Steve Bull's Blog, page 103

EPA Finds Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Water Systems Across the US

EPA Finds Toxic ‘Forever Chemicals’ in Water Systems Across the US

The Environmental Protection Agency discovered toxic, cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in water systems across the country.

The Aug. 17 finding comes after the U.S. Geological Survey found in July that perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl chemicals known as PFAS, were found in 45 percent of water taps in the United States.

The EPA’s separate findings are the latest evidence that these controversial chemicals are widespread in the environment.

PFASs are called “forever chemicals” because they build up and accumulate in a person’s body over time instead of breaking down and have been linked to a number of serious illnesses, including cancer and birth defects.

The chemicals are water resistant and do not break down in the environment and can remain in human bodies for years.

The EPA reported that the toxins could affect the drinking water of 26 million people, according to an environmental advocacy organization called the Environmental Working Group which analyzed the latest agency data.

The federal regulator said (pdf) that two of the most dangerous types of forever chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS, were also found at unsafe levels in between 7.8 and 8.5 percent of public water systems.

PFASs are used in hundreds of household items from cleaning supplies to pizza boxes, which broadens the chance of serious health risks, according to the USGS study.

They were developed in the 1940s with the creation of Teflon, a non-stick coating for cookware, and are now used in everything from clothing, plastic products, cosmetics, and stain removers.

Forever Chemicals Contamination Common Nationwide

The EPA said the cities that had the high concentration of these toxic chemicals were Fresno, California, and Dallas, Texas.

Samples from Fresno had 16 parts per trillion of PFOA and 29 parts per trillion of PFOS, which was 4 and 7.25 times more than the EPA’s proposed regulatory limit and 194.3 parts per trillion for PFAS particles.

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Scorching climate records call for real solutions

Scorching climate records call for real solutions

Renewable energy, energy efficiency and conservation offer numerous advantages over fossil fuels beyond climate benefits.

As the world breaks heat records, our biggest roadblock is fossil fuel companies, and their influence. Credit: Chris LeBoutillier / Unsplash

On July 6, the world’s average temperature was the hottest ever recorded, at 17.23 C. That beat the previous highs on… July 3 and 4! June was the hottest month ever, but July is shaping up to be even hotter. Experts expect more records to break over the next while, as an El Niño weather pattern combines with record emissions to drive up temperatures.

“We have never seen anything like this before,” Carlo Buontempo, director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, told the Washington Post, noting that “we are in uncharted territory.” Temperatures are hotter than they’ve been in 125,000 years!

People worldwide are feeling the effects, with scorching heat from Africa to Europe, across China and the southern U.S. Records are even breaking in Antarctica, where warming drove sea ice to 17 per cent below the 1991-2020 June average. In Canada, May was the hottest month ever, until June recorded even higher temperatures. We see the results in air congested with wildfire smoke.

Heat and humidity are already causing an increasing number of direct deaths, along with numerous other negative impacts — floods, droughts, wildfires, refugee crises, water shortages, biodiversity loss and more.

How bad does it have to get before the world wakes up?

Unless we reject the widespread power and influence of the fossil fuel industry in all aspects of our lives, we could reach the point of no return before we employ the many available and emerging solutions.

Industry puts massive resources into convincing people that curbing the crisis will cause too much hardship. Shell chief executive Wael Sawan recently offered an example…

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A Reader Asks “Does an Increase in Money Supply Cause Inflation?”

A Reader Asks “Does an Increase in Money Supply Cause Inflation?”

This seemingly simple question, is not so simple. What is the money supply? How does one measure inflation.

Other Deposit Liabilities vs M2, monthly average via St. Louis Fed

ODL vs M2 Chart Notes

Other Deposit Liabilities (ODL see description below), is a monthly average.M2 is a monthly measure through March.

A Better Definition of Money

The main difference between ODL and M2 is that ODL does not include currency or retail money market funds.

Currency is accepted at an increasingly fewer number of business establishments and simply cannot be used for very large sized transactions. Retail money market funds never became an important medium of exchange. Both are becoming a far less used medium of exchange.

ODL has the additional advantage that it is the main source of funding for bank loans and investments, making ODL both a monetary and credit aggregate. Friedman would not be surprised that the need to change the best definition of what constitutes money would change over the years.

The above three paragraphs from Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Management.

Whether or not one uses M2 or ODL, money supply has generally been decreasing. Why the Fed cannot release M2 more timely is a mystery. It’s July 15, but the latest M2 is for May. One might wonder “What the H is the Fed hiding?”

Definition of Inflation

Some Austrian economists would say increases in money supply do not “cause” inflation, it is the definition of inflation.

If you hold that view, then deflation is the opposite and we are in deflation now.

Some mean the CPI when they refer to inflation. Others, notably the Fed, think the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) price index is the best measure of inflation.

The huge problem with both the CPI and PCE is that it does not include asset prices, especially housing.

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Hundreds of ULEZ cameras destroyed by vigilante group following wider London roll-out

Hundreds of ULEZ cameras destroyed by vigilante group following wider London roll-out

The group intent on disrupting London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s green vehicle tax has received some political support despite its criminal activity

Hundreds of Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) cameras have been vandalized by a vigilante group that opposes the controversial scheme, which extended across wider London this week and charges road users for traveling in non-compliant vehicles.

The scheme is part of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s green agenda to enhance the air quality across the U.K. capital; however, many critics of its extension into London’s suburbs consider it to be a regressive tax and cash grab that will hit working families the hardest.

A vigilante group known as the Blade Runners has been targeting newly installed cameras across the capital in a bid to disrupt the implementation of ULEZ as much as possible, and hundreds of cameras have already been hit.

Prior to the roll-out, which came into force on Tuesday, around 500 cameras had been marked as out of action or damaged, according to a map the vigilante group promoted. Many of the cameras targeted were located in London’s southeast with 156 of the 185 cameras around the districts of Sydenham and Sidcup being hit, as well as 18 of the 22 cameras installed in Bromley.

The camera map, published on a popular anti-ULEZ Facebook page, allows users to update it when a camera has been rendered out of action. The black pins represent cameras that are now missing or damaged.

In the southeast town of Orpington, just two of the new number plate recognition cameras were in working order on the day of the ULEZ expansion after vigilantes smashed, spray-painted, or cut the wires of 14 cameras on a single road.

Video footage and photographs of disruptors vandalizing the cameras have been published on social media, much to the delight of those critical of the scheme.

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Why You Are Feeling So Much Poorer

Why You Are Feeling So Much Poorer

We are living through the largest pillaging of the American middle class in a half-century. It’s not in the headlines. This is extremely strange. In fact, this might be the first and only article you have read about it. This could be for a reason. If people knew what was happening to them, they would begin to feel very restless, even furious. Some people among the ruling class do not want that.

The Biden administration trumpets its economic achievements. It’s mind-boggling. Call it trolling. Call it gaslighting. Call it whatever you want but you know it is untrue.

Let’s look at the facts.

What do you spend money on month-to-month? It’s rent or your mortgage, food at home or out, utilities, and gas. Those are the basic categories. The Consumer Price Index includes far more than that, some items you do not purchase and some that are going up far less than others. So let’s look at government numbers on what you actually purchase; that is, the items and services that you consume that dominate part of your income. And let’s stretch that back three years.

Everything is going up and up and has been for three years. Looking at the items on which you actually spend money, we find increases between 18-plus percent to 22-plus percent. Let’s say we average it all out at 20 percent.

Now let’s look at real disposable income, which is income left over after expenses adjusted for inflation. That result is an increase of a pathetic 3 percent compared with three years ago. The stimulus payments felt great at the time but those are long gone, essentially a head fake. So your income demands are up 20 percent whereas your leftover cash is barely up at all. That’s essentially a disaster for your standard of living.

In short, you have been robbed.

(Data: Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED), St. Louis Fed; Chart: Jeffrey A. Tucker)
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Fossil Fuel Imports Are Already Constrained

Fossil Fuel Imports Are Already Constrained

For many years, there has been a theory that imports of oil would become a problem before there was an overall shortage of fossil fuels. In fact, when I look at the data, it seems to be clear that oil imports are already constrained.

Figure 1. Interregional trade of fossil fuels based on data of the 2023 Statistical Review of World Energy by the Energy Institute.

As I look at the data, it appears to me that coal and natural gas imports are becoming constrained, as well. There was evidence of this constrained supply in the spiking prices for these fuels in Europe in late 2021 and early 2022, starting well before the Ukraine conflict began.

Oil, coal, and natural gas are different enough from each other that we should expect somewhat different patterns. Oil is inexpensive to transport. It is especially important for the production of food and for transportation. Prices tend to be worldwide prices.

Coal and natural gas are both more expensive to transport than oil. They tend to be used in industry, in the heating and cooling of buildings, and in electricity production. Their prices tend to be local prices, rather than the worldwide price we expect for oil. Prices for importers of these fuels can jump very high if there are shortages.

In this post, I first look at the trends in the overall supply of these fuels, since a big part of the import problem is fossil fuel supply not growing quickly enough to keep pace with world population growth. I also give more background how the three fossil fuels differ.

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Why the world’s big debt loads may be here to stay

Why the world’s big debt loads may be here to stayIllustration: Brendan Lynch/Axios

Staggeringly high government debt levels around the globe may stick — a huge shift from previous years that could come despite the warnings of economic damage this dynamic may cause.

Why it matters: Aging populations, worsening partisanship, steepening interest rates and other factors could make it less feasible for governments to reduce their debt — even if they want to.

What they’re saying: “[D]ebt reduction, while desirable in principle, is unlikely in practice,” International Monetary Fund economist Serkan Arslanalp and University of California, Berkeley, professor Barry Eichengreen write in a new paper.

Ballooning government debt worldwide won’t decline significantly in the coming years as in decades past, they argue. “Countries are going to have to live with this new reality as a semipermanent state.”

Details: The paper, presented Saturday before global central bankers and leading economists at the Kansas City Fed’s Jackson Hole conference, says a collision of new forces will make it difficult to trim debt.

Demographics: Aging populations mean governments must spend more on health care and pensions.Green transition: In the U.S. and elsewhere, governments are ramping up spending to finance the transition to a greener economy.Interest rates: Higher borrowing costs mean any growing debt load will get even more expensive to service. (Meanwhile, inflating the debt away is not a “sustainable route to reducing high public debts,” the authors note.)Politics: Political polarization and divided government make long-lasting policy arrangements to trim the debt— raising taxes or cutting spending— “even more challenging than in the past,” the authors write.

Of note: Stronger-than-expected economic growth — caused by, say, a larger increase in productivity — could stabilize debt-to-GDP ratios.

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Climate change is redrawing the disaster map

Climate change is redrawing the disaster map

From tropical storms to wildfires, climate disasters aren’t confined to the places we’re used to seeing them.

Vehicles and housing structures are partially submerged after Tropical Storm Hilary flooded a community of unhoused people on August 21st, 2023, in Cathedral City, California.  Photo by Mario Tama / Getty Images

Disasters have no borders, and a summer of unexpected catastrophe across the US shows it. California is notorious for drought and fire, not tropical storms like Hilary that barreled over Los Angeles this week. The East Coast expects hurricanes, not the pollution nightmare triggered by smoke that drifted in from blazes hundreds of miles away. Hawaii’s native greenery isn’t supposed to burn, and yet fires engulfed Maui.

Climate change is sending new calamities to new places — a phenomenon that can be observed not just in the US but all over the world. It’s piling disaster upon disaster on communities figuring out how to adapt to these new realities. Often, they’re faced with some new crisis while still recovering from a previous one.

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Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable

Critics of ‘degrowth’ economics say it’s unworkable – but from an ecologist’s perspective, it’s inevitable

You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity’s demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually.

Many economists criticising the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth’s biophysical limits.

Ecologists on the other hand see the human economy as a subset of the biosphere. Their perspective highlights the urgency with which we need to reduce our demands on the biosphere to avoid a disastrous ecological collapse, with consequences for us and all other species.

Many degrowth scholars (as well as critics) focus on features of capitalism as the cause of this ecological overshoot. But while capitalism may be problematic, many civilisations destroyed ecosystems to the point of collapse long before it became our dominant economic model.

Capitalism, powered by the availability of cheap and abundant fossil energy, has indeed resulted in unprecedented and global biosphere disruption. But the direct cause remains the excessive volume and speed with which resources are extracted and wastes returned to the environment.

From an ecologist’s perspective, degrowth is inevitable on our current trajectory.

Carrying capacity

Ecology tells us that many species overshoot their environment’s carrying capacity if they have temporary access to an unusually high level of resources. Overshoot declines when those resources return to more stable levels. This often involves large-scale starvation and die-offs as populations adjust.

Access to fossil fuels has allowed us to temporarily overshoot biophysical limits. This lifted our population and demands on the biosphere past the level it can safely absorb. Barring a planned reduction of those biosphere demands, we will experience the same “adjustments” as other species.

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It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1

Recently released:It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1

A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.

With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.

The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.

Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.