122 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, February 3, 2023”

  1. Global food prices in 2023 (small red line) are still 30% above the 2020 average.

  3. https://cleantechnica.com/2023/02/03/is-toyota-circling-the-drain-will-it-take-japan-with-it/

    Japan is going to be the poster child in terms of dealing with a shrinking population, for sure.
    The economy is concentrated to an awesomely unhealthy extent in the automobile industry, and they’re deeper in debt than any other modern country, so far as I know.

    But some of their problems can be easily fixed. The empty villages and farm houses mentioned in this link are the result of the government policies that kept tiny little farms running, for political purposes.

    When the day comes that there’s nobody TO run them this doesn’t mean a lack of food or farming. It just means these VERY small farms will be consolidated and worked by modern methods…. using more machinery but far fewer people.

    Now as far as that debt is concerned…… WHO actually owns it?

    There’s an Wikipedia article about it, indicating that it’s mostly held domestically by Japanese banks and funds of one sort or another.
    My understanding of such things is rather limited.

    Hopefully somebody who knows more will have something to say about the implications of this debt.

    1. OFM , Kunstler says ” Japan will be the first country to go mediveal ” . His conclusion is based on that Japan imports 100 % of energy and 60% of food . He does not even mention demographics .

    2. I’ve been to Japan 20+ times, and Japanese were my main clients on dive and fishing charters.
      Don’t hold your breath on a crash.

      1. Japan is in trouble. They have nuclear reactors but they have to build them in earthquake hotbed (Ring of Fire).

        When peak oil bites, the oil tankers have a choice they can go to China, India or Japan.

        Remember there are lots and lots of submarines in the South China Sea.

        Japan will draw the short straw.

    3. OFM, I would scarcely venture to pretend that I know more than you concerning just about anything at all, but I can probably address your question about Japanese debt.

      (I am a Japanese citizen and live in Japan — grew up in the US but have mainly been here in Japan the last 50 years or so, mainly in metallurgical business and ancillary technical services. I’ve been reading POB since its inception, but have never commented before since I seldom know anything worth chiming in with.)

      Net Japanese public (government) debt is around 168% of the latest GDP. The 263% figure that gets bandied about in the media is gross public debt which double counts a lot of stuff that one part of the Japanese government owes to another part. That still makes Japan the most indebted of the OECD countries, but not by such a huge amount.

      The BoJ (central bank) has recently been buying about about half of all new government bonds, with Japanese banks and other financial institutions (pension funds, etc) owing the rest. BoJ started doing “quantitative easing” (buying JG bonds, REITs, ETFs) some years before any other country’s central bank started doing likewise. How the big QE experiment will play out is a big question, of course. I wouldn’t want to bet that we’re going to live long enough to find out.

      The private sector in Japan is mostly not at all heavily indebted but on the contrary has lots of cash — at least for the time being — and owns way more assets than debt (at least on paper). Toyota has enough money to finance and engineer its way through whatever transitions are coming down the pike — once they make up their minds what to do, that is.

      Japanese public debt is all denominated in yen and virtually all owned by Japanese banks and financial institutions, with the BoJ leading the pack. There’s no foreign debt or even foreign-owned debt, to speak of.

      Japan is also the world’s biggest creditor nation (overseas assets owned by Japanese banks/funds/companies). Current amounts of overseas assets (US treasury bills are the top assets category) are in the neighborhood of 120% of Japanese GDP, which means that the net indebtedness of the country at the moment is something like 48% of GDP, relatively not that much compared to OECD peers (assuming that the overseas assets’ value is more or less realizable when crunch time arrives).

      Btw the cleantechnica guys were getting bad information from wherever they got it, because while manufacturing is indeed the biggest employment sector in Japan, the latest figure from the Ministry of Economy and Industry (for 2019) is that manufacturing employment is about 21% of the total — not 90% as the cleantechnica post says. (Comparative published figures include 29% for China, 19% for Germany, 17% for Korea, 10% for the US or UK, 12% for France.)

      I hope these clarifications were somewhat helpful. (Sometimes the people who report various macro statistics in the media don’t fully understand the data they’re seeing, and their local sources could have reasons of their own for proffering vague or evasive interpretations.)

      1. Thanks Miro for your input . The problem for Japan is demographics . So a simple back of the envolope calculation , Total population 125 million . 30 % pensioners = 37 million , 25% children or still in collage =33 million . So working populatiin is 125 -70 =55 million . Now we say a male/ female ratio of 50-50 . I think the female work participation ratio is not very high in Japan . So my best guess is about 30 million workforce to support the 125 million . So technically speaking 1 worker to support 4 non workers . How many work for the government ? I don’t know . Prime minister Kishida called it so .
        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64373950
        P.S : I have met very few Japanese but must say they are very polite . Greatly appreciated in this world of brashness .

      2. Miro:
        Fascinating report on the Japanese economy. A much more optimistic report on government debt than I have read anywhere. Thanks!
        Probably more than national debt we have read a lot here about the perils of the aging demographics in Japan. Could you give us an update on that subject? It seems Japan is going to show the world how hard or easy is to deal with that issue.

        1. Miro , ” Japanese public debt is all denominated in yen and virtually all owned by Japanese banks and financial institutions, with the BoJ leading the pack. ”
          Not so simple . Zimbabwe ‘s public debt is denominated in Z$ and owned by Zimbabawian banks and Zimbabwian Central Bank , also Lebanon , Sri Lanka etc . Like I said , not so simple . I agree that BOJ has really tested the outer limits of QE .

        2. Yes, Japan is clearly a leading-edge country with respect to population decline and how to manage it, a poster child as OFM put it, though I imagine a poster child wearing a canary suit being lowered down a mine shaft without any safety equipment.

          My guess is that the outlines of how Japan can adapt to a smaller and still declining population will not be very clear until the boomer population (as you call them) have more or less died off. The Japanese word for this generation means a clod or lump or clump of earth, like something you need to bust apart when you plough or disk. Since I am a Clumper myself, I don’t expect to be around long enough for the view to clear up much. (When you’re inside the bag, you can’t see the bag, as we sometimes say here.)

          Nobody I know believes a word of the Japanese government’s stated policy countermeasures, such as they are, to combat demographic decline. Politicians wave their hands and make speeches, but there isn’t anything they can do about it. In 1940, Japan had about 76 or 77 million population (now over 125 million), and back then they were already complaining about being overcrowded and the propaganda mills were citing overpopulation as an excuse for predatory imperialistic designs on the neighbors. Standard of living will have to revert (people will eat more yams, pumpkins, turnips, sweet potatoes than they currently do, trains will run less frequently — already starting to happen, many many other adjustments.) It might surprise some PoB readers how often you can listen to well-known TV intellectual types appear on network news shows here to warn the viewers that they’d better get used to the idea of living on yams and pumpkins like in the 17th century, etc., because that’s almost certainly what’s in store.

          Somehow I can’t help suspecting that the ultimate disposition of the huge national debt — if any — must be likely to unfold as the Clump generation shuffles off the stage, since they beneficially own much more of it than any other group. Inheritance tax rates are quite high here, especially by US standards, and have been gradually increasing from the already high level. And soon the Clump people will be too old to squawk loudly if actual defaults (write-downs) take place (for every 1000 yen of your paper assets, now you can get 700, or less, or something like that). Nobody talks about such things in public, but even the Finance ministry bureaucrats may do so once they’ve had a few drinks. (Japan has enough dry powder to retire the whole kit and caboodle of debt one time, but then leaving no powder for future emergency use. A one-shot approach seems hard to imagine, far more likely it will get used up in small increments.)

          You are surely correct that the demographic issue is much more important than the debt issue, since the latter is actually quite manageable.

          1. Miro, thank you for your perspective, and the visual effects- ” I imagine a poster child wearing a canary suit being lowered down a mine shaft without any safety equipment.”

            Like most aging countries there may come a time when competition for young immigrant workers heats up. We will have to learn how to be attractive to those from other cultures, other than just money.

            A tragedy for all countries is just how much prime farmland has been lost to urbanization.
            Reclamation of farmland will a take a long time but will be a priority I think, especially in Japan which has so much mountainous terrain.

            btw- Japan has an excellent offshore wind resource, especially along the Pacific side of the northern zone.

      3. Thank you, Miro

        I have come to realize in recent years that I can believe only half of what I see with my own eyes, and no more than a quarter at the most of what I read. There’s simply no way to know, when I see the highway full of giant pickups used solely for personal transportation, that there’s a fossil fuel crisis brewing…….. unless I look deeper.

        And it seems that at least ninety five to ninety nine percent of what you read in the popular press on the net is either published to promote a hidden agenda, or simply to attract readers so as to sell advertisements.

        The only way to get at the truth, in most situations, is to have some substantial understanding of the principles involved, and some reliable data. If you have both, you are likely to come to worthwhile conclusions.

        The data you have provided would have taken me days at least, to dig out on my own.

        Money a country owes to itself, meaning it’s owed to its own resident citizens and or businesses, to the best of my understanding, a manageable problem.

        I have no problem believing Japan can dramatically up domestic food production, if necessary, and with a declining population, less food will be necessary anyway.

        Now as far as energy goes………. I suppose Japan can successfully continue to export enough consumer and industrial goods to pay for imported energy and raw materials.

        Neither Japan, nor any other country, so far, has even really scratched the surface in terms of what can be done in conserving energy.

        1. OFM , “I have no problem believing Japan can dramatically up domestic food production, if necessary, ” . Incorrect . Not enough farmers . How bad is demographics ? japan created a Subsidy fund of $ 10 billion during Covid to entice back Japanese companies operating in China to return . How many returned ? Nulla, nada, nil . Their reason the gave was ? We cannot even get a trained lathe operater leave alone a CNC machine operater . Demographics is destiny .

          1. When the time comes, when it’s NECESSARY, Japan will adopt modern farming practices similar to the ones we use here in the USA.

            Manpower, and woman power for that matter, will ALWAYS be found for the jobs most critical to economic survival, assuming of course that there won’t be any SUDDEN crisis, so that there’s no time to adapt.

            The Japanese will have to import the raw materials, but they can easily adapt existing manufacturing infrastructure to the production of modern farming machinery.

            I’m no expert when it comes to Japanese agricultural practices, but it’s my impression that their agricultural system is ( or has been in recent times) based mostly on keeping as many VERY small farms running as possible, and keeping OUT perfectly satisfactory meat and produce from other countries, in order to protect extremely inefficient local small producers, for political and cultural reasons.

            They’re very short of good farmland, for sure, but it WILL be farmed, and for a society as well adapted to industrialization, I won’t be surprised to see the Japanese people pulling off a miracle similar to the one the Dutch have accomplished. Greenhouses are expensive as hell up front, but once built, you can if necessary produce large crops, even of staples such as potatoes, as well as veggies.

            1. OFM,
              You are correct. On this board there are some very, very smart people who I admire, but they are very short on practical knowledge. They are strong on analytical capabilities, but I wonder how many have ever raised a vegetable. Yes our system will eventually collapse, it will wreck deep and broad financial havoc. Pension systems will not survive. Materialism will be brought down by an order of magnitude. The very old and infirm will suffer and may not survive. Children will suffer. Very large urban areas will be tough places and the arrangement of suburbia will be shambles. Beyond this however, there is a stark lack of imagination on this board on what will and can be done. The extended family arrangement will return, it is a very resilient and sustainable practice. As one who keeps a garden, orchard and berry plot, I know what can be done on very little area, short Maine growing season with poor soil. I grow 400 lbs a year and don’t work very hard at it. I’m 67. My wife doesn’t choose to participate at all. I could double that easily. If my wife pitched in we could double it again. We don’t even have a flock of chickens or quail. We may devolve back to 1900, but is that really so bad?? And population decline isn’t all bad. It actually concentrates wealth and output on a per capita basis. There are more real assets (as opposed to the paper assets) per capita. No pension systems will not survive, but there are other tried and true social arrangements which actually work better, like extended families. The aged will return to position of value in society where they can care for their grand children as opposed to expensive day care. They will teach the young as opposed to paying for teachers pensions. They will contribute deeply to the home economy. This board has a place, it is highly informative on the macro picture. But the board members are often hand wavers, and highly unimaginative when it comes to sustainable solutions. I wouldn’t bet a dime that electric cars will allow us to be sustainable in a social arrangement that looks more or less like ours does today. It will take deeper thinking than that.

            2. Tom
              “I wouldn’t bet a dime that electric cars will allow us to be sustainable in a social arrangement that looks more or less like ours does today.”

              Going forward in this time of rapidly shifting energy scenario I suggest that ‘social arrangements’ and economic ones will be very different from the past. we would be wrong to expect little change.

        2. “And it seems that at least ninety five to ninety nine percent of what you read in the popular press on the net is either published to promote a hidden agenda, or simply to attract readers so as to sell advertisements.”

          OFM, I think you’re dead right about that. And also surely right about how Japan can and will respond when confronted by increasingly urgent necessity to increase domestic food production.

          If you look up the percentage of the Japanese population that identifies as full-time farmers, it’s quite small and the full time farmers tend to be old. But they have children who are part-time farmers and step right into the old folks’ shoes once they hit retirement age. There is plenty of disused farmland around, but also more and more fairly well-organized (and funded) local organizations to train new young farmers and put the land back in use.

          Your impression of Japanese agricultural practice is correct. Even if the farmer owns four or five hectares, which would be a lot for most of them, their fields aren’t contiguous — vegetable patches might be several km distant from rice fields, your small rice field might be next to your cousin’s or uncles’ field but there might also be other people’s patches of land in between, so there are multiple inefficiencies. (Imported food is however widely available, though labeling laws are very strict — people who lie about where the produce came from and get caught go to prison — and farmers’ markets for strictly local stuff are booming and increasing in number.) There have been several legal adjustments in the last four or five years to make a Japanese version of agribusiness easier to set up (not protecting the underused or grotesquely inefficient small farm plots so much any more or creating incentives for their owners to lease them long term to better producers or even sell them.)

          Preferential tax treatment for registered farmland even if you don’t grow anything on it has also been a perverse incentive to leave fields unused, but that is also finally on the way out. (I own an inefficient bit of farmland myself — our vegetable garden, which allows us to be self-sufficient in onions, yams, radishes, green onions, and cabbage and even give them away to friends or swap them for other stuff from the real farmers in the neighborhood, so I know a little about that.) Though I don’t think Japan will ever stop importing North American soybeans or wheat, or corn, until push truly comes to shove once and for all, as the efficiencies here will never compare.

          Reliance on imported oil and gas (and coal) is the big issue, of course. As you note, Japan can afford to keep importing a lot — in addition to LTAs with major producers (though Japan is now no. 2 importer behind China), Japanese consortia own a lot of gas producing assets, in particular, at least in Australia and SE Asia. Whether complacency about being able to keep all that going will continue, or give way to heightened urgency about expanding solar/wind/geothermal and conserving more, remains to be seen but I guess baby steps will become teenage or adult steps in the near future. It’s not that hard to convince voters and other people here that much bigger steps will be necessary — provided that vested interests don’t stand in the way, of course.

          Speaking of vested interests, I forgot to note with respect to “Toyota circling the drain” that of Japan’s manufacturing share of total employment which is around 21%, “transportation equipment” including motor vehicles, ships, aircraft, and rolling stock (there are still five big companies that make rolling stock — lots of trains here) is 13% of the 21% (bigger than any other sector, with electronics coming in second. I think the 13% switches from total employment to counting by sales revenue, so it’s a little bit apples & oranges). Toyota is certainly the biggest manufacturer by sales revenue, so supposing it’s half of the 13%, that would be 0.21 X 0.13 X 0.5 = 0.01365, so Toyota’s share of Japanese GDP is somewhere around 1.3 or 1.4%. Not enough to drag Japan down the drain with it if goes under, which it doesn’t seem remotely likely to do. Toyota goes back to the 19th century when the Toyoda family company manufactured looms (Japan’s biggest industry was textiles until some point in the 20th century). When the great-grandfather of the current Mr. Toyoda started their automotive business, he consulted a fortune-teller who advised him that the Chinese characters for “Toyoda” had an inauspicious number of strokes for the occasion of embarking on a new enterprise at that particular time, so he called the new auto company “Toyota” using the Japanese kana syllabary instead of Chinese characters. (If he had left in the diacritical marks changing “ta” to “da”, the number of strokes would again have been unfavorable. The lucky-strokes thing goes way back to ancient China and is widely observed by Chinese and Japanese parents when they name their kids, probably seldom bothered with by contemporary Japanese who start new businesses though as far as I know owners still mostly check the stroke-count in China when they start a new enterprise.)

          1. Being a big Toyota/Lexus fan I wondered about the “d”. That was fascinating! Thanks.

    4. My mother-in -law lives in a village near Fukuoka. Nearly every house on her street is empty.Young people move to town to work.

  4. An outstanding comment on OFW . Complexity and energy . Copy/paste .
    Jan
    The first copper ores to be found where placers where the seam or bed reached the surface. People just had to walk by and pick the greenish shimmering minerals and process them in fires to get a free high quality knife. These areas today are more or less all exploited. Now we have to track the seams in the inside of mountains, dig holes and tunnels, move huge amounts of worthless stones and find a seam that contains enough ore to pay the investment.

    To walk by on a hiking tour or to start a mining enterprise is another level of complexity.

    The oil industry started in Texas, where people just had to ram a pipe into the ground, catch the outflowing crude, refine it locally and sell it locally to entrepreneurs that could monetize the productivity surplus. These fields today are more or less exploited. Crude must be shipped from the other side of the world or be transported through huge pipelines from remote areas, which means the routes must be militarily secured.

    To fill barrels in your backyard or to send crude carriers around the world is another level of complexity.

    The Vikings and probably a lot of fishermen before Columbus where able to jump via Greenland from Europe to the American continent. Dried fish paid their expenses. The Vikings had an amazing technology to build their ships, a special method to connect the planks so they would not break being hit by the strong waves of the Atlantic ocean. A technology the Phoenicians and Romans could never find. It would be unthinkable though to send Viking boats from the Saudi peninsula to New York city as crude carriers. That’s another level of complexity.

    Supertankers obviously must be build from steel. If the car industry shrank, would the steel prices go up or down? Would the mines be run still economically? Would the solar panel posts the earth shall be plastered with compensate for the cars? If the prices went up or mines dropped out of production, how would that affect to building supertankers? Would they become cheaper or more expensive or could they perhaps not be build at all anymore? What effects would that have on the oil price? Could we call higher oil prices ‘inflationary’? Or would it affect productivity? That’s another level of complexity compared to investment into building a Viking boat. Complexity creates dependencies.

    Supertankers obviously need glass for their windows as much as for their optical instruments. In Germany a huge glass factory providing glass for whole Europe was at the brink of closing down with the high gas prices as a result of German politics. To shut down a glass furnace means to destroy it. It cannot be restarted. It is always-on. It is another level of complexity compared to middle aged woodglass makers. It provides another level of quality also. Supertankers and binoculars cannot be made from woodglass. How would that affect the German ship industry building Supertankers, if no glass were available? How would that affect crude prices in New York? Could that be called an ‘inflationary effect’?

    Modern glass, especially optical glass, was invented by Otto Schott in Jena, Germany, around 1900. His genius and hard work let him add boracic acid to the process. Boracic acid can naturally be found in Tuskany, Italy. It is quite a long hike from Jena to Tuskany! Boracic acid can also be obtained from kernite, which can be harvested in Germany. To process that one needs sulfuric acid aka vitriole. The alchemists developed a lot of complicated ways to obtain vitriole. Today it is gained from crude…

    Our modern complexity is based on availability. If availability shrinks, complexity will shrink. We organize our complexity through a self-organising system called capitalism. If capitalism fails, availability will shrink and reduce complexity. The regionalisation incentives to prepare for war reduces availability and complexity. Apparently that’s why governments focus on biological warfare, how Mr. Fast calls it: Rat Juice. But if demand falls, availability will also go back and thus complexity.

    It is possible but hard to replace a self-organising system by bureucracy. The Soviet Union managed not too badly but obviously failed at the end. The Soviet Union was established to exploit the resources the former Russian Reich were so rich of. But today we are in another situation. We urgently need high technology to be able to extract the diminishing resources from the ground. But a centrally directed economy – that can easily help a glass factory at the brink of shutdown – might fail to administer the availability, dependencies and complexity needed to get the stuff out. We don’t even have useful methods to model that, Gail shows that nicely on the EROI concept – that I consider brilliant but not enough.

    All that is why we cannot go back! It is more likely that humans had to make a restart. And that would be a long, long journey!

    1. HIH,

      There are some traps when it comes to energy and complexity. But still the digitalisation of companies will solve more problems than the energy consumption for the digital infrastructure and ongoing activities creates. If a pressured grid in the future allows for only 10-20% of electricity to be allocated to computers, databases and the internet; it would probably be an allocation that is absolutely in the good in order for technology to help out to solve a multitude of challenges.

      Another aspect that is not black or white, is global trade. Given the pretty reasonable cost of shipment around the globe, it makes sense that a good proportion of the economy will remain with a global supply chain. No matter how sinister the state of global economy hypothetically could become. After all that is the only way a cheap source of production (and energy) could be exploited. A lot of the economy could benefit of being more locally based, but just a part of it I would guess.

      1. Kolbeinih , Complexity , connectivity and energy are the three legs of the stool which make our livingstyle system workable . Energy is the key . Once energy declines the other two legs will fall automatically . Regarding globalisation . It is over no matter what the shipping costs . Covid chaoes exposed the soft underbelly of globalisation and the fragility of long supply chains . The new ” mantra” is reindustralisation and self sufficiency . I have given the example of Japan and now we can see the subsidies that US is providing . TSMC ‘s new plant in Arizona is an example . EU is now working on it’s own formula to counter US subsidies .

        1. Freight rates crashed because their is not enough cargo . The high rates were only due to chaoes in shipping because of Covid . The pentup demand or blocked shipments now do not exist . Anyway we are in a recession so less demand . Freight rate Shanghai to Rotterdam .

          2. Fig1-Volume of World Trade and Industrial Production

            [global contraction hasn’t started yet, but someday it will]

            1. Be patient, its inevitable.
              Probably take a lot longer than many guess,
              In fact it already has taken about 3 decades longer than I had first figured.
              Maybe not for the Syrians, but on a global basis.

  5. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11712785/Putin-buzzed-colour-changing-UFO-spotted-makes-speech-threatening-nuclear-war.html

    “A report by Telegram channel Aviatorschina said the UFO was seen and reported to the aviation authorities by the crews of four separate passenger planes.”

    Russian commercial airliners and military planes report a UFO that was changing colors and altitude

    flying during

    Putin’s WWII remembrance speech

    And it wasn’t a Chinese spy balloon….This world is going bonkers

  6. Putin attended a ceremony last week to commemorate the Soviet victory at Stalingrad. Ceremonial Guards were without their weapons. Usually this sort of thing has a bit of rifle drill.

    1. I’ll take the optimistic view and assume that anyone who can hold a rifle, and all of the rifles, are being used inefficiently in Ukraine instead of at a ceremony, and that they are meeting others who are mad at Putin about being there.
      I also suspect that Putin won’t go anywhere that people have guns.

      1. It’s a sure thing his inner circle of body guards are armed, and it’s reported that he carries a pistol himself. I’m willing to believe that, no problem, considering his resume.

        I’m not sure what it means that the ceremonial guards didn’t have their rifles, but it’s well known that in Russian, Chinese, and North Korean political affairs that the inclusion or the lack of a person’s picture, or some particular scenery, or mention of some historical event, is intended to convey unspoken words.

        So…….. the guards if present would have had no ammo. That’s routine.

        Maybe the lack of rifles was intended to convey to the Russian people that Putin is not waging an offensive war, that he want’s peace, if peace can be had on honorable terms. ( his terms of course.)

    2. Putin cancelled the Air Force Flyover at another one of his events cause he was concerned one of the planes might drop a bomb on him

    3. If security is an issue one can issue the ceremonial guards a deactivated rifle to do the ceremonial rifle drill; but I suppose Putin is concerned someone will slip in with a non deactivated rifle. It’s an assassination risk control measure to not issue rifles to the ceremonial guards.

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Present_arms_(command)

    1. I’m not sure when it was that I first understood the madness of lakes Mead, Mojave and Powell. Average day time termperatures out there peak around 100 deg in the summer and are over 70 most of the year. The evaporation rates must be gigantic. As I recall there is virtually no longer any outflow to the Gulf of California as was intended by Mother Nature.
      So maybe the only way to increase the water consumption for population growth is to cover the lakes behind the dams. Who will tell the boaters?

      1. two big problems with the Colorado River Basin as a water supply and storage system
        -the rock of the basin is mostly very porous
        -water evaporates from the system not just in the reservoirs but also from the vast surfaces from which stream-flow is collected.

        Evaporate loss of water throughout the basin is greater as the temperature of basin gets higher.

      2. Powell is a disaster, perpetuated by greed heads.
        Read Abbey’s account in Desert Solitaire

      3. Yes – and what about the evaporaton of water from backyard swimming pools – everyone in the middle class in California seems to want their swimming pools. And then there are the lawns in Las Vegas constantly kept green by spraying – in the desert.

        1. California farm output in 2021 was over $50 billion, most of it from either Colorado river water or Sierra snow melt transported through the state aquaduct system. Some familiar crops such as celery, plums, grapes, spinach and carrots are virtual California monopolies. In the winter, when it is too cold to grow vegetables in the Salinas valley a staggering number of personnel move to Arizona to farm a winter vegetable crop there. All of this farm produce is at high risk now due to water shortages.
          A recent article in the LA Times, citing a Colorado State climate scientist, indicated that in the next decade there is zero likelyhood of filling the dams due to both rising temperatures and hugh population demand since the Hoover, Glen Canyon and Mojave dams were built. As of today the seven states depending on the Colorado river cannot agree on any plans to reduce consumption.

          1. Perhaps a new acronym is needed, I propose CRUW, Calorie Return of Used Water. Unit kJ/m3, kcal/acre feet or something similar, SI units preferable.

          2. Meanwhile in waterlogged Holland, tomatoes only need a tenth as much water per pound as in California.

            The American Weest is a man made desert.

    1. Both M1 and M2 money supply are in contraction. M1 has contracted by about $1 trillion and M2 by about $500 billion since Feb-March of 2022.

      There has never been a contraction in money supply like this. Not even in the 70’s when Volcker raised interest rate did the money supply contract.

      The jobs numbers released Friday aren’t in a sense real. You got to understand how it’s calculated. It’s not like they go from business to business counting jobs. There is this thing call population control factor.

      Basically they use the census data to calculate how many people there are. And what they are saying is there are about 800,000 more people than they originally thought. And they are just assuming they all have jobs.

      Fed is absolutely flying blind and has no idea what reality on the ground is. And they will continue hiking rates as money supply continues to contract.

      There is a reason why China and Japan and Switzerland are selling US assets and it’s not what keeps being repeated over and over in media. Which is moving away from the dollar. No that’s not what is happening here. Dollar shortage outside US and assets are being sold to get dollars.

      1. The USA is going to have to issue bonds to put sodas and candy bars in the vending machines.

      2. “Fed is absolutely flying blind”
        That is nothing new. Makes the job extremely tough, along with the fact they only have very blunt tools to counteract the policies of congress which are often at great odds with any program aimed at smooth and steady economic function.

      3. HHH , you are correct . Just in . “JAPAN HAS CONFIRMED THAT IT MADE RECORD INTERVENTIONS IN THE FOREIGN EXCHANGE MARKET IN OCTOBER, SELLING THE DOLLAR WORTH $48 BILLION TO SUPPORT THE YEN CURRENCY ” .

    2. Grape Ape , Simple maths 2.20 0.85 0.80 1.20 =5.05 trillion . Total Federal revenue 2022 was $ 4.56 trillion . I can hear the printers going full speed . Oh , now the Inflation Reduction Act of another $ 1.2 trillion . What can go wrong ? We owe it to ourselves . 🙂
      P.S :The USA is going to have to issue bonds to put sodas and candy bars in the vending machines. Do you have a patent on this quote or I can use it . 🙂

      1. Quote is all yours. Maybe the vending machines break even revenue wise.

        The dishwasher doesn’t though.

        Tax Revenues decrease during a recession. Does anyone see one of those on the horizon?

  10. Tim Watkins has a new book availble on Amazon .
    https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BTRFR8XF?&linkCode=sl1&tag=womensbits-21&linkId=82b72cc44b774c66d80d70cb65875ea5&language=en_GB&ref_=as_li_ss_tl
    Some excerpt >
    Humanity faces a bottleneck of crises which threaten the collapse of industrial civilisation. Of these, most people are only aware of climate change, which they believe can be solved via electrification and a range of simple changes to our lifestyles. But climate change is but one of myriad crises, including: antibiotic resistance, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution, cyber-attacks/AI consequences, etc., energy shortages, famine, financial crises, governance failure, infrastructure failure, microplastic contamination, migration waves, natural disasters, nutrient run-off, ocean acidification, resource depletion, soil depletion, war, water shortages, weapons of mass destruction, to name but a few.
    Any one of these crises threatens to undermine our complex industrial civilisation. But taken together, they constitute an existential threat to humanity as a whole.
    We used to think that, as the old adage had it, that “cometh the hour cometh the man…” That is, that so great a threat, would bring forth true leaders to rally the people to heroic feats so that we, and future generations, would come through the bottleneck unscathed. Instead, we find ourselves ruled by an incompetent technocracy which is so detached from reality as to constitute a form of insanity… So detached, indeed, that their actions – or more often lack thereof – threaten the survival of industrial civilisation. A Death Cult, if you will.
    In The Death Cult: Technological failure at the end of the industrial age, Tim Watkins explains the origins of the ruling technocracy, and how it became a “class for itself” – no longer interested in the little people whose lives it desires to take ever more control over, and, indeed, even hostile to planet Earth itself.
    Watkins outlines the graft and corruption at the heart of technocratic rule, together with the abject failure of various protest movements even to slow the pace of technocratic misrule. Even as, time and again, our self-identifying rulers demonstrate their incompetence, we are left with no mechanisms by which we can remove them. Not least because our own protest has been co-opted by the technocracy via so-called “stakeholder capitalism.”
    Watkins demonstrates that the technocratic vision of a digital future – variously known as “the fourth industrial revolution,” “the green new deal,” and “the great reset,” – lacks any grounding in reality and has been proven to be impossible given the material resources available to us on planet Earth.
    In the pursuit of its impossible techno-utopia, not only is the technocracy setting itself up to fail, but in the process it will inflict untold hardship on those it deigns to rule. And the worst of it is that by the time failure becomes obvious – most likely when the technocracy itself experiences some of the hardship it is exposing on others – it will be too late to prevent all of those other crises from overwhelming us.

    1. HIH
      There has been a multitude of litterature about the multipolar crisis coming ahead. No doubt we have had good times with not that many wars the last 2 decades (except for the one that started a year ago). As such there are questions to be asked if the material overflow society creates more happiness. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is still more or less within reach, but not so much in war zones or not quite at the top in authoritarian societies.

      Decline is manageable. Especially a materialistic one.

    2. I expect that many of the ‘ruling elite’ planning to remain on top through the approaching turmoil in the world will instead experience the ‘Marie Antoinette’ adjustment.

  11. To OFM or any other small scale farmers or gardeners.

    Have you guys every used rice water as a form of fertilizer ?
    Also stuff like banana peel drowned in water for 10+ hour as a source of K (potassium) ?
    The water you boil eggs in as a source of calcium and phosphorous ?

    Or any other household techniques for organic forms of NPK and micronutrients ?

    Any experiencial information is welcome thanks.

    1. Iron Mike- composting of all food and animal wastes is how to recycle nutrients back from the system to the soil. And/or pass all the scrap materials through your chickens and then into the soil.
      Small scale or large scale.
      Certainly better than just take, take, take from the soil.
      There are a thousand sources of info on it.

      1. Yea definitely, but with regards to animal or human waste it has to be composted properly i believe due to possible pathogens which might leach into the soil. Which is especially concerning if one is planting veggies or fruit trees.

    2. I’ve been gardening for 15 years in a woodland area of the Ozark highlands. The only fertilizer I’ve used is dilute urine.

      1. Haha yea i do this all the time. Good especially if one has a good clean diet.

        2. Some of the most expensive and apparently best wine in the entire world is or used to be produced by monks who collected their urine in wooden barrels all year around, and diluted it ten to one, before applying it in their vineyard. Can’t remember which ones or where.

          Urine is a SUPERB fertilizer, so long as you’re cautious in applying it.
          It’s perfectly ok to apply it directly, so long as you don’t put it in the same spot more than a couple of days in a row, or it will burn garden plants.

          It’s best to make a shallow hole, say six inches deep, and pee in the hole, and then kick the soil back in, which allows more time for the nutrients to be absorbed into the soil, rather than evaporating away.

          And as far as using YOUR OWN family’s human manure, well, it will NOT have any parasites or bacteria or virus in it that you don’t ALREADY host anyway.

          But it’s messy, stinky, and all around disgusting, not at all like animal manure, which is really only messy and not so stinky, compared to our own.

          I’ve known of a couple of people going in a bucket with a lid, and putting in some wood chips, sawdust, straw, etc, and after a few weeks, when the bucket is getting full, just letting it sit for a while, and then digging it in.

          These folks were HARD core about being self sufficient, and sort of weird, in some other ways, but decent enough people.

          All the people in my family who farmed or still farm, or garden, use any animal manure that’s handy, plowing it in in most cases. But you can apply some directly on top of the soil, and get good results. But this wastes a good bit of the nutrients to run off.

          Peeing in the field corn was ok, peeing in the garden was taboo, but sometimes the men did anyway, if the women weren’t around. Taking a dump where food was produced was simply not done, taboo, not even in the orchard months previous to harvest time.

          I’ve seen migrant farm hands summarily fired for number two in a field or orchard under cultivation anytime at all.

          We never used human manure in my neighborhood.

          BUT here’s a true story, never before published. MY now dear departed Dad used to go into the woods behind the house. He never said why, but I think it was simply because he liked to be alone among the trees, away from the house, to just have fifteen or twenty minutes entirely to himself.

          He loved to farm, but his greatest happiness was to get off into the woods whenever he could.

          This was a habit he maintained for well over fifty years to my personal knowledge and we had indoor plumbing the entire time except maybe the first couple of years.

          The trees in that immediate area are substantially larger than the ones a hundred feet away, same species, same age, same soil, same exposure to the sun, etc.

    3. I compost extensively. I grind fish parts for fertilizer. Very fundamental practice. I use wood ash as well. I use bark mulch. I use cardboard. I add earth worms to the soil and compost. There is much that can be done to amend soil organically. Compost is black gold to me. Bone meal is very good. All egg shells are composted of course, don’t mess around with the water bath. Rice water no, no rice around here. banana peels are directly composted, the entire peel…. why drown it in water when you can use the whole peel? Manure of course, sourced locally from friends.

  12. Equinor and SSE Renewables carry out early scoping work on potential 4th phase of Dogger Bank Wind Farm

    https://www.equinor.com/news/20230206-early-scoping-work-potential-4th-phase-dogger-bank-wind-farm

    “The second option being considered by the developers is the use of electricity produced by offshore wind to generate green hydrogen at a dedicated electrolysis facility in the Humber region. The facility, if developed, could become the UK’s largest green hydrogen project and, subject to supportive Government policy and supply chain alignment, could contribute to the UK Government’s green hydrogen ambitions.”
    ——

    Let’s see how it goes with the green hydrogen proposal. The major problem as of now is that it is a more costly alternative to natural gas. But for sure it is a backup for natural gas in the future the way this is portrayed.

      1. I wasn’t familiar with American Thinker magazine.

        But they also say
        “It is beyond the time to end subsidies for wind power. Not only has atmospheric CO2 risen without serious consequence, the doomsaying models proven consistently wrong, but the financial thumb on the scale via subsidies has encouraged development of a technology that is still immature, if it ever will be viable.”

        So i think i know where they’re coming from.

        1. American Thinker is obviously an ironic satire site, hence the name.

          *touches earpiece*

          Wait, I’m being informed Americans don’t do irony. Oh Lord.

  13. Like oil, copper and nickel discoveries have collapsed in the last decade, but unlike oil this is despite exploration investments staying high or increasing.

        1. It’s fine. The market will just substitute for something else. What’s the big deal? I bet rock is cheaper AND better at making things with than copper and shit. We loved for millennia that way anyway.

  14. that the lauded paper “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” was written by some highly distinguished climate scientists, led by the recently departed Will Steffen. In it they proposed that “… even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5 °C to 2.0 °C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a “Hothouse Earth” pathway.”

    The mechanism for the bifurcation between the stable holocene and a hothouse is through various positive feedbacks that at some temperature can become irreversible, and potentially cascading, tipping points.

    There are currently sixteen identified climate tipping points (see https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/08/world-on-brink-five-climate-tipping-points-study-finds and chart below) It is notable that the Steffen paper had the permafrost thaw tipping point above five degrees and the Amazon die off at three to five, yet within the past few weeks it has been proposed that some recent observations indicate that both may have been passed. Of the other tipping points identified current ice conditions suggest loss of Barents Sea ice may be imminent, loss of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice caps and mountain glaciers seems to be committed, even if over a few centuries.

    AMOC is weakening and some research suggests may be approaching the (known) shutdown point. Collapse of parts of the boreal forests, exacerbated by intensifying wildfires, is becoming apparent. Coral reefs seem doomed but I don’t know if there is a feedback leading to more warming, it seems more likely that 20% of world population losing their main protein source would reduce economic activity and hence emissions. Sometime this year or next I think it likely that there will be a general consensus that we have irrevocably passed two or more tipping points.

    The runaway to hothouse conditions would look exactly like the pathway proposed in the Hansen et. al. paper, which is currently under peer review prior to publishing, “Global Warming in the Pipeline” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.04474). This would lead to a warming of ten degrees even if we were to immediately stop all GHG emissions now, which agrees with the conclusion that we are past the bifurcation point and heading towards hothouse conditions.

    1. It seems like 2.0 degrees is baked in the cake, even without any positive feedback mechanisms.

      1. Not if we triple down on believing in DAC plants spontaneously popping up in every major city. I have hope we can avert this outcome I’ve been aware of for decades and taken no steps to avoid. I believe in you, magic techno fix.

      2. The main point of the Steffan et. al. paper is that 2C is not guaranteed to be stable, warming has to be kept below 1.5, maybe less given how tipping points are behaving now, or the world runs away to a hot house, which Hansen indicates will be 10C or more at equilibrium.

        1. Yes, I just don’t think we have much prospect of staying below 1.5C
          Too much momentum to the human bulldozer.

          1. 1.5°C is done. We’ll be lucky to keep it below 3 now with just what forcings are in place or will soon be.

            1. Given the coming El Nino, some experts say we’ll see 1.5+ by this time next year.

            2. “On the weather depends the harvest, on the harvest depends everything”

              Cue the famine.

    1. Will we have a nickel war in 2047?
      I hope to have all of my solar and wind deployment needs complete by then.

    1. It SCARES me to know how deep the rot is ALREADY in a number of cities in the USA.

      https://apnews.com/article/law-enforcement-tyre-nichols-memphis-crime-93033874b99a4893c6c996fd56676795

      It seems that damned near anybody who can walk and chew gum can become a police officer in places such as Memphis.

      Reading this kept me awake for a long time last night.

      I’m pretty damned liberal, taken all around. I’m scientifically literate, so I support the Democrats right down the line on renewable energy, climate, etc.

      I’m well enough educated to believe women are my equals, ( while strongly suspecting that on average they are superior to men in most ways, brute strength being the one obvious exception) .

      I’ve read my Darwin, and I understand the abc’s of the sciences.

      But I’m still a Christian, in the true moral sense of the word, meaning that I believe in the REAL philosophy of Jesus, peace, love, charity, good will, tolerance, etc.

      So ……. I don’t support the evangelical establishment, not AT ALL, since it jumped on the right wing band wagon starting forty or fifty years ago.

      But it’s still the glue that holds some communities together. I’ve personally delivered food, but not in recent years, to people in need, with other members of the family church, etc. I’ve gone with the old men to work on an old woman’s house and lay her in a supply of firewood, back in my younger days.

      Now I’m not exactly scared for myself, but rather for my country, and my extended family, which BY EXTENSION, is everybody. The police aren’t going to bother me, and I’m well able to take care of myself. I’m old and I’ll be dead in a few more years.

      But the general state of affairs distresses the hell out of me……… because it’s now part of the hard core and evangelical right wing political faction here in the USA that is looking more and more like THIS:

      Gott mit Uns
      “Gott mit Uns” (God with us), taken from the inscription on German soldiers’ belt buckles, originally meant to invoke God’s support, becomes in the English caption “God for Us,” a nationalist cry to smite the enemy.

      Some people I KNOW PERSONALLY, right here in my own backwoods community, who call themselves Christians and patriots are not all that different from the original Nazis. They know not what they do.

      My first wife lost just about every last known relative living in Germany or nearby to the Holocaust.

      You hear people who don’t understand nuance, or thinking at all, really, saying you’re an idiot to believe you can stand up to real soldiers. This is true.

      But what they don’t say, don’t realize, is that real soldiers have to give consideration to the safety and welfare of THEIR OWN families, and decide, once an ultimate crisis arrives, whether they will be with the people… as insurgents…….. or the dictator…… as his storm troopers.

      I wouldn’t want to live in a place such as Memphis wondering if a bunch of totally corrupt power mad cops might find it expedient to murder me someday.

      If a cop wants in my house, he should use his megaphone and spotlights, and I would open the door. He’s on SALARY. There’s no HURRY about such things. Cops are killing people without due cause on a regular basis in lots of places right here in America.

      But so far as I know, virtually every last Virginia cop within thirty or forty miles is at least reasonably competent and damned unlikely to kill anybody unless he really believes he’s about to be shot himself.
      I’m on a first name basis with some of the local police.

      I wouldn’t leave home without knowing they’re on the job…… except as necessary, and armed. I BELIEVE in police.

      But when you read about the hiring standards in some cities these days……….

      Anybody who wants my guns can pry them from my cold dead fingers. The cops won’t get here , even if I manage to call them, in less than thirty minutes at best. I’ve found it necessary to make it clear to at least two or three people over the years that since I was taking THEM, and their threats seriously, they could rest assured I would shoot them if they didn’t back off and make themselves very scarce indeed.

      There are tens of millions of DECENT people who share this conviction with me. I know the Democratic Party as a whole isn’t trying to take away our rights, but rather to have sensible regulations involving firearms. I’m on board with this.

      But there are ENOUGH Democrats talking about this to convince tens of millions of people that the Democratic Party actually intends to disarm them.

      That one issue alone is politically as radioactive as the abortion issue is for liberals as a whole, or evangelicals as a whole.

      I believe the choice versus ban question enabled the Democrats to hold even in the Senate, and kept the Republicans from winning a MUCH bigger majority in the House, last election.

      And I believe this one issue, firearms, has been THE issue that has kept Republicans in control of one hell of a lot of political offices from dog catcher to President for most of my life.

      It’s just too damned bad that neither end of the political spectrum these days is actually willing to consider the possibility that maybe the opposition has a valid point……. or at least the right to a different opinion as to what should or should not be done.

      So……… consider the fact that if gun control is about saving lives, and the political cost of the fight, in terms of causing the right wing to dig in and fight, and TAKE the fight to the political arena……….. has meant trump types in power, and now controlling the Supreme Court, and a large number of state governments………….

      Think a minute about how much EASIER it would be to win a fight passing a law that says the biggest letters on any food or drink package with added sugar would by law read ” contains added sugar which is PROVEN to kill you slowly”.

      “Diabetes was the nation’s eighth-leading cause of death in 2020, accounting for 102,188 deaths annually. Those with diabetes are twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke than those without diabetes.

      Explore Diabetes in the United States | 2022 Annual | AHR”

      Outlawing or at least OUTING sugar would save at least half of these people, according to medical experts.

      (Of the forty plus thousand people that died from guns a couple of years ago, OVER HALF of them were self inflicted……… suicides.)

      Oh well……. most people would rather DIE than think for themselves, lol.

      There’s an old saying in the hills. ” The more you stir shit, the worse it stinks”.

      I’m waiting for the figurative broken bricks headed my way, lol.

      1. When a society is on the verge of circling around the bowl you begin to see the first signs of institutional decay. Health care, law enforcement, infrastructure, politics, media, education, transportation systems, supply chains. We are starting to checkoff a lot of boxes. And we are not a unified country, so I think we all know what this portends.

        1. Cops have been useless shit for a while now. That encounter was pretty standard; just a few too many shots to the head. Other than that I’d say 80% of the violence shown has been a daily routine for several decades.

  18. Amazing things happening in America right now.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/western-states-that-rely-on-colorado-river-fail-to-reach-agreement-on-cutting-consumption

    Well, what we’re going through right now is a little bit like a bankruptcy proceeding. It’s like the river declaring bankruptcy.

    From the very beginning of the way that the states had shared the Colorado River, we had made assumptions about how much the river could pay out in any given year. Those assumptions that were made, now a century ago, were wrong. And we’re paying the price for those incorrect assumptions.

    Now, those assumptions were wrong both because the data was bad 100 years ago. It’s also wrong because the population has obviously changed a lot. And it’s wrong because the climate has changed quite a bit. So, even though we’re getting around 90 percent of our normal snowpack and precipitation, our winters are so short and they’re so hot, that a lot of that water just isn’t reaching the river.

    So this combination of factors has caused what is something like a bankruptcy proceeding, where you have lots of people who have a claim to a common resource, and the resource just can’t pay out to everyone who has a claim to it.

    ===

    Bankruptcy? Oh, economist brain, always infecting people with dumb takes. Can we not just get nature to extend a new line of credit after Chapter 11 gets resolved on the water cycle? I’m confused.

    I’ve still yet to finish reading The Water Knife, but I imagine soon I can just turn on the news and watch it’s denouement live at this rate.

  19. This is a good explanation of the greenhouse effect – just complicated enough to capture all the issues and counter denier crap (also explained well in Lawrence Krauss’s book on climate).

    I Misunderstood the Greenhouse Effect. Here’s How It Works, Sabine Hossenfelder
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8

    Her analysis hydrogen energy is really good.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zklo4Z1SqkE

    Having spent a few non-productive months working on a fuel cell project in the early 80s I can say she barely touches on what a total pain dealing with hydrogen is.

    1. To me it was obvious from day one that the US blew up the NS pipelines.
      Since Russia makes money by selling natural gas, why would they blow up the pipelines which deliver natural gas? The US on the other hand was concerned that lack of Russian natural gas during winter would cause widespread suffering in Europe and European governments would respond by lifting sanctions on Russia. By blowing up the pipelines the US loses nothing, gets to make a lot of money by selling expensive LNG to Europeans, and there is no longer a possibility of importing Russian natural gas.
      US wins and Europe and Russia lose.

    2. Oh yeah. Seymour Hersh.

      I remember way back when he was considered a credible investigative journalist, before he started jumping on any conspiracy bandwagon.

      1. How do we decide whether Seymour Hersh is a credible journalist or someone who jumps on conspiracy bandwagon? What is the touchstone for determining the truth? Some might argue that blaming Russia for blowing up their own pipeline which used to bring them a lot of income is the conspiracy theory.

        1. With Seymour Hersh, his reputation started to fall as he grew to start taking uncorroborated opinions as fact, and credibly believing poorly sourced or un-sourced materials.

          The best investigative journalists seem to develop story lines that reveal new facts, and get more and more corroboration as time goes on. Seymour is more the other way. He often produces a story and it just dies because it’s not based on anything real.

          I’ve enjoyed much of the stuff he did earlier in his career, but now I don’t think he’s credible.

      2. GerryF , it was already known that only the US profits by the blowup of thr pipelines to many who applied logic . That is what Lira in his video of September , explained via a process of elimination . Sy Hersch has pointed in the direction of ” how ” and ” why ” ,

        1. Greetings Hole in the head. I think that only the Russian Federation, the United States, and the countries of the European Union had the opportunity to undermine the Nord Streams. Even if the United States did not undermine the gas pipeline, the leadership of the US Military probably knew who did it.
          I came across a message: “There is no data on the Norwegian aircraft that could drop the buoy in the flight archive on Flightradar24, since it apparently flew with the transponder turned off. But the track of the P-8A Poseidon flight that arrived in the area of the incident was preserved on the resource exactly one hour after the explosion.

          According to the resource entry, the American plane flew in from the Atlantic, after which, after passing over Denmark, it flew up to the island of Bornholm. Then he refueled over Poland from the tanker aircraft KS-135R.

          After that, Poseidon returned to Bornholm and at about 04:45 European Summer Time made a full circle exactly over the area of ​​the explosion, starting to descend. Having made a U-turn to the right and moved away from the scene, the American intelligence officer gradually descended from a height of 7,300 meters to 2,200 meters, after which he disappeared from the radar, turning off the transponder.”
          If they didn’t know, then the plane would not fly there at that time.

          1. OA,

            Interesting. I have no idea what happened, but a good conspiratorial theory makes for a good reading. The back up facts are what makes this so difficult. And the war setting makes almost impossible for someone like me (not linked to government or a major company) to have any meaningful opinion on this subject.

            1. From whats been stated and concluded earlier, including Joes statement, the case is more or less closed in my view. You´re free to have opposed opinions, depending on prefered outlet channenls.

    3. That whole article by Hersch can be seen through the lens of a speculative and entertaining screenplay.
      He portrays a dozen scenes as fact, without really knowing.
      All or some of it could be true, or could be entirely irrelevant to what actually went down.

  21. Podcast called Irregular Warfare produced by West Point & Princeton has a December 30, 2022 episode regarding the Arctic. It is titled ‘The Arctic Heats Up: Global Competition in the High North’. Perhaps worth a listen if one has an interest in future trends analysis.

  22. Dennis, have you come across any local information you consider reliable concerning the performance of heat pumps during the recent extreme cold event?

    1. HICKORY —

      Some of my neighbours have recently installed heat pumps and are very pleased with them but apparently during extreme cold events they are not especially effective (I might have one installed as a local lad has offered to do the necessary work gratis). I only refer to the brand available locally; perhaps there are makes out there that do better when it’s really cold.

      1. Good for you Doug, do your homework

        AIR CONDITIONERS, BUYING TIPS, HVAC EDUCATION, HEAT PUMPS
        Heat Pump vs. Air Conditioning

        ENERGY EFFICIENCY/COST TO OPERATE
        In moderately cold outdoor temperatures, heat pump systems provide energy-efficient heating using only electricity. In these conditions they can be less costly to operate compared to systems that use more expensive heating fuel sources such as natural gas, oil or propane. As temperatures drop below freezing, the heat pump requires more energy to maintain comfort inside, reducing efficiency and increasing your electric bill. You can solve this problem by pairing a heat pump with a Carrier furnace, creating a Hybrid Heat system. However, due to the higher initial cost for the heat pump unit, a hybrid system may be more expensive than a more commonly paired system of an air conditioner and furnace.

        In cooling mode, both heat pumps and air conditioners come in models with high SEER ratings, providing energy efficient cooling during the warm summer months. SEER ratings are like miles-per-gallon for a car. They give you a standard measure of efficiency so you can compare different models. The higher the SEER, the more efficient the unit. In heating mode, heat pump efficiency is expressed in HSPF. The higher the HSPF, the higher the efficiency. In many ways, the energy efficiency and cost to operate factor comes down to location. In areas with moderate temperatures, a heat pump is a better option for efficient heating than in areas with extremely cold winters. If you want a higher efficiency model, be sure to select one that has been ENERGY STAR® certified.

        https://www.carrier.com/residential/en/us/products/heat-pumps/heat-pumps-vs-air-conditioners/

      2. In our local area, a few people with heat pumps said they worked fine last week when it was at -13F (-25C). One of them had it hooked up to a monitoring system and you could see it was working harder when it got below 0F, -18C. Their heat pumps both have electric coils that can come on if needed but they chose not to, in order to see what happened. They said at the coldest temperatures, their living room got down to 63F, 17C.

        1. It would nice to know the effiency numbers then. They can go under 1 – that’s why the systems have a coil heating. Or they can be strained a lot, with the danger of breaking.

          A neighbor here has to change the compressor every 2 years, guarantee is already off. Seems he got a lemon.

          The big problem with this heating is: When strained most, in a cold winter night + day, in many countries wind is calm to zero, and solar low to zero – where I live you have most times fog when temperatures go below -10 Celsius. And it’s high pressure,, what means very calm wind.

          If anybody would heat with this, the grid would break down on these days. No need for this kind of load the rest of the year (and even not every year).

          Sure, single heat pump installations like today are no problem.

        2. That applies to Air to Air heatpumps, I have one of those in one house, works very well down to -15C/5F, then looses efficiency, at -30C/-22F it´s 1:1 so no benefit.
          But there are also ground source heatpumps, with a shallow collector tube 1m/3 feet down in the lawn, or with a deep borehole. I have one of those too, 500m/1500 feet of shallow collector, works very good through the whole winter at 65N, I guess climatewise something like Wisconsin. In March/April the incoming collector water (with anti-freeze) is below freezing, ~ -5 -6C/22F but it still have full efficiency. They cost more of course though but can also make cheap hot water so a good deal overall in many cases. Other variants also exist.

  23. Human population growth rate projection with the most recent data from the world bank. The data point from 2021 seems like an outlier. Future datapoints will confirm this, or acknowledge a change in linear regression trend.

  24. Graph of the Day: Solar covers all of South Australia demand for six hours straight

    The state has, on occasions, met all its local demand from rooftop solar alone, as local network operator SA Power Networks revealed last year, including for one period of more than five hours. (Local demand excludes some big loads that get their power from big transmission links).

    South Australia has been setting all sorts of renewable energy records over the summer, including in December, when wind and solar contributed just over 85% (85.4%) of the state’s electricity demand over the month.

    According to the latest Quarterly Energy Dynamics report from AEMO, South Australian renewables peaked at an “extraordinary” high level of 91.5 per cent in November, even despite the state’s grid being isolated by broken transmission lines.

    Looking forward to the day when the state failing to meet all its local demand from rooftop solar alone during the midday hours becomes something worthy of being reported!

    1. Terrific, should allow them to export even more coal (and gas). Who knows, in a few years Australia’s coal exports might even exceed those of Indonesia.

      Note: “Coal exporters from Australia reaped as much as $45bn in windfall gain in the 2021-22 year, with a similar bonanza likely this year, offering governments a budgetary boon for those willing to grasp it, the Australia Institute has said.”

  25. More interesting stuff from the land down under (reneweconomy.com.au)
    Solar’s stunning journey from lab curiosity to global juggernaut wiping out fossil fuels

    And Blakers says that Australia should be proud of leading from the front, particularly in South Australia where the average share of wind and solar over the past year is nearly 70 per cent of local demand, and in the main grid where the main grid will soon reach instants where all demand will be met by wind and solar.

    “I think it’s very clear that all the politicians in all of the Australian states and territories know that the faster we go to solar and wind, the cheaper our wholesale electricity prices will be, and we can get away from being held to ransom by gas and coal companies,” Blakers says.

    “We’re solving problems that appear to be really difficult to those who are at per cent solar and wind. Researchers in other countries they say, oh, it’s gonna be really difficult to get to 40% 50% or whatever, pick a number, of solar and wind and I say, Well, you know, it’s actually been remarkably straightforward.

    “In Australia, the more solar and wind we’ve got, the lower the wholesale prices, we don’t have blackouts, we’ve got a stable grid. We can see lots of problems buut we can also see lots of solutions. And there’ll be other solutions that come out of the woodwork as we push up against this or that barrier.

    “It’s it’s just been marvellous to go back over some of the papers from even five or six years ago, about how hard and expensive this is all going to be.

    In the trial, Emma, you remember that we can have reliability or low energy cost or low greenhouse emissions, but we can’t have all three, well, whahat a lot of nonsense we getting all three.

  26. Inside EV’s is reporting that Q4 2022 plug in EV sales in California hit 24% market share. Considering that CA is the world’s fifth largest economy, and very close to passing Germany to become the fourth largest, this seems like a pretty big deal.

    How are the other top economies doing?

    The U.S. overall isn’t great at 7.2%, but still better than Japan which is a dismal 1%.

    Other heavy weights in 2022
    China: 30%
    Germany: 31.4%
    U.K.: 22.9%
    France: 21.6%
    Global: 13%

    2023 will likely see large increases in market share.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country

    1. The Japanese numbers are so very surprising, considering that they must import all their oil,
      and the history of being innovative in the vehicle sector.
      I think it has to do with the leadership of both Toyota and Honda being extremely slow to arrive at the EV
      platform, for some reason.
      Perhaps they are hesitant to undercut their current market share of ICE vehicles.
      If so, it means they are going to have to play a very big game of catch-up.
      Miro?

      -btw- I think the Toyota RAV4 Prime plugin hybrid is the best such vehicle currently for sale in the US-
      gets over 40 miles range on electric before the petrol engine kicks in.

      1. Once Toyota pivots and brings BEV’s to the market in mass numbers, they’ll sell well, but they better get on it. The Camry has been the best selling car in Australia for 28 years, but was beaten last year by the Tesla Model Y.

        The Corolla is next to go down. From NextBigFuture:

        “Tesla produced more Model Y than Toyota Corolla in the third quarter of 2022. Tesla produced about 238,000 Model Y and delivered 224,208 Model Y in the third quarter. Toyota delivered about 222k-230k Corolla’s in the third quarter.”

        And I agree on the Prime. Love to have one.

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