Never mind Peak Oil. What about Peak Neodymium? Peak Terbium? Peak Dysprosium? Peak Lanthanum?
Among the rare earths that would be most affected in a shortage is neodymium, the key component of an alloy used to make the high-power, lightweight magnets for electric motors of hybrid cars, such as the Prius, Honda Insight and Ford Focus, as well as in generators for wind turbines.
Close cousins terbium and dysprosium are added in smaller amounts to the alloy to preserve neodymium's magnetic properties at high temperatures. Yet another rare earth metal, lanthanum, is a major ingredient for hybrid car batteries.
Production of both hybrids cars and wind turbines is expected to climb sharply amid the clamor for cleaner transportation and energy alternatives that reduce dependence on fossil fuels blamed for global climate change.
And where, pray tell, do most of these metals come from?
That makes Toyota's market-leading gasoline-electric hybrid car and other similar vehicles vulnerable to a supply crunch predicted by experts as China, the world's dominant rare earths producer, limits exports while global demand swells.
Remember our post from last Wednesday?
World faces metals crunch as China considers export restrictions.
This brings to mind "Liebig's Law of the Minimum": growth is limited not by the total number of resources, but by the resource in greatest scarcity. Most of the worlds PGMs (Platinum, Palladium, Rhodium, which are all critical) come from Russia or South Africa. And many of the rare ones (Neodymiwhatsit) are from China. This is news to me too. So, we have the beginnings of scarcity, and the double whammy - those metals and minerals are in places that need them just as much as the outside world. Think they'll give them to us?
Soon we'll be looking for the most precious element of all: UNOBTANIUM.
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Four critical resources that may run out in your lifetime. A bit over-stated to say the least, but it's interesting to see depletion get a foothold in popular culture. The problem here is the term "run out" - which I take to mean "disappear". Neither fish, food, oil or water is going to disappear - but they are likely to be in much scarcer supply than at present. For many people this will amount to disappearance. Still:
We're living in lucky times. Living standards - in the Western world, at least - are the highest in history. It's an era of relative peace and plenty that would amaze our ancestors. But it's not going to continue forever; we're already stretching many of our natural resources to their limits, and the world's population will jump from 6.5 billion to around 9 billion over the next 50 years. Get ready for a painful correction - here are four interconnected resources that are headed for a catastrophic squeeze within our lifetime.
Since natural gas is now in decline in Canada, plans are afoot to build nuclear power plants to provide process energy for tar sands operations and possibly to produce hydrogen through the electrolysis of water. Oil shale developers are faced with the same challenges. They need heat, and for some extraction processes they need hydrogen. Either they will use natural gas which appears to have peaked in North America--the hype about shale gas notwithstanding--or they will use nuclear power.
The question then is this: Why not use these high-quality energy sources to power transportation and heat homes directly? Doing so would produce far fewer greenhouse gas emissions. And, direct use of these energy sources would be far more efficient than using them to transform tar sands and oil shale into useable petroleum products. The response from the oil industry has always been that we'd need a different infrastructure. But the answer to this objection is as follows: Why not build that infrastructure now? Why wait until the oil flow tops out at the tar sands and oil shale fields to do this?
Gorgon is just one of a clutch of LNG projects planned in the next decade that analysts say will pump tens of billions of dollars into the economy and see Australia challenge Qatar as the world's major gas exporter...
...Australia exported 15.2 million tonnes of LNG worth 5.2 billion dollars in 2006, a figure the government estimates will quadruple to 60 million tonnes by 2015 if all currently planned projects proceed.
Friendly Reminder to Australia: don't forget to use some of the ca$h to make a few thousand desalination plants.
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Yay! More Natgas = more PLASTIC! Hooray for Homo-sapiens.
The sheer quantity of plastic that accumulates in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex formed by ocean and wind currents and located 1,000 miles off the California coast, has the scientists worried about how it might harm the sea creatures there...
Katsuhiko Saido, a chemist at Nihon University, Chiba, Japan, told the annual meeting of the American Chemical Society last week that plastic actually does decompose, releasing potentially toxic chemicals that can disrupt the functioning of hormones in animals and marine life...
The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Germany's only storage test facility for high-level nuclear waste, into which Berlin has invested nearly $2 billion over the past years, is unsafe and needs to be closed, experts say.
Does this mean alternative energy is a waste of time? Of course not. Modest as the energy outputs from alternative sources are, they’re what we’ll have to work with when the fossil fuel is gone. What it means, rather, is that the particular kind of civilization we’ve built in the last three centuries will not survive the end of cheap abundant fossil fuels. A society that is used to getting things done by rolling huge boulders down steep slopes is going to have to learn to make do on the much less lavish results of bouncing pebbles across the flat.
The problem here is that very few people want to deal with that reality. The great majority will make themselves believe in zero point energy and evil space lizards and any other absurdity you care to name, rather than gulp and take a deep breath and admit that the prosperity we’ve enjoyed for the last three centuries was bought at our grandchildren’s expense. I sometimes suspect that one of the reasons so many people like to imagine an apocalyptic end to the industrial age is that sudden extinction is easier to contemplate than the experience of slowly waking up to the full extent of our own collective stupidity.
But last month, the Swedish Riksbank entered uncharted territory when it became the world’s first central bank to introduce negative interest rates on bank deposits.
Global Warming could change the Earth's tilt. Visit the equator without leaving your own home! (OK, that was deliberate Ecofascist Fear-mongering Hyperbole).
Warming oceans could cause Earth's axis to tilt in the coming century, a new study suggests. The effect was previously thought to be negligible, but researchers now say the shift will be large enough that it should be taken into account when interpreting how the Earth wobbles.
...something odd has happened that has satellite observers scratching their heads: the Air Force has announced the upcoming launch of a classified satellite from Cape Canaveral, but no government agency, certainly not the NRO, has claimed ownership. Its mission remains mysterious, as do other aspects of its existence...
The launch is designated PAN.
...Some Internet commentators joked that PAN stood for “pick a name.”
...But recently the launch patch for the mission was publicly released and it reveals that the name of the launch is not PAN. PAN is merely a shortened version of: “Palladium At Night.”
In the Greatest Country on Earth, healthcare can come to this 'charity':
Good Samaritan makes no secret of where it stands on the issue; the government has no business involving itself in healthcare.
"Governments treat you like a number," said the organisation's director, Dr John Crouch. "I really believe that there has to be a way to cover the folks who can't get care at all, and I think one of the ways is what we're doing. Maybe there's a different way of funding us, besides just funding us through our donations. We're emphasising that the more all the time."
Hersey concedes that the present system can be a tragedy for the poor.
What happens to someone with a chronic disease and no insurance? A woman with cancer, say, who might get the surgery she needs thanks to Good Samaritan but not the medicines afterwards. Hersey hesitates.
"They go without," she said.
You mean they die?
"Yes."
But Hersey quickly added that where there is no chemotherapy there is still God.
A hard-working (i.e. farming) adult burns about 2 million kilocalories (“calories”) per year. The food energy from Pimentel’s hectare of corn is about 7 million kilocalories. Under primitive conditions, then, 1 hectare of corn would support only 3 or 4 people — or, in other words, 1 square kilometer would support 300 or 400 people. And all of these are ideal numbers; we are assuming that all resources are distributed rationally and equitably. (We are also assuming no increase in population, but famine and the attendant decrease in fertility will take care of that matter very soon.) Even if every inch of our planet’s “arable portion” were devoted to the raising of corn or other useful crops, we would have trouble squeezing in those 470 people mentioned in the previous paragraph.
Given such figures, I have little patience with writers who sprinkle the words “alternative,” “sustainable,” and “transition” over every page. Simple arithmetic is all that is needed to show that such a lexicon is unsuitable.
Top Inside-the-Beltway Democrats are trying to serve up a two-decades old fiasco again: touting natural gas as the "bridge fuel" for a renewable energy utopia...
...The justification for this new solution of gas? Shale! Gas trapped in rock! This is not a new idea, nor is the notion that harder to access/process fossil supplies are made wonderfully available when prices for conventional fuels rise high enough and technology gets more sophisticated. But we can suffice to say that when unconventional supplies for fossil fuels are somehow attractive and need to be tapped to keep the house-of-cards economy going, we are clearly witnessing the sunset for U.S. fossil foolery and U.S. full-spectrum supremacy of the world.
Berman feels that the USGS technically recoverable gas estimates for Barnett Shale are likely way to high, even though many companies believe the opposite. The USGS estimates total technically recoverable resources of 26 trillion cubic feet in Barnett Shale. Berman estimates that the 11,817 wells drilled to date will only produce about a third of this amount, or 8.8 trillion cubic feet.
A Lebanese citizen being held in a detention center here was hooded, stripped naked for photographs and bundled onto an executive jet by FBI agents in Afghanistan in April, making him the first known target of a rendition during the Obama administration.
Unlike terrorism suspects who were secretly snatched by the CIA and harshly interrogated and imprisoned overseas during the George W. Bush administration, Raymond Azar was flown to this Washington suburb for a case involving inflated invoices.
Azar, 45, pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiracy to commit bribery, the only charge against him. He faces a maximum of five years in prison, but a sentence of 2 1/2 years or less is likely under federal guidelines.
Defense lawyers and prosecutors declined to comment on the case Friday.
But Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counter-terrorism director at Human Rights Watch, called the case "bizarre."
"He was treated like a high-security terrorist instead of someone accused of a relatively minor white-collar crime," she said.
Justice Department lawyers have denied any misconduct in the case.
A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs.
China mines over 95pc of the world’s rare earth minerals, mostly in Inner Mongolia. The move to hoard reserves is the clearest sign to date that the global struggle for diminishing resources is shifting into a new phase. Countries may find it hard to obtain key materials at any price.
For bonus points, read the comments following the article. DENIAL! ANGER! BARGAINING! Forget DEPRESSION and ACCEPTANCE, however.
The Euphrates, once broad and endlessly green, is now narrow and drab. In parts it is a slick black ooze, fit only for scores of bathing water buffalo. Giant pumps lay metres out of reach. Some are rusting. "Not long ago, the level of the Euphrates was at this rust line," said Awda Khasaf, a local leader in the al-Akerya marshlands, as he pointed at the dwindling river.
"It has now dropped more than 1.5m. This river feeds all the agriculture lands and marsh lands in Nasiriyah. It smells like this because it is stagnant," he said. "We turned to agriculture in 1991 after Saddam's rampage, but now the government has ordered us to stop rice farming."
The main thing to take away here is that credit card charge-offs and delinquencies are getting pretty bad and have the potential to go to 'worse.' The lagging effect of these charge-offs and delinquencies cannot be overstated as these problems slowly fester. Too many consumers have been struggling and now find themselves caught in the undertow; the wave has been building for some time now. The only questions now are how big will it get and when will it crash down?
So why did American liberals believe Obama would bring home the healthcare bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It's a big neighborhood, a very special place where "Your vote is important," and "by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation." Most of America lives in that neighborhood, even though they've never personally met. It's a place where the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as "values" and "hope" bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can affect "change." Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, "Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first."
As the world's population grows, competition for food, water and energy will increase. Food prices will rise, more people will go hungry, and migrants will flee the worst-affected regions.
As a visitor to Las Vegas you could be forgiven for not understanding that the city is suffering a prolonged and extreme drought. Yes, there was a small sign in the bathroom of my hotel room that read: "Dear Guest, Southern Nevada and the West are experiencing extreme drought conditions." It suggested reusing towels as do most hotels now, even ones not located in drought-striken areas. But it did not suggest any other measures I might take.
Outside the hotel and in seeming contradiction to the bathroom message, the Las Vegas strip is brimming with so-called "water features," a term taken from geology for naturally occurring water on the earth's surface or underground. But these are anything but natural. Perhaps the most spectacular is the fountain at the Bellagio which has water jets that shoot maybe 100 feet into the air and dance to tunes broadcast by cleverly concealed outdoor loudspeakers. (The link leads to a video of the fountain in action though one must really be there to appreciate it fully.) The pool from which this bit of spectacle originates looks like a small reservoir several football fields in size.
A few generations from now our descendants will wonder, “What took them so long to figure out that we’d reached the limits to growth?” The answer, of course, is that growth is the core of the myth holding the American psyche together. If it’s false, what’s the meaning of “life, the universe, everything?”
Germany was able to sell unused certificates across Europe -- to coal companies in countries like Poland or Slovakia, for example. Thanks to Germany's wind turbines, these companies were then able to emit more greenhouse gases than originally planned. Given the often lower efficiency of Eastern European power plants, this is anything but environmentally beneficial.
The average water temperature worldwide was 62.6 degrees, according to the National Climatic Data Center, the branch of the U.S. government that keeps world weather records. June was only slightly cooler, while August could set another record, scientists say. The previous record was set in July 1998 during a powerful El Nino weather pattern.
Meteorologists said there's a combination of forces at work: A natural El Nino system just getting started on top of worsening man-made global warming, and a dash of random weather variations. The resulting ocean heat is already harming threatened coral reefs. It could also hasten the melting of Arctic sea ice and help hurricanes strengthen.
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Green shoots of recovery my rectum. Mexico's Canterall oilfield (8th largest on Earth) may be Dead by 2010.
The days when you could find a supergiant oil field while fishing are over. Cantarell came late, in the oil age. That meant this global giant would receive all the best doctoring modern technology could provide. The result is that Cantarell was pumped out effectively and hard, especially after the technique to re-pressurize the field was adopted. This allowed for a spike high of daily production to be captured for several years, late in its life when a field would otherwise go into gentle decline. The result? Quicker monetization of the oil for the benefit of the Mexican state. But then the price: a catastrophic, fast crash...
...the next oil crisis will unfold as Mexico loses the ability to export oil, starting sometime in late 2011. However, as so often is the case in this era of peak oil, that forecast now looks optimistic. Mexico will need all the oil they produce for their own economy. But to have an economy, Mexico will also need to solve the problem of another decline: the crash in oil revenues, upon which Mexico has depended for so many decades.
Still not convinced about ‘Peak Oil’? Then review Figure 2 which charts the expected combined flow rates for crude oil, lease condensates and Canadian Oil Sands. As you can see from the grey shaded area, production is about to decline by roughly 5 million barrels per day by 2012.
Whew, what a relief! Everybody from Ben Bernanke and a Who's Who of banking poobahs schmoozing it up in the heady vapors of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to the dull scribes at The New York Times, toiling in their MC Escher hall of mirrors, to poor dim James Surowiecki over at The New Yorker, to - wonder of wonders! - the Green Shoots claque at the cable networks, to the assorted quants, grinds, nerds, pimps, factotums, catamites, and cretins in every office from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to the International Monetary Fund - every man-Jack and woman-Jill around the levers of power and opinion weighed in last week with glad tidings that the world's capital finance system survived what turned out to be a mere protracted bout of heartburn and has been reborn as the Miracle Bull economy. Our worries over. If you believe their bullshit. Which I don't.
I took the liberty of posting hightlights from some of Ben Stein's financial columns. You may remember Ben as the droning teacher in "Ferris Bueller's day off", or, more recently, the mastermind behind the Creationist propaganda film "Expelled".
Ben's business articles are an interesting study in professional denialism (you guys think I'm paranoid?), and quite amusing too - though not by design. Here's my favourite, from May 2008 - when there really was no excuse:
...My evidence is anecdotal at this point, but I'm hearing of an uptick in home sales in my beloved Southern California and my native Washington, D.C. I think the tide is hitting full ebb, and while it may ebb for a while, it'll turn before long.
The nation is still rich. Mortgage rates are low. Employment is high. Contrary to media reports, loans are easily available to qualified buyers. Houses are still tax-subsidized. Young families need homes. We old people need retirement homes. People are moving for many reasons, and they need homes, too. Clearly it's a good time to dip your toe in and see how you like the residential real estate water.
As for the financial journalists, take a cue from Henry Ford, who famously said, "History is more or less bunk."
I wouldn't say business journalism is all bunk. But I would say it's about glorifying the reporters and selling newspapers. And while fear sells papers, it doesn't make for good investors.
Given that you've been selling non-fear quite well, Ben (and Jim), don't you think the opposite of that statement might be the truth?
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Hm; so Hal Turner, right wing nutball extraordinaire, seems to have been an FBI Honeytrap - albeit a very fat and ugly honeytrap. Shocking.
David Kravets at Wired Threat Level blog reports that Hal Turner, a notorious shitbag "hate blogger" in New Jersey who was charged two months ago with threatening to kill judges and lawmakers, was secretly an FBI "agent provocateur" paid tens of thousands of dollars by our government to broadcast white supremacist rhetoric.
You mean you get paid for that? Expect a change in the idleworm editorial line to include more stories about Aryan supremacy and race-baiting! Ka-CHING! Your tax dollars @ work, citizens!
"No fish can escape mercury pollution" is the bottom line in a federal study of mercury contamination that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the United States.
Over at Dangerous Minds, Richard Metzger says, "I like how the AP writer tries valiantly to put a positive spin on this. It may well be that 100% of all fish in America has some level of mercury contamination, but only one fish in four has dangerously high levels. Dude, we are so screwed..."
TEHRAN, Aug. 20 (UPI) -- Though declining to specify exactly where, the outgoing Iranian oil minister announced the discovery of a giant oil field as a new government takes shape.
Iranian Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari announced the discovery of the field, which the semiofficial Fars news agency reports has in-place reserves of more than "20,000 billion barrels."
Coming soon? Operation Iranian Liberation! To free their women, y'see. To free their women.
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The recent study on Organic food health benefits (or lack of) produces a lot of garbage commentary from the usual idiots. It's a relief to see intelligent comment, fact-based (imagine that) from the excellent zone5 blog. Graham speaks highly of the study, and adds some other analysis of other benefits to organic farming, and whether these too should be questioned:
One of the great contributions of the organic movement has been an emphases on better care of wildlife habitats, and care of the soil. However, while organic farms in general may be better than conventional in this sense, this is also not a clear cut issue.
Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma discusses how many organic farms may have to harrow and cultivate more often for weed control, which can be more harmful to the soil than spraying, as well as using more fossil energy for this at least. He also saw evidence of the use of low-paid migrant labour on big organic farms to make up for the extra work involved.
A 2004 review of organic vs “conventional” farming practices by Anthony Trewavas concludes:
"...in the UK, at least, when problems with agriculture emerge they usually hinge around poor management not mode of agriculture. In environmental terms no-till farming currently seems to be better than others."
So in terms of soil health, no-till practices- as prioritized in permaculture for example- may be more influential than not spraying; while organic farmers may in general be more aware of issues of soil health and environmental protection, improvements in farming on some conventional farms show that good practice is possible there as well. It depends on the farm, not the mode of agriculture.
Only 14 out of 54 oil producing countries and regions in the world continue to increase production, while 30 are definitely past their production peak, and the remaining 10 appear to have flat or declining production [1]. Put another way, peak oil is real in 61% of the oil producing world when weighted by production. Since 2008 capped a record run for oil prices, most countries and oil companies were trying all-out to increase production. While a handful of producers (think Iraq) might be limited by above-ground factors, the majority of producers simply couldn't do any better in 2008 [2].
The evidence of the demise of the cheap oil era has become insurmountable. In the face of the highest oil prices on record, the great majority of the world's oil producers were incapable of taking advantage and producing more oil. Many nations including the US saw their oil production peak decades ago - there simply is no turning the clock back. This list shows that we are relying on a small number of countries to keep providing cheap oil. We need to move faster to alternatives and greater energy efficiency, before the last fourteen peak as well.
As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.
Under current EU law, German wind turbines aren't helping to reduce CO2 emissions. They simply allow Eastern European countries to pollute more.
Even more surprising, the European Union's own climate change policies, touted as the most progressive in the world, are to blame. The EU-wide emissions trading system determines the total amount of CO2 that can be emitted by power companies and industries. And this amount doesn't change -- no matter how many wind turbines are erected.
Experts have known about this situation for some time, but it still isn't widely known to the public. Even Germany's government officials mention it only under their breath. No one wants to discuss the political ramifications...
...At the same time, big energy companies have an interest in maintaining the status quo. As a result, no one is pushing for change. Everyone involved is remaining silent.
You’ve produced nothing of consequence in your Hundred Days, nor even in two hundred. Historians will not mention you in the same breath as FDR, but rather right alongside the wondrous Mr. Fillmore. You’ve responded to epic crises with half-measures that have produced quarter-results. In the short period of your presidency, your job approval ratings have fallen from the high sixties to the low fifties. In addition to those numbers beginning to look a lot like the guy with a cane walking onto your stage, they represent twice the drop an idiot named George W. Bush sustained during his first eight months in office. Maybe because he accomplished far more in that time. Far more (horrid though it was), as a matter of fact, than you are likely to do in four years, at the rate you’re going. Far more, even with a split Congress. How about that, Brother Barack? You’re getting your ass kicked by the worst president in all of American history.
So, dude, how’s this working out for you?
I don’t know how many readers of this blog remember, as I do, the headlines that came out of the Rust Belt in the 1970s, when the economic collapse of America’s industrial hinterland first really became visible on the large scale. Anyone who needs a refresher, though, can get one easily enough by reading the equivalent headlines coming right now out of California. The political gridlock, the sclerotic economy, the slumping quality-of-life indices, the special interests clinging to oversized shares of a shrinking pie – it’s all there, made all the more poignant by the anguished yelps of California politicians insisting that the rest of the country can’t just sit by and let the formerly Golden State finish circling the drain. (A hint to Sacramento might be in order here: state governments from Pennsylvania to Illinois tried that gambit repeatedly forty-odd years ago,and it didn’t work then, either.)
Any objective economic analysis will show that "green shoots" are just a mirage. We are approaching a major inflection point in the economy that will catch most people by surprise. Investors should exercise caution in the months and years ahead as sell-offs are likely to be brutal.
A study has found that as plastics break down in the sea they release potentially toxic substances not found in nature and which could affect the growth and development of marine organisms.
Until now it was thought that plastic rubbish is relatively stable chemically and, apart from being unsightly, its principle threat to living creatures came from its ability to choke or strangle any animals that either got caught in it or ingested it thinking it was food.
But the latest research suggests that plastic is also a source of dissolved substances that can easily become widely dispersed in the marine environment. Many of these chemicals are believed to toxic to humans and animals, the scientists said.
These days, all of a sudden, people all over are waking up to the option of deflation. Many don't yet seem to understand what it is, or what it will mean once it grabs a hold of an economy, as evidenced by a Bloomberg pundit, among others, singing the praises of deflation.
For them, it means prices will come down, and that seems a good thing. What they don't see is that what deflation really means is they won't have a penny left in their pockets to buy any of the cheaper goods. Over the past 20 months or so we've had a first glance at the effects of contracting credit, and the job losses and foreclosures it has caused. Deflation will be just like that, only many times faster and stronger, a credit crunch on crack.
"It's only a system," she said, as we floated through the sprawling supermarket's gleaming commodity lined indoor streets. "THE HELL IT IS! It's a goddamned air conditioned zombie hell of waste and gluttony," I thought to myself, before the usual vertigo completely enveloped me. Just back from Central America's simple, comprehensible mercados, bodegas and street cart vendors, the effect of this most common American shopping venue was, as always, one of vertigo. Head splitting light beats down on pyramids of plastic eggs, as if to incubate their hatching of the ladies stockings within, dozens of kinds of toothpaste, well scrubbed dead chickens, lurid baskets of too-perfect flowers, plastic wraps, tissue for faces, asses and wrapping gifts, row upon row of polished vegetables and fruits standing like soldiers waiting for the annihilation of salads or the ovens of casseroledom.
And all those hushed and not so hushed shopper cell phone conversations, this one consoling someone at the home base pod:
"Oh I am so sorry, baby, but I think they've quit making the Ranch flavored Pringles. Yes I know you don't like the jalapeno Pringles. I am so sorry. Really I am." Both parties seemed genuinely distraught.
Do you really think we can change things by electing different elites? Especially when the elites depend upon fellow elites for campaign money in the first place, and to put into action virtually anything? Do you think that is reformable? I don't.
Capitalism is without doubt dying of its own inner contradictions. Not to mention hitting the wall as to exploitable natural resources for production of the commodities used as sops in powerful nations such as the US, Japan and Germany, which until recently consumed two thirds of the world's resources. Peak everything is the reason we are seeing plain old water on our store shelves and for sale everywhere else on the planet. The global capitalists now dominate the needs hierarchy, top to bottom.
Workers in industrialized nations are so busy begging for jobs and wages enough to keep them in meaningless commodities and gadgets (which only shift more money to corporations) they cannot see the forest for the trees.
It ain't so much about jobs as it is about meaningful, materially and spiritually sustaining, important work that will accomplish what direly needs to be done. Starting with saving the earth that sustains the species.
Good evening ladies and germs. So, I just flew in from America and lemme tell ya…those Americans. They are sooo poor!
“How poor are they?”
Funny you should ask. They’re so poor that–get this–Americans can’t even afford their own funerals. Hwahahaha!
I nit you shot, folks. In counties all across the onetime “world’s only superpower,” Americans are literally abandoning their dead because they can’t afford to bury them. Here’s Time magazine’s account...
This month my CEPR colleagues John Schmitt and Nathan Lane showed that the United States is not the nation of small businesses that it is regularly dressed up to be for electoral campaign speeches and editorials. If we look at what percentage of our overall labour force is self-employed, or what percentage of manufacturing workers or high-tech workers are employed in small businesses – well, the US ranks at or near the bottom among high-income countries.
As economist Paul Krugman noted after reading the study: "One more American myth bites the dust." Indeed it has. And as both the authors of the paper and Krugman note, there is a plausible explanation for the US's low score in the small business contest: our lack of national health insurance. There are enough risks associated with choosing to start a business over being an employee, but the Europeans don't have to worry that they will go bankrupt for lack of health insurance.
The biggest factor in foreclosures and walk-aways is whether or not someone is underwater. If someone with equity always has a chance to sell. The second biggest factor is "skin in the game". Those who put down 20% are far less likely to abandon their properties than someone who put down 10% or less.
In light of the above, and given the preponderance of "liar loans" and low down payments in the problem states, those thinking clearly might be expecting to see a giant wave of foreclosures striking shore right about now. And they would be correct.
Look at the facts.
There were 1.9 million foreclosures in 2009 in the first six months, and there will be another 1.5 before the end of the year. Is that better? According to Bloomberg: "A glut of unsold homes is also pushing down prices. The 3.8 million homes for sale in June would take 9.4 months to sell at the current pace of transactions, according to the National Association of Realtors. The inventory turnover rate averaged 4.5 months in the six years from 2000 to 2005.....More than 18.7 million homes, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, stood vacant in the U.S. during the second quarter. That compared with 18.6 million a year earlier, the U.S. Census Bureau said July 24
Total home sales fell 23.7 percent in June versus a year earlier." Bloomberg)
Massive supply, falling prices, record foreclosures, flagging demand--and according to Deutsche Bank--48 percent of all mortgages will be underwater by 2011. It's all bad...
..."Some 247,000 jobs were lost in July, a number that under ordinary circumstances would send a shudder through the country...The country has lost a crippling 6.7 million jobs since the Great Recession began in December 2007...
...A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you combine the number of people who are officially counted as jobless with those who are working part time because they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called labor market reserve —
...The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the overall work force....
...It's not the end of the world, but it does foreshadow a protracted period of negative growth, social unrest and persistent high unemployment. Here's how the Wall Street journal sums it up: "A surprisingly large number of money managers and economists are warning that, despite the hopeful signs, the economy is still deep in the woods, not strong enough to support a long-running stock and bond recovery....Even after the recession ends, economists expect the gradual reduction of the nation's massive consumer debt to take years....
The United States Air Force Academy’s Class of 2013 began Basic Cadet Training this summer. Why is this significant to the readers of The Space Review? Because according to George Friedman in his book The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century, in 2045, one of them may well be a major general of US space forces—and will be killed in orbit.
A manned asteroid mission using two Orion spacecraft, docked nose-to-nose to form a 50-ton deep space vehicle, is being studied by Lockheed Martin Space Systems as an alternative to resumption of U.S. lunar landing missions.
The final segments of the Ares I-X were stacked on Aug. 13, completing the 327-foot launch vehicle and providing the first look at the finished rocket's distinctive shape. The Ares I-X flight test is targeted for Oct. 31.
This weekend, Microsoft is hosting a Space Elevator Conference to discuss ways of making the Roald Dahl-esque dream a reality. And NASA is co-sponsoring the "Tether Challenge," aka the Space Elevator Games, as part of its Centennial Challenge, with contestants competing to devise a material strong enough to carry items up 62,000 miles — with the winner getting $2 million.
Researchers from NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., are working to develop a new kind of lightweight inflatable spacecraft outer shell to slow and protect reentry vehicles as they blaze through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. They will test a technology demonstrator from a small sounding rocket to be launched at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Va. The launch is scheduled for Aug. 17.
India has completed the design of Chandrayaan-2, its next mission to the moon - this time in collaboration with Russia - that would have a lander and rover which can collect samples of the lunar soil and analyse them and send back the data.
Common herbs and spices show promise as an environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional pesticides, scientists have told a major US conference.
They have spent a decade researching the insecticidal properties of rosemary, thyme, clove and mint.
Only one in three said they are prepared to have the H1N1 vaccine with a third undecided and the rest saying no.
Almost 1,500 nurses were polled, of whom 91 per cent said they were frontline...
...Of the nurses who said they would not get vaccinated, 60 per cent said concern about the safety of the vaccine was the main reason.
An independent panel set up by the Department of Health warned ministers that plans to make the stockpiled drug widely available could do more harm than good, by helping the flu virus to develop resistance to the drug.
But ministers pressed ahead with a policy of mass prescription, fearing the public would not tolerate being told that the millions of doses of Tamiflu held by the state could not be used during a pandemic, one of the committee members has told the Guardian.
"It was felt ... it would simply be unacceptable to the UK population to tell them we had a huge stockpile of drugs but they were not going to be made available," Professor Robert Dingwall, a member of the Committee on Ethical Aspects of Pandemic Influenza, said.
All in all, "the end of the recession" sounds like a call that's ridiculously premature, if not simply ridiculous, period. The desire for this thing to be over gets the better of objective reasoning every single time a number is discovered that's not painted in thick red strokes. And whereas optimism may be a noble trait, realism can't be all that far behind. If this recession lasts until 2012, and turns into a depression on its way there, the sunny calls will look preposterous. But for some reason the rose-colored pundits don't seem to mind looking foolish. Perhaps it's a group thing; they sure don't risk standing out from the crowd.
The commercial real estate bust is going to be legendary. We are talking trillions of dollars. The attention of Americans is being pulled away by massive market volatility that has seen the S&P 500 shoot up 44 percent in four months. Yet the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve have kept their eye on this market and have started examining a “Plan C” focused on bailing out this industry even before major problems occur. The new preemptive doctrine of bailouts. That is, they want to saddle the taxpayer with further burdens on some of the most speculative bets known to humankind.
Non-essential services such as rubbish collections, libraries and health centres were closed, in the first of three planned Reduced Service days.
City authorities hope the move, with workers taking an enforced unpaid holiday, will save an estimated $8.3m.
Other cities in the US have already introduced similar measures.
At three of the five banks that failed Friday, increasing the total to 77 so far this year, the financial hit to the agency's deposit-insurance fund is expected by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to be about 50% of their assets.
If indeed $641 million was all that remained of the DIF, the FDIC is now bankrupt. Of the $641 million left, Community bank used up 781.5 million and Colonial Bank $2.8 billion
I'll just share my bias, based on all the factors I can collect: An advance in real GDP of 4-5% in 2010 and 2011 (2-2.5% per year) seems to me to be the very best that might be obtained, but less is more likely.
Without a strong recovery, there is little hope of a good outcome for the non-oligarchy banks. With a return to recession, in 2010 (and possibly 2011 and 2012) there could be carnage in regional and local banks not seen since the early 1900s, and maybe even worse than what occurred then.
I hope we don't have to compare what happens in 2010 to 1873.
All this frightful hyperbole is really mere précis to my real point here, for those of you already acquainted with some of the classic "doomer" themes, which is that the first "die-off" of The Long Emergency will not be one of human beings but of our beloved automobiles. Personally, I think the car die-off will come on with stunning rapidity as a combination of factors merge to make these colossal traffic jams staples of nostalgia in decades to come. As usual, the public is clueless about this, gulled by a cretinous news media into the earnest expectation of endless techno-miracles.
The funniest of these lately are the glad tidings from ("The New" ) General Motors. They came out last week with a laughable hype-fest for their proposed electric car, the "Volt," scheduled to arrive in the showrooms around 2011 (about the same time that all the mortgage-backed-securities sitting in Wall Street's vaults melt into a monumental puddle of radioactive goo). We're told the Volt will get the equivalent of over 200 miles-per-gallon, at less than 25 cents a charge from the plug on your garage wall, blah blah. They estimate that it'll cost about $40,000. Do we detect a little problem right there? Like, the whole adult US population is going to rush out and buy new cars priced the same as today's Mercedes Benz? Good luck with that, GM, especially when money for car loans will be about as easy to get as a royal flush in online poker. And good luck with changing out the battery for ten grand a couple of years down the road, so to speak. And good luck also with your expectation that the roads and bridges will remain drivable in the years ahead, as every municipality, and county, and state slides into bankruptcy and the paving machines sit rusting in the DOT marshaling yards.
