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– “They are driving the World over a cliff.”
But as you said yourself, they “more likely can not slow down”. They are, like every other country and company, locked into the profit-making system, to earn the money with which to buy raw materials. Under that system no one can slow down without going bankrupt and thereby freezing or starving.
Capitalism depends upon continual growth. On a finite planet. It has reached its limit, at least in its current form.
– “It is not deliverable.”
Not only is it not deliverable, not only does it not help, not only is it pointless, it would actively make matters far worse:
– Blue Hydrogen. The greatest fossil fuel scam in history?
– “Just Have A Think” on YouTube, ~16 minutes.More energy firms in the U.K. have gone bust today.
We seem to be heading in to the eye of a storm.
More expensive energy, more people catching covid.
More expensive and delayed shipping.
One hundred thousand HGV drivers short in the U.K. but a lot of the World has a shortage of drivers/sailors/farmers/plumbers
The NHS is virtually collapsed in England.
What is going on?I’ve got a question. How long do you think we humans have?
“How long does the human race have?”
“Ooh.”
“Umm,”
“ah wow..”
“I don’t exactly know, but maybe two…”
“I have no clue; I hope I give me at least fifty more years!”
“I think, there’s an infinite amount of time.”
“Infinite. It’s infinity, yeah.”
“I give us a million, a million years.”
“Being kind, I’d say about probably ten years.”
“Ten, twelve years.”
“Thousands of years.”
“Forty seven years three months five days, it’s approximate.”
“We’re kinda like cockroaches on the planet; no matter how much damage we’ll do enough of us will survive to procreate and keep it going.”
“Unless we can get to another planet but then we’re just gonna Fuck it up like we did Earth.”
“Well I think we’ll be here for a long time but we will change. We’re gong to turn back into apes!”Have you ever wondered what would happen if a single species took over an entire planet? Maybe they’re cute, maybe they’re clever, but lack a certain, shall we say, self restraint? What if they go too far? What if they go way, way, way, way, way, too far?
How would they know
when it’s their time
to go?Planet of the Humans by Jeff Gibbs,
YouTube, 1 hour 40 minutes.I should point out that various claims in this film are out of date and some are just plain wrong. However, many others are correct, especially the ubiquity of greenwash and the corporate promotion of utterly impractical technical miracles.
This film poses vitally important questions that need to be faced.
Michael @ 15,51
Natural gas comes 2 or 3 ways to UK.
Having so many companies “providing” gas is scam. They are just speculators or market players if you like. It is the same gas, being resold at different price pretending competition.
And: spot, futures and all other terms are just Speculation !After kolaps you will get the same gas charged by different company ?.– “Having so many companies “providing” gas is scam. They are just speculators”
I know they don’t supply gas, but is speculation all they do?
They have loads of customers, and they like to charge by direct debit. Often their bills are based upon “estimates” (as they like to call them) of usage. So, at any time, if they increased their estimates by say 3%, they’d take 3% more by direct debit from tens of thousands of customers. They’d have that “real” money, moved from a multitude of customers accounts and accumulated in their own. It wouldn’t be debt or invented money; it’d be money their customers had worked to earn. It would be their cut of their customers’ time and effort.
Now I know nothing about finance so I may be guessing the wrong term here, but might they be selling “liquidity” or something?
Indeed Clark. I have never accepted payment by direct debit for any utility that I can get away with doing so. Send me the bill by email (not paper) and I will pay it. If the bill is an estimate I go and read the meter and adjust the bill via whatever online adjustment mechanism there is. It can still be done. I’ll pay my bill in my own time thanks.
Pidgeon, you have made a very good point. Perhaps they deserve to go bust.
I remember, as a very small child, being pushed chaired up to the center of our village by my mother.
She would go in the electricity board and pay their bill.
Then in the water board and pay their bill. Then the same for gas, then coal.
All separate but mostly controlled by our government. You could also go in the dairy. Then in the wet fish shop. Then in the bakery. Then in the Post Office.
None of these places now exist, yet that village is now a large town, all gone, as not “efficient”.
I have worked, years ago in local factories, making machines, not one factory is left?
I suppose it must be because of “globalisation or commodification”.
But whatever, it is a downgrading of community, a downgrading of local resilience.Ah this is where the action is?
Look we were choking on horse shit and piss in the streets and cloppity clop noise pollution in our towns &cities until the trams and oil-based engines came along.
We are choking on oil based fumes and noise pollution of vehicles in our towns & cities with more vehicles than road spaces for them and whole noxious industries that are as acrid as knackers yards and don’t have as many trams but do have plenty of electric trains over and under ground.
Just like having to get rid of the equine infrastructure, we are in the process of transition and the last drop of profits are being drawn from the oil-based factories, pipelines, storage and usage ‘investments’ – should have happened decades ago but the monopolists have pushed it and allowed the mass increase in CO2 in the atmosphere and more seriously in hydrocarbon pollution of our food and water – because they are psychopaths and morons and some even believe they are gods or in the Rapture- such is the Implacable self-delusion of these who long ago captured finance as a magic potion no one else should be allowed to understand.
NextGen is where China is leading and will take the poorest who have, like them, no previous attachment to infrastructures to protect. Their bullet and maglev trains will sort out the neglected peoples and lands and allow a much higher quality of life for the majority of the 12 billions that we will be by the end of the century. The amount of resources per capita consumed and pollution produced will inevitably change. Yankees and us Europeans are going to have to get used to not being exploitative and exploited by our Bankers, Industrialist and Monopolies of Media and fake Religion.
Hence not just solar and electric but fuel cells and AI and yes comma protocols such as 5G plus means that the ‘Western’ Financial Owners are in mass panic. They can’t control innovation through IP capture as they have done for centuries now. They’re ****** and they know they are.
COPS is bs and a platform to set up and protect their hundreds of trillions income stream for the next century – it is doomed. Even their little elfin princesses and her army of child rebels won’t be able to do that. It’s a clear choice now Fight or Surrender.
Fight was easy when we had superior fire power and GunBoat coercion and mass slaughter and terror was defendable against – well mr Matthy mr HSBC Mr Mellon and all you Masters of the Universe – your easy money and impunity is OVER. As their Little Prince and Bank of France are set lose today to defend their Magic Money secret world by attacking a strawman MMT they have constructed.
I love the smell of desperation rising from the pants of so many inbred ‘Aristo’ arseholes.
The Unipolar Implacable Empire is Dead.
Long live the first multipolar All Human Empire.
The convenience of paying bills online etc is in my view great though I accept maybe there is a social aspect missing. The other thing I don’t miss are travel agents. One has to wonder about the privitisation of utilities and whether it was a success.
Supermarkets (the big 4/5 in UK and others elsewhere) have sucked out all the local businesses and offshored the profits taking money from the local economies. Living in London for 30 years I saw the disappearance of local butchers, bakers and independent off-licenses amongst others. It was a shame. The manufacturing base the UK used to have moved away to places where labour was cheaper. Ireland (Rep) never really had one in the first place though two factories in the town I am from making shoes (Clarks) and Cigarettes are now long gone. There are some new ones, Paypal being one. 😀
Now we have the problem taxing multinational corporations especially, though not exclusively, big tech with Ireland being a holdout. I don’t think that can last and I’m not proud of Ireland for that.
I don’t have a problem with online shopping and in terms of climate/energy usage it makes sense having one delivery van drop off 50 people’s shopping than 50 people getting in their vehicles and going to the shop. I see this is where it is going though I again accept there is a missing social aspect to it. That social aspect will have to be replaced with something.
ET, michael norton,
I strongly agree with both your points.
Michael – “She would go in the electricity board and pay their bill.”
– that’s how I used to do things in the 1980s. I still would if I could, and I still do where I can; the baker’s, and fruit and veg at the town market. I’m trying to keep the old ways alive, with their human connections.
But the system undercuts the old ways on price, and it alienates everyone from everyone else.
In my view having to go to the bank or having to go to the electricity shop to pay your bill was a pain in the ass and took valuable time I could have been having a pint or something. Also, in my job you couldn’t really leave the site to go do this kind of stuff in your lunch break (not that we had one which couldn’t be interrupted) so it all had to be done at weekends off.
I remember the “novelty” of booking flights or the boat home to Ireland on the phone but still having to go to the travel agents and queue for 3-4 hours to get your ticket issued (OMG that was a royal pain) so it didn’t actually save you any time and might as well have just gone to the travel agent in the first place. I certainly don’t miss all that. Now it takes me all of 5 mins to do the same thing and I can do it whilst having a pint. I am happy to be able to do these things online and thus have more of my free time to myself.
All of this stuff used to also involve social interactions though. My mum used to know fecking everyone and she’d stop and chat to them all which as a 3-4yo kid was also a pain in the ass 😀 It always seemed to happen in the doorways of shops and all I wanted was to get home and play or watch playschool or something. Largely, in my home town in Ireland, independent butchers and other shops do still exist. No one buys their meat in Tesco if they can help it.
I am someone who likes going to shops but I have found my shopping is much smarter thanks to online research and price comparison. I think we have a problem with offshoring of profit and I think if you trade in the UK (or any other country) you should have to pay taxes on all your trade in the UK, including intellectual property, in the UK. No offshoring. It is time for large windfall taxes everywhere and the meaningful shuttering of offshoring loopholes.
China Rapping Up Big Coal
“China’s economic planner, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), has outlined a number of measures to resolve the problem of power cuts, with energy supplies in the northeast of the country as its main priority this winter.
The measures include working closely with generating firms to increase output, ensuring full supplies of coal”https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58733193
“The China Electricity Council, which represents generating firms, has also said that coal-fired power companies were now expanding their procurement channels at any cost, in order to guarantee winter heat and electricity supplies.
However, finding new sources of coal imports may not be straightforward.”This might be problematic as Australia and China are now at each other’s throats.
Where I live, one of our main, local industries was brick and tile making.
They are building monstrous new housing estates.
All our local brick yards shut by the seventies.
All the bricks come in by diesel lorry from elsewhere, Poland, I think.This is not near me but gives you the flavour of industrial and community collapse.
“Near the little village of Stewartby, Bedfordshire, four chimneys and two kilns stand alone in what used to be a bustling industrial site.
At its peak in 1936, Marston Vale was home to the world’s biggest kiln and produced 500 million bricks a year. The last working site closed in 2008 as it could not achieve emission standards?”https://www.bedfordshirelive.co.uk/news/history/bedfordshire-village-home-largest-brickworks-4949097
We have to go back to real people doing real jobs, we can’t all just box stuff up at Amazon
or spend our meaningless lives pushing buttons.
Imagine how you would feel if you had no culture, no history, no real life existence, everything meaningless.“Since 2006, Europe has increasingly viewed the Eastern Mediterranean Natural Gas as a resource with huge potential to provide economic growth, mitigate climate change, and reduce dependence on Russian gas supplies. European companies have been involved in gas exploration, while the European Union has largely supported the idea of a new pipeline that connects Israeli and Egyptian fields with Cyprus and mainland Europe.
https://ecfr.eu/special/eastern_med/gas_fields
Now Turkey wants to rival Greece and Cyprus and Israel.
“The United States Geological Survey estimates that the Levant Basin – the waters of Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, Lebanon, and Palestine – contains 122.4 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable gas. To date, Cyprus, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine have discovered gas – which has stimulated cooperation between Egypt, Israel, and Cyprus.”
This Natural Gas is now rather important, as Natural Gas Futures has multiplied twenty five times in eighteen months
ATHENS, March 9 2021(Reuters) – Greek-Italian gas joint venture IGI Poseidon said on Tuesday it had signed an agreement with the Israel Natural Gas Lines Company to cooperate on building facilities to connect Israel to a planned gas pipeline in the eastern Mediterranean.
Greece, Cyprus and Israel last year signed a deal to build the Eastmed gas pipeline, which has been in the planning for several years and seeks to transport gas from offshore Israel and Cyprus to Greece and on to Italy to help Europe diversify its energy resources.
Looks like it is going ahead.
DunGroanin, your comment was awaiting moderation when I posted mine at 11:41, and then Wordfence (part of the site’s security) ate my reply to you. Then I had to go shopping.
– “they are psychopaths and morons and some even believe they are gods or in the Rapture.”
One thing the rich have no monopoly over is delusion; the proliferation of conspiracy theory across the Web is proof enough of that.
The problem is systemic. I had written a good description of its dynamics, but I am not feeling so articulate now.
Anyway, good to see you here.
A tiny village is to become the centre of a ‘revolution’ in the global energy industry and be connected to Morocco – with the world’s longest undersea cable costing £16billion.
The scheme will see Alverdiscott in Devon – population 286 – at the end of a line attaching it to North Africa.
The Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project says it will import enough sun and wind-generated energy to the UK to supply seven million homes by 2030.
Exxon Rejected Net Zero Pitch After Proxy Loss, Citi Banker Says
– Exxon Mobil Corp. rejected a pitch from a Citigroup Inc. senior investment banker to commit to a target for net zero emissions even after shareholders staged a revolt over the company’s climate policy. […]
– “They looked at me and said, ‘That’s great, but we don’t know how we would get there. We can’t commit to that if we don’t have a plan to get there,’” he said Thursday during the webcast of an event hosted by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Energy Studies and law firm Baker Botts LLP. “I assured them most companies today who have committed to net zero don’t have a plan on how to get there, but they’re working to get there.”
– – – – – – –
The market can’t do it. Capitalism can’t fix the problem.
We need to use less energy. We need to economise!
Alverdiscott in Devon
How interesting
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/Alverdiscott_National_Grid_Substation_-_geograph.org.uk_-_89419.jpg
Presumably, this is where the Interconnector will land.
Wibbery is an historic manor in the parish of Alverdiscott. Nicholas the Bowman, was a servant of King William the Conqueror. Nicholas was the king’s artilleryman, whose role was “the captain or officer in charge of the stone and missile discharging engines used in sieges” These devices were known in Latin as ballista, weapons for throwing “balls”, bolts or other projectiles, ranging in size from a cross bow to a large artillery piece. His name was traditionally translated as “the Gunner”, as the word gun was in use in the English language for such purely mechanical devices before the introduction of gunpowder.
[ Mod: text reproduced from Wikipedia – “Nicholas the Bowman” ]That is at least as interesting as the fact that the cable from North Africa, will take land here to give us renewable electricity.
Clark
before I start I would like you to read following article and hopefully spend
some time having a look around that website:line-height: 14pt”>https://positivemoney.org/2021/09/lawmakers-urge-bank-of-england-to-regulate-fossil-finance/
IMO Money creation is the core problem. Most of the money is created by private banks as debt.
It is up to them (banks) to lend where they find it profitable and least risky.
Fundamental problem is that they do not lend other people’s money as we all believe.
But governments have to borrow with interest.There might be some restrictions after 2008 but nothing major.
I strongly believe that Government should create extra money at least interest free if not debt free.
If D G joins this discussion, this link is for him. It is a Swedish link but very readable.
https://www.riksgalden.se/fi/our-operations/central-government-debt/how-does-the-government-borrow/
I don’t disagree with MMT but I question the assumption of their theory, and as such DG’s comments in the main thread.
BTW Sir Keir Starmer’s speech for me was cringeworthy. Any comments?
Pigeon English, you don’t need to convince me that money is concocted; it quite clearly has no basis in physical reality, and can be shaped to any ends by whoever controls its creation and distribution – primarily by the issuing of loans, under the control of private companies.
On the positivemoney.org page you linked, I have trouble with this:
– “all investment in new fossil fuel projects must end this year.”
This is probably impossible without killing lots of people. Humanity is dependent upon fossil fuel, and it will take time to replace infrastructure. For instance, right now, much fertiliser production has stopped due to the shortage of natural gas.
Transition to sustainable systems has been left far too late, and consequently we now have a crisis. I don’t know how to minimise the death and suffering that will result; near-term deaths from fuel shortages will need to be traded against deaths over a longer term from damage to climate and biosphere; a morbid calculation fraught with uncertainties.
What is abundantly clear is that the total, the sum of fuel shortage deaths and planetary damage deaths, would be reduced by conserving energy and reducing emissions, starting immediately and continuing until greenhouse gas concentrations are low enough and new infrastructure can keep them low enough.
There is massive scope to do this. Swathes of human activity is unnecessary, and swathes more is hugely inefficient. But the pandemic has just demonstrated that governments and people lack the necessary will and coordination. The situation looks extremely bad.
The murky world of green energy firms
“Last year Mr Fedotov was revealed to be the owner of Aquind, the company behind a £1.24bn project to build an electricity cable linking the U.K. to France. Aquind is currently seeking U.K. government approval for the project and a decision will be made in weeks.”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-58791274
I expect what with the head long rush into Green Energy, there will be all sorts of people fiddling like mad.
At the moment the U.K. seems to be going for a mixture of Natural Gas, New Nuclear and Renewables, with the most effort on New Nuclear and Renewables. Most of Europe is now having a lot of trouble with skyrocketing energy prices, too much demand or not enough energy? This seems a bit like the lack of butchers, lack of lorry drivers, lack of farmers. If Europe had enough a few years ago, how come now we do not? France is shouting that the E.U. make them pay too much for their electricity, yet seventy percent of French electricity is produced by their own Nuclear Power Stations. Maybe the people of Europe expect unlimited electricity and heat? When I was growing up in the fifties, we did not have a television or central heating or a freezer or airconditioning or double glazing or solar panels. Maybe people will have to revert to using less energy, afterall, it is not limitless.
