It takes energy to accomplish any of the activities that we associate with GDP. It takes energy to grow food: human energy, solar energy, and–in today’s world–the many types of energy used to build and power tractors, transport food to markets, and provide cooling for food that needs to be refrigerated. It takes energy to cook food and to smelt metals. It takes energy to heat and air condition offices and to power the internet. Without adequate energy, the world economy would come to a halt.
We are hitting energy limits right now. Energy per capita is already shrinking, and it seems likely to shrink further in the future. Reaching a limit produces a conflict problem similar to the one in the game musical chairs. This game begins with an equal number of players and chairs. At the start of each round, a chair is removed. The players must then compete for the remaining chairs, and the player who ends the round without a chair is eliminated. There is conflict among players as they fight to obtain one of the available chairs. The conflict within the energy system is somewhat hidden, but the result is similar.
A current conflict is, “How much energy can we spare to fight COVID-19?” It is obvious that expenditures on masks and vaccines have an impact on the economy. It is less obvious that a cutback in airline flights or in restaurant meals to fight COVID-19 indirectly leads to less energy being produced and consumed, worldwide. In total, the world becomes a poorer place. How is the pain of this reduction in energy consumption per capita to be shared? Is it fair that travel and restaurant workers are disproportionately affected? Worldwide, we are seeing a K shaped recovery: The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer.
A major issue is that while we can print money, we cannot print the energy supplies needed to run the economy. As energy supplies deplete, we will increasingly need to “choose our battles.” In the past, humans have been able to win many battles against nature. However, as energy per capita declines in the future, we will be able to win fewer and fewer of these battles against nature, such as our current battle with COVID-19. At some point, we may simply need to let the chips fall where they may. The world economy seems unable to accommodate 7.8 billion people, and we will have no choice but to face this issue.
In this post, I will explain some of the issues involved. At the end of the post, I include a video of a panel discussion that I was part of on the topic of “Energy Is the Economy.” The moderator of the panel discussion was Chris Martenson; the other panelists were Richard Heinberg and Art Berman.
[1] Energy consumption per person varies greatly by country.
Let’s start with a little background. There is huge variability in the quantity of energy consumed per person around the world. There is more than a 100-fold difference between the highest and lowest countries shown on Figure 1.
I have shown only a few example countries, but we can see that cold countries tend to use a lot of energy, relative to their populations. Iceland, with an abundant supply of inexpensive hydroelectric and geothermal electricity, uses it to heat buildings, grow food in greenhouses, mine “bitcoins” and smelt aluminum. Norway and Canada have both oil and gas supplies, besides being producers of hydroelectricity. With abundant fuel supplies and a cold climate, both countries use a great deal of energy relative to the size of their population.
Saudi Arabia also has high energy consumption. It uses its abundant oil and gas supplies to provide air conditioning for its people. It also uses its energy products to enable the operation of businesses that provide jobs for its large population. In addition, Saudi Arabia uses taxes on the oil it produces to subsidize the purchase of imported food, which the country cannot grow locally. As with all oil and gas producers, some portion of the oil and gas produced is used in its own oil and gas operations.
In warm countries, such as those in Middle Africa and India, energy consumption tends to be very low. Most people in these countries walk for transportation or use very crowded public transport. Roads tend not to be paved. Electricity outages are frequent.
One of the few changes that can easily be made to reduce energy consumption is to move manufacturing to lower wage countries. Doing this reduces energy consumption (in the form of electricity) quite significantly. In fact, the rich nations have mostly done this, already.
Trying to squeeze down energy consumption for the many countries around the world will be a huge challenge because energy is involved in every part of economies.
[2] Two hundred years of history shows that very slow growth in energy consumption per capita leads to bad outcomes.
Some readers will remember that I have pieced together data from different sources to put together a reasonable approximation to world energy consumption since 1820. In Figure 3, I have added a rough estimate of the expected drop in future energy consumption that might occur if either (1) the beginning of peak fossil fuels is occurring about now because of continued low fossil fuel prices, or (2) world economies choose to leave fossil fuels and move to renewables between now and 2050 in order to try to help the environment. Thus, Figure 3 shows my estimate of the pattern of total world energy consumption over the period of 1820 to 2050, at 10-year intervals.
The shape of this curve is far different from the one most forecasters expect because they assume that prices will eventually rise high enough so all of the fossil fuels that can be technically extracted will actually be extracted. I expect that oil and other fossil fuel prices will remain too low for producers, for reasons I discuss in Section [4], below. In fact, I have written about this issue in a peer reviewed academic article, published in the journal Energy.
Figure 4 shows this same information as Figure 3, divided by population. In making this chart, I assume that population drops only half as quickly as energy consumption falls after 2020. Total world population drops to 2.8 billion by 2050.
In Figure 4, some parts of the curve are relatively flat, or even slightly falling, while others are rising rapidly. It turns out that rapidly rising times are much better for the economy than flat and falling times. Figure 5 shows the average annual percentage change in energy consumption per capita, for ten-year periods ending the date shown.
If we look back at what happened in Figure 5, we find that when the 10-year growth in energy consumption is very low, or turns negative, conflict and bad outcomes are typical. For example:
- Dip 1: 1861-1865 US Civil War
- Dip 2: Several events
- 1914-1918 World War I
- 1918-1920 Spanish Flu Pandemic
- 1929-1933 Great Depression
- 1939-1945 World War II
- Dip 3: 1991 Collapse of the Central Government of the Soviet Union
- Dip 4: 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic and Recession
Per capita energy consumption was already growing very slowly before 2020 arrived. Energy consumption took a big step downward in 2020 (estimated at 5%) because of the shutdowns and the big cutback in air travel. One of the important things that energy consumption does is provide jobs. With severe cutbacks intended to contain COVID-19, many people in distant countries lost their jobs. Cutbacks of this magnitude quickly cause problems around the world.
For example, if people in rich countries rarely dress up to attend meetings of various kinds, there is much less of a market for dressy clothing. Many people in poor countries make their living manufacturing this type of clothing. With the loss of these sales, workers suddenly found themselves with much reduced income. Poor countries generally do not have good safety nets to provide food for those who are out of work. As a result, the diets of people subject to loss of income became inadequate, leading to greater vulnerability to disease. If the situation continues, some may even die of starvation.
[3] The pattern of world energy consumption between 2020 and 2050 (modeled in Figures 3, 4 and 5) suggests that a very concerning collapse may be ahead.
My model suggests that world energy consumption may fall to about 28 gigajoules per capita per year by 2050 (for a reduced population of 2.8 billion). This is about the level of world energy consumption per capita for the world in 1900.
Alternatively, 28 gigajoules per capita is a little lower than the per capita energy consumption for India in 2019. Of course, some parts of the world might do better than this. For example, Mexico and Brazil both had energy consumption per capita of about 60 gigajoules per capita in 2019. Some countries might be able to do this well in 2050.
Using less energy after 2020 will lead to many changes. Governments will become smaller and provide fewer services such as paved roads. Often, these governments will cover smaller areas than those of countries today. Businesses will become smaller, more local, and more involved with goods rather than services. Individual citizens will be walking more, growing their own food, and doing much less home heating and cooling.
With less energy available, it will be necessary to cut back on fighting unfortunate natural occurrences, such as forest fires, downed electricity transmission lines after hurricanes, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and constantly mutating viruses. Thus, life expectancy is likely to decline.
[4] It is “demand,” and how high energy prices can be raised, that determines how large an energy supply will be available in the future.
I keep making this point in my posts because I sense that it is poorly understood. The big problem that we should be anticipating is energy producers going out of business because energy prices are chronically too low. I see five ways in which energy prices might theoretically be raised:
- A truly booming world economy. This is what raised prices in the 1970s and in the run up to 2008. If there are truly more people who can afford homes and new vehicles, and governments that can afford new roads and other infrastructure, companies extracting oil and coal will build new facilities in higher-cost locations, and thereby expand world supply. The higher prices will help energy companies to be profitable, despite their higher costs. Such a scenario seems very unlikely, given where we are now.
- Government mandates and subsidies. Government mandates are what is maintaining demand for renewables and electric vehicles. Conversely, government mandates are part of what is keeping down tourist travel. Indirectly, this lack of demand relating to travel leads to low oil prices. A government mandate for people to engage in more travel seems unlikely.
- Much reduced wage disparity. If everyone, rich or poor, can afford nice homes, automobiles, and cell phones, commodity prices will tend to be high because buying and operating goods such as these requires the use of commodities. Governments can attempt to fix wage disparity through more printed money, but I am doubtful that this approach will really work because other countries are likely to be unwilling to accept this printed money.
- More debt, sometimes leading to collapsing debt bubbles. Spending can be enhanced if it becomes easier for citizens to buy goods such as homes and vehicles on credit. Likewise, businesses can borrow money to build new factories or, alternatively, to continue to pay wages to workers, even if there isn’t much demand for the goods and services sold. But, if the economy really is not recovering rapidly, these approaches can be expected to lead to crashes.
- Getting rid of COVID-19 inefficiencies and fearfulness. Economies around the world are being depressed to varying degrees by continued inefficiencies caused by social distancing requirements and by fearfulness. If these issues could be eliminated, it might boost economies back up to the already somewhat depressed levels of early 2020.
In summary, the issue we are facing is that oil demand (and thus prices) were far too low for oil producers because of wage disparity before the COVID-19 crisis arrived in March. Trying to get demand back up through more debt seems likely to lead to debt bubbles, which will be in danger of collapsing. There may be temporary price spikes, but a permanent fix is virtually impossible. This is why I am forecasting the severe drop in energy consumption shown in Figures 3 and 4.
[5] We humans don’t need to figure out how to fix the economy optimally between now and 2050.
The economy is a self-organizing system that will figure out on its own the optimal way of “dissipating” energy, to the extent possible. In physics terms, the economy is a dissipative structure. If the energy resource is food, energy will be dissipated by digesting the food. In the case of fossil fuel, energy will be dissipated by burning it. We may like to think that we are in charge, but we really are not. It is the laws of physics, or perhaps the Power behind the laws of physics, that is in charge.
Dissipative structures are not permanent. For example, hurricanes and tornadoes are dissipative structures. Plants and animals are dissipative structures. Eventually, new smaller economies, encompassing smaller areas of the world, may replace the existing world economy.
[6] This is a recent video of a panel discussion on “Energy Is the Economy.”
Chris Martenson is the moderator. Art Berman, Richard Heinberg and I are panelists. The Peak Prosperity folks were kind enough to provide me a copy to put up on my website.
A transcript of this panel discussion can be accessed at this link:
Italy on the other hand is trying to figure out how Not to pay back debt.
“Italy wants ECB to cancel pandemic debt”
Everyone would like all of the debt cancelled.
An astrophysicist named Michael Hart compiled the most influential people of all time. He said Mohammed was the most influential since he changed the world the most single handedly (He was a conqueror as well as a founder of religion).
Later, a person said Norman Borlaug was the most influential because he made hundreds of millions of people live.
The person’s surname was Murty
and his first name was Krishna.
Methinks, what Borlaug did is not that influential, because the people he helped to live are compatriots of Mr. Krishna Murty, whose utility to the world I have to question.
600K votes for Biden, 3K for Trump. Told at hearing.
https://nationalfile.com/video-crowd-gasps-at-pa-hearing-after-learning-of-600k-vote-dump-for-biden-just-3k-for-trump/
This was an earlier comment:
STOLEN
MASSIVE EVIDENCE
https://youtu.be/Dc-HQyBm8GU
I haven’t listed to all of the long video, but it must allege that some/all of this votes are missing.
Total system liquidity in the US has now turned negative.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnrWwLNW8Acc4xq?format=jpg&name=large
Do you have any ideas/commentary of the implications of this?
I found this article using Google:
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/cat_21427.htm
What is the difference between a bank’s liquidity and its capital?
Liquidity is a measure of the cash and other assets banks have available to quickly pay bills and meet short-term business and financial obligations. Capital is a measure of the resources banks have to absorb losses.
Liquid assets are cash and assets that can be converted to cash quickly if needed to meet financial obligations. Examples of liquid assets generally include central bank reserves and government bonds. To remain viable, a financial institution must have enough liquid assets to meet withdrawals by depositors and other near-term obligations.
Capital is the difference between all of a firm’s assets and its liabilities. Capital acts as a financial cushion to absorb losses. The value of a firm’s assets must exceed its liabilities for it to remain solvent.
Over time, banks have failed or required government assistance because they do not have enough capital, lack liquidity, or a combination of the two.
The Federal Reserve since the financial crisis has worked to increase the levels of both liquidity and capital at banking organizations.
“The International Monetary Fund’s October acknowledgment of the case for temporary debt monetization in Asia marked yet another example of how the pandemic has upended economic orthodoxy…
“The IMF’s October report even gave qualified approval for central banks in some cases to directly buy their government’s debt, with a list of conditions.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-25/imf-s-nod-to-asian-debt-monetization-marks-shift-in-orthodoxy
orthodoxy-schmortodoxy: the quasi BAU must continue for another day..
Good grief! There seem to be several countries that are interested. Indonesia, the Philippines, and perhaps Thailand and So. Korea. It is hard to see how foreign trade will keep up, if lots of countries are spending far more than they take in, and hiding it in debt that their central back buys up.
“Indonesia’s new bill seeks to expand central bank mandate, formalise bond purchase:
“…The new bill, drafted by the government and parliament’s financial committee… proposes to permanently allow BI to purchase government bonds in the primary market to prevent or in the event of a financial crisis, something that the central bank is currently only allowed to do in response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/indonesia-cenbank/indonesias-new-bill-seeks-to-expand-c-bank-mandate-formalise-bond-purchase-idUKL1N2ID0D1
With what, exactly, will the banks buy their government’s debt? An endless supply of ones and zeros? At least Spain in the sixteenth century was bankrupted by real gold; a lesson that seems never to have been learned.
President Trump Announces Complete Amnesty for Michael Flynn
https://texasnewstoday.com/president-trump-announces-complete-amnesty-for-michael-flynn/55127/
Already tried and tested in Slovakia in the 90s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladim%C3%ADr_Me%C4%8Diar
“At the same time relations between Mečiar and the President of Slovakia, Michal Kováč were rather strained. He was also blamed for having engaged the Slovak secret service (SIS) in the abduction of the President’s son Michal Kováč, Jr. — wanted on a warrant for a financial crime in Germany — to Hainburg, Austria, in August 1995, but his guilt has not been proven.[4] However, after Kovač’s term expired in March 1998 the Slovak parliament was unable to elect a successor, so Mečiar also temporarily assumed the role of acting president. As president, he issued an amnesty for some of those accused of the abduction.”
Flynn taked with the Russian ambassador 30 days before the inauguration. Not a crime in my book.
“The French government is assembling an expert commission on how to repay the billions of euros it has borrowed to save the economy from the coronavirus crisis, Budget Minister Olivier Dussopt said on Tuesday.”
https://www.thelocal.fr/20201124/french-government-assembles-taskforce-on-how-to-pay-off-covid-19-debt-mountain
“French Interior Minister Gerald Dermanin announced he was launching an investigation into the clashes that broke out late last night after police cleared up a makeshift migrant camp in Place de la Republique in Paris, adding that the footage of the clashes was “shocking,” Reuters reported.”
https://www.novinite.com/articles/206695/%22Shocking%22+Clashes+in+Central+Paris+as+Police+Clears+up+Migrant+Camp
“German economy: ‘Fourth-quarter contraction seems inevitable’.”
https://www.dw.com/en/german-economy-fourth-quarter-contraction-seems-inevitable/av-55710336
“The coronavirus crisis has hit Italy’s already historically-low birth rate, new projections from the national statistics agency reveal.
“Italy had last year already recorded its lowest number of births for 150 years, at 420,000. This could fall to 408,000 in 2020 and 393,000 in 2021, according to Istat.”
https://www.thelocal.it/20201125/italys-low-birthrate-plunging-further-due-to-coronavirus
Hm, interesting, thanks for the update. Front loaded pop crash by now already = very nice living after the full crash..
Repudiate the debt; leave the euro, and reinstate the “franc fort”. Thank you, and send me the money.
Robert, the practicalities would be daunting. David Korowicz writes about a hypothetical sovereign default and currency re-issue in the Eurozone in his “Trade Off” paper:
“While it is sometimes mentioned that a currency re-issue could be completed over a weekend, this seems exceedingly optimistic for some of the reasons already mentioned (the uniqueness
of the experience, the complexity of financial and monetary systems and infrastructure, the reflexivity trap). It could be days, or even weeks.
“Even if the exchange rate of the new currency with the Euro was known, and had the new currency available to businesses and the public, re-pricing would highly problematic. For example, suppose Italian bank accounts underwent a one Euro to one new Lira re-issue. Further, assume there is a defended 50% devaluation of the new Lira against the Euro.
“One cannot assume that every price along the supply-chain would just be the same nominal value in the new currency. In broad terms, the more import dependent the good or service, the higher the new price would have to be.
“This makes re-pricing highly opaque. Firstly because there are so many links in complex supply-chains, and the more links, the greater uncertainty in what the end price might be.
“Further, because of the dispersed delocalisation of supply-chains, they would be subject to growing volatility across many exchange rates. This brings us back to another facet of the stable surround idea. That is, large-scale stability can support new elements integrating with a system, or help a failed part re-equilibriate. So pricing a new good or service is possible because of the wide stability of prices along the supply-chain, the price stability of essential services, and the pricing of competitors.
“But if there is a systemic pricing fog (massive volatility) across a whole economy, there is no stable point of reference. This adds to the time over which transactions may not occur, even after a ‘successful’ re-issue. The risk of a systemic pricing fog increases for more complex, high speed and delocalised economies. It is such economies we are considering.
“But even if the re-issue was successful, speedy, and the effect of the pricing fog was minimal, there would remain many challenges. Many businesses would be bankrupt, having lost Euro assets. People and businesses would hoard any remaining Euros, but even the new currency would be spent guardedly. One would expect a massive and rapid reorientation away from discretionary consumption towards primary needs-food, essential
energy, medicines and communication.”
https://www.feasta.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Trade_Off_Korowicz.pdf
Potentially crashing the discretionary economy, just like the lock-downs……
One question remains open: For what would a new currency serve when we will have to aliment all businesses for not operating? We will immediately accrue huge (unrepayable) debts again. I do not se a solution in a new currency.
Also a debt jubilee will not solve the debt crisis and someone’s debt is anotherone’s asset, so this will be very deflationary considering that the people that “own the debt” are currently the only class that can “spend freely for discretionary items”
My heartfelt thanks for your long and most thoughtful responses to my short (and I admit cynical) post. No need for a rebuttal, because almost all of what you say is correct. But please consider this: does not the Euro have most of these problems also, with the difference that no individual country has the power to correct them. Perhaps the key issue, the one that underpins all others, is whether a nation has control over its own currency, and which is thus subject to the considered views of its citizens. The Euro zone has no such autonomy; control is exercised by a globalist clique elected by nobody and responsible to nobody. That is the cancer at the heart of the EU.
I had forgotten about this section. I can imagine international trade would suffer greatly.
“This year, for the first time in half a century, the global consumer class will shrink. Before COVID-19 broke out, we estimated that the global consumer class stood at 3.9 billion people spending approximately $62 trillion per year.
“Post-COVID-19, the global consumer class is 52 million people smaller than it was in 2019. Because of population growth, the COVID-19 outbreak has added 130 million people to the group of poor and vulnerable (people spending less than $11 per day) in 2020.”
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/future-development/2020/11/25/when-will-the-global-consumer-class-recover/
“Tourism slump hits global retailers:
“International retail chains were on Tuesday counting the cost of the collapse in world travel, as Abercrombie & Fitch said it would speed up the closure of flagship stores in several major tourist destinations and Tiffany said its sales fell sharply in Europe and the Americas.”
https://www.ft.com/content/dcafb5b0-3ecf-4324-b749-05948124ff97
“Airlines are on course to lose a total $157 billion this year and next, their main global body warned on Tuesday, further downgrading its industry outlook in response to a second wave of coronavirus infections and shutdowns afflicting major markets.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-airlines-iata/airlines-set-to-lose-157-billion-amid-worsening-slump-iata-idUSKBN2841KA
A smaller consumer class cannot help but hurt the world economy, going forward.
This was in response to Harry McGibbs
Rodster, the report and the Guardian article do acknowledge that economic damage results from lockdown, although there is no commentary as to how necessary they are:
“Controls to combat this new rise in cases may “severely damage” the economy.”
I posted another article from The Telegraph beneath it to give a different perspective but it is caught in the filter, alas.
Funny how they blame it on Brexit and NO mention whatsoever about blowing up the economy with all the unnecessary lockdowns. It’s like the Plebs are being setup on purpose for a good ‘ol fashioned “fake-out”. And unfortunately the people are buying into it as the lies and deceit continue to pile up.
In retrospect, the Cuban Missile Crisis should have become a full nuclear war.
Some cities in USA plus most of the East Bloc being destroyed, but that would have been a ‘blessing in disguise’ since
1. The Sixties cancelled
2. No Green Revolution (and probably no mass immigration as there would suddenly be a torrent of impoverished people from the East Bloc)
3. Leading to no unchecked pop growth in the Third World.
It’s hard to explain even to oneself, much less to others: people matter and don’t mater at the same time. There is something more important than a given number of people staying alive. Faithfulness/adherence to that “something” could take out a lot of people in the short run and leave a more durable system behind. A blogger known to some of us used to say it was necessary to have something you’re willing to die for.
Indeed. In retrospect, it was humanity’s final chance.
But Kennedy read a stupid book from Barbara Tuchman called the Guns of August, about the escalation of the July 1914 crisis.
If he didn’t read the book, the world would have had about half the people now and we would still have prosperity.
“The government has privately admitted the UK faces an increased likelihood of “systemic economic crisis” as it completes its exit from the European Union in the middle of a second wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
“A confidential Cabinet Office briefing seen by the Guardian also warns of a “notable risk” that in coming months the country could face a perfect storm of simultaneous disasters, including the prospect of a bad flu season on top of the medical strains caused by Covid.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/24/uk-facing-risk-of-systemic-economic-crisis-official-paper-says
“Britain is permanently poorer, and the British state weaker, as a result of Covid, the collapse in GDP and the gargantuan debt binge that has kept us going.
“Our economy is the most socialised it has ever been outside of war, and we have resorted to the printing presses to finance spending in a shockingly unprecedented way, pushing the great fiat money experiment close to breaking point…
“That, in summary, is the economic devastation described or implied by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in what is easily the most terrifying official economic assessment from a developed nation I have ever read.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/11/25/britain-facing-ruin-deludedtories-still-refusing-accept/
The Guardian is a sock puppet of the Remainers and has been since the beginning. Anything it says is propaganda.
One of the most partisan and dishonest papers around, and they have the nerve to claim that their content is unbiased and the best around as they are not owned by an oligarch!
>>The Guardian is a sock puppet of the Remainers
It is also now MI5s favourite MSM outlet, allegedly. It still publishes decent articles every now and again, but it is necessary to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
Worth noting, for Brits, that the document states that UK food reserves have been seriously depleted in the course of 2020.
I’ve been finding that supermarkets have reimposed quotas for basic foodstuffs, especially dry goods, no doubt to continue well into next year – and maybe forever?
I’ve also encountered a general lack of items manufactured in Germany as I’ve been restocking my Doom Bunker.
Courier deliveries have become erratic, and the notification system has generally broken down, unlike during the first lock-down. Pressure of volume one supposes More goods also arrive damaged, and badly-packed.
Interesting, thanks.
Besides the Brexit / frontiers factor, speaking about whole Europe, perhaps it all kept piling up and suddenly [NOW] we are at the threshold it’s no longer enough, feeding the poverty in various domestic enclaves, Greece, migrants already arrived, UN food programs abroad-around the globe, ..
A local problem, such as a food shortage in some villages, can usually be solved locally, one step up on the pyramid. But when a local problem is made into a global problem, by the UN, the EU, Oxfam, Save the Children, or whomever, it becomes impossible to solve.
Too many layers of administration; too many middlemen all seeking a cut; too many conflicting pressure groups pushing their own agenda. In my (biased) opinion, globalism has massively enriched the globalists, and totally failed the people.
It has been mentioned a few times before, but it is worth repeating. The UK imports almost half its food requirements, net. What are the chances that BoJo and his cronies will arrange a smooth exit from the EU, and our food supplies will continue to flow reliably after exit (not that they are 100% reliable now)?
“With COVID-19 still raging – and rates of infection, hospitalisation, and death now spiralling out of control (again) – the near-term risks to economic activity have tipped decidedly to the downside in the US and Europe.
“The combination of pandemic fatigue and the politicisation of public health practices has come into play at precisely the moment when the long-anticipated second wave of COVID-19 is at hand.
“Unfortunately, this fits the script of the dreaded double-dip recession that I warned of recently. The bottom-line bears repeating: apparent economic recoveries in the US have given way to relapses in eight of the 11 business cycles since World War II.
“The relapses reflect two conditions: lingering vulnerability from the recession itself and the likelihood of aftershocks. Unfortunately, both conditions have now been satisfied.”
https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/no-vaccine-for-a-us-economy-that-s-sicker-than-it-looks-20201124-p56hlt
“Gripped by the accelerating viral outbreak, the U.S. economy is under pressure from persistent layoffs, diminished income and nervous consumers, whose spending is needed to drive a recovery from the pandemic.
“A flurry of data released Wednesday suggested that the spread of the virus is intensifying the threats to an economy still struggling to recover from the deep recession that struck in early spring.”
https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/us-jobless-claims-rise-778000-pandemic-worsens-74396309
“The holidays often make people more vulnerable to feeling depressed or anxious. But for the millions of Americans suffering from a pandemic-induced financial crisis, the risk is much greater this season.
“Many are at their wit’s end. And it doesn’t appear that help is on the way. Congress is still at odds over a package that would provide additional economic aid…”
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/25/success/covid-financial-stress-mental-health-stimulus/index.html
The medical profession has been making the situation worse by not endorsing the use of medications that have been proven safe over the years, even if there is not absolute proof of their efficacy now.
People are getting sick of staying at home. Young people can see that the disease outcomes are generally not very bad.
“… the spread of the virus is intensifying the threats to an economy still struggling to recover …”
The spread of the virus was inevitable from Day One. The threat is rather from the totally inept and hysterical response to the spread, which is now redoubling its efforts to destroy the economy. Europe responded to the Black Death with far more intelligence and effectiveness. Yes, they had their flagellants, but at least they didn’t “flagellate” whole nations with absurd, infeasible. and ineffective moral exhortations. We are watching a civilisation collapse because its leaders no longer have the courage to defend it.
“Let us break their bonds asunder, and cast away their yoke from us.”
https://spectator.us/salem-thanksgiving-coronavirus-panic-safetyism/
“A mature civilization understands that risk is part of life and that there are higher purposes — even mere sociability — than avoiding death at all costs. No great venture can be accomplished if staying safe is life’s only guiding principle. Now, however, our elites mock courage and perseverance, explicitly repudiating the virtues that built this country. President Trump, upon leaving the hospital after a coronavirus infection, admonished the country to not ‘be afraid’ of the virus, in the Washington Post’s words, and to not ‘allow it to dominate’ our lives. That imminently reasonable exhortation, once expected in a leader, is still being denounced by public health experts and the media nearly two months later. If Americans do not repudiate this ethic of fear, future Thanksgivings will be even bleaker than this year’s.”
(You get one free article here over I don’t know how long.)
>> and rates of infection, hospitalisation, and death now spiralling out of control (again)
The rate of infection does not really matter if the large majority of those infected have no or minor symptoms. But the hype is good for inducing fear and submission amongst the general public. When I point this out to friends and family (in the UK) what they seem to hear is ‘I want you all dead’.
As for hospitalizations – the ‘Talk Radio’ guests on YT the last week or two seem to have data suggesting that currently the hospitalizations from flu-like illnesses (flu + CV19) in the UK are no worse than in previous years. But don’t let the facts get in the way of an agenda.
The economy was doing poorly before COVID came along. We can’t really expect it to bounce back. Many of the failing businesses were doing before COVID added to the problems.
> Oil bankruptcies rise in the third quarter
The number of bankruptcies in the energy sector rose during the third quarter as the coronavirus pandemic continued to take its toll on the oil and gas industry.
Forty-four oil production and oil-field service companies filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy between August and October, up from 29 bankruptcies during the previous three-month period. There were 17 oil producers and 27 oil field services companies that sought bankruptcy protection during the third quarter, according to Haynes and Boone.
“Combined with the general lack of access to capital, additional filings are likely before 2020 comes to a close,” the Dallas law firm said in its latest bankruptcy report.
A new wave of bankruptcies is sweeping the oil and gas industry after the coronavirus pandemic crushed global demand for crude and petroleum products such as gasoline and jet fuel. Unlike past downturns, oil and gas companies are under increased financial pressure after many investors pulled out of the sector in 2018 after years of underperformance.
…. Since the previous oil bust that ended in 2016, more than 500 oil production and oil-field services companies have filed for bankruptcy, bringing more than $279 billion of debt to court, Haynes and Boone said.
https://www.energyvoice.com/oilandgas/americas/279889/oil-bankruptcies-third-quarter/
> U.S. Shale Bankruptcies Accelerate Despite Pandemic Protection
…. According to a new analysis by BailoutWatch, Public Citizen, and Friends of the Earth, the fossil fuel industry received between US$10.4 billion and US$15.2 billion in direct economic relief, with more than 26,000 coal, oil, and gas companies benefiting directly. In addition, indirect benefits in the form of bond funds bought by the Fed and billions of newly issued company bonds “pushed government aid to the industry past US$110 billion,” say the activists in their report Bailed Out & Propped Up, which slams government support to the “money-losing dirty energy companies” and shames the firms that made use of federal government programs. The report goes on to recommend that “Congress must explicitly exclude further aid to the fossil fuel industry from any future coronavirus relief packages.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/US-Shale-Bankruptcies-Accelerate-Despite-Pandemic-Protection.html
These groups may think that they are “Friends of the Earth,” but they don’t understand that their own lives depend on having fossil fuels.
US shale has never been profitable.
> Implications of COVID-19 for the US shale industry
…. The year 2020 marks the 15-year anniversary of the US shale boom, which heralded an era of US energy independence and more than doubled tight shale oil production over the past five to six years. But beneath this phenomenal growth, the reality is that the shale boom peaked without making money for the industry in aggregate. In fact, the US shale industry registered net negative free cash flows of $300 billion, impaired more than $450 billion of invested capital, and saw more than 190 bankruptcies since 2010.
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/energy-and-resources/articles/covid-19-implications-for-us-shale-industry.html
There is no mention of how much oil companies paid in taxes of various kinds over the years. Not all of the taxes depend on profitability. Some are paid at the front end, regardless of profitability.
The USA FF industry is practically ‘nationalised’ with the tax state picking up the unprofitability.
The ‘market’ is a facade – and yet shareholders still get their pay outs at tax payers expense – nationalised ‘capitalism’.
> The US oil industry is flailing despite a $10 billion pandemic lifeline
…. The biggest benefit came from a little-known amendment to the tax code by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act. This allowed companies to accelerate tax credits and reclaim old losses to offset their current tax bills. While not explicitly targeting fossil fuel companies, the provisions disproportionately benefited the industry, which actively lobbied for them. Oil sector representatives also advocated for tailored bailout programs beyond Congress, says Lukas Ross of Friends of the Earth, a report author. In April, Texas senator Ted Cruz and other Republicans asked the Federal Reserve Board to loosen criteria for oil and gas firms to access its Main Street Lending Program. The Fed eventually made the requested changes.
…. But many were already unprofitable. That’s the biggest difference between the bailout of US fossil fuel companies and other industries. While airlines received huge cash infusions or benefits from the US government—more than $60 billion in loans, payroll support, and grants—they employ roughly four times more people and have proved profitable over the last decade.
That’s in contrast to the US shale industry, which relies on fracking to extract oil and gas out of formations. It has catapulted the US to the top of the world’s fossil fuel producers, but it has never recorded a net profit despite investing billions of dollars since 2010. Unless oil prices rose well above $45 to $50 per barrel, where they have languished since 2018, many firms were unlikely to survive on their own.
After 10 years of losses for US shale oil, 2020 may be the worst so far
That is likely to leave the US—and taxpayers—footing the bill for a moribund industry after the pandemic. Despite the federal help, the law firm Haynes and Boone reports 36 US oil producers have filed for bankruptcy in the first eight months of 2020. That comes on the heels of 190 bankruptcies in the US shale industry since 2010, reports the consulting firm Deloitte, representing a combined $450 billion in unpaid debt.
Ouch.
> Opinion: Disaster or deliverance? What Biden victory means for oil and gas.
…. Oil companies have cut as many as 118,000 jobs — and counting — since the pandemic began. Trouble had been on the horizon and the pandemic brought what had loomed crashing down. In the past five years, more than 500 producers and service companies have filed for bankruptcy, including more than 120 Texas producers. The Dallas law firm Haynes and Boone, which tracks Oil Patch bankruptcies, predicts more will be coming before year’s end.
…. Energy is now the poorest performing sector among the 11 components of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index. While the broad market is up more than 10 percent this year, the energy sector has fallen more than 40 percent.
A Biden presidency, in other words, may be the least of the industry’s worries. While tax policies and leasing programs have some marginal impact, presidents typically have little direct effect on the industry’s success or failure….
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Opinion-Disaster-or-deliverance-What-Biden-15742502.php
>>While the broad market is up more than 10 percent this year
I seem to remember reading that the FAANG Stocks (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet (Google) account for nearly all the growth over the last year?
> Trump Administration Targets Banks Divesting From Fossil Fuels In New Anti-Climate Rule
A new proposed regulation that would bar large banks from declining to do business with particular industries or groups of companies was released on Friday by the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) — a move that could have major implications for a wide array of divestment and boycott campaigns nationwide, including efforts to divest from fossil fuels.
…. With Wall Street reluctant to invest, drillers have grown highly dependent on bank lending.
In 2009, equities like stocks made up the majority of capital invested in the U.S. oil patch, according to SEC filings cited by the French multinational bank Societe Generale in a September 2020 presentation. By the first quarter of 2020, 96 percent of the capital in the oil patch was debt and just 4 percent represented equities like stocks, it adds.
…. It’s not clear, however, to what degree many small and medium-sized energy firms remain creditworthy. On Monday, debt ratings agency Fitch said that its “2021 Rating Outlook for North American Energy is Negative, reflecting the large number of companies with Negative Outlooks,” adding that a full 45 percent of companies they followed in this sector had negative rating outlook (and that the sector’s outlook reflected “an expected improving trend in 2021.”)
…. As this fall’s redetermination period loomed, corporate law firm Haynes and Boone surveyed oil borrowers and lenders. They found that 17 percent of producers still planned to borrow from banks this coming year (and just 25 percent said they’d source capital from “cash flow from operations” in 2021). A full 82 percent of respondents said that they expected the structure of reserves-based lending to include modified terms after this crisis, like banks declining to lend based on the value of so-called “proved undeveloped reserves” (see DeSmog’s coverage here) or more frequent scrutiny of reserves figures.
“Banks have backed away from fossil fuel lending mostly for reasons that are very easy to quantify: they’ve proven to be terrible investments,” Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told DeSmog. “Just look at the $170 billion in debt swept into bankruptcy over the past 5 years, at the major write-downs of oil assets that secure bank debt, or at the ongoing chaos in reserve-based lending as companies are forced to downgrade their reserves.”
“In some ways, some banks are getting environmental kudos for doing things that they would have done anyway on purely financial grounds,” Williams-Derry added….
https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/11/25/trump-administration-banks-divest-fossil-fuels-climate
More US FF bankruptcies ahead.
> Oil Crash Continues To Claim Bankruptcy Victims In U.S. Shale Patch
…. Between the beginning of 2015 and the end of October 2020, as many as 250 North American oilfield services providers filed for bankruptcy. Another over 250 filings in the industry came from E&P companies in North America, so more than 500 bankruptcies have been filed in the North American oil and gas industry since 2015, Haynes and Boone said.
More bankruptcies are expected by the end of the year, Rystad Energy said at the end of October.
If a WTI Crude average of around $40 per barrel and a Henry Hub price of $3 per MMcf persist in 2021, Rystad Energy expects 54 new E&P bankruptcies next year.
https://www.baystreet.ca/commodities/4343/Oil-Crash-Continues-To-Claim-Bankruptcy-Victims-In-US-Shale-Patch
Bankruptcies in the UK usually tend to mean that a company has gone into liquidation and will soon cease to exist. But in the USA you have chapter 11 bankruptcy which means the company has a few weeks where it can stop paying all debts and refinance debts with the debtees. Does anyone know – how many of these 500 or so companies have been liquidated and how many are still functioning?
It’s more akin to examinership.
A lot of the companies have been sold at a low price to someone else. Pension plans have been defaulted on, and wages may be renegotiated. The workers tend to come out badly on these deals.
https://www.frbatlanta.org/cqer/research/gdpnow
GDPnow for Q4 is plus 11.0%
that’s interesting.
dead cat has the right to bounce
Rebound ≠ recovery.
I’d like to see the equivalent of GDP now for Europe.
The current fall in energy consumption helped in fact energy consumers, as it brought the lower energy prices.
E.g. Slovakia, like the EU, which is heavily dependent on energy imports, is in fact having record foreign trade surpluses.
The rising debt is unimportant as the energy consumers create it in order to keep the declining energy production and consumption going on.
so people (in households and businesses) who CAN’T afford to maintain their energy consumption then cut back on their consumption, and the prices fall.
which is good for people who CAN afford to maintain their usual level of energy consumption.
but this will not end well if this direction of economic activity continues.
net (surplus) energy grew for centuries and now is reversing, so the average person will have decreasing prosperity because prosperity is dependent on the flow of energy through the economy.
then more and more people will not be able to afford to maintain their usual level of energy consumption.
energy prices could keep going lower, but it will not matter much to the growing numbers of people who are getting poorer year after year.
it’s a slow slow process, but it’s the endgame where smaller weaker countries can’t afford as much energy, and they keep getting poorer, and even the lower classes in bigger countries also fall more and more into poverty.
lower energy prices are a sign that the endgame is here.
The process may be slow, but it will start “taking out” more pieces of the economy. At first, the impact will be small, but later the impact is likely to be like an avalanche.
STOLEN
MASSIVE EVIDENCE
https://youtu.be/Dc-HQyBm8GU
This is a 1 hour and 37 minute video relating to Trump’s challenge to mail in voting (and perhaps other issues) in Pennsylvania. Early in the tape, it says that there will be another hearing tomorrow, Friday Nov. 27.
https://nationalfile.com/video-crowd-gasps-at-pa-hearing-after-learning-of-600k-vote-dump-for-biden-just-3k-for-trump/
I was thinking why the Limits to Growth has got this increasing birth rate and death rate after the collapse.
It really reflects the accumulation of the genetic mutations problem, which can be solved only via increasing death rate and the corresponding increase in the death rate. However, the role of the energy decline and the epidemics, as happened e.g. with the fall of the medieval ages, or unknown impacts of the persistent nuclear pollution at the time of the creation of the study, made it harder to model the real impacts of the genetic mutations.
Because the problem of the pollution, including the nuclear one, is that it accelerates the accumulation of the genetic mutations in the population to the point where the humans can not propagate naturally. The pollution by plastics also contributes to the degeneration of the human genome.
That way the population growth is curbed by irreparable damage to the environment, including the clmt chng, which mainly affects the clean water availability.
The clean water availability can be repaired only by increasing use of the cheap energy, which we do not have.
The persistent too low energy prices in case of energy producers and the too low income of the consumers make it impossible to restart the growth.
We need energy to remove the accumulating pollution and the genetic mutations. The current anti-coronavirus measures reflect how badly we need the cheap energy. That without the cheap energy, the system atomizes and implodes.
I don’t know the real reason for the increasing birth rate, except that perhaps birth control is less available. Also, mothers can see that their children have less chance of living to maturity because communicable disease again become a problem (or become more of a problem, in some parts of the world).
The authors of The Limits to Growth have said that after the peak is hit, the model should not be believed (not necessarily in the book much, more in speeches later). I wish that they had simply truncated the model after it hit limits. I don’t think that it does a reasonable job of simulating what impact a failing world economy has on all of the variables modeled.
Zerohedge has an article, “Fed, IMF Sound Warning That More QE Could Lead To “Unintended Consequences”
Basically, the run up in balance sheets is expected to look something like this, according to Morgan Stanley.
https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/central%20bank%20BS_1.jpg
This implies purchasing an unprecedented $1.2 billion in assets every single hour. According to the article:
Fiscal policy, in theory, would allow actions such as taxing the rich and giving the money to the poor, so that they can buy food and pay their rents and mortgages. But with a divided Congress this can’t happen.
Just creating more of a debt bubble for the rich seems likely to lead to another housing price crash, among other things.
there is some scary stuff in there.
yes, housing prices could be sacrificed because that affects the lower classes much more but not so much the 1%.
then this:
“… meanwhile what the Fed also said is that for all its concerns, it will most likely continue to pump liquidity, as the central bank is absolutely mortified of another crash – as only then will its lack of tools to sustain financial markets become apparent. As such, the Fed will do everything in its power to not only short circuit the business cycle in perpetuity, but also avoid any market drops… ever again.”
so nothing new here: they intend to avoid any market drops, but the unintended consequences of their actions could bring a market crash.
it’s a house of cards and could fall in any upcoming week or month or year.
(I keep an eye on energy supply, which holds things up. Relatively small but still significant 2020 declines in energy supply could be the beginning of the end, though not yet since the house of cards remains standing.)
Yes, all of this does sound worrying!
I want to wish Gail a Happy Thanksgiving and give my thanks that she hosts this site and shares her analysis and lets us kick up dust here in the comments.
A huge socially-distanced hug to you and all the OFW-ers.
A belated happy birthday to you, Gail, and indeed socially-distanced hugs all round.
My birthday is March 20. In the video, Chris Martenson remarks about my posting on Our Finite World since 2010.
Actually, I started posting on Our Finite World in March 2007. I posted only on The Oil Drum between September 2007 and October 2010. I started posting back on Our Finite World (with The Oil Drum copying only the articles that they agreed with) in November 2010. So, in a sense, November 2020 is my 10-year anniversary on OurFiniteWorld.com.
Even back then, I was talking about ideas that “Peak Oilers” found terribly wrong.
Happy Thanksgiving, Gail. Please enjoy many virtual hugs and a real turkey.
“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
Oh, that’s embarrassing. Happy *Thanksgiving*, Gail – not happy birthday at all. 😂
Thanks very much for your Thanksgiving wishes. We will be celebrating with our two sons, neither of whom is married or has children. In fact, they will do most of the cooking.
Happy Thanksgiving, Gail. And thanks to Lidia for jogging us into remembering/acknowledging how much we owe to you.
Re: Brexit, fishing and Scotland
Brexit trade deal talks are still stuck on EU fishing rights in UK waters.
Much has been said about how the incorporation of NI has hindered UK from reclaiming its sovereignty – but it is actually Scotland that is causing the present inertia.
Scottish fishing communities are among the last to favour UK. If Boris caves on fishing then it would be a further boost to independence. But if Boris goes ‘no deal’ then that would also boost support for independence. And Macron and co. will not back down – ‘no fishing, no deal’.
Boris is between a rock and a hard place when it comes to fishing waters.
As Gail explained in her article, dissipative structures tend to ‘find a way’ to do what they ‘want’ to do according to the laws of physics as dissipation declines, and Boris is beset with dilemmas on all front as the the UK pulls apart.
Many Englanders would likely be glad to see the back of the UK, it has become a serious nuisance. Polls indicate as much, with half of TP and LP voters now supportive of English independence even without any serious campaign on the matter.
> Why Scottish fishing rights are a Brexit deal breaker in EU trade talks
…. 1. Why is fishing such a big deal?
Fishing is small fry in economic terms for the UK, only 0.12 per cent of GDP, but it has huge symbolic importance.
Scotland’s north east fishing fleet, which accounts for almost half the UK total, saw entry into the EU Common Fisheries policy as a historic betrayal.
That anger was channelled for many years by the SNP which saw most of its gains in the north-east fishing seats. But with Brexit the Conservative promise of leaving the EU and “taking back control” of UK waters saw the Tories take a dozen seats from the SNP in 2017. Though their gains were are halved in 2019 any further “betrayal” of the industry will fuel the independence argument and undermine the principles Brexit was fought on….
https://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/scottish-fishing-rights-brexit-deal-22850163
Barnier has given Boris until Friday to cave.
My advice is to go for no deal and to let Scots do what they want.
> EU threatens to pull out of Brexit talks if UK refuses to compromise
Michel Barnier says further negotiations would be pointless if UK does not change stance
The EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, has warned David Frost that without a major negotiating shift by Downing Street within the next 48 hours he will pull out of the Brexit negotiations in London this weekend, pushing the talks into a fresh crisis.
In talks via videoconference on Tuesday, Barnier told his British counterpart that further negotiations would be pointless if the UK was not willing to compromise on the outstanding issues.
Should Barnier effectively walk out on the negotiations it would present the most dangerous moment yet for the troubled talks, with just 36 days to go before the end of the transition period.
While Brussels might hope such a move would put the UK prime minister under pressure to give Frost new negotiating instructions, it might also embolden those within the Tory party who believe no deal is the better outcome.
…. Von der Leyen said legal texts on judicial and social security coordination, trade in goods and services and transport were almost finalised. “However, there’s still three issues that can make the difference between a deal and no deal,” she added.
She said fishing communities needed “predictability” from year to year over access to British waters, in a reference to Downing Street’s wish to hold annual negotiations over catches in UK seas, with the option of blocking access.
On state aid, Von der Leyen said the EU was seeking a mechanism through which any breach of agreed principles controlling domestic subsidies could be swiftly remedied.
The EU is also seeking a mechanism to ensure there are consequences for either side within the trade deal if standards diverge over time….
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/nov/25/von-der-leyen-eu-willing-to-be-creative-to-seal-brexit-deal
Britain has already given the EU predictability on the fisheries issue: no access; not today, not tomorrow, not ever. You promised Edward Heath a fair deal, and immediately broke it, just as you have broken every other deal we have been conned into making.
And now you want a “level playing field” tilted 89 degrees in your favour. Again, no deal. This is not about trade, not about the economy, not about your tyrannical “rule of law”. It is about sovereignty, and always has been.
‘Many Englanders would likely be glad to see the back of the UK’
Yes, time to privatise Scotland, sell it to Canada, and give the proceeds to me. That chilly little country should become part of Nova Scotia.
Meanwhile Ulster is just an ulcer on the British body politic. Remember that little man who Benny Hill used to slap on his bald head? He was a Northern Irishman and probably represented the pinnacle of Northern Ireland’s usefulness.
Epic comment, perhaps ytube “AI” has been sending your way lot of unsolicited old Benny Hill videos as of recently as well (to me). It aged well.
Boots Randolph – Yakety Sax
Yep, NI is well run down for lack of investment. It was the industrial heart of Ireland in 1921, now it is a dependent shell like much of the north of England.
UK has 9 of the 10 poorest regions in northern Europe. Investment has been concentrated in London and SE for generations for a quick return.
It is time for NI to go back to Ireland. It has no future in UK and Englanders are sick of picking up the tab. The N Irish deserve better than that.
Going to Mars and the human risks,
It has been mentioned the impossibility of man surviving the voyage. It seems humanity has always been willing to sacrifice itself in some instances. Not that long ago men walked out of open boats, onto the beaches of France and almost certain death. Boat after boat landed until a beachhead was secured. It wasn’t free, Mars, asteroids, the Moon will not be free, people will die, seems it has always been that way.
Reading here it appears to me there is a certain comfort in nay saying, being part of a very conservative group, it can’t be done, it won’t be done. It does not seem much different than the man with the sandwich board declaring “The End is Near.” Well, for me, hold my beer.
I write not to convince anyone, but to try and understand the contra arguments, you guys are pretty sharp.
Dennis L.
lol Dennis
I only write stuff down so that I can try to understand it all myself too
Well, one thing is almost certain, the Muskianas have by now all ducks in a row, meaning “low cost” repeatable orbit cargo capability. And that means they can step by step in daisy chain style build up at orbit whatever way bigger contraption for daring mission through the Solar system.
So should there be any unforeseen problems like in transit “deep space / to Mars” high mortality due to radiation outburst or whatever biologic reaction to such journey away from shielded Earth, they can easily upgrade and send another mission with completely redone space craft with heftier shielding etc. There are millions of volunteers for such “mission” not mentioning fund rising ready public.
Now, that being sad, we just don’t now for sure where are we exactly standing in terms of the protracted collapse path today. There are many (sub) scenarios with dissimilar probabilities. Some might argue that, for example:
– the current plandemic is merely a test, how to better understand future arrangements how to optimize human excess consumption and general societal settings etc. aka quasi BAU to stay for a while longer..
– the current plandemic is the real deal, the salvo to end the world as we knew it, from now it will get only worse in terms of phasing in UBI and food / energy credit – allowance, canceling free movement, and worse..
– the current pandemic is merely unique in its chaotic unreasonable reaction because of achieved level of spoiled societies and rotten disorganized gov structures
..
.
There are dozens of such potential scenarios, and [the correct ones], obviously will have also bearing “on your” scenario of Mars colonization, mining asteroids and in general trend of humans always moving ahead.. to become a reality or not.
World,
“Now, that being sad, we just don’t now for sure where are we exactly standing in terms of the protracted collapse path today. There are many (sub) scenarios with dissimilar probabilities. Some might argue that, for example:”
What is being described on OFW is overall not very optimistic, so there isn’t much to lose by going for it.
Having read this site for a number of years, other sites earlier I am convinced things are going to change, I am convinced there are real limits to growth – on earth. Okay, systems which do not grow seem to fail, my bet is mankind will go for it.
When Greta started screeching I was put off, now it seems obvious. Earth is the spacecraft, it moves very quickly through the galaxy, it is self regulating and through billions of years has designed itself to work for us, time for us to kick it in gear and do our part. Move the damn pollution off this earth by moving the processes that cause it off this earth, save the earth, trash the moon.
Dennis L.
Musk has stated that the timeframe for a first colony on Mars is limited to the two-yearly transit windows (2022, 2024 etc.), when the planets are at their closest.
My question would be, how on (Mars?) are they going to create a self-sustaining human community on the red planet in those two windows? Because god knows they won’t have any other chances: the Limits to Growth forecasts which have been so accurate over time dictate the collapse of our industrial civilisation around 2025.
While I think Covid histrionics might be an elaborate plan to stall this collapse a few more years, Musk and co would still have the pressing issue of being entirely dependent on a planetary infratructure (Earth’s) that is collapsing at a rapid rate.
I’d hate to be one of the intrepid Mars colonists up there in 2024 watching helpess as everything goes to hell. It would be as if you were a pilgrim in 1620 getting news Europe had suddenly vanished. As well as all the oxygen.
In such scale and time window it’s impossible. They can at best send a big probe to test various propulsion options and get some specific new data from the locale of future landing site, but for full scale human expedition (even fly over) it seems impossible. That’s a huge logistics task about what has to be prepared in advance for the crew, tons of specialized gear and long term habitat systems, ..
In similar note, they had to in TSLA realm often engineer completely new machines and devices for the factories on their own, and then start the production, followed by improving quality. So, that’s why it is safe to buy their older now heavily updated models, but it’s always not advisable to be impatiently impulse buying newly launched stuff with lot of untidy knots.. say for first 1-2yrs
The equality has its costs. The women are handicapped by the nature in the same way as there are elderly or disabled or children who need the care that is often provided by women in the jobs that do not pay well.
With less fossil fuel energy, it is pretty much certain that women’s roles will need to change again, back more in the direction where they always have been. Men will need to be strong, and women cannot compete as well in that area.
Ah, I can get the woman’s vote, they are agreeable and the moon has less gravity so upper body strength may not be as much of an issue.
Always seeing the positive side.
Some here think this is literally lunacy, but there is nothing left here other than spaceship earth. Building an ore processing plant on the moon is trivial compared to constructing another earth which took say 2B years. We don’t have that much time, we can build plants on the moon in say 100 years, it will cost blood and money.
Happy Thanksgiving all,
Dennis L.
Reuters
Airlines set to lose $157 billion amid worsening slump: IATA
Laurence Frost
The International Air Transport Association (IATA), which in
June had forecast $100 billion in losses for the two-year period, said it now projects a $118.5 billion deficit this year alone, and a further $38.7 billion for 2021,
,….Passenger numbers are expected to drop to 1.8 billion this year from 4.5 billion in 2019, IATA estimates, and will recover only partially to 2.8 billion next year. Passenger revenue for 2020 is expected to have plunged 69% to $191 billion.
,…..The average airline now has enough liquidity to survive another 8.5 months, while some have just weeks, Pearce said. “I think we will get consolidation through some airline failures
Boy, this is going to be some upcoming event….
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RFADm6jAfSA
Can the financial system hold itself together with all the emergencies hitting it on all sides?
Herbie,
Of course it can, it always has, not everything goes up in smoke and even then it seems to always come back.
For some time it has been known oil was a finite resource, becoming an airline pilot was perhaps not the best use of one’s time or at best one needed to also learn an additional skill. How things would end was not known, we are finding out.
Regarding the facts and figures, all one has to do is read Buffett sold airlines, sell airlines, air planes, take what is left and move on.
It won’t be easy.
Dennis L.
Glad to hear of your optimistic outlook.
I’m hoping drinking Cool aid myself because I’m knocking on the door of retirement with a 401k, pension and BAU clicking along, at least here in the USA. Perhaps the new branch of the Military Industrial Complex, the Space Force, will keep everyone else in line.
Sure it will, sure it will…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=s-BgOyfTUfk
Cause any trouble and we zapp you good..
Works for me….joking of course😜
Dennis.. WTH? Aren’t all those pilots going to be need to charter space flights back and forth with materials from our future space-based factories?
Ah, another optimist, full employment for pilots, another vote block in the bag.
Dennis L.
Lidia, Arthur C Clarke’s “The Sands of Mars” has a brilliant discussion of what those space pilots would look like. As seen through the eyes of 1951 science.
>>Can the financial system hold itself together
>>with all the emergencies hitting it on all sides?
Damned good question.
The real step towards equality:
Period poverty: Scotland first in world to make period products free
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-51629880
It’s not free, English working men will pay for this through higher taxation.
How about making birth control free?
Discussion of birth control seemed to reach a high point in the 1970s and now is a topic few want to talk about.
I am member of the London-base charity Optimum Population Trust, and they say the data shows that if every woman on the planet who wanted birth control got it, the global population would stop rising. But alas the 200 M or so women that would like birth control but don’t have it have no say in the matter.
Even in most Western countries, who can and cannot have an abortion is decided by misogynists.
“you know i i had a kind of a fortuitous meeting in the mid 2000s uh with some clients that
kind of led me to search into how the actual monetary system actually works and the way
it’s designed in the way money moves and you know what i what i came to realize was that
in my opinion the system itself the design of the system is inherently unstable
and i find that interesting because you know to the extent that central bankers
they all have these models and they all have these mathematical frameworks and
they think if you push this button then this happens and they have these
complicated models but the very simple model of which the system is based on in my
opinion is flawed and that is that if you loan money into existence
the the debt is always going to be bigger than the the capital off of which it’s levered
and then you get into a system where for it to remain stable it has to grow
but if if anything grows forever it’ll eventually go exponential and exponential curves never
end well they either go up and you have huge inflation or whatever it is or it
crashes and you get the bust and so i i i i i kind of find that con you know it’s a there’s a
contradiction to me that they have all these you know very incredible um complicated
models but the very simple model of the exponential system seems to be beyond their
grasp”
https://youtu.be/YwK3gcjMFfU?list=TLPQMjQxMTIwMjA9AuSiVVEwFA
Find a good niche where the collapse is minimal. not everything fails.
Dennis L.
Sure, like someone else here that did it several times 😂 and learned the hard way, easier written than done…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WRK03q76GKU
All these brainiac theoreticians and administrators inside CBs are merely delegated the task to mop up structural imbalances caused by the true owners – influencers – stake holders of the system and their leveraged games, those top dogs / fat cats living several layers above gov-CBs..
If you take the conventional-msm narrative how CBs supposedly direct the world economy, you get always everything wrong then.
Okay, what is a model that gets one thing right and can predict tomorrow with some accuracy?
The only reason to look at models which do not work is to avoid building the same non working model.
Dennis L.
A model is just a model. It’s hindsight. If a model predicts something correctly that is also hindsight, just think of all the models that fail because something unexpected came along, or it didn’t include variable X which in hindsight would be good to put in. We are always analyzing the past thinking we can predict the future, we can’t.
Some will make good choices, some will make bad choices. All judged in hindsight.
A planetarium can predict the next lunar eclipse with near absolute accuracy. But then, so could the Antikythera Machine over 200 years ago. The flaw in most current models is that they are not based on hard science, but on the opinions of some dead economist, banker, or (dare I say it) climate “scientist”. Equations not grounded in the hard sciences are worthless, except when applying for research grants.
The “Overshoot and Collapse” model is one that today’s researchers never think about looking at. We must be too smart now. This is the one that the 1972 book The Limits to Growth suggested was likely to occur. There are hundreds or thousands of historical economies that have collapsed.
Even if there is lots of evidence that “Overshoot and Collapse” is the path we are following, people would like to believe the “Peak Oil” story, with oil prices rising and and allowing BAU to continue in a reduce form for a very long time. Alternatively, they believe the “Technology will save us,” model. The “We Can Save Ourselves by Transitioning to Electricity” model puts these two ideas together in one place.
What is well within their grasp is that babe has expensive tastes. Its a lot easier to flap your jaw then to move 15 tons of #9 coal. A lot of what education does is paradigm reinforcement. How do they get the huevos to propagate such ridiculous theories? Simple. The ones who wont are weaned out early in the “education” process. Above all the training is chase the $. Academic achievements are part of the motivation equation but they are validated by $. As world of H analyzed someone got to come up with some rhyme and reason to cover the mess. Covering the mess pays well. Talented and artful mess coverers are well compensated.
We know that historically economies have collapsed, but most people cannot believe that our own economy could also collapse. I haven’t had a chance to look at the video yet.
It is fairly much common sense the somehow the system will fail. The government has been trying to hire people to work on approached that might, in theory, provide an alternative to fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they don’t work well enough to be useful.
Reading Tom Morgan 11/23/21
“Third, we have reached – or passed – the limits of environmental tolerance of an economy powered by fossil fuel energy” Basically Greta said politely.
Say I am a very wealthy man, I got that way because I can look ahead. Say someone else is in the government and in a position to understand the same issues as well as understanding the politics of space exploration.
If the government comes up with carbon credits, and a certain manufacture has positive cash flow secondary to these credits and happens to have a company staffed with rocket scientists, that individual might be in a place to design and launch rockets much faster than old reliable, NASA.
The earth is mined out, a simple metal like Zn is done in 17 or so years, what is left? Space, the moon, asteroids. It is a long shot, it is hope and it is politically brilliant.
Politics is making sausage, it is always messy.
There might be hope.
Dennis L.
If the Earth is all mined out, then where will we get the minerals from with which to build the probes and mining craft to explore and mine the asteroids without cannibalising what we have already built on a massive scale? If global oil production has peaked and global net available energy has peaked, then where will we get the energy from to build the probes and mining craft, or even to cannibalise what has already been built to build the spacecraft, without deliberately engineering a recession which sends the financial system into a tailspin and therefore cuts down sharply on the funds available for building the spacecraft?
Mining asteroids makes fire a nice science fiction fantasy movie, but we are not going to do it on the scale required within the time frame required with the degree of affordability required.
We’ll use nanotechnology, then fire at a beam at you to make you tiny enough to pilot the spaceship. We’ll pay you $5 and a tin of beans per week as an indentured pilot. 😉
Mal,
We have been doing that for some time, the inconvenience is the time delay secondary to the speed o light, we have in a sense walked on Mars for some twenty years.
Earlier I referenced Chris and Isabella. It would be interesting to know what he was paid up front and what were the rewards from Isabella when he returned. Some days on those ships a can of beans might have looked pretty good, coming into port, ah, that could be a great deal of fun, others(beta males) would look on with envy.
Dennis L.
‘Some days on those ships a can of beans might have looked pretty good, coming into port’
Hmm. When was the can opener invented?
First patented in 1855.
Curt,
How can you be so sure? A man is landing boosters on their tail, on a barge in the ocean. This man makes innovative cars that have teething problems, bumpers fall off, sometimes the autopilot goofs, etc, but he seems to make rockets that work and are very large.
Assume Greta is right, assume it is a finite world and we have run out of materials, what then?
At the end of WWII, Germany was building jet bombers which could not be intercepted and V-1 rockets falling on Britain. Germany had very little oil, Germany was being blown to bits.
The US captured Von Braun and twenty years later landed on the moon. Von Braun also found a personal niche and lived an interesting life to a ripe old age.
Today’s and tomorrow’s problems will not be solved with today’s tools.
Mankind goes forward as a group, some groups take a wrong turn, some individuals don’t make it, but mankind does. Nature really doesn’t seem that concerned about the individual, that is a blessing of industrial society. Find the right group, get lucky and all is well with the universe. It is not going to be easy or painless.
Dennis L.
What happens is that civilization moves back many steps in complexity. The idea of flying to the moon and other planets will no longer look workable in not many years.
In fact, we are likely to find that a larger and larger share of the population is no longer literate because governments could no longer afford to pay for education, as the economy starts sliding backwards. Tax revenue falls everywhere. Governments find ways to cut back. Teaching classes online is one of them. It because possible to simply televise lessons to a whole age level of children, with a single teacher, and save a huge amount of wage costs. The wealthy will continue to educate their own children. Most of the poor will fall far behind.
Very true, also in terms of cross comparing various societies, it’s perhaps worth look at who made it big in recent decades in terms of bringing about technological change etc. If not most, many such individuals are coming from non US background, i.e. better education acquired at elementary, high school level, then jumping onto selected few top US universities, and after that securing venture capital already sloshing there for whatever goal they pursuit..
W. Europeans, Indians, Russians, Japanese, .. talent
So in a way this “way of inoculating progress” via imports seems as one way depletion game as well. Perhaps it could continue way longer than assumed or it’s just about to get exhausted pretty soon.
If the future resemble the past, I suspect otherwise. The poor will put their children into apprenticeships, which pay for themselves, and they will come out productive enough to raise families of their own.
The rich will send their children to study “transgendered feminist anti racist climate science”, and they will come out card carrying parasites.
In order for that progress to happen, we need to have the requisite resources available to us in sufficient quantities and level of quality and at an affordable price. We can no longer rely upon that being the case. Whatever our grand ideas may be, they shall come to nought if we cannot solve the resources issue.
In addition to that, even if we do somehow solve the resources issue to make it possible for us to keep growing and progressing, that growth would itself exacerbate some of the systems issues that we have – such as pollution and global warming.
The finite nature of the Earth places hard limits on what we can do. We cannot make Earth infinite.
When it comes to your statements regarding Elon Musk with his rockets and cars, his accomplishments have so far been from ideas that others have had for a long time. More importantly, his efforts require finite, depletable, nonrenewable resources just like so many other technologies. If the economy crashes due to resources and systems issues associated with a finite world, then so does Elon Musk and his grand ideas.
You describe the issues well!
Some thoughts on the price of oil.
Oil is priced on an average, it includes the least expensive and most expensive to produce, oil is fungible. This appears to be the price Gail is using. But, were oil not fungible(due to the dollar reserve currency?), then it would be priced at the margin in the currency of the area of production.
The US oil boom was shale oil – $70/barrel? – this is oil at the margin(yes, there is old oil, someone else can work the math on that one).
The real cost of oil in the US is maybe $50-$60/barrel, all costs in. If we leave the Middle East, what happens to the marginal cost of oil to a US consumer? To get the average price/barrel, add in our exports priced in dollars, do a weighted average and that would give the marginal price of US oil.
Is this part of the reason for the current US election panic?
This has some serious implications for various segments of the US economy, discretionary spending disappears, the ability to pay RE taxes declines drastically. It is then a very different world.
Dollar hegemony hides this, the dollar is sliding, housing prices show that dramatically. Houses in my neighborhood are up maybe 50 or more percent since I purchased mine 6 years ago -houses are on the market about 6 days. Houses are not fungible. Discretionary items are not being purchased – e.g. dress clothing. Closing restaurants whether part of a conspiracy or whatever has reduced that spending and ending with a bit of humor, the eating out discretionary spending has all gone into toilet paper.
Dennis L.
Dennis,
I don’t think you have this right. It is the laws of physics that controls the prices of commodities. Each refinery offers different prices for various types of oil, based on what it requires, and based on what supplies are available in the marketplace. A refinery that provides substantial upgrading to heavy oil will bid a much lower price than a refinery that does very little processing.
The reason that this happens is because, when it comes to selling finished products, like gasoline, diesel, and lubricating oil, the two types of refineries (those providing upgrading processing and those without) have to compete in the same markets. So it is really the amount that markets can afford to pay for gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other products that indirectly sets the markets pay for these fuels. The prices tend to be fairly similar worldwide.
Two different “benchmark” prices have come into common use. Both of these relate to quite high grade crude oil that does not require upgrading. The European one is “Brent;” the US one is “West Texas Intermediate (WTI).” They tend to provide an idea of what relatively high prices for oil might be. For a long time, these different benchmarks traded at very close to the same level. Then, when US markets were overloaded with oil from shale plays, WTI prices tended to fall quite a few dollars below Brent.
Historically, actual drilling and processing costs have been very low, relative to the price of oil, say, 10% to 20% of the benchmark price. This has meant that, pretty much everywhere, taxes on the sale of oil has become a big source of revenue for governments. In fact, governments of oil exporters have become very dependent upon it. Other countries have as well. Without the benefits of cheap-to-produce oil, it is very difficult for a country to have money to provide tax subsidies to renewables. Also, some of this money is needed for reinvestment and for dividends to policyholders. Pension plans have historically depended on oil producing companies to provide good dividends, so that they could provide pension benefits.
It is the lack of understanding of how this process works that has created great confusion. Governments get very dependent on this revenue. So do pension plans.
EROEI calculations have looked at this and tried to figure out what small percentage of costs go into extraction part of this. At one point, it might have been in the 2% range.
Gail, thanks,
It seems there are two prices, one determined by physics, one determined by selling price, the first is determinate, the second not so much.
Fracking is much more expensive than simple holes, it has a definite cost, it is a marginal cost, the same is true of off shore oil, bitumen, etc.
Oil sold is a market price, once the cost of a well is sunk all that can be done is sell the product as long as cash flow is positive. This is about the same as farming, oil is sold in a price taker’s market, oil is produced from the straight physics view with costs for steel, costs for sand, costs(market) for oil to run equipment.
Market prices are a blend, one would expect there is considerable financial engineering done, in the end someone gets the short end of the stick.
A hypothesis is the marginal cost is increasing, old oil is depleting say 6% per year, shouldn’t be that hard a model to make. Fracking became significant in the US when it went over 1MBPD, we use 9 million BPD? Your description is accurate as long as consumption can be cut faster than production declines, when it reverses the price should increase at the margin which in this case would be market. Blending market prices is an average and may obscure the underlying trends.
If one wants oil, one must eventually pay a price that covers costs one way or another.
Pensions are a significant problem, I am a pensioner, it is personal. On an earlier post I referenced two instances of how this problem had been handled in the past, when our personal metabolic needs exceed our useful contribution to the group, arrangements are made – young need less energy for maintenance than the old, G. West.
West, Morgan and you are excellent sources for information. Meadows is good as long as one stays on earth, my guess is we are moving industry off earth, earth is too valuable as a spaceship for humans, so Greta again.
Dennis L.
No, there aren’t two prices. Marginal costs don’t really come into play the same way with energy products, because they act like “yeast” to the economy as a whole. The benefit is far greater than what a person might ever guess, based on the extraction and refining costs. Once the yeast effect starts wearing off, energy prices start falling too low because of too much wage disparity.
The selling price for energy products has historically been far above what you and I might think of as most company’s “marginal cost of production.” This big difference has been the huge subsidy that allowed governments and economies to grow. Part of the reason for this was the high taxes that energy companies could pay. Oil exporters especially were able to pull oil out of the ground at a low price, and sell it at a very high price.
It is the fact that the society as a whole benefits so much from oil and other fossil fuels that makes the relationship different. Governments and shareholders are a step away from being “essential” to the production of fossil fuels. The taxes they pay and the shareholder dividends that they pay have been terribly important, especially for oil exporters. Even US states (such as Alaska) have been very dependent upon oil revenues. Without oil in Alaska, how many people would live there?
Governments tend to collapse after a few years of inadequate tax revenue. The governments in the Middle East look like they are on their way to collapse.
Pensions look likely to collapse as dividends keep heading down.
Strangely enough, EROEI calculation seems to show that oil from shale has a fairly high EROEI.
Whether or not oil is depleting at 6% per year, if the government maintaining order in the country collapses, production can (and will) fall a lot more quickly than 6%. Look at Libya.
I would watch out with respect to what Tim Morgan says. He believes too much of conventional economics. He does not understand how the system really operates. He started out following Charlie Hall and his EROEI stuff, then changed it somewhat to make his own model.
Even G. West comes at this, knowing only his piece of the puzzle. He doesn’t know how limits fit into the picture.
I have also seen an article by Tim Garrett, claiming that the economy operates on momentum (without much of any impact of limits), so we should be able to extract the fossil fuels that seem to be available, making climate change our big problem. Of course, he is a climate change researcher. He gets paid, if he can get grants for climate change research.
The situation is alway, “Reader Beware.” Some of these folks has amazing credentials. Just don’t expect them to know much outside their own fields.
“Strangely enough, EROEI calculation seems to show that oil from shale has a fairly high EROEI.”
If one gets more energy out than one puts in, it is impossible to go broke, why are shale companies going broke? Simple arithmetic, pump one barrel of oil into the earth, get one and half out, free money, $30 down the hole, $45 out of the hole, rinse and repeat.
I am sticking to my guns, oil is fungible, if enough expensive oil is produced to make a “surplus” the cost of oil will go down as oil is not sold on the margin, it is sold at a dollars /barrel market price.
If one follows the money, it would be interesting to see where the money for shale oil originated. A guess, the Fed.
A number of countries have tried to avoid selling in dollars, Libya, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. It didn’t work well for them. That is cheap oil, move it out of the dollar pool and one is left with much more expensive oil in dollars – no longer fungible. More simply put, whatever currency the cheap oil is selling in, one has to purchase those currencies with dollars – this is the exact reverse of the petro dollar. If the dollar is exchangeable for gold, people will want gold – this is what happened when American peaked in the seventies, Nixon stopped selling gold, printing dollars in exchange for oil was in danger of stopping.
There is no moat around the price of oil, fungible as always. `
Dennis L.
The EROEI model is too simplistic. It tells far less than what people hoped it would tell.
On an EROEI basis for food, none of us would eat berries. We would live on butter and oil products. Our bodies cannot live on just one type of food; neither can economies.
I am not certain what precisely goes wrong in the fracking calculations, but one of the big issues I see is what I call “calendar year” versus “future model.” Traditional fossil fuel EROEI calculations are based on a calendar year basis. How much energy was required in that particular year (say 2019), versus the amount of oil that came out that same year. Thus, there would be no guess work about how long devices would work in the future, or the amount of repair costs. It is simply a calculation of “Energy In” versus “Energy Out,” for some particular small segment of oil production. This is a project a graduate student can do, by visiting a few oil companies. Of course, the “Energy In” tends to be cheap energy (natural gas), while the energy out tends to be dominated by expensive by selling price energy (oil).
EROEI of both oil from shale wells and from Wind and Solar are based on more of “Model” approaches. How long do we (or the operators of the shale wells) think that production can continue? How much total oil will be produced? In the case of wind and solar, it is a question of how long the makers of these devices estimate that they will be operable. There is no charge for the fact that debt will be needed for fund these operations, since debt doesn’t “look like” energy that is being transferred out of the system. Oil, in the past and even in the present, has been heavily taxed (even if it is not profitable!), but this isn’t reflected in the calculations at all, either. This is part of why shale operators lose money.
Wind and solar get the huge benefit of “going first,” and distorting the pricing system for all other electricity producers, but there is no charge for this bizarre situation. They tend to drive nuclear and co-generation out of business; also coal and “base-load” natural gas. Total electricity production doesn’t rise as much as the intermittent wind and solar, without big subsidies by local governments who can see the huge problems that result.
“Boundaries” are a huge issue in EROEI and net energy calculations. Traditional crude oil experiences most of its costs in drilling and refining, because it can use cheap transportation and storage options. I don’t know to what extent the add-on costs related to all of the water and sand use in fracking are really considered. I presume they are, but the devil is in the details.
I think this issue is a good candidate for a future post. The Real Price of Oil? Gail has covered EROI several times in the past, but this could be a new angle.
If used in the right way, oil is worth a lot more than its price indicates.
Can it be worthwhile to use a barrel of oil in order to extract half a gallon? On the face of it, that sounds like nonsense. But start thinking about all the economic activity that this original barrel of oil is facilitating and the answer is not so clear.
Good News! Global Warming handwringers can breathe a sigh of relief at this WONDERFUL *mainstream* news coming out of Sweden!
https://youtu.be/JmATGtQbUho?list=TLPQMjQxMTIwMjA9AuSiVVEwFA
[Time: about 90 seconds]
So why aren’t Al Gore and Greta Thunberg celebrating???
Cherry picking data never gets old.
We really can’t do anything about the problem, except what our self-organizing economy provides. We also can move to a part of the world more to our liking, it changes occur. Where would we like to live, without electricity lines in good repair?
I’m thinking of Neil Howe’s insightful concept of ‘The Fourth Turning’, which first came to my notice via a link in the comments here a few months back. Neil Howe says that this decade most resembles the 1930s, and he’s right. The economy is flailing and the oil industry is failing, after these darn lockdowns. We are staring into the abyss of a economic Depression, with a capital D.
Given that, let’s have a medley of 1930s songs. Be sure to add your favourites. How did they do CGI-like effects in the days before computers? Just watch and smile:
Depression or not, life went on, and performers still sang of love. A joyful yet wistful song, this:
Al Bowlly – Love Is The Sweetest Thing 1932
The escapism of the 1930’s.
Aldous Huxley rightly pointed out that it served to relieve the misery for a while -if you could still afford to get into the cinema – and there would be ever more of that sort of thing to control a totalitarian society.
In the popular literature of the day, readers wanted either exciting crime thrillers or mushy romance.
The musicals made by the Nazis while their armies were raping Europe are worth a look.
And don’t forget “Triumph des
Wllens” (1935), a masterpiece of film making: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6uajey
I’m sure it’s been said before, but when I first saw that film I was left with the impression that the nazis had invented the rock concert.
You mean this one? I agree. It was an absolute masterpiece.
https://youtu.be/SoiKosRN5fY
Nothing wrong with escapism. We all need some. And the better the aesthetics and the bigger the spectacle, the more interesting it is. Ad the Olf and his cohorts understood that well and leveraged the developing art and technology of 1930s cinema to their advantage, to help hypnotise the population.
As a young man, Ad the Olf spent some time in Vienna. Apparently he was fascinated by the marches and rallies of the Social Democrats and trades unionists and the way in which they projected power and impressed the onlookers. He also visited the opera multiple times to listen to his favourite composer, Wagner. You can just imagine him listening to ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ – it was probably the only time his fifth limb managed to do a Na – ahem – zi salute. I expect he went home with soiled underpants. 😉
He later synthesised his experience of the power of rallies with the spectacle of grand Wagnerian opera to produce his Nuremberg rallies, as captured in the film that Robert Firth references below.
Here’s a German military march to add a bit of musical flavour: Der Königgrätzer Marsch (The Königgrätzer march), Königgrätz now being the city of Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic. Back in the 1930s, there were more ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia than Slovaks.
The first 45 seconds of the tune (flutes) are a bit boring. Then comes the brass and bit of oomph, then from about 1 minute 50 seconds there is a racier secondary tune, which is the bit I particularly enjoy.
This military march theme however seems to refer to late mid 19th century war – battle in which invading Prussia crushed Austro-Hungarian forces on NE Bohemian dominion. I guess at that time Bavaria further down south western direction was still ~independent and friendly to Austria. Prussia attacked from the North.
From that embarrassing defeat Austrian Empire was locked into severe subordinate position to Prussia and later German Empire be it during WWI or WWII or EU..
The latter part being debatable as the living standard is becoming higher in Austria vs DE (avg)..
According to “Hitler’s table talk”, his favourite composer was Engelbert Humperdinck (1854 to 1921), famous only for “Hänsel und Gretel”. The problem with Wagner;s operas is that the good guys nearly always seem to lose. Rather like Nazis, in fact.
‘Engelbert Humperdinck’ – oh, no – not that dusky dandy with his frilly sleeves and collars. Apparently the Soviets found a stash of Der Phewrer’s Shirley Bassey records when they excavated his Bunker. Such a hypocrite, he was. 😉
‘The problem with Wagner’s operas is that the good guys nearly always seem to lose. Rather like N.z.s, in fact.’
You implying that the ‘sizaN’ were good guys, Robert? Or just saying that they lost?
Malcopian, I was implying, perhaps a little too obliquely, that Wagner’s “good guys” often resembled the Nazis of a century later. No moral judgement was intended.
“Neil Howe says that this decade most resembles the 1930s, and he’s right. The economy is flailing and the oil industry is failing, after these darn lockdowns. We are staring into the abyss of a economic Depression, with a capital D.”
there is at least one huge difference, and that is in the 1930s the world had about 7 decades of cheap FF still to come.
from what I have gathered, Mr. Howe is clueless about this FF discontinuity. Yes? No?
after this Fourth Turning thingie, there will be no future surge forward of progress and prosperity.
just because it might have been true after the first three turning thingies, doesn’t make it anywhere near possible that it’s gonna be all well and good this time.
You’re quite right, of course. Yet hope springs eternal in the human heart, and still I pin my hopes on the Fourth Industrial Revolution. But in reality how can we undo all this pollution of 200 plus years of the industrial technological revolution?
I feel like I have a lot of hope.
I pin my hopes on a very slow decline in energy resources, which I hope will equate to a very slow decline in quality of life, and then death before things get much worse.
so far so good.
it doesn’t seem to work that way
human civilisations runs flat out, needing constant increasing energy input
we can withstand short term hiccups–depressions–but not long term
long term depression. i.e. 20% of people out of work for a long time produces social chaos.
20% is too big a proportion for the other 80% to cope with, so society ‘goes over the edge’ and resets itself. this transition is always violent because those involved don’t know whats happening.
and even if they did they would still react violently.
This reminds me about the recent events in France. Two days ago (?) new incoming migrants propped up tent city on major square in Paris. Clashes of malcontents (~antifa like) vs Police resulted in violent scenes, then in turn called by sitting french govs as abhorrent. This nicely illustrates the collapse in slowmo.
I recall, Alain Delon few years ago proclaiming today’s world to be a cesspool, disgusting place (incl. his FR) – yearning to be out of it for good soon.
People only remember the 20% who suffered in the great depression, the other 80% did very well indeed. With negative inflation and stable salaries their buying power increased considerably. I guess that is what is happening now.
the depression of the 30s was ended by WW2
impossible to say how long things would have gone if that hadn’t happened–in any event it was all due to fuel burning because jobs can only come from that.
I’ve often thought about it, but it seems to me that only the energy-burn of war ends mass unemployment, maybe that’s an ongoing human condition—who knows.
this time round though, the world doesn’t have the energy-means to put millions of men on battlefields for years on end.
that said, as collapse kicks in, increasing small regional conflicts seem inevitable, just as is happening now
“the other 80% did very well indeed”
…a bit of a stretch it seems to me….almost an entire generation impacted for life due to the scarcity of money….given that most people lived on farms, tell me how they did “very well indeed”. They scraped their basic needs from the earth, with little market that would provide them wealth.
@Norman
“the depression of the 30s was ended by WW2”
WW2 started in 1939. Germany experienced strong economic growth from 1933 onwards.
https://i.insider.com/5807694fc5240225008b5595
You can easily find a similar chart for the US, with significant growth starting in 1933 with the “New Deal”. Your statement is demonstrably incorrect.
Germany from 1933 to early 40s was essentially a Ponzi scheme
ie–The economy was funded by deficit financing—issuing bonds (promises) to cover expenditure over income. Those at the top profited greatly, those at the bottom of the pyramid didn’t.
Essentially the German government embarked on a program of rearmament, which created jobs.
But wartoys have no purpose other than destruction. Without a war, collapse becomes inevitable.
There are 2 ways out: collapse or war expansion to cover the growing deficit.
(Japan was on a similar track in the 30s) The expansion of both nations was ultimately a grab for oil.
Hitler chose war to grab resources of weaker nations to keep his Ponzi scheme going. He had to maintain war factory output.
Slave labour was his other energy resource.
******
Roosevelt chose another way of doing the same thing. But he built peace toys
He had one advantage Hitler didn’t: Oil so cheap and abundant it was virtually free.
He sucked in unemployed labour for vast construction projects, dams, schools roads and so on.
He had the necessary free energy to do this, but as with Germany and Japan, it couldn’t cease, because that would end the jobs program.
Roosevelt was paying construction wages with borrowed (taxpayers) money, just like Hitler did.
If you build a dam, the output of that dam must ‘create’ wealth by energising more and more jobs. Real wages cannot be created until energy is turned into stuff that people want and need.
Had ww2 not started, most of those projects would have petered out through lack of purpose. Ongoing prosperity must have demand, not just output. Workers on the ‘new deal’ projects couldn’t get rich by buying their own output.
As it happened, the USA could use the output of oil wells, mines and dams to build wartoys by the millions, far outstripping any enemy power. As long as energy remained in surplus, the factories could keep humming. Hitler was on a loser from the start.
they ran on after the war. Factories just switched to peace goods stuff after 1945.
That lasted until 1970.
So what happened in 1970?
The USA hit peak mainland oil discovery, and began the slow decline into oil deficit.
That was when the American Dream ended, and the nightmare began.
@Norman
A quick check for the UK shows that it too experienced economic growth from 1932 until the end of the 1930s (at least). Could you point to one example of a country that was in a depression until WW2 lifted it out of depression? Or any evidence at all that WW2 ended the depression of the 1930s?
Germany was in terrible shape. I am sure that was the reason for all of the persecution of the Jews. There was a famine at that time, according to a museum I visited in Israel. It was reaching peak coal (the cost of extracting coal was rising too high relative to what it could be sold for). I am sure that Germany’s huge problems were really energy problems that it was trying to solve.
that was my main point
all wars about resource grabs
Hitler’s Ponzi scheme was becoming unstable, so he had to invade Poland to deflect attention from it
all dictators reach the same end-problem. They must divert attention from their own inadequacies and blame others for their nation’s problems.
Trump did this at the start, then when he knew he was likely to lose in 2020, he blamed criminal elements in the Democratic Party for rigging the voting system against him before polling day
And so we see the same nonsense being touted over and over (even in OFW) —all convinced that the vote was ‘stolen’ despite there being impartial scrutinisers from both parties in every counting hall in the country. (maybe they had been bribed to go home?)
but that’s all fake news of course.
There is evidence that before Hitler invaded Poland, he dressed up dead poles in army uniform and had them strategically ‘placed’ on the German side of the border (or something like that)
Fake news is nothing new
I thought I just did
Germany ‘lifted itself out of depression and created growth’ on borrowed money
The USA did the same.
The builders of the Hoover dam were paid by the government
therefore ‘growth’ was in effect created on borrowed (taxpayers) money—which is the same as going to the bank, borrowing money, and using that money to give yourself a pay rise.
To anyone not knowing you had taken out a bank loan, your ‘growth’ would be all they were aware of.
War made the Germans go bust and the Americans lifestyle to vastly improve—so much so that they we able to pump money into Europe in order to prime the economic pump of Europe itself.
The UK had to borrow money from the USA to keep itself clear of the German threat after 1939
Trump is the same as hitler. Hitler invaded Poland. Trump brought all troops home from endless wars of previous administrations. Obviously the same.
Norman. Observers were stopped from observing in those places.
Does that mean that their was election fraud? No
Does that mean there was not election fraud? No. In the absence of a system where the ballot has a chain of evidence where a random sampling can be done to see whether the ballot had legal origin and status It comes down to trust. Scouts honor
Same system as before.
Yup.
Two things have changed
One the incredible hate generated by the false acusations and compromised media. This brings peoples motives into question. After all we have heard over and over and over.
“ALL THATS IMPORTANT IS TO BEAT TRUMP”
Oh ethics dont matter?
Oh fair play doesnt matter?
Knowing this and witnessing all sorts of violence by the radical left i certainly believe there are people out there who would cheat in the election in a heart beat. The democratics selection of Harris clearly demonstrates that they dont care whatthe vote is at all. She got 6% of the vote in the primary. This characterizes the attitude of authoritarian power the democraticparty has cometo represent. That papa knows best attitude does not inspire trust in me.
2. These elections were very close. Look cheating has gone on forever in Philly and Detroit politics. Ask anyone. Even as big as those towns are By themselves their cheating just doesnt matter in a nationwide election usually.This one is so close it did matter. And can a small county input a significant amount of stuffed votes no. But a big city can. And theyare corrupt. And they are blue. Not saying all blue is corrupt.
3You have not addressed the fact that poll watchers were effectivly stopped by being corraled in philly and detroit. Does that prove the election was stolen? No. Its certainly not provedits honest by disabling measures intended to keep it so.
4Statistically the anomalies surrounding the votes that arrived at are astronomical. Along the same odds as evaluating DNA evidence. Does that prove the election was stolen? No. It certainly doesnt prove it honest.
5 Covid. for the first time ever theres a lot of ballots unatached to people. A recipe for stuffing. Does this provefraud? It certainly doesnt disprove it
6 Trump said there was going to be fraud.
Thedemocratic party could have responded to these claims if they were basless. They could have put measures in place where people felt confidant about the results. They fight measures for voter accountability tooth and nail. They characterize efforts at ensuring election jonest as voter suppression. Does this prove the election is slolen? No
Does it prove it was honest? No.
So we have lot of factors that could indicate there was fraud. Without a system in place where random sampling of ballots can be done to verify legal origin and legal ballot we are asked to believe in the honesty of the vote count based on the morals and ethics of the vote counters and more importantly those who guard the votes against stuffing.
We are asked to trust them.
I grew up in Chicago.
My momma didnt raise no fools.
I dont trust them.
Ive given my reasons why.
You havnt addressed any of it you just keep on regurgitating trump hate propaganda. This forum values informed analysis and you provide little to none. You havnt been in these environments. you dont know what these places are like. You climb back on your soapbox patting your self on the back a german warning the yanks about hitler. No reason to actually address the concerns of the people that actually live there. Show me somthing please that indicates anything other that you have bought into a argument that fufills your selfish needs and that you dont care anything about the facts. If i wanted to read comments from people unwilling to look at facts id be over at the huffington post reading comments.
Norm has such a case of TDS that it may require hospitalization.
The election was clearly stolen.
[In 2019] Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, and Amy Klobuchar and congressman Mark Pocan warned about reports of machines “switching votes,” “undisclosed vulnerabilities,” and “improbable” results that “threaten the integrity of our elections.”
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/democratic-senators-warned-of-potential-vote-switching-by-dominion-voting-machines-prior-to-2020-election
Anyone interested in following election-fraud stuff should check out “The War Room” podcast by Steve Bannon. I know he has been discredited, but the material presented is gold, imo. He’s an anti-CCP guy who doesn’t hide his bias, but the people he has on who present the legal strategies and the statistics surrounding the wonky vote sound extremely credible. Too many points to list here of improbable things happening that one would have to swallow to accept the mediatically-hawked outcome.
===
I think what people should keep in mind is that this is all taking place in the context of the “Great Reset” and that the GR is a monetary power-grab above all. I don’t fully understand Trump’s recent actions w/r/t the Federal Reserve, but that has to have something do with this end-game-for-all-the-marbles. They are not playing this game for the “children in cages”, for the GND, or for domestic politics, imo.
Trump supposedly hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson when he arrived in the WH. Jackson famously fought wars against bankers.
Also not to be ignored is Trump’s Executive Order declaring the seizure of assets of anyone tampering with US elections. While it does sound theatrical, it’s quite possible a trap could have been set.
It’s also possible Trump is playing a role (against Klaus Schwab, the Bond villain from central casting) and the game will fall to some player yet unseen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGGlnHe3Rgc
Penn State Legislature panelist’s body language: “.. eh, this is getting seriously uncomfortable, I don’t want to be seen around here, they told me this is going to be easy, cushy job .. ”
🙂
believeeverything.. excellent comment.. although I don’t believe the election was really “very close”.
I recall Harris as having withdrawn during the primaries after getting 1-2%.
Here’s her Senate voting record, anyway:
From Jan 2017 to Nov 2020, Harris missed 350 of 1,265 roll call votes, which is 27.7%. This is much worse than the median of 1.8% among the lifetime records of senators currently serving.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678
Again, I think the Harris/Biden slate was presented in order to humiliate us..
Biden couldn’t even draw a crowd of 50 people with Obama out there as that guy trying to get passersby into the peep show.
worldof.. this is a great clip.. Thank you!
There’s no point arguing with Norman because Norman is a True Believer on the issue of Trump’s Horribleness. Everything about Trump is anathema to Norman. And no rumor or insinuation or accusation against Trump is too nasty for Norman to believe.
If Trump clinches re-election and gets four more years—which we are all waiting to see if he can do with the trepidation with which we would await an attempt by Harry Houdini to get out of a sealed box dumped in a river, or by Evel Knievel to cross the Snake River Canyon in a rocket—then I fear for what is left of Norman’s sanity.
It’s pretty clear to any unbiased observer—not that there are a great many of them around these days—that this election has been even more mired by fraud than usual. The courts are going to rule on whether various instances of fraud invalidate various parts of the count—just like in 2000 only on a much wider scale—but regardless of how that plays out, it is certain that Trump won the actual count by a landslide of electoral votes and that Biden stated clearly and unequivocally that the Dems put together “the most extensive and inclusive VOTER FRAUD organization in the history of American politics”—so make of that what you will.
But go on Norman, be my guest, check with Snopes and debunk THIS!
https://youtu.be/MA8a2g6tTp0
and that video was meant to say/prove what exactly?
I accept that my level of intellect is not on a par with yours, so I would appreciate being let in on the secret message contained therein.
I would be grateful to any of my Trumpisms pointed out that are/were not attributal to the man himself
from my observation point—and I do like to stand wwwwwwwaaayyyyy back to look at stuff
the last potus election, in certain quarters at least, is starting to take on the same aspects of hoax/fraud/scam nonsense as previous exchanges on the moon landings, WTC collapse, climate change (Chinese) hoax and covid (Chinese) hoax.
Plus others of minor interest.
Insistent name repetition was a characteristic of dear departed FE, it always came to the fore when he was on otherwise shaky ground. I used to notice that a lot before the aliens re-abducted him and seeded the world with covid dust in thanks–or was it retaliation?
Insistent name repetition was a characteristic of dear departed FE, it always came to the fore when he was on otherwise shaky ground.
Would this be anything like your insistent repetition of the name “Trump” in connection with the name “Hit*er”? And does this amount to an admission that you are on shaky ground with your half-baked inuendos and evidence-free accusations?
during my writing career, when faced with a problem that was both difficult to put over and impenetrable for people who might want to read my waffle—I invariably stood wayyyyyy back and tried to analyse it from the long perspective.
Was there a common thread of explanation here that would accommodate the lowest common mental denominator?
(always my benchmarks when nothing else works.)
So I look at the fraud-scam-conspiracy thing. Not just this one, but previous favourites of the late lamented FE, and his senior henchperson (your misguided self)
And I spotted that common thread.
Remember the moon landing—Always ‘me’ that was too stupid to accept ‘the truth’ which everyone else could see.
Then the WTC—ditto above—another conspiracy scam fraud. ‘Me’ too stupid to see the truth (again), Plus those 20 muslims who set up the hologram of the planes crashing into the WTC towers and elsewhere. Spectacular. For the moment we will ignore the unforgivable disrespect to the men who attacked the hijackers in the fourth plane. And died as part of ‘the conspiracy’.
Then the great climate change hoax, no such thing as global warming. (that used to be favourite too—it was a Chinese hoax to shut down American factories) Both the don and FE said so.
ditto above (again)
Then the virus appeared—it was another Chinese hoax, a fraud, didn’t exist. NP the idiot once more. I had exclusive rights to stupidity again. Luckily I was vaccinated against contact with idiots years ago. My immunity is long lasting fortunately. Idiot-vaccine produces laughter as an unavoidable side effect.
Then ‘vaccines’ came up.
Surely I wasn’t so idiotic as not to see it was Bill Gates plotting to take over everybodys brain because he was messing with the vaccines. Vaccines killed people!!!
and now we arrive at the Trump voting fraud….again ditto above.
All of the above have been debunked time and again, throughout the world, at every level.
I’d hate to be stupid AND lonely..
*******************
So—-the common thread I mentioned?
Obvious really. I needed to stand back to see it. That for all of the above ‘incidents’ to be somehow fraudulent, would require the co-conspiracy of literally thousands of individuals, all working together to a common goal (on each hoax) in absolute secrecy, where not one of them has broken ranks to reveal ‘the truth’.
Scientists—vote counters–moon scenery makers–, explosives experts. an endless list.
I worked out that if all the main elements of the above were mixed up, and re hashed, they could be re written at random onto any ‘conspiracy’ thread, and no one would notice any real difference.
*******************
Still. One bit of creativity arose out of it all, which I’m quite pleased with.
I came up with a new collective noun:
A humour of conspiracies.
The 4th Industrial Revolution is a project of the WEF, Davos and Global Elites.
Contrary to what people think, they know things are going down, and are ACTIVELY trying to depopulate the world and reduce the population’s access to energy – that’s when the 4IR comes:
– No commutting, no cars, no buses, no vehicles. The EV wave is just bogus to bankrupt the Auto industry. EV’s are an impossibility due to batteries (and there’s no solution to that, billions are being spent on it), sheer price and safety regulations.
– Indebt everyone, and seize all property – goodbye small business, hello again monopolists. “You’ll own nothing and be happy”
– The Coronavirus: more and more I think it was their project and their game. China was just colluding and moving along.
– Population division and chaos: increase racial hatred, religious hatred and cultural hatred. Create a blame-game on people and they’ll be the ones responsible for the coming crash, not the elites, not them.
This will create the justification needed for the return of authoritarianism and the end of democracy.
– Global Warming/Climate Change: justify the huge stimulus packages for the Green Industry (themselves), while preventing the Third World to industrialize with schemes such as Carbon Credit, just so that their Oil isn’t spent on them, but on the First World.
– Destroy Third-World countries who were doing well and consuming more energy locally. Do it economically (Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, etc) or militarly (Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc).
– Export the First-World manufacture base (it’s not coming back ever), to deindustrialize these countries and prepare for a return of agriculture.
– Turbo-boost China, make it polluted and heavily dependent on industry so that it crashes and burns violently in the future energy scarcity.
I could keep on going, but that’s basically it – the elites know it very well and everything you see, watch and read is their effort to deal with it and create a Neo-Feudal society.
trump lost the election! get over it! Trump is an idiot Biden is an idiot! There I said it! Those of you that sit and beat this dead horse are only showing your ignorance of the situation. You probably bought in to the whole Americun exceptionalism as well. The U.S has funded everything with debt…..they added more to the deficit in this last year than they did from 1876 to 1996….
I am still trying to convince people that no we can’t just stick a straw in the the ground and pull out tons of oil with no problem. Its people like you that are trying to shift the narrative to super man trump made everything work easy! I never thought I would say this but the U. S will lose its reserve currency status soon and when that happens you will see some crazy crap….or maybe you won’t because you are too busy being lazy complaining about the election…
Trump didn’t lose the election. Your other points are valid. This *is* about currency.. this *is* the “crazy crap”!
Paradoxically US loosing its reserve currency status won’t be as bad as imagined, comparatively speaking.
Still, the purchasing power per capita (and more importantly broader living-health standards) will drop profoundly at least by ~40-80% only in first stage though.
What was unique historically speaking though about the latest run of this global fin settlement arrangement was the timely coexistence run with the permeable globalization mega trend. So, while Europeans or now China and Asians tried to build up some inner corralling seclusion structures of breathing space for themselves – they achieved more or less just a mere refuge for their oligarchs than some standalone structural advantage.
In simple terms, “the final US crash” will be sinking all boats in ~synchro..
And this strange factor will in turn alleviate the true pain for the US, also depending on the level of newly gained local / regional independence vs the former center (and its twisted priorities) it could be also a healing, beneficial process.
Obviously, the above is a high horse macro and long term attitude analysis, the realities on the ground will be horrifying.
How about trying to improve the election process for the future. Computer programs are routinely hacked all over the world.There has to be at least verified back up paper ballots if a recount is needed. Tulsi Gabbard introduced legislation last year to do just that but like every other good idea she’s had it was totally ignored because she doesn’t precisely follow the script of the war mongers.
Numa, that was an excellent comment. I couldn’t agree more with it.
Denial, your reply to Numa was not about anything Numa was talking about.
In Latin, the term non sequitur means “it does not follow.” The phrase was borrowed into English in the 1500s by people who made a formal study of logic.
Perhaps you might benefit from a formal study of logic 101, as your comment, excellent though it may have been in some ways, was one long string of non sequiturs IF it was in reply to Numa’s comment above it.
On the other hand, IF you were replying to some other comment, it might have been apposite.
whatever the fourth industrial revolution brings, let’s hope we can eat, drink and breathe it
because if we can’t we’re screwed
Howe has been recently employed (or consulted part-time) w. Canadian hedge fund guy, who had been to some extent exposed (via communicating to all spectrum of investment people) to depletion/surplus issues, although it’s certainly not his main thing or focus.
For my purposes I proposed tweaked offshoot of “4th turning” based on different demographics of this very late era, especially in terms of more flexible timing and sequencing, basically prolonging – stretching these trends timewise a bit. If I’m not mistaken Howe himself is not that rigid on the concept as well, and allows for broader interpretations for given historical epochs.
and that is in the 1930s the world had about 7 decades of cheap FF still to come.
Bingo!
I was going to post that also.
not to worry
the saudis are building new cities based on ‘technology’, for the post oil world
obviously they are not members of OFW
I would agree that today’s world most resembles the 1930s. But, we don’t have the cheap to produce oil in the ground, and our debt levels are a whole lot higher. We also have a lot of women working, so we don’t have the big piece of the labor force that was added in the 1930s. There were also low-hanging fruit when it came to increasing food production per acre.
Yes but the majority of americuns think that they created this massive new technology called fraking to open massive oil fields!!! Remember Americans are energy independent meme??? I remember being told that we have 100 years of oil in the u.s !?!? This is a story that is pushed by the left and the right…..
This is where I think you have not done a succinct job in explaining this to the people of the United States! Most of them believe that the U.S has so much easy to obtain oil 100 years worth in fact that the u.s has no problem. I don’t know which is worse the bonehead that tells me this or the idiot that tells me oil will be obsolete because we will all be driving electric cars in the future!
>>This is where I think you have not done a succinct job
>>in explaining this to the people of the United States!
‘You’ who? Neither the inhabitants of the USA nor anywhere else are in the slightest bit interested in being exposed to reality. You / we can explain all we like but the normies ain’t listening.
I gave up long ago trying to explain our oil predicament to people. The reaction was invariably not-interested or hostility.
There is definitely a problem of the majority not being interested at all in listening. But there are definitely quite a few who are interested in listening.
It is hard to find any Anglo-American music from the 1930s that I care to listen to.
Classical was pretty dead too.
I tried to find some music from that period but I gave up.
What an awful time for music. It makes one glad that one lives now.
I would have been Great Depressed too.
No wonder they had a war!
Yep, that music is making me feel flippant.
‘It is hard to find any Anglo-American music from the 1930s that I care to listen to.’
You sad person. I’m exiling you to Scotland, so you can listen to the ‘skirl’ of the dreary bagpipes for the rest of your life. So what kind of music DO you care to listen to, Mrs. Mysterywoman?
Have you ever noticed that your Al Bowlly track, Love is the Sweetest Thing, is musically very similar to the Muppet Show theme track, with the same key and key changes?
I never did. So now you must like it, then?
“So what kind of music DO you care to listen to, Mrs. Mysterywoman?”
Well, I prefer the Muppet Shows ditties to anything recorded in the 1930s.
You MUPPET!!!
Did you watch Pennies From Heaven, by any chance. Lots of good music in there. Admittedly, none of it rocked or rapped.
Roll along prairie moon
Roll along while I croon
Shine above
Lamp of love
Praire moon…
Here’s the Al Bowley version:
https://youtu.be/iGhSBQ5ZMPg
‘Pennies From Heaven’
I did watch but wasn’t keen on the songs chosen. Nor did I think Dennis Potter was the great talent some claimed he was.
From the 1930s, I mostly like the faster tunes with witty unexpected that require a bit of verbal athletics. Example:
Putting On The Ritz – 1979 cover by
Peter Skellern & The Grimethorpe Colliiery Band
More Peter Skellern from his 1979 album ‘Astaire’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV9QsEK4uXg
==============
And his version of ‘The Continental’ – a gorgeous tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOEhpWgqoXs
==============
And then there’s Bryan Ferry singing ‘These Foolish Things’:
All excellent choices! I recall Peter Skellern for the first time in decades now that you’ve brought the name up.
As for Brian Ferry, I personally enjoy These Foolish Things—an album of covers—more than any of his very listenable original work.
And of course the song These Foolish Things is another classic that proves there was some great music composed in the 1930s.
Speaking of the 1930s and Germany, how about the pseudo-classical, pseudo-mediaeval ‘O Fortuna’ by Carl Orff? The snobs don’t like it, but it’s a jolly piece. The percussive flavour is similar to something Grieg did.
When Carmina Burana was first performed, Der Phewrer was present. The German audience waited for his response at the end. Would he consider it to be decadent and degenerate? No. He applauded. The relieved audience joined in.
Carmina Burana – fantastic music. To see live show on my bucket list but probably not possible now.
The Western classical music tradition died on 1911 May 18, with the death of Gustav Mahler. Afterwards there was only dreck, and a few zombie operas being staged with hopeless nostalgia or even more hopeless “updating”.
I would totally agree with you if there were no Bartok and two or three more. In fact, i believe all arts, with the exception of literature, began to die at the end of the century and by 1920 they were already a rotten business.
cmon now
music is a matter of personal taste
Copeland and Gershwin offer superb stuff, if you care to open your mind and see it
don’t forget Gypsy Jazz.
Agreed, Norman. Which is why I was careful to use the word “classical”. It would be inappropriate for me to comment on most other kinds of music, of which I am almost entirely ignorant.
Dow ends today at 30,046
what do we want?
levitation!
when do we want it?
now!
it often appears that any news justifies the Street to push the markets higher.
Buydeng clinches the election, good enough for now (many would like to see the case reach the Supreme Court, still 8 weeks until January 20, plenty of time).
There are two major approaches to fixing our problem with many defaulting businesses and many unemployed individuals:
1. Fiscal approaches, involving taxes and spending. These are things like taxing the rich, and either giving the money directly to the poor, or sponsoring make-work projects that they can be employed in. These need to be passed by the legislature and signed into law by the President. If the Senate does not have a majority of Democrats, this approach is out.
2. Monetary (or interest rate and more debt approaches). These have to do with changing interest rates, and making debt easier to get. These approaches tend to produce bubbles in stock markets and housing prices. This approach seems to be the primary one likely to be used in the US in the future.
Added to these recently, there seem to be two more approaches:
3. Forgiving debt or postponing payments indefinitely. Sometimes this seems to be possible without legislative action. This transfers the inadequate funding problem elsewhere, generally to those providing the loans. Biden has talked about forgiving some college loans.
4. In Europe and Australia, programs to continue to pay workers, even when there is inadequate work for them to do from the workers to the employers.
The issue with (2) is that it tends primarily to help the wealthy. It cannot work very well for very long, without the bubble popping. The use of approach (2) by the US also tends to make the US dollar fall, and other currencies rise. This tends to make the price of oil rise, because oil becomes less expensive for other countries. From the point of US consumers, it tends to make both the price of oil and of imported goods more expensive. From the point of oil producers, the higher oil prices are at least temporarily good.
(3) and (4) haven’t been tried before. We will find out what impact they have.
From the WSJ Opinion Section: Too Much Caution Is Killing Covid Patients
Doctors should follow the evidence for promising therapies. Instead they demand certainty.
The article talks about the evidence in favor the use of ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, quercetin, and bromine for treating COVID-19, but the medical profession’s unwillingness to use these medications without absolutely certainty. According to the article:
The author, Dr. Joseph Ladapo, is an associate professor at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
They should add sub-lingual zinc to the list!
> Joe Biden makes Brexit intervention and says there must be NO BORDER on island of Ireland
Speaking to reporters in Wilmington, Delaware, Mr Biden said: “We do not want a guarded border.
“We want to make sure – we worked too hard to get Ireland worked out.
“I’ve talked with the British prime minister; I’ve talked with the Taoiseach; I’ve talked with others and I’ve talked with the French.
“The idea of having the border north and south once again being closed, it’s just not right.
“We’ve just got to keep the border open.”
Mr Biden, who has made much of his Irish heritage, previously said there would be no UK-US trade deal if Britain violates the terms of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement.
Boris Johnson, who argues parts of the deal are an infringement on British sovereignty, has been threatening to make this move.
Speaking in September the then presidential candidate said: “Any trade deal between the US and UK must be contingent upon respect for the agreement and preventing the return of a hard border. Period.”
Mr Biden was vice-president in 2016 when Barack Obama decisively controversially intervened in the EU referendum campaign to warn against a leave vote.
The then president claimed it would put Britain at the “back of the queue” for any future trade deal….
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1364213/joe-biden-brexit-news-ireland-border-no-deal-eu-trade-talks-latest
Spiked has a new article arguing that the causes of British sovereignty and Brexit would be best served through Irish unity.
Polls have indicated that most British voters, including TP voters, could not care less whether NI stays in UK. The south of Ireland is firmly in support of Irish unity and polls show that NI voters are pretty evenly split, with more support for UI among younger generations.
Brexit has very much brought the issue to the fore.
> Why Brexiters should support Irish unification
Britain’s union with Northern Ireland limits the sovereignty of Brits and Irish alike.
Brexit represents a seismic moment in modern British history. Withdrawing from the EU has put democracy and popular sovereignty front and centre of British politics. Brexit presents the British people with an opportunity to make their state more accountable to them and to redefine themselves for the post-imperial era.
At the same time, Britain’s imperial past remains a real weakness for Brexit Britain. Former prime minister Theresa May’s backstop and successor Boris Johnson’s Northern Ireland Protocol are examples of how Britain’s rule in Northern Ireland has limited Britain’s capacity to assert its sovereignty. Indeed, the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), an international treaty through which Britain rules Northern Ireland, has been relentlessly exploited by Remainers and the EU to limit the UK’s room for manoeuvre.
Brexit has demonstrated that the union with Northern Ireland is not only a denial of national sovereignty to the Irish people, but also a limit to the sovereignty of the British people. If Brexit supporters think this government will get round the problem by breaking the agreed Northern Ireland Protocol using the Internal Market Bill, they are mistaken. As Peter Ramsay, writing in the Full Brexit, put it:
‘The Brexit process has repeatedly demonstrated that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is afflicted with an institutionalised vulnerability to the demands of foreign governments because it continues to incorporate a territory where it lacks adequate authority.’
That vulnerability is built into the Good Friday Agreement itself, which gives a foreign government – namely, the pro-EU Republic of Ireland – a say over how part of the UK is ruled. That will prove a millstone around the neck of Brexit Britain’s domestic and foreign policy.
But there is a way out of the current cul-de-sac that can remedy the democratic deficit and set Anglo-Irish politics on a new course. The solution is that the British government declares itself in favour of Irish reunification and calls a border poll (as it is empowered to do under the GFA). This solution is bold, radical and democratic. It is time for democrats in Britain not only to support but actively campaign for an Irish border poll.
A border poll would be a democratic act
The British state has never enjoyed democratic legitimacy in Ireland. Every generation has produced republican resistance to its rule, from the United Irishmen to the Fenians through to constitutional Irish nationalism. When the Liberal government of David Lloyd George ignored the result of the 1918 Irish election, which had produced an overwhelming mandate for Irish self-determination, and partitioned the country with the six northern counties remaining part of Britain, it relied on the negation of democracy. Indeed, the gerrymandering, violence and repression used to partition Ireland 100 years ago were institutionalised in the Northern Irish state. It was and is a failed state.
…. The GFA, the backstop and the Northern Ireland Protocol are the consequence rather than the cause of the British state’s lack of authority in the six counties. It already lacked sufficient support and legitimacy to rule in Northern Ireland, and its Brexit policy has served to weaken its grip still further. Unsurprisingly, a clear majority of people in Northern Ireland fear Brexit, and perceive it as something imposed on them rather than something they feel part of.
The result is that although support for Irish reunification was already slowly growing, many polls now show that a majority would vote for an end to Partition in a border poll. The LucidTalk poll conducted in February showed a slim majority in favour of remaining in the union at 46.8 per cent to 45.4 per cent. But the most recent LucidTalk poll conducted in October showed strong support for Irish unity among the under-45s, with 43 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds, and 42 per cent of 25- to 44-year-olds, in favour of leaving the UK, compared to 34 per cent and 29 per cent against….
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/11/23/why-brexiters-should-support-irish-unification/
The latest poll in NI shows that a plurality of voters support Irish unity, while many are held back from support by the private health system in the south.
Now may be the time for Ireland to sort out an NHS.
> Backing for Irish unity outstrips support for union but many undecided – poll
MORE people would vote for a united Ireland than to maintain the north’s union with Britain, according to the findings of a new opinion poll.
Notably though, neither those advocating Irish unity nor maintaining the status quo had anything close to a majority – with almost a third of people seemingly undecided.
The research carried out by Lucid Talk found that the National Health Service would be an important factor in the way people voted in a border poll.
However, the survey found that regardless of the NHS, 35 per cent of people would vote for Irish unity, while 34 per cent would vote to remain in the UK.
The proportion of those supporting Irish unity is higher among younger voters, with 43 per cent of 18-24 year-olds saying that they would vote to leave the UK regardless of the NHS, compared to 34 per cent who said the same about remaining in the union.
Nevertheless, more than a quarter (26 per cent) said that the NHS would make them more likely to want to maintain the union, with support increasing among older people, and Alliance and Green voters.
More than half of Alliance supporters (54 per cent) and 52 per cent of Greens said the healthcare system would make them more likely to vote to stay in the UK.
Fewer than one in 10 Sinn Fein voters said the NHS would make them more likely to vote for the union, compared to 28 per cent of SDLP voters.
The poll found that 84 per cent of Sinn Féin and 56 per cent of SDLP voters would vote for a united Ireland, and 75 per cent of DUP and 55 per cent of Ulster Unionist voters would vote to remain in the UK, regardless of the health service….
https://www.irishnews.com/news/northernirelandnews/2020/10/27/news/backing-for-irish-unity-outstrips-support-for-union-but-many-undecided-poll-2110708/
Re: UK age of parenthood continues to rise
UK parents continue to put off having a family. Men are now 33.6 years old on average and women 30.7 – the oldest ever.
Delayed parenthood will tend to mean fewer kids overall. With a fertility rate of 1.57 for UK-born women in 2019, the number births would almost halve every two generations. Men first marry at 38 on average, women 35; around half (48%) of kids are born outside of marriage.
Half of UK adults are married, 10% are in a relationship and 40% are single. 35% have never been married.
Of course fewer kids could make sense in various ways but not to the capitalist economy that needs ever more workers. The British state calculates decades ahead how many workers it will need to grow its economy and to service its structural debt and it foresees a continuation of the present rate of 700,000 (about half that, net) entrants per year for decades to come.
Around 40% of kids are now of another background; 34% of primary school kids are not classified as ‘white British’ while any Europeans with a British passport are, including many kids of Irish or partial Irish descent.
> Mothers in England and Wales are now older than EVER: Average age of women who gave birth in 2019 reached a record-high of 30.7 years old, official data reveals
Mothers are now older than they have ever been, official figures published today show.
The average age of mothers in England and Wales reached a record high of 30.7 years in 2019.
It stayed at 33.6 years for fathers – which was a record high, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).
The government agency’s records show the average age of parents has been rising consistently since the 1970s.
At their lowest point, in 1974, the average age of a mother was just 26.4 years, and a father 29.4 years.
Woman have increasingly chosen to pursue careers before motherhood, statisticians have said. Uncertainty about employment is also likely to deter women if they cannot financially support a child in their 20s.
The data published today also revealed a 2.5 per cent drop in births in 2019; 640,370 birth registrations down from 657,076 in 2018.
….
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8953557/Mothers-England-Wales-older-EVER.html
I know that when my father’s father came over from Norway, he waited until he was 38 to marry. (His wife was “only” 30.) When times were bad, first in Norway, followed by the difficulty in establishing himself here, he waited to marry.
I imagine this is a general pattern. People often don’t get married until they feel they are ready to support a family. When times are difficult, we end up with a lot of single adults.
Oil-rich Kuwait faces looming debt crisis
For the first time in history, Kuwait’s oil revenues will not cover salaries and subsidies, which could spell financial trouble.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/11/24/when-kuwait-emerged-from-a-monthslong-coronavirus-lockdown-hundr
This story is McGibbs’ grade!
This is part of the problem:
This is another part:
Regarding mammoth wind turbines in the home country of the GND Stockholm Institute and the first CB of the planet.
A bit of an oopsie, a collapse of the hopium laced blue pill “enhanced” phallic pretend-erects.
“A 230-meter tall wind turbine built by Vestas Wind Systems A/S collapsed at a site in northern Sweden over the weekend.”
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2020/11/23/591674.htm
Of course, as I pointed out earlier, Sweden is having difficulty with its grid. It had to pay one of the nuclear plants to stay online, because the grid could not accommodate the amount of wind that they wanted to add. Read about this in the article, “A challenging summer for Nordic power systems,” found at the top of this website: http://www.pfbach.dk
Four nuclear power plants have been closed in Sweden since 2015. At least partly becasue they are burdened with a comparably heavy nuclear power tax on every kWh, constituting 1/5 of the total cost. This is on top of the general taxes on electricity. Of course I also expect that the phenomena you have described is part of the problem, that is, intermittent production of wind makes the kWh prices to erratic for nuclear power. Prices gets significantly lower when it’s windy. Wind produces 10-15% of the Swedens electricity, it’s enough to distort the prices.
Thank you for the reference. I not only read the article, but sent a reply. The article itself was solid news, but the headline, calling the incident a “rare” accident, was propaganda. When 1/17 of a wind farm fails before the installation is fully commissioned, that is a good reason to reconsider the technology.
An earlier article of P-F Bach told how wind was leading to lower use of co-generation in Sweden. Co-generation is when an electric power plant also sells direct heating services. Co-generation is a zero-carbon source of electricity. It is also being forced out by the artificially low electricity prices resulting from wind.
huge new Chinese mission to the moon.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-china-mission-material-moon.html
“The mission’s key task is to drill 2 meters (almost 7 feet) beneath the moon’s surface and scoop up about 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of rocks and other debris to be brought back to Earth, according to NASA.”
(sarc on) amazing! 4 pounds of rocks! (sarc off)
this is truly an amazing technical achievement, but due to the (unknown) costs in money and resources, this type of human adventure is not scalable.
this type of human adventure is not scalable
Depends on your reference point.
In a small enough box, I agree.
But those small boxes are a drag to live in.
metaphorical small boxes are a drag to discuss.
I would suggest the actual details of reality as a better alternative.
but anyway…
big box bAU tonight, baby!
scaling up 4 pounds of rocks from the moon somehow reminds me of the old joke:
“We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume”
The last I heard (not long ago), Tesla was indeed losing money on every sale, but making it up with “carbon offset” credits from the taxpayers.
We need jobs for people to work at to earn money. As long as this is viewed as a reasonable enterprise for the Chinese Government, they can at least hire some of the huge army of engineers and others who need jobs. In theory, if someone can figure out a way to keep the current system going, better knowledge about the moon might be helpful in the long run.
IF they can even figure out how to do it. I watched a video of a Chinese “space walk.” The podcaster pointed out the very obvious fakeries in the video. It they can do their fakes no better than that, how can they be expected to pull off the real thing?
Your digital ID and internal travel permit—the much touted “Freedom Pass”—will be made and developed in China.
Speaking during the G20 summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping promoted the idea of introducing globally-recognized health QR codes, saying it would help to restore coronavirus-hit international trade and travel.
“While containing the virus, we need to restore the secure and smooth operation of global industrial and supply chains,” China’s leader told the virtual G20 summit late on Saturday, while advocating the need to “reduce tariffs and barriers” and “liberalize” the trade of crucial medical supplies.
He also called for the creation of mechanisms that would simplify the “orderly flow” of people in the coronavirus-battered world. They could come in the form of QR codes containing people’s health information, Xi said.
China has proposed a global mechanism on the mutual recognition of health certificates based on nucleic acid test results in the form of internationally accepted QR codes. We hope more countries will join this mechanism.
QR codes of this type are already in active use in China, where internal travel has become largely dependent on them and the corresponding “health apps.” Instruments to track people’s movement, including mobile applications and QR codes, have been implemented amid the coronavirus pandemic by other nations as well, though no global system has emerged yet.
https://www.rt.com/news/507469-china-president-coronavirus-qrcodes/
Hail Xi!
Great Visionary!
For our Health and Freedom!
I am so moved at such deep philanthropy, I feel tears welling up…….
MOST FAVORED INDUSTRY
The US oil industry is flailing despite a $10 billion pandemic lifeline
By Michael J. Coren
November 23, 2020
The US oil and gas industry has received more than $10 billion from the federal government to cushion losses during the pandemic, according to a recent report analyzing federal financial data. That has offered a temporary reprieve even as the industries’ woes, which started well before the arrival of the coronavirus, have continued amid rock-bottom oil prices.
A consortium of non-profits—Bailout Watch, PublicCitizen, and Friends of the Earth—analyzed federal data showing more than 26,000 fossil fuel companies have tapped US cash, loans, and equity purchasing programs since March. The money mostly came in the form of tax cuts and paycheck support for workers. In addition to that, they got some $90 billion through indirect support, such as massive bond purchasing programs by the US Treasury.
“Viewed together, these benefits amount to a multipronged government bailout for the fossil fuel industry,” the report stated. “By directing aid to companies whose problems long predated the pandemic, the government has artificially prolonged the industry’s decline and postponed the coming transition to clean
https://qz.com/1936859/the-us-government-bailout-of-the-oil-and-gas-industry/
And Exxon Mobile has joined the rank of the Dinosaurs
Don’t Buy the Latest Rally in Exxon Mobil — It’s a Dinosaur
XOM stock rose after earnings — but only because the $680 million loss wasn’t as bad as expected
By Louis Navellier and the InvestorPlace Research Staff, Editor, Growth Investor Nov 18, 2020, 11:05 am EST
https://investorplace.com/2020/11/dont-buy-the-latest-rally-in-xom-stock-its-a-dinosaur/
While the Artic reaches unprecedented record temperatures!😜🤭👯
You go Good Old Boys…
We desperately need the fossil fuel industry, however. Intermittent electricity is not possibly a substitute.
yes, true.
“In addition to that, they got some $90 billion through indirect support, such as massive bond purchasing programs by the US Treasury.
“Viewed together, these benefits amount to a multipronged government bailout for the fossil fuel industry,” the report stated.”
$90 billion to support the FF industry!
that is money well spent.
Right, if we are going to lockdown our economy and send it into a depression resembling the early thirtes, we must keep our critical industries and especially energy from completely disappearing. But I suspect the groups mentioned (I recognize Friends of the Earth) really do want to kill FF completely regardless of the consequences. Some of these “do-gooder” groups are top heavy with people who have more zeal than wisdom. The MSM often reports the conclusions of these extreme groups with no mention of their political biases or analysis of the consequences if they got their way.
The big sources of news seem to be located in major cities. These areas tend to be heavily Democratic, and they often have high ratios of black citizens.
If these newspapers and other periodicals want to seem “relevant” to their local readership, they will report news with a slant that their readers might like.
The comment section is all over the place on this one. Even Lidia17 is mentioned!
Gail, what are your thoughts about Extinction Rebellion?
People need and want a new religion. Biden isn’t quite liberal enough, and also is too old, to lead this new religion.
The Extinction Rebellion gives a reason for people to band together, both on line and in person, to “do things,” that they think are beneficial in preventing climate change. If regular churches aren’t working for meeting other like-minded young (and middle aged) people, this may be an approach that is beneficial in this respect. They can go out to bars and meet one another, after their marches and other forms of protest.
Of course, building more wind, solar and transmission lines is a way to use more fossil fuels. But people don’t think of it that way. And it is hard to see that wind and solar will be at all long-lasting.
The Extinction Rebellion has many different sub-organizations in different parts of the world. My impression from looking at a few websites is that they differ significantly in what they are doing. The Atlanta Extinction Rebellion hasn’t done anything since April, that I could discern. Making this banner (in April) is one of the three accomplishments of Atlanta group.
http://www.xratlanta.org/were-fucked-fight-anyway/
The Chicago group talks about having solidarity with “Black Lives Matter.”
Self-organizing systems work in strange ways. If we think of this as a way for people with a common belief system to band together together to get to know each other better and to find ways to encourage the spending of money (energy) in preferred ways, then this is as good or bad an organization as any. The Sierra Club perhaps is not appealing enough any more.
Thanks, well reasoned.
Dennis L.
Biden is a man without convictions who has made a career of doing what he is told. The only question is which faction–the center left or the far left–will get the upper hand and boss him around. I suspect that Biden has the added “advantage” that he is blackmailable. I think the Clintons (drugs and more), Bush2 (drugs), and Obama (drugs and more) were all blackmailable, and that this was part of their appeal to their elite backers. Like Biden, they were selected to run and win, because they could be controlled. Trump is hated because he is a true outsider who is hard to control. The real rulers are oligarchs behind the scenes. Aristotle would have understood perfectly.
+++
You may be right, I am afraid.
To be fair, and speaking as someone who does not have a dog in this race, Trump has also always looked pretty blackmailable.
Gail, thanks for your interesting analysis. However, I don’t think XR is a “self-organizing system,” or, in other words, a grass-roots organization. It reeks of financing and control from Big Money, just as Greta Thunberg’s theatrics did.
Gail Bradbrook has a nutty background, as does Roger Hallam, who is “pursuing a PhD at King’s College London in radical campaign design.” Radicalism: now a fully establishment-endorsed field of “study” with the ultimate stamp of societal approval, ha ha!
https://www.cnn.com/2019/12/25/uk/extinction-rebellion-gail-bradbrook-gbr-intl/index.html
Perhaps XR should be viewed as part of a larger self-organizing system. This system includes the organizations and wealthy people that it gets funding from. This system, too, needs adequate funding. But since these folks tend to be in the top 0.1%, there will be far more funding available than to more “ordinary” organizations.
Regardless of where it gets funding from, the organization will tend to be stronger in some areas and weaker in others, depending on whether there is a large base of unhappy people that it can tap.
Whut?
Just another Soros NGO, CIA psyop, globalist neo-religion and faux resistance movement.
A money laudering scheme, private militia and intel-community think-tank.
Exactly, Nob. XRUK’s ideas are going to maim the few peasants who actually take any of this tripe seriously.
Some Money Rebellion options [gag]:
I am interested in taking out a small loan with a bank and donating the money to a community harmed by that bank (I might not pay them back!)
I have a mortgage and would be willing to consider non-payment if a number of other people with the same bank were also taking the same action
https://actionnetwork.org/forms/xr-money-rebellion/
Extinction Rebellion is just another tool, front, facade for Socialist or Communist revolutionaries, like Antifa and BLM, and any organization they can infiltrate. National Socialism has been effectively suppressed, but International Socialism is alive and well.
Mister BAU doesn’t like his Cheese MOVED…
STEP ON THE GAS
American oil and gas companies are asleep at the wheel on methane emissions
Natural gas flaring in Texas. The US gas industry is behind on methane regulations.
https://qz.com/1936769/us-oil-and-gas-companies-opt-of-out-methane-emission-agreement/?utm_source=YPL&yptr=yahoo
Tim McDonnell
November 23, 2020
In the global race to eliminate the world’s greenhouse gas footprint, some sources of emissions are easier to fix than others. One of the lowest-hanging fruits should be methane emissions from the oil and gas industry, which occur at every stage of production and distribution either through leaks or intentional flaring. Yet US oil and gas companies—the world’s largest producers of both products—have demonstrated once again that they’re not interested in fixing the problem.
On Monday, 62 oil and gas companies representing 30% of global oil and gas operations joined a new voluntary agreement to report and reduce methane emissions, organized by the Environmental Defense Fund, the UN Environment Programme, the European Commission, and the Climate & Clean Coalition. Not a single one was American.
Globally, methane emissions from oil and gas production amounted to about 82 megatons in 2019. That’s much less, by volume, than the industry’s multi-gigaton carbon dioxide footprint (not to mention emissions from actually burning the stuff). But because methane is up to 36 times more powerful than CO2 at capturing heat, it is disproportionately potent. As a result, reducing the oil and gas methane footprint by 75% would shave nearly 10% off the planet’s total greenhouse gas footprint, according to the Environmental Defense Fund. That’s more than taking every vehicle in America off the road.
The solutions are neither complicated nor expensive: Plug leaks, replace faulty old compressors and other equipment, and stop venting so much of it during drilling. Because conserving methane also means producers are capturing more gas to sell, solutions largely pay for themselves: According to the International Energy Agency, oil and gas methane emissions could be halved at zero net cost, using existing technology.
“This is the most immediate and cost-effective thing anybody can do to slow the rate of warming, now,” said Mark Brownstein, EDF’s senior vice president of energy.
In other words, this is a no-brainer. Yet the industry has been slow to recognize this problem or take meaningful steps to curb, or even measure, its methane. And American companies have proved to be more recalcitrant than any.
The EDF agreement replaces a 2014 version that had only 10 companies, and requires participants to work toward a 45% reduction in the industry’s methane emissions by 2025, and a 60-75% reduction by 2030. It includes big names like BP, Total, and Shell, as well as smaller companies from Europe, Thailand, Algeria, the UAE, and elsewhere.
In a way, it’s no surprise that American oil and gas companies are choosing not to participate. They lobbied the Trump administration to roll back Obama-era methane regulations, which it did in August, and have been notoriously lax about even attempting to monitor emissions. But recently, that has come back to haunt them. Earlier this month French authorities scuttled a proposed $7 billion deal to import liquified natural gas from Texas, specifically citing concerns about the lack of methane regulation in the US. That’s a potentially huge problem, since the global energy system is increasingly dependent on gas. Whatever reasons there may be to ignore methane, they aren’t worth being shut out of the global gas market, Brownstein said.
So LNG becomes like the tax stamp on cigarettes… or organic ‘label”. Got its carbon capture stamp. check Got its methane minimum release stamp. check ALL SYSTEMS GO. burn guilt free.
All of the proposed solutions cost money (and energy). Oil and gas companies are doing very poorly now. They don’t have money for reducing CO2 emissions. Building natural gas pipelines to take the natural gas away is very expensive.
If push comes to shove, oil and gas companies may just stop producing.
Here is how it always works: some well are more lucrative than others. The losers get shut in but the lower cost wells continue to produce. However, total production is lower, and eventually shortages develop, and users start bidding up the price. However, even if current prices cannot cover the total cost of a well, it may still continue to operate if the upfront costs are sunk and current production is providing positive cash flow.
I hope this can work for a bit.Maybe even long term. It will perhaps be the same money we have today, but we’d think about it differently.
“Bank of Canada deputy downplays risks of consumer default wave:
“The massive policy response from the Bank of Canada and the federal government successfully prevented the country’s financial system from buckling, though vigilance is still needed, according to a top central banker.”
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/covid-recession-could-strain-household-debt-bank-of-canada-1.1526684
“Canada’s stagflation problem: Stagflation is an economic ordeal characterized by the combination of rising inflation levels amidst low growth and therefore high unemployment. In this environment, the rising cost of goods and services outpaces the purchasing power of individuals and households in the real economy.
“Canada is a nation burdened by some of the highest debt levels of any advanced economy today. A confluence of record-high leverage levels for households, provincial and federal governments, and the private sector will complicate Canada’s economic recovery moving forward.”
https://www.fxstreet.com/analysis/canadas-stagflation-problem-202011221451
Canada’s economy has not been doing well, either, recently. This is as much of a problem as anything else.
There is no easy solution for our energy and some other problems, but many of our financial problems could be fixed by a severe deflationary depression and tsunami of private and public defaults. That may sound horrifying, but, let’s be realistic, the total level of debt in the global and many national economies simply cannot be repaid from economic growth. Default now or default later.
“The surging coronavirus is stoking fears of a fresh downturn for the world economy, heaping pressure on central banks and governments to lay aside other concerns and do more to spur demand.
“Hopes are mounting that Covid-19 vaccines will become available as soon as December, but widespread delivery will take months and infections are rising again in many large economies. Authorities are responding with more restrictions to limit the virus’s spread at the price of weaker economic activity…
“…policy makers [are] hearing calls for more stimulus, even when central banks are already stretched and starting to worry about froth in financial markets. Meantime, politicians from the U.S. to Europe are clashing over just how much they can and should do with fiscal policy.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-24/world-economy-risks-buckling-into-2021-despite-vaccine-nearing
“Policymakers are often accused of preparing to fight the last war. But now, for once, perhaps that’s exactly right. The aftershocks left by the 2008 financial crisis have only been exacerbated by coronavirus.
“Central bankers and finance ministers are still faced with a triple threat of secular stagnation, liquidity trap and a growth model centred on leverage.”
https://www.ft.com/content/55161e29-27cd-4f9f-ae03-ab6ade9bc04d
Exactly! Our problem is really the last war, and we are not winning it. It looks like COVID, but without the overlay of the financial problems, it would be far less of a problem.
That Astra-Zeneca vaccine that was just announced sounds very promising. It is based on well established vaccine technology, not the untested new tricks that some others are trying to develop. However, it will take time to scale up production, and to persuade enough people to take it so that herd immunity can emerge.
Another philosophical question: Does life imitates art (or we could say “models” or “plans”), as a poet suggested, or is it the other way?
https://www.rt.com/usa/507618-utah-monolith-kubrick-aliens/
The metal rectangular solid pictured looks like it could have easily been installed anytime, say in 1950.
“Iraq is seeking an upfront payment of about $2 billion in exchange for a long-term crude-supply contract, the latest sign of Baghdad’s growing desperation for cash as its economy unravels.
“The Middle Eastern country is grappling with a crisis brought to a head by low oil prices and OPEC+ output cuts. As state coffers dwindle and school teachers go unpaid, the country risks a repeat of upheaval last year that brought down the government and saw hundreds of protesters killed.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/cash-strapped-iraq-seeks-242-billion-upfront-payment-for-crude/ar-BB1bi4c2
“Kuwait, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, is facing a debt crisis.
“The pandemic has sent the price of oil crashing to all-time lows and pushed the petrostate toward a reckoning with its longtime largesse, just as a parliamentary election approaches in December.”
https://egyptindependent.com/oil-rich-kuwait-faces-reckoning-as-debt-crisis-looms/
seems to me that the mullahs and their mates never venture into the place of infidels that is OFW
otherwise they would have seen this coming years ago
If you are of the opinion that Gulfies (and other energy carrier exporters) are not to some degree versed in OFW / Surplus topics I’d like to ask you for just few extra minutes of your time, we can discuss that once in a lifetime opportunity to buy my Bavarian castle on the cheap..
Now, seriously they have seen ample warnings about this coming their (our) ways years ago, but the mitigation strategies were inadequate postponing or merely shuffling and juggling with set aside fin assets. Also diversifying into longer term nonviable sectors in this context, e.g. the case of Emirates and their tourism, global airline biz etc. It could be also a thing about sequencing and timing, believing they can dodge the bullet for a little while longer (vs other players), which is not that uncommon if compared to Chinese policy papers and their envisioned global role in future decades.
We can imagine the reality as several threads of smoke lines (mega trends) running in parallel where at some junction turbulence appears and the flows are interrupted into various chaotic vortexes.
In simple terms, it’s very hard to ride this horse.
fact remains that the mullahs have less awareness of what to do than you or me.
nations are like people.
given a lottery win, the tendency is to spend and spend, slow horses—fast women—it will last forever.
Even ‘investing’ part of the winnings is ultimately futile because all ‘investments’ depend on oil to sustain their value. (and yes that does include land)
See Saudi ‘technology hubs’—great stuff.
once a lifestyle has been established, the demand is that it should go on forever. Technology is the thing—technology delivers wealth.
but it can’t, so every politician struggles with fraudulent arithmetic, while the masses riot outside..
And eventually get inside. With predictable results.
I get brickbats on OFW from those who still think we have a political problem, and that prosperity is something to be voted into office.
This is why I think 2024 -on will be even worse, because the economic system will have depressed itself still further, despite Biden’s intentions.
This is the bottom line everywhere, not just in the mideast.
“Democracy is the child of plenty, poverty makes it an orphan and it starves to death.”
(NP law)
They have always known their petrostates will eventually crash. Like the old Saudi saying, “My grandfather road a camel, his son drove a car, my son flies in jet plan, his son will ride a camel.” In reality, I suspect the wealthy autocratic families who rule these countries have invested their profits abroad and are ready to bail out if their countries experience a disorderly crash. The losers will be their subjects.
Or as the Chinese say, “骑虎难下” (ride tiger hard get down)
Pious Muslims believe that resource shortages -and bad crops, pests, etc – are due to Divine disfavour caused, of course, by sin.
So when you can’t heat your house Norman, it will be because you were such a wicked old devil!
Repent! Repent!
And, of course, rich people are rich because they are so good, or favored by God.
I try to keep warm by trying to self replicate more
gets chillier with each winter these days
How do we define a wealthy country? Maybe that isn’t right.
their approach to finance is purely Dickensian
“something is bound to turn up”
methinks they will still be sixpence short of a pound in 2 years time
Dickensian and at times delusional. UAE is striving for something called a “knowledge-based” economy and Saudi is pushing ahead with “Vision 2030”, as they attempt to diversify away from oil:
https://www.controlrisks.com/our-thinking/insights/saudi-arabia-will-push-ahead-with-economic-diversification-despite-covid-19
I see that Saudi Arabia’s near-term projects listed are focused on developing more luxury resort and entertainment options. Without a great deal more travel than is going on currently, it is hard to see how these will be very successful.
entertainment in Saudi must get wildly exciting
a public execution gives any holiday a plus
Quite right. That is why in mediaeval England public executions needed extensive crowd control, while mystery plays usually required captive audiences.
An up-front payment for oil is very much like a loan. It also guards against a drop in oil prices in the future. Venezuela entered into agreements like this with China, and we can see where it got Venezuela.
If you get a guaranteed supply in return, it is like a futures contract. You may disagree, but I think this could be a win-win deal IF it can be enforced for the full length of the contract. The buyer will over pay now, but under pay a few years in the future. (I know, you disagree. Hopefully we will both be around several years from now for one of us to say, “I told you so!”)
“Faltering Oil Demand Is Wreaking Havoc On The Tanker Industry:
“The tanker market is in “cash burn mode”, said the chief executive of Diamond S Shipping, as quoted by Lloyd’s List.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Faltering-Oil-Demand-Is-Wreaking-Havoc-On-The-Tanker-Industry.html
“Fewer drivers in California consulted Apple Maps a day after Governor Gavin Newsom imposed strict lockdown measures to stem the spread of the coronavirus in some of the state’s worst-hit counties…
“Declines in requests for mapping may signal weaker demand for fuel with governments across the U.S. restricting movements because of the worsening pandemic.
“Nationwide gasoline stockpiles sit at the highest seasonal level in decades and other indicators are pointing to sluggish fuel consumption. According to Descartes Labs, which identifies a strong correlation between cell phone movements and demand, U.S. fuel consumption is at the weakest since June.”
https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/california-map-requests-point-to-limited-fuel-use-after-curfew
I looked at EIA’s “This Week in Petroleum” for last week, and it is hard to see a big problem. Gasoline stocks are slightly above the 5-year average range, but they have been far more above the average range in the past few months.
https://www.eia.gov/petroleum/weekly/
Stocks of Crude Oil, Distillate, and Propane also look reasonable, relative to the five year average range. Of course, we have had sluggish fuel use and high amounts in storage in the past, affecting the five-year average.
It sounds like the oil shipping industry was doing amazingly well before:
Shipping has been a very volatile industry for the last decade or so. The terms yo-yo and roller-coaster come to mind. Take a look at the Baltic Dry Index for instance.
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/baltic
It probably depends a little on the particular type of shipping. Container shipping acts somewhat differently than bulk cargo, which in turn acts differently from oil shipping.
Profanity alert!
For months, we have watched protesters from the left interrupt and ruin the dining experiences of ordinary people in protest. We have seen tables turned, diners, accosted and even large fireworks were thrown at diners. This weekend, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and his family found themselves at the receiving end of a harassing protester while they dined out, presumably in Asbury Park. As the conversation heated, Murphy masked up. It was wrong when the left did it and it is safe to say it’s wrong when the right does it, but these are now the rules the left has made for society. Each day, the bar of decency is lowered in America, but as Democrat politicians embrace this sort of behavior, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
https://youtu.be/0WyMTRHZg6Q
Hollywood is essential work!
You’ve got to laugh, ent ya!
As millions of Californians endure another coronavirus stay-at-home order, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has reportedly decided to exempt the state’s signature industry from his lockdown mandate, allowing film and TV shoots to continue. The decision not only affects celebrities but also the thousands of blue-collar crew members who light the sets, transport the scenery, and keep everyone fed.
Deadline reported that the governor’s latest order doesn’t apply to the entertainment production industry, which is on the list of essential work and is thus exempt from the rule.
https://deadline.com/2020/11/entertainment-industry-workers-exempt-from-california-governor-gavin-newsoms-new-stay-at-home-order-1234619285/
There is a need to keep the masses entertained!
I added a transcript of the energy panel discussion to the bottom of my post. It can also be accessed here:
Energy Panel Discussion, October 2020
Reasons to be cheerful:
WORLD’S BIGGEST COMPUTER CHIP CAN SIMULATE THE FUTURE ‘FASTER THAN THE LAWS OF PHYSICS’ (What – even bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger in his young days?!)
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/worlds-most-powerful-computer-simulation-ai-b1760338.html
And an excellent review of ARM versus INTEL, or phone versus laptop, and how ARM is drastically reducing electricity consumption:
ARM => scam coiner demand / accelerated development
Electricity consumption dropped a lot when LED screens began to be used, instead of cathode ray tubes. Reducing the energy consumption of portable computers will certainly help battery life, but it won’t have nearly the impact that the CRT to LED transition did on total electricity consumption.