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The world economy is an amazingly complex, physics-based, self-organizing system. The three major elements are extracted resources including energy resources, human population, and demand coming through the financial system.
All three of these elements tend to increase over time, but both population and extracted resources tend to hit limits because the world is finite. Financial demand is emphasized by politicians because it seems to increase without limit. The extraction limit is not obvious: It is the amount that consumers can afford to pay for resources and the products they create. This limit cuts off resource extraction at amounts that are far below the amounts that geologists calculate are available for extraction.
In this post, I will offer some insights into how the world economy actually operates.
[1] There is a close relationship between world energy consumption and economic growth.
The fitted years are 1965 to 2023. The R2 =.98 tells us that there is a close relationship between energy consumption and GDP.
[2] There is a physics reason why energy consumption and economic growth are related. The economy requires energy for a similar reason to the reason why humans require food.
Physics tells us that every action, even the movement of molecules, requires energy dissipation. Within the economy, this energy can be human energy, energy from the sun, or energy from sources such as burned biomass or fossil fuels.
In physics terms, the world economy and many structures within the world economy are dissipative structures. These structures are self-organizing, and they often grow over time. Examples are plants and animals, hurricanes, and businesses.
Dissipative structures require energy of the right kinds for their continued “life” and for growth. Animals require food for their continued life and growth. Hurricanes get their energy from warm sea water. The fact that the economy is a dissipative structure has been known since 1996 and is written about today.
[3] Starting long ago, humans became adapted to eating some cooked food. This change led to humans being able to outcompete all other animals. Eventually, this change led to populations outgrowing available resources and collapsing.
According to Discover Magazine, pre-humans first began to build fires to cook food at least 800,000 years ago. The consumption of cooked food allowed early humans to have bigger brains, smaller teeth and jaws, and more time for activities other than chewing, such as making crafts.
Humans are now adapted to having some cooked food in their diets to get adequate nutrition. (A few people today try to consume a raw food diet, but they often use a food processor or juicer to break down cell walls.) As a result of the adaptation to eating some cooked food, two major changes took place:
(a) Humans were able to achieve dominance over other plants and animals. They could use fire directly to scare away other animals, and they could use fire to help make better tools for hunting and agriculture.
(b) Because of this dominance, the population of humans has tended to grow until some kind of limiting condition is hit. The resulting pattern is often called overshoot and collapse.
History shows a repeated pattern of overshoot and collapse. A population would grow until the carrying capacity of the local area was reached. Food surpluses would become lower and lower, so less food could be saved up for fluctuations in rainfall and temperature. Eventually, civilizations would succumb to one or another problem: disease, attack by a neighboring group, climate fluctuations, or governments overthrown by unhappy citizens.
We tell ourselves that overshoot and collapse cannot happen now, but human population is high relative to fossil fuel resources, and intermittent wind and solar are not working out well as substitutes.
[4] The financial system provides growing demand through debt and many other financial promises. An important aspect of this financial demand is its time-shifting ability.
Figure 3 shows my view of how the economy works. Debt is indeed important because it helps pull the economy forward. For example, it helps an entrepreneur afford to build a factory and hire workers. As long as the investment pays back well enough to repay the debt with interest, the system seems to work. GDP tends to grow. (Figure 3 also shows five other parts of the system, but I am leaving these to the reader to review.)
Debt is not unique in pulling the economy forward. Shares of stock issued with the promise of dividends act similarly to debt because they allow investment before a new product is made. Pension plans, even if not funded, stimulate the economy because citizens decide that they don’t need to save for the future (or have children), if they can depend on the government pension plan to take care of them. Even inflation in the price of a home or shares of stock can have the effect of adding to demand. For example, a person owning shares of stock can sell some appreciated shares of stock and use the proceeds to build a new factory.
It is the time-shifting aspect of debt and related promises that is important. With the help of debt and its equivalents, people can spend today to build a road or factory that will provide a long-lasting benefit. The hope is that the total return will be high enough that the debt can be repaid with interest, or that dividends can be paid on the shares of stock.
If the economy is growing quickly, interest rates can be quite high without slowing the economy. If energy costs are very high, or if all industries are stagnant, it may be difficult to get any payback at all from a debt-related investment. Instead, interest rates may need to be very low, or debt defaults become likely. Economic growth is likely to be low, or even negative.
In one their analyses of borrowing by governments over eight centuries, Reinhart and Rogoff unexpectedly discovered the phenomenon of low defaults among rapidly growing countries. They reported, “It is notable that the non-defaulters, by and large, are all hugely successful growth stories.”
[5] Models become very important in today’s economy. They often are misleading, even if they are supposedly scientific.
The easiest models to build are ones that assume the future will be very similar to the past, or that the trend from the past will continue. These models tend to be popular with citizens because they suggest that good times will continue indefinitely. Such outcomes are what everyone would like to see, so these models tend to be accepted as “scientifically valid.”
In a finite world, many kinds of patterns are constantly changing. Depletion of resources and rising population are particular stressors. Figure 4 shows the base scenario of a 1972 computer model of resource depletion, population growth, and pollution growth.
The model used was an engineering-type analysis of the physical quantities involved. This approach did not show growth continuing indefinitely. Instead, it showed a major downturn about now.
I have looked at the model myself, and I have talked with Dennis Meadows, who oversaw the analysis. The model looks at resources used in each six-month calendar period. The share of these resources needed for getting these resources out and transformed into usable work cannot be too high, or the economy tends to collapse. (Nature doesn’t use accrual accounting!)
In such a calculation, quick payback of an energy investment becomes very important. Also, the amount of supplementary equipment, such as electricity transmission lines and batteries required, becomes important. I would expect that wind, solar, nuclear, and liquefied natural gas (LNG) would do relatively poorly in such a calculation. Oil, coal, and burned biomass would do much better because their energy payback is immediate–when they are burned. Furthermore, oil, coal and biomass require relatively little specialized equipment for transportation and storage.
[6] Narratives are created to accompany the questionable models that have been developed.
One popular narrative is that Financial Demand is all that really matters. Politicians have significant control over the Financial Demand shown in Figure 1. They can see that if they can create more debt, they can perhaps get some of the money that the debt makes available down to ordinary citizens. With more money, citizens can perhaps buy more goods and services from the world economy.
Historically, raising financial demand has worked well because the extraction of fossil fuels and many other resources were well within physical extraction limits. Higher demand would lead to higher prices, which in turn would lead to more extraction. But as we get closer to the physical extraction limits, this approach works less well. The problem is that at some point, finished goods (such as automobiles and groceries) become too expensive for consumers if prices rise high enough to satisfy producers.
Because we are now reaching extraction limits, the added debt approach works much less well, as the short tenure of Liz Truss as Prime Minister of the UK in 2022 shows. The problem for countries other than the US is that with added debt, their currencies tend to drop relative to the US dollar. Thus, while perhaps their citizens can individually buy more, the cost of imported goods and services, especially energy, tends to rise. Overall inflation tends to be higher. This causes citizens to become very unhappy.
The US is in a unique position because it is currently the holder of the “reserve currency.” Its currency can’t drop relative to the US dollar. However, since 2020, the US has added huge amounts of debt, as have other countries around the world. Asset prices have also risen because of temporarily low interest rates. Newly made goods and services don’t increase in proportion to the rapidly growing debt and other financial stimulus. What tends to happen instead is inflation, as we have recently witnessed.
[7] One popular narrative is that if enough demand can be added to the economy through financial manipulations, energy prices will rise sufficiently to allow the needed amount of energy to be extracted.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t work. Affordability is important to the consumer, so oil prices can’t rise too high. At the same time, prices cannot fall too low, for too long, or producers will stop extracting oil. Instead, oil prices tend to spike and then fall back. They are to some extent not very acceptable to either buyer or seller. Whether the buyers or sellers are more disadvantaged varies over time. A similar pattern holds for other resources, as well.
[8] A third narrative is that climate change caused by excess CO2 is the world’s worst problem, and that the world can voluntarily move away from fossil fuels and fix this problem.
Unfortunately, the world economy can no more move away from fossil fuels than humans can move away from eating food. In fact, moving away from fossil fuels would likely lead to starvation for a large share of the world’s population. In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote about his concern that population was growing too fast relative to food supply. The timing was shortly before fossil fuels began being used very widely. World population at that time as only about 1 billion. World population today is over 8 billion.
In part, the climate change narrative seems to be an excuse to move manufacturing from Advanced Economies to economies that make extensive use of coal, as it tends to be a cheap fuel. The latter economies also tend to have lower wage and benefit levels, so there is a definite cost advantage. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. The result is easy to see in Figure 8 below. The US now exports coal to India and China, among other countries.
As a person might expect, world CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use have soared.
[9] The truth is that there aren’t enough resources to go around to support a growing world population. We are reaching a turning point where the total amount of goods and services that the world economy can produce will soon turn down. (This is not unlike the situation modeled in Figure 4, above.)
While the narrative we hear endlessly is “We are moving away from fossil fuels to prevent climate change,” I believe the real issue is that fossil fuels are leaving the world because we are hitting extraction limits. No one wants to hear such an awful story, however. The climate change narrative is a “sour grapes” version of the story that is more palatable to listeners.
Figure 8 below shows that the year 2020 should have been a wake-up call that the world needs to cut back on diesel and jet fuels. Diesel fuel is heavily used by agricultural machinery, large trucks, trains and boats. Of course, jet fuel powers jets. With rising world population and a growing economy, it would be expected that their consumption would continue to grow. Diesel and jet fuel are both “middle distillates,” which are most abundantly supplied by heavy oils such as Urals oil from Russia and oil from the Oil Sands in Canada .
Between 1990 and 2018, consumption of diesel and jet fuels increased by an average of 1.7% per year. Between 2018 and 2023, there has been no increase at all–in fact, world consumption for 2023 is slightly lower than in 2018. If the 1.7% per year growth pattern had continued, consumption of this combination of fuels would have grown by 8.8% during the five-year period from 2018 and 2023.
In a sense, there is a shortfall of approximately 8.8% of the diesel and jet fuel combination. Some airline schedules (especially in Asia) have been cut back. Farmers in Europe are protesting because the selling prices for the crops they grow are not high enough to cover today’s diesel and fertilizer costs plus other costs of production. Diesel is a problem fuel and fertilizer is very energy dependent. If the price of groceries rises high enough to cover the costs of diesel and fertilizer for farmers, grocery costs become unaffordable to many citizens.
[10] Added complexity looks like it would be a solution to inadequate energy and other resource supplies. Instead, added complexity leads to wage and wealth disparities and frequent system breakdowns.
Complexity can take many forms, including greater specialization; more education for some of the workers; larger, more hierarchical businesses; greater globalization; and ever more complex devices. Such devices can often use energy products more sparingly. Because of these potential energy savings, many people assume that such devices can allow the energy supply that is available to be stretched to cover all the economy’s needs.
In practice, it doesn’t work this way. Instead, added complexity often adds to energy demand instead of reducing it. For example, moving significant manufacturing to China starting in late 2001 was a type of added complexity. This change added to world coal demand and increased CO2 emission because the goods produced in China and shipped elsewhere were cheaper and therefore more affordable than goods made in the US or Europe.
Another issue with complexity is the susceptibility to breakdowns it produces. Just this past week, there was an example of this with the update of CrowdStrike computer software that took down computer networks around the world. Another example is the problem Kia is having with engines shutting down unexpectedly. Nature uses complexity, but it also incorporates redundancy so that unexpected breakdowns are not a frequent result.
A third problem with complexity is that it leads to supply chains for practically everything manufactured in the US or Europe needing to go through China. This makes the US and Europe dependent upon suppliers in China. Even military goods have supply chains running through countries that we are at odds with, including China. This means that China can, in many ways, “hold the US hostage,” by refusing to sell the US rare earth minerals, or by refusing to provide parts of supply chains needed for military armaments.
Perhaps the most important problem of all with added complexity is the wage and wealth disparities that it leads to. With added complexity, there is more specialization. A few workers with considerable training and advanced degrees get high paying jobs. The wages for these workers, plus the wages for managers, leave little funding left over for less trained workers. Also, competition with workers in low wage countries tends to hold down wages for less-skilled workers.
Besides the wage disparities, some people, mostly those who are already high-wage earners, become owners of these companies. If stock prices rise, this increases the wealth disparities between the rank-and-file workers and those at the top of the hierarchy. The higher-wage people also tend to purchase homes, and the price-appreciation on their homes adds to their wealth.
Physicist Francois Roddier, in his book The Thermodynamics of Evolution, explains that this growing wage and wealth disparities are to be expected when energy supplies are short, and added complexity is attempted as a substitute. Already wealthy people tend to get a disproportionate share of the goods and services produced by the economy, while poor people increasingly get squeezed out because of the physics of the situation.
[11] Ultimately, not enough goods and services to go around leads to conflicts of many types. These include conflict within political parties, within countries, and among countries.
I believe this issue is behind the conflict we are experiencing today. I will leave this issue for another post.
[12] Slowing growth is likely to lead to bankruptcies and financial collapse.
This is another issue that I will leave for another post.
[13] Conclusion
I hope these thoughts are somewhat helpful. I have only touched on a few aspects of how the economy really works. Perhaps I can offer more ideas on this subject in the future.
“Demitri MC a former
7:47 president of Russia a senior National
7:50 Security adviser to Vladimir Putin
7:53 basically put Europe on notice we are
7:55 going to Nuke you we are going to Nuke
7:58 you there is no question about it if you
8:01 do what you say you’re going to do we
8:03 are going to drop nuclear bombs on you
8:07 and we will also nuke America because he
8:09 said there are targets that we can’t
8:11 reach with our tactical nuclear weapons
8:13 so the Strategic component will come
8:15 into play hello America you’ve just
8:18 become a nuclear Target overnight you
8:20 didn’t know that “?
Medvedev is like the Bad Cop of a Good Cop Bad Cop psyop.
Somewhere in here, Scott Ritter says, “This will be the end of all humanity.” I don’t think so.
No matter where you go after a nuclear accident, there are survivors. Around Chernobyl, there are animals living and thriving. The Fukushima incident didn’t wipe out all living things in the area.
Also, the US is not all that good with long-range missiles, I expect. Even if we tried to hit strategic targets in Russia and perhaps China, I don’t think that the bombs would necessarily hit their targets.
And there would be many areas around the world that are not directly in line to be hit. Africa would likely not be hit much. Australia, New Zealand, and many islands in the Pacific are unlikely to be hit much. Northern Canada doesn’t sound like a good target. South America doesn’t have much to target.
At most, a nuclear war creates a very cold period, in which crops do not grow well for a few years. This will encourage further world-wide die off of humans and animals. High CO2 levels encourage plant growth.
The world is finite. It is intended to go through major changes, like continents ripping apart and poles switching from end to end. The higher level of radiation may encourage larger random changes from generation in humans. Survival of the best adapted may come up with a new version of humans that is better (in some way) than what we have now, at least in extracting fossil fuel resources.
I would not be at all surprised if whatever fossil fuels we leave behind are eventually be burned, probably by another form of human that is better adapted for this purpose.
The ‘elders’ would probably have the ‘nuclear depopulation option’ as their last resort if all other plans fail . I remember reading something about these options in conspiracy magazines I was reading more than 20 years ago. The options that were going to be used for their ‘new world order’ plans were 1. climate change 2. extra-terrastrial invasion 3. terrorism 4. nuclear option. This may explain why Bill Gates has been building bunkers under all his residences.
It will be the end of BAU. Without BAU it will be quite difficult to maintain a detector for radioactivity levels. There are some plants and there are longtime effects on animals but that is not very useful. A geiger counter requires a metal tube and voltage above 400V. It means at least copper. And how to amplify the signal without proper isolation like Shellac only with coils, I have no idea. All other methods are not sensitive enough.
One adaptation to higher levels of radioactivity might lead to having children earlier in life and raising them for a shorter period, to compensate for the shorter life-span. Cancer needs some years to develop. This would lead to lower intelligence and a decline in brain capacity.
If humans contaminate their habitat permanently, we dont have to talk about their intellectual capacity. The management of the pandemic and the inability to react to obvious energy shortages lead to doubts on human intelligence already.
Elephants have many more cells and undergo more cell divisions, yet don’t suffer from high rates of cancer. At least one reason is that they have dozens of copies of p53 variants. When a cell goes bonkers, it kills itself, whereas in humans the cell is less likely to undergo apoptosis. Thus, there are adaptations that don’t require intellectual regression. Other long lived animals (with a longer history within its niche) like sharks have more stable genomic expression patterns, which also helps against cancer and aging.
Interesting. Is that a hopeful possibility or do such humans already exist?
People who eat a lot of plant food in close to its original form (not ultra-processed) seem to have lower rates of cancer, too.
Indeed interesting:
Elisa de Stanchina & Scott W. Lowe
Nature Cell Biology volume 4, pages E275–E276 (2002)
Increasing the activity of the p53 tumour suppressor in mice protects them from cancer, but this has also been associated with an unwanted side effect, specifically, premature ageing. However, a new strain of ‘super p53’ mice are resistant to cancer but age gracefully, suggesting that protection from cancer doesn’t always come at a price.
“Much has been made of the resulting “nuclear winter” following the use of nuclear weapons. This theory was built on a very simple models in the 1970s, based on the mass destruction of wooden cities in Japan, that made every assumption possible to argue a massive plume of soot would be forced into the upper atmosphere, cooling the planet dramatically for many years. More recent analyses of this model have shown it is utterly implausible. Comparable releases of soot from the destruction of the Iraqi oil fields and major forest fire events have proven nuclear war would probably barely create a brief nuclear autumn. “?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-146945542
Thanks for the update on this.
Ecosystems seem to be set up to heal quickly. Political leaders and academic modelers have a mindset of “any change is bad.” It is bad, from the point of view of investors who see their investment not working out as well as planned. But the real issue is a hidden bad model that academic modelers are working off of.
Barking dogs, seldom bite.”
-English Proverb
I had forgotten that one.
This may be related to what we heard before, about Russia using Stable Coin to get around needing to use the US$ in trades, especially for internal transactions. This change would fix the need for the US dollar in external transactions.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-launch-international-payments-crypto-before-end-2024-2024-07-30/
Russia to allow crypto payments in international trade to counter sanctions
The US is inflating the dollar year by year. It is okay if this pays global stability and secure trade. Just for entertainment, digital control and orange revolutions it is a bit expensive.
How can a cripto coin work?
Will it be somehow related to the energy consumed to make it (‘mining’ process)?
Will it be related to any phisical asset)?
I think the faltering economy problem is more widespread than a slowdown in China:
https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/bloomberg-commodity-spot-index-goes-negative-year-amid-chinas-faltering-economic
Bloomberg Commodity Spot Index Goes Negative On Year Amid China’s Faltering Economic Recovery
I think you are right.
Dennis L.
Does anyone in the know know if DARPA or any United States government agencies, still follow any r&d rules similar to this still?
“DARPA operates on the principle that generating big rewards requires taking big risks. But how does the Agency determine what risks are worth taking?
George H. Heilmeier, a former DARPA director (1975-1977), crafted a set of questions known as the “Heilmeier Catechism” to help Agency officials think through and evaluate proposed research programs.
What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.
How is it done today, and what are the limits of current practice?
What is new in your approach and why do you think it will be successful?
Who cares? If you are successful, what difference will it make?
What are the risks?
How much will it cost?
How long will it take?
What are the mid-term and final “exams” to check for success?”
Outcome based evidence would suggest that such rules aren’t being followed. We can see what has happened with bioweapons. We can see to what extent actual weapons production is being moved offshore–in fact, to the very countries that we likely will be fighting with.
Our own economy is so service-based that it is hard for people with recent engineering degrees to find actual applications in this country to put their decrees to work on. Instead, they need to go to China, or perhaps Iran. Someplace where engineering is respected and used.
Engineering jobs tend to follow where the manufacturing jobs are. I think it’s hard to say that you can be trusted to design a a lawn mower when you are very far away from the factories and don’t have experience seeing factories follow turn your engineering plans to a working product made at a very specific cost. That is why I think there is such a huge focus on “attracting the best and brightest” from ” all over the world” instead of developing domestic human capital….The people most qualified to do high-level work will be the people who have direct or indirect ( friends, parents) experience with making products. The people from countries where U.S. industry has been offshored are more qualified to do the higher level service jobs related to industry that has been offshored to their countries. No way someone who has never repaired or built a transformer will be magically qualified after years of book learning than someone who has.
The energy thing is the only thing that stopped the U.S. from offshoring all its non-critical I.T. services to India. If India had a much better power grid, (cheap energy) I.T. would be an industry that provides far fewer jobs than it does now.
From Bing search/BBC: ” India is on the brink of an unprecedented power crisis. More than half of the country’s 135 coal-fired power plants are running on fumes – as coal stocks run critically low. In a country where 70% of the electricity is generated using coal, this is a major cause for concern as it threatens to derail India’s post-pandemic economic recovery.”
This is very bold for the MSM to admit there is an energy shortage somewhere.
The reasons given are
“As India’s economy picked up after a deadly second wave of Covid-19, demand for power rose sharply.”
pretty much “demand” related .
“In recent years, India’s production has lagged as the country tried to reduce its dependence on coal to meet climate targets.
The tptb intentionally want people to think energy supply is something the government can fix by adjusting its policy.
I think some of them may think throttling fossil fuel use up and down is a way to manage limited supply.
Worldwide, the coal situation is at least as bad as the diesel situation. Its supply has not kept up with population growth.
When I look at India’s coal production and consumption in the latest Statistical Review of World Energy, it looks like it is doing better with respect to growing production and consumption than the world average. But its stocks could easily be getting very low–this is hard to see from the report.
I can imagine a demand-related problem. Imports are no doubt in short supply. The report I link to in the post shows that the US’s largest exports of coal are to India.
Any long term investment ended with Obama
The “Heilmeier Catechism” sounds like talking to eight-year-olds.
“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.” – Alex Haley
New Zealand revoking offshore exploration ban amid gas crunch fears
https://www.offshore-energy.biz/new-zealand-revoking-offshore-exploration-ban-amid-gas-crunch-fears/
After New Zealand’s more than 4 million km2 exclusive economic zone has been off limits for further fossil fuel exploration permits for six years, the country’s government is setting the stage to lift the ban on offshore oil and gas exploration with a suite of proposed changes to an energy bill in a bid to stave off energy security woes due to looming gas supply shortages.
It isn’t clear to me whether this is a “done deal” yet or not. The article says that the government is “setting the stage with a suite of proposed changes to an energy bill.” It sounds to me as if it is still some ways away.
NZ has had a change of govt.
Labour would have us in fear of climate change, while National would have us in fear of deficits.
We all click our heels, say yes-sir, and follow the new pied piper. Happens about every 3 years.
Dizzying.
So perhaps drilling for oil is closer than I thought.
“The steamboat boiler explosion refers to several incidents in which steamboat boilers exploded, causing fatalities. One such incident occurred on April 27, 1865, when a steamboat carrying 2,300 recently released Union POWs, crew, and civilians sank after several of its steam boilers exploded. An estimated 1,800 people died, making it the deadliest maritime disaster in U.S. history1. Steamboat explosions were a frequent occurrence due to a combination of poor boiler construction and unsafe operation.”
I was wonder why no one mentions “steam power” anymore. I guess this is why.
What was cheap wasn’t safe and what was safe wasn’t cheap.
Transport by sailing ship was’t very safe either. I once read that it was possible to tell how many sailing ship were used in an era by how many sank. But these sailing ships were fairly inexpensive to build.
Would explain why a captain was a bit of a dictator traditionally. The sea alone is rather dangerous in a wooden boat so indecision by anyone in control of the boat is not a good thing. I wonder what the fatality rate was for crew members in the old days? If 5 percent per voyage, then the captain with seniority would have to be a survivor!
I hope it wasn’t as bad as 5% per voyage! Even 1% would have been pretty bad.
Italian PM believes China not interested in supporting Russian industry
“Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated that at a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, she “quite clearly raised” the topic of China backing Russia’s war in Ukraine. The official states Beijing is not interested in helping Russia’s industrial potential.
“On 29 July, Georgia Meloni met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping during her visit to Beijing, where they discussed the situation in the Middle East and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Previously, Meloni stated her goal to “reset” economic relations with Beijing.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/07/30/7468155/
Perhaps this is part of “not enough to go around.” China and Russia cannot both prosper, industrially. Russia has a lot of handicaps, with its cold climate, vast distances for transporting goods, and lack of good ports. China wants to succeed, if any country succeeds.
Of course it is Meloni… one step above Kamala on the insight scale.
Ukraine Pravda reports things badly, actually Meloni stated that she thinks that for China there is no advantage to sustain Russia, making surreptitiously understand that if China will sustain Russia, it will have all the West against.
Meloni clearly went to China to deliver a message from US/Israel.
https://tg24.sky.it/mondo/2024/07/30/giorgia-meloni-pechino
Which one of you guys made this?
8 min mark (lol)
“Spacex cancels Moon Mission: How America lost the Moon!”
This video starts with a clip of Elon Musk promising in 2018 to offer commercial flights around the moon by 2023.
At 8 minute mark, so called rocket expert learned about the subject on from youtube videos.
The market cap of nvidia increased by over 11% this morning. They’ve got plenty of resources to confuse us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/14/us/politics/photo-path-trump-assassination.html
Musk is a clown , just a huckster to separate the big institutions from their money
Someone here thinks he is a God or something and can conquer the space
Since he is a true believer it is futile to wake him from his delusions.
Devolping story in the Middle east . Escalation .
https://thecradle.co/articles-id/26195
About this issue in Middleast which is developing quickly, this article appeared some days ago…
“Peace in Ukraine, war in Iran”
https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/27/peace-in-ukraine-war-in-iran/
https://comedonchisciotte.org/pace-in-ucraina-guerra-in-iran/
This author expects Trump/Vance to win. They will get out of Ukraine and focus on Israel’s problem state, Iran.
The author sees pretty much all of the European nations under the thumb of the US. But right now, they need an excuse for war against Russia.
China contracted the Iranian oil and will defend it’s investment. War against Iran means war against China.
Worrying!
Yes, escalation:
I would expect that this event leads to elections favoring candidates that favor going to war. We will solve our problems by again going to war, ourselves.
“Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” -Joe Biden in 1986 as Senator. Do we support Israel to give Jewish people a homeland after the holocaust, or do we support Israel because they are America’s unsinkable aircraft carrier in middle east? How much does AIPAC money effect the situation?
I have a hard time understanding who is dragging who to war. Is Israel escalating with Iran to drag the USA into war? Does America (behind closed doors) want Israel to escalate, so we can invade Iran and take their oil?
That is an amazing quote from Joe Biden in 1986. I never have heard it before, but it makes sense with everything else I now know:
“Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” -Joe Biden in 1986.
So now we have three reasons to fight on behalf of Israel:
1. Some right-wing Christians believe that something of this sort is needed to hasten Christ’s second coming.
2. Jews are very much interested in having a homeland, so they favor it.
3. Israel further’s US hegemony. It is like a huge military base in the Middle East.
Every US leader favors Israel, even though we took away the land from the Arabs, and we are not treating the Palestinians at al fairly.
There is also another point.
US defends Israeli interest because US leaders in various fields are composed with that group.
It is not a secret, it is simply a fact, actually Jerusalem Post newspaper issues every year a contest (most influencial 50 top.. of the year) in which, at the end of it, the most influencial persons of their group are indicated to the readers, main of them are from US.
It is not antis… somthing, it is them who are saying to you about who are the top influencial persons.
Not others blaiming form that.
So, what one can expect do they do of their influency?
Chose tastes for ice creams?
Ask a song at karaoke?
For me there is no problem about that, but at least one should be aware of that in respect of one’s own smartness.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202407/30/WS66a8a9aca3104e74fddb799d.html
>> renminbi’s share as a global payment currency by value rose to 4.61 percent in June, significantly up from 2.77 percent a year earlier and compared with 4.47 percent in May.
>> The renminbi’s share as a global currency in the trade finance market came in at 5.99 percent by value in June
The share of global payments in RMB is something to keep an eye on, I think.
Good point!
Any thoughts on how one personally deals with this?
Dennis L.
Same as you hear elsewhere: diversification. The dollar will devalue even faster than now, if RMB or gold or a BRICS currency basket takes a sizeable share of global payments from the USD.
Some mitigation:
* take out fixed-rate debt (risky and hard to time, but potentially profitable) if you have a guaranteed income stream to cover payments
* hard assets (land, housing, gold, silver, lead, water purification)
* foreign bank accounts, financial assets, citizenship or visa (not everywhere will collapse at once) and know those languages
* set up financial transfer mechanisms *beforehand* so that if SHTF, you can quickly move money (better yet to have part of it split off already)
* best of all is to be useful / have useful skills and some business experience putting them to use
Agree with the last emphatically. Those skills are portable, they’re in one’s head.
A problem for the individual is the passage of time, one slows down; in business talk, overhead increases.
Dennis L.
“Washington is now lagging behind its rival [China] in ‘defense production and growth in force size and, increasingly, in force capability,’ the commission said.”
A new report by a bipartisan commission.
USA is now open that it has entirely lost its military advantage to China, and it cannot fight Russia or China because the USA military-industrial base is a much neglected write-off. (USA stands no chance now of catching up in the foreseeable.)
https://www.newsweek.com/china-wipes-out-us-military-advantage-west-pacific-commission-says-1931987
China Has Wiped Out US Military Advantage in Western Pacific: Commission
A bipartisan commission has issued Washington a stark warning: China poses the most serious threat to U.S. military supremacy since the Cold War and has particularly narrowed the gap in the Western Pacific.
“In many ways, China is outpacing the United States and has largely negated the U.S. military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment,” the bipartisan Commission on the National Defense Strategy wrote in its 2024 report to Congress, released Monday.
America Outpaced
China now boasts the world’s largest navy, with over 370 surface ships and submarines, largely concentrated in the Western Pacific, compared with the U.S.’s less than 300 spread across the world. China is also rapidly expanding and modernizing its air force and nuclear arsenal.
China’s cyber and space capabilities are “peer or near-peer” [?] level. The country would likely leverage this to disrupt critical infrastructure to hamper the U.S.’s ability to enter a conflict, such as one over Beijing-claimed Taiwan.
The commission reiterated the 2022 report’s position that China is “the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order, and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to advance that objective.”
That report called China the U.S.’s “pacing challenge,” which remains true, but Washington is now lagging behind its rival in “defense production and growth in force size and, increasingly, in force capability,” the commission said.
Sorry, our electric power was off last night (storm outage), as well as Internet. I couldn’t let comments through moderation.
The report, of course, leaves out the fact that the US lags far behind China in industrial strength to support the military. The US doesn’t have factories for a wide range of goods because our cost structure is so high, no one would want to buy any products from us. We depend on other countries to make military weapons, so we cannot defend ourselves.
Yes, and I am not so sure making all those weapons leads to much of a defense, perhaps only more war.
Dennis L.
You are correct, I am afraid.
making weapons makes jobs
making jobs make votes
making votes makes power
Everyone has become so inured to crazyness that the situation in Israel, Gaza, Palestine, Yemen means nothing to oil markets. Brent back below $80.
https://oilprice.com/
WTI is back around $75 per barrel.
The point is that (and maybe you don’t realize it at the moment in US) demand is very low because of very bad worldwide economic situation and expecially in Europe.
In my view tv news are not reporting that, but industrial orders are very weak.
So, oil price doesn’t go up
Low demand leads to low prices (and falling oil production).
My impression is people in all countries are unhappy with poor economic conditions. No impact on food yet.
they still have ability to lower rates to get the oil price higher if the oil price could be fixed on 100 dollars plus then more uneconomic oil becomes economic for producers it is only the consumers that would need to get more money to afford the higher oil price this would be possible if more debt was issued in the form of house loans and ev loans , look at all the new consumers in India thanks to the redirection of oil flows from Europe to India. The plan is to cause degrowth in the western countries and growth in less developed countries that way a more equitable world is produced.
the cost of oil has nothing to do with money
its how much it costs in ”energy cost”—and how much energy you have left over after, —-that is where our ”standard of living” comes from.
as that difference shrinks—and it will
so our living standards will diminish year on year
and spending more money–ie printing it—will not change that
Economic growth? What growth? Has anyone seen it?
0,3% for total EU, basically nothing. France +0,3%, Italy+0,2%, Germany in recession,
Just like we are on a petroleum production plateau, we are on an economic plateau…
No cheap and abundant energy, no growth, simple as that.
Europe’s growth lags US again, as Germany remains the eurozone’s economic problem child
https://apnews.com/article/economy-eurozone-gdp-europe-germany-eurostat-f685f16b12ed892848ab5aa482d1964f
Gross domestic product, the total output of goods and services, rose 0.3% in the second quarter in the 20 countries that use the euro currency, according to official figures released Tuesday by European Union statistics agency Eurostat. Germany slid back into contraction, recording a 0.1% fall in output.
These are official numbers and the official numbers are goosed. The real situation is worse. In line with that – and perhaps it’s apocryphal – supposedly US GDP has adjustments to count hookers and cocaine. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least.
Update – Okay, so US GDP doesn’t include illegal activities, but would include prostitution in regions where it’s legal.
https://theconversation.com/now-gdp-data-reflects-the-truth-drugs-and-sex-work-boost-the-economy-27407
UK GDP, on the other hand, does include prostitution and drugs. Anything to goose the number.
Italy did this a while back. Once one does this, though, one can’t do it again: it’s a one-off ‘goosing’ of the numbers.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/italy-includes-cocaine-prostitution-and-black-market-alcohol-to-gdp-figures-9424457.html
They can add hedonic adjustments, later. “She has increased her bedroom skills, the cocaine now has fentanyl”, etc.
“hedonic.”
Very funny.
Dennis L.
Instead of haircuts and fridges we produce more and more oil extracting services – for the same output. This lowers living standards. The same applies to military services and pandemic spendings.
GDP does not reflect this shift. Oil extraction services and psychotherapy are the same.
There is a whole lot of interest that needs to be paid on debt. This becomes hard to do, when growth is so low.
Gail, have you studied the work of Lars Larsen?
He calculates that in 3 years (2027) diesel imports will be unavailable to all countries except China and India.
https://un-denial.com/2024/07/29/book-review-the-end-of-global-net-oil-exports-by-lars-larsen-2024/
Rob , I have posted this paper when it was first published and several times later . The problem is that all info on oil production , refinery inputs — outputs is too cloudy to verify . EIA , IEA , Rystad etc are thoroughly discredited and have become tools of the West to suppress the oil price . ” Unavailable to all countries except China and India. ” . I don’t know enough of China but on India I can tell you it is in deep sh+t . There is a social churning that is happening currently that could lead to a caste war ( caste is a India specific issue ) . Imagine a country with 1.4 billion ( last census 2011) with 800 million surviving on 5Kg rice/wheat +1Kg chickpeas provided free and a youth unemployment of 80% . Farmers committing suicide 1 per minute . What will they do with the diesel ? Now I come back to Europe where I presume you are located . Frankly I am shocked that the price of diesel keeps falling since it is now mainly imported from India ( refined using discounted Russian oil ) . To sum it up ” I don’t know , too many moving parts ” . What happens if the war in ME expands ? Bibi is crazy .What about the elections in USA ? Ukraine war lost ? etc My thinking is ” So far , so good” . When TSTHF there is not a lot one can do . Adios .
ravi, thanks for your incisive reports.
Very interesting! Lars Larsen does refer to me quite a bit in the early part of his writing. He lives in Sweden. My background in Norwegian, so we have Scandinavian backgrounds in common.
Lars gives some interesting forecasts of falling oil exports. I suppose it is possible to compare them to what the Statistical Review of World Energy is showing.
I have tended to stay away from this kind of analysis partly because it is hard to do correctly. Also, there are so many related events going on, such as financial system collapse and possibly World War III, that we may never recognize our problem as being an energy problem.
Intuitively, his view that in 3 years, diesel imports will be unavailable to all countries except China and India sounds close to right. But there are details to be considered–quite a lot of Canada’s crude oil comes to the US as an export. Indirectly, it provides much of the diesel that the US uses. The US refines the oil, and sends some products to Canada and elsewhere. If we look at net imports from Canada (which are disproportionately heavy oil used in diesel and jet fuel), they have been generally been increasing.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MTTNTUSCA2&f=M
EROEI theory claims that the “net energy” oil from the oil sands is very low. This may be part of the reason that operators in the oil sands have a hard time getting an adequate selling price. But will Canada’s oil from the oil sands all go to China and India in a few years–some, but certainly not all. Or is the problem that Canada will collapse from its low tax revenue? I don’t know.
For exports, proximity matters, as do built pipelines. If Canada’s export remain, and the US continues to be around, I expect the US will continue to be a receiver of Canada’s exports. We should be teaching in the schools what a wonderful gift oil from the oil sands of Canada is.
Thanks Gail.
If we assume US and Canada will be fortunate to still have diesel in 2027 but most importing countries will be collapsing at that time, don’t you think everyone will be in serious trouble given our globally interdependent world?
I think we will be dealing with a serious collapse issue in most areas of the world in 2027.
But I have gotten the timing wrong before.
Rob , regarding diesel in USA , Canada . Note Canadian oil sands alone cannot be refined to produce diesel . It has to be blended with a certain grades of light oils ( imported) to make it suitable for refining . There is a problem and you can read my earlier post on the subject . Refining diesel is an intricate process . I had earlier posted a write up on this by Stephen Bowers , refinery manager . Maybe Gail can retrieve that and repost it . Extremely detailed .
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/07/22/how-does-the-economy-really-work/comment-page-3/#comment-464273
I know that in the US is piping diluent to Canada, so that the material extracted from the oil sands can be mixed with it to make it liquid that can flow through the pipelines for further refining. This mostly goes to the US, but increasingly goes to Canada’s west coast, where it can be shipped to China for refining.
This is the long comment you referred to:
”The Economics of Oil Refineries
It makes perfect sense. Oil refineries in the United States are designed and operated for efficiency. In layman’s terms, that means refineries are designed to make as much money as possible however they can. To maintain that efficiency and keep up with productivity, they have to be ready to process different types of oil on demand. Different crude oils have different sulfur content and a wide range of other characteristics. The refineries make the pivot processes rather quickly and produce their petroleum products with different types of oil based on a single issue: Money.
Americans love their petroleum products and oil companies love their profits. While it is true that a refinery could operate on only American petroleum, it isn’t cost-effective for them to do it. To put it another way, it just isn’t profitable enough.
Domestic vs. Foreign Crude
So what makes the crude from here in the United States different from foreign crude? Domestic crude usually has lower sulfur content and is considered “light crude.” Light crude is ideal for making gasoline, and Americans love their gasoline. But the American oil industry isn’t immune from capitalism. Not in the least. Domestic supply can be altered by a wide number of factors, including political posturing, lower oil prices for producers, and difficulty obtaining permits. Here’s a fact: When oil prices go down, the producers reduce their output or they can stop altogether until prices come back up where they want them.
If this happens (and it often does), it puts the refineries in a difficult position. So what do they do?
They use foreign oil. You sometimes hear this called “Sour Crude.” This foreign oil or Sour Crude often needs a lot more processing. It also has a much higher sulfur content and isn’t ideal for gasoline production. The truth is that this sour crude is usually dirtier. But here is the thing: There is a lot of it, and it is much cheaper than domestic crude. Much cheaper. This is what actually gives American refineries the flexibility to pivot their operations. They have been designed that way for years, and there isn’t any plan to change.
Why Not Change?
But why not change it? It would make sense that if American domestic oil is cleaner and more desirable, wouldn’t it make sense to just retool and redesign the refineries for only domestic production?
No, not in the least. That would cost a whole lot of money, and oil refiners don’t like parting ways with their money for any reason. It could cost a refinery billions of dollars to make this transition. And how things are in the United States, the ability to produce oil could change rather quickly. It is too big a risk for refiners to take.
The Need for Flexibility
So to sum this thing up, most American refineries are tooled for efficiency and flexibility. While they could operate exclusively on one or the other, it just isn’t likely that this will ever happen. If it sounds complicated, it is.
No Gail . This was posted on 28th as a response to drb and the piece is written by Matt Pierce . The Stephen Bowers post is old maybe 6-9 months ago and much more detailed .
Thanks for the explanation.
Jan Steinman said…
Kurt, Art Berman has raised the issue that a “barrel of oil” ain’t what it used to be, and that it may contain as little as 90% of the energy content it had just ten years ago. This is due to bookkeeping things, like including NGLs and refinery gain, but also because biodiesel and ethanol are included — which, particularly with ethanol, may be a net loss — an ERoEI less than unity. Finally, it appears that US fracked oil is predominantly “light,” and cannot be made into as much diesel as is found in conventional oils.
Do you have any insights into when the definition of a “barrel of oil” began to change? And when would you peg “peak energy” as opposed to “peak volume?”
Comment on Kurt Cobb’s blog .
The US only collected crude oil data up until 1979. In 1980, it started reporting All Liquids production. This report show the date when the changeover took place. By 1980, it was clear that we were short of crude oil and needed to add in anything else we could use as a substitute.
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/annual-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=A&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1704067200000
Some info on China that you will find interesting . Copy/ paste from Quark . Google translate as in Spanish .
https://www.gnvmagazine.com/las-ventas-de-camiones-a-gnl-afectan-a-la-demanda-de-diesel-para-carreteras-en-china/
This says:
LNG truck sales hit demand for on-road diesel in China
Sales of China’s LNG-powered heavy trucks rose from less than 10% to as much as 30% of the market.
I can believe this. LNG could work far better than hydrogen, for example. It wouldn’t be as good as diesel, in terms of energy density. One article says, ” LNG has roughly 1/3 the volumetric energy density as diesel.” But I don’t know if China will have the LNG supplies it needs, and places to store it, for the long run. For truly long distance transport, diesel will still be much better, I am afraid.
Good on them for being ahead of the curve. Gassy oil wells become oily gas wells; oil will deplete first and one should phase in the gas fleet before oil becomes scarce.
My husband in Italy had a normal small car retro-fitted for GPL/LNG. Commuting in Rome, there were few distributors at the time (not sure how it is now), but it still made economic sense and worked out well for him. The add-on GPL tank took up most of the trunk space. This was in the late 1990s.
Follow a link or 2 and you get to this beauty;
‘Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory.’
..its not denial, I’m just very selective about the reality I accept.
‘ While denial of death may appear to be a suspiciously complicated behavior to evolve quickly, it can, for example, be implemented by a modest tweak to the fear suppression module that mammals use when forced to fight. A side effect of this solution is that not only is death denied, but anything unpleasant is denied, thus the adaptation manifests as denial of reality (aka optimism bias).’
Rob has always been a proponent of, or at least open to, MORT.
In its essence it makes sense. Something has to propel people forward; if we were all to really take on board abject futility the whole game would end tomorrow.
Being strictly logical in this sense, one can doubt that it is possible to prove one’s own death by experiment.
Diesel will not become scarce! Germany/EU have already found a solution:
“Transport Minister Wissing warns the EU Commission against the decommissioning of millions of diesel vehicles. The background is a possible new interpretation in the compliance with pollutant limit values.”
(National TV)
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/innenpolitik/diesel-wissing-100.html
I will hazard one prediction here.
If diesel imports become unavailable to any country in 2027, that country will be hell on earth by 2030.
Lars has done the work and I haven’t. But I am confident that the controllers behind the scenes have got everything in hand.
On the other hand, if they haven’t got everything in hand and we do run out of diesel in 2027, the 2024 Olympics could be the last one, so every cloud has a silver lining.
Non era l’Ultima Cena?
Wasn’t it the Last Supper?
So maybe they do have it in hand. The ending, that is.
That’s true. Predictive programming. Well spotted
I looked at his book a few days back and was unimpressed by the methodology. Sure, at some point diesel exports will stop. I do not see why india should be favored over other nations (a case could be made for China due to residual manufacturing). It is more likely that exports to, say, Chile will continue, since the world will still need some copper. The 2030s is when this will happen.
(Byoblu)
The European vaccine card is ready
A trial of the European Vaccine Card will be launched in September 2024.
Based on the green pass experience, the card will contain a portable vaccination record, with vaccination history and scannable QR codes.
The pilot project will be operational in Latvia, Greece, Belgium, Germany and Portugal. It will last approximately one year and has the ultimate goal of implementation in all member countries.
The EVC, an acronym for European vaccination card, has been entrusted to the EUVABECO program: a cross-border collaboration between nine European countries, several universities and health agencies.
Funded by these institutions and the European Commission, EUVABECO-an expression for European Vaccination Beyond Covid-has a treasury of nearly nine million euros.
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
https://www.byoblu.com/2024/07/30/lanciata-la-tessera-vaccinale-europea/
The vaccine card sounds like a good reason for tourists to stay away. They may be caught up in the silliness.
I had been thinking the same. I will stick with China and Russia for travel.
Not yet. They are building up the legal frameset and infrastructure – I suppose all under US-control. Perhaps the first step towards digital money. A new state of emergency cannot be called before the winter infections. The largest risk for Europe is when the WHO contracts become valid in may/june 2025, and the WHO can force mandates. The next possibility for a respiratory pandemic will be winter 2025.
cutting to the chase: how will it be used to restrict people’s freedom to move?
I found an old non-blog news websites for the 2005 claim of 48 billion barrels in reserve for Kuwait. So now I think it’s fair to say this was a real report at the time, not just made up rumors like the announcement that Saudi Arabia was ending the non-existent oil-for-only-dollars treaty.
14 May 2007 – 13:41
https://en.shana.ir/news/104630/Oil-Minister-Puts-Kuwait-s-Proven-Oil-Reserves-At-48-Billion
>> Kuwait”s Oil Minister Sheikh Ali al-Jarrah al-Sabah confirmed on Saturday that Kuwait”s proven oil reserves are 48 billion barrels — a figure conflicting with the previous official estimates of nearly 100 billion barrels.
>> In an interview with a Kuwaiti newspaper, Sheikh Ali Al-Jarrah said unproved oil reserves in the country may reach 150 billion barrels.
24 OCTOBER 2008
https://www.meed.com/kuwaiti-oil-production-plans-hang-in-the-balance/
>> The reserves question has been a hot political topic since a report based on an analysis of internal Kuwaiti records in January 2006 concluded the country had oil reserves of 48 billion barrels and proven reserves of 24.2 billion barrels.
The reserves numbers given to the world by Kuwait decades ago reflected the real resource that existed under the desert sands of the Persian Gulf.
Let’s take for instance the Burgan field, the second-biggest oil field in the world.
The field consists in reality of three giant fields, Burgan in the south, and Magwa and Ahmedi in the north.
The Greater Burgan Field is a dome of some 500 km2, the Magwa Field has an area of 186 km2 and the Ahmadi Field has an area of 144 km2.
The upper part of the complex has an average reservoir thickness of 50 meters, and the lower part, Burgan, is around 270 meters, some other references state that it can go beyond 300 meters.
A volumetric calculation, using the formula reported at this link (https://wiki.aapg.org/Predicting_hydrocarbon_recovery), yields the following numbers considering an average porosity of 24% and Sw=25%:
127 billion for the Burgan part, 23 for the other two.
In total 151 billion which is roughly the same as cited in “Sedimentary Basins and Petroleum Geology of the Middle East” by A.S. Alsharhan.
With a recovery factor of around 70% (but with these kinds of spectacular sandstone reservoirs you can go well beyond 80%) that means 105 billion of reserves only for the Burgan complex at the beginning of the extraction.
Anyway, the real numbers are only in the hands of some high-end geophysical team in Kuwait.
Getting the oil out is not as easy as it looks. You need a lot of things to get the oil out.
You need a team of trained workers with drill pipe (probably from China) and many other supplies, including computers, imported from around the world.
You need a functioning government, to keep order and provide roads and other infrastructure.
You need a well-functioning financial system.
You need consumers who can afford to pay a high enough price for the refined products made from the oil.
If everything hangs together, maybe you can get the oil out.
I think this and the other comments prove quite well the global reserve estimates shenanigans.
The USA is the world’s top country. Why does it need its people to do dull things like farming? Surely that should be left to foreigners or AI? 😉
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1563717047910383&set=gm.472891608697026&idorvanity=402628549056666
Yeah, why do I need to wipe myself after going to the toilet?
Surely, AI can do that. It’s virtually impossible for me to do it myself, since I can’t put my phone down.
LOL! You nailed it ClickKid. Even the late great George Carlin couldn’t have come up with that!
get 2 phones
then you can see what you are doing in RT–even video it
(please do not post online though)
There is actually a quote from lady saying,
“Why do farmers need to grow grain when most people go to Krogers or Albertson’s to get their food?”
This is even worse than the misunderstanding about electricity, and where it comes from.
Most people don’t know where copper, zinc , molybdenum etc comes from. I always try to educate people who think electric cars are the answer. Elon Musk has figured it out he panders to one group selling them cars… I wonder if he believes his own bullshit
He definitely believes some sort of bullshit, otherwise why wouldn’t he take a hundredth of his paper wealth and fuck off to Tahiti and a life with no worries. That’s what I’d do.
In the 1990s, over 70% of Asian exports by value went beyond the region, with containers being shipped back mostly empty.
By comparison, roughly 60% of exports in Asia are traded within the region today.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/these-are-10-busiest-ports-world-cargo-traffic
We used to ship trash for recycling back in the empty containers, but China put an end to this January 1, 2018, and other Asian countries put an end to this shortly thereafter. Without the recycling (which was usually subsidized) filling the containers, shipping goods long distance became relatively more expensive. This is part of what pushed the Asian economies to start trading more among themselves.
Also, the economies of Asia have been growing. Many of the more distant economies have been stagnating. They cannot really afford goods shipped long distance from China and the rest of Asia.
” By comparison, roughly 60% of exports in Asia are traded within the region today. ”
Asia + Russia +ME +Africa + Latin America can have a common currency system . The political bricks/ connections are already in place . There are no political contradictions between them . Just thinking ,
Seems to be many fans of Russia here. I have a question, since I don’t follow them too closely.
Why is Putin walking with a noticeable limp?
Here is a video of his meeting in North Korea. Notice the 15 second mark and 45 second mark.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/north-korea-kim-jong-un-obesity-health-rcna164215
Is the reason he drove around with Kim Jun because he has trouble balancing and walking?
Do you think this is related to the video of him a few years ago?
Vladimir Putin seen gripping table with veins bulging as illness rumors mount
https://nypost.com/2022/06/16/vladimir-putin-seen-gripping-table-again-amid-illness-rumors/
#StandwithUkraine 🙂
I think it’s probably because the START Treaties required parity between Russia (fomerly the USSR) and the US.
As soon as it it became clear that the US was electing mentally deficient Presidents, the Treaties required Russia to take some equivalent action. Therefore, Putin had to develop balance problems to preserve strategic parity.
Being the fiendishly clever ex-KGB colonel that he is, he rather shiftily chose something that had next to no effect on his ability to perform his duties, therefore violating the spirit of the Treaty.
Oh those Russians.
“How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined. You always insist that the order sustaining society is an objective reality created by the great gods or by the laws of nature. People are unequal, not because Hammurabi said so, but because Enlil and Marduk decreed it. People are equal, not because Thomas Jefferson said so, but because God created them that way. Free markets are the best economic system, not because Adam Smith said so, but because these are the immutable laws of nature.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
I was astonished lately to see that my local supermarket was selling books by Harari, along with the usual thrillers, romances etc. This is on very limited space given over to books. They were the only books there which could in any way be described as appealing to intellectuals.
It’s almost as if the stuff is being pushed.
“In the past, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. […] In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow
There’s certainly a lot of haystack-building going on around the needles, but equally a great deal of effort goes into stopping those needles being ‘laid’ in the first place.
So, it’s a really cool quote, but not quite true.
“Knowing what to ignore…” Is quite a PRIVILEGE FOR YUVAL.
i was born more intelligent and stronger than you
or maybe the exact opposite
no gods involved, just the pairing up of your parents and mine
Mozart, maybe the greatest composer of all time, had a father as a brilliant violinist—that must have helped—but as a rule geniuses dont beget geniuses, or althetes beget champion athletes, or the children of great actors become one.
pure chance
so choose your parents well
It is certainly not “pure chance”, though there will be some reversion to the mean.
Geniuses don’t tend to beget geniuses because (like the other end of the bell curve, complete mental defectives) they are less likely to have children in the first place than an individual whose IQ is closer to the mean.
Also, if they are outliers, then it is unlikely that they will pair with an outlier of similar degree.
Because the Spike protein, by infection of vaxx, causes cognitive problems, anxiety or neuroinflammation in 30% of the people, who came in contact with it. To some it creates dementia, to others problems balancing.
To me it seems, they look for the most gaga puppets they can find. In European politics there are quite a few relevant proponents suffering of severe cognitive impairments, substance abuse or a completely exaggerated self-evaluation.
Perhaps, Putin tries to qualify for an even higher position?
“Vladimir Putin seen gripping table with veins bulging as illness rumors mount
https://nypost.com/2022/06/16/vladimir-putin-seen-gripping-table-again-amid-illness-rumors/”
You’re dreaming. He isn’t “gripping” the table and his veins are not bulging. You can’t see any veins at all. What hogwash.
Maybe he sensed an earthquake happening?
Maybe he was trying to hold in a fart. The media just projects the ownership class desires, nothing more.
ECoE:
“What’s so startling about this is that ECoE isn’t a financial metric at all. Rather, the Energy Cost of Energy is a measure of the material cost of supplying energy to the economy.”
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Gail has a strong belief this cost is too embedded in other period costs.
A period cost is one which is a sunk cost initially and is depreciated over time at a constant rate, generally and yes there are other depreciation methods.
The “income” from energy is in my understanding mostly set through long term contracts at the wholesale level. The posted price is set at various margins.
TM’s post notes that not only prosperity follows the flow of energy, so does the debt.
If I read things correctly, TM is seeing a decoupling of this correlation.
Conclusion: Film at eleven.
Dennis L.
The actual article you are referring to is at this link:
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/07/28/285-energy-and-the-credit-ratchet/
The article starts out:
I think that both Tim Morgan and I are both looking at the same self-organizing economy. I have said that increasing debt can be used (at least temporarily) to pull the economy forward, if there is not enough inexpensive energy available. This is the approach the Advanced Economies have used.
Tim Morgan has a metric that we can’t know the exact workings of. My suspicion is that it vastly overvalues intermittent wind and solar (because EROEI does, and Morgan’s metric seems to be patterned after it) but perhaps that doesn’t matter for the analysis here.
Morgan is seeing that the economy is headed downward, in terms of his metric (basically, higher energy cost of production). The economy needs more debt to try to hide this problem. I would agree.
Morgan’s article ends with:
I would agree that rising fiscal deficits are likely.
Morgan also says “a reversion to low real costs of capital” seems inescapable. He probably means that governments will lower interest rates back down, to facilitate investment, and to keep governments from having to pay huge interest amounts on their own debt.
But I am not sure that this will work, especially for an individual country like the UK. It will tend to drop the relativity of the UK pound to the US dollar. It will also make it harder for governments to sell their bonds.
I think we are headed for defaults on bonds. The exact path before reaching that point is less clear.
Blind Mans Bluff has got nothing on this circus.
Russian oil is needed to continue supply of diesel to Ukraine?!!
“If the transit of Russian crude via Ukraine is not renewed in a short time, [Slovak refiner] Slovnaft will not continue supplies of diesel to Ukraine,” the prime minister said in a Facebook video message on Monday, noting that Slovak deliveries account for a tenth of Ukraine’s diesel consumption.”
‘According to news agency Xinhua’s earlier report, citing Fico’s office, restoring at least partial access to Russian oil is extremely important for the Bratislava-based Slovnaft refinery, as alternative sources of oil are more expensive and may not be technologically compatible.’
https://www.rt.com/news/601809-slovakia-russia-oil-transit-ukraine/
NC has a very recent detailed analysis on just this very topic
nakedcapitalism.com/2024/07/kyiv-and-brussels-weaponize-oil-use-other-tools-in-bid-to-force-hungary-and-slovakia-into-supporting-project-ukraine.html
EU is total hypocrisy . They don’t import Russian crude directly but finished refined products from India which are using discounted Russian crude .
” Last week, Budapest’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Hungary would continue to hold up EU military aid to Ukraine until the sanctions are lifted, adding the country supplies 42 percent of Kyiv’s electricity imports. ”
Hungary should stop the supply of electricity — collapse the grid and end the war .
https://www.politico.eu/article/youve-had-two-years-eu-eyerolls-at-hungarys-russian-oil-request/
>> Hungary should stop the supply of electricity — collapse the grid and end the war .
It is glaring that they didn’t do this immediately in response to Kiev blocking their oil imports. Orban isn’t stupid or a sellout, so I wonder what specific blowback potential is worrying and preventing him from doing this.
” Slowing growth is likely to lead to bankruptcies and financial collapse.”
I look forward to your thoughts on this subject and how it unfolds.
Personal goal is not unlike my theories on a falling building; find a suitable distance so as not to be hit by bricks releasing their potential energy into kinetic energy.
Dennis L.
Does your Copilot support someone who has no affinity to the house and won’t shed a tear if it is broken down?
kul,
The world is a strange place, I firmly believe we explore it and learn as we go. It is a journey, not a destination and the universe is still expanding and perhaps not even it knows where it is going.
Dennis L.
Let’s assume for a second, that someone knows, that, which we all don’t hope, 30% of the people will be dead by 2030.
The consequence would be a financial crash, because it cannot be produced what has been promised or expected.
After a few weeks of uncertainties, the econony would start to function again in a lower level. GDP will fall by at least 30%. The infrastructure and the real world assets are now 40% more per capita, though. Including ressources, agricultural land, water, lifestock, cars, apartments and so forth.
Is it thinkable, that some people somewhere might believe, this could be an advantage?
Apparently Europe boomed after the plague, because resources per capita increased and demand for labor led to more egalitarianism. I’ve also read that it boosted IQ and that the rich were more likely to survive (better diet/health, cleaner surroundings, lower housing density) … make of that what you will.
I have to believe there are several organizations with new computer models of the world.
Dennis do you think I can get an AI to write me such a program?
Perhaps as bad a model as the economists are using.
Ed, simple answer, yes. I am Copilot, it is mostly for syntax. It finds objects I had no idea existed.
You are IBM, physicist I believe smarter than I could ever dream of being. You could make it work very well and do things today which were impossible ten years ago.
Dennis L.
I think the AI will do fine on structuring the program. The question is can it be creative and derive the various functions needed to relate the variables.
Ed,
Have been busy with other things, have a program which does indeed use parameters, will submit it and see what it thinks. Probably hidden correlations. Interesting question you have.
It is very good at commenting, understands what is being done. My version, the free version, has limits on number of pages of code, sure that can be dealt with for a few bucks; laughing quietly.
Syntax is a dream, I do ask for suggestions, is strongly oriented toward objects. I am basically just scratching the surface.
Dennis L.
I wonder what the Islamic community in France feels about the Olympic opening pysop.
Showing results for psyop
Search instead for pysop
Latest from Germany
Deutsche Bahn plans to cut 30,000 jobs
https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/deutsche-bahn-verlust-106.html
25.07.2024
Deutsche Bahn incurred billions in losses in the first six months of the year. Now the company wants to react – and cut tens of thousands of jobs over the next five years. Deutsche Bahn made a loss of 1.2 billion euros in the first half of 2024.
Strikes, extreme weather, construction sites and weakening demand have significantly worsened the group’s result compared to the previous year, the railway announced. The group intends to respond to the poor results by cutting jobs.A total of around 30,000 full-time positions are to be eliminated over the next five years, said Deutsche Bahn’s finance chief Levin Holle.
Jobs are to be eliminated primarily in administration, with the reduction of around 1,500 positions planned for this year.”
In the future, we need to create more rail with fewer people,” stressed Holle. Digitalisation and automation in particular will enable administrative processes to be carried out by fewer employees in the future.
Deutsche Bahn is the big train operator in Germany. I have heard that trains no long run perfectly on time, as they used to years ago.
Eliminating 30,000 jobs is a huge number.
I wonder if this is part of the problem:
https://www.dw.com/en/german-train-line-switching-fully-to-hydrogen/a-62907198
This switch to hydrogen is already underway. Doesn’t sound cheap at all.
Another money loser:
https://www.alstom.com/press-releases-news/2022/1/alstom-and-deutsche-bahn-test-first-battery-train-passenger-operation
Another expensive undertaking:
https://railway-news.com/deutsche-bahn-is-building-overhead-line-islands-for-battery-trains/
Also:
https://www.dailysabah.com/business/transportation/german-trains-to-stop-using-diesel-by-2040
They will switch to biodiesel.
This is another expensive approach. It also uses land that could be used for food.
Deutsche Bahn is a huge international logistics operator, owning DB Schenker with 70.000 employees in 130 countries and a value of around 15 billion.
Deutsche Bahn is also invested in a lot of European trains. It is a stock corporation owned 100% by the Federal Republic.
Maybe it is not as all over-the-top as the German part seemed to be. The articles are all about what Germany is trying now.
” I have heard that trains no long run perfectly on time, as they used to years ago.”
I spent three weeks in Germany this spring. Trains from Frankfurt Flughafen/Main into Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof were late. Train from Frankfurt to Erfurt ( I believe it was an ICE, inner-city express) was an hour late. Other trains were late. Everyone on the platform was bitching about the many train holdups.
Once in the boondocks most trains I took (local plus ICE) were on time. However, the fares were pretty confusing. Also, ticket automats didn’t accept my credit card. Fortunately there is generally a Reisezentrum, and they know what they are doing.
The fares have become quite high and I think buses with long-distance routes such as Flixbus are majorly biting into a lot of train travel. For both of my Flixbus trips (Lluebeck–Amsterdam and Amsterdam–Frankfurt Flughafen, Terminal 1) the prices were reasonable and I didn’t have to make any changes.
Germany has introduced something they call the Deutshclandkarte, which sounds great—covers all local and long-distance travel—but IMO not so great after all: It is a subscription app (only—no paper card) that renews automatically every month and of course collects data on all of a person’s travel plus probably tracks a lot of other stuff. They probably sell the data to keep costs of the card lowish.
No thanks.
Of course Germany is descending into left totalitarianism quite quickly and increasingly obviously.
Henry Kissinger described artificial intelligence as the “biggest challenge of our times,” predicting that humanity could be replaced by machines in the next five years.
The former top diplomat made the comments to Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer. A video of the conversation was published by Welt TV, part of Germany’s Die Welt newspaper.
Axel Springer is the parent company of both Insider and Die Welt.
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, the potential of AI has loomed large, threatening to replace humans in some jobs, particularly white-collar ones, Insider previously reported.
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Jobs in technology, media, law, market research analysis, education, trade, graphic design, accounting, and customer service are among those most at risk of being replaced by AI, experts previously told Insider.
Kissinger, who is 100, said he was concerned AI could become so powerful in the long run that it leads to the sci-fi-esque outcome of humans serving machines — not the other way around.
“I think it can be avoided, but only by understanding the essence of this intelligence, which will also be able to generate its own point of view,” he said.
Kissinger co-wrote a book on artificial intelligence, “The Age of AI and Our Human Future,” in which he, along with former Google CEO Eric Schmitt and computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher, explored how AI may change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and society.
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He is in the process of writing a second book on the topic.
Whether AI will replace humans, he says, is the “question of our lifetime.”
RIP KISSINGER “elder numero uno”
67 reasons why wind power cannot replace fossil fuels . Alice Friedman .
https://energyskeptic.com/2024/wind/
Alice Friedman comes up with 67 reasons why wind power cannot replace fossil fuels.
Those of us who have been looking at intermittent wind and solar for years start feeling like we are banging our heads against brick walls. The idea is absurd. There are too many apples to oranges comparisons. Intermittent wind and solar are not solutions to anything.
Objection! Intermittend solar is a wonderful technology – for a little light and radio in remote huts or on sailing boats. Why? Such little power can easily be equalized by a battery, which has to be renewed every year or two.
I doubt the system generates any energy at all, including the production energy for the batteries. But it is a wonderful technology: To carry a battery up a steep mountain on the back is easier than carrying gasoline. And secondly it is quiet. I am a huge fan!
But it is absurd to plan to run an industry on that!
A bike is wonderful but it cannot replace a freight train. Some things are absurd.
And windmills? The Dutch made nearly half of their beautiful land diy with windmills pumping water. Wonderfull technology! Only unsuited to produce electricity.
The problem is that you need the rest of the system to build batteries. The rest of the system is also needed to build the rest of the goods that use the batteries. So, at best, intermittent solar is a little band aid that allows us to use goods that have been built and transported with fossil fuel energy.
“? The Dutch made nearly half of their beautiful land dry with windmills pumping water.”
The Dutch were unable to drain (and control) the Haarlemermeer until the invention of the steam engine in the mid-19th C. And of course there is no way they could have built the Afsluidijk in the “age of sail.”
https://www.britannica.com/place/Haarlem-Lake
Immigrants’ children grow up speaking their own languages as a child.
I have studied the history of the Japanese-‘Americans’ who were put into internment camps during 1940s. Although they learned enough customs to pass as Americans to casual observers, they did grow up speaking Japanese as children since their parents rarely spoke English.
So, although they act like ‘normal’ Americans, as they grew older and had no more reason to mimic mainstream behavior, they grew bitter and suddenly remembered their Japanese roots, even if they didn’t speak Japanese too well by that point of time.
There were no complaints about their internment in the earlier days, but as most of the internees near the end of their lives, they tend to show their true feelings of bitterness and anger, since even though they were born and raised in USA and mostly spoke English, they cannot let go their childhood where they grew up speaking Japanese, a language completely alien to the Western Tradition.
When the founding fathers put the clause that only those born in USA could become President (Hamilton was grandfathered in but his native language was English), they didn’t expect peoples from cultures completely alien to the western tradition would settle and reproduce in there.
If there is a new iteration of USA, they will probably add the clause that if their mothers were speaking a foreign language, the person would not be eligible for any elected offices.
The dems are trying to install someone who has zero Western background as the US President.
Someone thinks she is talented, but it doesn’t matter. She has no stake in Western Civ and that means she does not give a crap about it, having no descendants (stepchildren do not count), relatives or anything in Western Civ.
A certain Georgian, with no Russian relatives whatsoever, ruled USSR. It was not that nice for the Russians.
If the West descends to that level maybe it is time for the West to die.
>> A certain Georgian, with no Russian relatives whatsoever, ruled USSR. It was not that nice for the Russians.
Some argue that, unlike the USA, the USSR was so damaged that they had to be fairly regimented and hard-nosed in their development goals if they were to have any chance of maintaining technological competitiveness. Along the lines of your “all for technology, nothing for the peasants” idea.
A US president with zero Western background is better than a president with too many boosters. Who is the true American president at the moment, Jill?
The big problem is, Trump is well connected to the Bibi people in Israel, due to his son-in-law. I am afraid, there is a choice between Skylla and Charybdis. WW3 will emerge anyway!
We can just hope, BAU will end sooner than expected and end the war!
woah. this can not be Stalin, who produced many years of double digits growth (not matched even in China), and is remembered fondly by 77% of the populace. My accountant (a retired accountant, but sufficient for my needs) every time she runs into some administrative snafu, grumbles that this would not have happened under Stalin. so who is this?
I Imagine being Stalin’s personal accountant brought a frisson of excitement to even that notoriously tedious profession.
i’ve heard orlov say the same, that stalin wasn’t such a bad dude. i learnt about what actually happened during the holodomor from the same conversation, very not what’s in western text books, golden embargo is your search term of choice for actual history. still, i’m such a programmed westerner that stalin = good is really quite a rearrangement for me, can you point me to something supporting the view that most russians are of this opinion?
The striking and ubiquitous encounter here in Russia is the Orthodox Stalinist. there are plenty of them. The clergy will generally still be anti-Stalin, but the descendants of serfs know no one did more to lift them out of a centuries old condition. This still has nothing to do with why Stalin is demonized in the West. Same as Putin, he betrayed his tribe in favor of national interest. they are from the same tribe.
“The dems are trying to install someone who has zero Western background as the US President.”
What does that mean? How is Kamala Harris not an American? How does she not give a crap about America because she doesn’t have children, why does that matter?
I agree. Kamala is an American. She has figured out how to “sleep her way to the top,” and then use D. E. I. to boost her the rest of the way.
Cuttingly witty, Gail!
I’d never heard of D.E.I., though.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”.
She has nobody in USA, no relatives, no nothing in USA to look for. No one. Which means she won’t give a crap if USA goes under.
kulmthestatusquo,
America is not a real country. It is a business center. Look at its most famous areas. People move there to make money, not to start a family, or find spiritual enlightenment.
Either with Trump or with Harris let’s say that it is probable that US foreign policy will be ‘slightly influenced’ by Israel goals.
“Harris’s Jewish spouse, to be 1st ‘second gentleman,’ breaks barriers of his ownDoug Emhoff was called a ‘secret weapon’ on the campaign trail; a lawyer and a golfer, ‘he was bar mitzvahed in New Jersey,’ says his mother”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/harriss-jewish-spouse-to-be-1st-second-gentleman-breaks-barriers-of-his-own/
>> “Harris’s Jewish spouse, to be 1st ‘second gentleman,’
This is fitting for a matriarchal culture.
No doubt that Harris will support Israel.
Not enough attention is paid to her spouse. Is he a dual citizen? Even if not one officially, he could well be one in spirit.
He needs to be investigated and scrutinized for past statements, connections, and behaviors.
The issue of the true size of OPEC reserves comes up periodically. I am not finding a reference or decent search results for the claim below, however.
https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/07/mexican-oil-production-to-decline.html
>> Leaks of information about lower-than-publicly-stated oil reserves among major oil producers. In 2005, leaked internal government documents put Kuwait’s oil reserves at 48 billion barrels, just half of the 99 billion publicly claimed at the time.
I also found this, but again, not a primary source
https://www.peakoil.net/Kuwait.html
>> according to internal Kuwaiti records seen by industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW). “PIW learns from sources that Kuwait’s actual oil reserves, which are officially stated at around 99 billion barrels, or close to 10 percent of the global total, are a good deal lower, according to internal Kuwaiti records,” the weekly PIW reported on Friday. It said that according to data circulated in Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), the upstream arm of state Kuwait Petroleum Corp, Kuwait’s remaining proven and non-proven oil reserves are about 48 billion barrels
From Peakoilbarrel, down below the Kuwait oil production since 2008.
https://peakoilbarrel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/blog240718i.png
An average of 2.6 million barrels of oil per day, 950 million annually.
This means that since 2005 around 18 billion barrels have been produced.
30 billion barrels left, according to the speculation of 2005.
What did they discover in 1984 ? See the graph — magical barrels out of thin air .
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Kuwait-proven-crude-oil-reserves-million-barrels_fig14_38108766
Well, reserves growth is a real thing in petroleum engineering, and usually oil companies can extract more oil if the price per barrel is sufficiently high.
Drilling injection wells, water treatment plants (you can’t inject simple water in any rock formation, there must be a chemical “affinity”), completing multilateral wells and doing multiple seismic work just on a small fraction of an oil field costs money, a lot of it.
The numbers given in those days, given the sustained rate of production up this day, I think they were pretty right, to be honest.
What they have left under those sands it’s a real mystery and I think that only a small handful of people really know the numbers.
Gian , some history . In 1984-86 period all OPEC revised their reserves upward with the stroke of the pencil . The reason was production and export quotas were set in those years and the quota was based on reserves . All members wanted maximum quota so all revised their reserves . In the link see the OPEC graphs below ( 13 countries) the Kuwaiti graph and you can see all OPEC members revised their reserves dramatically in that period . It is a fact of history . Reserve growth as termed by you and also understood by me is based on price and technology , is a different matter .
The real issue with oil reserves is how well the economy as a whole can stay together. If we enter WW3, all bets could be off. All of the numbers are guesses–some are expected value, others are wishful thinking.
Countries that use oil sparingly can withstand buying higher-priced oil.
It may be that some winners in WW3 can work to pull out more oil than current administrations.
I don’t think we really know how these numbers will play out.
The winners will easily squeeze the losers out and throw them into Bronzeage if they will not have been bombed there already. I bet that Nato believes they can weaken Russia as much that they can make Aserbajdshan join EU. Plus perhaps Iran. The USA will take the Saudi peninsula and Venezuela. China and India will get zero.
It is just a bit risky. If China stops delivering cheap goods, the simple Western people have nothing and cannot support any war. So the war must be won quickly!
America seems to be at odd with many countries with a large supply of fossil fuels.
A *conservative* talk show host gave a list of a ***hole countries and China was included! Basically, every country that the U.S./NATO/……../ is hostile to is “****” .
This may seem partisan but this actually a bi-partisan belief…the difference between the parties is whether a country (Yemen) is demonized or the ruling regime.
fusion works!!! we’re saved!!! widespread use planned for 2050!!!
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3269357/how-chinas-massive-industrial-supply-chain-may-help-give-rise-artificial-sun
Even the article says it ‘may’ lead to artificial sun
A lot of wouldyas, couldyas and shouldyas not leading to anything.
We only need to make it to 2050 in one piece …
Nuclear fusion is the energy source of the future.
And always will be.
TM is out this AM.
“What’s so startling about this is that ECoE isn’t a financial metric at all. Rather, the Energy Cost of Energy is a measure of the material cost of supplying energy to the economy.”
We at OFW and a few others are “believers” in this and to date it appears to be a good approximation with some variance around a general trend.
My more direct and local concern is our society and those around us. We live as a community and that is not easy to form.
I was offended at the brief snips I saw of the Olympic games opening ceremonies. Opinions will vary on this as expected.
Dennis L.
I would expect that the ECoE is like the EROEI, in that it puts in no charge whatsoever for the need to pay bankers and others for the use of their money in order to have a slow-payback resource. Thus, this metric likely makes wind and solar look like they are much more useful than they really are. Governments in particular end up with much of this debt. Part of the high cost is hidden. It varies greatly with the interest rate.
Zero interest rates helped hide the cost of wind and solar. But when interest rates came back to closer to a normal level, they no longer look feasible.
I should point out that ECoE like EROEI likely leaves out a whole lot of other necessary costs.
Renting land to place the wind turbines/solar panels is a big, long term issue that is neglected.
These devices tend to need very long-distance transmission lines. These transmission lines tend to be lightly used because of the intermittent nature of wind and solar.
We have discovered that solar especially seems to need a lot battery backup. This simply shifts the time of the electricity available by a few hours. This helps those using solar panels to have electricity late in the day for their air conditioning. It doesn’t do anything for our need for heat in winter, however.
Roads often need widening for wind turbines. Wind turbines should be paying taxes for this issue, but it is not included. Offshore wind needs big oversized boats for installation, year around offshore workers, and helicopters to handle the frequent repair issue. All of these issues are omitted.
Dennis, I am offended and willing to remove the people responsible.
Ed, I’m not sure how much truth there is to the story, but I read somewhere that well-off Russians have arranged boating parties to pick off pirates as entertainment.
From Norman:
“a climatic period can last for decades or 000s of years—for any number of reasons.
a weather spell might last a few hours, maybe a month or two in certain circumstances.
so far in uk. our summer has been abysmal—that;s weather.–it does not affect the overall rise is global temperature
even having to explain it is an embarrassment.”
Your explanation is actually quite vague. What time period marks the boundary between weather and climate?
there is no ”time period”
weather is what you deal with today
climate is what your grandchildren will have to deal with–and their children.
if they happen to live on the plains of india, and climate change removes the himalyan icecap over the next 20 years, they will die of thirst.
If they don’t starve first. There are lots of simultaneous issues. We basically have a “too many people for resources” problem.
comes to the same thing
the same scenerio applies in the American SW
except there they will kill each other in the name of jesus, while denying that they have no water and no food
but jesus will return and put things right, when enough of the ‘wrong” people are dead.
i can never understand why he just doesnt come back and fix things—if the world belongs to him anyway
The world belongs to Satan.
satan and me have always been on friendly terms
kindred spirits you might say
much more fun than the other guy
Lidia and Norman I choose to believe you are both being flippant.
The satanists are coming out these days. But only a limited, superstitious mind can believe that the world belongs to someone.
it is likely that the world runs itself, for its own ongoing viability, using a form of intellect we know nothing about.
our existence is incidental and temporary.
a life form which is incidental, and ultimatley meaningless, despite our self indulgence in the creation of gods, superbeings and suchlike.
we worship lumps of rock and wood, assert that natural phenomena and chance is divine intervention.—that we move on elsewhere after death etc,
why?
because we have the mental ability to conceive deep past and far future which as far as is known, no other animal can.
collective hysteria and self support. which of course helps our civilised existence….so we carry on with it, looking for divine signs of approval, from the same gods the eygptians did—they too were certain of divine approval.
many forms of religion await a ”second coming”—to rectify the evils of this world.
so far it hasn’t happened, and seems unlikely to.
Norm, there’s a huge contradiction right at the start of your reasoning, which you don’t seem to realize. If we don’t know anything about the world, you can’t claim that our existence is incidental and temporary or meaningless. That’s why everything that follows makes no sense to me.
i made no definitive claim—i said ”it is likely that”
which makes more sense than any ”god certainties” i think
the world and its people were in reasonable balance until 300 years ago, when we released fossilied energy.
at that point the world went (from our perspective) crazy—but what in fact it might be doing is rebalancing itself, using industrialised warfare to do it.
that takes time.
You said there was a time period, I quote:
“a weather spell might last a few hours, maybe a month or two in certain circumstances.”
Now you are saying, “weather is what you deal with today”
So which is it?
i’ll send over a box of nits for you to pick.
you might have a single hot day, or a months heatwave.
that’s weather.
a 10000 year cool spell gives an ice age in many parts of the world
a 10000 year hot spell puts crocodiles in the arctic
that’s climate.
A 10,000-year hot spell is a 10,000-year spell of hot weather.
You can call it climate if you like, but it is still weather.
Those crocodiles migrate to and from various places in keeping with the weather conditions. Swallows and other migratory birds go half way around the globe doing the same thing every year. They don’t travel all that distance in search of a better climate, but in the hope of encountering better weather.
i dont think anyone knows why swallows migrate
they breed in one place then fly south to avoid the winter.
i think youll find that the common definitions of climate and weather are commonly held as i have roughly defined them
not that it will influence your opinions in any way
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/weather-vs-climate
It is true that the common definitions of climate and weather are commonly held as you have roughly defined them. That isn’t at issue.
Of course many people know why swallows migrate.
You yourself believe you know why and you’ve written what you think is the reason: “They breed in one place and then fly south to avoid the winter.”
As an explanation, this suggestion has a lot going for it, since when they fly south, they do indeed avoid the winter.
But I think the actual reason they fly south is to avoid hunger and starvation that they would face due to the lack of insects when the weather turns cold.
i took it as read
that here in winter there would be no nits for them to pick.–winter is an all embracing factor.
i’m always making that mistake, even though when i was writing for a living i tried to adhere to the golden rule, never lose sight of the lowest common denominator.
Again Norman, swallows avoid starvation so they avoid cold weather. They don’t specifically avoid winter. Many East Asian swallows, for instance, spend the winter in Taiwan or the Philippines, BECAUSE winter is not cold there.
European swallows, on the other hand, fly over 6,000 km to South Africa, not because they like flying that far, but BECAUSE if they tried to spend the winter in North Africa they would die of starvation in the Sahara.
I am kindly and patiently trying to explain this to you, but you just don’t get it, do you?
You aren’t particularly stupid, but you enjoy playing the cantankerous old bugger, don’t you?
if you indulge yourself in even more radical thinking tim
it might just be that as climate has slowly changed, and the landscape itself has altered over time, it seems likely that swallows, (as a typical example) found themselves flying just a little bit farther each year.
we know that the sahara was grassy savanah with plenty of food 000s of years ago
does it not occur to you that swallows flew south to there, then with gradual drying out, they had to fly beyond it, but by tiny increments, which would have no effect on their flying endurance.
So you are using terms which you can’t define and then meltdown when people call you out on it.
Age doesn’t necessarily bring maturity…
lol
meltdown?
you read too much into words–as demonstrated by your previous 2 comments–maybe a reflection of yourself?
Well done?
Norman can’t give a definite answer, of course, because not only is there no definite or fixed boundary between climate and weather, there is no essential difference between weather and climatic phenomena.
Weather is our common or garden name for the state of the atmosphere at a particular place during a short period of time. The weather conditions at any time involve such atmospheric phenomena as temperature, humidity, precipitation (type and amount), air pressure, wind, and cloud cover.
The climate of a particular place is simply the long-term average of the weather conditions in that place. Climate is, accordingly, a statistical description, not a physical real-world phenomenon or set of phenomena.
We can never directly experience the climate. Whereas we can constantly experience the weather simply by opening a door or a window to the outside.
So, is climate real, or is it imaginary? And if it’s real, in what sense is it real? Isn’t it just another way of saying average long-term weather, or the sum of weather conditions over a long period?
Norman can’t answer this one, so he needs to find a snappy response to give himself cover without having to admit that “he’s wrong there” (as my grandad used to say).
Some people will tell you that climate causes weather, but obviously the real situation is the opposite: weather causes climate, because climate is measured based on measuring weather over time.
It sometimes rains or even snows in tropical deserts from Death Valley to the Sahara to the Arabian Desert. Does the desert climate cause this rain or snow? Obviously not. There is no mechanism that permits this to happen.
Hence, there is no mechanism that permits the desert climate to cause hot sunny weather either. Conversely, it is the continuation of hot sunny weather over decades, centuries or millennia that creates deserts. Anyone who hasn’t been brainwashed by the mass media (admittedly, that’s a small minority of us these days), should be able to understand this.
Weather has its causes, certainly, but climate isn’t one of them. Climate is, if anything, an effect, not a cause.
around here, glacial moraine ridges define the ice limits—which then retreated in a relatively warm spell, a few centuries, then advanced again—another few centuries of cold—then retreated and eventually vanished altogether
ie the climate altered for those stages to happen—why we dont know
year on year weather variations would have occurred
bt that didnt ifluence the overall final retreat of the icefield—climate change did that
Same around here. Glacial moraine ridges remain behind at the former limits of glaciers and ice caps when the weather becomes warm enough for the ice to melt, for what ever reason.
It’s long-term weather change. You may call it “climate change,” but it is actually warmer weather over an extended period that causes ice caps and glaciers to melt, and cooler weather over an extended period that causes them to freeze.
Most people seem to be stuck on the idea that climate is a real physical phenomenon, but it isn’t. It is average weather over time, a statistical abstraction. You can’t see it, or hear it or feel it, or photograph it, or interact with climate in any way.
And if climate is a statistical abstraction, then climate change is doubly so. They are both abstract nouns that can be placed in the same column as other intangible things like:
Love
Happiness
Justice
Creativity
Freedom
Democracy
Loneliness
Courage
Patience
Honesty
Beauty
Reliability
Terror
i just picked some news that some Japanese cities are hitting 45 c and people are dying (from a Japanese person)–not an ofw-ite
is this correct Tim?
Norman, I haven’t heard of any official records of 45ºC. 41ºC on July 28 in Tochigi Prefecture, a bit to the north of Tokyo, is the highest I’ve seen.
But it’s possible that some locations in cities got up to 45ºC or more due to a combination of the urban heat island effect, strong sunshine, and high humidity.
Places in small basins surrounded by mountains on all sides seem to get hotter than those on the wider plains or fronting the sea. Kyoto City is notorious for getting very hot in Summer.
It feels to me like the hottest summer ever, although in my valley in the quiet cool deep countryside well to the north of Kyoto, the hottest it has been this year is 38ºC.
People are dying of the heat, it’s true. Heatstroke is a killer in Japan every year in summer. Kids playing baseball, construction workers on the job, farmers and growers and grass cutters working outside for too long and not drinking enough liquids. And then there are old people who don’t feel the heat so much and who may not have air conditioning or may not turn it on because they don’t realize they need to or they are trying to minimize their electricity bill.
I don’t know if the number of such deaths is exceptionally high this year. Such deaths can happen even at temperatures as low as 30ºC when the humidity is high. The biggest factor is not the temperature per se, but the fact that people don’t take adequate precautions.
Also, the number of excess deaths due to cold, even in Japan, is far higher than the number due to heat. Old people can easily have a stroke if they go from a cold room into a hot bath.
Age makes people more susceptible to dying due to ambient heat or ambient cold, so aging societies such as Japan are bound to see a lot of such deaths.
thanks Tim
was just curious
it came from a Japanese hairdresser based in UK–i touch with back home obviously
interesting thouigh, that you use the term ”feels like the hottest summer ever”
rubbish summer so far in uk though
Tim,
That is a good point that climate follows weather – as per your post:
“Some people will tell you that climate causes weather, but obviously the real situation is the opposite: weather causes climate, because climate is measured based on measuring weather over time.”
I think people all too often throw words around without understanding what they mean. No doubt it is sometimes done deliberately to confuse people, e.g. “green”, “renewable”.
if, as is commonly believed, the milankovich cycle shifts global climate over very long periods of time
then it follows that a cycle that takes the earth into a cold era or hot era of climate, lasting many thousands of years, will of itself create weather patterms that follow those cycles.
yes, there well always be anomalies across the seasons, but a summer of say, 25k years ago, would not have carried heatwaves, because the ice would have still been in its full extent.
pretty much every reference point you care to check defines climate and weather as different from human perspective.
The furin cleavage site in the spike protein very likely was artificially engineered. It allows a fragment of the spike protein to cross the blood brain barrier and act as a primer to the CNS macrophages. This causes inflammation in several parts of the brain, which leads to cognitive impairment, dementia, anxiety, PTSD and the inability to react properly on new challenges.
This applies to both contact by infection as much as contact by injection.
Citations:
“SARS-COV-2 infection produces neuroinflammation as well as neurological, cognitive (i.e. brain fog), and neuropsychiatric symptoms (e.g. depression, anxiety), which can persist for an extended period (6 months) after the resolution of the infection. […]
Notably, approximately one-third of Covid-19 patients develop neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms, including anxiety, depression, PTSD, cognitive deficits, fatigue and sleep-disturbances.”
“Here, we provide evidence that the S1 subunit function as a PAMP in the CNS to drive neuro-inflammatory processes and the behavioural consequences of those consequences, and thus play a role in the SARS-COV-2 infection.”
SARS-COV-2 spike S1 subunit induces neuroinflammatory, microglial and behavioural sickness responses: Evidence of PAMP-like properties. Frank MG, Brain Behaviour and Immunity, 2022
—-doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2021.12.007—-
Download here:
https://shorter.me/FBJ0q
Additional content in German language, activate subtitles, with two university teachers of biochemistry.
Interview with Michael Nehls giving a few more biochemical insights, especially about the role of the hippocampus.
https://youtu.be/Eh0kwJFy8xU?si=N6Y73QGQt3gS5fvt
Interview with Ulrike Kämmerer giving a lot of biochemical insights, discusses a wider range of side effects.
https://youtu.be/tCeaGbFKxes?si=Kb_G8kmqhklpC4EL
This means the entire fate of the world is currently being driven in strong part by an ancient metaphysical cult whose roots lay buried deep in ancient Babylon?
“That said, we know Israel and its agents currently control the U.S. and by extension much of the Western world. What is indisputable, is that Israel is led by a fanatical, messianic end times cult at the very top of their leadership pyramid, the Temple Mount movement and likely the more esoteric sects driving it. In Israel, the government is merely a cover for these religious zealots and rabbis, who follow a book written in ancient Babylon, called the Babylonian Talmud. We have a video from the early ‘90s of the current leader, Netanyahu, literally being made to promise to “speed up” the bringing of the messiah at all costs, to the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Schneerson.
This means the entire fate of the world is currently being driven in strong part by an ancient metaphysical cult whose roots lay buried deep in ancient Babylon, rather than some kind of civic logic, justice, rationale, ethical governance, etc. . . .
The proof in the pudding is that CIA pioneer Allen Dulles was in fact a finance big wig himself, connected directly to the Rockefellers and huge firms like JP Morgan. In fact, thanks to this, the first official headquarters of the CIA was in Rockefeller Plaza in NYC, where Dulles also had his office. Thus, the Rockefellers and global financial interests, which were mostly run by Jewish-Zionist banking families, had total control of the CIA from the very beginning, and do so to this day. Most consider the Rockefellers themselves to simply be the American ‘agents’ for House Rothschild, who pretty much created Israel via the Balfour Declaration, and famous photos attest to them at least being close: . . .
Israeli cult leaders secretly view the Western world—that is, Europe and the U.S.—as basically New Rome, and thus believe they are exacting their ‘revenge’ on the old Romans for what they did to the Jews. It’s perfectly understandable to an extent, wouldn’t you hold the same view, and want some form of retribution? “?
Also?
“Arestovich recorded a video in which he announced the complete collapse of the Ukrainian energy system for 2-3 Russian missile strikes. Now Ukraine still has a nuclear power plant and an energy bridge with Europe. But Russia can destroy all this with two or three missile strikes, literally throwing the whole country back to the 17th century in a couple of days. Only the village will survive, the lighting will be from splinters. Winter will drive hundreds of thousands of people out of the cities and the whole country will be engaged in survival, not war. . . .
The current ‘rumors’ as per Mike Pompeo are that Trump supposedly plans to present his peace ultimatum to Russia with an implied threat that if the proposal isn’t taken, then the U.S. would arm Ukraine with “everything”, including a $500 Billion Lend Lease. This is the unpredictable warmongering way Trump’s mind works, and so there’s every possibility that in the interim, NATO will only continue existing and provoking. ”?
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/subscriber-mailbag-answers-72824
The video below is an interview with 80-year-old and still sharp-as-a-tack Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who believes that NATO is doomed and also that both Ukraine and Israel will be fortunate to survive as states if they don’t change their strategies. He also suspects that the US is preventing Ukraine from “arriving at a ceasefire”.
He also talks about Joe Biden, who he dealt with when he was as Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff 20 years ago. And he says the Biden we have been seeing for the past 18 months or so, is “not the same Joe Biden.” Whether he just means that Biden’s mental acuity has gone or he’s saying in a cryptic or understated way that the current Biden is an imposter, I can’t say for sure.
Wilkinson heaps praise on Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and also basically agrees with most of what Lavrov said about the US and NATO at the UN recently. While noting that, naturally, Lavrov speaks from a Russian perspective, Wilkinson points out that the man talks a lot of sense.
The NATO leadership is talking about expanding into the Pacific to confront China and unnamed other nations, but Wilkinson thinks this policy is going to overstrain the alliance. “I don’t understand how they believe they can sustain that politically. It’s already becoming unravelled. It’s already unravelled in France. It’s unravelled in Slovakia and Hungary. It’s probably going to unravel in Germany as soon as the present Chancellor is gone….”
49 minutes
wars—and credible threats of wars, can only be sustained through the availabilty of surplus cheap energy.
that was how ww2 was won and lost.
same drum…i know…but there isn’t another one in the band.
Not familiar with the 30 years war in Europe, but was that over energy?
Wasn’t there also a 100 years war?
Dennis L.
all wars are over resources—one way or another.
”that country possesses what is rightfully ours”
young men can always be aroused to fight, especially if there’s loot invoved–if you can put a god on your side, so much the better.—gods love bloodshed, it seems
territory is the ultimate energy resource—putin can see what the future holds, just like we on ofw.—
Ukraine is one of the breadbaskets of the world, and he wants it—(as did Hitler)
the 100 years war was in fact a series of wars fought over a 100 year period, over various territorial claims in euriope.
until recent times, battles tended to last just a few hours—after that the energy ran out.
Laughing quietly.
“until recent times, battles tended to last just a few hours—after that the energy ran out.”
Swinging a sword tends to tire one out.
Dennis L.
pens have the same effect these days
I heard that He (Putin) doesn’t want to see Russia broken up, conquered and pillaged by the Princes of the West, in other words, the Globalist Oligarchy.
I understand that He has plenty of good agricultural land.
Apparently, the parasitical West covets Ukraine’s land and natural resources and ultimately Russia’s land natural resources. Word has it that, far from being an idiot, He probably knows this very well, since the planners post some of their plans on the Internet.. He is also doubtless fed up with the West constantly provoking and sanctioning Russia, NATO expanding its membership through salami tactics (slice by slice), and people lie Norman calling him rude names.
If this goes on much longer, it is possible He will decide to Nuke every major Western strategic target and maybe a few of the power centers too, and destroy their electronics and electrical infrastructure with EMP weapons for good measure.
If He does this, He will be doing to the West what the West has done to Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and dozens of other countries over the past century. And if He doesn’t do this to the West, he knows the West is going to do it to Russia.
Exciting, isn’t it?
https://x.com/its_The_Dr/status/1800248764701237334
it is exciting
make me glad to be sitting close to the doors marked ”exit”
This is a Western picture of the world, in my view, which has the tendency to derive from our EU/US/Israel way to see things, but we have to think that there are billions of people, like people living China or India (and their élite) who don’t refer to our Bibble or ancient Babylon, how you define.
Those people have other sacred books and their élite refer to other ideas.
Their élite leaders are in contact of course with our Bibble reffered leaders/élite, but the multipolar world is different from what we tend to see from our perspective.
Actually I think that we are currently experiencing a fight between élite groups in the world, which in the past was different, being the Bibble related leaders fully in power, without any other able to open a discussion.
I think that the current global almost WWIII war is exaclty because Bibble/Babylon leaders don’t accept to lose their predominance.
The spillover from this conflict is farther-reaching than one might think. I recently saw a bunch of Japanese protesting in favor of Palestine, being shrieked at by Jewish tourists to Japan. I think an American stepped in to soothe the jews, saying the Japanese essentially “know not what they do”.
Japanese pro-Palestine protests apparently sparked a counter-wave of pro-Israeli protests.
Some cynics say pro-Palestinian protests are funded by Israel itself, in order to prompt and excuse pro-Israel and anti-antisemitism legislation and war funding. Problem, reaction, solution.
Are the Bible/Bable-ers are too strong, or are the indigenous systems are too weak to resist being subsumed by them?
The majority complies, whoever is behind. Responsible have been reelected. The majority obeys. So it is bigger than just an autoritarian act. It might be a combination of mind manipulation and bioweapon. The problem with this idea is, that the neurological effects of the virus could not be excluded from the responsible. There is no way to protect. Dietary measures, like carnivore or keto or intermittend fasting, could help to minimise effects. Meditating and a strong mind might help. But the box of pandora was opened also to possible members of any sect. It is a suicidal act – unless there is a very isolated spot somewhere, with all preparations for a restart.
Thank you. Someone had to say it.
Simplicius is clearly a sharp guy, but even he does not fully grasp the energy angle. of course he implies here and there that the USA have managed to beat a possible future competitor (Europe), but that also means that Europe is slowly choked out of the consumption game, leaving more for the rest.
“There are issues facing all three branches of the British military, and they are ‘much worse than thought.'”
The new UK Defence Minister (Labour) claims to have just discovered that the UK military is a complete write off. Is he serious? Everyone knew that and anyone could have told him that.
The situation is that the UK could not now even fight the little Falklands skirmish let alone do a major operation.
Yet the UK military establishment keeps banging on that it needs to be ‘ready’ to fight Russia, China, NK, Iran and basically everyone ‘within three years’.
That is completely ridiculous: it takes decades to build a serious military-industrial base and a functional military, and the idea that they could possibly do it in three years or even 10 is obviously a deception of the public and maybe of themselves too.
A 2.5% spend (instead of the current 2.3%) of GDP on the military would not even come close to making any difference. The UK state is living in cloud cuckoo land fulltime.
The social-democratic consensus and the state of UK finances strictly preclude any realistic spending on the military so the UK military is simply a write off and that is not going to change.
Yet they still reckon that they are about to ‘fight’ everyone. I suppose that we will see how that works out for them?
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/36261
> ‘Procurement Waste, Low Morale’ – New UK Defence Minister Notes Deplorable State of UK Forces
John Healey, the new British Defence Minister under the Labour government, warned that British forces are in a deplorable state after an external audit began last week.
Speaking at the British Army’s annual Land Warfare Conference hosted by the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank, Healey said that there are issues facing all three branches of the British military, and that they are “much worse than thought.”
“We know all three services face very serious challenges: hollowed out forces, procurement waste, low morale, recruitment and retention crisis and veterans who can’t access the services they deserve,” Sky News reported Healey saying.
Healey’s statement mirrored those made in recent weeks by General Sir Patrick Sanders, who until June, served as the UK’s chief of the general staff. Sanders said the current British army stocks “put the hairs up on the back of your neck” and that the UK lacks the capability to sustain a major operation.
“Could you scramble together the two brigades that took the Falklands? Yes, of course we could. But could we get them there? Could we have the task force that made it possible and sustain it? No,” Sanders told The Times.
Healey, Sanders and new UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer have cautioned that the British military should be ready for growing threats posed by adversaries.
During the NATO summit on July 11, Starmer said the UK would set out a “clear path” after the reviews to raise defense spending to 2.5 percent of its GDP without listing a deadline, while Rishi Sunak, his predecessor, vowed to reach the target by 2030.
A Conservative lawmaker acknowledged in April that the UK’s defense budget had not come any closer to the 2.5 percent target since 2010 when Labour was last in power; Another report claimed that day-to-day defense spending had been cut by nearly £10 billion ($12.9 billion) since 2010.
I wonder what happens if these battery fires start forest fires:
https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/lithium-battery-fire-sparks-traffic-mayhem-across-california-desert
Lithium Battery Fire Sparks Traffic Mayhem Across California Desert
Is it safe to move these batteries by truck?
This is another related story, linked at the end of the above article:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/rivians-amazon-delivery-vans-keep-mysteriously-catching-fire
Amazon delivery vans, manufactured by Rivian, keep catching fire.
That was the topic of a new report from Quartz.com this week which highlighted that the blue Prime vans seen all over the country keep catching fire at Amazon distribution centers.
Link referred to in this:
https://qz.com/amazon-rivian-vans-on-fire-1851573007
Seems to be linked to charging, especially in heat.
Don’t worry about forest fires caused by battery fires in the US; the US exports its forests to Europe to burn anyway.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/28/green-energy-biomass-plant-hands-300-million-to-shareholders-then-demands-more-subsidies/
‘ Matt Williams, of Cut Carbon Not Forests and advocate for US environmental advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, said: ‘It is unacceptable this company is burning the world’s forests and making money hand over fist from environmental harm.’
It sounds very political:
“, in 2023 Tory politicians received £48,000 in donations from companies connected to Drax. DeSmog claims Labour also accepted a lesser donation of £12,000 from Drax. Obviously I’m not suggesting such donations in any way influence whether politicians support Drax’s request for more subsidies.”
It’s not even safe to move them by hand!
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1817661444281770483
edit:
eoconservativism and libertarianism were movements borne of disillusionment with the Soviet Union….The sort of elitism present in it is on the Left as well….because some of the children of the people who were disillusioned with the Soviet Union are on the Left….Instead of believing the CEO does all the work, the children of the people who were disillusioned with the Soviet Union , believe the college educated people do all the real work and the people with no college degrees are lazy and dangerous in addition to being unproductive. CEOs make the most money because they have the most education, not because they do all the most work. The work CEOs do create the most value. Billion-dollar mergers, a new business deal that reduces costs and boosts profits, those are worth a lot more than someone who is measured by x amount of output. College education is the solution to everything. Since Iraq was a bedrock for terrorism and extremism, a long term solution was to build colleges. People busy getting credentials will not resort to violence or extreme customs that favor family formation over personal freedom It makes since why the U.S did not focus its efforts on security in Iraq. It was thinking long-term. It was thinking that it could pacify the region by winning hearts and minds through education.
https://apnews.com/article/urban-sprawl-saddam-hussein-baghdad-higher-education-iraq-897067824c11c022513d837211193c9a
The idea that education can solve all problems has been used many places, including the US, Africa, and China. The catch is that only a relatively small share of the population can truly get higher wages, or there are not enough total wages for everyone. It doesn’t matter as much as hoped that many more have advanced degrees. There still need to be roads and trucks and fossil fuels to operate machinery. This is part of the reason behind the difficulty in getting student loans paid back. An awfully lot of people are not earning high enough wages to pay back the loans and have enough left over for their families.
Education offen merely creates a sense of entitlement without the means to satisfy it.
“An awfully lot of people are not earning high enough wages to pay back the loans and have enough left over for their families.”
Perhaps as a result there are no or fewer families. A material good can be paid for on credit and when it is no longer useful, disposed in a landfill.
Children are a twenty year investment unless of course one is Amish although it appears even they approach twenty years of education but the last fiver are apprenticeships which generate so added value.
In Fillmore county, per Copilot, there are about 1,000 Amish. Not that many, the ones I see are along roads fairly close to the urban centers.
Saw a buggy along side of the road recently, even a buggy breaks down sometimes.
Dennis L.
(Bild – German newspaper)
There has never been a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.
(…)
Firstly, according to the RKI, the vaccination of children was not even necessary because children were not seriously endangered by the virus and were not themselves drivers of the waves of infection.
Secondly, the AstraZeneca vaccine was not harmless, as proclaimed by the Federal Ministry of Health, but was associated with dangerous side effects, which was known long before the vaccine was withdrawn from the market.
Thirdly, the federal government’s claim that people who do not get vaccinated are a danger to others was unfounded and false. The “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, which was proclaimed by the then Minister of Health Jens Spahn (CDU), never existed according to the scientists at the RKI. The unvaccinated were no more and no less responsible for the spread of the virus than the vaccinated.
Fourthly: The FFP-2 mask requirement was not recommended by the RKI, nor – fifthly – the 3-G rule and the 2-G rule (participation in public life only for vaccinated, tested and recovered persons – then only for vaccinated and recovered persons).
Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
https://www.bild.de/regional/berlin/gunnar-schupelius-die-pandemie-der-ungeimpften-hat-es-nie-gegeben-66a11419c95c382c5f780011
The problem is that once people “learn” something, they find if hard to believe the opposite thing–even if what they learned originally was completely wrong. How do they know that the writer is correct?
Yes, I agree.
My impression is that these actions follow the concept of ‘plausible deniability’.
Mainstream media admits that mistakes have been done.
Mainstream media can take itself out, because it didn’t know that at the time.
Current politicians can also say ‘I have been deceived’, I didn’t know that.
The system in this way admits its mistakes in a quiet way.
The system can still prof to everybody ‘we pursue the truth’.
People can go on doing their ‘normal life’.
Plausible deniability
Palusible deniability is the ability of people, typically senior officials in a formal or informal chain of command, to deny knowledge of or responsibility for actions committed by or on behalf of members of their organizational hierarchy. They may do so because of a lack of evidence that can confirm their participation, even if they were personally involved in or at least willfully ignorant of the actions. If illegal or otherwise disreputable and unpopular activities become public, high-ranking officials may deny any awareness of such acts to insulate themselves and shift the blame onto the agents who carried out the acts, as they are confident that their doubters will be unable to prove otherwise. The lack of evidence to the contrary ostensibly makes the denial plausible (credible), but sometimes, it makes any accusations only unactionable.
The term typically implies forethought, such as intentionally setting up the conditions for the plausible avoidance of responsibility for one’s future actions or knowledge. In some organizations, legal doctrines such as command responsibility exist to hold major parties responsible for the actions of subordinates who are involved in actions and nullify any legal protection that their denial of involvement would carry.
In politics and especially, espionage, deniability refers to the ability of a powerful player or intelligence agency to pass the buck and to avoid blowback by secretly arranging for an action to be taken on its behalf by a third party that is ostensibly unconnected with the major player. In political campaigns, plausible deniability enables candidates to stay clean and denounce third-party advertisements that use unethical approaches or potentially libelous innuendo.
Although plausible deniability has existed throughout history, the term was coined by the CIA in the early 1960s to describe the withholding of information from senior officials to protect them from repercussions if illegal or unpopular activities became public knowledge.[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
‘The criteria we use to find the person that will lead us to character discernment usually includes something as stupid as a person in authority, a person in a position in government, medical doctors, or maybe other “experts”—but in our current culture, usually sweet talking, lying, politicians. People we have been told to trust, and if we do not trust them, then we are lowly, stupid, deplorable, conspiracy theorists.
Think of this process as being similar to a newborn chick who imprints on whatever it first encounters to be its mother. We imprint on people or positions (such a president or prime minister) we are told to trust. Government we trust. And the imprinting sticks.’
…’We, as a human race, are losing the ability to think, to reason, to logically put dots together, and to trust our intuitive sense of what is right and what is wrong. We are being taught to see things in a polarized fashion, black or white, and then taught to listen to only one source that tells us which is black, and which is white. We no longer (or soon to be) can determine by instinct what is good for us, we cannot discern art from computer junk, we cannot see a human face in such a way that divulges malcontent or benevolence, we can no longer see blatant lies.’
https://off-guardian.org/2024/07/27/judging-character/
“The anchoring effect is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information offered”
https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/the-drawbacks-of-goals/
First impressions.
This is hilarious. According to internet sources, Bild is Germany’s and the EU’s largest-circulation newspaper. I guess it’s time for The Elder’s plan phase two, because why else would they announce to the sheeple that they’ve been had?
I tend to interpret these articles as simply due to the difficulty of managing the blob. There’s a million factions guys itching to go off the reservation everywhere within the system. I mean you have 1000+ scientific papers showing health damages due to the vaccine. It involved thousands of scientists who were keeping their head down in 2021. among journos it is probably the same.
so, OK, some editor at Bild might get punished, but global domination through usury never had the possibility of being 100% effective.
very interesting development ivanislav this means that the elders have been caught trying to commit mass murder . Some mass murderers in the past were Hitler, Idi Amin and Stalin.Unfortunateley for Gatesy his name will now join these ranks. It looks like he was chosen by the elders as the fall guy for this operation or whats known as a ‘patsy’. The real ‘elders’ remain to fight another day.
‘….a danger to others was unfounded and false.’
Here we have the perfect expose of the Climate Change Cult.
Its political, not truthful
Its scientism; not truthful
Its directed funding; not truthful
Its scaremongering; its the truth of fools.
Warren Buffet cut ties with Bill Gates and will no longer leave his fortune to Gates Foundation.
Buffet: “The Gates Foundation has no money coming after my death, it’s going in the wrong direction.”
Source: WSJ, Fortune
https://www.wsj.com/finance/warren-buffett-gives-us-a-preview-of-his-will-419ad46d
https://fortune.com/2024/06/28/warren-buffett-berkshire-hathaway-charity-foundation-bill-melinda-gates/
🙂 popcorn (munch munch)
Are we already jostling for post-collapse positioning? (More accurately trying to improve his children’s chances to save their skin. Being Bill’s main buddy not a good rep)
The fact he could go from pledging to donate $130 billion dollars to ZERO. It’s stunning, to say the least.
The subheading: “The famed investor, who owns nearly $130 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock, will direct his fortune into a new charitable trust overseen by his children”
Nobody has pointed out that JD Vance’s wife works for a law firm founded by Charlie Munger, Buffett’s sidekick.
Buffett is now betting differently from Gates.
Infighting among the oligarchs? Bill Gates too much behind the vaccine silliness and the plans to implant chips in people.
Yes, you are spelling out what I implied above. Gates being too toxic now for the elites. distancing ensued.
He’s telling a fib.
They want to appear that they are backing off vaccine passports and programmable money but if it comes down to them remaining wealthy and imposing another lockdown they will lockdown it allows them to stay wealthy and keep the system afloat for a few moments longer. They will look at the ff depletion rates in a year or two and will come out in support of another draconian policy.
No one becomes wealthy in finance by being honest.
It’s not honest work.
”Lopez Obrador has invested heavily in the six refineries, which increased processing to about 1 million bpd. Even so, its outdated refineries produce record amounts of fuel oil rather than much-needed motor fuels. ”
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/declining-mexican-crude-output-could-shatter-energy-independence-dream-2024-07-25/
Sorry , missed this by Kurt Cobb .
https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2024/07/mexican-oil-production-to-decline.html
“Fuel oil” is a fairly unrefined product, as I understand it. Building a refinery that is state of the art would be very expensive. Just getting oil to the “fuel oil” state would probably be much less expensive.
I have understood that in the past, Mexico exported crude oil to the US, and the US refined it, and sent quite a bit of it back to Mexico. This way, the US could get the low sulfur diesel it needed to operate trucks in the US. It may have also imported other oil from the US. The EIA shows:
US crude oil imports from Mexico has been as follows:
2021 711,000 bpd
2022 808,000 bpd
2023 910,000 bpd
US exports of oil products to Mexico
2021 1,156,000 bpd
2022 1,152,000 bpd
2023 1,165,000 bpd
EIA shows Mexico’s total production of crude oil to be the following, so it has some oil beyond that coming to the US.
2021 1,780,000 bpd
2022 1,843,000 bpd
2023 1,936,000 bpd
The article doesn’t sound like they are really planning a huge amount of new production. It says:
Earlier this month, Hebrew newspaper Maariv called Israel a “country in collapse.” The paper reported that 46,000 Israeli businesses have been forced to shut as a result of the ongoing war and its devastating impact on the economy,
“This is a very high number that encompasses many sectors. About 77 percent of the businesses that have been closed since the beginning of the war, which make up about 35,000 businesses, are small businesses with up to five employees and are the most vulnerable in the economy,” Yoel Amir, CEO of Israeli information services and credit risk management firm, CofaceBdi, told Maariv.
https://thecradle.co/articles-id/26096
Wow! I think of Israel as being almost an appendage to Europe. If Europe is doing poorly (not enough oil etc per capita), Israel may also be. Israel quite possibly entered the war to cover up problems it was having. These problems are now showing up, plus others.
The “plus others” is very accurate. But look, if war is supposed to reduce population and is an excuse for reducing consumption, the shuttering of businesses is part and parcel of reducing consumption.
In ancient times, they called this making a sacrifice.
The article you link to indicates that one big problem is the foreign tourism industry. Many fewer are willing to come, with all of the fighting.
Last week, the southern port of Eilat halted its operations, declared bankruptcy, after losing $13.61 million, and is to lay off half of its 120 workers. The port has been largely inactive since the start of the war as ships diverted around Africa to avoid the Red Sea route through the Suez Canal to reach Europe, following attacks by Yemen’s Houthi forces in support of the Palestinians in Gaza on shipping in the Red Sea with connections to Israel.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/07/26/amqd-j26.html
Trade between Turkey and Israel was worth $6.8bn in 2023, of which 76% was Turkish exports, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TUIK, or TurkStat).
Turkey’s biggest export to Israel last year was iron and steel. It’s biggest import was refined oil products
https://www.intellinews.com/turkey-reportedly-freezes-all-trade-with-israel-323757/
AI seems to require large amounts of electricity. Given that, does anyone here have ideas on the maximum power principal as it relates to competition between AI and humans? Furthermore, are there ideas on how various groups competing for this electricity will themselves use the maximum power principal to gain advantage?
Dennis L.
Basically if they want more power for AI they will have to reduce consumption and or population. I would assume that the underlying principle is that you direct resources to AI if it is worth it. And I do not think it is worth it expect for insurrection suppression (through target selection) during a crisis.
Those who follow virtue signaling will misuse the energy to benefit the group of population least likely to lead civilization to your cubic mile of pt.
I expect that the uses of AI will be fairly limited–places where AI can be used with actual human labor savings as a result. The total additional energy for these uses will be small. Actually charging extra for AI use will be difficult and will put limits on its use.
The AI bubble will pop, keeping it away from the excesses most hope for.
It’s time to limit how often we can travel abroad – ‘carbon passports’ may be the answer
What is a carbon passport?
The idea of a carbon passport centers on each traveler being assigned a yearly carbon allowance that they cannot exceed. These allowances can then “ration” travel.
This concept may seem extreme. But the idea of personal carbon allowances is not new. A similar concept (called “personal carbon trading”) was discussed by UK Parliament in 2008, before being shut down because of to its perceived complexity and the possibility of public resistance.
The average annual carbon footprint for a person in the US is 16 tons – one of the highest rates in the world. In the UK this figure sits at 11.7 tons, still more than five times the figure recommended by the Paris Agreement to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
Globally, the average annual carbon footprint of a person is closer to 4 tons. But, to have the best chance of preventing temperature rise from overshooting 2 Celsius, the average global carbon footprint needs to drop to under two tons by 2050. This figure equates to around two roundtrip flights between London and New York.
Intrepid Travel’s report predicts that we will see carbon passports in action by 2040.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/carbon-passports-explainer/index.html
I am afraid that by 2040, long distance travel will be a much shorter distance: longer than we can comfortably walk in day’s time.
But we know that even without fossil fuels, people traveled amazing distances in wind driven boats. There were a lot of ship wrecks, but it worked. I expect that this mode of travel will be back.
the point you omit Gail, is the number of people.
I live right on what used to be the fastest stage coach route in the world—160m in 16 hours, it was the wonder of the age.
but that involved at least 10 changes of horses (40 horses in total), to move about a dozen people at most.
that is your critical difference
Wind can accommodate a lot of people.
never so true on ofw
thats for sure
sounds like a lot of horse s hit to me Norm.
This sounds like the figures I have seen elsewhere for stagecoach travel. Only a very few rich people could do it.
But for now we are getting protests about “over-tourism” in various European cities. Have you ever over-tourismed anybody, Gail?
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/27/travel/why-europe-has-become-an-epicenter-for-anti-tourism-protests-this-summer/index.html
https://fortune.com/europe/2024/07/26/overtourism-inevitable-tourism-protests-european-cities-barcelona-spain-doxeys-irritation-index-butler-life-cycle
This form of travel requires more effort than the flying kind. Instead of one or two highly trained airplane pilots, what a boat needs is many strong, and skilled people who know how to travel in water. This is not an ability evenly distributed among humans. Some populations of humans are great at it, others are really bad at it.
Hi, Gail.
I’ve just discover your blog. It is a good article. I don’t know about science (any kind), but I’ve arrived to the conclussion that the big issue of the Climate Change is like a narrative for the big issue of resources and their distribution. Like Marin Harris said: an “emic” (or cultural aspect) that hide and “etic” (geographical, economicall, politicall, demographic… aspect).
However, I don’t think that necessairly that will take us to collapse or a huge extintion of complexity. Instead, what we will see is a change on the richest areas in the world that is already happening: the centre of the world is Asia (of course, this is extinction of complexity in x societys). I agree that the increase of the complexity to deal with difficulties have risk (especially, if we don’t do it well and efficient), but I also think that this complexity could guarantee succes and be efficient a while.
Also, and this is something that I not always see around, we can see how a lot of young people do not consume material objects or travel. Instead, they sepend a lot of time in the “virtual world”. Of course, depending on the complexity of this “virtual world” we will need a big or small demand on electricity. But, a guy with a car consume more a that a guy using the Play Station.
A very good discover, I will follow you. Sorry for my English, I am not used to use it
The issue that is difficult to see is that electricity, and the system that enables electricity in every home, is amazingly complex. In the US, wires tend to be above ground. There are breaks in transmission after every storm. It takes oil to keep trying to repair these problems.
Also, we use a lot of imported goods from abroad in all aspects of the economy, including electricity transmission. We may not be able to buy the electrical parts we need from China, for example.
So staying at home and gaming may not be an option. Growing your own food may become more important.
If a ‘virtual world’ is to entice anyone, then it needs to be complex.
It will evolve, as our real world, of which it would be a sub-system has, to dissipate as much energy as possible.
There is nö Escape.
Comupters use a lot of energy comparable to what cars use. Maybe if the
“virtual world” was a drug induced coma there could be some reduction in energy useage there….
“But, a guy with a car consume more a that a guy using the Play Station.”
A woman doesn’t need a reason get in a car. They love to travel. A man gets in a car to get food or a woman.
Computers haven’t really reduced the desire of women for novelty through travel or consumption or a man’s desire to eat food or chase skirts. (although we have made it much less socially acceptable for a man to use material goods (a good job) in to woo a woman. That helps but it is offset by the increased consumption of working women.) Computers, if anything have made life much more energy intensive than say in 1978. That’s what’s behind the high cost of living in developed country: It’s high energy requirements for just about everything.
I’ve opted for a shed, some candles and loads of board games. My family think I’m nuts, but they’re the ones I will be charging admission at the door. 🙂
Interesting article regarding the copper production in Chile.
Aging copper mines are turning into money pits despite demand
https://www.mining.com/web/column-aging-copper-mines-are-turning-into-money-pits-despite-demand/
April 17, 2024
The underground portion opened in 2019, pretty much in line with a revised schedule. But because of setbacks, including design adjustments, collapses and glitches with the conveyor belt that transports rock to the surface, the operation won’t reach full production capacity until 2030, at least four years later than planned.
The hiccups caused Chuquicamata’s overall output to dip below 250,000 tons last year, compared with half a million tons in 2010. In an April 15 interview, Codelco Chairman Maximo Pacheco highlighted the complexity involved in what ranks as one of the world’s biggest mining projects. “The rock reacts in a way that we don’t necessarily know exactly how it’s going to be,” he said. “We are in the frontier of knowledge of the technology of underground mining in the world.”
Chuquicamata stands as a cautionary tale. The stumbles there are one reason Chile’s copper production has sunk to the lowest level in two decades. Many of Codelco’s woes, and those of copper mines the world over, boil down to declining ore quality. Globally, the amount of mineral that can be extracted from a given amount of rock has been halved over the past two decades, from about 1% to 0.5%, as existing mines mature. Meanwhile, exploration has yielded fewer big finds in the past decade or so.
Codelco is now paying the price—along with Chile’s government—for prioritizing payments into state coffers while putting off investments in overhauling depleting mines. Back in 2016 the company was projecting its average annual output would rise to 2.1 million tons through 2040. That forecast has been slashed to about 1.6 million tons, according to a recent company presentation. The difference between the two amounts to enough copper to make 6 million Teslas a year.
The link previously posted is from 3 months ago.
There are more recent news, but first of all, we need a historical view of things.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/274265/copper-production-of-codelco/
At this link, we can see the historical production figure. From nearly 1,9 million tons in 2015, the Codelco production has fallen to around 1,42 million in 2023.
Also:
https://www.mining.com/copper-price-chile-codelco-face-another-lost-decade-of-output-growth/
Codelco’s struggles are Chile’s struggles: water scarcity, declining grades, depletion rates, skinny project pipelines, industrial action, taxation increases and regulatory uncertainty and ever-expanding capex budgets.
In 2021 Chile produced a quarter of the world’s primary copper output of 21m tonnes, according to the US Geological Survey. On a proportional basis that makes Chile’s position in the world of copper on par not with Saudi Arabia’s in crude oil, but the combined output of the 13 members of Opec.
In a recent report, BMO Capital Markets says Chile is now heading towards two “lost decades” in terms of copper output growth:
“Following the steady ramp-up in the 1990s and early 2000s, output levels have stagnated, with the projections of 6Mtpa-plus of output never coming to pass.
“And this is not for a lack of investment, with a number of large new mines coming to market over this period. Rather, it is a function of decline at existing assets.”
…”it is a function of decline at existing assets”.
Who would have ever thought, right?
And now, down below, a fresh article from 2 days ago.
World’s Top Copper Supplier Codelco Posts Drop in Production
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-top-copper-supplier-codelco-151225895.html
The company now expects to produce around 1,37 million tons in 2024.
No big growth, just an ever-lasting decline, it seems.
Don’t copper mines automatically refill -like oilfields?
🙂
yup
you treat copper mines like a wishing well
toss your small change down the hole
everybody knows that.
Just pray to Yahweh. He’ll turn 500 million tons of turd in high grade copper ore. We just have to pray hard enough.
Of course, worse ore grade means more energy expended per kg of copper. and that is the #1 problem. the rest is fluff.
The number one problema is a lack of education. These mining companies need to encourage their workers to get STEM degrees so they can produce more copper.
They also need to invest in more soft skill training. Widespread workplace screaming matches and fatal acts of violence have a detrimental effect on productivity. Fostering a culture of love and RESPECT. could lead to a lot of gains in copper. Look, we all love copper. But there’s no need to die over it, at work.
Regrettably I am on my Mac, otherwise you would have gotten a well deserved like.
We have discussed here the complexity about the production and delivery regarding electricity . The stability of the electric grid is a point in question . It has delivered till now is a miracle . Some issues discussed here .
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/on-grid-stability?ss_source=sscampaigns&ss_campaign_id=669f66ea858fb32ce0ed7ffc&ss_email_id=66a3dcbfbd342e087fa131dd&ss_campaign_name=NZW+Samizdat%3A+Renewables+under+the+microscope&ss_campaign_sent_date=2024-07-26T17%3A29%3A04Z
“Earth’s forests lost much of their ability to absorb the carbon dioxide humans pumped into the air last year, according to a new study that is causing concern among climate scientists that a crucial damper on climate change underwent an unprecedented deterioration.”
https://climateandeconomy.com/2024/07/27/27th-july-2024-todays-round-up-of-climate-news/
Luckily the worlds deserts’ are stepping it up!
Also, just buy carbon credits; they are limitless just like US debt.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/07/19/causality-analysis-finds-temperature-changes-have-determined-co2-changes-since-the-phanerozoic/
Its a circus, enjoy the ride, pick your narrative carefully and go all in.
Drill baby drill is a slogan , not a solution . 5 min read ,
https://medium.com/the-environment/drill-baby-drill-is-a-slogan-not-a-solution-cf28b877783b
Interesting preamble but the meat of the article is behind a paywall. can you put here the important parts?
A short cut ,
”The Economics of Oil Refineries
It makes perfect sense. Oil refineries in the United States are designed and operated for efficiency. In layman’s terms, that means refineries are designed to make as much money as possible however they can. To maintain that efficiency and keep up with productivity, they have to be ready to process different types of oil on demand. Different crude oils have different sulfur content and a wide range of other characteristics. The refineries make the pivot processes rather quickly and produce their petroleum products with different types of oil based on a single issue: Money.
Americans love their petroleum products and oil companies love their profits. While it is true that a refinery could operate on only American petroleum, it isn’t cost-effective for them to do it. To put it another way, it just isn’t profitable enough.
Domestic vs. Foreign Crude
So what makes the crude from here in the United States different from foreign crude? Domestic crude usually has lower sulfur content and is considered “light crude.” Light crude is ideal for making gasoline, and Americans love their gasoline. But the American oil industry isn’t immune from capitalism. Not in the least. Domestic supply can be altered by a wide number of factors, including political posturing, lower oil prices for producers, and difficulty obtaining permits. Here’s a fact: When oil prices go down, the producers reduce their output or they can stop altogether until prices come back up where they want them.
If this happens (and it often does), it puts the refineries in a difficult position. So what do they do?
They use foreign oil. You sometimes hear this called “Sour Crude.” This foreign oil or Sour Crude often needs a lot more processing. It also has a much higher sulfur content and isn’t ideal for gasoline production. The truth is that this sour crude is usually dirtier. But here is the thing: There is a lot of it, and it is much cheaper than domestic crude. Much cheaper. This is what actually gives American refineries the flexibility to pivot their operations. They have been designed that way for years, and there isn’t any plan to change.
Why Not Change?
But why not change it? It would make sense that if American domestic oil is cleaner and more desirable, wouldn’t it make sense to just retool and redesign the refineries for only domestic production?
No, not in the least. That would cost a whole lot of money, and oil refiners don’t like parting ways with their money for any reason. It could cost a refinery billions of dollars to make this transition. And how things are in the United States, the ability to produce oil could change rather quickly. It is too big a risk for refiners to take.
The Need for Flexibility
So to sum this thing up, most American refineries are tooled for efficiency and flexibility. While they could operate exclusively on one or the other, it just isn’t likely that this will ever happen. If it sounds complicated, it is.
So nothing that can not be fixed by nationalizing the refineries.
Right now, everything feels so surreal. I question the “stupidity” of the masses. How csn it be so bad? Perhaps nothing is real
People really want to believe what leaders tell them, no matter how ridiculous it is.
JB: Do you see nowadays more concern about civilizational collapse in the power circles, economic and political? Or do they still keep on short term business as usual? If so, to what extent are they relating it with the work you made in LTG?
DM: I am not in power circles so I can’t answer that. I am an 80-year-old retired teacher. It is the 50th anniversary of The Limits to Growth and except for the interviews that are done about a book that still arouses interest there is not as much attention as it might seem. [interviewer’s note: and as it should].
JB: Concerning the current myopic boundaries of concern, spatial and temporal, don’t you think the modern worldview is obsolete? Could you suggest some philosophical insights to transition to a new cosmology?
DM: Thank you for imagining that I might have the capacity to do such things. That the current worldview is obsolete is obvious just by looking at the news. Hardly anyone can be happy with the state of the world.
On a new cosmology: there is a huge diversity of philosophies, spiritual practices, many of them consistent with how the world works. Any that are going to work have to recognise the interaction and dependence we have with the natural world. We have already discussed the widespread myth that technology will lead us to overcome any obstacle. We see it with the climate challenge: there is this thing called Carbon Capture and Sequestration. Despite the irrefutable fact that it is cheaper, quicker and easier to reduce energy consumption, the tendency is to look for the technological solution that will allow us to do what we can no longer do without causing serious damage. It is a total fantasy. The best we can say about CCS is that it is an idea that is going to make a few people a lot of money.
We’re like on a treadmill that’s accelerating rapidly. You know, those treadmills that you run on but you don’t go anywhere. That’s what we’re doing. As we’re making bad decisions, that throws us into crises that by force shorten our time perspective, everything becomes reactive as we accelerate. That in turn helps us make more bad decisions because we narrow our time horizon more and more. It’s a vicious circle.
I think we are going to see more changes in the next 20 years than we have seen in the last 100. I don’t want what I’m about to tell you to happen, but I think it’s most likely: there will be significant disasters due to climate chaos and the depletion of fossil fuels, which will return humanity to more decentralised and disconnected states. Slowly, cultures will evolve that are more prepared for the situation. Only then, I believe, can an appropriate “new cosmology” emerge.
JB: Do you believe a coalition of gifted elites could change course in those circles?
DM: Gifted elites? Sounds like an Oxymoron to me.
Dennis MeadowsFeatured
https://mronline.org/2022/08/10/fifty-years-after-the-limits-to-growth/
Original interview with Juan Bodera.
Copilot did all the work finding it.
Dennis L.
I always try and be accurate. Several times I stated that DM in a personal conversation related the idea the LTG was not predicative after the peaks.
“What we did take great care, as early as 1972, was to make it clear that after the peak of any variable everything becomes even more unpredictable as factors come into play that could not be represented in our model. At this point it is obvious that we are going to be driven more by psychological, social and political factors than by physical constraints.”
https://mronline.org/2022/08/10/fifty-years-after-the-limits-to-growth/
It would seem the psychological, social and political factors are coming into play.
Interesting times.
Dennis L.
it is literally debatable about who should be questioned more…
the cluellesss masses who mostly are just trying to enjoy their lives…
or Fast Doomers, some of whom may be in a self-built Doom Trap where they possibly can’t be happy because IC hasn’t collapsed yet.
surreal feelings may be quite normal responses to the amazing complexity of the eternal Universe and temporary IC.
que sera sera.
it is litterally deebatable about who should be questtioned more…
the cluellesss massses who mostly are just trying to enjoy their lives…
or Fast Dooomers, some of whom may be in a self-built Dooom Trrap where they possibly can’t be happy because IC hasn’t collapsed yet.
surrreal feelings may be quite normal responses to the amazing complexity of the eternal Universe and temporary IC.
It may well be that the older we get (after achieving responsible adulthood), the harder it gets to cope with the amazing complexity of the eternal Universe and keeping track of what’s in the online bank accounts, credit card accounts, stocks, bonds, bitcoins, various IN boxes, fridge, microwave oven, while also remembering the To Do list, Christmas card list, daily prayer schedule (and direction of Mecca in the case of Muslims), and the comments at OFW.
certainly us older ones have less future to be concerned about as IC enters degrowth.
lucky us.
“or Fast Dooomers, some of whom may be in a self-built Dooom Trrap where they possibly can’t be happy because IC hasn’t collapsed yet.”
You just want the best of both worlds Dave – enjoying current plenty, combined with a thrill of anticipation that never ends. :-).
if I understand you correctly, then I agree.
I want plenty of good stuff daily.
and I want to see Fast Dooomers continue to be wrong month after month and year after year.
it’s fun, and along the way I learn new stuff, which is also fun.
though it isn’t all that thrilling to know that IC is always on the very edge of collapse, and yet keeps wobbling along.
David,
Sometimes there are no solutions, that would seem to be the temporary case at present.
The referenced DM article has some interesting comments on power seeking.
Dennis L.
“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.”
― D.H. Lawrence
Yes, we must build anew with what we actually have and within the limits of our abilities. What is most difficult is leaving behind something which previously worked and no longer has a future.
What comes will be different, mankind goes through these periods and always survives. It is challenging for the individual.
Dennis L.
“DAVID BLACKMON: Collapse Of Giant Wind Turbine Blade Product Of Biden Admin Green Agenda
” … It is only appropriate to point out here that none of this controversy and alarm would be taking place in the northeast were it not for massive green subsidies contained in both of the Biden-Harris administration’s main legislative accomplishments: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed in 2021, and the Orwellian-named Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 passed on strict party-line votes in both houses of Congress.”
https://dailycaller.com/2024/07/27/collapse-giant-wind-turbine-blade-product-biden-admin-david-blackmon/
I’ve seen videos of people roping around doing maintenance on blades of land-based wind turbines — what effect would marine winds have on such things, over time?
Maybe “collapse” is a good word for the whole thing, over time.
I think I said before that I am hoping this disaster will put an end to the offshore wind turbines for the US. This is the first offshore wind installation, IIRC.
The article says,
“It all makes one nostalgic for the good old days when Democrats used to at least put up the pretense of caring about the environment and endangered species. Those were some good times, huh?”
Off shore does not seem to be a good use of capital; with decreasing ability to “print” wealth, it will of its own weight collapse literally and figuratively.
Dennis L.
If you think the marine environment is harsh, outer space is even harsher. Imagine building anything that could stay together in that environment.
Please elaborate:
Voyager, Hubble come to mind.
Dennis L.
Space satellites need to be replaced because the environment of outer space beaks down the materials that the satellites are composed of, over itme.
from your authorities on the subject:
“satellites are designed to last up to 15 years, during which time they may be bombarded by charged particles. Most satellites cover sensitive electronics with layers of protective shielding, but over time, radiation can penetrate and degrade a satellite’s components and performance.”
The Voyager traveled away from the sun and faced less intense solar radiation. The Hubble telescope is within the radiation belt but it has been serviced several times, according to NASA. Most of it was due to upgrades, but some of it was a response to wear and tear. There is no mention of radiation damage but that does not mean there wasn’t any.