The Cost of Living Crisis Revisited
I know the situation is very different from the 2008 financial crisis but the effects are very similar. A year ago a cucumber at my local supermarket (Intermarche) was 1€, now it’s 2.30€. I remember very clearly our weekly shop at the beginning of Covid was between 75 and 100€. Now it looks very much like we’re paying much more for much less. Have you noticed vegetables getting smaller? That’s the result of the erratic climate in much of Europe. Tiny leeks, which are more delicious, but still, you need many more of them. Most winter vegetables were much smaller than usual, cauliflower, broccoli and so forth. In Britain there are supermarkets rationing tomatoes. At one people were only allowed to buy two tomatoes each. France and Spain are big vegetable producers so we’re not there yet but we have had our own occasional shortages as with Dijon Mustard last year (still going on now.) Consoglobe has put an alert for certain items warning in all likelihood they’re next on the list. These include red meat, rice, flour products and their derivatives (because of Ukraine), cereals and chickpeas (Ukraine + harvest issues in the EU and the US), vegetable oil, just to begin with.
Me being me, I’ve started putting together the shortage/cost of living pantry. Have I mentioned all these factors mean consumer groups are warning food costs are going to rise by another 30% by the end of the year? That means the more you buy when you see a good sale or a good price, the more you insulate yourself from what’s coming. If you can plant vegetables and water your garden with a rainwater collector that’s probably a very good idea. My fear at the moment is for the people who can’t insulate themselves from what’s about to happen. The idea that just because inflation is more or less under control in America, everything is going to be fine. is a very misguided fantasy. Most indicators point to very troubled waters ahead. How are you planning to mitigate the damage? And where are you putting your savings with inflation at +6% or higher in much of the developed world?
My Mazamet 
What I am reading is that the poor weather has resulted in poor crop yields but most of the North African vegetables are going to the EU (you) and not the UK because of Brexit. This may be a consequence of climate change but in England’s case, it is a self-inflicted wound.
Here in the US I have been pondering how red radishes could have gotten so big. They are easily twice the size they used to be, now being closer to the size of a golf ball. So, the incredibly shrinking vegetables may be do to the poor weather, harvesting earlier to meet demand, or any number of other reasons, but the reasons aren’t global.
The worst scenarios include autocrats/fascists using the impact this will have on household problems rising to power to “fix the problems” which they actually have no power to do. Fixing the weather is not exactly a political problem. Those autocrats will, however, do all kinds of things that have been on their agendas for years, to fix “the problem” I am afraid.
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I think the problem is the weather crises are no longer one offs. We’ve now had four years of significant events decreasing supply. Gmo’s can help with giant radishes but they won’t fix things.
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Which means we need to address it collectively and what is it that politicians, especially of the US ilk, like least? Collective action.
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1) Choose to live in the most climate resilient region.
2) Carry no debt (or as little as needed)/Live within one’s means.
3) Understand the difference between need and want and always either meet the needs one’s self or purchase with the highest affordable quality and longevity possible.
None of this is easy but learning why they are important, planning well, working towards achieving them when young, and taking each of these to heart in day to day living I think is key to building a relatively prosperous and resilient life. We – and the next generation who have followed the same guidelines – are now as well insulated as we can be not just on a day to day basis but invested in ways that match the rise and fall of the economic environment to keep us this way.
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Absolutely. That works for homeowners in the developed world but everyone else is looking at a way of life more like pre-1980. We’re all used to walking into shops in the developed world and just finding whatever we want at accessible prices. At one point last year a lettuce in Australia cost a whopping $10.
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Are you pulling a Dr Oz and complaining about the high cost of your crudité?
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LOL! I actually had a section about the rise in price of smoked salmon but then removed it to avoid the comparison 😀
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Biden’s economic policies and subsequent inflation have lowered the purchasing power of my retirement income by a third. Any cost of living increase is too little to be of much help. I’m 73 , live alone, support myself and my two adult children have their own financial needs so there’s no help from them. It’s becoming increasingly frightening. This is compounded by age-related illnesses and medicines which also take an increasing chunk of income.
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Carl, I hope you are checking the voting records of whoever you vote for. Did they argue to reduce Social Security and Medicare payments? Did they vote against giving the government the right to negotiate prescription drug prices? Those are not the guys you want to decide your fate. Sadly, a lot of them are in Congress right now.
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Millions of illegals flowing in and all need welfare: housing, food, medical plus strain on all cities and towns to service all their other needs. I think retirees will endure drastic cuts to fund it all and it gives me a real resentment. They get better care than 50,000 homeless American veterans and people like me who worked since we were 14 years old.
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Carl, I’m a retiree in Australia and I’m confused by what you say about ‘illegals’. We have a lot of ‘boat people’ and people on temporary visas, but NONE of them get welfare payments, which is actually cruel. If they’re in detention then that’s not welfare, it’s what every prison inmate is entitled to, and hardly luxury living.
Would you really prefer to see those detainees starve to death???
As for government spending, our previous conservative government preferred to spend our taxes on making life better for their corporate cronies. That’s where you need to look for spending cuts. 😦
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Ah, yes corporate welfare is an insult but the argument is they are the job creators. However, it seems the line the pockets of the already fat$ stockholders and astonishing large bonuses for management.
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Can I ask, gently, if you think Biden politics hurt you as opposed to Republican politics? When I look at the results of policies I have a feeling that might not be the case.
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I can’t think of any particular republican policies that have hurt me but naturally, policies from both parties tend to impose hardships on the working class to subsidize those at the top and very bottom . Open borders provide millions for very low-wage labor which will cripple the working class financially eliminating them from employment on a huge scale.
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Reading this plea for help makes me quite happy to do so very, very little social media. I think I’ll go pet my dog.
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Indeed. I’m fairly confident many immigrants also started working at 14 if not younger. They’re also the people who take the hardest and lowest paying jobs.
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Yes and yes. I’ve started watching youtube videos by your Robert Reich. Real eye-opening stuff. I’d started to understand corporatism thanks to a scifi writer by the name of Kim Stanley Robinson, but I honestly thought his view of corporations was just…’fiction’. Apparently not.
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This is only the beginning. The shortages in fertilizers are going to mean even smaller yields and there are already export restrictions in some places.
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In Europe we’re seeing both extreme heat in the summer with many areas experiencing drought and extreme floods in winter. Much of Italy is experiencing drought even now in mid winter. I think we’re watching the world enter the most important crisis of modern times while doing very little to respond to it.
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Oh yes, I’ve said at least for the last 20 years that we are witnessing the biggest mass extinction since the Permian. Living through extinctions doesn’t always seem apparent, even big ones, when you are in them because they happen over a long period of time.
Other effects we are seeing even in NA are mass migrations as people move from untenable situations of bad climate and wars which will only increase. The US has backed off from policing a lot of the world which secured trade. There are also demographic collapses in most of the developed world as the baby boomers retire and there aren’t enough Gen X, Millenials to replace them. The world is never going to be what it was unless we do radically different things now and we won’t.
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In Ottawa, this is the first time in forever the Rideau Canal has not opened. We have had hardly any snow this year. This usually causes a dry summer because the snow locks in the precipitation for Spring melt. This was the case last year as well.
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Welcome to the real world cost of not addressing climate change by public investment in a reasonable and responsible way over the past 4 decades. It’s not in the billions that scared so many sheeple who voted against anyone anywhere implementing meaningful interruption to our fossil fuel energy system but in high double digit trillions over the next 50 years (as well as the bonus prizes of global instability and rising disasters). Individuals will now bear the brunt of the massive cost adjusting to an increasing and sometimes overwhelming problem that STILL isn’t being fixed by public investment and needed regulation against the root cause: the continued and increasing rate of burning fossil fuels. So I guess we’re okay with the Po river evaporating and the Rhine and Mississippi unnavigable. It’s just the cost of doing business as usual and we wouldn’t want to disturb that. And so we pay. And pay and pay and pay.
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I agree. For far too long, corporations have been allowed to pollute air, sea, and water without having to pay a /cost/ for the use of air, sea, and water. These things have not had to be factored into manufacturing costs. If they had, we might have gone with renewables decades earlier because they would have been more /cost effective/.
The devil in these details is neo-liberalism which basically allowed corporations to run rampant and justified the lack of regulation via ‘trickle down economics’. -grinds teeth-
And now, as you say, ordinary people are paying and paying and paying. 😦
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A U.S. recession is very much on the table. Inflation is not under control. Economies around the world will continue to suffer (China is on the brink of collapse…)
And if I can draw your attention to this chart (click the “max” for the timeline): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/T10Y2Y
We see that we are inverted re: 2yr-vs-10yr which consistently predicts recession.
It is very much time for “Victory” gardens, better now known as “Survival” gardens.
Your cool new patio would serve well as a preliminary greenhouse (cover it with clear plastic and there you go). Just gotta keep it warm.
As the British would say: Keep Calm and Suffer, I mean, Survive.
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We have a real greenhouse! Our entire plot of land used to be the vegetable garden for the house next door and that included the green house built in 1850 ☺
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A head start on the rest of Mazamet.
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I’m wondering about another housing crash in the U.S. with all the knock on consequences of packaging mortgages and flogging them to financial institutions worldwide….did the banks learn lessons from 2008? Certainly did, they learned that they would be bailed out and the average person would bear the cost. Now the first to be hit will be those with accounts in said banks – your money is now legally their money – but when that proves to be insufficient as sure as shooting the state will step in to rescue those ‘too big to fail’.
I can see the knock on cost of fertiliser at the local feria….those who have never used it – though can’t afford to jump through the hoops for organic certification – have roughly the same prices as last year, the others have prices through the roof.
Inflation here is running at just under 8%….I can get that at the bank on a six month deposit, or 9.85% on a year’s deposit. What would really pay is to do small loans, but for that you need a couple of heavies and I am not really into oppressing people already under pressure.
We buy the offers in bulk when we see them and although solar panels etc are not economically justified given our electricity bills we are installing the system in order to be independent of the grid and to enable us to run an dditional freezer – whose use would take us into a higher tariff bracket.
I’m not too impressed by the climate change lobby….and least of all by net zero. My husband’s father was a district commissioner in the Belgian Congo in the ‘bad old days’ pre war. He would never have tolerated the use of child slave labour to extract the cobalt necessary for the lithium batteries the ‘unco guid’ use in their electric vehicles. Save the planet…stuff the children.
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Cobalt is not necessary for various kinds of lithium batteries. Tesla, naturally, leads the pack with over half of Q1 vehicles sold using lithium iron phosphate (LFP) that contain zero cobalt and nickel.
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Great, so why are the rest using it?
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An excellent question, DM. (Granted, the tech arrived for production only last fall.) It would appear to me that the wider sense is that anything Musk builds must be bad because, you know, Musk is bad. So his batteries must be based only on Bad Things like child labour. (Ignore the 2 year order backlog for Tesla’s giga battery packs made predominantly of iron.)
It seems to me that when narratives take over (like it has in so many ways infecting so many institutions), what’s true no longer matters and reality should just play along. If it doesn’t, then someone else must be to blame because they are not as virtuous as the narrative spreaders and need to be cancelled before their
reality-accepting ‘bigotry’ spreads and ‘harms’ others.
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The narrative has taken over….not just on the question of Musk, but generally, on the increasing authoritarianism ‘justified’ by being the response to ’emergencies’.
How about trying to stem the flow of refugees by giving families money to rebuild their homes, to buy some land to farm, rather than divert it through the corrupt channels of state and NGO aid?
How about using the Pebble Mill nuclear technology – using thorium?
How about developing public transport systems that people can afford to use – in the country as well as the towns?
No? Doesn’t suit the narrative that we all have to lower our standard of living to benefit those already enriched by the states’ misuse of public money to fund their enterprises.
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Mmm…Australia has one of the largest deposits of lithium [outside of China?] and we definitely don’t use child labour!!!!! I’m sure there are countries that do, and I’m sure there are corporations that don’t give a flying fruit bat how their supplies are sourced, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.
On a related note, there are all sorts of developments under way to produce much cheap, less problematic batteries than lithium.
Hopefully the next generation of batteries will be miles better. Like personal computers. I remember when they were big, clunky and about as powerful as an automated abacus. Look at them now. 😀
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Having a faint link to the Congo makes it a very sore point for me, but yes, there are more civilised ways of extracting lithium…if you ignore the environmental damage consequent upon them.
And when you have solved the battery problem…what will be producing the amount of electricity necessary to run society as we know it? Wind? Solar? Both with high costs to the environment both in manufacture and disposal.
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Mining cannot be done without environmental impact. The trick is to compare and contrast.
The environmental fallout of mining lithium is not even a faint whisper compared to the already 150,000 abandoned uncapped oil wells off-gassing methane.
Batteries are well over 90% recyclable. Solar panels are over 80%. Turbines are equivalent. These numbers improve with every iteration of technological advance. The toxic remainder is almost negligible. And so we hear these legitimate criticisms of renewables but fail to grasp just how improved they are and how inconsequential these criticisms are in any fair comparison to an energy system that not only fuels armed conflicts with the worst authoritarian rulers on the planet but funds most anti-western terrorist organizations and left alone is toxic to human life. Lithium poses none of these risks. Renewables harden our energy system, keeps it local, and enhances both its reliability and security while keeping petro-dollars out of the hands of those who use it to undermine and attack liberal democracies. In other words, there is no legitimate equivalency in any way.
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Yes, of course we can live without spent uranium and its uses…thus thorium for nuclear energy.
As to the petro dollar and its iniquitous consequences, looks as if the BRICS have a solution to its heretofore ubiquity.
I am yet to be convinced of the improvements in renewables….in practice rather than in theory. Most things can be improved…but will they be?
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I agree. The way they’re measuring success seems highly questionable to me.
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Measuring success? Give the metric, make the comparison. Renewables plus batteries (remember, ‘batteries’ can be almost anything that stores energy) win in just about every compare and contrast category to all versions of fossil fuels now and all categories as far as I can tell at scale including home grown secure, and reliable energy with more workers than today’s oil and gas and coal industries combined. So I’m really not sure what’s driving the ‘not convinced’ position other than perhaps manufactured doubt. Remember, the planetary toxin is in the burning of fossil fuels and the primary cause is in exchange for energy. Change the energy system (which is the root problem of climate change and all the associated problems and costs it presents), address the root problem with a real world solution that offers a veritable host of additional benefits, not least of which is environmental protection that pays direct dividends to those (and those areas) who host these facilities. Where’s the problem other than competing and winning against legacy energy producers?
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Talk to India and China
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Sometime last year I was looking at satellite images of China’s largest solar array and comparing it to the landscape 10 years prior. The older pic was desert brown with a thin strip of water running through it. The new showed a grid pattern of green and a much wider river. The same is true in Michigan where farmers use solar farms under which they grow alfalfa and harvest fantastic yields of honey. Taken together, the Michigan farmers are able to withstand developers trying to buy the land for sprawl because they’re making far more money producing energy and specialty farming/feed as well as deepening the soil loam and retaining more water in it. That would explain the green I was seeing in China’s solar fields, too.
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Let’s take cars as an example. There are 1,446 billion cars in the world. Is the plan to substitute that number for new electric cars? To substitute just the motors? To have a half and half system that will be rolled out in 50 years? 100? As this system is rolled out how does this affect the already haphazard electricity grids. Seriously haphazard in the developing world but far from ideal in Europe and America. Germany has had to reopen coal plants because it can’t meet basic energy needs. What percentage of their 49 million cars would you like plugging into the grid every night? Musk’s adventures so far look to me like greenwashing. I was extremely excited when years ago he made his last great big announcement which was roof tiles that were going to revolutionise energy as we knew it. I even wrote a post about how I wanted to be first in line – but here we are years later and nothing.
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You’re thinking Tesla is a car company… like most financial admins do. But it’s really an energy technology company which just so happens to make cars. It’s the energy technology component that matters here because, as you quite rightly point out, today’s infrastructure especially in the developing world but also still infecting advanced countries, is still business as usual, meaning the grid doesn’t care what creates the electricity it needs. Changing the system means changing what the grid is. Perhaps you were unaware that certain parts of California and Texas last year were reliant on Tesla EVs – pulling power from them – to meet the larger energy demands during both cold and hot events. The grid in these cases is a two way street taking and giving power into the entire grid. EVs in this sense are simply mobile battery units. This is what I mean by better understanding what renewable energy means: eliminating (eventually) any need to burn fossil fuels but, if done, costs way more in this kind of free market. Legacy energy cannot compete.
When you pair energy storage with energy use in a comprehensive ‘grid’ to scale, you massively reduce today’s infrastructure costs (like refining and shipping fuel) while ‘consumers’ pay less than today’s business as usual for this better, cleaner, and much more cost efficient energy. And it will sweep the globe as economies of scale kick in and make it cheaper and more reliable for developing countries populations to choose the renewable (and digitally controlled, let’s not forget) products and services (like flashlights that operate by hand temperature). And the company has untold and untapped advancements that have yet to be monetized beyond current design elements (like the tiny air conditioner in Tesla vehicles that has no moving parts or the high efficiency Hepa filtration system).
Tesla’s industrial battery division has a two year wait list and has just opened its first major factory. This part of Tesla rarely is mentioned in any financial discussions I’ve encountered and yet is already a 2 billion dollar company on its own. Tesla already has 3500 satellites in operation and permission for 7500 more this year. It’s already profitable 5 years ahead of schedule and was brought into service for Ukraine in under 48 hours to replace the destroyed infrastructure by Russia… free of charge with Musk continuing to pay 200 million a year for this gratis service. The point, however, is that Tesla is making these kinds of investments (they have by far the largest computing facilities in the world) that link energy to technology to real world products that no one else seems either willing or able to do.
I made mention of robots earlier in the thread regarding population decline and the need for more workers. Musk presumes elder care will become a significant market and plans on providing Optimus at under $25,000 (2020 pricing) to fill this at-home need. So the AI division is key not just to self-driving (which is incredibly complex to be fully autonomous in today’s world) but for Optimus. And it’s Optimus that will build human colonies on Mars, which is why Starlink connects with Space X (a rocket a day by 2025) which connects to Optimus, which connects to AI, which connects to Tesla vehicles which connects to the grid which connects to batteries which connects to energy use and storage. And it’s a vertical company, meaning it owns its own supply chain. That’s why this company is not about Musk’s comments or Twitter (a very valuable source of public input for the AI division) but a new way of doing business.
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All of that is fascinating and individually very promising. Call me a sceptic but I don’t see anything coming together in any viable way. If in 2023 we can’t manage as a society to fix the problem of 828 million people suffering from hunger there’s nowhere to go in any substantive way.
I mentioned the electric car thing more as a metaphor than a criticism of Tesla. Of course we can exploit poor countries to build great things for the developed world so we over here have cleaner air. We’ve been successfully doing that to China and India for a while now. So when we go to Mars in a first class cabin, do they get to move to Europe and North America? 🙂 I think the best we can do now is a managed and somewhat orderly decline.
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I just find it absolutely incredible that the one man in charge of guiding the one company that is doing the most work to produce solutions and address the fundamental problem of energy production is the most vilified by those western folk who are in a position of affecting the most meaningful change. It’s truly mind boggling.
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Do you think I’m vilifying him by questioning how all of that works as a coherent plan? I’m willing to sign up to and be a part of a great plan. My question is how does it work?
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I think he’s being vilified for being male, white, and very successful saying unwoke things.
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I think success is great but with that social responsibility. Everyone in positions of power should behave to a certain standard. I’m not saying people need to do what I think is right with their own money – but that doesn’t mean I don’t think that a foundation to end hunger or the creation of a model city, or one of many other things that could improve life on the planet isn’t a better investment of time and energy than a social media site where people scream at each other in 120 characters or less.
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Elon Musk donated around $5.74 billion to charity in November, just weeks after tweeting that if the UN World Food Program showed him how $6 billion would solve world hunger, he would “sell Tesla stock right now and do it.”
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The UN answered, didn’t they? They confirmed they received nothing from Musk after presenting their plan.
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Yes, the donation was based on a CNN headline that claim was supposedly made by The UN WFP chief, David Beasley. Musk responded that if the organization could describe “exactly how $6B will solve world hunger” reportedly made by The UN WFP chief, David Beasley, he would make the donation.
Beasley replied to Musk directly to tell him the reported claim was not accurate, and that $6 billion wouldn’t solve world hunger. That was Musk’s point. (Notice how CNN crafted this story to try to make Musk look bad.) And so he donated the 5.7 billion he would have given to WFP if the reported claim had been true and they had a plan to demonstrate how. Beasley then claimed it would, however, temporarily save 42 million people “on the brink of starvation.” CNN corrected its headline the next day to say Musk’s wealth “could help solve” world hunger instead of solving it entirely. See the twisting by media?
Musk and Beasley replied to each other several times, and Musk eventually asked Beasley to publish the WFP’s current and proposed spending in detail so the public could see exactly where the money would go.
Beasley told Musk that WFP’s financial statements, operational documents, independent evaluation reports, audits and annual global and country performance reports for the last 10 years are all public and on WFP’s website, which he linked. He then linked a “simple snapshot” of WFP’s plan to use $6.6 billion to save 42 million people on the brink of famine and said an “extensive detailed plan” would follow in the coming days. Musk then donated the money to ‘charity’ and dropped it.
But the point remains, Pink, that had in fact the claim been true, WPF would have received 5.7 billion dollars from Musk. It wasn’t so, as you say, they didn’t get it.
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You mean he can only do this through the UN? The 5.7 billion he gave to charity was to his own foundation. I understand he also pays 11 billion in tax and like many of us, use the charity thing to offset part of the debt. It makes us look good and kind at the same time. It seems his foundation did hand out 160 million in donations to non-profits. That’s great. Could he do better? I think so. Could he have sat a team down with people from the UN to come up with a project? I think so.
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Oh probably something like this, although it seems it wasn’t to his own foundation. His worth is based on stock prices. So when he ‘lost’ 200 billion dollars, notice that absolutely no one argued he should receive a reimbursement from losing this wealth (unparalleled in human history) but the same people also have no trouble holding that he should pay tax on the entire value of holdings when the stock price is up!
But the thing is, Pink, no other CEO – no matter how vile the products might be to become grossly enriched – is held to the same standard that critics of Musk have decided apply to him alone. This shows unfettered bias. And this is what I refer to that out of all the business leaders in the world, Musk is considered the the worst of the worst no matter what he says, no matter what he does, no matter how far he advances human capability to address things like climate change. Nope. In spite of these incredible achievements, he alone is worthy of the highest vilification by those – especially in legacy media and most of the environmental ‘champions’ on the Left – who I think use their distaste/disgust/mistrust of all things Musk to signal their own stellar virtue and tribal affiliation to The Elect as one the Good Guys… who achieve almost nothing in comparison except join the mob.
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I hold them all to account. I’d like to see the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation model be the norm. If ordinary people can invest a good portion of their time and money in charity, the wealthiest should lead that charge.
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So there you have Master Plan 3: to a world of sustainable and renewable energy without burning fossil fuels by 2050 – the benchmark year – at 60% cost of what oil, gas, and coal will spend in the next 20 years. Also, the move towards zero rare earth minerals for all Tesla batteries. Over a billion EVs by Tesla alone. (GM, for example, hopes to achieve 40,000 units by 2026 and Toyota… well… maybe some day). New manufacturing model (no longer the ‘line’ brought in by Ford and now used everywhere), very high efficiency model to drive down costs. And the list goes on (not least of which is a new kind of home heat pump).
I point this out because legacy media and most people pay zero attention to the most forward thinking and productive company on the planet when it comes to producing and implementing profitable real world solutions for replacing the root cause of rapid climate change, which is what effects everything else. Instead, they focus on the tenor his tweets and question according to their own vaunted position just how lacking is his moral character in comparison.
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Could you lay that out to me mathematically? What’s the impact of the proposed 20 million new cars/batteries per year? As I said before I’d like to understand the macro-plan.
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That’s a big ask, Pink! Here’s a general breakdown of how and why the Master Plan is doable and cost effective. (This is a severely edited and dry version to make it ‘only’ 28 minutes!)
Here’s the kind of video I usually watch to find out why Tesla is so far ahead than all others in everything it does… in this case with EVs. Munro is famous for breaking down cars and trucks right down to their nuts and bolts and offering companies insights and improvements based on what he finds for which they pay a great deal of money. So he’s a famous and highly respected vehicle engineering critic. He says, “Tesla engineers at the speed of thought.” So this video indicates five simple examples of how Musk forces his engineers to never be satisfied even when they are 4 or 5 generations ahead of the next competitor in all areas and what ‘Easter eggs’ Munro found just touring the Texas facility on Investor’s Day. (Originally Munro was very critical of early Tesla vehicles and was surprised that every one of his criticisms was addressed at speed, engineering was altered, and that this unusual corporate policy continues to drive improvements.)
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I did watch the video before my question and then again after your comment. But I’m still unclear on how that’s a real solution considering the pre-existing cars and the sort of production that would be necessary to substitute the totality. It seems to me these are all situations in which decline is unavoidable, just different types of decline. Wouldn’t real progress come in the form of a prohibition of cars? Or will more extreme measures become necessary eventually? The annihilation of certain countries? The takeover of others?
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The solution is to replace our energy system and stop burning fossil fuels entirely. Easier said than done. But here’s thing: this will happen in our lifetime (well, the next 30 years) because it’s cheaper, more reliable, easier to implement, more secure, and has the moral backing necessary to address the real problem causing rapid climate change. Vehicles of all kinds are a part of the problem and so they must be changed to run on something else. That’s a market that Tesla will grab a share but others will as well not because of morality but because of simple economics. Tesla shows by example how these economies of scale and efficiencies and technological improvements will accomplish the climate change solution and replace oil, gas, and coal with something much better in all kinds of ways and much more affordably. That’s why the farmer will choose it, why the pilot will choose it, why the truck driver will choose it, why the homeowner will choose it, why the captain of a ship or heavy industry will choose it, and so on. Cars are not the problem; they’re part of the solution! (Because they are part of the battery used by the entire grid.)
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Again, I hope you’re right. I really don’t see the possibility of a real worldwide effort. Consider that China and Russia won’t even admit their Covid vaccines are ineffective.
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Can you think of some use for the 13.9 million acres of farmland currently dedicated to producing ethanol?
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You’re right in what you say. Renewables /now/ are the lesser of two evils, but there are new technologies popping up all over the place. I keep track of new tech for my writing and apparently there are multiple models of wave-power coming online which may provide the baseload power we need without too many of the nasties.
I guess I’ve always believed something is miles better than nothing, or in this case, the status quo. Let’s just hope that cleaner technologies quickly replace the interim ones we have now.
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I suspect they won’lt while money is being made with what we have….
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There’s the very fascinating case of The Guardian attacking wood burning stoves and promoting gas which I find profoundly mystifying. They choose 2 out of 10 possible measures and decide those are the only ones that matter. The reader is left to ask: what in the world?
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Something I increasingly ask of ‘The Guardian’….it seems to be all of a twitter on all manner of things. Their editorial staff should realise that the paper’s reputation for honest journalism went down the drain a long time ago.
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I have the impression click bait is the way of the world now. When people start believing billionaires have the best interest of the common man in mind, things are going in an odd direction.
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No Carnegie libraries these days.
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I hope you’re wrong this time because I don’t think we have the time for business as usual. 😦
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‘We’ might not……..’they’ do.
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-sigh- yes.
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Most of us born before 1980 are going to die in the next 2 or 3 decades – which in essence means: Who cares?!? We have a diesel car. We heat primarily with wood. And we’re all going to die!
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Oh rubbish! I may only have 2 decades left but you’re still a wee lad. You’ll be enjoying climate change for quite a bit longer. 😦
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I think it’s very likely. Didn’t Trump dissolve all the regulations that were put in place right after the mortgage crisis?
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I lost track!
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With demographic collapse we have had issues with a lot of other things here in Canada. Healthcare issues with a doctor and nurse shortage (in Ontario this is made worse but just bad governing over decades and especially recently and bad policies by institutions outside government), housing crises where governments have allowed the prices of housing to sky rocket. We now have homeless encampments in larger cities and people who are on fixed incomes like seniors, disabled are priced out of safe homes and live in squalor. This can happen simply because a home owner cannot pay the increased city taxes because years ago provinces downloaded a lot of services to cities and cities only have property tax to get income from. There has been a crazy increase in crime. Random crime too like someone stabbing someone in the face on a subway or an elderly woman being killed when a man suddenly pushes her onto the concrete. It’s bad enough I no longer want to take public transportation into Toronto. I can’t help but feel this is the beginning of the end.
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Of course, you’re right, Pink. So we’d better start planning now on how to prepare best for increasing numbers of climate refugees not only in our home states but migrating globally. The faster the transition to renewables the more advanced nations take, the greater the resiliency, lower the cost, and higher the reliability to withstand the more extreme events from climate change (the New Abnormal, as Michael Mann writes). This is the necessary infrastructure. Greenhouse technologies, vertical farming, local food ag industries, fractions of feed, water, and fertilizer, gene modifications, all are doable now and will only become more efficient and at lower cost with scale. Promoting scale is what’s lacking when people are fooled by vested interests in keeping things the same… either by advocating impediments or staying quiet: both of these serve only one master and the wrong one.
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Good post. I’ve been thinking the same things, wondering when cauliflower got so small, meat so expensive and chickpeas so hard to find. I do have a kitchen garden and collected rainwater. I think my handyman and I have been at this long enough that we can actually count on decent crops this year. It’s a good thing because this may be the first year that I will actually want to rely on the produce. I’ve been wondering where to cut costs. I can’t conscionably cut Julien’s hours; with three kids at home, he needs every one of them. I’ve seen how happy he is at the end of the season, when he takes home the surplus produce. And that’s during normal years: this year he’ll be thrilled. So will we finally enact excess profits taxes? Limit the percentage difference between C-suite pay and that of entry-level workers? How about enacting Andrew Yang’s proposal that we receive a royalty for all that personal information we hand over to Google, Facebook and the rest? Those changes won’t do much about the climate crisis, but a little economic equality would at least soften the blow.
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A more egalitarian society tends to stem revolutions. I don’t think the CEOs will give up power easily. We are in for a rough ride.
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You’ve got an amazing set up for home growing. And even fruit trees, right? The weather was so strange last year that we had half the amount of figs and almost no loquats. Every year since we arrived I put loquats in armagnac and there’s enough to do one big jar for us and four or five to give away at Christmas- last year there wasn’t enough for a single small jar.
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The same issues for maple syrup here in Canada! Some places great, some places very low, sap running a month early here but a month late just over there… I’ll tell you, when you can’t rely on getting even one bottle’s worth from trees that usually produce about a dozen, as far as I’m concerned we’re approaching end of days!
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Pink, this is quite timely.
I think I will just go back to hunting
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Do you personally see the effects of the drought in Kenya?
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Oh yes. Dead animals in the park.
Veggies have become so costly and much more
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I’m pretty sure the most reasonable explanation is that Democrats staged those dead animals in Kenya to form a world government protected by Jewish space lasers.
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I thought bad things are because of Trump and good ones Dems. But I might have my things mixed up lo.
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You may be right. All I know is that one of these two parties must be at fault. (I was thinking of the Sandy Hook massacre and how right wing talk radio was all about it being staged by the Dems)
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Last I heard, Alex Jones crowd still believe it was a rumour. I don’t know what they say of the other mass shootings?
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There is a well known and documented connection between climate change deniers and conspiracy nut jobs (as well as racist but that doesn’t pertain here). Hence, the dead animals dying of thirst you mention in ever growing numbers as drought conditions worsen in dry areas (and flooding frequency and rate and level rise in wet areas) must be hammered into fitting the conspiracy model about climate change being a political and partisan narrative, where compelling evidence from reality (like dinosaur bones for creationists) must have been planted by those Bad People on the other side.
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Talking of dinosaur bones, have you visited the Dino museum in Kentucky? I have heard only good things about it. Humans and dinosaurs living together and being all friendly. The Ark surviving ants and woodpeckers among other things
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It’s on my post mortem bucket list.
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This is terrible.
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The cart does seem smaller now than usual. Priority # 1 (wine) still being handled exceptionally well 🙂
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Fortunately we’re in wine country here 😀
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Most of my close friends are right-wing preppers of some form or another. I always thought it looked fun but I never bought into their paranoia, now I am reconsidering my minimalist, apartment dwelling lifestyle… easier said than done. Despite growing up semi-rural it is hard to change gears after 20 years.
No one, left or right, thinks things are going to get better: well governed, high-trust, low crime societies feel like the past. We’ve destroyed the human capital that made it possible. The Right will say the problem is family destruction, mass migration, big government etc. The Left will say the problem is environmental and economic. Both have insights, but there has to be a new synthesis.
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Perhaps more people should pay attention to Investor’s Day on March 1st by Musk. Methinks we’re at the cusp of a way back.
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Sadly, I don’t think there is a managerial solution.
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I have to say, I don’t grasp this boilerplate criticism of Musk. Have you seen the efficiencies of a gigafactory in operation? Do you understand the challenges of creating a vertically integrated energy technology company that just so happens to make it a world leader in products in many very complex areas and profitable in those, building what is needed rather than talking in committees about who to blame when potential solutions fail to magically appear? If nothing else, he’s the kind of ‘manager’ who just so happens to get things done. Look at his first two grand plans. He met these objectives. That’s why this next offering is so interesting: he sees a way to attain these goals and he’s talking now about replacing the world’s energy system. Ignore this plan at your peril.
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I happen to work in a world leading gigafactory and I am sick of this shit. OTOH I have nothing against Elon Musk and I wish him well. He is a fun character and he owns his companies rather than just push paper around.
I am coming around to the idea that the well-being of a nation is a matter of human capital and natural resources. You can monkey all you want with banks and tech and development, at the end of the day it is people and land; both need cultivation and care, and it is a work of generations. All we have done the last century or so is blow through that human and natural capital. The Left sees the natural destruction, the Right sees the human, both propose to manage the way out of it but I don’t think they can do it with the categories they have.
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I think he’s not a very decent person. He accused an innocent man of being paedophile with zero evidence. He’s manipulated the market in ways which would’ve put him in prison in a number of developed countries. His hostile takeover of Twitter wasn’t to improve a service, it’s the naked pursuit of power and influence.
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For anyone concerned about climate change, Musk is the right guy at the right time with the right attributes to bring about real solutions in the real world. Twitter was a project (perhaps you are unaware of the extent of government manipulation of information using the platform) that has caused a disruption to the social media business-as-usual model and so his motives will always be controversial. So yes, he says and does things that bothers a lot of people and believes tuff that offends many and often for very good reasons. But… he is THE global champion of addressing climate change with workable solutions and for this we should sing his praises. His business and product innovations are literally world changing. We need – the world needs – more not fewer Elon Musks to bring about the changes needed. But, as I said, March 1st should be something to pay attention to and, for investors looking forward in an uncertain economy, an opportunity today that rarely happens. Just remember, he has a pedigree of saying what he means, meaning what he says, and doing what he says he’s going to do. Few others on the world’s stage and in such an influential position can boast to be this grown up.
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I hope you’re right but I don’t share your optimism.
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BTW, is you avatar art Jim Shaw?
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Indeed. The problem is everything really. One thing triggers the next. Climate breakdown and mass migration have always gone hand in hand. Greece has had to increase border protections because there are waves of people who lost everything in the earthquake who see no other option than coming to Europe.
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Inflation is at 7% here in Australia and as someone on a fixed income [age pension] I’m really feeling the cost of living rises. Thanks to the pandemic, I’ve been able to track the cost of my weekly food bill down to the last cent. At the start of the pandemic, I could afford to stock up on things that were in short supply, or likely to be in short supply. Now? I’m buying much less but still paying the same, or more.
Your mention of tomatoes made me smile as the Offspring went nuts with tomatoes and corn this growing season. We’ve harvested our own sweet corn, wonderfully fresh, plus we’re still getting masses of spinach and tomatoes. We’ve made tomato sauces almost every day, plus passata for the freezer, and the tomatoes keep on coming!
Meat consumption, on the other hand, has reduced to chicken drumsticks [cheapest cut], chicken livers, and a bit of pork mince. Lamb and beef have become ‘special occasion’ meals.
We’re still doing MUCH better than a lot of other people but…I’m really starting to worry about the rest of this year…and next.
Oh, and p.s. I bought an extra jar of Dijon mustard. 🙂
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Here in the U.S. organ meats have become really scarce the last 5 years, worse since Covid. Beef tongues and hearts used to be under a dollar pound now they are prohibitive. Beef and chicken livers are still cheap but but supply is very inconsistent, only showing up once a month or so. Pork livers and chicken hearts have disappeared from the shelves. As an organ aficionado I’m very put out.
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Prior to the pandemic I used to buy chicken livers from specialist butchers. Since we’ve been in protective self-isolation, I’ve had to rely on the large supermarkets for delivered food and only one still sells chicken livers – at over double the price pre-pandemic. Still cheaper than lamb or beef but depressing nonetheless.
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Apparently animals don’t grow organs post-Covid.
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lol – like seedless watermelons?
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Yes. An organless chicken was born in 2019 and they just cut bits off it and plant them in the ground.
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lmao – but I love chicken livers!!!!
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Where I am in Ontario Canada the meat is quite expensive as well. Even chicken is expensive because of bird flu. Groceries in general have gone up higher than inflation and have risen by 11%. I believe this is gouging as the grocery stores are few and they control also the food industry as there is little competition.
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In France those are still the go to items for a whole lot of people.
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We stopped eating red meat a while back for Cholesterol reasons. I’ll still have the occasional steak tartare or carpaccio, but most of the time we eat sea food. I’d get more dijon if I were you. There are four dept. in France in drought right now including the mustard growing areas.
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We bought a case of Edmond Fallot Dijon mustard…made from mustard seed from Burgundy…..it might become an heirloom….
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Funny you should say that about seafood… since the pandemic, and the need to freeze so much food, I discovered that you can buy two frozen salmon fillets [skin on] at half the price of fresh red meat so that’s my big splurge once a week.
Except for eating more carbs than we should, I think we eat better than we did before because we’ve cut out so many processed sweets. Instead, we eat home grown fruit, fruit compotes or, as we’ll do today, home grown peach cake. So there are silver linings with everything. Just so grateful we /can/ grow so much of our own produce.
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It is nice to see another perspective other than the American one. Never thought the inflation would be a global issue. Good work!
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Please like all the posts on harmander.ok
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Why?
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I just asked if you don’t want to its your choice
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