Home » Posts tagged 'the consciousness of sheep' (Page 2)

Tag Archives: the consciousness of sheep

The establishment media are suspiciously silent about the energy crunch facing Europe in general and the UK in particular. In October, when the wholesale gas price spiked at 400 percent above its January 2021 level, energy prices were headline news. So too was the sight of energy supply companies falling like dominoes. But then, perhaps because energy supply problems couldn’t be blamed on Brexit, the news moved on to MPs sleaze and the Prime Minister’s Christmas parties. Most Brits today are entirely unaware that our energy situation has become far more precarious.

It falls to the business pages of the American press to spell out what UK outlets refuse to consider. For example, Anna Shiryaevskaya, Jesper Starn, and Elena Mazneva at Bloomberg explain that:

“Temperatures are forecast to fall below zero degrees Celsius in several European capitals this week, straining electricity grids already coping with low wind speeds and severe nuclear outages in France. To make matters worse, Russia is limiting natural gas flows through a major transit route to Germany…

“Energy prices have spiraled this year, with European gas surging more than 600%. The region’s benchmark gas contract climbed as much as 8.8% Monday and closed record-high, while German year-ahead power, a benchmark in Europe, rose as much as 5.7% to a record 256.25 euros ($289) a megawatt-hour. The French contract jumped 9% to an all-time high.”

The energy crunch has been exacerbated by the political games being played out by the new German government and Russia – the former refusing to finalise the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal, and the latter choosing to store gas reserves for its own population rather than pump it over to Western Europe. One consequence for the UK – which is now at the end of the pipelines from Russia – is that the price of gas spiked above £3.70 per therm this afternoon (20.12.2021):

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hogwash

November 23, 2021

Hogwash

In the early 1980s, to Margaret Thatcher’s annoyance, union reps and managers at the steelworks in Port Talbot agreed a strategy to save the plant. As a result, Port Talbot was spared the post-industrial blight visited upon most of Britain’s ex-industrial towns. Now in private hands, and despite periodic crises, the steelworks employs some 4,000 people – a big drop from the 20,000 workers during the plant’s heyday in the 1960s. Nevertheless, those 4,000 jobs are supplemented by hundreds more sub-contractors, and together these provide the demand for local small and medium businesses.

What saved the Port Talbot plant was an agreement to implement neoliberal efficiency savings. Key among these was the sub-contracting of what we might think of as efficiency buffers – redundant capacity to cope with emergencies. For example, prior to the agreement, the steelworks employed a small army of fitters, electricians, welders and other skilled workers whose skills were only required when something went wrong. Instead of being paid a full wage – often for sitting around playing cards and drinking tea – they would be paid a retainer together with a set fee every time they were called out.

Similar arrangements were in place in the railway industry in those days too. And I personally spent shifts playing cards and drinking tea as part of the spare train crews kept on standby for sickness cover and unforeseen emergencies.

Whatever else neoliberalism was about, cutting out these “inefficiencies” lay at its heart. Companies were losing money paying people like me to sometimes sit around all day. And so, the redundancy process was enlisted to cut the workforce down to its bare minimum…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas

November 13, 2021

Separating the self-flagellation from the greenhouse gas

Speaking to the media at the Youth4Climate event last week, Greta Thunberg berated the UK for continuing to extract oil and gas from the North Sea while pretending to be green ahead of the coming COP26 conference. Not only that, but as the originator of the industrial revolution, Britain is doubly guilty:

“Of course, the climate crisis … more or less it started in the UK since that’s where the industrial revolution started, we started to burn coal there, so of course the UK has an enormous historical responsibility when it comes to historic emissions since the climate crisis is a cumulative crisis.”

So, here’s an interesting question that Greta has probably never had to answer, and which many of my readers will probably get wrong. If we add up all of the carbon dioxide emitted by households, businesses and industries within the boundaries of what we now call the United Kingdom, when will China – currently the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide – overtake? 2025? 2035? 2050?

No, in fact, China overtook the UK in cumulative carbon dioxide emissions two decades ago in 2002:

The reason for this is that China’s march to industrialisation following its admission to the World Trade Organisation, arrived just at the point when the world’s conventional oil deposits were beginning to deplete. Moreover, by December 2001, while oil was still in demand, most of the developed states had made deep cuts to their coal use. This gave China access both to its own deposits and to cheap deposits from around the world. But coal is a particularly heavy emitter of carbon dioxide, and China’s emissions from coal had already passed those of the UK – for the last time – in 1968:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A red light on the dashboard

November 5, 2021

A red light on the dashboard

On New Year’s Eve 2006-7, something unexpected happened. For most of the previous two decades, most of the pubs where I live had operated a system where they gave tickets to regular drinkers in order to limit the number of people seeking entry. This was a problem because one couldn’t secure tickets for guests. And since my relatives only stayed over for the holidays, it left us to seek out the few pubs that did not operate a ticket policy. And in most years, these pubs would be packed to the rafters.

When we set out in the last couple of hours of 2006, we fully expected the same crowds as the year before. So did the pubs, apparently, because they had hired security to control entry – something that was common for British nightclubs but rare for pubs. What none of us had anticipated though, was that the pubs would be almost empty! Nor was it just one or two pubs. Everywhere we went it was the same story. Indeed, on one occasion the security staff hired to keep the masses out tried hard to encourage us to come in. Quite simply, tens of thousands of people who had previously gone to pubs to celebrate New Year, stayed at home in 2006.

To me it was a warning sign that something unpleasant and dramatic was about to happen to the economy. It wasn’t that the beer had risen in price – although supermarket beer had long been cheaper than pub beer. It was an indicator of something much more profound. Coming on the heels of rising fuel prices and the central bank decision to begin jacking up interest rates, it was a signal that people’s standard of living had been impacted to the point that discretionary spending was being seriously curtailed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The climate war won’t work

October 30, 2021

The climate war won’t work

There are, in fact, no human comparisons for the effort required to reverse the global-scale damage wrought by 300 years of industrial growth. Nevertheless, people still reach for past human endeavours to try to spur our political leaders to an action which, in truth, is far beyond them. How many times have we heard that tackling climate change requires an effort similar in scale to the Apollo moon landings or the Manhattan Project? And then there is the stubbornly undead comparison to the Second World War. Every time we think we have successfully driven a stake through the heart of this insane proposition, someone who has failed to understand what the war was really about, resurrects it and drafts it into service in the fight against climate change.

Today it is everyone’s favourite media environmentalist George Monbiot’s turn to suggest that:

“The astonishing story of how the US entered the second world war should be on everyone’s minds as Cop26 approaches.”

Monbiot gives a reasonable summary of the various measures taken by the Roosevelt Administration to mobilise the US economy for war in the wake of Pearl Harbour. Then he asks:

“So what stops the world from responding with the same decisive force to the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced? It’s not a lack of money or capacity or technology. If anything, digitisation would make such a transformation quicker and easier. It’s a problem that Roosevelt faced until Pearl Harbor: a lack of political will. Now, just as then, public hostility and indifference, encouraged by legacy industries (today, above all, fossil fuel, transport, infrastructure, meat and media), outweighs the demand for intervention…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This is not 1997

October 26, 2021

This is not 1997

Not that minimum wages are anything new. The USA introduced its Federal Minimum Wage as far back as 1938; although today each state sets its own rate. And the general consensus is that minimum wages help raise wages in general with little or no impact on employment as a whole. The broad theory being that by increasing wages at the bottom – where people’s propensity to spend is higher – we increase demand across the economy. As the economy grows, demand for labour increases and forces wages up still further. And so, demand rises and promotes further growth.Although introduced to the UK by a Labour government, the National Minimum Wage is closer to the Tory approach to economic policy. This is because it passes the costs onto someone other than the state immediately. In this case, Britain’s employers. Labour governments, in contrast, have generally sought the politically easier approach of passing costs onto future generations via public borrowing… which was often the better policy if a combination of inflation and growth served to lower the real cost of the debt even as the state’s ability to repay it became easier.

This was no doubt the outcome desired by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown when they were elected in 1997. After two decades of suppressed wages – first under James Callaghan, and then under Thatcher – and despite the deregulation of the City of London and the increasing revenues from North Sea oil and gas, it was hoped that a legal minimum wage would generate the growth needed to lift people out of poverty. In neoliberal terms, it would “make work pay.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What then are we to become?

October 5, 2021

What then are we to become?

According to Boris Johnson, the economic dislocation which appears to be gathering pace across the UK is merely “a period of adjustment after Brexit.” In Johnson’s formulation, those who would turn the clock back are tacitly in favour of the low-pay and poor working conditions which were encouraged when the UK was a member of the European Union. There is, for example, no shortage of lorry drivers in the UK. More than 230,000 of us hold valid Heavy Goods vehicle licences. Unfortunately for those who like turkey for Christmas dinner and petrol at any time, the pay and conditions in the haulage industry are so poor that most prefer to work elsewhere. Cheap Eastern European drivers living out of their cabs and engaging in cabotage helped to paper over the cracks until the lockdowns began and some 20,000 of them opted to be quarantined at home rather than stay in the UK.

In the anti-Brexit narrative, the shortage of drivers, agricultural workers, natural gas, garden furniture and anything else which turns out to be in short supply, is the unintended consequence of an ill-conceived withdrawal from the EU. But in Johnson’s formulation, the dislocation is no more than the intended first phase of a transition from the low-paid and low-skilled economy of the past to a new, high-paid and hi-tech “global Britain.” It is not – his supporters claim – the government’s fault that these shortages are materialising now. It is the fault of employers who – despite having had five years to prepare for Brexit – have failed to train enough workers and offer them decent enough pay and conditions to retain them in their respective industries…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A crisis of affordability

September 30, 2021

A crisis of affordability

Western capitalist economies don’t really do shortages. There are a few stand alone exceptions such as a music festival or a sporting event, where demand so outstrips supply that queues form. But for the most part – as we saw last week with the eye-watering rise in wholesale gas prices – when something is in short supply the price increases; and when the price increases enough, the queues disappear.

In economics, this is the difference between demand and desire. I might, for example, desire a new sports car or a country mansion. But since I do not have anything like the discretionary income to buy these things, I do not contribute to the economic demand for them. And unless someone is going to offer them for sale at a ridiculously low price, I doubt that we are going to see queues forming any time soon. As Tom Chivers at UnHerd puts it:

“Over the long run, the market normally solves coordination problems like this, reasonably effectively. If lots of people want some resource, then the people selling that resource realise they can make more money if they raise the price. At the higher price, fewer people are willing to buy it, but the seller makes more money per unit sold. And, in theory, they can keep raising the price until the lost sales start to outweigh the gain per unit.”

When we witness queues piling up outside filling stations across the UK then, we might be correct in assuming that something – or most likely some things – are being done to artificially generate a shortage where none previously existed…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The march of folly

September 27, 2021

The march of folly

It is of some interest that people have been contrasting images of British petrol queues this weekend with the petrol queues which formed back in 1973 as a result of the OPEC oil embargo. Not least because a more accurate comparison is with the fuel protests in September 2000. That is, this weekend’s “shortages” are largely the product of a multinational oil company launching a media campaign aimed at avoiding having to improve the pay and conditions of its drivers. From past experience – including your rush to get toilet paper last March – you didn’t have to be a genius to realise that publicising a faux shortage of fuel would lead to a run on the country’s filling stations. They are, after all, just like banks in that if we all turn up at the same time, they break. And so, in a matter of hours fuel shortages became a self-fulfilling prophesy; aided by ministers taking to the airwaves to urge people not to panic.

If anything, we have become even more dependent upon just-in-time deliveries today than we were 21 years ago. And back then it only took the loss of 15 percent of deliveries to bring us to the brink of a cascading collapse. This is because the real economy fails in the same way as Liebig argued that crops fail. The absence of one component is sufficient to bring about a total failure. So, for example, in September 2000 several English hospitals ceased treating people because of a shortage of Sucher. The operating theatres were ready to go. The surgeons were in place. The patients were ready to be anaesthetised…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crisis by design

September 24, 2021

Crisis by design

Believe it or not, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has every right to stand before the nations of the world and lecture them on climate change. Not that Johnson himself has done much to address the crisis (indeed, given that having children is the single biggest cause of climate change at this point, Johnson’s inability to keep his willy in his pants makes him an exemplar of much that is toxic in our culture). But as the current political head of a country which has done more than most to pursue the bright green vision of a world without fossil fuels, he has every right to ask others to follow Britain’s lead.

They won’t do it, of course. US President Biden has already restated American motorists’ God-given right to cheap gasoline. Meanwhile, President Xi Jinping may be promising to cut other people’s access to coal-power, but China still consumes half of the world’s coal and shows no sign of curbing its own coal-fired growth. Germany talks a good Energiewende, but it still depends upon fossil fuels for two-thirds of its electricity, and is not pledged to end coal-fired generation until 2038.

In fact, Britain appears to be the only developed state to swallow the Big Green Lie at face value: The claim that it is entirely possible to operate a fossil fuel-based industrial economy without fossil fuels. Starting with the smallest, and easiest to transform, sector of the economy – electricity generation – we were promised not only that a seamless transition was possible, but that it would be cheap and easy. Indeed, it was precisely the promise that wind turbines and solar panels were getting cheaper which persuaded the Blair government to sign up to a policy to generate 20 percent of the UK’s electricity from renewable sources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Wrong for a different reason

September 19, 2021

Wrong for a different reason

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – A well-meaning but not particularly bright left-leaning US politician – made a stir earlier this week by wearing a figure-hugging dress emblazoned with the slogan “Tax the Rich” to the prestigious 2021 Met Gala. Since the slogan was clearly political, it wasn’t long before the various political tribes took to social media to pass judgement.

“Hypocrisy!” was the charge made by the libertarian right. As Amanda L Gordon at Bloomberg explains:

“The message itself wasn’t surprising — Ocasio-Cortez has been one of the biggest supporters of raising taxes on the rich to help pay for more social services and narrowing the massive wealth gap between America’s rich and poor. But the latest setting in which AOC — as she is known — chose to express it drew attention.

“The annual event at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the haunt of celebrities, designers, billionaires and various other members of the jet set that are willing to pay $35,000 a pop for the privilege to attend.”

But, the left ask, “where better to demand that the rich pay their fair share of taxes than in a gathering of the rich themselves?” According to Hannah Selinger at the Independent, for example:

“The truth is, women have always used clothing — the most accessible medium — to express their politics. One might say that such choices in the everyday sphere have been more subtle. Ocasio-Cortez’s dress, of course, was anything but. And that was entirely appropriate for the space in which the statement was made.”

Ocasio-Cortez has also clarified that she did not pay $35,000 to attend and that the dress was borrowed for the evening:

“The time is now for childcare, healthcare, and climate action for all. Tax the Rich.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A far from perfect storm

September 18, 2021

A far from perfect storm

Global warming may yet prove to be the one thing which saves us from our largely misguided attempts to respond to global warming. This is because, while the crisis is real enough, the solution that we have bought into is an absolute stinker. While a great deal of corporate profit has been made from the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) whatever question they are an answer to, it is not “how do we operate a complex industrial society without fossil fuels?”

Up until now this has not been a problem, of course. For the best part of half a century, politicians have been mouthing warm words about protecting the environment and saving the planet. But in practice they have simply presided over more business as usual while hoping that clever people somewhere else will discover some new energy source or invent some new technology which will save the day. In the meantime, energy-expensive solar panels and wind turbines were deployed – with huge subsidies doled out to landowners – to lull a gullible public into believing something was being done.

The establishment media played their part by conflating electricity with energy, so that they could falsely claim that this city, region or country had run entirely on renewable energy yesterday – although “yesterday” often turned out to mean “a couple of hours yesterday.” But since electricity is only 20-25 percent of the energy we use, these media stories simply ignored the gas used for heating and cooking, the oil used to operate transport, plant and agricultural machinery, and the coal used to make steel and cement.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Who determines prices?

September 12, 2021

Who determines prices?

One of the consequences of the response to the pandemic and the disruption from Brexit is that labour shortages are appearing across the low-paid sectors of the economy. So much so that even the metropolitan liberal Guardian has begun to wonder whether the benefits of higher wages for the low-paid might outweigh the cost of having to pay more for a plumber or an au pair. As John Harris puts it:

“For decades, large swathes of the labour market have been run on the assumption that there will always be sufficient people prepared to work for precious little. But here and across the world, as parts of the economy have been shut down and furlough schemes have given people pause for thought, the idea that they need not stay in jobs that are exploitative and morale-sapping has evidently caught on.

“In the UK, meanwhile, Brexit remains a disastrous and chaotic project – but, among its endless and unpredictable consequences, leaving the EU has cut off employers’ access to a pool of people who were too often exploitable. Time has thereby been called on one of the ways that our dysfunctional labour market was prevented from imploding.”

Harris points to sectors of the economy – mostly low-paid – where employers have been obliged to increase wages in order to fill vacancies. And there is certainly some room for wage increases across the economy. But the emerging narrative is that this is a bad thing because it will create price increases. Much of the thinking around this issue though, is based on experiences and on economic models that last saw the light of day half a century ago. And with this in mind, we should take mainstream narratives with a pinch of salt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A problem shared is a problem doubled

September 11, 2021

A problem shared is a problem doubled

At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of 9 August 2019, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid. This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea wind farm in the North Sea, taking another 799MW of power from the system. Fortunately, regulations at the time required that the Grid operator keep 1GW of back up capacity for precisely this kind of emergency. And so standby turbines at the Little Barford gas power station were started. However, the system failed, taking 244MW of Little Barford’s power offline too. This loss of power tripped a further 350MW of distributed generation bringing the total loss of power to 1,481MW. Within the next minute, 900MW of National Grid’s 1GW of backup capacity was brought online, stabilising the frequency at 49.2Hz. Seconds later, however, the gas turbine at Little Barford failed; bringing the loss of power to 1,691MW. At this point, National Grid had consumed all of its 1GW backup capacity and had no resource to cope with further power losses or frequency fluctuations. Then, half a minute later (16:53:50) the frequency fell to 48.8Hz; triggering the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme and automatically disconnecting 1.1 million business and household consumers. In response, and for yet to be discovered reasons, (16:53:58) a third turbine at Little Barford went offline bringing the total loss of power to 1,878MW – nearly double Ofgem’s stipulated backup capacity.

Network Rail was among the large industrial users in the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme, so that at the peak of the Friday evening rush hour, a large part of the UK’s rail network was brought to a halt…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Crisis hiding in plain sight

August 7, 2021

Crisis hiding in plain sight

Putting a positive gloss on the news is especially important as we attempt to recover from a pandemic. And if that positive gloss is green in colour, so much the better. And so yesterday we were treated to the news that:

“More electric vehicles were registered than diesel cars for the second month in a row in July, according to car industry figures. It is the third time battery electric vehicles have overtaken diesel in the past two years.”

That is surely great news. But as is usually the case in matters green, we are starting from a very low position. Much more will have to be done to raise the number of battery-only EVs from the current nine percent of registrations in 2021 to the planned 100 percent by 2035. Moreover, the current nine percent is a share of a dramatically depressed new car market… which is the real headline news in this story.

Nobody is actively covering this up; but they are playing it down. According to the BBC piece which celebrates the rise in EV sales:

“However, new car registrations fell by almost a third…”

Insofar as the wellbeing or otherwise of the car industry has been a measure of the health of the wider economy throughout the oil age, a 29.5 percent collapse in new car sales ought to have been given far more prominence. This is particularly true insofar as this year’s decline comes on the back of the massive lockdown-decline in 2020:

Instead we are treated to several implausible explanations for why this is nothing to worry about. First, we are told, the decline is the result of people no longer wanting to buy diesel cars. Certainly, there has been a collapse in demand for diesels in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal and government increases in tax on diesel vehicles…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: the consciousness of sheep

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts