On the Avengers and Denial

Helicopter money begins. h/t Panopticon.

Hong Kong is handing most of its residents a pile of cash to spend as it tries to save its slumping economy from the aftermath of protests and the coronavirus outbreak.

The Asian financial hub said Wednesday that the measure — the cornerstone of a 120 billion Hong Kong dollar ($15.4 billion) stimulus package — will involve giving 10,000 Hong Kong dollars (about $1,280) to all permanent residents in the city who are at least 18. About seven million people will benefit from that program.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/hong-kong-is-giving-7-million-people-dollar1200-in-cash-to-boost-its-recession-hit-economy/ar-BB10pms1

Dr. John Campbell explains that the WHO (World Health Organization) is a perfect example of reality denial.

Those of us who have followed this outbreak from the beginning know that the WHO is primarily concerned with protecting their high paying comfortable jobs by telling our leaders what they want to hear, but is NOT concerned about public health.

Isn’t it amazing that genetic reality denial can cause a health organization to disregard health?

Ilargi with a nice summary of what we know about the coronavirus and the idiots in charge.

https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2020/02/go-forth-and-multiply/

We will now start to see the economic effects (you haven’t seen anything yet in that regard). More on that later. Rule of thumb: companies have 1-2 weeks of supplies in stock. Just-in-Time. Then they need more delivered. But the Chinese economy is on its last legs. Please don’t think it’s about Apple or some other major company. This is about a million smaller companies and (chain) stores in the west. What was it, 80% of US drugs come from China? Or was that just antibiotics?

There are ways to minimize the damage a virus can do. Mankind as a whole, in the places where the proverbial chain literally is as strong as the weakest link, has not minimized it. Instead it has told the virus: “Go Forth and Multiply”. Prepare accordingly. If we’re lucky, this will die down and pass. But that’s the problem: it’ll happen only if we’re lucky, not because we’ve done all we know we could.

Dr. John Campbell explains the latest COVID-19 statistics and concludes we would be prudent to assume it will be everywhere soon.

Pay attention to what they do, not what they say. 760 million people are quarantined in China.

My plan is to stay home.

Iñigo Capellán-Pérez et. al. – Dynamic Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROI) and material requirements in scenarios of global transition to renewable energies

A novel methodology is developed to dynamically assess the energy and material investments required over time to achieve the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources in the electricity sector. The obtained results indicate that a fast transition achieving a 100% renewable electric system globally by 2060 consistent with the Green Growth narrative could decrease the EROI of the energy system from current ~12:1 to ~3:1 by the mid-century, stabilizing thereafter at ~5:1. These EROI levels are well below the thresholds identified in the literature required to sustain industrial complex societies. Moreover, this transition could drive a substantial re-materialization of the economy, exacerbating risk availability in the future for some minerals. Hence, the results obtained put into question the consistence and viability of the Green Growth narrative.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335609618_Dynamic_Energy_Return_on_Energy_Investment_EROI_and_material_requirements_in_scenarios_of_global_transition_to_renewable_energies

Steve St. Angelo explains that we’re burning the cheap stuff way faster than we’re finding it, and the remaining expensive stuff can’t generate enough growth to keep debt cheap enough to keep the money losing expensive stuff flowing.

Can you spot the self-reinforcing feedback loop?

Inquiring minds wonder how long the expensive stuff can be forced to flow if governments nationalize the oil industry after it goes broke? And what will happen to purchasing power when printed money is used to subsidize a huge unprofitable industry? And how will a suburbia suburban owner with a 40 mile commute and no public transit options react when they’re at the bottom of the priority list for gasoline rations?

So many questions and so few people thinking about them thanks to genetic reality denial.

Due to conventional oil production peaking and remaining flat for the past decade, in order to allow the global economy to continue growing, the world brought on much more expensive, lower quality, lower EROI, unconventional oil sources such as Oil Sands, Shale Oil, and Ultra-Deep Water.

While this unconventional oil supply has allowed the global economy to grow, it has done so with one CATCH. The world needed to increase the debt at a higher pace to offset these lower EROI oil supplies. With U.S. Shale oil production accounting for 75% of global oil production growth since the 2008 financial crisis, the United States was responsible for 75% of Global GDP growth over the same period.

…The world should be very worried that 75% of the global oil production growth that came from U.S. Shale oil is declining at 10 times the rate of the worlds mature oil fields.

The top four U.S. Shale Oil Fields added nearly 10,000 wells in 2018, and the overall production is down 45% as of October 2019. It will likely be close to 50% when the data is released for December 2019.

As the late great George Carlin stated in one of his comedy routines, “NO ONE SEEMS TO NOTICE, and NO ONE SEEMS TO CARE.”

Unfortunately, when we head over the ENERGY CLIFF, the world will be in for one hell of a RUDE AWAKENING.

https://srsroccoreport.com/red-warning-light-the-world-is-rapidly-burning-through-its-conventional-oil-reserves/

Two months later the mainstream media begins to pile on. Here is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard with a summary of the economic impacts of the virus. h/t Panopticon

My working assumption is that China will lose its battle against the 2019-nCoV viral enemy. At some point the Communist Party leadership will switch tack after much agonising, conclude that it is less disruptive to manage the disease, and shift to total economic mobilisation instead – as the lesser of evils.

If this is correct we must therefore all brace for a global pandemic. It may already be too late to stop it. The task will then be to tame the virus and hope to buy enough time for warmer weather to slow the spread. It is not the end of the world.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/02/11/china-cannot-fight-coronavirus-avert-economic-crisis-time/

Another example of how reality denial has (temporarily) inverted what should be true.

The health of the economy is now inversely proportional to stock prices. A virus shuts down the world’s factories? No problem. Everyone knows central banks in response will print more money and buy more stocks so everyone buys stocks on every bad news story, often by borrowing money, because it’s so cheap.

What could possibly go wrong? And the idiots in the mainstream media will report no one saw the “correction” coming.

Good interview on aging by Chris Kresser, a health expert I trust.

Aging is caused by information loss due to entropy.

https://chriskresser.com/how-to-slow-aging-and-increase-healthspan-with-dr-david-sinclair/

Tim Watkins is good today.

Put simply, there is not enough Planet Earth left for us to grow our way to sustainability. And even if there was, the environmental damage of constructing an entirely new infrastructure would likely destroy what remains of the human habitat anyway. In any case, without further economic growth and in the absence of a radical redistribution of wealth of a kind that would have made Lenin blush, it is hard to imagine increasingly impoverished populations voting for ever more expensive energy bills. There is a reason why Luddites like Trump and Morrison are currently getting away with dismantling environmental laws and regulations – and they are the relatively benign face of a nationalist populism that will get a lot worse if current levels of inequality continue to grow.

The challenge of a zero-carbon civilisation only appears realistic when one of its elements is viewed in isolation. Once it is seen in its complete energetic, material, technological, environmental, economic and political dimensions it is an obvious fiction. There is simply no way in which we get to continue with business as usual simply by swapping one energy technology for another. And attempts at channelling the ghost of John F. Kennedy will not change this.

https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2020/02/05/the-make-believe-future/