My unpublished (100,000 word) book “The Financial Jigsaw”, is being serialised here weekly in 100 Issues by Peter J Underwood, author
Quote of the Week: “The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.” – Franklin Delano Roosevelt, first Inaugural Address 1933
NOTE – If anyone would like a free updated, 4th edition, electronic copy of the complete book, I should be pleased to email a free PDF on request to: [email protected]. The book has many footnotes linking to relevant and explanatory Appendices, websites and videos.
Covid-19’s meant to be a new Black Death, but in Britain no more people are dying than NORMAL. What does this say about the virus? — RT Op-ed:
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/484548-coronavirus–people-die-outcome/
Global Oil Demand Plummets, Threat To Storage Capacity: “In the past two weeks, analysts have cut their global oil demand forecasts by a staggering 225%. Never in history has the world experienced such a massive reduction in global oil consumption. The situation in the world oil industry is changing so fast; the market hasn’t fully digested the tremendous damage taking place.”
“U.S. Gasoline Product Supplied Falls Off A Cliff. The BIG PROBLEM for the U.S. Refining Industry is that domestic demand for gasoline and jet fuel have fallen drastically while diesel consumption remains relatively strong. Why? The Trucking, Rail, and Shipping Industries that use diesel are still keeping quite busy. So, over the next few months, gasoline and jet fuel inventories will continue to increase while diesel stocks are drawn down. This is due to the limited amount of diesel that can be refined from a barrel of oil.”
https://srsroccoreport.com/u-s-gasoline-product-supplied-falls-off-a-cliff/
Here’s a report from South Africa indicating that maybe the mandated lockdown is not in its best interest. “The lockdown is not a mere inconvenience, as the rhetoric from those in developed countries and affluent circumstances suggests. This will result in deep, ongoing suffering, and mortality from causes other than Covid-19. The government essentially has to balance two things: the number of lives lost as a direct result of Covid-19 and an immediately overrun healthcare system on one side of the scale, versus the number of lives lost due to economic collapse on the other. While everyone is focused on the deaths from Covid-19, people – and disproportionately, the vulnerable in our society – will die as a result of the economic ramifications of a lockdown.”
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2020-04-08-fighting-covid-19-south-africa
Here is the link to last week: Issue 98
Updates about Brexit negotiations with the EU are now suspended for the duration of Covid-19: Brexit is definitely off the agenda for the time being.
Now that UK has left EUROPE I will continue to comment on relevant EU – UK events:
We got the first glimpse today, from the Eurozone where COVID-19 lockdowns were imposed well ahead of those in the US. And the data for the Eurozone released today picked up the effects. Wolf Richter has the data:
The Eurozone is simply so riddled with contradictions and stupidities it just defies journalistic explanation: Germany just doesn’t get it – for every country with an export surplus, there simply has to be a country with a corresponding deficit. It was German (and French) banks who signed off on the bad loans to the “immoral” Greeks which precipitated the biggest Eurozone problems, and yet it is German banks who got bailed out, despite their errors; and yet it is German banks who got QE to loan; and yet it is German banks which didn’t loan a dime of QE, and certainly not to Greeks. Germany is the biggest recipient of the ECB bond-buying, even though they don’t need it, whereas Greece was excluded even though they need it?
http://thesaker.is/if-germany-rejects-corona-bonds-they-must-quit-the-eurozone/
“As the coronavirus unleashes economic shockwaves across Europe, the European single currency, the most visible symbol of European unification, is facing collapse. The eurozone — a monetary union of 19 of the 27 Member States of the European Union that have adopted the euro as their common currency — is being buffeted not only by the prospect of a deep and long-lasting recession. Northern and Southern European countries are also feuding over possible financial support for Italy and Spain, the EU’s third- and fourth-largest economies, which have been especially hard hit by the coronavirus.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15856/coronavirus-euro-collapse
The 4th edition of The Financial Jigsaw issued recently includes a Foreword, Preface, Epilogue and Appendices which I will publish here in advance. Next come the Appendices:
Here is Appendix XI – This article describes some of the problems related to the effectiveness of renewables and why we need fossil fuels to install, maintain, and replace them.
Appendix XI
The fallacy of Renewables
This is an extract from the above article posted in June 2019 by FEASTA: Creating wind and solar equipment requires lots of fossil fuels and fossil fuels are also heading into a period of severe depletion. Consider this passage which gives a flavour of the issues:
“Electricity simply doesn’t substitute for all the uses of fossil fuels, so windmills will never be able to reproduce themselves from the energy they generate — they are simply not sustainable. Consider the life cycle of a wind turbine – giant diesel powered mining trucks and machines dig deep into the earth for iron ore, fossil-fuelled ships take the ore to a facility that will use fossil fuels to crush it and permeate it with toxic petro-chemicals to extract the metal from the ore. Then the metal will be taken in a diesel truck or locomotive to a smelter which runs exclusively on fossil fuels 24 x 7 x 365 for up to 22 years (any stoppage causes the lining to shatter, so intermittent electricity won’t do).
There are over 8,000 parts to a wind turbine which are delivered over global supply chains via petroleum-fuelled ships, rail, air, and trucks to the assembly factory. Finally diesel cement trucks arrive at the wind turbine site to pour many tons of concrete and other diesel trucks carry segments of the wind turbine to the site and workers who drove gas or diesel vehicles to the site assemble it.”
Source: http://energyskeptic.com/2019/wind/ See also: https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/can-you-make-wind-turbine-without-fossil-fuels
Note that it is not just that wind turbines (and solar panels) depend on a fossil fuel economy; it is also that fossil fuels are in depletion. This is invisible to orthodox theorists who use figures about gross energy supply in their considerations. But part of the supply of oil/gas/coal must be used to generate energy to be used in extracting more oil, gas and coal.
Building a rig takes energy, as does drilling, as does fracking, as does refining and transferring gross fuel from the extraction site to its place of refinement to its point of sale and use. What the depletion process involves is the necessity of using inferior sources of fossil fuels in more inaccessible places that are more costly to extract. This increasing cost of extraction is not only in money, it is in energy.
What matters is the net energy that the fossil fuel industry transfers to the rest of the economy. And the point is that with depletion, the ‘energy cost of energy’ (ECoE), is rising and delivering a smaller proportion of gross energy to the rest of the economy because a bigger fraction of gross energy must be used in the extraction and refinement and delivery process to supply energy in the first place. It is not gross energy that matters, it is net energy and net energy has been falling since 2000.
Dr Tim Morgan, who keeps track of all this with a “Surplus Energy Economics Data System” (SEEDS) calculates that the ‘energy cost of energy’ is as follows:
1980 – 1.7%;
1990 – 2.6%;
2000 – 4.1%;
2010 – 6.7%;
2020E – 10.5%
2030E – 13.5%.
(E = estimates)
The Energy Cost of Energy (ECoE)
Source: https://surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com/
Now here is some more information on the renewables mythology
http://energyskeptic.com/2015/tilting-at-windmills-spains-solar-pv/
To be continued next Saturday
“Fossil Fuels”. I’ve always thought that a little silly.
The Deep Hot Biosphere: The Myth of Fossil Fuels, Thomas Gold.
‘Suppose someone claimed that we are not running out of petroleum? Or that life on Earth began below the surface of our planet? Or that oil and gas are not “fossil fuels”? Or that if we find extraterrestrial life it is likely to be within, not on, other planets? You might expect to hear statements like these from an author of science fiction. But what if they came from a renowned physicist, an indisputably brilliant scientist who has been called “one of the world’s most original minds”? In the The Deep Hot Biosphere, Thomas Gold sets forth truly controversial and astonishing theories about where oil and gas come from, and how they acquire their organic “signatures.” The conclusions he reaches in this book might be at first difficult to believe, but they are supported by a growing body of evidence, and by the indisputable stature and seriousness Gold brings to any scientific enterprise. In this book we see a brilliant and boldly original thinker, increasingly a rarity in modern science, as he developes a revolutionary new view about the fundamental workings of our planet. Thomas Gold is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an Emeritus Professor at Cornell University. Regarded as one of the most creative and wide-ranging scientists of his generation, he has taught at Cambridge University and Harvard, and for 20 years was the Director of the Cornell Center for Radio physics and Space Research.’
https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/89/13/6045.full.pdf
Excellent book Anon, thank you and certainly something to be considered especially given the authors credentials. It is often the ‘way out’ thinkers of their time that have been proven correct in the long run and I would not dismiss these ideas out of hand. I also agree that the common nomenclature of ‘fossil’ fuels is not properly descriptive but is generally understood.