earth’s observed energy imbalance.
Earth remains out of energy balance, more energy coming in than going out,
because of the ocean’s long response time, i.e., its slow warming in response to
climate forcing by GHGs. Earth’s energy imbalance can now be measured, as I
will describe. The global average imbalance is now +0.75 ± 0.25 W/m2
. Because climate sensitivity is about 0.75°C per W/m2, this energy imbalance implies that
more than 0.5°C [0.75 × 0.75] additional global warming is in the pipeline.
How much further will temperature rise if we leave atmospheric CO2 at its
current amount (about 407 ppm) indefinitely?
Global mean temperature change on millennial time scales can be estimated
using ocean cores from many locations around the world. Although this introduces
uncertainty in the dating compared to the CO2 ice core dating, the results confirm
the tight control of CO2 on global temperature (Fig. 6). This figure implies that the
eventual warming for 407 ppm CO2 will be about 3.5°C, including the full effect of
both fast and slow climate feedback processes
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2018/20181206_Nutshell.pdf
The fires in California and now in Australia give us a foretaste of what is to come
The Australian government with a Prime Minister wielding a lump of coal in Parliament
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/09/scott-morrison-brings-coal-to-question-time-what-fresh-idiocy-is-this
is still in denial mode
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-14/former-fire-chief-calls-out-pm-over-refusal-of-meeting/11705330
Full of sound and fury (and “models”)… Signifying what, exactly? What shall humanity actually DO…?
The climate will change – so it goes.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth……
In North America, winter is setting in early.
Officials Are Using The Word “Disaster” To Describe The Widespread Crop Failures Happening All Over America
We are witnessing “unprecedented” crop failures all across the United States, but the big mainstream news networks are not talking too much about this yet. As you will see below, local news outlets all over the nation are reporting the disasters that are taking place in their own local areas, but very few people are putting the pieces of the puzzle together on a national level. The endless rain and horrific flooding during the early months of this year resulted in tremendous delays in getting crops planted in many areas, and now snow and bitterly cold temperatures are turning harvest season into a complete and utter nightmare all over the country. I am going to share with you a whole bunch of examples below, but first I wanted to mention the snow and bitterly cold air that are rolling through the middle of the nation right now…
http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/officials-are-using-the-word-disaster-to-describe-the-widespread-crop-failures-that-are-happening-all-over-america
The harvest this year in North America is definitely going to be below average. The upper Midwest is in terrible shape. There will be many farmers that need subsidies to keep going financially. We should be expecting a lot of variability in climate. We are getting plenty of it.
I am doubtful that we are capable of fixing this variability. This is just the way it is. This is why ancient people put away large stores of grain. They new that such stores could help them through difficult times.
“The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) food price index, which measures monthly changes for a basket of cereals, oilseeds, dairy products, meat and sugar, averaged 172.7 points in October, up 1.7% on the previous month and 6.0% year-on-year.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-economy-food/world-food-prices-rise-for-first-time-in-five-months-un-fao-idUKKBN1XH158
Ouch! That by itself would cause a problem, especially for low-income people.
cI don’t agree with James Hansen on many things. For instance—and this is a biggie—I don’t think he has come up with a credible scientific explanation of how the atmosphere is supposed to warm the oceans.
What actually happens in the real world is that sunshine warms the oceans and then the oceans, which cover seven tenths of the Earth’s surface, warm (or cool) the atmosphere through a combination of evaporation, convection and conduction. It’s like the way the water in your bathtub warms or cools the air in your bathroom and not the other way around, only on a global scale.
I also think James’s activism is way over the top and that he exaggerates the dangers of globbly wobbly to an almost McPhersonesque extent. But after all, he’s been one of the leading promoters of the cause for over three decades now, since that hot summer day in 1988 (probably before most of today’s alarmists were born) when he altered the temperature in the hearing room in the US Congress?
As his co-conspirator Senator Tim Wirth later confessed:
… What we did it was went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right? So that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room and so when the, when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot. … So Hansen’s giving this testimony, you’ve got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn’t appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/hotpolitics/interviews/wirth.html
And James has an impressive record of making failed predictions second only to fellow alarmist Paul Erlich.
But I do admire his doggedness, his criticism of the namby pamby state of climate politics and his fondness for nuclear power. I think the latter is his redeeming grace.
Are you saying that sunlight over the oceans has increased over the last couple of centuries, particularly the last few decades? If not, then it is not sunlight, per se, that is warming the oceans; it must be something else.
What exactly are Hansen’s failed predictions? In 2010 he gave Australian coal 10 years. Given the fires already in spring he seems to be about right
8/3/2010
NASA climatologist James Hansen at Sydney Uni: “Australia doesn’t agree now that they got to stop their coal, but they are going to agree. I can guarantee you that within a decade or so because the climate change will become so strongly apparent that’s going to become imperative”
20 seconds clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMD2sd0lPeg
Full lecture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E5EdbiB4HU
Warm water spreads from the equator:
https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/49826main_surface_temp_720x410.jpe
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/ocean/ytd/12/1880-2017
I think that fires are going to be the way of the future because of the huge amount of long distance transmission that is needed to support renewables. It is very difficult to maintain all of the transmission lines adequately, so that they do not cause fires when the wind blows. This is especially a problem in hot, dry areas.
Also, aluminum transmission lines tend to let go of their connecting devices if the lines get too hot (over 93 C. or 200 degrees F). This happen if lines get overburdened with too much electricity. It is difficult to keep up with the huge transmission needs of renewables. If insufficient new lines are added, fires should not be a surprise.
The root cause of the fires is high evaporation due to global warming and therefore dry vegetation. How the fires start, is another question. Australian police is even investigating arson
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/14/nsw-and-queensland-fires-fourth-person-confirmed-dead-in-bushfires-near-kempsey
On Australia’s east coast transmission lines are needed because New South Wales is an absolute energy guzzler and needs to import power from neighboring States.
21/1/2019
NSW power imports in January 2019 heatwave exceed 2 GW, drive up electricity prices
http://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-power-imports-in-january-2019-heatwave-exceed-2-gw-drive-up-electricity-prices
Sydney Water has estimated that dam levels will be zero by December 2023 if current rainfall patterns continue
https://www.waternsw.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/149957/Greater-Sydney-Operations-Plan-November-2019.pdf
Good luck to all climate change denying Australian governments
Gail, could you please post the source for the claim that HVDC calbes get into troubles after heating to 93 °C? Afaik Aluminium is the metal with the highest melting temperature and this claim does not seem very reasonable.
Thank you
The whole October issue of Utility Products is devoted to “The Evolving Nature of Safety.” The article, Connectors–The Weak Link: Increased operating temperatures are cause for concern by Carl R. Tamm.
https://www.utilityproducts.com/safety/article/14069293/connectors-the-weak-link
This article talks about 93 degrees C. being the temperature at which aluminum “anneals.” This is a lesser change than “melts,” but it still is tremendously important from a safety point of view. This was most likely not known, when the wiring was put up, 40 years ago or more.
This article says:
We can also look at the Wall Street Journal, in its coverage of California fires. It talks about broken “jumpers,” the connectors between power lines, being the problem. PG&E Power Lines Remain Risky to California, Even During Blackouts.
As background, the utility industry talks about “Transmission and Distribution” Lines. Transmission lines are the big high voltage wires from where the generation takes place to areas to where the electricity is to be used. Distribution lines are the lower voltage lines in local areas. What PG&E and other California utilities have been doing is cutting off is the local transmission lines. What is really the problem, however, is the big transmission lines, constructed many years ago (and now being overloaded by added wind and solar, we can suspect).
One transmission line that seems to have caused a major fire is the one from the geothermal generation in Northern California. The big transmission lines to the geothermal plants were added years ago. One can reasonably surmise that wind and solar have been added to this transmission line as well, in recent years, tending to overload it.
An analysis in Venezuela indicates that one of its major outages was caused by electricity transmission line fires to its major hydroelectric dam providing electricity to nearly all of the economy there.
The melting point of Aluminium is 660C, a temperature that we shall not reach until 2055 (just kidding). But there are two other, more urgent, problems. The first is that the metal begins to lose its resistance to outside forces well before that point; it becomes more subject to bending and tearing forces. The second is that pure Al cannot survive in the presence of oxygen; it is usually protected by a thin layer of aluminium oxide. But bending and tearing exposes the underlying metal to oxidation, and this can lead to a classic failure cascade.
in section 6
Another way collapse could be SIMULATED would be by rapidly raising interest rates or cutting off credit. With less purchasing power, the world would be pushed into recession.
Should that be “stimulated”. Feel free to delete this post.
A good post . Thanks Gail.
Niko
since you mentioned recession, I’ll provide this story:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/14/europe-markets-us-china-trade-talks-at-stalemate-german-data-in-focus.html
“German GDP (gross domestic product) grew by 0.1% in the third quarter, exceeding the -0.1% contraction expected and narrowly avoiding a technical recession.”
as Harry posted a few days ago, it’s amazing how some countries lately have been avoiding recession by the slimmest of margins…
plus 0.1 wow! who doubts that number? wink wink…
I agree. A 0.1% increase does sound more than a little suspicious. I am sure there are a number of places where estimation is used. These estimates could easily change the outcome by more than 0.1%.
I’m glad you picked up on that, Davidin100etc. – it gave me a good chortle!
Of course Germany is in recession. Their manufacturing PMI, export orders etc. have absolutely fallen off a cliff and that is now spilling over into the rest of the economy.
But ‘recession’ is such a powerful word – it exerts its own downward pressure on an economy, when spoken by those in power, so I don’t begrudge them their fudged data. It does make me curious though about how these PR decisions are made and by whom. To be a fly on the wall!
The central bankers remind me a little of boxing promoters, talking up their fighters’ abilities, even though they know they are shot and likely to be KO’d:
“Amid a roaring stock market and ever-increasing levels of corporate and government debt, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Thursday he does not see signs of bubbles brewing or immediate dangers being posed by trillion-dollar deficits.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/14/powell-no-day-of-reckoning-coming-for-the-us-anytime-soon.html
Meanwhile…
“”Based on the trend since the beginning of the year, but especially the data over the last six months, the Cass Shipments Index continues to signal that the economy is beginning to contract and that the GDP could go negative, or at least come close to being negative, in Q4’19 and or Q1’20.””
https://moneymaven.io/mishtalk/economics/recession-warning-freight-volumes-negative-yoy-for-11th-straight-month-0ZOT5dLcwE6t7RTXcErjWA/?fbclid=IwAR2i1fReh7OllEoSQtCbZfNPGFn4nuSrvWASV_tTYnk27hy1HXf6kKKfmYQ
“Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” Irving Fisher, 16 October 1929.
About as convincing as the Wehrmacht claim that they had nothing to do with war crimes and genocide in WW2. Amusing though,
But, dear Xabier, that was not the Wehrmacht, is was those dastardly SS! As you may recall, it was the SS who bombed Guernica, by dropping firecrackers from balloons. Or as you may not recall.
I changed the phrase to “collapse could be encouraged.” Of course, it is difficult to imagine that any politician would encourage collapse. Instead, they would encourage ridiculous proposed solutions. This is how we got into the renewables over expansion.
There are some renewables that work, particularly hydroelectric in the right places. But giving wind and solar priority on the grid tends to drive away backup supplies. Wind and solar need quite a lot of batteries, but even with this they need fossil fuels to back them up at the times of year that they are not available.
Pingback: Do the World’s Energy Policies Make Sense? – Enjeux énergies et environnement
A Bank of America Merril Lynch report:
The 2020s are set to be a decade of dramatic economic and social upheaval, reversing many of the trends of the past 40 years, according to one of the world’s largest banks.
In what it describes as “the decade of peak”, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAML) analysts say a range of economic and social challenges are “all heading to a boiling point” next decade
BAML is also predicting that the world will finally hit “peak oil” — but not in the way most analysts had previously predicted, which is that production would hit a maximum and drop off. Instead, the bank expects oil demand to hit a peak next decade and start falling away.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-13/the-2020s-set-to-be-an-economic-turning-point/11699386
Interesting but not very realistic view. They are expecting more rapid growth and higher interest rates, but less demand for energy products. That combination is extremely unlikely.
Lower demand comes from too much wage disparity. That is already happening, I am afraid. That is what gives too low prices for producers. We are already there.
They are right about economic and social challenges reaching a boiling point, however.
“Lower demand comes from too much wage disparity. That is already happening, I am afraid. That is what gives too low prices for producers. We are already there.”
That’s what I keep saying on Steve St. Angelo’s site http://srsroccoreport.com that we are at the point in the “Peak Oil” era where prices are too high for the consumers so when they cutback on energy it hurts the economy because with a HUGE wage disparity i.e. stagnate wages and inflation they can’t afford higher energy prices so they take that money out of the economy.
But the problem becomes that the energy producers need those higher prices to offset their exploration and production costs. We have picked all the low hanging fruit. Now we are dealing with higher costs to get at the remaining oil that’s in the ground and out at sea or in tar sands etc.
The other problem I see is that the lines of what energy producers need and what the consumers can afford to pay are beginning to meet in the middle where in a few decades both the high and low prices will not be able to move at all. So the energy producers will be in a position where they will have to accept selling their product for a HUGE LOSS, which will then result in just leaving it in the ground.