Posted originally on the CTH on September 6, 2023 | Sundance
Oil prices shot passed $90/bbl today after Saudi Arabia and then Russia announced a continuance of production cuts through the end of this year.
The BRICS alliance is going to deliver some pain to the Western alliance. Those people living in the yellow zone, with leadership chasing climate change and Green New Deal policies, are going to see more durable inflation as the cost of oil is attached to just about every product and service.
Gasoline, energy products, petroleum products, home heating oil, groceries, everything will cost more as the geopolitical battle continues; but we are supposed to pretend we are unaware of the global political dynamic.
(Zero Hedge) – […] Just after 9am ET, Saudi Arabia said it would extend the voluntary cut of 1 million b/d of for another 3 months, from October until the end of December, well beyond the expectation of just 1 more month. Saudi press agency SPA notes that the voluntary cut decision will be reviewed monthly to consider deepening the cut or increasing production.
The extension of cuts is meant to reinforce the precautionary efforts made by OPEC countries with the aim of supporting the stability of the oil market. The Saudi announcement came a shock to market as 20 of 25 traders and analysts surveyed by Bloomberg last week had predicted the additional cutback would be continued for just one additional month.
And then, literally seconds after the Saudi decision, Russian deputy PM Novak said Russia would also extend its reduction of oil exports until the end of the year, reducing its oil output by 300kb/d in voluntary cuts until December 2023.
Similar to the Saudis, Russia said that the decision to reduce oil production to be reviewed monthly to consider possibility of deepening reduction or increasing production depending on situation on the world market. (read more)
“The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve is empty, my friend”…
(Yahoo) – […] Higher oil prices are bad news for the world’s central banks, which have been trying to tame high inflation since last year. Energy is a key input for economic activities, so higher oil prices generally lead to inflation.
But Saudi Arabia and Russia’s keeping their oil supply cuts for longer means “they have no interest in what central banks are worried about,” Naeem Aslam, the chief investment officer of Zaye Capital Markets, wrote in a Tuesday note seen by Insider. (read more)
QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong, You were the only one who forecasted that real estate would continue to rise in conjunction with the rate increases by the Fed. I have been following you only since 2020 and COVID-19. I am impressed with your computer and your analysis, which does not change with every passing headline. Can you elaborate on the real estate market a bit?
Thank you very much for the education.
FH
ANSWER: The traditional forecast on real estate is always one-dimensional. Homeownership has historically been in the top 5 of surveys about what Americans most want in life. Property values have been rising despite rising high prices combined with higher mortgage rates. There is little sign on the horizon before the ECM peaks in May 2024. Analysts have been confused and caught up in this economic conundrum of the continued economic growth that has defied all their recession predictions.
Normally, housing has been one of the sectors that has been the most sensitive to interest rates. Over the past two years, mortgage rates have risen from less than 3% to more than 7%. That means that the median family today faces mortgage payments that have doubled from roughly 14% of monthly household income in 2020 to nearly 29% by mid-2023. This is the strongest rise since the economic turm on our ECM when it bottomed in 1985.65.
Nevertheless, the conundrum that has baffled traditional analysts has not led to a decline in house prices as they expected. They paused during the COVID-19 lockdowns and fell in the Blue States, which had the most draconian COVID-19 measures. Currently, housing prices during the second quarter of this year rose at an annualized pace of 15% according to the S&P Case-Shiller index.
There is a tight supply in the South, where much of the migration has taken place. I get, on average three calls a week asking if I want to sell my house here in Florida. The annual sales of property nationally have been around $2 trillion. Smart institutional investors have been shifting from public unsecured debt to private mortgages. The average person does not look at CPI numbers or GDP numbers. They look at the cost of this rising, and the confidence in the Biden Administration has been collapsing. When people no longer trust the government, they shift to the private sector. So add to that the great migration from Democratic states to the southern red states, and you will see collapsing real estate values in places like San Francisco and Chicago in comparison to even Wall Street, have been quietly moving to the Miami region. There are still buyers in the market and a shortage of supply in the Red States like Florida. Thus, sales have declined, but this appears to be more the result of the decline in supply.
Additionally, the rising inflation in materials means that the replacement cost of homes is often higher than the prices being paid, not to mention the waiting time for construction. The sheer replacement costs of housing have skyrocketed. Even pain was in short supply thanks to the COVID-19 lockdowns. This has impacted the market, and traditional analysis simply never considered that the replacement costs on preexisting houses, in many cases, are 40% to 100% higher. Add to that the shortage in labor. It was very hard to find a contractor in Florida who even was available. Most contractors I talked to were booked beyond 2024.
Newly built homes account for about one-third of active listings in 2023. This was up from an average of 13% over the two decades before pre-COVID-19. Add to all of this is the influx of foreign money looking at US property as a hedge against future wars and destabilization of the monetary system. Then we have had funds like Blackrock buying property and renting them out.
Expert Prof. Gerd Ganteför Calls For More Studies On The Regional Climate Impact By Wind Turbines 3 months ago Guest Blogger From the NoTricksZone By P Gosselin Countless wind turbines…Northern Germany drought may in part be caused by efforts to prevent drought (climate change)! More wind parks means less wind, which means less precipitation, which in turn means more drought and warmer temperatures. Image: P. Gosselin German online Reichschuster.de here reports on Gerd Ganteför, a German professor of experimental physics who taught at the University of Konstanz and Johns Hopkins University Baltimore (USA), among others. He has authored some 150 technical articles on renewable energies or climate change. Ganteför has been an outspoken expert critic of Germany’s energy policy and the alarmist aspects of climate science. Recently the renowned expert once again asked uncomfortable questions about possible connections between wind parks and their impact on regional climate. The answers Ganteför gave to the German daily “Nordkurier” have raised some eyebrows. In summary, the physicist warns: “We don’t currently know what all can happen if we continue to put up countless wind turbines.” The interview was prompted by a 2012 NASA study that suggested large wind farms in particular lead to an increase in the ambient temperature and are thus partly responsible for the warming of the climate. Though Ganteför, has some doubts about this phenomenon, he nevertheless believes the “connection between wind turbines and global warming is possible – albeit for a reason not examined in the study,” reports Reichschuster.de “The authors were able to show that wind turbines swirl the cool layers of air that are directly above the ground and the somewhat warmer layers above them, and that this leads to an increase in temperature near the ground.” Proven in other scientific publications Ganteför, however, focusses on another aspect: evaporation, which has been proven in other publications. The mechanism goes as follows: “Large wind turbines logically slow down the wind by sapping the energy out of it. Less wind means less evaporation and thus less precipitation. And if it gets drier, it could just happen that it gets warmer.” A study of this kind by Deutsche Windguard was reported on by reitschuster.de in July 2022. Overdoing wind energy Moist air from the North Atlantic plays a major role on Europe’s climate, and eventually makes its way over the sea to Germany. But that air gets slowed down by the relatively large wind farms in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, says Ganteför. The possible consequence: “If you overdo it with too many wind turbines”, the region “will become drier” and “this possible scenario needs to be meticulously played out and studied by climatologists.” “We don’t know at the moment what all can happen if we continue to put up countless wind turbines,” warns Ganteför. New studies warn Germany has so far installed over 30,000 wind turbines, which is about 1 every 11 sq. km. Plans are calling for doubling or even tripling the current wind power capacity. But this may be detrimental as new studies show that wind farms are altering local climates, and thus may be having an effect on global climate and contributing to regional droughts. We reported on this here earlier this month.
The Clean School Bus Program has been funded with a $5 billion grant from the Inflation Reduction Act that should be appropriately named the Climate Change Act. Around $1 billion of this will be spent on electric school buses. As with all spending plans, the budget quickly jumped from $500 million to $1 billion after the EPA said there was a strong demand. The buses will first be tested in low-income districts, and the people are not happy.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has reported a drastic dip in test scores since 2020 when the government closed down schools for a virus. Math scores are at a 50-year low. Out of a score of 500, 13-year-old students scored an average of 271 in mathematics. Literacy rates are also declining with the average 13-year-old scoring 256 out of 500. Pre-pandemic, this same demographic scored 260 in reading and 280 in math. “The bottom line — these results show that there are troubling gaps in the basic skills of these students,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. One troubling report showed that 70% of 10-year-old students could not read after the lockdown worldwide.
There is also a growing shortage of teachers due to low pay and most public schools are lacking basic supplies. A report from June 2022 showed that public schools lost 7% of all instructors (233,000 teachers) between 2019 and 2022. Here in Florida, there are reports on the news all the time of air conditioning systems failing amid a summer heatwave. Schools throughout America lack basic funding, kids are forced to share books, the most fundamental items like pencils are often shared, and the curriculum has nothing to do with becoming a successful member of society.
There are countless issues that public schools face, but let’s focus on spending on buses when that is not an area of concern to anyone outside the Build Back Better climate change crowd. Electric school buses cost between $350,000 and $450,000 – nearly four times more than traditional diesel buses. Need to replace the battery? That could cost around $50,000 to replace and the average lifespan is only 7 to 8 years.
“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus?” a smiling Harris asked an invitation-only crowd at Seattle’s Lumen Field, with an electric bus behind her. “We are witnessing around our country and around the world the effects of extreme climate,” she said. “What we’re announcing today is a step forward in our nation’s commitment to reduce greenhouse gases, to invest in our economy … to invest in building the skills of America’s workforce. All with the goal of not only saving our children, but for them, saving our planet.”
GOP political candidate Tiffany Smiley offered a word of advice to Harris: “At a time when school test scores are at the lowest levels seen in a generation due to harmful school closures, Vice President Harris and Senator Murray offered ZERO solutions to this education crisis at an event where they claimed to care about what’s best for our children. It’s easy to support infrastructure FUNDING, especially for cleaner buses. But the Democrat’s economic policies have led to labor shortages that threaten to derail infrastructure DELIVERY, with Seattle Public Schools unable to hire enough bus drivers to staff all of their routes. This is a prime example of Patty Murray caring more about the priorities of Washington D.C. over Washington state.”
Yet again the government is funding an imaginary problem while bypassing the real issues that need to be addressed. One BILLION dollars could fund a plethora of items that would improve the lives of the people immediately. This net-zero push is becoming increasingly costly and they want to have it all squared away by 2030. Expect more expensive and unnecessary changes.
A light-hearted story for a Monday, as we must laugh at the insanity of those protesting the weather. Extinction Rebellion is a group that consistently protests the changing climate, urging government to adhere to the WEF’s net zero carbon emissions goal. They think this goal can be achieved within the next two years. Just Stop Oil has similar goals in mind as they think the world can function without fossil fuels.
“We demand that the government immediately halts all future licencing [sic] and consents for the exploration, development and production of fossil fuels in the UK,” one of the group’s members told the Guardian. “I want a future and I want my government to stop trying to kill me.” This is the same group that has glued themselves to priceless paintings, tarmacs, and tankers. They continuously protest in absurd ways with no results because what they want is not possible. “I’m not doing this because I’m brave or insane or any of those things. I’m just doing it because I care and I’m afraid,” the same activist admitted.
A funny story happened about a year back in the UK. These protestors took to the streets to urge the government to end all oil production. Protestors strapped themselves to an oil tanker, causing mass traffic delays. “They want maximum disruption to stop the government from extracting oil and gas,” the reporter firmly told a bystander. “Yeah…well, that’s cooking oil,” he laughed.
Stop the trans fats! They don’t want us to have gas-powered stoves to cook on anyway, and perhaps the bugs that Schwabsuggested can be eaten raw.
Posted originally on the CTH on August 20, 2023 | Sundance
Everything about the Maui fire is sketchy. It was sketchy when it happened. It is sketchy in the aftermath, and it remains sketchy in the recovery stage. The FBI, EPA and FEMA have essentially locked down the island, and there are reports of people being evicted who did not perish and did not lose their homes.
I’m not sure if the issues are related to systemically gross incompetence, nefarious constructs, a blue state with poor systems and weak leaders, or a combination of all the above. However, what is abundantly clear is that the people of Maui are victims of more than just a massive wildfire.
Hawaii Gov. Josh Green appears on “Face the Nation” to tell Margareet Brennan that the failure of the now-resigned Maui Emergency Management Agency Administrator was “utterly unsatisfactory, to the world.” “Of course, as a person, as a father, as a doctor, I wish all the sirens went off,” Green said. The governor also stated there are more than 1,000 people still missing and many of them are children. He blames global warming. WATCH:
[Transcript] – MARGARET BRENNAN: We go now to Hawaii’s Governor Joshua Green in Honolulu. Good morning. Thank you for getting up so early, and I’m so sorry for what is going on in your state.
GOV. JOSH GREEN: Thank you, Margaret.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, can you tell us how many are still unaccounted for, and how long will it take to identify remains?
GOV. GREEN: More than 1000 are unaccounted for, about 1050. It will take several weeks, still, some of the challenges are going to be extraordinary. As you reported, 85% of the- of the land of the impact zone has been covered now by what amounts to an army of search and rescue teams and 41 dogs. So 85% of the land has been covered. Now we go into the larger buildings, which require peeling back some of the floors and structures. That last 15% could take weeks. We do have extreme concerns that because of the temperature of the fire, the remains of those who have died, in some cases, may be impossible to recover meaningfully. So, there are going to be people that are lost forever. And right now, we’re working obviously with the FBI and everyone on the ground to make sure that we do what we can to assess who’s missing.
MARGARET BRENNAN: That is hard to hear, Governor. I know a local Maui official said a large number of the dead may have actually been children who were left home that day because schools were closed, many of them alone or with their grandparents. Is that the case?
GOV. GREEN: That is possible. And that’s-that’s what we’re sharing here internally, that it’s possible that there will be many children. This is the largest catastrophe and disaster that’s ever-hit Maui, probably that’s ever-hit Hawaii outside of wartime events. So, we just thank everyone in the world for reaching out and supporting us through all of the, you know, the ways that they can. Right now, we are trying to make sure everyone is sheltered, and we begin to get all the federal resources we can to make life in some way livable for the survivors. That’s where we are at the moment.
MARGARET BRENNAN: When will the surviving children of West Maui be able to return to school? What do they need?
GOV. GREEN: In some cases, they’re returning later this week. Children can go to any school that’s in the region or where they are. We have six hotels that are basically full of families and their children that have survived. We also are doing distance learning. A lot of that was implemented during the COVID pandemic. There are just so many things to share. King Kamehameha Elementary School in Lahaina is burned to the ground. I mean, it’s totally gone. It used to host 650 children, some of those children have passed. Others will, of course, go to neighboring schools. You have to remember this is a very rural part of Hawaii. And that’s one of the challenges. So, schools are far apart. We’ve authorized other means of transportation, you know, vans and things to help families get farther distances to school.
MARGARET BRENNAN: As-as we’ve been discussing, there are now a lot of questions about all of the policies and procedures. You know, the National Weather Service had issued a Fire Watch for your state August 6, a few days before the fire hit. With the siren system, you said to CNN on Monday and again on Tuesday that you believe some of the sirens were broken. When did you learn they weren’t fully functional?
GOV. GREEN: We assess every siren across the state on the first of the month. And then we ask people to update them and fix them to their abilities. You know, I, of course, I as a person, as a father, as a doctor, I wish all the sirens went off. The challenge that you’ve heard, and it’s not to excuse or explain anything. The challenge has been that historically, those sirens are used for tsunamis. That’s when I came to Hawaii 23 years ago was told when I was living down near the shore. So, it’s usually tsunamis and hurricanes. For perspective, we’ve had six fire emergencies this August, we had six fire emergencies between 1953 and 2003. That’s how- how fast things are changing. I know that there is debate out there whether we should be talking about climate change or not. Well, let’s be real world, climate change is here we are in the midst of it with a hotter planet, and fiercer storms. And you asked the question, I’m coming back to it right now. Do I wish those sirens went off? Of course, I do. And I think that the answer that the- the emergency administrator for Maui, who has resigned, said was, of course, utterly unsatisfactory to the world. But it is the case that- that we’ve historically not used those kinds of warnings or fires.
MARGARET BRENNAN: I understand, and I know that you are conducting a review, but given that your state is experiencing a drought, and you’re in hurricane season, can you say whether other Hawaiian towns are as vulnerable as Lahaina was?
GOV. GREEN: We worry about a lot of our state, Waikoloa on the Big Island, which was experiencing a fire at the same time and required evacuations. We’re worried about them. We worry about all of our state. Some of the state, which is denser and more urban, like Waikiki, has a lot more water and a lot more firefighters, a lot more support. Oahu has three quarters of the population of the state. But we’ve had, although it’s not been reported in the press, we’ve had multiple small fires, some on Oahu, some on Big Island, of course, more on Maui, even in the days since the fire. And the firefighters, I want to thank them. They’ve been heroic in this period of time. They’ve just been constantly working, and everyone has stepped up. But yes, we’re worried, and we have done all that we can at the moment to continue to warn people that this is a season of fire and everyone, of course, doesn’t need more reminding because of what happened in Lahaina.
MARGARET BRENNAN: There has been scrutiny of the largest utility, Hawaiian Electric, because there were images, I know you know this, of power lines, possibly starting fires. Last year, that company had proposed an upgrade of the grid with Lahaina as a priority area and suggested a rate hike to do that. Do you know why that didn’t happen and if that contributed?
GOV. GREEN: I don’t know personally whether or not the- the power lines were the- the primary reason the fire occurred. That’s why I asked for a comprehensive review, I think two days into this, which is very atypical. Normally, these kinds of investigations come months or-or more later. But we have to ask that question, we have to ask the question on every level of how any one city, county, state could have done better and the private sector. This is- this is the world that we live in now. In this case, and I’ve seen footage of it from some of the survivors, I’ve seen footage of how it looked during the fire and how things were exploding and what the fierce winds looked like. They were 80 miles per hour gusting and the fire, I’m now told, was as high as 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. It just destroyed everything. It’s not to excuse anything else from any company. It’s just to explain what the world should prepare for, and I humbly asked all of the cities and states to spend that money now to prevent disasters like we are seeing here.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So just to be clear, when you’re talking about global warming, are you saying that climate change amplified the cost of human error?
GOV. GREEN: Yes, it did. There’s always going to be incredible things that people do to save lives, from the firefighters, from citizens. And there’s always going to be decisions that are made that I’m sure aren’t perfect in the moment. And- but when you have fire that move more than a mile a minute, and what happened I’m told by some of the survivors, they were at the initial fire. It was put out sometime late in the afternoon in Lahaina, and then the firefighters had to go to three other fires that had started because of the conditions. When they left the fire started up again. And then when the storm winds from Dora, which were that strong, swept it out, it just destroyed everything. So, there’s no excuses to ever be made. But there are finite- there are finite resources sometimes in the moment.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Governor, we’re watching, the country’s watching, good luck and thank you for your time.
GOV. GREEN: Thank you for your love and support. We appreciate it.
Climate change zealots are destroying our society. I mentioned how Maui suffered the repercussions of Biden’s America-Last policies after they received mere breadcrumbs compared to a much larger payment to Ukraine that same week. Hawaii Commission on Water Resource Management (CWRM) deputy director M. Kaleo Manuel is responsible for multiple deaths amid the Maui fires. You see, Manuel believes in a “One Water” approach where water is sacred and should be used sparingly, including in the case of a massive fire.
Manuel’s page on the Obama Foundation’s website notes: “Kaleo is the Deputy Director of the State of Hawaiʻi Commission on Water Resource Management. He believes that ancient wisdom and traditional ecological knowledge of native peoples will help save the Earth. Kaleo is passionate about elevating native and indigenous ways of knowing in all spheres of discourse and dialogue.”
Firefighters in Lahaina, Hawaii, stated that the fire hydrants were basically empty on the day the fire erupted. “Fighting fire for their lives, getting overrun, trying to have a captain they are trying to get out to a burn center, hydrants aren’t working, that’s no different from cops being in a gunfight without bullets,” Frank Lima, secretary-treasurer of the International Association of Fire Fighters, described.
Kaleo Manuel did not immediately respond to the request to refill the reservoirs. Instead, he told the firefighters on the frontlines to discuss the matter with a local farmer to see how diverting the supply would impact him. People were burning alive and Manuel thought perhaps it was not fair to use the water so recklessly. “We can share it [water], but it requires true conversations about equity,” Manuel said in a poorly aged clip.
The World Economic Forum released an article in March: “Our relationship with water is political, says this climate scientist.”The “expert” claims that human’s relationship with water changed a century ago as “the promise of the modernist world was to separate us, to emancipate us from nature.” Equity is the keyword used again here. Everyone should have equal access to water. In global elite lingo, that means that we, the people, the Great Unwashed plebians, cannot manage our water, and it must be allocated to us in rations.
There is actually a dystopian Korean movie on Netflix regarding this matter where everyone has a water allotment provided to them by the government based on their social credit score. Sadly all these dystopian films seem to foreshadow of the future. The climate zealots will cheer EQUITY and willingly give all power to the government so they can distribute the basics of what we need to survive. Lives could have been saved in Hawaii if the government had allowed the fire department access to WATER.
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This is a library of News Events not reported by the Main Stream Media documenting & connecting the dots on How the Obama Marxist Liberal agenda is destroying America
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