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Page added on July 8, 2022
The Landfill Economy
Our economy is in a crisis that’s been brewing for decades…
The Chinese characters for the English word crisis are famously – and incorrectly – translated as danger and opportunity. The more accurate translation is precarious plus critical juncture or inflection point.
Beneath its surface stability, our economy is precarious because the foundation of the global economy – cheap energy – has reached an inflection point: From now on, energy will become more expensive.
The cost will be too low for energy producers to make enough money to invest in future energy production, and too high for consumers to have enough money left after paying for the essentials of energy, food, shelter, etc., to spend freely.
For the hundred years that resources were cheap and abundant, we could waste everything and call it growth: When an appliance went to the landfill because it was designed to fail (planned obsolescence) so a new one would have to be purchased, that waste was called growth because the gross domestic product (GDP) went up when the replacement was purchased.
A million vehicles idling in a traffic jam was also called growth because more gasoline was consumed, even though the gasoline was wasted.
The Landfill Economy
This is why the global economy is a “waste is growth” landfill economy. The faster something ends up in the landfill, the higher the growth. Now that we’ve consumed all the easy-to-get resources, all that’s left is hard to get and expensive.
For example, minerals buried in mountains hundreds of miles from paved roads and harbors require enormous investments in infrastructure just to reach the deposits and extract, process and ship them to distant mills and refineries. Oil deposits that are deep beneath the ocean floor are not cheap to get.
Does it really make sense to expect that the human population can triple and our consumption of energy increase tenfold and there will always be enough resources to keep supplies abundant and prices low? No, it doesn’t.
The Nuclear Option
Many people believe that nuclear power (fusion, thorium reactors, mini reactors, etc.) will provide cheap, safe electricity that will replace hydrocarbons (oil and natural gas). But nuclear power is inherently costly, and there are presently no full-scale fusion or thorium reactors providing cheap electricity to thousands of households.
Reactors take many years to construct and are costly to build and maintain. Cost overruns are common. A new reactor in Finland, for example, was nine years behind schedule and costs tripled.
The U.S. has built only two new reactors in the past 25 years.
The world’s 440 reactors supply about 10% of global electricity. There are currently 55 new reactors under construction in 19 countries, but it will take many years before they produce electricity.
We would have to build a new reactor a week for many years to replace hydrocarbon-generated electricity. This scale of construction simply isn’t practical.
Supplying all energy consumption globally — for all transportation, heating of buildings, etc., would require over 10,000 reactors by some estimates — over 20 times the current number of reactors in service.
The Green Energy Delusion
Many believe so-called renewable energy such as solar and wind will replace hydrocarbons. But as analyst Nate Hagens has explained, these sources are not truly renewable, they are replaceable.
All solar panels and wind turbines must be replaced at great expense every 20–25 years. These sources are less than 5% of all energy we consume, and it will take many decades of expansion to replace even half of the hydrocarbon fuels we currently consume.
To double the energy generated by wind/solar in 25 years, we’ll need to build three for each one in service today: one to replace the existing one and two more to increase the energy being produced.
All these replacements for hydrocarbons require vast amounts of resources: diesel fuel for transport, materials for fabricating turbines, panels, concrete foundations and so on.
Past Isn’t Always Prologue
Humans are wired to want to believe that whatever we have now will still be ours in the future. We don’t like being told we’ll have less of anything in the future.
The current solution is to create more money out of thin air in the belief that if we create more money, then more oil, copper, iron, etc., will be found and extracted.
But this isn’t really a solution. What happens if we add a zero to all our currency? If we add a zero to a $10 bill so it becomes $100, do we suddenly get 10 times more food, gasoline, etc., with the new bill? No.
Prices quickly rise tenfold so the new $100 bill buys the same amount as the old $10.
Adding zeros to our money (hyper-financialization) doesn’t make everything that’s scarce, expensive and hard to get suddenly cheap. It’s still scarce, expensive and hard to get no matter how many zeros we add to our money.
Many people feel good about recycling a small part of what we consume. But recycling is not cost-free, and the majority of what we consume is not recycled.
The Truth About Recycling
The percentage of lithium batteries that are recycled, for example, is very low, less than 5%. We have to mine vast quantities of lithium because we dump 95% of lithium-ion batteries in the landfill. There are many reasons for this, one being that the batteries aren’t designed to be recycled because this would cost more money.
The majority of all manufactured goods — goods that required immense amounts of hydrocarbons to make — are tossed in the landfill.
Goods and services are commoditized and sourced from all over the world in long dependency chains (hyper-globalization): If one link breaks, the entire supply chain breaks.
Our economy is precarious because it’s in a lose-lose dilemma: Resource prices can’t stay high enough for producers to make a profit without impoverishing consumers. Prices can’t stay low enough to allow consumers to spend freely without producers losing money and shutting down, depriving the economy of essential resources.
Easy Money Isn’t the Answer
Playing hyper-financialized games — creating money out of thin air, borrowing from tomorrow to spend more today and inflating speculative bubbles in stocks, housing, etc. — won’t actually create more of what’s scarce.
All these games make wealth inequality worse (hyper-inequality), undermining social stability.
The economy has reached an inflection point where everything that is unsustainable finally starts unraveling. Each of these systems is dependent on all the other systems (what we call a tightly bound system), so when one critical system unravels, the crisis quickly spreads to the entire economic system: One domino falling knocks down all the dominoes snaking through the global economy.
Those who understand how tightly interconnected, unsustainable systems are basically designed to unravel can prepare themselves by becoming antifragile: flexible, adaptable and open to the opportunities that arise when things are disorderly and unpredictable.
Charles Hugh Smith via DailyReckoning.com
8 Comments on "The Landfill Economy"
Theedrich on Sat, 9th Jul 2022 1:45 am
People love to base their lives on myths. Western civilization was founded on the belief in a talking snake, which caused genetically inherited guilt, which in turn had to be “expiated” by human sacrifice of a god-man. Islamic societies are based on the ravings of a sixth-century psychopath who claimed all infidels should be murdered or at least enslaved. Never mind the ideas of an untold number of animal gods in India and elsewhere.
Modern America includes also credence in infinite growth on a finite planet, enforced by the U.S. military’s ability to rob other countries (e.g., Russia) of their natural resources. Under no circumstances can we allow belief in biological evolution producing different IQ levels or coping with the fact that we are creatures living on a small, spinning planet orbiting a mid-sized star in one of a trillion or more galaxies.
In order to accommodate this glorious American mindset, a new international strategy of war has emerged. It is called “plausible deniability.” The Pentagon supports over 400 biolabs around the world to produce diseases suitable for reducing a given population without any awareness of its source. China, not to be outdone, manufactures vast amounts of fentanyl and other narco-poisons and ships them to America and other Western lands to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, all while downplaying and denying its actions. The rampant genosuicidism in White countries accepts the mass deaths with little complaint, since politicians are making money off of the business. A new virus, COVID-19, now appears to have been manufactured with U.S. money in order to target certain ethnicities, especially Iranians, Italians and East Asians like the Han Chinese. The profitable “vaccines” (actually gene-modifying agents) developed by Big Pharma and imposed by political fiat are also killing and injuring large numbers of people. But none of these lethalities can be definitively traced to any real source because culpability is always plausibly deniable.
The fantasy that some political ideology will produce heaven on earth is also immortal. Marxism is only one variant. The “Great Reset” currently being pushed by multibillionaires is another one.
But sooner or later, nature is going to force dreamers of all shades to come to grips with facts: a world ruined by beliefs in myths.
makati1 on Sat, 9th Jul 2022 4:45 pm
Current planet age is about 5,000,000,000 years.
Dinosaurs existed for 165,000,000 years, or about .02% of that 5,000,000,000 years.
Assuming humans, in some form, have existed for say, 2,500,000 years, or .0005% of that time.
Intelligent (pun intended) humans have been here maybe 12,000 years or .00000015% of that time.
Why show this perspective? Because we are but a blip in the real world. Here today and gone tomorrow. The world never stops changing. Only arrogant humans believe they can control that change. All we “intelligent apes” do is waste the time we have, in our fantasy worlds, as Theedrich discuses above.
One question for the “believers”: If Adam and Eve begat the first kids, who did those kids marry? Their brothers and sisters? The first incest? Then murder in the “First Family”. Great start for “religion”!
FamousDrScanlon on Sun, 10th Jul 2022 1:41 am
Theedrich the dumb fuck statement that the new vaccines alter genes is a myth you stupid fuck head. You are simply repeating a line the health ranger’s team wrote. Prior to the pandemic you were not interested in infectious diseases or gene therapy – had no background in their fundamentals, but you think you are an expert (instant internet expert) because you read a few hair on fire articles put out by the health rangers squad of propagandists.
70% of your country got vaxxed and billions the world over.
Where are the bodies?
Where are the billions of bodies you stupid cunts predicted 18 months ago? That’s all you hysterical bitches talked about…..until it was obvious there are no bodies except the dead anti-vaxxers who died of covid..crying like little bitches to the ICU nurses. Lol.
No altered genes and no piles of bodies.
That means 2 more failed conspiracies down the memory hole and on to the next hysterical conspiracy for you and your idiot peers.
Holy fuck are you ever fucking dumb. Duh Duh Duh. Try not to drool on yourself too much retard.
Biden's hairplug on Sun, 10th Jul 2022 2:57 am
Brexiteers: anything but the white world.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1637175/brexit-news-boris-johnson-resigns-ann-widdecombe-remain-eu-rishi-sunak
That tart of a little Englander, memsahib Ann Widdlecomb, is ready to hiss a cartoonish-looking Indian and US green card holder into the saddle, just to prevent any sort of UK-European rapprochement, the ultimate horror in the eyes of this mud shark.
Whatever. I’m rooting for this Indian too, just to inflict the ultimate humiliation onto the English and let that renegade European province become a member of the Indian empire. Just kick the white Eastern Europeans out and open the sluice gates for endless immigration from Asia, exactly as Nigel Farage wanted it to happen, as long as they speak the language of globalism, English:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3630847/More-black-people-allowed-Britain-leave-EU-immigration-non-issue-says-Nigel-Farage.html
“More black people will be allowed into Britain if we leave the EU and immigration will become a ‘non-issue’, says Nigel Farage”
The fascinating thing is that the darkening of Britain seems to be spearheaded by “conservative” Tories even more than Labour. Labour is slightly more in touch with commoners, who hate immigration, than the Tory globalist business party, that only cares about money and oligarchs.
In the current race to become the next pm, at least half are darkies:
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/conservative-leadership-two-candidates-back-out-crowded-contest-top-tories-jockey-control-1733896
From that list, most white men have ruled out running, leaving “Anglo-Asians” Sunak, Javid and Zahawi, as well as dark women Braverman and Kemi Badernoch. On the white side: Mordaunt and Truss (women) and Hunt and Baker.
The bookies predict Sunak with a landslide, but perhaps it’s going to be Mordaunt, a white Brexiteer woman without children.
Whoever becomes pm, nothing is going to change regarding the real reason why BoJo was sacked: the catastrophic by-election result, prompted by bad economics, inflation and skyrocketing energy prices (not wallpaper, not Corona parties, not unpaid holidays at the house of mr Goldsmith). But the next leader will continue to flog the dead Brexit horse and yield the same results. To make matters worse, the opposition leader has recently shown his true colors and ruled out any reversal of Brexit, not even a return to the Common Market.
Upshot: Britain entered the EC in the seventies as Europe’s sick man, and it will swiftly return to that status. Britain will become a poorer and darker place, with diminishing international status, precisely the opposite of what the Brexiteers had hoped.
Biden's hairplug on Sun, 10th Jul 2022 4:04 pm
A vaccine refuser, who got away with it, has just won Wimbledon, the Serb Djokovic.
Refuse the garbage of these fraudulent Pfizer kikes, when the whole circus starts again in the Autumn.
makati1 on Sun, 10th Jul 2022 5:00 pm
Famouse,ignorance is in the one who calls others ignorant. You have zero info on what the GMO JABS contain or are meant to do in the future. ZERO. However, the sudden increase in unexpected deaths may point the way. Not to mention the future fertility or immunity, or lack of, in those jabbed.
Obviously, you have no knowledge of the history of Billy Gates and his band of merry vaccinators in Africa or the history of the US itself in experimenting on others with all kinds of drugs and vaccines. Get an education before you call someone stupid who is obviously not.
BTW: I had to get jabbed, but I chose the Chinese Vaccine, not the US gene experiment. We also have the Russian vaccine available here. Did you have a choice? NOPE! Not in “The Land of the Free.” LOL
makati1 on Sun, 10th Jul 2022 5:54 pm
Maybe these will open some eyes:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-infertility-diabolical-agenda/5786128
https://www.globalresearch.ca/more-than-1-3-million-adverse-events-following-covid-vaccines-reported-vaers-cdc-data-show/5786125
Only time will tell.
Time Bazar Day Panel Chart on Thu, 29th Sep 2022 3:39 am
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