Kansas is not opening many new wind farms. It is already having lawsuits to stop construction because the good land is used up. In 2019 they stopped a Reno county farm, there are doubtless other cases that didn’t make the news or where developers were deterred from trying.
Air and sea do not use the main fuel, which is gasoline and diesel. Telecommuting would reduce demand. However, the majority of people have hands on jobs, and diesel consumption should not be falling. The Phase 2 reopening in most states covered retail, which is a $5 trillion industry. Restaurants are $1T, other activities are even less. Probably 80% of reopening has happened even in the worst hit states and consumer spending has not recovered much. Even the spending is inflated because people are leaving cash for contactless payments, which makes spending easier to record even if its falling in reality. The more centralized and physical measures like industrial production, inventories, non ecommerce stores, and home sales have all been doing worse than anything cash related. Cash is used for a large share of transactions so it can massively temporarily inflate measured gdp if contactless payments grow.
The EIA is forecasting demand to increase in Q3. It would be odd if it didn’t since there is hardly anything left to reopen. If it gets to september and things are still in freefall I think your argument will look bad. Italy lifted quarantine in April, Germany a little later and they are having the same problem with peaking coal production. Their purchasing manager index is barely improving. China has the most coal left but it’s probably past the energetic (as opposed to tonnage) peak, so if it is piggybacking on US growth then its screwed. Russia also happens to be near peak oil. The Mideast is ok but that isnt enough.
Europe ended lockdown about 2 months before the US did. Look at it this way- Europe is where the US will be in august and it is still collapsing output. In fact, German industrial production was falling since the end of 2019.
The number of new wind turbines I see being transported down interstate 70 tells me you are wrong about wind farm development (so does the continuing rise in wind generation). Yes, Reno County stopped a new wind farm; Neosho County approved one. There will always be debates about where they should go, but the good land isn’t used up yet.
Ships have usually used bunker fuel, but recent changes are causing more to shift to diesel and related grades. Regardless, it all comes from crude oil, and the refineries will produce whatever grades of fuel buyers want.
Correct. A lot of people are afraid. Just because the state said, “you can open your stores,” that didn’t mean decided to go back to the stores. Retail will come back when consumer confidence returns, and that isn’t likely to happen while the coronavirus continues to spread almost unchecked.
I’m not sure what you are trying to say here. Businesses report monies received, no matter what form of payment is used.
You are confusing legal ability to reopen with consumer and business confidence to reopen. Those aren’t the same thing, and they don’t move in lockstep. Demand will increase in Q3 over the level of Q2, but it is still below Q1, and it’s likely to stay below Q1 for a longish time. Plenty of stuff has not reopened: look at schools, for example, which are still trying to decide what they’re going to look like for the fall semester. Major tourist attractions remain closed: Disneyland and its associated resort hotels, e.g., have indefinitely postponed reopening, while Disney World is still scheduled to reopen next month but Florida’s surging caseload may prevent it. That also means that the hotels and airlines and food venues and other nearby attractions that depend on big sites like Disney are either closed or much scaled back. A hotel could legally reopen, but if nobody is coming, why would it?
European lockdowns are ending, but they haven’t ended entirely and certainly weren’t completely over with two months ago.
German industrial production has been declining recently for a number of reasons, but inability to get fuel or power isn’t really one of them. Trade tensions with the United States and the fallout from the Brexit debacle rank high on the list; another big problem has been the emissions scandal in the automobile industry. Autos are Germany’s biggest industry and largest export, but since Volkswagen admitted five years ago to faking diesel engine emission tests to show lower emissions during tests than during actual driving, demand for German-made vehicles has declined (Daimler and Audi have now been implicated as well). “Dieselgate” has nothing to do with availability of diesel fuel, but rather with reputational damage to the brands.
Or the falling production since February might be a result of falling demand due to that world-wide virus problem we’re experiencing and so many people out of work, at home, factories shut down, etc. In support of this, prices also came down, which is the opposite of what you’d expect when there is still steady or rising demand for a resource that is running out.
The demand hasn’t even gotten worse. The question here is which is falling faster- demand or supply- because if supply is falling faster then that is the actual reason.
It won’t let me upload images but the gasoline inventory is actually no longer rising since feb, and has started falling. That’s a supply problem. Obviously the resources are depleted and saying demand matters is absurd but even then inventory is falling.
Businesses report the easy obvious transactions, if it is cash its indistinguishable from a non revneue transaction.
Wind turbines fail often and need to be replaced. It becomes an increasing task just to maintain existing infrastructure. Neosho also had a lawsuit. Nobody bothers with a lawsuit unless land is scarce and they are running out of places.
Even interest groups only project 7gw growth from 105gw by 2030, compared to 10pct annual growth before. Tell me the pace of growth hasn’t slowed dramatically.
I think the one clear thing we disagree on is that there is no excuse for output to keep falling in july and august if everything is reopen- and if coroanvrius cases continue to increase that’s because of the poverty and starvation due to peak oil. It’s extremely logical that total social collapse would have epidemiologic consequences.
US industrial production started falling late 2019. GDP has been propped up artificially by healthcare insurance costs, secondary markets, car repos and other improperly recorded activities. Home sales havent been doing well and neither have car sales but the price of these things keeps going up. This endless inflation of marginally different goods cant really fool people that gdp is growing and eventually there will be food shortages and disease. The hardest hit part of the economy is stuff that matters, like empty shelves, and the “good” part of the economy is stuff that doesnt matter like internet, mcmansions and luxury cars.
The world population has been increasing for centuries (the last time the world population actually decreased was about 700 years ago during the Black Death). Worrying about the effect of depopulation on genetic disease is probably not necessary.
Not as far as I’ve been able to find. This chart shows population growth every year from 1900 to close to the present World Population Growth - Our World in Data and shows that even during WWII population kept increasing (at a lower rate than prior to the war and after the war).
An increase of 60 million over 10 years could be a drop and then an increase, but it seems more straightforward to conclude that it was continuing growth at a lower rate (I apologize for my link - it doesn’t go directly to the chart I was talking about - you need to go to here World Population Growth - Our World in Data and then click on “absolute increase”.
Actually I think if world population was growing by 50m a year with 100m births and 50m deaths- just making up numbers here- and fertility fell by half then there was no growth 40 to 45. From 45 to 50 it would grow 250m which would explain the increase from 2.2 to 2.5b. If you assume the peak deaths were in early 1945, and while 10m died per year normally it was double that in January to May 1945 there was probably a brief period of weeks or months where population fell by a fraction of a percent. Also, population fell 100k in 5 seconds on August 6, 1945 while about 1 person was born.
There’s no “obviously” about it, because supply can fall for a lot of reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with depletion. Hurricane Katrina, e.g., caused gasoline inventories to plummet because of problems at the oil terminals and refineries along the Gulf Coast. The 1979 Iranian Revolution caused inventories to decline when protests, strikes, and the flight of foreign skilled workers disrupted production in that country; the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980 screwed up production in both countries. The OPEC cartel raises and lowers production to alter supplies and hence prices, while the 1973 oil crisis was purely a political move, an attempt to use the availability and price of oil as a weapon against nations supporting Israel in the Yom Kippur War.
In 2020, economics matters more than politics: for some producers, it’s better to turn off the taps and wait out the crisis rather than pump money-losing oil into a bad market. Shale oil, for example, tends to be expensive to produce. If the oil costs $50+/barrel to pump, a producer needs a really good reason to continue pumping when the oil fetches only $35-40/barrel when sold. Sometimes producers have a reason, sometimes they don’t, and supplies can be quite deliberately removed from the market to await better times.
The chart I linked to showed that the world population grew by 12 million in 1942 (the lowest rate during the war). I’m not sure how often babies were born in 1945, but I suspect it was faster than 1 every 5 seconds - after all, one baby was born every 11 seconds or so in the US alone (Live Births and Birth Rates, by Year), and the US was only a small percentage of the total world population. I take your point about a momentary drop in population (recovered from in a matter of days, though).