Steve Bull's Blog, page 89
November 25, 2023
The Harsh Truth: We’re Using More Oil Than Ever
In this age of climate crisis, the world is consuming more crude than ever. Peak oil demand? Not yet. Maybe one day, perhaps even soon, around 2030. For now, however, the global economy still runs on oil.
It will take a while before governments certify it, but every piece of data points in the very same direction: In the past few weeks, global oil demand has surpassed the monthly peak set in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic.Expressed in barrels a day, the fresh record high in global oil consumption totals about 102.5 million, likely hit in the last few weeks in July and above the 102.3 million of August 2019. Picture this: We use enough crude to fill about 6,500 Olympic-size swimming pools every day. More than a third of those swimming pools would be needed to quench the thirst of two countries: the US and China.
It’s not unexpected. The International Energy Agency, which compiles benchmark supply and demand statistics, has anticipated it for months. It was just a question of timing, since oil demand surges during the northern hemisphere summer, when millions of European and American families guzzle gasoline and jet fuel during their holidays. The wholesale cost of refined products, such as gasoline, is surging too.
[image error]Granted, the new demand milestone is just one flimsy data point. Global oil consumption statistics are routinely revised, and a final figure probably won’t be set in stone until next year, or even 2025. The margin of error is relatively wide, too, probably at least 1 million barrels a day. But experience indicates that demand is typically revised higher, rather than lower.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
November 24, 2023
Financing the End of Modernity
How financialization heralds the end of the industrial age
That didn’t worked out as intended… Who would’ve thought? Photo by micheile henderson on UnsplashWestern neoliberal economies are on the brink of a steep economic decline. Barring an energy / productivity miracle a prolonged and deep recession is clearly on the horizon. While mainstream pundits keep “informing” the public how GDP was actually growing in the past decades (except for a few brief moments), and how the G7 is still the top economic power block, the real economy of goods and services tells a completely different story. Growth — in the sense of real economic output — has stopped 18 years ago in the West, and conditions are now ripe for a rapid contraction. A sobering assessment of the real economy — in which your humble blogger is still actively involved — has become due. Buckle up.
As long time readers might already know by heart: money is not the economy, energy is. Money is but a claim on energy and resources. Everything we mine, grow, manufacture and consume takes energy to produce. No energy, no production, no services. The more we produce / consume the more energy is used up. And while it may seem like that rich countries have somehow decoupled their economies from energy use (ie managed to grow GDP much faster than energy consumption), in fact the opposite is true. All they did was send their high energy intensity manufacturing and mining abroad, then imported all they needed using their overvalued currencies, thus becoming more independent on foreign trade than ever.
The public, together with it’s ruling elite, was led down the primrose path with GDP, and now a reckoning is in short order.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
November 22, 2023
Humanity’s End Was Determined from the Start
Given the vastness of the universe, it’s possible that 1 billion intelligent civilizations exist.
So why is there no sign of these civilizations?
It is likely that all advanced civilizations are eventually destroyed by a “Great Filter”. And it’s probable that humanity is currently going through its Great Filter right now.
First, Let’s Examine Why Alien Life Should Exist
The Milky Way, our galaxy, is home to approximately 100 to 400 billion stars. Assuming that a portion of these stars are central to solar systems, similar to our own, it’s conceivable that the Milky Way could contain tens to hundreds of billions of such systems.
Adding to this, the discovery of thousands of exoplanets, many found in systems with multiple planets through missions like Kepler and TESS, reinforces the idea that planetary systems are a common feature around stars. This widespread occurrence of exoplanets suggests that a significant majority of stars throughout the universe might host their own solar systems.
Expanding this view to the larger cosmos, with an estimated 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, each potentially holding as many stars as the Milky Way on average, the numbers become even more astronomical. This implies a universe where hundreds of trillions to quadrillions of solar systems could exist, each with its unique characteristics and potentially life-supporting conditions.
To crudely estimate the number of solar systems with planets that have conditions favorable to life, let’s use the higher end of the estimate: one quadrillion solar systems in the universe. If 1% of these solar systems have planets with conditions favorable to life, there could potentially be about 10 trillion solar systems with planets that have conditions conducive to life.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
The Crash Will Be Spectacular
“Interest on the federal debt is now so immense that it’s consuming 40% of all personal income taxes… If federal finances continue on their current path, we are only a few years from the entirety of income taxes being needed to finance the debt…”
The government collects $2.6 trillion of individual taxes at the point of a gun and threat of prison. Meanwhile they still operate at an annual deficit of $2 trillion. And this is before interest on the national debt starts to really skyrocket. Our Troll Secretary of the Treasury Yellen had the opportunity to lock in trillions of our national debt for 30 years at 2% rates, but purposely kept rolling it on a short-term basis.
Interest on the debt will surpass $1 trillion annually within the next year, and, as you can see, will be approaching $2 trillion per year in a few more years. The government already spends every dime of the taxes they collect. That means they are already printing more fiat and borrowing from the rest of the world in order to pay the interest on the debt they already have.
Foreign countries, in particular China and India, are not only not buying any new US Treasuries, but unloading the Treasuries they already have. With the BRICS purposefully moving away from the USD for their trade, it’s only a matter of time until our mountain of debt crashes down in an epic avalanche upon the unsuspecting American public. The writing is on the wall, and if you refuse to read it, you will be shocked and devastated when you see your supposed paper wealth evaporate.
Now you know why Biden and his handlers are attempting to provoke wars across the globe against those countries who they realize are engineering the demise of the USD as the basis for world domination and control. We have evil men ruling our nation and they would rather burn it all to the ground than lose their wealth, power and control.
JFK Assassination Doctors Break Silence, Dispute Key Government Claim
Several doctors who were in the emergency room when former President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 raised serious doubts about the official narrative that says a lone gunman was responsible, according to a new documentary featuring interviews conducted in 2013.
The federal Warren Commission established that two shots fired by lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald, who was located in the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, struck President Kennedy from behind as he was traveling in a motorcade in Dallas. One of the bullets entered his upper back and exited near his larynx, while the second bullet entered the right side of his head and exited via his forehead.The former president was breathing when he entered Parkland Hospital before he was pronounced dead about a half an hour later. However, what seven doctors said in the recent footage disputes the commission’s claims about the event.
Jacquelynn Lueth, executive producer of “JFK: What the Doctors Saw,” interviewed the seven Parkland doctors for the documentary. She wrote for CBS News last week that the doctors’ “recollections were precise and clear, as if the intervening decades had melted away.”“Each of them reacted strongly when the autopsy pictures were projected on a screen,” Ms. Lueth wrote. “They didn’t agree on everything, but it became obvious that the way the president looked at Parkland did not match the autopsy photos taken at Bethesda even before the official autopsy began.”
She added that the Parkland doctors “had no agenda other than trying to save the president’s life” but stipulated that those who witnessed the wound to the president’s neck “believed it was an entrance wound,” which would dispute the Warren Commission’s findings. “Several of them saw a gaping hole in the back of JFK’s head,” she said.…click on the above link to read the rest…David Stockman on Washington’s Fiscal Doomsday Machine
Here’s one that will make your hair stand on end: The US Treasury closed the books on FY 2023, bringing the four-year cumulative deficit to $9.0 trillion!
That’s right. During the last 1,461 days (FY 2020 thru FY 2023), Uncle Sam has generated $6.2 billion of red ink each and every day including weekends, holidays and snow-days. For anyone keeping score at home, that’s $4.2 million of red ink per minute.
For the purpose of perspective, here’s how long it took to generate the first $9 trillion of US government debt: It took all of 43 presidents and 219 years to reach $9 trillion of public debt in July 2007. So the national debt clock has now accelerated to hyper-drive.
Market Value of Public Debt Outstanding, 1940 to July 2007
And, yes, we do mean accelerate. It turns out that when you remove the budgetary Mickey Mouse from the numbers, the federal deficit for FY 2023 clocked in at over $2.0 trillion, or double the comparable level in FY 2022. The reported numbers, of course, do not look quite as alarming, posting at $1.4 trillion last year and $1.7 trillion this year.
But as The Wall Street Journal cogently explained recently, that comparison is very misleading because it includes a $380 billion budgetary shuffle between the two years. It seems that Sleepy Joe’s student debt cancellation got recorded as a cost in September 2022, but then got canceled by the courts in FY 2023, turning it into a giant “savings”!
When the Biden administration announced its plan to forgive federal student debt held by 40 million Americans in September 2022, it logged the long-term cost of the program, $379 billion, on the budget all at once, even though effectively no money was spent on it that year… But in June 2023, the Supreme Court tossed the debt-cancellation program, meaning most of that money wouldn’t actually be spent. Rather than update last year’s deficit numbers, though, the Treasury recorded the changes as a $333 billion spending cut in August 2023.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
November 20, 2023
U.S. Financial Death Spiral – John Rubino
Analyst and financial writer John Rubino has a new warning about being fooled into thinking the economy is improving because inflation and interest rates have fallen some recently. Rubino says, “If the U.S. government is running crisis level deficits, which it is right now, borrowing money and paying interest on it means we are in a financial death spiral. The debt goes up, the interest on the debt goes up and that raises the debt even further, and you just spiral out of control. We are there right now. The official U.S. debt is $33.5 trillion. It’s growing by $1.7 trillion a year, and $1 trillion of that is interest costs. Interest costs are rising as the overall debt goes up. Then throw in this incredibly reckless military spending in the guise of foreign aid, and you get a society that has completely lost control. That’s where we are now. We are in the blowoff stage of a 70-year credit super-cycle. Those things do not end with a whimper, and they certainly do not end with a soft landing. They end with a bang, and the bang is going to be centered on the currency. People are going to look at this and say, ‘Do I really want to hold the currency or bonds of a country that is destroying its finances at this trajectory and this scale?’ The answer will be ‘No.’ At that point, it is game over for a deeply indebted economy. We are headed that way fast, and these wars are taking us that way even faster.”
If the Fed keeps raising interest rates, the economy tanks, but you protect the dollar. If you cut interest rates, you spike inflation even more, and the U.S. dollar tanks. Rubino says in the end, we get a “massive reset,” and the everything bubble explodes.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Defying Authority
Stanley Milgram’s experiment was conducted in 1963, before the internet, social media, and the complete takeover of the U.S. by the Deep State. His estimate that only 20% of the population have the critical thinking skills to defy authority may have been true in 1963, but I think it is far lower today. The powers that be (invisible government per Edward Bernays) utilize every tool at their disposal to make sure their authority is not defied. They have perfected Bernays’ propaganda techniques, integrating lies, misinformation and fear into their formula of control.
Witness everything that has happened in the last several years as proof they have been successful in suppressing any substantive defiance to their authority. The entire Covid scamdemic was a modern day Milgram Experiment and the vast majority of the world population were duped into believing the annual flu was such a horrific threat that they agreed to be locked down, lose their jobs, treat others like lepers, mask & distance, give their government unlimited authoritarian power, agree to censor and cancel critical thinking dissenters, and ultimately be injected with an untested, toxic, gene therapy that failed to combat covid, but certainly has caused millions of “sudden deaths”, turbo cancers, and myocarditis in young people.
Those who questioned the clearly stolen 2020 presidential election have been systematically destroyed by those in authority. Make a critical thinking case about rigged voting machines, fraudulent mail in ballots, or ballot stuffing, and you lose your livelihood, like being shocked in a Milgram Experiment. The authorities declared January 6, 2020 an armed insurrection, but no Trump supporters were armed or killed anyone. An armed black government thug killed an unarmed woman, but he was declared a hero by the authorities that engineered the fake insurrection.
…click on the above link to read the rest…
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CLXV–Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn
Monte Alban, Mexcio (1988). Photo by author.Today’s Contemplation is my comment on The Honest Sorcerer’s latest article that looks at the financial nature of our modern world.
Rackets: Keeping the Curtains on Reality Drawn
Excellent summation of our predicament and how reality is being ‘hidden’ by the story-telling nature of our species — especially the stories being disseminated by those benefitting most from our current practices and trajectory.
I’ve come to believe almost everything today is a racket of one form or another. And by racket, I defer to what U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler stated about this phenomenon with respect to war: “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.”
And this is where humanity appears to stand at the moment in our history on this planet: rackets are everywhere.
We are surrounded by rackets meant to keep the wealth-extraction/-generation schemes going and remaining in place in one form or another for at least another quarter or election cycle. And the stories associated with them are not only meant to keep the masses ignorant of the fraudulent nature of our practices and institutions, but to get the masses to support and cheerlead them on while ostracising and shouting down the voices that dare challenge or expose them.
And as our descent down the Seneca Cliff speeds up (due, of course, to the limits you discuss), the rackets are expanding in number and size in order to not only siphon more and more wealth from the masses towards the few at the top of our wealth and power structures, but to compensate for the expanding nature of our decline as the surplus energy needed to pursue growth quickly fades.
A perfect positive feedback loop expediting our descent and ensuring the inevitable ‘collapse’ is all the more spectacular and all-consuming in nature.
But, hey, let’s hear another feel-good story about our human ingenuity and technological prowess ‘solving’ all this and humanity living happily-ever-after, holding hands with each other and Nature…that tale is all lot more fun to listen to and believe in. Even if it is only a fairy tale told to make us feel safe and comfortable as the approaching storm grows in size and intensity.
Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh XXX–Ecological Overshoot and Political Responses
September 21, 2021
Tulum, Mexico (1986) Photo by authorEcological Overshoot and Political Responses
Today’s post has been prompted by some thoughts regarding the inability of our political systems to respond in a timely manner to our plight of ecological overshoot penned by Rex Weyler, co-founder of Greenpeace, and posted by Alice Friedemann of energyskeptic.com.
I agree with virtually everything Rex argues, especially the role of self-interest by our political class for their apparent rejection of the notion of ecological overshoot and what needs to be done to address the negative impacts this predicament will have on our societies (we can’t avoid these impacts but we might be capable of mitigating their worst outcomes somewhat). My experience with government (I spent many years involved with unions/federations/councils and their political action committees, including chairing some and being directly involved in negotiating contracts, thus having to deal directly with senior administrators and politicians) and readings pertaining to various sociocultural areas (e.g., economics, geopolitics, political systems, pre/history, etc.) have solidified for me the notion that our sociopolitical institutions are for a variety of reasons the last place we should be looking to ‘correct our course’ and attempt to confront the many complex issues of our overshoot and that are beginning to become more obvious. In fact, it is likely (I believe guaranteed) that our ‘ruling class’ will continue to do the exact opposite of what is needed.
Government systems appear to be a means to an end for maintaining the power (and thus wealth) structures within our complex societies. The ‘elite’ of society uses the various governmental bureaucracies/institutions/agencies (as well as other areas they tend to control such as media, education, entertainment, etc.) to meet their primary objective: the control and/or expansion of the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue streams. Everything they do more or less is to help meet that end. And, yes, they do throw some bones to the masses periodically if only to keep them mollified, distracted, and less likely to rebel (as Noam Chomsky has argued so well, control of the people is one of the most important concerns of those who hold power and privilege); one of the more ‘effective’ means in my view is the theatrical performance we refer to as ‘elections’ — convincing the masses in ‘representative democracies’ that they have agency via the ballot box is perhaps one of the most successful scams the ruling class has accomplished for as Johann von Goethe observed: the easiest slave is the one who believes he is free.
Growth, the very antithesis of addressing ecological overshoot, is promoted by government to help in their pursuit of both wealth and power. But it also addresses the unfortunate consequence of the way we have sustained growth the last few decades: exponentially-exploding debt (somewhat north of 200 trillion U.S. dollars at present for the globe, and the larger the debt the larger and more sustained the payments to the ‘lenders/creators’ of the world’s various currencies — the financial institutions that seem to work hand-in-glove with our governments). This debt has not only turned our financial/economic/monetary systems into gargantuan Ponzi schemes, it has necessitated the continuation of growth in perpetuity to help pay off the debt (significant revenue for the financiers) and keep the Ponzi schemes from collapsing.
Of course, such infinite growth is a tad difficult on a finite planet so the other options of addressing our financial dilemmas is to increase taxes and/or inflate away the debt. Our feckless ‘leaders’ are attempting all three of these approaches to keep things from collapsing. They cheerlead and encourage growth, telling the masses it has only beneficial properties and minimising, ignoring, or denying the negative aspects. Taxes are expanded continually and applied to increasing numbers of economic interactions, although the wealthy have an almost infinite number of ways to minimise their tax obligations, unlike the masses. Inflation (which in its original form refers to ever-increasing money/credit printing but eventually results in price inflation which is what most people think of) is, in perfect Orwellian language use, said to be a positive force for our economy while it actually debases our currency which serves the purposes of the large debtors (governments and large corporations) but harms the masses because of the debauching of their ‘money’ as is becoming increasingly obvious as wealth inequality continues to explode.
For all of these reasons (and more) it is unlikely (I would actually put the likelihood at zero) our political systems would ever intentionally curtail the pursuit of growth for it is their seed corn. They will pursue and cheerlead it right up until collapse can no longer be denied, and then attempt to push it some more as they tell those experiencing precipitous decline to stop believing their lying eyes; and/or blame our failing societies on some foreign/domestic bogeymen, but certainly not them and their policies.
The government, as with the rest of the ruling class and unfortunately most people, will not hear the arguments about ecological overshoot at all. It matters not how much ‘science’, data, or evidence is thrown at them. Almost everyone but especially the elite are in total denial (or at least feigning it, perhaps just to reduce their cognitive dissonance). This is why I have abandoned any ‘hope’ that our ‘leaders’ will in any way address ecological overshoot even if they do admit it exists — if they do, it will likely be leveraged to pursue activities that not only enrich the ruling class further but make our overshoot worse, such as ‘clean’ energy which is anything but clean and certainly not sustainable as sold. And, unfortunately, the political systems (at least in so-called ‘representative’ democracies) have morphed into out-promising the other parties for what ‘goodies’ they will provide freely to citizens. More. More. More. Which, again, is the opposite of what is needed to counter our going even further into overshoot…not that it may matter much at this point given how far we are likely already past the most important tipping points.
As Rex argues, the ‘solutions’ that will matter most to people will be at the local level. Relocalistion of as much production and distribution of goods as possible (but especially potable water, food, and shelter needs — including that which is needed to deal with local weather/climate, such as wood for winter heating) is the best approach to be taking to help one’s community mitigate as much as possible the coming storm. It’s likely to get ugly and ‘government’ will be nowhere to be found to turn to; you will need to depend upon immediate family, friends, and community members so cultivate those relationships and work on getting them to understand our predicament and begin making your local community as self-sufficient and resilient as possible.
