Steve Bull's Blog, page 1328
August 30, 2017
Arkema CEO: “No Way To Prevent Imminent Explosion” At Flooded Texas Chemical Plant
Yesterday we reported, that in a potentially disastrous outcome from the Harvey flooding, a chemical plant in Crosby, Texas belonging to French industrial giant Arkema SA, has announced it is evacuating workers due to the risk of an explosion, after Tropical Storm Harvey knocked out power and flooding swamped its backup generators. The French company said the situation at the plant “has become serious” and said that it is working with the Department of Homeland Security and the State of Texas to set up a command post in a suitable location near our site.
The plant, which produces explosive organic peroxides and ammonia, was hit by more than 40 inches of rain and has been heavily flooded, running without electricity since Sunday. The plant was closed since Friday but has had a skeleton staff of about a dozen in place. Following the flood surge, the plant’s back-up generators also failed. The threat emerged once the company could no longer maintain refrigeration for chemicals located on site, which have to be stored at low temperatures. The plant lost cooling when backup generators were flooded and then workers transferred products from the warehouses into diesel-powered refrigerated containers.
On Tuesday afternoon, the company released a statement which admitted that “refrigeration on some of our back-up product storage containers has been compromised due to extremely high water, which is unprecedented in the Crosby area. We are monitoring the temperature of each refrigeration container remotely.” It then warned that “while we do not believe there is any imminent danger, the potential for a chemical reaction leading to a fire and/or explosion within the site confines is real.”
One day later, and with the torrential rains finally over, has the situation at the giant peroxide chemical plant stabilized? Unfortunately, according to Reuters, the answer is no.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Houston Reeling Amid Outbreak Of Looting, Armed Robberies; Vigilantees Emerge
Inevitably every major metropolitan crisis brings out the best and worst of what humanity has to offer. While hundreds/thousands of people have rushed into Houston following the epic destruction of Hurricane Harvey to help in any way possible, others have once again predictably chosen to exploit the misery of others by looting abandoned shopping centers, robbing empty homes and even breaking into the Houston Apple Store (by shooting through the front door).
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The Venture @EGMNVenture
The doors to a flooded @Apple Store in #Houston appear to have been shot at with a firearm. Looters have been rampant. #harveyflood#Harvey
12:04 PM – Aug 29, 2017
In fact, just last night Houston’s Mayor was forced to impose a strict midnight to 5am curfew amid “an outbreak of looting and armed robberies“, in order to prevent property crimes against evacuated homes in the city. As Reuters notes, the curfew came after, among other things, reports surfaced of people impersonating police officers all so they could tell residents to evacuate their homes and then promptly rob them blind.
That proved too little for county officials who set up their own location as an outbreak of looting and armed robberies prompted the city to order an indefinite curfew from midnight to 5 a.m. (0500 to 1000 GMT).
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said late Tuesday individuals impersonating police officers knocked on doors in at least two parts of the city telling residents to evacuate their homes.
Sylvester Turner ✔@SylvesterTurner
Imposing curfew from 10 pm to 5 am to stop any property crimes against evacuated homes in city limits.
7:38 PM – Aug 29, 2017
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Total G-3 Central Bank Control – Craig Hemke
There’s a lot of amazement and wonder at how the “stock market” can be up today with the devastating news out of Texas and the latest North Korean missile launch. Longtime readers of TFMR know exactly how this market levitation is accomplished so this post is designed as a public service in order to better educate and inform everyone else.
Let’s just keep it simple…
In 2017…and, actually, since 2008…the “markets” don’t actually exist. Oh sure, there are trades and prices but in terms of what the markets were 20 years ago?…those days are long gone. Instead, what we have now is total HFT domination. Over 90% of all volume on the NYSE and NASDAQ is now done through HFT machines that swap positions back and forth. This is common knowledge and if you and I know this, then you can be assured that The Fed, The ECB and the BoJ ( known henceforth as the G-3) know this, too.
To that end, since the G-3 are dedicated to market stability and the wealth effect, these central banks clearly seek to influence the direction of the equity markets by influencing the two key drivers of the HFT machines. And what are these drivers? The currency pair of USDJPY and the volatility index known as the VIX. Simply stated, if your wish is to drive “the stock market” higher, all you need to do is buy the USDJPY while at the same time selling the VIX. It truly is that simple.
To that end, daily observation of trading patterns allows us to observe a clear and obvious, algo-driven program in the all-important USDJPY. Because of the sheer size of the forex market (up to $7T/day), any algorithm put in place to manage this pair could only come from pockets deep enough to make it happen….namely, the G-3.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
An initial look at the Australian electricity grid data
An Energy Matters contributor recently started to record electricity grid generation data from a published Australian source, giving us the opportunity to begin evaluating the performance of the Australian grid. This post reviews the limited amount of data (19.5 days) presently available. The reviews show that over this period fossil fuels supplied Australia with 82% of its electricity and renewables 18%, but that there were very large differences between generation mixes in different states. They further suggest that gas-fired plants may already having difficulty balancing erratic wind generation against demand in South Australia and that, like Europe, the wind in Australia is not always blowing somewhere. Updates will follow as additional data become available.
The map below shows the location of Australia’s electricity transmission lines. Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania (via the undersea Basslink) and South Australia are interconnected and make up the National Electricity Market (NEM). Western Australia is an electricity “island”. No data are available for Northern Territory.
The grid data supplied are at five-minute intervals. They contain generation segregated by state and source but do not include demand. They run from Thursday 27 Jul at 19:30 through Wednesday 16 Aug at 07:45 (NEM Time), a total of 19.5 days.
National and state-by-state generation data:
Figure 2, which plots total generation by fuel type for all of Australia, shows that 81.7% of Australia’s generation over the 19.5-day period came from fossil fuels (53.5% black coal, 16.1% brown coal, 12.1% gas), 17.9% from renewables (7.0% hydro,8.3% wind, 2.6% solar) and 0.5% from liquid fuel & other. Peak generation (34,246MW), which because Australia is an “electricity island” will be equal to peak demand, occurred at 6.20pm NEM time on August 3. Peak demand in the Australian summer will, however, likely be higher:
Figure 1: Australia total generation by source, July 27 – August 16, 2017.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 29, 2017
Here’s Why I Completely Changed My Family’s Long-Term Survival Plan
For five years, I lived the prepper’s dream. I lived on secluded acreage out in the boondocks, with a gate at the driveway to deter those who just wander past. I moved from the Canadian boondocks to the American boondocks (in foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains of California) and lived the life that all the prepping books recommend.
I grew food, raised livestock, and had hardly any neighbors, and definitely none close enough to be up in my business. I learned more about self-reliance during those years than I ever realized I didn’t know.
I scrimped and saved to be able to move ever-further out into the woods. I loved finally being able to have a small farm. But, then, I came face to face with two people who had lived through the kind of epic, long term SHTF event that we all prepare for and they both told me, based on their personal experiences, I was doing it all wrong.
Here’s the reason I changed my long-term survival plan.
When I first began working with Lisa Bedford, the Survival Mom, on our live webinar classroom Preppers University, my job was to teach people the things that I had spent years learning. But I never expected our guest instructors to have such a profound impact on my own long-term survival plan.
The first seed of doubt was planted by FerFAL (Fernando Aguirre), the author of The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse, who taught a class sharing his experiences during the collapse of Argentina. He commented that the people who lived more remotely were nearly always victims of horrific crimes. Their little homestead nirvanas were pillaged by criminals. The women were raped. The men were slaughtered. As ideal as their situations sounded, by nature of their very solitude, it made them the perfect target for those without morals.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Exxon Used the New York Times to Make You Question Climate Science
A breakthrough study from Harvard unearths the extent Exxon has gone to in order to destroy the public’s trust in climate change science.
Last week, Harvard University researchers Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes (of Merchants of Doubt fame) published the first peer-reviewed study comparing ExxonMobil’s internal and external communications on climate change.
The abstract of the Supran and Oreskes study shows that ExxonMobil’s own scientists and executives had a much sharper understanding of climate science than the company told the public (emphasis added):
“Accounting for expressions of reasonable doubt, 83 percent of peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12 percent of advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt. We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science — by way of its scientists’ academic publications — but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.”
As the Harvard authors credit, the advertorials came from a study published on PolluterWatch by our former colleague at Greenpeace, Cindy Baxter.
Cindy republished many of ExxonMobil’s New York Times advertorials back in 2015. This was right as investigative reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed the extent of knowledge among Exxon’s own scientists that burning fossil fuels caused unnatural global warming.
With these revelations in mind, Cindy recalled a peer-reviewed study in the journal Public Relations Review on “advertorials” or “op-ads” that Mobil Oil paid to have published in the New York Times. The authors of that study, Clyde Brown and Herbert Waltzer, reviewed 819 New York Times advertorials that Mobil placed “every Thursday” from 1985 to 2000.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Inflating the Russian Threat
Exclusive: The U.S. mainstream media, led by The New York Times, has behaved as classic propagandists, hyping a Russian military “threat” and promoting a new Cold War hysteria, as Jonathan Marshall describes.
Readers of the New York Times have more to sweat about than hot summer weather in the Big Apple. The paper’s chief military correspondent, Michael Gordon — co-author of the infamous 2002 story about Saddam Hussein’s “quest for A-bomb parts” — has all but warned that war in Europe could break out at any minute with the mighty Russian army.
New York Times building in New York City. (Photo from Wikipedia)
“Russia is preparing to send as many as 100,000 troops to the eastern edge of NATO territory at the end of the summer,” he reported last month with Eric Schmitt. Sounding like speechwriters for Sen. John McCain, they called the long-planned military exercises with Belarus — known as “Zapad” (Russian for “west”) — “one of the biggest steps yet in the military buildup undertaken by President Vladimir V. Putin and an exercise in intimidation that recalls the most ominous days of the Cold War.”
Gordon and Schmitt added that this latest and greatest example of “Mr. Putin’s saber-rattling,” represents “the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union that so much offensive power has been concentrated in a single command.”
Many other Western news organizations have echoed this story, albeit with less alarmist rhetoric. NBC News warned that “another military challenge may be on the horizon” as “thousands of Russian troops and tanks are preparing to take part in what may be the country’s largest military exercise since the Cold War.”
Reciting the same talking points almost verbatim, the London Guardian reported days ago that “Russia is preparing to mount what could be one of its biggest military exercises since the Cold War.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Spain: Breaking Up is Hard to Do
Photo by Rick Ligthelm | CC BY 2.0
When the Catalans goes to the polls Oct. 1, much more than independence for Spain’s restive province will be at stake. In many ways the vote will be a sounding board for Spain’s future, but it is also a test of whether the European Union—divided between north and south, east and west—can long endure.
In some ways, the referendum on Catalan independence is a very Spanish affair, with grievances that run all the way back to Catalonia’s loss of independence in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). But the Catalans lost more than their political freedom when the combined French and Spanish army took Barcelona, they lost much of their language and culture, particularly during the long and brutal dictatorship of Francisco Franco from 1939 to 1975.
The current independence crisis dates back to 2010, when, at the urging of the rightwing Popular Party, the Spanish Constitutional Court overturned an autonomy agreement that had been endorsed by the Spanish and Catalan parliaments. Since then, the Catalans have elected a pro-independence government and narrowly defeated an initiative in 2014 calling for the creation of a free republic. The Oct. 1 vote will re-visit that vote.
But the backdrop for the upcoming election has much of Europe looking attentively, in part because there are other restive independence movements in places like Scotland, Belgium and Italy, and in part because many of the economic policies of the EU will be on the line, especially austerity, regressive taxation, and privatization of public resources as a strategy for economic recovery.
When the economic meltdown of 2008 struck, there were few countries harder hit than Spain. At the time Spain had a healthy debt burden and a booming economy, but one mainly based on real estate speculation fed by German, Austrian, French, British and U.S. banks.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Climate Crisis as seen by the economics mainstream
Mainstream economics frames the climate crisis in a particular way but this approach is not at all helpful. There have been a variety of controversies which show clearly how economists think – like the “price of a life” controversy. The findings of the Stern Review were widely quoted but how were they calculated? Much of the controversy about the Stern Review among economists was about the discount rate to be applied to future projections. These issues are explained.
Although the effects of climate change seem to be near to apocalyptic over the long term, over the
short term taking signficant action to cut emissions also appears to be a tremendous challenge. The magnitude of this challenge is indicated by a statement in the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change: “Experience suggests that it is difficult to secure emission cuts faster than 1% per year except in instances of recession…” (Stern, 2006, p. 231)
When the Soviet Union was wound up the Russian economy collapsed. Between 1989 and 1998, fuel related emissions fell in that country by 5.2% per annum because economic activity halved. However, this was no model to copy. It was a period of deep crisis. The death rate, particularly among young Russian men, soared. (Stern, 2006, p. 232)
This brings us to the climate policy response so far, or the lack of it, and how mainstream economists frame the climate debate.
• Any policies have to be consistent with growth
• Optimal policies are supposed to be based on cost benefit calculations in which gains and losses
for different people through time are held to be commensurable in money terms
• An appropriate discount rate must be charged when making policy calculations
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Turn Your Sink and Shower Water Into An Abundant Oasis
TURN YOUR SINK AND SHOWER WATER INTO AN ABUNDANT OASIS
Chances are that you have probably heard of the importance of conserving water. Dozens of governmental and non-governmental organizations have orchestrated campaigns trying to convince the average person to reduce the amount of water that they use. From high-efficiency laundry machines to shower heads that are in line with the current national energy policy act standard, most advocacy for conserving household water use focuses on having us use less water.
While reducing the amount of water we use is undoubtedly important, re-utilizing water is a strategy and approach that is very rarely considered. Greywater recycling constitutes a way to reuse the water that goes down our drains. When done correctly, it comprises no danger to human health while also leading to greater ecological resiliency.
WHAT IS GREYWATER AND HOW MUCH OF IT DO WE USE EVERY DAY?
Every day most people send hundreds of gallons of greywater into sewer and septic systems. Greywater, or the water from our sinks, showers, dishwasher and laundry machines, differs from black water (from toilets) and contains mostly soap residues. This water can easily be recycled into the landscape allowing for an extra water source and source of fertility. Even in the driest regions, greywater recycling can allow you to create an oasis from the water you normally waste.
In places like California and the desert southwest, we read headlines almost on a monthly basis of how severe drought is causing problems for households. People are advised to take shorter showers and stop watering their lawn, but virtually no attention is given to what to do with the water that does go down our drains. It is estimated that between 60% and 80% of residential waste water is wash water that comes from our dish washer, sinks, showers, tubs, and washing machines.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
