|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
There are many myths about energy and the economy. In this post I explore the situation surrounding some of these myths. My analysis strongly suggests that the transition to a new Green Economy is not progressing as well as hoped. Green energy planners have missed the point that our physics-based economy favors low-cost producers. In fact, the US and EU may not be far from an economic downturn because subsidized green approaches are not truly low-cost.
[1] The Chinese people have long believed that the safest place to store savings is in empty condominium apartments, but this approach is no longer working.
The focus on ownership of condominium homes is beginning to unwind, with huge repercussions for the Chinese economy. In March, new home prices in China declined by 2.2%, compared to a year earlier. Property sales fell by 20.5% in the first quarter of 2024 compared to the same period a year ago, and new construction starts measured by floor area fell by 27.8%. Overall property investment in China fell by 9.5% in the first quarter of 2024. No one is expecting a fast rebound. The Chinese seem to be shifting their workforce from construction to manufacturing, but this creates different issues for the world economy, which I describe in Section [6].
[2] We have been told that Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the way of the future, but the rate of growth is slowing.
In the US, the rate of growth was only 3.3% in the first quarter of 2024, compared to 47% one year ago. Tesla has made headlines, saying that it is laying off 10% of its staff. It also recently reported that it is delaying deliveries of its cybertruck. A big issue is the high prices of EVs; another is the lack of charging infrastructure. If EV sales are to truly expand, they will need both lower prices and much better charging infrastructure.
[3] Many people have assumed that home solar panel sales would rise forever, but now US home solar panel sales are shrinking.
A forecast made by the trade group Solar Energy Industries Association and consulting firm Wood Mackenzie indicates that US solar panel installations by homeowners are expected to fall by 13% in 2024. There are many issues involved: higher interest rates, less generous subsidies to homeowners, not enough grid capacity for new generation, and too much overproduction of electricity by solar panels in the spring and fall, when heating and air conditioning demand is low. The overproduction issue is particularly acute in California.
For each individual 24-hour day, the timing of solar energy production does not match up well with when it is needed. With sufficient batteries, solar electricity produced in the morning can help run air conditioners in the evening. But storage from summer to winter is still not feasible, and batteries for short-term storage are expensive.
[4] It is a myth that wind and solar truly add to electricity supplies for the US and the countries in the EU. Instead, their pricing seems to lead to tighter electricity supplies.
Strangely enough, in the US and the EU, when wind and solar are added to the electric grid, electricity supplies seem to get tighter. For example, one article says, Most of US electric grid faces risk of resource shortfall through 2027, NERC [regulatory group] says.
Charts of electricity supply per capita show an unusual trend when wind and solar are added. Figure 1 shows that, in the US, once wind and solar are added, total electricity generation per capita falls, rather than rises!
The EU, using a somewhat shorter history period, shows a similar pattern of declining total electricity generation per capita, even when wind and solar are added (Figure 2).
I believe that the strange pricing systems used for wind and solar in the US and EU are driving out other electricity suppliers, especially nuclear. With this system, intermittent electricity enjoys the subsidy of going first at the regular wholesale market rate. Other providers find themselves with very low or negative wholesale rates in the spring and fall of the year and on weekends and holidays. As a result, their overall return falls too low. Nuclear is particularly affected because it requires a huge, fixed investment, and it cannot be ramped up and down easily.
Besides the foregoing issues affecting the supply of electricity generated, there are also factors affecting the demand for electricity. Electricity generation using wind and solar tends to be high priced when all costs are included. The US and EU are already high-cost areas for businesses to operate. High electricity rates further add to the impetus to move manufacturing and other industry to lower-cost countries if businesses desire to be competitive in the world market.
On a world basis, in 2022, wind and solar added about 13% to total world electricity generation (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Electricity generation per capita for the World based on data of the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy, prepared by the Energy Institute. Amounts are through 2022.
Based on Figure 3, with the addition of wind and solar, the upward slope of the world per capita electricity generation has been able to remain pretty much constant from 1985 to 2022, at about 1.6% per year. But the US and the EU, as high-cost producers of goods and services, haven’t been able to participate in this per capita growth of electricity.
Instead, China has been a major beneficiary of the shift of manufacturing overseas from the US and EU. It has been able to rapidly increase its electricity supply per capita, even with wind and solar. It has also been adding both nuclear and coal-fired electricity generation capacity.
Thus, this analysis produces the result a person would expect if the physics of the world economy favors efficient (low-cost) producers.
[5] It is a myth that the US and EU can greatly ramp up the use of EVs or greatly increase the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) without relying on fossil fuels.
Both EV production and AI are heavy users of electricity supply. We have seen that the US and the EU no longer have growing per-capita electricity supplies. Ramping up electricity generation would require a long lead time (10 years or more), a major increase in fossil fuel consumption, and an increase in electricity transmission lines.
The State of Georgia, in the United States, is already running into this issue, with planned data centers (related to AI) and EV manufacturing plants. The state plans to add new gas-fired electricity generation. It will also import more electricity from Mississippi Power, where the retirement of a coal-fired plant is being delayed to provide the necessary additional electricity. Eventually, more solar panels are planned, as well.
[6] It is a myth that the world economy can continue as usual, whatever happens to energy supply and growing debt. China’s homebuilding problems could, in theory, lead to debt bubbles crashing around the world.
The world economy depends upon a growing bubble of debt. It also depends on an ever-increasing supply of goods and services. In fact, the two are closely interrelated. As long as a growing supply of low-priced energy of the types used by built infrastructure is available, the economy tends to sail along.
China, with problems in its property business, is an example of what can go wrong when energy supplies (coal in China) become expensive, as supply becomes increasingly constrained. Figure 5 shows that China’s per-capita coal supply became constrained in about 2013. China’s per capita coal extraction had been rising, but then it dipped. This made it more difficult for builders to construct the homes planned for would-be homeowners. This is part of what got home builders in China into financial difficulty.
Finally, in 2022, China was able to get coal production up. But the way this was done was through very high coal prices (Figure 6). (The prices shown are for Australian coal, but Chinese coal prices seem to be similar.)
Building concrete homes at such high coal prices would have resulted in new homes that were far too expensive for most Chinese citizens to afford. If builders were not already in difficulty from low supply, adding high coal prices, as well, would be a second blow. Furthermore, all the workers formerly engaged in home building needed new places to earn a living; the current approach seems to be to move many of these workers to manufacturing, so that the popping of the home building bubble will have less of an impact on the overall economy of China.
There is now concern that China is ramping up its manufacturing, particularly for exports, at a time when China’s jobs in the property sector are disappearing. The problem, however, is that ramping up exports of manufactured goods creates a new bubble. This huge added supply of manufactured goods can only be sold at low prices. This new low-priced competition seems likely to lead to manufacturers, around the world, obtaining too-low prices for their manufactured products.
If other economies around the world are forced to compete with even lower-cost goods from China, it could have an adverse impact on manufacturing around the world. With low prices, manufacturers are likely to lay off workers, or give them excessively low wages. If wages and prices are inadequate, debt bubbles in other parts of the world are likely to collapse. This will happen because many borrowers will become unable to repay their debt. This is the reason that we have been hearing a great deal recently about raising tariffs on Chinese exports.
[7] The world’s biggest myth is that the world economy can continue to grow forever.
I have pointed out previously that based on physics considerations, economies cannot be expected to be permanent structures. Economies and humans are both self-organizing systems that grow. Humans get their energy from food. Economies are powered by the types of energy products that our built infrastructure uses. Neither can grow forever. Neither can get along without energy products of the right types, in the right quantities.
We become so accustomed to the narratives we hear that we tend to assume that what we are told must be right. These narratives could be based on wishful thinking, or on inadequate models, or on a sour grapes view that says, “We don’t want fossil fuels anyhow.” We know that humans need food, and that economies will continue to require fossil fuels. We can’t make wind turbines or solar panels without fossil fuels. What do we plan to do for energy without fossil fuels?
In a finite world, economies cannot continue forever. We don’t know precisely what will go wrong or when it will go wrong, but we can get a hint from the recent failures of myths that our economy may change dramatically in the not-too-distant future.
Signal vs Noise . A good synopsis .
TOM
IGNORED
04/24/2024 at 9:10 am
Signal vs noise.
Lot of noise in these posts looking at share prices, short term trends, looking at one sector in isolation of the whole. Step back, relax a little, try to see a bigger picture. Forget all the noise. It’s totally non productive, confusing and a waste of your time. Focus on the long term trends and look at LtG model output and get your head firmly calibrated on the big picture. The share price of Tesla stock this week is irrelevant. This board has some fine minds. capable of some real analysis, please let’s stay focused on the big picture!!!!!
1. We are past peak in Net Oil production. Approaching peak for other FF.
2.We are on the bumpy oil plateau, facing terminal decline within a decade or sooner.
3. The alignment of Russia, China, Iran, Iraq does not bode well for the west.
4. We might be going through a phase shift in the Climate that may accelerate temperature increases. Data within a year may confirm this.
5. Europe is seeing the beginnings of a phase shift in industrial production decline.
6. Affordability, masked as inflation, is gaining traction as a trend, due to critical resource cost constraints.
7. two hot wars, and several conflicts continue.
8. US politics are swirling around the bowl, going on ten years.
I’m sure I missed a few, but you get the idea.
We are past peak world coal is another important issue. Coal is in many ways as important as oil.
We are ? I thought we had 150 years left? David!! Where are you?!?
Only in the minds of the folks making the climate change models.
here I am, Sam… Sam-I-Am…
“2. We are on the bumpy oil plateau, facing terminal decline within a decade or sooner.”
Bumpy As Usual tonight, baby!
riding the tiger into the 2030s, oh no it’s going to be a bumpy ride!
notice how the 2020s are a handful of months from being half over?
UK peak coal was 1913. I think natural gas is near its peak. A very clean fuel but harder to transport and store than liquids.
It could help the situation slightly if rural homes heated by oil changed to LPG (propane). I’ve heard no mention of this in recent years although many people must know that diesel and kerosene are getting scarce compared to petrol or natural gas liquids (LPG).
I don’t know what the availability is of propane is in the UK. Even though it is quite available in the US, it might not be in the EU. My guess is that most of it would need to be imported to Britain now, given that its own production is way down.
Years ago, people lived with no external heat (or very close to it). They snuggled up together, and wore hats on their heads to keep warm. I think people who are aware of our energy problem are expecting that home heating will simply disappear. They don’t stop to try to use propane, even if it might be available. It would require a different type of heater, for one thing.
Agree with all 8, much discussed here and elsewhere.
Look to end of May, if Starship works/improves perhaps hope; if not my guess is a stairstep function down.
This discussion has been going on since LTG, what LTG does not speak to is what happens after various peaks. I was fortunate enough to ask that question directly of DM who was sitting next to me in ASPO, DC as I recall, perhaps Boston. My recollection is at that time the future was simply not part of LTG.
LTG is the end of minerals, earth based minerals among other things. There is plenty more stuff where it came from.
Dennis L.
Doesn’t matter whether starship works or now. It is over.
The score says 21-12 at the final possession. Even if the hail mary pass works and the conversion too, it will be 21-20 Final.
We ain’t gonna make it, are we?
https://www.yahoo.com/sports/nfl-draft-record-275000-fans-swarm-downtown-detroit-to-witness-first-round-023558382.html
People with not enough to do.
Or -people who have had it so good that they don’t know what to do with their lives nor do they understand why they’ve had it so good and therefore cannot possibly have the foresight to see what would happen if it is all taken away.
Even sheep realize they have to go out to pasture to eat and at the same time be aware of wolves.
😀 yes, I agree.
During Ancient Romans period, Roman people used to go to the Colosseum in great numbers to cheer Gladiators.
When the Empire started to have serious economic and security troubles, everybody was busy to find a way to survive and nobody cared about Gladiators.
Music, Sport, Movies are wonderful, but one should never forget – with maximum respect for them – that professional athletes, famous singers or actors are the equivalent of Gladiators, Minstrels or Comedians of the historical Greek Tragedy.
Useful, pleasant, nice, yes, but surely not people to adore.
More bread and circus for the masses to muffled out the increasing cognitive dissonance.
Accepting a shorter vehicle range and a smaller car, would certainly help make EVs (or any other kind of stored energy vehicle) more sustainable. Below are the specs for the Tesla Model 3.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Model_3
It comes standard with a 57.5kWh battery, giving it a range of 272 miles. It has a curb weight of 1600kg. The battery energy density is quoted as 0.15kWh/kg. This gives an appoximate battery mass of 383kg.
What if we could be satisfied with a 50 mile range? On the face of it, the battery would only need to be 18% as large. But cutting the battery by 82% would reduce curb weight by 313kg. So rolling resistance will be almost 20% lower. So the actual battery size could be reduced to 14.5% of the Tesla 3 standard, a reduction from 57.5 to just 8.33kWh.
Reducing the range requirements of the vehicle allows the consideration of many other options for powering the vehicle. We could use more sustainable battery chemistries. We could use compressed air, stored heat, flywheels, etc. But this woukd require human beings to be reasonable and compromise just a little. Not something they have historically been good at.
Perhaps a Leaf?
Dennis L.
Batteries are what are truly in short supply. Hybrids made better use of batteries.
Some people say Japan will unleash the worldwide financial crisis….
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/USDJPY=X/?guccounter=1
Currency interventions could shake global markets.
https://finimize.com/content/japans-currency-crisis-is-intervention-imminent
The value of currency plays a pivotal role in shaping global markets, influencing everything from the profitability of multinational companies to the costs of imports and exports. A move by Japan to stabilize the yen might provide short-term relief but could also unsettle established trading patterns, with far-reaching implications for international trade and investment.
The bigger picture: A shift in economic power dynamics.
A nation’s decision to manipulate its currency doesn’t just ripple through its own economy—it can affect global economic dynamics. Japan’s potential intervention to support the yen might influence how other countries handle similar economic challenges, thus impacting overall global economic stability.
Looking much like what occurred before
The hoped-for intervention didn’t take place.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/jpy-plunges-fresh-34-year-lows-after-boj-does-nothing-again
Japan is certainly a country with pretty much no energy supplies of its own and an amazing amount of government debt. The yen has been falling and falling.
Quark in Spain has a post on this as the Yen touches 156.90 . Google translate please .
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2024/04/llega-la-caballeria.html
I am not sure that I completely understand this article. It is generally about the yen problems potentially disrupting the “carry trade” of investors borrowing yen at a tiny interest rate, and investing in US government bonds.
I think that the concern is this one: (From a different article, found here: https://fastercapital.com/content/Carry-trade-unwind–Preparing-for-the-Carry-Trade-Unwind.html
A sharp decline in the value of high-yielding currencies like the US dollar would mean that commodities (like oil) would suddenly become cheaper around the world. This could cause problems for derivative contracts.
They have restarted their nuclear plants though. This will give them some 12GWe to play with. It is a country where a lot of transportation is via train. Concur with you about end game.
When I first moved to Japan in 1982, the yen was at about 240 to the dollar and 400 to the pound. At the time, this was considered a high yen because a decade earlier it was around 360 to the dollar.
The following chart gives a bit of perspective.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2550/dollar-yen-exchange-rate-historical-chart
A depreciating yen makes Japanese imports, including fuels and foods, more expensive, but it also makes Japanese exports cheaper. A few years ago I read that foreign trade accounted for about Japanese economy, against about 50% in the case of the South Korean economy.
The cheap yen is also drawing in inbound tourists, who are currently partying like it’s 2019. The hotel and department store operators in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka and Kyoto are chuffed at this.
The Japan government/BOJ cannot afford to raise interest rates very much because government debt is so high that the interest on it would bankrupt the nation, so it is forced to live with the depreciating exchange rate while raising taxation and stoking inflation in order to limit the size of the debt and monetize it away.
I’m sorry, I don’t know where that percentage went.
A few years ago I read that foreign trade accounted for about 12% of the Japanese economy, against about 50% in the case of the South Korean economy.
According to https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/JPN/japan/trade-gdp-ratio
(Data is from the World Bank)
Trade is the sum of exports and imports of goods and services measured as a share of gross domestic product.
Japan trade to gdp ratio for 2022 was 46.84%, a 10.07% increase from 2021.
There is a table of this ratio in 2022 for many different countries. High %s seem to mean countries that are heavily dependent on trade.
So. Korea is at 96.54%.
Luxembourg is at 388.51%
Ireland is at 234.27%
Germany is at 98.88%
The US is at 27.36%
These figures are for 2022. Fossil fuel prices were high in 2022, making the percentages high. I do not see China on the list. Presumably, the country did not report the required data.
Thanks for your perspective on the matter. Japan underwent a huge growth spurt early on, supported by a huge debt bubble and rising property prices everywhere. The property debt bubble collapsed in 1991, and the stock market entered a long period of stagnation. For a period before 1991, many people thought that Japan was a model for the world economy–centrally planned growth going on, almost endlessly.
Inside China Business has a new one out, electric auto production in China.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-jUpDbZ-9c
Making things is hard, policy will not do it.
Where does the US get the teachers to teach “making” things?
Like it or not, electric cars seem to be advancing, fits and starts.
This site understands fossil fuel depletion, environmental concerns are at least partially real, something is better than nothing.
Dennis L.
Small electric cars seem to work where there is a growing supply of electricity, mostly from coal. Don’t count on wind and solar doing much, however.
This video is very good. It seems to be closely related to a WSJ article from March 4, 2024.
https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/how-china-is-churning-out-evs-faster-than-everyone-else-df316c71
It says that Chinese companies are leaving autos (and other industry) can churn out new products 30% faster, and also more cheaply, because of four techniques:
1. They develop different parts of the automobile simultaneously, rather than one after the other. In particular, electronics are developed simultaneously.
2. They standardize across vehicles, even electronics.
3. They swap out suppliers much more quickly. Try one supplier, move on to the next.
4. They use computer simulations to try to figure out what will work best, instead of always trying it out in “real life.”
In the oil industry, I heard that implementing any significant change took 17 years. I can see why these changes would make things a whole lot faster.
Mike,
I think you are right, insurance costs have gone up dramatically in the last two years. Renewals start this summer for me, can’t wait.
This keeps up going to have to check out the prices of cat food.
Dennis L.
Everyone is selling’: Florida condo owners feel crush of rising insurance costs
‘The cost is so great the condos aren’t selling as quick as they were,’ Christina Auer says
NORTH PALM BEACH, Fla. — The rising cost of home insurance for one Palm Beach County condo is a story that seems to playing out at condos all across Florida.
“It’s shocking to watch in a few years to go from under $100,000 to pushing a half a million,” Christina Auer said. “It’s out of line.”
That fast increase in just a couple of years trickles down to the condo residents, who pay for it in their monthly fees.
Engineers surveyed it all. The structural integrity is perfect now, and there was no deduction like you normally should get,” Auer said referring to the building’s insurance policy.
Insurance experts tell WPTV that the days of cheaper policies are not coming back.
Weather, litigation, reinsurance, it’s all crashing in on the residents in these condos,” Lisa Miller, a former deputy insurance commissioner now the head of Lisa Miller Associates, said.
The higher prices, Miller said, are now part of the new normal for condos, especially those near the water like Auer’s home.
“Everyone is selling,” Auer said about her neighbors struggling with the insurance costs. “The cost is so great the condos aren’t selling as quick as they were.”
WPTV WEST PALM BEACH
One YouTuber advised never file a claim or even call the insurance agency until you have a major $100000 plus claim payout.
Some folks with pricey home pay $25,000 a year now in insurance, not including property taxes, ect.
We are seeing the ground move under our feet
This is what happens after years of insurance rates being suppressed by Florida regulators. Business interests in Florida want building in hurricane prone areas. They make certain that “rating areas” are drawn to be very large, to obscure the fact that costs are higher along the coast. They also tend to hold down rates.
Eventually, the real situation becomes clear to citizens.
Weather, litigation, reinsurance, it’s all crashing in on the residents in these condos,” Lisa Miller, a former deputy insurance..
Yep don’t forget these too
There is one other factor, grift. A couple of guys with a nice flyer stopped me in my drive, mention was made of possible hail damage. There is a word for this, grift.
In MN see many billboard advertising for lawyers and injury lawsuits. Saw this in my former law firm, downsized, mostly interested in injury cases, leases had no margin. Their office takes an entire floor of a new bank building, lovely; many empty rooms. Insurance pays the cost so sue Sue. Tough to get cashflow out of a private individual.
Trust is the basis of a society, I see or think I see that in the Amish; their communities work and seem to grow.
Dennis L.
And Lawyers…constant on TV promos here for Lawyers begging to file a claim against insurance companies.
A perfect storm…literally…very active storm/hurricane season forecasted
Priced Out: 1 in 3 Floridians who get dropped by their homeowner’s insurance company are choosing to move: study finds
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – One in three Floridians who get dropped by their homeowner’s insurance company have moved or plan to move somewhere else.
It’s new data that was just released by the real estate brokerage firm Redfin, but according to Florida’s Chief Financial Officer, there are ways struggling families can save money.
More than 70% of Florida homeowners are seeing rising premiums or changes in coverage when it comes to their property insurance.
….And to be honest, many homeowners that moved here from other states or in recent years, didn’t realize how high the costs were of home insurance, and how much that would impact their family’s budget. So people are making decisions to move out,” Insurance Information Institute’s Mark Friedlander said.
NEWS4JAX
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – In the middle of what’s being called a “property insurance crisis” in Florida, several local homeowners said their policies are being dropped by Progressive, one of the biggest property insurance companies in the country.
Progressive Insurance is sending out more than 100,000 non-renewal notices to homeowners saying they are “rebalancing their exposure” in the Sunshine State.
The Progressive property insurance shakeup primarily impacts what’s called DP3 Home insurance policies, which according to insurance experts, are homes that have older roofs or specific policies covering investment properties.
A total of 53,000 homes affected are in high-risk areas, and the remaining 47,000 are seasonal homes.
Insiders wrote News4JAX about what they are experiencing in the non-renewal process.
“After raising my rates dramatically last year, they now have dropped me. I have been moved to a new company, but I have not yet received my new quote,” Gary wrote.
Time for a musical interlude. This song was first released in 1969. Musically, it’s like no other song I’ve heard. Rod Stewart wrote it as a young man, yet the lyrics suggest an old man looking back over his life. How did Rod manage that?
I Wouldn’t Ever Change A Thing, by Rod Stewart
Something a little gentler now. Is the song really over?
The Who – The Song is Over
For Roger Daltry..it seems to be…
The Who frontman turned 80 years old on 1st March and discussed stepping down from his role at the Teenage Cancer Trust after 24 years because he believes that he hasn’t got many more years left.
“I have to be realistic,” he told The Times. “I’m on my way out. The average life expectancy is 83 and with a bit of luck I’ll make that, but we need someone else to drive things.”
I wore out those vinyl records of the Who back then…
Can’t believe the it’s getting near the end for all of us..
In with the new..out with the old.
“I wore out those vinyl records of the Who back then”
Yes, I still remember being “sent” by Baba O’Riley and the single version of “Won’t get fooled again”. Classics.
Roger Daltrey sang that he hoped he’d die before he got old. At least he’ll die before he goes bald. Amazing that 99% of these ancient rockers have still got all their hair. 😉 Apart from Elton, whose wig we know about, and Phil Collins, how many do we know who own up to being bald?
I still listen to LIVE AT LEEDS
BEST RECORDING MAGIG BUS
Substitute..
There have been a suspicious number of fires at significant buildings around the world in recent years. Notre Dame in Paris caught fire. Just recently the Stock Exchange building in Copenhagen caught fire. Now I have just read this in the Telegraph:
Accused Russian spy ‘led plot to burn down building in London’
British 20-year-old allegedly worked for Kremlin and ‘hired men to burn commercial premises’
https://archive.is/20240426114837/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/26/british-spy-man-burn-down-building-london-russia/
What if anti-Western powers are indeed behind these fires? And then we have had all these protests around the world in recent years. What if anti-Western powers are trying to provoke colour revolutions? Just a thought.
Interesting video on a Danish city scale heat pump supplying a district heating system.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-bIlAkTDw8Q
Ultimately, all European cities are going to have to build district heating networks if they want to keep warm. This particular heat pump uses harbour water as its heat source.
China has been using district heating, using heat co-generated by burning coal for a long time. District heating does not allow individual homes/businesses to control their level of heat, except by opening windows.
District systems have a problem if they, in any way, need to compete with subsidized wind and solar. Besides nuclear being knocked out by wind and solar, cogeneration tends to be knocked out by wind and solar. I know that this has been an issue in (IRRC) Sweden.
The US has not used heat from cogeneration for many reasons, one of which is preservation of the profit motive. Also, it requires that power plants be built near population centers.
I wonder how long the heat pump operates without needing repairs. I wonder how much CO2 was generated by the whole apparatus that is supposed to underlie this system. I wonder how long it will take to get replacement parts, and how available they will actually be.
In my childhood, early fifties, La Crosse had city heat in the downtown area, I think it was secondary to a generating plant. At one point the pipes buried directly underground corroded, caused a weak spot, a fireman investigating fell in and was boiled alive. City heat ended soon after that.
UW Madison has an extensive series of tunnels which carry steam all over the campus. At one time they were accessible, some adventurous souls did explore them. The campus has 40K+ people in a small area. Used coal in my day.
Dennis L.
Denmark heats suburbia this way, even villages. Getting towards 70% market share, I think. It has about three systems which store solar hot water from summer to winter in 100,000 or 200,000 m3 holes in the ground lined with plastic, more cheaply than electricity in batteries.
The Danish houses on district heating have normal thermostatic control, much the same as if you had a gas or oil boiler. No need to open windows.
But what possible relevance is a small country of five million people to the rest of the world …? That at least seems to be the attitude in the UK. We are located the other side of the North Sea and have used up most of our coal, oil and gas.
I think Tim Groves was the first commenter here to put us onto Ben Davidson and his YT channel, Suspicious Observers. Davidson talks of cyclical cataclysms and reckons the next one is due in the 2030s. We see evidence of this in the Earth’s rapidly weakening electromagnetic field and the coming reversal of the poles. Consequently, in the 2030s the grid will collapse and cars will no longer start. Machines will become statues.
Ben Davidson maintains that D.U.M. B. s are being built even now: Deep Underground Military Bases. These will shelter the Chosen from the cataclysms. The ancients knew about these cataclysms and retreated to their own underground bases for protection. Learn a little about them in this video.
Dr. Heinrich Kusch (English): Secret Underground Installations And Tunnel Systems In Ancient Europe
It is theorised that the PTSB have been aware of this alleged upcoming cataclysm for decades but have done their best to hide it from public knowledge. Yet on the other hand films have been released that allude obliquely to what is coming, for instance “Greenland”, “Don’t Look Up” and “2012”. The aim is to cleverly put the public off the scent, so that the PTSB can claim that anybody warning of the imminent cataclysm have gullibly mistaken fiction for fact! Devious.
You will remember Fast Eddy, who claimed that the “pandemic” was a smokescreen for the mercy killing of those who would otherwise die horribly once the oil runs out. By contrast, Christian Köhlert claims in his book “The Phoenix Hypothesis” that the “pandemic” was in fact just one aspect of a smokescreen to prepare for the imminent cataclysm. I am currently about a third of the way through his book.
The movie “don’t look up”. Which is really just the plot to the great movie “Melancholia”.
This guy also has a lot of videos of phoenix project He combines it with his own theory of history, but sometimes he is interesting
https://www.youtube.com/@Archaix138
That’s the guy Cromagnon pays attention to, I think.
Jason has given me some well received and accurate personal advice over the years. His views are shall we say,…..unconventional.
Reality itself is a construct…….most in 3D time space cannot discern this…..which was of course the plan all along.
If one is not gifted with second sight, one must use other evidences to gain appreciation of what we are immersed in.
that explains a lot cro
I am glad you feel enlightened Norman.
I myself am increasingly incredulous and saddened as I gain experience in this realm.
But I intuit that that, is the plan as well.
The video shows some underground tunnel systems that were built over 10,000 years ago. I can understand that there would be many reasons why ancient people would want to have tunnels. They would shelter themselves from heat and coal, predators, and other groups of people wandering around. They would seem to be hard to keep lighted.
The video makes a lot of confusion among various types of tunnels, mixing ancient Romans ‘catacombe’ (Catacombs) belonging to the first Christians around year 30 – 100 after Christ, which were used to hide people from persecutions and other kind of underground excavations.
Gail, there are surely no such kind of long tunnels dated 10.000 years ago in Europe.
Some caverns of Paleolitic period surely yes, but not long tunnels.
By the way I’m reading a very interesting book of a Spanish University Professor, expert in ancient linguistic studies and archeology, who gives a very interesting picture (quoting many recent researches) about how European populations developed from 5.000 before Christ till what Historians call the presence of hystoric populations: Celts, Germans, Italics, Slavs, Greeks, Iranians, Illyrians, Baltics etc.
I don’t know if one can find English translation.
Anyway I really suggest it.
It is called ‘The Indoeuropeans’.
Here it is a link of the book:
https://www.amazon.it/indoeuropei-origini-dellEuropa-Francisco-Villar/dp/8815127062
“there are surely no such kind of long tunnels dated 10.000 years ago in Europe.”
Or anywhere else? How can you be so sure? There are tantalising hints of a hi-tech world civilisation before the Great Flood. And what about the old Vedic stories, with their tales of vimanas and what sound a like nuclear war?
there was no great flood
and no high tech before it
“there was no great flood
and no high tech before it”
Prove it. There are legends in all cultures around the world about a devastating flood. And there are still mysteries about the pyramids, e.g. their weird sonic qualities. Try reading some of Christopher Dunn’s books.
As usual Norman finds it impossible to think outside the box.
Norman ‘s been thinking outside of the box for decades, actually.
Not asserting the gospel truth of the Bible exposed one to considerable social outcasting in prewar Yorkshire, and absolutely precluded tea with the vicar, but this never deterred Norman from following the scientific method.
Interesting that Zemi is siding with the Christian Fundamentalists on this one.
Was Noah’s Ark real, and what did they feed the Lions and Tigers for forty days and forty nights?
Or, is Zemi saying, “not THAT great flood….”
It is hard to believe that anyone thinks the “Noah’s arc” story is literally true. The boat described would have lots of problems. It couldn’t hold all of the animals in it, and the food that they would need. Where would all the waste products go? It was a good fable to tell children. It provided a “God will take care of us” point of view, whether the narrative was true or not.
Zemi
i know that there is a chocolate teapot in orbit around Mars
I defy you to prove me wrong.
flood legends are in every culture—certainly.—does it not occur to you that these are separate flood incidents?
Easy to see where the biblical flood story came from—the Meditterranian overflowed into the Black Sea basin at the end of the last Ice age, 16k years ago, throughthe Bosphorous strait—easily within human folk memory.
i can look out of my bedroom window over the bed of what was an enormous lake, and visit the gorge it carved at the end of the last ice age—same era.
the sand and gravel beds and old bogs and marshes are there to ”prove it”.
as are the hundreds of ”erratic” boulders left by the receding ice, which can be ”proven” to come from hundreds of miles away. the boulders are there, their origin is known.
mysteries around any ancient structure does not ”prove” some weird fantasy that might be woven around them.
@ TIm:
“Not asserting the gospel truth of the Bible exposed one to considerable social outcasting in prewar Yorkshire”
Not true. Most Englishmen by then wore their religion lightly, if at all. Secularism and atheism were well advanced.
“Interesting that Zemi is siding with the Christian Fundamentalists on this one.”
Oh no, I’m not.
“Was Noah’s Ark real, and what did they feed the Lions and Tigers for forty days and forty nights?”
Of course, I wasn’t, you silly girl. Here’s my position. In old texts we have some pure fact, some legends, and some myths. Legends are fictionalised retellings of actual events. I do believe that there was a series of cataclysmic floods around the world, some thousands of years ago, but the idea of Noah and the Ark was just the Bible’s way of dramatising it. There was no Noah, of course. Myths are totally fictional but are invented to explain some psychological or other principle in dramatised form. I believe that there are BOTH legends AND myths in the Bible. However, I do not identify with Christianity or the Bible, despite having been “christened”.
> Or, is Zemi saying, “not THAT great flood….”
Precisely, Tim. I am using the term “Great Flood” as short-hand that most people recognise. I believe that Norman gets irritated when I use it, because he is as anti-religion and Christianity and the Bible as Richard Dawkins. So I would ask Norman not to get irritated when I lazily refer to “the Great Flood” but instead look at real evidence for cataclysms and shiftings of the Earth’s crust. The existence of freshwater seahorses in some mountain lakes in Peru is just one hint. And I am most certainly not a Bible basher or Christian fundamentalist.
Anyway, I had thought that Norman was from Lankasheer, not Yorkshire.
zemi
i’m too old to be irritated by anything
eye rolling is as far as it goes, as tim well knows.
in general terms, i try to offer information that is readily available to anyone,
i try to avoid suppositions and wild speculations based on myths and fantasies
Normal wrote:
“flood legends are in every culture—certainly.—does it not occur to you that these are separate flood incidents?”
Of course it has occurred to me. But it is possible that they were caused by a single cataclysm.
“i’m too old to be irritated by anything”
You don’t know yourself very well.
“in general terms, i try to offer information that is readily available to anyone”
So then you miss new research, which sometimes can lead to new paradigms in science.
“i try to avoid suppositions and wild speculations based on myths and fantasies”
So do I. But there is plenty of archeological evidence for certain suppositions. And as for 9/11, what we were told about that does not add up. I check the evidence. You have a closed mind.
Excellent reply, Zemi.
I didn’t for a minute think you were really a Fundamentalist.
And by the way, I once sat next to one on a 15-hour flight across the pacific. He was a US Marine stationed in Japan who was going back to the Midwest for the Christmas and New Year holidays.
He insisted that every word of the Bible was true and that there was only one correct interpretation of their meaning. You can’t get much more fundamental than that.
He insisted that the Great Flood covered everything on the earth, and that when the waters subsided, the Ark rested upon the slopes of Mount Ararat.
He was pleasant company, although I would have probably more enjoyed talking to Richard Dawkins, who I would have questioned as to the real potential of genes to be selfish. I expect he would have said he was being metaphorical there. That was something that the Fundamentalist US marine couldn’t accept. He held that everything described in the Bible was literally true.
We didn’t touch on the subject, but he probably would have placed the Great Flood around 5,000 years ago since as far as he was concerned, the world was only about 6,000 years old.
Archbishop James Ussher, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656, dated the Creation to around 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC, per the proleptic Julian calendar.
Ussher was a Calvinist, and so we’d expect him to be dogmatic. But some of the leading proper scientists of his time were also in broad agreement with his dating. Johannes Kepler calculated that the Earth and indeed the Universe were created in the year 3993 BC and Isaac Newton came up with a slightly older date of 3998 BC.
Today’s best guess is that the creation took place 13.8 billion years ago, But in other respects, Big Bang cosmology could be seen as a sciencified version of the Genesis creation story—basically everything began with a flash of light.
The Catholic Church these days has no problem with the Big Bang hypothesis. It allows the Bible story to be metaphorically correct albeit with a much longer timescale than the Bible indicates. What the Church really abhors is the Steady State hypothesis in which the Universe has always been around, as that eliminates the need for a single Creation event and puts the Creator out of a job.
not 9/11 again—-perleeeeze–that really does test my eye rolling capacity.
i thought that was laid to rest along with the great deported eddy.
you are i fear irritated by things i say—because i do not concur with your daft pronouncements.
that it not the same as me being irritated—i can only manage mild amusement.
i research new stuff all the time—for some reason best known to themselves, people want to come and listen to my ramblings on a few things that interest me and them.
i certainly do not recant wild theories and hypotheses, conspiracies etc.
though recently i gave a talk on ”conspiracy theories” which went down rather well.
—guess where i got my inspiration for that subject.
i certainly wouldnt propose the notion that the pyramids were energy generators. re Dunn—my audience would expect me to prove it.
awkward moment.—especially as one of them is often a retired psychiatrist.
remember that energy generation is no use unless it has a purpose—
“i certainly wouldnt propose the notion that the pyramids were energy generators. re Dunn. remember that energy generation is no use unless it has a purpose”
Precisely, which leads to the suspicion that it was used to power a hi-tech civilisation. And no, NOT the ancient Egyptians, but well prior to them. Their copper chisels could not have cut the granite that the pyramids are made of. But you’d have to look at the evidence, and you are far too narrow-minded for that.
As for 9/11, well, of course Saddam had WMD as our governments told us (NOT). And of course bin Laden turned those buildings to dust, all while sitting alone in his cave with only his hi-tech video cassette recorder for company. NOT! But of course the US govt will never tell us what REALLY happened.
As for c-theo ries, that is just an insult that the authorities use to make people wary of countering their puny fictional stories of what actually happened.
Great flood, perhaps this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
even looking at an atlas while i was still at school, it was easy to figure out that the ”great flood” was overspill through the Bosphorous strait.
Yes. It was a real event that people reported widely. It was definitely not a flood of the world.
Well actually there are hundreds. Many are probably due to tunneling of Pleistocene mega fauna.
The vast middle eastern underground cities are of human origin. They were probably built to avoid cataclysm…….its actually a feature of this reality. That huge nuclear engine hanging in our skies can be rather unpleasant at times.
Go back to sleep Norm…nothing to see here.
please supply whereabouts of ”vast underground cities’ cro—then i can sleep easy
oh—and do expand on pliestocene megafauna
what are we discussing here—3ft long termites?
Gigantic badgers Norman…….giant terrifying badgers.
as far as cities go…use google Norman…we covered all this ground like 2 years ago……..prehistoric cities 11 stories deep into the ground and more at many locales.
if we covered this 2 years ago cro
you will have no trouble reminding me where they are.
my memory isn’t what it was—in fact i dont think my memory has ever been what it was.
a world of badgers doesn’t sound so bad—they just want to be left alone to do what they do.
11 stories deep—why iam i exchanging nuttiness on such a nutty concept…like teslas and the giza pyramid
Derinkuyu in Turkey Norman,….for example……pretty solid nuttiness….
google that.
You gotta remember to take your fish oils Norman…it will help retain info in your neural network.
cro
woke up to checked the link—three times, as is my usual way.
history dates it to 1–2k bc–cut into very soft rock–easily done over time with hand tools.—and easily checked.–the landscape makes it obvious anyway.
you appear to be weaving a fantastical yarn about a pre ice age high tech civilisation.—or something of the sort.–you obviously have your own wacky reasons for that
total rubbish–like i said.—you denigrate my comments on the matter—i merely return the compliment.—backed up by recorded observation, not wishful thinking.
i dont do daydreams.
plieocene megafauna—i wouldnt stoop to comment about such utter bs.—i had hoped you were being sarcastic about that.—you were not—wow!!!
like the thought of megabadgers though—but tell me you were joking.
no great flood—no high tech before that—tunneling into tuff requires no high tech at all
“Davidson talks of cyclical cataclysms and reckons the next one is due in the 2030s. We see evidence of this in the Earth’s rapidly weakening electromagnetic field and the coming reversal of the poles. Consequently, in the 2030s the grid will collapse and cars will no longer start. Machines will become statues.”
sounds good to me woooo!!
at least another 2,000 bAU tonights baby!
That’s just typical of your cynicism, davidina. It is of course a well known fact that you are evil beyond belief. The only trouble is, I can’t get anybody to believe it.
Anyway, I relayed your response to my good friends the POTUS and hi-tech guru Elongated Tusk. They decided that you had earned a place in the D.U.M. B. s. Did you ever read Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” ? You will be kidnapped off the street and transported to a secure underground den. It is fitted with CCTV. In it is a small supply of fine food and drink. You will be left on your own and the entrance and exit sealed up. Your ordeal will be livestreamed on a special edition of “Big Brother”. Talk about bread and circuses! You will make such a circus as your bread runs out. LOL! You can at least be proud that the video of your demise will be hugely popular. 😉
No one dark chocolate lover is 100% bad.
Kusch never said, tunnels, “Erdställe”, are for protection of cataclysms. Some facts contradict this idea. Scripture of the church indicate, that people were living permanently underground and that those tunnels had a mechanism to send and receive, apparently also marterial things, not just information.
Kusch claimed to have found artifacts in layers 60.000 years old, that don’t match our ideas, out of place artifacts.
I have some results to share on the concept of low temperature cooking using long term stored heat. My idea was to combine interseasonal heat storage with low temperature cooking and build a cooker that was large enough and stored enough solar heat long enough, to cook for a whole town over winter. This cooker is essentially a tank of hot water, surrounded by thermal insulation, with a tunnel at its base, which would serve as an oven.
All food can be safely cooked at temperatures greater than 68°C, which kills undesirable bacteria. Meat can be tenderised at temperatures between 55 and 65°C. So a temperature of 68°C will tenderise meat and kill bacteria. But for poultry a slightly higher temperature of 74°C is recommended. However, many vegetables require a cooking temperature of 80 – 90°C to properly soften. So I am going to assume a minimum cooking temperature of 90°C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-temperature_cooking
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sous_vide
https://coldgbcprodstd.blob.core.windows.net/cold-content-hosted-files/site-pdfs/GBC_Sous_vide_guide.pdf
Base case. The water tank is a right circular cylinder, 4m in diameter and 4m high. At its base, it sits upon a plinth some 0.5m thick made from aerated concrete blocks, with thermal conductivity k = 0.15W/m.K. The sides and top are insulated by 1m of loose, dry sand with k = 0.3W/m.K.
I had tinkered with the idea of modelling the scenario using a finite element spreadsheet. But I realised after a few screening calcs that a straightforward application of fourier’s law would be only slightly pessimistic, overestimating thermal leakage by a few percent. My assumption is that the tank has a starting temperature of 100°C and the outside temperature is a constant 10°C. Applying fouriers law, I calculated the time taken to drop tank temperature to 90°C in 1°C increments, adjusting the thermal gradient each time.
Results: For the base case, the tank would drop in temperature from 100°C to 90°C in 12.6 days. The heat flux to the environment is 2.036kW at 100°C and 1.81kW at 90°C. Although the base case does not fulfil the design goal of storing summer heat for winter cooking, it could still be useful as a town cooker by absorbing intermittent electricity from a wind turbine. A 12.6 day cooldown period is enough to cover most lulls in wind power.
How do we increase the cooldown time further? By doubling the diameter of the tank, cooldown rate halves, because surface area per unit volume halves. By doubling the thickness of insulation and depth of the plinth, the rate of cooling halves again. By using a more efficient insulating material, cooldown can be extended further. The consecutive effect of each variable on increasing cooldown time (from 100 to 90°C):
Case 1: (base) – 12.6 days.
Case 2: Doubling tank diameter – 25.2 days.
Case 3: Doubling insulation thickness (2m) and plinth thickness (1m) – 50.4 days
Case 4: Swapping sand insulation (k = 0.3) to straw (k = 0.075) and increasing plinth thickness to 2m – 185 days (6 months).
Case 5: A 4m tank diameter, with 2m straw insulation and a 2m plinth – 85.3 days.
Case 4 meets the design requirement, as it would allow a community to cook year round on stored solar heat alone. However, unless the town happens to be large it may not be a desirable option, because the physical size of the tank (8m wide x 8m tall) and its insulation would constitute a significant capital cost.
Case 5 is for a tank with half these dimensions, but with better and thicker insulation. In locations where winter wind power resources are even moderately good, the base case (Case 1) or Case 5 is likely the best option, with the hot water tank provided with top up heat by a wind powered immersion heater. This can be activated intermittently when the wind provides more power than is needed for other applications. A time averaged power of 1.8kWe would be needed to keep the tank above 90°C for Case 1 and 0.27kWe (Case 5).
165F is low heat in a slow cooker (74°C). It turns out that vegetables will cook at that temperature. It just takes twice as long as it would at 100°C.
[url]https://storables.com/articles/how-long-does-it-take-to-cook-vegetables-in-a-slow-cooker/[/url]
So my estimates may have been conservative. I will recalculate tomorrow. I would estimate that even the base I considered above, would take over 1 month to drop from 100°C to 74°C. Case 5 should provide year round cooking if we can allow temperature to drop as low as 74°C.
Peter,
The food you are cooking absorbs some of the heat. You need to account for that.
Yes. In fact that ends up dominating the energy requirements. Let’s say the cooker cooks 1 tonne of food per day, enough for 1000 people. The specific heat of food varies. I take an average to be about 3.7KJ/kg.K.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/specific-heat-capacity-food-d_295.html
Q = 1000 x 3700 x (90-10) = 296MJ or 82kWh per day.
This suggests that there are diminishing returns to making the cooker bigger and adding more insulation. It takes a minimum of 0.082kWh to cook 1 kg of food, because that is the energy needed to heat it from 10°C to 90°C.
The only way to overcome resource shortage is blockchain system.
Track every single molecule using nanotech, which will eliminate waste as those who tend to waster resources will be denied the use of such
No mercy, no slack, no consideration whatsoever, a very harsh but efficient world will enable the top crust of humanity to escape the Great Bottleneck.
Sounds very complex. Likely to use more energy than it saves.
Useful nanotech doesn’t really exist. I should know. The science headlines are just cherry-picked nonsense. Maybe that will change, but I’m skeptical of the chances it will be figured out before time runs out.
“Track every single molecule using nanotech,”
lol
you don’t know what you are talking about.
Arrogant, stupid and evil is not a working combination there Mr. Sociopath
overcoming resources shortage with blockchain—-
i like the sound of that—-
as far as i can discover, the word blockchain has only existed since 2008
and means ”distributed ledger”–or something
this means, in effect, that to increase supplies of, say, oil….we just add as much as we want to the credit side, and oil supplies increase instantly.
i wish i’d thought of it first.
A post singularity world will surprisingly be very boring, almost quiet.
Everything running like machines, no inefficiency
Permanent stasis, no rebellion as human horizons expand in a Type I Civ
Good luck! I am afraid I cannot believe in such a thing.
Post singularity will actually consist of tribesmen spitting out small electronic parts from the cybernetic twat they are eating.
This reality will not tolerate any truly artificial intelligence inside the realm. The AI already running this 3D crap show is a bit of a stickler in that regard.
You’ve heard of it I am sure…the names are legion and its real old testament.
cro
do you ever read back over what you write before pressing ”reply”
kulm
you cannot have a machine without inefficiencies
sorry
“Based on what they claim, Russia and Belarus can now move large forces into this region.”
I am guessing that it is only a matter of time before a wider conflict between Russia (and maybe China) and NATO goes off.
That is probably going to work out really badly for NATO given the technological and military-industrial disparities between the two sides.
Humans gonna do what they gonna do?
https://warnews247.gr/diethnh/europe/ora-mhden-gia-ton-diadromo-suwalki-leukorwsia-dexthkame-epithesh-apo-natoikes-dunameis-sthn-lithouania-anaxaitisame-drones-kamikazi/
Zero hour for the Suwalki Corridor – Belarus: “We were attacked by NATO forces in Lithuania – We intercepted kamikaze drones” (vid)
“They want to take over the Kobrin region”
Important developments are coming to Eastern Europe and the Baltic, as Belarus announced that it intercepted a kamikaze drone attack from the territory of Lithuania. It is the first time that Minsk has officially spoken of an attack by NATO forces stationed in Lithuania.
In their statements, the Belarusian security authorities and the country’s president have implicated Poland, Lithuania and Ukraine. Based on what they claim, Russia and Belarus can now move large forces into this region.
In particular, the head of the Belarusian security service said on Thursday that it had prevented an attack on the capital Minsk by drones launched from Lithuania, Russian state news agencies reported.
“The State Security Committee, in cooperation with colleagues from other law enforcement agencies, recently took a number of strict security measures, which made it possible to prevent a series of drone attacks against targets in Minsk and its suburbs,” the head of the forces emphasized Belarusian KGB security guard Ivan Tertel.
According to him, “the West is creating terrorist nuclei inside Belarus”.
“Hidden terrorist cells are being created on the territory of the country, which will appear simultaneously with the invasion of the country.
Fighters are being trained in Ukraine,” Tertel added.
The head of the Belarusian KGB gave no further details, saying he could not reveal any information yet as the investigations were still ongoing.
Tertel noted that Lithuania has become a base for radicals who, with the support of the Lithuanian formation “Riflemen’s Club”, plan to enter the adjacent regions of Lithuania to carry out terrorist attacks.
Plan to attack Kobrin?
At the same time, the president of Belarus, A. Lukashenko, emphasized that there is a NATO attack plan against his country.
According to him, the plans of the opposition and its Western facilitators are to occupy the Kobrin region of Belarus, declare a new government, turn to NATO and send troops.
“64,000 US troops along with 33,000 more from NATO are permanently stationed in Europe. Of these, 20,000 have been deployed in Poland and the Baltics,” Lukashenko added.
He claimed that 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers were deployed near the border with Belarus and stressed that he is “very sure” that a serious incident is about to happen!
The Belarusian leader said there was a high risk of an incident along his country’s border with Ukraine, according to Russian state news agency RIA.
The Kobrin region is located in the Brest region of Belarus, on the border with Poland.
The First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Security Council of Belarus, Pavel Muraveiko, added that not long ago the KGB arrested representatives of Western intelligence agencies who were recruiting military personnel inside the country to obtain information.
I wonder whether this is really true. I am not convinced NATO forces can do very much.
Funny .
https://www.gulte.com/movienews/223537/a-hilarious-meme-on-natu-natu-golden-globe-win
I sometimes watch Indian movies and I find them very well packaged in comparison with the past, some of them are really very nice.
The part about the dance is for me one the most boring thing on earth.
These parts appear to me also like comedy for children.
I’m sorry, I like India.
I admit that maybe it is because I’m not accastomed to it.
Put on your sandals, shit in front of a mosque on a quran and try again.
?
I worked for my college movie group. An Indian student called us up to check on an upcoming showing. “Is movie black-and-white or colorful?” He didn’t want to waste any time on monochromatic entertainment.
That’s why its called the movies lidia.
NATO= No Action Talk Only .
One wonders how long a infinite printing press will last in a finite world.
A unprecedented 7 trillion of treasuries rolled over in the last three months.
Who bought them?
“foreign buyers”
If China Japan and Saudi were buyers (they are not) and doubled their holdings that would be less than three trillion.
Where is the source of the money that the 7 trillion in treasury rollover purchases came from.
As we see from Credit Suisse and SVB the western financial institutions are at their saturation limit of treasuries.
Really in a world of infinite money only one source the infinite printing press can create the money needed to backstop the treasuries. Control P and Voila Treasury buyers sprout up like tulips in the Caymans.
No organic economy in the world can support the US treasury debt and the deficit spending. Some portion of it can be supported by world organic economy’s GDP but in its entirety it is largely a function of control p now and just like the western financial institutions they are saturated.
No one took their money and ran. They all rerolled 7T over into 4.5% treasuries for 20 years. Or control p. Those are the two alternatives.
Expect this conflict between the amount of finite resources in the world and infinite debt to become more pronounced because even as twisted and artificial as the GDP numbers have become they bear a relationship to organic economy’s and are not capable of supporting infinite debt.
Yes. “foreign buyers”. Not China not Japan not Russia not Saudi. Perhaps it was Cambodia? Thats it. Cambodian financial institutions based in the Caymans.
Perhaps this will effect current events more than politicians eager to fund their Ukrainian and Israeli constituents at some point.
Control P on a Macintosh sends files to the printer. Perhaps in this case as well.
A currency regime serves interests. Mostly not yours.
Blast, in the past I’ve only ever seen CtrlP refer to QE being CB created credit applied to accounts of primary dealers to purchase their trading stocks of treasuries.
I would assume that purchases through the Caymans were not being done by CBs, but by credit, equally as fictitiously backed though, by private commercial banks extending loans in what’s referred to as the usual course of business. This funding could originate through the carry trade and fx to USD, or in USD loans created on the balance sheets of US domiciled or offshore eurodollars or where ever. nothing necessarily US based about it at all.
The impact of the process, however, apart from funding US deficits and holding down treasury yields, is dilutionary on the worth of savings in USD
That’s what i said.
Effect is more inflation, as long as the process works.
It seems like banks are running out of money. I just got an e-mail asking me for deposits! I thought that was unusual.
Agree with you . It is all sleight of hand and dark entities . Here is list . Ireland, Luxembourg , Caymans , UK etc .
https://inside.com/daily/posts/major-foreign-holders-of-u-s-treasury-securities-as-of-july-2023-394176
I find the video offensive; sexualization of everything is not good for society.
For all its faults, civilization is better than pure biology.
Dennis L.
“The Dark Ages may return, the Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of Science, and what might now shower immeasurable material blessings upon mankind, may even bring about its total destruction. Beware, I say; time may be short.”
—Winston Churchill
“If the stories we tell can be boiled down to a handful of basic plots, then the danger of hubris must be one of them. It is there in the Old Testament: “Pride goes before destruction,” the Proverbs tell us, and “a haughty spirit before a fall.” It is there in the Greek myths: Icarus who flew his wax wings too close to the Sun, Phaeton who rode his golden chariot too close to the ground. And it is there in the English literary canon: Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dr. Faustus’s deal with the devil, Jay Gatsby’s green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock. Cautionary tales like these, where ambitious human beings get too far ahead of themselves, are among our all-time favorites.
“The moral, though, is that we fail to see the proverbial forest for the trees. In fact, these stories all share the same underlying cause: the relentless pursuit of growth.”
Susskind, Daniel. Growth: A History and a Reckoning . Harvard University Press. 2024
That is a great quote from Daniel Susskind.
The Advanced Nations seem to be very much into pride and haughty behavior.
Yes, that does seem the case. Too many policy makers, not enough makers. Making things is very hard, putting together a group which can make things is even more difficult. Amish do just that, very little policy, nice furniture and well trained horses.
Not an argument for the Amish way of life, an observation of trust in a society which makes/grows things.
Dennis L.
None of the stories apply to the landed gentry
Hubris does not apply to gods.
It is just fake story by priests to discourage people from thinking independently
LOL of course you would think that.
But this is one of the clearest patterns in human history.
Human beings with a language module on top of their monkey brains think the stories they tell themselves are true when at best they are useful stories.
People have some short term success and they use that success to isolate themselves from negative feedback (stabilizing feedback) and their delusions grow and grow. They disregard inconvenient facts and repeat the increasing deranged stories to themselves until the consequences of their hubris destroys the foundation of their initial success.
for example idiots who think a Type 1 civilization is possible and desirable.
Hubris has always seemed to me to exemplify devine retribution. Whether one takes this as “gospel” or not depends on one’s personal philosophy
some we do miss
“… fantasies of justice, vengeance and a purified world.”
Xabier
Just came across this channel on YouTube…Gail will find it useful…
The BIGGEST oilfield on the planet – Ghawar, Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field is the largest oil field in the world. With recoverable reserves of between 67 – 92 Billion barrels along with substantial gas reserves. We take a quick look at the field structure and production history and put the vast scale of this field into some context. We also describe how production varies across Ghawar and explain some of the geology behind these variations.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=juh0_Tyzb4A
Has a library of others examined …what a handy resource…learned much already
Thanks! Back in my Oil Drum days, we had many articles about Ghawar.
On the topic of cooking using long-term stored heat. It requires combining two technologies:
1. Interseasonal heat storage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seasonal_thermal_energy_storage
2. Low temperature cooking (60 – 90°C):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-temperature_cooking
Both technologies are demonstrated and the second is centuries old. But cooking in this way using heat stored for months, is only workable on a large scale. The tank or masonry heat store needs to be well insulated and have low surface area per unit volume, i.e. it must be big. It wouldn’t work for a single house. As I said before, it is a public work that requires cooperation at a town scale. Most of the solutions that might allow us to live well on renewables are like that. That wind powered laundry I talked about, is only workable if enough people pool their resources to build it. In much the same way, a town can pool resources to build a public swimming bath. But it wouldn’t be practical for many individual houses to have these.
The way most technologies are proven is by making small scale models and then gradually scaling up. The typical scale-up of technologies (at least as used in the petroleum industry) seems to involve four levels of scale up, to work out all of the things that go wrong.
If you are using a technique to cook food, I would like to see an actual demonstration of this technique and how it would work in practice. What kinds of foods would be cooked? In what timeframe could it be re-used? (Multiple meals per day would be needed.) Would it provide a low-cost affordable solution?
Hay box……
How to Build a Solar Oven
By D.S. Halacy and Jr. ©1959 by D.S. Halacy, Jr., and originally published by the Macmillan Company as a chapter of the book, Fun With the Sun. Reprinted by permission of the author.
The “greenhouse” effect is well known to those who grow plants in such structures and also to those of us who have left the windows of an automobile rolled up on a warm, sunshiny day. The rays of the sun go through the glass well enough, but the reflections of longer wavelength are unable to bounce back out of the car. The result is aptly described as resembling an oven. And that is just what we’re going to build: a solar oven that will do a real job of cooking on a clear day, even in winter.
One aim of solar scientists is to provide a means of cooking for those countries in which fuel is scarce or expensive. Dr. Maria Telkes, a well-known experimenter in the field, has designed such an oven, which she feels might be mass produced at a reasonable price. Our design is copied from the Telkes unit, which has been demonstrated in foreign lands.
Basically the solar oven consists of a box for the food and a glass cover to admit and trap heat inside the container. The box shown is made from galvanized iron but could as well have been aluminum for lighter weight. The reflector panels are of aluminum.
Besides the sheet metal parts, we need a piece of double-strength window glass, a sealing strip for the pane and 3 handles. We will insulate the box with spun glass
Published on Jan 1, 1974 Mother Earth News
MEN also published an article on a Hay Box in 1980!
Rediscover Haybox Cooking
By Bonnie M. Arnold
Heat the dish to boiling in a Dutch oven (or a similar heat-retaining pot) and nestle it into a hay-packed box. RIGHT: When the pot is in place, cover it with a hay-filled pillow for additional insulation, close the box up, and wait.
Great stuff back then 1974 and 1980
“But will it heat up my pot noodles and fry my chips?” says your average football hooligan.
But your tea will taste just fine..
BTW…don’t see any of these around ever…so much for a good idea..
Wonder how many actually worked in villages in other countries like Peter is working on in his project.
Most really desire a open flame 🔥 or electric oven
I would like to see what that means in practice. I get that you can cook a pig in a pit, but the heat is stored for a day or so by making a fire, and transferring hot rocks to the pit. How can my village in italy or Russia store heat from summer to winter? This sounds like the guys who say we should use the Brayton cycle instead of the Carnot cycle in ICE. Theoretically it is fine, in practice not.
I am writing a spreadsheet programme to model how long a hot water tank will retain heat with various thickness and type of insulation when exposed to outside air. I will let you know what I find.
I wonder what kind of system is required to support building a hot water tank? What share of today’s hot water tanks are built completely inside the US, with materials from inside the US?
Complexity has a real cost, but it tends to get lost in a calculation of a small part of the system. It always looks a whole lot more beneficial than it really is.
Some years ago our hot water tank failed. It had lasted 35 years. I pulled it apart and found all the parts had been manufactured in Australia, most in Melbourne. No electronics. Mostly quite simple casting, rolling and welding technologies. Gave me hope that it could be done again, but gas was plentiful then.
that will never work. Only underground. You can store cold in the form of ice and it will last until next year. Storing heat is far more problematic, specially if it needs to be above 50C.
From a physics standpoint there is no cold only a absence of heat. Given uniformity of transfer mechanism (convection, conduction,radiation) and transfer quantity the heat transferred is dependent on delta. The degree soil is an insulator of heat or a conductor of heat is largely dependent on moisture content. Working for or against you depending. Wet soil both conducts heat readily and holds large amount of heat and as such is a very efficient heat sink much better than water alone for instance. Frozen soil not near as much.
Earth from a practical view is primarily a heat sink and not easily but not impossible to make a heat source.
Whats important is delta. If you have a square foot of earth at 70degrees and the surrounding soil is 50 degrees (reasonable from mean soil temperatures) the heat transfer would be the same if the soil was 90 degrees and the soil 70 degrees. There is no such thing as cold in physics only heat.
If you ever fought forest fires you will observe that yes large amounts of heat can and will be stored in soil for relatively long periods of time.
There is always a lot of heat in soil relative to total absence of heat. Even in permafrost keeping your beer cold in your makeshift cooler up north.
From the perspective of using a large mass of soil as heat sink to provide uniform shelter temperatures now is the time of year that is less than optimum as you wait for the huge energy mass to catch up to the more desirable temperatures experienced outside at times during a 24 cycle. If your mean soil temperature is 50 and you like 70 uninsulated soil will always be a sink. Insulate that soil and its a whole different ball game. A ball game that has wins and losses (pun not intended).
Cold does not store better than heat because there is no such thing as cold. There is only heat, mechanism of transfer, storage capacity of materials, and Delta.
Excellent points. We can work around too hot surroundings by living in underground shelters.
Physics is an attempt at a description of how the natural physical material world works, functions or operates at its basic and fundamental levels.
As such, there are various possible ways to describe what’s going on. You can argue that there is no such thing as cold if you wish, just as you can argue that the Sun doesn’t really rise in the morning.
But coldness, just like sunrise, is something we can experience and is a very useful concept in everyday life, even for physicists, who need to take care not to dip their hand into a vat of liquid nitrogen.
And you can argue that does not store better than heat because there is no such thing as cold, but you can’t argue that there is no such thing as cold storage. The science of cryogenics would be difficult to practice without it.
I suppose it might be possible to eliminate the words cold, coldness, colder, coldest, and words from the same stable, replacing them with words such as unhot, unhotness, double-plus unhot, etc., and then perhaps you wouldn’t feel the need to point out to other people that cold doesn’t exist.
On the other hand, somebody else may come along and point out that heat doesn’t really exist either because it’s really just motion at the molecular level, and then we could dispense with heat pumps in addition to cold storage and life would be so much simpler.
cold is stored better because of the heat fusion of ice. Yes, I know about your points. I taught thermodynamics at the college level. it does not work as well with heat, water vapor is low density. Also in my northern latitudes freezers could store cold, using tanks of water+some alcohol based molecule that freezes at the desired -14C or -19C. but it would require a fairly large fan that is activated on cold nights, so I assume not a structure for the post civilization world.
Withnail wrote: ‘Well that is false, hydraulic cranes were in use in England in 1846.’
My point exactly. Hydraulic systems were workable even with mid-Victorian technology. Those early systems operated at pressures between a few bar and 50bar. They were cumbersome, relying on cast iron pipes and steam engines to generate power. Power density was on the low side. Hydraulics didn’t really take off until after WW1, with the development of high speed centrifugal pumps and polymers that were both strong and flexible. By that point, electricity was already widely available and easier to install for fixed applications. But electrical systems are inherently more complex, require some exotic materials and involve long manufacturing supply chains. Hydraulics may be easier if we need to make mechanical devices on a smaller scale and the consumers are clise to the energy source.
Withnail wrote: For example, the people of a town need to be able to clean their clothes.
How does the town exist? How do they make the clothes and feed themselves? What jobs do the people do? How do they heat homes?’
One problem at a time.
Withnail wrote: ‘We could build town bath houses, cook houses and various factories that work on the same principle.
Well no, no we couldn’t. There are essentially no options as to what happens during collapse. And what happens does not involve buildings being constructed. What happens is that the former towns and cities are abandoned.’
That depends where you are and how completely the system declines. But the collapse of the Roman empire was not the end of civilisation. It marked the beginning of European nations. There were still towns in Europe during the dark ages and they were anything but dark. New buildings continued to be constructed on a smaller scale than before. If individual Greek city states could build public works using pre-Roman technology, then it isn’t going to be beyond the capabilities of people in western countries in the middle of this century.
Collapse will no doubt vary around the world. What works one place will probably not work other places.
I just hope there is enough fodder to feed the horses around those cities and towns. The fires we set in them will be a great spectacle.
What horses?
During collapse every large catchable animal is likely to be eaten, because the population of humans is so vast everywhere, and there are billions of guns existing to kill to every animal found.
Our ancestors between 120,000 and 12,000 years ago sent many mega fauna into extinction and there were only around 4 million of them at most. Now 8 billion people with many guns will be trying to feed their families in a world of much less megafauna…
Not quite everywhere.
Here in Australia the human populations are not vast, although cities and towns are certainly densely populated.
The catchable (or shootable) animals nearby are few and guns also are relatively few.
So the ‘collapse’ applies to humans and their current BAU in these areas.
Soylent Green may be the only option for them.
However vast areas away from cities and towns are swarming with animals, with culling having difficulty controlling numbers even now.
When culling ceases due to no fuel for helicopters and for other transport and humans are occupied otherwise, many of these animals will spread over farmland and closer to what’s left of cities and towns.
So the few survivors may get a chance at these animal after a while.
Even now I am seeing deer getting closer ( they are not easy to cull in their terrain).
I am seeing rabbits again now too, after they were ‘wiped out’ in my area about ten years ago.
Promising for me as I can catch rabbits and don’t need a gun. (not allowed to have one anyway).
In other areas the type of animal depends on the country type.
There are horses in the snowy mountains, camels in the desert, pigs in all sorts of places ( and they become a hazard to humans), deer in the cooler hilly areas. Probably lot of other species now and in future.
So BAU will end. but human survival will be possible.
Many humans living in the bush now could survive.
Guns may fail or run out of ammo, but a transition to bows or traps is not difficult (for country people anyway).
These survivors will need to rebuild their lifestyle in their own way, and I suggest that some will succeed.
(Ah, no smart phones, no internet etc, etc, sounding good already).
Pedro , welcome to somebody down under . The problem’s of Australia and New Zealand are special . The first problem is that though Australia is huge the central area is basically a desert . All population about 80-85% live along the coast . The water situation is terrible in the cities . Here is Perth for you
”Western Australia’s Integrated Water Supply Scheme delivers 279 billion litres of water to 1.5 million people in Perth, the Goldfields and parts of the South West. This water comes from three main sources: groundwater, surface water and desalination.”
This is not much better than Riyadh or Dubai. I can give you the same info for Sydney and Melbourne, but you can do your own research. Australia is at the forefront of climate change. The weather is becoming hotter and drier. The Murray – Darling basin is drying up and there is already a decline in wheat production. Second all of Australia’s fossil fuels have to be imported. Third Australia is an island nation and has a higher risk of collapse ( read Tainter) as globalization (trade) declines.
Don’t worry about the animal population ( they will sort it out ala Darwin) , it is the human species that has created an artificial habitat courtesy of cheap fossil fuels . When the FF declines so will the human species . It is inevitable . Of course the species will not go to ”zero” but 26.1 million all crowded on the coast will not . Take care and be well . Just in case you may not be aware please visit the website of Matt Mushalik , my go to guy for the FF and other matters in Australia .
https://crudeoilpeak.info/
I am afraid you are right.
Australia does have some coal and natural gas, but it is declining in quantity. It is difficult to make a profit on the exports. Oil supply is way down also.
Australia is not big enough to have much industry of its own. It depends a lot on imports, particularly from China.
So pleasing to see fellow Aussies on this site. In Melbourne?
Actually wanted to several commenters on my previous post, but no ‘reply’ options?
To Raviuppal4,
Your long discourse on Australia seems to directed at me.
I said – ‘here in Australia’.
In fact I have been here since 1957, have lived, worked, prospected, toured etc in all parts Australia so I don’t need any research.
The link describes the condition affecting a number of states.
I am aware of what’s going on in my own country and now reside in the state of Tasmania which seems to offer the best option for the future.
To Craig,
No, not Melbourne, North East Tasmania on the edge of the forest area.
To Gail,
Yes the prospects are poor for continued BAU.
That why I’m in Tasmania.
Yes, the oil will stop, industry also, so BAU will stop, BUT just over a hundred years ago this state had hydro, railways, engineering works and a small amount of useful minerals.
It can survive in the short term (food, water, timber) and progress long term
without oil or Chinese imports as long as a new manner of living is devised.
I.e. Not a capitalist system again, none of the other mistakes which currently burden us.
A major Job which may not occur.
I would take on the job of benevolent dictator and do it, but too old now, Sorry.
The sea close also provides fish.
Here 100 miles from NYC the estates have 1000 acres of grass and grain to feed the horses. The hunt club is doing fine the hounds are kept at a kennel not far from my house on a quiet night I can hear the hounds.
The idea that the mobs from NYC will make it through the state police, the county police, the town police, and the estate security is unlikely. The horses can rest at easy.
As to the fires, yes please, clean out the mid tier between Manhattan and the country side. Open it up for productive use like farming. The future looks bright for the owning class.
surely the police itself will eat the horses.
The former police will be the ones to worry about. A trained, armed gang with at least some level of pre-established group trust.
In Russia other businessmen behind closed doors will advise you to never hire a former soldier or policeman. Although current policemen.are easily one order of magnitude less corruptible than 20 years ago, but we all know it can and will revert eventually.
But the collapse of the Roman empire was not the end of civilisation.
It was the total collapse of a civilisation.
If individual Greek city states could build public works using pre-Roman technology
There’s no evidence the Romans had any better technology than the Greeks. The Greeks had aqueducts, theatres, agoras and all the rest. The Roman and Greek worlds merged well before the common era anyway.
There were still towns in Europe during the dark ages and they were anything but dark.
Name one
You are wrong, not a total collapse. Except for maybe in Britain. Some examples:
The Romans created surplus energy in their latifundia to run their army and establish control. This control deteriorated under the migration waves of the Germanics, who, for some time, substituted the Roman Army, before it fell into seperate states.
Many modern cities go back to Medieval towns and Roman camps and gatherings, for example Vienna, Cologne, Valencia, Salamanca, Augsburg, Genua – to name a few.
The fall of Carnuntum was a local management failure, while Vienna emerged from a camp into a Middle Aged city, without prior destruction.
Hainbourg though, former seat of the Roman imperor, today is an unimportant little town.
This development from a Roman settlement into a Middle Age town can especially be seen in France.
Of course many cities were older than the Romans and go back to Phoenicians and Celts.
This loss of military control has been attributed to climate changes, that affected the latifundia, to an overstretching of the Reich, and to a loss of discipline and selfrestriction of the Roman elite.
What seems interesting, the emerging areas of the Middle Ages rise, where frutiful, undepleated soil and woods were available – less in the old Roman Reich, probably it has been depleated already, but in Middle and North Europe.
The economic rise of the Middle Ages is explained by the growing availability of metal tools, that allowed permanent agriculture and the establishment of control and order by knights and as such property.
Metal tools at that time were made by the use of charcoal.
When the woods were depleated, the coal age started.
If the Middle Age cities were dark or not depends on expectations. The University of Salamanca is amazing. Carnuntum, which is a museum today, contains all the Roman technologies and was much more compfortable than any Celtic or Viking settlement – but still on a very low level. The amazing objects found in Greece and Rome cannot be found in the European provinces. The main achievement in carnuntum was a public bath. The Middle Ages built monasteries, cathedrals and churches way superiour and more complex.
There are no clear cuts between Roman Reich and Middle Ages. The inheritage is manifold, think of Roman law, still the basis of most European law systems. A lot of European nobility in the Middle Ages go back to Roman elites. I don’t see any large cataclysmus, it is more a deterioration. Suddenly foreign troops run over Rome.
The degree of integration was much less than today. If Diesel would be unavailable, agriculture and logistics would stop. If larger parts of our econony desintegrated, nuclear and chemical waste would soon become a problem. The fall of the Roman Reich had none of these consequences.
i think you may have missed a fundamental point Peter…..
old civilisations collapsed, and new ones arose. agreed…but those new civilisations still had untapped energy resources to draw on, most of europe was still virgin forest, and the heat source to build/make things was wood and charcoal.
the americas were unknown.
we’ve now effectively run out of what we would need to start over—no civilisation can exist without surplus energy. The more surplus available, the higher the level of civilisation.
The Romans used slave labour for that, and looted what they wanted. As did many others.
we can’t do that anymore. (though some are still trying).
Not plugging my book—but that’s precisely why I titled it “The End of More” when I wrote it 10 years ago.
and btw–Medieval towns (as were Roman and greek) were certainly dark, and awful places—the only light was the naked flame, and glass was too expensive to make windows
Michael Hudson has a new interview on Dialogue Works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inFlC2LjyRs
Towards the end he discusses financialization as in the US and compares it to China. I do not disagree with him and am liking his approach more and more. Perhaps it is time for the US to give up spreading chaos.
Economics: Wonder if demand cannot create its own supply. Next month Starship launches again, more and more autonomous robots with incredible ability are appearing, Musk has put more satellites in orbit than any other entity in perhaps the entire hx of the spacefaring. For what it is worth, I am not excited about putting all this stuff in orbit, it is an experiment with our spaceship earth.
We can explore the solar system now, all we need is the metaphorical cubic mile of Pt, it is out there somewhere and transportation once found is easy, overcome momentum. With robots manufacturing/refining in space becomes easy, infinite energy, not exactly green, but fusion.
Life in the country is hard and expensive. Living without electricity is not pleasant, automobile travel has many advantages. We will let go of some of the past and we will live in the coming future.
Watch robotic farming, it will be organic and my bet is electrical with solar used at the source. Cost of a fuel cell is currently $76/kW net, 8000 hours of durability, if Pt, recycling should not be that hard. energy.gov claims 4,100 hour 120,000mile durability of fuel cell system in vehicles. I like the idea. A tractor which can farm is basically $1,000 per hp, so 500 hp is $500K. The maintenance is awful. Biodiesel is a mess.
Demand creating its own supply, catchy phrase don’t you think?
Dennis L.
The Michael Hudson interview is very good. Hudson points out that the money ostensibly used to support Ukraine nearly all comes back to the United States, but help provide funding for US armament makers.
Hudson also says that Putin says, “We aren’t fighting Ukraine; we are fighting NATO.” If bombs or other warfare starts to come from other NATO members, we will retaliate against those states.
There is an automatic transcription of the video shown at the right hand of the screen.
I see that at 11:16 Hudson says:
” What’s Europe going to do Europe is already been defeated by the United States and is now an economic colony of the United States at what point will the Europeans see that?”
At 12:24 Hudson says
” The Ukrainians don’t own the Farmland anymore you’re referring to
12:30
the Farmland has been sold to Blackstone and to George Soros and to
12:37
other people. Oakland Institute every few months writes a whole
12:43
report on how the Americans have built Ukraine. The Americans have said they want to take Ukraine is to dump.
. . .
13:09
and now the world will be even more dependent on American grain.
Sorry, this is only part of it.
God Bless America..the Ownership Society…
At times it is rather difficult to exist in such a Matrix of allusion and the mindset of fellow citizens that uphold the idea of the United States as defending democracy, ect
Life, Liberty, and Property. What is so hard with that. Some have no property. They die or become the most servile of slaves.
“A few years ago I sought to update my breakdown of the balance of payments to update the impact of U.S. military spending and foreign aid. But the Commerce Department’s
Table 5 from its balance of payments data had been changed in such a way it no longer reveals the extent to which foreign aid generates a transfer of dollars from foreign countries to the United States, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. I phoned the statistical division responsible for collecting these statistics and in due course reached the technician responsible for the numbers. “We used to publish that data,” he explained,
“but some joker published a report showing that the United States actually made money off the countries we were aiding. It caused such a stir that we changed the accounting
format so that nobody can embarrass us like that again.” I realized that I was the joker who had been responsible for the present-day statistical concealment, and that it would
take a Congressional request to get the Commerce and State Departments to replicate the analysis that still was being made public in the years in which I wrote Super Imperialism. “?
https://files.libcom.org/files/Michael%20Hudson%20-%20Super%20Imperialism%20-%20New%20Edition_%20The%20Origin%20and%20Fundamentals%20of%20U.S.%20World%20Dominance%20(2003).compressed.pdf
Good work. Give them no peace.
Dennis, I assume you are talking about mining platinium group metals from asteroids for use on Earth. This won’t be easy. Many asteroids contain a nickel, iron, chromium mixture in condrules that is a natural form of stainless steel. This contains 20ppm platinum group metals. Getting even 1t of platinum from this source implies a lot of mining and ore processing in difficult conditions, a long way from Earth. Setting that operation up requires that we have a plan for mining objects in zero g, have ore processing facilities that work in zero or low g and have a transportation system that can get the stuff back to Earth.
All of that means a lot of equipment lifted out of Earth’s gravity and transported to said asteroid. It is technically possible, but I don’t think it helps to downplay how difficult it would really be. And as soon as you start shipping a lot of Pt metals back to Earth, the market will be swamped, crushing the price and your profit margins along with it. There needs to be a very solid economic and technical model for space mining before most investors will take it seriously. It is something that no one has yet done and very easy for people to dismiss as some kind of fantasy because it hasn’t been done and sounds fantastic.
Peter, don’t know enough to definitely say it is possible, don’t have a clue what is available in space, but it can’t be that different than earth. Prospecting should be much easier as can produce robot explorers in space with robots. Transportation should be easier as momentum problem only, virtually zero friction.
In this scenario, limiting material on earth is Pt, with very cheap Pt can make fuel cells, H from sunlight. No exogenous heat to earth other than what comes from the sun currently.
Gail has convinced me electrical transmission has too many problems, use the electricity locally, hydrogen for short term storage to minimize issues with permeability of H through most metals. Even the most radical of conservatives cannot have problems with water as an end product.
I know it is going to be bumpy, but we appear to be unique in the universe, we are meant to be here and TINA. It took the universe 27B years to get us this far; even if it is a game I don’t think the players have the patience to start a new game.
Best bet, Starship and a cubic mile of Pt. With that much Pt, it should scale, there would be no exogenous heat on earth, and Pt should recycle easily which also helps with NPV.
Dennis L.
I will just say that it is far different from earth.
“And as soon as you start shipping a lot of Pt metals back to Earth, the market will be swamped, crushing the price and your profit margins along with it.”
The profit comes from making solar uninterruptable and the waste product heat which as already on earth as radiant energy and water which probably would be potable with minimal effort.
Dennis L.
Dennis
in your starship fantasies, you go on about demand and production being infinite
but you never mention infinite consumption
how does that work?
I don’t think infinite consumption is possible on a finite planet.
We will see how Starship works in the near future, next launch in May.
Time will tell.
Dennis L.
The PPS ( Petroleum Production System) is a closed loop system consisting of producers , pipelines/ tankers and refiners . The refineries are the weak link in the system . A comment on POB on this subject .
CARNOT
IGNORED
04/24/2024 at 2:07 pm
Dear Dennis,
I am not sure of your background but I believe you are an academic. No problem with that but from experience academia has an unrealistic idea of the world of refining. Refining is a low margin business; the money is typically made upstream. Refining is a volume business; margins are typically < $10 per barrel. Some products have negative margins.
A new build hydrocracker would cost upwards of $2 billion for a 60 kbd (3.2 million tonnes/annum) unit. In a diesel once through mode the unit might produce around 1.5 million tonnes of diesel and jet fuel. The other products would include HC naphtha and unconverted oil (UCO) . The hydrogen consumption would be of the order of 230 SCUF per barrel (1360 nM3/M3) i.e. a lot. A hydrogen production unit would also be required, either by gasification, POX or SMR.
In other words lots of money. A very simple calculation
Investment $2 billion
Payout 10 years
Cost per annum $200 million
On feed flow = $200/3.2 = $ 62.50/mt ($9.2/bbl)
On positive products 1.5 million tonnes(jet and diesel)
200/1.5 = $166/ mt ($24.41 per bbl)
This ecxludes the cost of money. No refiner would invest in a project like this especially as the outlook is for for high cost of carbon ( in the west) and a so called net zero target for emissions.
This is the sugar coated candy version.
In other words the refiners will keep their hands in their long pockets. So would I.
I do not need to go further.
Conclusion: No one will build a new refinery in the West.
Yes and the oil that comes from fracking has to be shipped out of the country because the U.S does not have the refinery capability to do it here. That is why drill baby drill is so stoopid. The U.S will soon be in decline…..high oil prices are not inflationary!!! I can’t believe people on here still think that. All you have to do is look at 2008 what did high oil prices do ?
The plan is to put us in a great depression easier to control the people.
Good to hear. I was afraid some communist Canadian would get some “big ideas” about oil sands crude…..
The sooner Canuckistan enters the fully Dark Age the better.
Cheap low cost nuclear plants to make hot water to harvest the tar sands. 50 years of production to go. It will not be left to some communist Canadian stoner. It will be done by the global capitalists.
Same for directing the water resources of western Canada to western US. For the common good.
I am sure Trudeau has camps for trouble making Communist Canadians.
I look forward to eating vax free Canadian Bison or is it Buffalo or are they the same? Do you ship to the US?
>i>Cheap low cost nuclear plants to make hot water to harvest the tar sands.
Contradiction in terms.
I agree.
This idea has been looked at for a long time. Nuclear plants last 60 years. I am doubtful the extraction of the oil from nearby in the Oil Sands would last that long. Nuclear plants are built with a huge amount of concrete and steel. These have a huge environmental impact. We would need to import much of the steel from China.
Look at the report linked yesterday about the making of steel. It also mentions concrete.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/
Its not the communist Canadians that will go into camps. Trudeau loves them…their his kinda people.
We may see a burgeoning civil war begin when Trudeau cancels the upcoming election however.
I don’t ship meat stateside. I keep it in province….and if possible, inside of 50 miles.
I have no faith it bitcoin…..only mild faith in gold….but I think there is a booming future in pemmican and jerky……packed in rawhide and shipped via horse and camel back.
I will accept payment in slaves, high quality axle bearings, things that kill at distance and light weight drones………I can be convinced of other things occasionally with aged whiskey and packaged salt.
🙂
Remember the now deceased oil man Is T. Boone Pickens writing the same during that period stating the Continental US as drilled like Swiss Cheese and no new refinery will ever be built… promoted an idea to use natural gas as a bridge fuel to tie us over the transition…really don’t recall much of his proposal…but back then this Oil Man saw the hand writing on the wall…you know it’s common knowledge now among the players. Still amazed others are clueless.
RIP T Boone ..Go Okies
“In other words the refiners will keep their hands in their long pockets. So would I.”
yup, no need for building any more new refineries.
just keep maintaining/repairing the existing one$.
should keep bAU going in The Core for a couple more decades.
it’s all good.
Should of, Would of, Could of…what I used to say under my breath on the golf course after scoring a triple boogie on an easy par 4 hole playing the senior tees.
We shall see…I doubt it…but it’s nice to dream and hope
Dennis says he is a dentist. In other words a mechanic.
No need for these expensive toys , Non discretionary spending will be the first to go .Here on the forum are aware of that .
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/apple-slashes-vision-pro-shipment-projections-50-demand-craters
The thing with VR headsets is that the hardware side is very good now and has been for years. better screens and more pixels, the usual deal.
You can churn those things out in factories but not the software. It’s a titanic effort to make a game for those things, to do a really good one you woiuld be talking hundreds of millions. And the userbase is far too small to pay what such a game would have to cost.
That is a good point. No one wants to bother making a good game for a small user base. I hadn’t thought that through.
And you would be competing with other extremely popular non VR games like GTA V. Nobody is going to bet against that game.
It seems like all of these video game toys compete with each other. This is more expensive than others, besides being difficult to use.
I would hate to be in Cairo, Lagos or New Delhi .
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2024/04/cities-doom-loops-are-even-worse-than.html
https://endoftheamericandream.com/which-major-city-will-completely-collapse-first-los-angeles-chicago-or-new-york-city/
I think Charles Hugh Smith nails the problem on the head. This is part of his argument:
I remember reading in the 1970s that big cities are more and more inefficient the bigger they grow. This was after the oil crisis of the 1970s and urban sprawl was also coming into question, so there you have it. Big cities too inefficient, urban sprawl unsustainable, one my simply follow the other down the tube so to speak. Best of luck everyone! Have a nice day!
Gebhard von Blucher was one of the leaders who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo.
He was given all the titles and buried at at Krieblowitz, in Silesia.
Fast vorwart 130 years, Soviet troops took that town, which the Poles renamed Krobielowice (guess they didn’t have a better name for it) and blasted open Blucher’s tomb.
His skeleton was taken out and the Soviet troops played soccer with his skull.
I forgot to mention that when the late Dr Firth had said Europe was saved. Yes, Europe was saved so the Eastern Hordes could play soccer with one of the ‘savior”s skull.
A passing Polish priest, seeing Blucher’s bones being scattered like that of a lowly soldier, reburied him in a common cemetary along with Polish peasants who who had died in that area where he still resides with people he probably did not consider to be humans in his lifetime.
With the rapid Indianization of the no-longer-great Britain, it seems Wellesely’s tomb will suffer the same fate, to be renamed the Tipu Sultan tomb in a century with a piece of whatever to memorialize the Mysore tyrant.
Europe’s energy was so vast and so expanding but the British killed them off one way or another, all the way to 1943 to promote Churchill’s hare brained idea of attacking the Mediterranean (for the 2nd time he failed at that sector), when there were no Atlantic Wall and no major German presence in northern France in 1943.
The ‘Asians’ in no-longer-Great Britain don’t give a rat’s ass about British tradition, like this movie Green Knight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNOU7LHeAno
When a clearly Indian child plays with the crown of England (the actress’s name is Ruth Patel or Rose Patel, both of them revealing her origins easily )
Such is how years of Balance of Power shit ends.
don’t give a rat’s ass about British tradition,
Let me just clarify that one for you Kulm. it might help you to one day become one of the elite so that you can carry out your plan for global genocyde.
Native British people (the ones like me) are not called British except on their passports. UK is interchangeably used as well. Nobody cares. We are English, Irish , Scottish or Welsh.
The only exception is Northern Ireland (Ulster) where the Protestants are wildly enthusiastic about being specifically British and the Catholic side considers themselves to be Irish.
Most persons in England identified as ‘British only’ in the 2021 Census with a marked drop in the ‘English only’ response.
That was likely simply because ‘British’ was put top of the list of options, and most persons probably do not give it that much thought/ stress about it.
Neither category is entirely accurate anyway as the English are mainly a British/ Anglo-Saxon/ France Iron Age mix. And culturally it is more complex yet. ‘British’ is probably adequate.
Persons are obviously free to identify however they like in UK, ‘it is a free country’ and all that.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/culturalidentity/ethnicity/bulletins/nationalidentityenglandandwales/census2021#:~:text=More%20than%20half%20of%20the,the%20%22English%22%20only%20identity.
…. “British”, “English” or “Welsh” only identities
More than half of the usual resident population (54.8%, 32.7 million) chose a “British” only national identity in 2021, which is a rise of 35.8 percentage points from 19.1% (10.7 million) in 2011. The opposite trend was seen for the “English” only identity. This fell by 42.8 percentage points, from 57.7% (32.4 million) in 2011 to 14.9% (8.9 million) in 2021.
While the increase in number of usual residents describing their national identity as “British” and the fall in the number describing their national identity as “English” may partly reflect true change, it is most likely to be a result of the changes to the question structure where “British” became the top response option in 2021 for England only.
We are saved, as the master resource is normalizing. BAU baby.
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/cocoa-drops-most-april-2009-some-losses-recovered-muti-day-volatility-rollercoaster
Hurray!
I think IC would collapse without cocoa.
it’s a raddical new theeory, I know, but I think it has some merit.
Entirely plausible.
This is interesting.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/
The amount of steel needed for each average MWe of power from a wind turbine actually increases as they get larger. The amount of force acting on the tower is proportional to swept area. But the bending moment on the base is proportional to swept area x hub height. So that is roughly propirtional to the cube of blade length, whereas power scales with the square of blade length.
Until the 20th century, wind turbine towers were built from masonry or wood, both of which are energy cheap. That is possible for relatively small wind machines. A compressive masonry tower often lasts for centuries. Blades were made from wood. These provided direct mechanical power to grind grain, make explosives, cut wood, polish glass, etc. If we were prepared to work with the weather, we could still use wind machines to provide direct mechanical power for many applications. Whereas in the past power transmission distances were very short and factory layouts were constrained by line shafts, today hydraulics and pneumatics provide options that didn’t exist before the 20th century.
For example, the people of a town need to be able to clean their clothes. Instead of every house having a seperate washing machine, we could build a laundry on top of a hill. It would have a windmill type machine built into its structure. The washing machines would be powered either by a line shaft from the windmill, or by hydraulics driven by a hydraulic pump at the base of the wind machine. Warm water would come from an underground interseasonal storage tank. This would be costly to build. But once constructed, it would last for centuries. The amount of time taken to get clothes clean would depend on the amount of wind power available. During calm periods, clothes would need to be hand washed.
We could build town bath houses, cook houses and various factories that work on the same principle. Cooking could be done using solar heat stored for months in an insulated mound of rubble or sand. This works for a cooker that is large enough for a whole town, but wouldn’t work for an individual house.
Interesting!
I know that quite a few years ago, I read that small wind turbines were basically useless because they generated too little power, relative to the materials. Furthermore, if they were placed on top of buildings, they caused a huge amount of stress and vibration on the building.
More recently, offshore wind turbine manufacturers have been having difficulty with the largest turbines they make. This is a recent story talking about GE’s problems:
https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-the-death-of-a-mega-turbine-rattled-us-offshore-wind-2/
We seem to have hit maximum turbine size, for the reason you discuss.
You might also like Tom Murphy’s (physics prof at University of California, San Diego) post called “Inexhaustible flows?” https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/02/inexhaustible-flows/
There was a link to it recently on OFW, but not everyone saw it.
Yep, wind is a female canine. The wind speed increases with altitude, the power is proportional to the area and to the velocity to the cube. And so torque is also highly non linear with turbine dimensions. Then the power is AC with variable frequency and so the high power electrical equipment fries often.
China Wants Everyone to Trade In Their Old Cars, Fridges to Help Save Its Economy
Car sales set to get biggest boost in Beijing’s trade-in plan
Overhaul also covers appliances, machinery upgrades for firms
China’s world-beating electric vehicle industry, at the heart of growing trade tensions with the US and Europe, is set to receive a big boost from the government’s latest effort to accelerate growth.
That’s one takeaway from what Beijing has revealed about its plan for incentives that will encourage Chinese businesses and households to adopt cleaner technologies. It’s widely expected to be one of this year’s main stimulus programs, though question-marks remain — including how much the government will spend.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-22/china-is-betting-trade-ins-for-evs-fridges-can-help-save-its-economy?embedded-checkout=true
Trade in old cars, fridges = spend more money now; create more demand now. Some people and businesses will need to add more debt for this to happen. Stimulates the economy. Ramps up current energy consumption and raises current CO2 level, based on all of the new steel and other products needed. In the model, long term CO2 production goes down, but it depends on the timing of everything and the amount of the CO2 reduction. CO2 from making the new refrigerator or car stays in the atmosphere for 300 years. EVs have especially high front end emissions.
Gail you are wonderful…as I stated..we are toast 💋❤️
Sipping more coffee…with a nice breezy comfort.
Life is good…for today
Like with the MBS financial blowup, it’s actually the demand for debt that conjures up artificial demand for whatever’s attached to it.
Also, from the Low Tech article you link to,
The section Steel and Wind Power starts out:
I always wonder what kind of assumptions the EROEI folks have been making in their estimates. They also miss the importance of timing differences–getting a very delayed return from all of this upfront estimate of resources has a very real cost.
y hydraulics and pneumatics provide options that didn’t exist before the 20th century.
Well that is false, hydraulic cranes were in use in England in 1846.
For example, the people of a town need to be able to clean their clothes.
How does the town exist? How do they make the clothes and feed themselves? What jobs do the people do? How do they heat homes?
We could build town bath houses, cook houses and various factories that work on the same principle.
Well no, no we couldn’t. There are essentially no options as to what happens during collapse. And what happens does not involve buildings being constructed. What happens is that the former towns and cities are abandoned.
. Cooking could be done using solar heat stored for months in an insulated mound of rubble or sand.
Demented. Absolutely demented.
I was confused by the Peter Cassidy’s comment myself. What he was describing would require a lot of steel. I am doubtful that it would be possible. And storing year for months in an insulated mound of rubble or sand doesn’t work either, as far as I know, even with a lot of fossil fuels. Wind and solar don’t work, in part because the energy they provide can’t be stored long enough.
But I would ask you not to use terms like “demented.” You simply get other commenters angry.
I shouldn’t have said it and wasn’t constructive, I apologise.
I’m a little confused as to what the forum rules are since I though it was OK here to spend ones’s day expressing hatred for ethnic groups other than white, disabled people, overweight people etc, not to mention the dog-whistle posts I see multiple times daily.
You probably won’t know them when you see them but you perhaps have wondered what a term like ‘Khazar mafia’ means. That kind of thing gets blogs shut down on a regular basis.
I’ll leave you guys to it for now.
One thing I definitely don’t like is insulting other commenters. Try to be polite if you disagree with someone else.
People often have a mixture of comments. Some of them represent overly optimistic views of the future, and some of them represent overly pessimistic views of the future. Some of the ideas border on the ridiculous, but they may have elements within them that can be somewhat useful. And some of their other posts can provide valuable information or ideas. So I tend to allow them. We need a mixture of ideas. This mixture changes over time.
I am writing a spreadsheet programme that models the temperature of a water tank that is insulated with different materials and exposed on the outside to air at 10°C. This should give some idea how practical the idea of interseasonal heat storage is for cooking and other applications.
As I said in anther comment:
I wonder what kind of system is required to support building a hot water tank? What share of today’s hot water tanks are built completely inside the US, with materials from inside the US?
Complexity has a real cost, but it tends to get lost in a calculation of a small part of the system. It always looks a whole lot more beneficial than it really is.
Eddy must have left because he passed peak rudery then
Could be.
“we could build a laundry on top of a hill.”
Some places just don’t have hills, so first you’d have to build some! Much of northern Germany is as flat as a pancake. So is what I saw of Denmark when I was there – very boring country incidentally: Lego, lager, Lurpak and the Little Mermaid – dreary countryside and weather – and now the Copenhagen Stock Exchange has burnt down!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/i-ve-studied-more-than-5-000-near-death-experiences-my-research-has-convinced-me-without-a-doubt-that-there-s-life-after-death/ar-AA1fSZzN?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=1da763a6720f463291820030262babc3&ei=13
Have lived my life with this basic understanding. Personal experience is many of the necessary decisions are not fun, some involve sacrifice of life to repair mistakes of others.
Perhaps that is why we need hope.
Current American society has become narcistic as well as following comfortable narratives. The universe is not always comfortable, and it sure as heck isn’t fair.
Dennis L.
What is needed is the realization of the current situation, not the false hope.
I already cited Maxim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths. In the end those who listened to the pilgrim, who spread words of hope to the bottom feeders but runs away when reality begins to sink on them, all end up more badly than before while the gambler, who didn’t listen to the pilgrim, maintains his existence.
Gorky wrote that play to ridicule people like Count Lev Tolstoy, who lived in a vast estate which still exists despite of a visit by Guderian in 1941, who wrote stories of christian hope which are rarely read after 1917. In my opinion he should have died, like Doestoevsky, in his 50s before he began to write all these BS stories of hope.
Denise , ”Perhaps that is why we need hope. ”
Hope is not a strategy . Try fear .
200 Greatest Mathematicians
http://fabpedigree.com/james/gmat200.htm
All but the insane John Nash were educated in USA.
In other words, American contribution to mathematics was less than that of India, and equivalent of Persia, which produced Omar Khayyam, better known as a poet now but was an important mathematician in his day.
In other words, if USA never existed, the world would not really have missed anything as far as scientific theory is concerned.
Which is why the post WW2 brain drain to USA was so painful for Civilization – all these European educated geniuses moved to USA, whose children became attorneys, physicians and quants, letting the creatively disabled Asians to do science and tech.
In a sense USA is like a retarded man-child who crashed into the party and destroyed it beyond recovery.
The stock lost because of the actions of uSA won’t be recovered. Those who married the daughters of Asian tiger moms will have Asian descendants, who won’t be able to reach the levels of the giants.
This article is 12 years old. But even back in 2012, Xinjiang was home to more than half of all remaining Chinese coal reserves <1km deep.
https://www.chinasignpost.com/2012/09/21/xinjiang-poised-to-become-chinas-largest-coal-producer-will-move-global-coal-natural-gas-and-crude-oil-markets/
Since then Xinjiang coal production has grown significantly. But it was still (as of 2020) only 180m tonnes per year, or 5% of total Chinese production. This is an indication of the difficulty of transporting coal over 3000 miles of mountainous desert. Transporting the energy by wire is an option the Chinese were considering even back in 2020. But building transmission infrastructure for hundreds of GW of power over 3000 miles of sparsely populated terrain is clearly a challenge.
I agree. It is difficult to understand the issues with long-distance transmission. Also, when a storm hits and transmission lines go down, there can be a problem with getting repairs made quickly. I know that in Alaska and other areas where transmission goes through remote areas, helicopters are needed for repairs. Keeping these available with trained crew, fuel, and replacement parts is a challenge.
In the US, we have a lot of problem with transmission lines coming down and causing fires at times with dry weather. We have seen this in California, Hawaii, and Western Texas. I don’t know whether China can escape this problem. When this happens, there can be a double problem:
a. Dealing with the displaced citizens (I have a neighbor who is still providing housing to her son and daughter-in-law and their three children, after their home burned down in the Maui wildfires in August 2023.)
b. Getting the transmission lines put back in place again.
At least China is now making pretty much all of the parts of the system. In the US and Europe, we need to depend on many imported parts in the supply chain.
BEIJING, April 23 (Reuters) – China’s coal consumption will fall by just one-third by 2040, according to a report by a European consultancy published on Tuesday, threatening climate targets that call for phasing out much of global coal use by 2040.
The International Energy Agency has said that global coal power capacity has to be eliminated by 2040 to keep average global temperature rises within the key threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Yep, China’s greenwashing and cashing in like everyone else on the planet..
Turning it to money…We are done as a species…don’t need Fast Eddie to cry the alarm bells about that..
https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/04/24/24th-april-2024-todays-round-up-of-economic-news/
Any coal that the US leaves in the ground will be available to a foreign government that succeeds in taking over the US. If it can figure out a way for the US to be more efficient in using fuels (people very poor, stay at home), it may be able to extract the coal and use it later.
The belief that CO2 emissions are our greatest threat will die out, as other problems become greater.
Problems are pretty large in that department, too. I’m 😳 afraid ..we live in a bubble world of convenient living…need something, log in to Amazon or drive down to Target or Walmart…
Us folks here are just not seeing it yet due to our privileged (spoiled) status…yes, Klum telling it like it is,
Now back to drinking my coffee in front of my electric fan sitting in my comfy chair.
Have a good day everyone
we live in a bubble world of convenient living…
I think most of us had noticed that. This is sounding a bit Dennis-like.
Sometimes we forget billions are excluded from that bubble.
I need to constantly remind myself of that and face the fact it the rug pulled under my feet at any time.
No matter, last time I’ll mention it
the whole point of the current level of ”civilisation” is to turn the planet into cash, as much as possible as fast as possible.
been banging on about it for years.
and there is absolutely nothing any of us can do to stop it or slow it down.
Interesting copy and paste, did you have a point to make?
Greenwashing is a term that should not be used. It implies there are green ways to generate electricity. There are none.
‘Green’ is a political ideology and should not be confused with what is environmentally freindly. The Greens spend a lot of time banging on about gay and trans rights. That is a core part of Green political ideology but has dick all to do with helping the environment. Being an Environmentalist and being Green are two very different things.
Here is another China demographic pyramid produced by Morgan Stanley.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-chinese-growth-engine-is-sputtering/
It tells almost exactly the same story as Zeihan’s pyramid. A huge bulge in population between 20 – 50 and a much smaller younger generation. Except the M&S pyramid in now 9 years out of date. How has the situation deteriorated since then? That 20 – 50 year old generation is now 30 – 60 years old. In 30 years, they will all have retired. And the working age population replacing them will be half the size. We know that because most of them were already born in 2015. And birthrates in China are declining rather than increasing. One doesn’t need much foresight to see that the Chinese workforce is going to decline steeply over the next few decades.
Question: We seem to accept civilizations ebb and flow, is it biology after all?
It is consistent with my understanding that without biology there is no economics.
Dennis L.
With available resources appearing to decline in the future, declining population isn’t necessarily all bad. The big issue is the huge share of the population who will not be contributing to the economy and the huge amount of healthcare spending that these individuals now require.
It seems to me that customs can change, or countries with mandated systems can make approaches change. Somehow, all countries need to migrate toward a system in which everyone works, whether it is staying at home helping take care of children or grand children, or helping in some part of industry. We also need to move to a system where services for the elderly are severely restricted. Most of the care is palliative care. Let nature take its course, in the situation of failing health.
Canada has been floating the idea of the government making voluntary suicide available to citizens. (Parents can even take infants with severe disabilities to be euthanized.) Japan has had a custom in which some people go off to the woods to die, when their time has come. Somehow, death needs to be seen as an acceptable end to life, not something to be put off indefinitely, when the body is no longer functioning.
That is logical, though it sounds exceedingly grim.
I think most older people could work longer, depending on the work. It would be far more palatable if they could reduce their working hours. For someone in their 70s, a 20 hour, 3 day week of light work is perfectly manageable. But most jobs don’t seem to work that way. It is either full time or not at all. If it could be made to work, it would have side benefits as older people would have more money. Everyone wants more money and no one wants to be bored. Not everyone wants to retire. I don’t plan to. But I want to choose what I do. My personal ambition is to start a micro distillery.
Yes, birth and death are two ends of life, biology; part of the fabric of the universe.
“Most of the care is palliative care. Let nature take its course, in the situation of failing health.”
Been there, done that, got a pass; it is not that bad, acceptance.
Working like hell to be useful. Pretty crazy to be the student in class who is three times the age of the other students. Generally finish last in time, pretty close to first in exam/lab grades; this is a challenge to the ego and can scare the hell out of a person. My goal in class is always to be fluent. Have heard of the 10,000 hour rule, not too many cycles left.
As we grow older, things of the past become part of the past and will never again be part of the future. Choose wisely.
Dennis L.
A 1m2 polycrystaline solar panel contain about 1kg of polysilicon. It will generate about 200kWh of electrical energy per year under eastern China insolation conditions and 5000kWh over a 30 year life. This means that each kg of polysilicon generates about 1/6th the electrical energy of a comparable kg of natural uranium. So polysilicon is a commodity that is energy dense enough to ship by rail or road across China, even if the infrastructure is poor.
In fact, even if solar power in China only breaks even in EROEI terms, it still makes sense for the Chinese to do this. They are using slave labour and otherwise stranded coal to make an energy commodity that they can use to stretch the finite coal reserves of their eastern provinces. It is a good deal for them. But we are kidding ourselves if we pretend that the Chinese are in any way champions of the green energy transition. This is a short term gimmick for them. A way of stretching their coal reserves long enough to build a nuclear generating infrastructure.
I agree with you. Wind and solar are a way of stretching China’s coal reserves.
Also, EVs are a way of making use of China’s coal resources. It has little oil. It makes sense to make personal automobiles that use available electricity, if China can provide enough transmission for this electricity.
It is laughed at here, but for storage, H and Pt. Can fuel cells be made in a way which is easily recyclable when necessary?
That is until we have our cubic mile of Pt.
Dennis L.
They are using slave labour and otherwise stranded coal to make an energy commodity that they can use to stretch the finite coal reserves of their eastern provinces.
Ridiculous lies and nonsense.
I know that your country is terrified of China, and if China behaved half as badly as the US you’d have every reason to be scared. But there are no signs that China wants to attack countries 10,000 miles away on bogus pretexts, or drop nuclear bombs on anyone, or any of that sort of thing.
I imagine nowadays the Chinese feel like they’re taking crazy pills when they talk to the USA which seems to have lost its grip both on reality and credibility. When the US shot down that weather balloon for example. They ignore calls from US officials for months on end, then finally Janet Yellen or someone ends up going there, only to issue ‘warnings’ about a ‘genocyde’ in Xinjiang that China cannot stop because it isnt happening because the US made it up. It gives me a headache too.
Any references to support the brash statement that the Uiyger genocide isn’t happening? Maybe all these folks are lying?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57124636
https://www.skynews.com.au/australia-ne … ddad7a6e48
https://www.theguardian.com/environment … d-turbines
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/compani … r-BB1kOFP2
Maybe the moon landing were fake. Maybe Elvis isn’t really dead. Maybe the Earth is flat. Maybe the moon’s a balloon.
I imagine that the population level is too high for resources to support in the area where the Uiyger population is living. China seems to be trying to get the population down to what the resources will support. Muslims elsewhere have high birth rates.
Peter , all 5 eyes resources and propaganda . How come nothing about the Uyghur genocide from other countries ? Nothing ever in any media in S E Asia , ME , Africa , Latin America . Not even in Mainland Europe . Are there any restrictions to travel to Xinjiang for foreigners ? None at all . For your info foreigners travelling to NE areas of India neighboring China must get a special permission termed as ” inland permit ” . Wake up .
P.S ; Do not mention The Epoch Times owned by Falun Gong .
I don’t need to prove a negative. since your accusation is extremely serious, you need to present irrefutable evidence. if such evidence existed, a case would be brought to the International Criminal Court in The Hague
Has a case been brought to The Hague, yes or no answer only please. Any other answer will be ignored and I will continue to ask the question.
There has been significant international concern and allegations regarding human rights abuses in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China. Reports from various sources, including international human rights organizations and media outlets, have raised allegations of mass detentions, forced labor, cultural suppression, and other human rights violations.
But genocide? No, there is not the faintest hint of any genocide going on at all!
The Chinese government has denied the above allegations and characterized the detention camps in Xinjiang as vocational training centers aimed at combating extremism and promoting economic development. They have maintained that their actions in Xinjiang are necessary for maintaining stability and security in the region.
And the Chinese government is an honorable government.
There is something worse than bringing a knife to a gunfight and that’s an empty gun.
Do you Americans think the rest of the world is oblivious to the fact that you can’t produce shells and missiles? Do you think they don’t see what it means?
the rest of the world knows that the USA can bring nukes to a shell and missile fight.
Nuclear weapons are not practically useable and its unlikely many of America’s still work. If I remember right the warheads need regular topping up with extremely rare and expensive stuff, is it tritium?
Vietnam had none nor did Afghanistan. China could wreck you just by stopping selling you stuff but in the unlikely event you went Samson option they’d win that too. You’re done.
What is this obsession with nukes? Seems to be people of as certain age.
no obsession from me, but in a missile fight, the one with even a few working nukes has the advantage.
I wouldn’t bet on US leadership being sane enough to think that nukes are “not practically usable”.
but there are more closer to home and personal worries.
death from “old age”, death from nuclear war, same difference in the long run.
no big deal.
I mean nothing against Americans individually, I am steeped in American culture by personal choice and can name and locate every state on a map.
But all Americans are the same pretty much in their unthinking belligerence and arrogance towards the rest of the world and its so misplaced. Russia would kick America’s ass let alone China.
“I am steeped in American culture by personal choice”
Lol. So who is your favourite American hero? Mickey Mouse? Superman, who wore his knickers over his tights and generally boosted trairns jenderism? Or Simón Bolívar, who liberated much of the continent from the Spaniards?
And what is your favourite US quote? “It’s American as apple pie” ? (As if they invented it!) Or “Make my day!” ? Or “Well, they won’t be any the wiser!” ? Or “Anyone who hates children and animals is a friend of mine!” ? So many to choose from.
Lol. So who is your favourite American hero?
The word hero does not mean what you think it means.
The competence and wisdom of “our” leadership has fallen precipitously; I wouldn’t put it past them to hit every red button in the final death throes of US hegemony.
I made a comment, but for some reason it must be ‘on hold’.
Surely the world is preparing an offer they can not refuse for the american elite. stay in power in the USA (we will help you) but retreat from BRICS areas, or prepare to die. I think it is a mandatory step if nuclear holothing (sorry, I don’t want to be kicked into moderation like Student) is to be avoided.
Seriously, forget about the nuclear nonsene. it’s never going to happen.
You know what will happen? Every country that has them will recycle the warheads into reactor fuel. We havent got energy to throw away incinerating cities.
…not appeared yet….
I have real doubts about the usability of both the nuclear weapons of both the US and Russia.
–We all live on the planet Earth. No one wants to accidentally mess up climate for years on end, because of unknown adverse impacts of nuclear.
–Like you, I am doubtful that they will work after years of neglect.
–The missiles that are supposed to carry the nuclear weapons are another issue; I expect they may have problems leading to the nuclear bombs detonating in the wrong location.
Believe it or not, these things don’t just get shoved onto a shelf and forgotten about. They have a programmed operational life, after which they are stripped down and rebuilt.
Most nuclear weapons are what is known as boosted fission bombs. They are fission bombs, but contain a small booster stage containing tritium and lithium deuteride which produces fast neutrons that boost the proportion of plutonium or enriched uranium that undergo fission. Tritium has a halflife of 12.7 years. So the weapons need to be stripped down every 5 years or so and the tritium replaced. We don’t have to build nuclear weapons that way. The first ones were pure fission and could have sat on a shelf for decades. But boosting gives a bigger bang per buck and allows more compact weapons that are suitable as warheads.
Interesting!
With cutbacks in budgets, I wonder if this really gets done.
I know a lot of US nuclear bombs have been recycled into fuel for nuclear reactors. Even more Russian bombs have fueled US nuclear reactors over the years.
Good post Peter. I have always wondered why the Soviets would build enormous centrifuge plants. I mean if you have even seen one you will not forget it. It is 1kmX200m, all centrifuges. And clearly this is the answer. A number of their nukes are built to last.
I think there are 300,000 Japanese that would disagree on that point. Of course those people were converted into dust and gas and blown into the stratosphere. These days, they don’t agree or disagree with much of anything. But nuclear weapons were very practically used against them. And they ended WW2.
I believe that there is some controversy with respect to whether the bombs were really nuclear. I went to visit one of the sites on the tour of Japan I took. The damage seemed to be not terribly large. There didn’t seem to be a big effect of radiation after the fact. There were many people living in the area, without any huge problem.
I left wondering what kind of nuclear bomb could have caused so little damage.
The lack of radioactive contamination from the Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombs were largely due to their being air bursts. This is done to increase destructive radius and maximise fatalities. It is also why there was no detectable crater at either site. The radioactive fission products from the blast were mostly carried into the upper atmosphere by convection. But the total radioactivity released by a 15kt blast is modest.
Most of the fatalties from a medium yield fission explosion are due to the shockwave. If you are close enough for ionising radiation to effect you, then the heat, UV and soft x-rays from the fireball will probably burn your skin off. Most of the energy of a nuclear blast is released as heat, not ionising radiation.
Radioactivity from nuclear detonations is often misunderstood. For fission bombs, which account for the majority of weapons in service, the actual quantity of fission products released is only 1-5% of the mass of the fissile charge, because only 1-5% of the charge actually undergoes fission. Fallout is a concern for ground explisions, because short lived fission products are locally concentrated. But these are dangerous precisely because they are short lived. They deliver high doserates. This is part of the reason why radiation levels were normal by the time the Americans reached both sites.
What you are saying may be true.
The issue is that we don’t have much of a real-life demonstration of what would happen if a typical nuclear bomb were demonstrated in the most damaging way.
A lot of people are worried about what nuclear bombs would do.
Photo taken circa 1980 of a surviving Hiroshima victim. Ouch!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/17xR1HNE3JyY853yIls9t9DJ19xNULwy_/view
There’s a lot to unpack here.
A weapon that destroys everything and contaminates the region wth radioactive fallout for generations is like using a sledgehammer to hit ants in your own home if your home was an upstairs apartment.
I’ve said the following many times:
Nuclear weapons became obsolete when precision long range conventional weapons came into service. All you have to hit in a city is a few critical things like power, water, sewage, gas, etc. It;’s obviously a massive war crime doing this but its America’s preferred way of attacking civilians nowadays.
And no, the nuclear weapons did not ‘end WW2’. Japan was already in ruins by that point and had been trying to start negotiations. America just wanted to test them on real cities and real human bodies since there were 2 types of bomb.
As I said to you, it’s very lucky for both you and us in the UK that China is ready to move on from the things we did to them and in general does not seem to me to be a country we need to fear, but could benefit from. Actually China was going to build our high speed rail line and nuclear power stations before America stepped in and stopped them.
Of course those people were converted into dust and gas and blown into the stratosphere.
George Orwell 1984 reference. O’Brien says something like this with reference to Winston becoming (or ‘unbecoming?) an unperson.
In my view, the most important message from last extremely-expensive-package for Ukraine approved by US politicians, is that politicians want to support financially Ukraine for a while, making expensive for Russia to go on (but they will go on anyway with success, in my view).
The key point is that even if arms and weapons will arrive at the right time to Ukraine, that Country has run out of soldiers able to use them.
So the purpose is probably another Berlin wall, shifted further.
The difference this time is that on West side there will be a very weak EU, without energy (only very expensive fossil fuels coming from long distance and very expensive renewable), an EU also progressively deindustrialized and with an ungoing core substitution of people from standard Europeans to North Africans, Africans, South Americans, Middle Easterns, Asians, immigrants.
Additionally, Europeans will become in the meantime older and older only thinking to have a retirement and young generations will be trapped in transgender and green-climate-change brainwash.
This is the real picture in my view.
It is interesting to see how US, which was born from Europe, it has become the one destroying its own original birth place.
You may be right about much of this.
The US is running into a lot of migration issues at the time its own birth rate is low.
Years ago, and in China today (I strongly suspect), schools did not cater to the many kinds of students with handicaps, or who did not know English. Children who could fit, in the classroom setting, went to school. Other children stayed at home and received what little schooling parents or others could give them.
At one time, there was toleration for students of very different ages learning together. Immigrant children who were older were allowed to learn alongside younger children. There were many one-room classrooms in the US, for grades 1 to 8.
Education costs are a whole lot lower with a system that does not try to cater to all of the many different problems children have.
Also, I understand that proper behavior is something very much taught in some Asian schools. The grade school I visited in China had a mandatory course in 4th grade devoted to proper behavior.
When I visited Japan, I encountered many Japanese teen agers with their teachers, visiting religious sites. They all had their notebooks to do their assignments related to the trip. They lined up precisely as told. I understand that conforming behavior is highly valued throughout the school system in Japan
China and Japan have not been very welcoming to immigrants. This has allowed them to have a very uniform culture.
Now the US and Europe are both encountering much more diversity. This becomes a problem for teaching students. But funding is low. So all of the students are dumped into the same classroom. But the lack of uniformity creates a problem for teachers. Teachers cannot handle the classroom situation if there is no way to keep order in class. The better students drop out–go to private schools. The public school system becomes service to take care of children while parents are working, primarily. This is especially an issue in low-income areas. In high income areas, schools may actually work for a while.
Yes, thank you for letting my comment appear and have your feedback too.
I can tell you that, about schools, my nephew (who is only an active boy) under this new ‘inclusive’ and ‘condescending’ teaching system, he has been diagnosed ‘iperactive’, so instead of teaching him to learn and stay calm, he has been allowed to use ‘support’ facilities to help him during exams (such as slides, schemes etc.) because they say that being ‘iperactive’ he has difficulties to focus enough…
I can tell you that he focus very well on videogames and playing football.
The result is that he is an intelligent guy but extremely ignorant in comparison to others of his age and extremely unable to engage on tasks he doesn’t like…
The problem is also that, typically on our society, his parents are divorced, so it is very difficult to help his parents to find an agreement on these aspects.
It is only a single episode of our society, but I think very indicative.
I think we are in a holding pattern here, with our future course “to be determined” by the US November elections. Whether Trump, Biden, RFK, Jr or some other dark horse like Big Mike gets selected will make no difference. Yet the hype and anticipation for now drives events. The primal instinct of every politician is to get re-elected.
The US, Russia, China, and now even the Middle East know that the US can no longer wage assymetrical large land based wars like they did in the Iraq war. The foreign countries know that we can’t do it, and we know that they know that too. We couldn’t even hang on in Afghanistan, not that the CIA protected heroin trade was needed once the fentanyl started coming across the southern border- one of the many modes of attack to destabilize the US.
So for now, it’s the MIC screaming at the corrupt politicians like that banker in The Big Short yelling at Michael Burry, “Michael, I want my fucking money back.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAlCbE-yCTw @2:00
The MIC just wants its money. They don’t care that the Russian-UKR war is a lose-lose for the US citizens, and for the families and all the dead, wounded, maimed Russian and UKR soldiers. It’s all about profits, profits, profits.
The US, Russia, China, and now even the Middle East know that the US can no longer wage assymetrical large land based wars like they did in the Iraq war.
This is what I’ve been saying. The giant isn’t as steady on his feet as he was. Others in the street are starting to look sideways at him.
The giant’s friends aren’t much help as they are all pensioners. Russia is walking around with a swagger and a smirk and people are trying to avoid eye contact. There are three elderly sisters who even share the same building as Russia.
Movie Review
Civil War by Alex Garland
It is visually award winning. The sound is award winning. It is a good story of journalists.
Politics and war have no place in the story line.
The movie uses the condensation of politics down to one person the good man or the bad man. The self appointed president, the bad man, is one side of the civil war. A hand full of soldiers filling for the good man. The good men shoots the bad man with two shots only. The bad man dies. The movie ends.
There is a visually beautiful scene of two people sitting with a sparkling lake in the background. There is a visually striking scene as our heroes drive through a bunch of trees on fire with sparks falling down all around the car.
For the visuals and the sound it is worth seeing. As an explanation of what is happening in the US, it has nothing to offer.
I will skip it.
Gail wrote: ‘There is now concern that China is ramping up its manufacturing, particularly for exports, at a time when China’s jobs in the property sector are disappearing. The problem, however, is that ramping up exports of manufactured goods creates a new bubble.’
I think the reason the Chinese are doing this is that their ageing demographics make consumption led growth impossible. The impressive industrial growth in the US between the end of WW2 and 1990, was driven by a combination of cheap energy and consumer demand as baby boomers were born, grew up, entered the workplace and started families of their own. The US was the worlds largest producer of goods in all those decades and the largest consumer too. The US still has a reasonably healthy demographic structure, meaning that there are plenty of domestic consumers for the goods its industries produce.
The situation could hardly be more different in China. One reason they were able to achieve such impressive growth in output was the absolute collapse in their birthrates. This allowed working age people to save a lot of money, which could also be reinvested in new infrastructure. But when the current generation of chinese retire, the generation that replaces them will be much smaller. By mid century, Chinese working age population will be half what it is now. Here is Peter Zeihan’s population pyramid for China.
https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-7-the-northeast-asian-crash/
The yellow bars in that diagram don’t exist, based upon new population data. This suggests that China is facing some kind of collapse as an industrial power. It will be increasingly disfunctional in the future. With a shrinking labour force, even export led growth is impossible. But with a large middle aged workforce that don’t consume very much (either no kids or kids have left home), an export led growth model is the best they can do for now. Investing in population infrastructure like housing and roads, is busted flush because working age population is now falling. Demand for new infrastructure is declining.
Zeihan lives in fantasy-land because he is paid to represent and stroke the egos of the MIC. He has a great record of nearly everything he predicts turning out the opposite. It isn’t China that’s FUBAR geopolitically, it’s us.
Is his population pyramid for China accurate or not? That is what is of interest here.
Massive changes are happening *right now* and he’s asserting that China will collapse because its working age population will lower in 25 years. 25 years lol! 10-15 years ago Zeihan was on stage telling the world that India is the new geopolitical and economic big dog because of demographics. How has that turned out? Resources and culture matter; you can’t make predictions exclusively based on demographics – if that were valid, Haiti would be doing great.
How about doing some research yourself to validate his thesis? Our demographics are almost as bad as China’s, just a little smoother / less variation, and with more “diversity” (read: latent potential for inter-tribe violence), and ossified institutions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/
How will it be in another 30 years? India has a larger population and a healthier demography than China. It will have 2-3x China’s working age population in 30 years time. You don’t need to be a genius to see that India is going to surpass China as an economic entity. You only need look at the population numbers.
India won’t be going anywhere. 80 IQ corrupt people won’t be making AI drones or anything. They will just breed more until everyone carries 20km walks with water. So no. A larger young-heavy male population with no resources is ripe for civil war.
You might be right.
Civil war is a real possibility.
India won’t be going anywhere. 80 IQ corrupt people won’t be making AI drones or anything
You sound like quite the genius yourself, dear Kim.
Fook Peter . You are nuts . 800 million surviving on 5kg wheat/rice + 1 Kg chickpeas per month / per person FREE. . Youth unemployment is 82% . Pregnant woman undernourished is 70% . Child malnutrition is 65% . 55% of the world’s total illiterates are in India . I can post the links but I have posted them earlier several times so do your own research . Currently elections there , watch out in June when the results are announced .
Is his population pyramid for China accurate or not? That is what is of interest here.
The reason you imagine it’s important is because Ziehan told you that it was going to cause China’s imminent collapse. The reason Ziehan said that is because he wants to make money in America.
Agree Ivan . I call Zeihan ” Jim Cramer of Geo politics” .😂
He’s a fool and anyone who takes his nonsense seriously needs to start thinking for themselves.
Everyone is FUBAR geopolitically. It is only a question of degree. The entire world outside of Africa and ME has birthrates that are beneath replacement or will be falling beneath replacement soon. That even includes India. This is the demographic legacy of industrialisation. And it poses a severe problem for all industrial nations because consumer bases and tax bases are now shrinking.
Zeihan is one of the better geopolitical analysts that I have come across. For the most part, his work is well researched. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have biases and never makes mistakes. One must always apply judgement in interpreting the predictionsof others.
Also, politics is unpredictable. The more precise any prediction of the future is, the more wrong it will be. But assuming that Zeihan’s population pyramids are even close to accurate, I don’t need any additional analysis to know that China is screwed as a unified industrial nation.
AI?
Dennis L.
Your stance makes no sense whatsoever and you cant have checked the shyster Ziehan’s alternative facts very well because he hasnt got the first idea what he’s babbling about.
There are far too many people on the planet and you keep talking about low birthrates as though they are a problem?
I don’t need any additional analysis to know that China is screwed as a unified industrial nation.
So you started with the conclusion you wanted and went youtube shopping to find someone who would tell you what you wanted to hear.
Everybody wins. Bless the free market.
Not so fast!
I read Peter’s last book and it was one of the best I have ever read. With that being said, I did find his “China” theories to be absurd. At least, I have never heard anyone suggest they are going to fall like a house of cards. He also predicted that Apple Computer was basically worthless and would do the same. (due to supply lines breaking down internationally)
if you enjoyed it, great, but it’s fiction/disinformation.
do you read many books in general or do any research yourself?
I mean if Peter’s theories are correct, why is the US currently so weak and getting weaker while China is stronger every day?
The Chinese have a large working age population right now, but far fewer younger people to replace them. Ironically, this means that in the short term they do have a lot more excess capital because the average Chinese has a smaller family or none at all. That means lower costs. But the benefits are strictly short term. The downside is that they are heading for a demographic cliff. They don’t have enough young people to replace more than half the people working today.
Look I actually like Peter Ziehan’s videos because they are fun and the delivery is great.
But they’re just entertainment. Here we talk about real things.
You could have a million people, 10,000 people, 100 people. If the resources dont exist for them to do X Y or Z it wont happen.
People dont matter. Resources matter and for a country to have an industrial revolution it has to start with cheap coal. You cant start it with oil or gas because you need a Victorian coal based economy with plenty of steel to do so.
How is the US weak?
The US Navy protects ALL global trade being shipped around the world. Thanks to the Bretton woods agreement.
The US has the cheapest food in the world. 1/4 the price on average.
Cheapest (nonsubsidized) electricity prices.
70% of the worlds grains as harvested in the US. (Grain is the master crop) aka Bread
90% of the worlds lumber is made here. (which makes all paper) why are houses are so big.
Largest oil and gas producer.
Largest amount of fresh water.
Two oceans separating us from the rest of the world. And a border with Canada who’s basically our brother. (Name two major countries who are next door neighbors who are closer than us?)
And a border in the south that is always getting attention, (protecting us, with gun toting crazy people in Texas and Arizona. .
California has the world 5th largest economy. And two of the world’s most powerful companies, (Google and Apple). And bank with the largest market cap (Wells Fargo).
The US produces the most published science papers. Also 3 of the top five universities with the most noble prizes in Science (Berkely, U of Chicago, Harvard)
And world’s largest national park (Yellowstone)
Agree, fade him to make money.
Dennis L.
On the chart for China, I notice how much smaller the number of young women is, compared to the number of young men. This will be a problem in keeping up the birth rate. Homes are terribly expensive in China. Women will need to work. They won’t be able to have many children.
Our fossil fuel problem is sort of a per capita fossil fuel problem. Maybe so many old people is not such a problem, if people can be productive all of their lives. Get rid of retirement programs. But there will also be the problem with all of the roads, pipelines, train systems, and other infrastructure that will need maintenance. It gets old, as well.
Gail,
We seem to get slower as we age, very frustrating.
Dennis L.
Ziehan is an imbecile. He tells racist or ignorant Americans what they want to hear.
The Chinese helped make solar cheap through subsidies, coal and forced labour.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2021/05/19/china-made-solar-cheap-through-coal-subsidies–forced-labor-not-efficiency/
This article is close to three years old. I wonder how things have changed.
I saw this article recently:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-solar-industry-faces-shakeout-rock-bottom-prices-persist-2024-04-03/
-China has driven global oversupply of solar production capacity
-Prices of Chinese solar panels fell 42% in 2023 -Wood Mackenzie
-China’s 2023 production capacity was double global installations
This is bizarre:
The Chinese helped make solar cheap through subsidies, coal and forced labour.
If the US doesn’t like China, all it needs to do is stop all imports of goods and raw materials from them. Like right now, today. Including dysprosium. Do you know what dysprosium is?
Yes, probably have a box or two sitting on a shelf; somewhat useful in wind turbines.
Dennis L.
More on the growing problems the Chinese are having with maintaining coal supplies. China’s remaining coal resources are concentrated in the far north (inner mongolia) and far west (Xinjiang).
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-RFawtZ0dyoo/VNpeWncyBAI/AAAAAAAAABo/r8YOTRzBm2Q/s1600/2000px-Map_of_China_coal_resources.svg.png
These are areas that are sparsely populated and have poor transportation links to the Chinese population centres, which are on the east coast of the country. It is difficult to get accurate data out of China. But the data we have suggests that whilst overall coal mining is still growing, it is shrinking in China’s core population provinces and growing in the northern and western provinces.
https://thecoalhub.com/top-3-provinces-contribute-70-of-chinas-coal-output-in-jan-may.html
In Henan province, a historically important mining region within the Chinese eastern heartland, production is falling steadily.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Coal-production-in-Henan-Province_fig3_335141759
IEA data shows that in 2018 – 2019, Inner Mongolia and Shanxi accounted for most of the growth in Chinese production, whilst production declined elsewhere.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/year-on-year-change-in-coal-production-in-china-s-major-coal-producing-regions-by-mine-size-2018-2019
But these are relatively remote provinces, that are a long way from where most Chinese coal powerplants are located.
https://visguides.org/t/power-plant-distribution-in-china/667/1
Inner Mongolia has the largest coal electrical generating capacity. It is also one of the fastest growing coal producers. But it is remote from Chinese population centres and is sparsely populated.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1268490/coal-power-capacity-in-china-by-province/
As Chinese coal consumption has grown, demand has outstripped supply from core regions, which now have supply deficit. Regions with surplus are generally more remote. Transporting coal from remote mining regions to population centres means shipping coal hundreds of miles by rail.
https://www.stratfor.com/sites/default/files/styles/wv_small/public/main/images/China_Coal.jpg?itok=l8Z_5vAR
The CCP are well aware of the problem of declining production in core provinces. Their 2016 – 2020 (5 year) plan included very large increases in transmission capacity from the north and west of the country to coastal population centres. I have no information on how much of this infrastructure was completed.
https://www.clsa.com/special/mappingchina/
When I visited China in 2015, I visited Inner Mongolia. There were a lot of empty apartments there, built in anticipation of people moving in to get coal production from there ramped up. There were four lane highways, with practically no vehicles on them. The airport we used seemed to be bigger than needed, for the amount of traffic at the time. One of the grad students I worked with was from the near there.
I will be interested to read those articles.
Sitting here, I fail to see why moving coal for hundreds of miles is a problem. It really does not cost very much given its energy content and efficiencies in turning it into electricity. What am I missing?
Coal is fairly bulky and heavy. You need to have all of the apparatus for doing the moving–plenty of rail lines, plus the necessary types of cars for moving the coal. It takes time and resources to build these things. There are big hills involved, so the train has to be powered by diesel oil, which is in short supply. Coal is normally a very inexpensive fuel compared to oil. The cost of the diesel can add quite a bit to the cost of the coal. I would guess 30%. There is also the issue of the availability diesel, if it is in short supply.
Electricity can work on flatter terrain. But there also has to be a source of electricity, a non-trivial problem in sparsely populated areas.
One problem is capacity. A 1GWe coal burning plant consumes about 3 million tonnes of bitumous coal per year. Xingjiang is 3000 miles from Chinese population centres on the Chinese coast. So that is 9 billion tonne-miles per year. That is about 3x the total annual rail freight transported within the UK on all railroads. And that is just one powerplant. The chinese have over 1000GWe of coal burning plant. Building enough railways to transport enough coal to fuel even 10% of these isn’t realistic.
Another problem is cost. Whilst rail freight is a lot cheaper than road for bulk haulage, it isn’t exactly cheap. These are mean figures applicable to the US.
https://www.costmine.com/2024/03/26/rail-transport-costs-how-much-have-they-increased/
Transporting 1 tonne of freight 1000 miles, will cost about $100. That tonne of coal will produce about 3MWh in a superheated steam plant. This means that fuel transport costs alone add $30/MWh for every 1000 mile the coal needs to travel. The Chinese need cheap electricity for their export dominated industrial model.
Glad you put some numbers to the problem.
The wholesale price of electric in NY is $20/MWh. Thanks to our four nuclear power plants.
Do they also run 1950’s-era rail lines? Do they operate in the US? No? Then the US cost assumptions are nonsense. And why are you bringing the UK into this? The UK isn’t known for much of anything these days except yapping at the Russians, certainly not industry and moving freight and real goods.
I was using it as an example. The amount of ton-miles required to ship coal from western to eastern china for a single powerplant, exceeds the total rail freight of a large European nation. I thought that was obvious.
US transport cost are also obviously not directly applicable to China. The Chinese would need to construct entirely new railway lines to get get coal out of Xinjiang. I provided some example cost figures to illustrate the problem.
The energy cost is then a small part of the total cost (not sure I buy it). The energy cost of moving one ton of coal over 1000 km is 300MJ. The thermal energy content of one ton of coal is 30 GJ. Coal fired plants are about 70% efficient. Yes, I do not buy it, sorry.
There is one way you can do it that works which is on ships directly to steel plants with their own ports.
Japan successfully did it. The big car plants like Nissan have ports as well.
Those are interesting charts. It takes a whole lot of resources to build all of the electricity transmission lines. In the US, it takes 10 years or more to get new lines put in, but I suppose China is faster. Wind and solar are not efficient users of electricity transmission lines; they need lines for the maximum use, and they are empty most of the time.
I tried to find something useful about the transmission line problem. I didn’t much of anything for China specifically. This is the IEA’s report regarding grids in general.
https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-grids-and-secure-energy-transitions/executive-summary#
Full report
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ea2ff609-8180-4312-8de9-494bcf21696d/ElectricityGridsandSecureEnergyTransitions.pdf
One point I picked up is that in general, it is the grid that is the weak spot in trying to make any transition. Another is that there has been a shortage of transformers since 2021 (p. 53) To do the planned grid expansion (world, not China) would take an enormous amount of materials (p 96).
If China is making transformers, I expect it will have better access to them than other countries.
Some people think USA has the best talents in the entire world, and I say that if that is true the world is done.
The education system of USA won’t raise the kind of people who will lead the world to the next level of civilization, no matter how much Dennis L or others at here might disagree.
Applied physics is zombie science. It will only create more zombies, not advancing civilization a bit. Starship might orbit but it will just orbit, doing nothing, like birds in the sky or meteorites.
I have said that the American at Los Alamos were no different from the managers at Foxxcon. Just there to supervise the manufacturing, not add anything to science, including Oppenheimer.
The world would have lost nothing if we lobotomized all students of MIT and Caltech this year, since they would have just created more zombies.
You can have all the education you want. The baseball bat doesn’t care about Jane Austen.
You seem to like history, maybe you could tell us how many of the great scientific achievements came out of the Ivy Leagues in the time since the Ivy Leagues have existed. Harvard was founded in the 1630’s according to Wikipedia, so we actually have a surprisingly long timeline to work with.
Einstein? Dirac? Tesla? Pasteur? Bohr? Euler? Faraday? Gauss? Pascal? Poincare? I haven’t checked, but I’m guessing: none of them.
He thinks Oxford and Cambridge are havens of intellectualism full of geniuses in tweeds. It’s not like that and I should know.
All US universities are technical universities, to develop good technicians to service machines.
More sanctions by US, but probably not enforced.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/congress-passes-new-iran-oil-sanctions-biden-unlikely-enforce-them
Are we standing on the brink? I remember J R Kunstler’s chilling words of 2006, in his book “The Long Emergency”.
“People will not believe that two centuries of modernity can be brought to a halt by a worldwide energy shortage”.
==========
And what then? The ROF that FE used to love to regale us with.
ROF = Ripping off of faces.
Or does the economy go down slowly, with people ordered to stay in their homes for fear of catching some dread disease? Businesses mostly come from recycling unneeded structures, such as shopping malls. Also, trying to grow food without modern machinery.
Re. Growing food , There are battery operated small tools like hand drills most handy men now find indispensable . If a battery hedge trimmer can be used to cut a small stand of wheat, or an electric chainsaw used to harvest firewood. Or even a small electric tractor to till a couple acres , when do tools that can yield back food or heat calories serve in our upcoming decent . Is there any priority toward self sufficiency from energy spent that yields caloric returns? What if a tool could enable more calories produced than the energy cost to build the tool ? Not saying all tools can repay their energy cost but shouldn’t we be experimenting with those we think can ? IMO more human labor will parallel the energy decent but I think there may be ways to ameliorate some of the hard side of that toil at least for the next few decades.
After 5-10 years all those batteries become useless, then what? OK some buy themselves a little bit of time, but when industrial civilization collapses all method of making the batteries disappear.
Collapse will by necessity be hard and dramatic, happening over a much shorter time period than even most degrowth people believe. People in cities wont just sit idly by to die of starvation when they ‘think’ people in other places have food.
I expect that collapse scenarios will vary around the world. Counties where people have long gotten along without electricity and with very little oil may do better.
Batteries are not an energy source. Without a major new additional energy source, the system collapses and the raiders come. Concepts of who exactly owns what tools will be a lot more fluid, along with ideas we have like torturing people is bad.
“Are we standing on the brink? I remember J H Kunstler’s chilling words of 2006…”
ha ha, thanks for that, 18 years ago and bAU is still rolling along in The Core.
then how does 2042 sound?
sure, no guarantee, but if someone can be wrong for 18 years, what about another 18?
que sera sera.
I will say this: We are nearer to the end of the world than we’ve ever been.
We are standing on the brink of several tipping points and cascading collapse.
Remember Seneca: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the road to ruin is rapid”.
Read it, that was 18 years ago and things still work. All/ most of the predictions have yet to come true.
Dennis L.
I especially liked the book because it was focused on how things worked together. For example, it pointed out that if homes couldn’t be heated any longer, then indoor plumbing would not work in areas with freezing temperatures.
Today, we know that water pipes must be drained for the winter, if a home is not to be kept above freezing all winter long.
Kunstler also suggested stopping making new private passenger automobiles, long before oil ran out, so that there would not be a huge number of drivable cars without fuel.
USA seems set to impose sanctions on China’s financial system with the aim to stop China’s and BRICS’ development of alternative financial structures to those of USA (Swift &c.)
However it seems likely to further incentivise and indeed prioritise the development of those alternative financial structures.
China has been stockpiling gold and masses of materials in preparation for the sanctions.
It is likely to damage the USA economy that is far more fragile than the Chinese with inflation and massive public debt, a trillion dollars added every three months.
And is liable to be especially damaging to Europe that is already hit by economic ruptures with Russia.
My thoughts: USA is likely happy with a weakened Europe and it especially does not want a strong and united Eurasia from China through Russia to Europe.
UK is also likely happy with a weakened Europe as they are potential opponent states at the end of the day.
Europe and UK have been subjugated by USA since WWII and there are liable to be consequences to that weakness.
They are liable to be run down poodles of USA while BRICS outpaces USA. ‘Not you.’ Arguably this is as much about ‘containing’ Europe and UK.
Bad cop Blinken to deliver ultimatum to China
It seems to me that the US doesn’t have the power to deliver an ultimatum to China; it needs lots of things from China, both now and in the future.
I agree that sanctions are “likely to further incentivise and indeed prioritise the development of those alternative financial structures.”
No body can give an ultimatum to China until they want a ” die off ” . For this one must understand the word API = Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient . All medicines have several chemicals like bonding agents ( keep the tablet from disintegrating in the mouth instead of stomach) , coloring agent , catalysts , delay release agents etc but there is a small percentage of the real chemical that is going to heal you . This is called API . Example a sleeping tablet has only about 50% of the chemical DIAZEPEM that puts you to sleep . This is the API , the rest is just other ingredients Similarly blood pressure drug Olemartsen 20 mg tablet has 12.5 mg of the API , the rest of 7.5 mg is other ingredients . More than 50% of the API ‘s are coming from China . Heck 99% of the world’s paracetamol ( an OTC painkiller , used in cough syrups and other medicines ) is coming from China . Don’t fook with China ,
I am not joking .
https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/leading-european-manufacturer-augments-paracetamol-production-15249
I remember a while back [2021 ] bringing baby paracetamol to my daughter in the Boston area (in my luggages when we visited) because she could not find it on the shelves of the stores where she shopped. That was when we had “empty shelves” problems before.
It does seem ambitious of USA to try to dictate who China partners and trades with.
USA is so dependent on China and it is preparing to have a war against it with the pretext of Taiwan anyway.
USA will be lucky if China trades anything with USA in 10 years time the way that USA is playing its hand?
Arguably the USA just got lucky as Europe destroyed itself in WWI and WWII and USA was able to just take over the ruins.
USA is actually not that good at geopolitics. Maybe it is just not bright enough as a political establishment?
USA spent 20 years building up China from the 1990s into a peer competitor and now USA is panicking and lashing out like it is still an unrivalled hegemon.
China is liable to call bluff on USA. If USA wants a war in the Pacific then that will work out really badly for USA.
USA has attempted to stage its Thucydides Trap with Russia and China to maintain its hegemony but it is really not working out for USA.
CCP is liable to chew up USA and spit it out much as Russia has the EU.
“USA is so dependent on China and it is preparing to have a war against it with the pretext of Taiwan anyway.”?
Unless policy has changed?
“By the time you got to the first Bush administration, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they came out with a national defense policy and strategic policy. What they basically said is that we’re going to have wars against what they called much weaker enemies and these have to be carried out quickly and decisively or else there will be embarrassment—a way of saying that popular reaction is going to set in. And that’s the way it’s been. It’s not pretty, but it’s some kind of constraint. “?
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/03/noam-chomsky-populist-groundswell-u-s-elections-future-humanity.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
It does seem ambitious of USA to try to dictate who China partners and trades with.
China is a lot more polite than the US would be if the tables were turned.
The US is an economic midget compared to China. It’s practically plankton.
2023 virgin steel production (no need to spell it out here, right?) totals:
China: 870,000,000 tons.
USA I estimate: 10 (ten) million tons.
It’s over. It’s so over.
Knew well an industrialist(machine tools) in the seventies and eighties who spent time in both Japan and China building up the business.
Perhaps on a political/policy level there was more, but this fellow was interested in markets for his product.
Knew the person who opened up China for a cooling equipment manufacture, large compressors, etc., same goal.
Dennis L.
Blinkien
Harvard again, Graduated with a BA in social studies, 1984, law degree from Columbia Law 1988.
These guys are narrative, but the universe doesn’t agree with their narrative; endless blind alleys.
These people are intelligent, they are test takers which is a different game than learning.
In some manner those who seek leadership positions need to be held accountable, their actions need to have a personal cost.
Dennis L.
Will the janitor greet Blinken at the airport?
I hope not, the janitor would lose face.
An old video 3 yrs ago of a China- US talks held in Iceland . Day 1 the Chinese minister puts Blinken and Sullivan in place . The Chinese minister had reportedly in a private conversation told Blinken/Sullivan to get a mouthwash . It was a 3 day meeting but the Chinese returned to Beijing on day 2 saying they will only resume talks when the US changes it’s attitude . It took six months of behind the scenes cajoling to get the Chinese back to the table .
This a better one .
Good news folks…BAU 2040
BEIJING, April 23 (Reuters) – China’s coal consumption will fall by just one-third by 2040, according to a report by a European consultancy published on Tuesday, threatening climate targets that call for phasing out much of global coal use by 2040.
The International Energy Agency has said that global coal power capacity has to be eliminated by 2040 to keep average global temperature rises within the key threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Better News Folks..
Saudi Arabia’s oil giant boss speaks up for China, saying its massive production of solar panels and EVs helps affordability
Huileng Tan Apr 23, 2024, 3:23 AM ET
Saudi Aramco CEO Amin Nasser praised China for making solar panels and electric vehicles affordable.
The West has recently stepped up criticism over China’s dumping of cheap green products on the global markets.
Saudi Arabia is fostering closer ties with China and wooing Chinese investments and business partnerships.
China really helped by reducing the cost of solar energy,” Amin Nasser, the CEO of state-owned Saudi Aramco, said at the World Energy Congress in Rotterdam on Monday, according to the Financial Times.
“We can see the same now in electric vehicles. Their cost is one-third to one-half the cost of other electric vehicles,” Nasser added, as he called for globalization and collaboration, per the FT.
Because China has made these green products so affordable, they will help the West achieve its target of cutting carbon emissions to a net zero level by 2050, said Nasser.
See, we have all bases covered till then…rock on Davie
Saudi Arabia wants China to help fund its struggling $500 billion Neom megaproject. Investors may not be too excited.
Beatrice Nolan Apr 22, 2024, 7:21 AM EDT
Saudi Arabia took its Neom road show to China amid speculation about the scope of the project and its finances.
Neom officials visited Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong last week to court Chinese investors and shed more light on the mysterious megacity.
While no deals have been announced, one attendee told Agence France-Presse that the exhibition helped make Neom “less mysterious.”
That observation came from Leonard Chan, the chair of the Hong Kong Innovative Technology Development Association who also told the news agency that reactions to the ambitious project at an invitation-only reception were “mostly neutral.”
Advertisement
Choosing an AI solution for your business can be tricky. Here’s how to get it right.
SPONSORED CONTENT by NICE
Choosing an AI solution for your business can be tricky. Here’s how to get it right.
Chan may not be first in line for The Line, however. “I’ll visit for fun, but I won’t live there. It’s like something out of ‘SimCity,'” he told AFP.
A private showcase provided attendees with an “immersive experience” exploring The Line, a 105-mile-long futuristic city, along with Oxagon, which promises to redefine the “traditional industrial model”; Trojena, Neom’s mountain resort; and Sindalah, a luxury island in the Red Sea that opens to the public later this year, per a press release.
Saudi Arabia’s $500 billion Neom megacity is reportedly seeking new sources of cash
Saudi Arabia is desperately trying to woo bankers to pay for its futuristic desert city
Take a closer look at the plans for the main regions of Neom, Saudi’s epic megacity project
Neom officials did not address recent reports that plans for the hugely expensive desert project were being scaled back.
Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Saudi Arabia had significantly reduced estimates for the number of people expected to live in The Line. Officials cut the number of expected residents for the “horizontal skyscraper” from 1.5 million by 2030 to fewer than 300,000, the report said.
Tarek Qaddumi, Neom’s executive director, said that the population target of 9 million would be achieved in time, per AFP.
Representatives for Neom did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider made outside normal working hours.
Wider concerns have reportedly been raised about the trillion-dollar investments in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 project.
The financial realities of the project, which could cost as much as $500 billion, have started to cause alarm within the Saudi government, Bloomberg reported. The country has also started borrowing to help fund Neom and other Vision 2030 “megaprojects,” The Wall Street Journal reported in February.
China is so wonderful..friends in need are ..
Foolish Fitz had said
“One can only imagine what a United Europe would have done”
You’d need bloody a vivid imagination, if you looked at their history, which is needlessly bloody. Emotionally stunted, squabbling halfwits are not generally very good at playing the united front.
“United Kingdom has been its biggest enemy against it”
More like a harsh matron, giving you a good slap and placing you firmly in your place and on the thankfully rare occasion that you managed to find half a dozen competent leaders, the Russians stepped in and gave you a well deserved kicking(you always bring it on yourselves and blame everyone else).
I did not reply at that time since the end of reply was coming up, but I reply here.
United Kingdom’s balance of power shit killed off the European stock beyond the level of recovery, and the winter of 1944 was , in my opinion, the last straw.
WW2 could have ended in 1944 , or 1943. The lives of ‘Americans’, whose granddads came thru Ellis Island, were, I have to say, not worth too much no matter what some people here might think.
Russia was trained as a good hound to hinder European unification and now it is showing its true colors.
The ‘Romanov’ dynasty ceased to be Russian long ago, and from Sophie von Anhalt-Zerbst, born at Stettin, Prussia (the Soviets did NOT forget that irony and awarded it to the Poles even though it was never part of Poland in its entire existence – Poland was always landlocked until Wilson awarded a sandtop, renamed Gdynia, to it in 1919) the ‘Czars’ of Russia were all Germans, so it could be called that during the ‘Romanov’ dynasty it could be called as European, but after 1918 it was no longer so, with two Asian leaders (Stalin and Chernenko, born in Caucasus and Siberia respectively).
Meanwhile United States became inundated with Africans originating from north of Sahara, namely the Hibernians, the Spanish speaking people who were conversos, and the southern Italians who came from the invaders originating in North Africa.
So the Russian hordes conquering Europe for all practical purposes is the classic ‘Leopart ate my face’.
A United Europe would have reached much farther than what the north-African dominated United States did.
North-African dominated? Maybe you mean Levant.
The North Africans , disguised as Irish, Hispanic or Italian, are much more numerous than the Levantines (actually Western Slavs).
“A United Europe would have”
Done as they always have and squabbled amongst themselves, killing off their own stock and not having the wit to realise that others will see that and use it to their own advantage. Been happening for centuries, just like the blaming everyone else.
Fear not, the pirates and privateers days are numbered. We are going back to the more natural order of the world island(maybe). That’s why control of the pivot(heartland) has suddenly become the big issue(without it the west is nothing but an unimportant periphery.
Did you see Helmer’s piece the other day?
https://johnhelmer.net/a-nasty-little-book-about-the-allied-invasion-of-russia-in-1918-is-a-nasty-big-lesson-for-now/
Books like that are written and promoted for a reason and I think that reason might materialise before the years out.
Europe is again allowing itself to be led to another slaughter, but of course, it won’t be their own fault, because they should not be treated like responsible adults, that can judge a situation logically. They can’t even see that the only friend they have ever had, is the very same that they are now being set up to fight. It’s very hard to have any sympathy for such repetitive idiocy.
The future of Europe is India . Mr B . 11 min read .
https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/i-saw-the-future-of-europe-in-india-6312929e2f88
KENGEO
IGNORED
04/22/2024 at 6:34 pm
Construction Slump-Led Recession? This seems very peak-oil-esque…
JT – This (“far worse than 2008”) was the exact response I got yesterday when I asked someone in commercial real estate construction/development industry about how business was…they painted a very bleak picture and think that a significant reckoning is underway that will make 2008 look like a very small bump in the road… some/many headlines seem to confirm this outlook:
05-Apr-2024
“The price of Fly Ash in Europe’s largest economy experienced a decline at the end of the first quarter of the year. This decline can be attributed to subdued demand for Fly Ash from the downstream construction sector”
“The number of bankruptcies in Sweden increased by 14% in September from a year earlier, weighed down by a slump in the construction,…”
“Property sales and housing starts have collapsed, and Beijing may not be able to prop up construction much longer before it crashes by half.”
“A pair of Iowa developers has filed for bankruptcy in federal court, leaving uncertain the future of homes and properties in three states…”
“From San Diego to Seattle, developers are building far fewer apartments in 2023.”
https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/international/germanys-industrial-downturn-stretches-seventh-month
Thank you.
Dennis L.
Add CRE crisis to the mix .
https://wolfstreet.com/2024/04/22/brick-and-mortar-meltdown-fells-express-simon-property-brookfield-to-avert-more-vacant-stores-and-bad-leases-at-their-malls-buy-brands-and-435-stores-out-of-bankruptcy/
This is wild! Big mall owners (who own lots of malls that have gone into bankruptcy) are buying out the bankrupt retailer Express, and its 435 stores. The Mall owners desperately need to keep some tenants in their malls, even if they are not doing well.
This is some sort of financial engineering to keep the system going a bit longer.
I agree that real estate is a major problem. You seem to include quotes from different sources.
The quote about China real estate seems to come from here: https://www.businessinsider.com/china-economy-housing-market-real-estate-crash-investors-outlook-construction-2024-3
The “pair of Iowa developers” quote comes from here:
https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/waukee/2024/03/14/future-of-estates-of-waukee-homes-unclear-as-developer-vintage-cooperative-ewings-bankruptcy/72956750007/#
I found this about West Coast apartment builders:
https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2023/08/22/new-apartment-construction-declines-california-oregon-washington#
As much as I would like to see Europe produce a decent cricket team, the future of Europe is not India. Demographics will see to that.
Yes, people will need to get used to ‘make do and mend’ and conditions will degrade, but Europe lacks and will lack the sheer vitality a young population provides.
There will be an interim or intermediate period, in which we partly live on our inheritage – the ruins left over. For example, nuclear waste or chemical waste. Ghost cities full of concrete. Cars, made of crap metals, that rust away and dont even material for a good knife. Perhaps an old still working singer from 1920 without needle and yarn supply.
A production without quality control and workers protection has been the foundation of all technology in history. Cutting off edges from flint can damage your eyes. There have been found chimneys, though, to lead arsenic fumes away from workers in metal production, that are 6.000 years old.
Part of our inheritage is also the ability to invest. Currently we are investing into a technology that cannot work. If tomorrow a genius would make nuclear fusion possible, we wouldn’t have the means to deploy it.
For me, the end of fossile fuels is mainly a mental or call it spiritual challenge.
Every average grandmom can learn within two weeks, how to cook over open fire and milk a goose. After three weeks she won’t miss electric lights.
But the screaming: Nooooo, without USB connector and plastic surgery I don’t wanna live! The screaming is the problem. I am my opposite gender!
It would be nice to bring nuclear waste out of the way and find a technique how to make lenses from wood glass in a small workshop. But I am afraid, we won’t manage, the screamings cause more attention.
The nation will sell £12.4 billion ($15.3 billion) more gilts compared to the Debt Management Office’s original plan for the 2024-25 fiscal year, it said in a statement Tuesday. That will take issuance to £277.7 billion, with the additional sales skewed toward shorter maturities
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-23/uk-raises-planned-gilt-sales-for-year-by-more-than-expected
In the US debt is also skewing more towards the short-term.
Typical deadbeat trajectory.
Are there articles about deadbeat trajectory skewing toward the short term?
Calcutta in 1910 (I do not use the ‘modern’ names)
https://youtu.be/bY6u5Ru0XbE?si=6YPtyb5f00sjLVEA
I don’t know about Europe but it will be the future of the no-longer-that-Great Britain since its elites are inundated by those from the Subcontinent.
the British destroyed European unity but propped up the Hindus so it is inevitable that they get what they have chosen.
i watched the video on there about ‘primitive’ manufacturing
it was nothing of the sort, they were using modern machining techniques, but with sandals and bare feet pouring hot metal.
I have been to India. I have even seen a little of the industry in India. I was appalled at the lack of protective wear for the workers.
Unfortunately, this seems to be what efficiency of the manufacturing system looks like. Some workers sleep on the manufacturing floor at night. Lighting was very minimal–a hole letting light in and perhaps a single light bulb.
I wrote an article about India not too long ago.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2023/09/25/can-india-come-out-ahead-in-an-energy-squeeze/
India is a low cost producer. It has definite advantages over others.
In this article, Mr. B first talks about India, and how the workers work with a minimum of protective equipment and burn fossil fuels. I would add that in India, they burn coal (not oil). From what I have seen, they also burn discarded clothing sent by Advanced Nations. India does a lot of recycling.
Mr. B says, “The Future of Europe Is India,” I would point out that most of Europe’s coal that is left is in Ukraine (highest) and Poland. Germany also has some very low quality coal. Without the coal, Europe will have a hard time, even recycling things. Maybe they can burn old clothes, but that doesn’t go very far. If Russia wins the war with Ukraine, those coal reserves will likely go to Russia. Europe doesn’t have much coal reserves left.
The US has what appears to be quite a bit of coal “proved reserves.” This makes the US takeover target for anyone else looking for coal. India and China have their own coal, but have been importing some as well. This chart shows countries buying imported coal from the US recently. India is high on the list, but China and Netherlands are getting some as well. Also Brazil, Morocco and Japan.
https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/pdf/t7p01p1.pdf
David, how does this set of predictions suit you? We will, on the average, be as poor as a church mouse by 2040.
This is taken from Tim Morgan’s latest post, entitled The Worthington Factor, and summarized by John Day. Dr. Morgan’s prognosis for Japan is particularly poor, with Britain not far behind, but you are all going to have to shrink your expectations:
=====
In economic terms, material prosperity is at, or very near, the point at which prior growth inflects into contraction. Meanwhile, the real costs of necessities are continuing to rise. The result is leveraged compression of the affordability of discretionary (non-essential) products and services… ..The projections provided by SEEDS don’t, at first sight, look particularly frightening. In comparison with 2023, aggregate prosperity is forecast only fractionally lower by 2030, though 14% reduced by 2040. The world’s average person is set to be 7% poorer by 2030, and 25% less prosperous by 2040. This is a far cry from the imminent economic “collapse” predicted by some.
The devil, though, is in the detail. Whilst the world’s average person may be “only” 7% poorer by 2030, his or her cost of essentials is projected to rise by 14% in real terms over that period. This means that per capita PXE – Prosperity eXcluding Essentials – will fall by 17% in the coming seven years, and will have more than halved (-54%) by 2040.
As well as ceasing to be able to afford costly holidays, a new car or entertainment subscriptions, and in addition being unable to respond to the allure of the advertised, the average person is going to find it increasingly hard to ‘keep up the payments’ on all of the mortgages, secured and unsecured loans and broader financial commitments taken on in the years of reckless credit expansion… ..It was never likely that we would choose to address environmental and ecological hazard by voluntarily relinquishing our fixation with “growth”. One doesn’t need to be unduly cynical to think that sustainability alone could never have been sold to the public as a choice preferable to consumerism. This, perhaps, is why the pursuit of environmental responsibility has been presented to the public as a promise of “sustainable growth”.
As the economy inflects from growth into contraction, two trends, at least, are clear. The first is that we’re going to have to prioritise needs over wants. The second is that we’ll have to redesign a financial system built on the false predicate of infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet.
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/276-the-worthington-factor/
>> we’ll have to redesign a financial system built on the false predicate of infinite, exponential economic expansion on a finite planet
I will take the other side of that bet:
We (USA) are going to go down swinging because “the American lifestyle is non-negotiable”. We collectively don’t grasp what’s happening and, even if we did understand, lack the culture and wisdom to deal with reality gracefully. There will be no purposeful systemic redesign, just chaos and flailing while drowning before the next semi-stable system emerges. The only thing up for debate is the timeline. The usual deus ex machina / techtopia prediction caveats apply.
I’m part of that generation which experienced the energy crisis of the 70s and 80s with the frustration of long lines at the pumps waiting to fill up on odd or even days. Never mind the actual stealing of petro from tanks and selling of anti theft devices such as springs or locking gas caps. Vivid memories of all out fighting when folks were told no more gas after waiting.
There were trucker protests too that created roadblocks.
Never mind the stagflation, something we are beginning to experience again now.
I knew eventually this would reappear again, since our way of life did not change course one iota and in many ways escalated even worse. Some peak oil commentator suggested we go back to a lifestyle of the 1970s…like that would solve anything…
That’s how unrealistic or mindset really has become.
Remember the opening of the Alaskan North Slope and the boom it provided. Many rushed to cash in job opportunities it provided.
If any of us think we are able to go back 😔 to before, I agree with Gail, it ain’t going to happen willingly.
What we are seeing is just fiddle faddle …
I shutter to think when it really strikes again…and it surely will..
You can’t stop what’s for coming, it’s not waiting on you…that’s vanity..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=IvqLz9xcvGQ&pp=ygU0bm8gY291bnRyeSBmb3Igb2xkIG1lbiB5b3UgY2FuJ3Qgc3RvcCB3aGF0J3MgY29taW5nIA%3D%3D
The reason there was physical shortages of gasoline and oil is because Nixon put in price fixing which means you have to ration supplies. If they would have not done that – the price would have exploded higher and lowered demand and no shortages.
And actually, the US didn’t have it so bad because they worked out a deal with the Saudi’s. Japan and Europe had TWO energy crises. The second when Iraq and Iran went to war. I think early 80 or close. And they had shortages twice. In Japan panicked housewives ran around stores which ran out of all kinds of supplies.
Where I live in the midwest they didn’t have shortages for the most part. From what I hear. Just long lines and such. many refineries are around the midwest. Hence Cleveland where John D something started something which is now (Marathon).
You were very lucky then…from my memory the story was a little different. That’s OK, it’s all History now and regardless of the details, just a little bitty shortage creates havoc in our way of life. Without automobiles,/trucks things go gaga.
Take care…no need to rehash … we’ll be seeing a different version of it …hoping not too soon
1979 New York
https://youtu.be/G7SnaMphvug?si=KwvnveF7ApoW1yZ2&t=27
this projection seems much too optimistic to me.
but reasonable for the Russians?
Possibly. Some numbers: transport by train is 0.3MJ/Tonkm (0.2 in flat Russia). Shipping is ten times cheaper (but generally over longer distances) and trucking about ten times more expensive. But trains are electrified and we are not about to run out of electricity. and of course there are ship worthy waterways that can take you from Iran to Petersburg and from Turkey to the Urals. Yes, I can see Russia being a pauper and the West a disaster in 2040.
or not until the 2050s.
the speculation is quite entertaining.
“Whilst the world’s average person may be “only” 7% poorer by 2030, his or her cost of essentials is projected to rise by 14% in real terms over that period. This means that per capita PXE – Prosperity eXcluding Essentials – will fall by 17% in the coming seven years, and will have more than halved (-54%) by 2040.”
first, it doesn’t really matter if he’s somewhat right or way wrong, and it doesn’t really matter who agrees or disagrees.
but to me it’s become the best bet that this will be the general path of degrowth, that surplus energy will decline gradually and prosperity will also.
and to me, PXE down 50% by about 2040 doesn’t sound bad at all, since that means that the average person’s non-essential spending will be halved, but they will still be able to afford essentials.
it’s reasonable to extend this out to 2050 or so and guess that by then the average person will only be able to afford essentials.
beyond that. the word collapse may be fitting for IC.
I would be over age 90 by 2050, so I seriously doubt I will be here by then, but I hope to see 2030 and if my optimism held up fairly well or not.
que sera sera.
“first, it doesn’t really matter if he’s somewhat right or way wrong, and it doesn’t really matter who agrees or disagrees.
but to me it’s become the best bet that this will be the general path of degrowth, that surplus energy will decline gradually and prosperity will also.”
Agree with first, second, step function for prosperity? E.g. a mortgage, it is not linear; after a period of time where it is not paid, house is gone.
Dennis L.
the house doesn’t just go away when it’s value to a lender plunges.
we should look at the problem longer term.
the 29 depression was part of the system breakdown, as was ww2, and current homelessness of thousands—all a resource problem, showing up in different ways in different places.
we look to politics to solve the problem, and so elect lunatics.
with collective greed, we have rendered the planet into cash, but cash is only a token of energy.–a problem that can’t be solved by voting.
without energy, cash is worthless.—but of course most can’t accept that, so we blunder on towards the final collapse.
“with collective greed, we have rendered the planet into cash, but cash is only a token of energy.–a problem that can’t be solved by voting.”
Agree.
“without energy, cash is worthless.—but of course most can’t accept that, so we blunder on towards the final collapse.”
Secondary effect, without biology, people, there is no economics, it is secondary to biology.
Amish are closer to nature, less transactional value of cash. Around me, they seem to prosper. Last Sunday saw a group, under a tree, buggies all around. A day of rest.
Dennis L.
amish buggies run on tarmac roads
and i imagine, if they want dental work doing,(or an appendix / or leg), removed—they dont forgo anaeasthetics
Which is the product of the industrial society they do not like.
Amish are maybe a bit odd—but no different to the rest of us.—they prosper through the society they live in.
“we should look at the problem longer term.”
I try to, it looks like inner parts of The Core might be able to keep bAU running long term ie into the 2040s or 2050s.
“… all a resource problem, showing up in different ways in different places.”
and so the future too, countries in The Periphery will be enduring big problems soon, some are even now and many more on the way there.
in different ways in different places in different times.
with collective greed, we have rendered the planet into cash, but cash is only a token of energy.–a problem that can’t be solved by voting.
What is greed? Why shouldn’t I consume as much as I want? Nor can any problem be solved by voting.
Interesting, but I would assume that different economies around the world would do differently. Some will do terribly, and some would do OK. And failing financial systems would have a big impact.
The rapid growth in Chinese solar panel manufacturing capabilities is really a way of dealing with the problem of Peak Coal in their core provinces. Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia have large coal reserves. But these are stranded, too far from core provinces for transportation of the coal to be practical.
So the Chinese came up with an ingenious, though sadistic, solution. They used forced Uiyger labour to mine coal, which was burned in powerplants at the mine head. This produced some of the cheapest electricity in the world, which is exactly what is needed to produce semiconductor grade silicon very cheaply. They then used more Uiyger forced labour to cut the silicon wafers and assemble the solar panels. Voila! The cheapest solar panels in the world and the back bone of the green Left’s energy transition ambitions.
The solar panels represent a condensation of coal based energy that can be transported affordably to grid connections in the core provinces. By using the coal powerplant as backup for solar and wind, the chinese manage to generate more electricity using less coal from their core provinces. So wind and solar helps to stretch their coal resources and buy the time they need to bring nuclear capacity online, which is their only genuine replacement for coal.
The surplus solar panels get sold to the west at bargain prices, allowing virtue signalling green lefties to pretend that they are saving the planet. The whole green Ponzi scheme looked sustainable whilst interest rates were in negative territory. Some version of thesolar ponzi scheme will continue at a weaker pace, so long as the Chinese still have stranded coal, Uiyger slaves and a gullible western kosher run ellite, willing to turn the other cheek and buy the bargain solar panels. But we are kidding ourselves if we pretend that buying these things is in any way saving the planet or in any way ethical. They are made using slave labour and coal based energy. They are really no different to the skin lampshades that were shipped back to Germany from the ‘work camps’ in Poland.
Interesting!
As long as solar and wind are used to supplement stranded coal, rather than using the idiotic pricing approach that forces other providers off the grid, it has a place. I can see why what you are talking about would work.
it is a terrible world we have evolved into we have taken a page out of hitlers guide book and are supporting the nazi party in its new disguise remember what the nazi emblem stood for ‘peace’ but can we have peace without war? these people that are being forced to save the world by working as slaves for china shows us that perhaps china and ww2 germany have something in common that the rest of the world is supporting china as saviour for the world had germany won the war would we had not done the same for germany and not cared what happened to the people that were in those camps .World war 2 was about the oil had middle eastern oil not saved us by keeping BAU alive then Germany would have won the war and people would not care what happened in those camps just like we dont care about ulgers really we dont where are the mass protests listen guys dont knock hitler we will be worse.
“The surplus solar panels get sold to the west at bargain prices, allowing virtue signalling green lefties to pretend that they are saving the planet. ”
Thank you,
Dennis L.
Last night saw a government spokesperson (it was a woman), addressing the manufacturing base of the United States and it’s deficiency and decline. At least she was honest how we moved it overseas to take advantage of cheap (slave like) labor.
So, now I’m reading China is getting too expensive and the multinational players are moving to cheaper locales..
Suppose many share the guilt of taking advantage of those unfortunates….but with better window dressing
Woke’ Apple continues to use Chinese slave labor, report shows
Well, a new investigative report from the website The Information shows seven Apple suppliers have been accused of using slave labor.
“The Information and human rights groups have found seven companies supplying device components, coatings and assembly services to Apple that are linked to alleged forced labor involving Uyghurs and other oppressed monitories in China,” the report reads. “At least five of those companies received thousands of Uyghur and other minority workers at specific factory sites or subsidiaries that did work for Apple, the investigation found.”
Washington Times
One wants to choose one’s group wisely; some work better than others. Biology adapts albeit slowly at first than suddenly I am told.
Dennis L.
Most times we don’t choose..it’s chosen..
Riders on the Storm..
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iPRSxwZBmcM&pp=ygUdcmlkZXJzIG9uIHRoZSBzdG9ybSB0aGUgZG9vcnM%3D
Do you have any links describing this?
So the Chinese came up with an ingenious, though sadistic, solution. They used forced Uiyger labour to mine coal,
Bunch of crap. America lacks the ability to take on China economically or militarily but lies are still cheap.
Found on the MoonOfAlabama Ukraine thread. Seems military analysts still have some sense:
Posted by: vargas | Apr 22 2024 15:03 utc | 195
I think that if anyone has analysts worth their salt they on all sides know that from 2040 onward we’ll be entering a 160 year period from which very little that we recognize as the modern global word, let alone civilization, remains.
What I think they have missed is that it is not a fall of rome but a collapse of the bronze civilizations level (at least). No Constantinople , no holy empire, and the level of population size, interconnection and food dependence may well destroy typical surviving cultures…
Posted by: Newbie | Apr 22 2024 15:49 utc | 202
“160 year period”?
more like a “forever period”…….or until we get a metaphysical system reset…..
Sure, but maybe he is talking about the time required for population and cultural stabilization. I’m inclined to give majority credit for getting the major point right.
Here is another comment on MoA. The long-anticipated and much poo-pooed global architecture changes are finally coming into clear view and becoming common knowledge:
>> The reasons for the current inflation are actually much more fundamental than what “experts” admit.
With the economic decoupling between the West and the RoW, the former can no longer appropriate 90% of global resources and labour. This causes a mismatch of (monetary) demand and physical supply in western countries, with infighting for their shrinking ‘piece of the pie’ increasing. EU & Japan are reducing consumption, so US/UK can keep over-consuming for a little longer, paying for it with bond issuance. That’s bad enough from an economic perspective – but the really scary thing is what political consequences this will entail. I’m afraid we ain’t seen nothing yet in terms of ‘populism’ (a.k.a. fascism).
>> That’s my explanation/ interpretation at least, and I’ve yet to read a better one.
>> Posted by: smuks | Apr 22 2024 16:12 utc | 208
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1DyhxVInb9Y
China is building a 60GW hydro dam.
Stopped watching when it said construction will begin in 2025 or 2026 and could be operational as early as mid to late 2030’s, barring any delays.
China usually builds things fast. This sounds like too big a project to really work.
Another Three Gorges Dam…wonderbar
whats your problem with that? Jealous?
Hi Gail
for some reason comment links are not appearing in my email inbox for this OFW session
any thoughts on why?
I am afraid not. You responded to OFW that you wanted to see all comments, and they are not appearing?
no nothing appears
The Fast Eddie Hex perhaps
I’ve been having the same problem Norman. Checked settings and nothing wrong. Trying a different email provider might be worth a go.
will try that fitz, thanks
Let me know if it works please and I will do the same.
no it hasnt worked Fitz
I’m going to unsubscribe and log in again. its very odd
Electric mining truck done.
An interesting measure will be whether it can move enough ore to produce its own batteries. Of course, that doesn’t account for the energy of smelting and fabrication, but it’s a start.
This just came my way..Happy Eaarth Day Everyone
https://qz.com/ev-prices-still-too-high-despites-sales-1851419946
Electric vehicles are seeing huge discounts right now, but those new lower prices are still not enough to get folks to, y’know, buy them. Now, an ever-more-bloated EV inventory is pushing automakers and dealers to slash prices even further. Five-figure price discounts are no longer out of the question.
On average, automakers discounted their EVs about $6,000 per unit in the first quarter of 2024, according to a Cox Automotive study reported by Automotive News. Automakers and dealers alike are offering these high-ass discounts for the simple fact that people do not want to spend a huge premium on electric vehicles, and they’re now piling up on dealer lots.
Some automakers are going well above and beyond that $6,000 average, though. Nissan is offering nearly $16,000 off its Aryia electric crossover. That works out to nearly a third of its MSRP right off the bat, and that doesn’t even include tax breaks or utility rebates for buyers. Mercedes-Benz is also making big cuts, according to AutoNews. Its EQS SUV currently getting nearly $20,000 cash on the hood, cutting the price to a tick under $105,000. That works out to a 19 percent discount.
Here’s more from Automotive News on how massive EV inventory is impacting car dealers:
As of April 1, EVs were sitting on dealership lots for an average of 119 days. While that’s fallen from a peak of 169 days in mid-February — helped by the discounts — it’s still a lot higher than the 73-day supply average of gasoline-powered vehicles.
Car dealers throw cold water on electric vehicles versus gas options: ‘I wouldn’t feel safe’
Dealers said gas cars drive better, are more economical and do not track data like electric vehicles
FOXBusiness https://www.foxbusiness.com/media/car-dealers-throw-cold-water-electric-vehicles-gas-options-wouldnt-feel-safe.amp
Abdul Cummings, the owner of Jersey City Autoland, told Fox News Digital that few people he has encountered feel confident buying pre-owned electric vehicles.
According to Cummings, electric vehicles typically require low maintenance and the cost of ownership is often as advertised. However, many potential buyers are concerned about the distance EVs can travel.
There’s a lot of range phobia when it comes to electric vehicles. I think that’s still the main obstacle,” Cummings said, suggesting that charging stations are still nowhere near where they need to be in many parts of the country.
….Cummings said companies and the U.S. government are trying to push EVs with positive momentum and as a “good gesture” to benefit the environment. However, he feels the current approach is “too aggressive” and “too fast.”
Also, it takes us away from looking at other ideas that can also solve some of the problems we face in the auto industry. I like to stay positive, but I don’t think the way the decision-makers would imagine it would be in 2030 or 2035, as promised—I think that’s highly, highly unachievable,” he added.
The Jersey City Autoland owner also believes car manufacturers and regulators should have experimented more with hybrid vehicles, noting that many models are still desirable to car buyers.
He further called the rapid shift towards electric vehicles a “risky bet” and said “trust issues” among the public regarding government perceptions could unintentionally push people away from electric options.
It ain’t going to happen..
I wonder whether some EV owners will intentionally “total” their vehicles, to get rid of them. Use the money to buy something else.
Boy, if that happens, hate to see the increase in insurance rates for them..and all cars for that matter. Can barely afford it now
Learned a new one, never considered that.
Civilization depends on a degree of honesty and trust.
Everything takes a team, once trust is gone one plus one is less than two instead of closer to three.
Dennis L.