Steve Bull's Blog, page 1283
October 18, 2017
Electrifying the A9 Trunk Road in Scotland
The Scottish Government recently announced the phasing out of the internal combustion engine by 2032, i.e. in 15 years time. To support the policy it was also announced that the A9 trunk road would be electrified with the provision of charging points along the route. Like all announcements made by the Scottish Government on energy policy I viewed it with some skepticism and I wanted to find out what it would entail. Did this mean hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of charging points?
The A9 Trunk Road Route
The A9 today originates in the heart of Scotland’s densely populated Central Belt near the town of Dunblane, the home of Andy Murray. The road is in three main sections. Dunblane to Perth (29 miles); Perth to Inverness (112 miles) and Inverness to Thurso (109 miles) giving a grand total of 250 miles. It is Scotland’s longest road. Thurso lies on the N coast and is home to the Dounreay fast breeder reactor (now being decommissioned).
Figure 1 The route of the A9 showing the towns mentioned in the text. Blackford and Tomatin are the points where traffic volumes are recorded.
The most famous section is Perth to Inverness since just N of Perth the road enters the Highlands and winds its way north through the scenic Grampian and Cairngorm Mountains and it is this section that will be the focus of this post.
Electric Car Range
“Family” electric cars today have a typical range of 100 miles. Teslas will give you 200 to 400 miles but only through cramming a huge battery pack into the chassis adding lots of weight and cost. While there is much ‘Greenspeak’ about battery technology improvements, in reality battery technology has not improved much for decades since the Li ion battery came of age.
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Nonlinear Complexity – Too Much for Most People to Comprehend
QUESTION: Dear Mr. Martin Armstrong.
Good day to you Martin. I know you are a very busy man, but I still like to send you emails time to time, hoping that you may read my email and respond to me. In regards to your recent post about the theory of Non-linear intervention, I was quietly amazed at the fact that I recently had the same idea as yours.
In my math class, my teacher taught us a different way to solve quadratic equations, and it was completely done by original algebra rules, not with the formulas we used to be given in high school. My math teacher said that most teachers do not use this method other than using special case formulas because its non-linear solution and that messes up people’s brain.
Also in my Economics class, we are learning about the basics of supply and demand and here we again use the straight linear method, such as ceteris paribus. I was sincerely curious to know if that is true for everything we do.
You have shown me a clear path in every aspect of this world. But I have a question about the Euro, I too have lost so much money by just looking at the fundamentals and execute trades and now I have learned that the fundamentals do not matter the most to move the market unless its very significant incident. (is that correct?) For instance, the Euro rallied whenever there was a chance to go up, and as a person who was only looking at the fundamental side, it was very odd and frustrating for me to watch it go up, but on the other hand, the technical communities were chanting a song that EUR/USD will spike to 1.2000 and so it did. I am still a fool who cannot read the market.
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If Catalonia Fails, We All Fail
While I’ve touched on the Catalan independence movement in several recent posts, I want to make one thing clear from the start. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether or not independence is the right move for the region and its people. It would be completely inappropriate for me, a U.S. citizen living in Colorado, to lecture people 5,000 miles away on how they should organize their political lives.
While I don’t have an opinion on how Catalans should vote, I unwaveringly support their right to decide the issue for themselves. When it comes to the issue of voting and referendums, we’ve entered a topic far bigger than Catalonia, Spain, or even Europe itself. When it comes to the issue of political self-determination, we’re talking about an essential human right which should be seen as inherent to all of us, everywhere.
The Catalan push for a right for vote on independence should be seen as part of a much larger push toward greater self-determination that humans will demand in increasingly large numbers in the years ahead. The time is ripe for us as a species to insist on a transition toward a more voluntary, sane, peaceful and decentralized process of political organization. This is an idea whose time has come, and I thank the Catalan people from the bottom of my heart for brining it to the fore, and also for conducting themselves in such a noble, courageous and thoughtful manner. You are leading the way for the rest of us.
The key reason Madrid is wrong on this issue relates to its insistence that Spain must sustain itself in its current form forever. Since Spain is a manmade political creation, this is the modern equivalent of claiming a “divine right of kings,” but rather than bestowing this archaic conception on individual rulers, it’s bestowed upon a nation-state.
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October 17, 2017
How The Elite Dominate The World – Part 3: 90% Of What You Watch On Television Is Controlled By Just 6 Giant Corporations
How much is your view of the world shaped by what you see on television? On average, Americans spend more than 150 hours watching television every month, and it is called “programming” for a reason. If you allow anyone to pour ideas and information into your mind for five hours a day, it is going to change how you look at reality. Everyone has an agenda, and every single news program, television show and movie is trying to alter your views. Sadly, our society has become absolutely addicted to media, and the mainstream media is completely dominated by the elite. In fact, about 90 percent of the programming that comes through your television is controlled by just 6 gigantic media corporations. Most of us are willingly plugging ourselves into this “propaganda matrix” that is completely dominated by the elite for several hours each day, and that gives them an enormous amount of power over the rest of us.
In Part I and Part II of this series, I discussed how the elite use money as a tool to dominate the planet. Today, we are going to talk about how they use information. If you control what people think, then you control a society. And through their vast media empires, the elite are able to shape how we all think to a frightening degree.
Just think about it. What do we talk about with our family, our friends and our co-workers? To a large extent, those conversations are about movies, television shows, something that we just saw on the news or a sporting event that just took place. The reason why we talk about certain things is because the mainstream media gives those things attention, and other things we ignore because the mainstream media does not make them seem to be important.
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Washington: The Bleeder of the ‘Free World’
Washington: The Bleeder of the ‘Free World’
Among the many self-flattering epithets it gives itself, the US has always claimed to be the “leader of the free world”. It’s a rather patronizing notion that America views itself as a selfless protector and benefactor of its European allies and others. This fairytale depiction of the world is coming to a rude awakening as American power buffets against the reality of a multi-polar world.
Less a world leader and more like a blood-sucking leech on international relations.
We got a clear view of the contradiction in America’s narcissistic mythology with US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was disavowing the multinational nuclear accord with Iran last Friday.
Trump didn’t axe American participation in the deal just yet, but he has put it on notice that he or the US Congress may terminate the accord over the next two months. How’s that for high-handed arrogance?
However, there was near-unanimous push back around the world to Trump’s disparagement of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was originally signed in July 2015 by the US, Russia, China, European Union and Iran. All the signatories uniformly rebuked Trump’s attempt to undermine the deal, which is supposed to lift international economic sanctions off Iran in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program.
While Trump accused Iran of “multiple violations” of the accord, all the other stakeholders asserted satisfaction that Iran has in fact fully implemented its obligations to restrict uranium enrichment and weaponization of its nuclear program. The UN watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, also responded to Trump’s claims by reaffirming that eight consecutive monitoring reports have found Iran to be fully compliant with the JCPOA.
Britain, France and Germany, as well as Russia and China, have firmly said that the nuclear deal – which took two years to negotiate during Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House – is not for renegotiation. A point which was reiterated too by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
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Massive WiFi Flaw Affects All Connected Devices: ‘You Have To Wonder If It Was Corrupted On Purpose’
The security protocol used to protect the vast majority of WiFi connections has been broken. This will expose wireless internet traffic to malicious attack, according to the researcher who discovered this weakness.
It doesn’t bode well that the mainstream media is also ignoring this problem completely because it’s a very big deal. Anytime the mainstream media brushes something off, most start asking questions. Unfortunately, none of the answers we have so far to those questions are of comfort.
Considering every single cellphone now has WiFi in it and this major “weakness” could affect almost everyone. According to ARS Technica, researchers have disclosed a serious weakness in the WPA2 protocol that allows attackers within range of vulnerable device or access point to intercept passwords, e-mails, and other data presumed to be encrypted, and in some cases, to inject ransomware or other malicious content into a website a client is visiting.
The proof-of-concept exploit is called KRACK, short for Key Reinstallation Attacks. The research has been a closely guarded secret for weeks ahead of a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for 8am Monday, East Coast time. A website disclosing the vulnerability said it affects the core WPA2 protocol itself and is effective against devices running the Android, Linux, macOS, Windows, and OpenBSD operating systems, as well as MediaTek Linksys, and other types of devices. The site warned attackers can exploit it to decrypt a wealth of sensitive data that’s normally encrypted by the nearly ubiquitous Wi-Fi encryption protocol. –ARS Technica
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Preparing for Floods, Droughts and Water Shortages by Working with, Rather than Against, Nature
An almond farm in California’s Central Valley is flooded in the wintertime to replenish groundwater supplies while scientists study the effects on soils, tree health, and water quality. Photo by Joe Proudman/UC Davis
[This piece is an excerpt from the first chapter of my new book, Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity, released this week by Island Press.]
As I wound my way up Poudre Canyon in northern Colorado, the river flowed toward the plains below, glistening in the midday sun. It ran easy and low, as it normally does as the autumn approaches, with the snowmelt long gone. I was struck by the canyon’s beauty, but also by the blackened soils and charred tree trunks that marred the steep mountains all around. They were legacies, I realized, of the High Park Fire that had burned more than 135 square miles (350 square kilometers) of forest during the previous year’s drought.
It was September 7, 2013, and my family and I were heading to my niece’s wedding. Tara and Eric had chosen a spectacular place for their nuptials—Sky Ranch, a high mountain camp not far from the eastern fringe of Rocky Mountain National Park. As we escorted my elderly parents down the rocky path to their seats, I noticed threatening clouds moving in. They darkened as the preacher delivered his homily. Please cut it short and marry them, I thought to myself, before we all get drenched.
The rains held off just long enough. But that day’s brief shower was a prelude to a deluge of biblical proportions that began four days later. A storm system stalled over the Front Range and in less than a week dumped nearly a year’s worth of precipitation in some areas. The Poudre— short for Cache la Poudre—flooded bigger than it had since 1930.
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The United States of Weinstein: Complicity, Greed and Corruption Is the Status Quo
If integrity means more than any of these baubles, then prepare to fail.
The theme this week is The Rot Within.
The sordid story of Harvey Weinstein is being presented as an aberration. It is not an aberration; it is merely a high-profile example of how the status quo functions in the USA, a.k.a. The United States of Weinstein, in which complicity, greed and corruption reign supreme in every sector and in every nook and cranny of power.
The dirty secret of America’s status quo is that power and wealth are both extremely concentrated, which means there are gatekeepers who must be bribed, sated or serviced if you want to claw your way up the wealth-power pyramid. Mr. Weinstein’s alleged conduct and payoffs of those he exploited is par for the course in the corridors of power in the USA.
As a gatekeeper in Hollywood, Mr. W. could make or break careers with absurd ease.
Gatekeepers are the key functionaries in a rentier economy in which the few at the top skim the wealth of the many. Want to play in the big leagues of Hollywood, Washington D.C., the Pentagon, or the various HQs of Global Corporate America? You have to pay the Gatekeepers what they demand.
It might be the casting couch or a slice of the profits, or a vote in committee, but the price of admission will always include complicity–silence about the crimes committed and the endemic corruption, and a sacrifice of moral standards. This is the minimal price of “success” in the elite circles of wealth and power in America.
If you doubt this, dig deep into any concentration of power in America and see what you find. Outsiders won’t find anyone willing to talk, of course; that’s how complicity works.
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The Real GHG trend: Oilsands among the most carbon intensive crudes in North AmericaOilsands at 50 Series – The Real Cost of Development, Part 1
The Oil-Climate Index suggests that the oilsands generate 2.2 times as many emissions per barrel than the average crude extracted in North America. Photo: Jennifer Grant
Over the past 50 years, the development of the oilsands has changed the face of Alberta, driving innovation and technology to make oilsands a reality. The oilsands are the third largest oil reserve on earth, and despite a cycle of boom and busts, contribute to the prosperity of the province. Industry, however, has not addressed many of the largest environmental impacts generated by the oilsands, and much work is still left to be done. This blog is part of a series where we look back at the last 50 years of the oilsands industry and shed light on a number of the remaining challenges. See Part 2 here and Part 3 here.
After 50 years of production, the oilsands remain among the world’s most carbon intensive large-scale crude oil operations. Studies continue to back this up. The Carnegie Endowment’s Oil-Climate Index suggests most oilsands crude is associated with 31 per cent more emissions than the average North-American crude from the point of extraction through its lifecycle to the point of end use (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. Emissions associated with the full lifecycle of a crude (from extraction to combustion) for a selection of crudes produced in North America
When looking at the carbon pollution associated with the extraction and processing, the Oil-Climate Index suggests that the oilsands generate 2.2 times as many emissions per barrel than the average crude extracted in North America (See Figure 2).
Figure 2. Emissions associated with the extraction and processing for a selection of crudes produced in North America
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The Real Destabilizer in the Middle East in Not Iran But Trump
Photo by David Stanley | CC by 2.0
As President Trump withdraws certification of the nuclear agreement with Iran, commentators across the world struggled for words to adequately convey their outrage and contempt. A favourite term to describe Trump is as “a wrecking ball”, but the phrase suggests a sense of direction and capacity to strike a target which Trump does not possess.
The instant that Trump decertifies the deal struck by President Obama in 2015, the US becomes a lesser power and Iran a greater one, because he will confirm the belief that America is led by an egoist motivated by ignorant prejudice. Accusations of mental derangement have always been part of common currency of political abuse, but there is a growing belief among international leaders that in Trump’s case there might be something to it, though they have few ideas about what they should do about this.
Their bemusement is understandable given that the situation is so bizarre. In the past, highly neurotic individuals were most like to gain power as hereditary monarchs, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany being a prime example. Full blown psychoses are less common, though madness of Charles VI of France and Henry VI of England in the late Middle Ages precipitate both countries into civil wars. What is extraordinary about Trump’s all-consuming egomania, or what some call “malignant narcissism”, is that it did not prevent his rise to power.
Iranian leaders may calculate that, short of all-out war, they come out the winner: the US-led coalition of states that once isolated Iran has disintegrating and today it is the US that risks isolation.
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