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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"
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:14 pm
BTW, anybody that has an opinion different then mine is extremist. Just so y’all know.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:19 pm
Have fun lunatic. Going to bed to read. I will clean up your mess in the morning.
Further to the above. I stocked up on more bleach and baby wipes. Just so all you morons know.
Pleasant dreams dumbasses
makati1 on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:30 pm
JuanP, the stats prove the West is dying and the East is growing. Even the US military recognizes that it is losing the race and, of course, wants more $$$$. Not that that is going to help. The US cannot build anything new that works.
The whole tariff thingy is about trying to keep China down. It has nothing to do with the dollar balance excuses Trump posts on his wiener…er…tweeter. China is tying the world together. Trump is trying to tear it apart. All he is doing is isolating the US.
Tying the world together for the eventual One World Government? We shall see.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 7:32 pm
One last note before I tuck myself in at 8:30 pm. I just realized. The bleach and the baby wipes were both manufactured in China.
Ruh roh!
I AM THE MOB on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 8:44 pm
Mak
Prepping is futile
Myth: Well-prepared individuals, groups, and communities will survive our impending collapse and maintain healthy, fulfilling, and productive lives in its aftermath.
Reality: Those who survive our collapse will be those who can obtain sufficient life sustaining essentials—especially clean water and food—on a continuous basis, both during and after collapse. Those who store large quantities of these essentials and those who attempt to produce food, either individually or in communities, will be easy targets for the vast majority who have neither the foresight to store nor the skills to produce. No matter how remote or secluded your sanctuary, somebody will know about it; and they will come to call when they become desperate; and they will be well armed and devoid of compassion. You can prepare for a last stand, but you cannot prepare for post-collapse survival. Post-collapse Life Will Be Preferable to Our Industrial Lifestyle Paradigm
Myth: Industrialization has brought nothing but misery and degradation to the human race; our quality of life (and spiritual wellbeing) will improve substantially in a post-collapse world.
Reality: The post-collapse lifestyle awaiting the few who survive will, under the best of circumstances, share many attributes with pre-Columbian America. Unfortunately, the realities associated with subsistence level existence bear little semblance to the Hollywood accounts.
Those who anxiously await our post-collapse world will be disappointed, assuming they live to experience it. The fact that nobody is opting to jettison the amenities afforded by an industrialized way of life in favor of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle today should be sufficient proof that our future way of life is not something to be anticipated. Industrialism is not inherently “evil” or immoral; it is simply physically impossible going forward.
Davy on Sun, 16th Dec 2018 9:20 pm
Shame on me…….Someone, anyone, please castrate me post haste.
Otherwise, it’s up the butt and through the ol’ penis.
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 12:13 am
MOB: ” Those who survive our collapse will be those who can obtain sufficient life sustaining essentials—especially clean water and food—on a continuous basis, both during and after collapse.”
Correct! And that is what we are setting up here. Americans are helpless. No survival skills, bad health, etc, Filipinos are much more self sufficient. Most live on less than $5 per day. Most already grow their own food. You would not know as you have never been here. Sure the cities will contract and the people will go home to family. THAT is a huge difference. A thousand year culture that is used to hard times.
Life pre industrialization was difficult. You had to work for your living, as in sweat and ache. But you didn’t have the stress of modern industrial life. Your “conveniences” own you today. You have to earn the money to buy them. Then you have to deal with planned obsolescence, meaning they will wear out/quit at regular intervals and need replacement. Then there is the space needed to keep them. Insurance to protect them. Maintenance. Energy input. Etc..
When you scale down to the real “necessities” of life, you also gain a freedom most Americans never experience. I came to the Ps with two suitcases. True, I have added to my “stuff” over the 10+ years, but I can still get all of it in about six large suitcases, and if I lose it all tomorrow, I will not stress over the loss. No “thing” is more important than my life.
I plan to watch the coming events from my land of eternal summer. Cannot freeze. No taxes. Plenty to eat, even though the diet may get a bit boring. Rice, fish, chicken, eggs, veggies, fruits. No, I think I will manage quite well. LOL
Greenie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 2:03 am
I am sure that this article has the big picture right. My tuppence; just as individual storms can’t be attributed directly to increase in global temperature, particular instances of turmoil cannot be attributed directly to the decline in energy, but the direction of travel is clear. So I agree with Cloggie that there is no direct link between Brexit and EROI, but it fits the pattern. Similarly, the author SERIOUSLY underestimates the role of the west in the deliberate destabilisation of the M.E. and has fallen completely for western war propaganda – but his point about Syrian famine and decreasing revenues obviously made Syria a softer target.
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 2:40 am
“Declutter your life: Why becoming a minimalist is a win-win for your finances”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/columnist/2018/12/14/declutter-why-clearing-out-stuff-financial-win/
“It’s hard not to think of a journey toward minimalism as a win-win. You get rid of junk, live a cleaner, more organized life and potentially end up with more money and nicer possessions.”
Been there. Done that. One quality item instead of 10 pieces of cheap junk.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 4:40 am
“France in Turmoil… Blame Russia!”
https://tinyurl.com/yby3vom5
The French public are incensed by mounting economic hardship under the government of President Emmanuel Macron, the former investment banker who wants to gut workers’ rights and social benefits under the euphemism of “reforms”. That’s after he and his wife recently redecorated the gilded Élysée Palace with ornate furnishings, wallpaper and carpets to the tune of €600,000. Many French workers are struggling to even heat their homes, such is prevalence of poverty.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 4:40 am
“The ECB’s Quantitative Easing Failure”
https://tinyurl.com/yal44bxf
1. Eurozone PMIs are atrocious. The euro-zone index falls from 52.7 in November to 51.3 in December, well below the consensus forecast of 52.8. More importantly, France’s PMI plummeted from 54.2 in November to a 34-month low of 49.3. 2. Unemployment in the euro-zone, at 8%, is double that of the US and comparable economies. Youth unemployment rate remains at 15%. 3. Economic surprise has plummeted as the ECB balance sheet reached 41% of GDP (vs 21% of the Fed). 4. More than 900 billion euro of non-performing loans remain in the banking system, which keeps a trillion euro timebomb in its balance sheets (read). A figure that represents 5.1% of total loans compared to 1.5% in the US or Japan. 5. Deficit spending is rising. Government debt to GDP has risen to 86.8%. 6. The number of zombie companies -those that cannot pay interest expenses with operating profits- has soared to more than 9% of all large quoted firms, according to the BIS. 7. Sovereign states have saved around one trillion euro in interest expenses, but have spent all those savings. Today, almost no eurozone country can absorb a modest rise in interest rates, and Italy, Spain, France, Portugal, Slovenia, and others are demanding more spending and more deficits. 8. There is no real secondary market demand for eurozone sovereign bonds at these yields. At the peak of its quantitative easing program, the Federal Reserve was never the sole buyer of Treasuries. There was always a relative secondary market. In the Eurozone, the ECB has been 7 seven times the net issuances of sovereigns. No investor is likely to buy eurozone sovereign bonds at these yields once the ECB steps down. 9. Eurozone growth and inflation estimates have been revised down again in December. Industrial production has fallen sharply. 10. Trichet, the ECB’s predecessor to Mario Draghi, had lowered interest rates from 5% to 1%, injected billions into the economy, buying sovereign bonds in 2011.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:25 am
“Europe’s Retail Apocalypse Spreads to Online From Shopping Malls”
https://tinyurl.com/y9qjf2yp
“Europe’s retail crisis is spreading from bricks-and-mortar stores to e-commerce as Asos Plc plunged the most in 4 1/2 years after warning that Christmas shopping got off to a disastrous start. The gloomy update from a U.K. online retailer that competes with Amazon.com Inc. and has furnished fashions to the likes of Meghan Markle shows that retail weakness is widespread in the runup to the holidays. Last week, Sports Direct International Plc Chief Executive Officer Mike Ashley said sales were “unbelievably bad” in November, sending the shares off a cliff.”
Cloggie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:34 am
““Europe’s Retail Apocalypse Spreads to Online From Shopping Malls””
According to Bloomberg: “Europe” = UK shopping mall Asos.
Never heard of Asos, let alone continental European online “apocalypse”. More Anglo wishful thinking.
Asos likely has to do with Brexit.
Europe has the New Silk Road.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:38 am
“Europe’s Retail Apocalypse Spreads to Online From Shopping Malls”
(graph) https://tinyurl.com/ybhcglkw
Neder, can you show me some silk road companies and their performance?
Cloggie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 8:31 am
Apart from Zalando never heard of any of them. Most are probably British.
Don’t be silly with your “New Silk Road Companies”. The essence is the construction of a new giant “goods pipeline” between China and Europe, lowering the cost of transport, hence increasing trade opportunities. The trade route can’t be blocked by predators who opine that they own the entire world. Additionally it helps defining the WW3 battle lines of the near future.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 8:35 am
“construction of a new giant “goods pipeline” between China and Europe”
AH, where are the results? IMA, any of this can be done by sea born freight. BRI is a nothingburger for euroland. It gives people like you neder a chance to ride a train to China and crow about Eurasian greatness.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 9:16 am
Davy continues living in denial; he is such a good American! LOL! I posted an article here a couple of days ago that reported how rail cargo between Europe and Asia has grown by more than 70% this year. More than 6,000 trains have made the trip so far this year. Davy, the USA is going down faster everyday because stupid, ignorant, weak, greedy, evil, cowardly Americans living in denial like you are destroying it, but, by all means continue blaming China, Russia, etc.. I am quite certain that the USA is going down because Americans are like an anchor around its neck. China and Russia, on the other hand, seem a little less disconnected from reality and that probably means they will fare better. Also, no other civilization in human history achieved less with so much than the USA; they are the most wasteful culture to ever had existed. Not even the Romans came close.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 9:22 am
“The Irish should know their place”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/446691-ireland-britain-brexit-border/
I think that there is something intrinsically wrong with Anglosaxons. I don’t know whether it is genetic or cultural, but many of them tend to be the most repulsive people on Earth. I wish these assholes could be forced to live with the consequences of their words and actions. I am 1/4 English and ashamed of it.
Cloggie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 9:26 am
“IMA, any of this can be done by sea born freight”
That would be true if all Chinese production would occur at the coast, but that isn’t true. And then there is the speed gain of up to 200 kmh, more or less at shortest possible distance, avoiding the Suezcanal.
Keep telling yourself the NSR is a nothingburger, that Brexit is irrelevant and that renewables can’t work without oil.
That all is exactly what we want you to believe.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 9:51 am
China is celebrating 40 years of opening up and reform. What the Chinese have achieved in the last 40 years is nothing short of a miracle. They lifted 700 million Chinese citizens out of poverty by implementing extremely smart policies that led to the fastest, strongest, biggest, uninterrupted economic growth of any nation in human history. I am filled with respect and admiration for the Chinese people and government. China keeps getting better while the USA keeps getting worse. But don’t worry, according to Davy China will fall first! ROFLMFAO! Insanity rules in the USA! LOL!
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:02 am
“JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 9:16 am”
“I posted an article here a couple of days ago that reported how rail cargo between Europe and Asia has grown by more than 70% this year.”
You mean the one you posted using my handle by “Escobar: How The New Silk Roads Are Merging Into Greater Eurasia” right. “Gotcha”
“Davy, the USA is going down faster everyday because stupid, ignorant, weak, greedy, evil, cowardly Americans living in denial like you are destroying it, but, by all means continue blaming China, Russia, etc..”
Nonsense, your emotional no factual assessment is not accurate. The global economy is stalling including China and we are going down together. You are in denial of this.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:04 am
“I am filled with respect and admiration for the Chinese people and government. China keeps getting better while the USA keeps getting worse.”
I bet you are in awe and admiration for the planetary destruction of the Chinese cancer too, no doubt.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:07 am
“That would be true if all Chinese production would occur at the coast, but that isn’t true. And then there is the speed gain of up to 200 kmh, more or less at shortest possible distance, avoiding the Suezcanal.”
Much of China’s production is on the coast as well as a significant amount of its population. “”nothingburger for euroland””. It is more significant for Asia, Africa, And Russia.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:33 am
More Sinophobic nonsense from the board’s American Exceptionalist living in denial. Three emotional, extremely biased comments with nothing but lies and falsehoods. A typical contribution from the board’s most insane regular! ROFLMFAO! God, you are such a pathetic widdle piece of American shit, Exceptionalist!
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:38 am
Delusional Davy “Nonsense, your emotional no factual assessment is not accurate.”
You are projecting again, Exceptionalist! LOL! You are the most dishonest person I’ve come across in my life, Davy. You claim to want the truth and yet you deny it with your every breath. Your family must be very ashamed of you. Little wonder they bought that farm in flyover country to send you there. Not even your children love you! You are one sad fuck of an excuse of a human.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:44 am
Delusional Davy “I bet you are in awe and admiration for the planetary destruction of the Chinese cancer too, no doubt.”
You are wrong again, Davy. I think you are confusing your feelings for your country with mine for China. By the way, there is no country in the world that is more responsible for the global environmental destruction the world has seen than the USA. Are you proud to be an American? Are you proud to be a terrorist supporter? The USA is not just the most destructive country in human history, it is also the biggest terrorist organization in human history, too. At least the USA is #1 at something! ROFLMFAO!
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 10:45 am
Juan, just when I thought you might begin the process of returning to being a mature and rational contributor you return to your rouge and lawless ways. You above two comments are just gaming. You did some puppeteering this morning so that was ugly but at least no identity theft that is a start. You need a 12 step program on being human.
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 11:28 am
Delusional Davy “You need a 12 step program on being human.”
I think that is an AA reference, but I am neither an addict nor a drunk; I think you may be projecting again, Davy! LOL! No amount of steps would make you a better person, though, you are a complete piece of shit and you will keep getting worse until you die, loser. Why don’t you do everyone a favor and kill yourself. I know your family would be glad to get rid of you as would most of us here. I am afraid that if you don’t kill yourself or get institutionalized you are going to go on a typical American murdering rampage and murder others. It is people like you that doomed this country. You are the worst the USA has to offer.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 11:48 am
Juan, I am honored that such a disgusting and revolting person like you feels this way. Since July you have taken this forum into the gutter. It has never been this screwed up. You are the reason and your actions are all about you but you pretend it is for the board. You don’t care about anybody but you. This is documented in your words in forum history. If I could spit in your face I would. I would do worse but then you are not worth it. Get the fuck out of my country you hate with such a passion.
Antius on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 12:40 pm
“I think that there is something intrinsically wrong with Anglosaxons. I don’t know whether it is genetic or cultural, but many of them tend to be the most repulsive people on Earth. I wish these assholes could be forced to live with the consequences of their words and actions. I am 1/4 English and ashamed of it.”
JuanP demonstrating just how much he really knows about ‘The English’ and British political history. Like many on the American Left, he probably thinks Braveheart is some sort of historical documentary. An in-depth view of British political history would bore him, so he prefers to think of ‘The English’ as some sort of mythical villain that terrorised its Celtic neighbours throughout history. That sort of view may please Scottish and Irish nationalists, but it could hardly be further from reality.
The mediaeval English ‘oppression’ of the Scottish, was a series of skirmishes between ‘Norman’ occupied England and Scotland that went on for over five centuries. The Scottish had relatively little arable farmland, suffered frequent famine and would periodically invade and pillage Northern England, requiring the Normans (and later English) to repel them from Northumbria and Cumbria. Scotland was never a very tempting target for the Normans to conquer; it was far from the population centres of the South, making it difficult to control and it lacked productive agricultural resources, so there was no real wealth to benefit from. None the less, it was a constant threat to Northern England. Edward 1st attempted to quell the Scottish unsuccessfully. One only need look at the fortifications built to protect the border towns of Northern England to realise what a threat they were.
By the 16th century, England and Scotland were heavily integrated economically. The 1707 Act of Union formalised an arrangement that was already an economic reality. In part it was an attempt by the ‘English’ to pay the Scottish off and end once and for all the constant threat that they posed to Northern England. In return, the Scots gained access to England’s overseas wealth. If you remade Braveheart and gave Mel Gibson a Cumbrian accent and set it within a Cumbrian town occupied by the Scottish, then the brutality of the film would be true to life. Except it would be Scottish brutality against poor and smelly English people.
The ‘English’ occupation of Northern Ireland is basically a Scottish Protestant occupation. The ‘Irish’ potato famine affected all of Britain – the 1840s were remembered as the ‘Hungry Forties’. The Great Hunger was aggravated by the Corn Laws; an attempt by wealthy land owners (English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh) to protect their incomes by restricting food imports from abroad. The idea of it being an English attempt to oppress and callously exploit the Irish doesn’t really stack up, given how many English people died from hunger in the 1840s. A better way of looking at it would be wealthy land owners exploiting poor people. The only silver lining of the whole sorry episode was that that the scandal permanently ended the absolute power of the landed aristocracy in Britain. From that point onward, the mercantile class gained the balance of power.
The idea that the ‘English’ have unfairly victimised their Celtic neighbours is absurd to anyone that understands British history. The reality of the British elite is a rich Anglo-Scottish-Protestant Irish (and later Jewish) over class, often exploiting poor people. But for better and for worse, Britain has been a partnership of people that largely made the modern world what it is, for many centuries. The technology, customs, infrastructure, code of law, language and political reality of the world is disproportionately what we made it.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 4:00 pm
“If I could spit in your face I would. I would do worse but then you are not worth it. Get the fuck out of my country you hate with such a passion.”
Sorry for losing my shit again everyone.
I need to learn how to contain my nasty widdle temper tantrums.
Cloggie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 4:30 pm
Brexit vote third week of January:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6503315/May-joins-forces-Boris-condemn-Brexit-referendum-calls.html
So, now switch on the telly to watch Newsnight…
JuanP on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:16 pm
“I know your family would be glad to get rid of you as would most of us here. I am afraid that if you don’t kill yourself or get institutionalized you are going to go on a typical American murdering rampage and murder others.”
Sorry for losing my shit again everyone.
I need to learn how to contain my nasty widdle temper tantrums.
Cloggie on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:27 pm
Richard Spencer White Christmas broadcast:
https://youtu.be/v96HbZyU3vA
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:36 pm
“Yellow Vests” & The Downward Mobility Of The Middle Class”
https://tinyurl.com/y82qv5st
“Capital garners the gains, and labor’s share continues eroding. That’s the story of the 21st century. The middle class, virtually by definition, is not prepared for downward mobility. A systemic, semi-permanent decline in the standard of living isn’t part of the implicit social contract that’s been internalized by the middle class virtually everywhere: living standards are only supposed to rise. Any decline is temporary. Downward mobility is the key context in the gilets jaunes “yellow vest” movement in France. Taxes and prices rise inexorably while wages/pensions stagnate. The only possible outcome of this structural asymmetry is a decline in the standard of living.”
“Many commentators have listed the systemic sources of the erosion in standards of living and financial security: the loss of cheap, plentiful oil to fuel “growth” at rates that lift all boats; the financialization of the economy, which favors capital over labor; globalization, which increases corporate profits via labor, social welfare and pollution arbitrage (move production where these costs are the lowest), and the corruption of the political machinery via pay-to-play (favoring the corporations and super-wealthy) and the concentration of financial and political power in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. Another way to understand this downward mobility is: the elites no longer need a vibrant middle class to hold power and increase their wealth. The real money is in globalized capital flows, access to central bank credit and ownership of debt. The role of the middle class has largely been reduced to being compliant, passive debt-serfs who can borrow money to fill the yawning gap in their standard of living and make the payments.”
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:39 pm
JuanP: “The USA is not just the most destructive country in human history, it is also the biggest terrorist organization in human history, too.”
Absolutely correct!
Re Davy: “It is people like you that doomed this country. You are the worst the USA has to offer.”
Again absolutely correct!
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:49 pm
JuanP: “The USA is not just the most destructive country in human history, it is also the biggest terrorist organization in human history, too.”
Absolutely correct! Even worse than Genghis Kahn.
Re Davy: “It is people like you that doomed this country. You are the worst the USA has to offer.”
Again, absolutely correct! Davy is totally brainwashed and he doesn’t seem to realize it. Goebbels would be very impressed with the empire’s sucess in indoctrinating its citizen debt slaves. US good! Russia bad! US exceptional! China trash! Twenty years ago China and Russia were friends. Now…? But American memories are about one tweet long. The US is swirling down the shitter faster and faster every day. So be it.
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:50 pm
Second post is the revised/extended first post. LOL
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:55 pm
“Re Davy: “It is people like you that doomed this country. You are the worst the USA has to offer.” Again absolutely correct!”
Quit the childish putdowns billy you are just showing how beaten and wounded you are. JuanP is a lunatic and you support his bad behavior and then whine about it. You are one messed up old man. Your complicit in this disgusting behavior.
“Again, absolutely correct! Davy is totally brainwashed and he doesn’t seem to realize it.”
Billy, again, I kick your ass nearly every argument we have no wonder you are so hostile and hypocritical. Who is the one always whining about putdowns and now look at you. Pathetic
“Goebbels would be very impressed with the empire’s sucess in indoctrinating its citizen debt slaves”
Listen to yourself stupid you are the one: “swirling down the shitter faster and faster every day. So be it.”
I AM THE MOB on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:58 pm
Mak
The US invented the airplane and the TV and internet..We have changed the world for the better..You wouldn’t have made it to your island without the US inventions..
So show some respect you ignorant fuck!
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:58 pm
“Second post is the revised/extended first post. LOL”
Translation:
I was so friggin excited by the thought of attacking Davy I screwed up. I layed in bed last night thinking about him. NUMBNUT
I AM THE MOB on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 5:58 pm
End of days: Is Western civilization on the brink of collapse?
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731610-300-end-of-days-is-western-civilisation-on-the-brink-of-collapse/
Fantastic article!
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:00 pm
The wealthy have been raping the serfs since, well, forever, but the current batch of elite vampires realize that the end is near and even they cannot stop the end of capitalism and fiat money as the system goes into the toilet. Even the serfs are waking up to that fact.
Intelligent countries are preparing for a reversion to the old gold standard and means of trade that do not rely on BAU and JIT delivery. That pretty much excludes the Western countries and Japan, as this article points out. It is only beginning. Are you prepared?
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:02 pm
Davy, I do not even think of you except here when I post, and then only slightly. You are a zero.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:02 pm
“Intelligent countries are preparing for a reversion to the old gold standard”
Where dummy? got some references for your pseudo economic drivel?
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:05 pm
“Davy, I do not even think of you except here when I post, and then only slightly. You are a zero.”
Sure you do billy, you have been coming out swing first thing when you get up. I have trashed your binary mind and you are finally breaking apart.
makati1 on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:22 pm
mOB: Inventions =
Boat – Netherlands 8000 BC
Concrete – Syria 6500 BC
Wheel – Russia 3500 BC
Abacus – China 3000 BC (Early computer)
Iron processing – China area 2000 BC
Paper – China 105 AD
Gun powder – China 800
Compass – China 1100
Firearms – China 1300
Eye glasses – Italy 1286
Telescope – England 1668
Steam engine – England 1698 Beginning of FF Age)
Air ships = France 1852
Combustion engine – France 1852 (Made airplanes possible)
Television – Many inventors and countries involved. 1800s
Modern computer – Germany 1941
World wide web – UK 1989
http://totallyhistory.com/history-of-technology/famous-inventions/
Get educated before you make assertions, MOB.
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:41 pm
I’m afraid to interact with people in the real world, cause I’d get my pussy widdle ass kicked so hard I’d be crying for my mommy.
MOMMY!
Davy on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:45 pm
I AM NOT FUCKING CRAZY!
STUPID DUMBASSES!
Admin on Mon, 17th Dec 2018 6:48 pm
Whoa there widdle fella. Take a few deep breaths and try to relax.
How’s about registering and becoming a real member here at PO.com? We promise not to report you to the FBI.