Steve Bull's Blog, page 108
August 4, 2023
German energy use drops 7% in H1 amid high prices – Ageb
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(Montel) Primary energy consumption in Germany fell 7% to 1,545 TWh in the first six months of the year, energy statistics group Ageb said on Wednesday, pointing to high energy prices and a weak economy.
“According to the assessment of Ageb, the high energy prices as well as the weak economic development are responsible for the considerable decline in consumption,” Ageb said in a statement.In terms of electricity consumption, Ageb reported a decline of 6.2% to 251 TWh, with the share coming from renewable sources rising from 49.3% to 52%. Green power use, meanwhile, rose by 0.6% to 306.4 TWh.
Germany aims for a share of renewable energy of at least 80% of gross electricity consumption by 2030.
Fossil fuels plunge, emissions fall
According to the report, lignite saw the greatest decline in consumption, falling by 18% year on year to 130.3 TWh.
Among other fossil fuels, hard coal consumption fell by 10.8% to 138.9 TWh, with the use in power plants dropping by almost 19%.
Germany plans to phase out all coal in power generation by 2038 at the latest, while utility RWE last week reported a 40% year-on-year drop in lignite-fired output in the second quarter.
Natural gas consumption also fell, sliding 10.1% to 403.9 TWh, with Ageb citing flagging demand from the industrial sector as well as households. Accordingly, electricity generation from natural gas fell by 4%, district heating generation by 2%.
The declining consumption of fossil fuels saw energy-related carbon emissions fall by more than 8% in the first half of 2023 compared to the same period last year, Ageb’s preliminary data showed, corresponding to a reduction of 28m tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Meanwhile, Germany exported a net 3.1 TWh of electricity in H1 2023, down from 17.3 TWh in the same period last year.
Last year, primary energy consumption fell by 5.4% to 3,269 TWh – the lowest level since reunification.
Lebanon caretaker PM warns of total collapse if reforms not implemented
The caretaker PM’s warning comes as the Central Bank is considering completely halting its funding of the Lebanese state
(Photo credit: Dalati Nohra/Handout via Reuters)Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister, Najib Mikati, warned on 3 August that the country’s total economic collapse will be imminent in the event that the Central Bank and its newly appointed governor fail to implement reform policies called for by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“Lebanon will not be able to secure medicine or pay salaries in foreign currency, in the event that the monetary and economic plan presented by the Acting Governor of the Banque du Liban, Wassim Mansouri, is not approved,” the caretaker prime minister said.
“Mansouri’s plan is consistent with the government’s plans, and our goal is to approve these plans and not waste time because the goal is to save the country,” he said.
In reference to consultations made recently between Mikati and the interim bank governor, the former said that there is “harmony [in the Central Bank] with the government’s plans.”
However, Lebanese media reported on 3 August that the Central Bank is considering completely halting its funding of the state as of Monday, 7 August.
Upon taking the reins of the Central Bank following the end of Riad Salameh’s term last month, Mansouri said: “I will not sign on any expenditure for financing the government if it contravenes with my principles or the appropriate legal framework.”
Days later, on 3 August, Lebanon’s parliament failed to pass a law that would allow the state to borrow foreign currency from the Central Bank. Mansouri’s condition for lending funds to the state from the Central Bank was the passing of the law, and the reimbursement of the funds “through a realistic plan,” Naharnet reported.
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Our Oil Predicament Explained: Heavy Oil and the Diesel Fuel it Provides Are Key
It has recently become clear to me that heavy oil, which is needed to produce diesel and jet fuel, plays a far more significant role in the world economy than most people understand. We need heavy oil that can be extracted, processed, and transported inexpensively to be able to provide the category of fuels sometimes referred to as Middle Distillates if our modern economy is to continue. A transition to electricity doesn’t work for most heavy equipment that is powered by diesel or jet fuel.
A major concern is that the physics of our self-organizing economy plays an important role in determining what actually happens. Leaders may think that they are in charge, but their power to change the way the overall system works, in the chosen direction, is quite limited. The physics of the system tends to keep oil prices lower than heavy oil producers would prefer. It tends to cause debt bubbles to collapse. It tends to squeeze out “inefficient” uses of oil from the system in ways we wouldn’t expect. In the future, the physics of the system may keep parts of the world economy operating while other inefficient pieces get squeezed out.
In this post, I will try to explain some of the issues with oil limits as they seem to be playing out, particularly as they apply to diesel and jet fuel, the major components of Middle Distillates.
[1] The most serious issue with oil supply is that there seems to be plenty of oil in the ground, but the world economy cannot hold prices up sufficiently high, for long enough, to get this oil out.
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August 2, 2023
Concerns that The White House Could Declare COVID-Like ‘Climate Emergency’
Concerns are rising within energy industry circles that the White House might declare a climate emergency, reminiscent of the COVID-19 emergency declaration.
Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, expressed this apprehension, stating such a move would equip the president with “vast and unchecked authority to shut down everything from communications to infrastructure.”
Read More: American Patriotism on the Decline: Only 18% of young adults ‘Extremely Proud’ to be American
Stewart raises concerns on critical infrastructure, ‘climate emergency’ impact
Credit: DepositPhotos© Provided by Everyday ChirpMr. Stewart suggested that critical infrastructure, including water and electricity, could be impacted.
“They can literally do exactly what they did in COVID,” he said. He voiced worries over the potential to stifle dissenting voices and the indefinite nature of the ‘climate emergency.’
White House remains silent on speculations on climate emergency
The White House didn’t respond to requests to comment on these speculations.
President Joe Biden, although emphasizing the urgency of the “climate crisis,” has refrained from declaring an emergency. Yet, some Democrats and environmental groups continue to advocate for such a measure.
Momentum grows for climate emergency declaration
Rep. Earl Blumenauer’s (D-Ore.) “Climate Emergency Act of 2021” has received backing from about 60 Democrats. This legislation demands a climate-related emergency declaration from the Biden administration.
On another front, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres issued a dramatic message, declaring that “the era of global boiling has arrived.”
Divergent views on climate change action, criticism from Stewart
Concurrently, media outlets like the Los Angeles Times have suggested deliberate “occasional blackouts” to combat climate change, while The Guardian urges Biden to “declare a climate emergency” immediately.
Mr. Stewart criticized these reports as a “propaganda war” attempting to “condition the public to think it is their duty to the State to be miserable, cold, and hungry.”
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Desertification: An Existential Crisis For Iran
Temperatures in Iran are hitting record highs, rivers and lakes are drying up, and prolonged droughts are becoming the norm, highlighting a water crisis that is turning much of the country’s territory to dust.
The desertification of Iran is occurring at a staggering pace, with officials last month warning that more than 1 million hectares of the country’s territory — roughly equivalent to the size of Qom Province or Lebanon — is essentially becoming uninhabitable every year.
The situation has Tehran scrambling to gain control of the situation in a country where up to 90 percent of the land is arid or semi-arid. But the clock is ticking to stave off what even officials have acknowledged could lead to an existential crisis and the mass exodus of civilians.
The warning signs were on full display this month. Temperatures in southwestern Iran hit a staggering 66.7 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit), higher than what is considered tolerable for human life.
Iranian scientists warned that the water levels of Lake Urmia, which is in severe danger of drying up, are the lowest recorded in 60 years. And in what has become routine, advisories were issued about the threat of suffocating dust storms.
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Lessons from the Unraveling of the Roman Empire: Simplification, Localization
The fragmentation, simplification and localization of the post-Imperial era offers us lessons we ignore at our peril.
There is an entire industry devoted to “why the Roman Empire collapsed,” but the post-collapse era may be offer us higher value lessons. The post-collapse era, long written off as The Dark Ages, is better understood as a period of adaptation to changing conditions, specifically, the relocalization and simplification of the economy and governance.
As historian Chris Wickham has explained in his books Medieval Europe and The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000, the medieval era is best understood as a complex process of social, political and economic natural selection: while the Western Roman Empire unraveled, the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) continued on for almost 1,000 years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and the social and political structures of the Western Roman Empire influenced Europe for hundreds of years.
In broad-brush, the Roman Empire was a highly centralized, tightly bound system that was remarkably adaptive despite its enormous size and the slow pace of transport and communication. Roman society was both highly hierarchical–the elites claimed superiority and worked hard to master the necessary tools of authority– slaves were integral to the building and maintenance of Rome’s vast infrastructure–and open to meritocracy, as the Roman Army and other classes were open to advancement by anyone in the sprawling empire: every free person became a Roman Citizen once their territory was absorbed into the Empire.
When the Empire fell apart, the model of centralized control/power continued on in the reigns of the so-called Barbarian kingdoms (Goths, Vandals, etc.) and Charlemagne (768-814), over 300 years after the fall of Rome. (When the Ottomans finally conquered Constantinople in 1453, they also adopted many of the bureaucratic structures of the Byzantine Empire.)
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July 24, 2023
The End Of Fossil Fuels Will Be The End Of Modern Capitalism
That which is unsustainable can not be sustained
Ed Yourdon from New York City via Wikimedia CommonsNone of us are ready for the chaos of the we are stoking, caused by the rapacious growth of what Kurt Vonnegut Jr. referred to as “thermodynamic whoopee”. You might know it as Global Industrial Civilization-GIC. This is the beginning of how the world will sort itself out for the next 20 years.
An energy conversion from fossil fuels will not be possible to an equal extent in all world regions before peak oil occurs. It is likely that a large number of countries will not be able to make the necessary investments in good time and to the required extent.
The communities that live around those festering wounds and the toxic pools know this. And their anger and disquiet is growing as is their numbers. From sanitation employees in Paris to farmers in Punjab.
Even under the threat of our mighty military the other economies and nations of the world will make alliances, some out of necessity and some out of short-term gain, but the harder we push the more defined the battle lines will be. Our ruling class wants us to believe we can win this energy transition war. By any humanitarian definition of “winning” they are lying. They think THEY can win this war. They are wrong.
The contemporary financial system is at severe and worsening risk because of the gargantuan scale of the ‘excess claims overhang’ that has been created on the false assumption that the creation of money and credit in their various forms (known to conventional economics as “demand”) can somehow expand the real economy of goods and services. Demand can raise prices but demand can not create more oil in the ground.
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Our Predicament Re-stated
There is a meme doing the rounds on social media… a picture of a vegetable patch, captioned “the time is coming when only those who know how to grow food will survive.” The idea being that, as our complex civilisation breaks down, we will be forced to return to a far simpler economy, where most people revert to roles within agriculture and food production. As with most memes, it functions as a thought-stopper… one which hides the obvious reality – backed by millennia of experience – that, in fact, “it will be the people who know how to force others to grow food,” who will be the real winners in the post-industrial economy.
At a deeper level though, the meme is an example of the way we delude ourselves into believing that a positive version of collapse – usually in the form of managed de-growth – is possible, and that those promoting such a view will be the ones who inherit whatever benefits it offers. History says otherwise, of course. Life in pre-industrial civilisations was mostly short, brutal, and often marred with chronic pain. The best most people could hope for was life in an institutional version of slavery, where at least serfdom laid some nominal responsibilities on the clergy and the nobility who ruled over them. And again, it was those with the wherewithal to protect and/or steal food by force who got to rule and to enjoy the few luxuries on offer.
Not that most of those promoting some version of the “green” techno-psychotic vision of a future of wind turbines and electric cars are likely to fare any better. Sure, the WEF neofascists and their politician acolytes are currently making a play to cling on to power as industrial civilisation collapses…
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The Rise Of Totalitarianism: Banks Denying Services Based On Political Views
Then British Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage speaks during a visit at Dover harbour, in Dover, Britain, on Aug. 12, 2020. (Matthew Childs/Reuters)When the Berlin Wall fell, I naively supposed that freedom was now secure, that never again would the spectre of totalitarianism return to Europe. I failed to take into account what I should have known, that the thirst for power is at least as great as that for freedom. Freedom and power are forever locked into a kind of Manichaean struggle, as are good and evil, and the thirst for power is perfectly capable of making an instrument of supposed good causes.
History doesn’t repeat itself, at least not in precisely the same way. The new totalitarianism doesn’t resort to thugs in the street and the midnight knock on the door. It’s somewhat more subtle than that, but nonetheless ruthless and dangerous for all its subtlety.
In Britain, a well-known politician, Nigel Farage, has had his bank account closed by a bank called Coutts that specializes in rich clients. It’s owned by the much larger National Westminster Bank, whose largest single shareholder by far, since the banking crisis of 2008, is the British government.
Mr. Farage is a well-known figure, the scourge of the Euro-federalists, and probably more responsible than any other single person for the referendum vote in 2016 for Britain to leave the European Union. Like most public figures with both strong opinions and a strong personality, Mr. Farage is both widely admired and widely detested. If you ask someone about him, he’s unlikely to answer, “On the one hand, on the other …”
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Cancellations Start for John Clauser After Nobel Physics Laureate Speaks Out About “Corruption” of Climate Science
Dr. Clauser was due to speak to the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office this Thursday under the title: “Let’s talk – How much can we trust IPCC climate predictions?” It would appear that “not a lot” isn’t the politically correct answer. Clauser is a longstanding critic of climate models and criticised the award of the Physics Nobel in 2021 for work on them. He is not alone, since many feel that climate models are primarily based on mathematics, and a history of failed opinionated climate predictions leave them undeserving of recognition at the highest level of pure science. Not that this opinion is shared by the green activist National Geographic magazine, which ran an article: “How climate models got so accurate they won a Nobel.”
Last week, Clauser observed that misguided climate science has “metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”. This pseudoscience, he continued, has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other related ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies and environmentalists. “In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis,” he added.
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