Signal on fossil fuel financial collapse is NOT peak oil!

Discussion in 'Energy' started by 101101, Aug 4, 2018.

  1. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    There will come a time in the not too distant future when it is clear that beyond every manipulation including subsidies and tariffs that fossil fuels will never be able to claim profitability again- not that fossil fuels ever actually were profitable, just radically subsidized. This will be due in large part to the green replacements which unsubsidized are already dramatically cheaper, being not only radically superior in every way, which they already are, but radically superior on cost by a factor of 10x and dropping without limit to a full cutting of the petrol rent seeking cord. Even the clear shadow of that reality will end the fossil fuel industry over night by drying up its finance instantly. When this realization settles into the financial industry it will spread immediately. The usual tricks will not help, the government won't be able to bar divestment or force consumption as the US Fed is attempting now with coal. Financial hostage taking won't stop this either. For instance about 9/10s of the revenue in petrol is for fossil fuel applications and of course the remaining 1/10 of revenue may remain but just being tied to that critical piece of petrol will not stop the collapse at all and we know how easily states can nationalize the material producing piece if need be and clearly they would in an emergency. But no state or even group of states at this point is powerful enough to stop the permanent collapses and overnight obsolesces of fossil fuels.

    Note that the UK actually said no to Saudi Arabia on oil trade over human rights and recently hit 50% green electricity production. Corbyn looks likely to be the next PM and wants to use QE in a resource based economy kind of way where money is printed for direct purchase of infrastructure holding out the possibility that the UK will go green faster than even China, that is a signal! But also add California and Norway and France, Washington DC and countless cities like Seattle. Think of the divestment movement which claims to have divested 5 trillion dollars when the fossil fuel industry is said to be worth only 5 trillion globally- clearly that divestment is still pending to a degree and think of the essentially unanimous Paris accord sign on and think of the recent suits against petrol where even when two ere dismissed in the US another state added one after the dismissal.

    This signal is already going out, the shadow of it is already hear as green energy is already better than what hot fusion promised and this is so even if current green tech was about the most pedestrian way to this result. This will hold even as green energy destroys the primary basis of rent seeking in the world in the necessary destruction of the fossil fuel industry.

    But lets hammer home the practical psychology of how this is already happening in the market. Start by thinking about "aggregate energy" efficiency. In a thermodynamic sense with fossil fuels you have to find it (expensive in aggregate energy cost and money cost,) you have to fight for it (expensive added cost) defend it (expensive added cost,) extract it (expensive added cost,) ship it (expensive added cost,) store it (expensive added cost,) refine it (expensive added cost,) ship it again (expensive added cost,) store it again (expensive added cost,) retail it (expensive added cost,) then you have to have all these machines with countless moving parts for combustion (expensive added cost,) then you have to let it tear up your infrastructure even in just shipping it (expensive added cost,) then you have to let it pollute your air (expensive added cost,) pollute your water (expensive added cost,) pollute your food (expensive added cost,) pollute your health (expensive added cost,) pollute your climate (expensive added cost,) pollute and corrupt your politics (most expensive added cost,) subject you to disaster with centralization of infrastructure (expensive added cost,) cause climate migration (expensive added cost,) cause resource wars and additive existential risk (most expensive added cost,) subject your economies to speculation and supply vagaries (expensive added cost,) and petrol is mature, built out, at scale tech that has a cost or efficiency floor below which it cannot go with any remotely foreseeable tech so it has been stagnant or terminal for decades (another expensive cost) and finally you must let all this horrid sub threshold in-efficiency hollow out your entire public and financial sectors with all the artificial scarcity created by its ultra-low aggregate efficiency and basically impoverish your domestic population and take you backwards as a society toward the plantation and feudalism (expensive!!!!.)
    Look at the perversion of the US financial sectors every financial sector instrument including mortgages and every form of so-called insurance (health,life, auto) or pension has been captured to invest in petrol and constantly socialize regular rent seeking loses in higher costs in the underlying product and of course the public sector petrol subsidies run to a 1/3 of the Federal budget while the industry still claims imaginary profits and dividends (same scam for its history) and still takes massive private debt which it defaults regularly on and passes on the losses through austerity. If this weren't enough its economics are so horrid that it requires regular bailouts known as pre-emptive wars but sometimes taking other names like Trump's Tariffs and trade war. Each of its failures while predictable is greater than the last with cumulative damage It is so bad we might as well be mining an ore off Pluto to try to run an economy. Its sub threshold low efficiency means we might as well be pushing our own cars around with our physical bodies much of the time. It got us to 1950 but it shouldn't have got us further.

    Again think about how bad it really is. Early watts steam engines would only convert 1lbs of every 100lbs of fuel to movement. A brand new Toyota Camry will use 60lbs of every 100lbs to heat up the atmosphere or have the occupants of the car behind it in traffic smoking its tail pipe. Scams like petrol powered hydrogen are even worse because they have even less aggregate efficiency than petrol another layer of expense and are dirtier with long tail pipe games hiding the use of even more petrol and its pollution! Clean coal is just as bad, trying to sequester the CO2 adds massive aggregate efficiency losses.

    That we didn't leave petrol by 1950 or completely by 1970 was just a result of of the rich in the US wanting to keep rent seeking alive past the actual death (despite the lean proposition of petrol) of the economic problem or the scarcity problem and take us back to the plantation or slavery which really only ended in the US in 1950 by re-introducing scarcity through increase petrol useage and the ultimate stupidity of the petrol dollar. Its clear that this petrol push increased even nuclear proliferation where having pursued cleaner forms of nuclear technology might have led to dramatically less proliferation. So you must understand that petrol is Civil Rights part II or Civil Rights on a world scale and its continued existence even this far was based on the idiotic notion that there is a right to exploit people or treat them like property or slaves.

    A lot of this was pushed globally from the US through the so called Texas Energy Sector. Very obvious that a lot of the corruption in US politics came by way of Texas and the so called Southern mentality which didn't properly die in the Civil war. Quite ironic that Musk is from Apartheid South Africa or to a degree post Apartheid South Africa.

    Aggregate Efficiency of Green
    With regard to the fossil fuel killing replacement technology, the electrons come to you (no added cost,) the electrons are free (no added cost,) there is no question of supply, its rock solid straight line cost curves for 30 years or so (no added cost,) no question of speculation (minus costs,) the energy is properly distributed or decentralized (minus cost,) to this point there is generally more than enough enough energy density on a calculator or a house or factory roof top to take care of the need on site so there aren't even any transmission costs- this will only get better as with solar cells that for instance work at night in IR (no added cost,) and the basic tech of energy capture and usage is solid state no moving parts and tech is made out of stuff as abundant as sand (again minus costs) the price reductions in green tech don't have a limit where its reducing on a Moore's law basis because its basically a chip fab tech and as such energy will be essentially free at some point in the not so distant future (again cost minus,) and it is a hardener against petro induced externalities and contingencies it hardens against disasters and again the tech is incredibly rugged and durable but its decentralization is a huge cost cutter. Whereas you get brittleness out of fossil fuels and the politics of desperation (again minus huge costs and risk,) with green you get almost no externalities generally not even heat pollution and instead you get a way to clean up fossil fuel externalities like loss of snow pack with equatorial solar desalinization (huge cost minus.) Financing on it is a huge cost reducer as well but makes it hugely disruptive to petrol as it eliminates petrol cash flow as you pay once and you don't pay again for decades, it is opting out of the petrol rent seeking enclosure and it can be done with very little money with huge financial pay offs for the average family.

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    Last edited: Aug 4, 2018
  2. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    Continued:
    The form the tech itself is not be surprising as chip tech was meant to manipulate electrons for computation which involved routing and storing electrons or charges and this is the same thing with the routing and storing of electrons- this is why silicon valley drives this tech. This is not the rent seeking, hedging, speculating, wealthy deflation shield, scarcity inducing, austerity inducing, loss socializing, wealth concentrating, power concentrating, democracy destroying tech that petrol was meant to be and is.

    So when you add it all up the marginal cost of new green is free. For contrast fossil fuel is definitely the heart of rent seeking and enclosure, inequity and artificial scarcity in the world which gives it a lot of power as in bail-ins and savings accounts that charge you instead of pay interest? Fortunately most of the world has figured this theft (fossil fuels) out and is bent on being rid of this pusher. Also you will see that green energy gives an insurmountable strategic advantage in the cost of goods for trade and domestic consumption so you see the tariffs are a defensive end of game for fossil fuel players, the aggregate energy efficiency of green energy is such a cheaper input that it echoes through-out the society as a positive economic multiplier. Cost advantage for fully green economies could be on the order of 30% on the cost of a good but the citizen would also have more buying power. China built out something like 150 percent of the US infrastructure from 2011 to 2013 and you have to see that it is on the verge of being able to do that with green energy. It recently built a solar farm on the high Himalayan plateau where 150 of these facilities which would replace all of the US's energy needs.

    Centralization and rent seeking giving way to decentralization and non-enclosure.
    Let me say that the argument for centralized forms of solar power might include Autonomous EVs. That argument holds to a degree but note Sonos and a few others are introducing practical solar powered cars with integrated panels that cover the majority of use and in 2015 BYD did a bus for the Himalayan plateau that could run all day only making use of solar cells on its roof as long as sun was out- trains are starting to use this type of power arrangement certainly semi trucks and their trailer swill. These solar vehicles were done with current efficiency cells but much more efficient cells are coming. And of course the vertical surfaces of buildings can be used for cells and tops of car ports and even windows, all that exists already.

    Covering something like 1/10th of the US roof tops with solar cells would meet all of its power needs. And we also know there is no need or any marginal case for any petrol fuel source anymore. No need even for pumped hydro- distributed batteries take care of that, ultra capacitors take care of spike needs even more efficiently. Won't even be any need in aviation or rocketry. There are even paint on cells.


    The practical opt out is trivial, quick with a huge financial pay out.
    Right now with a simple phone call you can get some batteries and PV cells for the average home for about $30K and the rest of what you need is swap out items. You can pick up a couple electric cars for swap out prices used or new. You can swap out if you need to the water heater, range, central heater, gas dryer for electric units. You can do efficiency items like a solar powered roof fan and weatherizing and double pane windows. But you don't need some of these. Point is for 30K average US family can save at least 200K over 30 years on gas bill and electric bill and gasoline bill in a way that ads linear value to the home. But if you forego cars altogether and go with Autonomous EVs (of course powered by cheaper green) the savings probably range from 400K-500K per family. Its shows how petrol rent seeking causes family members to work a week or two extra a month (all theft) and how this could lead to paid off inter-generational homes stopping more downward spiral intergenerational rent seeking through reversed mortgages while increasing disposable income (freedom from bs post scarcity problem phony economy work-harrassment-treadmilling) and the difference in income makes it possible to make double payments along the way and pay that much less in interest which again can't go to subsidize loser fossil fuels through passing on compulsory banking losses through bad mortgage terms- don't think that happen (?) look how Wellsfargo was forced in the banking 'crisis' to take on insuring debt on stranded petrol assets with by definition junk known as petrol derivatives . So again it is just the call to a supplier like Tesla and the cost of cells and batteries and then you're off grid which insulates from the total idiot logic of private for-profit petrol utility monopolies being able to pass on losses (instead of absorb them for their idiot investment habits) to remaining customers that having gone off grid yet. And think also about the reduction in the non-useful tax burden as petrol spending just destroy everything more than randomly burning down cities for the sake of rebuilding them would. The useful return to the average citizen on public spending would another additional huge savings.

    Look at 1970s US vs today. In 1970 the average person could raise their own children and do it on a single income, they could expect to pay off a home, have job security, definitely retire, have no credit card debt, no medical bankruptcy and put all their kids through school with no student loan debt and expect their kids would be better off and have social mobility. And the average person wouldn't be working a ton of overtime and would be free of work for a chunk of their life before 18 and after age 64. None of that is true anymore. Although we are 4x more productive and work more than 2x as much (both parents working) we are only getting 1/3 of the GNP whereas in 1970 the average person and the sector of the economy represented by the average person was absorbing 75% of the product. So we are getting 1/16 as much for unit of work. Worst of all we have to pay also impoverished strangers to watch and essentially raise our kids while we are at useless unnecessary busy work jobs designed to keep us down and treadmill us to keep us too tired to reflect and resist, while our kids are sent to little prison schools that aren't safe.

    A lot of this was due to the idiocy of delinking wages from inflation allowing all gains to accrue to a wealthy oppressor class that contributes less and less and even gives back less and less of what it stole from people's work and ages that lives off unearned income from rent seeking but even more of it was due to the petrol dollar and trying to increase artificial scarcity through petrol to take us back to the plantation. Making these crimes and theft possible with was the capture of media through the ending of both the fairness doctrines and the free speech doctrines which allowed the capture of law making and the corruption of the state. Of course labor was also coopted and now we have the bribery or theft based society or stupid kleptocracy best symbolized by GOP politicians- villains. This is petrol and the structural violence it enables. Breaking its enclosure and cutting its rent seeking cord is the most important thing that can be done today along with high indexed GAIs and getting rid of the sponsored media with accurate, honest, open, ad free, sponsor free, semantic search.


    Recap:


    The myth is that when peak oil comes then decades later the fossil fuel industry will slow down and go away. After all, how could we still be making more internal combustion engines and have so many ICE vehicles still being driven and have petrol suddenly implode?

    The answer is that a permanently cheaper drop-in radically superior full replacement green tech is already taking share and doing so without protections without subsidies and doing so in a way that can't be protected against by offensive subsides or tariffs or other manipulations. This replacement will go to 10x cheaper to zero marginal cost free as a part of an energy liberation movement. Vesting in or staying vested in fossil fuels would be likely worse than siding with DVD/CD over streaming or long distance over Skype and even worse than siding with Blackberry against an iPhone that at introduction was substantially cheaper than the historical iPhone and had included life time high quality phone and
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    Last edited: Aug 4, 2018
  3. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    Continued... internet service for no additional charge. You see that the new green is pay once an increasingly smaller cost and then don't pay again for decades. This eliminates rent seeking cash flow.

    The real collapse comes instantly when it becomes clear to finance (not the public) that there are no future fossil fuel profits not even with cheating from government enforced rent seeking in place like the subsides and tariffs and attempts to force people to buy the product (Like Brit's trying to force Indians to consume only inflated Brit salt when salt was practically free.) The moment that signal of no future fossil fuel profits is communicated the game is over. Its just the shadow of that signal that will do it. It is a stronger signal than credit and debt markets freezing because petrol due to rigging, arbitrarily became too expensive to buy and the ensuing collapse of finance and petrol prices. This is a bigger deal because that would right itself after austerity and corrections, this can't be fixed, its permanent and it is wonderful. It is also something the US doesn't have the power to prevent even if it means the GOP and to a lesser extent DNC become insolvent over it and even if it means the heart of rent seeking and the rent seeking life style flames out.


    Mindsets and habit are also hiding how sudden this will be. Consider the related denial ridden decision making process and mind set of many involved. Is the fossil fuel industry Titanic already on the sea floor or an hour away from the ocean floor or going into the scrap yard in 40-50 years? I think it is a mix of already being on sea floor and being an hour away from the hitting the see floor. The 07 collapse was the boat hitting the ice and the Trump Tariffs are the alarms going off. So many people out of learned helplessness and denial are acting as if they were told they would have to go on a voyage with the Titanic tomorrow and that at some point the Titanic would sink on that voyage and they are are trying to figure out ahead of time which side it will list on so they can spend the voyage in the right life boat or if not figure out the central point with the best shot to the life boats so they can get there before the crowd when what they need to do is not get on the Titanic or get off before it departs.

    Another version of this is where people are on a rock outcropping looking down 2000 feet at the precipice below with the wind whooshing in their hair and then they hear a loud "crack!" coming from behind. They turn around and see what appears to be a crack forming that is running all the way through the rock outcropping. They rub their eyes. They are in denial about what they are seeing. Denial leads to panic but they are petrified and can't move. Finally they scramble across.

    Let me also describe the supply side's mentality. It is like they are masonry contractor on the verge of retirement who can't retire without another decade of work. Further their whole family and everyone they know are in brick laying and this goes back generations in the family. Suddenly they are being told that the economics of brick laying make the business impossible and that there will be no more market for brick laying because of Earth quakes and code and also that where there seemed to be other more amenable paths to transition all that remains now is making and selling ice cream. He is a 53 year old brick layer from New Jersey being told his only chance is to quit smoking and learn Mandarin in order go to Shanghai to open a Baskin Robbins franchise and sell ice cream. He tries making ice cream in his cement maker. This is true supplier displacement. He ends up not learning mandarin but does move to LA and opens a Baskin Robbins on the edge of Korea town. 10 years later he is able to retire but he is one of the 10% that get to keep their retirement plans. This is VW/GM/Toyota trying to transition.




     
  4. 101101

    101101 Well-Known Member

    Might as well add this as well. I don't think the USSR went under, it just saw that with the solution of the scarcity problem recognized around 1970 that the US too had become a top down centralized fully planned society just as the West had long claimed the USSR was and with the solution of the scarcity problem it meant labor was dead and hence also capital- at that point what is the difference (?) so the USSR just went dark. The foe had defeated itself even if it was trying to go back to the feudal plantation. What do you make of a supposed sunken battle ship when you don't find any float sam? It just converted into a submarine. I see the UK having Corbyn at is head abolishing the vestigial monarchy, adopting the UDHR, getting a green economy and solid basic income and even cleaning up its media and getting rid of the rent seeking sponsored society. I see it joining the BRICKs block of Brazil, Russia, India, China, Venuzula. This block alone will go green fast, I think Russia can sluff off petrol centrism very quickly, it may be that the political model it adopts begins to look a bit more like China's (communist) even as China's model is in flux- but I see this group moving away from theft and slavery based now dead for 5 decades capitalism and moving away from its phony economy and its artificial scarcity inducing petrol.
     

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