Retreat to Sanity

Hmm, it’s getting worse, not better.

https://www.freightwaves.com/news/record-shattered-61-container-ships-stuck-waiting-off-california

New evidence that virus was man-made and funded by US government via Fauci.

Also may explain why vaccines were available so quickly.

Alice Friedemann today found a very good essay by Rex Wyler, co-founder of Greenpeace.

Lots of wise words here. It’s comforting to know there are others thinking the same thing.

I think Wyler’s wrong on the root cause which I believe is the Maximum Power Principle (MPP) common to all life, which is enabled in a species intelligent enough to know better by Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory. The first step therefore must be to acknowledge our genetic tendency to deny unpleasant realities.

https://energyskeptic.com/2021/rex-weyler-why-is-the-political-process-so-slow-to-respond-to-our-ecological-crisis/

Rex Wyler. September 2021. Ecological crisis: Might as well speak the truth

Why is the political process — worldwide — so slow in responding appropriately to our ecological crisis?

We may point out that most political processes are hobbled by corruption, self-interest, and bureaucratic incompetence. However, there may be a deeper reason, connected to how the status quo protects itself, not just against foreign aggressors, but against dissident ideas that threaten its accepted narrative.

Regarding our ecological problems, the popular narrative of most societies and governments today is that we have a “climate problem,” which can be solved with “renewable technologies” such as windmills, carbon capture, and efficient batteries.

However, global heating is a symptom of a much larger, more fundamental ecological crisis articulated by William Rees, the Limits to Growth study, the Post-Carbon Institute and other ecologically aware observers. Humanity’s urgent and primary challenge is what ecologists call “overshoot,” the predicament of any species that grows beyond the capacity of its environment. Wolves overshoot the prey in their watershed, algae overshoot the nutrient capacity of a lake, and humanity has overshot the entire capacity of Earth. Global heating, the biodiversity crisis, depleted soils, and disappearing forests are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.

All paths out of overshoot (genuine solutions) involve a contraction of the species and a decline of material/energy throughput. There are no exceptions.

Furthermore, the contraction of humanity is inevitable, so all genuine options exist within this framework, whether we respond appropriately or not. And finally, every day that we ignore this reality, the deeper humanity falls into the overshoot rut, the faster the feedbacks take over (forest fires, methane from melting permafrost), and the less chance we have of mitigation.

In several cases, scientists and other colleagues who have attempted to introduce these facts in political settings have told me: “It is a non-starter. They don’t want to hear it.” Okay. That reveals a deeper problem: political inertia and the paradigm trap.

If mentioning the real problem to any given group that wants to help is a “non-starter,” I cannot imagine how that group is ever going to be effective.

In my experience, this is how the status quo maintains itself: Not necessarily with conspiracy or evil plotting (although those phenomena exist), but rather with social gravity, pulling every alternative idea or narrative toward itself, until the alternative idea is safely inside the event horizon and there is no escape. The capitalist/growth status quo black hole has virtually gobbled up the entire environmental movement, and the civil rights movements, this way.

Politicians reach out to scientists for an articulation of our problems, but typically reject the warnings from scientists if those warnings violate the accepted paradigm. The message from serious ecological science suggests that a clear understanding of overshoot is absolutely essential for anyone or any group hoping to understand the problem. Non-starter or not, I suggest it would help anyone attempting to influence governments to have a one-pager on “Overshoot” available for everyone, to distribute it relentlessly, and to articulate it at every opportunity. Don’t wait until it is acceptable.

Paul Ehrlich bravely and brilliantly warned humanity of the population crisis in the 1960s, and tried to get the topic on the UN agenda in Stockholm in 1972, and almost succeeded, but was sabotaged by people (including Barry Commoner) who claimed the subject, though correct, was a “non-starter.” So here we are, fifty years down the road, having wasted half a century on pretending, with the population having doubled, and material throughput quadrupled. Meanwhile, we’ve wasted 42 years of climate meetings, allowing political appointees to avoid the real dilemma, while pretending that carbon-capture and mechanical efficiencies would solve the erroneously-described problem.

A leading environmental leader once told me that, although true, she could get “no traction” with the overshoot warning or with population issues. I sympathize, but my response was, and still is: What good is traction if you’re going down the wrong road?

Sometimes the “traction” is to help with fundraising, but I don’t believe that funding is the solution. As often as not, funding is the problem, because the funding represents a huge packet of energy, resources, and person-power, so if the funding is creating traction down the wrong road — tech fixes, better lives for 9, 10, 12 billion people, a marginally more benign American or European empire — it is part of the problem.

So the articulation of the problem includes this: We don’t have another half-century to quibble.

Governments claim to care about risk mitigation, but ignoring the real dilemma is the biggest risk of all. It’s like turning on the air conditioner when the house is on fire.

I believe most of the solutions that will matter will be local: Learn to grow food, grow food, learn about energy, reduce energy throughput, build up local and regional energy sources, protect local ecosystems, build community cohesion, establish systems to create soil, enrich the soil, recycle everything locally, reduce material throughput, set local limits on growth.

Virtually none of this can be achieved globally, but there still exists useful global efforts — including efforts to inform governments of the genuine challenges. I would engage in any global effort that is realistic about the problems we face.

In that case, what are the global priorities: My list starts with universal women’s rights, available contraception, a global promotion campaign for small families, to address unrestrained population growth; a vast reduction of militarism and weapons manufacturing; reduce psychopathic behaviour in governments and institutions; limit corporate power in government and in ecological regulation; reduce/eliminate frivolous consumption, and so forth.

I suggest that to be effective, all this has to be done within the biophysically, ecologically correct context: Humanity is in a state of overshoot, getting worse daily, and all paths out, all genuine solutions, include a large-scale contraction of human enterprise.

So, when you lobby your government for action, don’t equivocate. If your government ignores you because you insist on bringing up these issues, it is better to find out now, rather than in another decade or half century.

Rex Weyler

September 2021

Michael Pettis is my favorite source for China insight.

https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85391

What Does Evergrande Meltdown Mean for China?

The impact of Evergrande has caused financial distress to spread faster and more forcefully than Beijing’s financial regulators expected, putting pressure on them to move quickly to stop the contagion. But they cannot rescue Evergrande’s creditors without also undermining their fight against bad debt.

Policymakers in Beijing are in a tough position on what to do about Evergrande, the Chinese property developer whose slow collapse has transfixed the markets. Evergrande is the most-indebted property developer in the world. Its on-balance-sheet liabilities amount to nearly 2 percent of China’s annual GDP, and its off-balance-sheet obligations add up to as much as another 1 percent.

This wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Chinese property developers, state-owned enterprises, local governments, and even ordinary households did not all have excessively high debt levels. But because the Chinese economy has long been plagued by debt problems and moral hazard, the situation will be much more difficult for regulators to sort out.

Our leaders in denial will say no one saw this coming.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-18/europe-faces-bleak-winter-energy-crisis-years-in-the-making

Faced with surging gas and electricity prices, countries from the U.K. to Germany will need to count on mild temperatures to get through the heating season. Europe is short of gas and coal and if the wind doesn’t blow, the worst-case scenario could play out: widespread blackouts that force businesses and factories to shut.

The unprecedented energy crunch has been brewing for years, with Europe growing increasingly dependent on intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar while investments in fossil fuels declined. Environmental policy has also pushed some countries to shut their coal and nuclear fleets, reducing the number of power plants that could serve as back-up in times of shortages.

Europe’s gas prices have more than tripled this year as top supplier Russia has been curbing the additional deliveries the continent needs to refill its depleted storage sites after a cold winter last year. It’s been hard to get hold of alternative supplies, with North Sea fields undergoing heavy maintenance after pandemic-induced delays, and Asia scooping up cargoes of liquefied natural gas to meet rising demand there.

“Gas supply is short, coal supply is short and renewables aren’t going great, so we are now in this crazy situation,” said Dale Hazelton, head of thermal coal at Wood Mackenzie Ltd. “Coal companies just don’t have supply available, they can’t get the equipment, the manufacturers are backed up and they don’t really want to invest.”

Supplies are unlikely to improve significantly any time soon. Russia is facing an energy crunch of its own and Gazprom is directing its additional production to domestic inventories. Prices could stay high even if Europe ends up with a mild winter, said Fabian Ronningen, an analyst at energy consultant Rystad Energy AS.

Kurt Cobb today on peak natural gas. It seems our bridge to a green future is crumbling.

http://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2021/09/its-all-connected-natural-gas-market.html

Natural gas was supposed to be the so-called bridge fuel to the low-carbon renewable energy economy. It was abundant, cleaner to burn than oil and coal, and more and more available to anyone who wanted it as a global market in liquefied natural gas (LNG) blossomed and boomed.

But this season it is looking increasingly like that metaphorical natural gas bridge is going to come up short. And, the effects are starting to ripple throughout the economy, not only in the natural gas markets themselves, but also in the electricity and agricultural markets.

In electricity markets the natural gas price spike had, well, electrifying effects, and not in a good way. Electricity prices in Europe have climbed 250 percent since January owing in part to the rise in the price of natural gas which now powers an increasing number of electric generating plants. In the United Kingdom electricity prices traded near all-time highs. The culprit once again was the price of natural gas and the fuel’s expanded role in electricity generation.

The effects on agriculture may also be dramatic because nitrogen fertilizers are made largely from natural gas. Two fertilizer factories closed in the U.K. recently because of high natural gas prices.

It is an irony that high fossil fuel energy prices increase the cost of fertilizer which, in turn, increases the cost of growing biofuel crops such as soybeans and corn. Soybean and corn prices are soaring this year as their use for food competes against their use as feedstocks for fuels such as biodiesel and ethanol.

Many people dead that shouldn’t be. Health “leaders” need to go to prison.

Charles Hugh Smith today on manipulation of the narrative.

He’s right that most of our important indicators are manipulated to distort reality, but I suspect this is a widespread accepted norm because both citizens and leaders aggressively deny what’s actually going on.

We will do anything to avoid acknowledging overshoot.

http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/09/ministry-of-manipulation-no-wonder.html

The cost of living–the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a.k.a. inflation–is the most threadbare trash heap of manipulation currently on display. Fully 40% of the Index is based on the opinion of random people rather than easily tabulated real-world data. I refer to the government’s comically wacky method of reckoning the cost of housing: ask a random bunch of homeowners what they guess they could rent their house for.

But wait, why not simply tabulate the actual rents being paid? That data is easily available, and could be made apples-to-apples by applying the methodology of the Case-Shiller housing index, which is to track the cost data of the same homes / flats over time. This would provide reliable data on the actual increase or decline in rents being paid.

Gathering actual real-world date is anathema because then the CPI would be much higher and not so easily manipulated. The same can be said of all the other tricks of manipulating the cost of living: seasonal adjustments (i.e., lop off price increases and attribute the reduction to “seasonality”) and hedonic adjustments (i.e., after adjusting for the better stereo and the rear-view camera, today’s $40,000 car is tabulated as “cheaper” than yesteryear’s $10,000 car of the same size).

My home is located too far to walk for supplies and I’m getting older so I just bought an e-bike.

I was going to wait another year or two for the designs to improve but with China on shaky ground, and e-bikes in short supply, and battery prices increasing, I decided to buy now. I got lucky and found a demo with a few km at a good discount.

It has a range of 60+ km which is plenty for my needs. I just finished customizing it for hauling cargo.

h/t Ilargi @ TAE

Dr. Kendrick vouches for Ivor Cummins which is good enough for me to pay attention.

Joe Rogan today discusses elusive truth…

This year they decided to beat the rush and fail before the COP26 conference is even held.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/4/us-china-climate-change-talks

China and the United States have failed to reach an agreement on climate change, with Beijing rebuffing calls to make more public pledges on climate change before a United Nations’ climate summit in Glasgow in November, according to the South China Morning Post (SCMP).

In a report published on Friday, the Hong Kong-based newspaper said that the talks also got entangled in the debate on human rights, after Washington recently targeted Beijing’s solar power industry over allegations of forced labour of minority Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang.

Very interesting. Something big is afoot in China. The government is tightening control with many important policy changes.

Doug Noland suspects they’re getting ready to weather the storm that will occur when the global everything bubble pops.

http://creditbubblebulletin.blogspot.com/2021/09/weekly-commentary-easy-money-anesthesia.html

Risk grows exponentially during the “Terminal Phase” of Bubble excess. I assumed Beijing would move decisively to rein in excess, particularly in lending and apartment speculation. But what is now unfolding goes way beyond measures to contain excess. China has begun a transitioning phase, with momentous yet uncertain consequences and ramifications. What began seemingly as a campaign to rein in apartment speculation and crack down on the big tech monopolies has speedily developed into something much more systemic and Draconian.

Beijing has been bustling with activity. Communist leadership has clearly turned against Capitalism, though it’s difficult to fault their effort to curb the “disorderly expansion of capital.” Untethered finance has so corrupted today’s Capitalism. Under the guise of “market reform,” Beijing is in the process of wresting ever-tighter control over the markets, the economy and society at large. I’ve long assumed Beijing would respond to a bursting Bubble with various forms of financial, economic and social repression, while casting blame on foreign governments (i.e. U.S. and Japan). It appears Chinese leadership has decided to begin executing some sort of plan.