Steve Bull's Blog, page 37
May 11, 2024
World’s Oldest Central Bank Keeps Sounding Alarm on Fragility of Cashless Economies. Are Other Central Banks Listening?
At a time when the dominant narrative around cash is that its demise is all but inevitable, as well as broadly desirable, the 2024 payment report by Sweden’s Riksbank may offer a cautionary tale.
In October last year, in More Good News for Cash in Europe, More Bad News for Digital Dollar in US, we reported that recent developments suggest that the trend away from cash and toward purely digital-only payment systems may not be quite as smooth or as seamless as some may have wished or expected. One of the developments we highlighted in that report was growing concern among central bankers and politicians in Sweden, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, about the unintended consequences of driving cash out of the economy:
Even by late 2020, Sweden had less cash in circulation than just about anywhere else in the world, at around 1% of gross domestic product, according to the latest available data. That compares with 8% in the U.S. and more than 10% in the euro area. As a recent piece in Interesting Engineering notes, Sweden is already “officially cashless”:
Cash is never needed, not even for small purchases like hot chocolate at a Christmas market in Stockholm. All vendors have a mobile payment chip-and-PIN card reader like the one offered by Stockholm-based mobile payments company iZettle, or they accept payments through the mobile application Swish. Swishing is perhaps the easiest way of payment for everyone.
The Risks of Going Fully Cashless
But now the country is beginning to realise that an almost exclusively digital payments system comes with significant risks, especially at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. In time-honoured fashion, the article in the UK Telegraph began with a spot of fearmongering about Vladimir Putin.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Escalating Threat Of Avian Influenza H5N1 And The Ethical Quandary Of Gain-of-Function Research
Since the Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI) H5N1 virus was first identified in humans in 2003, approximately 600 cases have been reported worldwide, with a laboratory-confirmed case-fatality rate (CFR) of 60%.
The recent death of a woman in southwest China who had no contact with poultry signals a potentially alarming shift in the virus’s transmission dynamics, raising the specter of human-to-human transmission, according to a report by the Federation of American Scientists.
Health authorities in Guiyang, Guizhou province concluded that two patients, including the woman who died, did not have contact with poultry before showing symptoms of the illness. Currently, the public health community remains cautious as H5N1 influenza viruses continue to evolve and potentially gain the ability to be transmitted efficiently to humans.
The evolution of H5N1 over two decades necessitates an urgent and strategic response from the global health community. Scientific efforts are primarily focused on understanding the genetic shifts that facilitate the virus’s leap among species, aiming to forestall a possible pandemic. This has led to the controversial practice of gain-of-function (GoF) research, wherein viruses are deliberately engineered to be more potent or transmissible.
And of course, as we all know – a bunch of over-educated idiots cobbling together chimeric viruses that can better-infect humans may have led to the COVID-19 pandemic – as GoF research is fraught with ethical, biosafety, and biosecurity dilemmas.
The dual-use nature of this research—where scientific advances could potentially be misused to cause harm—places it under intense scrutiny. The debate is not just about managing the risks of accidental release but also about the moral implications of potentially providing a blueprint for bioterrorism…
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Costa Rica to ration electricity as drought bites
San José (AFP) – Costa Rica has become the latest Latin American country to introduce rationing due to drought, announcing Thursday it will limit access to electricity for which it relies heavily on hydro-generation.
Costa Rica will ration electricity as water required for generation runs low © Ezequiel BECERRA / AFPDams that feed the country’s hydro-electric plants were low due to the El Nino weather phenomenon, officials said.
“This El Nino has really been the most complicated in the history of Costa Rica,” Roberto Quiros, director of the country’s ICE electricity institute, told reporters in San Jose.
Rationing will start Monday for an undetermined period.
About 99 percent of Costa Rica’s electricity comes from renewable sources — about three-quarters from hydro-electric plants.
“We have not seen a drought like this in 50 years,” said Berny Fallas, a climate expert at the ICE, which is Costa Rica’s main energy provider.
On Wednesday, the World Meteorological Organization said in a report that Latin America and the Caribbean had their warmest year on record in 2023, as a “double-whammy” of El Nino and climate change caused major weather calamities.
Much of Central America, it said, experienced intense drought, causing neighbor Panama to limit traffic in its eponymous canal.
The ICE said this will be the Costa Rica’s first electricity rationing since 2007, when El Nino also wreaked havoc with water levels.
Hospitals, basic services and industry will not be affected by the cuts, it added.
Further south, Ecuador has recently had to ration electricity due to a shortage of water for hydro-generation, while the capital of Colombia, Bogota, is rationing municipal water.
Texas Spot Power Prices Jump Almost 100-Fold on Tight Supply
(Bloomberg) — Texas electricity prices soared almost 100-fold as a high number of power-plant outages raised concerns of a potential evening shortfall.
Spot prices at the North Hub, which includes Dallas, jumped to more than $3,000 a megawatt-hour just before 7 p.m. local time, versus about $32 at the same time Tuesday, according to data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
This morning, Ercot, as the state’s main grid operator is known, issued a “watch” for a potential capacity reserve shortage from about 7-9 p.m., meaning the buffer of spare supplies could fall to low enough levels to call on back-up generation, cancel or delay outages or curb usage.
The conditions are the tightest of the year so far and raises the risk of prices rising to the $5,000 cap — which they last did on April 16, when Ercot also warned of a potential shortfall. Unusually hot weather in the region has boosted demand for cooling and lowered the efficiency of many power plants. Wind output has also fallen from a day earlier and there are more outages.
“Ercot has not called for conservation this evening,” it said by email. “The grid is operating under normal conditions at this time.”
The high prices may force big consumers, including Bitcoin miners, to curtail their operations for a few hours. Batteries are also expected to ramp up to keep the grid stable.
The impact on consumers will depend on their retail contract, with the state requiring households to pick a third-party supplier and decide ahead of time if they want to lock in prices for a month or even years. Retailers have been prohibited from fully exposing residential consumers to wholesale prices since February 2021.
North America’s biggest city is running out of water
Mexico City is staring down a water crisis. It won’t be the last city to do so.
Mexico City is being threatened by a water crisis after the main reservoirs remain under 40 percent of their full capacity due to low rainfall, geography, and lack of infrastructure. Hector Vivas/Getty Images.Mexico City is parched.
After abysmally low amounts of rainfall over the last few years, the reservoirs of the Cutzamala water system that supplies over 20 percent of the Mexican capital’s 22 million residents’ usable water are running out.
“If it doesn’t start raining soon, as it is supposed to, these [reservoirs] will run out of water by the end of June,” Oscar Ocampo, a public policy researcher on the environment, water, and energy, told my colleagues over on the Today, Explained podcast.
Already, some households receive unusably contaminated water; at times, others receive none at all. It’s stoking tensions over obvious inequities: Who gets water and who doesn’t?
The crisis is also leading Mexico City to siphon more from the underground aquifers on which the city sits, a decision that’s not just unsustainable without replenishment but also causes the ground to sink — at a rate of almost five inches each year, Ocampo said.
While many factors that led to this moment might be specific to Mexico City, or CDMX (including the Spanish colonists’ decision hundreds of years ago to drain the lake on which the city originally sat), or this moment in time (see: El Niño exacerbating droughts), the bigger issue is not.
Bogotá, Colombia, is rationing water amid a drought that has pushed reservoirs to “historically low” levels. And you might remember Cape Town staring down its own Day Zero crisis in 2018. A few years earlier, Sao Paulo, Brazil confronted a similar situation.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Floods and flooding ‘will be part of our lives,’ says Brazilian architect and urbanist
Civilians help with rescues in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, in the floods that hit the state. Photo by Alex Rocha/PMPA, used with permission
Rio Grande do Sul, the southernmost state of Brazil, is going through the worst climate disaster in its history. From April 28 onward, a major part of its territory, about the size of the United Kingdom, has been submerged underwater. The heavy rains soon transformed into violent floods, impacting over 1.4 million people, with at least 100 people confirmed dead, according to reports published May 8. Entering its sixth day of flooding, the state capital, Porto Alegre, is now facing a shortage of drinking water.
Under such critical circumstances, it is crucial to understand how this situation escalated so rapidly and consider how intentional city planning might prevent it from repeating itself.
Mariana Bernardes is an architect and urbanist from Passo Fundo, in the northern portion of Rio Grande do Sul. The city is also among the 425 out of 497 affected, with floods isolated to certain regions of the city.
Bernardes’ work focuses on humanizing structural problems with planning, technical responsibility, and social commitment. In an interview with Global Voices, she spoke about what could have been done to prevent the floods in Brazil and what can be done as communities look to collective reconstruction.
Global Voices (GV): The floods in southern Brazil demonstrate a series of failures and omissions, especially by the State. How could a humanized view of architecture and urbanism have prevented parts of this ongoing tragedy?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Militarization of Space: Report to U.S. Congress Outlines U.S. Determination to Establish “Space Command and Control”
Back in mid-February, the mainstream propaganda machine bombarded us with a slew of reports about “big bad Russian space nukes“, claiming that Moscow is using its technological prowess to build strategic space-based weapons. And while it’s true the Eurasian giant is a cosmic superpower and that it certainly has the know-how to accomplish such a feat, the mainstream propaganda machine conveniently “forgot” to explain why the Kremlin would make the decision to expand its space capabilities. Namely, Russia is indeed planning to deploy a nuclear-powered anti-satellite weapon (ASAT), but there’s a massive difference between having thermonuclear warheads pointed at Earth from space and having a nuclear-powered spacecraft. The Russian military is already in possession of the former, as it was the world’s first operator of the FOBS back in the early 1960s.
FOBS, an acronym for the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (СЧОБ in Russian), is a thermonuclear weapon system found on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), designed to make their range effectively limitless. China tested its own version of the technology only in 2021, while the United States has been unable to create anything similar. Thus, Moscow has had this capability for well over half a century, so why is there such hype over a supposed nuclear-powered ASAT all of a sudden? It’s exceedingly difficult to ignore the fact that this is being used as yet another excuse to push several warmongering agendas at once. First, it furthers the idea that there “cannot be peace” with the Kremlin, and second, it gives Washington DC the perfect excuse to continue militarizing space, started years (or, in reality, even decades) before the special military operation (SMO).
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Is China’s Oil Demand Set For A Major Bounce Back?
Since the mid-1990s, China’s extraordinary economic expansion almost singlehandedly drove a supercycle in key commodities prices it required to power such growth, including oil and gas. In 2013, it became the world’s largest net importer of total petroleum and other liquid fuels and, as late as 2017, its still high rate of economic growth allowed it to overtake the U.S. as the largest annual gross crude oil importer in the world. Late 2019 saw much of this activity grind to a halt as Covid hit the country, and the economic slowdown was exacerbated by its Draconian ‘zero-Covid’ policy that saw complete shutdowns of major economic centres at the slightest hint of infection. However, 2023 saw it achieve its official gross domestic product (GDP) growth target of “around 5 percent” – posting 5.2 percent in the end. The same official target is in place this year, with the key questions for oil markets being whether this will be achieved and if so, how easily?
16 April saw China’s National Bureau of Statistics release the country’s Q1 GDP figure, which showed a 5.3 percent year-on-year increase. This was way above consensus analyst expectations of 4.6 percent and was also a rise from the Q4 2023’s 5.2 percent. “Aside from the continued decline in the property sector, policy support is filtering through investment,” Eugenia Victorino, head of Asia strategy for SEB in Singapore exclusively told OilPrice.com. “With property sales now 60 percent lower than their mid-2021 peak, transaction volumes are now comparable to levels last seen in 2012,” she added…
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Asia Embraces Coal as the U.S. Rejects It
Vietnam and other Asian countries are on a coal spree! Given the dynamics of energy use in the rapidly developing industrial sector there, it is no surprise that these nations have backpedaled on big promises made at international climate conferences to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.
Vietnam’s projected 2024 growth rate for Gross Domestic Product (GDP) stands at 5.8%, the sixth highest in Asia. Among the biggest contributors to GDP is the industrial sector (38 percent), especially manufacturing. S&P Global has noted a considerable improvement in Vietnam’s manufacturing sector in the fourth quarter of 2023 and is expecting Vietnam to perform well this year.
Electricity is a cornerstone of manufacturing operations in Vietnam. In 2023, coal produced more than 40% of all electricity in the country, while the country’s abundant hydro reserves contributed around 30%. Natural gas accounted for about 10%.
However, 2024 is expected to see a shortfall in hydroelectric generation because of less rainfall. Simultaneously, electricity production with natural gas is being complicated by forecasts of higher gas prices. Bloomberg reports that state-run PetroVietnam Gas “recently decided not to purchase a cargo for June due to high offer prices.”
So, the heavy lifting to meet power demand must now come from coal. The country is urging coal miners to maximize production before demand reaches peak in the summer months. The country’s prime minister has asked for an increase in coal exploration as well, signaling a sustained interest in the medium to long-time reliance on coal.
Vietnam’s move to increase coal use was inevitable. It cannot continually risk a huge demand-supply gap whenever dams go dry or gas prices skyrocket. The growth rate of power demand from expanding industries is increasing at a fair pace, and energy security is critical in ensuring manufacturing’s positive trend.
Similar patterns across Asia
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May 10, 2024
‘Desperate’ rescues under way as Brazil floods kill 90, displace thousands
Thousands in Brazil’s southern Rio Grande do Sul state lack water and electricity as floodwaters inundate entire towns.
Rescuers are rushing to evacuate people stranded by floodwaters across the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, where at least 90 people have been killed and more than 130 others are missing.
The state capital of Porto Alegre has been virtually cut off by the flooding, with the airport and bus station closed and main roads blocked.
Reporting from the city on Tuesday afternoon, Al Jazeera’s Latin America editor Lucia Newman said the situation had become “very desperate” as volunteers and rescue crews try to evacuate residents.
(Al Jazeera)“Everywhere you look, people have no water, no electricity. Sewage has, in this part of town which is downtown, completely come up.”
The state’s Civil Defence agency said the death toll has risen to 90 with another four deaths being investigated. Another 131 people are still unaccounted for, and 155,000 are homeless.
Heavy rains that began last week have caused rivers to flood, inundating whole towns and destroying roads and bridges.
In Porto Alegre, a city of 1.3 million residents on the Guaiba River, residents faced empty supermarket shelves and closed gas stations, with shops rationing sales of mineral water.
Five of Porto Alegre’s six water treatment facilities are not working, and Mayor Sebastiao Melo on Monday decreed that water be used exclusively for “essential consumption”.
“We are living an unprecedented natural disaster, and everyone needs to help,” Melo told reporters.
“I am getting water trucks to football fields, and people will have to go there to get their water in bottles. I cannot get them to go home to home.”
Almost half a million people were without power in Porto Alegre and outlying towns, as electricity companies cut off supplies for security reasons in flooded neighbourhoods.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
