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No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.
This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.
Politicians cannot possibly admit that today’s world economy is headed for collapse, in a way similar to that of prior civilizations. Instead, they need to provide the illusion that they are in charge. The self-organizing system somehow leads politicians to put forward reasons why the changes ahead might be desirable (to avert climate change), or at least temporary (because of sanctions against Russia).
In this post, I will try to try to explain at least a few of the issues involved.
[1] Citizens around the world can sense that something is very wrong. It looks like the economy may be headed for a serious recession in the near term.
Consumer sentiment is at an extraordinarily low level, worse than during the 2008-2009 great recession according to a chart (Figure 2) shown on the University of Michigan Survey of Consumers website. According to the same website, nearly 48% of consumers blame inflation for eroding their standard of living. Food prices have risen significantly. Over the past year, the cost of car ownership has escalated, as has the cost of buying or renting a home.
The situation in Europe is at least as bad, or worse. Citizens are worried about possibly “freezing in the dark” this winter if electricity generation cannot be maintained at an adequate level. Natural gas supplies, mostly purchased from Russia by pipeline, are less available and high-priced. Coal is also high-priced. Because of the fall of the Euro relative to the US dollar, the price of oil in euros is as high as it was in 2008 and 2012.
Many other countries, besides those in the Eurozone, are experiencing low currencies relative to the dollar. Some examples include Argentina, India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Japan, and South Korea.
China has problems with developers of condominium homes for its citizen. Many of these homes cannot be delivered to purchasers as promised. As a protest, buyers are withholding payments on their unfinished homes. To make matters worse, the prices of condominium homes have started to fall, leading to a loss of value of these would-be investments. All of this could lead to serious problems for the Chinese banking industry.
Even with these major problems, central banks in the US, the UK and the Eurozone are raising target interest rates. The US is also implementing Quantitative Tightening, which also tends to raise interest rates. Thus, central banks are intentionally raising the cost of borrowing. It doesn’t take much insight to see that the combination of price inflation and higher borrowing costs is likely to force consumers to cut back on spending, leading to recession.
[2] Politicians will avoid talking about possible future economic problems related to inadequate energy supply.
Politicians want to get re-elected. They want citizens to think that everything is OK. If there are energy supply problems, they need to be framed as being temporary, perhaps related to the war in Ukraine. Alternatively, any issue that arises will be discussed as if it can easily be fixed with new legislation and perhaps a little more debt.
Businesses also want to minimize problems. They want citizens to place orders for their goods and services, without the fear of being laid off. They would like the news media to publish stories saying that any economic dip is likely to be very mild and temporary.
Universities don’t mind problems, but they want the problems to be framed as solvable ones that will offer their students opportunities for jobs that will pay well. A near-term, unsolvable predicament is not helpful at all.
[3] What is wrong is a physics problem. The operation of our economy requires energy of the correct type and the right quantity.
The economy is something that grows through the “dissipation” of energy. Examples of dissipation of energy include the digestion of food to give energy to humans, the burning of fossil fuels, and the use of electricity to power a light bulb. A rise in world energy consumption is highly correlated with growth in the world economy. Falling energy consumption is associated with economic contraction.
In physics terms, the world economy is a dissipative structure, just as all plants, animals and ecosystems are. All dissipative structures have finite lifespans, including the world economy.
This finding is not well known because academic researchers seem to operate in ivory towers. Researchers in economic departments aren’t expected to understand physics and how it applies to the economy. In fairness to academia, the discovery that the economy is a dissipative structure did not occur until 1996. It takes a long time for findings to filter through from one department to another. Even now, I am one of a very small number of people in the world writing about this issue.
Also, economic researchers are not expected to study the history of the many smaller, more-localized civilizations that have collapsed in the past. Typically, the population of these smaller civilizations increased at the same time as the resources used by the population started to degrade. The use of technology, such as dams to redirect water flows, may have helped for a while, but eventually this was not enough. The combination of declining availability of high quality resources and increasing population tended to leave these civilizations with little margin for dealing with the bad times that can be expected to occur by chance. In many cases, such civilizations collapsed after disease epidemics, a military invasion, or a climate fluctuation that led to a series of crop failures.
[4] Many people have been confused by common misunderstandings regarding how an economy really works.
[a] Standard economics models foster the belief that the economy can continue to grow without a corresponding increase in energy supply.
When economic models are designed with labor and capital being the important inputs, energy supply doesn’t seem to be needed, at all.
[b] People seem to understand that legislation capping apartment rents will stop the building of new apartments, but they do not make the same connection with steps taken to hold down fossil fuel prices.
If efforts are made to bring down the prices of fossil fuels (such as raising interest rates and adding oil from the US petroleum reserves to increase total oil supply), we need to expect that extraction will be adversely affected. One article reports that Saudi Arabia does not seem to be using recent record profits to quickly raise reinvestment to the level that seemed to be required a few years ago. This suggests that Saudi Arabia needs prices that are quite a bit higher than $100 per barrel in order to take significant steps toward extracting the country’s remaining resources. This would seem to contradict published reserves that, in theory, take current prices into consideration.
Reuters reports that Venezuela has reneged on its promise to send more oil to Europe, under an oil for debt deal. It wants oil product swaps instead, since it is lacking in its ability to make finished products from its oil itself. It would take a long run of prices much higher than today’s level for Venezuela to be able to sufficiently invest in infrastructure to do such refining. Venezuela reports the highest oil reserves in the world (303.8 thousand million barrels), even higher than Saudi Arabia’s reported 297.5 thousand million barrels, but neither country can be counted on to take major steps to raise supply.
Similarly, there have been reports that US shale drillers are not investing to keep production growing, despite what seem to be sufficiently high prices. There are simply too many issues. The cost of new investment is very high, outside of the already drilled sweet spots. Also, there is no guarantee the price will stay high. There are also supply line issues, such as whether appropriate steel drilling pipes and fracking sand will be available, when needed.
[c] Published information suggests that there is a huge amount of fossil fuels remaining to be extracted, given today’s level of technology. If we assume that technology will get better and better, it is easy to believe that any fossil fuel limit is hundreds of years in the future.
The way the economy works, the extraction limit is really an affordability issue. If the cost of extraction rises too high, relative to what people around the world have for spendable income, production will stop because demand (in terms of what people can afford) will drop too low. People will tend to cut back on discretionary spending, such as vacation travel and meals in restaurants, cutting back on demand for fossil fuels.
[d] How “demand” works is poorly understood. Very often, researchers and the general public assume that demand for energy products will automatically remain high.
A surprisingly large share of demand is tied to the need for food, water, and basic services such as schools, roads, and bus service. Poor people require these basics just as much as rich people do. There are literally billions of poor people in the world. If the wages of poor people fall too low relative to the wages of rich people, the system cannot work. Poor people find that they must spend nearly all their income on food, water and housing. As a result, they have little left to pay taxes to support basic governmental services. Without adequate demand from poor people, the prices of commodities tend to fall too low to encourage reinvestment.
The majority of fossil fuel use is by commercial and industrial users. For example, natural gas is often used in making nitrogen fertilizer. If the price of natural gas is high, the price of fertilizer will rise higher than farmers are willing to pay for the fertilizer. Farmers will cut back on fertilizer use, reducing yields for their crops. The farmers’ own costs will be lower, but there will be less of the desired crops grown, perhaps indirectly raising overall food prices. This is not a connection that economic modelers build into their models.
The lockdowns of 2020 show that governments can indeed ramp up demand (and thus prices) for energy products by sending out checks to citizens. We are now seeing that the approach seems to produce inflation rather than more energy production. Also, countries without energy resources of their own may see their currencies fall with respect to the US dollar.
[e] It is not true that energy types can easily be substituted for one another.
In energy modeling, such as in calculating “Energy Return on Energy Invested,” a popular assumption is that all energy is substitutable for other energy. This isn’t true, unless a person accounts for all of the details of the transition, and the energy needed to make such a transition possible.
For example, intermittent electricity, such as that generated by wind turbines or solar panels, is not substitutable for load-following electricity. Such intermittent electricity is not always available when people need it. Some of this intermittency is very long-term. For example, wind-generated electricity may be low for more than a month at a time. In the case of solar energy, the problem tends to be storing up enough electricity during summer months for use in winter. A naive person might assume that adding a few hours of battery backup would fix intermittency problems, but such a fix turns out to be very inadequate.
If people are not to freeze in the dark in winter, longer-term solutions are needed. One standard approach is to use a fossil fuel system to fill in the gaps when wind and solar are not available. The catch, then, is that the fossil fuel system really needs to be a year-around system, with trained staffing, pipelines and adequate fuel storage. A modeler needs to consider the need to build a whole double system instead of a single system.
Because of intermittency issues, electricity from wind and solar only substitute for fuels (coal, natural gas, uranium) that operate our current system. Publications often talk about the cost of intermittent electricity being at “grid parity” when its temporary cost seems to match the cost of grid electricity, but this is matching “apples and oranges.” The cost comparison needs to be in comparison to the average cost of fuel for plants producing electricity, rather than to electricity prices.
Another popular assumption is that electricity can be substituted for liquid fuels. For example, in theory, every piece of farm equipment could be redesigned and rebuilt to be based on electricity, rather than diesel, which is typically used today. The catch is that there would need to be an enormous number of batteries built and eventually disposed of for this transition to work. There would need also need to be factories to build all this new equipment. We would need an international trade system operating extraordinarily well, to find all the raw materials. Likely, there would still not be enough raw materials to make the system work.
[f] There is a great deal of confusion about expected oil and other energy prices, as an economy reaches energy limits.
This issue is closely related to [4][d], with respect to the confusion about how energy demand works. A common assumption among analysts is that “of course” oil prices will rise, as limits are approached. This assumption is based on the standard supply and demand curve used by economists.
The issue is that the availability of inexpensive energy products very much affects demand as well as supply. Jobs that pay well are only available if inexpensive energy products can leverage human labor. For example, surgeons today perform robotic surgery, requiring, at a minimum, a stable source of electricity for each operation. Furthermore, the equipment used in the surgery is created using fossil fuels. Surgeons also use anesthetic products that require fossil fuels. Without today’s fancy equipment, surgeons would not be able to charge nearly as much they do for their services.
Thus, it is not immediately obvious whether demand or supply would tend to fall faster, if energy supply should hit limits. We know that Revelation 18:11-13 in the Bible provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon. This suggests that at least sometimes during prior collapses, the problem was too low demand (and too low prices), rather than too low supply of energy products.
[5] The International Energy Agency and politicians around the world have recommended a transition to the use of wind and solar to try to prevent climate change for quite a few years. This approach seemed to have the approval of both those concerned about too much burning of fossil fuels causing climate change and those concerned about too little fossil fuel energy causing economic collapse.
A rough estimate of what the decline in energy supply might look like under the rapid shift to renewables proposed by politicians is shown in Figure 6.
If a person understands the connection between energy consumption and the economy, such a rapid drop in energy supply looks like something that would likely be associated with economic collapse. The goal of politicians seems to be to keep citizens from understanding how awful the situation really is by reframing the story of the decline in energy supply as something politicians and economists have chosen to do, to try to prevent climate change for the sake of future generations.
The rich and powerful can see this change as a good thing if they themselves can profit from it. When there is not enough energy, the physics of the situation tends to lead to increasing wage and wealth disparities. Wealthy individuals see this outcome as a good thing: They can perhaps personally profit. For example, Bill Gates has amassed about 270,000 acres of farmland in the United States, including newly purchased farmland in North Dakota.
Furthermore, politicians see that they can have more control over populations if they can direct citizens in a way that will use less energy. For example, bank accounts can be linked to some type of social credit score. Politicians will explain that this is for people’s own good–to prevent the spread of disease or to prevent undesirables from using too much of the available resources.
One way of dramatically reducing energy consumption is by mandating shutdowns in an area, purportedly to prevent the spread of Covid-19, as China has been doing recently. Such shutdowns can be explained as being needed to stop the spread of disease. These shutdowns can also help hide other problems, such as not having enough fuels to prevent rolling blackouts of electricity.
[6] We are living in a truly unusual time, with a major energy problem being hidden from view.
Politicians cannot tell the world how bad the energy situation really is. The problem with near-term energy limits has been known since at least 1956 (M. King Hubbert) and 1957 (Hyman Rickover). The problem was confirmed in the modeling performed for the 1972 book, The Limits to Growth by Donella Meadows and others.
Most high-level politicians are aware of the energy supply issue, but they cannot possibly talk about it. Instead, they choose to talk about what would happen if the economy were allowed to speed ahead without limits, and how bad the consequences of that might be.
Militaries around the world are no doubt well aware of the fact that there will not be enough energy supplies to go around. This means that the world will be in a contest for who gets how much. In a war-like setting, we should not be surprised if communications are carefully controlled. The views we can expect to hear loudly and repeatedly are the ones governments and influential individuals want ordinary citizens to hear.
Global recession is coming. UK new export orders in the global manufacturing PMIs fell to 41 in the flash reading for August, down from 46 in July (pink). Germany is also at 41, down from 43 in July (blue). Europe is the epicenter of the global recession that’s coming
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa7j1vbVsAI5goA?format=png&name=small
New York’s fuel inventory is so low that shippers are paying big premiums to get supplies there by boat
New York’s gasoline inventories are so low that more seaborne cargoes are arriving, Bloomberg first reported.
Shipping via boat typically carries a steeper price tag compared to pipeline flows.
But the main pipeline that supplies New York is already running near full capacity.
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/commodities/new-york-gas-shortages-inventory-jones-act-ships-oil-imports-2022-8
European industries are planning to raise further the price of refined products so the big industries do not expect lower earnings
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa7xLsVXkAAdjfz?format=jpg&name=large
Businesses figure they can get away with higher prices. They tend to be much more upbeat than ordinary citizens.
That’s cuz they are sanguine … like me!
Here we see months’ supply of new homes. New homes under construction, and Fed rate.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa74qMZXgAAY29K?format=png&name=medium
President of Latvia Egils Levits calls for “dealing with” the country’s Russian speaking minority who “do not support Riga’s anti-Russian policy” and to “isolate them from society”.
People invade. People get kicked out. People invade. People get kicked out. It has always worked like that, unless the preceding people are bred out or enslaved or exterminated.
Many such cases.
In 1923 the League of Nations supervised a forced “population exchange” between Turkey and Greece that involved 1.6 million being uprooted and diven with fire and sword, losing their homes and livelihoods and legal nationalities.
The League’s Commissioner of Refugees managed it all with a perfectly straight face (after all, they were at that time also very busy clearing the Germans out of formerly German lands). The previous year, 1922, this same Commissioner had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa7kbOQWAAAUr4e?format=jpg&name=900×900
In 1947-1948, the tribe drove 800,000 Palestinians out of their homes and into a lifelong refugee status, yet in 1949 the UN immediately welcomed israel as a legitimate nation.
Many such cases. People pick and choose in a most cavalier manner which ones are human rights monstrosities and which are not.
Could always send them to the gas chambers…. I am sure Pfizer could get the old recipe out and make the gas for them
BREAKING: Benchmark European natural gas prices (Dutch TTF) rise above the €300 per MWh level.
(that’s ~$87 per mBtu, or more than $500 per barrel of oil equivalent)
https://twitter.com/JavierBlas/status/1562464689321168907
Wow! Basically not available!
Ya it looks bad but it’s only temporary … as soon as the Ukey war finishes … this will return to normal.
I’m not worried about this situation … I’m what you might call .. sanguine…
Interesting word this sanguine… let’s see how it came about shall we????
sanguine (adj.)
late 14c., “blood-red, of a blood-red color” (late 12c. as a surname), from Old French sanguin (fem. sanguine) and directly from Latin sanguineus “of blood,” also “bloody, bloodthirsty,” from sanguis (genitive sanguinis) “blood” (see sanguinary).
The meaning “cheerful, hopeful, vivacious, confident” is attested by c. 1500, because these qualities were thought in old medicine to spring from an excess or predominance of blood as one of the four humors. The sense of “of or pertaining to blood” (mid-15c.) is rare.
OMG! I guess they’ll eat cereal for dinner cuz cooking is too $$$.
https://youtu.be/KhRuama5Nag
Russian Seaborne Coal Exports Effectively Halted by EU Ban
(Bloomberg) — Russian coal exports were effectively halted by a European Union ban on entities within the 27-nation bloc servicing shipments of the fuel to anywhere in the world.
Suek JSC, Russia’s largest thermal coal miner, was unable to ship the fuel since mid-August, according to people familiar with the situation who asked not to be named because the matter is private. The insurance and reinsurance markets are dominated by EU, UK and Swiss companies, making it hard for shipowners to find cover, the people said.
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/russian-seaborne-coal-exports-effectively-halted-by-eu-ban-1.1809922
The folks in the EU must be slightly crazy.
“An EU ban on imports of Russian coal and other goods into the bloc started on Aug. 10, following a wind-down period of four months.”
the EU should make the ultimate sacrifice for Z… the cocaine addict…
I know some folks who sniff quite a bit of blow (not me though – I have no supply chain…)
And they do EXACTLY THIS — I will usually joke ‘so you got a cold?’ (that’s code for I see you – I know you been sniffing powder).
In fact I was on a vidjo call with someone the other day … and he wandered off the screen for half a minute… and he came back sniffling just like Z….
https://youtu.be/xoT0FrapdCc
Poland’s biggest chemicals company halted production of nitrogen fertilizers and trimmed output of ammonia because of record gas prices.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa4ZrT-VEAIEAlm?format=jpg&name=large
Next one: Orlen also in Poland halts nitrogen fertilizer output
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa4asMVXgAA4Ik0?format=jpg&name=medium
Reconfirming Global Holodomor.
Waiting on my Candied Fentanyl.
Spot price for fertilizers:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa76PsEXgAEaWgR?format=jpg&name=large
Holodomor Cometh… along with winter.
We will not be able to afford electric cars, but maybe electric bikes:
https://alwaysfreshnews.com/news/world/398837/sulik-announced-a-large-investment-bosch-will-create-four-thousand-jobs-in-the-presov-region-hnonline-sk/
I always wonder if it is possible to park an electric bike in a public place without fear of it getting stolen.
The battery is usually detachable and can be carried in a napsack, that would leave the heavy framing and they are hard to peddle without electricity.
When I see someone on an Ebike… these are the words that run through my mind (in no particular order):
weak… snowflake… pathetic… feeble…. lazy….useless…disgusting… soft….impotent… flacid…. KFC…. soda…. sofa…excuses… worthless… frail….mentally ill.
I have two sister-in-laws with e-bikes. One is 100+ pounds overweight; the other is undergoing chemotherapy. She sometimes carries a chemotherapy pump on her back as she rides. Neither of them is up to riding a regular bicycle.
The one who is on chemotherapy had been an avid bike rider before she came down with pancreatic cancer, over a year ago. With the electric bicycle, she can keep up with her friends on group bicycle rides. Her immune system is badly affected by the chemotherapy. She feels that bicycle riding is an activity that she can actually do with her friends without being too exposed to germs, since it is outdoors.
There are always exemptions to rules….
I am talking about able-bodied people … I am increasingly seeing young people on E-bikes… in fact the other day I passed a family on Ebikes — parents and two teens (16ish)…. Almost everyone is on an E bike now…
norm would be exempted … his legs would fall off if he pushed too hard going up hill… and the stuff would squish out the sides of his diaper due to the pressure points…. norm – you qualify for E bike status
eddy
i imagine you have the same thoughts about people in wheelchairs too—don’t you?
I seem to recall you exercising your descriptive talents on competitors in last year’s paralympics too.
I once had to do an operating manual for people who had nothing but eye movements to control their immediate living environment.
You would have had a field day with that one.
It all depends… if the person in the wheelchair can walk… then ya… lazy…
But if they’ve been vax damaged and their brain is f789ed up so they cannot think + have damaged motor coordination and seizures (like the fitness instructor!!!) then … a wheelchair is acceptable ….
Why do you ask – are you in a wheelchair? What about mike and anna?
eddy
do try to make your mind a little more difficult to read.
life should present some challenges, however trivial
Bigger Picture … does it justify spending our tax dollars on a Paralympic Volley Ball team to travel across the planet — to slither about on the floor chasing a ball?
Something that nobody has any interest in watching except that it’s PC to say one enjoys watching.
I fail to see how this is any different than funding a basketball team of able – bodied but hopelessly inept basketball players… and broadcasting the matches on ESPN.
I think its a pretty good deal. I dont buy Kows argument that oats and ebikes are key to enlightenment but as you know-Im often wrong. Everyone I know on one is very fit. Look if you got to go up a hill you dont get on the bike. The E is for the hills. Or after work when your pooped.
How do you get fit if you barely peddle up the hills?
I sometimes bike with E-bikers… they go up hills and they are not at all out of breath at the top… whereas my lungs will be burning….
They may not be obese — but fit?
Why go through the pretence of exercise — just buy a petrol scooter and putter around the countryside…. I know why they don’t – cuz motorized vehicles are not allowed on the tracks.
If extermination was not imminent let me tell you what the future would look like…
Battery tech would improve to the point where Ebikes would not require the rider to peddle at all…. and just as the weaklings embraced the current lazy man’s option… they’d all transition to the no-peddle option…
Cuz people are soft… they want easy … they want to be influencers doing nothing and getting money… it’s a disease of the mind… they do not want a challenge…
E Bikes and Kim Kardashian are signs of the times… we’ve just about devolved into blobs of nothing — what’s the book Vonnegut wrote about this – Galapagos?
And it’s time for humans to exit the world. Good riddance weakling.
Eddy
the word is pedal—pedal up the hills
Once might be a typo–we all make those. Three times is ignorance.
If you’re going to light up our lives with flashes of wit, –do get a grasp of grown up English first.
Don’t rely on auto-correct. I doesn’t work for peddle and pedal.
norm stop pedalling your bs and tell us why you support injecting infants.
the only possible answer eddy?
with your towering intellect—which you have told us about so often—i thought you could come up with something better than that
I guess it depends on the lock. Always lock the frame on some piece of infrastructure.
https://images.internetstores.de/products/879096/02/0540c6/abus-ultra-410-buegelschloss-230mm-sh34-1.jpg
Ideally with a ebike with an integrated battery.
There is only one form of alternative transport (outside of walking) available long term. It has 4 legs and names like horse, ox, camel, donkey etc. Lot of brand names there.
Why are humans so incredibly dense?
hate to point this out
but to put the necessary energy into a horse of useful size, requires about 2 acres of spare grass
A donkey–less than that, but you get less work out of the animal
Oxen? The origin of the word ‘morgen’ (morning) was the time an ox team could plough land before becoming exhausted.
In far Northern countries, only very small animals (horses) could be used in agriculture in the past. I heard a talk on this subject once from a person from Finland. The solar energy was not great enough there to support large animals for farm work.
And so humans will do what we actually do best
We walk.
From 1100 to 1550 AD my family controlled the middle march of Northern England. The family has extensive records of the manorial system and its production. I can state unequivocally that oxen teams were the primary motive power for plow agriculture. Horses we used to make war. We made a lot of war.
I can believe that oxen were used for plowing and horses were used to make war.
Here in NZ we don’t oxen cuz we have Plough Hogs… obese large boned women … that we hook up to ploughs… which they drag across the paddock … prepping the soil for planting
Did I mention we have a Plough Hog Olympic Games?
The crowds are immense and it’s quite a thing to behold when tens of thousands howl Soooo Eeeeee to cheer the Hogs on…
One should add this experience to their bucket list…
Cows where vital for the farmers in northern Sweden, Finland and Norway. Milk, meat and draught. Horses where status. Oxens eat less but work slower.
and that also explains why the Inuit never built cities and had armies with which to invade south
CF Fertilisers UK Announces Intention to Temporarily Halt Ammonia Production at Billingham Complex; Company Will Import Ammonia to Produce AN Fertiliser and Nitric Acid at Site
At current natural gas and carbon prices, CF Fertilisers UK’s ammonia production is uneconomical, with marginal costs above £2,000 per tonne and global ammonia prices at about half that level. The current cost of natural gas at NBP is more than twice as high as it was one year ago, with the NBP forward strip suggesting that this price will continue to rise in the months ahead.
The Company has notified customers who purchase carbon dioxide (CO2) on a contract basis from the Billingham Complex about the impending temporary halt of ammonia production. Once the ammonia plant is safely shut down, CO2 production, which is a byproduct of the ammonia production process, will stop until the plant is restarted.
The Company has not yet determined the exact date when it will begin the temporary shutdown of the ammonia plant. At this time, CF Fertilisers UK do not anticipate any impact on employees regarding this announcement given the substantial level of activity that will continue to occur at Billingham.
https://cfindustries.q4ir.com/news-market-information/press-releases/news-details/2022/CF-Fertilisers-UK-Announces-Intention-to-Temporarily-Halt-Ammonia-Production-at-Billingham-Complex-Company-Will-Import-Ammonia-to-Produce-AN-Fertiliser-and-Nitric-Acid-at-Site/default.aspx
Awww come on … just pass the costs onto the consumer… like the petrol stations and power companies are doing …
Then they can go on strike and get a 25% raise… and the circular economy (simon michaux???) can continue!
Emmanuel Macron, President of France, announces publicly ‘The End of Abundance’ : The day I read Gail’s new article about “Why No Politician Is Willing to Tell Us the Real Energy Story”.
Can you believe it ?
It’s in all French papers and TVs.
So does tell us the real energy story ? Not really, but it’s still a bold step.
It’s a speech where he says (I try to translate the most accuratly possible) :
“We’re living a moment of a big swing. A big upheaval … We are living the end of what could appear as an abundance …
…. Abundance of liquidities (money) with no cost … abundance of products and techs always available … without any supply chain break, no rarity of raw materials of tech parts … abundance of water.”
… then he speaks about war and democracy in Europe.
Later he says the expression “end of abundance” in his speech and its the title of all the articles in the news.
So he never used any word related to energy, fuel, electricity, etc …
Reactions, comments on websites are terrible : a flow of hate : “we people never knew abundance, the elites know the abundance, and they have to renunce it. Macron must leave. Incompetent.” And so one. So indeed politicians can’t tell the truth.
The link to a site with the video of the speech :
https://www.lejdd.fr/Politique/conseil-des-ministres-emmanuel-macron-annonce-une-grande-bascule-et-la-fin-des-evidences-4129850
Macron almost stole the title from that guy Norman Pager’s pamphlet of a few decades back. “The End of More”.
I spect FE is gonna want the end of MORONS now.
Maybe there are things that become very obvious.
I notice that the WSJ is reporting:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-jackson-hole-fed-powell-11661288446
Jerome Powell’s Dilemma: What if the Drivers of Inflation Are Here to Stay?
Policy makers gathering this week in Jackson Hole are worrying about the emergence of a more volatile world with higher interest rates
I expect that somehow the article (which I have not yet read) is expecting that growth will continue, but with ever-higher prices and ever-higher interest rates. This cannot happen, of course, because wages will be adversely affect. Taxes will fall, also. Macron in right.
Macron is a former banker, so he knows. He even proposed to have Europe sells its physical gold to reduce Africas debt burden. Extend & pretend.
Gail,
Without affordable energy, many things of value cease to have value, indeed they may have negative value in that getting of them costs additional energy. E.g. Detroit, easier to walk away from “wealth” than to remove the previous remains. Seems like this has happened to past civilizations, people just walked away.
Stores of value across time are a challenge.
Dennis L.
The thing people want in housing is location, location, location. If the only work available is manual farm labor, a house in the city won’t do much good.
well–whaddya know?
Macron plagiarises my book title
shameless
Close, but no cigar. 🙂
He got it from David Archibald’s 2014 book TWILIGHT OF ABUNDANCE: WHY LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY WILL BE NASTY, BRUTISH, AND SHORT, in which “he reveals the grim future the world faces on its current trajectory: massive fuel shortages, the bloodiest warfare in human history, a global starvation crisis, and a rapidly cooling planet. Archibald combines pioneering science with keen economic knowledge to predict the global disasters that could destroy civilization as we know it—disasters that are waiting just around the corner.”
https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Abundance-Century-Nasty-Brutish/dp/1621571580
my book was 2013
we’ll ask eddy
he’s the plagiarism expert
I wouldn’t interpret this as a positive … he’s telling the people of France that they should prepare to be exterminated
I believe there may be a happy side (sort of) to the story of our descent into the world of the Long Emergency: the elite everywhere are going to be a lot less powerful. With all the essential resources running dry, they (the elite) will gradually no longer have the means to maintain the hardware — surveillance systems, firearms, aircraft carriers etc — by which they have abused the rest of humanity for decades. Nor will they be able to pay the Stormtroopers who do all the dirty work for them — and if the troopers don’t get their dues, I anticipate their blasters are going to point in a very different direction.
Underground bunkers? Sure, I’d grant they may have enough to hide in them for a couple years. After that the said bunkers will become their mausoleums.
The meek may inherit the earth after all.
We will have to wait and see, IMO. I certainly agree that underground bunkers won’t work for very long.
You are right at least in the sense that with a reduced population there will be less people willing to do the dirty work of the oligarchs.
But… history shows that even with a world population in millions, the Sumerian kings had enough henchmen to be buried alive with servants, wifes and soldiers. Such is human nature!
I actually agree with FE on one point – the psychopaths in charge would love nothing more than taking us all with them when they die. I am just not naive enough to believe they would do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
I’m not that sure how similar the henchmen of the Sumerian kings of old are to the henchmen of today’s oligarchs. The former probably would believe anything you tell them, including any myth about gods and the like that you may use to manipulate them. The latter would perchance be equipped with a somewhat more sophisticated intellect, besides which they have access to way more information regarding the world around them.
I agree…to a degree…The aircraft carriers will disappear, being too monstrous to maintain and deploy. But the paid henchmen on the ground will be around for a long time. That is the dilemma. It really is no different from feudal times….where the paid henchmen carried swords and weapons to go out and enforce the tax.
You are more right than you know.
Complexity is unravelling now faster than at anytime since the Roman legions abandoned Brittany. Within 18 years we will see wholesale collapse of most world government structures. In the late 2030s all visible elites will disappear completely from public view. They will try to escape (as they always always do) into vast underground redoubts. But not to escape the great unwashed…… to escape the great reaper of the wealthy and the scornful. Moderns would try and name it a celestial sphere, a planetary body out of the southern heavens. The pious would call it the angel of death. The observant would describe a terrible machination of the firmament.. A few would call it what it really is….. a programmed reset of the simacrulum.
It will come like it came during the Bronze Age Collapse, or like it came for the Tower of Babel. It will manifest like it did during the great flood of the time of Noah.
The elites will die in their thousands. Crushed beneath heaving mountains of granite and basalt, drowned in the surge of oceans over slipping their basins. The sun will go black and the moon blood red, the stars will slide crazily across the night sky. Billions will die, but the elite will be targeted.
Then again in 2046 something even worse.
Oil depletion is just a mild start to the festivities.
Remember, the elites KNOW what is coming. They are about to exit the simacrulum,… May they re enter it quickly and in poor circumstance,…. their souls need the education.
You could be right. We don’t know what is ahead. Maybe things move more slowly. Perhaps Europe freezes in the dark, but the problems don’t spread everywhere simultaneously.
Calendrical Isometrics,….. we actually do know the future within certain boundaries. The Ancients understood this, they were far more sophisticated than moderns.
Nostradamus was not actually gazing into a bowl of water. It was his metaphor for measurable ripples in space time both backward and forward.
The keeper of the calendar is coming and it’s transit will transform this worlds surface.
Might be OK if you can get a feudal system setup.
But what will you pay your henchmen with?
Initially no manufactured or in trade products, so no products for sale anywhere.
All us peasants still trying to grow basic foods for our own survival.
Take our potatoes, sure, but we will be dead from starvation next time you visit.
The feudal system had peasants who knew how to farm,
so they can be abused to the maximum to take whatever the henchmen deemed tolerable without destroying their source.
The elite would be better off staying with their baked beans and Bourbon in their self contained fortress for the rest of their lives rather than entrust their continuance to ‘henchmen’.
Tim;;
Is this really your girl Greta? Say it aint so.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/XhLcsgtrc6JM/
It’s nice to finally see that girl smiling.
Perhaps my heckling is finally getting through to her.
Watch: CNN Tells Viewers Monkeypox Is Not Sexually-Transmitted. Despite vast amounts of data showing that the spread of Monkeypox is occurring predominantly among gay men, CNN went to great lengths to explain that it is absolutely NOT sexually transmitted.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/watch-cnn-tells-viewers-monkeypox-not-sexually-transmitted
Tell that to the poor greyhound.
I suspect these shots are purposed to help with causing Covid mutations… like Paxlovid
1+1 = 7. M Pox is not s exually transmitted
(1) “One article reports that Saudi Arabia does not seem to be using recent record profits to quickly raise reinvestment to the level that seemed to be required a few years ago. […] Similarly, there have been reports that US shale drillers are not investing to keep production growing, despite what seem to be sufficiently high prices.”
That’s because neither Saudis nor US frackers are going to repeat their failed, self-damaging policies from the past. None of them needs more boom-bust cycles; none of them needs more price wars. They will not rock the boat they are all in, and rather try to keep oil scarce and expensive, relatively speaking. “That’s just good stewardship,” as the article you refer to says.
(2) “Reuters reports that Venezuela has reneged on its promise to send more oil to Europe, under an oil for debt deal.”
Let’s not ignore the elephant in the room: Venezuela’s oil industry is under strict sanctions from the Empire and its vassals. Venezuela has been condescendingly allowed to deliver oil in exchange for debt relief, i.e., for nothing of practical value. All what Venezuela wants now is to change this ‘nothing’ into ‘something’ (i.e., oil products).
(3) “These shutdowns [in China] can also help hide other problems, such as not having enough fuels to prevent rolling blackouts of electricity.”
Locking down one or more millions of people out of 1.4 billion can hardly prevent rolling blackouts in a meaningful way. When the Chinese had coal shortages, they didn’t make it a state secret. Today, when they have electricity shortages and rolling blackouts due to drought, it is not a secret either. If anything, lockdowns could cause uncertainty in the global oil market leading to lower oil prices – which is something China wants.
(4) “We know that Revelation 18:11-13 in the Bible provides a list of a number of commodities, including humans sold as slaves, for which prices dropped very low at the time of the collapse of ancient Babylon.”
Honestly, i find it baffling how anyone could think the Revelation describes events in the ancient Babylon in a literal sense. To me, the text reads like a phantasmagoria, wish list, or fan fiction written by a Christian zealot. I googled maybe a dozen of hardcore Christian sites contemplating the Revelation (not necessarily a representative sample of course), and every single one of them interpreted it as some kind metaphor of a judged, rotten society.
(5) “Politicians cannot possibly admit that today’s world economy is headed for collapse, in a way similar to that of prior civilizations.”
We can speculate about what’s possible or what’s probable. But we don’t know until we know. See: Thomas Robert Malthus.
You make some good points. I am not sure I would agree with you about (4). People at the time Revelation was written would have know about what happened in terms of prices and demand at the time Babylon collapsed, because that information would have been passed down by the Jewish leaders who were at that time still captive in Babylon. Whether or not the book of Revelation makes any sense at all, I have a hard time believing that whoever “John” was that supposedly wrote this book would get the story completely backward.
I suspect that Revelation is, at least partly, trying to warn about upcoming collapses, using very veiled language so as not to upset the powers that be. There was, of course, the near-term up coming collapse. But we can also read it as possibly relating to a longer term collapse, as well.
Added later: I imagine that the political powers of the time did not want the story of possible collapse getting out. Thus, the writer of Revelation expected censorship if his writings were very clear to everyone. Not too different from today.
Politician; The world is running out of affordable resources and the biosphere is becoming saturated with toxic buildup from all the industrial activities therefore we will all have to live with less and less and we will all be getting sicker and dying.
Other than that everything is doing super good!
we thought we could turn the planet into cash by setting fire to it
the result of that was to be served an eviction notice
The already wealthy look like they will be the ones who benefit. So, from their point of view, things are fine.
For your viewing pleasure, it is a green future, it is an electrical future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHnMPIOqzTE
We all die, now we know the worst news, time to live, time to move forward and have the antithesis of JRM’s death of progress. What happens to old philosophers wondering about the mystical, cosmic divine as the world changes around them? Change, another name for progress?
Our lives will both change and end, we live the change, we make choices, we abandon those which do not work as does nature, it is called evolution, it takes time, mostly more than a lifetime, bummer.
Gail is right, there is no going backward, anyone seen a dinosaur lately?
I get it, we are out of affordable oil, next.
Dennis L.
Of course, the video is based on overly generous subsides, both at the time of purchase and based on the monthly credit to the bill. The company selling grid electricity needs to raise rates for the rest of the population. These folks tend to be poorer than the rest.
The problem is that the cost of operating the electric grid is close to fixed. Perhaps costs even go up, because of all of the extra transmission needed for wind and solar, and the need to try to balance everything. Even if use of the electric grid is greatly reduced, the homeowner with the solar panels needs to be paying close to the same amount for keeping the grid operating as other homeowners, without these systems.
Hawaii, California, and Florida have been trying to work around this problem. I know that Hawaii has been able to significantly slow grid additions since 2017. I believe that recent legislation was introduced in California and Florida to try to fix the problem, but I am not sure how successful it has been.
Yes, I know, silly, old pedantic man:
How about electrical farming? How about crops grow in the summer, how about using solar energy on the farm following seasonal variations, how about no transmission losses, about storing solar energy in grains? How quaint, store energy in grains. Has mankind ever done this before?
The world will end any day now, everyone fails to see what is coming.
Maybe not?
https://siamagazin.com/john-deere-new-all-electric-battery-electric-tractor/
There is always darkness, but so far, each day begins with sunlight. Note, cab is optional. Pretty damn easy to navigate a field compared to a freeway.
Is there some old nut on OFW who saw this sometime ago? Well, probably a delusional optimist.
Dennis L.
Point of use photovoltaic is great. It wont sustain IC. Force defines human existence and will also define its non existence. Carry on. I support your sense of style. Style is really all we have. Sometimes even the very best plan doesnt pan out. To think that there is always something that pans out is delusional. Trying your best is admirable. In the real world there are not certainties from our actions only uncertainties(death and taxes aside). Thats what makes it fun!
Point of use photovoltaic works only as long as you can keep the system as you use it repaired. If you need an inverter, this needs to be replaced/repaired from time to time. Batteries need adjustment. Even if you significantly “overbuild” the system, you will likely need a diesel generator for the times of year it doesn’t produce enough.
Photovoltaic is a versatile power source that can be used many ways. Many of the ways humans use power are wasteful IMO. AC electricity is a precious resource best saved for driving motors. All electricity can be changed to heat. Thats where it wants to go to anyway- entropy. Humans have need for heat in various applications to keep domiciles warm to cook and for bathing water. This application of photovoltaics requires no inverter and no other electronics other than the panels themselves.
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijp/2017/7540250/
None of this is hard. Its at what in my time was 6th grade science fair. Storing heat energy for a 12 hour period until the sun shines again in thermal mass is not rocket science either. Nor is storing heat in thermal mass for keeping houses warm. Its commonly 30 below zero where I live. Is storing heat in thermal mass a perfect climate control? Hardly. Its quite comfortable by my standards.
Most of the crops in the USA use crop circles which utilizes the aquifers to pull water up from the ground. This requires a inverter and batteries but if done in the day batteries are minimilized as the power is just regulated not stored coming off the panels.
I know hundreds if not thousands of families using photovoltaic most of them with incomes around the poverty line. They use it because land is cheap when the grid is not close. They are joyous and happy that they have energy. Would you tell those people stop using photovoltaic it has problems?
As I mentioned it is clear photovoltaic will not sustain industrial civilization. One of the things I so greatly respect about your analysis Gail is you dont advocate false solutions. Solutions are never all encompassing at their best they are compromises. IMO point of use photovoltaic is a reasonable solution. Do I stop going to the store to buy things that have fragile supply chains? No. We use systems all the time that will not persevere in the medium-long term. Point of use photovoltaic provides solutions in a decade long time frame when used conventionally and two decades in straight DC applications. Thats pretty good considering mankinds situation. I agree non point of use facilitation is not a logical application. The point is to keep people with some degree of joy in their life. What if we enabled households to provide hot water for themselves with straight DC applications of photovoltaic instead of military expenditures. Next year I will be traveling outside of the USA to provide rural villages with some photovoltaic capacity in a impoverished country. The energy it provides will be appreciated in liu of no energy. Not to get brownie point but because I appreciate joy and happiness in people. That allows me to feel those same emotions and I like that. I and many others including families with children appreciate photovoltaic very much.
Good points! If the PV is used to pull water out of the aquifer, it even helps with food production.
Farmers still need some oil to go with this, for plowing. Having some fertilizer would help as well.
But it would be difficult to keep population very high, with PV only.
Next year? That’s very optimistic!!!
I was thinking of trading my Hilux but it would be 6-7 months for the new one to arrive. I’ll just keep the old rig till BOOM.
Could be kiddo, could be. I could very well be wishing for some strawberry fentanyl. Just not my style.
Imagine the hunger gnawing at your guts… the sirens going EEEE AWWWWWW as the dead and damaged are collected (and driven off to the mass incinerator stations that have been set up in every borough)…
The trucks with the huge speakers rolling round and round the streets with ACDC quality speakers pumping out the message over and over ‘Stay Inside – The Food Vans Will Come to You – Tomorrow. Stay Inside – Anyone Outside will Be Shot… Everything will return to normal as soon as the Ukraine War ends’
The nurses will all be dead or mentally ill at this point so former shampoo girls will be recruited to go Door to Door to offer the latest Booster Shot….
That jug of cherry flavoured F is gonna start looking like the only good option.
Alternatively take out your high powered rifle and take pot shots at the Eeeee Awwwww sound … that will attract the snipers and they’ll finish you.
Most of the crops in the USA use crop circles which utilizes the aquifers to pull water up from the ground
That isn’t true. It’s used in some parts of the USA.
I know hundreds if not thousands of families using photovoltaic most of them with incomes around the poverty line.
How do they afford expensive solar panels then?
Up to 2019 panels got cheaper and cheaper. I saw panels as cheap as .15 a watt. Thats $300 for a 2kw array. Poverty is defined at about $20K income a year in the USA. Some degree of power is desirable and that includes people of limited income. If the land can be acquired people move onto it. Rural people do everything themselves. The services that are in the city dont exist. They work on their own infrastructure. They dont just get a quote for $20,000 for a PV system and think what it costs. They price the components. Thats what it costs for them.
Their are a lot of elderly fixed income people living this way. It beats a retirement home. They go to town maybe once a month.
Usually people who live rural off grid start with a gen set to build their home. The noise and fuel consumption gets old and they start with a small solar system to provide lighting using DC. Well and septic system are the two costs that people struggle with. A decent Photovoltaic system is much less expensive then that. The batteries are far more expensive than the panels. Inexpensive Chinese inverters and charge controllers and two 6v golf cart batteries are common with starter systems and some people never move beyond that.
People with limited income do their best to budget. They buy what energy and food they can. Homestead rural has no bills. They have no rent. A great deal of their expenditures are on infrastructure and tools.
These days are mostly over. The price of land has tripled. The exodus from the cities in 2020 did it. Its different now. Typically city people lasted about two years then went back to the city before 2020. They are sticking now. People who never got a piece are out. Its common to see people who ran small businesses for decades unable to make profit with rent increases.
As far as irrigation. This article cites 54% of farming uses aquifers.
https://www.circleofblue.org/2014/world/u-s-farm-irrigation-becomes-efficient-moves-east/
brilliant ‘Circle of Blue’ link–thanks banned, hadn’t come across that before
but—the actual link you cited was dated 2014, I think things have moved on a bit since then.
There are some interesting more up to date items, particularly this one:
https://www.circleofblue.org/the-drying-american-west/
They should just live in caves.
“brilliant ‘Circle of Blue’ link–thanks banned, hadn’t come across that before
but—the actual link you cited was dated 2014, I think things have moved on a bit since then.
There are some interesting more up to date items, particularly this one:
https://www.circleofblue.org/the-drying-american-west/”
Because drought makes aquifer reliant growing less important not more?
Not that you care about growing food. I would bet dollars you find the USA drought amusing. Just causing trouble again. Mostly what you do.
My comment about ‘circle of blue’ was sincerely meant, i hadn’t come across it before. It interested me.
try to think after you’ve read something, not before. And not be too eager to leap over the precipice of conclusion. It’s a long way down
I know a great deal about the Ogalla—and what it means for the future of the American people as it goes into terminal decline. I possess a very old atlas–the south west of the United States is simply called, “the Great South Western Desert’. I tend to be aware of such things. Especially when vast cities are built there on the promise of ‘infinite resources’. I do not wish tragedy on anyone, or take pleasure in it. It is nevertheless inevitable in the face of such hubris.
it is far from amusing, but perhaps the shallowness of your thinking allows you to think it so on my behalf. It isn’t. My amusement is reserved for the clowns who believe everything that passes across their scanning range on the internet. I am not one of them. I suggest you resist it.
my comments are sometimes contentious–usually in the face of the wild and wacky statements, for which the answer can only be gentle amusement. You may choose to take it seriously–no matter how ridiculous. I don’t.
The fact that vast swathes of the USA are running out of water is not something I find amusing.
It kinda rhymes with the 1930’s ‘Dust Bowl’
https://youtu.be/Y8U84qtZVbw
AC isn’t exactly “precious;” it’s the easiest to generate from mechanical rotation and, more importantly, it makes transmission and distribution practical.
High current is the enemy of transmission; that’s the number that drives heating in conductors. Therefore, to move a certain amount of power from one place to another you want to make the current as low as you can and therefore the voltage has to be as high as you can stand (P=VI). If your T&D is AC-based, you can step voltages up and down using transformers, which mostly use very simple materials and have no moving parts. There are places around the world where there are HVDC systems to get a lot of power from point A to point B but that’s all it’s good for – not general distribution. In those cases, the reduction of induction losses (a downside inherent to all AC) is worth all the hardware you have to have at either end to rectify (convert from AC to DC) and/or invert (convert from DC to AC) the electricity.
“AC isn’t exactly “precious;” it’s the easiest to generate from mechanical rotation”
Exactly. And that mechanical energy comes from fossil fuels and is to my mind finite. Finite = precious. In a perfect world we would use dc to convert to heat from PV in order to conserve fossil fuel mechanical energy for critical needs AC power generation amongst them.
I think we can keep the grid up without residental. Residental can get by with point of use. Agriculture and critical industry get AC.
Of course, getting replacement parts is your problem.
There is a fellow named John Howe who started the interest in electric tractors, quite a while ago. I met him in 2007. This is a photo I found:
https://www.compassionatespirit.com/wpblog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/John-Howe-1.jpg
There is also a photo up on pinterest, but I don’t have an account there.
John Howe’s approach doesn’t require batteries.
Not sure what’s going on in that photo but I know this much: tractors powerful enough to handle most all hobby farm needs (to include pulling a plow) are in the 60-90hp range, or 45-67kW. A single solar panel in full sun is generally in the 0.25kW range. So if the deal here is that he’s replaced the tractor’s gasoline motor with an electric one and put a few panels across the top of it, great – for going down the driveway to get the mail and that’s about it. Maybe with enough reduction gearing you could plow at a certain number of inches per minute.
Sick of these kinds of visual lies. There’s also a prototype car covered with solar panels that’s been promoted recently on youtube and of course 99% of people who see it think the car can charge itself in a few hours.
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Nothing suspicious about this at all. Just another coincidence.
Olympian Katie Archibald tried to save dying partner Rab Wardell
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-62657986
“Olympian Katie Archibald said she tried desperately to save her partner Rab Wardell as he suffered a fatal cardiac arrest in bed beside her.
The champion cyclist expressed her devastation after Wardell, a mountain biker, died aged 37 on Tuesday morning.
His death came two days after he won the Scottish MTB XC Championships in Dumfries and Galloway…”
Katie is quoted as saying:
“I still don’t understand what’s happened; if this is real; why he’d be taken now – so healthy and happy.”
Poor Katie… mentally re tarded … and now mentally ill
2 m3 of dried firewood (North EU) in june €450,-. Today €700,-
I got ‘mine mine mine’ 6 months ago. We’ll see about next year, politicians said we have to share the burden so i guess i can rip some wood off of our majors house then.
Thanks Gail, that’s a good one to send to folks who haven’t considered what’s going on. Appreciate you honing the existential blade in such a way as you do.
Thanks! Politicians and people running universities look at the problem differently than we do.
The visit in a Slovak prison for women: women repeatedly returning into prison for a chocolate or a criossant theft.
https://brainee.hnonline.sk/notsorry/news/96036860-navstivili-sme-zensku-vaeznicu-budicek-o-5-15-milostne-vztahy-a-11-druhov-jedal
When I was a juror in a murder trial, one of the police officers told about people who would commit minor crimes each fall, so that they would get food and a warm place to stay during the winter. One of the people testifying at the trial said his residence was in a parked car, in front of an address he gave.
The testimony gives some insight regarding how people living “on the edge” approach life. Prison acts as a safety net for folks who would otherwise be homeless.
Aqua parks closing: the monthly electricity bill of an aqua park in Slovakia went from EUR 12.000 to EUR 120.000
https://mynitra.sme.sk/c/22992059/znamy-aguapark-zatvoria-cena-elektriny-narastla-podla-primatora-desatnasobne.html
Oops!
An abandoned gym
A few years ago I was walking in the park in one of the spa towns in Slovakia and saw a new construction on its edge.
Now this building seems to be and abandoned gym:
https://index.sme.sk/g/209463/pozrite-sa-ako-vyzera-hangar-centre-v-turcianskych-tepliciach?gref=https%3A%2F%2Findex.sme.sk%2Fc%2F22988589%2Fturcianske-teplice-sportovo-relaxacne-centrum-hangar-skrachovalo.html&list=1
We have abandoned factories, abandoned homes. The current era brings us a new type of abandoned facilities, namely abandoned gyms, as the population is heading into poverty and ageing.
I would be surprised if by end of the coming winter, any gyms or public swimming pools, or travel companies for that matter, survive in the UK / EU.
In times of scarcity large spaces are not desirable. Small well insulated spaces are desirable. Except for the rats.
The aluminum smelter in Slovakia is shutting down due to electricity costs.
You need a lot of electricity for aluminium smelting.
From the Asahi:
A bus bound for Nagoya Airport burst into flames after overturning on an expressway here on the morning of Aug. 22, killing two people and injuring seven men in their 20s to 50s.
A fire broke out aboard the bus, which overturned while it was heading to Komaki, Aichi Prefecture, near the Toyoyama-Minami Interchange on the Nagoya Expressway’s Komaki Route at around 10:15 a.m., said an official from Nagoya Expressway Public Corp. and others.
The bus was rear-ended by another vehicle on the expressway, according to Nagoya’s fire department and Aichi prefectural police.
Part of the section near the site is currently closed to traffic.
The two people, who died in the accident, were believed to have been aboard the bus, and injured men were taken to a hospital for treatment, according to the fire department and police.
An official from Aoi Traffic Corp. said the Komaki-based company operates the bus, which can carry up to 61 people, including a driver.
The official said the bus was heading to Nagoya Airport after leaving Nagoya, adding that the company is gathering information on the accident, including details on those injured.
Me: For a bus to overturn onto its side, it has to collide with something tough at quite a high speed. In this case, the bus seems to have veered to one side and hit a concrete lane divider.
From Kyodo:
The bus is believed to have hit a concrete divider as it was going to exit the Nagoya Expressway, with a passenger car also colliding into it, at around 10:15 a.m. near the Toyoyama-Minami interchange.
The bus was en route from central Nagaya to Nagoya Airport in the town of Toyoyama, Aichi Prefecture, its operator said, reversing its earlier explanation that the bus was going the opposite way.
The operator, meanwhile, said it has been still unable to get in touch with the bus’s driver, a 55-year-old man, with the police trying to confirm whether he is one of the dead.
The driver had arrived for work at 4:30 a.m. on Monday, the operator said, adding that he had no pre-exisiting conditions and no abnormalities were detected in an alcohol test carried out prior to the incident.
The seven people hurt, all of them men, suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the police said.
An official of the transport ministry’s regional bureau in Nagoya said it plans to conduct a special inspection on the bus operator in Komaki, Aichi.
https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2022/08/24cbd6cfefad-9-people-injured-after-collision-on-expressway-in-central-japan.html
Tim: I am going out on a limb and putting this one down to SVIGOLAL (Sudden Vaccine Induced Going Out Like a Light)
I thought that you were going to say that this was an electric vehicle with batteries that had gone up in flames.
4 months ago i had my covid booster
today my microwave oven stopped working, and filled the kitchen with smoke.
No one ever told you not to put metal bowels in a microwave or not to inject experimental genetic drugs into your body? Or is your memory going? Because of the microwaves?
Not that the microwave actually went up in smoke. We know you made that up. After all its edddywar. Alls fair in love and war. In this case both.
nope
i don’t write fiction, or indulge in self seeking BS
whether you can accept that at face value is a matter of complete indifference to me.
i only make verbal war with opponents of equal ability—dealing with skoolyard prepubescent wall-chalking requires only erasure. you may see it as ‘adult’–that is your problem, not mine.
you have only read grown up English from me, not faux obscenity or childish fantasy.
as i’ve said before eddy
i only use four letter words in their absolute precise correct context–ie when they mean something.
i don’t debate with a 14 yr old (going on 5) who needs faux obscenity as a prop to literacy.
11.04 am uk time
todays eddywit sighting
Attenborough has specifically asked me to note the times when the eddywit rises from its BS nest site.
When he gets to NZ to make the documentary on it, it makes filming so much easier if he can anticipate when it might be active.
Did you get one of those magnetized boosters, Norman? Do fridge magnets stick to your arm? That might explain why the microwave went up in smoke.
4 months ago???? norm you definitely qualify for the 5th… what are you waiting for????
dayum
never thought of the fridge magnets
Developments! From NHK:
In an accident in which two people were killed and seven others injured when a bus overturned and burst into flames on the Nagoya Expressway in Nagoya, interviews with investigators revealed that the bus is believed to have been travelling at a speed of around 60 km/h and hit the dividing line without applying the brakes.
The police are investigating the possibility that the driver may have been suffering from some kind of physical condition.
Based on drive recorder footage of the following vehicle and the damage to the vehicle, investigators have learned from interviews that the bus is believed to have been travelling at around 60 km/h, which is the speed limit near the scene, when it hit the dividing line without braking.
It is also understood that the bus was initially travelling in the right-hand overtaking lane of the two lanes, and that from at least several hundred metres before the accident scene, the bus was driving erratically, occasionally veering to the left and stepping on the boundary line.
Tim: What did I tell you? It would have been worse if the driver hadn’t had that second booster!
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20220824/k10013786001000.html
When I drive I am extra vigilant now — keeping an eye on oncoming traffic…. expecting a CovIDIOT to collapse and cross the lines…
It would be a shame to have come all this way and miss the fire works.
yeadon https://t.me/childcovidvaccineinjuriesuk/2049
norm?
”We never give experimental medicines to pregnant women”
‘Oh but this is different — pregnant women are at high risk of dying from covid so it’s worth the risk of taking an untested treatment’ mumbled norm… as he tried to work out how to tie his shoes.
Food shortages are being planned https://t.me/robinmg/22596 because they want there to be no food once Global Holodomor commences…
They want you to stay home — and wait for the vans.
Local residents looking for a King of the Lighthouse have sweetened the deal by offering free sardines for life. Look, they just need somebody young and strong to help keep the Chinese water-tankers out of Lake Superior. Very little crime up there. It’s probably among the ‘last-to-go-ROF’ locations on Earth.
From link:
Israelis en masse have walked away from c19 vaccination. “Expired” is the bulk classification!
Mike Yeadon
New house sales plunged in every region compared to July last year. Note the West, oh dear:
Northeast: -37%
West: -50%
Midwest: -23%
South: -21%.
https://wolfstreet.com/2022/08/23/sales-of-new-houses-collapse-in-the-west-by-50-inventories-supply-spike-to-high-heaven-worst-since-peak-of-housing-bust-1/
https://wolfstreet.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/us-new-house-sales-2022-08-23-sales.png
All those mortgages the banks created at 3% is what it costs the banks for their money now. Not that it matters with mark to mark and maximum leverage limits “suspended” for the banks. Since the measures put in place to ensure bank “fidelity” from 2008 and “covid” are still in place the hatches are battened. Even people walking away from mortgages in bulk a bankruptcy event in times past will not bankrupt the banks now. Prices will go down on homes and my guess is at least as radically as 2008. Someone wont continue to pay a mortgage on a house if its valued at half what they owe. IMO the “solution” to 2008 -zero interest rates- is no longer a option because inflation is just as catastrophic. That raises questions whether what worked in 2008- banks putting foreclosed homes into shadow inventory until prices rise- will work again. Zero interest rates are gone IMO they wont return. Fundamentally there are many reasons why home ownership can turn into a bad deal from a good deal. For years its been you cant lose at 3% but guess what if the value goes to half you lose. Of course if the bank owns most of that the bank loses people walk away.
Traditionally homes were viewed as a commodity like a car. You had to be able to afford the home with your income. As homes became financialized they were regarded as a investment not a commodity. With the home value to income levels so terribly inappropriate for decades what we may be seeing is homes returning to a commodity status. This makes them worth only what people can afford to pay as a function of their income. The idea that renting is a bad decision may not be true if we are seeing a return of homes to a commodity. If this is what is occurring it is a fundamental change in American society. Homeowners have regarded their home as a storage of wealth and this allows other debt psychologically.
If homes can not be built at a cost that is profitable due to inflation then inventory drops eventually. There were huge housing developments after 2008 sparsely occupied brand new ghost towns basically. Rodents became a big problem in the vacant properties. Zero interest – claims on future productivity- got those homes sold occupied and we built a shit ton more. Will the cavalry come riding in again with zero interest again inflation be damned? My guess is not. Zero interest is a claim on future productivity and at some point if productivity falls to a low enough level that claim can not be sustained. All of a sudden the casino walls appear out of mist and it becomes clear- you can lose.
If no one can afford to “own” a home or is incentivized to do so because “you cant lose” then home “ownership” ends. Then decisions arise. Since all requirements for the banks to liquidate foreclosed homes – financial assets to the banks- have been done away with in the beginning we see what we saw in 2008 – stagnation and empty homes people with no place to live. If zero interest can not be returned to- and I dont think it can- because of “inflation” then things will get much more stagnant than 2008. At some point the nationalization of housing by the pretend government and its owners like blackrock would seem to be a “solution” rather than just leaving the houses empty and degrading because of lack of maintenance. This outcome seemed virtually certain to me as homes became financialized and values far far in excess of ability to pay via income were created.
Fundamentally food housing and energy must be in surplus if they are to be consumed. Claims on those things become malleable as they deplete.
You have interesting ideas. You might be right.
I know that there has been a growing interest in buying homes to rent them out. Also, in building homes to rent them out.
My theory has been that what would happen is what happened in 2020: Laws would be changed to allow people to continue to live in whatever homes they are currently occupying, no matter how little they can afford to pay.
My reasoning is that politicians do not want the streets filled with homeless people. Thus, it would be those who expected rent on these properties who would be out of luck. Also, the banks with the loans that cannot really be repaid.
I also have expected that people will tend to live together more. For example, grandparents with their children and young adults with their parents. Thus, there will be less total housing needed. Also, assisted living and nursing homes will decrease in usage.
Under this scenario, the price of homes would fall. There would likely be a lot of abandoned homes, occupied by people who would otherwise be homeless or occupying apartments.
houses represent one of the last refuges for energy capital.
There used to be coalmines, oilwells, car factories—and so on. Now the return on those is depleting fast.
Now homes seem to be all thats left
Gail, you are correct. More and more people will start living together. I’ve been running somewhat of a boarding house since about 2014. Empty nest, big house, no brainer.
It was a stroke of genius for California to not charge shop lifters as long as the value was under $1000.
Just let them walk out of the shops with what they need/want
Poland’s president calls for Nord Stream 2 to be removed
https://miselec.com/polands-president-calls-for-nord-stream-2-to-be-removed/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/canada-germany-hydrogen-partnership-nl-1.6559787
We, here in Germany, will be rescued by hydrogen from newfoundland!
lol
Saludos
el mar
Poland’s President Duda, Truedow, Ardern-turd, Macrom, the Ozzie pretender, Obummer (current US Prez), etc etc.
All have a fresh faced, Utopian, I know best, Pol Pit type look.
All from the same bad Wef batch.
I thought Nord Stream 1 was old and leaking, built with old technology and in need of frequent maintenance. Nord Stream 2 was a modern version of Nord Stream 1, built only a few feet apart.
Germany blocked the use of Nord Stream 2 when it became ready for use. Germany’s supposed reason was a law on its books requiring multiple ownership of the pipeline allowing competition, but the real reason, I expect, was to make Russia angry. It was not a long time later that the cutbacks in natural gas from Russia started.
Any debt, whether government or private, is a draw on future energy use.
Money is destroyed when debts are repaid.
There is never enough money, according to capitalism, to pay off all debts on the due date, because the interest costs on the debts were never issued as loans.
If there is simply not enough net energy, the Ponzi money system collapses.
That is the point we are currently at.
That is not necessarily the case. Debt created by the central banks can just be “booked out”. There will be an inflationary effect though. Investions into the future, like a bridge over the river, will also help future generations.
I doubt that is the case with buying and throwing uncountable amounts of jabs.
I know some areas where the infrastructure of the past cannot be maintained.
Imagine excess mortality rises further. Then the inheritage should be transfered to the living. Houses, furniture and machines will be reused. In case the changes will affect the general living conditions, the city is not secure anymore, cannot provide water or food, it’s buildings depend on electricity for lights, cooling, air or elevavators the investments have no value anymore.
I guess we will see that in future. I guess a lot of promises like pension plans will not be fulfilled.
If the legitimy of the state erodes also private property will not be guaranteed. What about house owners that cannot pay their energy bills?
effectively, the 2nd law of thermodynamics kicks in:
>>>as energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it is wasted.<<<
which covers all the points you just made.
I love the talent to get to the heart of complex matters! 🙂
I think el mar could be right here back in nov 2020 a leak from a davos meeting claimed the end was nigh in other words “rof” or “mad max” was finally here then i saw a bill gates interview in2021 where he stated that we could get one or two years from the financial system that is left so it does not look good according to “el mar” , ” “bill gates” and the ” davos crowd “, hopefully these people are all wrong and we get another decade of “good times”
Slovakia is going to impose the tax on Russian oil called something like “the tax on the advantage obtained as a result of a special situation on the oil market”
https://index.sme.sk/c/22991364/sas-podpori-zdanenie-ruskej-ropy-predlozit-chce-aj-navrh-na-znizenie-dane-na-paliva.html?ref=njctse
Send the Russian oil elsewhere. Doesn’t sound like a smart idea, unless the country cannot really afford the oil.
This is priceless — I don’t care what variant it’s for I WANT A BOOSTER hahahaha
https://t.me/goddek/2062
norm what do you see? https://t.me/TexasLindsay/323
“Wind turbine blades could be recycled into gummy bears for human consumption at the end of their lifespan, according to new research from scientists at Michigan State University.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/08/23/wind-turbine-blades-could-be-turned-into-gummy-bears/
The dire energy situation in Europe:
The energy prices for schools, hospitals and nursing homes for the elderly in Slovakia reach as much as tripled amounts.
https://domov.sme.sk/c/22987283/ceny-energii-skoly-narast.html?utm_source=https%3A%2F%2Fdomov.sme.sk&utm_medium=rozcestnik&utm_campaign=podpora-clankov
Nice. Fragmentation is the new normal.
It’s a good thing we’ve got the Ukraine ‘war’ to blame for all of this .. otherwise the peasants might lose their minds.
Peasants? The peasants have died off decades ago.
The peasants you refer to are of the financial variety.
I believe that the Peasants of the Fast Eddy variety are the mental pygmies that presage a new kind of zombie apocalypse.
Yes, that is a more precise definition.
Wow! Another reason to close homes for the elderly and smaller hospitals, and have students learn from their parents at home. It saves energy.
Hahaha… happens all the time … now…
MOUNTAIN biker Rab Wardell has tragically died in his sleep aged 37.
The Glaswegian passed away just two days after winning the elite men’s title at the Scottish MTB XC Championships.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/sport/19598047/rob-wardell-dead-mountain-bike-champion/
We do not need mountain bike champions anyway.
He died of fear of being superfluous.
Hopefully this is real:
A ‘Tsunami of Shutoffs’: 20 Million US Homes Are Behind on Energy Bills
Surging electricity prices spur worst-ever crisis in late utility payments.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-23/can-t-pay-utility-bills-20-million-us-homes-behind-on-payments-facing-shutoffs?srnd=premium
The situation is going to get a lot worse, I am afraid.
There was a WSJ article this morning saying that natural gas prices yesterday reached an inter-day high.
I tried to call my other mate who had terminal cancer…. voice mail…. messaged him… no response… I get a call from his brother on the weekend — seems I was trying to contact a dead man.
Turbo Cancer is real – his first symptom was a sore throat — went to the doc — told he was riddled with cancer… they gave him some token chemo … all that did was prolong the pain… at least it was a fast death.
And he doesn’t have to starve like most of us will (where is the blueberry Fentanyl???)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=cancer+and+tuberculosis&size=200
Hmmm… just wondering if there’s more to the story
It is indeed fascinating since my last comment here about 1 week ago when OFW’s 20-day limit is up.
1. The number of international is still dropping, especially intercontinental flights.I monitor it everyday.
2. I talked to people about EU energy crisis where the energy bills goes up 5 times. Reaction from them – huh? so? It is similar to you telling them about C19 and vax
I think the only Western developed country that is OK is USA. Taiwan or EU,if there is war, locals and foreigners cannot leave because there are very few flights out. I have met with people from EU/UK. They say if there is a crisis, (1) it will not impact them because they are rich (2) They can leave EU/UK.
One plane load of people is 350 passengers. A maximum of 30 planes taking off per hour is 10,000 people leaving in one hour. So, in 24 hours, that will quarter of a million people. Yay !
I think that is what the idealist or politicians will think and it is “workable”
1. Can the airport handle that work load? (you will get the answer, “Yes they can. They have done it in 2019). This “hurried/intense pace” is not sustainable over long periods like 24 hours. With the current short of staff, it is impossible.
2. Does the airport have enough fuel for that kind of evacuation?
3. Do we have enough planes to do that?
4. Like the evacuation of Afghanistan, we can see clearly that it is not easy even for a small volume of people. The whole of EU/UK trying to leave? that would be interesting…
Academic exercise for my brain :
I was thinking that perhaps there are 25,000 Malaysians in Taiwan. If there is a need to evacuate, let us say they use commercial planes. 350 per flight. You need 70 flights out. That is a big number. How do you coordinate at the airport with hundred thousand people there trying to leave (different nationalities)? Logistically impossible if there are missiles flying and bombs dropping.
Let us move to Germany, EU or UK. 20 flights out per day to destinations outside of EU/UK. That is 7000 people. Hard to increase flights. Not enough pilots or planes. No ground staff especially if ground staff are literally frozen at home. Not enough jetfuel..
Ship? Boats? I think it is the same issue. Not enough capacity or capacity not there when you need it.
Bottom line, I think it is not possible to evacuate or leave a country easily now.
“We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?” – “Excess deaths have averaged 1,000 a week for 15 weeks of this year,” writes Michael Simmons in the Spectator. “Yet unlike Covid deaths, they are met with silence”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-re-at-pandemic-levels-of-death-why-is-no-one-talking-about-it-
Ya why norm?
Interesting psychological mechanism at work, isn’t it? Frustrating too.
I am currently unable to raise issues such as this with anyone in the offline world. It seems they are either in denial or totally uninterested in hearing about the details—quite unlike the fascination they had for each new daily report of the Covid Death Count.
Covid was make-believe fear—like Friday the Thirteenth or the Exorcist. But jabber’s remorse is the real thing, and too terrifying to contemplate.
Yet neither the covid deaths that didnt happen or the injection deaths that did and do even make a tiny dent in population growth. Well maybe for you in Japan Tim… Its certainly amazing that a grand experiment was performed on the population at 30 seconds to midnight but were still at 30 seconds to midnight. What I just wrote is very unpopular. “Theres plenty for us common folk they are hoarding it all”
I hear that all the time from people of all religons and economic classes including some I would consider real wealthy. Amazing. As I continue to say. They may have turned down the tap it doesnt mean the cistern is close to empty.
All species expand range and population until they hit limits. Anyone living in the USA could educate themselves what real poverty is. But they dont. Its them. The guy with a million says hes poor its the guy with a billion. The guy with a billion says hes poor its the guy with a trillion. Its never enough. Thats how life forms roll. Same everywhere in the world. Show me where humans voluntarily choose austerity? Humans make up all sorts of wild stories to consume. The politicians tell professional wild stories to justify consumption. That is their function. People tear any one apart that gets in the way of their consumption or turn a blind eye. “Pity that. Hes a little high strung. BAU tonight.”
There are some religious figures living in monastic situations that are stoics…
But they are actually mentally ill so they don’t count.
Everyone who is not mentally ill — wants to live large.
They dying that is to come (and already happening) is real.
Nobody is hauling people into the ICU and venting them to death … or stuffing end of life pills into them to increase the body count and inspire fear.
Nope – this is the real deal now. Healthy young people dropping stone cold dead.
The CovIDIOTS surely must have a gnawing suspicion that something is not right … but they cannot accept the obvious… they keep on boosting because in for a penny in for a pound
Our World in Data indicates that UK deaths recently have been up by something approaching 20%, for pretty much all age groups.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/excess-mortality-p-scores-projected-baseline-by-age?country=USA~GBR
COVID deaths don’t seem to be terribly high, so it must be something else.
‘Of course it’s something else!’ insisted norm … ‘it’s care exhaust and heavy braking’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11139977/Car-fumes-exhaust-heavy-braking-raise-risk-heart-attacks-study-suggests.html
Energy Bills Could Hit £6,552 in April
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/08/23/energy-bills-could-hit-6552-in-april/
Clearly that is not feasible therefore we need UEP by Christmas
Clearly what these eye-wateringly high prices are telling us is that there is not going to be enough energy to see everyone through the winter, effectively rationing through price. Therefore this talk of subsidizing less well off folks (most of the households in the UK looks like) so that they can use as much energy as last winter, makes no sense – it will not be possible. But rationed it will be, one way or another. High prices and blackouts.
Our local bin men (council) go on strike tomorrow.
That’s no doubt how many will react to out of control inflation … pay me more!!!
I cannot see how we make it through winter.
BTW – I know a double injected person (not willing to boost) who has been sick literally continuously for over 3 months …
Figure 3 is very cool.
real Brent price in euros is at an all time high.
coupled with all time high natural gas Dutch TTF is about 280
and Newcastle coal over 420
all of this pushing Europe towards “hungry and freezing in the dark”.
it’s only getting worse.
que sera sera.
We are on target for Q4 Boom. Where is my candied Fentanyl?
Your wish comes true
US Border Agents Seize 1.6 Million Fentanyl Pills In Big-Rig, Destined For US Cities
Last week, Humphries tweeted, “colored fentanyl pills with the appearance of candy” were seized at the port of entry. The candy-like fentanyl pills are very troubling as children could mistake the drugs for candy during Halloween.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-border-agents-seize-16-million-fentanyl-pills-big-rig-destined-us-cities
I am thinking this is not a coincidence…. there can be no reason for Candy Fentanyl… other than … when the time comes… you want the kids to come to mother and say mom — can I have some candy.
They may not be willing to swallow it if it looks like medicine.
And mom will give it to them .. cuz the alternative is Global Holodomor…
Reading a history of Iran … and during their many famines… people reportedly hunted children (generally orphans)… widows… and beggars… to eat.
This is all going down as FE predicted years ago… Fentanyl for the masses….
When life becomes too stressful — reach for the Fentanyl.
Smash a few up and feed it to your pets as well.
The US stock market is up today, despite all of the bad news. People are happy about the reduction of student loans by $10,000 per person ($20,000 per person for some students). Also, payments will continue to be waived through December 31, 2022.
The stimulus effect of this loan forgiveness more than offsets the recent legislation that supposedly stops inflation.
I am sure that there is a political aspect to this as well. I doubt the monthly payments can be restarted without messing up the spending plans of quite a few families. I would not be surprised if future loan repayments are waived again.
Yes. Crazy is the name of the game.
the EU is trying its best to “win” that game.
All parties are nuclear armed with delivery capability. Remember Zoolander? “Dont you know Im crazy esse”
If you cant win you make sure the other guy doesnt. “Out of the depths of hell I stab at your eyes”. EU cutting off their own energy = “dont you know Im crazy esse”
It looks crazily mixed up, as Jan alludes, but I too think we need to get to like it.
what’s not to like about the slow but accelerating collapse of so many smaller weaker countries in the Periphery?
and Europe willingly trying to join them by making stooooopendous blunders?
well, except if a person lives there, I suppose.
This is worth watching https://drtrozzi.org/2022/08/23/dr-david-wiseman-leaves-us-too-wise-to-kill/
This is an excerpt from the blurb:
A Review of FDA and CDC Events from June and July.
Dr David Wiseman and his team have done us the extreme favor of attending and monitoring in detail all the meetings of three separate advisory committees to the FDA and CDC. Here he reports on their June and July activities, and the FDA’s and CDC’s relationship to them.
We need to know how ridiculous these organizations are, and how dangerous following their advice will be. Dr Wiseman converts hundred of hours of his teams research into 40 minutes that will leave us too wise to kill.
In this high speed tour of the recent madness, Dr Wiseman demonstrates that the FDA and CDC go far beyond sloppy and reckless, into the realms of negligent, fraudulent, and in my opinion criminal causing harm and death. Please formulate your own opinion based on this evidence. I think you will be shocked and rid of any naivety that would support confidence in the FDA or CDC.
They know the shots are dangerous. They know the shots do not work.They know the shots increase the risk of covid infection. They use fraudulent math and cover up realities like a 27 times risk over benefit ratio, seizures in children, myocarditis, confusing labels, and absence of expiry dates.
They have no real world proof of benefit; instead, they invented the term “immunobridging” which means simply that some antibodies are produced after the injections. That is their new standard for claiming effectiveness, and it has no scientific foundation. Consider “antibody dependent enhancement“
Their standard for “effective” is a continuously eroding interpretation of their criteria called “may be effective”; seriously! The FDA’s own records discuss that the already shocking VAERS records of death and harms from these injections, are an under-estimate by a factor of 10 to 36 times.
Great article, Gail!
What I am thinking, the problem has already ruined earnings so companies consider unconventional ideas like a risky injections. We might also file Volkswagen’s diesel cheating or the criminal actions of Deutsche Bank as such.
In Europe energy prices are rocketing. An average German family is expected to have higher costs for gas only of 3000 to 5000 EURs annually. That will lead to social unrest.
High prices are partly due to speculation as it seems.
In Austria the state owned energy companies are reporting record earnings. That does not go well with raised costs.
In Vienna, Austria, the mayor is a dedicated vaxxer. While the oppositional Social Democrats complain about raising prices on the federal level the prices in Vienna ramp up for social housing, energy and public services – all owned by the town that has been reigned by the Social Democrats for centuries.
Now bad voices say, the risen energy prices are in fact used to pay the massive vaxxing and testing.
If that is the case the mechanism described by Gail should lead to an accellerated Seneca cliff, because corruption fuels the process.
I tried to say it in other words:
ASPO Germany writes (01.2022):
“As a result, the reality check turns out to be somewhat devastating. Given the fact that tight oil accounts for the vast majority of US oil production, the study is an alarm signal. The peak of funding has either already occurred or it is just around the corner. This also means that there will be a decline in funding, which will most likely be severe. The goal of US energy independence is disappearing more and more and remains unattainable, with far-reaching consequences for oil availability and oil prices.
This also has an impact on global oil production. The rapid increase in tight oil production in the United States over the past decade has masked the peak of global conventional oil production. Then it’s over. Peak Oil becomes visible and noticeable to everyone.”
http://aspo-deutschland.org/dokumente/2022-01-03_Rezension_EIA-Report_Mushallik.pdf
Pandemic and war can be seen as an attempt to mask Peakoil. I suspect that this is an attempt to prevent panic in the markets. In addition, it will become possible to introduce Central Bank accounts for every citizen. This would make it possible to maintain capitalist principles even in an economy without growth. Accounts and budget limits could be specifically subject to negative taxes and linked to usage requirements.
I am afraid that economic stagnation has led to a change in economic processes. Instead of products that are in demand on the market, the takeover of former state tasks has occurred. The state is also being instrumentalized in order to guarantee sales that would never be achievable without state intervention, i.e. in a capitalistic way. This is, of course, seriously questionable under the rule of law.
There are signs that this approach is also responsible for the huge increase in the price of energy products. As I understand it, the profits are siphoned off by companies that are not directly involved in extraction.
These profits do not necessarily have to be available for oil production, but can also be used to maintain an elaborate standard of living. What is more, the false assumption that alternative energy sources could replace fossil fuels also leads to wrong investment decisions that misdirect investment flows and prevent necessary investments in oil production.
If that were the case, it would speed up the process described by Gail.
We could summarize as a thesis that the loss of prosperity due to the decreasing productivity of fossil fuels also affects the upper class and they try to maintain their prosperity with dubious methods. These methods accelerate the Seneca cliff even further. In addition to the burden of more and more challenging extraction and the need of large investments in extraction and exploration, there is added the alimentation of the ruling elites, who see no other way to secure prosperity.
What is sad is that well-meaning energy researchers could indirectly encourage a shift to wind and solar by making false equivalences in their models. There is way too much simplification made in the models. Variability is hard to model, so it tends to get left out. It is assumed that the problem will go away, as wind and solar act to offset each other and long distance transmission is added.
Also, the early users of EROEI theory were themselves very concerned about peak oil, and their intent initially was to try to get the word out with respect to how bad the situation was. Lots of other researchers adopted similar theories, and applied them as liberally as possible. False equivalences to “grid parity” added to the problem. The fact that the analysis did not match up quantities required of specific energy products with specific time frames led people to believe that wind and solar could save us.
If the EROEI of wind is 35 or more, and that of oil is, say, 10, then why not shift to wind? Lots of reasons, number one being that it basically doesn’t work. Wind can be used to extend the supply of fossil fuel generated electricity, but it tends to stop at the same time that the rest of the system stops. Wind is only an add-on to fossil fuels. The system needs oil powered helicopters to repair off-shore wind turbines, for example. And the road system needs to be maintained, as well as the electricity transmission system. None of this will happen with a little intermittent electricity. The system badly needs cheap oil (and coal and gas)
I have recently read a wonderful book, trying to conserve the traditional knowledge of the construction of mills:
Werner Schnelle: Mühlenbau. Wasserräder und Windmühlen bewahren und erhalten. Verlag Bauwesen, 1999. ISBN 3-345-00678-2
The construction is very complex. The knowledge of the old mill builders was very wide-ranging, because they selected the trees from which the boards were sawn, poured cast iron gears, forged rings and hewn the grooves of the millstones. Of course, they were able to calculate the dimensions mathematically. The difference to today is that they could not access finished parts. They may have used a blacksmith, a forester and woodworker or a carpenter, but they could guide them. The core of these mills will last for over 1000 years with proper maintenance.
I’m sorry to say it: hydro power and wind power work! It just doesn’t work to power our modern world.
The old miller got up in the night to take advantage of a rising wind or to turn the mill out of the storm.
Every society has to adapt to the opportunities it has.
Therefore, knowing that the modern world has no further possibility of existence, we must create a new world of the possible. This is not a backward, but past experience may help us.
Instead, we are investing in an impossible future. The Great Reset is not thinkable without semiconductors and continuous power supply. However, semiconductors face a very difficult future, a war with Taiwan alone could cause bottlenecks.
Our problem is not a lack of resources but a lack of reasoning. Our problem is not climate change but our response to it.
The disappointment of Robert Hirsch is more than justified.
One chart I didn’t put into my post is one I have used in the past shows historical energy production in England and Italy.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/wrigley_annual-energy-consumption-per-head-1561-to-1870.png
Annual energy consumption per person (megajoules) in England and Wales 1561-70 to 1850-9 and in Italy 1861-70. Figure by Tony Wrigley, Cambridge University.
The interesting story is that water and wind never amounted to more than a tiny fraction of energy production in England and Italy. They generate mechanical energy, but they don’t generate heat energy. What the economy needed was heat energy, for the most part.
Pandemic and war can be seen as an attempt to mask Peakoil. I suspect that this is an attempt to prevent panic in the markets.
Correct.
But the pandemic is more than that… it’s a way to buy time … and to ensure the MOREONS inject the death serum….
one day it’s ‘normal’ – the next the power is out and you’re holed up waiting for the food vans… that never come… eyeing the candied Fentanyl…
If only the Ukey War would end … maybe it will in September.. and we can get back to normal!
Ooooh… Aaaaaah!!!! Boom!!!
GAME OVER: The Latest Society of Actuaries (SOA) Group Life COVID-19 Mortality Survey Report
https://2ndsmartestguyintheworld.substack.com/p/game-over-the-latest-society-of-actuaries
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff726df30-0fc3-4034-8477-4f470360f10e_1314x1018.png
Nice report;
‘Also of note is that when the alleged COVID deaths in America reached 600,000 the Center for Disease Crimes (CDC0 put an asterisk on that number admitting that “COVID only” deaths as registered on actual death certificates represented a mere 5% of that figure, or around 30,000 deaths. That is essentially a flu season that since the rollout of PSYOP-19 had magically disappeared.’
The impressive thing is the continuing growth in excess mortality with time, especially the 25 to 64 age group. So boosted, so doomed.
Boosted outta here! Not SAD.
Boosted may be the new google; google it, boosted it.
My life insurance policy renewal just arrived. Forgot I had it because it just clicked over every year.
Major increase from last year; time to cancel as it exists from I time when I had debts.
Actually, whats the chances there will be any payouts on insurance beyond the next 6-12 months?
I say very slim. SAD.
We are subsidizing the Injected MOREONS … insurance companies should be cancelling all policies of the injected.
I found myself laughing as I read through this….
Why? Cuz so many people urged me to get injected and I responded saying I’m waiting for the long term testing results before making up my mind.
And it seems they’ve all poisoned themselves…. which will cure their stupidity.
Well done norm!!!
THE SPIKE PROTEIN AS HUMAN “SYSTEMIC HERBICIDE”: MITOCHONDRIAL DYSFUNCTION: PHOTOSYNTHESIS AND ATP
A slow, persistent kill
We have been lied to. All of us. On a scale that even I find to be unimaginable. I do not believe that what I have discovered is an “accident,” or “honest mistake.”
We have been looking at the behemoth of SARS-CoV-2 in the dark, each of us sensing our own niche of pathology while we miss defining the monstrous beast in its entirety. And, that beast, is without question, the engineered Spike Protein.
https://wmcresearch.substack.com/p/the-spike-protein-as-human-systemic
This write-up is very good. Its title is
“THE SPIKE PROTEIN AS HUMAN “SYSTEMIC HERBICIDE”: MITOCHONDRIAL DYSFUNCTION: PHOTOSYNTHESIS AND ATP
A slow, persistent kill
Some excerpts:
“. . . systemic herbicides are used to kill WEEDS.”
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO HUMAN BEINGS?
Systemic herbicides work by interrupting the energy conversion of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is how plants generate their energy.”
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO THE SPIKE PROTEIN?
The Spike Protein is a supreme disruptor/destroyer/reprogrammer of mitochondria.
ACUTE COVID DEATH AND LONG COVID AS A STATE OF SLOW DEATH
While the mitochondria are being destroyed, many pathological events occur before the organism dies. They should, by now, sound all too familiar.
—-
The author then gives lots of examples of adverse outcomes we are familiar with, including sudden deaths of young people.
Looking to excess mortality they pay with death and not cure stupidity. 🙁
I have read about the assumption that the behaviour we see might be rooted genetically. It was argued that industrialisation made a selection on people who go with the authorities.
A difficult future does not need egoist psychopaths or decent sheep but people that think, try creative alternatives and make the family survive. It was argued that this is a genetic trait.
I can imagine eugenicists to think like that. I would never have supported it but I find that idea interesting.
Keep in mind that this species genetics will result in it being the first species to ever self-extinct (self exterminate) itself…
And they celebrate their great intelligence by ringing a bell on a podium on Wall Street.. ‘look at us — we are the great pillagers!!!’
look at them… ringy dingying their way to extinction — and smiling all the way hahahaha
https://www.toledoblade.com/image/2016/05/06/670x_b1_a4-3_cCM_z/b7ringing-1.jpg
Stooopid f789s.
hahaha The Matrix
https://youtu.be/aHZym4QG7UQ?t=113
“Why No Politician Is Willing to Tell Us the Real Energy Story…. This… energy story is essentially a physics [dynamic].”
Gail, perhaps we can elide those two propositions. Humans _are_ the dissipative structure (economy) in motion. They have evolved as components of dissipative structures and as ordered to those structures. Their behaviour likewise, ordered to the structure through their organic drives.
Politicians are selected through mechanisms (like votes) of the dissipative structure itself to perform roles for that structure. Political forms are generated by the structure to order the human components to itself. Its mechanisms keep them in line or replace them.
The behaviour of politicians includes the production and promotion of narratives that allow the structure to function. Thus their opaqueness is itself an aspect of a physical dynamic. The function of narratives is not primarily to elucidate but to facilitate the operation of the structure.
‘All narratives are will to power (of the dissipative structure).’ Humans entertain the narrative in consciousness that they are ‘in control’ of themselves and society, but really their behaviour is generated by the dissipative structures of which they are components.
Of course, from the standpoint of reality, there are no ‘problems’, energetic of otherwise, but only dynamics. Reality simply moves on with the next structure, it is not ‘bothered’ by the ‘failure’ (another human concept) of any structure and there is nothing ‘unfortunate’ about it.
Admittedly it is fine to indulge humans with that sort of subjective language, they kind of expect it, and it is congruent with the requirements of the structure. Subjectivity is further opaqueness of narrative that the structure relies on to order humans to itself and to function.
“Reality simply moves on with the next structure, it is not ‘bothered’ by the ‘failure’ (another human concept) of any structure and there is nothing ‘unfortunate’ about it.”
Would you reckon that inadvertently running your ICE car without oil until it seizes up as a mode of failure, and find yourself in an unfortunate situation from a malfunctioning oil level sensor in the engine?
As an outside observer you’ve got the convenient perspective of considering it as a logical consequence of blowing through a finite resource without reliable measures?
I think it is reasonable to entertain the two descriptions of objective reality.
1. Internally subjective and experienced
2. Externally objective and measurable
Don’t be dishonest.
A failure is a failure.
But ultimately it is what it is.
What about hope though? Who’s that for? tee hee….
Directly from the horse’s mouth:
https://youtu.be/ZIZErkuSHR0
Enjoy the grande finale.
😊
Let’s all join in …
Hope…
is …
for…
Losers!
UEP = no hope… be a Winner — embrace UEP!
“Which is to say: Only suckers put hope in the future”
YOLO!
MOAR
TRYHARD
🤣👍👍