What allows any type of energy to be sustainable? I would argue that one of the requirements for sustainability is adequate production of taxable revenue. Company managements depend upon taxable revenue for many purposes, including funding new investments and paying dividends to shareholders. Governments depend upon taxable income to collect enough taxes to provide infrastructure and programs for their growing populations.
Taxable income is a major way that “net energy” is transferred to future investment and to the rest of the economy. If this form of net energy is too low, governments will collapse from lack of funding. Energy production will fall from lack of reinvestment. This profitability needs to come from the characteristics of the energy products, allowing more goods and services to be produced efficiently. This profitability cannot be created simply by the creation of more government debt; the rise in the price of energy is tied to the affordability of goods, particularly the goods required by low-income people, such as food. This affordability issue tends to put a cap on prices that can be charged for energy products.
It seems to me that Green Energy sources are held to far too low a standard. Their financial results are published after subsidies are reflected, making them look profitable when, in reality, they are not. This is one of the things that makes many people from the financial community believe that Green Energy is the solution for the future.
In this post, I will discuss these ideas further. A related issue is, “Which type of oil production fell most in the 2018-2021 period?” Many people had expected that perhaps high-cost energy production would fall. Strangely enough, the production that fell most was that of OPEC oil exporters. These oil exporters often have a very low cost of energy production. The production of US oil from shale also fell.
If the ratio of Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) is to be used as a measure of which type of energy best meets our needs, perhaps the list of items to be included in EROEI calculations needs to be broadened. Alternatively, more attention needs to be paid to unsubsidized taxable income as an indicator of net energy production.
[1] According to EIA data, world crude oil production hit a peak of 84.5 million barrels per day (bpd) in the fourth quarter of 2018. Production fell as low as 72.3 million bpd in the third quarter of 2020. Production rebounded to 75.4 million barrels of oil a day, still 9.1 million bpd below peak production in the 4th quarter of 2018.
This drop in oil production was unprecedented. It far exceeded the drop in oil production at the time of the Great Recession of 2008-2009. As of the first quarter of 2021, crude oil production was roughly at its level in 2011. It still has not rebounded very far.
[2] The biggest drop in crude oil production during this period was that of the cartel led by OPEC and Russia. United States’ oil production also fell during this period. Production of the Rest of the World, in total, was fairly flat.
The big concern of OPEC and Russia was that crude oil prices were too low to provide adequate tax revenue for the governments of these countries. This is especially an issue for countries with few other industries besides oil. These oil exporting countries tend to have large populations, with little employment besides government-sponsored projects. Nearly all food needs to be imported, so subsidies for food need to be provided if the many people earning low wages are to be able to afford this food.
If oil prices are high, say $150 per barrel or higher in today’s dollars, it is generally fairly easy for governments to collect enough oil-related taxes. The actual cost of extraction is often very low for oil exporters, perhaps as little as $20 per barrel. The need for tax revenue greatly exceeds the direct expenses of extracting the oil. Companies can be asked to pay as much as 90% of operating income (in this example, equal to $130 = $150 – $20 per barrel, probably only relating to exported oil) as taxes. The percentage varies greatly by country, with countries that have higher costs of production generally paying less in taxes.
When oil companies are asked about their required price to break even, a wide range of answers is possible. Do they just quote the expense of pulling the oil from the ground? If so, a very low answer is possible. If shareholders are involved in the discussions, this is the answer that they would like to hear. Or do they give realistic estimates, including the taxes that their governments need? Furthermore, if the cost of extraction is rising, there needs to be enough profit that can be set aside to allow for the drilling of new wells in higher-cost areas, if production is to be maintained.
Because of the need for tax revenue, OPEC countries often publish Fiscal Breakeven Oil Prices, indicating how high the prices need to be to obtain adequate tax revenue for the exporting countries. For example, Figure 4 shows a set of Fiscal Breakeven Oil Prices for 2013 – 2014.
If a country tries to maintain the same standard of living for its population as in the past, I would expect that the fiscal breakeven price would rise year after year. This would occur partly because the population of OPEC countries keeps rising and thus more subsidy is needed. The fiscal breakeven price would also tend to rise because the easiest-to-extract oil tends to be depleted first. As a result, new oil-related investments can be expected to have higher costs than the depleted investments they are replacing.
In fact, if a person looks at more recently published fiscal breakeven prices, they tend to be lower than the 2013-2014 breakevens. I believe that this happens because oil exporters don’t want to look desperate. They know that attaining such high prices is unlikely today. They hope that by using more debt and reducing the standard of living of their citizens, they can somehow get along with a lower fiscal breakeven price. This is not a long term solution, however. Unhappy citizens are likely to overturn their governments. Such a result could completely cut off oil supply from these countries.
[3] A cutback in oil production is not surprising for the OPEC + Russia group, nor for the United States, given the chronically low oil prices. The profitability was too low for all of these producers.
Oil prices fell in late 2014. Fiscal breakeven prices calculated before that date likely gave a somewhat reasonable estimate of the needed prices for oil exporters to make an adequate profit, at that time. By early 2019, when the first decreases in oil production began, these countries were beginning to become fed up with chronically low oil prices.
It is interesting to note that Qatar, the country with the lowest breakeven price on Figure 4, decided to withdraw from OPEC effective January 1, 2019, rather than reduce its oil production. For Qatar, oil prices in late 2018 and early 2019 were close to adequate. Qatar mostly produces natural gas, rather than oil.
The decrease in US shale oil production reflects somewhat the same low profitability issue as OPEC + Russia exports, with an additional factor added. Besides low prices, there seems to be a well-spacing issue. There are reports that the spacing of shale wells gradually got closer and closer, until the closer spacing became counter-productive. The more closely spaced wells “cannibalized” the output from nearby wells. The extra drilling may also have released needed pressurization, reducing oil availability.
Such a problem would have been a difficult issue to pick up from EROEI analyses because there are not enough of these EROEI studies to see sudden changes. Figure 6 shows the timing of the drop in US oil production, relative to the drop in oil prices:
Figure 6 omits oil from the Gulf of Mexico, because its quantity tends to bounce around, especially when a hurricane hits. Because of this exclusion, the oil shown in Figure 6 reflects a combination of declining oil production from conventional oil wells plus (after about 2011) rising production from shale wells.
Figure 6 shows that production of oil from shale was developed during the 2011 to 2013 period, when oil prices were high. When oil prices suddenly fell in late 2014, shale producers suddenly found production very unprofitable. They cut back on production starting in April 2015. Shale production started rising again in 2017 after prices moved away from their extreme lows. Growth in oil production began to slow in late 2018, when oil prices again began to fall.
The big shutdown in world oil demand associated with the COVID-19 epidemic began in the second quarter of 2020. Shale production fell in response to low oil prices in March through November of 2020. As of April 2021, production does not seem to have rebounded significantly. We have seen reports that workers were laid off, making it difficult to add new production. If, indeed, well-spacing had become too close, this may have played a role in the decision not to ramp up production again. It is quite possible that many drilled but uncompleted wells will permanently remain uncompleted because they are too close to other wells to be useful.
Based on this analysis, it seems likely that US oil production for 2021 will be lower than that for 202o. Ultimately, the lack of adequate profitability can be expected to bring US oil production down.
[4] There are some high-cost oil producers who continue to produce increasing amounts of oil.
The keys to maintaining high-cost oil production seem to be
- Large up front investments to make this production possible with little new investment
- Governments that are not very “needy” in terms of revenue from oil taxes
Even with these considerations, having an unprofitable or barely profitable oil industry weakens a country. Neither Brazil nor Canada is doing very well economically in 2021. These countries will likely reduce new oil investment in the next year or two, if inflation-adjusted oil prices do not rise significantly.
[5] Somehow, “Green Energy” has been allowed to compete in the energy field with huge subsidies. If Green Energy is actually to be successful long-term, it needs to be profitable in the same way that fossil fuel energy needs to be profitable. If wind and solar are truly useful, they need to be very profitable, even without subsidies, so that they can support their governments with taxes.
There tends to be little recognition of the extent of subsidies for renewable energy. For example, allowing the electricity from wind turbines and solar panels to be put on the grid whenever it is generated is a huge subsidy. Such generation mostly substitutes for the coal or natural gas used by electricity-producing plants, rather than the electricity generated by these plants. The many reports we see that compare the cost of intermittent electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels with the cost of dispatchable electricity generated by fossil fuels are simply misleading.
Furthermore, electricity generated by wind turbines and solar panels doesn’t need to be sufficiently profitable to pay for the much larger grid they require. The larger grid requirement occurs partly because the devices tend to be more distant from users, and partly because the transmission lines need to be sized for the maximum transmission required, which tends to be high for the variable production of renewables.
The lack of adequate profitability of wind and solar on an unsubsidized basis strongly suggests that they are not really producing net energy, regardless of what EROEI calculations seem to indicate.
It might be noted that in past years, oil exporters have been accused of giving large energy subsidies to their oil producing companies. What these oil exporters have been doing is charging their own citizens lower prices for oil products than the high (international) price charged to foreign buyers. Thus, high taxes were collected only on oil exports, not from local citizens. With the fall in oil prices in late 2014 (shown in Figures 5 and 6 below), this practice of differential pricing has largely disappeared.
“Oil subsidies” in the US consist of financial assistance to low income people in the US Northeast who continue to heat their homes with oil. These subsidies, too, have mostly disappeared, with lower oil prices and the availability of less expensive forms of home heating.
[6] It seems to me that an economy really has three different requirements:
- The total quantity of energy must be rising, at least as rapidly as population.
- The types of energy available must match the needs of current energy-consuming devices, or there needs to be some type of transition plan to facilitate this transition.
- There must be enough “net energy” left over, both (a) to fund governments with taxes and (b) to fund any transition to different energy-consuming devices, if such a transition is required.
Thus, in order for a transition to Green Energy to really work, it must be extremely profitable on a pretax, unsubsidized basis, so that it can pay high taxes. The greater the need for a transition to different energy consuming devices, such as heat pumps for buildings and electric vehicles of many types, the greater the need for more net energy generated by Green Energy sources to help facilitate this transition.
High profitability for energy products is normally associated with a very low cost of energy production. Furthermore, the type of Green Energy available needs to be in a very useful form. In a sense, there are really two different energy transitions required:
- The output of intermittent electricity devices must be brought up to grid standards, using a combination such as many long distance transmission, very substantial battery backup, and the use of many devices to provide the electricity with the precise characteristics it needs.
- As mentioned above, if greater use of electricity is to be made, a transition to electric devices is required.
Both of these transitions will require a significant quantity of energy (really net energy not used elsewhere in the system) to accomplish. If fossil fuel energy is being phased out, an increasing share of this net energy will need to come from the Green Energy sector by way of the tax system. Such a system will only work if the Green Energy sector is very profitable on a pre-tax basis.
[7] Figure 8 suggests that the world has a problem with low energy consumption per capita right now.
There is a strong correlation between growth in total energy consumption per capita and how well the economy is doing. The slight downward slide in energy consumption per capita in 2019 indicates that the economy was already doing poorly in 2019. The huge downward shift in 2020 dwarfs the downward slide in 2009, when the world was in the midst of the Great Recession. My earlier research, looking back 200 years, indicates that low growth in energy consumption per capita is likely to lead to conflict among nations and collapses of governments. Epidemics are also more likely to spread in such periods, because greater wage and wealth disparity tends to occur when energy supplies are constrained.
Any shift away from fossil fuel energy to Green Energy will almost certainly mean a huge drop in world energy consumption per capita because the world doesn’t produce very much Green Energy. Such a drop in energy consumption per capita will be a huge problem, in itself. If the Green Energy sector doesn’t generate much taxable income without subsidies, this adds an additional difficulty.
[8] Conclusion: Examination of the EROEIs for various fuels, using calculations the way that they are performed today, gives inadequate information regarding whether a transition to another set of fuels is feasible.
Researchers need to be looking more at (a) the total quantity of energy produced and (b) the profitability of producing this energy. An economy is only possible because of profitable businesses, including energy businesses. A person cannot assume that energy prices will rise from today’s level because of scarcity. Today’s huge debt bubble is producing very high copper and steel prices, but it is not producing correspondingly high oil prices.
Heavily subsidized energy products look like they might be helpful, but there is little reason to believe this to be the case. If Green Energy products are truly producing net energy, we should expect this fact to be reflected in the unsubsidized profits that these products generate. In fact, if Green Energy products are truly producing large amounts of net energy, they should be so profitable that businesses will be rapidly ramping up their production, even without subsidies or mandates.
Put your useless masks back on because the fraudulent Certificate of Vax ID cases are surging again.
https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/covid-cases-los-angeles-indoor-mask-mandate-51626437577?mod=mw_latestnews
As Cases Surge, Los Angeles Brings Back Its Indoor Mask Mandate
Published: July 16, 2021 at 8:13 a.m. ET
Health officials are battling a surge in Covid-19 cases across the U.S.
Los Angeles will bring back its indoor mask mandate for all. In New York City, the Yankees baseball team suspended a game Thursday night after a number of players tested positive. At least some of them were vaccinated.
There is an editorial in the WSJ today that says that hospitalization rates seem to fall when Delta becomes the dominant COVID-19 variant. This isn’t 100% proven, but they certainly don’t rise.
The Reassuring Data on the Delta Variant
There’s no sign of a surge in hospitalization or severe illness, and the vaccines remain extremely effective.
So far no Devil Covid… so far….
Yet the MSM keeps warning… and remember this (which pulled off of the CTV news site)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/uLStFKAw8Okm/
This is what Team Bossche predicted… Calm Before the Nightmare
“Global issuance of sustainable debt is on track to surpass $1 trillion this year with green bonds dominating…
“With corporations and financial institutions under growing pressure from investors to up their environment, social and governance (ESG) game, the issuance of bonds to raise money for climate-related or social projects, or linked to sustainability targets, is an increasingly popular option.”
https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/global-sustainable-debt-issuance-will-crack-1-billion-mark-2021-iif-2021-07-15/
“The Japanese central bank is planning to offer zero-interest long-term financing to banks that finance energy transition efforts by Japanese companies towards achieving the country’s decarbonisation goal by 2050.”
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news/2234883-japans-central-bank-to-back-energy-transition-finance
Japan has to import pretty much any energy it uses. Pretty much the only exception is its nuclear, which of course uses imported uranium.
According to the article,
“China, Chile, Turkey and Mexico are the biggest issuers currently.”
I wonder how these projects will actually turn out. Lots of things could go wrong.
“Falling solar wholesale prices in California mean subsidies will likely be needed to sustain the cost-effective deployment of PV in the state over the next three decades, according to a new report from research centre the Breakthrough Institute.
“While California is a world leader in solar, with around 20% of its electricity coming from the technology, the fact that PV generation is concentrated in a relatively short period of the day means it is susceptible to value deflation.”
https://www.pv-tech.org/concerning-decline-in-california-solar-prices-reducing-incentive-for-new-installs-report/
value deflation is a nice way to say some fraction of it is worthless
And here is an example:
TAN
Invesco Solar ETF (ETF)
Jan 1, 2021: 125
July 16, 2021: 82
Added solar is certainly not of much value to the electric grid. A greater and greater share of the output needs to be stored until it can be used, or simply not used. Building all of required batteries becomes impossible. At some point, the added solar needs to be stored from summer to winter, something that is pretty much impossible.
According to the article, a study says that it is impossible to sell the output of solar PV for as much as it costs to build and install it.
I would expect that US$26/MWh or US$27/MWh is close to the wholesale cost of natural gas generated electricity.
“Australian government stokes fears that Europe’s new carbon levy could hurt jobs… The Morrison government has renewed fears that the European Union’s new carbon tariffs could hit Australian jobs, despite Australia’s major exports being largely spared from the first stage of the scheme.
“Exports to Europe of cement, iron and steel, aluminium, fertiliser and electricity are the first to face potential costs under a new climate policy unveiled by the EU late on Wednesday night Australian time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/15/australian-government-stokes-fears-that-europes-new-carbon-levy-could-hurt-jobs
KSA on the brink of “Total Collapse”
Saudi Aramco’s dividend obligations appear to be crushing the company – $75 Billion/yr. they are having to cancel projects and issue poorly received bond offerings to maintain this commitment from their fiasco of an IPO. Swirling around the toilet bowl…
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Huge-Dividend-Cripples-Worlds-Largest-Oil-Company.html
This makes we happy. I have a bottle of Champagne set aside for the day KSA is gone.
Lewis Grizzard of Atlanta fame once said the only thing you need to have for SHTF is a bottle of champagne and 2 glasses
This does sound like a disaster. As I recall, only 5% of the company stock was sold, but they had to make significant commitments to do that. According to the article,
Love this
The UK is “not out of the woods yet” and people should act with caution as Covid restrictions in England end on Monday, Prof Chris Whitty has said.
England’s chief medical officer warned that Covid hospitalisations were doubling every three weeks and could hit “scary numbers” in future.
Prof Whitty said the pandemic still had a “long way to run in the UK”.
Solicitor General Lucy Frazer said while cases will rise, there were “consequences for not opening up”.
But she warned: “Of course, if we get into a situation where it is unacceptable and we do need to put back further restrictions, then that of course is something the government will look at.”
It comes as:
the UK recorded almost 50,000 new cases on Thursday – the highest daily number since January
more than half a million self-isolation alerts were sent to people using the NHS Covid-19 app in England and Wales during the first week of July – a rise of 46% on the previous week
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57858864
If vitamin D and C are not being pushed on the population I have not sympathy.
Patents, Ed. Patents!
Why take boring unpatented vitamins when you can have exciting, cutting edge, patented injections from Big Pharma? Only children and old ladies take vitamins. If you want to be cool these days you’ve got to dabble in patented experimental gene therapy treatments.
hahahahaha… this is GREAT
Covid cases are soaring in the Netherlands after easing lockdown – the UK is about to make the same mistakes
Cases have risen from 500 a day to 10,000 since the end of June, and the country is heading back into restrictions
https://inews.co.uk/opinion/netherlands-covid-cases-after-easing-lockdown-uk-19-july-same-mistakes-1104945
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/protests-erupt-across-greece-government-bans-unvaccinated-public-spaces
Lots of people… but don’t see any fires yet…
The complexity of the human habitats is rising. Keeping them operational becomes harder and harder.
And some species, that spread the diseases, favour human habitats:
Species that can make us ill thrive in human habitats
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02189-5
Squeezing humans into smaller spaces and letting some spaces that humans have light occupation go back to wild won’t fix the problem, I would guess. The closer we are together, the more illnesses spread.
“Smaller units, instead of meaning a smaller cubicle inside a very large structure, could mean very small units that are detached and surrounded by some open space–like a shed. The advantages for supply-chain durability, portability, standardization, versatility would lower cost and mitigate many of the problems people think will accrue from not sticking people on top of one another in high-rises.
Last week, the news about excavating the first Potter engine in Slovakia caught my attention:
https://www.aktuality.sk/clanok/905458/archeologovia-hlasia-z-novej-bane-jedinecny-objav-z-potterovho-stroja-zostalo-viac-ako-cakali/
https://www.archaeology.org/news/8867-200721-slovakia-steam-engine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine
https://youtu.be/zEYtMKio1io
https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Isaac_Potter
“Potter was recruited by Joseph Emanuel Fischer, the son of the famous architect Fischer von Erlach, to travel to Austria to construct Newcomen engines. The silver mines of the Austrian Monarchy were constrained by flooding. The waterwheels had reached their technical limits, and water supply was limited. A successful transfer of technology saved the Habsburg state from bankruptcy: the steam engine replaced waterwheels in the battle against pit water.
The first atmospheric steam engine of the Monarchy was constructed in 1721 in Königsberg bei Schemnitz in what is now Slovakia. In the following year, another was constructed at the Schwarzenberg Palace. Both engines were built by Isaac Potter and Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach. Potter improved the control of the engine imported from England and from 1730 he successfully built further installations in the Slovakian coalfields. The Schwarzenberg engine fed the reservoir of a fountain.”
The saying goes, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”
The only thing is the Slovaks had nothing to do with the building of such engine.
Dear Gail,
Thank you for another insightful post.
I am interested in the energy per capita figures for Africa.
I went to the BP report you mention, but I was unable to find much (most African countries are simply lumped together as ‘Other African countries’).
I have long suspected that energy per capita must have been falling on the continent for quite some time, due not only to the fossil fuel predicament that you write about regularly but also to:
– a lack of infrastructure
– quickly rising populations
I have long assumed that the ‘Rising Africa’ drum beaten by the media-NGO-political class is (mostly) false, apart from enclaves of wealth, if only due to energy constraints, and that African countries would probably be among the first to ‘collapse’ (as we may be witnessing now in South Africa, although Lebanon seems to have got there first).
Would you know where to find reliable energy per capita figures for African countries? (and in particular, for Ethiopia, a country with (allegedly) close to 10% economic growth for most of the 2010-20 decade) as well as a booming population. Ethiopia has often been touted as a good pupil: ‘Africa’s China.’
Thanks again for your writing.
Yves-Marie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JevGPfr7TvE
It’s all good
The International Energy Agency has information through 2018 for Ethiopia. A search for “IEA Ethiopia data” will probably get you this information.
https://www.iea.org/countries/ethiopia
If you click around on the page, you can find a number of tabs with charts of different things, including electricity generation by source. Most of Ethiopia’s energy consumption is burned biomass. BP and the US EIA mostly exclude locally gathered and sold biomass.
The EIA has some information about individual small countries. For Ethiopia, the data is through 2018. There are several tabs that give more information
https://www.eia.gov/international/overview/country/ETH
If you click around enough, you can find electricity data through 2018.
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/country/ETH/electricity/electricity-consumption?pd=2&p=0000002&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=none&l=249–69&s=315532800000&e=1577836800000
A company named “Enerdata” has data it wants to sell about 186 companies. It shows this information for Ethiopia through 2019. This link gives a chart of energy consumption for Ethiopia through 2019.
https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/ethiopia/
Thank you very much, very thorough!
I’ll go over these sources carefully.
Yves-Marie
I am sure Dennis L will come back with some treatise saying it is not necessary to bring tax revenues to be sustainable and Elon Musk and his mythical argonauts will bring the materials from an asteroid 400 hundred miles away.
That aside, it might be feasible to run a smaller system in a private island or fiefdom like Dubai or Qatar. Rulers of these locales do not have to feed their subjects, they have no labor laws (the laborers to these countries are brought from the Indian Subcontinent, and are paid up front so if they are injured, too bad. Plenty or replacements)
so if they push for the development while they have plenty of oil and no need to please the people a higher status of living, then they might make it.
Best Facebook post I ever got
Ten years from now we will look back and think what a strange year 2021 was. Then we will pick up our machete and make our way over the wasteland staying to the undergowth to avoid the cannibal scavenger.
Status report on the wealthy of Manhattan. The blue prints for hill top mansions have been rolling in to high end builders for the last two years here in the mid Hudson. This month they stopped and the builders are firing staff.
Thanks. I predicted, ha ha fooolish me, that the US housing surge would continue throughout 2021, since there really isn’t much time for the tide to turn. So perhaps now we have one small note of anecdotal evidence that the housing bubble will stop inflating soon. That doesn’t mean the bubble will pop spectacularly any time soon, but 2022 sounds about right for the crayzzzeee house inflation to end.
David, it is interesting to see if you trace back housing how many little industries are attached to it. Mortgage companies title companies trades people lumber companies furniture companies the list goes on and on. I thinkThat is why housing is always a big driver for the economy. And afterwords the house becomes a piggy bank of sorts.
Interesting! Recently, I haven’t been getting calls about selling my home either. I still get post cards from realtors wondering whether I would be willing to list my property.
I know lumber prices are way down.
The local hospital monopoly in my area is having a staffing shortage. It is requiring the vax in violation of the Nuremberg Code. Many staff are quitting. I had a procedure today when I mentioned the Nuremberg Code the nurse stated taking notes on his cell phone.
The little waif of a young woman that brought me to up explained why they had missing staff. I told her about Nazis being hung for medial experimentation and that I hoped the current criminals against the code would be tried ad hung if found guilt. She quickly dropped me off and ran.
All and all it was a good day.
I’m not surprised
(assuming you’re not doing an Eddy and fantasising of course)
Come now, you hope that they will be “tried and hanged,” not “tried and hung.” One day the Grammar Nazis will put you on trial!
Gail, thanks important point the containing nation state needs to also function.
Figure 4 is most helpful. I you can crop off the graphic at the top of it that says figure 11 that would be clearer.
I fixed the graphic. This is the new image:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/APICORP-OPEC-Fiscal-Breakeven-Prices-2014-1024×580.png
I am on the Advisory Board to the Biophysical Economics Institute (along with a long list of other people).
https://bpeinstitute.org/our-board/
This group would like some things to refute “Intermittent wind and solar will save us.”
I am not convinced that EROEI calculations will solve the problem, however.
This group would like some things to refute “Intermittent wind and solar will save us.”
Here is a 3 step thought experiment I used on a colleague (disclaimer, he is an engineer, not a paper-pusher or e-mail forwarder, so he knows production inputs and outputs):
1. Took a random product which is “produced” in our company and was visible in the 2m mandated safe-space.
2. Asked to see *any* supplier down our supply chain who uses 50% renewables in the production department *only* (just production, not supply, R&D, support, engineering, fixed expenses). Note that I did not go for the “Full Monty” 100% renewable production.
3. Wait…
“Those whom the Gods would destroy they first send crazy”.
Cognitive dissonance could be what is sending people crazy. Many issues in society are now cloaked in religious fervour – green energy, vaccines, the pandemic, climate change etc. The benefits of solutions are ephemeral at best and typically evaporate to nothing, or turn out to have a net negative impact.
However, being cloaked in religion means that no logical analysis or retreat from a position is permitted, thus the cognitive dissonance builds up until a fuse blows.
People are also blinded by the non-infinite nature of the world. They don’t realise that eventually stuff they loot and burn down doesn’t get replaced. Everything takes a step down.
The other aspect is corruption, which is a major factor in South Africa’s demise. Their particular tribalism being another. The ANC has been milking the country dry for sometime, living off decaying infrastructure built up during the white-rule era.
As EROEI declines and the total pie gets smaller, looting by the elites becomes an ever larger part of the pie and their lite looting appears to accelerate, perhaps because they know time’s running out.
BTW Orlov is having a field day with the US’ ignominious retreat from Afghanistan. He reckons a cost of $2.2T ish, which dwarfs the CIA’s drug revenue from there. Imperial treasure thrown to the wind.
Question for the panel:
You can’t run industrial civilisation without technicians, specialists etc and if the vaccines are killshots, as opposed to just more $$ for Big Pharma and the usual psychos, who’s going to run the place afterwards?
So do the Elders exist, what’s their plan? Are the Faucis et al just useful idiots?
So do the Elders exist, what’s their plan? Are the Faucis et al just useful idiots?
Of course they do. But they are out of their heads kaaabaalaa worshipping cultists. The Faucis, Gateses and Big Pharma industrial complex are all expendable. All being prepped for replacement by new agey techno mix promise of paradise under Hegemon Kushner or some other messiah on a stick that you will forced to bend the knee to if you want to stick around for a while longer.
Who needs afghani opium trade when you can manufacture tons of Fentanyl for peanuts?
I agree about the “technicians.” Anything happens to these… they walk off the job for some reason… any reason… lets just say, no one is going to pick up the slack. I would say the same applies to truck drivers. Not an easy job. If most of them decide to stand down, quit, take early retirement… everything grinds to a halt.
For now, I don’t believe the vaxxines are killshots. I believe the experiment involves injecting a certain number of people with placebo. The rest are subjected to various tests which have yet to be adequately verified through vial analysis. The whole spike protein narrative could be a red herring. Graphene oxide could be another. The massive number of deaths and adverse reactions could be from other ingredients that affect sensitive people during the first weeks. If you inject a billion people, including people that would not normally line up for a flu shot let alone experimental mrna shots then of course you’re going to see a much larger number of damaged individuals. Nothing more nothing less.
We have evidence that polysorbate 80 in the recent flu shots may have caused the first and second wave of cooovid – dry pneumonia, blood clots, auto-immune response etc. in sensitive individuals followed by deliberate malpractice and application of euthanasia drugs to drum up death numbers.
But anything is possible come the fall. Major conflict is looking more likely. Weather modification is already active causing conditions for mass starvation. Crops are bought and allowed to rot. Starvation and nutritional deficiencies with war as cover are the true cause of disease outbreaks leading to mass death. Of course, the historians will blame the fall of civilisation on a viruuuus. Scare stories for children.
COMPASSIONATE EXTINCTION PLAN (CEP)
1. Every country on the planet is on board with the Injections. Even Sweden. When have all countries aligned on any issue? Never.
2. Not a single MSM outlet is interviewing any of the expert dissenters – Yeadon, Bridle, Montagnier, Bossche etc… and the mainstream social media platforms are blocking them.
Why?
Conventional Oil peaked in 2005 http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/C-Cdec141.png
Shale in 2018.
According to Rystad, the current resource replacement ratio for conventional resources is only 16 percent. Only 1 barrel out of every 6 consumed is being replaced with new resources
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Biggest-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-Of-2019.html
Shale binge has spoiled US reserves, top investor warns Financial Times. https://energyskeptic.com/2021/the-end-of-fracked-shale-oil/
Shale boss says US has passed peak oil | Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/320d09cb-8f51-4103-87d7-0dd164e1fd25
THE PERFECT STORM : The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel https://ftalphaville-cdn.ft.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
“The global economy was facing the worst collapse since the second world war as coronavirus began to strike in March, well before the height of the crisis, according to the latest Brookings-FT tracking index. “The index comes as the IMF prepares to hold virtual spring meetings this week, when it will release forecasts showing the deepest contraction for the global economy since the 1930s great depression. https://www.ft.com/content/9ac5eb8e-4167-4a54-9b39-dab48c29ac6c
Fed is sharply increasing the amount of help it is providing to the financial system (source) Banks did not trust each other. Similar situation when Lehman collapsed
Oil Gluts – do NOT indicate we have found more oil. We just pumped what’s left too fast.
Summary In 2019 a second Perfect Storm was approaching – the central banks had been doing ‘whatever it takes’ for over a decade…. Essentially nothing was off the table — throw the kitchen sink at pushing GFC2.0 into the future. In 2019 the guns were blazing but the beast was no longer held at bay…
What do you do when you are burning far more oil than you discover — and your efforts to offset the impact of expensive to produce oil push you to the edge of the cliff? You can accept your fate and allow the beast to shove you into the abyss…. Or you can take the ‘nuclear option’ and shut down as much of the economy as possible, preserve remaining oil and pump in trillions of dollars of life support to keep the system feebly alive.
Punchline: The problem global leaders face is that if you unleash the nuclear option without some sort of cover, the sheeple and the markets would be thrown into a panic and you risk blowing things up prematurely. So you need a reason for putting the global economy on ice — one that does not spook the masses – one that is big enough to justify such epic amounts of stimulus and extreme policies — and one that allows you to explain ‘this is just temporary – once this is gone — we will get back to normal’
A pandemic is the perfect cover.
End Game – Covid was foisted on us as cover for the response to peak oil (if we don’t slow the burn oil prices go through the roof and we collapse) but it is also being used to convince billions to be Injected. The Injection is meant to cause extremely deadly variants like this .. only worse because we are deploying into a pandemic so everyone dies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous.
The reason for this is that 8B people need cheap oil to live. They would starve without it. And 8B people without food would result in epic starvation, violence, rape and cannibalism. Industrial civilization ends soon after peak oil. Unfortunately we also have 4000 spent fuel ponds that will boil off and release toxic substances for centuries. These facilities cannot be controlled with computers and energy. So even the subsistence level humans die as they consume these toxins in the food, air and water.
The PTB understand all of this and that is WHY every leader is on board with the Injections. There is NO way out of this — so they have decided to mitigate the suffering as much as possible by putting us down.
https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/1600×900/651857-Werner-Herzog-Quote-Civilization-is-like-a-thin-layer-of-ice-upon.jpg
COMPASSIONATE EXTINCTION PLAN (CEP)
1. Every country on the planet is on board with the Injections. Even Sweden. When have all countries aligned on any issue? Never.
2. Not a single MSM outlet is interviewing any of the expert dissenters – Yeadon, Bridle, Montagnier, Bossche etc… and the mainstream social media platforms are blocking them.
Why?
Conventional Oil peaked in 2005 http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/C-Cdec141.png
Shale in 2018.
According to Rystad, the current resource replacement ratio for conventional resources is only 16 percent. Only 1 barrel out of every 6 consumed is being replaced with new resources
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Biggest-Oil-Gas-Discoveries-Of-2019.html
Shale binge has spoiled US reserves, top investor warns Financial Times. https://energyskeptic.com/2021/the-end-of-fracked-shale-oil/
Shale boss says US has passed peak oil | Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/320d09cb-8f51-4103-87d7-0dd164e1fd25
THE PERFECT STORM : The economy is a surplus energy equation, not a monetary one, and growth in output (and in the global population) since the Industrial Revolution has resulted from the harnessing of ever-greater quantities of energy. But the critical relationship between energy production and the energy cost of extraction is now deteriorating so rapidly that the economy as we have known it for more than two centuries is beginning to unravel https://ftalphaville-cdn.ft.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Perfect-Storm-LR.pdf
“The global economy was facing the worst collapse since the second world war as coronavirus began to strike in March, well before the height of the crisis, according to the latest Brookings-FT tracking index. “The index comes as the IMF prepares to hold virtual spring meetings this week, when it will release forecasts showing the deepest contraction for the global economy since the 1930s great depression. https://www.ft.com/content/9ac5eb8e-4167-4a54-9b39-dab48c29ac6c
Fed is sharply increasing the amount of help it is providing to the financial system https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/fed-repo-overnight-operations-level-to-increase-to-120-billion.html Banks did not trust each other – similar situation when Lehman collapsed
Oil Gluts – do NOT indicate we have found more oil. We just pumped what’s left too fast.
Summary In 2019 a second Perfect Storm was approaching – the central banks had been doing ‘whatever it takes’ for over a decade…. Essentially nothing was off the table — throw the kitchen sink at pushing GFC2.0 into the future. In 2019 the guns were blazing but the beast was no longer held at bay…
What do you do when you are burning far more oil than you discover — and your efforts to offset the impact of expensive to produce oil push you to the edge of the cliff? You can accept your fate and allow the beast to shove you into the abyss…. Or you can take the ‘nuclear option’ and shut down as much of the economy as possible, preserve remaining oil and pump in trillions of dollars of life support to keep the system feebly alive.
Punchline: The problem global leaders face is that if you unleash the nuclear option without some sort of cover, the sheeple and the markets would be thrown into a panic and you risk blowing things up prematurely. So you need a reason for putting the global economy on ice — one that does not spook the masses – one that is big enough to justify such epic amounts of stimulus and extreme policies — and one that allows you to explain ‘this is just temporary – once this is gone — we will get back to normal’
A pandemic is the perfect cover.
End Game – Covid was foisted on us as cover for the response to peak oil (if we don’t slow the burn oil prices go through the roof and we collapse) but it is also being used to convince billions to be Injected. The Injection is meant to cause extremely deadly variants like this .. only worse because we are deploying into a pandemic so everyone dies https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/tthis-chicken-vaccine-makes-virus-dangerous.
The reason for this is that 8B people need cheap oil to live. They would starve without it. And 8B people without food would result in epic starvation, violence, rape and cannibalism. Industrial civilization ends soon after peak oil. Unfortunately we also have 4000 spent fuel ponds that will boil off and release toxic substances for centuries. These facilities cannot be controlled with computers and energy. So even the subsistence level humans die as they consume these toxins in the food, air and water.
The PTB understand all of this and that is WHY every leader is on board with the Injections. There is NO way out of this — so they have decided to mitigate the suffering as much as possible by putting us down and here is the mechanism https://www.geertvandenbossche.org/post/why-the-ongoing-mass-vaccination-experiment-drives-a-rapid-evolutionary-response-of-sars-cov-2.
https://quotefancy.com/media/wallpaper/1600×900/651857-Werner-Herzog-Quote-Civilization-is-like-a-thin-layer-of-ice-upon.jpg
Right. The pandemic is a cover for peak oil.
I am concerned that Delta and other variants will be cover for the continued decline in oil supply.
I found myself in several minds while watching this video. He knows nothing about energy. Much of what he says does not add up. At the end, when you must rip off the mask and walk free he leaves us with nothing if we don’t have organization to look to. (And we have very little worthwhile organization.) I suppose I just wanted to believe he had the issue covered, but I doubt that he does.
Forgot to post…
https://www.facebook.com/thegreatawakening2021/posts/2582726575357574
I hope the Delta is a nothing burger… that Bossche is wrong … and that all that we are doing is using Covid to extend BAU for as long as possible ….
Then at some point the lights go out… and the Vile Species Rip Faces Off.
Unfortunately that does not align with their goal to shove a Lethal Injection needle into every arm…
In my opinion, the general idea behind the so-called green energy is that while the fossil fuel industry is inevitably becoming less and less profitable, the green energy industry will, one day in the distant future, become profitable thanks to technological innovations kick-started by heavy government subsidies.
And if this plan fails, well, at least all those self-important apparatchiks will look as if they know what they are doing for a very long time.
on the greenie side, their general idea is yes gov subsidies until we have enough wonderful awesome green energy so that we can discontinue that terrible awful FF stuff.
as their plan proceeds, they may actually think it is proceeding successfully, but that will be only because all greenie plans are being propped up by the massive energy content of FF.
when it ultimately fails, they will have no clue that is was due to decreasing net (surplus) energy, which is inevitable as FF suffers its imminent and irreversible diminishing returns.
So the greenies can do well right now, which is all human lunatics ever care about. Can’t be changed any more than sheep psychology can. And some of us are the border collies to herd and direct them, or stop them wandering off.
Perhaps Gail might point you to a few previous posts that demonstrate that this is an impossibility?
I think the big issue is that an awfully lot of people think price is driven by scarcity. It will rise endlessly, making intermittent wind and solar profitable. They also think that these industries can be ramped up endlessly, and that a transition to an electricity based system is easy to do.
Why a Great Reset Based on Green Energy Isn’t Possible
Intermittent Renewables Can’t Favorably Transform Grid Electricity
Where Energy Modeling Goes Wrong
How the World’s Energy Problem Has Been Hidden
Rethinking Renewable Mandates
I remember when the EU banned incandescent lightbulbs ca. 10 years ago. Some pissed-off people were even stockpiling them back then. Today’s LEDs are not only by an order of magnitude more efficient, they also have a much longer lifetime.
Is it only a drop in a bucket? Maybe. But it’s something. Which is more than nothing.
I don’t think there are only two allowed results: either we replace all fossil energy with “green” energy ASAP while maintaining the current standard of living, or we are all going to die of peak oil.
the problem is not energy, but ‘surplus’ energy
BAU requires constant surpluses
they are not available
either we replace all fossil energy with “green” energy ASAP while maintaining the current standard of living
What are we at now? Renewables make up something like… 2% of total energy use?
Long way to go wouldn’t you say? And it’s not looking good for renewables or for that matter anything else right now.
In a kind of sick twisted way… the elite master farmers have it right…
You have to cut consumption of everything.
or…
You have to cull the herd.
I think they’re aiming for a double whammy!
Fracking is highly capital intensive. It costs a lot of money to drill new wells, and the wells are rapidly depleted, so frackers constantly need to raise new money to keep drilling. If oil prices were high enough that the frackers could make enough profit to pay for their new wells themselves, their business model might work. But since the fracking boom took off in the late 2000s, oil prices have rarely been sufficiently high, so the industry has in effect operated as a Ponzi scheme, where the frackers pay off old loans with new loans rather than with profits.10
From 2010 to 2020, large publicly traded U.S. producers poured a total of $1.18 trillion into drilling and pumping oil and gas, mostly in fracking. But they made only $819 billion in cash from their oil operations — a combined loss of $361 billion.11
https://www.ran.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/RAN_OCI_Fracking_Fiasco.pdf
The link is to a document called Fracking Fiasco: The Banks that Fueled the US Shale Bust.
The concern is that Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase will lose a lot of money on loans they made to the Oil and gas industry in the last few years. Earlier, the oil and gas companies funded their investments to a greater extent with the sale of bonds and shares of stock. Now banks are likely to get stuck with a lot of unrepayable bank loans.
It argues for renewables, presumably because with the subsidies, the profits should be better.
Japan, while pioneering the technology of LED lighting, has never banned incandescent lightbulbs. They are still on sale at home centers and are very cheap. Some people prefer them for some purposes or for some reason. But there has been a steady shift towards LEDs that was based not on prohibitions or laws, but on letting market forces have their way. The idea of getting the same amount of light for between a tenth and a sixth of the electricity cost is very appealing to consumers.
Japan has taken a similar stance on solar power. There are subsidies paid as incentives, but no mandates or coercion. If you want a solar roof, you can have one, but nobody is going to twist your arm or force you to comply.
Regarding Covid-19 it’s much the same story. There are no mandates on individuals, only appeals for cooperation. Amazingly, this works perfectly well in the Land of Politeness and Harmony. Who could possibly refuse to cooperate by putting on a mask when entering a supermarket or a hospital that has a sign on the door saying “Please wear a mask on the premises”? Who could possibly go out for non-essential purposes when they’ve been asked politely to avoid doing that, as is the case in Tokyo at present. Only someone who is unmutual, egotistic and not properly house-trained. And what’s to be done about such people? Ignore them. Pretend they don’t exist. Let them be. Confronting them would only create more disharmony on top of the disharmony they are creating with their lack of cooperation. And that would never do.
There have been no lockdowns and, as far as I can tell, no police arresting the recalcitrant or forcing them to comply with these requests.
And regarding vaccination, the Government has repeatedly stated that it is recommended but will not be mandated. This softly softly approach looks likely to achieve high vaccination rates without generating the friction that comes with coercion—if they ever manage to get enough vaccine to meet the demand. At the moment, the rollout is hitting snags due to sufficient doses being unavailable in many places where demand is high.
Very well, but weren’t the Japanese led to obedience and conformity for centuries?
If energy supplies per capita aren’t very high, having everyone conform to a common standard makes the energy supplies go farther.
Japan and China have both needed to encourage conformity, over the years. The approach has worked pretty well.
Sorry. LED does not have a long lifespan. Much shorter than CFL.poor quality, be it from a large multinational or an unknown Chinese brand. I have changed many LEDs in my house that have much shorter lifespan. The cost of the new LED exceeded the cost if energy savings
A quick search brings up this data:
Average lifespan
Incandescent: 1,250 hours
CFL: 8,000 hours
LED: 25,000 hours
Total estimated costs over 25,000 hours
Incandescent: ~$219
CFL: ~$54
LED: ~$28
https://www.ny-engineers.com/blog/top-7-benefits-of-using-led-lights
I am talking about real life data from my house. So, all these “data” are pretty much useless to me since I am paying for al lthe LED light changes. I am now going back to CFL for lighting.
I just have 2 more LED lights burned out. The plastic casing that held the LED was brittle and everything shattered.
The data as probably extrapolation.
LEDs can also function as microphones:
“There are cases when a LED light can spy by covertly listening and then send that audio over 300 meters away to the eavesdropper. But this time, it is the LED fixtures that are the ‘backbone’ of a new surveillance system scrutinizing and recording us. The New York Times reported that 171 LED fixtures inside Terminal B at Newark Liberty International Airport are ‘watching’ us.
“Using an array of sensors and eight video cameras around the terminal, the light fixtures are part of a new wireless network that collects and feeds data into software that can spot long lines, recognize license plates and even identify suspicious activity, sending alerts to the appropriate staff.
“It’s not the ‘green’ side of saving energy by automatically turning the lights off and on that has the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey excited and ‘already talking about expanding it to other terminals and buildings.’ Instead, the excitement comes from the mountains of data captured by sensors and analyzed by software about ‘the habits of ordinary citizens.’ Right now Port Authority, which operates Newark Airport, ‘owns’ the data collected, but law enforcement can obtain it via a ‘subpoena or written request.’”
“These companies are not the only players claiming to analyze data from their Internet-connected LED light fixture systems to provide actionable intelligence. The Times said executives claim ‘the potential for the advanced lighting is nearly boundless,’ but that ‘potential’ seems much less about saving energy and more about collecting data.”
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2475911/don-t-look-now-but-the-led-light-fixtures-are-spying-on-you.html
Victoria has recorded six new local Covid-19 cases overnight as the state enters its fifth lockdown.
While the official number is 10, that tally includes four cases which were announced yesterday afternoon.
All 10 are linked to known cases, and the new infections bring the state’s current outbreak to 24.
The news comes after hundreds of anti-lockdown protesters took to the streets in Melbourne’s CBD last night, just hours after Premier Daniel Andrews announced the state would enter a five-day snap lockdown from midnight.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/covid-19-coronavirus-victoria-outbreak-grows-by-6-after-anti-lockdown-protests-in-melbourne-cbd/JD6QLZEMS36RN2SXOQXOW3G5DA/
Seems most are on board with the 5th lockdown … staying safe!
Lockdown Under.
Domestic school holidays have another week to run … then The Despair will kick in hard.
Can’t complain … ski slopes will be empty during the week … Faster is Funner for FAST Eddy.
The US is doing better than the four eyes thanks to states rights. I guess we will see hoow long that lasts.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
https://youtu.be/GiWxAf6QRv4?t=216
FE, I very much like that poem. I am thinking it is like a phase change one instant we have water and the next we have ice. Same atoms same place but different.
At least they have cars (some of them, at least), they still queue up for a Big Mac, and they are all wearing face masks. Looks remarkably civilized. And the security guy with the submachine gun looks friendly, and is happy to be able to get his face on the telly.
Yes— we are not quite there yet… this is a teaser…
Lebanon looked to be there.. but someone paid the power bill — I doubt the Elders will allow a total collapse … that would spoke the goy … keep them on life support till the CEP finishes up
But will don make an appearance? That’s what we are all wondering….
Not sure I buy it.
Tax base changes are a fundamental part of all economies. Economies built on whaling changed to other tax bases when whaling disappeared. Sometimes there is a significant economic impact (think Ghost towns in the west when mining disappeared). Certainly economies centered completely around oil & gas will have significant disruption if we stopped production (think collapse and societal dysfunction, migration, and war)
Has shale gas ever been profitable? From what I can tell they have operated at a loss for over a decade, yet people keep throwing money at those investments. You have to do something with the free money, and perhaps it will be different this year.
And oil & Gas have significant subsidization built into our tax code (can we say intangible drilling oil and gas tax deduction?).
And perhaps it is just fine to subsidize energy production based on societies needs. We subsidize building roads and bridges and don’t seem any worse for wear.
I think the real ax you have to grind is that renewable energy is not oil & gas, and you like oil and gas.
Mike
Mr. Mike,
Would renewable energy exist without massive government subsidies?
Windmills and solar panels ability to function got laid bare in the Texas cold snap.
Watch Calofirnia for the next couple of months, rolling blackouts that are likely not making the news.
Tesla’s $7,500 per unit government subsidy has been almost all of his profit, as he as been selling the tax subsidies he could not use to other car manufacturers.
It is NEVER mentioned that electric car batteries get power cut about in half, more or less when temperature drops to about freezing. So draw a line across the world for that issue.
All the long haul trucks carrying the just in time food fuel and clothing to Wally World and to all the stores in the country using diesel cannot make it with solar panels and windmills on top of the truck.
Repeat: “The Green new deal is a fairy tale for the kiddies.”
Anyone who thinks we can transition to alternative energy sources … (which they call renewable)…
Should have their skull sawed open … brain removed … and fed to feral dogs… and a new brain implanted… and then hope this helps them overcome their Delusion.
norm… NORM!!! be polite and say thank you for the gift
https://youtu.be/nUDoGuLpirc
Long haul trucks..what about the container ships that use ~63,000 gallons of diesel per day (running 23-28 knots) keeping Walmart full of cheap trinkets for the plebs..
I am sure that wind and solar could easily replace that…/s
All large ships could be powered by compact modular nuclear reactors or whatever powers military subs and carriers.
Then all you need (my asumption) is a squad of private military contractors aboard every single ship for… you know… safety.
But then I don’t know why we don’t just go all in with mass produced nuclear for most things. We have nothing to lose at this point.
Wild-ish guess: perhaps the oligarchs believe in a continuation of civilization for 500M people, powered by nuclear energy, provided they can quickly get rid of the 7500M supernumerary generated by fossil fuel surplus energy? Is that Da plan? What do i know (especially about nuclear energy)?
This i know: socio-psychopathic billionaires are not the type to give up on victory & survival dreams, so our masters surely plan to survive the collapse of fossil civilization. Extinction yes, but for the hoi polloi. ,
I absolutely agree with your assertion and should remind myself that first you get rid of the hoi polloi or at least the surplus and then you deploy whatever tech makes sense in the aftermath. As long as you get to stay on top all’s good!
But what if the hoi polloi or at least enough of them rise up against the masters and dethrone them? Would it make any difference? Are we still facing the same fate? If we have nothing to lose then what’s wrong with getting in a few punches before the lights go out. Riots and uprisings seem to be the flavor of the month. Much more to come over the next year. No sides just chaos and more chaos until… the Kush takes the throne!
lol—again
which is the best I can come up with
Mike, have you considered the economy back in the day of whaling? What services did the government provide? What percentage of GDP was in the hands of governments? What percentage of the population lived in an urban environment.
Renewables need subsidies now -imagine what will happen when all the choice locations for wind power are taken, the cost of renewables produced at very distant sites.
Oil, even shale oil is a net payer of taxes, Today shale oil is profitable at $50 and will remain so as long as the producers remember the laws of supply and demand as OPEC has re-discovered.
Governments should subsidize infrastructure not everyday commodities.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/22/shale-industry-will-be-rocked-by-300-billion-in-losses-and-a-wave-of-bankruptcies-deloitte-says.html
This makes me happy.
I like oil.
In that case, https://htyp.org/Cheap_synthetic_fuel
There is a well funded company that is working on a major cost reduction for electrolyzers. If there is someone with the skills to work on this, let me know and I can send your contact data to a recruiter.
yes, conventional crude, tar sands, fracked LTO, synthetic, whatever. Oil is great.
I think the comments are missing my point. Regardless of how you feel about the policy of supporting renewable energy, the thesis of Gail’s paper is that lack of tax revenue and excessive subsidization are impediments to adoption.
I’m saying that’s hogwash. There are plenty of things that are subsidized out the ying yang and do just fine, and plenty of economic activity that is previously taxed at a high level and later it falls off as economies change. Perhaps there is pain when this happens, but humanity is used to pain.
There may be a macroeconomic question on taxation / manufacturing capacity / subsidization, but I don’t think in isolation there is any issue with switching technologies from one type (low subsidy/high tax) to another type (high subsidy/low tax).
Mike
What I am saying is that the system can transition to Green Energy unless those items are truly profitable. They have to be putting out a lot of “spare” energy that can be used to run the rest of the system.
Renewable energy is in fact simply an extension of fossil fuel energy. It cannot run without a very large fossil fuel energy system. Fossil fuels are what make the “renewables” we talk about possible. Even wood chips and shipping them from country to country requires a whole lot of fossil fuel energy. There are all kinds of direct and indirect subsidies that make these “renewables” appear to cost less than they really do. One of these is the fact that renewables do not pay adequate taxes.
yup
money is a token of energy exchange (that is immutable)
therefore if you ‘subsidise’ any activity you might appear to be paying money, but you are really using energy to do it.
The actual activity (or commodity) is irrelevant.
You can subside theatre tickets, You can ‘subsidise’ the price of bread. The Romans gave it away free. (Hence bread and circuses).
But in reality the subsidy was on the energy necessary to produce the bread in the first place.
If you use slave labour on the farm, then the energy drawn from the slave subsidises the bread.
When you run out of slaves, bread reverts to its correct (energy based) cost.
this is why people riot—they get used to ‘freebies’, then find they are not there anymore.
We’ve had freebies (cheap fossil fuels) for a couple of centuries, now they are not there anymore.
they were free because we looted the land we live on. We were told it was infinite.
*********
If you take subsidy a stage further, and ‘subsidise’ the capital costs of renewable energy, what you are doing, in effect, is subsidising one energy form (which has a low EROEI), by diverting/consuming another energy form (which has a higher EROEI).
which the same as trying to fill a sieve under a running tap.
It is not possible to create energy by printing money
(1) Companies producing fossil fuels are subsidized because they are not forced by legislation to pay for the removal or neutralization of their waste products, namely CO2. The results you see in California, for example, although this is of course caused by the cumulative effect of 150 years of burning coal, oil and gas. Nature responds to our CO2. It is not part of an endless debating club competition. James Hansen latest paper on temperature is here: https://mailchi.mp/caa/may-2021-global-temperature-update-6vdouglinl?e=48e82f5ca2
(2) Nature is physically forcing us to get away from fossil fuels no matter what we think or argue. The required transition must be properly planned, phased and financed. Just like a mission to Mars. Or a war (because we are at war with nature).
(3) Aging coal fired power plants have also become “intermittent”. Australia recently experienced outages, load shedding and a turbine explosion, leading to price spikes 150 times the average
14/6/2021
NSW power spot price spikes May 2021 become regular (part 2)
https://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-power-spot-price-spikes-may-2021-become-regular-part-2
7/6/2021
NSW power spot price spikes May 2021 become regular (part 1)
https://crudeoilpeak.info/nsw-power-spot-price-spikes-may-2021-become-regular-part-1
(4) The power pricing in Australia is done by 5 min bids
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-electricity-market-nem/data-nem/data-dashboard-nem
This camel market will NOT lead to a proper transition
(5) I know too little about whether US nuclear power plants have properly disposed of their nuclear waste, without future cost
(6) I suspect that certain countries in OPEC happily reduced production and use the lower oil demand in a Covid world to cover up the problem of their questionable oil reserves
http://crudeoilpeak.info/opec-paper-barrels
(7) China increased its oil imports in 2020 by around 9%. It is oil other countries did not consume because of the worldwide Wuhan virus recession. Well done.
(2) Nature is physically forcing us to get away from fossil fuels no matter what we think or argue. The required transition must be properly planned, phased and financed. Just like a mission to Mars. Or a war (because we are at war with nature).
Transitioning to what?
BTW – we cannot fly to Mars (or the Moon) because:
https://youtu.be/bMfUpqnLFCc
We could have before (like in the 60’s) … but not anymore:
https://youtu.be/16MMZJlp_0Y
As Richard Feynman said “you can not fool mother nature”.
Mike it’s not Co2 that’s the problem; our Sun is the problem. Check out suspiciousobservers.org and the disaster series on Youtube. There’s a lot of science involved and as a kid I hated science classes on waves, but now I’m forcing myself to listen to the solar and space science. Once you take a dive, you’ll see why our Sun is soooooooooooo much more influential of not only our climate and weather, but of earthquakes and volcanoes too, and hurricanes.
It’s all about Earth’s magnetic shield, the Sun’s activity or lack thereof, and space weather. Oh, and solar science was co-opted by the CIA back in the 40’s.
Please check out the site and note the size of Earth to scale against the size of the Sun. Then ask yourself, “Could the Sun have anything to do with Earth’s climate?”
Yes of course… but the DelusiSTANIS will refuse to watch … because the MSM does all their thinking for them.
“In the last 35 years of global warming, the sun has shown a slight cooling trend. Sun and climate have been going in opposite directions.”
https://skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm
The earth’s magnetic shield is down what, 15-20%? So even if output from the sun is slightly less, more solar energy is reaching earth through our weakening magnetic field, thus the warming trend..
More warming means more polar ice melt, which decreases the salinity of the ocean water, which means greater likelihood of freezing and shutting down the warm water currents that keep northern Europe etc habitable..
Our future is cold not hot…the scientists in the 70’s had it right..
“. . . and 40,000 years ago the magnetic
42:45 field basically zeroed out in what we
42:47 call the LeSean phenomenally for a
42:49 millennium or so and when it did the
42:51 cosmic rays came screaming into the
42:53 earth system and you see in basically
42:55 all sedimentary records this peak in
42:57 cosmic ray produced nuclides we had a
43:01 big cosmic ray signal and the climate
43:04 ignores it and it’s just about that
43:08 simple these cosmic rays didn’t do
43:10 enough that you can see it so it’s a
43:13 fine tuning knob at best . . . . “
Interesting vid..
He says the sun doesn’t play much role in earth’s climate..curious…the marauder minimum in the 1600s was a sun driven phenomenon that lead to a mini ice age and a 25% crop loss in Europe..
So, if he is correct, then we burn all the FF and have catastrophic climate change..or we don’t use FF and we have no way to feed 8 billions ppl and IC collapses…
So, if his opinion is correct, we are damned either way..
People should be skeptical of Skeptical Science, because the only thing skeptical and the only thing scientific about that website is its name.
Instead, they need to get real by visiting Real Climate Science instead. It’s chock full of real climate science, and is all in all a hive of fascinating facts, superlative statistics, amazing anecdotes and the best trolling since the Three Billy Goats Gruff.
For instance, did you know that:
“On this date in 1901, Nebraska and Oklahoma were over 110 degrees, twenty-three states were over 100 degrees, and all but three states were over 90 degrees. More than half of the US was over 95 degrees. ”
I’ll bet you didn’t. And I bet Skeptical Science wouldn’t tell you.
“Weather that hot is incomprehensible now. Click on the newspaper below for a larger image.”
https://realclimatescience.com/2021/07/july-16-1901/
Given we’ve burned almost all the fossil fuels we will ever burn … and we have been told we are enveloping the earth in a blanket (cumulative)…. how is it possible that we ever have any bitterly cold weather periods at all? How is it that there is ice in the north and south poles?
How is it I can still go skiing and there is snow?
reminds me of the senatorial clown (Inhofe) who brought a snowball into the senate, saying :
“look, global warming is impossible, I just made this snowball as I came in.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E0a_60PMR8
He also said:
“I don’t believe in scientific facts. The Lord god almighty can change these so called ‘facts’ in the blink of an eye”
So I congratulate you on the company you keep Eddy.
It defines your level of understanding of the problems we face.
“People should be skeptical of Skeptical Science, . . . ”
Play the wo/man. not the ball?
Government everywhere are just trying to keep the status quo and enormous amounts of debt; soon they will just be pushing on a string.
This is for Marco since he’s disappointed we have not collapsed yet. 🙂
“MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule”
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
I posted the Gaya Herrington paper this article is based on a few weeks ago here on OFW.
You’re welcome Nafeez…
The least expensive, unsubsidized PV I know about is 1.35 cents per kWh. That makes the energy cost in a bbl of synthetic oil just about $40. Unfortunately, the current capital cost of the hydrogen electrolyzers came out at $88/bbl. There is a major R&D effort afoot (Boston and SF area) to reduce this by a factor of ten. I am in contact with these people and can pass on contact info if there is anyone here who wants to work on the project. My analysis is here: https://htyp.org/Cheap_synthetic_fuel
Keith — can you beam some of that cheap energy to the Lebanese… they were in total darkness for a few days… and they are hanging from a threat ….
Keith, I am trying to get invoked with some robot making folks in Norway. If that does not pan out I will contact you about the project.
I am looking back on the people in my life – I am probably just tipsy and feeling sorry for myself. Anyway, if ‘morality’ was so easy, it would have happened a long time ago. IC is totally messed up and there is no ‘salvation’ coming any time soon. The idea that the British state or other IC states are about to sort things out seems just ridiculous. People are who they are. Have you even met them? This is headed for destruction. If they gesture righteousness, it is only to their own supremacy – but that is how humans are. I am not expecting any change from the ‘greens’ but the same. I have met ‘greens’ before. Everyone is con man on the make.
At some point Mirror, you’ll come to the inescapable conclusion that ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ are not produced by active decision making and free will, but are fluid and the direct expression of material conditions.
Prior to crashing on that mountain-top, do you think a particular Uruguayan rugby team ever considered eating one another?
There is no objective right or wrong, only ‘interest’, and if one isn’t suicidal or a religious nut, altruism is highly correlated to one’s wealth and relative shelteredness.
I have said that materialist sort of thing myself before and I think that there is a lot of truth in it.
I am not sure that I was talking about ‘altruism’ there though, so much as the ability to hold a society together in the long run. I would not conflate the two in any simple way. Eg. state loyalty seems to be more a feudal instinct, a bred in trait of subservience, rather than altruism or even solidarity in any simple sense. A combination of state loyalty, obedience to laws, herd conformity, and self-interest may keep things ticking for for a while but it does not seem adequate to ‘save IC’ or even particular nations. Humans may simply not be up to the task, for evolutionary reasons.
So I seemed to be speaking of ‘morality’ in a difference sense there, probably a broad pragmatic sense, but one can only try to decipher oneself when tipsy – which can be quite interesting and challenging. I certainly would not assume that I was getting at the opposite of the sort of thing that usually concerns me.
“if ‘morality’ was so easy, it would have happened a long time ago”
Love that line Mirror
Yes, that line is quite funny. : )
Delta Drives Explosion Of New COVID Cases Across Asia; Tokyo Outbreak Worsens As Olympics Loom https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/delta-drives-explosion-new-covid-cases-across-asia-tokyo-outbreak-worsens-olympics-loom
Covid cluster at hotel hosting Olympic athletes raises concerns as Tokyo cases surge
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/07/15/olympics-covid-cluster-forms-at-games-hotel-as-tokyo-cases-surge.html
PR Team — “if we cancel the Olympics at the last minute… because of the Variants… that would Really Scare the Goy”…..
To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, “Kill some grannies to frighten the goy.”
Please forgive my crudity. I’m suffering from Covidiocy Fatigue Syndrome.
I am contemplating setting up a site called Covidiocy… how much fun would that be!
My guys are a tad busy with other pointless crap as we pretend that there will be a return to BAU…
Food and fuel shortages loom in South Africa after logistics networks wrecked by riots
South Africa’s inland provinces, especially the economic heartland of Gauteng, are on the brink of severe fuel and food shortages, with key supply routes from the KwaZulu-Natal coast – the N2 and N3 – blockaded by rioters, preventing trucks carrying petrol, diesel and fresh produce from moving.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-07-14-food-and-fuel-shortages-loom-in-south-africa-after-logistics-networks-wrecked-by-riots/
The resolution (collapse) will be televised!
How do we spin this … ahhh… how about ‘this is what happens when you don’t enough people Injected’….
Part of South Africa’s problem is too many people; part of its problem is depleted coal resources. Water supply can be a problem, although not necessarily everywhere, all of the time. If rioters cut off road access, this can suddenly make conditions worse.
When the military runs out of diesel… then what?
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/its-war-zone-south-africa-deploy-25000-troops-country-brink-civil-war
Off topic, but this recent article supports many of Gail’s previous posts: https://news.google.com/articles/CAIiEOlXDZVFf8Q8eDqH0oRw6O8qFwgEKg4IACoGCAowis8wMLmCBjCfkLEG?hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US%3Aen
Thanks very much for the link. My impression is that Gaya Herrington has a little too much faith in models, especially after collapse begins. The economy is headed for collapse, but I am not convinced that the shape of decline in the models is a very good indicator of what will happen over the longer term. I know that Dennis Meadows says that the models can only be relied upon until collapse starts because the dynamics change dramatically.
By the way, I worked for a different consulting firm that is now part of Willis Towers Watson. For a while, I was a “Partner,” which is sort of parallel to her role as a “Director.”
A new study has shown that MIT’s 1972 “Model3” – the basis for “Limits To Growth” – is right on track.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-vindicates-1972-mit-prediction-that-society-will-collapse-soon
Thanks! This is the same article quoting Gaya Herrington’s work as the one immediately above it. You give this link first, but I didn’t get to it first.
Yes, it is interesting. I think Gaya Herrington has a little too much faith in what the models say after 2020.
Autopsy Shows Man Who Died After Pfizer Shot Had Enlarged Heart, Coroner Says Vaccine Not to Blame — Wife Not Convinced
Tim Zook became ill 2-and-a-half hours after his second dose of Pfizer’s vaccine, and died four days later. An autopsy showed an enlarged heart — consistent with myocarditis now linked to mRNA COVID vaccines — but the coroner ruled out the vaccine as cause of death
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/autopsy-tim-zook-mrna-pfizer-vaccine-myocarditis/
Did they autopsy his brain? They’d need a jack hammer ….
You know what.. f789 his wife… they both surely knew that Pfizer could not be sued if things went sideways… that alone should be enough for anyone with a glimmer of intelligence to question ‘why’… and when you question why … you surely search for more info and you realize this Injection is an experiment … and you find out that if you are not old / half dead… Covid is LESS deadly than the flu…. and you make The Right decision and you politely Decline.
Anyone wanna bet that Tim and his wife bragged about how they were getting the ‘Pfizer’ Injection … mocked Refusers… shoved their self-righteous bull sh in the face of anyone who would listen…
Well then … let’s celebrate the death of Tim … good riddance Tim you vile pc of sh it… and let’s hope for more of the same for DelusiSTANIS who Drink the Covid Laced Kool Aid….
https://media1.tenor.com/images/ff4d95ac7f82e4ba73cc88aa52b5d5b7/tenor.gif
Collateral damage and it was for the greater good because Dunce and Norm have both convinced me we all need to take “The Jab” at least once a week. It’s that safe so nothing to see here.
Not every Tim is as excited about getting Jabbed as Tim Zook was. FE is not far wrong in his characterization. I don’t know Zook he mocked anyone, but he talked about how “exited” he was to be fully vaccinated on Facebook of all places. And it isn’t good to get exited at his age.
This is an “old” story from January this year. Apparently, Tim was an early adopter.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9194107/X-Ray-technician-60-dies-just-two-days-getting-second-dose-Pfizer-jab.html
X-Ray technician, 60, who was ‘excited’ to get COVID vaccine dies just two days after getting second dose of Pfizer jab and suffering ‘bad reaction’ including breathing difficulties – but officials say his cause of death is inconclusive
Tim Zook, a 60-year-old X-ray technologist at South Coast Global Medical Center died on January 7 – two days after receiving his second Pfizer jab
He had written on Facebook that he was ‘excited’ to be fully vaccinated
But within hours he was admitted to the ER with breathing issues
He was later placed on a ventilator and placed into a medically induced coma
His kidneys began to fail and was officially pronounced dead on January 7
The Orange County coroner has said Zook’s cause of death is inconclusive and said further toxicology testing will take months
In a statement to DailyMail.com, a Pfizer spokesperson said the company is aware of Zook’s death and is also investigating the matter
This is for Tim
https://media.giphy.com/media/xT9IgrF9dS6HoQfiSs/giphy.gif
RIP Tim… RIP….
“… but he talked about how “exited” he was to be fully vaccinated on Facebook of all places. And it isn’t good to get exited at his age…”
Well, he exited alright! To quote that irascible cartoon character Snagglepuss: ‘Exit stage right!’
Sorry. That must have been a Freudian slip on my part. Either that or the AI spellchecker that surreptitiously rewrites my stuff has an excellent sense of humor.
Experts Warn of ‘Huge Risk’ as Moderna Launches COVID Vaccine Trials for Pregnant Women
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/moderna-covid-vaccine-clinical-trials-pregnant-women/
It pretty much blows my mind that a woman would Inject an experimental substance into her body while pregnant … she’ll go without coffee and booze during the pregnancy then while boob feeding… but… BUT … she’ll Inject some crazy shi t into her body….
As we can see — goy are so easily controlled… that they need to be controlled.
Stupppid dummmb barn yard animals… and the smarter ones are actually the dummmmest. Because they know if they do what the master says they get rewarded… that’s why they studied so hard and never break the rules (Do What You Are TOLD!!!…ok)
If the Doctors who advocate using “the vaccine” have sworn the Hippocratic Oath shouldn’t it be changed to the Hippocritic Oath ?
ultimately money is a token of energy exchange.
so subsidising ‘green energy’ is in effect using one energy form to ‘prove’ that another energy form is somehow viable.
Put it another way, the ‘still profitable’ (EROEI) energy content of oil is being diverted to reassure us that the ‘profit factor’ of ‘green energies’ actually exists on terms that we understand.
if we take an amount of money that is underpinned by fossil fuels (which has a relatively high EROEI), and invest that money in wind turbines or solar panels which deliver an EROEI at a much lower rate, then BAU becomes as logical as getting to work on an exercise bike.
No matter how hard we pedal, we never actually get anywhere.
Actually, the crazy way the EROEI calculations are made, it doesn’t necessarily work out the way you would expect. High cost and low EROEI don’t necessarily match up.
Also, there is no hard boundary regarding what EROEI level is too low. Is it 10:1, or 4:1, or 3:1. I have heard some people (who really don’t know what they are saying) claim that anything above 1:1 is OK.
EROEI unfortunately doesn’t tell a person as much as people would like to think it does.
I didn’t offer an exact EROEI ratio, because it is a variable, depending on where you stand in the human pecking order.
If you live in the Amazon rainforest, or in a homeless tent, your EROEI requirement/availability is very low.
If you own half a dozen homes on different continents, and use a private jet to commute between them your EROEI needs are extremely high.
Or to be more exact, you draw a higher proportion of energy out of the quantity available to the public at large.
Most of us exist at a median level of course, almost impossible to define what that is.
But I think a useful measure is to look back to the time when cities around the worid suddenly expanded from a few hundred thousand, into millions, and now tens of millions, and with transport networks to keep them viable.
Only a massive return on energy investment could have done that, far more than 10:1
In the 19th c coal delivered the energy impetus, in the 20th, things accelerated with oil. Life improved for (almost) everyone.
Raw energy underpinned money, money sustained large populations who demanded living amenities–so we had the post war building boom because energy resources were cheap, delivering massive returns on investment, up to 100:1 while the oil lasted.
The problem we have now is the belief that we can have a 100:1 lifestyle, (i.e. full employment etc) using a 10:1 energy return ratio. (or lower).
Or put more simply, still have the ‘American dream’ on 10% of the income.
Can’t be done.
Back in 2015, the IMF predicted that Saudi Arabia could go bankrupt by 2020:
https://www.rt.com/business/319465-saudi-bankrupt-projection-imf/
Did something change? What should the revised year date be? Or can they just borrow money? I’m sentimentally attached to the prospect of the collapse of the Saudi regime, although I realize this would probably add to the woes of the rest of the world and, by extension, me.
The saudis gave away their oil (by way of freebies to their own people) on the assumption that it was a free gift from Allah
Saudi had about 2m people when oil was discovered there
there’s now around 30m
when they finally work out that Allah wasn’t involved, all hell is going to break loose.
Interesting!
There are probably a lot of countries that are near bankruptcy now, with any reasonable accounting.
We have a welcome back gift for Norm Dunc… apparently gravity affects multi-tonne steel girders in a horizontal manner … flinging them across streets…. I always thought gravity was a vertical thing until I watched this!
https://youtu.be/nUDoGuLpirc
Thanks for posting; had not seen that one. I’m a small financial supporter of A&E911truth.org.
I wonder if Norm Dunc will make a contribution … although that would be wasting money … because what the Elders want… they get.
Fast Eddy – powered by 1500 Horse Power Engines… adding more HP every week.
Check me Out
https://youtu.be/W9L3bllEbm4?t=99
1500 horses of your pedigree are only of any use to rose growers
(and ultimately glue makers of course)
Thanks for the new article.
For those who may have not followed this… we get to see why the Elders decided to deploy the CEP:
https://www.npr.org/2021/07/12/1015337240/the-economic-crisis-in-lebanon-may-be-one-of-the-worst-in-the-world-since-the-18
https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/a-country-running-on-empty-lebanon-suffers-medicine-fuel-shortages-20210703-p586ir.html
Nice Videos – https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/south-africa-deploys-military-amid-widespread-social-unrest
Mad Max was here https://twitter.com/i/status/1415265185653305345
‘No jobs – no food – we’re hungry’ https://news.sky.com/story/south-africa-violence-troop-numbers-on-streets-double-to-5-000-amid-looting-and-more-could-be-deployed-12355785
An occasional problem with charging battery powwered cars shown in here.
Spontaneous combustion that spreads. In a concrete garage and not in a wooden house!
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2021/07/15/going-green-4/
THANKS MUCH for all your superb work.
Taxing solar panels and windmills output without the massive subsidies is obviously quite hopeless,
as when the solar panels are covered with snow, and or the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow for the windmills, output obviously goes to Zero.
For the U.K. and elsewhere, the huge offshore windmills get lots of decent consistant wind, BUT the CAPEX and OPEX for those units in the salt water environment has to be quite large. Question is, are those costs factored into the cost of the electricty output, along with the CAPEX of the battery installations thereto?
The “Green New Deal” is obviously a fairy tale for the children with ZERO comprehension of reality.
ref : “For the U.K. and elsewhere, the huge offshore windmills get lots of decent consistant wind”
this is not so . we have had quite a few weeks per month this year when output from the currently installed 22GW capacity was below 1GW delivered .
this misdirection is of course comparing capacity with delivery .
take a look at gridwatch
wind and solar are
too fickle
too little
too late
Forbin
NOTE: HMG intend to build more on the Dogger bank , 33GW capacity @ est £82.5 Billion cost.
the peak GW power during any one hour of the year will be
current fleet = 13.855
new fleet 33 x 0.63 = 20.79
combined = 34.645 GW delivered
And the minimun lull figure is;
current fleet = 0.095
new fleet 33 x 0.00432 = 0.143
combined = 0.238 GW delivered
As stated before we have a lot of days ,even weeks of lull .
We buy 10% electricty from abroad
Calculations do not include extra demand from electrifying transport or dumping gas boilers, etc.
What can’t Gail accept the simple truth?
That the “Federal” “Reserve” can’t taper because it is insolvent
Therefore Gail will be wiped out by HyperInflation before 2025.
I doubt that there will be much to buy by 2025. Maybe there will be lots and lots of cash chasing those few things, wiping out the usefulness of past “savings” in bank accounts. Or maybe banks will simply be closed. Of maybe there will be new accounts, that don’t incorporate saving from old accounts. Regardless of the situation, no one will be able to buy much.
Vanity is coming to an end.
Supposedly, part of the thinking behind the “Great Reset” is the acceptance that the existing global and national debt can never be repaid so it’s now full steam ahead until the Wile Coyote moment.
I can believe this: “the existing global and national debt can never be repaid so it’s now full steam ahead until the Wile Coyote moment.”
https://i.imgur.com/YXCnaKp.gif
Insolvent? Did they run out of digital ink or digital paper?
Gail, I’m wondering if there is room for the “Comprehensive Annual Financial Report” (CAFR) in your analysis regarding government taxation:
From “(NEW) Endgame: Globalism Through Public Pension Ponzi Schemes Now Manifesting… CalPERS and News Outlets Caught Lying To The Public Again!” by Clint Richardson:
“There exists today, despite my own exhaustive efforts and documentary research, a strangely apparent and seemingly willing denial of the audited information located and easily accessible in the CalPERS pension fund Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) published each fiscal year, and for that matter the same audited report disclosing all government agencies and municipal corporations (cities, counties, districts, states, federal, pension funds, etc.) in their financial standing.
All governments and independent agencies of government everywhere are required to complete a CAFR, which shows not only the yearly budget (income/outcome balance) as the more common annual budget report does, but as well all investments and extraneous funding for each specific government since its inception — since any government was first municipally incorporated.
If the yearly budget report were only the accounting report of the checking account of each government, the CAFR would comparatively be the total or ‘comprehensive’ reporting of the checking, savings, investment portfolio, and any and every other asset not necessarily shown on the budget report.
To purposefully ignore the CAFR when speaking of anything regarding the financial markets worldwide is like Helen Keller trying to describe an elephant she can’t touch, see, or hear. Without even a basic understanding of the CAFR accounting system, especially in public pension funds, no one can possibly comprehend the rational behind the purposeful fluctuation and seemingly out-of-control stock market in any way (as ordered chaos), since government is the main investor and thus proxy shareholder voter in all corporations through control of domestic and international equities, mutual funds, mortgage-backed securities, bonds, foreign currencies, precious metals, real estate and real estate investment funds (REITs), bundled debt instruments and loans, and other toxic-debt-type financial ‘products’ of these financial markets and of their own making.
To exclude the CAFR from any and all reporting whatsoever about the commercial, governmental, and financial world, the CAFR being the audited financial statements of all corporations including all governments, equates to a blatant, blanket lack of vetting and verification of any and all information emanating from any source, news agency, or other propagandist. Its not just bad reporting, it’s patent laziness and profound, often purposeful ignorance.”
https://realitybloger.wordpress.com/tag/clint-richardson-cafr/
I wouldn’t expect anyone to read the entirety of the above post (Richardson could use an editor), but a search for the acronym “CAFR” might yield some insights.
The gist is that the CAFR is submitted to government under oath and is the financial audit of every incorporated government entity “…that’s every city, county, state, district, and pension in legal, corporate existence.” It is a requirement of congress as federal law that the CAFR be accurate under penalty of perjury.
Politicians and reporters do not have to address the CAFR publicly because they are not under oath to disclose it’s contents to the public. Instead, they present the public with the yearly budget and omit the CAFR data. The CAFR is legally required to be made available to the public but most of the public are unaware of its existence and/or disinclined to review it.
“You can obtain a city or county CAFR online or at your local library along with the budget report, usually at the resource desk, or as a digital copy online. The amount of assets hidden from each of us by the purposefully obfuscating and inadequate yearly budget report when put in comparison to this full and comprehensive report each year is staggering to say the least. There is literally no such thing as an insolvent government in the United States, including Detroit and Stockton, when considering each governments legally required and CAFR-audited investment funds. But you won’t discover this by reading only the yearly budget, which ignores such accumulated investments returns and interest. There are instead congressional and state laws that purposefully prevent your taxpayer money from being used for taxpayer purposes, even when they are needed. Instead, our taxpayer collections are labeled as ‘restricted’ (for limited use only) by being placed in specialized investment funds, often labeled specifically as ‘non-governmental’ and as ‘enterprise’ funds. The existence of these reserved investment funds is strictly for the purpose of keeping them from being used for any other taxpayer services — to keep them out of the ‘general fund’ (used for ‘unrestricted’ taxpayer use). There is no excuse to not use what is in the general fund, and so these many schemes, pension funds, and other non-governmental (non-taxpayer) and enterprise funds are created to cause funds in the general fund to be transferred out and into those funds that, by law, cannot be used for general purposes (i.e. taxpayer services).”
Dear Gail,
I enjoy very much reading your analysis of energy fundamentals because it makes sense to me…
I would also appreciate reading some of your opinions on the fundamentals of mining and metal economics as they apply to energy, from my own calculations it is going to take a tremendous amount of new mines to supply the metal required for all these “renewable” energy sources, especially copper but also other metals….
my point of view is that this is just plain not going to happen, it takes too long to develop mines plus there is almost always local and/or “environmental” opposition
I think you are right about not being enough metals in the right timeframe, as well.
Renewables fail in so many ways that it is hard to understand the reason for the interest in them.
Stooopidity?
Chris Clugston makes a strong case that even without peak oil or climate change nearly 100 minerals and metals essential to industrial civilization will be in irreversible decline between 2030 and 2050.
https://www.readblip.com/
Thanks for the new post! A good read and some very interesting figures. Btw judith curry has a 5 minutes essay on the climate crisis narrative https://judithcurry.com/2021/07/11/5-minutes/#more-27715
I would agree that the essay of Judith Curry’s is a very excellent essay. She starts out,
I should warn you about trying to copy this essay from her site. Don’t do it. It acts like a virus.
Oh that’s not an issue for norm dunc and mike…. they are immune to viruses now … even the variants
I am still trying to figure out if promotion of green energy is yet another attack on world population to ultimately squeeze the energy supply. This would also spill over into reduced mobility of the masses And the subsequent in ability to travel to work and possibly being herded back into the cities as opposed to fleeing the cities to a more sustainable lifestyle in rural areas.For those people who have ICE transportation, in the face of gasoline shortages, it is still more feasible to store gasoline in containers even if only for a year before the gas goes bad. In contrast not too many people have sufficient home battery storage to run EV‘s. Their mobility is limited and the governments would have more control over people’s mobility simply by the flick of a power grid switch as opposed to the difficulty of controlling hoarding of gasoline via storage containers. In short this would be yet another form of control like digital currency, Covid passports, gun control and mandatory vaccinations.
No it’s all about convincing the goy that we can transition off of oil to an infinite and wonderful source of energy … if they knew the true oil situation… they’d be in Deep Deep Despair.
Harry… can you get more on the developing situation in South Africa…. looking like that will be the first country to be shoved off the deck of the Titanic into the icy sea.
BTW – I was trying to organize some More Coal to burn …. and the good people at Ohai https://www.newvaleohai.co.nz/ (really good clean burning coal… not that I care but when Green Grooopies chastise me I can always say ‘but I burn the Louey Veetton grade of coal .. it’s really clean … and the smoke is mostly grey not black… ) informed yesterday that the mine will close permanently in September.
When I asked why … they said … the remaining seams are Too Deep…. it is not economically viable to extract the coal any longer.
Note – they increased their prices by 15% this year….
On the positive side…. it’s looking increasingly unlikely that I will need any coal next winter.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/ujdksjikossbwvicnwfz.gif
A person can’t go very far from home on a battery powered car without a lot of charging stations. The few who can afford these vehicles will stay very close to home, I expect.
Strange strange strange. Not yet collapsed in Europa. South africa yes Cuba too Libano too
South Africa economy is presently self-organizing based on the laws of physics.
a quick return to subsistence farming after the cannibal great reset
https://youtu.be/QriPV_59gJc
Here you go Marco, collapse already under way according to this article. Happy Days for you.
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/they-warned-us-that-there-would-be-a-collapse-of-civilization-in-our-generation-and-they-were-right/
Quotes from the article, proving we are already in collapse:
Also,
Irrefutable evidence the “vaccines” are a bioweapon
FULL INTERVIEW – There is NO variant, Not novel, NO pandemic – Dr David Martin with Reiner Fueller
https://www.bitchute.com/video/lIUGg5dXHxiQ/
thanks for the new post, Gail. i hope you had a nice break.
I apologize for being so slow to get this post up. I was in Minnesota, visiting with a group of cousins.
It seems to take me a while to write a new post. The first draft rarely works. And I make far more images than ever appear in the final post.
Why apologize? It’s not like you’re required to produce content according to a certain schedule.
No problem … I’ve been amusing myself on Off Guardian with Sophie …
I think she’s Rough Beast curious ….
I know someone with a sailboat for sale, if that’s any help
The wait is always worthwhile. Your posts are so well done and important that they’re worth even a longer wait.
We value your sane articles whenever they come out, Gail – beacons in the dark night of lunacy and lies which we have been plunged in to since late 2019.
Unfortunately, seeing the trend in propaganda and increasingly repressive legislation, I suspect that discussing the truth of our economic situation will soon be classed as ‘subversive activity undermining faith in governmental competence’…….
All together now, and I mean ALL:
‘100 years of Progress in 25 years, comrades!’
Xabier, do you ever get the feeling that we are all living in a Global Potemkin Village?
All we seem to have done over the past 25 years, comrades, is to build grander and more grotesque façades to hide our terminal decline behind. And no country has been more successful at this than the UK, although the veneer is starting to peel pretty badly now.
Life is a facade. All is illusion. When the veil drops… then we’ll get to see the real world.
Allegedly.
wasn’t that the point of the dance of the seven veils?
We are always happy. Take as long as is convenient for you.
Right, the government makes way too much money from taxing fossil fuels and it’s baked into their projections and budgets. It’s like trying to put tobacco companies out of business. They can fine those companies but if they are out of business, there goes their revenues.
Governments everywhere depend on fossil fuels, both directly and indirectly. Even hydro-electric, nuclear power, wind turbines, and solar panels need fossil fuels to be built and maintained. The whole idea of moving completely away from fossil fuels cannot really work, if a person understands all of the connections.
Ultimately, you can only tax a “surplus.” No surplus, no taxation is possible, without destroying the taxed entity. This is just as true of fossil fuel companies as medieval turnip farmers.
If wind and solar aren’t profitable enough to be taxed on their own two feet then they aren’t really worth it to society. This is true of a great many companies now which aren’t really profitable and rely on future promises of “scale” and “growth” in order to be profitable.
Banks create money by loaning it into existence and ultimately borrowers need to create collateral (by applying energy to resources) which is worth more than the the cost of inputs. This is not really possible anymore. A system which is no longer profitable (can’t be taxed without destroying the means of production) collapses almost by definition.
Throw some of the excess energy from fossil fuels at ‘renewable’ energy … to convince the goy that we are in transition …
Heck we use how much energy on going round and round and round on ski lifts…
End of the day it’s all wasted… so why not calm the MOREONS with some windmills and solar panels
Blonde Beast,
Glad you agree with me. Ultimately, you can only tax a “surplus,” is a good way of putting the problem.
it isn’t possible to tax fossil fuels until someone buys them
if people can’t afford them
no taxation
Check it out norm
https://youtu.be/nUDoGuLpirc
Good point!