127 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum July 11, 2024”

    1. Uh, actually, if you check Neven’s Arctic Blog Forum, you’ll see ice is vanishing really quickly these days.

    2. About 45% of new vehicles sold in China are electric ( BEV or PHEV ) . This is the “China market” for cars.

    1. I am really sick of this media storm on Biden. Their objective, as usual, is to generate viewers regardless of the cost. OK, no surprise there.
      What is the objective of the high profile Democrats? Wouldn’t rational actors do what the Republicans did with Nixon; send the most powerful delegation possible to the White House and try to talk the man into retiring.
      I’m not sure that, this late in the election cycle, even that is rational. But it wouldn’t be the circular firing squad we are seeing.
      Are these high profile dunces aware that every time one of them denounces the president they increase the likelihood that Trump will be re-elected?
      I think I’ll go bury my head in the sand.

      1. It’s clear Biden is not quitting now. It’s time for the party to stop eating it’s self. This election is as simple as good and evil, right and wrong, chaos or calm.

        1. Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

          But also, this guarantees a a Trump victory now. The Dems have fucked us here with Biden and their slow realisation that the guy needs to be retired stat.

          1. Just how did Biden fuck anyone? The country is in better shape than ever before. We are pumping more oil than ever before and more than anyone in the world has ever pumped. The stock market is at an all-time high, and wages and employment are high.

            That lying idiot Donald Trump Built a National Debt So Big (Even Before the Pandemic) That It’ll Weigh Down the Economy for Years Trump placed the word of Putin over the word of our own CIA and FBI. Trump called our fallen soldiers losers and suckers. Trump is a convicted criminal and a rapist. He is a bigot who, with his father, was sued for not renting to blacks. Anyone who cannot see through that lying idiot must be stone ass blind.

            The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.

            1. Someone should let the voters know what an amazing economy he has given us (ignoring debt, because it’s a meaningless metric when servicing costs on debt are what matter, not nominal amount of debt mostly owned by US taxpayers).

              https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating

              The most incredibly bad net approval ratings, Trump is actually higher.

            2. I’m fully on board with Biden’s record and his standing as an ethical leader.

              And up until now, I’ve been of the opinion that he should hang in there, period.

              But on the other hand, a number of people among my personal acquaintances believe he should step down, and call for his supporters to throw their utmost efforts into supporting somebody else.

              And there’s this to be said for his doing so.

              The right wing has been and will continue to have a field day, painting him as incompetent,senile, or worse.

              The trump crowd won’t have that advantage against a new candidate…. hopefully one who will be loud and clear, around the clock, pointing out that trump and his lackeys are utterly unfit for anything, other than providing plenty of employment opportunities for jailers.

              I’m having trouble deciding which course would be best for the D’s, and for the country.

              Maybe I’ll be a fence sitter on this until one side or the other is clearly going to prevail.

            3. I’m with you OFM. The problem isn’t Biden, it’s the left wing voters and young people. Biden is completely capable of managing the job and probably the most knowledgeable person on earth to handle USA foreign policy. Ya, he’s a little slow and mixs up a few word and names, but he knows what he is talking about. Where as Trump knows nothing and just lies about everything. The economy is doing extremely well compared to any other country in the world post covid. Biden has it right on guns, Roe, sexual freedom to love who one wants too, women, immigration, democracy, taxes and the economy.

              My mother died at the age of 96 from alzheimer’s and I first saw the begining of it when she was 84. Biden doesn’t have dementia. Trump could have a heart attack tomorrow.

            4. Imagine the president actually calls the shots. You guys do realise that Biden could literally be Terri Schiavo right now and nothing would change?

              This weird fetish for the main face of the system that runs without you even having an input, is strange to a non-American. I think both your candidates are cunts (ethical Joe? Seriously?), but I’m only jesting in who is going to ruin the country or not, because ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

              I’m sure it makes for good entertainment in the press and the media in general for shovelling ads at the populace overall.

              Hey, maybe this time if you vote for Joe, the Dems will codify Roe in law. A thing they could have done for longer than I’ve been alive, but sure, they just didn’t get around to it and it’s totally not a stick to beat “Blue or death” Democrats over with during every election.

              And I thought the GOP was stupid.

            5. I’ve admired him all along, since I was a teenager and he was new to the political scene.
              But its time to hand it over.

            6. Poll: 67% of Americans say Biden should bow out of presidential race
              https://www.axios.com/2024/07/11/biden-drop-out-poll-democrats-trump-harris

              I think at this point, you really should look at this as a bellwether for voter sentiment. You either drop Biden and use Harris or some other contender for a possible victory, or keep him for an almost guaranteed Trump victory.

              DNC needs to do something. This isn’t going away and reminds me of Rishi Sunak trying to ride the wave of bad feelings by calling an election early. And that didn’t work out so well for him.

            7. Both Biden and Trump are incompetent for the job.

              Trump is a way worse human than Biden, Loves Kim Jong Un and Putin.

              Trump would without hesitation destroy the USA to save himself and/or enrich himself or simply enact revenge on someone who doesn’t do what he says.

              Trump is a sociopath who grew up extremely wealthy, never had any boundaries, never suffered any consequences and has no ability to experience EMPATHY.

              And don’t forget that picture of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and they had there arms around each other gawking at women.

              https://www.newsweek.com/jeffrey-epsteins-visits-mar-lago-detailed-1857636

              Biden at this point probably just makes public appearances.

              His inner circle are managing things thru him.

            8. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

              14 years olds are pretty young!

              From above article

              Trump on Epstein

          2. On inflation and debt…Trump would only make those two problems worse based on his espoused plans.
            “Most economists believe inflation, deficits and interest rates would be higher during a second Trump administration than if Biden remains in the White House, according to a quarterly survey of forecasters by The Wall Street Journal.”
            “May 8, 2024 — Trump’s inflation bomb: How his second-term plans could make it worse. Economists warn tariffs, lower interest rates, lower taxes and mass deportations could super-charge inflation.”
            “16 Nobel economists see a Trump inflation bomb”

            1. No one really has an out on this, because 15+ years of ZIRP has fundamentally changed the system to be a low rate rent seeking economy of spreadsheets with people chasing massive returns. Dropping rates will turbocharge inflation, but if they keep them up then you run the risk of detonating all those zombie companies floating about that are dead weight thanks to barely covering interest payments on their debts.

              And deflation will never be allowed to happen.

            2. “No one really has an out on this”
              Yeh but we don’t get a choice on perfect.
              We have to pick the one who won’t as much of a problem.

            3. I just don’t see the Fed doing something that doesn’t end with a massive shock to the system in the next six months. HHH is better at this assessment than me, although it’s evident that there are no perfect choices or even really good ones. The kicking of the can since 2008 has only made the eventual dénouement that much harder to swallow.

              If we keep rates as they are, then people get immiserated by whatever debt servicing costs they have to endure. That goes for corporations that only ever made sense with the money tap on full flow. The money chases whatever returns are available to offset this loss of consumption and free money output, so we get things like the AI boom and everyone gobbling up NVIDIA stocks like they’re candy.

              But if we get a rate cut, as Jerome keeps threatening (before then saying the complete opposite or something suitably vague to keep markets guessing), then it’s back to the environment that enabled unsustainable businesses to prosper and also throw that effectively free money at anything and everything to try and grow. That isn’t going to help the inflationary pressures, especially as a lot of that was down to too much cash chasing too few goods in an actual supply side issue. This is also pretty shitty for anyone who isn’t a minted person of means.

              If people are disillusioned with Bidenomics, I don’t think they’ll get any reprieve with Trump throwing accelerant on the fire. He literally can’t choose a good option at this juncture, so people will very quickly, as they likely will in the UK after the elation of voting the Tories out, get reacquainted with reality and the lack of magical fixes.

              I think this could be a pretty consequential 12 months as things change in many nations like the UK, France and US, and also don’t really change since the gov’t is hamstrung with the playing pieces they have, not what they wanted. No one is going to bring in a golden era in this situation, and most people have grokked that disinflation is not the same as making everyone better off in real terms. It just means you’re not getting fucked over a barrel as badly as 12 months ago.

              I work in a pretty big biotech adjacent company owned by an American corporation of size. I’ve never in the 15 years of working, outside of 2009, known it so dead in terms of work. Sponsors are either rescheduling work constantly to a later date, or cancelling or trying to haggle cheaper prices for our services. My department had two people laid off last month, and that’s the first time I’ve been in the sights. The GFC ended up with us losing people, just not in my area, and we’ve not even hit the actual crash that is on the horizon.

              Another thing that won’t help is the de-dollarisation currently gaining momentum in the BRICS and elsewhere, while also nations like Japan have to sell bonds after the US gave them a bollocking over interfering in the FX markets. The dollar being a reserve currency is what props up a lot of the world we have right now.

            4. Call the election off. Trump having an assassination attempt on his life is basically hitting the win button for him now.

              No idea how Joe beats that.

    1. What’s that make Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ? An idiot ?

      And Trump ? An idiot bullshiter ?

      1. I’ve run out of adjectives for both of them and anyone who considers either for any elective office. We are experiencing the ultimate downside of the democratic experiment.

        1. If you think Biden mistaking Zelenskyy for Putin is bad, it means you love Trump. I don’t make the rules.

          1. I’m old, and have lots of old acquaintances. Mistaking names once in a while is a very common thing. It does NOT indicate incompetence or senility. I’m confident Biden is all there, and quite capable of making reasoned decisions, listening to and following professional advice, etc.

            But I’m also seriously concerned that the average voter in my country is so ill informed that he or she all to often votes on the basis of sound bite level reasoning.

            HRC lost in large part because she LET trump and his cronies get away with her character assassination over the long term. She should have called trump out directly, in no uncertain terms, early and often.

            Biden and the Democratic Party have made the same mistake. It’s probably too late to save Biden, in respect to the ill informed shoot from the hip voters who vote based on sound bite level reasoning. Call them what you like. In a close election, they’re numerous enough to flip it either way.

            It’s quite possible, maybe even really likely, that the D’s are more likely to win this fall, if they run somebody else.

            1. You have a candidate who just shrugged off getting assassinated and has produced imagery that is already on T-shirts and tattoos, versus a man who looks for all intents and purposes like he’s trying to sneak up on Scooby and Shaggy.

              https://i.imgur.com/X8HBhoo.gif

              It’s not even close. And yeah, voters care about image. Ask JFK how the first televised debate worked out for him.

          2. By “both of them” I meant Trump and Kennedy.
            Sorry to have confused you.

  5. Just for all the believers in a clean green economy, being entirely a circular economy, I found this announcement from Australia’s largest recycler of lithium batteries..
    https://investorhub.lithium-au.com/announcements/6426354

    They finally made a profit from the operation, not from selling the recycled bits, but by collecting the waste, to a tune of $A5.63/kg…

    This is disastrous for anyone thinking a circular economy is possible. If the only way to make money is to charge people to take away waste, then the overall recycling rate will be much lower. people will dump stuff in holes in the ground a lot of the time before paying to have it carted away.

    It’s all these extra little bits added together, that show how a ‘bright green future’ is not possible. All the waste is collected with diesel trucks, the chemicals used in recycling processes are from fossil fuels etc.

    As soon as really hard times approach, this business will go bust, as people/businesses will not be able to afford the high payment to have old batteries removed, so will either stockpile them or go bury them ‘somewhere’…

    1. Oh, a bright green future is possible but it doesn’t include any objects or chemical substances that don’t occur naturally in the ecosystem.

    2. I truly believe that mining is a fully sustainable and beneficial practice for our species.

      We can just mine ourselves to prosperity and a better environment using the power of the blockchain and AI.

    3. Hideaway
      It simply doesn’t fit the capitalist model which is the world we’ve grown up in. If all costs were included no profit could result. You have to bury the waste in holes that’s the business model. Eventually governments have to clean it up if they can and provide for the displaced workers who can’t move to the next hole in the ground.
      Capitalism leads to socialism 101 macro economics. BTW subsidies are socialism not capitalism.
      There is no price discovery any longer the system is so broken it can’t be repaired. The fools on Wall Street take their cues from the Fed. It’s all print and spend. The core are now runny nosed kids who have no clue how the system got here or how it works.
      Just like 2000 years ago when they forgot how to build aqueducts .
      “Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual idiots “

  6. I wonder how this will slow the adoption of EVs. What is the typical lease time 3 yrs? Will this start to flood the used EV market and drop prices which will help used car EV buyers but will increase lease costs for new EV lease buyers.

    But a question about whether EV owners were “very likely” to switch back to ICE vehicles—meaning, replacing them entirely and not just adding a second or third gas or hybrid car to the fleet, Kampshoff said—has gotten the largest amount of wider attention. “We’ve gotten tons of inbound requests to talk about this one,” he said.

    Globally, around 29% of the survey respondents said they probably would not go electric next time.

    All of those owners cited familiar pain points with modern EVs: problems finding working public chargers, an inability to charge at home for whatever reason and general range anxiety.

    https://insideevs.com/news/726008/mckinsey-study-half-ev-buyers/

    “I didn’t expect that. I thought, ’Once an EV buyer, always an EV buyer,’” Philipp Kampshoff, the leader of the McKinsey Center for Future Mobility, told Automotive News.
    Among the owners surveyed who are planning to switch back, 35% cited the lack of charging infrastructure, 34% said the costs were too high, 32% said planning long driving trips was too difficult, 24% said they could not currently charge at home, 21% said worrying about charging was too stressful and 13% said they did not enjoy how the cars felt while driving.

    https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jun/22/46-of-us-electric-car-owners-want-to-switch-back-t/

    1. Ovi,

      I imagine if there was a survey of early ICEV owners, many would have said they would switch back to the horse and buggy, for the most part it did not occur. I don’t expect I will ever own an ICEV in the future. Sold the 2013 Camry Hybrid back in 2022, the last ICEV I will ever own.

  7. The fossil fuel home boys tend to deliberately forget that oil is a one time gift of nature, and cannot be recycled at all, whereas rechargeable battery technology is arguably just now approaching junior high school status, in terms of what it may be another ten or twenty years down the road.

    I’ve been hearing one argument after another as to why renewable electricity is never going to work for the last fifteen or twenty years or so. One after another, each of these arguments has been promoted until it was obviously more bullshit than anything else….. as for instance the argument that the grid would never be able to accommodate more than ten percent, or fifteen percent, wind and solar power.

    Now the anti renewable arguments are approaching the heights of absurdity….. with the fossil fuel shills arguing that renewable electricity is BAD because it can be sold at dirt cheap prices, at times when the weather is good.

    I find it HARD to understand why I shouldn’t be glad to buy electricity at dirt cheap prices, lol.

    The people who own the dug in existing generating plants are just going to have to go the way of the horse and buggy industry….. given time. All their pissing and moaning amounts to nothing more than that, just pissing and moaning.

    One way or another, the regulatory authorities, such as they may be in any given area or country, will do what HAS to be done to ensure enough of that traditional coal or gas fired capacity is kept ready to go, indefinitely, for as long as necessary.

    And in the meantime….. we will be at far less risk of WWIII as the result of hot war involving oil and gas…….

    And let’s not forget that while renewable electricity is SUPPOSED to be unaffordable….

    The more we have of it, the cheaper the price of natural gas and coal. I’m having a hard time coming up with good numbers in this respect….. but the total savings seem to be astronomical, on a cumulative basis, and sure to continue to grow as nature’s one time gift of gas depletes.

    1. Fossil fuels are not vanishing any time soon. I’m sorry you hate reality so much, but going on about bad vibes regarding the premier energy source on the fossil fuel knowers blog is pretty funny. You’re better than that. Or maybe you’re not. You do seem awfully wishy washy on these things.

      Let me know when FFs aren’t supply the majority of all energy usage and have increasing funding and output quotas. Maybe then you can talk about the shining city on the mount that is powered purely by renewables, it’s just we kinda already had that for, oh, all of human history until 1750 or so. And it did not enable the lifestyle anyone alive today, nor in the last two centuries, enjoyed. Dr. Murphy’s blog links his textbook that goes over this. The maths is sound. China’s excess productive capacity making PV and wind turbines cheaper does not address even a fraction of the issues with a renewable only global economy. Not even close.

      EDIT: Just looked at a quote for a PV system for my house again and, uh, yeah. Unaffordable unless I want to go into debt with a nice high interest payment on top of it. Silly me for not earning Tesla Model X money. This must be why so many on here are clueless about the US economy and say it’s great. Maybe the plebs should try not being poor?

      1. I’ve frequently posted comments to the effect that we’re going to be using fossil fuel on the grand scale for a long time to come. You won’t find any comments I have posted indicating that I believe we can go all electric on cars and light trucks, never mind heavy trucks, farm equipment, construction machinery, etc, within the next few decades, maybe never.

        I have generally argued that electric tractors and combines and other heavy farm equipment will still be running on diesel fuel indefinitely… because batteries are affordable if you use them regularly, as in a car or truck, almost every day.

        But put a battery in a medium to large tractor big enough to run it even five or six hours, and it’ll have to be as big as the ones put into a semi truck… because tractors have and USE that much horsepower.

        The rural grid is utterly incapable of supporting charging such batteries on farms, and such tractors aren’t generally used every day. They sit in sheds for weeks at a time.NOTE….. I’m NOT talking about long distance high voltage transmission lines, but rather the smaller lines that go from house to house, farm to farm, nation wide.

        So…… I’m thinking diesel farm equipment, and diesel construction machinery will be the norm for decades at least… and probably for half a century or more, maybe even forever, or as long as civilization lasts. ( Synthetic diesel fuel produced using off peak wind and solar power likely be cheaper and better all around than batteries up to the job. PROBABLY. Using renewable juice to manufacture synthetic diesel incidentally solves the STORAGE problem in this respect as well. Diesel stores quite well, and at a very modest cost. )

        Oil truly is the lifeblood of industrial civilization. Natural gas is arguably the most important industrial feed stock, period, given that it’s used in such large amounts for so many critical purposes, such as manufacture of fertilizer. Only an idiot, or maybe somebody who pays next to no attention, could possibly believe we’re going to give up oil and gas anytime soon.. and certainly not within the lifetime of old farts such as myself and others hanging out here in this forum.

        You guys who insist that solar and wind juice are TOO EXPENSIVE are quite right……. depending on how you frame your assumptions.

        I’m so old now I’ll probably die without owning a solar system of my own big enough to meet my personal needs and run some of my farm equipment…. which is mostly parked these days anyway.

        But ya know what? I couldn’t make it work, on an annual basis, because the COST of such a system was falling fast enough that I was putting it off from one year to the next buying it. Paying my utility another year was a better deal for me, in dollars and cents.

        There was a time when my grand parents and great grand parents couldn’t afford trucks and tractors. Mules and horses had to do . Move it up a hundred years.

        There was a time I couldn’t afford a cell phone…. not that I didn’t have money enough to pay for one, but rather that I didn’t have enough use for it to justify the expense, considering the problems…. the bill would have been pretty high, and the service would have been extremely limited at my location.

        Now I can’t afford NOT having a cell phone. It saves me more than it costs just in gasoline and vehicle expenses, because I can take care of a lot of stuff from any place I might happen to be. No driving back to the house to use the land line to call the parts store to see if a part is in stock, etc, picking up something for a family member while at the supermarket, etc.

        Four or five years ago I didn’t have any friends who owned a zero turn lawn mower for their own personal use. Too expensive.

        Now at least a couple of them have one, given that they penciled it out and know that they save enough in terms of time to more than justify the cost. Yes, we tend to have a lot of grass. I cut an acre plus myself.. but my house and grounds aren’t worth a quarter what the house alone would be in a nice suburb with maybe a thousand square feet of grass total.

        More than half the costs, as estimated by people in the industry, of owning a domestic solar system involve the installation process… from getting the permit to paying the contractor.

        In a few more years, this portion of the cost, in terms of constant money, will fall quite a bit… maybe as much as twenty to fifty percent within a decade or so, as the industry gradually finds ways to eliminate unnecessary paperwork, endless delays in getting permits and inspections, as more qualified technicians can be trained and put on the payroll, etc.

        Plug and play is the rule rather than the exception these days, when you buy a personal computer or other electronic device.

        Building a deck on the back of your house is pretty close to plug and play……. getting the permit usually takes only a few days, and sometimes you can get it the same day you apply for it.
        The contractors and building inspectors know the rules inside out. Your deck can go up as fast as your contractor can get to your house…… assuming lumber is available. Offer him a couple of hundred more bucks if he finishes early, or pays a penalty for being late, and you can have your deck within a week, certainly within a month, unless business is so good the contractor CAN’T get to your job.

        And let’s not forget that the nature of wind and solar power is that you pay for everything up front, while you collect the earnings in kilowatt hours over the next couple of decades.

        I’m ready to bet my farm that the retail price of electricity will on average double here in the USA within the next decade, because from here on out, I’m convinced inflation is a sure thing. Electric utilities pay high wages, pay high property taxes, buy ever higher priced trucks and other machinery, buy ever more expensive transmission cable, pay more for repairs necessitated by storms, etc.

        It’s quite commonplace for people who have owned their own home for ten years or longer to pay their PITI plus repairs and maintenance for quite a bit less than a renter is paying for a more or less identical house across the street.

        In my own work, we went from using forty horse power machines to two hundred fifty horsepower machines on our own place within a span of twenty years…… couldn’t afford NOT to.

        Anybody who thinks wind and solar power will be MORE expensive, in constant money terms, as the years go by, is either ignorant or simply unwilling to face up to reality.

        Anybody who thinks there will always be plenty of oil and gas available at affordable prices simply has his head up his ass so far he’ll never see daylight.

        Maybe we’ll have cheap safe nukes. My bet is on cheap safe wind and solar power…. backed up of course.

        1. I would keep the diesel for agriculture and heavy industry rather than try and electrify it in any way before things get dicey. The rest of the oil usage in transport can be diverted to other things like what we make from it as a feed stock, rather the burning it when we could have more pedestrianised cities and public transit running off diesel-electric or fully electrified.

          I can dream. Shoulda had SMRs rolling out already, but Nuscale screwed the pooch and no idea what Rolls-Royce are doing.

          1. I expect geothermal to get traction quickly over the coming 10 years…its going to be a good time to be a driller.

            SMR’s aren’t dead yet, although I don’t think the energy output will be competitive for general baseload production compared to big nuc units. Nonetheless they may become widespread for certain deployments such as data centers, smelters, upper crust bunkers, and military sites. Charge up your robot crew or your laser drones.
            https://finance.yahoo.com/news/oklo-start-building-first-small-160000862.html

          1. South sea bubble, tulips in Holland, wall street late 20’s, Japan 1989, 2000 tech bubble….

            Millions of investors worldwide never make mistakes, LOL..

            While we continue to increase fossil fuel use, which is clearly happening, as in more TWh of production added every year than renewables, then of course the ‘renewable’ bubble can keep growing.

            What actually is happening, is the ripping up of rainforest to build new coal mines and industrial facilities, to then burn coal to make the cheap Aluminium, in places like Indonesia, so the new solar panels and transmission lines and EV body panels can be built, so we can claim to be going green.

            Humanity is just digging up more of the planet, with fossil fuels, sending more species into extinction, adding more CO2 to the atmosphere, more pollution throughout the ecosphere by building more machines that have relatively short lifespans and all have to be replaced with minerals from lower grade ore bodies, which will take more energy to access.

            This progress is just a hastening of our journey to the end of modern civilization and the destruction of most of the ecosphere in the process. Of course the IEA wants this destruction to happen much faster, we need to invest more.

            It’s always MORE, of everything, never less, which is what’s needed to reduce future suffering when modern civilization collapses due to rapidly declining oil availability, whenever that happens..

            1. “It’s always MORE, of everything, never less, which is what’s needed to reduce future suffering”

              Hideaway, there are times when I think your the one with alzheimer’s disease. Day after day, you repeat the same collapse scenario. If you have made this type of comment once, you have done it a hundred times. You should practice what you preach. From you “It’s always MORE, never less” collapse. My guess is you can’t comment less on collapse or how to help meditate any of the planets or humanities problems.

              More or less, what is it ?

            3. Huntingtonbeach, yet my reply is to the post we’ve had adnauseum about MORE solar and wind being built, with the link saying we need MORE transmission, MORE storage, MORE help/incentives for poorer countries that are lagging behind etc..

              All the building of MORE, MORE, and MORE has done is increase the use of fossil fuels over the last 2 decades. The building of MORE has raised the content of CO2 in the atmosphere, brought about MORE rainforest destruction, MORE species extinction etc.

              My arguments of needing LESS building of everything, strict population control and reduction around the world is always in answer to someone’s post about building MORE, yet you never say a word against building MORE…

              The continual building of MORE modern civilization is not possible forever on a finite planet, and what we’ve built has had a massive detrimental effect on the natural world, that we totally rely upon. What’s worse is that we are building MORE with a depleting, one time asset, that needs an increasing complexity to mine from deeper depths and lower grades on average..

              The answer you and every other cornucopian has, always appears to be an acceleration of the building MORE meme, always with handwaves of any approaching problems, like plastics, fertilizers, explosives, chemicals needed for farming, mining and recycling, that are all fossil fuel based, that will all fall in availability once we are past peak mining of oil, coal, gas, and everything else as well.

              LESS economy is what’s needed to reduce suffering in the future, yet the economy has no way to slow down without crashing, therefore it will crash either by choice, or by depletion, which will be much worse than a planned reduction.

              However because most of the population does not want to give up their creature comforts, they look to any piece of fiction to hold onto the modernity they enjoy and deny the possibility of a bad outcome in the future, which is precisely why we will head into a fast collapse when we are past peak oil production in an accelerating decline.

              The feedback loops from the unravelling of complexity of everything in the modern world guarantees the collapse in all energy production and therefore everything else.

              When in history was the last time there was a huge reduction in available energy year after year, an downward acceleration in available energy. The answer is probably never, so the event of the near future, when it happens will be something unlike anything possibly ever experienced by humanity as a whole.

            4. So Hideaway his a secret plan to solve the environmental destruction problem associated with producing renewable energy infrastructure.

              Too bad he isn’t publishing it.

              If anybody has even a clue as to why he thinks giving up on renewable electricity is going to somehow prevent or even seriously slow the “ripping up of rainforest” I’m all ears.

              And the guys badmouthing renewable electricity because it’s not resulting in using LESS fossil fuel day to day, or year to year, SO FAR, or NOW, are either mathematically illiterate, or pretending the rest of us can’t understand basic math.

              Wind and solar power production is growing FASTER than fossil fuel production.

              This trend, if it continues, as seems extremely likely, means that sometime down the road, we’ll be cutting back on fossil fuel and relying to an ever greater extent on renewable electricity.

              And given that we’re never going to run out of sun and wind, whereas fossil fuel depletion is a VERY real problem, this day is probably going to arrive during the lifetime of some of the regulars here in this forum.

              Of course it’s possible we’ll run out of the energy and mineral resources and so forth that are necessary to continue building out wind and solar infrastructure…. but I’ve yet to see any convincing proof of this argument.

              There’s a problem with rare earths…. but it seems to be a political rather than a geological problem. I’ve read about a number of quite substantial discoveries of rare earth ores in places OTHER than China recently.

              And I’m reading about new technologies coming to market this year and the next, at the FACTORY level, such that batteries will be made using a lot less expensive materials ……… batteries at least good enough to get the job done, and maybe even get it done better than the current dominant design requiring lots of lithium.

  8. Just as an aside to the cogent, intelligent comments here:

    The weather in MAINE is really, really fucked up right now. It has been high-80s-90s for days. It will continue to be high-80s-90s for several more days. The broccoli that I have BABIED since March refuses to head up. I fear for the fates of my cabbages and b. sprouts. My potato plants have stopped growing. My onions and beets look STRICKEN. Corn, beans, and squash are going HOG WILD. I have never, ever had corn plants over my head in mid-July before this year. I expect to be pulling fat ears off the plants by the end of the month. My apples grow VISIBLY by the day. Strawberries have simply shriveled and given up. I actually picked a PEPPER today. Remember, this is MAINE!!!

    PS Several friends here have remarked on the queer absence of mosquitos and other flying pests.

    1. The UK has seen something like one week of actual summer so far, back in end of June. Outside of that, it’s been the coldest and wettest summer, nay, year I can remember. I live in a fairly arid area and I don’t recall this much rain since 2012, which was particularly bad. The jet stream is so far below where we are as an island, it’s even impacting most of Western Europe, while the south and east get baked by heat domes.

      Historically, this year is more in line with summers in the mid- to later 20th century. However, if you only remember what’s passed for summer in the last 30 years or so, thanks to climate change (that liberal hoax), you’ve only ever endured really hot summers and hotter ones on average every year. So this return to normal, however brief, is weird and disorienting. Seriously, there’ve been at least two BBC articles on “when will summer start?” in the past month alone.

      I also wonder if the AMOC is about to kick the bucket. There’s at least two papers that indicate a high confidence on it falling over in this century, and one of them stated before 2050 even. If that goes, then Europe drops a good 12 ºC practically overnight in average temperatures, and so our agriculture goes from death from rain/drought to death by cold.

      1. The irony is sick.

        Go here, click on 500hPa Geopot. Hgt, and look at the big f-ing high over the Atlantic. That’s what’s wreaking havoc here.

        1. There was a point, sometime last October I think, when the jet stream was just this super long vertical down from the Arctic circle to probably the UK, then straight back up. To say the thing is wavy and erratic these days is an understatement. The melt season this year hasn’t even been that extreme, admittedly I’ve not kept as close an eye on it this year.

          There’s also the massive amounts of heat that are making those Cat. 5+ hurricanes in the Atlantic. The Earth is trying to distribute this heat, and it’s coming out in the most bonkers weather. I tell my coworkers and family when they complain about permanent winter instead of getting a summer that, if the alternative is the heat domes Greece or the eastern US have been enduring, I’ll take the cold, thanks.

    1. I blew my chance to catch a coffee or beer with you…simply forgot to check in.
      I was in Sisters for the weekend two weeks ago for the Big Ponderoo music festival.

  10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYjVmQPhLm8

    Nothing to do with energy but hillarious!

    Andre the Giant and Ken Patera (world’s strongest man) had a drinking contest.

    Andre (French) drank 116 beers

    Ken drank ~40.

    They showed up to the sold out arena WASTED.

    You can see it in the FILM.


    Bill Clinton said he and Newt Gingrich were buddies!!! They would just massacre each other for THEATRE and laugh about it later.

    These politicians are just GIGGLING about it!!

  11. Whenever the FED starts cutting rates is when everything blows up. I’ll explain why.

    Banks funding cost are tied to the Sofr rate. So as the FED raised interest rates the Sofr rate went up. Last I checked Sofr or a banks dollar cost funding rate was 5.4%. Banks are sitting on a bunch of unrealized losses on assets they bought during the pandemic that yield less than 5.4%. A lot of these assets yield 3.0-3.5%. So banks are losing money holding these assets. Because those assets don’t yield enough to cover their current dollar funding cost. Even if they hold to maturity the unrealized losses don’t become realized losses. They are still hemorrhaging money by having these assets on their balance sheets.

    So by raising interest rates the FED has in fact supercharged the reach for yield. Banks are forced to buy all kinds of risky assets that yield more than their dollar funding cost.

    CLO’s backed by junk corporate debt and commercial real estate is what the banks are being forced to buy.

    When the FED moves to seriously cut rates. The banks will move back into treasury bonds and out of all the risky stuff they have been forced to buy.

    Corporate bond yields will blowout. Which will lead to freeze on corporate stock buybacks. Sending stock prices lower. Corporates will look to trim headcount’s . Which will put further downward pressure on stock prices due to a cut in passive retirement inflows into the stock market.

    Everyone who currently locked in their current 3 or 3.5% home mortgage and can’t afford to sell their home. As you can see by the record low housing inventory for sale. As the FED cuts aggressively and mortgage rates come down. The supply or inventory of homes for sale will go up drastically. Which means lower prices. Much lower home prices.

    Slowing inflation that leads to FED rate cuts equals nothing good for the economy or the markets.

    The reach for yield is why stock markets continue higher when the FED’s balance sheet is shrinking. If you remove the reach for yields by cutting interest rates stock market goes down not up. The size of the FEDs balance sheet simply doesn’t matter.

    1. Exactly what I said. The best economy ever and fundamentally strong and true, and Trump is about to ruin it with his evil ways.

  13. I must admit that the more I learn, or try to learn, about high finance, the less sense it makes to me, once I get down into the weeds and dirt.
    But I do believe I’m right about one thing.

    Money is not a real thing, in the sense that it has value in and of itself. It’s a marker, a way of identifying ownership of real things, and of proving ownership. If you owe money, you can pay it back using money…… but ultimately, money is worthless, because it must eventually be exchanged for goods or services… and there potentially comes a day when nobody wants it. No amount of money would tempt me to part with my last few bags of flour or salt, in the event of the economy going totally to hell, but I would consider trading for ammo, or medical supplies, or other goods, or the work a young man could do for me, supposing I were willing to trust him.

    Money of course, so long as it’s still accepted, can buy power, it can buy politicians, it can buy judges and cops, or congress men. It can buy presidents and Supreme Court Justices.

    But power in the ultimate sense resides in the people, and if they are once aroused and united, they can throw out the old rules, and put in new ones…… assuming they succeed in rebellion against the existing power structure.

    The REAL productive powers are people, resources and capital. In the event such a rebellion succeeds, the people remain. Any remaining resources are just that….. remaining resources. And while capital is tricky, a united people can make big things happen…… including creating a new kind of money……similar to the old, but backed by the people themselves.

    I can’t say that I really understand just how it was done, but the Nazi’s somehow managed to get their economy screaming like a race car engine, when Hitler came to power, even though Germany was desperately short of credit, desperately short of most natural resources, desperately short of just about everything, except people willing to work. Unfortunately, Hitler put them to work building his war machine, resulting in the worst possible consequences for Germany and the rest of the world as well.

    The Soviets somehow managed to build a formidable industrial economy of their own, starting from an industrial base at least fifty and maybe a hundred years behind western countries, and using that industrial base to create a formidable war machine of their own…. one capable of holding out against the Nazi’s, albeit with some substantial help from the West.

    Back when Daddy was a kid, some of the local guys who couldn’t have raised a thousand bucks among the lot of them took it on themselves to upgrade one of the worst stretches of the main pig path road into and out of our little local community…….. doing so without spending a dime, other than what it cost them to replace and repair their hand tools and wagons as necessary. Point being old debts and old money can at least in theory be disowned, discarded without pay, and new rules, and new money created to take the place of the old.

    I’ve had to do evermore, until lately I’ve taken on the all the work and hired some help……. and in times gone by, I could have traded some of my farm goods for my helper’s time….. thereby negating the need for any money passing between us.

    I’m not altogether sure how India and China go about working out deals with the Russians, but I’m pretty sure some Russian wheat ( stolen Ukrainian wheat? ) and oil have been traded in exchange for cargoes of such goods as precision instruments, medical supplies, or tropical fruit.

    Barter on the grand scale is clumsy as hell, but it can and does work sometimes.

    1. Money is just a token.

      Value = GDP (productivity) divided by # of tokens in the system.

      If the # of tokens grow faster than GDP you might get inflation.

      If the # of tokens grow slower than GDP you might get deflation.

      Debt defaults cause tokens to go away. Bank loans create more tokens.

      tokens can be eported because of trade deficits. “Exporting inflation.”

      The denominator -The FEDERAL Reserve can PRINT tokens (HHH and Weekend Peak will argue with this and may be right but close enough in a simple model) !!!

      The numerator – But they can’t print Economic Productivity ( you can’t print a pig or an apple ).

      There are ALOT of Venezuealan Bolivars(the denominator) floating around Venezuela and ALOT of guys sitting on the streets with nothing to do (the numerator) because Maduro and Hugo Chavez wrecked the place.

      2. Well said, Andre!

        I don’t have any problem at all following your comment.

        But I must admit that I don’t really understand a lot of the more nuanced details, and have some trouble following the arguments presented by HHH for instance.

        1. I think finance is very simple at its core.

          But boggles the mind when you throw in these complex financial scenarios (derivatives, reverse repos, etc)

          I enjoy HHH posts, but the EURODOLLAR stuff he touts IMO is not what is taught at University and is not mainstream.

          Another unnecessarily confusing thing, because a EURODOLLAR
          has noithing to do with Europe. Its not the EURO vs the Dollar it is a ledger entry outside of the US that is denominated in US Dollars.

          I question why banks would buy treasury’s with liquid spendable cash and exchange it to the FED RESERVE for “Reserves” that HHH. Weekend Peak says are not spendable in the economy.

          Seems like a bad business move IMO.

          It would be great if they could explain that better.

      3. The overwhelming quantity of tokens – as you call them ( I actually like that) are created by the private banking sector, not the Fed. And the banks create them when they get a larger quantity of collateral than the quantity of tokens that they issue. So really the quantity of tokens in the economy is a combination of liquidity preference and available suitable collateral combined with the available investment opportunity set. Liquidity preference refers the the preference to hold either a deposit or a ( non deposit) asset.

        And this all rolls right into expected returns – a rational investor is not going to pledge collateral at a cost of X if the return s/he will get on the asset, purchased with the freshly created deposit is less than X ( adjusted for risk) plus some kind of margin the pay for expenses and profit.
        rgds
        Vince

        1. The global monetary system or Eurodollar. Is a bank ledger between banks. Yes there is collateral involved. But to simplify it without getting into all the details credits are moved from one bank to another to settle transactions.

          No physical currency is transferred between banks. It’s just entries on balance sheets that move around from bank to bank.

          The global monetary system doesn’t use bank reserves. The Fed doesn’t and can’t print the global reserve currency.

          Saudi Arabia’s wealth is nothing more than book entries on the ledger of the global banking system. When nothing physical is exchanged. It’s just credits on a ledger.

          The supply of say gold or bitcoin are pretty steady. There will never be more than 21 million bitcoins. But in comparison under the right circumstances the supply of dollars can contract in a huge way.

  14. Trump seems ok.
    Violence should not be part of our political process.

    1. Agreed.

      In this case it backfired, literally. The Secret Service anti-sniper squad killed the guy.

      Trump will win now.

      He came out looking strong and will win the sympathy vote as well.

      1. It’s hard to top the framing of that photo of him fist pumping while surrounded by Secret Service, blood spattered, and with the Stars & Stripes in the background.

        That one will be in the history books, I imagine.

        The RNC is less than 48 hours away…

      2. The secret service really dropped the ball here. I’m honestly amazed that someone came that close to shooting a presidential candidate in the head. I wonder how far away they were and what caliber they used. My guess is they used a .270 from 300 yards away. Total shot in the dark though.

        I should say my original thought was someone snuck a polypropylene 3d printed gun into the rally. But then I saw that it was a sniper.

        Edit: damn according to the news he was about 150 yards away, guess the secret service is more incompetent than I thought.

          1. Regardless of the specific weapon used, the Secret Service dropped the ball in allowing him to get close enough to make the shot.

            I’m not an expert rifleman by any means, but if this shooter was less than two hundred yards away, and up to three hundred, and had a first class weapon designed for long range precision shooting, he missed either due to bad luck or lack of skill.

            It’s quite common for a highly skilled hunter or target shooter to hit head sized targets once shot after another at such distances.

            I infer that the shooter was skilled but not truly expert level, or that he was in a hurry, or that there might have been some wind he was unable to estimate properly, or that his rifle wasn’t one of the better ones readily available for less than a thousand bucks or so.

            The details will be coming out eventually. Maybe I would make a good profiler in some respects, lol.

            This shooting is a disaster for the country, because it makes trump more likely to win.

            1. I think the outcome would be worse if Trump had died. A Trump assassination could’ve sent the politcal culture of this country down a path of no return. And of course people should be allowed to choose their leaders.

            2. In regard to the statement by Cactus, I say that if Trump had been killed it would have given the republican party/voters a chance to put a bonafide qualified human being on the ticket…. for the first time since 2012. Looks like they will have to wait.

    1. Do you trust the US to redeem it? I think we all know what happened when Europe decided to call in their dues in gold when the US dollar was backed by it.

      1. True.

        I don’t see how the Gold Standard can work in a global economy. Who pays the shipping costs to send me my Gold if I want to redeem?

        However, oil producers, in a declining environment, can demand whatever they want?

        1. It’s probably impossible for any currency or form of money can be backed by gold over any extended period of time or space, so long as the economy and population continue to grow.

          The temptation to produce more money, or tokens, is overwhelming, because it can be so incredibly popular.

          Consider just how profitable it is to produce counterfeit currency, at least up until the point you get caught manufacturing and or passing it.

          There will inevitably be more dollars, or euro’s or whatever chasing after the available supply of goods and services at any given time…… because it’s so easy to create more dollars or euros.

          Prices will go up, inevitably.

          And people will want gold in place of their dollars or euros. There’s never going to be enough gold to back up currency in ever growing quantities.

          People will bid up the price of gold in order to get it in place of their dollars or euros.

          Just ain’t gonna work, long term.

  16. There was only one question that needed to be answered: if I was a reasonably intelligent lunatic, where would I attempt to assassinate the presidential candidate?

    That is the question that the secret service failed to answer.

    1. Definitely ignore the guy pointing at the water tower outside the venue. No one would ever try to use an elevated space to snipe a presidential candidate.

  17. Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20 of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania; voter records show Crooks was a registered Republican who made one singular $15 donation to a liberal PAC on January 20, 2021 — Biden’s Inauguration Day.

    The fabled “swing” voter.

    1. And apparently a really bad shot only clipping his ear with a rifle from that distance and with several rounds sent down range at a stationary target.

      To quote a tweet minutes after the attempt: the best way to deal with fascism is to move a little to the left.

      1. Audio sounds to me like Thomas made 3 shots with a 223 before counter sniper returned fire with a 308. Not sure what Thomas was aiming at; maybe the head, and missed by a tiny bit, or maybe the chest and missed point of aim by a fair bit. Perhaps Trump’s ego did not permit him to follow procedures and keep his head down and protected in event of second shooter. A video of Reagan assassination attempt is a better example of good hustle on the field.

        1. Crooks, according to school classmates, bullied and really into hunting attire. He was also at the school rifle association where, allegedly, he was dangerously bad with a long arm.

          If you want to get things done, you go USMC.

          https://youtu.be/liusEeP1QcE

          Or you become the guy that murked Shinzo Abe with his self-made hardware store, Fallout style blunderbus.

          1. I read about the bullying thing too, it’s all pretty sad. Seems like a school shooter type looking to get attention by doing something awful. Now the country will have to deal with an ultra energized MAGA base and endless conspiracy theories from many sides. We’ll also have to deal with the image of a bloody Trump with his tiny fist in the air plastered anywhere a redneck can stick it.

          2. Shinzo Abe is def the most cyberpunk assassination to date.

            Trump has extensively condoned political violence on numerous occasions. I’m kinda surprised it took this long for some to come back his way.

      2. Not so bad a shot after all, considering the circumstances.

        But as has been pointed out by others, there’s a HUGE difference between a professional and an amateur. This kid was obviously under a hell of a lot of pressure, probably nervous as hell, his heart pounding, etc.

        And if it’s true that he had an AR15 variant or derivative weapon, with open sights, then he didn’t have time or money or opportunity to obtain a satisfactory weapon, one well suited to the job…….. or else…. He didn’t know any better.

        Considering that he apparently had a significant amount of experience shooting, that he tried out for his school rifle team, etc, it’s hard to believe he didn’t know any better.. unless he was a dimwit, to put it politely.

        Anybody who has spent more than a few hours reading any well respected shooting publication knows that you don’t bet your life and mission on such a weapon. He could have bought any one of a couple of dozen readily available rifles and ammo far better suited to the occasion at just about any well stocked gun store as easily as his Dad bought the AR.

        Maybe he didn’t make up his mind to actually do it until it was too late to put his hands on a proper weapon and get in a little practice with it.

        Trump is alive today because luck was on trump’s side .

        1. His goal may have been suicide by Secret Service and he may have been as surprised by his head shot opportunity as they seemingly were.

  18. Everyone is America is wetting their pants about something that almost happened but didn’t

    Meanwhile back in the real world, 1.3 million homes and businesses in the Houston area are without power and have been for four days.

    https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/07/11/weather/texas-heat-beryl-power-outage-thursday

    I have heard the claim made that renewables will make the grid less reliable. This is often presented to support the claim that their use will not spread.

    The grid already is unreliable. Nobody cares. Not even people who make this silly argument about renewables. It’s more fun to spread conspiracy theories about non-events.

  19. “Clarence Thomas Torn Over Case Where Both Sides Offer Compelling Scuba Trips”

  20. Interesting article showing how poorly designed Houston is a a city.

    https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/hurricane-beryl-houston-power-outage-residents-rcna161579

    No wonder you dinguses thing the sky will fall if anything changes even the slightest bit. Your world is brittle by design.

    You believe oil is the alpha and omega, but there’s plenty of oil in Houston, but aircon doesn’t run on oil, and Houston runs on aircon.

    I am reminded of stupid Rick Perry, Republican Energy Secretary who wanted the Department of Energy abolished not realizing it had nothing to do with oil and was mostly focused on nukes.

    1. Vance once called Trump “America’s Hitler.”

      It must be hard being a Repug?

      1. Some people seem to want someone like that, Vance and Musk included.

        1. I want Vance, Musk and Trump to all take a trip in a billionaire’s submarine to see the Titanic.

          1. If this is true Klelber, you clearly don’t understand how your constant collapse, collapse, collapse rederick feeds MAGA beliefs. Critical thinking or facts are not MAGA’s strong suit. What they hear is Donald Trump is their savior and only he can save them. Truth is your “less is less suffering” doesn’t stand up to critical thinking either and is totally unrealistic to human behavior. MAGA is mostly about self serving individuals protecting their resources from have nots and their leaders protecting their own power and wealth over the masses.

            Listen to OFM, as resources on earth run out. Humans will become more efficient and less wasteful. We will have to contract our living space on earth to areas that don’t need fossil fuel to live. This will happen over decades and centuries, and the population will contract naturally to a new sustainable level for current resources. Suffering and pleasure is part of life. If your lucky at the end. You will die in your sleep pain free. Don’t kid yourself.

            1. “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
              -Gramsci

            2. “Don’t kid yourself.”

              Literally the best possible advice for everyone on this over populated planet.

      2. Trump has been running the Hitler play book for a long time now. Actually I don’t think it’s hard at all for Republicans. They live in a world of entitlement, denial and without empathy outside their own. Not much different than 19th century salvary in the US. They don’t see others as equals, but as inferior animals to be used for self benefit. Trump is already promising you detainment camps for brown colored skin people.

            1. It’s been going for years with no Dem pushback. It was also the same people that formulated Obamacare, so, y’know, not too worried about this supposed fascist takeover that the Dems were fine with until they no longer were.

              It would be great if the DNC tried to actively change the country for the better, as opposed to just acting like they’re hamstrung constantly.

            2. First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
              Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
              Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
              Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
              —Martin Niemöller

              ********

              TOP Expert on Dictators SOUNDS ALARM on Trump

              First time I have heard anyone speak the truth about the debate!

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6JcQ3avRJQ

              The Gish gallop (/ˈɡɪʃ ˈɡæləp/) is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time alloted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.

              British journalist Mehdi Hasan suggests using three steps to beat the Gish gallop. Because there are too many falsehoods to address, it is wise to choose one as an example.

              Choose the weakest, dumbest, most ludicrous argument that the galloper has presented and tear that argument to shreds (“the weak point rebuttal”).

              Do not budge from the issue or move on until having decisively destroyed the nonsense and clearly made the counter point.

              Call out the strategy by name, saying: “This is a strategy called the ‘Gish Gallop’ — do not be fooled by the flood of nonsense you have just heard.”

      3. Was Vance trying to compliment or insult Trump by calling him the American Hitler?

        1. Alimbiquated,

          At the time he said it Vance intended it as an insult, but perhaps the dictator on day one took it as a compliment.

        2. He’s an opportunist weasel. He follows the money. Trump seems a fair bet now.

          Integrity? In the 2024 GOP? lol

    2. “Design” isn’t the right concept to use here.

      The physical infrastructure of a city is collection of a great number of individual parts. Any one of those individual parts may (or may not) have been ‘designed’ at a given point in time to a given standard. For example, one specific potable water supply pipe may have been designed to carry a specific volume of water at a given pressure for a specific burial depth with a finite useful life. Those design standards and useful life inherently reflect what the public is willing to pay at the time of construction. These same standards and expected useful life also dictate the reliability of the system and how that reliability might change over time.

      Suggesting a city is ‘designed’ implies some master plan governing the complex system that makes up all of those individual parts as well as how they are arranged in space and time. Not too many cities like that.

  21. https://www.ladbible.com/news/science/nasa-astronaut-178-days-space-ronald-garan-562427-20240711

    Every last one of us should make sure every body we know reads this piece.

    But unfortunately, the large majority of the people I know are incapable of truly comprehending it. You can’t fix ignorance, as a purely practical matter, in less than a generation, and as likely as not, less than two or three generations…. and even then, only if our school system is actually functional.

    It may well be too late to get the general public on board in terms of taking care of the environment.

  22. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve failed…. no, I’ve certainly failed.. in one critical respect, in terms of getting my pro renewables argument across.

    Some of the skeptics are arguing that we need less of everything…. less people, less mining, less manufacturing, less growth in general….. and I agree with them, in principle.

    But we part ways when it comes to mining more minerals, burning more oil, and spending more capital, human and otherwise, on renewable energy.

    Politics is often said to be the ” art of the possible”. Nothing could be more true, when the subject is public policy. Policy makers, regardless of their motives, good, bad, or indifferent, have to and can ONLY do what they can get away with, and stay in power. Out of power politicians don’t make and execute policies.

    And plain old day to day reality is such that it’s pretty close to impossible for a politician to argue FOR austerity, FOR giving up growth, IN FAVOR of incentives to have small families, or in favor of putting roadblocks in the way of people who want large families.

    Such political strategies just don’t work in the real world.. except maybe in authoritarian states willing and able to force them on the people……. and even then….. the leaders themselves invariably WANT growth, because growth means more power, more prestige, more wealth for THEM.

    But , and this is a HUGE but, it is possible to convince people to do ” the right thing”, if you offer them convincing reasons for doing so, while at the same time reassuring them that doing ” the right thing” won’t seriously cut into their present day or anticipated future higher standard of living.

    So….. it’s possible to convince people that smoking is bad, and that high taxes on tobacco actually SAVE them money, especially if they aren’t smokers themselves. It’s possible to convince people, if they’re at least abc level scientifically literate, that clean air and clean water laws are GOOD policy, such that the costs of such policies are a bargain, rather than a burden….. even if paying for them NOW means a little higher cost of living today.. so long as there’s a believable promise of a better future life in exchange for that minor loss of purchasing power today.

    Arguing for no growth economic policies in the real world is pretty much equivalent to a political death wish.

    Our resident skeptics have to keep this in mind. They’re not going to save any rain forests, or much of anything else, by opposing the renewable energy industries.

    BUT ….. there’s plenty of reason to hope that as we get ever closer to the economic and environmental crash that we generally agree is pretty much baked in…… that we can and hopefully will come to understand that we can collectively go proactive, because we have NO other choice……. other than to just let everything go straight to hell.

    Going proactive will mean understanding the NECESSITY of austerity in certain respects, such as taxing large personal vehicles out of existence in favor of mini cars for example. I’m not going to go into the details of what may be and likely will be necessary to keep the wheels from falling off…..I’ve had enough to say about that earlier.

    IF, and this is a mighty big IF, the people can come together, the way we have at times in the past, during WWII for instance, it’s absolutely necessary that they, or we, have something to believe in…..

    Without something to believe in, we’ll never come together, never support such policies as will be essential to saving at least some part of our current way of life.

    Renewable energy is going to be THE thing, if not the only thing, we’re going to have to believe in.

    Somewhere back there, some wise old Englishman, I forget his name, said that when people cease to believe in God, they do NOT henceforth believe in NOTHING.

    He was absolutely right, absolutely dead on.

    We don’t have to create a true sustainable economy in our own lifetimes, or even within the next couple of generations.

    What we have to do, in the here and now, is come up with and implement ways to save as much of the living environment as we can, while stretching out our limited and depleting one time gifts of nature such as oil, natural gas, and metal ores, etc.

    There’s no doubt at all in my mind at least that the best and likely only viable path forward is to stay petal to the metal on renewable energy, conservation, recycling, and so forth, while adapting to living as well as we can with LESS instead of more as the years go by. We WILL adapt once it’s clear we have no choice but to do so.

    People in general, human beings in general, will make sacrifices even to the point of giving up their very lives, if they have something to believe in.

    A nationwide HVDC super grid, and wind and solar farms out the ying yang are going to cost us a bloody fortune….. but having it will mean our finite endowment of oil and gas can be stretched out to last two or three or maybe even four or five times as long.

    We can’t afford NOT to have it.

    1. OFM … “Arguing for no growth economic policies in the real world is pretty much equivalent to a political death wish.”

      I fully agree, that no-one will ever have degrowth as a policy, no-one would ever get elected on that type of platform, while others are promising growth forever, which is precisely why the suffering and collapse will be way worse than it needs to be.

      Solar, wind and batteries are not renewables, they are replaceables or rebuildables and are no answer to anything. They have a limited life, so in 10 years for batteries, 20 years for wind and if lucky 30 years for solar, they need replacing, with more digging up of minerals from lower grades on average..

      Did you see up thread how the largest battery recycling company in Australia is charging $5.63/kg to take old lithium batteries? For average Joe it will be far cheaper to dump batteries than to recycle them, so the recycling rates will be much lower than most expect. It’s the only way the company can make money as selling the recycle scrap is not profitable!!

      Only by destroying the last of the rainforests and natural areas to gain access to all the remaining higher ore grade bodies of every metal, and by using up all the remainder of the fossil fuels would we be able to build all the HVDC transmission super grid and solar and wind out the ying yang for the whole world, then what?, as it all crumbles over the next couple of decades??

      It’s not the fortune it costs, it’s the immense quantity of materials and energy needed to build it, that’s the problem. Plus of course it’s all built with fossil fuels, and so will the next generation, if there are any fossil fuels to build it..

      BTW, the first generation of wind farms are up for replacement or rebuilding only a couple of hundred kilometers from here. They are all going to be torn down with diesel equipment, including the foundations, which will be an enormous operation, powered by fossil fuels. There are currently zero plans to replace them, mainly because the wholesale price of electricity goes negative when the wind is blowing and sun shining here.

      We have lived in a world of growing energy availability, as did our parents and grandparents. The downslope will be vastly different as there will NOT be the energy available to rebuild anything!! People everywhere will be scrambling just to survive.

      The complexity of all our energy systems is so massive, relying totally upon 6 continent supply chains, that when it all collapses, that’s it, modern civilization is over. There will not be the fuel available to take an old truck around to old cities and grab scrap metal to take to smelters, as the smelters will not have the fuel to operate!!

      None of it can get going as people everywhere are starving as farms wont have fuel and over 80% of the populations in developed countries are in cities. There is no fuel to take them to the country and build them anywhere to live. Without a grid in operation and no fuel available because all the easy to access oil as used up, rebuilding anything will become a non starter..

      It doesn’t matter how much willpower or organisation there is, as the only oil available will require really complex technology to gain access to, the type of complexity we have today with high level computers helping to operate horizontal drill bits 10,000 ft below ground in a very narrow precise area, but wont have after collapse.
      There will be no, simple to gain access to, energy available, with the remaining forests being shredded by people to just keep warm.

      OFM …” What we have to do, in the here and now, is come up with and implement ways to save as much of the living environment as we can, while stretching out our limited and depleting one time gifts of nature such as oil, natural gas, and metal ores, etc.”

      Except none of that is happening.. We keep using excuses to build another Thacker pass, or rip up more rainforest in an effort to make more renewables available. That’s what’s actually happening, so by the time the renewable world is ‘built’, there will not be much of a natural environment left.. There will never be enough renewables either, as building MORE always requires a higher energy use to do, which raises the base level needed in civilization, so MORE needs to be built, meaning destroying more of the natural world to do it. It’s a never ending feedback loop.

      The simple reality is that it all ends when the available energy declines at an accelerating rate, as the lower energy will feedback upon itself making less energy available the following year, no matter what the energy is.

      Another simple reality is that drilling a hole in the ground to gain access to another million cuft of gas every day for a decade or 2, to be sent into a nearby pipeline requires a fraction of the energy needed to build a solar farm of equivalent energy output (hundreds of MWh plus GWh of batteries !!).

      Of course the gas provides energy 24/7, every day including middle of winter when the sun doesn’t shine, plus, provides the building blocks for many products that are essential for the modern world.. The solar doesn’t do either of these while taking so much more energy and materials to build!!

      We get to the stage where fossil fuels are too difficult to gain access to as depletion sets in, plus destroy the climate in the process, so they are NOT an answer. But neither is using lots more fossil fuels, to build out a system of lots of eventual statues after a short life span.
      We should have had population control and a simplification of everything decades ago, but instead chose as a species to use up every available resource possible to reach the current level of plague phase, where the only option is to reduce numbers by one or 2 orders of magnitude fairly quickly. We can chose to do it or let nature do it to us.

      We have been choosing to let nature do it to us, by denying that unlimited growth on a finite planet is not possible, nor was ever possible. Because of entropy and dissipation, we always need MORE materials from lower grades in even a steady state economy. Materials from lower grades means more growth in energy use, just to remain stable, which is impossible in the long term…

      1. Yes, from an ecological perspective it makes sense to halt all energy, mining, forestry, construction and agricultural operations now. Absolute halt, full stop.
        But humanity won’t do that.

        On energy they/we will do everything possible to have enough of it, even if it means cutting down the very last tree.

        That is why a place like Iowa devotes a large portion of its yearly land use to produce a small amount of net energy gain in the form of corn ethanol. And also why they have quite a bit of wind energy production…about 70% of annual state consumption.
        A different attempt for each different different region depending on what they have.
        Before fossil fuels, energy extraction from human beings in the form of slavery or share cropping was commonplace.

        1. Hideaway and his sort are apparently unable to get their heads around the perfectly obvious fact that we get more useful energy out of wind and solar farms than we could ever HOPE to get by using the same amount of resources ( coal, gas, metal ores, human capital, etc) the old fashioned way…… by building a giant fire in a generating plant.

          It’s hard to really come up with a figure everybody can agree on, but in places with really good sun, solar farms are being built and selling the juice on contract for peanut prices.

          And there’s every reason to believe that the cost of solar electricity will continue to fall, in terms of constant money.

          In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three years ahead of schedule, dropping from about $0.28 to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

          SunShot 2030 | Department of Energy
          Department of Energy (.gov)
          https://www.energy.gov › eere › solar › sunshot-2030

          https://www.pv-magazine.com/2018/06/11/lowest-approved-solar-power-contract-in-the-united-states-2-49¢-kwh/

          There’s no particular reason a given solar farm should ever be scrapped outright, unless it was poorly sited, or otherwise defective in design or performance for some reason.

          If a solar farm is scrapped outright, as mentioned by Hideaway, it’s not because it couldn’t be refurbished to better than new for a fraction of the cost of building from scratch…… but rather because the BUSINESS MODEL prevailing in the electricity industry has a fatal flaw or two.

          It’s easy for any particular industry to overbuild in a given time or place. I’ve read about numerous cases where in the retail industry gets overbuilt, the hotel industry gets over built, etc.
          In my own business, farming, we over build and over produce, so that some of us periodically go out of business.

          There are solar farms selling electricity today for less than it costs to produce the same amount in coal fired plants in the same area.

          Of course you still need the coal fired plant at night…..

          But given that we can shift loads, and find ways to live as well using less electricity per capita….. we can gradually cut back on the size and capacity of coal fired plants… saving money, over the long term, by doing so.

          It will be necessary to subsidize a lot of conventional generating capacity, so as to keep it ready to go, but only as needed….. at night, when the skies are cloudy, anytime there’s not enough wind and solar juice to meet demand.

          This is not an physics or engineering problem. It’s a MANAGEMENT problem….. one involving the public welfare, meaning that the government’s job is to make sure the lights stay on……

          On at the lowest workable cost for everybody, while maintaining an adequate safety margin.

          Within a decade or two, we’re likely to have forty to fifty percent wind and solar juice on the grid over vast areas of the USA….. maybe even half the country, on average…… meaning we will need only half as much natural gas to generate electricity.

          We’re not going to run out of sun, or wind.

          And while we have plenty of gas here in this country, for now, I’m wondering how long it will last, and how much revenue, and how much power and influence it will bring our way, so long as we have enough to export large amounts to support our friends in the world.

          1. OFM, It’s like you have fallen for all the propaganda…
            “We’re not going to run out of sun, or wind.”

            It has nothing to do with the sun or wind..

            It has everything to do with the building of the machines and entropy of the already built. Solar panels do NOT last forever, they are machines that suffer from entropy like everything else in the universe, they need to be replaced over time as they stop working!! We do all the mining, processing and manufacture of all the components with fossil fuels.

            What do you suggest happens at the end of life when we can’t build any new ones due to the depleted nature of fossil fuels??

            OFM ……”It will be necessary to subsidize a lot of conventional generating capacity, so as to keep it ready to go, but only as needed….. at night, when the skies are cloudy, anytime there’s not enough wind and solar juice to meet demand.”

            So your solution is for a much more inefficient system, that will be much more expensive in terms of money, and energy to build and maintain, that still totally relies on fossil fuels anyway, a depleting resource that is eventually leaving us.

            OFM ….”But given that we can shift loads, and find ways to live as well using less electricity per capita”
            How does this work if you have to constantly replace machines made from metals that come from lower grade ore bodies on average? If you do the hand wave of, “we’ll recycle everything”, please show the energy calculations on how that is possible including ALL steps, using just electricity as the input source of energy, not fossil fuels.

            It becomes increasingly obvious to me that the ‘renewable’ future only works if everything else throughout modern civilization happens in a business as usual manner, which includes increasing use of fossil fuels. A world of less fossil fuels, means less energy for mines, less energy for processing and less energy for transport of everything.

            Competing interests for this lower energy means higher prices for EVERY sector.
            Renewables, batteries, EVs become more expensive as they are extremely energy intense machines to build. So does every other type of machine, Nuclear power plants become much more expensive to build, so do coal fired power stations, or gas turbines, plus ships, tractors and trucks.

            It all gets extracted and built with cheap fossil fuels, none of it gets built with just electricity, the underlying assumption seems to be “so long as we have fossil fuels to do all the hard bits”..
            In the long term it can’t work and in the short term it means increasing fossil fuel use to accelerate the building of ‘renewables’. In other words, it’s all an excuse to appease the public that ‘something’ is being done to ameliorate CC’, when in reality it’s just more BAU until it all collapses..

        2. Hickory …. “On energy they/we will do everything possible to have enough of it, even if it means cutting down the very last tree.”

          I agree, which is why modern civilization collapses when the energy available starts declining at an accelerating rate, especially the master energy resource, oil, that is needed to produce every other form of energy we use.

          We have built, we operate and maintain our modernity with a depleting, resource that was cheap to obtain. We are attempting to build the replacement for oil with oil and it’s products, not something different. All those wind turbines have a limited life due to entropy, there is no stopping this process.
          Everyone wants to concentrate on the consumption of energy and not the production of the machines that need constant replacement and maintenance, which is where the problem of modernity lies..

          How many new machines do the wind turbines make??

          1. Solar and wind have a good strong net energy return, when you put them in decent locations.
            Where I strongly agree with you, Hideaway, is the problem of intermittency. No question it is a big drawback. Most locations are going to need a big component of other sources on the grid to balance the supply, since there are few places that have a great balance of wind and solar all year long, all day long.
            Since fossil fuels have two grand drawbacks (depletion and carbon emission), we will need to take advantage of all of the other net positive energy sources in various parts of the world. Not a complicated notion. And it can/will be partially effective for awhile, long enough for you (us) to properly dispose of all of your processions and assets, and to decommission your factories, mines and toxic pits, if we so desire.

  23. Meanwhile in the best of all possible worlds, there are still hundreds of thousands of households in Houston without electricity.

    Obviously we could never do better than this. This is peak civilization. No technical change will ever be able to make anything better.

  24. didn’t see this posted upthread:

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02448-y

    “Abstract
    Planetary boundaries represent thresholds in major Earth system processes that are sensitive to human activity and control global-scale habitability and stability. These processes are interconnected such that movement of one planetary boundary process can alter the likelihood of crossing other boundaries. Here we argue that the observed deoxygenation of the Earth’s freshwater and marine ecosystems represents an additional planetary boundary process that is critical to the integrity of Earth’s ecological and social systems, and both regulates and responds to ongoing changes in other planetary boundary processes. Research on the rapid and ongoing deoxygenation of Earth’s aquatic habitats indicates that relevant, critical oxygen thresholds are being approached at rates comparable to other planetary boundary processes. Concerted global monitoring, research and policy efforts are needed to address the challenges brought on by rapid deoxygenation, and the expansion of the planetary boundaries framework to include deoxygenation as a boundary helps to focus those efforts.”

    And here’s the phys.org review write up:

    https://phys.org/news/2024-07-loss-oxygen-bodies.html#:~:text=They%20call%20for%20the%20loss,of%20life%20on%20planet%20Earth.

  25. They’re both old. The Republican is a lying criminal.
    Am I gaining some insight?

  26. Probably not the best question?
    “The only info in Trump’s medical report not easily guessable is how many pounds did Trump’s diaper contain.”

Comments are closed.