Steve Bull's Blog, page 203
August 6, 2022
Green technocracy’s dirty secret
Germany is in trouble. The IMF has revised its projected growth figures down to just 1.2 percent for 2022. Even this may prove to be optimistic now that gas imports from Russia have dropped to just 20 percent of what was anticipated prior to the EU sanctions. With autumn approaching, German industry is anticipating power outages while the population looks forward to food and energy shortages.
The cuts in gas supplies – resulting, apparently, from Canada refusing to return essential turbines following repair – mean that Germany has no chance of building up its gas storage before winter arrives. And, of course, it is possible that the Russian state will use this moment of weakness to cut supplies even further. After all, most of the future gas which would have gone to Europe has since been sold to Asian states instead.
Inevitably then, German – and western – media outlets will spend much of the winter talking about “Putin’s energy cuts.” In reality, it is the European technocracy and its puppet politicians who bear the greater responsibility. After all, it is they who have spent the last three decades leaving Europe vulnerable to precisely this kind of supply shock. As Lea Booth at Quillette argues:
“The truth is that the Energiewende was doomed to fail from the start. Germany bet big on solar and wind and shut down their nuclear plants when they should have forgone renewables and expanded their nuclear energy program instead. Germany’s anti-nuclear ideology is so rigid that they closed three nuclear plants in December 2021, despite the global energy crisis, and plan to close their last three nuclear plants this December, despite Russia’s energy extortion.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Norway Considers Limiting Electricity Exports To Prevent Domestic Crunch
Norway may soon introduce a rule to reduce its vast electricity exports if levels at reservoirs for hydropower generation drop to critically low levels in a bid to prevent power shortages and further rises in energy bills domestically.
Norway’s Energy Minister Terje Aasland told Norwegian media, as quoted by Bloomberg, that the government could introduce limits on electricity exports if the water in reservoirs drops to “very low” levels.
A cut in Norwegian power exports would be felt in Northwest Europe, which itself is grappling with issues at coal and nuclear power generating plants due to the low water level in rivers limiting coal supply via barges and warm river water unsuitable for cooling nuclear reactors.
As a result of these issues and the uncertainty over natural gas supply from Russia, power prices in Germany for the year ahead jumped to a record on Friday.
This summer’s dry weather across Europe has affected Norwegian hydropower, which accounts for 90% of Norwegian power generation. The remaining around 10% of the electricity supply in Norway comes from wind power.
While Europe scrambles to procure natural gas for winter power generation and heating, Western Europe’s biggest oil and gas producer, Norway, has a whole different power problem this summer—dry weather, which depletes water reservoirs for hydropower.
Although Norway doesn’t use gas for power generation, Europe’s gas and energy crisis is felt there, too. In recent weeks, hydropower producers have been discouraged from tapping more water for hydropower generation to save water for the winter. Operators were also asked not to export too much electricity to the rest of Europe as reservoirs are not as full as in previous years, and not to rely on imports from Europe, which is struggling with energy supply. Some Norwegian utilities, including top electricity producer Statkraft, have followed the plea from transmission system operator Statnet not to produce too much electricity now.
UK Water Restrictions Go Into Effect As Heatwave Persists
Britain has recorded one of its hottest and driest summers on record. Rivers and reservoirs are drying up as towns in the southern part of the country imposed the first hosepipe ban on Friday.
The country’s record heat in July — above 104 Fahrenheit (40 degrees Celsius) — melted airport runways, buckled train tracks, and shuttered transportation networks, as London’s fire brigade said it had one of the busiest days since World War II. The heat dome resulted in dozens of building structure fires and wildfires.
As of 1700 local time Friday, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight residents will be placed under emergency water restrictions called “temporary use ban.” If residents water their gardens, yards, and/or clean their vehicles, they could face a stiff penalty of up to $1,200 (£1,000). A similar ban will go into effect for residents in Kent and Sussex from Aug. 12.
“Months of sparse rainfall, combined with record-breaking temperatures in July, have left rivers at exceptionally low levels, depleted reservoirs and dried-out soils,” British newspaper The Independent wrote.
London dodged the water restrictions for now as its large reservoirs are at “very comfortable levels,” Barnaby Dobson, a research associate on the Community Water Management for a Liveable London project at Imperial College London, told Bloomberg.
However, water reservoirs in London could slump as the metro area faces levels of drought not seen in a decade.
Dobson said rationing is a measure of last resort and would come after hosepipe bans. He said water utilities are very wary of implementing water rationings because it would trigger consumer backlash.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 5, 2022
“Widespread Civil Unrest” Looming in UK Over Cost of Living Crisis
Movement to stop paying bills snowballs.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
The chance of “widespread civil unrest” occurring in the UK as a result of people being unable to afford to pay their bills due to the cost of living crisis is “inevitable,” according to one campaigner.
With energy prices set to soar even higher in October as a result of the sanctions on Russia, many Brits have resolved to refuse to pay their bills as part of a growing backlash some are comparing to the poll tax riots.
London was hit with violent riots back in 1990 in response to the government’s efforts to introduce the poll tax, and the new levy was eventually scrapped after a coalition of interest groups amongst both the working class and the middle class combined to defeat it.
A similar movement under the umbrella of the Don’t Pay organization is now urging people to cancel their direct debits in October if energy prices continue to rise.
Average energy bills in the UK for dual fuel are expected to rise to £3,615 by January 2023, an increase of 283 per cent on March levels.
“Millions of us won’t be able to afford food and bills this winter,” asserts the Don’t Pay manifesto. “We cannot afford to let that happen. We demand a reduction of bills to an affordable level. We will cancel our direct debits from October 1st if we are ignored.”
However, others have warned that a mass refusal to pay bills will only result in energy prices soaring even higher because more companies will leave the market, allowing fewer corporations to create pricing monopolies.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
August 4, 2022
World population is growing faster than we thought
We’ve all heard the aphorism ‘Lies, damned lies and statistics.’ Statistics are an invaluable tool for understanding and responding appropriately to the world, but when the numbers say one thing and the headlines say another, it’s a cause for concern. TOP takes a dive into World Population Prospects 2022.
The world’s population has grown more than anticipated in the past three years.
That should have been the headline when the United Nations released its latest revision of world population data (World Population Prospects 2022) on 11 July. Instead, the headline was that global population would peak in 2086 at 10.4 billion, about 15 years earlier and half a billion fewer than projected in 2019.
Is this fake news? Why should greater-than-anticipated growth yield lower future growth projections? Let’s look at the data they have given us. Apologies if this article is a bit nerdy, but the UN projections play an important role in government planning throughout the world. Any criticism of them needs to be thoroughly justified.
Figure 1 shows the world population as it was estimated in each revision of World Population Prospects (WPP) from 2010 to 2022. The pink line connects each revision’s estimate of the current population, i.e. the mid-2010 population as estimated by WPP2010 connected to the mid-2012 population as estimated by WPP2012 etc. Using this rolling-current estimate avoids any bias in the UN’s model that might be influencing the slope of the projected line.
In blue dashed lines are the projected growth anticipated in each of those revisions. With the exception of 2019, where recent past estimates closely matched what was expected in 2017, each new revision has concluded that growth since the last update was greater than they anticipated.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
UN Secretary-General Blames Global Economic Crisis On Ukraine War
NATO governments and globalist institutions have put on a good show acting as if they hate Putin and the Russian advance in Ukraine, but the reality is that the war acts as an all encompassing distraction from the greater agenda at hand. It offers globalist organizations, western politicians and central banks a perfect scapegoat for the ongoing economic instability caused by THEIR policies.
As anyone that follows alternative economic knows, the stagflationary crisis that is escalating today was triggered well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Price inflation was hitting 40 year highs in December of 2021, months before the war started. Gas prices were skyrocketing long before sanctions on Russia were ever implemented, climbing from an average of $2.20 per gallon in November of 2020 to $5 per gallon in June of 2022. That’s more than a 100% increase in less than two years and most of it occurred before Ukraine was an issue.
What really caused stagflation? It’s a process initiated by central bank stimulus that the alternative media has been warning about for many years. The real culprits are central bankers and the politicians that align with them. The world has been awash in fiat money as a means to prolong economic corrections that should have been allowed to run their course a long time ago. Instead, bankers sought to artificially prop up the system and funnel money into “too big to fail” corporations along with the too big to fail stock markets. Now, of course, things are changing.
The inevitable Catch-22 dynamic has come into play – Central banks can continue to print and keep interest rates near zero, but inflation will rapidly expand, making all their efforts pointless as rising costs lead to plummeting demand…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Lowdown on the “Climate Act”
This past week the media announced an historic climate legislation deal was struck in the Senate. The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, ( a misleading title because the Act will do nothing to tame inflation) will allocate $370 billion in spending toward a “Green Energy” future.
Where is the money going?
According to the Wall Street Journal it would subsidize “wind, solar, critical minerals, biofuels, hydrogen, carbon capture, nuclear, ‘sustainable’ aviation fuel, lithium-ion batteries, electric-vehicle charging stations and more.” Additionally there will be $80 billion in rebates for home improvements and electric vehicles, $20 billion in inexpensive federal loans to build “clean vehicle” factories among other allocations.
The money we carry around in our wallets, purses and resides in our bank accounts is used to buy goods and services. Money represents and is a medium of exchange for minerals, metals, biomass and energy.
$370 billion from this Act will be deployed in the economy to extract, manufacture, fabricate and deliver those materials to shift us from an energy source that emits carbon.
The International Energy Agency states that an electric car takes six times more mineral inputs than a car. And according to the Manhattan Institute, building wind turbines and solar panels requires ten times more materials compared to machines that burn fossil energy.
And many of the minerals and chemicals used in the processing of solar panels such as phosphine, arsenic, lead, chromium, trichloroethane, stannic chloride, and others are highly toxic to humans.
The overwhelmingly enormous amount of mining and future wastes will create unprecedented long term pollution and destruction of tens of millions of acres of habitat and fresh waterways, endangering human and planetary health.
Additionally if this Act makes buying energy and materials cheaper for the average American what will they do with those savings?…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Sorry! Diesel prices are likely to climb again soon
Behind the scenes of why fuel is so expensive in 2022
Truck stops made record diesel profits this quarter. (Roger V. Solis/AP)For today’s MODES, I called up FreightWaves Editor-at-Large John Kingston to find out what the heck is happening with diesel prices recently. I learned a lot, but the most important takeaway was the World Oil Market Waterbed Theory.
This conversation was lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
FREIGHTWAVES: Just to start off pretty broad, the macro conditions are pretty much the same from what we saw earlier this year to what’s happening now. Obviously, we haven’t built any new refineries in the past few months. There’s still a war in Ukraine. Why is it that future prices are going down, and maybe not as quickly, but retail gasoline and diesel prices are also going down?
KINGSTON: “It’s a good question because it’s not really clear. I think part of the reason is that the news reports continue to trickle out about Russia doing relatively well in finding new buyers for its crude oil. Whereas, the International Energy Agency had predicted a couple of months ago that the loss of Russian supplies was going to be about 3 million barrels a day, which is roughly about 3% of the world market — which is a lot when you lose that much supply.
“I’m going to date myself with this reference, but it’s the best I can do. The world oil market is like a waterbed. If you push down one corner of the waterbed, the water moves throughout the entire mattress. If Russia is actually finding buyers for its oil that maybe had gone to Europe previously, but the oil is instead going to India or China, it’s the same as it getting out to its normal places…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Peak lithium makes transportation & electricity storage pointless
Preface. The lithium batteries in cars need electricity to recharge, but the electric grid can’t stay up with just wind and solar, that’s why natural gas is the energy storage today. Nor do pumped hydro or compressed air energy storage scale up. And battery storage doesn’t either.
Barnhart (2013) found that the only utility-scale battery for which there were enough materials on earth to store 12 hours of electricity production were Sodium sulfur (NaS) yet the main batteries being developed for both utility-scale electricity storage and automobiles is lithium. To provide enough energy storage for just 1 day of electricity generation in the United states, li-ion batteries would cost $11.9 trillion dollars, take up 345 square miles, weigh 74 million tons, and need replacement after 15 years (DOE/EPRI 2013). Multiply that by 28 since at least four weeks of energy storage are needed to cope with the seasonality of wind and solar. That doesn’t leave much if any lithium for cars. Vazquez (2010) also points out that lithium does not grow on trees, and the amount needed for utility-scale storage is likely to deplete known resources (Vazquez 2010).
And what’s the point of electrifying cars? That only replaces gasoline. But it is diesel that’s needed, peak diesel is the real existential crisis, since large trucks, locomotives, and ships burn diesel. Without this transportation civilization ends within a week. I explain this in greater detail in my book “When Trains Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation“. The main reason trucks can’t run on batteries is that they weigh too much in long haul, tractors, harvesters, bulldozers, fire, logging, mining and myriad other essential heavy duty trucks doing the actual work of civilization. Plus over 80% of U.S. cities have no rail or ports and depend on trucks alone.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
‘Soon the world will be unrecognisable’: is it still possible to prevent total climate meltdown?
Record high temperatures and extreme weather events are being recorded around the world. Photograph: Ian Logan/Getty ImagesBlistering heatwaves are just the start. We must accept how bad things are before we can head off global catastrophe, according to a leading UK scientist
The publication of Bill McGuire’s latest book, Hothouse Earth, could not be more timely. Appearing in the shops this week, it will be perused by sweltering customers who have just endured record high temperatures across the UK and now face the prospect of weeks of drought to add to their discomfort.
And this is just the beginning, insists McGuire, who is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. As he makes clear in his uncompromising depiction of the coming climatic catastrophe, we have – for far too long – ignored explicit warnings that rising carbon emissions are dangerously heating the Earth. Now we are going to pay the price for our complacency in the form of storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves that will easily surpass current extremes.
The crucial point, he argues, is that there is now no chance of us avoiding a perilous, all-pervasive climate breakdown. We have passed the point of no return and can expect a future in which lethal heatwaves and temperatures in excess of 50C (120F) are common in the tropics; where summers at temperate latitudes will invariably be baking hot, and where our oceans are destined to become warm and acidic. “A child born in 2020 will face a far more hostile world that its grandparents did,” McGuire insists.
Bill McGuire is emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London and was also an adviser to the UK government.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
