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Page added on December 29, 2018
Brexit: Stage One In Europe’s Slow-Burn Energy Collapse
Everyone’s talking about Brexit. Some about the French riots. But no one’s talking about why they are happening, and what they really mean. They might think they are, but they are usually missing the point.
On 6th May 2010, the Conservative Party took the reins of power for the first time since 1992, propped up with some help from the Liberal Democrats. Hours before the election result, I warned in a blog post that whichever government was elected, it would be the first step in a dramatic shift toward the far-right that would likely sweep across the Western world within 10 years.
“The new government, beholden to conventional wisdom, will be unable or unwilling to get to grips with the root structural causes of the current convergence of crises facing this country, and the world,” I wrote, describing the failure of all three political parties to understand why the heyday of economic growth was unlikely to return.
“This suggests that in 5–10 years, the entire mainstream party-political system in this country, and many Western countries, will be completely discredited as crises continue to escalate while mainstream policy solutions serve largely to contribute to them, not ameliorate them. The collapse of the mainstream party-political system across the liberal democratic heartlands could pave the way for the increasing legitimization of far-right politics by the end of this decade…”
My prediction was astonishingly prescient. The global shift to the far-right began within exactly five years of my forecast, and has continued to accelerate before the decade is even out.
In 2014, far-right parties won 172 seats in the European Union elections — just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. In 2015, David Cameron was re-elected as Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority, a victory attributed in part to his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU.
The following year in June, the ‘Brexit’ referendum shocked the world with its result: a majority vote to leave the EU.
Six months later, billionaire real estate guru Donald Trump shocked the world again when he became president of the world’s most powerful country. Like the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans too had forged trans-Atlantic connections with European parties and movements of the extreme-right. Since then, far-right parties have made continued electoral gains across Europe in Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Hungary.
We are on the cusp of a tidal wave, that looks poised to accelerate into a tsunami. Exactly as I had anticipated, far-right politics is no longer the province of the fringe, but is becoming increasingly normalised. This not an accident. It is the result of a system that is failing — and the efforts of a network of far-right groups to exploit the fractures emerging from this system-failure to tear everything down, and erect a new order of their own fashioning.
My prediction of the resurgence of the far-right was based on analysing the probable consequences of a long-term ‘system-failure’ in which we are unable to return to the levels of economic growth we had become accustomed to in the heyday of the 1980s and 90s. That system-failure, I explained, is rooted in the economics of the energy production that enables economic growth:
“…. a full and lasting recovery… is likely to be impossible in the constraints of the current system, because we’re running short on the physical basis of the last few decades of exponential (and fluctuating) ‘growth’ — and that is cheap, easily available hydrocarbon energies, primarily oil, gas and coal. The turning point has arrived, and without that global cheap energy source in abundant supply, we cannot continue growing, no matter what we do. Something has to give. Our economies need to be fundamentally, structurally, transformed. We need to transition to a new, clean, renewable energy system on which to base our economies. We need to transform the way money is created, so that it’s not linked to the systematic generation of debt. We need to transform our banking system on the same grounds. Whitehall, and the three political parties, recognize only facets of the picture, but they don’t see it as a whole.”
Turning point
The energy turning point is unequivocal. In the years preceding the historic Brexit referendum, and the marked resurgence of nationalist, populist and far-right movements across Europe, the entire continent has faced a quietly brewing energy crisis.
Europe is now a ‘post-peak oil’ continent. Currently, every single major oil producer in Western Europe is in decline. According to data from BP’s 2018 Statistical Review of Energy, Western European oil production peaked between 1996 and 2002. Since then, production had declined while net imports have gradually increased.
In a two-part study published in 2016 and 2017 in the Springer journal, BioPhysical Economics and Resource Quality, Michael Dittmar, Senior Scientist at the ETH Zurich Institute for Particle Physics and CERN, developed a new empirical model of oil production and consumption.
The study provides perhaps one of the most empirically-robust models of oil production and consumption to date, but its forecast was sobering.
Noting that oil exports from Russia and former Soviet Union countries are set to decline, Dittmar found that Western Europe will find it difficult to replace these lost exports. As a result, “total consumption in Western Europe is predicted to be about 20 percent lower in 2020 than it was in 2015.”
The only region of the world where production will be stable for the next 15 to 20 years is the OPEC Middle East. Everywhere else, concludes Dittmar, production will decline by around 3 to 5 percent a year after 2020. And in some regions, this decline has already started.
Not everyone agrees that a steep decline in Russia’s oil production is imminent. Last year, the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies argued that Russian production could probably continue to grow out to at least 2020. How long it would last thereafter was unclear.
On the other hand, the Russian government’s own energy experts are worried. In September 2018, Russia’s energy minister Alexander Novak warned that Russia’s oil production might peak within three years due to mounting production costs and taxes. In the ensuing two decades, Russia could lose almost half its current capacity. This sobering assessment is still broadly consistent with the Oxford study.
The following month, Dr Kent Moor of the Energy Capital Research Group, who has advised 27 governments around the world including the US and Russia, argued that Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel in its prize Western Siberia basin.
Moor cited internal Russian Ministry of Energy reports from 2016 warning of a “Western Siberia rapid decline curve amounting to a loss of some 8.5 percent in volume by 2022. Some of this is already underway.” Although Russia is actively pursuing alternative strategies, wrote Moor, these are all “inordinately expensive”, and might produce only temporary results.
It’s not that the oil is running out. The oil is there in abundance — more than enough to fry the planet several times over. The challenge is that we are relying less on cheap crude oil and more on expensive, dirtier and unconventional fossil fuels. Energetically, this stuff is more challenging to get out and less potent after extraction than crude.
The bottom line is that as Europe’s domestic oil supplies slowly dwindle, there is no meaningful strategy to wean ourselves off abject dependence on Russia; the post-carbon transition is consistently too little, too late; and the impact on Europe’s economies — if business-as-usual continues — will continue to unravel the politics of the union.
While very few are talking about Europe’s slow-burn energy crisis, the reality is that as Europe’s own fossil fuel resources are inexorably declining, and as producers continue to face oil price volatility amidst persistently higher costs of production, Europe’s economy will suffer.
In September, I reported exclusively on the findings of an expert report commissioned by the scientific group working on the forthcoming UN’s Sustainability Report.
The report underscored that cheap energy flows are the lifeblood of economic growth: and that as we shift into an era of declining resource quality, we are likely to continue seeing slow, weak if not declining economic growth.
This is happening at a global scale. EROI is already beginning to approach levels seen in the nineteenth century — demonstrating how constrained global economic growth might be due to declining net energy returns to society.
Britain: the end of net energy growth
Britain, which is due to leave the European Union on 29th March 2019, is a poster boy for this brewing energy-economic crisis.
In January 2017, the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy run by the University of Leeds and London School of Economics, produced a startling analysis of Britain’s declining net energy problem. The study attempted to develop a methodology to examine national-level figures for Energy Return on Investment (EROI) — the amount of energy one uses to extract a particular quantity of energy.
The goal of the study was to pinpoint the EROI value as much as possible using Britain as a prime case-study. The concept of EROI fleshes out the recognition that a significant surplus of energy is required to fuel economic activity, separate to energy that is consumed precisely to extract energy in the first place.
The less energy we use to get new energy out, the more energy we have left to invest in the wider goods and services of economic activity. But if we keep using more energy just to get energy out, the amount of net energy we have left to fuel our economies decreases.
According to the study authors, Lina Brand-Correa, Paul Brockway, Claire Carter, Tim Foxon, Anne Owen and Peter Taylor:
“The higher the EROI of an energy supply technology, the more ‘valuable’ it is in terms of producing (economically) useful energy output. In other words, a higher EROI allows for more net energy to be available to the economy, which is valuable in the sense that all economic activity relies on energy use to a greater or lesser extent.”
The verdict on the UK predicament is stark. They find that “the UK as a whole has had a declining EROI in the first decade of the 21st century, going from 9.6 in 2000 to 6.2 in 2012… These initial results show that more and more energy is having to be used in the extraction of energy itself rather than by the UK’s economy or society.”
Citing the work of French economists Florian Fizaine and Vincent Court, which estimates a minimal societal EROI of 11 for continuous economic growth, the paper concludes:
“… the UK is below that benchmark.”
In other words, early last year, a major scientific study found that for the last two decades and beyond, Britain’s economic growth is fundamentally constrained by domestic net energy decline. But this groundbreaking news did not make the ‘news’.
Break-up
At the close of 2010, in my book A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization, I predicted that large trans-national state structures like the European Union are likely to face challenges to their territorial integrity as a side-effect of these processes. The failure to address the systemic causes behind the 2008 financial crash, the incapacity to recognise it as a symptom of a system in decline, would lead to an increasingly authoritarian politics.
The integrity of large trans-national structures depends on the abundance of cheap energy flows to sustain them. If those flows come at greater cost and lower quality, then those structures will become increasingly strained and potentially even begin to break down. Costs to keep the system going increase while returns are squeezed, meaning that the surplus to invest in core social goods to maintain such structures declines.
That is why despite the so-called ‘recovery’ — tepid as it is and based on accelerating debt levels (in biophysical terms borrowing from the Earth today with promise of paying it back tomorrow with what has already been over consumed today) — in real terms, peoples’ purchasing power continues to decline.
The failure to understand and engage with the root, systemic causes of the crisis also means that policymakers put themselves in a position where they can only address surface-symptoms.
All too often, that means short-term, reactionary responses. And so in France, instead of addressing the question of how to galvanise a third industrial revolution to speed a post-carbon transition and infrastructure revival, Macron’s response to the climate crisis was to protect fossil fuel and nuclear producers while hiking up fuel taxes. He didn’t want to tackle the horrendous supply chains of big French corporations. He didn’t want to penalise the powerful oil, gas and nuclear lobbies that he hopes might help him get re-elected, and did next to nothing to speed a viable post-carbon transition that might transform economic prosperity on more sustainable foundations.
Riots in Paris
And so by placing the burden almost exclusively on French workers and consumers, Macron triggered the spiral of rage and riots. Protestors have set fire to banks, smashed and looted shops, and even targeted the Arc de Triomphe. They demand an end to corporate freeloading, along with nationalist demands such as ‘Frexit’, France’s departure from the EU, and preventing migration. It is telling that while some demands are compelling, there is no semblance of understanding the real planetary crisis beyond banal tropes about Big Banks. The French state has responded with its own violence, firing water cannons and tear gas on protestors, arresting over a thousand people, and threatening to bring in the French Army.
This is a microcosm of what can happen when states and peoples both fail to understand the deeper dynamics of a failing system: everyone responds to what is in front of them. Protestors blame Macron. The French state cracks down on violence. Politics becomes militarised, while scepticism of the liberal incumbency across the political spectrum finds vindication.
France’s riots therefore did not come out of the blue. They are part and parcel of a wider process of slow-burn EROI decline in which the returns to society from economic activity are being increasingly constrained by the higher energetic costs of that activity and productivity declines of the ageing centralised industrial-era infrastructure and technology. It was only a matter of time before the average person began to feel the impact of that squeeze in their day to day lives. Macron’s tax hikes were not the cause, but the trigger. They lit the match, but the tinder box was already fuming.
Brexit
But we’ve been here before, in Syria and beyond.
Brexit was triggered in the context of global system dynamics which remain poorly understood. Over the decade preceding the 2008 financial crisis, Britain’s economic growth was being undermined not merely by a debt-bubble in the housing markets, but by an ailing fossil fuel dependent energy system.
That ailing system was indelibly linked to the European migrant crisis, which saw over a million refugees from the Middle East and North Africa seeking sanctuary across Europe, including the UK and France, that fuelled the surge in nationalist populism sweeping across the continent.
The migrant crisis, too, did not come out of the blue, but followed hot on the heels of the turbulence of the Arab Spring. The destabilisation of Syria, Egypt, Yemen and beyond was a long time coming — but it was triggered by a perfect storm of crises. Domestic oil production declines which pulled the rug out from beneath oil-export dependent state revenues conspired with global oil price spikes thanks to the plateauing in world production of cheap conventional oil. A string of climate crises across the world’s major food basket regions led to crop failures and droughts which boosted food price spikes.
Global systemic crisis interacted with the breakdown in local national systems. As I’d reported in 2013, a natural drought cycle in Syria was massively worsened due to climate change, devastating agriculture and driving hundreds of thousands of Sunni farmers into Alawite-dominated coastal cities. As Syrian oil revenues plummeted, its domestic conventional oil production having peaked in the mid-1990s, the government’s slashing of critical fuel and food subsidies just as prices were spiking globally was the last straw. People could not even afford bread, so they hit the streets.
Bashar al-Assad responded with escalating brutality, including shooting civilians in the streets. When protestors picked up arms in response, the cycle of violence kicked in. Outside powers intervened to coopt their favoured sides, Russia and Iran backing Assad, the West backing various rebel groups — neither particularly interested in supporting Syrian civil society. The conflict escalated, devastating the country, and fuelling an unprecedented refugee crisis.
When NATO intervened in Libya, when the US and UK backed Saudi Arabia’s indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Yemen, it only destabilised the region further. The arc of collapse across the Middle East and North Africa resulted from a fatal combination: an earth system crisis, compounded by short-sighted and self-serving responses from human systems.
When families and children began turning up in their droves on European shores, the earth system crisis ‘out there’ came home. The West could not shield itself from the long-range consequences of the unsustainability of the very postwar system it had nurtured since the Second World War: structural dependence on fossil fuels, a patchwork of alliances with regional despotic regimes, laying the groundwork for converging climate change, crude oil depletion and the resulting domino effect of food and economic crises.
The earth system crisis that erupted in Syria triggered a wave of human system destabilisation of which Brexit was merely the first eruption.
And so the Syria crisis is indeed a taste of things to come. Europe is already a post-peak oil continent, whose domestic fossil resources are in decline. Most credible studies of Europe’s shale gas potential show that it is extremely weak and not similar to the American situation. If we are hell-bent on maintaining dependence on fossil fuels, we will be forced to import.
But as I showed in my scientific monograph for Springer Energy Briefs, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (2017), if demand growth increases at current rates, it is unlikely that Central Asian and Russian suppliers will be capable of meeting that demand at costs we can cope with in coming decades.
Meanwhile, certain climate impacts are already locked in. Between 2030 and 2045, large parts of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are likely to become increasingly uninhabitable due to climate change. This is the same period in which oil production across the MENA region has been forecast to begin plateauing and declining. As the energy costs of fossil fuel production and imports increases, and as the EU is likely hit again by the challenge of large-scale migration from the Middle East due to climate devastation, the challenges to the EU’s territorial integrity will not go away.
Brexit is merely a ripple on the surface of deeper currents. It is a symptom of the great civilisational phase-shift to life after fossil fuels.
In this sense, the Brexit fiasco is an example of how distant we are as a species from the conversations we need to be having. Talking about being in or out of Europe and in what way is not unimportant, but it’s also a massive distraction from the deeper systemic crisis that is unfolding beneath the very issues driving our immediate concerns about Brexit.
Earth system disruption does not inevitably result in destabilisation of human systems. But if human systems refuse to engage and adapt to those disruptions, then they will be destabilised. As long as Britain, Europe and their citizens continue to obsess myopically on the symptoms rather than the causes, we will be incapable of responding meaningfully to those causes. Instead, we will fight with each other manically about the symptoms, while the ground beneath our feet continues to unravel.
The crisis of Brexit and the eruption of the riots in France are symptoms of a great unfolding civilizational transition, in which an old reductionist paradigm of materialist self-maximation is dying. Citizens and policymakers, activists and business leaders, need to wake up to what is actually happening to have the conversations that can kick-start meaningful approaches to systemic transformation.
This is not a far-flung crisis that is going to happen years in the future. This is now. This is happening and it is affecting you, your children, and those you love the most. And it will affect their children, and their children.
This is your legacy. This is your choice. This is your chance to engage with and become an agent of a new paradigm, one that speaks for all humans, all species, and the Earth itself. Maybe we don’t know exactly what the emerging paradigms will look like. But we know that it’s time to ask ourselves: where do we stand? With the old, or with the new?
72 Comments on "Brexit: Stage One In Europe’s Slow-Burn Energy Collapse"
wm-scott on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 8:23 am
Sounds like “the new” will be living in a cardboard box under a bridge while roasting a rat over a small campfire. With WIFI you could be a more authentic internet troll.
Sissyfuss on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 9:04 am
An excellent article but the question at the end should be, ” Where do you stand? With all the accoutrements of a fossil fuel lifestyle or with a rudimentary existence surfeit with sacrifice.” Is it any wonder why the majority picks the former.
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 9:10 am
Oh please, not again this Muslim Nafeez Ahmed doomer, the absolute darling of apneaman/mobster:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nafeez_Mosaddeq_Ahmed
Discover has labelled Ahmed as a “doomer.” A December 2013 blog post by Kloor asserts: “Once someone starts down this civilization-is-collapsing road, like Guardian blogger Nafeez Ahmed, it’s hard to stop. If you want a tour guide to the apocalypse, Ahmed is your guy.”[24] A March 2014 blog post says: “Like the most warped fundamentalists who exploit tragedy, the merchants of eco-doom also cynically seize on current events. On this score, nobody rivals Nafeez Ahmed (the UK Left’s faux-scholarly equivalent to Glenn Beck), who has an unquenchable appetite for peak-everything porn
Ahmed is the world’s greatest doomer drama queen since Heinberg’s fall from grace.
Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU.
Yeah, unknown, because it isn’t true. Brexit and Trump are two very different phenomena. Trump is indeed closet white nationalism.
Brexit is concern with immigration alright, WHITE immigration from Europe to be precise. In reality Brexit is the expression of a wide-felt British feeling to be member of the wrong club. Their world always has been Anglosphere, together with which they waged two world wars against continental Europe and poisoned relations for decades, if not centuries to come.
far-right politics is no longer the province of the fringe, but is becoming increasingly normalised. This not an accident. It is the result of a system that is failing — and the efforts of a network of far-right groups to exploit the fractures emerging from this system-failure to tear everything down, and erect a new order of their own fashioning.
It is true that the “far-right” is rising everywhere in the West (except in notoriously globalist Britain). But it has very little to do with “collapse” or energy or peak oil… but everything with the too abundant presence in formerly white lands of the likes of Nafeez Ahmed of this world.
Obviously, Nafeez Ahmed doesn’t want it to be true that many consider the only interesting fact about Ahmed to be his departure date.
Europe is now a ‘post-peak oil’ continent. Currently, every single major oil producer in Western Europe is in decline.
Big deal. Europe and certainly Britain, has a booming offshore wind sector that by 2030 would have sufficiently energy produced to weather a WW3:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/european-wind-industry-energy-scenarios-for-2030/
Obviously this deceiver is not losing a single word about the wind energy Bonanza in the North and Irish Sea. That would only undermine his messianic message of doom, so many on this board are in love with too.
Ahmed should stick to his core expertise: the Coran.
eugene on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 9:47 am
The man is not a “doomer”. To the optimistic, a realist always looks like a doomer. Sorry folks but the party is over. Renewables will never support our society let alone allow it to grow. In America we have the wildly optimistic shale folks when 2-300 billion has already been lost at current oil prices. Or the wind/solar savior. All this with the gutted eastern cities, a population that can barely read/write, millions living in Walmart parking lots/tents and debt beyond comprehension. And the move to the radical right is occurring all over the West. When the shit hits the fan, us humans always turn to a savior. It’s why Trump is viewed as a messiah.
JuanP on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 9:50 am
No, it won’t affect my children because I never had any, but it does affect my wife and me. We’ve been preparing for decades. We are teaching others how to do it. But, if this forum is somewhat representative of what is happening in the wider world then it is all for the pleasure of doing itself rather than any consideration consideration of the potential outcome. By growing food I don’t hurt anyone, either.
Davy on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 9:56 am
Anyone patting themselves on the back for a prediction is suspect in my book. This late term civilizational decline is more than energy related and more than eroi. It is also systematic with economies, networks, social fabric, and the planetary system. There is plenty of disenfranchisement left to do with parasitic wealth transfer. Technology and the will to grow is still very strong. We are at an undefined turning point of a complex system that the author is unable to decipher. I am not saying he is wrong. I am saying he only gets part of it. Peak oil’s effects are part of this process but only part. What is happening politically is not fully understood. We can all agree profound changes are in motion. The timing is uncertain as is the locus of collapse. This could unfold over many years or end tomorrow. That uncertainty definitely makes for anxious living and this is likely why so many people are pissed off. Get used to it worst is yet to come.
onlooker on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 10:46 am
Eugege, Clog is in dreamland
“EU’s green energy debacle shows the futility of climate change policies”
https://business.financialpost.com/opinion/eus-green-energy-debacle-shows-the-futility-of-climate-change-policies
Duncan Idaho on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 10:48 am
All this with the gutted eastern cities, a population that can barely read/write, millions living in Walmart parking lots/tents and debt beyond comprehension. And the move to the radical right—
Well stated.
And times like these will pull the depressed to the right, as they will look to simple solutions to blame.
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 11:38 am
Eugege, Clog is in dreamland
“EU’s green energy debacle shows the futility of climate change policies”
Onlooker, with dry eyes is posting 2015 articles about an alleged “green debacle in Europe”.LOL
Here the real figures behind the “debacle”:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/unleashing-europes-offshore-wind-potential-2030/
Currently offshore wind is the cheapest source of electricity, certainly with penetrations below 40%, when you don’t have to worry about storage.
Oh and onlooker, you (and makati) loved to post this 2011 garbage as a “proof” that wind doesn’t work:
http://energyskeptic.com/2018/wind/
I took 2-3 hours of my life to rebuke these fake 41 argument, one turd at a time:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/28/prejudices-from-amateurs-against-wind-energy/
So you are warned when you are tempted to post the link again.
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:05 pm
More and more people begin to realize that the Yellow Vests uprising in France is a populist uprising:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/05/world/europe/yellow-vests-france.html
“How France’s ‘Yellow Vests’ Differ From Populist Movements Elsewhere”
https://townhall.com/columnists/jackkerwick/2018/12/10/the-yellow-vests-a-populist-nationalist-rebellion-n2537210
“The Yellow Vests: A Populist, Nationalist Rebellion”
Canada has them too:
https://www.nugget.ca/opinion/letters/dec-18-letter-yellow-vests-pushing-a-white-nationalist-agenda
“Yellow vests ‘pushing a white nationalist agenda'”
https://ricochet.media/en/2461/yellow-vests-canada-the-far-right-go-high-visibility
“Yellow Vests Canada: The far right go high visibility”
Forget about this Nafeez Ahmed and his idea that the Yellow Vest movement is against “peak oil”, it’s against Nafeez Ahmed!
Davy Hypocrisy on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:37 pm
“Anyone patting themselves on the back for a prediction is suspect in my book.”
Davy Prediction on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:39 pm
“This could unfold over many years or end tomorrow.”
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:56 pm
Yellow Vests today in The Hague:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6QTEAawZZw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2Q3zU98hm4
Note the Dutch flags everywhere.
Nantes, France, aujourd’hui:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRTeK7oqafI
Outcast_Searcher on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:13 pm
With gasoline at $2 a gallon in much of the US, NG cheap and plentiful and being widely adopted for many uses, green energy and EV’s rising at a good percentage clip, lots and lots of coal left if needed, talking about an ongoing “energy collapse” is just silly — if you get beyond the endless empty economic collapse meme of the fast crash doomers.
Get back to us when prices and supply look meaningfully concerning — like in the 70’s. Big hint: that was a good 40 years ago, and the world has changed a lot since then.
We have plenty of problems in a world where BAU growth persists strongly — but short term or even moderate term “energy collapse” looks like a very low probability event, for those willing to look at lots of data objectively.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:21 pm
All clogg can do is shoot the messenger ie ad hom fallacy..Dr Ahmed has written numerous scholrly papers..and discover blog is a joke and not a real science publishing
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:24 pm
Dr Ahmed just published a peer reviewed book by spinger last year.which is owned by the journal of nature..this article is backed up by solid science..
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:27 pm
Outcast
The price of gas averaged one dollar a gallon throughout the entire 20th century..you uneducated dimwit..tell your rich friends when the oil shotlrtage hits I will be banging their daughters..and making them watch.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:29 pm
Notice stupid clogg never tried to refute an article..he just says they are “insert some stereotype”…a total moron.
onlooker on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 1:48 pm
Maybe Mob, Clog should read this article and take it too heart. Feel good studies and articles for those who cannot face the facts
“What psychology experiments tell you about why people deny facts
Many of us will pay money to avoid points of view that differ from our own”
https://amp.economist.com/united-states/2018/12/08/what-psychology-experiments-tell-you-about-why-people-deny-facts?__twitter_impression=true&fbclid=IwAR0TQDycBCGMMCAp8rULJml9RBWl1OO7RTPH2cg69i2jEqsT2ZAci3CngiM#top
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:19 pm
We have plenty of problems in a world where BAU growth persists strongly — but short term or even moderate term “energy collapse” looks like a very low probability event, for those willing to look at lots of data objectively.
Exactly right.
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:20 pm
“Maybe Mob, Clog should read this article and take it too heart. Feel good studies and articles for those who cannot face the facts”
Which “facts” do I deny, onlooker?
makati1 on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:23 pm
asshole JuanP said this:
Davy Hypocrisy on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:37 pm “Anyone patting themselves on the back for a prediction is suspect in my book.”
Davy Prediction on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 12:39 pm “This could unfold over many years or end tomorrow.”
More Davy Identity Theft on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:29 pm
makati1 on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:23 pm
onlooker on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 2:49 pm
Clog, we have competing studies, interpretations and conclusions related to the feasibility of Renewable energy being able to replace FF especially given the ever more precarious economic situation and the declining Net energy from FF. Posters here have posted for and against. But in any case time is running out for this transition to successfully occur
Cloggie on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 3:19 pm
“Clog, we have competing studies, interpretations and conclusions related to the feasibility of Renewable energy being able to replace FF especially given the ever more precarious economic situation and the declining Net energy from FF. Posters here have posted for and against. But in any case time is running out for this transition to successfully occur”
The entire EU and all its national governments are committed to make the transition work. And so is European industry and scientific community. The vast majority of the European population supports the endeavour, provided of course that the costs don’t explode. There is nobody who claims it can’t be done. Only populists deny climate change and want the transition cancelled on cost ground.
Jon on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 4:58 pm
This was quite thought provoking, but can I ask. Who wrote this? I see no author line in the title. It would be nice to know who (s)he is and maybe have a link to a bio so we can look to see that they are not just a Sgoti (Some guy/gal on the internet) and look at other works they might have published.
Kevin Cobley on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 7:29 pm
It’s very clear that the only way to reduce energy consumption is to increase the price of Oil via an excise, also registration taxes on vehicles should be increased substantially. The raised funds used to improve public transit.
The public in France have rejected this approach wanting business as usual and reduced energy taxes, therfore at some stage a Governmnet that will apply the required soutions will come to power (the military). Either the French public get theri act together and accept the solutions needed or all go down together. There is no “socialist solution”, “populist solution” or “right wing solution”.
DMyers on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 7:31 pm
“But if we keep using more energy just to get energy out, the amount of net energy we have left to fuel our economies decreases.” [Quoting from the article]
This is the assumption on which the article rests. We have heard the same from the likes of Martensen, Heinberg, Shortonoil (local hero), indeed from almost anyone making a statement on the EROEI subject.
There is a strong intuitive appeal in this, but there is lacking a practical description in all cases. Other than prices, which mostly reflect supply and demand factors (and are avoided as a probative factor), there is nothing to explain how the information about the watering down of end-use energy reaches actors in the economy, in order to alter their behavior. The fact that events occur that are consistent with the theory does not prove the theory. There could be, and probably are other explanations, and these must be scientifically eliminated before this is taken as on par with a scientific fact.
“Joe, have you noticed you get less energy out of your gasoline than you used to?”
“Hell I don’t know. I don’t think so. Still driving 90 in a 65 on I 40 and getting to work on time every day.”
I love the idea. Without specific cause and effect scenarios, there remains an air of magic about the role of “net energy” in human action.
makati1 on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 8:15 pm
NET energy is like NET income. At some point it will determine our ability to consume. If it takes a barrel of oil (energy) to recover, refine, and transport a barrel of oil (energy), it is game over. Actually, it will be over long before that 1:1 event. Somewhere around 1:10 or so. Deny or not, reality is a bitch.
DMyers on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 10:37 pm
Mak-man, I’m not denying anything. All I’m saying is that it is hard to see how knowledge of the net energy factor travels to the crucial actors. It is a bit technical in nature, and therefore not likely to be of much interest, other than in economic terms.
Speaking of the 1:1 event, you have not yourself spelled out the concrete outcome of that moment in history. You can suppose this to indicate no oil will be recovered for lack of profit. But it could be that the pursuit would go on, simply as an effort to cut losses and appease certain uninformed interests. Shale oil is proof that profitless drilling goes on.
Mainly, I’m asking how does declining EROEI manifest itself in order to change human behavior (aside from price increase and scarcity, neither of which applies at this time)?
makati1 on Sat, 29th Dec 2018 11:04 pm
DMyers, It is not about profit. It is the energy required to get energy to the end user. We are fast approaching the point where most oil fields will not have a net energy to sell. You cannot use a barrel of oil to get a barrel of oil to your consumer, the public, government, military, etc. Way before the 1:1 point, the wells will shut down. No profit involved. EROEI.
There is a long process from the ground to the gas station. The cost of materials (drilling equipment, piping, trucking, highway maintenance, a refinery, more storage tanks, trucking, and labor.) and energy to get the oil above ground, thru the processes and to the final buyer/user. I’ve seen estimates of a limit of one barrel of energy to produce 10 barrels of oil end product. The game started when one barrel produced over 100 barrels. Those days are long gone. The fields will shut down one by one until there are no more that can produce an acceptable energy level. No profits required.
Anonymouse on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 2:08 am
Careful mak, or ‘the narrativemans’ net-energy alert warning system will go off, stirring him out of his cancer-juice induced euphoria. He will feel compelled to remind, as he so often did back when he found shilling here profitable, how ‘the narrative-man’ doesn’t give two squirts about how much usable net-energy oil extraction delivers to society. No, he will remind you he only cares about about money deposited to his bank account as a result of his involvement in said extraction.
The idea of diminishing returns is foreign and alien to shills like narrativeman. He will tell you, once a field gets played out,it does not matter, he’d just go stick metal straws in the ground somewhere else, since Jesus \ Yahweh, has promised him and his ilk that the Earth has an infinite supply of readily obtainable cancer juice*. Thus worrying about hippy dippy things like what science and reason might have to say about their activities and where they will lead to, is just a waste of time. Especially when there are dollars to made.
And on some level, it is not hard to see why this attitude is as strong as it is in amerikaland. When you have Gawd on your side (aka the uS fed), and gov, printing an infinite stream of subsidies for your cartel. Not to mention armies of regime-change specialists, and on numerous occasions, actual armies on standby to help secure control over said oil when its rightful owners insist on having some say over how it gets used, well….
*All denominated in uS toilet paper of course, and guarded by uS corporate mercenary forces.
makati1 on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 2:24 am
Well said Anon. Although, I am not sure the Fed is actually trying to save America. I see it as a major tool being used to bleed the peasants and take down the system step by step. Since its inception in 1914, it has done nothing but blow bubbles and then pop them. Every pop took the US lower on the food chain. This one may be the final blow, pun intended, that takes the Us to the 3rd world level. We shall see. Have a safe and happy holiday! ^_^
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 3:21 am
“Joe, have you noticed you get less energy out of your gasoline than you used to?”
“Hell I don’t know. I don’t think so. Still driving 90 in a 65 on I 40 and getting to work on time every day.”
The oil and gas are the same as ever. Yes, net energy declines, because you have to input more energy to harvest the same amount of oil and gas output. But that is completely offset by advancing technology, that enables doing more with less energy:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2018-01/f-01-2017.png
Mileage per gallon development:
1975 – 10
2020 – 30
Oldschool 40W lightbulbs are now 5W LEDs.
My previous fridge: 200 kWh/year, my new one 60 kWh/year.
Heat pumps can deliver the same room temperature with 3-4 times less energy.
The internet could enable most office workers to do their work from home online via the cloud, eliminating the need for commuting or private car ownership.
Etc., etc.
EROI is a wanting measure, for starters because on the input side it is ill-defined.
But most here are Americans and are submerged in their oil culture, that began in the 1850s and was the prima causa for the insane American geopolitical success and find it very difficult to imagine something else.
In the light of the huge potential for renewable energy, Europeans can praise themselves lucky that they didn’t have much oil and gas, one of the main reasons why continental Europe lost WW2, and now they need to reinvent themselves energetically and are doing so, where Americans are mainly busy convincing themselves that it is not going to work in the first place. Which is OK, because it gives us Europeans a crucial head start and major economic and geopolitical advantage.
Ssssst.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 4:26 am
“The entire EU and all its national governments are committed to make the transition work. And so is European industry and scientific community. The vast majority of the European population supports the endeavour”
Yea, you mean like the yellow jersey people? Macron’s effort at raising fuel prices ignited a firestorm so yea total support.
makati1 on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 4:36 am
Cloggie, most vehicles in use today get less than 20 MPG average. Even those who profess to get more, don’t.
Electric has to come from somewhere for those batteries. FFs. Not to mention the need to replace them before the car wears out.
The new LED bulbs cost 10-20 times as much as the old tungsten bulbs and rarely last near their promised lifetime so more energy is needed to buy and maintain them. Not to mention recycle costs or trash.
Technology does NOT do “more work with less energy”. There is a physical law that say so. Every “energy saver” takes more energy to exist and be maintained. As tech gets more complicated it becomes more energy intensive.
BTW: I had a 1975 Chevrolet Impala SS (3 tons) 396 V8, 4 bbl engine, that got 15-18 MPG on the interstate at 65 MPH. It got 12 or so in the city. Not much worse than today’s REAL numbers fpr a similar car. I also had a 1956 Ford Crown Victoria with a large V8 engine and a 4 bbl, that got 12+MPG in town and almost 20MPG on the interstate. Few cars only got 10 MPG then unless they were race cars.
You can try to defend “renewables” and “technology”, but you need better arguments than above.
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 4:41 am
Yea, you mean like the yellow jersey people? Macron’s effort at raising fuel prices ignited a firestorm so yea total support.
Fuel prices are merely a symptom, the real frustration goes far deeper and are related to tax levels and immigration.
For the rest, France is not necessary and will not play a central role in bringing about the transition, that will be Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, with Denmark, Germany and Holland the three most important providers:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/29/unleashing-europes-offshore-wind-potential-2030/
Between 2020-2021 the Netherlands will be the #1 offshore wind country, after which Britain will take over. Holland will remain #2 afterwards, before Germany and France.
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 4:48 am
Cloggie, most vehicles in use today get less than 20 MPG average. Even those who profess to get more, don’t.
The tendency in the US is indeed towards SUVs/pickups, away from sedan’s. So much for an energy crisis, there isn’t any.
Having said that, the technology exists to build super efficient cars, unlike the seventies. If for some reason fuel will become scarce and expensive, people will immediately return to smaller, more fuel efficient cars.
My previous Audi-A2 (not sold in the US) had 33 km on 1 liter or 78 mpg (long distance)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A2
Technology does NOT do “more work with less energy”. There is a physical law that say so. Every “energy saver” takes more energy to exist and be maintained. As tech gets more complicated it becomes more energy intensive.
Please reread the comments I made about light bulbs, fridges, online working from home, etc.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 4:58 am
“It’s very clear that the only way to reduce energy consumption is to increase the price of Oil via an excise, also registration taxes on vehicles should be increased substantially. The raised funds used to improve public transit.”
A policy of higher oil prices has loop holes but is an effective way to a point. There are no easy ways to reduce energy consumption. The very act of reducing energy consumption reduces economic activity which has a knock on effect at reducing the renewable buildout, efficiency and conservation efforts. A tradeable credit scheme on consumption above a certain level is another option. Set a target for what is reasonable consumption per individual then for those who require more make the cost increasingly dearer. This policy could resolve the problem with poor behaviors and but still allow some of it. The downside is the administrative costs. Look at our tax system that is out of control. Limit the ownership of the number of vehicles and impose strict fuel economy standards and types of fuels. This has had mixed results but we should have a minimum of this as policy. The government should spend less on road expansion and more on public transport especially trains. Reduce the opportunities for poor behavior with the type of vehicles we use. Do we need all the boating and private aviation? Do we need road trips and NASCAR? These are small examples compared to auto use but we need a variety of efforts and behavior changes to sum to real change. Longer term it could be about education and policy promoting localism in my opinion. There appears to be little interest in localism. Anything else is like a Band-Aid on a problem. As long as society desires increased affluence based on being mobile then you are in a constant fight against behavior. Behavior wins when you have elected officials an industries who profit from this behavior. The EV policy effort in Europe is great but I am curious how far it will go before resistance. The physics of it is debatable currently. Most EV’s run significantly of a grid fossil fuel supported. I am not optimistic with any effort. The only real effective means is lower economic activity and in today’s world that will be very messy.
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:01 am
Theresa May’s preferred successor is Jeremy Hunt:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6539111/Born-Brexiteer-Jeremy-Hunts-manifesto-low-tax-Britain.html
Note his impeccable Anglo/Global Britain credentials, from the photo of his (Chinese) wife. Wants to turn Britain into another Singapore, with ultra-low taxes, that is a business heaven and commoners hell. In America the lowest paid are wearing diapers, because they no longer are granted a few minutes off for a pee. Will come to Britain as well. But if you are rich, Britain will be great again! And very dark, with imported talent from all over the globe, but not the disliked white Eastern Europeans.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-6539165/Why-Im-looking-east-vision-post-Brexit-prosperity-writes-JEREMY-HUNT.html
“Why I’m looking east for my vision of post-Brexit prosperity, writes JEREMY HUNT”
(they influence of a woman over a man-latest)
Poor Jeremy, not being a member of the EU any longer, he won’t be guaranteed to be able to use the fastest trade route Europe-China, namely overland by rail. And when Spain will take over Gibraltar, with PBM-backing, not even the Suez-canal is guaranteed, if UK-EU relations will be hostile if May’s deal will be rejected (completely open).
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:06 am
The new LED bulbs cost 10-20 times as much
That BS. Bought several of these last week:
3.49 euro
https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi420973/energetic-led-standaard-e27-60w
(conventional light bulbs costed ca. 1 euro)
9W real consumption = 60W old school light bulb light yield, that’s a factor of 6 efficiency gain, which is huge.
You and I are unlikely to be around to verify that these lights will indeed burn for 15,000 hours rather than the 1,000 hours of the old school light-bulb.
LED-lights are a perfect example of progressing technology.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:08 am
“But most here are Americans and are submerged in their oil culture, that began in the 1850s and was the prima causa for the insane American geopolitical success and find it very difficult to imagine something else.”
There are ten charts here that tell a different story that is a mix. Europe may be talking the talk and walking that way but it still has a huge way to go.
“Guest post: Ten charts show how the world is progressing on clean energy”
https://tinyurl.com/ybk3acu5
makati1 on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:15 am
Cloggie, you cannot just pick one example that fits your agenda. You need to specify that a certain car brand gets X MPG, not a wide statement that “1975 cars got 10 MPG and 2020 cars will get 30MPG”. With a 10 to 15 year turnover rate, even if a super energy efficient/economical model came out tomorrow, it would take 20 years to replace the existing billion or so. By then, there will be no personal vehicles anywhere, of any kind. FFs will be dead and all of the “renewables”, like wind and solar, gone to the trash dump. Our kids and grand kids will live in a very different, and less affluent, world in 20 years.
Technology may exist to do as you claim, but it will never happen. Why? $$$$$$. If it is not profitable/affordable it will not happen. And then there are people like the Yellow Vests, in the majority, that will resit change until it is too late. We passed the U turn long ago and are headed for the cliff.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:20 am
“Fuel prices are merely a symptom, the real frustration goes far deeper and are related to tax levels and immigration.”
Right, it is called less affluence and this is true for Europe as it is in many other places. It is the primary reason for the frustration you mention.
“For the rest, France is not necessary and will not play a central role in bringing about the transition, that will be Germany, Britain and the Netherlands, with Denmark, Germany and Holland the three most important providers”
You are not there yet neder. Your renewable effort is still advancing. Mass EV penetration of the vehicle stock are a work in progress. The whole renewable effort is overall stalling in Europe anyway. Sure wind is being built our significantly but not enough. Study after study shows how difficult this build out will be beyond a point. We know that beyond 50% the cost go up markedly. It seems like this discussion is routine. It is your Euro agenda and it is not living up to your fantasy.
“Between 2020-2021 the Netherlands will be the #1 offshore wind country, after which Britain will take over. Holland will remain #2 afterwards, before Germany and France.”
Neder review wind contribution to primary energy and get back to me with a number to brag about
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:23 am
Cloggie, you cannot just pick one example that fits your agenda. You need to specify that a certain car brand gets X MPG, not a wide statement that “1975 cars got 10 MPG and 2020 cars will get 30MPG”.
I gave you the data:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/styles/large/public/2018-01/f-01-2017.png
Technology may exist to do as you claim, but it will never happen. Why? $$$$$$.
That doesn’t make sense. You predict economic collapse, fine, then people have to exercise belt-tightening. How? Smaller, more fuel-efficient cars. For the moment, for a large segment of the (very materialistic) US population that is not necessary and they can afford bigger cars again.
Europe may be talking the talk and walking that way but it still has a huge way to go.
30 years.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:23 am
“Please reread the comments I made about light bulbs, fridges, online working from home, etc.”
Diminishing returns is near or already breached with the mentioned appliances. The real deal is behavior and the yellow jerseys showed us we are near a limit there. Advancements in efficiency and enforced conservation are stalling.
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:36 am
Right, it is called less affluence and this is true for Europe as it is in many other places. It is the primary reason for the frustration you mention.
Wrong, it is less affluence because of increasing tax burden; GDP did very well increase. Western Europeans on average have to work at least 1 month per year to fund these f* darkies (or ENEMY for short), our leftist US-oriented elites wants us to replace us with, on instigation of the UN.
Not going to happen. Said leftist western “elites” are facing a nice, potentially bloody 1989 of their own. In continental Europe and in Heartland USA. Totally deserved.
The whole renewable effort is overall stalling in Europe anyway.
Got links? Of Course not.
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/12/28/renewables-set-to-account-for-38-of-german-electricity-in-2018/
Germany 20017–>2018 from 36–>38% renewable electricity.
This wind farm under construction will give a big boost to Dutch renewable electricity by 2020:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/1484-mw-borssele-to-become-the-largest-windfarm-in-the-world/
Two 7 GW monster Dutch offshore projects are in the pipeline:
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/tenders-windpark-ijmuiden-ver/
https://deepresource.wordpress.com/2018/12/27/tenders-windpark-hollandse-kust-zuid-i-iv-1460-mw/
I expect Holland to be virtually independent in electricity by 2030, not 2050.
Davy on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 5:49 am
“Wrong, it is less affluence because of increasing tax burden; GDP did very well increase.”
Neder, GDP increase is in decline. Europe is facing recessionary forces after huge ECB bond buying program that has neared its effectiveness. You can’t argue the numbers anymore. This will not be the golden decade you have been cheerleading.
“The whole renewable effort is overall stalling in Europe anyway.”
“Germany 20017–>2018 from 36–>38% renewable electricity.”
There you go you provided them for me. That is a definition of stalling in my book
“I expect Holland to be virtually independent in electricity by 2030, not 2050.”
Please, don’t talk out your ass with 2030. We are a decade away in a climate of decline.
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 6:52 am
A little bit off-topic but still about Britain.
A few years ago I traveled to London to join a history gathering organized by David Irving, the maverick British revisionist historian. I had read a lot about 1941 Operation Barbarossa, from a non-Allied perspective. The official lie is that Barbarossa was an unprovoked German attack on “peace-loving USSR” for the purpose of acquiring “Lebensraum”.
Two sources contradict that view:
1. Viktor Suvorov
2. Mannerheim files
#1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbBnRZoTHFs
#2: http://prokarelia.net/en/?x=artikkeli&article_id=667&author=10
I managed to talk to Irving in an aside. His view at the time was that, yes, Stalin wanted to overrun Europe eventually, but not in 1941. He had never heard of either the Mannerheim files nor Suvorov and obviously, as a professional historian was not willing to adapt his views, because of some Dutch amateur nobody. Fair enough.
Yesterday however, I saw on his site this:
http://www.fpp.co.uk/online/index1.html
The Icebreaker speaks “Will they forgive me? No”: ex-Soviet spy Viktor Suvorov speaks out — This Ukrainian is a brave man. He holds the key to rehabilitating Hitler in history
And linked to an article of the leftist Guardian about Suvorov:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/29/ex-soviet-spy-viktor-suvorov
Kadeng! Irving made the Suvorov transition!
The Guardian article is yet another hit piece against Putin. And you have to dive deep into the article to arrive at the real Suvorov-stuff:
From his new home in the UK, Suvorov wrote one of the most influential books of the perestroika era, Icebreaker. When it was published in 1988, his argument was heretical: that Stalin had been secretly plotting an offensive against Hitler’s Germany, and would have invaded in September 1941, or at the latest by 1942. Stalin, he wrote, wanted Hitler to destroy democracy in Europe, in the manner of an icebreaker, thereby clearing the way for world communism. The book undermined the idea that the USSR was an innocent party, dragged into the second world war. Russian liberals supported Suvorov’s thesis; it now has broad acceptance among historians.
Well, well, well, our lefties from London now unheedingly drop the Suvorov thesis without contradicting it.
[part 1]
Cloggie on Sun, 30th Dec 2018 6:55 am
Again, the real story of WW2 in brief. It was a US setup from the beginning. All of the German invasions were provoked:
– US pressured UK and France in to war guarantee for Poland
– Invasion of Poland in 1939 was a reaction to the Polish ethnic cleansing of Germans from Versailles Poland, encouraged by the US and UK-French war guarantee
– Norway was a response to UK-French attempts to halt supply of Swedish iron ore from Narvik
– Holland really started WW2 by secretly allowing British and French troops to attack Germany via Dutch territory
– Hitler on purpose did NOT slaughter British troops in Dunkerque in order not to escalate
– Churchill refused German peace proposals (group hug, everybody going home), leaving the Germans no choice but to invade Britain in order to force these trouble makers to peace (Operation Sealion). If the Germans had invaded London, arrested Churchill, give him a fair trial and next execute the war monger, London would be a 100% British town today. Rest of Britain likewise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion
– Seelion was called off when German intelligence detected that the Soviets were massing troops near the unprotected German border in the East.
– Crucial was the November Molotov visit to Berlin. Molotov began to mock Hitler that he was trapped into war and Molotov began to make outrageous demands, like a Soviet naval basis in Denmark. Hitler knew that sooner or later the Soviets would attack and that the Non-Agression agreement was worth shit.
– Than came this insane Italian move of invading Greece, giving the British the excuse to bomb German oil sources in Romania from Greek territory, the only oil the Germans had, forcing them to invade Greece, losing 3 valuable months. Without “ally-from-hell” Italy, the Germans probably would have reached Moscow in time, enabling them to dissolve Reagan’s evil empire.
– By April the Germans had certainlty: the USSR was in a state of full mobilization. Suvorov elaborates on this extensively.
– In May Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland, a desperate thing to do for the #2 in the Third Reich, in an attempt to at least achieve peace with the British. Churchill, in the pay of international Jewry, is not interested, he knows since the mid-thirties that he will win the war because he can rely on Soviets and Americans
– On June 22, 1941, the Germans attack and according to Suvorov preempted the Soviet by 3 weeks. It is thanks to Barbarossa alone that Holland was not overrun by the Soviets in 1941-1942.
Thanks Dolfie, f* Churchill, f* you Roosevelt.
[part 2]