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Historical data show that, to date, a reduction in energy availability has mostly affected the US, European countries, Japan, and other advanced economies. I expect this situation to continue as energy limits become more of a problem. Advanced economies will start looking and acting more like today’s less-advanced economies. The world economy will face a bumpy path in a generally downward direction.
In this post, I give an overview of our current predicament. All economies are subject to the laws of physics. We are biologically adapted to needing some cooked foods in our diets. We have also moved away from the equatorial regions, so many of us need heat to keep warm. With a world population of 8 billion, we are a long way from meeting all our energy needs with renewable sources alone.
The world’s fossil fuel supplies are depleting, but politicians cannot tell us the true nature of our predicament. Instead, we are told a “sour grapes” narrative: “We need to move away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change.” What this narrative, in fact, seems to do is shift an ever-greater share of fossil fuels that are available to less-advanced economies. It may also spread out the use of fossil fuels over a somewhat longer period. But there is no evidence that this narrative actually reduces the overall quantity of carbon dioxide emissions. Instead, the more advanced economies are likely to be hit sooner, and harder, than the less advanced economies by the problem of energy limits, pushing them on a bumpy road downward.
[1] Economies tend to collapse because populations rise faster than the resources (particularly energy resources) required to support those populations.
We are dealing with an age-old problem: Humans are able to outsmart other animals, and for this reason, human populations tend to rise except when external conditions are quite adverse.
The necessary steps needed for humans to outsmart other animals began about one million years ago, when pre-humans first learned to control fire. With the controlled use of fire, humans could
- Cook food to make it easier to chew and digest.
- Kill pathogens by cooking food or boiling water.
- Scare away wild animals.
- Keep warm in colder climates.
- Eat a more varied diet, with more protein. Primates eat mostly plants; humans are omnivores.
- Spend less time chewing food and more time working on crafts.
- Indirectly, the shape of the human body could change. Teeth, jaws, and guts became smaller; brains became larger.
After 1800, when fossil fuel consumption began to grow, human population started to rise at an unprecedented rate. With coal, it was easier to make metal tools, including cooking utensils, in reasonable abundance. While it is possible to smelt some metals using charcoal (made by partially burning hardwood, then cutting off the air flow), doing so tends to lead to deforestation if more than a small quantity of metal is made.
Figure 1 indicates that population had started rising well before 1800. Thomas Malthus wrote about the difficulty of increasing food supply as rapidly as population in 1798. The problem of rising population exceeding resources is an age-old problem.
[2] The physics reason for the limited lifespan of economies is not understood by many people.
In many ways, economies are like humans and hurricanes. In physics terms, all three are dissipative structures. They need to “dissipate” energy of the right kinds to remain “alive.” All dissipative structures are temporary in nature. No dissipative structure, including an economy, can stay away from a cold, dead state permanently. Usually, dissipative structures are replaced by slightly different dissipative structures. This process allows long-term adaptation to changing conditions.
Dissipative structures are self-organizing. They seem to act on their own. Our human leaders may believe they are completely in charge, but this is not really the case. The economy seems to choose its own course, just as humans and hurricanes do.
The energy products that humans require are food products, some of which need to be cooked. The energy products that economies require are of many kinds, including solar energy to grow crops, human energy to tend the crops, and many types of fuels including firewood, coal, oil, and natural gas. Electricity is a carrier of energy produced by other means. Much modern equipment uses electricity, but trying to transition to an all-electric economy is fraught with peril.
In today’s world, energy products of many types act to leverage human labor. As far as I can see, growing fossil fuel consumption is the primary reason why human productivity grows.
Oil is especially important in farming and transportation. Coal and natural gas are important in steel and concrete manufacturing, and in providing heat for many processes. Years ago, oil was burned for electricity, but today coal and natural gas are the fuels typically burned to provide electricity. Fossil fuels are also important for their chemical properties in many different goods, including in plastics, fabrics, drugs, herbicides, and pesticides.
Using renewable energy, alone, sounds like a good idea, but it is not possible in practice. Forests were the major source of energy to support the economy before the advent for fossil fuels, but deforestation became a problem long before 1800. The world’s population, even at one billion, was too high to sustain using biologically renewable sources alone.
At a population of around 8 billion today, there is no way that wood, and products derived from wood, can support the energy needs of today’s population. Doing so would be like humans trying to live on a 250 calorie a day diet instead of a 2000 calorie per day diet.
What are referred to as modern renewables (hydroelectric power and electricity from wind turbines and solar panels) are really extensions of the fossil fuel system. These devices can only be made and repaired using fossil fuels. In addition, today’s electrical transmission system is only possible because of fossil fuels.
[3] Advanced Economies tend to be “advanced” because of the large amounts of fossil fuels they use to leverage the labor of their citizens.
In my analysis, I use the term “Advanced Economies” to mean countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Other than Advanced Economies” are then equivalent to non-OECD countries. I use this terminology because it better describes the reason why these two groupings have such different indications. Also, it is not intuitive that such a difference underlies these two groupings.
My analysis shows that energy consumption per capita is much higher in Advanced Economies than in Other than Advanced Economies, for all three energy charts shown: oil (Figure 2), all other kinds of energy grouped together (including renewables) (Figure 3), and electricity (Figure 4).
It is clear from these charts that the general trend in energy consumption per capita in recent years is down in Advanced Economies, while the general trend in energy consumption per capita is up for Other than Advanced Economies. To me, this means that the self-organizing economic system favors Other than Advanced Economies in the bidding for scarce energy resources.
One interpretation might be that Advanced Economies are using energy products in a wasteful way, compared to Other than Advanced Economies. The self-organizing world economy in some sense tries to maintain itself, even if some less efficient parts need to be squeezed down or out.
The narrative we hear from politicians and others is that Advanced Economies are moving away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change. This seems to be the narrative the self-organizing economy provides to people who live in Advanced Economies. I will discuss how this occurs, and its lack of success in reducing overall carbon emissions, in Section [5] of this post.
[4] Figures 2, 3, and 4 (above) reflect the impacts of several events leading to a squeezing down of energy consumption per capita.
The following are some events that indirectly squeezed back the energy consumption growth of Advanced Economies:
- Oil prices spiked in 1973-1974, leading to recession, indirectly in response to US first hitting oil limits in 1970.
- Severe recession, in response to Paul Volker’s increase in interest rates in the 1977 to 1980 timeframe.
- China was added to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, allowing it to ramp up its manufacturing using coal. This primarily represented an increase in energy consumption by Other than Advanced Economies. At the same time, it removed a great deal of manufacturing from Advanced Economies, so their energy consumption should have been reduced.
- The Great Recession of 2007-2009.
- The 2020 pandemic and its response.
A person can see the impacts that these changes have had on per capita oil consumption (Figure 2), energy other than oil consumption (Figure 3), and electricity consumption (Figure 4), by looking for these dates in the charts, and noticing what changes in trends took place.
Figure 2 shows that there were very large cutbacks in oil consumption per capita in Advanced Economies, prior to 1983. In this early time frame, cutbacks in oil usage were fairly easy to obtain. Some examples include:
- US-made cars in the early 1970s were large and fuel inefficient, but Japan and Europe were already making smaller vehicles. By importing smaller vehicles, and making smaller ones in the US, major savings could take place in oil usage.
- Some oil was being burned to generate electricity. Such generation could be changed to natural gas, coal or nuclear.
- Home heating often used oil. Such heating could be replaced with heat based on natural gas or electricity.
With respect to China joining the WTO in 2001, and this action leading to much greater consumption of coal for manufacturing, these actions ironically followed the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. According to this protocol, Advanced Economies indicated that they planned to reduce their own carbon dioxide emissions. They did this by outsourcing manufacturing to countries not affected by the Kyoto Protocol. These countries were poor countries, including China and India.
It is possible to see the effect of this ramp up in energy consumption by Other than Advanced Economies in both Figures 3 and 4, starting about 2002. In theory, energy consumption per capita by Advanced Economies should have fallen at the same time, but it didn’t. This is one reason why carbon dioxide per capita started rising rapidly in 2002 (Figure 6).
One squeezing-out event disproportionately affected “Other than Advanced Economies.” This was the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. All the countries involved in the Soviet Bloc were affected. Manufacturing in these countries dropped at about this time, as did all types of energy production and consumption. This can be seen as a small dip in the “Other than Advanced Economies” line between 1991 and 2001 in Figures 2 and 3.
While the Soviet Union had plenty of fossil fuels, the world oil price was very low (indicating oversupply). As a result, the country was not getting enough revenue for reinvestment in new oil fields and to repay debt and meet other obligations. The world’s self-organizing economy squeezed out the least efficient oil producer, which was the Soviet Union. The fact that the economy was Communist, and thus allocated resources and rewards in a strange way, may have also played a role in the collapse.
Figure 5 shows the widespread impact of the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union.
[5] The narrative, “We are moving away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change,” seems to be self-organized by the dissipative structures underlying Advanced Economies.
The real story is that fossil fuels are moving away from us. Somehow, we must adapt, very quickly, to this disastrous situation. But this is not a story that politicians can tell their constituents, or that universities can tell their students who are studying for future job opportunities. Instead, they need a “best case” scenario: There is perhaps something we can do; we can transition away from fossil fuel use quickly.
It is not possible to explain to the public what is really happening. Instead, a “Sour Grapes” scenario is presented. In this narrative, the current economy can continue, much as today, without fossil fuels. (This is clearly nonsense in a physics-based economy, with today’s “renewables.”) We should move away from fossil fuels because they add too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
It should be noted that this “we-can-move-from-fuels narrative” has been spearheaded by the International Energy Association (IEA), which is an arm of the OECD. (I mentioned earlier that I have equated OECD with Advanced Economies). Countries included in “Other than Advanced Economies,” at best, claim lip service to limiting carbon emissions. Their primary interest is in raising the living standards of their populations. To a significant extent, the fossil fuels that Advanced Economies decide not to use can be used by Other than Advanced Economies.
Figure 6 below shows that the efforts of IEA/OECD to reduce carbon dioxide emissions have worked in precisely the wrong direction, on a world basis. Preliminary data for 2023 shows that world carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels rose by another 1.1%.
The plan to reduce carbon emissions for participating countries was first specified in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The World Trade Organization (WTO) began a little earlier than this, in 1995. The purpose of the WTO was to increase world trade and thus the total goods and services the world economy was able to produce. In some sense, the Kyoto Protocol and the WTO had opposite objectives. The only way more goods and services could be produced was by using more fossil fuels.
Figure 6 shows that fossil fuel emissions increased sharply after China joined the WTO in December 2001. China was able to ramp up its industrial production using its very large coal resources. It is not clear that the Kyoto Protocol did much besides encouraging Advanced Economies to move their manufacturing elsewhere. This paved the way for the industrialization of Other than Advanced Economies, mainly by burning coal. At the same time, the Advanced Economies have been turned into service economies that are dependent upon Other than Advanced Economies for manufactured goods of nearly all kinds.
NASA says that when carbon dioxide is added to the atmosphere, it stays around for 300 to 1000 years. NASA also reports that the increase in atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa was the highest ever in 2023.
The increases shown on Figure 7 are relative to a large base. As percentages, they range from about 0.2% per year in the earliest periods to about 0.6% per year in recent periods.
In summary, whatever the Advanced Economies are doing to restrict emissions still leaves the world’s emissions from fossil fuels, as well as atmospheric emissions, rising fairly rapidly. Given the self-organizing nature of the world economy, I am doubtful that there is anything we humans can do to fix this situations. The people in Other than Advanced Economies need fossil fuels to feed their growing populations, and to give them the basic necessities of life.
[6] Figure 8 shows the path that Advanced Economies seem to be following.
In my opinion, with less oil and other energy per capita, Advanced Economies have become increasingly hollowed out, with more of their manufacturing transferred to Other than Advanced Economies.
In Figure 8, economies start out small, with growing resources per capita. As resource limits are hit, economic growth slows, and well-paying jobs become harder to get, especially for young people. In agricultural economies, the problem is that farms need to get smaller and smaller if there are too many surviving children, and they all want to be farmers. Clearly, too small a farm will not feed a growing family.
In the case of Advanced Economies, they become hollowed out because they find themselves increasingly dependent on imported goods and services. Other than Advanced Economies, with lower wages, less overhead for heating/cooling homes and health care, and lower energy costs, can produce manufactured goods more cheaply than Advanced Economies.
As Advanced Economies lose manufacturing and industries such as mining, they also become more dependent on debt and government programs. This added debt becomes increasingly hard to service, especially when interest rates rise.
Advanced Economies become particularly vulnerable to adverse changes because they have lost the ability to manufacture many of the goods required for everyday living. In fact, it becomes a problem even to fight wars, because many of the materials required to make weapons need to be imported from overseas.
Over the long-term, collapse may occur, but this collapse is unlikely to occur all at once. Instead, it can be expected to be what is sometimes called catabolic collapse, which takes place in steps. Parts of the economy will hold together as long as there are resources to support those parts. Future changes in Advanced Economies can be thought of as being somewhat like the changes to the economy in 2020 (indirectly related to Covid-19), but “on steroids.”
[7] Some of the kinds of changes that can be expected.
We don’t know precisely what changes to economies lie ahead, but these are some ideas of things might happen to Advanced Economies before a full collapse.
[a] Loss of the “hegemony” of the US. In the years since World War II, the US has taken on the role of the world’s policeman. But the US has been having increased difficulties when it comes to actually winning the wars it gets involved in. It is very difficult for the US to make weapons in quantity when large parts of the supply lines involve other countries. Also, today’s weapons aren’t necessarily suited to dealing with today’s attacks, such as by the Houthi Group in the Red Sea.
Changes may already be starting. We hear about Victoria Nuland’s recent abrupt retirement as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. She is described as “a determined advocate of tough policies toward Vladimir Putin.” She is being replaced, at least temporarily, by John Bass, who oversaw the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.
[b] Loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The US has had a financial advantage, as long as all other countries had to first change their currencies to the US dollar, in order to trade among themselves. This arrangement allowed the US to import more than it exported, year after year. It also allowed the US to use sanctions against other countries to cut off their trading abilities.
Changes already seem to be starting to reduce the role of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. In May 2023, Reuters reported, Vast China-Russia resources trade shifts to yuan from dollars in Ukraine fallout. Also, the BRICS nations have been working on an alternative currency, as a possible replacement currency for trading. And, of course, there are all kinds of cryptocurrencies that might be expected to facilitate purchases across borders.
[c] Major loss of trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific freight trade and passenger travel. An easy way to save oil would be to stop shipping goods as far as producers do today. Unfortunately, quite a bit of what we purchase in the US has supply lines that start in China.
Without trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific supply lines, many goods the US depends upon would disappear from shelves in the US. Computers and telephones, for example, might become unavailable, as would many drugs, especially low-cost drugs. Even high-quality steel drilling pipes, used for oil extraction, might become difficult to obtain.
It is not clear how the US would deal with this issue. It is likely that the economy would need to find substitutes or get along without whatever is lost due to broken supply lines.
[d] Significant defaults on financial promises of all kinds, including bonds, loans made by banks, rental contracts, and derivatives. Ultimately, a decline in asset prices seems likely.
The amount of debt and financial products used in Advanced Economies is at record levels. If a major recession occurs, debt defaults and derivative failures can be expected. Some renters will default on their contracts. Bank failures can be expected, as well.
Politicians will not want to throw people out of their homes; they likely won’t even want to take their automobiles away. Instead, it is likely to be those who are counting on wealth from long-term promises made by poor people who lose out. For example, some of today’s wealthy people may find their wealth disappears when renters cannot make payments on their apartments or farms.
If bank lending starts becoming a problem, peer-to-peer lending may start to take a larger role. This would seem to be the equivalent of replacing taxis by Ubers and replacing hotels by private citizens renting out rooms. The total amount of debt available will fall. With less debt available, asset prices of all kinds will tend to fall.
[e] Much more interest in reusing old buildings, old furnishings, and old clothes. Also, making use of salvaged parts of buildings and spare parts from old mechanical equipment, including automobiles.
If the making of goods that depend on overseas supply lines becomes difficult, substitutes such as previously used goods will likely be in demand. For example, we may go back to sourcing replacement parts from automobiles parked in junk yards.
Local entrepreneurs will find ways to make use of whatever goods can be used again. Such work may be a new source of jobs.
[8] We are likely to have a bumpy road ahead. Energy and the economy work together in very strange ways. While the path is generally downward for the world, the part of the world that uses energy very sparingly has a better chance of maintaining and even increasing its standard of living.
Our self-organizing economy puts together all kinds of narratives that lead us to believe that we certainly know the only path forward (and, in fact, we can control the economy to follow this path). But the system doesn’t behave the way we think it does. We assume that if we in the United States or Europe stop using fossil fuels, it will reduce the world’s use of fossil fuels. For example, stopping the Keystone XL Pipeline in 2021 was considered a great environmental victory. But now we read, Canada could lead the world in oil production growth in 2024.
This extra production will likely be going west to China and to other Asian destinations. Canada’s expanded Trans Mountain Pipeline will open in April 2024, adding 590,000 barrels per day of export capacity. If US protestors don’t want Canada’s “tar sands,” many people in China and other poor countries certainly want it. The very heavy oil that Canada produces is ideal for producing diesel, which the world economy is short of.
Likewise, the US may have bypassed easily mineable coal in its rush to shift electricity generation to natural gas. If the US cannot maintain its military strength, this coal becomes a valuable resource for any military power that wants to test its strength against the US. This available coal makes war against the US by other powers more likely. It is well known that a major reason for wars is to obtain energy resources for one’s own people.
We don’t know what is ahead. The “truths” that we are sure we know, aren’t necessarily true. The world economy seems likely to head downward slowly, but this general downward movement will be in spurts. Trying to predict exactly what is ahead is close to impossible.
Russia is now attacking the entire UKR energy system. It has also attacked Europe’s largest gas storage facility that the EU relies on and that could present problems for EU.
Russia has massively increased the production of hypersonic missiles during the war and it is now using them to that end. UKR missile defence is largely collapsed.
Obviously the destruction of the UKR energy system makes military sense and it shuts down a lot of other stuff- electric railways, factories, so transport, industry, logistics.
The UKR defence lines are eroding and a major Russian offensive seems to be coming in future months.
Perhaps that will be how the energy basis of industrial civilisation ultimately ends- not with whimpers but with bangs- like we saw with the Nordstream pipelines?
Russian missile strikes intensify
Alex and Alexander discussing Ukraine’s lack of success against Russia. Ukraine claims to have hit two Russian ships, but photos show that this is not really the case. Ukraine is quickly using up the ammunition that they have. Ukraine only use up the missiles they have been given.
Russia keeps making massive missile strikes, four days in a row. Attacked Europes biggest gas storage tank used by the EU, among other things. Railroads disrupted; electricity damaged. Collapse of Uranian defense of Dombass region. Rapidly accelerating Ukrainian collapse.
Now Russia is destroying energy infrastructure of Ukraine. Also intelligence offices. Russia is aiming to paralyze the railroads used to transport Ukrainian troops. This is gradually diminishing the supply of men to the front lines. This is part of a major offensive by Russia.
Russia’s attack is getting stronger and stronger. The $61 billion the US congress is looking at won’t achieve much of anything. Last winter, Ukraine should have built up their strength. Instead, they have ground down their equipment.
Collective West wanted a movie narrative. But Ukraine can’t provide it. Hoped that the Russians would run away. That is what the West thought.
—
Strange!
At the moment the only narrative of the West that is working well is ‘climate change’ instead of fossil fuels depletion.
Because, making some examples:
Covid from animal origin instead of lab, ended badly.
mRNA salvation of the world instead of normal treatments to people, ended badly.
Russia defeated and splitted, ended badly.
Men on the Moon 6 times in 3 years during the 70’s (of the previous century), seriously in doubt.
This is for Gail
With energy demand surging, utilities fall back on their old standby: Fossil fuels.
Federal incentives for clean energy are struggling to overcome old-school planning.
Power lines along the Savannah River at dusk form a pattern of intersecting lines with the cables of the Talmadge Memorial Bridge in the distance
Paul Souders / Getty Images. Emily Jones
This coverage is made possible through a partnership with WABE and Grist, a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future.
Georgia is enjoying an economic boom. Lured by tax breaks, high-tech data centers and manufacturers are flooding the state. It’s a trend state leaders are celebrating at every opportunity.
“We have seen over 171,000 new jobs come to our communities, we brought in over $74.5 billion of investment to the state,” Governor Brian Kemp told a gathering of lawmakers, business leaders, and other Georgia bigwigs earlier this year.
But that growth has created a problem: all the new businesses need lots of electricity.
The state’s largest electric utility, Georgia Power, now says it needs significantly more energy, significantly sooner than planned to meet the spike in demand. So the company is asking to buy and generate that electricity. Their plan calls for solar power coupled with battery storage, but it relies heavily on fossil fuels, including three brand new turbines to be powered with oil and natural gas.
Customers and clean energy advocates alike are decrying this plan. Large groups of students and medical professionals have dominated the public comment sections of hearings over Georgia Power’s request, pleading with the state’s Public Service Commission to reject it.
https://grist.org/energy/high-power-demand-utilities-see-fossil-fuels-solution/
Happy Weekend everyone . Collapse one hold till Monday.
Wind and solar certainly cannot provide the needed electricity for all of these things. Only fossil fuels work for such demand.
“Large groups of students and medical professionals have dominated the public comment sections of hearings…”
so mostly uninformed people, a high probability.
Two more nukes for Georgia!
Replace Indian Point with six co-located nukes.
How do we maintain the uranium supply chain for the nuclear power plants?
This is for MG the Slovak
Slovakia plans to be coal-free by 2024, 6 years earlier than originally planned
https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/28/slovakia-plans-to-be-coal-free-by-2024-6-years-earlier-than-originally-planned
Slovakia originally slated its coal phaseout for 2030 but has now expedited this to mid-2024.
Slovakia stopped production at its last coal-fired power plant this week. Its electricity will now come almost entirely from nuclear and renewable sources.
The Vojany power station, located in the Michalovce district in eastern Slovakia, opened in 1966.
Slovenské elektrárne, the company that owns the plant, announced that all of the electricity generated in the Eastern European country will be free of direct CO2 as of June 2024.
Slovakia originally slated its coal phaseout for 2030 but has now expedited this to mid-2024, when it will join Belgium, Austria, Sweden and Portugal as a coal-free country.
Slovakia will be coal-free by mid-2024
The Vojany coal plant has two remaining units of 110 MW each and will not produce any more as of this week. By the end of June, it will close down operations completely.
Operator Slovenské elektrárne has been trialling waste and biomass incinerators but concluded that this alternative fuel supply is unreliable and insufficient.
The lack of alternative fuel was also the motive behind the closure of the Nováky coal plant at the end of last year.
The problem is that wind and solar are terribly intermittent. They don’t come when they are needed.
Nuclear cannot easily ramp up and down. (It is possible to build nuclear plants that ramp up and down, but it seems to me to be a waste of resources to do so). Countries need coal or natural gas to ramp up and down when needed, as in winter.
The pricing of wind and solar is very often a problem for nuclear. The pricing often gives negative wholesale prices to the nuclear, when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. This drives the nuclear out of business.
In some ways, wind and solar are worse than nothing, because they drive the nuclear out of business. They also tend to drive coal out of business. They leave people freezing in the dark in winter.
A lot of English speaking people have an undue fear of Russia which permeates to this day.
Russia did LOSE the Great War, but Woodrow Wilson, to give Poles and Czechs their countries, restored most of the lands USSR lost to Germany back to Lenin, one of the most stupid decisions USA ever made.
USSR had trouble feeding its people. Lots of materiel flowed from Vladivostok and Murmansk to feed the Soviets, whose best lands were under German control. Yet Eisenhower, to save the lives of a few thousand lowlives whose only merit was they spoke English (with heavy redneck accents), awarded Berlin to Stalin, something Putin did not forget to remind the world 79 years later.
The Mongols DID conquer Russia, and ruled it for two centuries. The Poles DID conquer Russia in early 17th century. If the Dutch sailors had thrown a Pieter, later called Peter the Great, to the sea we would not be hearing too much about Russia now.
Russia can be conquered , from the East. The Central Asian republics were the key. The Trans-Siberian railroad used to go through a sliver of Kazakhstan. After 1991 a new line was built north of it, but to do so it had to abandon the more direct line of Moscow – Kuybyshev (now called Samara) – Ufa to the northeast line of Moscow-Yaroslavl – NIzhni Novogorod (called Gorky during USSR and still called the way by o most people even now). It is still kinda close to Kazakhstan which can cut it off if it feels like that. Omsk, a key junction of that railroad, is less than 100km away from the Kazakh border.
However Bush botched the Afghanistan war, robbing a chance to spread further into that region.
The key to destroy Russia is incite China. Give China enough concessions and divide Russia with Beijing, a policy Hilary Clinton was going to implement if she won in 2016.
Although she would have implemented policies which would have been hard to swallow by men in the Western World, she would have secured the Russian resources once for all, ensuring a more or less bumpy but secure ride to the Type I Civ.
Russia possesses a total of 5,580 nuclear warheads as of 2024. I don’t understand how Hillary Clinton and the Chinese would divide Russia without a thermonuclear war occurring first.
This is what World Population Review says:
I find it hard to believe that the US has 5,550 nuclear weapons, of which 1,389 are active. I would guess that nearly all of them are in need of a lot of work to actually use.
Putin later admitted that there was just one, 1, Corps between the Polish Border and Moscow in 2010
The 8th Guard Army, of Stalingrad Fame, was the primary force opposing Nato during the Cold War, stationed in East Germany. It was disbanded in 1998, and rebuilt in — 2017
A joint invasion of Russia, with a tacit approval from Beijing and the forces of Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Georgia and the Central Asian countries would have worked back in 2017
ensuring the flow from what was Russia to the West forever as Finland gets Karelia, Poland gets Moscow, Ukraine stretches to the Volga, and the Siberian oblasts all becoming independent.
your dry comedy is amazing.
how to destroy Russia in a few easy steps, by Glumthestatusquo.
really, the mightiest military industrial nation, overflowing with more natural resources than any other nation.
and YOU have a naive plan to destroy that?
you have almost gone off the deep end with your mental efforts to convince yourself that the sci-fi idea of Type 1 civ is realistic.
Not in 2017
Its old, rotting nuclear arsenal would have been easily neutralized
After that, like what Sergei Brin had said , pacifying NIgeria with snow would not have been hard with much more advanced tech the West possessed at that time
This is real news . The decline in the Permian has started . The narrative of ” endless ” shale is now punctured . Watch what will happen in the junk bond market . Now it gets interesting .
https://twitter.com/OilHeadlineNews/status/1773741101901353262/photo/1
Plan B ..Take it away from someone else…by force if necessary
What is MY oil doing under your sand…ect, ect,ect
christian oil doesn’t belong under infidel desert
why d’you think we have oil wars
There were similar fluctuations a few years back. Let us wait until May to declare it. Easy to say for me as I am 100% de-dollarized.
cool, Ravi.
the downturn has arrived, it’s quite exciting.
such a slooooooow process though, unfolding through week after week and month after month of slightly lower numbers.
one of these years, bAU in The Core will be affected.
maybe 2025, I hope to live to see how it goes down.
Slowly at first….. And then all at once.
slowly at first… and then slowly for years and years more… and then all at once.
in a handful of months, the 2020s will be half in the history books.
which might be a big surprise if Fast Doomers thought about it.
It is possible that US first quarter 2024 oil production will be lower than first quarter of 2023 because drilled but uncompleted wells are down. If so, we may be seeing the peak in the Permian production.
Permian decline has been predicted for a long time, so it will be good to have it here finally, to check off one more item on the degrowth list.
Until someone comes along with an innovation, and finds a way to get more oil out. People keep trying new approaches.
I like preheating with hot water from low pressure safe nuclear.
but getting more oil out doesn’t increase the amount available, it just uses it more quickly
This is not a surprise . Mike Shellman had forecast this decline in December , only he said look for production of March/April . Apparently this has been pulled forward . Today he discounted the usual excuse given by the bulls ” it is the weather ” .
https://www.oilystuff.com/forumstuff/forum-stuff/january-shut-ins?origin=notification
On this blog all are peak oil and markets aware . We know that markets work not on facts but sentiment and they swing from euphoria’s to FOMO . The question then is , will the market sentiment shift from ”Saudi America of oil ” to ” Rush for the door” when there are production falls for Feb-March-April . The murmur for $ 100 has already begun . Can we afford this in a rising interest rate environment and $ 300 trillion global debt ? Like I said ” now it gets interesting ” .
Shocking stat of the day:
Since 1800, 51 out of 52 countries who have reached a 130% Debt-to-GDP ratio have defaulted.
According to the US CBO itself, Debt-to-GDP in the US is on track to hit 130% for the first time by 2033.
In 2007, Debt-to-GDP in the US was just 60% and it has quickly doubled since then.
Currently, Debt-to-GDP is at ~124% which is HIGHER than the peak of World War 2, at 119%.
Since 2020, Debt-to-GDP is up a whopping 20% after the government’s massive borrowing spree.
Simply put, this is unsustainable .
Oil at $ 100 will knock the bottom out of the system .
https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/1773780017350082864
adjusted to today’s inflated dollars, the 2011-2014 oil price plateau was in the $120-140 range.
$100 oil is merely a moderate price.
today’s mid $80s is a good bargain.
degrowth may be enough to lessen demand and keep it under $100.
we’ll see, ultimately it’s no big deal how high it goes.
$200 would be cool, but I doubt I’ll live to see it.
que sera sera.
Legos, something simple, or maybe not.
Gail brought up a good point regarding Tesla making cars more like Legos, they can’t be repaired.
There is a romance about shade tree mechanics but old cars were not very good, they weren’t safe, they weren’t comfortable, and they were not efficient. At 100K miles they were finished, they rusted before that. When new cars, the good ones, stop, they are junk.
The earth is indeed finite, but space does not seem to be that way.
We humans self assemble, we do not repair very well, we replicate and make a copy with somewhat similar properties. If it is a bad offspring, historically the universe shrugged its shoulders and made another. The universe does not repair.
Maybe repair is so yesterday.
Self assembly appears to be a current “hot” area of biologic studies, first approximations are it is electrically driven. We are learning.
Dennis L.
Actually, humans do repair themselves pretty well, a lot better than a chair or table or dishwasher do.
We increasingly are manufacturing things that can’t be repaired.
Don’t we all die? Something must be failing. What is the optimum life span for a human in terms of a group?
In dentistry nothing we did was ever as good as the original unless it was bad engineering from the start and then dental engineering was never as good as done well the first time.
Not being a physician I am not competent to evaluate that area; I strongly suspect it is the same. At the end of this week I shall attend a Mayo presentation. The procedures are works of art, they are never as good as engineering done well the first time.
The age of excess energy is temporarily changing, how will we handle Medicare? That is repair, nature regenerates from what I see. Nature uses replication with evolution weeding out what is not optimal. Evolution does not invent the new, somehow that is done by the universe in ways we do not yet understand.
Dennis L.
Of course, the US and NATO backs Ukraine!
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-announces-substantiated-evidence-ukraine-link-crocus-hall-terrorists
Russia Announces ‘Substantiated Evidence’ Of Ukraine Link To Crocus Hall Terrorists
“Of course, the US and NATO backs Ukraine!”
And do you too, Gail? Do you believe in “My country, right or wrong!” ?
Gail doesn’t wish to say. Does she worry that the Elders and the Deep State are watching her? After all, the USA and Cuba have been enemies for decades, yet Cuba still allows the US to own Guantanamo and send people there to be renditioned. So beware! Be very beware. 😉
Ramping up fear in Europe!
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-threatens-attack-western-air-bases-hosting-ukrainian-f-16s
Putin Threatens To Attack Western Air Bases Hosting Ukrainian F-16s
According to RT, Putin said:
How many front does Putin want to fight on? How many is he able to fight on? Ideally he’ll have to wait until Ukraine asks for terms, and then he and the Europeans will no longer want to fight.
There’s nothing we could actually do if Putin hit our airbases. He’s already flown a missile into Polish airspace.
Of course there’s stuff we could DO. It would only produce retaliation and escalation, though. And in any case, Russia cannot be beaten or conquered. Napoleon tried it, A.H. tried it. Both failed. Nor could Russia conquer Europe.
Zemi , back home we have a saying ” One blow of the blacksmith = 100 blows of the goldsmith ” . I have several times warned ” Don’t mess with Putin” . It fell on deaf ears .
Yes, ravi, I well remember 2014, and the US politicians visiting Ukraine to support and egg on the Ukrainian extremists. And the ethnic Russians burnt alive in the trade union building in Odessa.
Never go to a land war in Eurasia . Napoleon and Hitler learned this the hard way . It is for NATO to learn this . Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it .
At least a bit of the recent oil price rise may be related to the US working on refilling the SPR. But now plans for a complete refilling of the SPR have been cancelled.
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/The-US-Breaks-Its-Self-Imposed-Oil-Price-Ceiling-of-79-to-Refill-the-SPR.html
Technically speaking the SPR should be 30 days of consumption which means 20 x 30 = 600 millions barrels minimum . ” it should be back to normal by the end of the year.” Crap .
I think the argument is that we are pumping our own oil now–except it is not the right kind. In fact, a disproportionate share of what we are pumping is natural gas liquids.
This would be a disaster for Palestine!!
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israel-may-cut-palestinian-banks-global-banking-system-next-week
Palestinian banks could be cut off from the Israeli banking system starting next week following a decision by Israel’s finance minister to cease dealings between the two financial institutions, according to a report on Thursday by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has two days to convene a cabinet meeting to discuss reversing plans by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich to isolate Palestinian banks from both the Israeli and international banking systems.
The Palestinian economy is based on the Israeli currency, the shekel, making it reliant on ties to Israel and its financial dealings with the rest of the world must go through the Bank of Israel and Israeli banks.
Earlier this month, the hardline minister Smotrich threatened to paralyze the Palestinian Authority’s economy in response to the United States imposing sanctions on four West Bank extremist settlers accused of violence against Palestinians.
Also
This seems to be indirectly related to new US sanctions. This needs to be fixed!
Ethnic cleansing done thoroughly. I had no doubt. In case you are wondering, Palestinian refugees are starting to arrive in rural Russia.
Why would Russia do this? I understand the humanitarian needs, but … Russia seems intent on de-Russifying itself.
Russia could follow the Chinese example and send them to camps to be “re-educated.”
kadyrov has some money and he is using it. This group I am talking about had their homes in the West Bank destroyed by you know who.
Russia has significant social programs to increase sizes of families, and there is a lot of ongoing mixing between Christians and Muslims, and it has been going on for decades now (it was initiated during the USSR). Why not complain about Lavrov and Shoigu then? they are surely not Russian.
Also consider the alternative. One state solutions only are possible in Palestine. Would you rather have 2M chews arrive in Russia over several months? Russia is doing relatively well in part because there are so few of them. They poison and distort society so much I strongly prefer to have 6M palestinians here instead, and no comparison really. My heart is with the Palestinians but my head is with Israel.
I would like to think that everyone can live together, but my reading of history and a few studies is that no matter the minority, when they grow, it causes conflict, distrust, and instability.
Perhaps you should come here and take a look (although your handle seems to indicate you were maybe born here). The culture is much more accommodating of mutli-culturalism. I don’t see many problems. The Palestinians are a mutli-religional bunch and so are the rossiskies. Having lived in SE Michigan for 3 decades, I think I know them. I really prefer them to Israelis who can speak russian.
drb, my antecedents are from former Yugoslavia and everyone knows the history there. Everything split along religious and cultural lines. Then of course you yourself mentioned Chechen independence and propaganda to prevent Dagestan joining it. Perhaps multiculturalism can work, but I view it as a latent threat that is prone to manifest during hard times.
PS – I think that were Russia not to have the resources it does, various regions would break away because those resources buy quality of life and that buys tranquility.
Of course. Once resources run out it is going to be collapse everywhere. Here transportation is largely electrified and that will buy us some time. I have to wonder which regions would break away. Siberia eats what Russia produces, and Russia uses Siberia’s resources. I expect, for example, the grain market to become a lot less liquid in 20 years. I doubt that China will have the means to support other nations with food.
‘Chews’ and Muslims and Christians lived relatively peacefully in the ME before the Protestant imperialists stuck their fangs in.
I understand Palestinians are between a rock and a hard place, but putting your banking system in the hands of the enemy is not a smart move. Come to think of it, here in the USA…
From Zerohedge:
As I see the situation, the crazy pricing scheme of wind and solar tends to drive out nuclear especially – also coal and natural gas. So subsidies are needed for nuclear, to help it compete.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/historic-reversal-us-restart-shut-down-nuclear-power-plant-first-time-ever
In Historic Reversal, US To Restart A Shut Down Nuclear Power Plant For The First Time Ever
No posts for 12 hrs. Other than Fast Eddy’s musings, which we will miss, and Dennis L’s proselytizing his Starship Cult, a variation of the Cargo Cult of Polynesians who were impressed by the US materials during world war 2, no one is really posting.
To get to the next level of civilization, extralegal, extra-moralistic,, extra-you-name-it policies are needed. It won’t get there thru ‘humane’ way.
Today is “Good Friday,” a religious holiday in some Christian countries. US stock markets are closed today. Some folks go on three-day holidays with their families. That could play a role. The US Senate and House of Representatives are on holiday for Easter. I expect a fair number of reporters are on vacation.
there is no ”next level of civilisation”—
Norm,
Two of my favorite movies are “Grumpy Old Men” and “Grumpier Old Men.” Who could object to Ann Margret and Sophia Loren?
You are our grumpy old man, you add color and excel in usage of the word, “no.” Laughing quietly.
Dennis L.
lol dennis
i don’t use the word ”no” lightly—i certainly never used it in response to Sophia Loren, no matter how many times she came round to my house in dire need. That would have been very discourteous. After she had taken the trouble to travel so far.
However, I do use it in response to the starshippers of this world.
Why?
Because in 1000 years of getting ”off earth”, no one has yet improved on the method used by the Chinese.
The asteroid mining fraternity assure me they can get ‘stuff” from ”out there”–turn it into more useful ”stuff” we can use.
We can fly around the solar system at will, doing what we need, when we need.
And all by using exploding chemicals to get ‘off earth’ just like the chinese 1000 years ago.?????
I try to be polite dennis, but your fantasies are self deluding BS.
I don’t doubt you actually believe this stuff—but the fact remains we do not possess the means to do it. Thinking about it is not the same thing. As surplus energy leaves us–we will stay firmly on terra firma,
Show me otherwise? But do stop daydreaming. And demeaning your own intelligence.
Norm, same idea as this great tune by Starship sung by a little girl with her kitty riding her tricycle ..big hit in Europe
We built this city on Rock and Roll
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KRE-LYqwAi8&pp=ygUhR2lybCBhbmQga2l0dHkgd2UgYnVpbHQgdGhpc2NjaXR5
Time will tell, norm. I have placed my bets, betting on a positive future. A thousand years is the blink of an eye or less.
No reason to argue, this is going to play out in the next five years max.
Dennis L.
Always five years from now!
When Fast Eddy was here we were all going to die like fivevyesrsvag9
in 2005 i was saying—–we’re all ddddddooooomed
Luckily Sophia Loren told me not to be so stupid
If we believe Eric Chaisson, the Universe always keeps moving toward greater complexity. Today’s cities represent the highest energy density and highest complexity, as I understand the situation.
I can imagine a situation in which today’s Advanced Economies collapse, and some of the other economies, in a somewhat different form, can continue to go forward. Over a period of years, they may be able to come up with a more efficient way of using the earth’s resources. Much less of the world’s economy will be in cold parts of the world, for example, because there the requirement for heating homes and for substantial means of transportation is much higher.
It is possible that the remnant that remains can eventually rebuild higher than our current Advanced Economies. They may be able to find ways to economically extract fossil fuels that we have not, for example. But I don’t believe in Kulm’s view, based on what we know today.
the fourth most comment element on the planet is iron.
iron is our base element of construction. we have nothing else.
but we cannot use iron unless we can heat it ore tio 1500 c
we’ve spent centuries doing that, and in the process consumed most of the heat producing material–ie hydrocarbons. We are now scrambling to maintain that heat output, because without it, our civilisation, in the sense that we need it to be, ceases to be.
without those surpluses, there can be no going forward, because there is no material to replace iron—( I am open to to be proven wrong there, but mining jupiter’s moons doesn’t cut it.)
The world my be full of scrap cars, but unless a way can be found to remelt them, they will revert to iron oxide.–the proof of that is all around us.
rebuilding to a higher level requires industrial complexity—and it is not possible to build that without complex industry.
Good one Norm, thanks for bringing us back down to the Mother shop, Earth.
kul,
Just for you, a post!
Guesses:
1. We(OFW) already know what does not work and beating on it isn’t helpful. Summary: the easy to get “stuff” is gone, gone, gone.
2. The universe is twice as old as we thought, so we took >12B additional years to get this far as biology. Wow! That is a lot of effort.
3. The universe is expanding, where? No one knows but along with it knowledge is expanding in some areas and in others the boundaries have been reached and the narrative of limits to that knowledge is not going down well.
4. A bridge is needed. I don’t see anything other than back to the basics, H, or electrons to protons to electrons, catchy phrase if I do say so myself.
5. Starship is fact, the company that makes it routinely launches rockets, and incredible amounts of money are being invested – where is it coming from? Looking at the schedule, if it is achieved, Starship is the largest human endeavor in the earth’s history. That is big, really, really big.
6. Is it Type I? (disclaimer, I have no idea what Type I means)
7. Blessed Easter to all said in a noninvasive way.
Dennis L.
more BS Dennis
Can’t wait for all the resources we get from outer space that turns into junk….sure Dennis, can see them blast it off back to where it came from…. sarcasm 😭
Will hate to see my bill they charge for that service..
Someone has to pay and it will be me
Yes, probably in one form or another, but life is finite so that too ends.
There is a great deal invested in us humans, to date the nihilists have been wrong, the optimists live in ways never imagined.
And, they get the best women, more biology. Good women do not come cheaply and are not cheap. Biology, always biology.
Dennis L.
Okay, no problem, no argument.
Dennis L.
To get to the next level of civilization, extralegal, extra-moralistic,, extra-you-name-it policies are needed. It won’t get there thru ‘humane’ way.
I’m just cleaning the house ready for visitors so unfortunately I don’t have time for any atrocities or human rights violations today. I’m free on Sunday though.
atrocities and human rights violations are best inflicted on visitors i find
by mutual consent—naturally
Goodness, the world is grim right now. Time for a little musical interlude to cheer us up.
You will have heard music by dead composers. But I expect that you have never heard any music that they composed AFTER they were dead. So they were composing as they were DEcomposing, in effect. 😉
In the 1960s a middle-class Englishwoman called Rosemary Brown claimed to be channelling new piano compositions from dead classical composers. Leonard Bernstein excitedly paid her a visit and played some of these compositions from “the other side”. He was impressed and believed that she was onto something. Watch and listen to this old documentary and judge for yourself.
Music from the Beyond – the Mediumship of Rosemary Brown
https://youtu.be/mX477Zo7otg
I also remember watching a documentary on British TV in the mid-1970s about an Austrian woman who also claimed to be channelling new music from one dead composer in particular. However, I can’t remember her name or which composer she was allegedly channelled. Has anybody her heard of this case and knows their names?
They sound like complete nutters.
They used to put that rubbish on UK TV?
LOL
Mike Rutherford (of Genesis) wrote this song. “Silent Running (On Dangerous Ground) with his temporary group “Mike and the Mechanics” while Phil Collins was taking a break from Genesis to do some solo work.
Has space/ time travel, and some kind of end of civilization /doom undertones, 1986.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i17mgRK3GX8
(lyrics in the show notes)
“Swear allegiance to the flag whatever flag they offer”
Great song.
From Genesis I remember this very nice song. They were a band of 3, like Police, but although being 3 a small number, they were able to bust the stage.
I’m all for living in The Now of bAU:
brought to you by the age of oil… try not to enjoy this too much.
It seems to me that this lot are becoming irrelevant as energy and world events (BRICS, West’s economic problems) overtake them
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-15/we-need-a-plan-for-the-transition-to-renewable-energy/?utm_source=Post+Carbon+Institute&utm_campaign=cdbffc624f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2024_03_26_09_40&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-cdbffc624f-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D&mc_cid=cdbffc624f&mc_eid=3cfe52d8c9
David Fridley and Richard Heinberg are telling a narrative that will perhaps help them get donations for their work. Fridley is author of “Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy.” They need to read what David Murphy is writing.
I had in particular a very bad impression of Richard Heinberg when he wanted to play down what happen to Trump about stolen election and Capitol Hill.
He insisted that we still needed to believe mainstream media while for years he has been saying that mainstream media didn’t tell the truth on fossil fuels…
On that period I think we had a great breaking.
Independently by being Trump a good President or not, but a great breaking in US happened in my view.
I don’t know if Heinberg didn’t understand or he wanted to tell another story or someone said to him to tell another story.
Anyway, in my view, from that period on what Heinberg started to say become separated from reality.
I’ve learned to tune out anything that starts with “we need”.
Clever.
Dennis L.
we need Starship and asteroid mining and outer space manufacturing.
Definitely, it is a real need and a solution.
I placed my bet, sticking by it.
That idea is high value added, translation: great return on capital.
Now, tell me this isn’t progress. Getting laundry done the right way, shorts neatly folded is what we need.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8vsTNFUFJEU
Meanwhile background music begins playing, “Take out the papers and the Trash.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRA3majpFXI
Also used in a John Candy movie. John was in off times a DJ in San Diego back in the day.
Summer of Tom Cruise, definitely not woke. North Island, home of the “Hawk.” Got a tour from the bridge to shaft alley by a boyfriend of my daughter. Who say’s boyfriends aren’t useful?
Music tells stories.
Just a cubic mile.
Go Elon!
Dennis L.
dennis
try to make comments without sticking your hand in a scrabble bag, and writing down whatever handful of letters you pull out.
then we might have some idea of what you are going on about
The two kids who helped hundreds get out of the concert hall. through back stage. One is a Kirghiz, the other either Russian or Ukrainian.
A ploy to induce Kirgizstanis into fighting
The soldier who raised the flag at the Reichstag was thought to be a Russian, but during the Chechen war, to prevent the people of Dagestan, next door to Chechnya, from supporting the breakaway region it was announced that a Dagestani soldier raised the flag.
Classic propaganda, which did work since Dagestan stayed loyal to Russia
Do you really think the Kurgs will be fooled? I thought Saddam Hussein had gassed most of them, anyway.
Their pasttime is getting fooled by the latest great power passing by
Zemi, Kirghizi and Saddam are or were 4000 km apart.
That didn’t stop Saddam bombing Kurgistan.
Great impersonation of an idiot Zemi. I was totally fooled.
The depletion of the people who built the current civ, replaced by those who had no stake on it, means the end of civilization.
The peoples who have no stake on civilization can care less about the end of the possibility for a Type I Civ, since they never asked for it and are not too hot about it
The do-goodism of USA was to blame. Its leaders thought everyone should have their own country.
That logic came forth because USA had all the Latin American countries under its thumb.
Not too many people know this, but in 1912 close to half of all countries were in Latin America. Asia had 5 countries (Japan, China, Thailand, Persia, Afghanistan) Europe has around 20 countries, only one country in North America (no one considered Canada as a country back then – it was a Dominion of Canada. No one really knows when Canada gained independence – legally, it is April 17, 1982, and until than it was NOT a country, still being the world’s largest colony.)
So Americans expected the newly independent countries would be controllable, but the Latin American countries had 300 years of ‘smoothing’ by the Spaniards, but the newly independent countries , except maybe Indonesia, didn’t have the smoothing out process by Europeans so were not truly subdueable.
For those interested in the Japanese economy . The Soros moment .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2024/03/japon-y-el-momento-george-soros-la.html
This is a difficult article to understand, even with Google Translate.
The big concern that this author has is the high level of governmental debt that Japan has, as well as its continued deficit spending each year, adding to the debt. The path of the yen can be expected to be down in the future.
The author sees the Euro on the same path, but not as fast.
The sees the US dollar as holding value better than the others, but ultimately he sees the system going back to gold.
I am wondering if gold can hold its value, if the total quantity of goods and services being produced each year is falling. Each year, gold will purchase less.
I would think that grain would be the ultimate commodity for trading and holding its value, rather than gold.
The problem is the devaluation .Year ago it was Yen 133 today it is Yen 152 per USD . This is a devaluation of 18 % in an year . It may not matter to the general public but it is a problem for the currency markets . I have mentioned the carry trade where you borrow at 0% in Yen and buy 1 year US notes at 3% and win in the interest arbitrage . However with this devaluation the trade is underwater . This is a catch 22 for BOJ . It cannot keep low interest rates and at the same time defend the value of the yen .Similar to the situation of the GBP when it was forced to exit the ERM and Soros pocketed his first billion . That is why it is called the ‘ Soros ‘ trade .
Excellent point:
“It [Japan] cannot keep low interests and at the same time defend the value of the yen.”
If Japan has a large and growing supply of cheap fossil fuels, it could keep the economy growing because of the increasing leverage of the fuels with respect to the value of human labor.
Having to import all of its fossil fuels, Japan has to use a growing amount of debt to create make-work jobs for a whole lot of people (serving tea to visitors to Japan; building amazing multilane roads that are used by practically no-one). I saw a lot of different kinds of make-work jobs when I visited Japan in 2018. It is this practice that the world economy does not reward well.
I have mentioned the carry trade where you borrow at 0% in Yen and buy 1 year US notes at 3% and win in the interest arbitrage .
Ravi, have you not grasped this way the wrong way around? If you borrow in yen and the yen devalues 18%, you have to repay 18% less USD or whatever. Thus it’s an 18% BONUS from an offshore perspective, not a loss.
This is the reason the nips have to keep their currency weak and bond yields low because if yields jump significantly and/or the yen appreciates the whole carry trade will blow up
It doesn’t sound good from Japan’s point of view, however. Imports tend to cost a whole lot more.
This carry trade bubble is one of the great financial wonders of all time.
It’s one of the main engines for global credit creation.
The derivative betting on the JGB yields rising has come to be known as the “widdow-maker trade”
When it blows, no one will have known the future …
nor the present
In the meantime with the nip plebs so lacking in consumerist libido, the main impact on them of the weaker JPY is imported food costs, so they just get whipped harder.
USD = 103JPY Jan 2021 Three years later USD = 151JPY this returns a positive 50% kick in returns for offshore borrowers of JPY
And the industrials exporting make a motza!! What’s not to like?
Only possible with a zombiefied population and a trade surplus.
“This carry trade bubble is one of the great financial wonders of all time.
It’s one of the main engines for global credit creation.”
I hadn’t thought of this.
Thanks Moss . An article on how it works .
https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/markets/what-is-carry-trade-and-how-does-bank-of-japans-rate-hike-affect-it-12487541.html#:~:text=What%20is%20a%20carry%20trade,equities%20and%20commodities%2C%20and%20bonds.
How big is the Japanese carry trade? Japan’s government is engaged in a massive $20 trillion “carry trade” — the funding of loans and foreign assets by borrowing low-cost yen — that could bring unexpected risks if the central bank tightens policy, Deutsche Bank analysts warned on November 14, 2023.05
I thought about it. It needs to be something relatively portable (so no grains), and there is ever more gold for ever less consumable goods, so gold is not good. I vote for purified milk fat (ghee). It is very precious for humans, being the best fat there is, it lasts a long time, it even has a gold color. You need jars, a pot and a strainer (besides a producing cow). In US prisons canned mackerel is used for money, same concept.
Canned mackerel??! Come on! Really? You’re telling me that you are going to give prisoners metal for making knives and keys and who knows what else.
They figured it out on their own. It’s what they do.
In an environment of energy scarcity, the amount of Gold being mined will drop to near zero. The ore grades being mined with heavy equipment today are of extremely poor quality. It would seem that in such an environment, the relatively fixed amount of Gold already in existence (above ground) would be an ideal form of money.
Whatever the amount of gold, the amount of goods and services being produced each year will be falling. This means each unit of gold will purchase less each year. So we will again have inflation.
Gold has often been said to be a store of value, but value as you say, is indeed relative. As goods become scarce, theoretically it then becomes a wash. Gold vs grub.
But when all the oil has been burned and industrial civilization (IC) has retraced back to a sustainable baseline, in theory gold and silver will re emerge as money as they have always done, but will be used as a medium of exchange for payment in local trade- after the flurry of barter subsides and more organized trade makes a resurgence as local markets get restablished in the new baseline.
In theory, gone will be the wire transfers of trillions of Xs and Os in whatever fiat currency, cryptocurrency, or CDBCs as it will be too costly to continue international shipping of meaningful quantiies of goods except maybe by sail. The “convenience” and speed of electronic/digital/fiat payments will become moot. Limitation of trade to local markets will mandate a return to real money like gold and silver.
So all those gold bugs out there who think that just because they’ve got some gold stashed away and that they will be able to scoop up all the assets on the cheap and acquire great wealth like some did back after the Weimer collapse might be disappointed. Sure, you can buy stuff, but it will be a one for one trade. You will not make a killing unless of course you can outright confiscate tangibles like the feudal lords did.
Tongue in cheek and respectfully, Pt.
Dennis L.
Last page I talked about Chucky in detail so I won’t do it again
Thanks to him these change occurred
1. Since there were now a lot of peoples, including the colonials, who had military experience, and the Revolution in Russia (which was also prolonged by Chucky since if the British were chased out from the continent Berlin would send two telegraphs, one to Paris and another to Petersburg, to finish the conflict) made the upper class to make concessions to the ‘working class’, which led to a Labour government in United Kingdom in 1924, just 6 years after the Great War ended and 10 years after Chucky’s fkup, the working class began to consume resources in earnest, a very negative development.
2. The rise of extremism in the defeated, i.e. those whose victory was cheated by Woodrow Wilson, countries. Everyone knows that so I won’t talk about that.
3. The rise of awareness in the colonies. The British conscripted people from India, the French from Algeria, Senegal and Vietnam, etc. They went home, telling the stories of roundeyes being torn to pieces, and the locals now realized they could do that if they ahd weapons, which led to most colonies becoming independent after world war 2 (although that might have been different if USA did not intervene with Holland’s attempt to regain the East Indies, where they almost won before USA balked) and consuming resources as they saw fit.
That eventually led to the Brics crisis where the resource producing countries wanted more for themselves and the events everyone knows have occurred , which will restrict resources from the countries with potentials to advance to Type I Civ , preventing it.
It is amazing what a person, actually no more than 400 people, can screw up human civilization, although the WEF and the Wokists are doing their best to emasculate the peoples who have the tendency to repeat stunts like this from ever getting relevant, as the events on Jan 6, 2021 had shown.
it is always worth repeating:
thank you for keeping alive the blessed name of Chucky.
and almost daily!
well done.
IF the world worked well, the whole of Worcestershires would have full of nuclear waste dumps and other places to dump dirty stuff, and declared uninhabitable forever like these zones
https://www.worldwar1centennial.org/index.php/communicate/press-media/wwi-centennial-news/1323-after-100-years-some-world-war-i-battlefields-are-poisoned-and-uninhabitable.html
these zones in France which are still uninhabitable.
The people of Great Britain lived too comfortably, putting Europe to war for centuries, and Rotherham is just a small piece of the karma they will have to pay for.
I miss Sasha though.
OK, Here you are..get you Sasha dose and hope you enjoy you pick me up…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_KKoDIW3VSo
Office Outfit , Pantyhose , Lingerie , Tights , Stockings , Strumpfhose , Collant , High Heels .
381,664 views · 5 months ago…more
Sasha Nylon 332K
Self assembly, in cars, copied after biology and Legos. Legos have the information of assembly built into the structure of each block.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/tesla-s-25-000-car-means-tossing-out-the-100-year-old-assembly-line/ar-BB1kGpoG?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=d06105e58d0b4633aca806595ae09070&ei=22
Musk again, always Musk.
I wonder how well the proposed procedure will work.
I have a hard time believing that the parts will fit together as well as planned.
Also:
This sounds like a nightmare for insurers. Instead of replacing a little part in an accident, a whole large piece needs to be replaced. And repainting it to match the rest of the car will be a nightmare.
All air , no punch .Similar to the idea of SMR nuclear reactors . Unworkable .
He thinks it will work. Delusion makes someone really unable to see the reality
Does he really think it will work, or… ?
lidia,
It works for human beings, the idea of self assembly is in active research. With human beings after assembly they can work without some parts, but not ver well, E.g. an arm.
However, think of a starfish, lose a limb, grow one back.
Dennis L.
He things cars are as complex as starfish
Also he refuses to believe in thermodynamics, which basically precludes any chance of an eternal civilization. The laws of thermodynamics apply to anywhere in the physical world, starships or not, and the aliens are also subject to them.
Good insight, guess, the car is totaled, no way to put it together again except if the remaining Legos are not damaged. Then it is Legos all the way down.
Dennis L.
replacing a little part in an accident, a whole large piece needs to be replaced. And repainting it to match the rest of the car will be a nightmare
This is how it is now. Why do you think car insurance is rising so fast?
I noticed that the front-page article on the latest issue of the magazine for actuaries, “Contingencies,” is called, “Driving Costs Higher: Our nation’s fleet of hyper-safe vehicles is expensive to insure.”
dobbs
Sounds like we made the right decision. Your type I civilization sucks and the vast majority of people did not want it, so feel free to cry me a river that your evil desires were denied.
Kulm the Status Quo answers
Without a winner take all society, it is impossible to raise the standard of civilization
If all resources are dissipated to maintain the kind of people who do not advance civilization then the chance of reaching a higher level of civ is lost
It is like a lottery, where everyone, old, young, rich or poor has to chip in , say, $100,000 each but the payout is $1 quntillion, more than what was put in, although only one party gets to enjoy the payout.
Type I Civ is so advanced and so great that even though few earthlings will get to enjoy it the aggregate gain would outweigh the pains most earthlings will have to endure, so in a utilitarian way it is a good thing.
“Type I Civ is so advanced and so great that even though few earthlings will get to enjoy it…”
this is a naive opinion which hasn’t been fully thought out.
what if human existence when uploaded is a tortuous hellish existence?
go ahead and answer, but there is no way of knowing in advance.
the nothingness of eternal death is the natural solution.
Obviously those who are organizing the uploading will make sure they enjoy their uploaded status to the fullest so at least some of them do get to live in paradise
This is a probably last gasp attempt to escape the prison of earth. A huge hail mary pass. If it fails, it is over
you are still not thinking this through all the possibilities.
this would be a new process, and there is great potential for something to go wrong.
what if the first uploaders are uploaded defectively and end up in a tortuous condition?
since this would be a process invented and used by fallible human beings, there is a HIGH CHANCE that something will go wrong.
(not that this uploading nonnsense will ever happen, but I’m trying to play along with your Type 1 Fantasy.)
There’s little point arguing the Civ I stuff with you because you take it as given that it is phenomenally great without ever saying why, but your last paragraph is self-contradictory: “Type I Civ is so advanced and so great that even though few earthlings will get to enjoy it the aggregate gain would outweigh the pains most earthlings will have to endure, so in a utilitarian way it is a good thing.”
Utilitarianism was promoted by Bentham and Mill who reduced humans to operations based on pain (and its avoidance) and pleasure (and seeking it). It is generally defined as the greatest good for the greatest number, based on the foundational motivations and results of pleasure and pain and the greatest amount of pleasure overcoming the costs of the pain. By definition, a system that creates great pleasure for a very small handful of ppl at the cost of great suffering by everyone else is not a utilitarian success, but if nevertheless pursued disproves that utilitarianism is its justification.
Utilitarianism maximizes utility, so if one billion loses $1 each but one person gains $1 billion and 1 dollar, the aggregate greater good has been achieved.
In other words, if the Great Pleasure * Number of people enjoying it is larger than suffering * those enduring the suffering, then that is the greater good.
https://youtube.com/shorts/UyOBPNZVUtY?si=P9sGUhVBE4xeotqb
https://youtube.com/shorts/Y5Xr_1__KLA?si=GevNR6oUhb2EcNZn
I think these are worth the suffering of a few billion earthlings.
Czech Republice: the personnel in a hospital exchanged patients and induced abortion to wrong woman
https://hnonline.sk/svet/96138768-potrat-namiesto-beznej-kontroly-v-cesku-nastala-fatalna-zamena
Anything that can go wrong, will!
This is from a german alternative media website:
“Will the debt tower be blown up in a “controlled” manner?”
The global debt tower grows and grows and grows. If it collapses or is blown up, the result could be the largest bottom-up redistribution of all time. A scenario.
I have reported on the global debt tower five times in recent years here on achgut.com, most recently in the summer of last year. The total amount of global debt has now risen to over 300 trillion (that’s an unimaginable 300,000 billion) US dollars. It cannot be ruled out that this tower could be “controlled demolition,” with 80 to 90 percent of the property, which is still widely distributed, passing into the hands of the richest per thousand of the population.
Last year, former hedge fund manager David Rogers Webb published an essay on the “Great Taking,” a financially engineered process that he expects will end the inflation cycle has been ongoing since 1971, when the US dollar became a fiat currency. Although his own text is poorly structured and is more of a mixture of theorizing and experiential reporting, it is worth examining his main hypotheses because Webb has really realized something: Webb believes that the fifty-year period of inflation that we have now gone through is linked to one massive debt deflation, during which we will see a “confiscation” of large parts of private property by central banks and certain banks chosen to survive the crisis. How is that supposed to work?
Webb draws an analogy between our time and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Before 1929, when the stock market collapsed and the Great Depression began, there was a period of inflation and increasing debt. As the debt tower toppled, the real value of debt then increased dramatically due to deflation: as the purchasing power of money increases, the debt burden becomes much higher because a unit of debt has a higher value. The debt deflation spiral described by Irving Fisher began when more and more debtors were no longer able to service their debts and had to sell their collateral such as real estate or machinery.
What happened during the Great Depression
This creates an oversupply of the previously inflated assets, their prices fall, and deflation sets in. This deflation causes more consumer, mortgage and business loans to default, leading to more fire sales and prices falling even further. The value of bank assets then falls because a large part of them are loans and because the value of the collateral falls. Banks must write off these losses on their balance sheets so that their equity falls below the minimum relative capital levels. This leads to a sharp increase in bank insolvencies and bank runs occur. The banks can no longer fulfill their transaction function. The credit market comes to a standstill, lending and spending decline sharply. Production falls, a combined supply and demand shock occurs, a contraction worse than a mere recession. That was essentially what happened during the Great Depression.
In the wake of these events, the US federal government closed all banks in 1933, which was the Bank Holiday. A third of the banks (those with the worst balance sheets) never reopened, only the banks selected by the Fed were allowed to reopen. Webb describes: “People with money in banks that were not allowed to reopen lost all of their money. However, their debts were not canceled but were taken over by the banks selected by the Federal Reserve System. If these people could not pay their debts—which was now likely since they had lost their cash—they would lose everything they had financed with debt, such as their home, their car, and their business” (p. 43). The remaining banks took all of their collateral from debtors, even after they had almost paid off the debt for decades, because debt deflation had devalued the nominal price of the collateral to a level below the outstanding debt. For example, a mortgage that was 80 percent paid off could not be paid off by selling the house because selling the house would have yielded less than 20 percent of the total mortgage value. The ownership went to the owners of the banks.
In this situation, the Fed created additional concentration of wealth by keeping the issuance of new loans low. Interest rates, while low, were still higher than zero, and the Fed did not engage in quantitative easing (bond purchases) like it does today. This led to a prolonged contraction and deflation that forced many small businesses into bankruptcy and forced their owners to sell their property. Overall, the economy shrank by 35 percent. Webb concludes: “If this was a comprehensive program to ensure there was no surge, then it worked pretty well.”
To prevent the emergence of a new independent banking system and to increase demand for credit, the government banned private gold ownership in May 1933. It was illegal for almost forty years until 1971, when gold lost its role as a backing for the US dollar. Gold had to be exchanged for banknotes, which quickly lost value due to the inflation that soon began again. Gold possession was criminalized, so most citizens complied. In this way, the state deprived its citizens of the only way to protect small assets from confiscation as collateral. Gold ownership was now an exclusive privilege of the state. The confiscated gold became the property of the Federal Reserve, which is a public institution owned by private individuals. In other words:
Rich American and European families, who still own the US central bank through their shares in the Fed (although the ownership structures have evolved), confiscated the gold that had been privately owned. The overall effect was a redistribution of wealth from the middle class to the bank owners, ruining millions of citizens and driving them into the debtor class.
Seizure of assets through the “Great Takeover”
Webb’s theory is that after 50 years of constant private and central bank inflation like the 1930s, we are now entering a new phase of debt deflation that will lead to a financial crash and a confiscation of all security property. What mechanisms does he predict?
Webb focuses on the clearinghouses of the financial system, the members of the central clearinghouses (CCP). CCP members are clearinghouses that act as intermediaries between two parties trading foreign exchange, securities, options or derivatives by assuming transaction risk and providing for the transfer of ownership and settlement of trades. For example, Luxembourg-based Clearstream International S.A. a clearing institution for the central storage and settlement of securities transactions for securities of all asset classes. The securities are stored in digital form with the company acting on behalf of their owners. Clearstream will allocate the titles to the new owner when the deals are completed. In 2018, it held and settled more than $11 trillion (11,000 billion) worth of collateral. The main task is to ensure a flawless transfer of ownership when concluding a deal. Essentially all financial transactions involving collateral, loans and their numerous derivatives are now processed through CCPs. Therefore, much of the risk is concentrated in this sector of the financial system.
The clearing institutions bear the risk that one of the parties to the transaction defaults on their balance sheets. But they are massively undercapitalized for a situation in which such failures occur more frequently. In this case, their equity is used up and they go bankrupt. This endangers the central clearinghouses in which they are organized. If they are unable to save their members because too much of their equity has been destroyed, they will go bankrupt themselves. Then, says the Fed, “if the securities intermediary is a clearinghouse, the claims of its creditors have priority over the claims of its beneficiaries.”
This means that if the debtors are institutions that have used collateral from private investors, they will lose their ownership to the clearinghouse creditor. Such collateral may include bonds, stocks, life insurance or pensions, and many financial derivatives created from collateral by the clearinghouse debtor party, for example a bank, insurance company, or wealth fund. The owners of these titles, individual investors and companies who believe that their titles are safe with the issuer, which may be their bank, life insurance company or pension fund, lose all title because the creditors of the clearing institutions have priority over them. You can take ownership of any assets, even if they are debt-free and reflect the owners’ savings. For example, if a bank has launched an exchange-traded fund (ETF) in which individuals have invested their savings, and that bank defaults on a clearing transaction, the clearing institution’s creditor will have priority over and receive the defaulting bank’s collateral, including the Shares in the bank’s ETF. The holders of ETF shares, whether small or large, lose their savings as if they had a savings account in a bankrupt bank and were unable to withdraw their savings on time.
Webb demonstrates that this is not just a crazy conspiracy theory, but actually the case, by examining the standardization and harmonization of US and EU collateral management systems and the regulation of clearing institutions. To test his hypothesis that large creditors can have priority over the individuals and entities who actually own the assets, he examines the financial crisis of 2008. For example, when Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, JP Morgan (JPM) had client money in advance of the collapse taken over as secured creditor and appropriated these customer funds (Webb, p. 34). Courts later ruled that this was legal because JPM is one of the privileged parties under the Safe Harbor Regulation.
This regulation will be widely applied in the next crash. Unlike Webb, I do not believe that the clearing institutions necessarily represent the breaking point of the system; This may well happen in another area, for example in a collective panic with mass sales of life insurance contracts, stocks or government bonds or derivatives thereof. But the impact of bankruptcies among issuers of digital securities (assets) will be the same, and confiscation of assets by central banks will occur in the same manner and have the same consequences as in Webb’s scenario.
We are already in debt deflation
Webb argues that we are already at the beginning of a debt deflation that will end a 50-year period of inflation that led to the largest relative and absolute debt bubble in human history, currently over $300 trillion. In the US, house prices and transaction rates have been declining since the end of 2022, and the same is true in Europe. Interest rates continue to rise, with Fed rates now above 5 percent. At the same time, banks are affected by deflation as bond prices fall as coupons rise, eliminating an important security class on their balance sheets; This is why several banks failed last spring, including the giant Crédit Suisse. These are symptoms of the beginning of debt deflation. With policies that have structural consequences similar to those of the 1930s, the Fed will not return to low interest rates or quantitative easing, but will keep credit market momentum low to force further wealth transfer. As pressure increases on indebted companies and individuals, more will go bankrupt, fueling the debt deflation described above.
It will end in an economic collapse with mass defaults. But unlike 1933, bankruptcies this time will not only lead to the confiscation of debt-encumbered securities such as mortgages or corporate loans where real estate or machinery serves as collateral. This time, Webb predicts, confiscation will also be extended to collateral that is debt-free and legally owned by those who have invested their savings (individuals) or profits (corporations) in assets. It is a confiscation of debt-free assets by the creditors and ultimately by the central banks and their owners and the banks belonging to them, from which all property.
It is likely that, as after 1933, central banks will complicate market conditions to prolong the recession and force more owners out of their property. This could be enforced, for example, through tax regulations for property owners or through regulations for “green” renovation of houses (“heating law”), such as those now being enacted in Germany and other European countries, to help small homeowners who cannot afford the expensive regulations. to evict them from their property. Another way to destroy private property is through the regulation of companies, but especially through the deliberate depletion of energy. The main gas pipeline from Russia to Germany has been cut, and in the midst of an energy crisis, Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants and raising energy taxes (so-called carbon taxes), driving small businesses into bankruptcy. The result is clear that non-oligarchic distributed ownership will be reduced even further.
This could make it possible to confiscate 80 to 90 percent of property not already in plutocrat ownership. These are primarily real estate, stocks, government bonds and life insurance. This could allow those involved to increase their ownership share from today’s 50 to 70 percent of all means of production (estimate by French economist Thomas Piketty) to over 90 percent of all property, including real estate, ending at the dichotomy level of feudalism (when one thousandth of the population owned everything and 99.9 percent owned nothing).
Given the enormous global debt, central banks can trigger the collapse of the financial system at any time by raising interest rates to initiate the “great takeover.” When might this happen? What will be the equivalent of confiscating gold?
All major banks in the world are preparing infrastructure for central bank digital currencies (CBDC), which will replace the current monetary system when the crash occurs. This money will be digital, used only through computers and phones, and issued directly by central banks (or their distributors) without private money creation by commercial banks. Like the money of the Soviet Union, it will be a full currency (without a fractional reserve), completely under the control of central banks, but since it will be digital, this will allow tracking of all transactions, which was not possible in the USSR.
Since each unit of the CBDC will have a unique identifier, it can be tagged with metadata that can be customized depending on the recipient of the unit. For example, the unit could be given an expiration date or a limited validity so that it can only be issued in certain countries or only for certain classes of goods.
This would allow total control over the transactions of any company or individual in which the state has an interest. Once debt deflation reaches its peak and distribution problems with black markets and illegal makeshift currencies arise (as occurred after World War II in Europe before the monetary reforms of the late 1940s, see the Carlo Reed film “The Third Man”), the public will switch to CBDC , which will appear as a kind of deus ex machina of salvation. Such a system is unlikely to be fully functional because human transactions are too complex to be fully covered by digital transaction means.
If such a plan succeeds, after the “big takeover” and the introduction of CBDC, Klaus Schwab’s famous prophecy “You will own nothing and be happy” could become a reality.
Translated with google.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/wird_der_schuldenturm_kontrolliert_gesprengt_
Excellent!
Dennis L.
Seeing it now,
central banks will complicate market conditions to prolong the recession and force more owners out of their property. This could be enforced, for example, through tax regulations for property owners or through regulations for “green” renovation of houses (“heating law”), such as those now being enacted in Germany and other European countries, to help small homeowners who cannot afford the expensive regulations. to evict them from their property. Another way to destroy private property is through the regulation of companies, but especially through the deliberate depletion of energy. The main gas pipeline from Russia to Germany has been cut, and in the midst of an energy crisis, Germany is shutting down nuclear power plants and raising energy taxes (so-called carbon taxes), driving small businesses into bankruptcy. The result is clear that non-oligarchic distributed ownership will be reduced even further.
Thank you, Harry..
Homes need to electrify. New building codes will make that harder
A nonprofit group that sets U.S. building codes has nixed rules to make new homes ready for EVs and heat pumps. Climate advocates blame fossil gas lobbyists.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/carbon-free-buildings/homes-need-to-electrify-new-building-codes-will-make-that-harder
In a last-minute change, the International Code Council (ICC) board of directors stripped key home-electrification provisions from its 2024 International Energy Conservation Code. Those rules would have required new homes and multifamily buildings to include electrical wiring that can support EV chargers, heat pumps, induction stovetops and other all-electric replacements for fossil-fueled cars and fossil-gas-fueled heating and appliances.
A major detail is that no Advanced Country has electricity sufficient to support all of these add-ons to the current system. Everyone will freeze in the dark.
Thanks for this write-up. We truly are living in a time similar to the time between World War I and World War II.
I agree that today’s rise in interest rates will tend to drive ownership of assets to the very rich. So will regulations that homeowners who have already paid for their homes need to add (ridiculous) improvements to supposedly stop climate change.
The other side of the story is that the real value of these assets that the already rich are claiming increased ownership to is, in some sense, dropping to zero, because without adequate fuel and adequate spare parts for today’s equipment, factories become worthless. Farm equipment won’t work. There will be scarcity of food, especially for the many very poor citizens who cannot earn an adequate wage. Tax revenue to the government will fall.
While governments are certain that Central Bank Digital Currencies will work, their own revenue will be drying up. The ability of the system to produce 24/7/365 electricity will be failing. The system as a whole will be producing fewer goods and services.
In the earlier period, the system as a whole could be bailed out by World War II, the debt bubble that followed, and the huge amount of oil that could be extracted to fix the world’s energy deficit problem.
At this point in the current period, we haven’t identified anything that can fix our energy problem (but we keep trying). Governments can try to hold on by issuing more debt, so as to be able to pay all of the world’s Social Security and pension checks. But the problem is really too little goods and services to go around right now.
History shows that governments (and governmental groups) often collapse, because they too need energy to fund all of their programs, such as schools road repairs, and armies. We have already seen a little of this in 2020. The US and NATO don’t have resources to fight a traditional world war today.
Somehow, the world economy will rearrange itself to use the resources that are available. I expect some people will survive in pretty much every part of the world. Small island economies (Haiti, Cuba, Sri Lanka) will see their economies hit early on. World trade will likely drop back greatly. And I would expect to see a pancaking of today’s debt system. People who think that their paper assets will find out that this is not the case. We are headed for a bumpy ride.
Yup, the rich own nothing. Even if you had claims on 932,394 arable land units or 495,696,494 fictious derivative numbers, if it is indefensible with angry people — you don’t own it. If something is not available to be defended, whether in trust in the system by the public or availability of energy to keep an upkeep of defensive forces — you own nothing. So, whatever notional ideas of wealth, are, false.
“Might makes right.” Robin Hood and his band of men will reign again.
I’ve watched David Rogers Webb’s video “The Great Taking” and I think Gail’s point is well taken that this time it will be different than the Great Depression because there will be no backstop of plentiful cheap of relatively young educated workers , few non productive elders, of easily accessible raw materials afforded by diesel powered mechanization post WWII.
If there had been no debt build up, then depopulation, the only practical solution when faced with more costly raw material and energy, may have been a smoother speed bump. But because of the energy enabled population boom/overshoot, the payback will be hell.
People will finally see all this financialization, involving both credits and debts, like a person who is on the desert and is getting thirsty and thinks there is an abundance of water. But its not there. It’s all a mirage. All these quadrillions of fiat currency, debt obligations, insurance, pensions, social security will be recognized as essentially a mirage. It didn’t matter as long as you weren’t thirsty.
The implied orderly confiscation of the all property through a legalized shystem ( actually I meant to type the word “system,” but the correct hybrid is shysters + system = shystem ) will be a lot more visceral than that, especially when here in the US we have the 2A. Tjose who own property free and clear (except for property taxes) see that squatters can stay in a home for a year or two without being evicted will not take kindly to imposition of these outrageous directives by the elites in the name of climate change. If squatters can’t be evicted then neither can we, and the house is paid for and we aren’t going to surrender it for non-payment of property taxes, viewed as extortion. People will really be pissed, especially when they perceive they are being displaced to make room for illegal aliens.
And if there are food shortages forthcoming, I don’t think the errand boys of the elites, such as members of the sheriff’s department who have to serve eviction notices will be treated kindly at the door. Maybe the elites in other European countries can get away with it but not in the US. Furthermore, the racial divides and age demographics will ignite even further secondary conflicts that will consume any efforts directed at property owners. CBDCs will be yet another mirage and people will know it. CBDC’s therefore may work only for a short while, as will cash under the mattress. Once people realize that their dollars are useless confetti, CBDC’s will be rejected as well.
I like your analogy of a mirage. Promises that can never materialize. It will be a big shock to people, I am afraid.
And you are right about being in a very different time period. We have a whole lot of elderly people who expect pensions now. Back in the period between WWI and WWII, we had many young people and few non-productive elderly. We also had much more available fossil fuels.
” I like your analogy of a mirage. Promises that can never materialize. It will be a big shock to people, I am afraid. ”
Watch out for India in the second half of 2024 .Elections will be held in April/May . Result on 4th June . Rigging expected . The ruling party and the opposition promising freebies which will remain a mirage . I expect mayhem thereafter in the second half .
Yes, the plan is shit!
Expropriation and CBSC will probably go down in the chaos of the downward spiral that will then be triggered!
My guess:
There will probably be MAD Max first and then decentralization and new equilibrium at a much lower level with much less people!
= collapse!
We will NEVER recover from this due to a lack of available dissipation energy!
Saludos
El mar
That means the end of civilization since concentrated capital can never be raised again
Concentrated capital is closely related to big fossil fuel supplies. It is not possible to make believable big promises, without concentrated energy sources of the right kind, as well as other materials to fulfill those promises.
By that stage, People will do anything…for a coffee.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQ0I0C6jYM
The past and future do not exist. The Universe knows only The Now.
As humans we spend our lives in a world of illusion we create in our heads where we always imagine ourselves in the past or future which are just phantoms.
To reach enlightenment a person only has to stop thinking and exist in The Now.
yes when I reached enlightenment, I realized it was no big deal.
The Now can be expressed in different ways, such as:
bAU today, baby!
I am not sure that my thoughts are related much to the video.
The world economy works on energy flows. We have invented, in our minds, the idea of accruals–we can save up for the future, or we can make promises for what the future brings. We have created models of what we expect.
Our faith in the future is so ingrained now that we don’t realize when we are looking at promises that are only mirages.
Tough to accrue a barrel of oil.
Dennis L.
“For all intents and purposes, biology has figured out a way to tap into the continuous and (seasonally) reliable flow of solar energy using a bare minimum of mineral requirements from the land’s surface. It took billions of years to solve this very hard problem. One could consider the result to be a “circular economy,” in that minerals are recycled into the environment and taken in by microbes, fungi, plants, and on up the food chain. By working within the strictures of multi-level selection (evolution) subject to long-term ecological viability in relation to other life, the result has the word “sustainable” effectively built in: sustain-a-built. No? Okay, yeah, that’s pretty lame.”?
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-02-21/inexhaustible-flows/
Biology and the fabric of the universe.
Took the universe 13-26B years to get biology to the point where it could reach to space , tap Pt and return to an elemental H economy; electrons to protons to electrons.
Dennis L.
It took the universe 13-26B years to get biology to the point where it could HAVE DRUG DREAMS ABOUT reaching to space, tapping Pt and returning to an elemental H economy.
This is an article by Tom Murphy, a physics professor who occasionally publishes articles in the Do the Math blog. I like his work a lot, including this article, a lot.
Tom Murphy explains how efficient natural processes are compared to our so-called renewable wind and solar.
From the post:
He later takes on the huge amount of materials that go into wind turbines and solar panels.
And of course, they are not biologically recyclable.
Later he says:
Regarding recycling he says:
As to who is liable for the Baltimore bridge destruction, there is the doctrine in common law that the active party is liable. In the case of a run away bull that does damage it is the bull that is liable and the owner of the bull has liability limited to the value of the bull. Likewise in maritime cases it is the ship that is viewed as the actor and so liable. Compensation by the ship owner is limited to the value of the ship and its cargo.
Yes, the damage done was about 100 times the value of the ship and cargo but them’s the breaks. No sweat Genocide Joe says the federal tax payer will cover it in full.
It seems that in the harbor the pilots were port employees. complex legal case but Biden will pay for it all so no prob.
In the old days they would be hanged, and displayed at the harbor until their flesh are eaten by crows as a warning to every sailer who f’ks up.
i conclude you are against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Being Baltimore, there is a high chance that those got the job through that program.
It appears the state of MD runs the port, not the city of Baltimore.
Dennis L.
This is an article on how the insurance program seems to work. Losses are likely to be spread widely.
https://www.reuters.com/business/insurers-brace-multi-billion-dollar-losses-after-baltimore-ship-tragedy-2024-03-27/
Bullets:
-Claims could total up to $4 bln, record for shipping disaster
-Insurance lines affected include property, marine, liability
-International Group of P&I marine insurers have reinsurance cover of $3.1 bln
-AXA lead reinsurer on first layer of IG reinsurance cover-Insurance Information Institute
I used to think it was China doing the fifth gen warfare against the US. Now I think it is the deep state doing the warfare to stage a coup. So they no longer need to work in the shadows. They can just issue edicts as they please.
Hitting infrastructure is a poor way to act on the psyche of the masses. Unless it is the electrical grid and everyone goes dark. non-consumer facing supply chains are rarely discussed at the dinner table.
Looks like incompetence; generally the problem when combined with hubris.
Dennis L.
And Macron wants to go war .
https://mishtalk.com/economics/expect-a-financial-crisis-in-europe-with-france-at-the-epicenter/
France is not complying with the EU’s low debt requirements. Neither are the countries to the south of France. But France is the country that wants to go to war against Russia.
Perhaps Macron thinks that war will help disguise the country’s other problems.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/03/ntsb-releases-data-dalis-black-box-reveals-no/
NTSB Releases Data on DALI’s Black Box, Reveals No CCTV Footage Found, Sensors Cut Off and Turned Backed On, Voice Recorder Disrupted By Background Noise
Nothing to see here move along.
Why no interview with the Pilot and with the Harbor Master both US citizens and fluent in English.
Let’s hear from the pilot before he “commits suicide from remorse” by two gun shots to the back of the head.
He is a pawn, so he will have nothing useful to say, so he should just ‘keep his honor’.
Hope the pilot lives long enough to be interviewed.
CDC is supposed to be close to approval for a new suicide vaccine. That’ll fix everything.
Why no bumper guard? See Verrazano Narrows bridge which has a bumper all around 60 feet from the pier 30 feet wide made of stone and cement. Also the suspension cables are sheathed in hollow steel tube so no one can place a cutter charge on the cables.
There were two pilots aboard. Let’s hear from them.
Certainly no problems involved.
Hail storm in Texas yesterday destroys thousands of acres of solar farms.
The Climate Mafia was unavailable for comment.
I minute video
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1772466901345599716?
a beautiful video, quite a moving experience, to see some modern works of humankind obliterated by the hand of Mother Nature.
ah, Mother Nature, destroying human structures for the entire existence of the human species.
the human struggle never ceases.
Lots and lots and lots of solar panels, many of them broken.
Let no poor country get unkicked in the face; right, Kulmie?
With what the Pakistan Army elite hopes will be a stable new oligarch regime “installed” after recent rigged elections in which … candidates who were “losing” the elections “were made to win” and … the chief justice are also completely involved in this
gulftoday.ae/news/2024/02/17/senior-bureaucrat-confesses-he-helped-rig-pakistan-general-elections
Sound familiar? … media focus in Pakistan has shifted to the Peace Pipeline, an Iranian-Pakistan project abandoned by Pakistan in 2013 with their section from the border that the Iranian part had reached, unstarted. They work had been put in abeyance because of funding risks under the pressure of US sanctions.
So, up popped US Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu who in testimony before a Congressional panel attested that it was an American “goal” to ensure the pipeline is not completed. March 23, 2024
dawn.com/news/1823296/pipeline-under-fire
Again, Pakistan’s Petroleum Minister Musadik Malik … underlined his country’s urgent demand for a US sanctions waiver regarding the gas pipeline from Iran, saying Islamabad’s position on the gas transfer project with the Islamic Republic is not merely an expression of desire but “the need of the hour.”
… “We are earnestly striving to advance this project and we have numerously conveyed this commitment to our Iranian brothers,” the oil minister told local broadcaster Geo News television channel.
english.almasirah.net.ye/post/38966/Pakistan-Says-Iran-s-Gas-Project-%98Need-of-the-Hour-%2C-Pushes-for-US-Sanctions
It is necessary for the poorer countries to be just feeding stations for the advanced countries to advance civiliation
Poorer countries should not be allowed to adt independently
Keep the natural gas in the ground for later? Supposedly to punish Iran.
“This is a brilliant, well-planned strategic attack on one of the most important supply chains in the United States of America,” investigative journalist Lara Logan told Steve Bannon on The War Room.
“Why are you coming to the mic telling the country that it’s not terrorism when your own intelligence agencies are telling you it is?”
“How did they do it?” she asked.
“They knew that they had to target one of two main anchor points on that bridge. There are two load-bearing pylons that any structural engineer can identify that are on the end of each side of the bridge. These are the ones that are thicker and stronger than anything else on that bridge. And when you hit one of those pylons, when you take that out, the reason you see so much of that bridge collapse instantly is you just brought 50% of the span of that bridge coming crumbling down.”
Logan called the collapse “absolutely catastrophic” and “a structural nightmare and a logistical nightmare.”
According to Logan, the collapse is expected to shut down the affected corridor for four to five years, with immediate effects on the movement of hazardous materials and oversized loads.
The attack not only affects ground transportation by shutting down the I-95 corridor but also impacts sea transport by closing the shipping corridor.
“This is what you call death by a thousand cuts. It is an absolutely catastrophic attack on critical infrastructure, and you cannot see it because a cyber attack is unseen, just like the attack in 2020 on the voting machines that you cannot see.”
13 minutes
https://rumble.com/v4lq4j2-lara-logan-on-the-francis-scott-key-bridge-it-is-a-financial-and-economic-a.html
Lara mentioned an interesting coincidence.
She said they puta big anti-terrorism guy in charge of the Baltimore Field Office “just yesterday!”
So I google, and what do I find on the FBI Website?
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/william-j-delbagno-named-special-agent-in-charge-of-the-baltimore-field-office
March 25, 2024
William J. DelBagno Named Special Agent in Charge of the Baltimore Field Office
Director Christopher Wray has named William J. DelBagno as the special agent in charge of the Baltimore Field Office. Mr. DelBagno most recently served as the acting assistant director of the Inspection Division at FBI Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
Mr. DelBagno joined the FBI as a special agent in 2005 and was assigned to the New York Field Office, where he conducted counterterrorism investigations. He also served on the Hazardous Evidence Response Team and became a certified weapons of mass destruction coordinator.
In 2012, Mr. DelBagno served temporarily as a supervisory special agent in the Chemical Countermeasures Unit of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate at Headquarters. In 2013, he was promoted to unit chief of the WMD Operations Investigative Unit. He became assistant section chief for the WMD Investigations and Operations Section in 2014.
Mr. DelBagno transferred to the Washington Field Office in 2016 as a supervisory special agent and coordinator of the counterterrorism program. Later in 2016, he transitioned to SSA of the Joint Terrorism Task Force Guardian Squad. In 2018, Mr. DelBagno was promoted to assistant special agent in charge of WFO’s Mission Services Division, where he was responsible for administrative programs, technical services, security, and compliance.
In 2020, Mr. DelBagno was promoted to section chief of the Counter-IED Section of the Critical Incident Response Group at Headquarters, where he was responsible for national program management of the Special Agent Bomb Technician program, the Hazardous Device School in Huntsville, Alabama, and the FBI’s response to a weapon of mass destruction.
Mr. DelBagno became chief of staff for the Criminal, Cyber, Response and Services Branch at Headquarters in 2021. He was named deputy assistant director of the Inspection Division in 2022 and acting assistant director in 2023.
Mr. DelBagno is a graduate of the United States Military Academy and served as an armor officer in the U.S. Army. He received a Bronze Star Award for his combat service in Iraq from 2003 to 2004. He earned an executive master’s in leadership from Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business.
It was a perfect hit on the center of the pier. Dumb luck?
I don’t think that it was terrorist attack, but sorry to say, as Americans that support terrorists group in various part of the world to make terrorist attacks, it is normal to expect that sooner or later someone will make the same kindness to US.
I think that before discussing about that Americans should open in US a good debate about stopping to support terrorist entities in the world (and Americans have many good American journalists who showed that).
Unfortunately American agencies are not a third external party and Americans are detached of that…
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Baltimore-Coal-Exports-Blocked-After-Bridge-Collapse.html
Baltimore Coal Exports Blocked After Bridge Collapse
(Music)
In these days Tajikistan is not appearing well, so I decided to propose a music from that Country to try to balance the terrible figure.
I don’t think that they are all terrorists.
It was composed by a well known composer in that area and not only, now not anymore with us.
Muboraksho, also known as Misha.
Probably drb could know him, because I read on wikipedia that he had a great success in ex Urss in the 80’s.
How did I discover him?
Bbc persian made a documentary recently on Persian, Middle East music and they said he was a great composer…
Have a nice evening.
I don’t know him. I do have a tajik friend, good guy. I know his family as well, very traditional. he wants to buy some of this year bulls too. I don’t think Tajik people will feel threatened now, everyone knows a dozen central asians. Russians (and rossiskies in generals) are quick to prefer someone not their faith who is honest and easy to deal with, compared to people of same faith or ethnic group.
I posted earlier, but for the moment the following article for me shows a plausible version of the story.
Expecially about the way they conducted the attack and the way they were captured and why.
What do you think?
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/the-crocus-disaster
There are elements of truth there. Note that the Zirkon strikes in Kiev were aimed squarely at Budanov, who might be dead now. What we know:
1) whole ordeal lasted less than 15 minutes. 2) Most dead due to the fire and inability/unwillingness to come out of hiding in time. 3) Fire was started using gasoline bottles they had in their backpacks.
Larry Johnson, ex CIA, notes that from the clips he has seen these were poorly trained people. Chances are high that the planned hit was March 9 for another concert in the same venue, to disrupt elections. All in all this points to Ukraine. Budanov is high in the pyramid but not highest. Need to see how far they go up the pyramid in seeking revenge.
please post on Budanov and higher ups if you see updated news.
“The Moscow Concert Hall Attack May Have Been A Staged Event (Updated)”?
https://swprs.org/the-moscow-concert-hall-attack-may-have-been-a-staged-event/
In my view, these articles that try to make people believe of something fake or staged seem not much credible and have probably the intention to create confusion and fog on the minds of ‘western readers’.
In my view, articles like also the additional following one are more interesting, even if not all what is written may be correct.
This is from Pepe Escobar
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/03/26/the-nuland-budanov-tajik-crocus-connection/
For all things Russian I really like John Helmer (he lives here). Here is a summary of evidence published two days ago. Less fearful of saying something bad about Russia (though he does not in this article), and ever thorough in presenting all facts first.
https://johnhelmer.net/the-evidence-on-the-crocus-gang-attack-in-moscow/
Yes, it is interesting also that article, than you.
In my view, there is actually still the possibility that Russia ‘let it happen’.
That in order to show to the world the dirty hands of blood of who is finincing the war in Ukraine.
Anyway, I think that Russia will go on dismantling Ukraine methodically without rushing up after that, but Russia will have the justification now to hit hard and publicy who is behind that attack, instead of punishing with more difficulty who supported a terrorist attack that didn’t take place…
If we think that Europeans Countries didn’t have problems to sacrify thousands of people who died and millions who had permanent effects for a sperimental mRNA therapy, 100 or 200 Russian people are nothing.
I would like not live these times, but other times, but unfortunately this is the logic that Countries are currently following in this phase of almost global war.
And I think that in particular Russia, Iran and China are fighting to remain ruled by themselves, instead of foreign Countries or foreign entities.
Having said that, it is difficult for me to say where I would like to live and of what Country I would like to be citizen of.
Probably still an American citizen, but living in a remote area of Texas or similar and riding with my horses, with cowboy hat and boots 🙂
Typing mistake. Please consider ‘thank you’, instead of ‘than you’
Also I think that based on this (swrps) and other writings the notion that the event was staged needs to be entertained. It seems like a regular occurrence in multicultural nations and it has happened in this part of the world. swrps provided excellent information at the beginning of the pandemic. Over time I will ask around in Moscow if people know someone who has died. I can tell you for example that the Ukraine war is real, but I could double check.
I can tell you that I know many people, I follow around 400 clients, with 2/3 contacts per client.
I’ve heard about people dead in hospital during the period that Doctors intubated patients, then when mRNA vaccination started, I’ve heard of people dead for heart problems or sudden death or multistemic failures or strokes, then, after months, started deaths of people for cancer and various brain problems.
The virus was surely real and lab created, but if correctly treated, it was like a heavy flu.
As every flu, it can kill fragile people.
With sperimental vaccination in West, leaders deliberatley decided to kill also normal and strong people and that it is a non sense if someone wants its society to survive.
Spartans would have killed their leaders who had ever decided to do so.
I think it was an unacceptable decision.
In Russia and China there are many many negative points (and sorry, I don’t like China) but they didn’t decide to make killing experiments on people and that was something positive that we, western, must admit and take a lesson.
Yes, swprs has some credibility. They were the first to publish damning covid evidence, got harassed by authorities, etc. They present factual arguments and generally are quite a bit even handed and if anything sympathetic to Russia.
Greetings all and thank you Gail for your post.
A few thoughts:
… shift an ever-greater share of fossil fuels that are available to less-advanced economies.
… the self-organizing economic system favors Other than Advanced Economies in the bidding for scarce energy resources.
There is an energy consumption transfer when offshoring industrial production for export as energy is consumed in a country not consuming the output of it but instead represented by the deficits of Advanced Economies.
justifying the application of resources by the self organizing dissipative system towards military materiel on the basis of efficiency enhancement is hard leap logically
unless empirical looting or tribute returned is above it’s cost
Yeltsin’s heroism in the cause was staggering, globally measurable.
… As far as I can see, growing fossil fuel consumption is the primary reason why human productivity grows.
as far as I can see fuel consumption is closely correlated to credit expansion following the founding of the Bank of England in 1694
Could not your Advanced Economies be reconsidered as yesterday’s winners? Of such nations, many have fallen into debt saturation, trade deficits, corrupt political arms purchases
ultimately the kindness of strangers now upholds the cowered workers within the OECD financial system
For the others on top it’s a master:slave situation, lip service like masters everywhere.
You need credit expansion to get the fossil fuel out and enable making all of the goods and services that would actually make use of the fossil fuels. Credit is the ultimate source of the “demand” that makes the system work the way it does.
Yes, the Advanced Economies are indeed yesterday’s winners. They (and China) have greatly expanded their debt. In fact, with the limited fossil fuels left, it seems unlikely that they can continue expanding. They also can’t repay their debt with interest.
The workers within the OECD system now have lots of immigrant workers willing to work for low wages. These wages set the bottom of the wage distribution. But without enough goods and services to go around, an awfully lot of young people get very low wages as well, even if they have advanced education.
The people on top would like a master slave situation. She slaves cannot pay much taxes however. The system tends to flatten itself. The government cannot get enough funds from taxes for all that it wants. Either the current government gets overthrown, or it falls down one way or another. In theory, it could try to bail out a huge amount of defaulted bank debt, defaulted derivatives, and other creditors. This might end up with a form of hyperinflation.
Otherwise, a more likely scenario is deflation with falling asset prices. Assets that were previously productive assets are no longer productive. This makes their value $0.
Also, I agree that after the transfer of industrialization, the Advanced Countries suddenly look like they are using much less fossil fuels and their CO2 impact is lower. This isn’t really the case, however, because they have just moved their production (and pollution) to another part of the world.
Yes, the Advanced Economies are indeed yesterday’s winners. They (and China) have greatly expanded their debt.
Agreed, but I think the Advanced Economies and China are on very different trajectories. I’ve mentioned here previously the concentration of CNY created bubble debt in state owned Chinese banks which Michael Hudson believes is very manageable by govt as it can forgive (his penchant). FE detailed in his present collapsed system in China narrative the complete separation of HK where the convertible currency allows Advanced Economy investment in onshore debt securities. While significant no doubt to their oligarch holders, they’re of considerable minor concern to Beijing and it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they’re left to flap in the wind.
This pro-oligarch site is an excellent source of Chinese property collapse porn
scmp.com/topics/evergrande-crisis
but the interlineal narrative shines considerable light on alternative interpretations of what they report. For example, last week we saw Beijing bail out Vanke, one of China’s largest residential developers in order for them to finish properties for delivery to purchasers. Their view of this bailout
China Vanke gets US$194 million loan from Industrial Bank in temporary relief
A loan for China Vanke, one of China’s largest developers, could provide temporary relief to a sector rocked by defaults and by a court order for the liquidation of China Evergrande Group, the world’s most indebted developer.
scmp.com/business/article/3256021/china-vanke-secures-us194-million-loan-industrial-bank-brief-respite-troubled-property-developer
I remain relatively unconcerned about the destiny of China compared to the lucky Advanced Economies
Big bugs have little bugs upon their backs to bite ’em and little bugs have littller bugs and so ad infinitum
I understand the slave society about me within which I’m embedded to work in much the same manner as this but inversely with respect to financial muscle; but only for we slaves, of course. To our masters so far above, I’m utterly insignificant, whether I pay my taxes or not. Equally unknown to them individually are their bigger slaves with more authority who can kick me about if I don’t pay up, but I regard the payment or otherwise of taxes as totally meaningless as a contribution to the operation. Float bonds, increase taxes or print money … the masters are above law and above prices; their only purpose for money being the impoverishment of lower orders. Masters don’t need money, but using the buddha sent ability to blast some unsuspected financial asset out of the water, say a trillion dollar one day market cap jump in Nividia, their so called wealth effect, the consequential burst of credit creation on the part of stockholders caused by the collateral value increase; this doesn’t make masters meaningfully wealthier but only makes the rest of us poorer through asset value dilution. hahaha as someone once said. The slaves are those with mortgages and debt or who believe in reading price tags or gloat upon their property valuations
The system tends to flatten itself.I take you to mean that it implodes rather than inequality just gently reverts downwards towards a diminished state of inequality. Other feasible alternatives exist to your total financial bailout or complete deflationary default – such as selective bailout to resolve excessive cross liabilities and leverage, fraud etc and retain productive enterprise, surely?
Dennis L. says:
I stand by my comment, to this day I see a wife and her son standing by the bed of her husband with part of his face missing as well as an arm.
Perhaps Eisenhower looked at all the killing on his watch and said enough
—
===
That was done in a response to my argument earlier that it was bad for Eisenhower not to drive to Berlin and deny USSR (and Russia later) the raison d’etre (reason to exist).
The forties and fifties are not as whitewashed as people not conversant on that period might imagine in propaganda pieces like THe Best Days of our Lives or Band of Brothers.
Hubert Selby Jr , who is better known for his book ‘Requiem for a Dream”, wrote “Last Exit to Brooklyn” to document the reality of the 1950s, and a German, who grew up in postwar Germany, made that into a movie in 1988.
https://youtu.be/SrkoFQWvRuc?si=n_IbNahjzMNQfdmv
https://youtu.be/72qDxpdDr7A?si=qofw5PYMXS3mRoD4
https://youtu.be/Ah6JhC5iBk0?si=wKk_31ARCNfbd6qr
That movie is actually a bit more ‘sanitized’ than the original, cutting out the really dirty part.
Already, in late 19th century people like Stephen Crane wrote about such kind of people, although the more privileged people simply acted as if they did not exist.
Are they the people for whom Eisenhower sacrificed the future of humanity?
Were these people worth saving and whatever their pains might have been would have worth saving?
For these people USA failed to take Berlin, giving USSR/Russia a permanent moral superiority which Putin reminded to Tucker Carlson recently, as every people in former USSR (except the Baltics) is ingrained about.
For these people USA failed to destroy communist China and restore Chiang Kaisehek the land he lost.
For these lowlives.
kul,
I looked at the trailer, looked on Amazon, movie made in 1990, going to pass.
Your movie seems to revolve around sex; I am far from a Puritan, but there are only so many ways you can stand on your head, and yelling and shouting as a large group whch is much easier than actually building a group.
Life is difficult, getting even a small group to work is very hard, getting a simple marriage to work is very hard.
Next movie for me is “Damn Yankees.” Now there was a woman with a real caboose and a nice set of headlights. Much simpler.
Grew up in a union family, I think they are good.
I am betting that things will work as well as is possible. My goal is to fit in and enjoy the last years. Not everything thrills me, but such is life.
Whatever it is you are searching for, I hope you find it. Me, I think things are working as well as the universe can do; it seems that it has taken not 13B years to get here, but >26B years. Patience young grasshopper.
Dennis L.
Book came out in 1964 and here is the wikipedia summary for those who are interested
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Exit_to_Brooklyn
And, yes, the sex is sanitized. The prostitute gets to live to tell the tale in the movie, but in the original the lowlives, those whose lives Truman and Eisenhower valued more than subduing China and nipping it at the bud, put a stick to the prostitute’s uterus, breaking it, with the prostitute presumably bleeding to death. She was no angel herself, having managed to ruin an injured Korean war veteran’s life.
You have never seen things like this so you don’t know. I have.
Marie Antoinette, who always had a privileged life, had a vague sympathy on the poor. However, her daughter Marie Therese, who actually got to live among the lowlives during the revolution, after becoming the effective ruler of France in 1815 did everything to take away any privileges given to the poor as possible, which were not restored till 1945. Having firsthand experience on who and how they are, she had no reason to have any mercy on them.
Things are not working as well as you wish , but whatever floats your boat.
listen up kul very soon there will be only one class the lowlifes could be one way of describing this class but is this what you want to call yourself when you join those ranks the oil is nearly gone and all that will be left once the true decline begins in the order of 20% annual declines will be the stuff we created in the good old days. Skyscrapers will be changed into living quarters for the new class and it will all be free the only big drawback for all people will be food and water this is where reality will eventually force new habits to develop everything will be eaten with a heartbeat. A movie to watch to see what lies in store for us is the classsic Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson. In this movie the end has come in the year 2022 and people have become desperate and lowly. Crime has skyrocketed and jobs are virtually non-existent for the vast majority.I wont say anymore in case you want to see the movie.I cant see robots or artificial intelligience succeeding once the declines really take off they will just end up being relics in the dustbin of historical inventions.
Or , more likely, the local landowners will form death squads, often from the ranks of unpaid or underpaid cops and other branches of LEOs.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/19/colombia-paramilitary-salvatore-mancuso-auc-death-squads
Have watched soylent green long ago. If they are going to do it they will do it much more efficiently.
Landowners do not maintain their land by being lazy. They will show no mercy, and the largest rooms of these office buildings will be reserved for the landowner, and landowner only.
Matt Simmons was not wrong , just early . An assessment of why KSA is not increasing production ,
https://blog.gorozen.com/blog/saudi-arabias-oil-reserves
Based on a Hubbert Linearization approach:
The fact that the Saudis have been using every excuse to cut production leads me to believe that they are past peak.
I concur with you and Ravi, but I think they are a lot farther along than 52%. I think they started pumping water into their fields in 1958.
That would seem like a real possibility to me also.
Additionally that they are very interested to explore alternative energies, like hydrogen projects, in new NEOM location.
Check out the Saudi’s vision 2030. Especially Oxagon and the Line. They think Solar is the way they can maintain their energy leadership. https://www.vision2030.gov.sa/en/projects/neom/
“Matt Simmons was not wrong, just early.”
yes yes!
and so many energy/FF/oil commenters are even now, today, in the present, “not wrong, just early”.
bAU tonight, baby!
Contaminated poor quality fuel may have caused failure of the B’more ship’s engine.
https://www.tovima.com/wsj/baltimore-bridge-crash-investigators-to-examine-whether-dirty-fuel-played-role-in-accident
Probe is just starting, but contaminated fuel can create problems with a ship’s main power generators
A safety probe into a Baltimore bridge collapse will include whether contaminated fuel played a role in a giant cargo ship losing power and crashing into the span, according to people familiar with the investigation.
Fuel contamination has been suggested.
The main engine runs on bunker fuel, the generators run on diesel. Bunker fuel is dirty stuff which cannot be used in harbour and coastal areas because of pollution. It would seem likely that the main engine runs on the same diesel as the generators while close to land.
It is highly likely that the main engine has electronic controls which will not function in the absence of generator power, hence total loss of power if the generators fail.
The ship obviously has separate tanks for high quality diesel and for bunker fuel.
If bunker fuel was put in the diesel tanks by mistake, it is sludgy stuff, which is, I believe heated before going to the main engine. Bunker fuel would block the filters used for the generator diesel and possibly for the diesel used by the main engine close to land.
The most likely cause of this disaster is bunker fuel being put in the diesel tanks.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/oil-refinery-owner-sounds-alarm-over-dirty-fuel-baltimore-bridge-collapse-probe-continues
“The most likely cause of this disaster is bunker fuel being put in the diesel tanks.”
I can believe this.
Uh oh. If this is true, then we go back literally to the question of Captain of the Shi, an archaic legal doctrine which states as in my case below, that the nurses and techs, even though they are hospital employees, are acting as if they are my employees during a case, and that I am “borrowing” them from the hospital. Thus they become my “borrowed servants” and responsibility (liability) for their actions is transferred temporarily to me.
Is the captain of this cargo ship responsible for knowing which type of fuel is going into the the proper tank ? Shows you how twisted and triggered my mind is when even a far bigger case like this, I immediately start thinking back how the KY Medical Board threw me under the bus for purely political reasons.
The Board suddenly relied on a new argument, the old archaic doctrine of captain of the ship, where as the surgeon in charge, even when the operating room nurse had violated her sacred trust, duty, and nursing standard of care in a premeditated act by delegating her duty to act on my verbal order for delivery of a drug I was held liable. A drug that I had specifically ordered and which she had acknowledged and written on her scrubs and read back verbatim, but had then sent a tech with no training to go “fetch the local” . That tech selected a lethal drug. I was unaware this forbidden transfer of duty had gone on behind my back. The 21 year old man, my patient, died on the table from a lethal drug. I was held totally responsible and my license was suspended. Nothing happened to the nurse or tech- to protect the hospital from the adverse publicity- of course. “The hospital is fine, it’s just the bad doctor who worked there.”
Meanwhile, the KY Board of Medical Licensure, in its minutes stipulated, as is the time honored standard for a charge medical malpractice, that a doctor had be held to the standard of care of his own specialty. Therefore they sought their own pre-approved orthopedic panel expert who thoroughly exonerated me, as my act of giving an operating room nurse a verbal order for a drug to be handed to me in the operating room was the well recognized standard procedure for all orthopedic surgeons at that time, not only in my hospital but throughout the state. I produced a highly regarded orthopedic expert as my expert witness who positively affirmed that I had not fallen below the standard of care for my specialty.
Thus, from a legal aspect, the Board had no evidence and the case should have been dismissed by directed verdict. Instead, the Board then held me to standards of an anesthesiologist, whose skill set and tasks are night and day different than a surgeon’s.
Against this back ground, if the wrong fuel was delivered to the wrong tanks, who is responsible/liable for checking? The captain of the ship and his company, the owners of the ship or those who were responsible for delivering the correct fuel? Will it be joint and several liability ? Will the civil engineering firm that built the bridge have to bare some of the liability for not having installing protective shields on the bridge pillars? This event resulted in the deaths of at least 6 bridge workers.
Apologies to all for the off topic analogy and digression.
Why is there no TV interview with the Captain, Pilot, Engineer, harbor master in Baltimore?
According to Baltic Shippping the Master of the Dali ship is a Ukie, Motorman/oiler is East Indian. I tried to post the link on a popular YT article tracking the ships movements side by side with video and harbor feeds and neither the word Ukraine or the link to country of origin would refresh, lol.
Wow, Ukranian captain !
Incredible coincidence.
I think anyway that it is false claim.
And additionally during those manouvres the official pilots of the area are the one driving the ship.
So the ship was proabably being driven by an American citizen during that moment.
The problem is probably the fuel, which goes more in the direction of what we talk here, that is collapse of modern civilization.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ukrainian-captain-bridge-collapse/
Good catch. YT must have been on top of the situation.
Do they speak English? A lot of East Indians speak primarily their local dialect–not much English. It would likely be difficult to get a translator, if this is the case.
Somehow, they did send a Mayday notice to shore, in time to get vehicles off the bridge, however.
I saw Zerohedge article claiming that the captain of the ship was from Ukraine. I thought I would wait to see if that was confirmed by other sources before commenting on it.
President Biden has denied it was anything but a tragic accident. And he’s gonna Build Baltimore Back Better!
My eyes are rollin’ like Norman’s after a Fast Eddy post.
seriuos eye rolling time there tim—i’ve noticed posts here and there where you have been testing your divining rods of BS in a vain attempt to attain the dizzy heights of eddys soap box and start your own fakeathon.
when the aliens have finished diddling with him, our ex masterfaker will be back. (I’ll be back!!!!) when he drives his truck through your front door, and finds out you’ve been trying to usurp his rightful title of fakemeister-in-chief, all hell is going to break loose–
and you will be consigned to the outer darkness where bs and truth are coalesced into a singularity, and you will be unable to separate the two.
oops—you are there already
A ship hits a bridge, obviously a plot by the elders. Biden organised it. 50 shades of the World Trade Centre!!! Are you sure Obama and the Clintons weren’t in on it too?
Not even our departed masterfaker would have come up with that one.
Things do happen that are not created by plotmongers Tim
Some facts on the Indian shipping crews .
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/how-india-became-a-talent-pool-for-the-global-shipping-industry/articleshow/108833385.cms
Bombshell Study: We now have 100% Scientific Proof why the Jabbed are Dying Suddenly
Apparently, according to Dr. Chris Shoemaker—who is measured and sincere but also passionate and attempting to keep calm in what he obviously views as a horrendous situation—hearts are having to work MUCH harder for people who have had two Covid-19 Jabs or more.
From the Rumble video blurb:
A September 2023 published study in which multiple major study centers from around the world participating in comparing non-vaccinated hearts to those who have been vaccinated – what they found was astounding — a 47% INCREASE effort going on in the Cardiac Cells of vaccinated people compared to unvaccinated people .
They found that this elevation persisted for at least SIX Months.
Was this study Valid?
YES. They took 5,000 patients worldwide and they meticulously (screened) got this down to 1,000 so this would be a valid, verifiable study in which 700 were double jabbed and 300 were non-jabbed. This was a legitimate elevation and strain on the heart muscle.
It was confirmed with P Value <.0001.
The Unvaxxed had no elevation in cardiac effort for the next six months.
Now we have a scientific reason why people are dying suddenly 6 months to a year after the shots.
“This terrible, nefarious thing, in which lots are different one place to another, that’s a plan. They didn’t accidentally make one lot worse than the other. It was purposely done. It didn’t happen by accident!”
Video: 32:41
https://rumble.com/v4bxk9r-bombshell-study-we-now-have-100-scientific-proof-why-the-jabbed-are-dying-s.html
Link to the actual study?
I posted it but it got held up in moderation.
https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.230743
Basically, this study seems to have been conducted on Japanese patients, so what the implications are for people in other countries is debatable. The COVID-19 shots were not brewed to a consistent formula, and their composition seems to have varied widely.
“This retrospective study took advantage of a large consecutive repository of 18F-FDG PET/CT studies that were obtained at our institution [probably Keio University School of Medicine in Tokyo] between November 2020 and March 2022 in adult patients to evaluate various malignancies or other unrelated indications, including comprehensive medical checkup. The study included one group of patients who had received one or two doses of the vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 with clear vaccination documentation from February 17, 2021, (the start of the vaccination program in Japan) to March 31, 2022, and a second group of patients who did not receive the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine during this period or during the period before vaccination was available (November 1, 2020, to February 16, 2021).”
“In conclusion, in a set of patients who underwent PET/CT for indications other than myocardial inflammation, those who had received a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine showed increased myocardial fluorine 18 (18F) fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) uptake on images up to 180 days after their second vaccination compared with patients imaged before SARS-CoV-2 vaccination was available. Vaccinated patients showed higher myocardial 18F-FDG uptake on PET/CT scans compared with nonvaccinated patients, regardless of sex, age, or type of mRNA vaccine received. A prospective study would be needed to validate the findings of this study, including comparisons with cardiac enzyme levels, cardiac function, and non-mRNA vaccination.”
It’s a Japanese study. I’ve noticed they are willing to buck the groupthink a bit more than the most Western cultures, at least on Covid issues. For example, the Tokyo Medical Association supported ivermectin when it was taboo and being discouraged by all Western agencies.
If the contents of the injections do indeed bugger up the blood vessels of all who take them, resulting in damage to the walls of arteries and of the heart muscles, then the heart would have to work harder to keep the blood flowing. This could be why Dr, John Campbell, for one, reported high blood pressure following his jabs.
In Japan, as in the rest of East a Southeast Asia the numbers of disabilities and deaths reported or suspected in connection with the jabs seems to be considerably lower than in Europe and the Five Eyes countries. This may be because the Asians have more margin to deal with assaults on the circulatory system because they tend to be less obese, less prone to diabetes, and statistically less likely to die from cancer or diseases of the circulatory system in middle age than people of Western countries do.
Having said that, I know some prime candidates—obese people in poor health—in Japan who have survived five or six jabs. I also know a lot of people who stopped taking them after one, two or three because they had bad reactions to what was in them.
That’s good to know…I’ve had Two jabs myself since our Medical Government leaders went on TV and claimed it was safe and effective (I knew they were S.O.Bs and not telling the truth…but approved it for children, which is criminal on par with the Nannies of Addie Hitter in my book).
So, unfortunately, no ill effects for myself up to now…I do stair runups and briskly walk several hours a day..and do physical work. Read long while ago that folks with 0 negative blood type have protection…maybe so.
Not worried or concerned at all for myself…what I read about other poor souls… horridness
P.S. I want to stress I was warned NOT to take it from this comment section too.
It was a Socrates act of resignation
This is the study from last September that they are discussing:
Assessment of Myocardial 18F-FDG Uptake at PET/CT in Asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2–vaccinated and Nonvaccinated Patients
Takehiro Nakahara , Yu Iwabuchi, Raita Miyazawa, Kai Tonda, Tohru Shiga, H. William Strauss, Charalambos Antoniades, Jagat Narula, Masahiro Jinzaki
https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.230743
I suspect the additional heart strain could lead to heart scarring which is associated with Myocarditis. While you people might survive the initial 6-12 months there is a very good chance that their life expectancy is significantly reduced. These jabs were a terrible crime against humanity. I lost my job for refusing the jab. And to be honest I’m still angry with the peer pressure, loss of income, and mental duress experienced during the darkest days of the pandemic. I was forced to move from my rental house when the owner declined to renew the lease. Forcing me to use personal funds at great expense to move into a vacant condo that my in-laws rented to my wife and I at a a discount. It was not just a very difficult time but expensive and humiliating. I admit to being satisfied that the people putting me in that difficult position will be reaping their just reward. They will be dealing with fear, death, turbo cancers, and the knowledge of what they did to others. I can’t help but being grimly satisfied. A dark character flaw on my part.
The threat of retribution is what forces fairness on those who otherwise would do harm. Desire for revenge is hardwired in our DNA and serves a useful purpose, both individually and socially.
It was reprehensible that people were forced or pressured into taking these injections and that those who refused were often penalized. But when you look back, you have good cause to be pleased with yourself that you and your wife remained unjabbed despite the psychological warfare used against you.
On a personal note, one of my brothers took three jabs in 2021 and 22, after having a bad case of COVID-19 in 2020. Two years on, he was given an oesophageal cancer diagnosis and started on chemotherapy in February and this month he tells he will need to have his entire stomach removed because the doctors found some more tumors.
He trusts his doctors and he feels very fortunate that he has been taken into hospital and is being given tens of thousands of pounds worth of medical care and treatment for free. I am not going to sour his mood by raining on his party at this stage.
I am so sorry to hear about your brother. I find it extremely fascinating that anyone facing such a dire diagnosis and an extreme loss of health and prosperity still has trust in the medical profession. I can’t pretend to understand them. But I do wish him and his family the best and hope they find their highest good.
Thanks, affirmation, I passed the jabs. Don’t have a clue what those in charge of the program were thinking or doing. That seems like speculation; it seems incompetence is mostly a cause of failure when humans are involved. That is opinion only and really means nothing.
Dennis L.
How supply chains will be affected by the Baltimore accident . Usually behind paywall but I think this one is free .
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-26/how-baltimore-key-bridge-collapse-will-impact-the-supply-chain?cmpid=BBD032624_TRADE&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=240326&utm_campaign=trade
The Russians built the Crimean bridge in 27 months. Any bets on how long it will take this mess to be cleaned up?
Holy cow . The whole crew was Indian .
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/crew-of-container-ship-that-collided-with-baltimore-bridge-all-indian-company/articleshow/108796636.cms?from=mdr
Gail knows better but the liability of the shipping company is very limited by law .
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/titanic-law-helps-ship-owner-limit-liability-bridge-collapse-816591
There are a whole lot of details that I don’t know. The article says:
Reading farther in the article, it says:
This stuff doesn’t go through multi-line insurance companies. It no doubt uses the world reinsurance market.
This is a link to the International Group of Protection and Indemnity Clubs. It says
https://www.igpandi.org/article/about/
I would expect the group to use the services of consulting actuaries to set their rates.
All Indians?
Were they all on their tea break?
and what were the cowboys doing at the time?
The captain was Ukrainian according to something I saw.
I had heard the captain was Ukrainian.
Any bets on how long it will take this mess to be cleaned up?
The Big Dig was a megaproject in Boston that rerouted the then elevated Central Artery of Interstate 93 that cut across Boston into the O’Neill Tunnel and built the Ted Williams Tunnel to extend Interstate 90 to Logan International Airport.
Planning for the project began in 1982; the construction work was carried out between 1991 and 2006; and the project concluded on December 31, 2007.
FUBAR
” Jim Monkmeyer, president of transportation at DHL Supply Chain, said there are some indications that the port could reopen in May. However, it could be 3-5 years before a new bridge is constructed, which only suggests local supply chains will be disrupted for years. ”
Give the job to the Russians or the Chinese .
One thing that the article note is that a lot of vehicles are imported, and somewhat fewer exported, through the Baltimore port. It then says:
“It is important to realize that spending more money on oil exploration will not change this situation.”
Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrère
It is about diesel . Mr B — The Honest Sorcerer
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/meet-the-gator-growing-energy-demand-316de796d191
On another blog someone suggested that we should retrofit equipment to run in butane to replace diesel . This gives the reason why it is not going to work . Clutching at straws , anything hydrogen , biomass , renewables etc . for BAU.
”You might like to do some homework on butanes, the supply of which is miniscule compared with diesel. The global supply of butanes is less than 200 million tonnes and much of the production is already consumed in existing appllications ( petrochemicals, alkylation, gasoline blending, auto-gas, heating). the consumption of diesel is considerably more than 1.5 billion tonnes depending on the applications.
Moreover butanes would require that the engine be modified to in effect be duel fueled. Butanes have a high octane number and low cetane number making them resistant to compression ignition. A small pilot charge of diesel fuel typically combusted in an indirect injection set up that acts as a pilot flame to set off the alternative fuel which is injected separately.. This is how a diesel engine can run on methanol or LNG.
Comparing fuel costs in volumetric units is always misleading. Butane have a density of about 0.65 whereas diesel it typically 0.84. The CV of butanes is about 5% greater than diesel m/m. ”
The author goes by “B” … The author at Moonofalabama also goes by “B” … same guy?
No , Different persons .
Yeah, the B at MoA is German, the other guy is from Eastern Europe.
Most of this is about net energy being too low. I am not fond of this theory. Processing of energy is part of the economy; it provides jobs, for example. The calculation of net energy compares a huge number of apples to oranges, ignoring timing differences, interest issues, and many other things.
I see net energy being transferred to the rest of the economy through taxable income. Fossil fuels, particularly oil, have been big payers of taxes historically. For oil exporters, they are often the largest source of government income. Wind and solar require huge subsidies, on the other hand. In fact, nuclear seems to require subsidies as well. If an energy source is truly providing energy to the economy, I see it providing taxable income to governments. That is the proper test.
Subsistence farming provided little “net energy,” but it provided lots of jobs, and at least some taxable income for governments (especially grain farming, rather than root crops). With taxable income, governments could grow, and economies could flourish.
Oil companies themselves in the good old days would have been paying back bonds at high inteest rates which was grest for investors and they would have had lots of profits to add to the finanicial system themselves and provide capital for other businesses.
The book Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states points out that the growing of grain was key to building the earliest economies. The grain could be easily taxed because governments could see where it was growing, and it provided more than what the farmer and his family needed. It could easily be transported and stored to be used by city residents.
Thus, cities with governments could be built with grains, and the taxes based on that grain income. Cities didn’t arise where only root crops were grown, because they didn’t have the same characteristics.
Renewables require mandates and subsidies. Electricity doesn’t store well at all. It doesn’t work to support a government.
Nice one from Tim Watkins.
“So, here’s a thought experiment – what would have happened in the 1930s if there was no such thing as oil?”
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/03/07/a-fatally-repeated-misunderstanding/
simple answer
humankind goes back to the economic level of the farmcart and the sailing ship—ie pre-17/1800s
which is where we are headed in any event, maybe a century–or less—hence.
I don’t believe that! Industrialisation came up in the late middle ages and led to a dramatic overuse of wood. This system was not sustainable. Engines, if you exclude wooden constructions in mills, need the availability of iron. And this needs coal or oil. Charcoal can only provide for some knives and minor weaponry, think of Viking production.
Before the middle ages we saw shifting cultivation for a reason. Without iron tools harsh crops came through after some years of food cultivation, usually 30 years. At least in middle Europe. So for permanent food production, iron is necessary.
This is current mainstream history. Perhaps, there are other ways, think of terra preta.
Our cultural memory tells us, that there was a time when we lived closer to nature. This time already was industrialisation. Times before were on a much lower level.
So not to fall back into really wild situations, I’d suggest some research and preparation. But that would mean to accept, peakoil might be an issue. And that’s what noone wanna hear.
I don’t believe that! Industrialisation came up in the late middle ages and led to a dramatic overuse of wood. This system was not sustainable.
By the 1600s England was using a million tons of coal a year both industrially and domestically and The Netherlands was using a whole lot of peat. I’m sure Scotland for sure and likely England as well would have been too. We were fossil fuel powered for much longer than people imagine.
to make ‘stuff”, energy must be converted from one form to another.
to make iron, from iron ore, needs a temperature of over 1500c—you cant get that from wood, you need charcoal.
as a rough guide, you need 1000 tons of tree==to 100 tons of charcoal==1 ton of iron
hence ”industry” was limited to the growth of trees.
so we were limited to the farmcart and the sailing ship or windmill, as i said—almost entirely wooden construction—iron was a luxury commodity until it was made cheap by the industrial revolution of the early 1700s.
iron was, and is, the key material to all modern industry—no exceptions.
and fossil fuel is critical to converting iron into useful objects, on which our existence depends.
there is no ”might” about it.
Yes, as withnail says, we were using fossil fuels pre-1700s, but iron allowed deep mining, using steam engines to extract water, that allowed access to vastly greater quantiries of coal
The economy would have bled out, slowly then all at once.
This underlines the extent to which modern coal production is a derivative of oil production.
Coal is only produced at current levels, or anything near, because diesel-powered machines replaced axes and ponies.
It’s oil that’s kept coal going.
Regionalized or even local tribal warfare, up close and personal with swords, spears, arrows, replacing intercontinental industrial warfare as was suggested at the beginning of the article.
Of course, the population overshoot would have been mooted without oil as wood and coal were depleted. Who knows, the degrowth might have already been well in progress by now.
But with woefully inadequate forest biomass, and unobtainable coal without oil, a huge population will eventually be left stranded when the energy cost of extracting the hard to get oil leaves little left over for useful work.
It means civilisation will never ever recover. Humans living at a peasant level aren’t going to be able to build diesel engines and heavy plant equipment and oil wells and refineries if they get the idea to mine some coal.
Of course they will also have to contend with shocks like the sudden thunder of hooves and the twang of Hunnic bows as Cro Magnon’s descendants carry out his command to kill the dirt grubbers wherever they find them. So it’s going to suck for them.
If my sons and grandsons can find the trees needed……they will shove sharpened, fire hardened, poles right up the nether regions of these scum and leave them as stark reminders to all who pass what happens to those who dare to turn over earth. I showed them how to prepare and plant the stakes.
I predict shocking things will happen over the next few years now in Canada. The grain markets have begun their long awaited implosion. The livestock markets are soaring as desperation sets in amongst the meat buyers because so much has been lost. We are in freefall economically now and the RCMP are madly wondering what they are gonna do when the seething masses that hate them beyond any possible negotiation start to move against them.
Trudeau will not allow fair elections and with the driver of economic depression as a back drop we will hopefully, finally see much, much, more than Kenworth’s idling in Ottawa streets.
I know I am correct….I have been offered my passport back……without my asking……”please leave good sir.”………lmao.
I’d rather stay now, thank you very much.
Nothing is by chance inside the simulacrum.
Tim Watkins ends,
“How different might the post-war years – or even the last 16 years – have been if we had treated cheap oil as the temporary gift that we should have understood it to be?”
I don’t think that there is any way we can treat oil as a temporary gift. We have to be “going all out” to keep the world economy from collapsing. The world economy would simply have collapsed sooner.
It’s sort of like saying, “treat your birthday cake as the temporary gift you should have understood it to be”.
Which means what? We eat one crumb per week or per year of a birthday cake that sits under a glass dome on the counter growing mold?
Interesting article on the Crocus Terrorist Attack in Moscow.
Surely something different of what is possible to find on mainstream media during these days.
Original in English:
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/the-crocus-disaster
Translated in Italian:
https://comedonchisciotte.org/il-disastro-del-crocus/
Mike wrote:
Why didn’t post the link Withnail?
Sure you did…another spin interpretation if I ever I heard one.
Boy, Gail was so correct, this is a very unfriendly CC site…so glad it is because it has no significance
I posted 2 links, 1 from the US Geological Survey and one from Scientific American that explain how weather is not the C word. I hope those sources are acceptable.
Perhaps you don’t recall my position on the issue. I do not deny that CC should in theory happen due to human activities. Nothing whatsoever can be done about this. I therefore see no purpose in wringing our hands over every hot day in Spain or whatever it happens to be. These are all just weather events anyway.
I live in the UK. I just got up after sunrise and it’s just above freezing point here, 40 degrees in your language. The only way the weather is going to kill me is if it’s too cold not too hot and natural gas is either unavailable or too expensive.
Maybe living in a humid hot hellhole like Florida has affected your outlook on the issue. Bet you run your aircon all day don’t you? We don’t need that here.
The only way the weather is going to kill me
Edit to add I suppose I could also be struck by lightning or felled by a giant hailstone.
If we blow past 6 degrees, it will screw up all the nitrogen and chemistry in our atmosphere and humans won’t be able to breathe.
Sounds pretty far fetched and who cares anyway. Nothing we can do about it.
The world has been 6 degrees warmer before.
And didn’t mammals exist in that period as well? So they can survive it.
during previous climate changes, all animals–including us–just moved a little to accommodate the changes, year on year.
now the changes are sudden, and humankind has created fixed borders, but the need to climate-migrate is still there.
hence the mass movements of people with nowhere to go
now there’s too many of us, and too little room.
Norm, this is the most fun I’ve had since crazy nutty uknowwhom hogged these pages…
Even to debate this topic at this stage is a joke in my 📚 book.
Humans are such comical creatures.
I like Gail’s take…she has class and should be a diplomat. Thank you Gail
Well good luck, humanity of the future. Pro tip – learn to evolve real fast.
Sure, we humans are very good at evolving, Withnail… tremendous leaps in the technical part… psychological,
Either you change or don’t, from the way we relate to each other, well you be the judge of that..don’t want to lecture you of all people.
Why do you say there is no psychological evolution? | J. Krishnamurti
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HLQ0I0C6jYM&t=21s
Better this way
Sure, we humans are very good at evolving, Withnail… tremendous leaps in the technical part… psychological,
Either you change or don’t, from the way we relate to each other, well you be the judge of that.
I was kidding about the evolving thing but you’re absolutely right to say we really can evolve fast in the ways you mention.
Yep, I caught that, more through in jest..and it gave me an excuse to post the link..
Good luck with Krishnamurti…
I assure you that the changes are also small year on year. most are staying put.
What sort of scary climate changes are you guys imagining might happen in your grandchildren’s lifetimes?
Pear in mind that we don’t actually need any scary climate change to happen, as long as we can create the general perception that scary climate change is happening.
For most people, perception trumps reality every time, and the laws of physics be. So keep those imaginations working, guys. And the scarier the predictions, the better.
I looked it up, and right after the demise of dinosaurs, when mammals became the dominant terrestrial species, the temperature was up to 12 degrees (Celsius) higher. Obviously, back then the atmospheric pressure and therefore the greenhouse effect were far larger. People do not understand that in hot areas the temperature will vary little. The temp. increase is all near the poles.
If you’re eligible, join me and sign up to get your vaccine. Come with me if you want to live!
https://twitter.com/schwarzenegger/status/1351973032953188352?t=fF7mdVePcx39XTZSFBJtsA
Arnold Schwarzenegger, 76, had pacemaker fitted after 3 open heart surgeries:
https://nypost.com/2024/03/25/entertainment/arnold-schwarzenegger-76-pacemaker-fitted-after-3-open-heart-surgeries/
It must be all those diabolical steroids he used to take.
Telling little kids, “I’m gonna pump you up!” What doooo you expect?
It’s congenital with Arnie, though, isn’t it? He’s had heart valve problems and surgery for that since way back.
The shooting in Crocus in Moscow should remind Vladimír Putin that is the too high population density causing anxiety that makes him attack the Ukraine for more space.
I do not like tight spaces where humans live like animals, immersed in their pollution and fighting for scarce food, energy etc., too.
Wrong. Putin did not attack the UKR because Russia lacked space or resources, but because he doesn’t need NATO missiles near the Russian border, just as the US wouldn’t accept Russian missiles in Tijuana. How difficult is it to get this?
The level of ignorance is astounding. Russia has so much space that land is basically free.
The shooting reminded him of MI6 and the CIA and Victoria Nuland’s promise of ‘nasty surprises’ for him.
I wonder if they can use recycled steel for bridges. I’m guessing not. That’s going to be a problem if so.
Crimea is Russian since the 16th century. That is way longer than the USA exist.
If you take a glance on any map, you will see three points: the oil of the Caspian Sea has to come through the Black Sea, Russia has no ice-free port next to Sevastopol and Crimea secures the dominance over the Black Sea.
As we are debating oil issues, you might know, that the Caspian Sea has some relevant amounts of oil. What might be new to you is, that this area is imminently European, not to say the heart of Europe. Moskew and St. Petersburg are not, but Baiku is. EU and Aserbajdshan as much as EU and Georgia are in negotiations to join, contracts are signed. If a large industry area with nearly no resources is joining with a resource state, do you really think it is mainly for reasons of culture and freedom?
If you read American thinktanks, US strategy is to cut off slices of the Russian sphere until Russia cannot be seen anymore as a guarantee for stability in the region and the whole falls to pieces. If Europe gets the Caspian oil it means the Russiana won’t have it. It means no industry, no logistics, no security, no petrochemical agriculture.
Putin is not interested in any failed country with an ever burning nuclear facility. Putin is neither interested in taking over failing EU countries. It is the strategy of the European countries to scream, look how beautiful we are, Putin thinks day and night about us! While polls show that acceptance of European governments amoung citizens is on a alltime low.
From my point of view, the European and American leaders are incapable to solve the problems resulting from peakoil. And there is noone in sight, that could do better. The emerging right parties suggest a back to the 80s – but we had much more oil then. The drama is that the German Energiewende does not work.
Both Murmansk and Vladivostok are ice free.
Yes, Murmansk, astonishingly enough! Are they growing wine and roses?
No. Murmansk was usable only 3 months per year, and Vladivostok also freezes in winter.
Which is why Russia wanted Port Arthur, also called Lushun, in the Liaotung peninsula in China. It got that but Great Britain incited Japan to take it away from Russia in 1905.
Later, Japan built a port at Rashin in the northeastern tip of Korea, which does NOT freeze. Called Rajin by the North Koreans, it is closed to Russia per now but with Putin and the fat guy in North Korea getting friendly, Russia might gain the use of Rajin.
I get that they used to freeze. They don’t freeze now. Or do so rarely/thin crust. Climate has changed, especially in arctic regions.
Reply in moderation. But the 1800s are long over. neither does freeze.
Are you on crack? Too high population density in Russia? Go look at a map…
Wondering what the secondary economic costs related to the Baltimore bridge will be. The US Government is borrowing $1T every three months, perhaps the money earmarked for Ukraine will go for infrastructure in our country.
You can find it yourself, Gen Flynn has some observations on this “Black Swan” event.
War among other reasons can be used for economic stimulation assuming there is excess stuff which can be destroyed by borrowing money today under the assumption growth in stuff will occur tomorrow. It seems generally agreed on this site that stuff is finite and in many cases declining or becoming increasingly expensive to obtain – think about that one for bit, you will get it.
We bring all the troops home, we mind and heal our country and use Starship to get more stuff in a nonpolluting manner while employing AI to make as few mistakes as possible – I believe in the 80-20 rule, one needs to cut mistakes short but accept life is full of them.
It is going to be bumpy, but it is said tough times make strong men. Time for the weak men of easy times to retire.
Dennis L.
Answering part of one of my own questions:
“Forbes reports, “The Port of Baltimore also handles the largest volume of heavy farm and construction machinery in the country, according to the state… ”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/leland-vittert-s-war-notes-mayday-call/ar-BB1kA0yL?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=fa2cc9329a69447db44975a10539f13a&ei=19
Note JD, not good news for the Quad Cities area where I was for thirty years. How much farm inventory is now sitting in Baltimore? What is the cost to move it to other ports? How long will that take? What is the effect on cashflow? Generally, when items are shipped they are FOB, does that mean they have to be on a ship or is leaving the factory good enough?
The US and probably Europe has too many narrative people, if it sounds and feels good will come. STEM is very hard ; look at an engineering curriculum, it is heavy in credits and hard in what one must learn. If the real economic output declines, which this site states it must, then the narrative structure on top will one way or another contract. This was one of the points in TM’s last post.
Some war movie had a line, “Where there is chaos there is profit.” This related to sergeant level officers “borrowing” what their operation required; worked as long as the officers went to the officers’ club when items magically appeared. We are going to have chaos, it can be managed but it is not fun.
I have generally done well in tough times, older now, now sure what is the price of Glenlivet. Overhead, always overhead.
Dennis L.
We have lots of old infrastructure that could fail with only a small push. We are dependent on imports from China, India, and other countries from the materials we need to fix these broken things. As the world supply gets less and less sufficient to go around, we will have an increasingly difficult time fixing the broken infrastructure.
In many cases it is easier and less costly to build de novo rather than to repurpose and repair stuff.
What about converting CRE to residential? Somewhere I recall hearing a figure of 50% more. Is that 50% more to convert CRE into residential compared to just building residential from scratch?
Then in certain areas like NYC, there must be hell to pay to try to modernize century old water and waste systems, especially if trying to restore old buildings on top.
I recall years ago about all the problems Boston had with doing that in the so called “Big Dig.” I assume it went way over budget and was finally completed well after the projected date.
Hubbs, I think you are right. The only reason to renovate old is if the time value of money is figured in. If one has a good job, buy a new house.
It is the same with factories, Musk builds new, does not repurpose.
Dennis L.
They can do that with smaller, older buildings, but newer, larger ones have too much floor space that’s unreachable by the amount of light and ventilation needed for comfortable habitation:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230312014528/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office-conversions.html
My mother used to say to me, “What do you get if you renovate an old house? You get a house with electrical problems, plumbing problems, insulation problems, and many other problems, unless you fix absolutely everything. That is why we don’t buy an old house.”
It is impossible to fix all of the issues, once the systems are inside a house. A while back at OFW, we talked about homes in Japan over a certain age (40 years??) selling for practically nothing. They can’t be upgraded to meet standards needed to withstand earthquakes, for example.
Reminds one of recycling. I am in favor, but tough to make work.
Dennis L.
Gail, that’s funny, because I’m living in a new house I just had built, and it has had problems from the outset. Some of them are due to systems the builder and I assumed would work but simply weren’t up to the task.
I have a decent-sized masonry heater plus underfloor radiant, and both of those going full blast on the coldest days this year (lows below 0F, of which there were really just a very few) could not stop:
1.) the main water inlet from freezing, 2.) interior faucet lines from freezing, and even 3.) the underfloor heating loops themselves from freezing, due to whatever dysfunctional combination of design and insulation installation.* It’s supposed to be a “super-insulated” house, but heating costs are greater, with less comfort, than the elderly house we left in town.
The underfloor radiant was supposed to be a back-up in case we weren’t able to fire the masonry heater, but it’s been running a good deal of the time regardless, and we have had to fire up space heaters simply to keep the underfloor circuits alive while the MH is also operating (bedroom temp. with all this happening dropping to 50F). Zone thermostats are set to 64 for the living/bed/bath, 60/50 for the pantry/mudroom, which are separate little wings. We aren’t demanding normal American room temps throughout the building.
*I opted not to run anti-freeze in these loops since we hadn’t planned to go away this season, and I read that AF reduces heat transfer by 10-15%. AF also apparently corrodes the pumps, shortening their lives, so I chanced it. It also needs to be pH tested and replaced every so often at the cost of several hundreds of dollars (special-snowflake recipe). I wasn’t aware of these latter particulars until it was too late.
What I thought would be a lifeboat has turned out to be a boat anchor.
Ironically, I would be better off in a crapola tract house or mobile home, but that’s the MEPP for ya’…!! :-))
If I had to start over, I would choose to retrofit an older house rather than contend with foam, OSB, chinese drywall, etc.
OT, I wanted some old-fangled plastering done, just for the bathroom (7×12). Quote was $40k.
The issue is the selling price of old homes and old cars is too high. There should be a steep discount on these things if we didn’t have constant inflationary ” ‘industrial’ policy “.
I suppose this is the “Invisible Hand” working to nudge consumers towards the purchase of newer homes and cars but those items are often purchased with debt and are expensive to repair as well.
In many cases, newer products are not really better. Is a car where all buttons and controls have been replaced by computer tablet sized screen “better” than a system of hundreds of buttons and knobs?
Is a McMansion more energy “efficient” than a 200 year old smaller home with no central air?
Is a pod home a solution the housing crisis caused by previous iterations of growth?
“What the Oil and Commodity Bulls Are Missing”
March 24, 2024|Art Berman
” … There’s nothing wrong with Goehring and Rozencwajg’s—or Jeff Currie’s—analysis except that the paradigm that made it valid has expired. It assumes that demand for oil and other commodities will continue to increase because the human enterprise must continue to grow.
“The market is saying that it’s not so sure about that.”
https://www.artberman.com/blog/what-the-oil-and-commodity-bulls-are-missing/
I agree with Art. One thing Art says is
“The market is telling us that the cost of expanding new capacity beyond its current rate of growth does not warrant its cost. That message probably applies to commodities as well.”
We have removed the inexpensive to extract stuff. Now we are reaching the end of the line. We keep adding more debt, but at some point, the system is going to break in some way. The debt doesn’t really lead to productive growth in the energy system.
The real miracle is that the system remains standing despite many attempts to dismantle it. A weaker system would have buckled. by now.
There go the insurance rates:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/thousands-of-solar-panels-in-texas-destroyed-by-hailstorm/ar-BB1kzCS2?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=cabb383f40d34a7588f8273e3f778530&ei=32
Hail plus solar panels are not good. Now the good news going forward, it doesn’t hail in space.
Dennis L.
According to the article, residents are also concerned that the chemicals inside the solar panels will leach out and pollute the ground water.
I wonder what organization is insuring these solar panels. It could be a self-insurance group, perhaps in Cayman or some other lightly taxed domicile. “Regular” insurance companies are generally not very large. They don’t generally insure huge commercial exposures. And government structures are self-insured.
“They don’t generally insure huge commercial exposures.”
Thank you.
Dennis L.
I’m part of a private solar co-op, and our insurance seems to have doubled recently. Very few insurers service this sector.
Thank you, nice to know.
You are in WI, yes?
Dennis L.
Vermont. It’s a volunteer organization, so documentation is uneven, but looking back through some of it, I see that in 2017 total ins. exp. was $1769. In 2019, it went to $2776. This year, it’s $3315, of which $2020 is liability. It is a 183kW array. It’s out in the middle of a farm field, so I’m hard-pressed to think how much liability could effectively present itself.
Every year or two someone tries to get a better ins. deal, but can never find a better price. Insurance is the biggest expense by a mile (prop. tax of $1470 and repairs at $1755 were the next two.)
Micro-meteorites.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230121070740/https://omni-innotech.com/roscosmos-and-nasa-have-a-plan-to-replace-damaged-soyuz-spacecraft-at-iss/
Trust me, the insurance companies will make sure whatever they put in the space has to be insured. Against which I am not sure but they will find something
And you planned to move too Sunny Florida and kick back in your Golden years..
Sure you are..NOT..that’s just too bad…freeze your butt off
Florida’s Condominium Market Is Becoming A Disaster Zone
Eric McConnell
Mon, Mar 25, 2024, 1:14 PM EDT4 min read
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/floridas-condominium-market-becoming-disaster-171447434.html
This does look like a problem. According to the article,