Steve Bull's Blog, page 225
May 26, 2022
Australian fuel import bill going sky-high
In March 2022 Australia’s petroleum product imports have reached almost AU$ 4 bn per month, an increase of 70% compared to December 2019.
Fig 1: Petroleum product imports by volume (black lines) and value (brown line)
Fig 2: Australian dollar to US$ exchange rate
The Australian Dollar was also around 0.7 US$ in December 2019, just like in May 2022 so it was not the exchange rate which drove up the bill in that period. It is the closure of Australian refineries (caused by peak oil of international oil companies), the oil price and the competition for fuels on the Asian market.
The Morrison government’s election-opportunistic cut of fuel excise duty by 50% until Sep 2022 will of course not reduce this import burden on the balance of payments. Fuel imports are now 12% of goods and services imports:
Fig 3: Goods and services debits (imports)
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/economy/international-trade/international-trade-goods-and-services-australia/latest-release#goods-and-services-debits-imports-seasonally-adjusted
Fig 4: Diesel imports by volume and value
Fig 5: Diesel imports by country
Australia’s dependency on China and a brand-new Chinese refinery in Brunei in the last years is clearly visible.
Fig 6: Monthly diesel imports
Imports change from month to month depending on the arrival of tankers. Diesel from China has been replaced by Diesel from India.
Fig 7: Petrol imports by value and volume
Fig 8: Petrol imports by country. Singapore now dominates
Fig 9: Jet fuel imports by value and volume
If jet fuel imports go back to their pre-Covid levels of, say, 600 ML/month the jet fuel import bill will double to A$ 700/month.
Conclusion: Australia must reduce its thirst for transport fuels. No new projects should be started which increase fuel consumption.
Related posts:
Australian Oil Stocks Consumption Cover
22 Mar 2022
https://crudeoilpeak.info/australian-oil-stocks-consumption-cover
9/12/2021
Australia crude oil import vulnerabilities Sep 2021 data
http://crudeoilpeak.info/australia-crude-oil-import-vulnerabilities-sep-2021-data
15/2/2021
Exxon-Mobil’s refinery closure in Australia: peak oil context
https://crudeoilpeak.info/exxon-mobils-refinery-closure-in-australia-peak-oil-context
14/11/2020
Australia’s BP Kwinana refinery closure: peak oil context
https://crudeoilpeak.info/australias-bp-kwinana-refinery-closure-peak-oil-context
It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’
I enjoyed writing a book review for my last post so much that I’m going to write another one this time around. But whereas last time it was a long review of a very long book addressing itself to a large slice of human history, here I offer you a short review of a much shorter book about the life of a single man.
The man in question is Simon Fairlie, and the book is Going to Seed: A Counterculture Memoir (Chelsea Green, 2022). Disclosure: I know Simon a little, as I suspect do many people in England with more than a passing involvement in the movement for local, sustainable agriculture – testament either to the still regrettably small corps of people the movement commands, or perhaps more positively to Simon’s tireless efforts in making the case and spreading the word on numerous fronts. I’ve written for Simon’s excellent periodical The Land and there’s an endorsement from me inside his book. So, needless to say, I am not an unbiased observer.
Parts of Simon’s life story were therefore familiar to me as I read his memoir: cofounder of the influential low impact agricultural community, Tinker’s Bubble; land rights activist and rural planning expert; reviver of the fine art of scything; acutely perceptive agricultural thinker, whose book Meat: A Benign Extravagance is still the best-articulated vision of a just and sustainable small farm future I know. Other parts were newer to me: an upper-crust if unconventional childhood, dropping out in the 1960s and joining the hippy trail to India, 1990s road protesting and a brief stint in jail as a member of the Twyford Six (“an unwarranted honorific given the minimal degree of martyrdom we had to undergo”), work as a stonemason high aloft at Salisbury Cathedral…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
May 25, 2022
Honeybees: A holistic perspective on a superorganism
It is a great privilege to call myself a beekeeper. Having bees in my life, constantly reminds me to notice the sheer wonder of the world around me and often leaves me with a visceral sense of my place within this world. Honeybees have seen a dramatic rise in public awareness and beekeeping has exponentially increased in popularity, however the mindset of industrial farming is still alarmingly prevalent in beekeeping practice, and how it is discussed and taught to the next generation of beekeepers.
[image error]I trained as a beekeeper about 10 years ago, and when I started I had already completed training as an organic grower. As I studied beekeeping, I was alarmed at the similarities between the methods I was being taught and the mindset of industrial farming. I was unsettled by some of the practices that seemed to be very common. Routine use of miticide within the hive, routine disturbance of the nest space, routine suppression of reproduction and routine sugar feeding, all seemed at odds with what I had learnt as an organic grower. A defining moment was a visit to a teaching apiary to inspect the bees. We opened the hives and carefully checked through the brood nest, the area where the young bees are developing, if we found any developing queens we would kill them. Our presence obviously disturbed the bees who defended their nest space, in hive after hive that we opened, by attacking us. The bees were clearly communicating the threat they felt and I was struck by the violence of this process which was charged with conflict – even putting on the beekeeper’s suit had the feel of preparing for battle. There was a clear cognitive dissonance between this experience and my imagined harmony between beekeeper and bees…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A surprising benefit to owning gold– especially now
By the year 41 BC, just a few years after the assassination of Julius Caesar, Rome was under the strict rule of a three-person dictatorship known as the Tresviri rei publicae constituendae.
Historians today refer to this committee as the Triumvirate, and it included a general named Aemilius Lepidus, as well as Gaius Octavius– who would eventually become Emperor Augustus.
But the leader of the group, at least at first, was Marcus Antonius, also known as Mark Antony.
Mark Antony was not especially popular. Many Romans rightfully suspected that Mark Antony had been involved in Caesar’s assassination. Plus he was sleeping with Caesar’s widow, Cleopatra.
But Antony’s power through the Triumvirate’s was absolute. He could raise taxes, establish new social and religious traditions, regulate daily life, seize private property, and even condemn people to death… all without any oversight or due process.
And he wasn’t shy about using this power to squash his opposition.
Antony put several of his political enemies to death– including the much beloved Cicero, who was trying to escape Rome when Antony’s goons killed him.
Antony also threatened to kill another Senator named Nonius. But unlike Cicero, Nonius managed to escape Rome… bring with him about $1.5 million worth of gold and jewels.
People in the ancient world knew that precious metals (and precious stones) were pretty much the only portable forms of wealth.
Human civilization at the time was completely agrarian, so most productive assets like land and crops were impossible to move. Gold was almost the singular option to move large sums of wealth, and it remained this way for centuries.
These days there are much better options. Many forms of wealth– financial securities, intellectual property, bank deposits, and cryptocurrency– are completely portable. So gold is no longer necessary as a way to move money abroad.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Reduce Waste: How To Make The Most Of Your Autumn Leaves
The end of the summer garden is always bittersweet for me. I miss my daily fresh cut lettuce but I also love the falling leaves and bright reds and oranges of autumn. Luckily, those fallen leaves are more than just pleasing to look at. In this helpful guide, we’ll walk you through a few easy ways to use your fallen autumn leaves as a zero waste and cheaper options around your place.
The end of the summer garden is always bittersweet for me. I miss my daily fresh cut lettuce but I also love the falling leaves and bright reds and oranges of autumn. Luckily, those fallen leaves are more than just pleasing to look at. In this helpful guide, we’ll walk you through a few easy ways to use your fallen autumn leaves as zero waste and cheaper options around your place.
One of the best sustainable and organic ways to help prepare your garden is to add a mulch, and the beautiful fallen leaves of autumn are a great way to this. According to Ready Nutrition, in the gardening community, leaves are huge. When they are composted they become known as “black gold,” a nutrient-rich material that can be used in a multitude of ways in the garden.
The life cycle of a leaf begins when a tree makes its leaves in the spring. The tree concentrates all of its energy and nutrients into making the leaves because the more leaves there are, the more photosynthesis can occur. When the leaves drop in autumn, they create a ground cover for the trees to conserve moisture. As the leaves decompose, they provide the tree with nutrients and resupply the depleted soil with microbes…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
3 Sustainable Ways To Reduce Your Dependence on the Supply Chain
It’s no secret that the supply chain disruptions have created global impacts on us. Many of us are feeling the burn of soaring food prices and are ready to do what is necessary to continue to feed our families. It’s not about choice, it’s about survival, and now is the time to take the necessary steps to ensure you can make it when the entire food supply system crashes.
One of the easiest ways to reduce your dependence on the supply chain is to start finding ways to phase out food sourcing and make it a priority! That means you will need to be innovative and think of other ways food can be acquired than just going to the grocery store.
23 Things You Can Forage For From April to June
Create more sustainability around your life and you learn to live more simply in the process. You will realize how much you actually have and other ways of putting items to use. As well, as building a more localized food supply. You will also be reducing greenhouse gases due to the gas used to distribute fresh produce. This also boosts local economies and strengthens food security locally, which is where the focus needs to be. Quite honestly, it’s already around you – you just have to know where to find it.
FORAGE: A simple way to start is to learn how to forage for edible plants. These plants live all around us, are abundant, and better yet; are free! Not only that, these edible plants can be medicinal and will have a lot of nutritional value! Here are some food freebies you can find in your own backyard.…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
One Billion People At Risk Of Power Blackouts As Global Grids Stretched
This summer, power grids worldwide won’t produce enough electricity to meet the soaring demand, threatening more than one billion people with rolling blackouts. Grids are stretched thin by fossil fuel shortages, drought and heatwaves, commodity disruptions and soaring prices due to the war in Ukraine, and the failed green energy transition where grid operators retired too many fossil fuel generation plants. Combine this all together, and a perfect storm of blackouts threatens much of the Northern Hemisphere.
The power crisis, affecting a large swath of the world and top economies, could be less than a month away when summer begins on June 21. Regions that concerned Bloomberg are Asia, Europe, and the US, where there’s not enough power to go around when cooling demand is set to surge as households crank up their air conditions to escape the sweltering heat.
Asia’s heatwave has caused hours-long daily blackouts, putting more than 1 billion people at risk across Pakistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and India, with little relief in sight. Six Texas power plants failed earlier this month as the summer heat just began to arrive, offering a preview of what’s to come. At least a dozen US states from California to the Great Lakes are at risk of electricity outages this summer. Power supplies will be tight in China and Japan. South Africa is poised for a record year of power cuts. And Europe is in a precarious position that’s held up by Russia — if Moscow cuts off natural gas to the region, that could trigger rolling outages in some countries. –Bloomberg
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
May 24, 2022
Limits and Beyond: The Yawning Gap
Chapter 1: The Story of an Idea
The book Limits and Beyond, edited by Ugo Bardi and Jorgen Randers, provides a 50th anniversary review of the seminal report Limits to Growth (LtG). The following is from the back cover of the book.
50 years ago the Club of Rome commissioned a report: Limits to Growth. They told us that, on our current path, we are heading for collapse in the first half of the 21st century. This book, published in the year 2022, reviews what has happened in the intervening time period. It asks three basic questions:
Were their models right?Why was there such a backlash?What did the world do about it?The book consists of 19 chapters, each written by a different author, two of whom — Dennis Meadows and Jorgen Randers — were part of the team that wrote the report.
In this post, we review the first chapter, written by Ugo Bardi. He says of the chapter,
The present section . . . tells the story of how the idea of civilization growth and collapse fared in history and how it was interpreted by the LtG study.
Ugo BardiHistorical Overview
This first chapter provides an excellent overview of the work of various scientists and authors that has led to our current understanding of physical limits and constraints. It shows how societies rise and fall, and how our current level of stable prosperity is so unusual. Starting with the 18th century authors Edward Gibbon and Thomas Malthus, Bardi describes the work of many analysts, including William Stanley Jevons, Rachel Carson, Aurelio Peccei, Jay Wright Forrester, M. King Hubbert and Joseph Tainter.
He describes how the LtG report was received, and discusses possible reasons for the largely negative response at the time of publication. However, the report’s insights seem to be increasingly relevant to today’s world..
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
We Have A Scalability Issue
When the sea refuses to scale up to accommodate your shipwreck. Image credit Timur M via UnsplashAt the dawn of the industrial revolution less than 1 billion humans inhabited this earth. We’ve consumed only a small proportion of the easy to access ores of iron, copper and coal. With the power of coal we’ve became capable to tap a vast amount of new resources. Everything we did seemed miniature in scale compared to the vast resources and pollution sinks (the ocean and the atmosphere) of this planet. It was very easy to believe, that this is really an infinite world… An empty world — at least in economic terms — all there for the taking.
Back in 1950’s, when the great acceleration has really kicked into gear neoclassical economists started to believe that there are really no limits to growth. Needless to say, this observation was completely blindsided to the fact that this growth was due exclusively to a one-time boom in non-renewable resource extraction of both fossil fuels AND minerals.
This energy and material blindness was combined with a good deal of disregard for those who cared to do the math and begged to differ — an act of hubris lasting this very day. As a result, this ‘great acceleration’ has came at the cost of tipping the only habitable ecosystem (at least in a 4 light-year radius) into an irreversible decline.
If you have only 42 minutes to understand what is really going on our planet besides climate change, and would like to know what is this ‘great acceleration’ I’m blathering about, watch this very informative presentation from Will Steffen, emeritus professor of the Australian National University.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
World Has Just ’10 Weeks’ of Wheat Supplies Left in Storage, Analyst Warns
A combine drives over stalks of soft red winter wheat during the harvest on a farm in Dixon, Illinois, on July 16, 2013. (REUTERS/Jim Young)World Has Just ’10 Weeks’ of Wheat Supplies Left in Storage, Analyst WarnsThe world has only about 10 weeks of wheat supplies left in storage amid the conflict in Ukraine and as India has moved to bar exports of wheat in recent weeks, a food insecurity expert says.
Sara Menker, the CEO of agriculture analytics firm Gro Intelligence, told the United Nations Security Council on May 19 that the Russia–Ukraine war “simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning,” saying that it is not the primary cause of the wheat shortage. Ukraine and Russia both produce close to about a third of the world’s wheat.
“I want to start by explicitly saying that the Russia–Ukraine war did not start the food security crisis. It simply added fuel to a fire that was long burning. A crisis we detected tremors from long before the COVID 19 pandemic exposed the fragility of our supply chains,” Menker said, according to a transcript.
“I share this because we believe it’s important for you all to understand that even if the war were to end tomorrow, our food security problem isn’t going away anytime soon without concerted action.”
In providing data, Menker said that due to price increases in major crops this year, it’s made another 400 million worldwide “food insecure,” adding that with wheat, the world “currently only [has] 10 weeks of global consumption sitting in inventory around the world.
“Conditions today are worse than those experienced in 2007 and 2008,” she said. “It is important to note that the lowest grain inventory levels the world has ever seen are now occurring while access to fertilizers is highly constrained, and drought in wheat-growing regions around the world is the most extreme it’s been in over 20 years…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
