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Energy Epiphany
So I took three years of Spanish in High School and had no idea that January 6th is "Epiphany Holiday" and I found out much to my dismay that nothing here is open in Spain today.
So back at the five star hotel, (costing me nearly 500 Euro per night) I had the time to ponder and come to some epiphanies of my own today which I have pinned down and will share with everyone.
Suffice it to say, today's headline news is "Bitcoin dives after Kazakhstan kills internet". So apparently 'Peak Oil' is the precursor to civil war and the breakup of the fabric of society everywhere since the rise in fuel prices is what sparked the protests that turned deadly in Kazakhstan. Sure, CIA might have had a role in that to disrupt China's BRI/RCEP but they can't start a color revolution in a pure vacuum, there had to have been already fertile grounds.
BIG PICTURE: since the first Planck era moment of the Big Bang, the arrow-of-time marching incessantly forwards means constant and eternal increases in Entropy, from low entropy state to higher entropy. (Cosmic inflation, not to be confused with the monetary sort) "Life" as we know it to be, (at least carbon based biological life that replicates on DNA) is merely a temporary localized low-entropy region/state at the expense of expelling more (higher) entropy elsewhere into the external system. Think of it as a refrigerator on a hot summers day, a small local region of cool temperatures at the expense of it expelling even more hot heat waste into the rest of the already warm outside environment.
They say nature abhors a vacuum, and so perhaps the optimization of maximization of equilibriumization of energy gradients (low to high entropy temporary transition process) is what gave rise to the evolution of life, and later to that of the evolution of intelligent life (including us homo sapiens species) eventually leading to revolutions of industrialization, age of fossil fuels, and the advent of computerized technologies to help assist in the more expedient exploitation and consumption of said aforementioned resources.
Energy underpins everything, it is energy and resources that power and run society and civilizations. Money, in all its forms,(be it Dollars, Yuan, gold, bitcoin, NFTs, stocks, real estate, bs artwork, commodities, etc) are merely nothing more than human social construct of abstract proxy tokens meant to symbolize and account for and help make sense of these energy flows and resource deposits/allocations.
It is human nature to go after the low-hanging fruit first. When the first barrel of oil was pumped out of the ground it took the energy equivalent of that one barrel of oil to pump, extract, and process and make useable an additional 100 barrels of the same oil, thereby yielding a EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) ratio of 100. In recent times the global EROEI of oil has dipped below 10; and it is still rapidly falling... Imagine an oil-tanker semi-truck that had to drive further and further each time it made a delivery of fuel (analogous to having to drill deeper and deeper for more sulfuric and lower energy quality/density hydrocarbons) and thereby burning more and more fuel in order to make each subsequent fuel delivery run in the first place, he is doing more and more work (driving longer hours) but delivering less and less net usable energy (even though nominally he brings back a full tank each time) and thus he is living in a society with ever falling productivity/ and less real wealth (purchasing power) even as he is working harder than ever before. I think many if not most people can personally relate to this, however very few people realize the root cause of the issue is actually a net decline in EROEI.
Net-usable-energy available for global society is falling sharply because the EROEI threshold keeps diminishing and is itself already falling off a cliff. Massive money printing is a mere futile attempt meant to 'mask' (pun intended) and cover up for this issue but it is akin to putting on a Band-Aid on one of the holes of the hull of a sinking ship when all is does is makes the water flow in faster from the other countless holes and gaps. Money is an abstract proxy for the ability of energy to do "work" in the future. Increasing the money supply while actual resources are all being depleted and whilst EROEI keeps diminishing means modern money is now almost entirely decoupled from what it was meant to represent. There is too much pumped up paper/abstract money out there and not enough real resources, net usable energy, nor the supply chains to effectuate and make good on it. It is all but a mathematical certainty that for the vast majority of people today that nest egg they saved up is not going to be there for them for the very simple fact that the global useable energy is gone... as the raw purchasing power of money was always almost entirely inflated by the availability of cheap and abundantly high-quality energy (and the “work/productivity multiplier effect” derived thereof) and the assumption that it would always be the case of remaining exercisable and actualizable into perpetuity...
The "work and productivity multiplier effect" of energy (the vast majority of which is primary energy of fossil fuels in all its forms) afforded to us by the inheritance bestowed upon mankind (billions of years of solar energy captured in the form of plant/phytoplankton/zooplankton/algae photosynthesis and converted into rapid-release capacitors of hydrocarbon based coal, oil and natural gas etc which we have consumed to near depletion in less than 150 years which is the mere blink of an eye) is diminishing commensurate to the global net decline in EROEI of said primary energy sources. This is why governments have to print more and more money while the living standards of their citizens continue to fall off a cliff. The United States, being the current global hegemony with its dollars still as global reserve currency, is no exception to this nor is it immune to the Energy Trap. In the last couple years alone it has printed more than 50% of all the dollars that has ever existed cumulatively in the entire 245 year history of the United States Empire. Yet the real living standards of the vast majority of Americans have continued to nosedive faster than ever before.
Money (or rather its real purchasing power) is really just a measure of the work/productivity multiplier-effect of energy (net usable primary energy), so therefore printing more money to try and account or make up for the decline of availability of remaining energy resources (and also the diminishing EROEI of these primary energy sources) is akin to opening the refrigerator door inside your home to try to cool down the house room temperature after your central AC failed. Locally your face might feel cooler but globally you are just making the entire house even hotter than before. Simply put, energy is what gives modern money most if not all of its real value, so printing more money to try to cover up for the decline in energy is really just locally masking up the issue while globally having zero effect or perhaps making it even worse. Alas, there are no thermodynamic free lunch nor free energy perpetual machines in the real world. This is nothing more than kicking the can down the road while making the eventual day of reckoning that much more worse. It has collectively allowed society to continue on business as usual until one day we find it’s too late to even attempt an energy transition in earnest and are already well inside the "Energy Trap" looking out, much akin to the fate of the inhabitants of Easter island. It is very probable that we have already crossed that point of inflection.
An intercontinental flight/trip from the US to EU is estimated to burn up to 100 gallons of gas (av fuel) per person for the round trip. One gallon of gas if burned efficiently yields as much energy as equivalent to 2 to 6 weeks of natural man muscle power. It would take four years to naturally accumulate the amount of energy needed to make such a cross ocean trip and yet most middle income American's can currently still purchase a ticket for the flight with less than a week's salary. During our ancestor's hunter and gatherer days everyone spent most of their time scavenging for food, it was only after the invention of agriculture that there was an net energy surplus (there was more than enough food so some members of society could spend their days working on other things) so that the surplus energy could be used for things like building Great Wall of China or the Pyramids in Egypt etc... But yet it wasn't until the discovery of coal/oil/NG approx ~150 years ago that human society and global human population and global economic activity really compounded exponentially.
In these modern times, on average for every calorie of food that we consume, roughly nine other additional calories of net energy went into the production and transportation of that food. In a very real sense, we are basically converting fossil fuels (fertilizers and pesticides are all byproducts of petroleum) into food in order to feed the vast majority of the global human population. Without the discover of fossil fuels and the advent of industrialization that relied upon it, the global population could never have grown exponentially from one billion to nearly 8 billion people in the mere span of slightly more than a century.
Even right now, with the US Federal minimum wage still at $7.25/hr, (where it’s been since 2009) even the lowest paid member of American society (even if it’s just sacking groceries into bags) can 'earn' enough money in an hour to purchase roughly two gallons of gas at his local gas station. Those two gallons of gasoline contains enough energy to be equal to 4 to 12 weeks of manual human muscle power/labor. This Kroger clerk is still tapping into the billion year sunlight inheritance. This immense "work and productivity multiplier effect" (in this case more than a factor of 224x times) of energy that we inherited from billions of years of captured sunlight compressed into the form of fossil fuels/hydrocarbons is the true reason why during the 70s a mere cashier working in a grocery store could afford to make a decent living with a nice house in the suburbs and comfortably raising a family of four. It is also the reason why that as energy becomes more scarce and EROEI continues to diminish that lower paid workers of society can no longer afford to even drive across town for their jobs and at the same time businesses cannot afford to increase real wages because their own "work and productivity multiplier" has drastically decline as well, hence the seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of massive so-called labor shortages yet abysmal real unemployment rates all at the same time. This is why the US middle class has been effectively wiped out and tent cities are popping up everywhere in America at an ever increasingly and soon to be exponential rate. It’s not a stretch to imagine that concentration camps are right around the corner especially once the US dollar loses its global reserve currency status and all the privileges that came with it.
None of the renewables are energy dense enough (high threshold of EROEI) to power modern society at scale and certainly not the kind of globalized world we have become accustomed to... for example solar has an energy payback of 2 to 3 years currently... that means for the first three years of a solar project you have net sunk energy into it and don't make an energy profit until after that period. Then after ten years or so you have to expend even more resources and energy to replace/maintain the panels and turbines. Whereas oil has an energy payback period of exactly zero days, you can use it immediately to provide net positive energy and it is both a means of energy and storage of energy. The problem with solar and wind is that it needs energy storage, and there are not enough lithium, copper, nor rare-earth in the world to be able to build enough batteries to store enough energy to scale to the entire world's current energy consumption levels even if we could achieve 100% renewable sources... (solar, wind, hydro, etc)
Currently all of the renewables that are so-called 'break even' are actually dual-subsidized, the first subsidy is the financial one by the governments of the world and the second is the invisible energy subsidy of the current existing infrastructure powered by primary energy source of fossil fuels. Any attempt to globally scale up the renewables to anywhere near a meaningful extent will by definition mean the end of economic subsidies as well as the end of reliance on the use of cheap high density fossil energy to build out these renewable infrastructures in the very first place!
The "energy payback time” of renewables means it will incur a permanent 'energy taxation' on all work/productivity/interactions in society somewhere between 20% to 40%, and this a thermodynamic physical energy taxation that comes before any government taxation (resulting in a total collapse of global economies and permanent macroeconomic depression everywhere) and that is even assuming there are enough raw resources to scale up (and later maintain) renewables to replace fossil fuels in mass in the first place. (there is not)
Now that the printing money game is soon to be over, the next stage is the clamping down on freedom of movement and the artificial suppression of consumption demand by way of covert destabilization of global supply chains. After all, you cannot spend your money on goods and services that aren't available to purchase in the first place. When push comes to shove, as much of the world undergoes a forced self-cannibalization in a very scale invariant fashion, it is the so-called discretionary activities that are first to be chopped, already including things like luxury cruises, tourism/vacations and air travel, going to bars or clubs, or even buying expensive graphics cards for pc gaming machines, etc etc etc... One way or another, in the name of endless booster shots and vaccine passports, or mandatory individual carbon caps, before long whatever money that you have left saved up that hasn't already been diluted and inflated and taxed away by then will still be worthless as it’s no longer able to buy the things or services that you want nor take you to the places that you wish to go...
As that one 'New World Order' person said, by the end of this decade you will own nothing, have no privacy, be able to go nowhere, and "be happy" about it.
I logged in just so I could say thanks bochen. Fascinating post. Anybody who liked this post might also like:
https://capitalistexploits.at/a-forecast-for-the-next-decade/?utm_source=twitter
Quote from master_sidoshi on January 11, 2022, 4:29 amI logged in just so I could say thanks bochen. Fascinating post. Anybody who liked this post might also like:
https://capitalistexploits.at/a-forecast-for-the-next-decade/?utm_source=twitter
This forecast uses a lot of the Deagel 2020 comments. Interesting! For sure Germany is running to its grave as it is shutting down its nuclear power plants and pressing hard on power from solar and wind and 100% renewables without backup technology. As German gas reserves for winter are quite low and they still don't want to open the Nord Stream 2 pipeline it looks deer. Yesterday there was a major power failure in Berlin. Thanks also @bochen2021 for your overview!
Here are my final addendum thoughts on the matter...
Modern money derives almost entirely it real purchasing power (and thus value) from the underlining "work/force/producitivty multiplier effect" in the context of the society in which it exists in.
As that societies/civilizations primary energy sources dwindle and/or its EROEI (total net usable energy) threshold declines, then so does that societies money likewise deflate and devalue.
The same unit of money will be able to fetch less energy, produce less work, contribute to less producitivity, and thus enable less real economic activity etc
- In such a situation, using money to measure economic activity is like using an ever shrinking ruler/yardstick to measure the deminsions of your physical property and volume of your tangible assets.... even as you get poorer and had to sell off more of your things, if your ruler or measurement device is shrinking at a faster pace then it would still appear by all measurements you were well off (for example using money to measure GDP as a signifier of the health or status of a nation or global economy)
The US stock market is no longer any indication of the well being of the nation as a whole nor does it represent the standing of most average Americans, the Feds basically printing directly to prop it up. But energy is what underpins everything, and in the final analysis at the end of the day there is no cheating the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
Bottom line is that money's value is derived from the underlining net energy (EROEI) that civilization has access to use.
As access to energy peaks and declines (as globally it did back in 2019) and EROEI threshold deminishes, the same amount of nominal dollars is now actually worth less and less. This becomes a double problem when we still try to price energy in terms of dollars and use classic economic models to try and forecast the future. Imagine pumping fuel into your car gas tank but as you are pumping it the price per gallon keep going up in real-time. But what would your total price come out to be? It now also depends on the rate of your pump and how fast price of energy goes up.
Energy is still priced way too low (not to mention not all resources are the same, its uniquely energy that gives or props up all other economic activities including human labor the vast portion of their value etc) and in this regard money as a unit of measure and in fact modern economics itself has completely failed in being a true signifier or being able to accurately measure and price the remaining energy we have left.
Energy is the prerequiste to all economic activity and indeed all life itself, in a decreasing EROEI world, money loses ability to accurately price/value the remaining energy thus causing a viscous cycle of energy being monetarily cheaper than it should otherwise be, which again in turn CONtributes to propping up the value of money itself -- (recall that modern money derives almost entirely it real purchasing power (and thus value) from the undelining "work/force/producitivty multiplier effect" in the context of the society in which it exists in. ) -- which it itself in turn means it only serves to accelerates and compounds the errors in pricing or accounting for subsequent consumption of energy and the remaining energy and so on and so forth...
It means we could collectively be right on the edge of total collapse but no one would even know it, all most people know is their 401k went up 20% last year. Once we globally fall off the EROEI cliff, (modern civilization is structured to require a minimum EROEI threshold, whatever that number turns out to be) it could be a runaway collapse supernova implosion of ended up in the dieoff of at least 90% of current human population. or worse
If energy was accurately priced for once, then the true value of almost all other economic activities would deflate and the real state of the eCONomy would be unmasked.... that cannot be allowed to happen until the elites get out from under their positions first... hence the likes of CIA ShitCoin for the masses of iSheeple to HODL
Instead of pricing energy correctly, which for political reasons the powers that be dont want to do as it would be admitting modern economic theory and economic models have a huge flaw, we get everything blamed on things like covid (CIA biovirus) to vaccine hesistancy to "supply chain issues" and from "lack of workers" to "labor force in quarantine due to omniCON" etc etc etc all to mask the real underlining root cause of it all, : accelerated irreversible terminal decline in global net EROEI.
So instead they have chosen to attack the demand side with a series of false flags and other more overt impositions...engineered to be artificial global demand destruction hence we now have the controlled demolition of society by the locking down of the masses and the shutdown of businesses, the endless boosters and vax passports (restriction of movement) and the implementation of an individual carbon cap quota system (control of consumption) all again to try to kick the can down the road and prolong a little while longer (to allow time to implement the control mechanisms in place) the masking of the real underlining root cause of it all, : accelerated irreversible terminal decline in global net EROEI.
"it could be a runaway collapse supernova implosion of ended up in the dieoff of at least 90% of current human population. or worse". Can imagine that, with all the dependencies and fragility of our modern global society. People would not even get to basics like food or clean water anymore, heating in winter etc. Riots everywhere. Brrr. Better to live in a third world country then. There is a discussion on EU level to define nuclear power as renewable or "green" so it can be used in the subsidising system too, like wind and solar. Might be a last attempt to steer away from the cliff.
Quote from WaterTiger on January 11, 2022, 10:15 pm"it could be a runaway collapse supernova implosion of ended up in the dieoff of at least 90% of current human population. or worse". Can imagine that, with all the dependencies and fragility of our modern global society. People would not even get to basics like food or clean water anymore, heating in winter etc. Riots everywhere. Brrr. Better to live in a third world country then. There is a discussion on EU level to define nuclear power as renewable or "green" so it can be used in the subsidising system too, like wind and solar. Might be a last attempt to steer away from the cliff.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0921800915303815
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0164733
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41247-017-0019-y
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652617304225?via%3Dihub
http://www.see.leeds.ac.uk/fileadmin/Documents/research/sri/workingpapers/SRIPs-103a.pdf
Read the "Macro Update: Energy" section.
https://www.cathedra.com/investors/letters/2021-letter-to-shareholders
What if oil (petrol) isn't a fossil fuel and instead is a renewable?
https://canadafreepress.com/article/oil-is-not-a-fossil-fuel-and-agw-is-non-science
How would that change things if this is true?
I'm not sure yet what I think about this other than I wouldn't be surprised if Big Oil has been lying the whole time so they could keep control of the market and make $$$$.
Yes... I can't find my sources right now, but that is my understanding as well.
The old [dry] wells now magically have more oil... I think the location was investigating Pennsylvania.
That whole story of dissolved dinosaurs, or other carbon life into oil is highly suspect.
