The Writing on the Wall #1

As we (very) slowly ease out the highly infection phase of the Covid pandemic, I decided to take a moment to reflect on this mess. The “writing was on the wall” when it came this event, we had warning shots over the bow (SARs being quite recent), yet still, the handling of this situation was purely abysmal by most countries in the world (which included my country, Canada).  We could dig into the why, but let’s just boil it down to the basics: no one wanted to spend the money to prepare. One often justifies inaction via the risk – weighing against the probability. With the world economy practically stalled, and hundreds or possibly millions of (small) business on the brink, it would be an interesting question to pose the bodies in power – Do ya think you made the right call now?
Ok, hindsight is great, and saying “I told you so” leaves little satisfaction, and for the most part, it's pointless.
So how do we stop this from happening again? I'm sure we are going to hear from many experts on this - and I do expect parties in power to implement changes. We can all hold them accountable for that. That motto "learn by your mistakes" come to mind.

BUT, let’s take a good look at other things where the wall has been plastered with warning signs – and MAYBE we should be pressing the our political representatives to take action.

I decided to make a first (simplified) look at this, applying some basic logic. Please note I do not wish to come out of this with a negative slant of things.  I'll be the first to admit I'm not always right, some of these things may not occur, and we may be able to stop some of this before it reaches a critical point.

So in MY OPINION let’s examine some of what I think is obvious “writing on the wall”:

Economy

• I expect this to be our next major issue as a fallout from the pandemic, (and possibly on par with its impact), the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back.  I’d love to hear our political leaders defining their strategies on how they are going to manage this NOW versus acting like a victim later. Countries are printing money, over leveraged, and have incurred “extreme” amount of debt  (ie: interest costs on this debt are skyrocketing)
  • It's highly probable to expect market adjustments and some “big changes” across the globe
  • Lots of negative talk on the internet – worldwide depression, and all that. In my opinion the world is abundant with investment opportunities – it’s the market levels/valuations that are out of whack.
  • Governments need to have the ability to control their own capital. The bank cartels hold countries under their thumb and constrain governments from acting to the benefit of its citizens. Most debt is primarily owed to the multinational banking cartel. Financial independence of our countries is absolutely essential to implementing meaningful change.   
  • These cartels can’t control encrypted currencies and that in turn drives its global appeal.  I expect more developments in this area – specifically in regards to block-chain account management – which provides the owner with a single vector of managing their funds.
• Watching the stock markets, its clear that Tech companies are carrying as large portion of the investment growth load, and sure many are delivering.
  • The “fake value” companies are fads – and I don’t expect them to last, but I do expect then to cycle from one to the next.
  • The true tech companies – the problem solvers – the service providers – they will continue to forge ahead. These are the movers and the shakers right now  (SpaceX Starlink, Amazon, etc)
• Municipalities are under tremendous stress to repair and modernize their failing support infrastructures. Some of these problems can be solved be new methods, technologies, ideas and unfortunately, higher taxes.  The insane real-estate market is driving up mill-rates, and therefore municipality income – but if history serves, we’ll see aggressive waste. If and when a depression arrives, and the market crashes,  we’ll see pressure for a reset on these mill rates – and my guess it will take citizens taking matters in their own hands to "sue" the municipality before this corrects.
• This next part is what one may consider "conspiracy thinking" until one starts to dig deeper and actually find these openly published stories and videos. This is troubling to say the least.  I'll call this group "The money spinners", members of the IMF and WTO, the other cartels (often call the Cabal), are systematically dismantling the middle class, and essentially driving whole countries into imposed feudal systems – where citizens will "own nothing and be happy". Perhaps more accurately live as indentured slaves to the ‘system’ and never aspire to more. Exposure of this agenda, I dare say,  that requires involvement of the people.  If you are unsure what I am referring to – google it – educate yourself and make a difference.  This is the natural order of things – rich get richer, poor become poorer. It's my belief the average citizen is losing ground.

 
Power (and the Production of)

• Coal and Oil: How long can oil last? Well there is shale extraction – and that lengthens the curve on productivity by many, many years. As the northern and southern hemisphere ice melts away, many new future oil fields may be discovered.  And as for coal, for every plant shut down in the west, we see how many more sprout up in the east? Its seems this is an unwinnable battle with our own planet at stake.
  • What will it take to abandon this archaic technologies? A shift in the financiers is the clincher here, and I don’t see they have the will or desire to do it.
  • The impact – read the environment notations below.
  • The trend so far – NO SIGNIFICANT CHANGE  (well, actually consumption is just getting worse) . So why think it’s going to change in the future?
• Electricity: Let’s first start with the single, most important consumption challenge - electric vehicles. We all think they can, and should, continue to grow in demand and supply, but the holy grail of adoption of private to commercial cars and trucks is the long duration, short (high capacity) charge, battery. We aren’t there yet but we are getting closer. Ongoing investment by environmental consciences parties are needed to make this real. But this also requires our governments to step in to help develop the underlying infrastructure where the conflict-of-interest oil companies are hampering development. A single billionaire can beat the system, but he can’t keep the momentum up alone.   
  • So the next problem – increasing supply, modernizing distribution.  This means the collective WE must step back into the nuclear age, or we build some amazing solar generating centers covering thousands of square miles – considering we can figure how to build these panels without rare materials.
  • Nuclear Fission: There are new designs that are amazingly safe – they would fail to a low-energy state. These new reactors can actually be fed waste from the old breeder style reactors.  Every existing breeder reactor today is a possible nuclear disaster. It’s time to shut them down, move away from 1960’s technology, and embrace the future.  I don’t see this happening with some serious public education and buy-in from the public and political parties – but we have the answer here, just not the political will.
  • Nuclear Fusion: Is the “safer” version, but to date the power to run the system is  "almost" equivalent to the power generated  ("almost" means yes we’ve seen improvements here). Will we ever get the math to work? – maybe, possibly, sure. The first one out of the gate wins, so the race is still on.
  • Wind and Geothermal power: Why lump these two together? Because the commercial units are high-cost and have limited lifetimes.  The current commercial windmill fleets are financial disasters waiting to happen. With unit lifetimes rated between 20-25 years, the math doesn’t work unless there are fundamental changes in approach. Only large commercial operations can make these numbers work, considering the scale of costs.
  • Solar: I do think we can grow this technology, but the need for rare materials is the clincher. The cost of production is still quite high, relatively. We should all be able to source power into the distribution grid, and in turn provide a distributed power production that is much more stable than limited large sources. I do think we are going to see more improvements in this area.
  • Other: Maybe Tesla was on to something with his “Wardenclyffe Tower” (although that was distribution vs generation). I guess we’ll never know as his materials/plans were seized by the government at the time.  That would be interesting to know though, wouldn’t it? There are other possibilities for independent power generation solutions, I am sure.

 
Our Planet, our Home

• Call me a tree-hugger if you want. Say I’m scare-mongering about this information below. It's up to each and every one of us to be comfortable with our choices. We are the ones that must be able to answer if it’s all going to be OK for our children, and our children's children.
• To start off, want to see something really scary?  Go here: https://extinctionclock.org/
• Global Warming/Climate Change
  • To summarize: We dump CO2 into the atmosphere at the rate of billions of tons a year  (or maybe its trillions, doesn't matter). In early 2019 we reached the critical 400 ppm and then surpassed it. We have collected and observed direct evidence the climate is warming, the ocean is warming, the ice is melting. We witness evidence of methane bursting out of permafrost and from the ocean floor, and we watch year after year as temperature records are subsequently broken, each year successively climbing higher and higher. This is the runaway greenhouse effect.
  • Who or what is producing all this CO2?  The big sources include coal plants churning out our endless need for electricity, machines of every shape and size using the internal combustion engine, and furnaces and heaters burning natural gases. Yes, even we and other mammals breathe out carbon dioxide. We'll omit natural sources like volcanoes as they are fringe sources, although they can play a part.
  • Despite arguments to the contrary (from certain non-believers) the evidence continues to pile up that global warming/climate change is REAL. The question for many is is this going to affect me at all?  If you live in a coastal city, or on an island, maybe you'll see changes in a very direct way within the next 10 to 20 years. The link below really doesn't sound that bad by its projections, but experts have been wrong so many times in the past, I know I can only wonder. An example story on projections are here: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/09/200917122838.htm  and here https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ice-melt-1.5886228 Consider that we are seeing 10,000 year old ice is melting at the poles.
  • I do worry about the "indirect" things though, and that includes problems that we cannot and have not anticipated. Perhaps some think-tank out there has all these risks identified by now - I'd like to see that list. Maybe we can do things to get ahead of this, to prepare.
  • Modern civilization rides along performing this tenuous balancing act of supply and demand, distributing electricity, natural gas, fuel, food, and emergency, health and law-enforcement services.  But we've seen what happens when this balance is damaged.

• Loss of life
  • Extinctions of plants and animals – we are looking at 1/3 to 1 /2 of our species lost by 2050 at least from one source, Here’s another:  https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/forests-and-deserts/species-extinction-rate/story
    • Where’s this all going? It’s really quite simple, we all lose.
  • The amazon rain forest has been stated to be the “lungs of the planet” but we are destroying it in millions of acres per year. Is this a concern? Well, never mind us wiping out the undiscovered cure for cancer  (we’ve already done a movie on that one) how about low oxygen levels?  O2 levels have been on a constant decline, accelerating since the 1900s. We are at 20.9% mixture in the atmosphere, when we get below 19.5% human beings are in serious trouble. Current prediction models based on consumption need to be updated to reflect reduction of production capability. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209592731830375X#f0025
    
  • Many parts of the ocean are dying – literally becoming “hypoxic dead zones” and I certainly don’t see this getting any better. Improvements to this problem requires considerable changes both in improved sewage management, and agricultural practices. The following link provides a map of known areas:  https://www.sciencealert.com/dead-zones-in-ocean-quadrupled-since-1950s-killing-marine-life

• Increasing geological activity
  • Earthquakes – although the last 10 years have shown an increase in activity, the current expert thinking is that this is just part of the larger variations of the planet. Certainly that is an argument (same one is used with climate change). The true issue at hand is that we have little to no capability of improving this situation.-  https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/worldwide-surge-great-earthquakes-seen-past-10-years-n233661  vs https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/why-are-we-having-so-many-earthquakes-has-naturally-occurring-earthquake-activity-been?qt-news_science_products=0#qt-news_science_products
  • Volcanoes – Smithsonian says no that events are on the increase as per this link:  https://volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?question=historicalactivity  although this next source counters the position. As with earthquakes, we have no way to improve this situation. http://www.publichealthintelligence.org/content/volcanic-activity-within-last-10000-years
  • Let me throw a curve your way. Gigatons  (yes that’s what I said) Gigatons of ice are melting every year into the oceans. Glacial melting and satellite imagery is there if you wish to look for it. This "extra weight" imposed upon the tectonic plates of concern, is not uniformly spread across all the oceans. Such forces (which are titanic in magnitude) introduce a strong potential of increasing geological instability, which in turn results in increasing earthquake and volcano activity.

 
Please allow me to leave you with a perspective if you will.  Many people spend their lives trying to answer the question:  Why am I here? Or What’s my purpose in life?   
Maybe we can all start with just a few small things: 
1) Let’s be responsible stewards of our home, and of our planet. Do what we can, where we can.
2) Let’s reach out and help others in need.
3) Let’s get involved. When we encounter things that are just plain wrong - let's not ignore it.

The above is an incomplete set of concerns, and there are other areas and specific items that should also be included, but I'll leave that for another date...