Here Comes Pain – OPEC+ Makes Surprise Oil Production Cut Announcement, The Global Cleaving Continues


Posted originally on the CTH on April 2, 2023 | Sundance 

Despite the fact the Western Alliance have created the policy that will deliver pain to their citizens, not a single government leader will look at this move as a bad thing.

The pain will not be felt by the elites, it will only hit the citizenry.  Lowered oil production outputs that drive up gasoline prices and fuel inflationary drivers, expedite the Build Back Better narrative and objective.

However, that said, in context to this announcement, a pain that will hit the Western economies of the alliance represented in yellow, the last 18 months of moves by Mexico makes President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador look remarkably prescient.  The new strategic relationships and trade partnerships between China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, India and beyond, take on an added geopolitical dimension.

DUBAI, April 2 (Reuters) – Saudi Arabia and other OPEC+ oil producers on Sunday announced further oil output cuts of around 1.16 million barrels per day, in a surprise move that analysts said would cause an immediate rise in prices and the United States called inadvisable.

The pledges bring the total volume of cuts by OPEC+, which groups the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries with Russia and other allies, to 3.66 million bpd according to Reuters calculations, equal to 3.7% of global demand.

Sunday’s development comes a day before a virtual meeting of an OPEC+ ministerial panel, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, and which had been expected to stick to 2 million bpd of cuts already in place until the end of 2023.

The latest reductions could lift oil prices by $10 per barrel, the head of investment firm Pickering Energy Partners said on Sunday, while oil broker PVM said it expected an immediate jump once trading starts after the weekend.

“I expect the market to open several dollars higher … possibly as much as $3,” said PVM’s Tamas Varga. “The step is unreservedly bullish.” (read more)

We have been closely monitoring the signs of a global cleaving around the energy sector taking place. Essentially, western governments following the “Build Back Better” climate change agenda stop using coal, oil and gas to power their economic engine, while the rest of the growing economic world continues using the more efficient and traditional forms of energy to power their economies.

Within the BBB western group (identified on map in yellow), the logical consequences are increased living costs for those who live in the BBB zone, and increased prices for goods manufactured in the BBB zone.  In the zone where traditional low-cost energy resources continue to be developed (grey on map), we would expect to see a lower cost of living and lower costs to create goods.   Two divergent economic zones based on two different energy systems.

This potential outcome just seemed to track with the logical conclusion.  The yellow zone also represented by the World Economic Forum, and the gray zone also represented by an expanding BRICS alliance.  Against this predictable backdrop, we have been watching various events unfold – some obvious and some less so.

FLASHBACK to July 2022:

[…] “China’s invitation to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to join the ‘BRICS’ confirms that the Kingdom has a major role in building the new world and became an important and essential player in global trade and economics,” Mohammed al-Hamed, president of the Saudi Elite group in Riyadh, told Newsweek. “Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 is moving forward at a confident and global pace in all fields and sectors.”

[…] “This accession, if Saudi joins it, will balance the world economic system, especially since the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil in the world, and it’s in the G20,” Hamed said. “If it happens, this will support any economic movement and development in the world trade and economy, and record remarkable progress in social and economic aspects as Saudi Arabia should have partnerships with every country in the world.” (read more)

That would essentially be the end of the petrodollar, and – in even more consequential terms – the end of the United States ability to use the weight of the international trade currency to manipulate foreign government.  The global economic system would have an alternative.  The fracturing of the world, created as an outcome of energy development, would be guaranteed.

Keep in mind, in early June 2022, Federal reserve Chairman Jerome Powell stated, “Rapid changes are taking place in the global monetary system that may affect the international role of the dollar.”  {LINK}

The Western Alliance (yellow) would be chasing climate change energy policy to power their economies.  The rest of the world (grey), including Mexico, would be using traditional and more efficient energy development.  The global cleaving around energy use would be complete.

This is not some grand conspiracy, ‘out there‘ deep geopolitical possibility, or foreboding likelihood as an outcome of short-sighted western emotion.  No, this is just a predictable outcome from western created events that pushed specific countries to a natural conclusion based on their best interests.

You can debate the motives of the western leaders who structured the sanctions against Russia, and whether they knew the outcome would happen as a consequence of their effort, but the outcome was never really in doubt.  Personally, I believe this outcome is what the west intended. The people inside the World Economic Forum are not stupid – ideological, yes, but not stupid. They knew this global cleaving would happen.

For a deep dive on BRICS, as predicted by CTH, {SEE HERE}.  The bottom line is – the 2022 punitive economic and financial sanctions by the western nations’ alliance against Russia was exactly the reason why BRICS assembled in the first place.

Multinational corporations in control of government are what the BRICS assembly foresaw when they first assembled during the Obama administration.  When multinational corporations run the policy of western government, there is going to be a problem.

In the bigger picture, the BRICS+ assembly are essentially leaders who do not want corporations and multinational banks running their government. BRICS leaders want their government running their government; and yes, that means whatever form of government that exists in their nation, even if it is communist.

BRICS leaders are aligned as anti-corporatist.  That doesn’t necessarily make those government leaders better stewards, it simply means they want to make the decisions, and they do not want corporations to become more powerful than they are.  As a result, if you really boil it down to the common denominator, what you find is the BRICS+ group are the opposing element to the World Economic Forum assembly.

The BRICS team intend to create an alternative option for all the other nations. An alternative to the current western trade and financial platforms operated on the use of the dollar as a currency.  Perhaps many nations will use both financial mechanisms depending on their need.  This is how they replace the U.S. as the global superpower.

The objective of the BRICS group is simply to present an alternative trade mechanism that permits them to conduct business regardless of the opinion of the multinational corporations in the ‘Western Alliance.’

The BRICS team, especially if Saudi Arabia, Iran and Argentina are added creating BRICS+, would indeed be a counterbalance to the control of western trade and finance.  This global cleaving is moving from a possibility to a likelihood.  If Saudi Arabia joins BRICS, the fracture becomes almost certain.

March 29, 2023, CHINESE national oil company CNOOC and France’s TotalEnergies have completed China’s first yuan-settled liquefied natural gas (LNG) trade through the Shanghai Petroleum and Natural Gas Exchange, the exchange said on Tuesday (Mar 28).

Approximately 65,000 tonnes of LNG imported from the UAE changed hands in the trade, it said in a statement. TotalEnergies confirmed to Reuters that the transaction involved LNG imported from the UAE but did not comment further. (read more)

This exchange between the UAE and France is taking place without dollars. If the process continues, the dollar weakens.  In the geopolitical world of currency valuations and trade, this might be considered the Archduke Ferdinand moment for the end of the petrodollar.  The question will become, can they grow this process with OPEC+ support and begin eventually trading oil in yuan?

MEXICO – Three new oil refineries together with new railroads and highways are under construction right now as the government continues positioning itself for energy independence. [Video Here]

The energy plan, which runs counter to the expressed demands of Canada and the United States, includes two regional ‘green’ refineries that will have the ability of turning used cooking oil into fuel.  However, the plan also includes new oil refinery capacity that will permit cheap gasoline independent of the need for Mexican oil to be refined in Texas and returned.

All of the refinery projects are on schedule to be completed by the end of this year and into 2024.  In essence, Mexico will have very cheap gasoline and diesel fuel in the near future.  This was previously outlined as a goal by AMLO in July 2022, and is against the interests of the Biden administration.  Now, those plans are becoming a reality.  Mexico is not joining the North American (Western Alliance) suicide mission of windmills, solar panels and reliance on unstable green energy.

Ever since the July 2022 Oval Office press conference at the White House, CTH has been saying to keep an eye on Mexico, because these energy plans align more with the BRICS nation agenda than the goals and objectives of the World Economic Forum (western nations).

It is not accidental the U.S. government, including our intelligence agencies and DHS, has been seeding a negative overall impression of Mexico ever since.  However, you can see how prescient Mexico has been when contrast against current geopolitical events.

Steve Mnuchin is Not Pretending, States U.S. Economy is Already in Recession


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on October 26, 2022 | Sundance

A lot of people didn’t like Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary, I did.  Secretary Mnuchin was an inside player, a billionaire himself, who worked for the outside team.  He already had a full bank account and carried ‘f**k-off’ money.   That, combined with Wilbur Ross having the same ability, was exactly what we needed to execute the America-First MAGAnomic resurgence.

The U.S. middle-class saw and felt the benefits.  Economic security is national security, at a nationwide and even individual level.  Mnuchin, Ross and Lighthizer constructed that economic outcome guided by the larger strategy of President Donald J Trump.

RIYADH, Oct 26 (Reuters) – Former U.S. treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin said on Wednesday he believed the United States was in a recession and said this would continue.

Speaking at Riyadh’s flagship investment conference FII, he said: “I think we’ll probably see a peak of 4.5% 10-year rates.”

“I think you are going to see inflation in the U.S. begin to come under control, it will probably be a two-year period,” he added.

He said the U.S. and China must learn to co-exist. He added that the Middle East’s economic issues need to be dealt with regionally. (link)

Massive Increases in U.S Natural Gas Exports are Driving Up U.S. Energy Prices


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on September 10, 2022

It is good to see at least one energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, speaking commonsense.  In an article by Clark Williams-Derry for Barron Magazine [SEE HERE], the author accurately outlines how significant U.S. Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) exports are driving up prices for American consumers.

The author accurately refutes the notion that exports do not drive-up domestic prices, by walking through the example of how natural gas prices dropped for U.S. consumers when the liquefied natural gas plant in Quintana, Texas [Freeport LNG] was temporarily shut down, blocking a portion of the export capacity.  However, that facility is about to come back on-line and with increased exports from other facilities domestic U.S. prices have already doubled.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Association (IEA), U.S. storage of Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) is 12% below the five-year average (LINK).  Additionally, the IEA is expecting the U.S. to export 11.7 billion cubic feet of LNG per day during the fourth quarter of 2022 — up 17% from the third quarter. The destination of that export is Europe.

Consider that 43% of U.S. households use LNG for home heating, and power suppliers use LNG to create electricity.  With the massive 2022 exports of LNG to Europe (+17% in fourth quarter alone), that means lower domestic supplies and increased prices here in the United States for electricity and home heating.  We are seeing and feeling these massive price increases right now.

Barrons – […]  If you need more evidence of the impact of natural gas exports on prices, just compare supply and demand fundamentals for the year leading up to February 2020 (the last pre-pandemic month) versus the year leading up to this May (the most recent month with full federal data). Annualized production rose over the period, while domestic consumption remained roughly flat. Yet LNG exports almost doubled—a surge that tightened U.S. gas markets and doubled the price that U.S. consumers pay for the fuel. 

The growth of global demand for U.S. LNG can be tied to many market forces, including the shortfalls in Europe due to Russia’s manipulation of European Union gas markets. Sustained high demand in wealthy Asian nations has contributed to export growth as well. And so has the U.S. gas industry’s dogged determination to ship its wares to the highest bidder, foreign or domestic. 

Russia’s role has been particularly critical in the rise of global LNG demand. As Russia choked off gas shipments to Europe, EU buyers have turned to global LNG markets to make up the shortfall. Global LNG prices rose in response, and U.S. LNG companies ramped up output, shipping more cargoes to Europe. But Russia responded by further clamping down on gas supplies to the EU—a vicious circle that has hurt Europe’s economy even more severely than it has harmed America’s.

There’s little sign that U.S. gas prices will ease in the coming years. Freeport’s demand will be back online soon enough, and there are three other massive LNG export projects under construction, with more than a dozen of others waiting for financing.

[…] Curiously, federal regulators have consistently found that the gas export projects are in the public interest—meaning they were in the economic interest of LNG companies and gas drillers. But now, exports are creating sky-high costs for U.S. consumers, and drillers are reluctant to boost gas output lest prices fall back to earth. So, it’s high time to consider whether soaring U.S. LNG exports are actually in America’s interest—or if, instead, runaway LNG exports are fueling energy inflation and undermining the nation’s economic competitiveness. (read more)

Not only are U.S. taxpayers directly paying for the majority of costs in Ukraine, but we are also subsidizing the European Union by exporting LNG and driving up the price for energy here at home.

We the taxpayers are directly paying Ukraine, and indirectly paying Europe to maintain gas sanctions against Russia.  As a result, we the taxpayers are also paying higher prices here at home.  This is the reality of the current exfiltration of wealth as created by the Biden administration.

FUBAR

U.K Energy Reaches Crisis Point, Britain Announces New Oil and Gas Leases and Lifts Moratorium on Fracking


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on September 10, 2022 

There is a particular historical irony in the timing.  On the same day King Charles III ascends the throne, previously Europe’s most isolated from consequence – yet loudest voice in chasing the catastrophic climate change energy policies, the British government is forced to reverse course on years of energy regulations and restrictions.

Britain’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss announced, “a new round of oil and gas licensing will come next week with more than 100 licenses issued. A moratorium on fracking will be lifted and planning permission can be sought where there is local support,” in an urgent emergency effort to lower energy costs for British citizens.

The move comes in combination with a government plan to help citizens and businesses cope with skyrocketing prices for electricity and home heating fuel.  The climate change chickens have come home to roost throughout Europe and the British government is urgently trying to head-off the calamitous consequences.

Inside the media announcements of the Truss plan, the biggest concern expressed is how the financial and multinational banking sector (the ESG investment groups) will respond to the government position. After decades of ideological “green” outlooks flowing into the energy industry, the biggest concern expressed in the financial analysis is how a reversal by such a large economic system will reverberate.

The climate change ideology has a stranglehold on the energy sector of the economy, this move by Great Britain would be the most significant push-back in decades.  The minority green activists are apoplectic that they may lose control over the majority of opinion.  The economics of a reversal in energy policy could reverberate throughout the western alliance, particularly in Europe.  It will be interesting to see whether this shift in U.K. policy has ripple effects in the U.S.

LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) – Britain’s move to green-light dozens of new oil and gas fields will leave investors and banks with a tough PR job as Britain struggles to shore up its energy security whilst sticking to its climate commitments.

Starting new oil and gas projects runs counter to the world’s shift away from fossil fuels in the fight against global warming and a commitment at last November’s U.N. climate talks to phase down their use.

Yet runaway inflation amid conflict in Ukraine has forced the hand of new British prime minister Liz Truss as Russian President Putin seeks to use energy as a weapon this winter.

Britain will launch a new round of oil and gas licensing next week with more than 100 licenses issued, part of a wider package of measures to tackle the energy crisis announced by Truss on Thursday.

And Britain’s not alone in reassessing its energy strategy. Germany, for example, has been forced to turn back to even dirtier thermal coal to help fuel its power plants and keep the lights on, hampering short-term efforts to rein in climate-damaging carbon emissions.

But for energy companies and the investors, bankers and insurers that finance them, new investment in fossil fuels also presents a challenge given many have made their own pledges to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century.

“This will absolutely hinder companies’ … ability to hit their climate targets,” said Pietro Bertazzi, global director of policy engagement and external affairs at non-profit environmental disclosure platform CDP. (read more)

This is the first crack in the western alliance and the ‘climate change’ agenda of the World Economic Forum as it relates to energy policy and ultimately control over human life within the alliance.

The war in Ukraine was being used as a justification to explain the consequences of European energy policy, particularly rapidly increasing costs for energy and food, but the war in Ukraine was not the cause.  The true root cause of the exploding inflation and economic mess was the Build Back Better agenda, and the series of policies dictated from within it, that each nation willingly accepted.

Wow, Europe Household Electric Bills Estimated to Jump by $2 Trillion Next Year, That’s 12% of Their GDP


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on September 6, 2022 | Sundance

What is predicted to happen in Europe is just stunning, literally stunning.

♦Context – According to official data from the World Bank, the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the European Union was just over $17 trillion US dollars in 2021. That is the last calculated measure.  The combined GDP value of European Union represents roughly 12.78 percent of the world economy.

According to analysts for Goldman Sachs, the current energy crisis in Europe has increased electricity prices at a rate that is increasing almost daily.  Within the data it is now estimated that households within the EU will pay an additional $2 trillion for electricity in the next year.

Put that $2 trillion into context with their GDP, and that scale of energy cost would be wiping out 12% of the purchasing strength within the total EU economy.  Forget about buying anything else, if this analysis is correct Europeans will be buying food and energy, nothing else.

If you consider what that means, it is bordering on full economic collapse of western Europe.

What is being described above is what we posited when we outlined the impact of the “Energy Economy” {Go Deep}.  When you suck 12% of the purchasing power out of an economic engine simply to maintain the status of current energy use, everything else starts to collapse.

Also keep in mind we are only talking about the direct impact of $2 trillion in electricity cost.  The downstream consequence is far greater because everything created, produced, or manufactured, including food, is dependent on electricity – which will drive the final cost to produce of all those products even higher.

The damage is almost unimaginable in scale.

[Fortune] – European households should brace for an expensive winter owing to the continent’s deepening energy crisis that will likely send electricity and heating bills soaring.

Energy affordability in Europe is reaching a “tipping point” that could peak next year, with total spending on bills across the continent growing by 2 trillion euros ($2 trillion), a Goldman Sachs research team, led by Alberto Gandolfi and Mafalda Pombeiro, said in a note published Sunday.

Many European households are already feeling the bite of a steadily worsening energy crisis, brought on by Russian natural gas producers intermittently pausing flows along the critical Nord Stream pipeline following Western sanctions this year.

Energy bills at some restaurants and coffee shops have already more than tripled this year, but with threats looming that natural gas supply from Russia could become even tighter as the Ukraine War rages on, analysts warn that Europe’s coming struggles are set to rival some of the worst energy crises on record.

“The market continues to underestimate the depth, the breadth, and the structural repercussions of the crisis,” the Goldman Sachs analysts wrote. “We believe these will be even deeper than the 1970s oil crisis.” (read more)

The economic contagion will not be isolated to Europe.

The impacts to the social fabric are also almost unquantifiable in scale.

Example: What happens to migration patterns when economic migrants are now considered a threat to scarce resources?

While the US is not quite in the same level of energy desperation, what we were discussing last week is an example of the problem we too may face.

Let’s say you are an average USA Main Street household with an income around $100,000/yr, and you now face an increase in electricity rates from $300 to $500 due to Joe Biden’s new national energy policy known as the Green New Deal.  That’s $200 more per month for this initial economic/energy “transition” moment.

That extra $200/month equates to $2,400 per year.

That $2,400 per year is static economic activity.  Meaning nothing additional was created, and nothing additional was generated.  The captured $2,400 is simply an increase in the price of a preexisting expense.

Take that expense and expand it to your community of 100 friends and family households.  The $2,400 now becomes $240,000 in cost that doesn’t generate anything.  $240,000 is removed from the community economy.  $240,000 is no longer available for purchasing other goods or services within this community of 100 households.

The economic purchasing power of the 100-household community is reduced by $240,000 per year.

Take that expense and expand it to your county of 10,000 households.  Now you are reducing the county economic activity by $24 million.  In this county of 10,000 households, $24 million in economic transactions have been wiped out.  Meals at restaurants, purchases of goods and services, or any other spending of the $24 million within the county of 10,000 households (approximately 25,000 residents) has been lost.

Now expand that expense to a larger county, quantified as a mid-size county, of 50,000 households.  The mid-sized county has lost $120 million in household economic activity, simply to sustain the status quo on electricity rates.  Nothing extra has been generated. $120 million is lost.  The activity within the county of 50,000 households shrinks by $120 million.

Expand that expense to a large county of 100,000 households, and the lost economic activity is $240 million.

Expand that expense to a small state of 1 million households (2.5 million residents), and the lost economic activity is $2.4 billion.

Expand that expense to a state with 5 million households (approximately 12 million residents) and the economic cost is $12 billion in lost economic activity unrelated to the expense of maintaining the status-quo on electricity use.   This state loses $12 billion in purchases of goods and services, just to retain current energy use.

These examples only touch on household expenses.  The community, county and state business expenses for offices, supermarkets, stores, etc. are in addition to the households quoted.

Meanwhile the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the community, county and state, remains static because the GDP is calculated on the total value of goods and services generated in dollar terms.  The appearance of a static GDP is artificial.  In real Main Street terms, $12 billion in economic activity is lost, but the price or increased value of electricity hides the drop created by the absence of goods and services purchased.

Fewer goods and services are purchased and consumed.  However, statistically the inflated price of electricity gives the illusion of a status quo economy.

Now expand that perspective to a national level and you can see our current economic condition.

All of this is being done under the justification of “climate change.”

Previously I would have said this level of economic impact in Europe would lead to a total revolt against the government.  However, with the backdrop of the recent COVID lockdowns and government control mechanisms in mind, and looking at the citizen compliance that took place in response to those government mandates, it is now more likely the citizens in Europe will simply bow to the energy control mechanisms of the governing authority.

It’s almost as if the COVID compliance effort was the test…

Neil Oliver, the Madness of Teaching Children Nihilism Through the Insanity of the Green Energy Agenda


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on September 3, 2022 | Sundance

During his weekly monologue, a refreshing blast of commonsense amid a world gone mad, GBNews host Neil Oliver pushes back against the ridiculous ‘green’ propaganda that people are parasites on the planet.

Generations of children have been taught their existence is destroying the world, and the growing population is the source of environmental damage.  Yet none of that is true.  Greta Thunberg, the weird Swedish kid who tells all the adults around her what to do – and they listen, is the textbook example of a child scared out of her wits by anti-human propaganda, who grows up to become a cult leader.  WATCH:

[Transcript] – It’s time to stand up for humanity. Underlying so much of what is wrong in the West now, is a pernicious, baleful belief that there are too many people in the world – that people are the problem.

Generations have grown among us that have been taught – actually taught to believe – that our species is some sort of plague upon the Earth, a planet-wide cancer, if you will – that human beings only destroy, only do harm, only contribute one by one and billion by billion to the end of the world.

There are uncounted millions of children out there right now who are growing up unhappy and terrified of the future – all because relentless anti-human propaganda dressed up as Green politics and policies – the activities of outfits like Extinction Rebellion and many others besides – have made them feel guilty just for being here and alive.

There are so many adults who talk about how they, “Don’t feel it’s right to bring a child into this world.” Plenty more, if they allow themselves to have children at all, consciously limit how many they have – not because they don’t want them, wouldn’t love them, cannot afford to raise them, but because the guilt they have internalised persuades them a child is a sinful indulgence – a wrong committed against the planet and against nature.

Those are people who have been affected by more of the same propaganda that openly declares the world would be better off without us, better off without most of us at least.

How many possible people, fellow travellers – individuals whose contributions to the world will never be known because they were never born – have we been denied on account of anti-human fear mongering? This is a profound evil and it has to stop.

All the time we are told there are so many of us now – approximately 8 billion and counting – that we are collectively an unsustainable drain on finite natural resources.

This nihilism has been in the air since at least the work of the Reverend – note that he was a man of the cloth – Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthusianism concluded that a species – yeast, rats, whatever – eventually multiplies until there are too many individuals for the available food supply, so that all must starve.

In the 20th century more harm was done by American biologist Paul Ehrlich and his bestselling book The Population Bomb that predicted, in 1968, imminent world-wide famine caused by over population.

The scientific theory of Reverend Malthus was hopelessly flawed, and Paul Ehrlich’s famines never happened.

But in spite of how wrong both scientists were in concluding people were the problem, the fear and the anti-human rhetoric has stayed with us.

Now that same fear emboldens destructive nonsense like Net Zero and Agenda 2030 that will, by denying them access to plentiful cheap fuel, perpetuate the poverty of hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest people while simultaneously dangling millions in the so-called developed West back over the same old yawning abyss that swallowed so many of our ancestors.

Lord Grey, British Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of World War I famously said, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” He was talking about the looming darkness of war, its attendant miseries. More than a century after the war to end all wars the lights are being extinguished again.

This time it’s on account of a war being waged against all of us by the ruling classes. Blackouts, energy rationing, in Germany, in France, in Poland, in Spain and all over. Winter is coming and people will die – not because of Global warming, but because of cold and hunger, on the continent that was a birthplace of civilisation.

In Germany people are cutting down trees for firewood so they might heat their homes and cook food this winter in the absence of natural gas. France has gone from being an exporter of energy to a country in which energy must be rationed.

Here in Britain there’s talk of 70 percent of restaurants preparing to close … for the last time … for want of plentiful cheap fuel. There is talk too of rationing and blackouts, closed schools and cold swimming pools. PM Boris Johnson has made it all about Ukraine – the sacrifices he loftily declares Britons must make in support of Ukrainians. But the energy situation is the product of many years of insane, ruinous policy-making driven in its entirety by Green zealotry. And always remember too that Johnson, like the rest of those preaching necessary hardship, has no intention whatever of experiencing so much as a moment of discomfort.

His gilded world of excess, of plentiful food and the thermostat turned round to full will continue without the merest disruption.

And while we’re on the subject of Green, it is always worth exposing the lying hypocrisy that underlies the Green movement.

If we’re supposed to be about saving the planet, how are we meant to square that with the catastrophic damage to landscapes and ecosystems that results from the making of all the batteries to store the electricity – electricity still generated mostly by fossil fuels?

The extraction and processing of the rare earth element lithium is wildly destructive of environments and ecosystems, as rapacious as any other mining, and also toxic.

So too the acquisition of cobalt – most of which comes from the DRC and exploits the labour of children in circumstances little different from slavery.

It has been estimated that 50 tonnes of ore are processed to make the battery for just one EV.

How many people acknowledge to themselves that when they depress the accelerator in their shiny Green EV, they are putting the boot in to some of the world’s poorest children?

Presumably the Malthusians and the acolytes of Ehrlich rest easy, insulated by their belief there are too many children anyway. None of it is Green.

What it is … is grotesque. It is a ruthless and determined ideology. It is about changing society by having people accept a leap back into the impoverished past. It is about weakening people, diminishing people’s options so they are more susceptible to control.

All of this madness is excused and promoted as the remedy for a world being overheated by too many people using too much natural gas, oil and coal. Renewables – energy generation based on wind and sunlight – will never … never … replace fossil fuels in a like-for-like hand over.

What is being forced on what was once the most developed continent in the world is fuel poverty and all its myriad consequences.

Millions of people – all but the richest elite – are being coerced into smaller, colder, hungrier, darker lives.

All of this incoming misery is necessary medicine, we are told by those who travel endlessly in their private jets – the biggest generators of the infinitely maligned and demonised CO2 – for a planet made terminally ill, choking to death on too many human beings.

A new book – Superabundance – the Age of Plenty – by Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley – invites us to consider that more people actually means more ideas and thereby the inspiration for more solutions to problems.

For almost all of the 2 to 3 hundred thousand years our species has been here, virtually every individual endured a life inconceivably tough, miserable and short compared to our own. The mass of people were poor – in every sense – in ways that are impossible for us to imagine.

It wasn’t until around 1800 that the world’s population reached one billion for the first time. Now there are 8 billion of us – and more of those than ever before – more than any Malthusian could ever have imagined – are living longer, better lives, freed from poverty.

The possibilities actually made manifest by our numbers mean we are infinitely better equipped to solve our problems, carry more and more people into better futures.

I watched a podcast this week in which Marian Tupy talked about the potential of combining different elements. There are around 100 elements on the periodic table. It took our species the better part of 200,000 years to discover you could combine copper and tin to make bronze. That’s just one combination of just two elements.

Once you start thinking about combining groups of 4 elements – and wondering what those combinations might offer – you realise the same 100 elements allow for 94 million different combinations.

Now, says Tupy, if you think about all the possible combinations of 10 elements – mixing 10 elements at once – you have possibilities more numerous than the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago.

We are smart compared to our Bronze Age ancestors, but the potential of our future, made possible by all the ideas and innovation drawn from billions of people, unique individuals, becomes limitless.

Thinking we will run out of resources is like thinking we will run out of tunes because there are only 8 notes.

It is also useful to appreciate that in the almost empty world of our ancestors, good ideas often died like sparks in the darkness, for want of others of like mind to help cradle them, coax them into fire.

For most of our species’ history we were too few, and so the sparks flashed for moments and then went out forever. Only once there were billions of us together, sharing ideas, did we reach the point where we could make life better for the many rather than just the few.

Here’s the thing: to seek to persuade generations of children that they and their kind are a plague upon the earth, a curse, is an unforgivable wrong.

In many ways Greta Thunberg is the textbook example of a child frightened out of her wits by anti-human propaganda. Her fear was picked up and weaponised by adults determined not to improve the lot of the many, but to favour and enrich, beyond imagining, the few.

Natalism is a belief that promotes the reproduction of human life as a good idea. It is high time we recognised that the agenda being pushed upon us now is anti-human and predicated upon the belief that a world with far fewer people in it would be much better for the few that remain.

By now you will likely have heard the words “Useless eaters” to describe the mass of the human population. It’s not a fringe term – it’s freely thrown around by public intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, closely allied to the World Economic Forum. Keep a close watch on any and all who would describe, let alone dismiss, as useless eaters, billions of fellow human beings, each with his or her own unique hopes and dreams.

We split from the species that would become chimpanzees and gorillas some 6 or 7 million years ago. Courtesy of clever hands we have clung to existence on this earth ever since, often by our fingertips. It has been a close-run thing more than once – times in the not too distant past when the whole human species numbered perhaps just a few thousand individuals.

We are challenged by plenty of things. We are infinitesimal specks of existence on a blue dot in the dark. We have enough to contend with in the years ahead. Who, after all, gets to decide which of us eaters are useless? I say it is time to remember and to have some respect for the species that has, inside three pounds of rosy-pink meat, beneath a thin cap of bone, a human consciousness, still barely understood, that represents the most profoundly astonishing creation of the universe that we know about so far.

In ways best expressed by philosophers, the universe only exists because we – we troubled and troublesome human animals – are here to comprehend it. Our eyes evoke the blue of the sky.

Our ears evoke the sound of thunder. The light from distant stars is only able to begin its unimaginable journey because our eyes, optic nerves and brains are here ready to receive the photons and so be dazzled by their brilliance.

But for us, Homo sapiens, the universe – and everything that surrounds it – might be mere meaningless quanta.

That so many are denied the opportunity to reach their potential – to give what they have to give – is on account of years and years of deliberate schemes to keep us inadequately educated, thereby dependent upon malevolent institutions, lied to and, worst of all, in a perpetual state of fear.

What those malign elements fear above all are smart, educated, independent, happy people who DO NOT NEED THEM. I say it is time to stand up for the people … all of the people. And I say the more people, the merrier.

US Oil Reserves Nearly Depleted


Armstrong Economics Blog/Energy Re-Posted Sep 2, 2022 by Martin Armstrong

The US Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has been at its lowest level since, ironically, 1984. The reservoirs are composed of four underground sites constructed from salt domes on the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana and Texas. The White House began extracting oil from the emergency reserves to combat rising gas prices. Politicians simply hope that the problem can be patched up for as long as they can remain in power.

In August, the US extracted 18 million barrels of crude. The stockpile now sits at only 450 million, reaching a nearly 40-year low. Additionally, the White House under Biden has been selling off the remaining reserves to foreign refiners. China received nearly a million barrels of oil to a subsidiary of Sinopec, a company that previously received BILLIONS in investments from an equity firm operated by none other than Hunter Biden. In fact, Biden has sold off nearly a quarter of oil reserves this year alone. Is he deliberately trying to create a crisis to spark the Great Reset?

Russia is not to blame for rising gas prices, as a gallon cost a mere $2.28 in December 2020. A year later, after Biden implemented disastrous green policies, the price rose to $3.40. Biden panicked once gas hit $5 in June and began to pull from the reserves to make it seem as if he had a grip on the problem. The government has no solution for the current energy crisis. The best we can hope for is the Republicans coming to power and demanding that domestic production continue immediately.

Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin Attacked on Stage During Campaign Event in New York State Governor Race


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 21, 2022 | Sundance 

Yikes, things are getting spicy in New York as Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was attacked by a guy while giving a campaign speech in Monroe County near Rochester.  A bystander intervened and removed a weapon from the hand of the attacker.  Mr. Zeldin was unharmed.

New York – Lee Zeldin, the Republican candidate for New York governor, was attacked during a campaign stop near Rochester in upstate Monroe County on Thursday night.

Zeldin, also a sitting US congressman from Long Island, was giving a speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Perinton when a man jumped on stage and lunged toward the lawmaker, according to witnesses and video of the incident.  “I saw that he [was] approaching the congressman, so I jumped up on the stage,” witness Joe Chenelly told The Post.

“The congressman turned and faced him. I thought he might just be there to hug the congressman or to, you know, maybe heckle him or something along those lines.”

The suspect approached Zeldin wielding an unknown weapon and Chenelly tackled him.  

“Once the man was on stage, he reached into his right pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a knife or a razor blade, maybe a box cutter and lunged at the Congressman,” Chenelly said.

Zeldin attempted to block the suspect — who witnesses said was disheveled and possibly intoxicated — and the man lunged at Zeldin once more.  (read more)

Climate Alarmist Explains Policy Targeting Farmers to end all Beef, Pork and Chicken from Human Diet


Posted originally on the conservative tree house on July 21, 2022 | Sundance

A few years ago, we might have just brushed this type of ideological policy aside and called the guy a nut.  However, he might indeed be a nut, but more and more countries are adopting the climate change farming policy he is advocating.  {Direct Rumble LinkWATCH (2 minutes):

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I often wonder about the mental health of these people.