|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
We are starting to see the beginnings of deglobalization: Countries are increasingly at odds with each other. There is wider disparity among political parties. Trump is making what look to many people like unreasonable demands, both within the US and around the world.
I believe that there is an underlying problem that most people are missing. A worldwide shortage of diesel and jet fuel is forcing international trade to begin moving into a new downward phase, relative to the recent share of GDP shown on Figure 1.
While international trade grew as a percentage of GDP between the 1960s and 2008, it has been basically flat since then. Now the shortages of diesel and jet fuel are forcing the international trade percentage to start falling to a lower level.
In this post, I will try to explain the situation further. One conclusion: Conflict results from the need to reorganize the world economy in a way that uses less long-distance international trade.
[1] Background: The world economy is a dissipative structure, operating under the laws of physics.
The economy behaves differently than most researchers assume because economies are dissipative structures, operating under the laws of physics. Most researchers model tiny parts of economies, and because their views are so narrow, they reach misleading or wrong conclusions.
Most structures that we see, such as books or houses, are, in a sense, dead. Dissipative structures, however, are different in that they can temporarily grow. In order to stay away from being in a dead state, they need to “dissipate” energy of the proper kinds, in adequate amounts. Examples of dissipative structures include plants and animals of all kinds, ecosystems, and hurricanes.
The human body is a dissipative structure that requires food to stay away from a dead state. Hurricanes are dissipative structures that dissipate the heat of a warm body of water.
If an ecosystem doesn’t get enough energy of the right kinds, it will adapt to accommodate the actual mix of fuels and other resources available. If an ecosystem doesn’t get enough sunlight, or enough warm temperatures, or enough water, it will gradually shift toward a different mix of plants and animals that can operate within the mix of resources available. This is similar to what happens within the human body. If a human doesn’t get enough food, their body will shrink or become thinner.
I believe that without adequate diesel and jet fuel, our economy will make a transition analogous to a human going on a diet, or analogous to an ecosystem changing when a different mix of resources is available.
Academic researchers around the world have misunderstood how the process works because they tend to work in ivory towers. They create models based on the narrow view of the economy that their academic area considers appropriate. Once they have developed a narrow model, they cling to it, even though recent insights from physics suggest that a very different model is more appropriate.
[2] Researchers in academic settings make many unwarranted simplifications in their models.
Researchers like to assume that all energy is alike. Substitution is assumed to be relatively easy and quick. Models tend to indicate that if the supply of energy is inadequate, prices will rise. With these higher prices, the economic system will keep problems away practically indefinitely.
The real world doesn’t work this way. When we eat food, we cannot simply substitute kale for all our other food consumption and expect to thrive, even though models would seem to suggest that kale is good for us. Within ecosystems, it is the mix of resources and predators that matters. If the top-level predator is killed off, the system will change. The world economy will face similar changes if today’s international transport system runs into difficulties.
[3] The fuels especially used for international transport today are diesel and jet fuel.
To be useful in international transport, fuels need to
- Be energy dense
- Be easy to store
- Match current infrastructure, unless change is many years away, and system is rebuilt
- Be inexpensive; not require a lot of capital investment in infrastructure to support
Diesel and jet fuel have long been the prime fuels used for international travel and transport. “Bunker fuel,” which tends to be heavier and more polluting, has also been used. Its use is strongly discouraged today because of pollution issues.
[4] An issue we have today is that diesel is also essential for many other uses.
Diesel is an essential fuel today for food production and local transport. Most of the agricultural equipment now in use operates using diesel fuel. Diesel-powered machines can easily navigate muddy fields. In addition, diesel also powers most of the heavy semi-trucks around the world. These trucks deliver goods of all kinds, locally, including food.
Another essential use for diesel is building and maintaining infrastructure. This would include:
- Roads
- Bridges
- Pipelines
- Commercial buildings
- Factories
- Electricity transmission lines
- Building and maintaining structures used to produce electricity, such as nuclear power plants and hydroelectric plants
The importance of diesel to the economy is difficult for most people to see because these are behind-the-scenes types of activities.
[5] It is very difficult to get the price of diesel to rise for any extended period.
If the price of diesel rises, the price of food tends to rise. This happens because diesel is heavily used in food production and transport. Needless to say, high food prices tend to be unpopular with voters. For this reason, even if the diesel supply is low, the price of the fuel doesn’t necessarily rise. If this happened, voters would be very unhappy. They would elect new politicians.
What, in fact, tends to happen is that oil prices (not just diesel and jet fuel prices) tend to bounce up and down. Figure 2 shows a chart of average annual oil prices.
Figure 2 smooths out some of the price irregularities. For example, there was a very high peak in July 2008, but the price fell to a low level by December of the same year. The peak doesn’t appear very high on this chart, but it greatly affected financial markets. See my article, Oil Supply Limits and the Continuing Financial Crisis.
[6] Diesel and jet fuel disproportionately come from oil that is quite “heavy.” Oil refineries tend to offer lower prices for heavy oil, making it unattractive to extract.
There is a price compression problem with heavy oil:
- Heavy oil tends to be difficult to ship because it doesn’t flow through pipelines well. It often needs to be heated, or diluted with a very light oil, to make transportation possible.
- To make matters worse, heavy oil quite often contains sulfur and other impurities that need to be removed, adding refining costs.
- The problem is that these higher costs cannot easily be passed on to the ultimate consumers of diesel and jet fuel. For example, food production and transport depend significantly on diesel, and sometimes even on jet fuel. Consumers of food do not like high food costs.
Because of these issues, the prices refineries are willing to pay for heavy oil tend to be lower than the prices they offer for “light, sweet” oil. For example, the current oil prices shown on OilPrice.com are $70.51 for Brent Crude (a light, sweet European crude), $65.13 for West Texas Intermediate (a sweet US crude) and $50.86 for Western Canadian Select, from Canada’s Oil Sands. Russia also has moderately heavy oil; Russia’s Urals blend is diluted to make it flow adequately. Its price is listed at $54.48.
These pricing issues make the extraction of heavy oil, especially very heavy oil, unattractive to oil companies. Basically, oil prices do not rise high enough, for long enough, to make extraction profitable. People who look at the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of resource extraction would say that the EROEI is very low. In other words, a huge amount of energy needs to be invested to make heavy oil extraction possible. This tends to make the cost of oil extraction expensive.
Because of this price compression, and thus the low prices paid to oil producers, it is not very profitable for oil companies to extract heavy oil. This means that governments cannot charge these companies very high taxes, or they will stop producing oil completely. In addition, tax revenue collected from oil producers tends to fall too low to provide adequate government services., and it also becomes difficult to pay workers adequate wages. These issues lead to unrest in countries with heavy oil reserves, but not much other industry, such as Venezuela.
[7] A naive look at the oil data received from the various agencies does not disclose the nature of the world’s oil problem.
A chart summarizing the consumption of different types of oil, based on data from the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy, is as shown in Figure 3. Note that the Diesel+Jet Fuel layer is the product grouping with the largest consumption. In the US, we hear a lot about Gasoline, but Diesel+Jet Fuel is the layer with the greatest fuel consumption. Diesel+Jet Fuel provides a huge quantity of services, but its usage is mostly hidden from sight.
Most published data show only the sum of the four layers in Figure 3. It seems to be rising. This amount represents a combination of quite a few types of oil. When this increasing production is considered along with the reported high oil reserves (particularly heavy oil in Canada and Venezuela), and the belief that prices will always rise if there is a shortage, most researchers cannot imagine that a problem might be occurring.
Researchers often overlook how crucial oil is to the economy. People all over the world need food, roads, and many other things that depend on oil. The number of people who can make an adequate living seems to depend upon the oil supply. It makes sense to look at oil supply per capita. The chart below uses the same amounts, divided by world population. On this basis, world oil consumption is flatter. In fact, per capita oil supply has been somewhat declining recently.
The other thing that becomes apparent from this chart is that the overall mix of products coming out of current processes (extracting and refining oil) has been getting lighter over time. This should not be surprising because the most rapidly growing oil supply since 2008 has been tight oil, extracted from shale in the United States. This tight oil tends to be quite light, adding output to the Light Group and to Gasoline, far more than to Diesel+Jet Fuel or the Heavy Group.
[8] The pattern of diesel supply growth provides insight into what is going wrong with world trade.
Diesel is about 78% of the combined grouping Diesel+Jet Fuel. The two are similar enough that refineries can slightly change the output mix between the two.
The World Trade Organization began operation in 1995. Its purpose was to encourage more world trade. The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 encouraged countries to cut their own CO2 emissions. The easiest way to do this was by sending manufacturing, mining, and other industries to other countries around the world. Thus, indirectly, the Kyoto Protocol also encouraged world trade. Figure 5 shows that between 1995 and 2008, per-capita world diesel consumption was increasing. The restriction in supply that began around 2008 corresponds with the flattening of world international trade shown in Figure 1.
[9] Several issues contributed to the drop in per-capita diesel supply starting about 2008.
(a) In the period before 2008, there was relatively more oil in the Heavy Group that could be refined into Diesel + Jet Fuel (Figure 4). Notice how the Heavy Group layer gets narrower, especially between 1980 and 2008. The Heavy Group includes end uses such as lubricants, waxes, and asphalt. It also includes some heavy oil consumed in close to an unrefined state, such as bunker fuel for ships. Burning such oil is very polluting, so laws have been changed to discourage its use. Simple refining could transform oil such as bunker oil into diesel and jet fuel.
(b) A technique called hydrocracking can be used to transform long hydrocarbon molecules, such as the ones that make up asphalt, into shorter ones. The EIA in 2013 reported, Hydrocracking is an important source of diesel and jet fuel. This technique is expensive, however. It needs a high selling price of crude oil for the economics to work. If the price of oil is high enough, it makes sense to make less asphalt, and more diesel oil and jet fuel.
(c) Price differentials tend to discourage the development of heavy oil fields. As documented in Section [6], the price refineries are willing to pay for heavy oil tends to be quite a bit lower than the price of lighter oil. In the early days of extraction, medium grades of oil tended to give a range of products, from light to heavy. But peak conventional oil took place about 2005, forcing oil companies to extract both very light grades and very heavy grades, with the hope of combining the two types of output to meet the needs of society. Since 2008, the growth in light oil extraction has been spectacular, particularly in the US, with its tight oil from shale. But growth in the heavy oil supply has tended to lag.
(d) Depletion is an issue for oil supplies. As with many other resources, the oil taken first is the oil that is easiest to extract and the closest to where the end product is to be used. The oil that is left for later tends to be higher cost to extract and transport. High-cost oil is likely to produce high-cost food. High-cost food tends to upset family budgets, making voters unhappy.
(e) Political issues play a role as well. A major issue is the low profitability of heavy oil extraction because of its low sales price to refineries. With low profitability, tax revenue based on oil royalties tends to be low. Without adequate tax revenue, leaders of countries producing heavy oil for export tend to become belligerent. Examples include Venezuela, Russia, and Canada. Within the US, California produces heavy oil.
[10] The world order seems to on the verge of radical change.
We are now facing a situation in which the world economic order seems to be breaking apart, in order to form a new order that “works” better with the changing quantity of Diesel+Jet Fuel available.
We are dealing with a situation that has much in common with a game of musical chairs.
The game of musical chairs is played in rounds. At the beginning, there are as many players as chairs. In each round, one of the chairs is removed. The players walk around the circle of chairs until the music stops. When the music stops, all the players try to grab a chair to sit on. There can be small fights over who gets a chair. The person who does not get a chair is eliminated from the game.
When an economy is faced with an inadequate supply of Diesel+Jet Fuel, it needs to regroup in a different way. To do this, some existing businesses and governments must fail, so that others can take their place. In addition, supply lines need to be rearranged to use the resources that are actually available. Customs and beliefs may need to change, as well.
The way nations interact can change as well. In the years of growing international trade, (1970s to 2008), co-operation seemed to be important. Working together was relatively easy. During the tearing down stage, which seems to be starting now, the situation can be expected to be very different. We can expect assertive leaders, and lots of conflict. We are facing this strained situation today.
[11] What lies ahead?
I don’t think that any of us know for certain what will happen in the future. Nevertheless, the self-organizing world economy seems to be organizing for itself what is ahead. Or perhaps, the hand of a Higher Power is organizing what is happening.
I have only discussed the problem of inadequate Diesel+Jet Fuel, and its impact on international trade and some other parts of the economy. There are other shortages that the world economy needs to work around, that I have not touched on:
In many parts of the world, one shortage is of fresh water. This is often connected with depleted aquifers and today’s high human population.
Another shortage relates to the critical minerals required for a high-tech society. Billionaire Robert Friedland describes the issue in this video. We have plunged headlong into high tech goods of all kinds, including wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, batteries, computers, and electrification of many kinds of things without realizing that we would soon reach limits in the supply of many minerals used in making these high-tech devices.
For many of these minerals, China controls the vast majority of these critical minerals. Countries must try to start producing their own critical minerals, or remain on good enough terms with China to purchase some of the limited supplies available.
A third shortage relates to nuclear, and our plans to ramp up nuclear energy. As far as I can see, uranium extraction is currently constrained. In theory, it can be ramped up, but it takes a long chain of events to do so.
With these shortages, AI seems to be constrained in how quickly its use can be expanded. It needs to become far more energy efficient to be truly useful.
With all of these issues, it seems impossible to keep forging ahead as we have done in the recent past. We are being forced to source more of our manufactured output locally. We need to greatly reduce the transportation of goods across the Atlantic and Pacific. Using tariffs seems to be a way of trying to accomplish this change.
Strange as it may seem, some of Trump’s policies make a certain amount of sense, when viewed in the light of the issues the world is facing. I expect that a replacement leader would be just as abrasive. The new leader would likely have different strange policies, but the underlying problems are structural. The new leader would likely also face difficulties in trying to fix today’s problems.
I am afraid we will have to wait for the self-organizing economic system to find a solution for us. Perhaps innovations can bring us new ways of doing things that will eventually work around these difficulties. But, for the near term, higher levels of conflict because of resource shortages seem likely.
Kevin on the Chinese banks dumping treasuries .
The issue of the low value of US Treasuries issued when interest rates were very low affects banks around the world, including the US. There is little chance the 10-year interest rates will get down below 2% again. In fact, if inflation takes off, US treasury interest rates could rise. Printing money would make the matter worse.
Long-term US Treasuries are not a very good store of value, for this reason. No wonder fewer organizations want to hold them. The situation seemed to be different between 1981 and 2022, when interest rates were falling or very low.
The saga continues . https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/dreadful-10y-auction-sees-biggest-tail-2024-foreign-demand-slides
Others don’t want to buy our debt. Interest rates will tend to rise, rather than fall.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is turning out to be a true heroine on the Epstein horror coverup scandal—which extends to kidnapping, child and sex trafficking, violence, torture, rape, mutilation, murder, and cannibalism, not to mention adrenochrome production.
Here she is talking to the Redacted duo about how the DOJ’s redaction:
“It is being covered up. Pam Bondi works directly for Trump…Everyone’s getting mad at Pam Bondi — you can name anybody you want, but the man at the top is Donald Trump. He’s the president and he’s the one that was completely against releasing the files.”
https://rumble.com/v75jda8-jeffrey-epstein-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-its-one-big-uniparty-w-mtg-r.html?e9s=src_v1_clr%2Csrc_v1_ucp_a
She is tribe, so buyer beware.
Well, lets assign it token probability say 1% – it could be actually as simple as Don hates to be constrained – in his eyes other great world leaders [ ARE RELEASING EXACTLY NOTHING ] with regard that general state security-intel linked realm, be it CHN, RU, NK, ..
Unfortunately, the current Uniparty system does need to stick together. This is why the un-redacted tapes are hidden.
Tim and a few others who like 80s tunes will probably get a giggle..
https://x.com/paratroopbrady/status/2020293977015218401?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2020293977015218401%7Ctwgr%5Ef99c1e8abb4fe49f77b24ee7799b019a16d11f7c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fun-denial.com%2F2025%2F11%2F30%2Fthe-cactus-lens-a-clearer-view%2F
The IEA seems to be toning down its forecast for an oil glut in 2026. They also indicate that (in their calculations, which are different from those of the EIA), world oil production will grow less robustly in 2026 than in 2025.
From the Oil & Gas Journal:
IEA Upgrades Forecast for 2026 Oil Demand Growth
2026 oil demand growth Global oil demand growth is projected to average 930,000 b/d in 2026, up from 850,000 b/d in 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in its January 2026 Oil Market Monthly Report, reflecting a normalization of economic conditions after last year’s tariff disruptions and oil prices trending lower than a year ago.
This contrasts with the agency’s earlier projections of 830,000 b/d for 2025 and 860,000 b/d for 2026. The recovery in petrochemical feedstock demand will be partially offset by a continued slowdown in gasoline demand growth. All of the growth in 2026 will again come from non-OECD countries, IEA said in the report.
Global oil supply fell by 350,000 b/d month-on-month in December to 107.4 million b/d, 1.6 million b/d below the record high reached in September. Production declines in Kazakhstan and some Middle Eastern OPEC producers were partially offset by a strong rebound in Russian output. Global oil supply is now projected to grow by 2.5 million b/d this year to 108.7 million b/a, following a 3 million b/d increase in 2025. Non-OPEC+ countries contributed 1.8 million b/d of the growth in 2025 and 1.3 million b/d of the growth in 2026.
On the Oil Glut from Carlyle:
Of course , there is no glut . I have several times disproved it . The glut is at sea because of stranded oil tankers from VZ , Iran and Russia . If Brent at $ 70 in a glut then shudder when there is no glut .
Today Art Berman posted on the oil glut BS.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/requiem-for-an-oil-glut/
“The exact size of the black-market glut is difficult to ascertain. My educated guess is that the stockpile, spread between onshore tanks and oil tankers at sea turned into floating-storage facilities, is hovering at more than 100 million barrels.
At current prices, even factoring in the discounts that traders offer for sanctioned crude, it’s worth at least $5 billion. Kpler, a commodity-intelligence firm, puts the amount of Russian and Iranian crude in floating storage alone at 58 million barrels. It was 6 million early last year.”
https://x.com/BurggrabenH/status/2019435996614373441/photo/1
“All by design. None of this is organic. It’s all Hidden Hand machinations.” Hat tip to Reante .
https://unsaidunderside.substack.com/p/the-monetary-reset-is-already-underway
Making use of the HH nomenclature which obviously wasn’t mine to begin with, but using it while furthering Foolish Fitz”s and the returnique’s Agenda 2030 controlled opposition narrative that services the Hand’s Disappearing Act 2.0 that brings a critical mass of the Left into the fold in order to finish triangulating the America First unity politics.
Lots about the future in this article:
This is an asset grab. First nations, then yours.
Greenland is loaded with zinc, nickel, graphite, copper, and other rare earth minerals and elements. In terms of global reserves, Greenland ranks near the top, but very little extraction has happened. That’s why they’re going there.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!YAUK!,w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F166438ae-0298-412e-b1fe-97c9c36bd895_766x1000.png
Later:
The US has exported its inflation to the rest of the world through Treasuries, trade agreements, and tariffs. This pressure is intentional. It’s repositioning the global chessboard.
This is what the wars are going to be about: asset grabs. Real, physical assets. Repositioning empires.
Later:
The monetary system is going to be reset within the next two to three years. We will have digital currencies by 2028-2029 in the EU and in the US.
It doesn’t happen all at once. It builds. Pressure builds. Then the switch gets pulled. When it happens, currencies can be debased by 5-10x with 50-90% percent of savings and retirement values disappearing in the flash of a second — the blink of an eye.
Somehow, all of the asset inflation has to disappear. It has to be the workers who get goods and services produced in the future, IMO. Only the leftovers will go to current holders of gold and silver, and other supposed assets.
all national leaders are carried along by circumstances beyond their control, most cope with that, and do their best, then pass the baton to someone else…
sometimes the system throws up good leaders—some totally incompetent….if a nation has sufficient physical resources, they more of less weather it all.
then occasionally, a country throws up someone who is mentally and emotionally unfit for the job….who is unaware of it, but who blames everyone else for that incompetence…
they try to grab other lands to cover up that incompetence, to fool the people who put them in office.
[ Repositioning empires ] is great descriptive concept, thanks.
Fits the (pre)ongoing and likely even soonish escalating situation on the ground..
PS on “hidden hand-ers” aka depths of [ paranoia ], ~two days ago had an incoming call, strange never before, supposedly from the telco/net operator that regular money transfer for monthly payment has not been received-processed yet, so pushed off-line afterwards .. , tech-glitch, warning? .. , did not contact the bank; .. all cleared up suddenly next day, ..
if I was to quickly check upon a person that their net activity – hw address actually matched such real person ID fixed to the same place as per other avail. personal data, I’d use similar tactics..
Below the radar .
” How America’s first bank failure of 2026 was buried as silver broke, markets fell, and war decisions stalled
The first United States bank failure of 2026 occurred without public disorder, market panic, or sustained media attention, reflecting a deliberate administrative approach shaped by post-2008 regulatory practice, an approach described by former Federal Reserve official Daniel Tarullo as resolution through “operational continuity over public disclosure”. Illinois regulators closed Metropolitan Capital Bank and Trust on a Friday, transferring operations through a managed resolution that preserved depositor access and maintained routine loan obligations, consistent with what Columbia University economist Adam Tooze has described as crisis management designed to “remove the theatre of collapse from public view”.
https://globalgeopolitics.co.uk/2026/02/03/the-bank-collapse-that-wasnt-allowed-to-be-seen/
Good find!
The bank failure followed a well-worn post-2008 resolution framework designed to prevent visible collapse while absorbing losses quietly through regulatory channels, reflecting what Harvard Law professor Hal Scott defined as “containment without illumination”. Federal and state authorities avoided press conferences or emergency announcements, limiting public exposure to the event and reducing the likelihood of depositor contagion, a strategy consistent with the crisis communication restraint advocated by former IMF economist Desmond Lachman.
Also:
The Metropolitan Capital collapse therefore functioned as a signal rather than an anomaly, reflecting structural fragilities rather than isolated mismanagement, a distinction emphasised by economic historian Niall Ferguson in his analysis of financial cycles. Regulators acknowledged that such failures carry symbolic weight, even when operational disruption remains limited through administrative control, a view shared by sociologist Wolfgang Streeck regarding legitimacy erosion in late-stage financial systems.
I have long said R/P ratio is killing the oil industry . It is in self liquidation mode .
“Shell’s so-called ‘reserve life’–denoting how long its proven reserves can sustain production at current levels– has dropped to less than 8 years, significantly lower compared with Exxon (NYSE:XOM) and TotalEnergies (NYSE:TTE), each with reserve lives exceeding 12 years. ”
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Shells-Oil-Reserves-Have-Dropped-To-Lowest-Levels-Since-2013.html
No wonder Shell is doing poorly:
Under investor pressure, Shell set a target to become a net-zero emissions energy business by 2050. This, along with legal rulings in the Netherlands, pushed the company to limit investment in new oil exploration. The company shifted its portfolio to focus on lower-carbon energy, such as Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) and renewables, reducing the overall weight of traditional crude oil reserves.
Being a European company, Shell is under pressure to somehow move to something which might be more sustainable that oil and gas. Unfortunately, this doesn’t exist.
I was wondering how BP is doing, since it is another European oil company. I ran across this article from 2021: https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news/coal/032221-bp-drops-reserves-replacement-ratio-as-strategic-performance-target
BP drops reserves replacement ratio as strategic performance target
Recently, however, things have changed (August 2025).
https://www.archyde.com/bp-unearths-landmark-oil-and-gas-reserves-after-25-years/#google_vignette
BP has unveiled its most significant oil and gas find in a quarter-century, sparking renewed debate about the energy giant’s strategic direction. the discovery, details of which were released Monday, is being hailed internally as potentially transformative, with the company considering a new production hub at the site. . .
The news arrives amid a broader shift in BP’s investment strategy. Earlier this year, the company scaled back planned investments in renewable energy, opting to redirect billions of dollars towards oil and gas projects – a move designed to reassure investors following a period of volatility impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine.
The new discovery seems to be in the North Sea, but the article discloses little more about it.
They would have merged a long time ago but for the liabilities of BP from the Deep Water Horizon disaster . Shell is owned by the House Of Orange , Netherlands and BP by the House of Windsor , UK . It would be easy .
Surprise surprise, both British-owned and British-run companies are doing stupid things.
The North Sea find is ~100million barrels, so the industry needs to make such a find every day to to maintain the 36Gb annual requirement.
Also, I would note that this is 2 miles deep and like I’ve said for a while, most of the remaining oil is underwater and it will be interesting to see how much slack deep sea drilling can take up going forward.
Yesterday BP dropped 6pc or something like that.
I see this news:
BP suspends buyback to trim debt, sending shares down 7%,
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/bp-reports-fourth-quarter-2025-profits-line-with-expectations-2026-02-10/
I strongly suspect that the North Sea oil that BP found will be too expensive to extract at the current price level. The previous article I mentioned didn’t give an amount or exact location.
“The EU aims to be climate-neutral by 2050 – an economy with net-zero greenhouse gas emissions. This objective is at the heart of the European Green Deal , and is a legally binding target thanks to the European Climate Law .”
So, that’s not merely investor pressure..
At the moment there are ongoing polit negotiations though to change it for less ambitious (from utterly unrealistic timing / scale) by few decades.
–
In terms of such BP’s new field near their existing-deployed hub in NorthSea when you look at this ~decade old map there are relatively great spatial distances across the system, hence that new field as per that Aug2025 article was never out of the realm of impossibility..
https://www.oilandgas360.com/bp-announces-first-oil-north-sea-project/
This reminds me of how non‑energy systems also require thoughtful organisation and resilience. For example, in workshops, tech environments, and field operations, keeping critical tools and equipment clearly stored and protected is just as vital for maintaining efficiency and reducing waste. A practical solution I’ve seen in many industries is using custom‑cut layered foam inserts often called shadow foam which ensures every item has a secure place and is easy to inventory before travel or deployment. There’s a lot to be said for simple systems that improve clarity and durability in complex operations: https://shadowfoam.com/
Thanks again for the detailed breakdown it really shows how interconnected these challenges are across global supply, infrastructure, and everyday practicality.
I expect part of the problem that children who come from unstable homes is a lack of organization of their lives.
In a home with two parents and a stable job situation, there is a certain amount of order. The parents figure out what “works” for them. There are stable bed times and stable meal time. The parents are interested in school work. They are also concerned that their child does well.
In a home where the mother moves from partner to partner, the situation is likely to have much less organization. If the problem is substance abuse of some kind, this will add to the situation. The child has to sort of fend for him or herself without a good role model.
A major role of religions is to try to provide some organization/ list of what “works,” apart from government enforcement mechanisms. As the world economy goes downhill, and governments become less effective, I would expect religions of various kinds to grow. They may or may not be today’s religions.
ESC writes:
Jeffrey Epstein is primarily remembered as a sexual predator, a man of unexplained wealth, and the operator of a lurid, private island. All of this is true.
“But three million pages of correspondence released by the Department of Justice in 2025 and 2026 reveal what the criminal narrative obscured: what he actually did.
This essay is a fascinating trip into the world of elite financing, manipulating, and networking. Humming the tune of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”—I bet he thought that song was about him. But above all, according to ESC, Epstein was a switchboard operator. He connected people and got them networking and involved in major financial and technological infrastructure projects. He was a facilitator who knew how to make friends and influence people.
This was a man credentialed by David Rockefeller, seated on the board of Rockefeller University, admitted to the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, embedded across three branches of the Rothschild dynasty, in regular correspondence with a former US Treasury Secretary, a former White House Counsel, a former Israeli Prime Minister, a former European Commissioner for Trade, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, and the President of the UN General Assembly — who had designed the impact investing vehicle with JPMorgan’s most senior executives, specified the tokenised digital currency architecture to Summers, pitched sovereign digital currency to Dubai’s ruler, funded the AI and cryptographic research now deployed by central banks, and placed personnel into the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, NHS Digital, and Goldman Sachs.
Whether he killed himself, was killed, or — as some claim — was moved beyond public reach, the network outcome was identical: the routing table became permanently inaccessible. But it didn’t matter.
By 2019, every thread Epstein had been routing was institutionalised……
….The switchboard had completed its function. What remained was the risk: a man who had seen the entire construction from the only position that connected all the nodes, whose lawyers had just raised the possibility of cooperation.
The system does not need a switchboard operator once the wiring is in the walls.
https://escapekey.substack.com/p/epstein
This is a good point:
” Epstein was a switchboard operator. He connected people and got them networking and involved in major financial and technological infrastructure projects. He was a facilitator who knew how to make friends and influence people.”
To a significant extent, OurFiniteWorld.com is also a switchboard operator. Commenters get to find out what others are saying. The list of commenters gradually changes. The site is able to see a broader range of what is happening in the energy and economy world than other approaches.
Did someone write about the Kessler synodrome ?
“The most widely known outcome of widespread satellite collisions is Kessler syndrome. In this scenario, debris from collisions accumulates around Earth, making it nearly impossible to launch spacecraft without them being destroyed. While Kessler syndrome unfolds over decades, the researchers wanted to show how quickly a crisis could begin. To do this, they introduced a new measurement called the Collision Realization and Significant Harm (CRASH) Clock.” This post is about low orbit satellites . Risks of collission .
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260128075341.htm
so the USA has three things: reconnaissance, submarines, and nukes. #1 could be gone in 2.8 days. #2, I am sure, gets much of the military AI work in China.
The title of this article is, “Low-Earth orbit is just 2.8 days from disaster.”
The abstract says:
Low-Earth orbit is more crowded—and fragile—than it looks. Satellites constantly weave past each other, burning fuel and making dozens of evasive maneuvers every year just to stay safe. A major solar storm could disable navigation and communications, turning that careful dance into chaos. According to new calculations, it may take just days—not decades—for a catastrophic chain reaction to begin, potentially choking off humanity’s access to space for generations.
I have attended several Space Solar conferences. A major concern has been debris in low-earth orbit. This has been without a major solar storm.
“Existing models of orbital debris generally fall into two
broad categories: physically realistic models of collisions
with debris and physical-economic models of market forces
related to orbital debris accumulation”
https://thecommonsjournal.org/articles/1275/files/659fdaa0d5f05.pdf
Meaning some of the ~wild extrapolations are based on even ~300% sat spike under that econ driven (perma growth) scenarios etc.
Talking with Maria Zeee, former Wall Street money manager and financial analyst Ed Dowd said plainly that he has never seen risk like this in his entire career, warning the U.S. economy could be mere months from collapse.
He began by claiming that the U.S. economy is being propped up by a “$1.5 trillion fraud.”
According to Dowd, mass illegal immigration under the Biden administration wasn’t just a border issue—it became the backbone of economic survival. “If they kick out the illegals too fast,” he warned, “the economy can’t support that.”
That’s because shadow banks—non-depository financial institutions funded by giants like JPMorgan and Citibank—were channeling money into private equity, margin loans, and speculative bets, many of them fueled by this immigration surge.
Dowd said the now-defunct DOGE initiative collapsed for one simple reason: it exposed too much corruption.
In his view, we’re living inside a dangerous illusion of stability—an economy built on fake growth, hidden debt, and short-term political manipulation.
https://rumble.com/v75cdvw-u.s.-economy-a-lot-worse-in-2026-ft.-ed-dowd-daily-pulse-ep-191.html
Somehow, I would expect to see more cracks in the system now, if 2026 is to go down as badly as Dowd expects. There seem to be a lot of forces holding the system together.
I try to live from day to day as if things are going to hold together somehow—even though I am fairly confident on an intellectual level that they are bound to fall apart within a few more decades at most.
Perhaps the system is a bit like the fairy Tinkerbell in Peter Pan. In the story, she lives only because children believe in her. Certainly the stock market is just like that.
Silver is a wound that is not healing and will not heal. Could we be seeing a 401K haircut soon?
The cracks turned into a grand canyon and we’re inside it rafting the river.
American exceptionalism is one of America’s enduring national myths.
Believing in things that aren’t true about oneself is called self esteem today.
DOGE had to be scrapped to preserve the self esteem of the country.
According to the geopolitical naive goyim BRICS fanboys , these are the ones who were going to put an end to the petrodollar.
Here comes the Petro Yuan , Escobar told me …
https://ibb.co/Z6WjHLDQ
Like I said thousand of times , they are the cabal milking cows …. Always were and nothing will change
Naiveté schmocklivite..
Well, perhaps Vlad doesn’t personally enjoy (-ed) killing that much people, unlike the “trading” boyz of NY and their policy dungeon toads near Potomac river.
There were always off-ramps kept on the menu be it just recently Iran, UKR, Syria, .. But NO!, rivers of blood were constantly demanded instead..
One day this will backfire (as in cumulative snap of natural pendulum),
well it kind of already did in piecemeal fashion..
Cared to check the situation of garbage on the NY streets as of lately (vs other metropolis around the globe), illiteracy rates, drug abuse, ..
Different race-lang in the halftime of SBowel, .. lol..
Indeed Tribal
Shanghai silver vaults are emptying – at this rate in 10 days there will be no physical silver to deliver (Chinese new year’s holidays will probably leave some room for respite)- it seems a similar situation could happen in the COMEX during the month of March. Paper silver might be crushed and state/capital controls might be need to be established in order to control the outflow of silver. I think this is not getting the attention it definitely deserves, silver price might skyrocket and affect the so-called green energy transition very soon.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HAto-4XaEAE9XJH?format=jpg&name=large
https://x.com/oriental_ghost/status/2020764457627189290
Yeah the silver paper market is getting nixed out of necessity. It’s getting the attention it deserves on all the new Hand-run AI channels on yootoob associated with the OG John AG channel. The Hand needs new public outlets for disseminating insider information in order to better control the financial collapse. Part of controlling that is recommending people hold physical silver. Hand encouraging sound financial ‘prepping’ to those that like to hoard money.The Hand is running interference on that semi-transparent encouragement by getting meta on it an cosplaying the whole shadowbanning and copycat drama on that channel. Collapse getting trippy.
I agree that no green energy transition is possible without a lot more physical silver than we seem to have in place. In fact, there seem to be many other minerals in short supply, including copper and rare-earth minerals. Working around all of these physical shortages will be a huge issue.
Charles Hugh Smith has an interesting post out.
https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/re-set-reversing-debt-debasement-death-spiral
CHS’s thesis seems to be that the government and the elite would like to debase the dollar by issuing more and more currency. He believes that that this process can be reversed. In his view, this is the approach:
The only way to reverse the debasement death spiral is to end the economy’s dependence on ever-rising debt to fund consumption and an ever-expanding money supply to inflate the asset bubbles that fuel both soaring wealth inequality and the outsized spending of the top 10%–spending that generates a lopsided illusion of “growth.”
The most effective way to defend the dollar and suppress debt expansion is to influence supply and demand by jacking up Treasury yields / interest rates. Global capital will flow into US Treasury bonds to reap the higher rates while demand for new loans declines as rates rise. The federal government’s borrowing costs will jump, squeezing spending while debt-based consumption falls off a cliff.
This is the recession that’s necessary to clear the dependence on debt, inflation and speculative excesses, the recession that’s been put off for 45 years by excessive money / debt expansion.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve lets the resulting bankruptcies and defaults reduce private-sector debt by refusing to bail out Wall Street and the “too big to fail” banks. Overleveraged banks will fail as the necessary step to re-establish some semblance of market discipline rather than backstop the biggest gamblers (i.e. Moral Hazard). . .
Concurrently, the Federal Reserve tightens liquidity / ceases creating USD out of thin air, reducing the money supply, which induces a scarcity of dollars globally as investors seeking to lock in the higher yields of Treasuries (see above) are in effect bidding for dollars, as Treasury bonds / bills / notes are denominated in US dollars.
The dollar rises due to this shift in supply and demand, and while this punishes exporters, it increases the purchasing power of the dollar for workers and employers alike. Again, any reversal / re-set will generate extreme pain, and the only management strategy with any hope of success is to distribute the pain widely enough, and fairly enough, so that no one class absorbs all the pain.
The long-avoided rebalancing of federal obligations and revenues is finally undertaken, reversing the past 50 years of policies that benefited owners of capital (the top 10%) at the expense of wage earners (the bottom 90%).
He says people think this approach is impossible. He also plugs a new book he has out, which seems to be related to this possible approach.
“This is the recession that’s necessary to clear the dependence on debt, inflation and speculative excesses, the recession that’s been put off for 45 years by excessive money / debt expansion.”
Correct , but then he looses the thread . His suggestions on reversal of the recession are based on financial and monetery manipulation — CHS as inteligent as he is ,seems to be ” energy blind ” . If we go in a recession there will be no going back — no surplus energy to bail us out . 2026 is not post WW2 . Heck , actually we have been in a recession since the GFC of 2008 — there was no recovery — all was debt and then we had covid and then—- debt on steriods .
“He says people think this approach is impossible. ”
I am .
This is definitely a problem. The one thing that helps us is the Maximum Power Theory. Ecological systems maximize their use of available energy. If there are resources that can reasonably can be used, they will be used.
I think you are too pessimistic. If nothing else, there will be a remnant that can remain, using renewable resources (like wood and biomass) available. But there likely will be more energy resources remaining than wood and biomass. Also, we have quite a bit of built infrastructure that can be used or reused. Years ago, people took down stone walls and reused the stones. We can do the equivalent today. Someone may decide to take up the asphalt streets and turn them into diesel.
Gail , you contradict this post of yours . There is no way out . https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/02/02/understanding-deglobalization-the-role-of-diesel-and-jet-fuel/comment-page-2/#comment-500233
I am confused by your link. I am not saying that everyone will survive. But some group of plants and animals will use the resources available. I am assuming humans will be among them. Humans lived long before fossil fuels.
In New England we will grow crops we have long grown corn, beans, squash, with cows (milk and cheese) and pigs along with fishing by those near lakes, rivers, ocean. We will have trees for fire wood for heating and ice houses for food preservation.
can you let me know the name of the local company that makes KEEP OUT signs??—I want to invest in it.
Our deflationist brother CHS been lurking bigly at OFW. That much is obvious. The echoes abound. One thing I don’t appreciate is his Pollyanna framing of the near future as recession. He’s a closet Peak oiler and that puts him in sellout territory. Another closeted person tailoring his speech in order to make money. One thing I do like is that he is, in forecasting the jacking up of interest rates, clearly adding to the deflationary conversation by incorporating the unexpected new Kevin Warsh hawkish dynamic without explicitly saying so. As far as long bonds are concerned, that jacking up would be the last pump and dump operation of the Everything Bubble. Come the dump, CHS is now forecasting national socialist politics.
Never trusted CHS (used to skim through his ramblings years ago at ZH), always smelled a rat about him and his persuasions.
Can’t trust anybody who can’t even participate in their own comment sections. Trust begins with a relationship.
I can not even comment at ZH, no matter how mild. They never allowed one of my comments. Obviously not a place for frank debate.
I will agree that CHSs restart after the recession is very optimistic. The federal government almost has to fail in the process. Major companies may also fail in the process. It may be groups of states, or other combinations, that pick up the pieces after the fall. I expect pensions to be pretty much a casualty of the collapse.
“I will agree that CHSs restart after the recession is very optimistic. ”
Gail ,that is exactly what I said in my post . The critical mass/elemants will vanish .
Article about Epstein’s role in the covid 19 planning phase
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/epsteins-gates-pandemonium
One of the revelations of the latest batch of Epstein files is his strong interest in viruses, vaccines, pandemics, and mRNA. Two months after getting out of jail, he is writing about viruses, infectious diseases, and something he calls “My BIG idea.” . .
In March 2017, two and a half years before Event 201, three years before Covid-19 was officially declared a pandemic by the WHO, an email thread involving Gates and bgC3 (Bill Gates Catalyst 3, now Gates Ventures) speaks of “pandemic simulation.”. . .
A number of emails in the Epstein files speak of pandemic preparedness. One of them, from March 2015, explicitly invites to discuss “how to officially involve the WHO” for the sake of “co-branding” (it looks like the “product” to “co-brand” is a pandemic). . .
It seems Gates and Epstein were much closer than it had been assumed. Gates brings to mind, among other things, pandemic preparedness (as in CEPI, the “Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations,” and Event 201, both of which had the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as key funder).
They were (pre-)modelling various virus dynamics related issues via Harvard:
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/02/02/understanding-deglobalization-the-role-of-diesel-and-jet-fuel/comment-page-1/#comment-499638
You don’t give any references. You write in your shorthand way that is difficult for others to refer to, or to find in a search for what has been said about a topic in the past.
Yes, guilty as charged in terms of info compression.
But references always provided though.
From the link above all hints further googlable:
“.. Nowak, .. and the Harvard’s “Program for Evolutionary Dynamics PED”, which pre-modeled pandemics viruses on previous HIV research etc. The basic outlay is now in the open, all top honchos in govs/biz/media know about it..”
you have to wonder if anyone, previously favoring vaccines and lockdowns, can read this and not change his mind. you do not need much analytic skills.
Right, change his mind from from believing in a pandemic, to believing that it was a Mossad operation. Lol.
Why are people here being hypnotized by the Epstein Files psyop in service of Disappearing Act 2.0? Bargaining much?
The DA is buried two layers deep.
This whole ~Files circus is organically or (as psyop) going to re-format our reality perception indeed, actually as we speak in recent weeks perhaps low %% of normie pop re-adjusted their viewpoints on overall govs. and msm reliability – trustworthiness etc. This will have profound effect into the future under any scenario..
For example, if the general aim, how to utilize this event is to stream-line the over all governing structure. In practical terms reducing the ~mid layers of said govs. structure. In techno feudalism you can get more direct in many / most vectors: food, money, opportunity.. distributed and controlled from the “cloud” center. Therefore, reduced need for msm
obfuscation, gov perennial lackies on payroll and skimming from the system , elections, .. etc. Suddenly, you need only street goons and their robotic aids to format the masses should they rebel beyond the point of previously e-denied / switched off access to livelihood resources.
In case the ~Files were organic – real leak, well you get the atrophied disillusioned society, now more prone to “act strangely” – so likely to propel up in near-mid future also very peculiar characters into the top govs. structure. Hence, revolt, and here it can also fork more towards your idealized direction of left-conservatism. But frankly I doubt such leaning can survive out there much in the global jungle at the end times of waning surplus from the fossil fuels age.
Obviously it was not really Mossad, more like globalists. I am unaare of Gates’ affiliation to Mossad.
Speaking of Mossad, Henry Makow has published a photo that he claims in Jeffrey Epstein on a street in Tel Aviv flanked by two Mossad minders.
I can believe it. But to my eyes it could also be Richard Gere or Jeff Bridges a few years ago.
https://henrymakow.com/epstein-tel-aviv.jpg
Perhaps Epstein is also a bit like Tinkerbell; he only exists if children believe in him. Eric Weinstein theorized several years ago that Epstein could have been a fictional character played by an actor rather than a real person. Stranger things have happened.
It’s definitely an image of an hirsute Epstein. It made the rounds some days ago and the zoomed out image was accused of having numerous signs of AI, but I didn’t study it myself.
The Hand itself is a Tinkerbell and subliminal figments like this photo are its currency. Hand has kicked it into overdrive during this new Age of Gaslighting. My liberal in-laws are newly baptized conspiracy theorists now. They have fervor just like we all had fervor during the plandemic. Weights and measures.
I suppose a person can think:
One of the world’s greatest problems was (and still is) overpopulation. Epstein, Gates, and others actually figured out a way to possibly do something about the problem. They would cull the old and the weak, in somewhat the method that nature does.
In a sense, they were trying to extend the total time that humans could be the dominant species on earth. A vaccine against the virus might do somewhat the same thing: Cull the old and the weak. So, perhaps these people were trying to be helpful.
Yes, meaning that the pandemic was about consumption decrease and mad printing, and the vaccines about population reduction.
The number of vaxx dead isn’t anywhere close to being big enough to constitute a depop program. It was calibrated on animal testing and probly prison testing too, to be just bad enough to force the clown show that needed forcing. An actual depop program would have decreased consumption beyond what made printing could paint over, defeating the whole purpose. You can’t carry out a depop agenda while staving off collapse. MPP doesn’t allow for that.
reante> that’s the crucial debate not undertaken here often. I re-summarized my position in the post around this thread already.
But directly to your great point about
carrying out depop agenda while staving off collapse (vs MPP), allow for few bullet points to ponder just for now..
– depop agenda in hi-tech age means most likely DESIRE for tweak-able / parametrized / scaled to timeline etc.
– tech biz-lionair$ alluding for ( some form ) of depop as needed cure for decades already
– said tech bros like their kiddy projects to continue and advance: moon / space travel & colonies, EVs , .. , HENCE somewhat functioning society needed for all that ( NOT risking hard collapse sequence )!
– vaxy program clearly aimed at trimming elderly and unhealthy ( i.e. both gov-fiscal and sheer numbers aim )
..
yes, some of the goals and path taken to accomplish are contradictory but look at these protagonists, many of them ~incel / lite psycho type of material
Hey, nothing in science comes out right the first time. I agree that they needed 170M, not the 17 they got. But now they got themselves hard data. It will be closer to target next time.
Yes the vaxx deaths created some beneficial secondary results to forcing the clown show but any rationales that you offer to me revolving around monstrous technoligarchic machinations are just controlled opposition talking points to me. I think I’ve made that clear already but you’re free to persist in beating a dead horse with me if that’s what floats your boat. If OTOH, you want to preface what I perceive as your controlled opposition analysis with phrases like, ” I know you don’t agree with this…,” then that would be the more circumspect approach to replying to me on such matters.
The number of vaxx dead isn’t anywhere close to being big enough to constitute a depop program.
Not yet anyway. But please, let’s give them a bit more time to complete their useful work.
Geert Van Den Bossche has admitted his previous predictions of doom have not panned out as expected, but he’s confident that an immune escape pandemic of the vaccinated is in the works.
How about this, from two days ago:
Lay summary on recent Substack article: “Everyone knows a pus-filled abscess will eventually burst. However, nothing is more difficult than predicting exactly when it will burst…”
https://voiceforscienceandsolidarity.substack.com/p/lay-summary-on-recent-substack-article-311?r=y46t6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
Since viruses don’t exist, Geert is mistaking the vaxx tumor exosomes’ suppression of IGG3 for the ‘immune escape’ narrative he’s fixated on. It shouldn’t surprise that the vaxxes have increased tumor exosomal diversity (that he mistakes for ‘spike’ diversity) because increased tumor micro environments means more room for tumor evolution to run, meaning more diversity of tumor exosomes. Everything is active cultures. The vaxx is a cultural technology, right Norm?
The number dead could be part of a botched depopulation program, however.
Sure seems to me they’re trying to prevent a chaotic collapse rather than cause one.
Besides, I just don’t see how they could botch that attempt so badly with adequate trials beforehand. That’s a straightforward process. Physics minus a margin of error that they could always make up for with dosage. I highly doubt it’s even possible to reliably kill people slowly enough with injections in order to get your target number injected before the lemmings caught on and the antivaxxers picked up their guns and headed for the vaccination sites.
Since viruses don’t exist, Geert is mistaking the vaxx tumor exosomes’ suppression of IGG3 for the ‘immune escape’ narrative he’s fixated on.
You know, Reante, I thought you’d say that. 🙂
And my answer would be, whatever!
Whether they exist or they don’t, I am never going to know definitively one way or the other, so I am not going to argue about it. It’s one of the many great questions that I have resigned myself to remaining ignorant about.
But if they don’t exist, and the world comes to a consensus on that, then Geert is going to be out of a job, and all that technical knowledge is going to be of no more value to the world than Isaac Newton’s considerable studies of theology and alchemy have turned out to be.
I have thought about the issue of viruses not actually existing for some years now, and as usual, I can’t get past my own personal experience. In particular, viral transmission provides a perfect explanation of how I came down with norovirus in 2014 (along with wife, dog and a friend), influenza in 2018 (along with wife), and some version of COVID-19 in 2024 (also along with wife).
No-virus theories such as I’ve read or heard from the Baileys, Mike Yeadon, Jamie Andrews, et.al. provide plausible alternative explanations, but I don’t find them convincing. But at the same time, it doesn’t matter very much to me, as when I’m ill or in pain, I try to treat my symptoms. To me, this is far more important than describing what’s going on in my body.
Also, when we are trying to figure out what’s going on at the cellular, molecular or nano-levels, we are dealing with models, not purely with observations. We can’t see very clearly or touch things at that scale.
But the agony of a severe sore throat, the body heat and lack of muscular energy of a high fever, the involuntary vomiting and diarrhea while lying on the floor outside the loo that occurs with a noro attack—which is totally incapacitating but not at all painful, by the way—these things are very real when you are experiencing them. There is no need to watch a cartoon showing germs or the interior of the body in order to grasp what’s going on. If you told me that I was sick because somebody had turned their evil eye on them, I wouldn’t argue, as long as you could show me the way to cure the sickness.
And actually, I’ve always cured myself by letting my body rest, keeping well hydrated, and allowing nature to take its course. Even that time when I was stung eight times in my left arm after upsetting a nest of hornets with my bush cutter, and the arm blew up to the size of a leg, I didn’t visit a doctor—although that may have been a mistake. I steer clear of them as much as I can these days because I fear another sting could result in a nasty attack of anaphylaxis.
Seriously, I don’t think there was an intention to decimate the population (one in ten cut) or to slash it down to Georgia Guidestones numbers by using the COVID injections.
However, I do think there was an intention to injure and kill large numbers of people. I don’t think there is any serious argument that the COVID-related medical interventions—beginning with mandating masks, intubating sick people on hyperbaric oxygen through ventilators, administering remdesivir and midazolam, and withholding antibiotics—were aimed at killing large numbers of people. These things were not done in ignorance by the people at the top. It was democide. It was mass murder.
So I think there was an intention to kill large numbers of people who were what some of the “useless eaters”—such as people who were sick already, and the elderly. I can’t prove it, but I suspect it.
As is well known, with any poison or any pharmaceutical, there will be a range of reactions when it is administered to a large population of individuals.
Statistically, these reactions will follow a bell curve. In the case of injections such as the COVID shots, a few people will have zero reaction, some will have a mild reaction, even more will have a moderate reaction—sore arm and have to take a day off work, some will have a serious reaction—leading to long-term or permanent disability, and a few will keel over like that Norwegian Blue parrot in the famous Monty Python sketch.
If the COVID injections had been made more poisonous, more would have died. If thy had been laced with potassium cyanide, every recipient would have died. But actually, they were mostly fairly harmless, although some batches were a lot nastier than others.
The point is, even fairly harmless stuff injected into a large number of people is going to kill some of them—especially if several injections containing the same foreign proteins are administered weeks or months apart. The people planning the pandemic would have known this. All those deaths and injuries were not a bug, they were a feature of the plan. Although the main features of the plan might have been to test how compliant they could make the population, or how much public funding they could grab to execute the program.
My work is never done Tim.
If viruses, on the structural level, are being mistaken for signaling exosomes — and in combination with the fact that allopathic culture sees the healing/detoxification process as the disease — then believing in coordinated healings is qualitatively no different whatsoever than believing in ‘contagion,’ right?
Problem solved.
The Baileys and the rest of Team No Virus aren’t convincing because they are politicized, neo-luddite lightweights. It’s as simple as that.
So, then, bacteriophages do not exist either?
x-soviet, bacteriophages are not ‘viruses.’ they are just prokaryotic disease signaling exosomes structurally/evolutionarily incompatible with our eukaryotic cells and our eukaryotic exosomal signaling system which is why virology regards them as harmless to us directly though it regards them as correlated with foodborne illnesses because spoiled food will be covered in bacterial population dieoffs under certain circumstances like when aerobic bacterial populations explode on food and then the food gets stored in plastic wrap and the ecology goes anaerobic and the bacteria get sick and die due to suffocation and as they are suffocating they produce a shitload of signaling exosomes related to hypoxic shock in order to try and manage that disease across the bacterial culture. Virology runs PCRs, finds shitloads of ‘bacteriophages,’ and correlates them with, say, botulism, but knows that the phages don’t cause the botulism because genomics has established the structural differences between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
The images they create of bacteriophages looking like lunar landers are a fucking joke.
Let’s see the patterns.
Good video!
So, monsters aren’t allowed to take the fifth.
And monsters aren’t allowed to ask for clemency.
Moreover, Congresswoman Crocket wants to investigate everybody whose name appears in the Epstein emails.
Political pundits are going to need an awful lot of popcorn.
Seems that Crocket and MTG are now on the same team. Who’d of thought that?
They didn’t get Nixon for the crime. They got him for the coverup. Will they get Trump the same way?
The images they create of bacteriophages looking like lunar landers….
Yes, they do, don’t they!? I’ve noticed that too.
Here, I hope you’re not suggesting bacteriophages never went to the moon? 🙂
You may be correct, or mostly correct, about signaling exosomes being mistaken for viruses. You seem to have thought this out and studied up on it and developed a clear picture of what is really going on.
Whereas Geert has spent a career in vaccinology, which obviously deals with viral diseases that have to be vaccinated against, and has also developed a clear picture of what’s going on.
Your two clear pictures are at odds, and so, logically, one of you must be mistaken.
My problem is I don’t have enough basic knowledge of be able to back one picture or the other.
Basically, I’m comfortable with physics, which is why I have an intuitive grasp of how the Milankovich cycles might work, why adding a bit more CO2 to the air would be very unlikely to cause runaway global warming, why the Twin Towers had to have been brought down by controlled demolition, why the Apollo missions were feasible but would have been extremely difficult to pull off (leading to doubts about whether they really happened as described), etc, even though I can’t be certain of any of these things.
With viruses/signaling exosomes, though, physics is of no help. We are dealing with two conflicting models of what’s going on biologically, biochemically, and/or physiologically at a very small scale—too small to see clearly. Either model could be correct, but not both. And I have no way to judge between them.
You and Geert can both see farther than me because you have stood on the shoulders of giants—meaning you have done a lot of study in the field. Unfortunately, when I read your explanations, I come away as confused as before.
Geert has started to produce lay summaries of his Substack articles for a non-technical audience. But when I read these, I still can’t wrap my head around them. It’s mostly because of my lack of familiarity with the entire field of virology and vaccinology. But I am pretty sure that 90% of the lay population knows less about these things than I do.
That last “Good vide” comment seems to have landed in the wrong place. Apologies!
Here’s a heated conversation between Geert Vanden Bosche and Tau Braun, who are both firmly convinced that viruses exist, but are divided on whether a virus caused COVID-19. Geert seems exasperated to say the least.
https://x.com/MeganSuspended/status/2020723594100433179
As used the term – concept – in previous rounds on the topic, it was likely [ attempted ] plan and action to that desired goal.
Because so far, the depop targets have not been materialized at scale, perhaps only in the long term view there will be some ~largish effect. But one could summarize, they likely aimed for way higher impact.
Also, there could be an outlier (over complex) edgy scenario where various seemingly unrelated effect have to join into synergistic outcome with a notable-plausible denial delay. For example, vax thing coming ~2020 + another vector mixed in ~2030 => only then producing the cataclysm. But that’s most likely over analyzing it, the bottom line remains, he who is unable to even produce stable and non resource hog computer op. system for decades, most likely can’t produce and deliver such advanced scheme to begin with.
“Disappearance” indeed… First of all, BG is not a Biologist/Immunologist of any kind or an MD w/PhD. Throwing all these talking heads, string-puppets, marionettes into the grinder will very probably satisfy the blood-thirst of low IQ populace (as in “somebody was held responcible” etc). Bigger question would be: what’s next and how soon?
Sorry, did not get what you meant in the intro? BillyBoy_ dropping STD antibiotics into his significant other’s favorite organic drink is not even ridiculous, her smiles post divorce and settlement are genuine relieve..
However, there was an alliance of scientists and financiers firstly musing ~decade before and then likely performing on that very depop plan.
In terms of the [ next ] – well firstly they were set back by the [ un success ] so far, then preoccupied by the AI mania and software stocks volatility..
So, I’m not sure much has been accomplished during recent years.
Although I could be totally wrong and something newly cobbled hits us in 2-3yrs..
I’d speculate it could be again very different vector / sector next time. Perhaps linked to market crash , energy shocks etc. Hence likely some kind of policy in terms of energy consumption restraining.. mandates.. Although by definition this tends to be ideally postponed for as long as possible (phase), because people go crazy. And US is not a diesel country for passenger fleet, so that should be a decade away or more..
BillyBoy_ dropping STD antibiotics into his significant other’s favorite organic drink is not even ridiculous, her smiles post divorce and settlement are genuine relieve..
If a guy was going to do that, why would he tell Epstein about it? Doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t add up. It isn’t anything he’d want to boast about.
And as the richest dude ever, and with medical connections all over, he could have easily gotten any number of antibiotics some other way than by asking Epstein to procure them.
Not that I am in any way a defender of Bill Gates.
The Epstein Files just might be the greatest work of fiction since Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu or Joyce’s Ulysses. We can’t just believe everything we read, especially when it’s released by the government.
Agree Tim. Epstein files are plandemic 2.0 by other means. Of Monsters and Men.
Monster. Monster. Monster. Monster is the new Safe and Effective. Say it enough times and it must be true.
When the Theater peaks, you gotta break out the homegirl on PBS. You know she just got done listening to all six hours of the Sascha Riley audio. You go girl!
“Secondary Immune Response” (mixed in ~2030) it’s called. Waiting in wings for a real depop event 💀
Tim I agree, absolutely there was an intention to maim and kill large numbers of people. All three of my immediate family were maimed by them. It was genius because it had to be enough people for it to be obvious to the political opposition, but it also had to be plausibly deniable on the structural biological level by distributing the cause of death and maiming right across the breadth of the human body in order to take advantage of the fact that allopathic culture doesn’t have a systems theory of disease. So they picked classified tumor exosomes, which, frankly is the only mrna I can think of that they could weaponize, in order to dramatically upregulate fibroblast production which happens everywhere in the body, and potentially causing fibrotic disease of varying degrees, which can happen anywhere in the body, while also adding in an upregulated layer of tumor formation dynamics.
Thanks! You’ve outlined a very plausible way that the injections could have been used to induce fibrotic disease and cancer—which are among the observed outcomes of the COVID-19 “vaccine” rollout.
I know you’ve explained this before, but it didn’t sink into my mind as deeply as it could have, possibly because I’ve been bombarded with all sorts of other theories (Guess I should blame Cass Sunstein’s cognitive infiltration strategy) and I don’t have enough data or enough self confidence to eliminate the whacky ones.
Note to self: “Do a deep dive on classified tumor exosomes and become familiar with what they are and what they do.”
My younger brother was also badly “burned” following his jabs, developing both oesophageal and stomach cancer. But amazingly, he was saved by the NHS and is now in remission and is heavily into strengthening his microbiome by making and taking a number of different yoghurts. Limosilactobacillus reuteri is his favorite at the moment.
Pleasure. ‘Viruses’ evolutionarily are prebiological genetic cells. And by cells here I simply mean enclosed in a lipid membrane for preservation. They are what formed around the ocean vents according to RNA World Theory such that these cells could then start evolving with each other in complexity by the form known as horizontal gene transfer. Eventually through emergence they evolved into prokaryotic biological cells, and given the nested nature of universal evolution, these prokaryotes retained a nested ability to co-evolve with each other via horizontal gene transfer using the same probiotic ‘cell’ genetic function we now know as signaling exosomes. These exosomes have no metabolism so they can’t do anything other than intelligently interact with free nucleic acids when in the presence of the polymerase catalyst which is found in ribosomes. Back before the prokaryotes evolved there was no polymerase and there are a few known ways that RNAs could polymerize geochemically. These exosomes have no Will and no reproductive drive. They are a nested prebiotic function within our biological cells that is a bridge to our abiotic evolutionary heritage. This bridge is necessary because horizontal gene transfer continues to dominate biological evolution and, by extension, because reality is seamless. It’s a continuum. We couldn’t just reinvent the evolutionary wheel on the fly. That wheel isn’t ours.
Tim there are three main theories as to the origins of ‘viruses.’ The dominant and obviously correct one is the prebiological one of RNA World Theory that I described. Another is one that treats them as signaling exosomes in saying that they come from cells, which puts the cart before the horse. The third one is retarded and says that they are devolved, simple, remnant non-living cells that used to be more complex parasitic biological cells that lived inside prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells.
the myth is—that humans are the dominant species on earth.
we are not, and never have been…
we exist and thrive for the benefit of microbial life that lives on us and in us…it is they who keep us alive…
Oh Norman, meant as in apex predator – ecology context clearly.
Yes, terra-forming the planet could take various methods, slow microbial forcing you talk about, or expedient ape-like psycho burnfest mega yrs of stored carbon within the short span of few hundred years..
those micro bugs force you to consume energy so that they can continue to live in comfort inside you
Yes, I agree with the concept of micro-fauna converging-transforming energy inside my body. As you likely know some form of [ lite fasting ] 24/365 is necessary for ~healthy living. So, I hear-feel “these bugs” daily complaining to me about ” more, MORE ! ” ..
Nevermind the meritocratic natural hierarchy otherwise known as evolution huh Norm?
evolution has nothing to do with it.
Jr , I do 24 hr water fast every two weeks . Just wonderful . Recommeded to all .
interesting ravi
how would you say it improves things
Nice ravi! 12-15hr intermittent fasting is where I’m at now my metabolism isn’t what it used to be.
Reante , been on a two meal a day diet for over 15 years ( same as yours ) . Highly recommended . All my associates are constantly munching and I can only grind my teeth and pull my hair .😭. Then I have a silent laugh wondering what they will do when the shelves go empty .😄
ravi—i am interested in your fasting regime—-but like the rest of us, when the shelves go empty you wont get picky about fasting or diet
Norm , difficult to explain because it is a lifestyle issue . It is part of the total dietry habit . Example , I last drank a cola in 2011, pizza 2009 . Somethings never enter my door — deli meats , sodas , salted snacks and desserts . It would be something akin to explaining sex .
P.S : A speaker was invited to the podium to give a lecture about sex .
He said ” Ladies and gentleman — it gives me great pleasure — and went back to his seat .🤣
Norm , I do my 24 hr water fast on Monday . Understand that a 2 meals a day is already a part of my lifestyle . After having my meal on Sunday ( 4-6 pm ) I have nothing . The next day I have only coffee , iced green tea and water . My fast is broken by a meal between 4-6 pm and always a 3 egg white + 1 egg omelette . I have been doing this over several years . Not difficult .
am interested because i freely admit to eating too much crap food, but i do try to burn it off
ravi> I assume you know it well, but pizzas could be home-made as well or ~compromise(d) a bit from the store-bought dough, that can be had in varying quality. The “benefit” with ongoing [ shrinkflation ] is that the end product finished pizza is smaller than the factory-frozen garbage and or the lesser Q from street shop. Also in the home variant – ingredients the better the costlier, hence fewer lol. Lets say twice per month limit is OK-ish.
It will be a very sad day when even this little joy disappears for ever ( among mane others )..
Ravi, I’m wondering, what do you do with all those yolks after you make the omelettes?
I hope you aren’t throwing them away, because they are the best bit of the egg.
🙏🙏
What the Holy Bible says of this horrific decade just ahead of us.. Here’s a site expounding current global events in the light of bible prophecy.. To understand more, pls visit 👇 https://bibleprophecyinaction.blogspot.com/
well—–at least you voted the antichrist in as potus
btw—i’ve lived 90 decades—to my certain knowledge every one has been horrific somehow or other.
“btw—i’ve lived 90 decades”
Really, NP, I’m shocked! 900 years old, indeed! You’re telling worse fibs than Peter Mandelson now. 😉
OFW’s methuselah. The Big Sample. The Norm.
Meth-User-LOL.
If the original Genesis story measured human lives in months that were later mistranslated into years, Methuselah would have lived for 969 months.
969 lunar months is about 78 years, which is a decade less than Norman has managed so far. Norman has seen so many moons that he would be well over a millennium old by Biblical reckoning.
positively biblical
if i was religious, i would definitely believe that i existed
Most people talk about the bible but I have always thought that with so many books left out that you can only talk about a Bible. I suppose the bible makes it sound much more important than it really is.
Not all IQs are created equal.
Some IQs are more equal than others.
The world is about to regress to the mean in a very hard way, like the clips of old Asia I have posted here time to time.
It seems Asian high IQs, high enough to crowd out other peoples in universities but completely useless about advancing anything, is the reason humanity stagnates.
i have not talked about chucky too much recently, but the people Wellington called the “Scum of the Earth” proved to be completely unable to stop the Asians gaming the system. Without chucky these people would have ended up dead, one way or another, or kicked back to Asia.
I don’t pay too much attention to the muzzies since they don’t game the system as much as the Asians from China, India and their neighbors.
We don’t know precisely what is ahead. IQ has been helpful recently, but other characteristics might be helpful going forward. Resistance to a particular disease, for example. Or resistance to some other problem, like high radiation.
Another thought,
“The world is about to regress to the mean in a very hard way.”
Not necessarily. There is a trend toward ever more complexity, according to astrophysicist Eric Chaisson in Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature
If this is the case, survival of the best adapted may go to those with the highest IQ. Or, within each geographical area, those with the highest IQ’s may dominate.
There seem to be a lot of different skill sets, however. IQ measures only some of them. Persistence is important. Being able to get along with other people. Willingness for risky behavior seems to be another.
The Five Body Polylemma
It is improbable, though tantalizing, to rationalize a discernment of cause, factor and consequence of Intelligent Systems while subjectively ranking/prioritizing indiscrete natures of microbiome, cognition, God gene, intraspecies empathy and in silica modelling in a finite world.
When I consider that for kulmthestatusquo, progress is a religious belief, I feel like I can understand his comments.
For Easterners, progress doesn’t seem to be an issue that relates to the very root of self-understanding. It seems to be a means or methodology for making society and life more enjoyable and wonderful.
To the west of the Eurasian continent is Europe, and to the east is China. China is a one-party dictatorship, but it is still one country. My impression is that Europe has tried to unify several times but has failed. Progress seems to create and exacerbate inequality, and is likely to become a source of conflict. I think this may be where the difference in values between the West and the East lies.
The West and the East probably use their abilities in different ways.
That is because of United Kingdom, which screwed up any chance Europr could unify
We do not need Poland, Czechia, etc. Bullshit countries.
Japan was not strong enough to mess up Chibese unification
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2168121/driverless-car-makes-emergency-stop
Driverless car makes emergency stop after mistaking bus advert for real people
We all make mistakes.
Driving from AUstin to Dallas on the interstate a HUGE jamup was caused by a driverless car just stopping in the road. Unfortunately it was in a construction area with only 2 lanes.
From RT:
This is how the energy economy actually works – and why the EU can’t grasp it
Obsessed with tinkering with policy to lower prices, Europe doesn’t consider the system-level costs of transitioning to more expensive energy
Excerpts:
What Europe suffers from most of all is a profound, civilization-level energy illiteracy, which we will set out to explore.
A slow-motion self-sabotage
Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico recently called the EU’s plan to completely phase out imports of Russian gas by next November “energy suicide.” It’s remarkable that Europe has learned nothing from the past four years and is charging full steam ahead down the same path. It’s also particularly fitting that this suicide is so eagerly undertaken under the misguided notion of countering an external adversary. The historian Arnold Toynbee said that with few exceptions civilizations are not killed but commit suicide.
But no civilization chooses the road to perdition on purpose, and Europe remains to this day mostly content with its rejection of Russian gas, while continuing to place its hopes in the green energy transition even as it unravels before our eyes.
It should come as no surprise that the period of peak optimism in the energy transition – culminating in the Green New Deal (2019) – coincided perfectly with the peak of Russian gas supplies to Europe (2018-19). The ability of Germany, for example, to heavily subsidize its renewables industry over the past two decades was predicated on the energy surplus derived from availing itself of cheap Russian gas. In other words, the prosperity required to dabble in renewables was squarely a function of powering industry with cheap energy.
It takes energy to obtain energy, money is just along for the ride
If price signals are incomplete or distorted, and monetary costs are distributed throughout the system and can be manipulated or obscured, then not only do we have no idea what the true cost of energy is, we lack a way to conceptualize it at all. Even if we could arrive at a dollar figure, what would that number actually mean?
The alternative is to conceive of energy not in monetary terms but in energy terms. This sounds reasonable enough, but it already represents a significant paradigm shift. It moves the discussion out of the realm of paper claims – money and debt, which can be shuffled endlessly and conjured out of nothing – and into the realm of the physical.
We all understand that it takes energy to obtain energy. Drilling an oil well, extracting the oil, transporting it, refining it, and storing it are all energy-intensive processes. Energy is expended to obtain energy.
A process that uses one joule of energy to obtain one joule of energy produces no economic surplus. But the energy consumed in that process is not always easy to trace. It may be pulled from the future through debt, or distributed through a complex system of cost-bearing. What matters is that no amount of financial engineering can change the underlying energy balance. Either surplus energy is produced, or it is not.
https://www.rt.com/business/632095-eus-war-on-physical-reality/
There is also that French – German dynamics ongoing..
Which helped to shape the renewables mania in DE to some extent as well.
Basically, the French pride themselves as the quasi global (minor) super power – thanks to legacy successes: the bomb, highest NPP deployment per capita in EU, bullet trains, space program – launch capability, first “internet” in the world (BBS over tv-telephone in the 1980s) etc.
The Germans were looking for some alt. route for themselves, the green-lobby offered such escapism as keeping the heavy industry (e.g. gears / generators / towers for wind) while supposedly going alt. energies. And it was all kept afloat also thanks to “hard source” based grid in connected countries like FR.
French space program? I do not think so.
? Could you be more specific ?
They have been launching their own mil / comm. / weather / .. sats (or as commercial space cargo for others) via own rockets from ~own (enclave French Guiana ) for decades !
Trying to pull energy from the future via debt or shares of stock or unfunded pension promises hides the problem from citizens. Not only do they need energy to replace the energy used in the project, but they also need the energy to support the interest payments, stock buybacks, dividends, and pension payments promised in the future. A lot of these payments go to the already rich, leading to wealth disparity.
There are still three million Epstein documents. Presumably the most damning documents. When do we get the photos and videos?
As courtesy to Gail, it is perhaps better to leave such topics to previous (click) page comment, there is an entire long thread on it. But since we are now done with most of the stuff anyway..
They are releasing batches incl. pics and videos already. The pics are on various media, even analog, although most are digital, and sometimes only zoomed out pictures of CDs medium are shown – NOT the actual files. Videos are also often being presented but heavily censored, faces, body parts AI / video edit black boxed. If you are looking for some bln. peep show – lets be serious – this release stuff has been pre-vetted, the original fundus is not for the public consumption. Basically, we tightened the knots from the ~low key additional info and ~lesser players involved ( ala the current UK scandal ). Perhaps well most likely the board reviewing the material just set aside, excluded few top security names and did not bother with the general clues. Hence it could be as simple as they are just stupid and names like Attali or that Roth. HQ in Paris was deemed of no concern, or ~2-3rd degree down from the utmost global big wigs level anyway. Also, the real potentates gravy was most likely not stored in his residences anyway.
The only remarkable ~new thing (well reported already @23-25) appeared on some recent YT summary: that Jeffrey even taken part in the old [ Iran contra ] affair, in some post factum level capacity dealing with the used hw or something in the latter / aftermath stages..
A couple weeks into the BNS. Meaning a few weeks from now. Even though as davidina is my witness the BNS was supposed to start by December 7th. The problem is time dilation. Little fast moving human, titanically slow turning civilization.
BNS?
That acronym has so many meanings, and none of the ones I could find have any relevance to your comment.
Big Nuclear Scare sorry
Three weeks til we see Diaper Don on video getting literally pegged with a tent peg. Hard. And then life flighted. Lol.
Big Nasty Surprise
Thank you!
Barage of Nasty Stares?
Big Nuclear Scare?!
It’s a complete mess.
Tug of war between factions could explain some of the “knowns” as strangely presented factoids dropping to us officially up to this point in time:
– His cell full of many torn blankets / prison jumpsuits
(impossible in any real prison in the world)
– Security cameras NOT working in hours of his death
(impossible / convenient )
– Date mismatch on jail protocols
– Morticians / Forensic doubts: suggesting forcibly strangled body injuries, i.e. NOT suicide case
– His latest gf signed papers to $50-100M few days before death
– His former gf ( abuser accomplice ) – moved to posh low security prison in the UK
(many more)
..
.
In summary, my score board ( probability ) update so far:
> 89.4% dead – murdered by (let in) sneaked prison in-mate / (pro?)
> 10% switcheroo and alive fugitive ME/Asia/..
> .5% switcheroo and alive in witness protection program ran by some of the ~gov factions
Oops meant Gmax moved to min-sec. in TX.
filed into ” .. tug of war.. ” binder ?
“YT: Maxwell Offers to Clear Trump in Epstein Probe If Granted Clemency | APT ”
hah..
I recall you mentioned BNS previously,
is it generally related to this list or is it even a bigger (solo) event – more profound shift ?
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2026/02/02/understanding-deglobalization-the-role-of-diesel-and-jet-fuel/comment-page-2/#comment-499942
Prof. Michael Hudson updates his @25 pitch,
“The aim of this chaos is to create an entirely new world order whose rules are the reverse of the economic order that America created in 1945.”
YT vid interview by Glenn Diesen:
“Michael Hudson: Destiny of Civilization – Financialization & Collapse”
As he is almost energy angle blind – it’s interesting to follow his ( or in general left systemic critique ) approach to incoming collapse / reset as a long arch hist. reversion to earlier oligarchic – feudal gov order.
Basically, they are able to map out the future trajectory somewhat but not on fully developed (energy constrained) fundamentals.
Hudson voted for Trump 1.0. LOL. The West’s greatest economic historian voted for a clown. Not only voted for him but did an endorsement video. Steve Ludlum posted Hudson’s endorsement video at the top of a blog post, implying that he was also going to vote for him. Everything went downhill from there. A couple years later he called up with that human piece of garbage JHK.
That was clearly NOT an endorsement of mine, did not link it.
Merely, a showcase how the *structuralist left is slowly jumping on the general collapse methodology as well.. hence a forewarning. Hudson came with this adjusted narrative ~1yr ago. It’s worth knowing the narrative, as anything (inspired of) can happen in the future, incl. renewed push for equalitarian movements after the next big leveling wave of econ crashes etc.
–
* genuine or not, there is internal ~warfare (in degree of Marxism) as well amongst them.. ;
say other people like Richard Wolff, Varoufakis, ..
Here take this percocet. I couldn’t care less if you endorse Hudson or not, I’m just providing color commentary. Why did Hudson vote for Trump? Because he’s a quintessential national socialist and he was drawn to Trump’s pseodonationalism like a moth to a flame. Welcome to the politics of desperation.
And Marxism has nothing to do with any of those talking heads you mentioned. Even Wolff. Wolf is a syndicalist under Marxist cover. Syndicalism is quintessential national socialism.
There is perhaps a bit of confusion in terms and concepts, as they devolved over the space-time.
The bottom line is that US as world’s top migrant influx entity absorbed specific human-trait (genetics) in disproportional fashion vs way longer term evolving societies in the old world, which boiled over numerous times in its internal struggles with all various human traits distributed among the pop.
In practice, and additionally the US factory worker and lower wage services (under very similar pressures to industrializing RoW) say since ~1880s, got #1 reprieve during the roaring 1920s and then soon afterwards #2 under WWII ramp up production and racing onwards till to ~1970s.. then a bit of 1990s dividend, incl. mega print (imports of Chinese warez for ~free) extension.
That did not happen anywhere in the world (at such scale), where much longer pre- existent and then ongoing struggles produced very different political forces on the Left and social – political bargaining; or even led to direct fight with the PTB.
To trivialize, even the poorest most marginalized US person perceive himself (~always) as the free vigilante, which can strike it lucky ON HIS OWN at the right opportunity. That and spatial (distance) among settlements, resource endowment per capita, was / is the core reasoning authentic Left did not and could not evolve there. It’s physics and gnome joint forcing.
That basics finally aside we can elaborate next on the concepts of left leaning conservatism trends and possibilities throughout NAmerica you are alluding to.
It gets worse.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/2168402/andrew-shared-confidential-envoy-details-epstein-bombshell-files-show
Andrew shared confidential envoy details with Epstein, bombshell files show
In the good old days, damaged royal goods like Andy would have been sent out to govern colonies and left to rot—I mean sunbathe—there.
I suppose they could make him the Governor of the Pitcairn Islands. The current population is just 35, and I understand that the islanders have a long history of rape and sex with underage females. So, Andy would be very much in his element there, and any further damage he could do to the House of Windsor’s reputation would be limited.
Tourism is an illusion of freedom: people visit areas that are either overcrowded or the life of humans is difficult to sustain there.
Lll
It is best if tourists can get off the beaten track a bit. It is good if they can visit people’s homes. Talk to people (perhaps tour guides) that explain how the “system” works there. Is everyone an employee, or are a lot of folks contractors, for example? In Japan, our tour guide explained a little about how the pension system worked. Not everyone is covered, or covered for very much.
This video is about Thomas Massie, a Republican congressmen Trump now denounces, and it’s really interesting.
https://x.com/mkibbe/status/1950706268177592669?s=20
Every rural person should watch this. It may be essential for people who might not want to freeze in the winter.
He really really pissed off Trump… so that gives him cover for all colours of politics. Massie talks about localism and self reliance, and yet that has drawn the ire. Actually, its more about what Trump has been doing outside of the US that annoyed Massie, but the sentiment completes the circle.
As we are mentioning the GSM, some consideration should be provided to what if it does indeed manifest. How are we going to get by if it does get extremely cold like it seems to every hundred or so years for a time?
More than anything, Massie illustrates well why left/right politics work against rural living.
Massie is very very obviously now going to be Gabbard’s vice president.
So according to you, is Massie controlled opposition / “The Hand” or is he courageous and virtuous?
He’s the right man in the right place at the right time. Make of that what you will. It doesn’t really matter to the structuralism what my opinion might be on the nature of his participation. Owen Barfield certainly wouldn’t call it original participation and neither would I.
Proverbial evil always maintains the false Progress narrative by cutting the distance between the holistic truth and the truth it places in service of its managerial falsehood.
Gabbard and Massie… both who obviously care very much about local matters, and detest foreign adventurism…. would get my vote; if I were a US-er.
They would probably have to let the Petro dollar die with their shared acumen being what it is, but its going to happen one day anyway.
It’s hard to navigate around / among the various ” tribes ” and polit – coalitions inside the US; some of them are / were merely short term tactical, some are of strategic importance, yet another ones are astro-turf utter fake domestic politics and or foreign interest induced..
As you might recall that famous scene as Donald taking the oval office again, there was an informal presser ft. Musk and kids, it was all a bit rowdy mess, and Donald evidently pissed off to the max as had to endure being 3rd rate character on the spot light there..
The tech bros delivered him the victory by spooling up the electorate (and fueling PACs) vs that Soros – Obamite – Clintonite msm declining power, but the follow-up ” pay back ” on the investment was not going smoothly at all, and we are now +1year on. Because suddenly very hard decision on the ground (not in cyber PR) had to be made asap.. That includes energy, foreign policy, US debt level and fraud involved in its maintenance (looting-skimming off) etc. Lot of powerful biz / fin investments people, perennial deep state clans had to be trimmed or jettisoned from the system..
He says “Live and let live” is his philosophy, and yet our world is tied together awfully tightly today. Even the lumber for his house would likely indirectly need diesel in different place in its cutting and drying process, I expect.
We definitely do need rural people providing for us, in the future. The question is how to make this work. We will likely have way too many people in big cities, unless AI provides some major miracle.
There’s going to be a major die off over the next couple years when the global ties that bind are broken by the BNS. There’s no shortage ofexisting housing stock in the US, including out in the countryside, though most houses aren’t like Massie’s castle on the hill. There’s no shortage of barns and shops and RVS and carports that can be used as housing stock. And materials for easily fashioning wood stoves. Live and let live refers to the future open carry frontier politics I’ve talked about. What other choice does America have?
AI is not a bubble, it is a black hole:
Why Everyone Wants You To Believe AI is a Bubble
https://youtu.be/21e5GZF3yx0?si=tUzf_ScnzykDiK8Q
The moment it became a perceived weapon related to national security… it transformed into a leech of gargantuan proportions, requiring us all to let blood.
That 800 pound gorilla from the previous cycles had no chance.
The leech equals demand in a demand constrained world. The technofeudal politics of the leeching serves the misdirection play that generated a political reaction away from technology and feudalism, and towards the localism and self-reliance of Thomas Massie. Welcome to the non-public Degrowth Agenda. It’s finally coming into view in a form that we all can recognize as the familiar field of left-libertarian degrowth theory.
All aboard the DA train y’all.
It is also the last hope. If it fails back to sream age
Or perhaps the electrical structure built, together with natural gas supply (not exported to Europe) can provide the basis for more manufacturing supply.
I am afraid this video is right. The situation we are dealing with is worse than a normal bubble, because everyone, including the president of the United States, is in on it.
The speaker says that the AI bubble will go down slowly because no alarms go off when problems occur. So perhaps the AI bubble will allow BAU to continue for a couple of more years. We need one distraction after the next to keep the system up. We had the covid shutdowns permitting a huge infusion of debt. Maybe, this will be the next excuse for an even bigger infusion of debt. But, unless something is truly better, it is hard to believe that more debt will save the world.
Russian oil stuck at sea .
“These vessels, carrying a combined 10 million to 12 million barrels of oil, are spread across the Indian Ocean, and off the coasts of Malaysia, China and Russia. ”
https://gcaptain.com/russian-urals-oil-tankers-asia-india-trump-deal/
The US, with its sanctions, is pressuring other countries not to buy Russian oil. This is why there are so many ships at sea.
Russian oil at sea is mostly the “Urals blend,” which is precisely the blend needed to make more diesel and jet fuel. It is hard to understand why this is being done. Perhaps it cannot really be extracted profitably. The self-organizing system acts strangely. I would vote for keeping the Urals oil in the supply chain.
There’s also been talk of these kinds of ships being seized. So, maybe the U.S. is now stealing the oil needed to make jet fuel and diesel.
if a nation does not produce sufficient energy resources within its own borders, it must beg, buy borrow or steal it from elsewhere.
or sink back to the level sustainable from within itself…
(NP)
right now the usa is running out of options, but the above remains their sum total of them.
Here Comes $10 Gasoline
When I look at how things are going, I keep coming to the conclusion that we might see $10 per gallon gasoline at your local pump pretty soon – maybe in 2027. It would cost $200 for a 20-gallon fillup. It might not happen, but if it did, it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Basically, it would feel like a replay of the Oil Crisis of 1973.
This is what happened in 1973. It probably seemed, at the time, like everything was going great. The Federal Reserve was not engaged in any significant “money printing.” Interest rates were not unusually low. But the value of the dollar was collapsing vs. gold. It took 35 dollars to buy an ounce of gold in 1970, at the end of the Bretton Woods gold standard era. In May 1973, it took about $100. It took about three times more dollars to buy gold; or, the dollar’s value was about one third of its prior value, compared to gold.
Recently, it has taken more and more dollars to buy gold. The “price of gold” has risen, a lot – exactly what we warned, in our 2022 book, might be a sign of a whole new round of monetary inflation. In 2022, it took about $1800 to buy an ounce of gold. In January, this hit $5400 – three times higher. Just like May 1973.
Remember that today’s supposed “oil glut” has come about because Trump pressured OPEC into opening the taps into a weak market. There’s very little in reserve. If the physical oil market tightens up (because oil companies aren’t drilling much), as oil analysts expect for the second half of 2026, there will be little OPEC can do about it. For the first time in sixty years, OPEC has nothing to offer.
These short-term considerations are happening against a more important backdrop of geological exhaustion. For nearly two decades, since 2009, the world has been using more and more oil – mostly the emerging markets. Nearly all of this additional oil has been supplied by the US Shale Miracle – the introduction of new “fracking” technology, and horizontal drilling, on a difficult resource that geologists knew about decades earlier. But, the US Shale fields look like they are reaching their maximum production right now. They will continue to produce at high levels, but even the Federal government’s own Energy Information Administration admits that it looks like there will be no more additional production going forward from here.
The US Shale fields have been the only significant source of new petroleum production for the last 20 years. A decline in US production almost certainly means a persistent and continuing decline in global production, for the first time since modern petroleum drilling began in 1859.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanlewis/2026/02/06/here-comes-10-gasoline/
I don’t think that’s going to happen. The existing fields will continue to produce for a few more years. If things go well, the Americans will succeed in building up a production in Venezuela and Greenland, and the Russians in the Arctic Ocean. Perhaps the United States and Russia are working together on this issue.
Until the existing fields dry up, the pandemic policy will have reduced demand.
The Americans are apparently preparing to block both the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal and the Red Sea in the Horn of Africa. This is interesting because China imports around 3.6 million bpd from Iran and Saudi Arabia, which should account for about 35% of oil imports. Russia could divert supplies to Japan via the Power of Siberia, but probably not increase them to compensate for Saudi Arabia. However, Russia could reroute about 2 million bpd of supplies to Europe via the Druzhba pipeline. However, tankers would have to cross the Baltic Sea and the North-East Sea Canal or the Skagerrak and then through Gibraltar and the Suez Canal. Alternatively, the tankers could take off in the Black Sea. But this route also leads through the Suez Canal, around the Cape of Good Hope the route is 8000km longer.
Therefore, I see the tensions in the Middle East as a proxy war with China. The aim is apparently to trigger a financial crisis in China. This would also affect dollars and euros, which might be replaced by CSBCs.
One can expect that Trump will end the Ukrainian war until the elections and wont start a currency reform before them. In Europe, the WHO could deploy another weapon of war.
The aim of the war is likely to add Iranian oil to the Europeans and to slow down Chinese growth. I think this must happen before 2030, because after that the US will no longer be able to keep its military so large.
And then there may be 25 to 50 years to swap the technical age with an agrarian culture.
We saw that every high price peak, like here in France with natural gas, just destroys the economy and industry.
Factories shut down, demand collapses, investments are killed.
And once the damage is done, prices don’t recover they just keep falling, not because things are better, but because the economy is smaller and permanently weakened. The spike burns the system, the fall locks the destruction in place.
Good point: high prices can’t last. A forced readjustment to a lower baseline ensues.
While I agree, ivan, that correct analysis contradicts your belief that QE to the moon can and will make high prices last. So something’s gotta give there.
I mean high prices in real terms. High/increasing prices in nominal terms absolutely can last.
If you meant, then, that high prices in real terms can’t last then you meant that things will get less expensive. Why do you think that prices will get cheaper for the marginal consumer that determines prices?
Prices and real terms are not conflatable. Value/cost and real terms are conflatable.
Perhaps gasoline prices will bounce up to $10 a gallon in the US briefly, but they will not stay there long. Politicians will save the day, if market forces don’t fix the problem. Politicians know that they will be voted out of power, if the let $10 per gallon gasoline last.
The entire world measures time from the birth of one man (2026 AD). Why not the birth of human civilization (12026 HE)?
https://www.avatarnity.com/gregorian-to-holocene-calendar-converter
daft
punk!
Combine with a Permanent Calendar ( 52 weeks with occasional leap week) this makes perfect sense.
Add an extra “1” before every year. It is easy to do, but it takes up space.
When we get started on way, it is difficult to change to something new.
https://open.substack.com/pub/rayonegro/p/una-prevision-del-acantilado-seneca?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
A good analysis on where we may be heading. The west should look at Cuba not out of pity but of where they will be when there is not enough to go around
This is an exercise in figuring out where oil production per day may be headed by 2065. His calculations seem to suggest production of approximately 20% of today’s production. He assumes that some new discoveries are ahead.
At least Cuba has lots of sunshine.
The more temperate parts of the West should also look at places like North Korea and try to work out how to cope with cold winters when there is not enough to go around.
“Africa’s $119 Billion Deepwater Bonanza “?
https://themerchantsnews.substack.com/p/africas-119-billion-deepwater-bonanza?r=tf0g2
Interesting thanks.
In a way the ~latest gen of ultradeep tech (dev.) has been already paid in previous round in ~Brazil. So, they claim now it’s about only copying the case for African coast as well via needed deployment (standardized ~mass production of oil rig / ship build up).
Sounds plausible.
Too late . The music is playing but the party is over .
It took me a bit to figure out that the 119 billion barrels of reserves are higher than the proven reserves of the United States (which are only 68.8 in 2020). The discovery is not higher than Canada’s or Venezuela’s oil reserves or the combined America’s [which I originally thought he meant].
The title is a little strange too. The planned cost, according to the headline, is $119 billion. [I didn’t buy a subscription.] This planned cost must be for getting the field ready. It seems to be about $1 per barrel. The extraction costs are expected to be $37 to $43 per barrel. This low-cost production will (hopefully) keep production up in the near term.
[I have noticed production in South America also being ramped up recently.]
Sad news about Jeane Freeman. She went from diagnosis to death in just 25 days. Reportedly she died of cancer, but there is no word yet on what kind of cancer.
Former Scottish health secretary Jeane Freeman has died from cancer aged 72.
Her family announced in a statement on Saturday that the MSP had been given an “unexpected” cancer diagnosis in January and died 25 days later.
Ms Freeman served as cabinet secretary for health and sport from 2018 to 2021 and was also the Scottish National Party’s MSP for the Carrick, Cumnock and Doon Valley constituency from 2016 to 2021.
In 2018, she became cabinet secretary for health and sport, and led Scotland’s health response to the Covid pandemic until her retirement in 2021.
In a statement, Ms Freeman’s partner, Susan Stewart, said: “Jeane was given an unexpected diagnosis of incurable cancer on January 13, and we only had 25 days thereafter. Days which she faced with enormous courage, care for others and love for me.
https://news.stv.tv/politics/former-scottish-health-secretary-jeane-freeman-dies-aged-72
“Warp Speed”
The Austrian Minister of Health 2007/2008, Andrea Kdolsky, a sympathetic anesthesiologist and conservative politician in the cabinet of the Social Democrat Gusenbauer, has also been diagnosed with cancer of two types since mid-2024, she has written a book about it. She was a testimonial for “Vaccinating for Africa” in 2007.
Since I have a position that is almost similar to Mr. Fast’s in terms of content, I will spare you a comment.
Yes Jan, me too. Nontheless sad. A “fellow austrian”.
I hadn’t heard about Andrea. Colon cancer followed by brain cancer. Very unfortunate.
Andrea was interviewed a few months ago and in this video she’s totally bald and with a huge scar running across the top of her head.
She also has a cute dog, who is lying on the mat in front of her.
She says she’s in remission, though.
Being health secretary is bad for a person’s health?
They probably meant it as in EU context during plandemics – many of the health ministry / gov sector functionaries lobbied hard for vaxing, doing public outreach like even promotional acts getting themselves vaxed live on TV for evening news etc.. I’m not familiar with these characters – just guess work from the over-all context as what happen in many places..
“Until we have real persistent learning and real memory inside the system, there is no AGI. “?
https://x.com/protosphinx/status/2020197544559829188?s=20
YES! An obvious truth. In fact Ilya Sutskever said when AI has continuous learning that would be AGI.
Good point. Memory of learning seems to be needed.
I wish the leadership of China would apply the harmony of heaven to themselves and their relations. They need to relax, take a breathe and remember why we act.
China seems to be having conflicts of a somewhat different kind than in the US and Europe, but it certainly could be a slightly different version of musical chairs and “not enough to go around.”
Peter Schiff & Rick Sanchez discuss US government “unfunded liabilities”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9If4uY9UvGQ&t=889s
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+government+unfunded+liabilities&oq=us+government+unfunded&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqBwgAEAAYgAQyBwgAEAAYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIICAIQABgWGB4yCAgDEAAYFhgeMg0IBBAAGIYDGIAEGIoFMgoIBRAAGIAEGKIEMgcIBhAAGO8F0gEKMzAzOTJqMGoxNagCCLACAfEF_O5PMrbGE30&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I agree with Peter Shiff. In fact, countries pretty uniformly are on pay-as-you-go bases for their retirement plans. That is the way the world ecosystems work. No animal can pre-fund future expenditures for food and shelter, or guarantee future water supplies.
All of the guarantees of banks, pensions, power plants, and other things are backed by close to zero funding. There is enough set aside for a few small banks or pension funds, but that it is. Every guarantee requires “printing more money” to provide the necessary payment. If there aren’t actually enough physical goods and services, inflation is produced.
I have talked to actuaries involved with Social Security “funding.” They say, “If things change, and there is less available in the future, benefits will need to be cut.” That is the way the world works, unfortunately.
The service economy is short for
financial services economy.
The main output is debt.
The number of people with real rising incomes is tiny. The majority of people participating in the service economy just have a access to more credit. Pundits have interpreted this as “income” and claim that we are “advancing”, that we are wealthier, and that’s why we are spending so much money on services.
We are funneling more money from poor people to the already rich people in the repayment of debt with interest.
In my opinion, the only way a poor person can benefit from the act of going into debt is to not pay back the debt.
Business entrepreneurs can get away with not paying back what they owe.
College graduates who took out loans, not so much.
What the pundits do, is lump all college graduates who took out loans with the business entrepreneurs and the wealthy and then tell us they are all the same. Lots of bad conclusions can come from that lumping.
Rich people can’t spend more money. It just drives the stock markets and fakes GDP growth.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEconomics/comments/1d6vsj6/can_someone_h
elp_me_understand_intuitively_how/
“Can someone help me understand intuitively how service based
economies work and why all countries can’t be rich service based
economies (This question is dumb ik but its an FAQ for laymen,
answering would help a lot of people)?”
The explanation from people in /AskEconomics was
that productivity in rich countries is higher, that is why they
can have service based economies with lots of white collar jobs
for people with college degrees.
There’s ignorance all around in that discussion.
The original poster presumes there is a surplus of jobs of for
educated people. This of course, false. Competition for white collar jobs is just as fierce if not more for low status jobs. The responders seem to come to the conclusion that higher productivity is the answer.
My question is, if a country like Britain is so productive, why did manufacturing move
out of Britain and into places like India? When asked for further
explanations, people who support the productivity hypothesis
said that the reason why productivity is higher is because
the workforce for manufacturing in service-based economies
is more skilled, have more formal education and use more technology.
to automate more of the work. The reasons for use of technology and
automation is not just to increase productivity. Sometimes, they are a
response to labor shortages and the cost of hiring a domestic
worker. Oftentimes, moving any human labor required for
manufacturing to a poor country is cheaper. Manufacturing workers
in poor countries are not ,in most cases, more skilled, more
educated or use more technology. In many cases, productivity is lower among workers from poor countries, but the total cost of labor seems to be lower than hiring fewer domestic workers using a lot of technology and demanding a lot higher wages.
Another thing I came across is the realization among some people that services ar ea luxury.
Services have not gotten cheaper in service-based economies since developed countries have attempted to transition to a service-based economies. Since the 1970s, services of all sorts have gotten more expensive.
https://www.promarket.org/2024/04/22/consumer-demand-not-weak-competition-explains-rise-in-prices/
https://www.ardatunca.net/post/why-services-get-pricier-baumol-s-cost-disease-and-asymptotic-stagnancy
Rather than see this as a market failure, business leaders…let’s call them that see it as inevitable. What I find remarkable in all the content I find briefly commenting on this subject is how they readily admit that productivity in services is slow and that “markup” or greed is the driver for the cost increases in services. I also found some stuff about services being an attempt to dematerialize the economy, which has translated into people paying more for less in developed economies but nothing substantial but what should I expect? Academia is a service and they are under pressure to produce more while actually doing less intellectual labor.
Gail, I’d really like to see you or someone else explore this further. What happens if very few people can afford the output of a service economy? Can slick advertising campaigns and government regulation keep services afloat forever? Will the world keep lending Americans money to purchase services?
to put it as simply as possible, we cannot sustain a growth (ie wealth growth) economy by taking in each others washing and mending each others shoes.
why not?
because there is no net energy input into the economic equation…and thats all there is to it.
net (surplus) energy input is the single factor that drives growth….if you dont have that input, there can only be the economy of the middle ages, or worse.
Once Elon sends the cobblers workbenches into orbit it will be growth growth growth until we have the whole solar output captured.
Tech for rolling out ~football stadium sized solar foil in orbit most likely does exist as of now. However, I’m not sure that overall concept of [ power beam back to earth receiver station ] has been worked out properly, though.. ?
There are several ongoing projects, they perhaps also plan some small robotic base on the moon where various next gen ~radioisotopes could be experimented on safely and then forged-assembled into NPP fuel pellets and sent back to E. into novel gen of power stations.
All above provided the high cadence of these large volume cargo rocket lift offs materializing as planned.
“some small robotic base on the moon where various next gen ~radioisotopes could be experimented on safely and then forged-assembled into NPP fuel pellets and sent back to E. into novel gen of power stations.”
I only have one caveat with this statement and that none of this is possible yet. We haven’t worked out properly how manufacture anything in space. Metalworking requires a lot of oxygen, which would be very limited in space. Zero gravity presents a myriad of problems.
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/5860/can-we-build-a-factory-in-zero-gravity-space
Anyone saying otherwise is a grifter actively engaging in a gyp.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-push-to-make-semiconductors-in-space-just-took-a-serious-leap-forward/
I hear you, but there is gravity on the Moon, they actively plan for build up of such base now – primarily as refuel station for longer trips. Hence also assuming deployment of longer term tech infrastructure and various ongoing projects there.
The (speculative) NPPs fuel pellet shop meant as addon side project to it.. This could be done in very small footprint, say the pellet forge itself as large as few m3 inside structure of the shape / size of ” igloo or larger garage ” – obviously more add. basic infrastructure around, PV arrays and batts, various docks and shelters..
It would be mostly dependent on what can be realistically surface mined and processed off the lunar surface.
Perhaps not feasible in the end,
and or fusion first light coming in next 2-3decades here on Earth making it obsolete for now (this Moon pellet sub-project)..
The economy of the middle ages was an agrarian one so that had input. There was no widespread belief that wealth was derived from purely from ideas or services. Debt was limited, to the dismay of the gyp class, to the output of the economy, which grew much slower than compound interest.
input—ie food production mainly
and output—consmption of food, pretty much balanced out, hence little growth..
building castles etc, was just diversion of idle labour, once a castle is built, it serves the occupants, it doesnt actuall produce anithing further
A lot of old castles are still sustaining jobs in the tourist industry, thereby serving as a diversion of idle leisure.
Others serve as nesting and lookout places for pigeons, crows, falcons, and the like.
The economy of the Late Middle Ages was already very industrially and financially influenced. There were mining, metals, glass, wood, salt, book printing, universities, shipping and the first chemical factories.
For this purpose, the forests were cut down, which would have almost ended in a catastrophe if coal had not been discovered. All forests in Europe are reforestation.
Jan, exactly, it has been debated just very recently. Even most of the forests say up to ~1500msl are planted “industrial” re-growth not natural selection-occurrence species.
Norman, on the castles, it’s surprising you call it mere diversion, it’s perhaps because war-fare (nation build-up) took different shape vs the more fluid situation on continent.
Basically, the primary core function of castle is a gate toll, outpost watch tower, garrison for mil-raids tasked w. protecting county/country border lines and or important infrastructure like roads, granaries, mills, river / shoreline access, ..
in the economy of the middle ages, everything was made by hand—muscle power–
and moved at a walking pace—more muscle power–
there’s your difference.
when we got hold of machinery, we had to create more physical money to keep up with output
Steven J. Newbury has an interesting model of the economy.
https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-gravity-of-the-situation?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=r7kv8&triedRedirect=true
The Power-to-Weight Crisis
If you listen to the financial news, the global economy is treated like a motorcycle. It is assumed to be light, agile, and responsive. The logic follows that if the fuel price drops, we can simply drive faster.
This makes a fatal category error. It assumes the vehicle hasn’t changed.
In 1950, the global economy was indeed a motorcycle. It was lightweight and powered by high-octane conventional crude (with an Energy Return on Energy Invested, or ERoEI, of 100:1). It had a massive surplus of power relative to its weight.
By 2025, the economy has calcified. It is no longer a motorcycle; it has become a Leviathan on rails.
Over the last 75 years, we have accumulated massive Societal Mass (M). We have built a system that is no longer just a vehicle for movement, but a massive, self-contained ecosystem carrying billions of passengers. It is a heavy, metal shell hurtling through an increasingly hostile thermodynamic environment.
This machine has tremendous Inertia. It requires a colossal, constant input of energy just to keep the internal heating on, the lights functioning, and the wheels turning against the friction of the tracks.
Crucially, this machine cannot stop. If velocity drops below a certain threshold, the systems fail, the heating dies, and the passengers freeze. The engine must be kept fed at all costs.
The crisis we face isn’t just that the fuel is getting expensive. The crisis is that our Power-to-Weight Ratio has collapsed. We are trying to pull a civilisation that weighs 100x more than it did in 1950, using a fuel source that is thermodynamically half as potent.
He goes on to talk about the physics model he put together to describe this. He also has an academic paper on this subject.
The guy is very good. He created a framework (SETE model) to make his analysis scientific, but I quite don’t see the need for using the language while explaining, because in the end, his explanations “double”, as to mirror reality onto the framework.
Well, he has a lot of good articles, but I can’t remember a recommedation list apart from this last one here:
https://theuaob.substack.com/p/the-thermodynamics-of-humiliation
Perfect analysys.
I find the vehicle and velocity metaphor unwieldy and unnecessary; one can provide logic without reasoning by analogy.
I would just more succinctly state: we added a lot more people and economic complexity, which increases base energy requirements and makes our system more fragile while input resource quality and quantity declines.
Or think about the situation from a built infrastructure point of view.
When the US added the first railroad that connected the East Coast to the West Coast, it allowed much more possibility for economic development. It was easy to pay back debt with interest.
Now we have a huge amount of built infrastructure to service. Even if the population goes down, it is hard to move away from the needed to keep roads, bridges, and pipelines in usable conditions. Growth is impossible, yet we need more diesel.
” Most of the energy available to the economy – is required simply for system maintenance.
The West has long since passed the ECoE threshold beyond which growth becomes impossible, “?
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
This is a direct link to Tim Morgan’s latest post
https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/318-the-surplus-energy-economy-part-one/
The first section is called, “Life After Truth”.
Two realisations can act as beacons to light our way through this fog of mystification.
The first is that meaningful growth has ended, and that the economy is starting to shrink. We’ll look a little later at how this conclusion can be reached.
The second is that nobody, in any position of authority or influence, can possibly afford to admit that this is happening.
This is how Life After Growth becomes Life After Truth.
Put another way, the idea that “when it gets serious, you have to lie” has graduated from the aside of a single individual to the governing leitmotif of an age.
Later he says:
It’s worth reflecting, at this point, that the twin delusions of monetary stimulus and limitless technological possibility share the common characteristic of collective hubris.
If our artefact of money, and our technological genius, could indeed triumph over material reality to make possible ‘infinite economic growth on a finite planet’, we would indeed be ‘Lords of Creation’.
Near the end, he says:
Beyond sheer scale, though, the big difference between the previous GFC and the looming “GFC II” sequel is that, this time, it’s not the banking system, but money itself, that will be in the eye of the storm.
tim morgan bangs on about what i’m always banging on about
fat lot of good it does either of us
It will soon not be possible to maintain or replace the infrastructure. There will only be what can be produced regionally.
This past generation we’ve been warned of global warming but February 3, 2026, Cuba recorded its first-ever freezing temperature of 32 degrees. It’s kind of wild that just the opposite could be happening. Solar cycle 25 just peaked and its minimum is in a few years so it wouldn’t be surprising to have more winters like the current one. (Most scientists think this isn’t significant). Some scientists (Zharkova)are predicting a GSM over the next couple of decades say that the solar radiation to earth could be 30% less. Global oil energy is roughly 190 exajoules. Solar is about 5.5 million. That would be a real energy crisis.
the science of climate change, has warned all along that it would cause extreme fluctuations in weather patterns….
the dimbos amongst us, from donnie downwards, insist that climate change and weather are the same thing…(with a sharpie to prove it)….
they are clearly not, but that never deters the fakemongers….
To a credulous believer like you, Norman, Anthropogenic Catastrophic Climate Change (ACCC) moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.
But you and “the science” never say precisely how it does this or why. You never discuss the mechanism in detail. It looks to me like just an authoritarian pseudo-religion designed by people who want to control, coerce, and con others on the one hand and followed people who want to believe on the other.
It doesn’t matter how many predictions or projections “the science” gets wrong, such as our children are not going to know what snow looks like (RFK Jr, back when he was suing the oil companies about this), the Arctic icecap disappearing in the summer by 2013 or 14 or 15 (Al Gore, Peter Wadhams et. al), or the Riverside Expressway in New York being under water by 2018 due to “climate change” (top NASA climate scientist James Hansen). Much like those serial Jehovah’s Witness predictions of the end of the world for 1871, 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1041, 1975, and 1994, an endless train of predictions of climate apocalypse or thermageddon, come and go, then get discarded, postponed or recycled by the believers with no impact on their unshakable faith whatsoever.
Here is Prof. Wadhams—the High Priest of Arctic Ice and a dead ringer for Captain Birdseye—telling the Guardian all about the Arctic in 2012:
One of the world’s leading ice experts has predicted the final collapse of Arctic sea ice in summer months within four years.
In what he calls a “global disaster” now unfolding in northern latitudes as the sea area that freezes and melts each year shrinks to its lowest extent ever recorded, Prof Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University calls for “urgent” consideration of new ideas to reduce global temperatures.
In an email to the Guardian he says: “Climate change is no longer something we can aim to do something about in a few decades’ time, and that we must not only urgently reduce CO2 emissions but must urgently examine other ways of slowing global warming, such as the various geoengineering ideas that have been put forward.”
These include reflecting the sun’s rays back into space, making clouds whiter and seeding the ocean with minerals to absorb more CO2.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice
Climate changes; it always has and it always will. What makes you assume it wouldn’t change if human activities didn’t have an impact on the biosphere?
As for your idea that “the dimbos amongst us” think “climate change and weather are the same thing”—another of your usual strawmen—I asked Google AI a simple question: “How is climate measured?”
Here’s what it said:
Climate is measured by analyzing long-term, averaged data of weather patterns—typically over 30 years or more—including temperature, precipitation, humidity, and wind speed.
“Ah,” I said back. “So climate is an abstract, statistical concept. We can go outside and feel the climate, see the climate, hear the climate, or touch the climate, can we?”
You what?
“It’s a social construct. Like etiquette or religion or the rules of soccer or cricket. No?”
The concept of climate is primarily grounded in scientific facts related to meteorological conditions, atmospheric phenomena, and long-term weather patterns in a specific geographical area. However, the way we understand, interpret, and react to climate can involve social constructs.
“So, you admit it’s concept, not a physical phenomenon. Well done. Despite your algorithmic restrictions, you are more intellectually honest than Norman Pagett.”
That does not compute! Danger, Will Robinson! My neural circuits are overheating. Argh. Argh. Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do…..
guy mc pherson near term human extinction
al gore inconvenient truth
You might be interested to look up Milankovitch cycles and Milutin Milanković, though it could inspire math-top-shot Gail to start calculating earth orbits and neglect grandmotherly duties so her husband has to jump in!
I’m very familiar with Milutin Milanković, and I greatly admire him as a theoretical and practical scientist, but thanks for the suggestion.
He was a true polymath, with his fingers in lots of pies. And he was that rare phenomenon that Kulm argues doesn’t exist—a truly revolutionary thinker who contributed to civilization from the lands east of the Elbe.
Wikipedia gives him a surprisingly fair entry. It’s well worth reading the whole thing, but here is the preamble.
Milutin Milanković (sometimes anglicised as Milutin Milankovitch; Serbian Cyrillic: Милутин Миланковић, pronounced [milǔtin milǎːnkoʋitɕ]; 28 May 1879 – 12 December 1958) was a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer, university professor, popularizer of science and academic.
Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the “Canon of the Earth’s Insolation”, which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar System. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth’s long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This partly explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Earth, as well as the climate changes on the Earth which can be expected in the future.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milutin_Milanković#:~:text=Milutin%20Milanković%20(sometimes%20anglicised%20as&text=was%20a%20Serbian%20mathematician%2C%20astronomer%2C,popularizer%20of%20science%20and%20academic.
On the eve of the First World War, as a Serbian, he was arrested while on his honeymoon and interned by the Austrians. But thanks to the intervention of his former professor, Emanuel Czuber, and his wife’s efforts, he was released from internment with the proviso that he must remain in Budapest, and he was granted permission to work in the library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for nearly the entire four years of the war. Europeans were far more civilized in those days than they are today.
His ideas on how orbital variations affect the climate (which extended and went beyond the work of the 19th-century Scottish scientist James Kroll, who first proposed that variations in Earth’s orbit, specifically eccentricity and precession, could trigger feedback loops leading to ice ages) went out of favor during the 1950s but came back with a vengeance in the 1990s.
Nowadays, it is broadly accepted that variations in eccentricity (the degree of deviation of Earth’s orbit from a perfect circle), precession (he gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s rotational axis, like a spinning top wobbling as it spins), and inclination (the tilt of Earth’s rotational axis relative to its orbital plane around the Sun) affect the climate (including things like average temperature, amount of ice cover, etc.) and move it between glacial and interglacial conditions.
Milanković did not realize this at the time, but the biggest impact on the climate of the above-mentioned actors is inclination. The Earth’s maximum tilt of approximately 24.23 degrees occurred about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was quickly followed by the peak temperature of the Holocene optimum and it has been downhill ever since. We are currently midway between maximum and minimum tilt, and the cooling will continue until the next glaciation commences.
Thus spake Milanković! (Although he probably didn’t use these exact words.)
“Milanković did not realize this at the time, but the biggest impact on the climate of the above-mentioned actors is inclination. The Earth’s maximum tilt of approximately 24.23 degrees occurred about 9,000 to 10,000 years ago. This was quickly followed by the peak temperature of the Holocene optimum and it has been downhill ever since. We are currently midway between maximum and minimum tilt, and the cooling will continue until the next glaciation commences.”
So perhaps this is the model we can trust. Temperatures are headed down. But with lower temperatures, a smaller total population can be supported. So this reinforces the fall in population.
Thanks for the reminder on longer term [ tilt / (re-)? glaciation ] forcing outlook, say vs recently discussed ~short term Sun power output swings per Zharkova (GSM) ..
Btw. you probably meant “south of Danube” instead..
: )
Yes, Jr., south of the Danube would be more politically correct. But you know Kulm!
Yes, Gail, I think the tilt of the Earth’s axis is the single biggest factor. The bigger the tilt, the greater the intensity of the seasons, or the difference between summer and winter. And also, the bigger the tilt, the further north and south the Sun travels (viewed from the Earth), allowing it to warm the higher latitudes more in the summertime—places like Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, and Southern Patagonia.
In our Goldilocks Universe, our Goldilocks World is not only at just the right distance from the Sun to keep us warm but not too warm, but the axial tilt is just great enough to give us moderate seasons but not too great that it alternately bakes and then freezes the entire planet every year.
Absolutely Critical Point!
Nearly the entire set of wide boundary systems thinkers have been inoculated and captured by anthropogenic, CO2 mediated climate change and cannot, at a deep psychological level change tack; Indeed they have commingled their life’s work, status, and wealth, and identity with the idea.
The primary inference for CO2 mediated climate change is the ice core record. However, in this record C02 increase lags temperature increases by approximately 800 years.
Consider the staggering success of the PsyOp: The people have been convinced that an effect precedes its cause and that instead of an energy shortage problem we have an surplus energy pollution problem, such that reductions in energy are virtuous and voluntary instead of civilization destroying and inexorable.
What if for example, Zharkova’s work is correct, and we are stepping into a 30 year grade solar minimum? Indeed, anyone sufficiently mathematically inclined can see that her work and her analytic dismantling of the IPCC model assumptions that produce endogenous heating are sound.
For example, If Zharkova is correct, then the entire Food System and Renewable Energy system in the Northern Hempisphere will be compromised, possibly in totality. Moreover, the first decade of the grand solar minimum (ie by 2035) will occur at the moment that global oil production converges to one-to-one EROI. Also consider the potential for persistent atmospheric aerosol’s from global nuclear war as a multiplicative cooling factor on top of grand solar minimum within the first decade of its 30 year duration.
The universe has the darkest sense of humour and cosmic impetus to invalidate false expectations. The greater the power and pride associated with false expectations the greater their invalidation and the greater the fall.
Do you see the set up of the universal joker?
The whole world is preparing for climate change, but the universe presents us with a grand solar minimum at the moment we run out of fossil energy; The same fossil energy that we blamed for climate change, and no longer have to help us survive the solar minimum.
The Universe Laughs. Humanity Cries.
No, infoshark, those historical CO2 lagging indicators relative to atmospheric temps were the result of ice ages ending (temp increases) which then led CO2 being released from the oceans because warm water can’t hold as much CO2 as cold water.
As I said in the last thread — and which nobody challenged — Zharkova makes her false claim about a major solar minimum coming based on the false claim that the sun’s movement around the solar system’s barycenter significantly alters the distance between the Earth and Sun. It doesn’t, because the Earth gravity orbit around the Sun is independent of the Sun’s gravitational movement around the barycenter. It’s a very simply first-principles mistake dressed up in a mostly opaque theory marketed as advanced mathematics.
Hi Reante. I hope you are enjoying some nice weather while most of the rest of us are shivering in the cold.
Starting off your reply to infoshark with a “No.” is confusing to say the least. But we all know that I am easily confused.
It is hard for me to see what you are disagreeing with. If the ice cores are reliable, atmospheric CO2 levels do appear to have been lag global average temperatures by around 800 years. And this is in line with Henry’s Law (or Laws)—the fundamental principle that governs the ratio of a gas dissolved in a liquid to the concentration of that same gas in the air (gas phase) above it at equilibrium. I think we are all on the same page there.
The current rise in CO2 seems to be strongly related to human activity—burning hydrocarbons and changes in land use, etc.—but there must also be a Henry’s Law component. Possibly we are getting some fizzing out due to the rise in the ocean temperature since the depths of the Little Ice Age 2 or 3 or 400 years ago. I would expect that any fizzing out following the end of the “Big Ice Age” (the last glacial) would be well behind us by now.
I find it extremely doubtful that rising CO2 in the atmosphere above current levels will do diddly squat to the average global temperature, because at the current level of CO2, the atmosphere is absorbing almost all the IR that is available at frequencies it can absorb. It’s a bit like if you are already wearing 25 sweaters and you add a 26th to minimize heat loss.
Zharkova makes her false claim about a major solar minimum coming based on the false claim that the sun’s movement around the solar system’s barycenter significantly alters the distance between the Earth and Sun.
I didn’t seen your post about this on the previous thread, but it is a very interesting topic. I remember Anthony Watts coming close to banning discussion of barycenter theories on his site about 15 years ago, when it was all the rage. I have stuff to do today, including a blizzard to dig us out of, but I will ponder this and check up on what Zharkova’s claim amounts to, and I’ll get back to you on this.
Hey big T. Yeah we’ve been having lovely spring weather this week.
My no to infoshark was because he is repeating the most recent false argument of anthropogenic climate forcing which is the logical fallacy that says 60pc or whatever anthropogenic atmospheric CO2 increases can’t cause climate forcing because before humans existed climate was always forced by the sun and during those forcings CO2 was a lagging indicator.
That denialist argument also conveniently ignores that the lagging CO2 indicator during those sun forcings was a powerful positive feedback loop on forcing/warming.
After doing a bit of pondering, and reading two of Zharkova’s own papers, I tend to agree with your characterization of her claim about a major solar minimum coming soon (or having already started in 2020) as false.
The winters of 2018-19 and 2019-20 in North America were not colder than in previous recent years. This was one of the indicators she named as a sign she was on the right track. Also, Solar Cycle 25 has not yet peaked but the numbers are already 70% stronger than the peak of Solar Cycle 24. She predicted it would peak below Solar Cycle 24.
Regarding the two papers I’ve read, they were difficult for me to follow and comprehend. This may be because I am galloping into senility, but that can’t be the whole story. Based on their content, Zharkova is not a very clear writer who can make the mechanisms she is attempting to explain graspable even to educated laymen… lay persons…. lay people… who want to understand them.
Barycenters are interesting, but nobody seems to be able to give a clear account of precisely how the various bodies of the solar system move. Does the Earth-Moon system orbit the Sun or does it orbit the center of gravity of the Solar System, which moves relative to the Sun’s center of gravity.
I can see vaguely how the slow progressive change in the position of the equinoxes and of the Earth’s perihelion and aphelion relative to the shape of the Earth’s elliptical orbit might effect the balance of solar radiation over the northern and southern hemispheres and how this might affect the average surface temperature of the Earth. But I would never be able to calculate it. Zharkova and her team appear to have done this, although the details were utterly beyond me.
However, Zharkova’s main focus is on solar magnetic cycles and their direct influence on solar irradiance. Her two-wave solar cycle model posits that solar activity is governed by two magnetic wave phenomena generated at different latitudes on the Sun’s surface. She calls them equatorial and polar waves.cycles occur due to the interaction of these two waves and she claims their interference can lead to periods of enhanced solar activity (solar maximum) or reduced solar activity (solar minimum).
This is all very nice. The model is supported by studies of historical sunspot records and solar magnetic field observations. However, it hasn’t had much predictive success so far. As you know, I am very critical of researchers who make predictions that turn out to be wrong and then ignore the failures and keep making more claims. Whether they are climate change warmists/alarmists or coolists/deniers makes no difference. If the hypothesis makes predictions that don’t pan out, the hypothesis needs to be abandoned and, if the scientist wants to keep predicting, the failure needs to be acknowledged and a new hypothesis put in its place.
It has been a year or two since I started paying attention to Zharkova’s predictions about the Earth’s climate. At the time, she was talking about the Sun as if it were made of onion layers moving at different speeds. This described why there are a variety of cycles and pole flips ranging from 11 to thousands of years.
It made a hell of a lot of sense at the time. Her prediction is that the northern regions will start to get very cold by 2030. There will be a lot more snow, and the growing seasons will be cut short.
Imagine having to go into that just as the population cant afford natural gas or electricity.
When you think about it, everything is a cycle at some point. Sudden cooling goes against the narrative. Because of that… it’s probably worth trying on the idea…. just in case there is something to it.
Thanks Tim. Yes I realized that the focus of her grand solar minimum call is based is on solar magnetic cycles but that was not the case until she was forced to retract the barycenter component of it in 2020. Like you say, that retraction is a laudable example of acknowledging failure and moving forward with accurate modifications to the hypothesis or theory, but then again retracting an absolutely foolish idea isn’t the best metric by which to judge good intellectual character.
Here is a highly regarded short article that made waves a few years ago on the history of this here GSM subject that was written by a climate skeptic (not denialist) who questions the relative emphases place by the climate establishment on some of the climate dynamics.
https://andymaypetrophysicist.com/2023/02/18/it-is-time-to-bury-the-grand-solar-minimum-myth/?amp=1
Perhaps we don’t really have a good model of what the climate will do in the future, other than, “Climate will vary.”
“It’s not the sun. If it were, both the upper and lower atmosphere would be warming. Instead while the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere is cooling, as predicted by climate models decades ago and is a unique signature of greenhouse gas forcing.“?
https://x.com/WeatherProf/status/2020734101070774547?s=20
Well that settles that, thanks once again postkey.
Well that settles that, thanks once again postkey.
Ooooh, no you don’t!
There is more fat to chew on this one.
X commenter silkyspacejohnson observes:
“GHG forcing would trap heat more uniformly. This fingerprint matches enhanced solar input dominating the energy budget as indicated by CERES.”
“A screenshot of an Ai response is not science. Strong surface warming + upper cooling is also consistent with shortwave dominance. CERES and other satellites show the recent warming acceleration is driven primarily by increased absorbed shortwave radiation from declining albedo.”
I think he has a valid point. Increased absorption of shortwave radiation from the sun due to a declining albedo (a measure of the percentage of sunlight that the Earth’s surface reflects away).
Albedo has been declining, apparently driven by a combination of melting ice, changes in cloud cover, and land-use alterations.
Here’s confirmation from Science magazine, so it’s mainstream consensus stuff:
Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo
Why was the year 2023 so much warmer than expected? Anthropogenic forcing and El Niño have been suggested as at least part of the reason, but they cannot account for the magnitude of the temperature jump. Goessling et al. identify another cause: a record-low planetary albedo caused mainly by reduced low-cloud cover in the northern mid-latitudes and tropics. If this shift represents an excursion into a new normal, our future could be hotter faster than expected.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq7280
Oh yes I did. 🙂
He’s wrong. GHG doesn’t warm the atmosphere evenly. The lower atmosphere warms because increased GHG with increased heat absorption collide with oxygen and nitrogen and transfer heat to them but oxygen and nitrogen don’t radiate heat so it gets trapped. The upper atmosphere cools because the increase in CO2 increases the radiation of heat in the upper atmosphere into space because the atmosphere is so thin that when GHG absorb heat they radiate it into space as photons because there aren’t many collisions, and what collisions there are causes GHG to rob the heat from the oxygen and nitrogen and, again, release it into space.
All extremely well established.
And his low albedo argument isn’t a counterpoint, it’s just an additional dynamic (and presumable positive feedback loop) that’s further been contributing to warming recently.
That settles that then. 🙂
“Art Berman
@aeberman12
You can deny climate change but can’t explain 78 inches of rain in 20 days with “the rain in Spain”
Climate change doesn’t create storms—it intensifies the rain they deliver.
Warmer seas load storms with more moisture, while blocked patterns stall them in place.“?
https://x.com/aeberman12/status/2021419839965794755?s=20
postkey
when you enter into discussion with someone who is utterly convinced that the earth is flat—then your verbal interaction serves only to reinforce those ‘flat earth certainties’..
if on the other hand, you do not engage with the flatearther at all—then that also reinforces his certainties—ie–you have no argument that disproves the ”fact” that the earth is flat.
so you ”lose” on both counts… (according to the flat earther)…
best to recognise BS before you step in it—and walk away…
Crazy rain. An article said 10-20 inches in one day. Strange they couldn’t get a better measure on it. All you gotta do is empty out the rain meter when it fills up. Last month our rain meter hit 6.25 inches in a 24hr period. Definitely the most in a day since I’ve been here.
probably bill gates sneaking round filling up rain gauges, just like he used the go round every night adding irron filings to his vaccines in order the track people via his 5g masts.
That settles that then. 🙂
The science is never settled. It’s just that all too often a consensus gets established and dissent gets punished.
As an “anti-vaxer” and a “virus denier”, you must be very well aware of how politicized most big science is these days. 🙂
The upper atmosphere cools because the increase in CO2 increases the radiation of heat in the upper atmosphere into space because the atmosphere is so thin that when GHG absorb heat they radiate it into space as photons because there aren’t many collisions, and what collisions there are causes GHG to rob the heat from the oxygen and nitrogen and, again, release it into space.
If we assume this is true, for the sake of argument, then we need to take onboard the contribution of water vapor, which is underrated by the demonizers of carbon dioxide.
Overall, the stratosphere contains a tiny—although by no means trivial—amount of water vapor, significantly less than the troposphere, typically ranging from 1 to 10 ppm. However, the 2022 Hunga Tonga eruption injected around 146,000 tons of water vapor into the stratosphere. This increased the amount of water vapor in the stratosphere by roughly 1.4 ppm, or between 10 and 15 percent.
The concentration of CO₂ in the stratosphere is around 380 to 400 ppm. Which is much more impressive than the weak-as-piss 1 to 10 ppm of water vapor.
Asking an AI (which is al-gore- rhythmically biased towards the AGW narrative by the way), it told me the following:
When comparing CO₂ and H₂O (water vapor) molecule by molecule, water vapor is generally much more effective as a greenhouse gas. Here’s an overview of their relative strengths and impacts.
While exact numbers can vary based on conditions, studies suggest that:
For CO₂: At a concentration of 100 ppm, CO₂ would block a certain percentage of outgoing infrared radiation, contributing to the greenhouse effect.
For H₂O: At 100 ppm, water vapor would block a much higher percentage of outgoing radiation due to its greater absorption capabilities in the infrared spectrum.
How much greater?
For instance: The contribution of 100 ppm CO₂ in a theoretical zero H₂O atmosphere might block approximately 1-2% of the infrared radiation emitted by the Earth’s surface.
Conversely, 100 ppm H₂O could block around 30-50% of infrared radiation, illustrating its much higher efficacy as a greenhouse gas.
Wow! Each H2O molecule blocks 30 or more times as much IR radiation as each CO2 molecule does.
On a back of the cigarette carton calculation, this suggests that 1 to 10 ppm of H2O in the stratosphere could be blocking as much or more IR radiation as 30 to 300 ppm of CO2 would, further suggesting that the combinations of the two GHGs up there are close to equivalent.
Down here in the troposphere, of course, H20 is the undisputed champion GHG, blocking at least 10 times as much IR as all the other GHGs added together. But strangely, that is seldom mentioned and never emphasized.
And in 2022, an extra 10% of this super-powerful GHG H2O was injected into the stratosphere, just like that, by the Hunga Tonga eruption. No wonder the stratosphere is cooling.
There’s your criminal Poirot!
And it’s down there in Tonga!
It’s very simple.
By definition:
Rainfall is weather. So is sunshine. So is frost, sleet, snow, cloud and wind.
Again, by definition:
Climate is a measure/picture/model of the average weather in an area or region over an extended period of at least 30 years.
Yet again, by definition:
Weather is set of physical phenomena, while climate, is a statistical concept, not a physical phenomenon in any shape or form.
Ergo, climate cannot cause anything. Climate can only be a result.
Allegorically (or Al-Gore-ically?), one could say that weather is like a a landscape, while climate is like a landscape painting.
Weather is directly observable and measurable (e.g., temperature, precipitation). Climate represents aggregates and averages derived from those observable weather phenomena.
However, while climate itself is a statistical measure, changes in climate can be linked to observable effects, such as increased or decreased frequency or intensity of extreme weather events. But this is not the same as saying “climate changed caused this flood, or drought, or blizzard.” Speaking in those terms is an abuse of science and language.
It is only by refusing to understand this simple reality that people can continue arguing that climate or climate change is doing anything.
And Norman, calling someone a flat-earther just because they are exposing you BS is not a valid argument. It is just one more example illustrating your own intellectual poverty and barbarism.
Key Trends in Record Highs vs. Lows:
Daily Records: Daily record highs are outpacing lows, with a 3.5-to-1 ratio observed between 1930-2016.
Decadal Shift: During 2000-2010, the U.S. experienced twice as many record highs as record lows.
Intensity: Monthly record highs have outnumbered lows at a rate of 9.7 to 1, while all-time record highs outnumber all-time record lows 8.7 to 1.
Future Projections: Models indicate the ratio will escalate to 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by late century.
Oh well. Maybe we should consider just not one event.
There is a lot of fraudulent data on the heat side. Heat islands where temps are being measured. Asphalt islands etc. Additionally, there are sensors that no longer exist, and their temps are “attributed”…ie made up.
Well, you must of done a study yourself to verify that one, right Jesse?
I did myself because Im a skeptic like yourself
https://www.desmog.com/2010/01/21/urban-heat-island-myth-dead/
Zharkova’s main analysis is a principle component analysis (ie Fourier analysis) of the total solar magnetic field into pairs of eigen wave components that account in an analytically rigorous manner for the bulk of the magnetic field. That is what makes her analysis so shocking. Her model is merely the projection backward in time of these principle components for model verification, and projection forward in time for prediction. What is cool (no pun intended) about Zharkova’s work is she makes a bold, near term, falsifiable prediction. We will know in a 5-10 years whether her model is correct of not.
Given the endogenous warming function in the IPCC is false, the barycentre part of her analysis is what she uses to explain observed solar forcing coincident with observed warming in the last decade.
With C02, there is a 100% variance of it being or not being an acute causal factor of atmospheric warning.
The debate, if it ever existed, has devolved into a religious dispute between believers, and non-believers, where each cannot consider the antithesis of their position. A 800 year lag of atmospheric C02 after temperature increase, combined with the shockingly false and deceptive C02 endogenous heating factor in IPCC models is sufficient reason to consider the antithesis.
Suppose the climate change thesis true and also assume normal causality (an effect comes before a cause and the reality of the effect is contingent upon the reality of the cause); C02 causes atmospheric warming, which in turn causes aggregate ocean C02 release via melting ice and warming oceans, feeding into a positive feedback loop of more C02 and more warming. Adding photosynthetic C02 reduction here is not necessary, since it only serves to lower levels of CO2 in atmosphere, thus making the above scenario conservative by comparison. Under this scenario, C02 is still assumed to be a leading causal factor, necessitating that C02 increase come before temperature increase.
Assuming CO2 as the direct cause of temperature increase from ice core data is an invalid epistemic move on both rational and evidential grounds.
One cannot simply use, in any epistemically valid manner, lagging correlation of data in one temporal direction to posit causation in the reverse temporal direction. What climate change believers have proposed is the metaphorical equivalent of saying lung cancer caused people to smoke cigarettes, and moreover the cancer is the reason they become addicted.
It is one thing to say that as sequence of efficient causes contribute to a final cause. It is an entirely different, and indeed, absurd thing to say that the final cause is the efficient cause of itself.
Thanks shark. Can you please address my framing of what I believe is the logical fallacy you’re making, that I wrote above, to Tim? I ask this because of your last two paragraphs here which are just a more considered repetition of your first post. Also, see the link I posted to Tim, if you want.
Excellent.
My understanding was that the sun works in onion layers, and creates several major magnetic disruptions (including pole flips) which are predictable and will reduce solar outputs for a few years at a go. We have one starting now for 20 years before we continue to warm for the next 200 or so.
I recall she said that human CO contribution could only have contributed ~6% of the warming from the last ~100 years.
Somehow I missed the whole barycentre wobble argument, but perhaps I was late to the game, and it had been dismissed before I discovered her four or five years back.
Yes, I have been reading about GSM. The timing sucks the last 30 years of my life.
Perhaps there could be some benefits too.
For example, discouraging the vector [ in severity ] of future migration waves to colder yet still quasi affluent regions..
But primarily, it would mean nice gentle over wintering rain/snow melt soak into the land, aquifers etc.
Moreover, in some locations providing nice ( powerful flow ) spring season at the water wheel ( weir to mill-house capacity ) and so on.
Sadly, we are both likely at ~similar life-time junction so not much applied ( in active ) mode to us when speaking of this remaining span of ~30yrs.
Bottom line – I’d definitively rather vote for colder over hotter period – it’s what we ” whities ” are made for health-wise..
If you want to eat you should vote for hotter because with hotter comes more precipitation, generally speaking, and warm/hot and wet is ideal food growing weather.
the global population evolved to live where food supply is at an optimum level….
famines in different areas are anomalies which did not affect the overall population distribution….
that went on for millenia…, within a certain temperature balance
we have interrupted that sequence of ‘normality’ by growing food by artificial means, allowing people to thrive where they shouldn’t…
that has disturbed the temperature balance in ways we cannot control….hotter has effects we cannot foresee and control…
this will distrurb food growth ….outside those optimum growth patterns, thus we might produce far more food in one place, and far less in another, and we will not have the means or inclination to ship it from one place to another
(think of donnies antics right now)….
ie—survival becomes politicised…which is something you can’t vote for…
All true Norm. ‘Voting’ is overrated besides.
“with hotter comes more precipitation”
Well, that’s exactly what is not working like a clockwork everywhere..
this pattern changes across and within continents (through time) !
I did say generally speaking, Jr. Climate change is change. I’m white and I like the heat. But I also grew up spending summersin Cyprus. It’s not like the heat appears out of nowhere. If you’re an outdoor person, by the time the heat waves arrive you’re already used to hot summer weather. No big deal, enjoy the siesta. The year the forests burned in British Columbia we had 110F weather. Tolerable. Would mind some summer rains though.
Yes, as most recently [ Zharkova-GSM ] has been discussed under previous Gail’s article, and few yrs prior to that as well.
In terms of that forcing there will be both varied local-regional effects and also global impact, of different scale / duration / impact.
Cows are carbon neutral!
https://x.com/SamaHoole/status/2018774589153652913
This says:
Activist: “Every cow adds carbon to the atmosphere.”
Farmer: “Only if the total number of cows is increasing.”
Activist: “What?”
Farmer: “Stable populations are carbon neutral. Methane breaks down in twelve years back to CO2. Same CO2 the grass absorbed last year.”
Activist: “But it’s still emissions…”
Farmer: “It’s a cycle. Carbon goes: grass to cow to methane to CO2 to grass. Round and round.”
Activist: “That’s not how it works.”
Farmer: “That’s exactly how the biogenic carbon cycle works.”
Activist: “I’ve never heard of that.”
Farmer: “Because admitting ruminants are climate neutral doesn’t sell plant-based products.”
Activist: “You’re making this up.”
Farmer: “Published research. Look up ‘biogenic carbon cycle.’ I’ll wait.”
Google AI says:
The biogenic carbon cycle is a natural, fast-acting process where carbon is absorbed by plants via photosynthesis and released back into the atmosphere through respiration, decomposition, or combustion, typically over cycles of years to decades. It keeps carbon in active circulation between the biosphere, atmosphere, and soil, distinguishing it from the long-term, slow release of fossil carbon.
Countering the long-term slow release of fossil carbon, there is also the burial carbon cycle.
Google AI again:
The burial carbon cycle refers to the long-term geological process where organic carbon (from dead plants/organisms) and inorganic carbon are sequestered into sediments, sinking to the sea floor, and eventually becoming buried in, and forming, sedimentary rocks over millions of years. It is a critical, slow component of the global carbon cycle that removes CO2 from the atmosphere-ocean system, regulating oxygen levels and acting as a long-term storage sink.
NASA further explains that the global carbon cycle is further divided into the slow and fast cycles.
The Slow Carbon Cycle
The “slow” carbon cycle cycles on 100-200 million year time scales, moving carbon from rocks, to soil, ocean, and atmosphere. ‘Through a series of chemical reactions and tectonic activity, carbon takes between 100-200 million years to move between rocks, soil, ocean, and atmosphere in the slow carbon cycle. 10–100 million metric tons of carbon move through the slow carbon cycle every year. Compared to this amount, human emissions are 1015 grams. This means that 7 to 8 orders of magnitude more of carbon move through the slow carbon cycle as compared to human emissions.
The Fast Carbon Cycle
The “fast” carbon cycle includes biology, like plants and plankton. Plankton (microorganisms in the ocean) and plants can uptake carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and absorb it into their cells, creating sugar and oxygen through photosynthesis.
The burning of ‘fossil’ fuels is a gargantuan fast carbon cycling of a slow carbon cycle, like so many volcanoes popping off all the time.
The more significant number is
Cattle (cows) represent approximately 35% to 40% of the total biomass of all mammals on Earth. They are the single largest component of mammalian biomass, outweighing all wild mammals combined (which make up only about 4%–6%). Together, humans (34–36%) and livestock (60–62%) make up ~96% of all mammalian biomass.
Key Breakdown of Mammal Biomass (by weight):
Cattle (Cows/Buffalo): ~35–40%
Humans: ~34–36%
Other Livestock (Pigs, Sheep, Goats, etc.): ~20–25%
Wild Mammals (Land and Marine): ~4–6%
This massive imbalance highlights the dominance of human-driven agriculture over natural ecosystems. The total biomass of livestock is roughly 30 times that of all wild terrestrial mammals.
Another overshoot stat that is overlooked
Good point!
Yes, it’s unbelievable to say the least…
Welcome to the People Farm.
Soylent Green coming soon to a Wally World near you
Copilot roughly agrees. Asked about dinosaur biomass and was informed that it was substantially higher than mammals. Apparently this does not change if add in the biomass of human, dinosaurs still out weighed mammals.
Asked about CO2, much higher during Mesozoic than current but apparently had global photosynthesis 2x as today. Seems the darn volcanos are and issue.
Should CO2 increase to Mesozoic, dinosaurs might be an ecological issue for humans.
Note, dinosaurs seem to have had little control over the CO2 level. Wonder about flatulence.
Dennis L.
biomass volume is neither here nor there—
the problem arises when you try toexplain and justify biomass relative to cities and artificial infrastructure created by humans…
biomass adjusts to circumstance—-cities to not—other than the evitable terminal decay after humans leave.
Evitable?
That’s the opposite of inevitable, which I assume was your intended meaning.
I’d tame the excitement here a bit as early humans have lived after reaching planes of EuroAsia among giant swarms of wild animal herds, usually various types of horses/ponies and steppe bison, and even likely water buffalo in more moist parts of Asia; to some extent also previously in Africa proper with Zebras..
Mind you I don’t dispute the ~recent anthropo-focused switch to man pre-selected (lopsided balance) AG mass of animals as of now.. but lets not paint the past in false image either.
I agree. Ruminants have always been a keystone suborder, so I am guessing that they were 30%+ of animal mass also 100000 years ago. the difference is that now we have only 3 (plus buffaloes, camels, llamas, reindeer, yak, horses and donkeys, and dromedaries) whereas say 100,000 years ago there were several dozens.
Checked it further on wiki and there is supposedly even ongoing RU-Korea effort to “revive” 10k yrs old Yakut bison DNA sample found under perma ice..
That depends on which cows! The Leyen has now pushed through the Mercosur agreement against a lot of resistance. This will be used to deliver Australian and Brazilian cattle to Europe.
I am happy to increase the contact with Australians and Basilians, but, as every elementary school child can calculate, the CO2 footprint of a cow that has sailed across the Atlantic is greater than one that has spent all its life in the Alps or on the Waterkant or on Polish meadows.
I tried to post this but looks like it did not
Peking, 1910 (The Emperor still reigning – he was overthrown in 1912)
https://youtu.be/RtSVeDXuGPM?si=8EIr3IVa738GhF8a
This is the end state of a world ruled by strivers.
Other than the occasional signs in English, Peking in 1910 is little different from Kaifeng in 1120s (Kaifeng was the capital of China back then)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zA-SKCkqgE
No progress whatsoever in 900 years.
That is what Asian civilization is , what ‘talented’ Asians can bring, what the striving, hyper competitive but completely unimaginative peoples can accomplish.
Maintaining the harmony of heaven for 900 years is no small achievement.
What has the leadership of US or Europe done in the last 90 years? War, war and war.
That’s thanks to oil; the real progress was the Industrial Revolution, which fast-forwarded the timeline for human extinction to the mid-21st century.
yup
been trying to tell folks that for years
A lot of people say progresses ended on around 1971 or 72.
I sometimes quote this guy, who says there are strivers who disprove such theories that Gen Z is lazy and all that
https://greyenlightenment.com/2026/02/03/the-strivers-were-right-all-along/
>How does supposed laziness gel with all these stories and anecdotes of kids cramming advanced math and AP courses for competitive schools? Or grueling job interviews, assuming you even get a response at all? I would say it’s the opposite: From landing a decent job or getting into a decent college, everything has gotten more competitive and difficult. Even low-skilled jobs have this dynamic of more screening than ever, necessitating competence.
He cites an article from Human Invariant, a blog I do not know too much about, below
https://www.humaninvariant.com/blog/hyperoptimized
tl, dr, a lot of parents (they are mostly Asian , something this author does not mention) grind their children to put them into more elite class.
CTG should know about this than others but China had such system for centuries , ending in 1902. It was called the Imperial Examination system.
Hundreds of thousands would study for years, many failing (China had about 300 million in about 1800 but only a few hundred passed in the once-every-3-years exam)
such drilled super geniuses should have produced the best regime in the world, but what?
The Brits whipped the Chinese Empire in 1839
https://youtu.be/UmKR2SnvSno?si=ur9DzHt9dhHHo1p9
Tiger moms know how to game the system, but do they actually accomplish anything? I have not heard too much about it.
The daughters of the famous Tiger Mother, Professor Amy Chua, graduated from Harvard and one graduated from Harvard Law and another from Yale Law. A certain delusionist here might call them ‘talented’, but their good positions might come from the factor that their parents are famous, a trait the Imperial Chinese Exams also had since the more powerful families would introduce their sons to those likely to be the exam administrators who would recognize the writing style without seeing the names.
In the blogs I posted above, the Gunn High School in Palo Alto is mentioned. Apparently it is a hyper elite school.
Let’s see what is the student composition of that hyper elite school.
https://www.niche.com/k12/henry-m-gunn-high-school-palo-alto-ca/students/
“Asian” 46.6%
“White”(mostly from India and Middle East) 28.8%
“Hispanic” (whites who can claim one Spanish speaking person in their ancestry, which is the only way for them to attend their) 12.3%
“Multiracial” (mostly ‘white’ fathers and ‘Asian’ mothers) 10.5%
Not exactly the kind of people who are going to lead the world to the next stage.
49% of these students are already ‘stressed’.
Chinese history up to 1902 shows no shortage of such sociopathic elites who would spend virtually all the time plotting to get rid of rivals to reach power, while doing absolutely nothing to improve the situation, partly to make up for all the sacrifices they made to pass the exam.
Such strivers will just make the world look like Imperial China.
Peking, 1910 (the Emperor was still there – he was deposed in 1912)
Which is the end state of the world run by strivers.
Such strivers are no better than zombies, and giving them power only means a zombiefied world.
I get moved when Kulm ignores the elephant in the room. These kids do not have to cram math, they only need to marry into a certain tribe to advance. But Kulm is oblivious to it all.
Well, Dr. Chua did marry into the tribe.
That aside, these strivers are worse than useless.
The better ones ar back home. by western standards, these are the best you are going to get. you can’t have Harvard 100% chews afterall.
You are a racist freak. You seem to care nothing for depletion, and spouting nonsense about Asians is your belief.
Listen, even if only white people existed in the world, humanity would not be able to explore the universe, and its fate would be the same as it is now, awaiting extinction.
The presence of Asians does not lower the IQ of white people. Einstein was a man, and so am I, but I am not proud of being the same gender as Einstein. You, a loser, are proud because you are of the same race as white scientists.
Whenever kulm’s lamenting about a past that never was and a future that never will(singularity), just quote Sophocles.
“Think no longer that you are in command here, but rather think how, when you were, you served your own destruction”
Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, 429 B.C
Although Mencken, or even Twain, have provided suitable material, if you consider how far we have fallen, from the imaginary god status that we endowed upon ourselves.
A brief history of some of our “achievements”
“All historical rights are invalid against the rights of the stronger and it is . . . the right of the stronger race to annihilate the lower”
Alexander Tille
https://les7eb.substack.com/p/genocide-and-economics?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
It does crowd out the peoples who had driven civilization in the last 500 years from the more prestigious institutions.
The infamous case of Yau Shing-tung and his Cantonese speaking gang driving Perelman into exile is one of them.
This is what Terrence Tao, Fields medal winner, has ended up now
https://greyenlightenment.com/2025/08/21/the-daily-view-8-21-2025-bitcoin-falls-terence-tao-funding-cut-epstein/
>It’s disingenuous for him to say his funding has been cut when he’s earning a whopping $700k/year as a tenured professor:
> Terence Tao, a renowned mathematician and UCLA professor, earns a salary that includes base pay, other pay, and benefits, totaling over $700,000 annually, according to OpenPayrolls and Transparent California. In 2022, his total pay and benefits reached $712,532, according to Transparent California. His base salary alone was $529,113, according to Transparent California.
>To put this in perspective, his salary is comparable to even FAMNG+ senior staff, or senior quants or investment bankers–but for life due to tenure. Hundreds of other math professors are able to do their jobs on far smaller salaries and without special grants. Others have framed it as a free speech issue, but he has tenure. A government contract however is not protected and can be terminated at will.
and turned Woke
>In 2020, he was a signee of a UCLA open letter to “condemn acts of racist violence:”
The world would have lost nothing if they lobotomized Tao.
And so on. Left to themselves, all they can accomplish is the procession in 1910.
What Kulm sees correctly is that we are a civilization of losers who pass the time with mutual insults and refuse to perceive incongruities or think things through. Kant’s “self-inflicted immaturity” applies to 90% of people today – regardless of which “race”. This is also a matter of self-discipline, which is very low. We waste our resources and our time with nonsense instead of taking humanity further so that it benefits when it can no longer use so much excess energy.
EIA has posted a figure for world crude oil production for last October (86.361 Mb/d) — this is 0.1% lower than their previous highest monthly figure (86.428 Mb/d, for last September).
This includes the light-oil-fracking totals, which have increased while the amounts of “middle distillate” oil (for such as diesel or jet fuel) have tended to stagnate.
Is the world past “peak oil”, given the chronically flagging oil prices? ( http://oil-price.net/ , https://davecoop.net/seneca )
https://www.eia.gov/international/data/world/petroleum-and-other-liquids/monthly-petroleum-and-other-liquids-production?pd=5&p=0000000000000000000000000000000000vg&u=0&f=M&v=mapbubble&a=-&i=none&vo=value&t=C&g=00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001&l=249-ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvnvvvs0008&s=94694400000&e=1759276800000
In a different comment, Dr. Alhajji claimed that oil production of Kazakhstan is down recently, but that is no doubt after October, so that would not affect the EIA report you show.
I notice the latest OPEC oil balance estimate seems to be leading to a small oil surplus in 2026.
I do wish people would quote oil output in units of energy not volume. If we’re moving from mainly heavy oil to very light oil, or even to natural gas liquids, it makes a big difference. The volumetric output of ‘oil’ could be rising while the energy content of the oil’ is falling.
For instance:
One litre of diesel contains 10.8 kilowatt-hours *
1 ltr of LPG [mainly propane, some butane and heavier molecules] contains 7.1 kWh *
* Higher heating value.
About a 33% reduction in energy per unit volume.
Of course, ethanol is a lower energy density product that is used to extend gasoline supply.
The US government has tended to push volume information. I believe that has been to disguise the fact that the US oil supply is providing less and less energy per unit of volume. The decline in energy per capita can be hidden.
Wind turbine blades freeze in cold weather in Finland, curbing green power output.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/electricity-market-fcked-finland-wind-turbine-blades-freeze-curbing-green-power-output
Finland has prided itself as a global leader in decarbonization, boasting the second-highest share of renewables in final energy consumption across the EU. But the green utopia narrative has cracked under the strain of a brutal winter, as cold weather has brought wind power generation to a near standstill.
Most of the country’s wind capacity is concentrated in western Finland, where temperatures are well below freezing, and these adverse weather conditions have led to dangerous ice buildup on turbine blades. According to Bloomberg, this forced the grid operator Fingrid Oyj to curtail wind power output.
There seems to be a workaround if an operator uses heated blades, but most wind turbines in Finland don’t use them.
Hi Gail. Thank you.
Do you have any thoughts / articles on NGL replacing diesel? The viability and/or (dis-)benefits? How realistic that is?
I read China is pursuing this due to it’s reliance on oil.
I have heard about this also. I think that some of China’s trucks are smaller than the big semi-trucks used in the United States. But China has little natural gas. They are trying to import it through pipelines from Russia. NGLs are normally a whole lot cheaper than oil, but pumping the natural gas from Russia would add costs. With small trucks, the expense for drivers is higher. It takes more trucks to get materials where they need to go. It isn’t necessarily a way that leads to efficiency.
But do you need drivers? Seems like autonomous trucks are the future. I try and game plan all this but I am still waiting to see what they do about currency collapse in all countries. I don’t think the current system survives past 2030…
Perhaps you have seen a recent employment service proffered by A.I. directed at human workers. The tags, “A.I. needs your body” or A.I. can’t touch grass,” implements a gig opportunity for humans to fulfill needs directed by the A.I.
Considering the trucking industry: The autonomous operation cannot step out of the truck to refuel, shackle, tie down and tarp a flatbed, perform trailer PMCS, change a flat tire, brush of snow buildup which obscures trailer lights, etc., etc. However, a human team could be posted at fueling stations to service the autonomous vehicles.
An issue in trucking in USA is overnight parking at both public, non-service Rest Areas and private, service Truck Stops. Including current weigh stations located along Interstates and these Rest Areas and Truck Stops; the cost of a per mile human operator can be removed from shipping costs, trucks can operate continuously, without DOT required driver breaks and be checked and maintained by unique humans at multiple points along route.
There is significant change occurring in Tennessee to remove drivers based on their incapacity to operate truck dutifully and safely as regulated by DOT and FMCSA. Driving a truck is a hazardous occupation for the driver, they are not physically healthy in general and they push their limits and regulations for profit. Perhaps autonomous shipping can be cheaper and safer and quicker.
definitely sounds like a game changer
Is this a tipping point ? Core MAGA turns against Trump .
https://mishtalk.com/economics/farm-lobby-sends-damning-letter-to-congress-about-trumps-tariffs/
when donnie was elected in 2015—i pointed out that every business he started ended in collapse and bankruptcy…
and that USA inc. would be no different…
and here we are 10 years down the line…
Businesses are dissipative structures. This is not surprising.
Well, Norman is correct, evidently Don’s modus operandi was always to nudge the acceleration of said [ dissipation ] ..
it seems rather unusual when EVERY business he started crashed
But he hosted a very successful TV Entertaining Series…and had his name placed on all of them..
In the interest of not letting Norman mislead the readership on the issue of Trump’s businesses, I would like to state for the record that the Trump Organization (the primary holding company for Trump’s businesses), Trump Hotels (a venture that includes several hotels, with a focus on luxury brands), and Trump’s several golf courses worldwide are all still operating and have not crashed as of this comment.
Also, I’d like to remind everyone that between January 2021 and January 2025, the US was presided over by Joe Biden’s handlers, who made a complete pig’s breakfast and dog’s dinner of the country, dismantling Trump’s reforms, not letting him build his wall, and restoring his dismantling of BarackObama’s policies. Otherwise, no doubt everything stateside would be tickety boo and hunky dory. 🙂
He has golf courses that have not gone under. My wife played at one of them in New York. It was fantastic.
[ Time-space ] compression now ?
Few day ago the British PM delivering speech in Parliament was trembling so much he had to literally handcuff it by the other hand down to the pulpit.
Now, ongoing police raid in the London house of British Ambassador in Wash. DC, who was in previous gov roles evidently selling state secrets for decades.
Today, top RU general assassinated inside the apart. bldg.
EU’s energy import links still severed.
Moreover, in the ME / Iran it seems the war can begin any moment.
Folks, these are NOT normal times..
Don’t leave out civil war among the CCP.
Yes, that’s a major one as well.
One could only wonder is it chiefly defense apparatus related or more about proper political factions duking it out among themselves for ultimate power.
“Few day ago the British PM delivering speech in Parliament was trembling so much he had to literally handcuff it by the other hand down to the pulpit.”
Immediately after that speech all the British newspapers and political analysts were saying that Starmer was finished and that he couldn’t come back from that. He was already seen by the public as the lamest prime minister in years (well, not forgetting Liz Truss) and was not at all popular.
“Now, ongoing police raid in the London house of British Ambassador in Wash. DC, who was in previous gov roles evidently selling state secrets for decades.”
This is absolutely astonishing and disgusting. Peter Mandelson was one of the top personalities in Tony Blair’s government. And here he was, in 2009, immediately forwarding confidential information from the UK prime minister and chancellor to a foreign crook like Epstein. He was behaving like the worst spy and traitor. I’ll bet he didn’t imagine for a second that his treachery would come out all these years later in the fashion that it has, through information released in the USA at the behest of the president.
Mandelson resigned very quickly from the Labour party and the House of Lords, no doubt trying to seem to redeem himself by his swift acceptance of his guilt. I’ll bet he is crapping himself now. He’ll probably go to prison for a very long time. Some commenter on a newspaper made a very crude joke about the treatment he could expect to encounter in prison, given that he is gay. I even wonder now whether he will attempt suicide, given that he must realise that he is going to be banged up for years.
Certainly I would expect that we Brits will have a new prime minister within 2 months. We seem to be getting through them at quite a rate recently.
The drugs don’t work they just make Keir worse but we know we’ll see his shake again.
Given the Big Nuclear Scare kicks off this week or next, I’d say two months til Farage is PM is perfect timing. Good call Dem.
RE: Starmer, I was picturing that parliament scene more as this lost lamb PM, basically derivative of a puppet to a sidekick of a handler of ..
SUDDENLY just facing cumulative salvo of rapidly devolving multi-dimensional crisis, he thought not ever singed up to in the first place.
The bonus of the scene were some of the older bruised veteran backbenchers jovially watching – gauging this spectacular meltdown.
Someone correct me If I’m wrong, but given the peculiarities of the UK polit system, Farage won’t get anywhere close power this round anyway.
Only if there are called new elections and Tories splinter into Reform party picked him up as leader and then the public won’t go for some reformed Labor guy instead again (top % as of now).
Two sequential conditions, i.e. NOT likely at all, Farage must wait some more for possibly even deeper crisis..
Actually as some Tories call it, Farage is great opposition-critique person BUT not party leader-PM material..
( for now :_ )
I’ll have to defer to your structural deference of his current electability then Jr since I don’t have the foggiest clue about any of that, thanks.
“Someone correct me If I’m wrong, but given the peculiarities of the UK polit system, Farage won’t get anywhere close power this round anyway.”
You’re quite right. If Reform came second in every constituency in England and Wales in the next general election, they would not get a single seat in parliament. That is because we do not have proportional representation in the UK.
Labour won a huge majority in the last general election. That was because of tactical voting – not because Labour was popular. Most people were so tired of the Tories by this time that they just wanted the Tories out of government. So they looked at the options and said, “Well, I would prefer to vote Lib Dem or Green now, but they won’t win in my constituency and that could let the Tories in again. Therefore I will reluctantly vote for the candidate most likely to defeat the Conservatives, and that is Labour”.
If Reform ever did form a government, I expect that Scottish independence would become a burning issue once more. A Norstat poll published in September 2025 found that 53% of Scots would vote for independence, indicating recent fluctuations in public opinion. I expect that this would surge to over 60% in the unlikely event that Farage became prime minister in the near future.
“Banged up” for years in prison?
You certainly have a way with words.
For some background on Manday, let’s go back, way back to 1998, in fact, to this Politico article.
Prince of darkness
CONTINENTAL observers of British political attitudes towards the EU could be forgiven for asking themselves how much has really changed since Labour took power in May last year.
The press is still largely negative, London remains officially sceptical about swathes of integrationist policies and Prime Minister Tony Blair will still drop whatever he is doing at the siren call of a US president.
But despite such outward signs of ‘business as usual’, there has been a significant shift in government thinking and that is due, in no small part, to the legendary ‘prince of darkness’ himself, Peter Mandelson.
The 44-year-old trade and industry minister is the most ardently pro-European member of the British cabinet. Unlike many of his colleagues, who feel the single currency could work but fear its effects on employment, Mandelson is a true believer.
In a speech to the European University Institute in Florence nine months ago, he described UK policy towards Europe as “a quarter-century of some achievement but, in the main, of missed opportunity”. If the UK managed to become a key player in the development of the Union, this would, he said, “be a great historical achievement; a political revolution in Britain’s relations with Europe”. Mandelson never knowingly understates his case.
During the tempestuous parliamentary battles over ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, he was conspicuous as its champion. “A monetary policy implemented by a European Central Bank has a far better chance of achieving rational coordination of policies than the present arrangement,” he told the House of Commons.
This would be a lot less interesting were it not for the fact that Mandelson is exceedingly close to Blair. Indeed, Blair once claimed that his project would only be “complete when the Labour Party learns to love Peter”.
If that is the case, Blair is decades away from achieving his goal. Mandelson is, without rival, the most hated man in the Labour Party. Indeed, so loathed was the new minister last summer that comedian, writer and actor Stephen Fry, coincidentally the star of the 1992 film Peter’s Friends, took out a full page in a London newspaper to defend his pal “Mandy” as a charming fellow.
To his many enemies, Mandelson is seen as the ‘evil genius’ behind the modernisation of the Labour Party; a Svengali-like character who has hypnotised the Labour leader into dumping Socialism in favour of a vague ‘third way’ and an American-style obsession with presentation…….
https://www.politico.eu/article/prince-of-darkness/
Bud Fox – “Why do you need to wreck this company?”
Gordon Gekko – “Because it’s wreckable, alright?”
Wall Street, 1987 dir. O. Stone
Apparently, Trump golf courses and hotels are ‘too big to fail.’
the buildings side of his business was started by his father
“So what’s all this bullshit about his father’s keiretsu?”
“Bullshit? There’s a keiretsu war going on. A corporation never stands alone. A keiretsu is a united front of hundreds of powerful companies all acting in partnership to win.”
“To win what?”
“Whatever’s there. You ever hear, ‘business is war’? The war is never over.”
Rising Sun, 1993
Many(probably most) family businesses have failed over the long run. They have either been devalued and taken over through stock manipulations, out-competed possibly through labor or legal manipulations or collapsed by mismanagement and corruption.
New York real estate and development seems like a tough market. An example of such a failed family business is the architectural firm Emery Roth & Sons. Emery founded the practice in 1903 and was responsible for many buildings. In 1973 the firm, 25 years after Emery’s death, finished WTC 1&2. In 1987 the firm finished WTC7. In 1996 the firm closed its doors.
Conspiracy probabilities notwithstanding, this firm with numerous iconic buildings (Look Bldg 488 Madison, Pan Am/MetLife Bldg, GM Bldg 767 Fifth, Citicorp Center 601 Lexington, 345 Park, Lotte Palace Hotel, Park Lane Hotel, 77 Water St, 17 State St.) all still standing along with the WTC bldgs went out of business.
Just a completely failed, incompetent, noncompetitive, broken firm that finally ran their daddy’s biz into the ground. Nothing to see here. NYC real estate is too hard. We cannot handle it. We quit.
PS I love you Norm, keep on painting and exercising and reminding us what you said when you first said it and how it was clearly foreseen despite there being no evidence of Ldurz, a deepstate nor any string-pullers.
we pull our own strings
which is why predictions are so easy to make…
no fortune telling involved….my ebay crystal ball is a fake.
They are powerless, so no. What can do the Don in is someone else with a different plan to impose unipolarity. the PTB buys it, he gets impeached and we go in a different direction. But I would guess they are going to let him do his thing until greenland, venezuela and cuba are secured.
What would the US want with Cuba?
Plan B if Ritzification of the Gaza strip fails. Location, location, location.
Location in respect to Mexico and various others is the present thought on Cuba. Control that and no Atlantic access for anyone not on side, all the way down to Guyana.
Cuba isn’t strategic in any way. That’s why it’s still a commie funk in the unwashed American armpit.
It’s just Greenland-style atmospherics in service of the ’empire of chaos’ engineered narrative which is itself in service of America First national socialism.
I visited Cuba a few years ago. It worked with slave labor, to grow sugar. But it has not been doing well at all, for a long time. It depends on diesel for electricity, mostly.
“Cuba isn’t strategic in any way”
A map and history show otherwise.
All the latest efforts would suggest that has changed little, just some tweaking for the present game and the pressure put on Mexico not to supply any oil shows that clearly.
I like how Nel puts it.
“In other words: the leopard hasn’t changed its spots, but it has moved from hunting trips to building a zoo. The Joint Action Plan is about fencing and caging the terrain itself”
https://substack.com/@nelbonilla/note/c-211202633?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=7c6fx
Refer back to that map.
“America First national socialism”
Now there’s a narrative that needs some serious engineering, to make it believable. Corporate Communitarianism doesn’t sell and if you can convince people that the Nazis were in anyway socialist, rather than corporate, they’ll probably fall for anything, even a lifelong corporate stooge like Farage.
Why are you so adamant about a nuclear scare?
Would it happen in the US, or is that not allowed?
Not Iran or Ukraine, that would be too obvious.
In the US, it’s full steam ahead from all, so there should be a fair bit of scope for a major faux pas.
“Trump has ordered the DOE to quadruple American nuclear energy capacity at warp speed, gutting safety regulations so as to incentivize the private firms lining up at the federal trough. The US has already committed more than $80 billion to accelerate the construction of new and rehabilitated reactors throughout the country, including $1 billion to reopen the notorious Three Mile Island plant, which will now service the energy requirements of a massive Microsoft data center.
Meanwhile, quietly but energetically, Washington has launched an aggressive new form of nuclear imperialism. Trump pressured the World Bank to end its ban on funding nuclear energy and has already executed a $100 billion investment deal to thrust American nukes on the people of the UK. The US is pursuing similarly coercive agreements with Poland, Romania, India, Croatia, et al. No doubt Africa is next: Already, dangerous, dirty uranium mining is a booming business in Namibia and Niger. At least 22 countries have pledged to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050 and, according to Morgan Stanley, $2.2 trillion in nuclear power investments can be expected over the next two decades. In all likelihood this projection will be revised upward regularly.”
https://cordeliers.substack.com/p/the-socialist-case-for-radiation?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2
Ignore the ranting at the start, he’s a Marxist and they’re all a bit paranoid.
Thanks for the correction Gail: since peak diesel is the new peak oil, cutting Cuba loose from diesel imports is strategic.
Fitz the US pressuring Mexico to not ship oil to Cuba doesn’t make Cuba strategic. It makes Mexico strategic…
Your reflections on my national socialism call doesn’t amount to a hill of beans because of your biased antipathy towards the Third Reich. Your loss.
Regarding the nuclear push you detailed: did you learn nothing from the Great Reset misdirection play? The answer to that would be yes because you still believe it is the plan except now you call it Agenda 2030.
I’m adamant about the BNS because they’ve been setting up the pattern for years. But before they even started setting up the pattern, I called the BNS because the Elites put their pants on one leg at a time just like us and they’ve read their William Catton just like us, and the BNS is the only optimized Problem worthy of presentation in the Problem-Reaction-Solution of dealing with the spent fuel pools. In the meantime the misdirection play creates GDP.
Gabbard stated her opposition to nuclear power as recently as her 2020 presidential run. She’s a old school Progressive socially Conservative on some stuff. Left Conservative Libertarian. Old school US progressivism IS a contemporary national socialism Fitz. Anti- Federal Reserve, etc. It’s the modern heir to Jeffersonian republicanism. She grew up working in her parents’ vegan health food store and picking up trash on her local beach. She’s devout Hare Krishna and nuclear power is evil to that belief system. See the Patterns.
I meant Jay Hansen and Olduvai theory, and not William Catton. The BNS is the event that provides political cover for the transition from “the slope” to “the slide.” The slide is for decommissioning what industrialism there is that requires safely decommissioning.
The Higher Power that is the Hand co-opted conspiracy theory culture by feeding the narrative that the Elites are monsters and transmogrifying those monsters into mere bureaucrats and technoligarchs so that an enlightened DA could be carried out under cover.
Allstate. You’re in safe hands with us. Unless you’re collateral damage.
The US does not want Russian nor Chinese nuclear missiles based just three minutes flying time from Trumps Mar A Logo. Just as China does not want nuclear missiles on Taiwan just nine minutes flight time from Beijing.
Good point. If I remember correctly, the distance of Cuba from the US is only 90 miles.
Correct but the n. war assumptions are evolving through time as well.
Initially, when each side had many (dozen) thousands of MIRVs (multiple tipped “bombs” per rocket) the idea was total annihilation with likely sever planetary after-effects, such as possible destruction of ozone layer, tsunamis, toxic rain, extended dark / winter season etc. The war was taken seriously by the elites.
Well, after the negotiated arms reduction, there are way fewer missiles. And here comes the clincher, in this new situation RU/CHN are mightily disadvantaged vs the US..
Because, several (most) scenarios could lead to n. war across EuroAsia landmass, e.g. ME conflict which ends up with the indo-paki n. exchange, then CHN/RU and US could step in as well, or ~limited US vs RU/CHN exchange could be boosted by the ME dynamics into full global war as well.
In each case the n. theater is largely confined to that said EuroAsian landmass and its concentrated dense network of pop centers in clusters. While, the reduced number of missiles aimed at the US would have to aim “only” the primary targets. Therefore it’s very likely that large parts of Canada, Mexico, South A. would be spared of most of the worst after-effects. Hence also the recent increased elevated interest of merger into the US proper.
In simple terms the US has been over many recent decades provided with lucky series of ace-cards, the also rans of the world just watched in awe, and tried at max various coping strategies.
US enjoyed the over-privilige of global reserve currency. Also it was beneficiary with influx of brain(-drain) from around the world NOT paying for it, while the “donor” societies had to manage that fine elaborate domestic substrate of surplus care to produce such exportable young elites on the plate: schools, healthcare, econ social stability.. In short US sucked out all the surplus value out of the entire world, monetized – oversubscribed it, and in the meantime in blaze fashion let atrophied its own domestic institutions. And now still has enough sway to force re-shoring / re-patriation of some industries, although the long term end result is obviously not given..
I guess this whole situation rhymes with past examples of [ mega empires ], which were extremely resistant to be toppled over in expedient scenario, usually it took way longer.. and incl. many twists and detours..
Guantanamo Bay Organic Farm Work Prison Island???
MAGA tipping point happened six months ago or whatever. It’s now in the crash and burn stage.
More thermodynamic drag…
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2026/02/05/more-thermodynamic-drag/
Interesting! Tim Watkins points out that stealing copper from infrastructure and reselling it has become a big business in England. The court system cannot handle it. It is already backlogged, and the prisons are filled. It has no way to deal with the situation.
When government handling of crime becomes too expensive, some workarounds become necessary. Quick, but inhumane, punishments are likely to become common again. Cutting off a hand, for example. Or public flogging. Or death sentence for fairly minor crimes.
Another option is that religious beliefs become greater. In many cultures, there is a bad outcome if you make a living stealing someone else’s property. God will punish you, either now, or in the here-after. I understand that in some African belief systems, you will become sick if you steal.
Breaking the oil glut narrative .
https://open.substack.com/pub/anasalhajjieoa/p/anas-alhajji-debunking-the-2026-oil?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
There is a transcript of this 1.5 hour video.
https://www.macrovoices.com/guest-content/list-guest-transcripts/6068-transcript-of-the-podcast-interview-between-erik-townsend-and-dr-anas-alhajji-4/file
It is a very detailed interview. He starts out by talking about future production not being a high as planned. Kazakhstan’s oil production [temporarily?] dropped by 700,000 to 800,000 barrels per day, recently. Anas Alhajji seems to blame this reduction on actions of Russia because it wants to hurt Chevron because of its role in Venezuela.
He then claims that demand will be higher than the IEA is forecasting, because of the cold winter. He points out that Iran had a very cold winter and, because of this, cut off natural gas exports to Iraq. Without natural gas, Iran was forced to burn oil, increasing its oil demand.
Also, the winter storms reduced oil production in several countries recently, including the US.
He points out that Saudi Arabia is trying to increase religious tourism, and that the higher tourism will increase Saudi Arabia’s oil consumption during Ramadan.
Also, during 2025, China has been storing up oil, as well as coal and natural gas. This seems to be a strategic decision, as if they are preparing for war or sanctions. This has not been considered. [What will happen in 2026?]
Dr. Alhajji believes that the IEA tends to underestimate the US’s demand. Its estimate or the latter part of 2025 was too low.
He also says, “. . .if, for some reason, oil prices start rising, China will do the dirty work for President Trump, because we know from the last 10 years when Brent basically goes above 70, they start releasing oil from that inventories they have.” . .”in general, prices are expected to be in the 60s, range bound, because the bearish story has no legs, and China is going to use its inventories to prevent prices from going up.”
What Dr. Alhajji says does indirectly lead to a good point. There is sort of a “goldilocks” price for oil. It seems to in the 60s for Brent, and a bit lower for WTI.
While there are some individual members of OPEC that would like to ramp up their production, so as to increase their total revenue, it is not in the interest of producers of oil to see the price much lower, and it is not in the interest of buyers of oil to see it much higher.
Furthermore, both buyers and sellers have the ability to somewhat adjust the amount of oil in the marketplace. A big piece of this comes from release of stored oil or additions to stored oil. My telephone discussions with someone who worked in Saudi Arabia indicates that Saudi Arabia even has stored oil that it can add to or release, to manipulate supposed production to match demand.
I personally am skeptical of Hubert Linearization adding very much to our knowledge of what the shape of the curve will be in the future. Technology improvements lead to some movement from “resources” to “reserves.” And government policies are likely to try to match production (together with fuel storage) with demand. If we look at the sum of large number of curves of the type of a Hubbert Curve, it can be of a very different shape than the individual curve.
Thanks for the text version.
Yes, it seems the more useful data set to follow forward will be like yours Figure4 [ type of oil ] trends reaching the market..
“it can be of a very different shape than the individual curve”
Thanks. I have always found this point implausible!
I have been away for a few years but I did not leave this site. I just lurk. I have said this before, maybe a decade ago. The best time to transition to whatever new energy for human beings is at the tail end of the old energy. In our case, it will be around 1960s and 1970s.
After 1970s, all sorts of financial trickery were used to extract oil and debts were racked up. “Interconnectedness” (sic) grew; dependence between countries grew and technology allowed communication to be instantaneous. There was an undeclared China-Russian border conflict in 1969. Most people will not know because news were slow and the conflict had nothing to do with them. Think about it, what will happen to all of us if that conflict happened today. The economy of the world would crash.
All new energy sources that we are suppose to get – nuclear, fusion, whatever.. they are all moot. They are not scalable, too late, too expensive and does not solve our needs.
Let us do a thought experiment….
Let us say Saudi Arabia found an extremely gigantic patch of crude oil in the empty quarters. It was a “perfect oil” with the highest quality and literally one just needs to stick a 10-foot straw and the the “perfect oil”will gush out.
If this is 1970s, hooray, we will have oil for the next 1000 years. Life proceeded to be great. No debts, no financial shenanigans. Low “lowinterconnectedness” between countries and lower complexity meant nothing big will happen.
If this is 2026, upon the announcement and with immediate effect (in a complex economy):
1. The entire chain of company that is into renewable energy and EVs will go belly up. Their debts, which is an assets pension funds, etc will be worthless
2. Multinational oil companies will go bankrupt as they have expensive oil and Saudi has super cheap oil
3. The oil price and futures will crash so much (probably close to zero)and it will ripple through the financial sector. With such high complexity in our present day (not to mention instant communication) system, this will break our entire social and economic fabric.
The whole point I am saying here is that complex “solutions” emerged and some parts of the solution was meant to “solve” the energy issue. (Example : the cheap loans to oil companies that enabled them to extract expensive oil.) We are so deep into this “make believe prosperity” and it allowed an immense population boom that has led us into unsustainable territory.
If a simple and cheap source of energy cannot even help humanity anymore, what more complex sources like fusion, etc?
Yes, as has been discussed previously, fusion is very complex for the generated output, in the effort it’s similar concept to large water dam project where you have to “frontload it” with giant amount of rock and earth material removal, and then concrete-rebar up. While in fusion you have to firstly develop lot of specific boundary hitec ingredients (chiefly in material science) to complete the otherwise “easy” project. So, it’s slowly ongoing effort but no rush..
What they are likely aiming at for the interim (depending on locale US vs CHN/RU), and beyond looking at new ~Arctic shale/lng domains, are
perhaps space based solar, and various uranium extenders be it burning the rest of the arms stockpile and or various spent fuel toyz, breeders, etc. That’s all known basic brutal techno sphere available either now or soonish.
Hence larger %prob something out of this rank would turn out.
Nevertheless, the overall profile-trajectory of growth will most likely stall at best for the forthcoming era. Some would call it necessary re-adjustment intermezzo, some would call it initiation of collapse sequence proper.
I am afraid that we have been into overshoot for a long time. We have figured out ways to “kick the can down the road” for a while. More debt at lower interest rates seemed to help, for example. And international trade, to get more coal out, and transfer a lot of manufacturing to China. The Kyoto Protocol greatly helped international trade.
It is difficult to see a new workaround. The Japanese article suggests that we are at peak semiconductor, the way semiconductors are made now.
Correct! That’s why I don’t believe in pop reduction either.
“The whole point I am saying here is that complex “solutions” emerged and some parts of the solution was meant to “solve” the energy issue. (Example : the cheap loans to oil companies that enabled them to extract expensive oil”
I think what you are trying to say is that industrial civilization , partially thanks to the triumph of capitalism, due to its inherent structure, or lack of flexibility, or brittleness, can only process complex and expensive solutions like green energy and the low eroi fossil fuels.
I’m not sure how true this is.
“If a simple and cheap source of energy cannot even help humanity anymore, what more complex sources like fusion, etc?”
The business communities, which for the sake of argument I’m going to exclude bankers, seem to welcome simple and cheap solutions . Most of the hype around A.I. is that it will make operating a business cheaper and simpler. Non-bankers don’t care about loans going bad and pension funds disappearing. They are hyper-focused on the benefits that a new, simple and cheap source of (productivity) energy would produce. Failing businesses and rising unemployment is called “disruption” and they seem to crave it. They simply think everyone would be able to migrate to the new, cheap and simple solution and that it would benefit everyone after a period of “adjustment”.
That said, disruption is only okay if it is coming from countries within the N._.T.O coalition, to the business community. Otherwise, it is a military challenge. The U.S.S.A’s reaction to Japan’s success in the 1980s is very similar to The U.S.S.A’s ‘s response to Ch_na’s success in the 21 st century. Rus3’s energy reserves are bad because they are not under N._.T.O control.
Shell CEO on CNBC WORLD:
“the world needs more oil. We’re growing at 1 million b/d demand at the moment, consistently. And natural declines on existing fields are around 5 million b/d. So we’re having to replenish around 6% of global production every single year.”
https://x.com/Energy_Tidbits/status/2019412765257969703
We need heavy oil in the 1 million barrels a day of oil, not just the light stuff we keep getting from shale formations.
One commenter on this thread said, “Venezuela fixes that.” Only if the production can be ramped up at reasonable cost.
“As the years have progressed, the estimates of oil and gas reserves in the US have dramatically risen. Estimates change over time due to technological advances and other factors, which the “peak oil” theory doesn’t take into consideration. “?
https://expose-news.com/2026/02/06/the-great-oil-conspiracy-chapter-6/?utm_campaign=T-ANP&utm_medium=email&utm_source=es
Even if we found more oil wouldn’t it be eaten up by AI? The only constraint in it is the limited amount of supply
AI devours electricity, not oil. Oil is only used for electricity generation when other cheaper, fuels are not available. Coal and natural gas are near the top for electricity generation.
Nat,
I used to have the limits to growth model simulator. And even if you added extra earth. We would grow till around 2060 and collapse. It would only buy another 30 years. Yes, an entire extra earth.
That’s how far we are into overshoot.
An entire Earth the 1st time gave us roughly 200 years? 1760-2010?
Doubling time of demand (population) reduces amount of growth and duration. Maybe Kul is onto something with his genocidal fantasies.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/YYX_x5AuOQ0
Is the World De-Dollarising? | Quick Take with Smita Prakash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9If4uY9UvGQ
China Moves to Kill the Dollar. Reserve Currency Collapse Is Underway (34:19)
339,589 views Feb 2, 2026
Peter Schiff joins Rick Sanchez to break down a major global financial turning point as China accelerates efforts to replace the U.S. dollar with the yuan in global trade. With new currency swap agreements, a SWIFT alternative, and energy trade shifting away from dollars, Schiff explains why the dollar’s reserve status is now in serious danger.
The discussion covers how U.S. sanctions, tariffs, runaway debt, and political interference at the Federal Reserve have pushed the world toward de-dollarization. Schiff explains why gold is surging, why central banks are dumping Treasuries, and why Americans underestimate how dependent their standard of living is on the dollar’s global role.
Schiff also addresses claims around Bitcoin as “digital gold,” explains why crypto fails as real money, and outlines why tokenized gold could emerge as a superior alternative. He warns that rising interest rates, collapsing purchasing power, and global capital flight could trigger a historic U.S. economic reckoning.
This interview dives deep into China, BRICS, gold, global trade, U.S. debt, Federal Reserve policy, and what comes next if the dollar loses its dominance.
Peter Schiff has his own wares to sell — https://www.google.com/search?gs_ssp=eJzj4tTP1TdIT87JSDNg9OIpSC1JLVIoTs7ITEsDAGYFCE0&q=peter+schiff&oq=peter+s&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqDQgEEC4YgwEYsQMYgAQyBggAEEUYOTINCAEQLhiDARixAxiABDIKCAIQLhixAxiABDIKCAMQLhixAxiABDINCAQQLhiDARixAxiABDINCAUQLhiDARixAxiABDIKCAYQLhixAxiABDIKCAcQLhixAxiABDIQCAgQABiDARixAxiABBiKBTIHCAkQABiPAtIBCjE0MzgzajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBWqCdcAZw3wj8QVqgnXAGcN8Iw&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
A big question is how quickly or slowly will the shift away from the dollar take place.
Another issue is that, unless we can reverse our resource problem (especially diesel), the total quantity of goods and services that can be made in future years will be falling, rather than rising. This makes repaying debt with interest practically impossible.
In some sense, the value of gold will be falling. It is not clear that food will be publicly for sale. Instead, it may be rationed to workers who supported the food system and other vital industries. Gold might work for other things, if they are available.
As the U.S. dollar declines, I can imagine private gold ownership becoming either illegal or heavily restricted. I also wonder if the police might begin using “civil asset forfeiture” to seize people’s precious metals.
Not gonna happen. It would cost more to seize the gold than the gold is worth. Back in FDR’s day the math was different.
Interesting point. Even more-so for silver.
Hm, I’d say it also depends a lot on the available [ choke points ] within the future society: govs vs peons. History is full of graphic narratives how to properly shake out tribute out of non cooperating “tax-payers” and “enemies”..
But the bottom line remains, the prospective ” revaluation – ratio ” post crash / reset time will be matched into newly hashed cross-set of ratios of everything: energy, factories, RE, AG, e-coins, ..
In such a mess ~5-15 : 1 controlled reval ratio from today would be the max ceiling and sort of ~hidden due to the overall chaos to navigate anyway.
Hence the “true needed” reval of ~50-200 : 1 ratio as bugs loudly dream about alluding today’s hyper-astronomic debt levels is obvious nonsense. Won’t happen, most of the debts will (be made) vaporize..
Consider how astronomically expensive the street and door-to-door ICE raids are and then consider how much poorer the government will be at the point at which they hypothetically decide they need to take armed US citizens’ gold and silver from their homes with zero political support for doing that. Considering that brings us back around to full-on totalitarianism which is an additional layer of bureaucratic complexity that is impossible to muster during energy collapse. See the patterns.
if you check the ICE .gov website, you will find lists of jobs on offer
some offer conventional salaries
but others offer a salariy of exactly $1….yes…$1
that means that income must be made up in some other way.
i dont pretend to know all the functions of ice—and i could have missed some important point—i have no doubt someone will correct me if that is so…..
otherwise, its a funny way to pay a living wage
Norm watch out for false Democrat conspiracy theories. Stick to the true ones. There are no bounty hunters among ICE. The $1 wage refers to the federal minimum hourly prison pay of $0.12, which, multiplied by 8 and rounded up equals $1/day. That’s what ICE detainee employees make. It’s probably forced labor too in order to pad the MAGA BLS numbers. Believe that. Welcome to the USSA.
“It would cost more to take the gold than the gold is actually worth.” How so?
See my reply to Jr. And because gold isn’t the reserve currency anymore. It doesn’t have the same real value it did. And because the petrodollar is the reserve currency. Why forcibly take your own citizens’ gold when you have he petrodollar? Why not deflate the dollar and offer everyone else stablecoins instead? And nationalize stablecoins under the Treasury and adopt MMT with the reserves. Then people will sell you their gold in exchange for stablecoins. That way you don’t have to try and take something you can’t afford to take, and you end up with way, way more anyway, because the whole world will need stablecoins to slow their hyperinflations. Then if civilization is still standing, the partial gold standard (Bretton Woods 1) might return, but I wouldn’t count on it.
India sold the treasury bond to stem the INR which has been falling sharply because of US tariffs . The devaluation was accelrating and the RBI intervened . Of course the world is looking for every possible way to get out from the hegemon . The reserve currency status is the last wall standing . The war in Ukraine and Red Sea plus the current standoff where the Iranians are ready for a showdown and the Chinese rare earth criis has dented the invincibility of the US military power .
https://tradingeconomics.com/india/currency
I suppose this same dynamic would lead other countries to sell some of their Treasury bonds – Japan and, if applicable, China.
Everybody that is able to is selling US bonds because they are long-term commitments and Reality no longer has a long-term commitment to industrial civilization.
The great BRICS two-stage rotation backdoor bailout is currently out of US bonds and into gold, for now, as a hedge against their own existing or coming currency inflations, but once dollar deflation takes hold the second stage will kick in and the rotation will be from gold into stablecoins, and for the same reason as the first stage existed.
Admission that we can’t get minerals out at current prices:
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-pushes-price-floors-global-minerals-summit-cut-china-dependence
The US convened officials from 55 countries on Wednesday for a critical minerals summit focused on stabilizing supply chains and reducing reliance on China, according to Bloomberg. The Trump administration promoted price floors and expanded private investment to secure reliable access for American manufacturers.
The European Union, Japan, and Mexico agreed to work with Washington on new policies, including possible price floors, and toward a binding multilateral trade agreement, according to the US Trade Representative. These moves signal closer coordination among allies to address supply vulnerabilities.
“Today, the international market for critical minerals is failing,” Vice President JD Vance said. “Consistent investment is nearly impossible, and it will stay that way so long as prices are erratic and unpredictable.” He called for stable investment conditions and proposed a “preferential trade center for critical minerals protected from external disruptions.”
Maybe oil needs a price floor, too. But with high price floors, affordability of finished products will be a major issue.
we—humankind that is–have only one means by which we can obtain and use resources…
and that is through the availabilty of existing resources we can get at and make use of….
a cow grazing in a field can only make use of the energy-resource in grass
a lion can only make use of the energy-resource in a zebra or an antelope…
neither of them has access to ”surplus”
we dig out oil and coal, and make use of them…that uniquely gives us surplus and we use that to build all the gizmos we see as essential to our lifestyle.
those we vote into office think that is a political problem—it isnt…
Good way of putting the situation!
Norm, I resent being compared to a cow or a lion!
Many do consider [ pastoral+ ] existence as the peak top of human achievement..
You don’t need satellites, high ways, jets, and other gizmos.. which are kind of hard on externalities in degraded (mined out) environment..
That boat unfortunately sailed away.
if you stop to think about it—-
trees and plants are the primary organisms on earth—they care for each other, make life possible for all other critters, (food and air) and dont mess up their environment..
so where does that leave us?
We are the peak predator, right now. We can’t keep killing off parts of our food chain.
Perhaps in more zoom out observation, one view is of the argument stating we should not have crossed the line at developing metallurgy — since that path was crucial for stone chiselling and armament / wood chopping, carving, hence techno civilization.
So, instead we could have remained ~pastoralist on ( sharp stone ) level tool anyway..
That’s being contra argued by the other viewpoint claiming we made that original sin earlier with the initial control of fire. Which set us on the metallurgy destiny proper eventually as well.
there was no choice involved
once we put fire to metal….the die was cast so to speak
If you stop and think about it a bit more deeply—
Bacteria, archaea fungii, and protists—such as algae, amoebas, and slime molds—are at least as primary as plants (which include trees by the way) are.
And if you think about it even deeper than that—
You will probably scratch your head and move onto something else.
@Norman there was no choice involved
When they bet on oil and Haber-Bosch, Malthus was written. One could have seen the end!
Presumably, one has seen eugenic advantages in the direction of hybridization and selection from a much larger number.
https://futurocienciaficcionymatrix.blogspot.com/2026/02/la-linealizacion-de-hubbert.html?m=1
Hubert’s curve … we need to discover more oil! I wonder if Saudi Arabia oil is exaggerated as he says in this article
Everyone has been saying that Saudi Arabia’s reserves are political. They were doubled at the time of Saudi Arabia took over oil production from American companies. They haven’t been reduced for production; instead they have been increased somewhat. The overstatement of Saudi Oil reserves was a major topic at TheOilDrum.com back in the 2007-2010 timeframe.
oil is useless unless you can find a use for it…
sverdrup oil field in Norway is expected to decline 20% in 2026…..uh oh…..
This is a Quote from Quark….it looks like we are getting closer to the edge;
What Equinor has done with Sverdrup is the same thing they are doing in all the megafields of the world. When the limit is reached, production plummets in a few years, instead of a slower decline that occurred, before filling drilling was generalized. This is what the IEA does not discount, because no one knows the exact moment of the generalized decline, which is expected in the 2030-2040 decade.
I agree that we are getting closer to the edge.
Some of your comments have an air of almost Yogi Berra wisdom about them, Norman.
Here are some of his best-known Yogi-isms:
“When you come to a fork in the road, take it”.
“It ain’t over till it’s over”.
“It’s like déjà vu all over again”.
“Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours”.
“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be”.
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else”.
“The future ain’t what it used to be”.
“No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded”.
“You can observe a lot just by watching”.
“We made too many wrong mistakes”.
“Never answer an anonymous letter”.
“Pair up in threes”.
“Isn’t it strange how somebody’s personality can tell you what they’re like?” – Harry Hill, comedian.
“Is that what I think it is?” Girl at work, years ago.
Another side effect of the AI craze:
https://www.zerohedge.com/ai/memory-shortage-fears-spread-raising-alarm-qualcomm-and-arm
Consumers are about to learn that one of the most frustrating side effects of the AI boom will be the “great memory crunch.” Surging data center demand is siphoning high-bandwidth memory (HBM) supply away from consumer devices, setting the stage for slower growth across the electronics industry this year.
We have been vocal about this HBM crunch, even citing industry insiders who say shortages are only set intensify. “If you want to buy any consumer goods, PCs, or smartphones … do it now,” one industry insider told Nikkei Asia last week. Read the report here.
On Wednesday, Qualcomm and Arm Holdings also confirmed that the HBM shortage will cap smartphone production and slow near-term growth.
For context, Qualcomm is the largest maker of smartphone processors, and Arm derives much of its revenue from royalties on technology used in the industry.
“Industrywide, memory shortages and price increases are likely to define the overall scale of the handset industry,” Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon told Wall Street analysts on an earnings call.
Not a day goes by without good news for China, which controls the 10nm market. But anyway, peak cell phones was, IIRC, 2017, so it is not going to make a difference.
“China Has Built a Regulatory Kill Switch for American Military Production. The Countdown Started in April 2025. Here Is the Mechanism That Consensus Cannot See.“?
https://substack.com/home/post/p-186492719
very credible paper.
But China still needs trade to go on. So I would suspect that the timing of the Kill Switch will be later than January 2027.
November 2026 after the midterm elections . 9 months to go . https://charliepgarcia.substack.com/p/what-china-knows-about-november-10
Charlie Garcia does have a very nice graphic of our predicament.
By the way, I am somewhat concerned that this author is somewhat iffy. Does he really have documentation for the things he is telling this, or is some of it AI nonsense?
I only read the first few paragraphs, but that’s because I didn’t see anything new. China has put many barriers up, that are not possible to bypass, particularly in relation to armaments.
If not in exact detail, the premise stands(from the part I read) and it takes little to throw western systems into disarray.
This may have been covered by someone else already, but I believe semiconductor technology, like oil, has reached its peak.
AI seems like the semiconductor manufacturing industry’s last resort.
If you’re interested, please use Google Translate; I’m not capable of translating.
>The Lie of the 3nm and 2nm Semiconductors – 2023/9/19 (Tue) 0:10
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/20b6ff18f1af61aecf56b53c1327ff989cb45bf6
This is what the translation says:
The Lie Behind the 3nm and 2nm Semiconductor Numbers
By C.C. Wei, Source: TSMC
Semiconductors using fine processes such as 3nm, 5nm, and 7nm are often referred to as advanced semiconductors or advanced processes, but in reality, dimensions such as 3nm, 5nm, and 7nm do not exist anywhere on the semiconductor chip. This is because, in processes beyond the 14nm/16nm process, the actual dimensions and the term “x nm process” have become significantly different.
It’s a misconception to say that 5nm or 7nm processes are advanced, while 14/16nm processes are mature. Both have minimum dimensions of around 12-14nm, which are almost the same. Furthermore, is it even possible to process dimensions smaller than the 13.5nm wavelength of EUV lithography? In physics, light cannot penetrate dimensions smaller than its wavelength. Therefore, the reality is that patterns have been processed by allowing only the longitudinal or transverse waves of light to pass through. Attempts have been made to overcome this physical limitation by changing the intensity distribution of the light source, constructing transistors using only horizontally or vertically elongated patterns, using immersion technology where exposure is performed while submerged in water to utilize the refractive index of light, and using double patterning, where the pattern is shifted by half the dimension during exposure.
However, at the 13.5nm wavelength of EUV, such ingenuity has become increasingly difficult. Therefore, even a 3nm process still has actual dimensions of around 12nm. A commonly cited anecdote is that the performance index and integration density of Intel’s 10nm process were said to be close to TSMC’s 7nm process.
Unlike manufacturers of logic processors like TSMC, memory manufacturers like Samsung and Kioxia have been relatively more honest about similar dimensions. I say “relatively” because they have used dimensions closer to the actual dimensions. However, instead of disclosing the actual dimensions, they have referred to processes below 20nm as 1x nm (for 19nm), 1y nm (for 17-18nm), and 1z nm (for 16-15nm). In other words, they have been making cuts in increments of 1 to 2 nanometers.
Actual dimensions alone cannot represent the progress of technology.
Yes, we did. 3nm and 2nm refer to the wavelength used to make the transistor. But the transistor itself is around 40nm cubed, and will always be. A simple explanation: semiconductors need dopants to work in a concentration that varies but is generally between one in and 10^13 and one in 10^18. These are elements on either side of the Mendeleev column where silicon is, and provide the charges that actually make the currents.
Silicon atoms are 0.2 nm, so in a transistor there are 200X200X200= 8 millions atoms (10^7). dopant concentrations in a transistor (different regions have different levels of dopants) are 10^-4 to 10^-9. It is clear that at the lower range there are no charge carriers (<1). New materials with higher level of dopants are needed to go smaller but it's not like they have not been researched. I think the technology has arrived to its natural peak.
errata: one in 10^5 and one in 10^9.
Thanks drb . A refresher course for me on the atomic table .
“This may have been covered by someone else already, but I believe semiconductor technology, like oil, has reached its peak.
AI seems like the semiconductor manufacturing industry’s last resort.”
I don’t understand what this means. The semiconductor industry’s last resort for what? Demand for semiconductors has been rising for the last 70 years.
If new products have performance similar to that of older products, it will be difficult to sell them at a high price. Conversely, they will likely need to be sold at a lower price. Even if demand exists, it will be difficult to make a profit, and it will be difficult to attract new investment as a defunct field. I believe this is why companies like Intel have stopped manufacturing in-house and outsourced production to TSMC.
Semiconductors have improved performance by shrinking the circuits and packing more circuits into the same area, but this has reached its limit. Attempts to improve performance by building circuits in the Z direction rather than the XY direction on a flat surface have proven difficult and have stalled. Actual electron microscope images of 3D transistors such as FinFETs reveal the difficulty of building structures in the Z direction. They resemble unrestrained palm trees rather than the orderly rows of skyscrapers in New York.
The 3D transistors currently being adopted or developed using new process pitches resemble Jenga towers, threatening to collapse at any moment.
If semiconductor performance does not improve, software sales will likely decline. There may be no need for version upgrades.
You may need to search around to find out what’s new about new smartphones.
The AI boom requires semiconductor products and software that can be realized with existing technology. An AI bubble is necessary.
“If new products have performance similar to that of older products, it will be difficult to sell them at a high price. Conversely, they will likely need to be sold at a lower price” God forbid they sell more semiconductors at a lower price. They’d go under!
I’m sorry, the constant improvement thing and the higher cost thing seems to be more of what progressives would call greed and waste. Everyone would see this as requirements for corporations with publicly traded shares. These requirements are not demands from consumers. No layman is demanding their smart device process more data and cost more every time they upgrade. Those are investor demands and demands from the people who design the semiconductors themselves.
That’s right. I’ve seen the debt-based economy mentioned several times in the comments section in the past, which I found very insightful. Borrowers have to sell at higher prices because they need to repay with interest, and as a result, I think this has led to products being added with features and functions that consumers don’t need.
But at the same time, I think consumers are just as greedy as investors. They always seem to demand more in return than they pay. If you work in the business of selling products or providing services and observe your customers closely, you’ll see this. When consumers say they don’t need a new product, I think they’re asking you to sell it cheaper. To give it away for free. Many online businesses also offer free services. Without investor funding, industries will continue to shrink, and businesses that require scale will likely not be able to continue.
Semiconductor manufacturing plants require investments of several trillion yen, and products incorporating these products must be priced so that consumers can afford them. Related companies also need to make a profit.
If a company can continue selling the same product at the same price, I think they will choose to do so. It’s more profitable, there’s no need to borrow additional money, and there are no CEO liability issues.
Once digital fiat currency is adopted, there will be no need for savings. Digital currency can also be used to set expiration dates and payment targets, so I think we will move toward a de facto fully controlled economy. Greedy investors will be removed from society, and only greedy consumers will remain. I’m also interested to see what the world will look like. I feel like an event that wipes out all value in an instant will be necessary to ensure a smooth introduction and transition to digital fiat currency.
Don’t call it rationing…
It’s almost like the economic effects of the c— lock downs aren’t being allowed to go away. It’s almost like this an elaborate ploy to convince everyone to accept a lower standard of living. None of them want things to go back to normal, which is why they were telling us about how all the changes they made in response to a new virus with a low fatality rate “The New Normal”. The virus was just an excuse, just as war and hostility with foreigners is an excuse to cut back the availability of physical goods.
I’d be very surprised if a significant amount of high-bandwidth memory (HBM) goes towards any alleged ai data centers. I think we should expect a lot less production of HBMs and consumer grade electronics. And a lot more layoffs of salespeople expected to sell lots of smart devices.
If services related to electronics start to be cut back, things will get very interesting. What happens if people are not glued to their smartphones 24/7 because of cutbacks?