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Page added on December 15, 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 exports 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.
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 maniacally 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?
144 Comments on "Brexit: Stage One in Europe’s Slow-Burn Energy Collapse"
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 12:36 pm
Twelve generals accuse Macron of treason:
http://freewestmedia.com/2018/12/14/french-generals-accuse-macron-of-treason-over-un-migration-compact/
Normally this should lead to the arrest of Macron, in order to pave the way for the presidency of the Putin-friend Fillon.
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 12:46 pm
“Brexit: Stage One in Europe’s Slow-Burn Energy Collapse”
Brexit has absolutely nothing to do with energy, but everything with 500 years of British Balance of Power and Splendid Isolation policies.
But just like Britain turned to the US as an ally of last resort in WW1, we in continental Europe can turn to Russia and even to China. Brexit is about gopolitics, not energy. And the enormous confusion in both the British politics and population is a clear sign that Brexit could soon be seen as a tremendous mistake.
https://youtu.be/1yZDvnKERP0
Lord Heseltine: Germany won WW2 after all.lol
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/24/lord-heseltine-suggests-brexit-allowing-germany-win-world-war/
print baby print on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 2:03 pm
Cloggie you are wrong energy makes world goes around , not even money can’t compete with energy . Author of this text is right
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 3:22 pm
Another fantastic article by Dr Ahmed..He really nails it and always uses excellent references..
Unlike clogg the duffus who uses fringe sites and fake news..
Europe is collapsing..Just like Soros warned!
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 3:58 pm
“Another fantastic article by Dr Ahmed..He really nails it and always uses excellent references..”
Apneaman had exactly the same hero: Ahmed.
How is the weather in Vancouver, TalmudTurk?
Look for “apneaman”/“ahmed”:
https://peakoil.com/publicpolicy/trump-left-saudi-arabia-off-his-immigration-ban-heres-why
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:00 pm
“Cloggie you are wrong energy makes world goes around , not even money can’t compete with energy . Author of this text is right”
Of course it does.
But what is the connection with Brexit?
There isn’t any.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:05 pm
Clogg
If you would read the article you would see the connection..Perhaps read the section titled “Britain: the end of net energy growth”
It references a peer reviewed study..i know that not the daily mail quality of sources you are used to..But it will have to do..
LMFAO!
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:08 pm
The letter to Macron over the Marakesh migration pact, signed by 12 generals:
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/a6afdy/french_generals_accuse_president_macron_of/
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:08 pm
You have to love the willful ignorance of Clogg the dough boy..He totally ignores the whole article and reference and says “There isn’t any”..like its all made up and an illusion..
Clogg proves that some humans climbed out of the trees while other fell out..
LMFAO!
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:13 pm
Clogg
Didn’t you see the caption right under it?
“Generals are retired and the headline is misleading”
Here I took a screen shot to show you
https://imgur.com/a/bSLaUiF
You are so easily duped..You are dumber than dirt and a liar..
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 4:51 pm
““Generals are retired and the headline is misleading””
I did see that it is about retired generals. So?
It is still a very significant action.
You want to start a debate about whether a retired general is a general or not?
Davy on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:00 pm
“I did see that it is about retired generals. So? It is still a very significant action.”
Big difference neder but still a significant statement.
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:16 pm
Dutch populist explains concerns related to UN Migration Pact in European Parliament.
(English, 4 minutes)
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:17 pm
Link:
https://documents1940.wordpress.com/2018/12/15/dutch-populist-explains-concerns-with-migration-pact/
Kevin Cobley on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:23 pm
Raising of excise is the most efficent means of reducing Fossil Fuel consumption, but is must be transparent the total tax raised must be refunded in a fixed rebate to all citizens of taxpaying age.
It isn’t possible to reduce fossil fuel consumption by complex regulation or subsidy schemes.
The non transparent protests in France were instigated by truckers a well known pressure group.
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:25 pm
Here the leading Général Antoine Martinez of the open letter, giving a speech last year at a conference about the DE-ISLAMIZATION OF EUROPE!!!
We are no longer talking about “angry old white deplorables”, now we have a very serious signal made by those people who carry the state, so to speak.
It is very difficult to overstate the importance of this development. It is not yet a coup attempt, but very much a threat.
Civil war is not very far off, neither in France nor in the US. The end of empire is near. And they key for white survival is in Russia.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:25 pm
Clogg
If you kick out all the migrants who is going to clean Donald Trumps toilets?
You just want to pick on the vulnerable because
you are pussy who wont challenge the powerful..
Lets imagine you could deport every migrant..
Then what?
Nothing would change for the better..Your GDP would still be trending towards zero by 2028..
Thats the problem with fascism..You eventually run out of other people to blame.
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:26 pm
Link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yuOIkUnv6U
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:28 pm
If you kick out all the migrants who is going to clean Donald Trumps toilets?
His wife, or his Jewish daughter or better his Jewish son in law. The possibilities are endless.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:28 pm
Kevin
Great comment, I agree..and its nice to see some intelligence around here for a change.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:47 pm
I should mention, as I no measure of intelligence of my own to speak of, and only know how to spam incoherent nonsense non-stop, I leave it to others to make thoughtful, and well-considered comments that I am incapable of articulating.
I am just here to help Davy and my other best friend, clogger.
Cloggie on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 5:55 pm
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq3_AyM69qI
America is in True Civil War
Ozarks Brother Jerry 73,418 views
Antius on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 6:47 pm
“Brexit has absolutely nothing to do with energy, but everything with 500 years of British Balance of Power and Splendid Isolation policies.”
You’re so damn sure that you know it all aren’t you Cloggie. I live in the UK and voted leave. I know plenty of other people that did the same. Why did we do it? A desperation to halt immigration, especially the non-white kind. A desire to punish the globalists that run the UK. A desire to bring governance back to our shores. None if it really corresponds with what you have been saying.
twocats on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 7:27 pm
another awesome article from ahmed.
this is how the article cloggie posted to ends:
“I remember, echoing down the corridors of history ‘you turn if you want to; the lady is not for turning.’ This lady was for turning.
“The old saying is ‘if the facts change, I change my mind’, but they are not changing and I don’t see the slightest chance of them changing.”
What the F!!! pure undiluted gibberish. and cloggie is so full of bologna that its almost hard to imagine. absolutely nothing to add to the conversation and his links are garbage. there is meaningful debate to be had – but cloggie, like a good troll, will prevent that from ever happening.
Dooma on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 7:59 pm
MOB, the whole world is collapsing, not just Europe. I do realise that you like to stir Clogg about Europe because he is very patriotic. The truth of the matter is that it is that we are looking at a depression far more significant than the one in the 1930s as a BEST case scenario.
This is a well-written article, and the author states that we reached the economic heights on the back of cheap energy and now those days are over — a point that is well known by most on this forum.
But the ‘news’ is doing a great job of distracting the masses about the perils that await us.
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 7:59 pm
Twocats
I think clogg is starting to totally lose his mind..He sees his entire region falling apart..and he knows there is a global oil shortage headed his way.
The vice is getting tighter and soon he will crack!
I AM THE MOB on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 8:03 pm
Dooma
We are already in a depression..That is why Nazi’s, trade wars, police brutality, are all coming back..
Actually we are worse than the depression era because wages actually rose during that timeframe..while ours have declined..
What we are headed for is a total collapse of all markets and economies..The end of the road..
The Great Depression 1929-1940 US Economic Growth GDP (1%)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression
The Great Recession 2006-2017 US Economic Growth GDP (1.5%)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locati
*Note: 20% Great Recession 2006-2017 (GDP) includes (FIRE) finance, insurance and real estate
GetAVasectomyDuduLifeSuckAss on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 9:26 pm
Protest are pickup steam. Same complain, everthing is too expensive:
Belgian protesters call for resignation of PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIzSXhlhmsU
YELLOW VEST PROTESTS REACH ISRAEL, RAGE AGAINST HIGH LIVING COST MOUNTS December 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xq-HAEk0YMc
French Protestors cover government building in manure #GiletsJaunes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi_EhMWKLQg
energy investor on Sat, 15th Dec 2018 11:19 pm
Up to this point the argument about the reduction in energy seems conclusively proven for both Western Europe (incl UK), Syria and the Arab Spring countries.
The EU has been compensating by printing money to such a degree that the old economic multiplier principle has gone negative – but not only for the EU but also for China, Japan and USA. Now the ECB has the equivalent of a USD2.6 trillion balance sheet to manage. And as for the others…the numbers are also huge.
Now the money printing is being switched off or reduced, the absence of that effective subsidy for citizens, means a step further down into poverty and hunger for the middle and lower classes – so roll on the yellow vest rebellions. So yes, I agree with this thesis in its substance.
I am not worried at all about global warming because it is just a faux crisis.
The far more immediate and severe crisis is alluded to by the research of the Russian astrophysicists and the continued work of Professor Valentina Zharkova and her team at Northumbria University.
They have rigorously examined the sun’s internal dynamo system and concluded that we face a Grand Solar Minimum for the 33 years from 2020 to 2053 of as great or greater intensity than the Maunder Minimum.
Valentina’s oral presentation is a bit difficult to understand, so herewith Lee Wheelbarger’s attempt at interpretation…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAroWjEVNRQ&feature=youtu.be
While in 2004 I thought Anthropogenic Global Warming was potentially a viable theory, I am since convinced it is impossible for the small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to have any significant effect on climate change. Yet the solar influence on climate explains recent warming and has been proven over many milenia.
Moreover, because the proof has been available since the 1990’s that CO2 CH4 etc could not possibly have the claimed theoretical effect, those analysts still clinging to that hypothesis are no less fraudsters than Bernie Madoff, Charles Ponzi and John Law.
I have always wondered whether the fraud really matters. It may be a useful side show to detract from panic when folk work out what is really happening.
But if I were running a country, I would screw down immigration, try to wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy on a user pay basis and then try to establish a steady state economy.
If my country possessed oil, gas or coal I would seek to minimise exports and husband my fossil fuel resources to prioritise them as part of an essential energy transition resource.
Bugger the IPCC and bugger the UN.
Why?
Because it is possible, if not probable that on our planet with 7.6 billion humans, a 400 year Grand Solar Minimum may prove to be a significant extinction level event.
Our dwindling resources include many other finite minerals, potable aquifers etc and the arrival of something that could easily be a few degrees colder within our lifetimes (and I am 72yrs old), is a big issue that should dominate all other considerations.
GetAVasectomyDudeLifeSuckAss on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 12:36 am
This is also what I think energy investor. The big danger facing humanity is not global warming, it is global cooling.
I also believe we might be looking at a total human life extinction because of the new ice age.
Outcast_Searcher on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 12:57 am
All the scientific evidence shows the CO2 component completely overwhelms the solar component re AGW.
But clowns like energy investor and getavas imagine differently, and use the usual doomer nonsensical claim of conspiracy where they don’t like the data (i.e. faux crisis).
Only convincing to clowns who ignore or can’t begin to understand science.
makati1 on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 3:28 am
Outcast, I will take the word of the climate change/warming earth scientists who are way in the majority over a few who, for their own rea$on$ claim otherwise.
I have watched the climates change. I have noticed the freaky weather the US now enjoys because the Arctic is warming up and changing the Jet Stream.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/isobaric/500hPa/orthographic=-96.36,33.05,425
My sister keeps complaining about it every year. It is not so obvious here as we are surrounded by ocean and a I live on a relatively small island that has no desert interior like the US, China or Australia, to warm up. And, being near the equator, the days are almost all of the same length year round, as are the nights. Sun up at ~5:30AM. Sun down at ~5:30PM. The Land of Eternal Summer.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 4:18 am
Good post by energy investor. Do agree, more or less, with:
“I am not worried at all about global warming because it is just a faux crisis.”
Would not call it a faux crisis, but am not entirely convinced about the true causes and if it will continue at all. Burned my fingers with believing in peak-oil-now once.
“The far more immediate and severe crisis is alluded to by the research of the Russian astrophysicists and the continued work of Professor Valentina Zharkova and her team at Northumbria University.”
Yep, could be true. And then there is this logarithmic, not linear, relationship between CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and global warming, which would imply that global warming levels off asymptotically with increasing CO2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5M1qtN62yk
And it is not clear if global warming is really only bad. The planet gets greener and (especially as an aging Dutchman) I love the new warmer conditions. People in India are allowed to disagree on that one.
“But if I were running a country, I would screw down immigration, try to wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy on a user pay basis and then try to establish a steady state economy.”
Totally agree with that one.
For me the purpose of the transition towards renewable energy is to fight climate change (if any), but also geopolitics, that is to produce your energy locally and not depend on thousands of miles of supply routes that could be interrupted, because of certain folks playing empire. And eventually because renewable energy is cheaper, now that the whole world is throwing itself at it and because Mother Nature does not invoice her wind and solar kWh’s. All you need is infrastructure, but the fuel comes for free, until kingdom comes.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:03 am
Massive internal Chinese propaganda for the New Silk Road infrastructure project:
http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/chinas-neue-seidenstrasse-deutsche-medien-bieten-propaganda-plattform-a-1239600.html
The Chinese are preparing their population for an economically integrated Eurasia. If Americans (Anglos) feel excluded, they are correct. The New Silk Road is to become the 11,000 km premier planetary transport backbone.
Additional 900 billion of funds are reserved for rapid expansion of the project that should connect the economic basins of Yangtze and Rhine river deltas with ever larger flows of goods.
Any negative economic fallout from Brexit will be easily and rapidly compensated by this new giant reservoir of import and export opportunities.
About Russian-Chinese “unity”, it is purely the result of neocon threats directed at the two. Here pro-western Japanese source, describing the realities of the “alliance”:
https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/China-and-Russia-build-anti-US-axis-but-Moscow-has-concerns
They do not use the term PBM (Paris-Berlin-Moscow), but they do discern that Russia is in reality very uncomfortable in its current junior position vis-a-vis China.
For people who can count to three, it’s easy to arrive at the real Russians geopolitical desire, namely to team up with Europe and build a counterweight against the seemingly unstoppable rise of Chinese power. In a certain sense is Russia protected from China, because of the behavior of the US, that for the moment is the bigger threat for both China and Russia. If that threat false away (CW2), Russia will gravitate towards Europe at the earliest opportunity. And Australia will be bathing in the sun, like Brigitte Bardot in her best days… without a bloke to protect her against the very big dragon.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:27 am
“All the scientific evidence shows the CO2 component completely overwhelms the solar component re AGW.But clowns like energy investor and getavas imagine differently, and use the usual doomer nonsensical claim of conspiracy where they don’t like the data (i.e. faux crisis).”
OS, I have to agree. You cannot force a planetary system like we are with the carbon cycle and expect climate not to react from a stable state it has been in. We have also deforested the planet and introduced vast amounts of pollutions of many types. We have warmed the oceans and destroyed the food chain there. Coral reefs are bleaching and dying. The ocean plays a huge role in climate and we are acidifying it. We have altered the web of life on land which is also very important to the planetary cycles that regulate climate. Anyone disregarding this is a denier and ones who use science to diminish or downplay the real science of climate are frauds.
I do believe this solar minimum will play a part but likely the part will be even more climate instability. Our civilization exists because of vast monocultures of crops of just a few varieties grown in just a few important regional belts. Anyone who thinks population can go through a rapid die down and remain highly advanced like we are today is dreaming. So if we have a quick die down it will likely mean in a generation most populations if not all will be much less advance possibly nearly primitive. It is the degree and duration of a shock that matters for a species who goes through a die down from overshoot. A quick die down will be a bottleneck. Both our advancement and our population levels will be impacted. It should now be our effort to accept a die down is coming and we should try to lower the degree of shock and lengthen out the duration in a slow decline we can adapt to.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:44 am
British world class humor in action at TEDxBrighton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_Efg_UgAT8
“How I stopped worrying and learned to love Brexit | Joe Wade”
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:47 am
“Good post by energy investor. Do agree, more or less, with: “I am not worried at all about global warming because it is just a faux crisis.” “And it is not clear if global warming is really only bad. The planet gets greener and (especially as an aging Dutchman) I love the new warmer conditions. People in India are allowed to disagree on that one.”
Neder, it is not so much global warming it is global instability. Stable climate produced human agricultural societies that allowed the specialization that got us to where we are now. If stability ends we surely will not support 7BIL plus people and our levels of advancement will likely tumble.
“But if I were running a country, I would screw down immigration, try to wean us off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy on a user pay basis and then try to establish a steady state economy.” “Totally agree with that one.”
Well that all sounds honky dory but first you don’t just screw down immigration in a global economy without ending globalism as we know it and there is no precedence of globalism ending to know how this will result. We are in the dark with history. There is not steady state economy with such a large and advanced global economy. If we went about this downsizing the right way with wisdom and sacrifice we may be able to do less and have more human satisfaction but not much. We are talking a population that likely needs to drop from 7plus to 2 or bellow BILLION. This means growth of both population, economic activity, and affluence must end and go in reverse. Yea, that is not going to be steady state. Steady state is a theory that could work with much small populations with a stable world. There is little chance this will work for our current civilization.
“For me the purpose of the transition towards renewable energy is to fight climate change (if any), but also geopolitics, that is to produce your energy locally and not depend on thousands of miles of supply routes that could be interrupted, because of certain folks playing empire. And eventually because renewable energy is cheaper, now that the whole world is throwing itself at it and because Mother Nature does not invoice her wind and solar kWh’s. All you need is infrastructure, but the fuel comes for free, until kingdom comes.”
We have had this discussion so many times. Renewables may transform our decline. They may lower the shock of dropping net energy. We may have bought some time but renewables will likely not save us. Saying renewables will save this highly consumptive and overpopulated global economy is not intellectual. It is peddling a techno optimism for self-serving reasons. Your reason is a new PBM empire with a resurgent Europe in a Eurasian dominance. This is your agenda. Renewables, climate change, and race are just pieces in the puzzle. Renewables and storage systems will likely not run the type of society we have. Our behavior must change before renewables can really help us otherwise they are just assisting more growth that is unsustainable. There has been an awakening of intellect and spirit but the inertia of what is happening is too great. The forces both active and self-organizing will likely not allow a change without vast pain and suffering. We have so little wisdom today and basic human behavior of the masses is going in the wrong direction and for the wrong reasons. Protest today are about more affluence not less. We need less population and affluence. We are screwed and it is because of our human nature we are screwed.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:55 am
“The Chinese are preparing their population for an economically integrated Eurasia. If Americans (Anglos) feel excluded, they are correct. The New Silk Road is to become the 11,000 km premier planetary transport backbone.”
China is in an slow and unstoppable economic meltdown so they can hype the belt road initiative all they like but economic reality is going in a different direction.
“Additional 900 billion of funds are reserved for rapid expansion of the project that should connect the economic basins of Yangtze and Rhine river deltas with ever larger flows of goods.”
Sounds like more stranded assets and malinvestment to me with a global economy in decline. The Chinese want to double down on globalism when it is globalism and the past 15 years of unprecedented Chinese growth that is killing the planet.
“Any negative economic fallout from Brexit will be easily and rapidly compensated by this new giant reservoir of import and export opportunities.”
Dream on Eurotard.
“About Russian-Chinese “unity”, it is purely the result of neocon threats directed at the two. Here pro-western Japanese source, describing the realities of the “alliance”: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Comment/China-and-Russia-build-anti-US-axis-but-Moscow-has-concerns They do not use the term PBM (Paris-Berlin-Moscow), but they do discern that Russia is in reality very uncomfortable in its current junior position vis-a-vis China.”
Come on neder, show the article content don’t just make up what they are saying like you do. You are a fraud
“For people who can count to three, it’s easy to arrive at the real Russians geopolitical desire, namely to team up with Europe and build a counterweight against the seemingly unstoppable rise of Chinese power.”
Russia is a Mafia state run by a Czar. Putin is about Russian dominance but you are being sucked in by his siren song. It is what you want to hear and part of your fantasy PBM.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 6:15 am
American television attempt at Brexit humor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mtet4-dJy8
“#MattDamon #MileyCyrus #MarkRonson
Happy Christmas, Britain – SNL”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6500795/He-bounced-left-clean-mess-comedy-SNL-mocks-Theresa-Mays-Brexit-stress.html
“Stab in the back”
Tony Bliar visiting Brussels in an attempt to set up a 2nd referendum in the hope that the British this time around vote right:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6500799/Theresa-denounces-Tony-Blair-insulting-office-Prime-Minister.html
May reacted furiously at this attempt to undermine her authority, but several of her cabinet ministers could support it. A 2nd referendum is a major threat that Brexit will be canceled in the last minute, a nightmare for true continental European oriented neo-Gaullists, like myself.
More infighting between the rebel Con-Brexiteers:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6500117/The-heavyweight-contenders-wrestling-job.html
Not going to happen for at least 12 months.
Tess meanwhile has relative high approval ratings (47%), more than double those of Macron:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6499743/Theresa-Mays-approval-rating-highest-Prime-Minister-new-poll-finds.html
In the end the majority of the population will probably back the Barnier-Raab deal. Perhaps Westminster will follow by the end of March.
Is he going to self-deport?
Sajid Davis in favor of closing the borders.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6501001/Sajid-Javid-wants-EU-immigration-slashed-80-cent-Brexit-border-reforms.html
Don’t book that European holiday after March 29 just yet. You might get stuck behind that new Iron Curtain, pushed westwards by 1000 km, now running through the Channel:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6500849/Tourists-warned-not-book-holidays-March-29.html
#BlackpoolHasItsCharm
#SkiingAtSpitsbergenBecomesAllTheRage
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 6:56 am
“England’s Glory or ship of fools?”
https://tinyurl.com/ycqcuzt2
“Properly understood, eroding prosperity has been as instrumental in the “Brexit” process as it has been in the election of Donald Trump, the handing of power to an insurgent (aka “populist”) coalition in Italy, and the elevation, and subsequent travails, of Emmanuel Macron in France.”
“And this, really, is the critical point. Policymakers right across the Western world simply don’t understand that prosperity is heading downwards. Because they (and their advisors, and most of the commentariat) remain wedded to conventional economic interpretations, they really believe that people are getting better off.”
“The reason why financial adventurism has been adopted to create a simulacrum of “growth” is that the energy dynamic has turned negative. According to SEEDS (the Surplus Energy Economics Data System), Britain’s trend energy cost of energy (ECoE) has risen from 3.4% in 2003 to 9.2% now. The latter number is a growth-killer. This has been worse than the global increase (from 4.5% to 8.0%) over the same period, which is one of the main reasons why prosperity has fallen more rapidly in Britain than in most other countries. Part of the differential has been the unlucky timing of the maturing of the UK North Sea oil and gas province. But this has been exacerbated by energy policy, nowhere more obviously than in protracted vacillation over replacement nuclear capacity.”
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 8:50 am
Massive populist demonstration in Brussels against vile UN Marakesh immigration promotion:
https://youtu.be/Lxg8hNiTxMo
The UN needs to be destroyed from the ground up.
Europe, Russia and China should retreat into Eurasia and withdraw from the UN. Trump and Brexit offer the opportunity.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 8:55 am
“Properly understood, eroding prosperity has been as instrumental in the “Brexit” process as it has been in the election of Donald Trump, the handing of power to an insurgent (aka “populist”) coalition in Italy, and the elevation, and subsequent travails, of Emmanuel Macron in France.”
Typical British BS.
Trump presidency = closet white nationalism.
Brexit = British persistent feeling of being a member of the wrong club:
https://www.amazon.com/History-English-Speaking-Peoples-Bloomsbury-Revelations/dp/1474216315/ref=sr_1_1
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 9:03 am
“Russia is a Mafia state run by a Czar.”
Yes and Germans wanted to conquer the world and killed six million in gas chambers and the US is one giant Red Cross organisation, standing by to help people in need.
I know your routine by now.
Cloggie on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 5:03 pm
Why was Victoria Nuland in Kiev in 2014, but not in Paris?
Hint: she did not organize the yellow vest revolt.
https://russia-insider.com/en/still-waiting-vain-victoria-nuland-join-french-protests-cookies/ri25671
JuanP on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 6:20 pm
I see Delusional Davy keeps denying the truth on a dailly basis. I particularly enjoy all his tortuous efforts to deny China’s meteoric rise and the great success of its Belt and Road Initiative. Only someone completely disconnected from the truth could possibly argue that China’s BRI is a huge success. The truth is simple: China is going up and the USA is going down! Are you ready for these changes?
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 6:48 pm
Geeze Juan, you are trying to actually say something? What got into you?
“I see Delusional Davy keeps denying the truth on a daily basis.”
Translation: I have been neutered.
“I particularly enjoy all his tortuous efforts to deny China’s meteoric rise and the great success of its Belt and Road Initiative.”
I don’t deny BRI at all just call into question the cheerleading from the board extremist. You binary individuals have a fantasy picture of China. I have posted multiple articles showing the reality is not the “meteoric” you claim. You anti-American clowns latch on to anything to promote your agenda of a beaten US. This is just not the case. The US is diminished but still a power despite all your wishing and hoping.
“Only someone completely disconnected from the truth could possibly argue that China’s BRI is a huge success.”
It is not finished yet Juan how can it be a success. When will it ever turn a profit? You are preaching instead of analyzing. This is what extremist peddling an agenda do.
“The truth is simple: China is going up and the USA is going down! Are you ready for these changes?”
Sure thing Juan, You sound more and more like a misguided jingoist without a home. China is stalling and ready to have a hard landing. The US is heading that way too. I am not sure who is going to land the hardest first but China is ahead currently. Big storm clouds ahead out there for China but the board extremist billy, you, and neder don’t want to see these things. It messes with the narrative. Sorry life is real not narrated.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:03 pm
For any of you dumbasses that missed my morning post from the hedge. Here’s a recap.
“Escobar: How The New Silk Roads Are Merging Into Greater Eurasia”
https://tinyurl.com/yaxqbhfz
“The conceptual heart of Greater Eurasia is Russia ia’s Turn to the East, or pivot to Asia, home of the economic and technological markets of the future. This implies Greater Eurasia proceeding in symbiosis with China’s New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And yet this advanced stage of the Russia-China strategic partnership does not mean Moscow will neglect its myriad close tIes to Europe”
“ Diesen notes, Russia and China have become inevitable allies because of their “shared objective of restructuring global value-chains and developing a multipolar world”. It’s no wonder Beijing’s drive to develop state-of-the-art national technological platforms is provoking so much anger in Washington. And in terms of the big picture, it makes perfect sense for BRI to be harmonized with Russia’s economic connectivity drive for Greater Eurasia.”
“That’s irreversible. The dogs of demonization, containment, sanctions and even war may bark all they want, but the Eurasia integration caravan keeps moving along ties to Europe.”
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:07 pm
Sorry about the stupid neutering comment Juan. I just remembered that you’ve had a vasectomy. Geez, I am such a dumbass.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:08 pm
Back at it already Juan with your identity theft! You can’t just debate normally. BTW “https://tinyurl.com/yaxqbhfz” that was not my post. You posted it Juan. Escobar is an extremist like you and I generally don’t read him. I am not saying he is all wrong just rights with a bias package.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:10 pm
Have fun lunatic. Going to bed to read. I will clean up your mess in the morning.