Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – July 3, 2022 by Tony Wikrent Strategic Political Economy “America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat” Ed Yong [The Atlantic, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 6-28-2022] “In 2018, while reporting on pandemic preparedness in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I heard many people joking about the fictional 15th articl […]
I have been “asked” to relay the following message:
Dear Gentle Readers:
My name is Captain Spaulding. On behalf of the Fraternal Order of Jokers, Jesters and Clowns I want to express our outrage over the above poster. We are an ancient brotherhood of professional entertainers who specialize in easing stress by mixing humor with subtle political and social commentary.
Barack Obama is not one of us. He is a talentless poser who belongs in the Union of Puppets and Ventriloquist Dummies.
Best wishes
Captain Spaulding
PS: If you call Obama a clown I will harvest your kidneys with a dull knife while you’re still conscious.
I wouldn’t make Captain Spaulding mad if I were you.
Not only have I told you so, repeatedly, but so did everybody else who’s capable of coming up with four when adding two plus two, going right back to Amory Lovins and the DFHs.
The McKinsey report [pdf] arrived at [its] figures by performing a fairly simple economic analysis: what measures, if rolled out on a large scale starting in the near future, would have a positive return on investment by 2020. Those are fairly conservative conditions, since many efficiency projects require a substantial up-front investment that’s only paid back gradually; time horizons longer than a decade aren’t uncommon when it comes to payback. Nevertheless, the numbers were staggering. $520 billion worth of investments would produce a total of $1.2 trillion in savings by 2020. Presumably, the numbers would look even better later into the century.
At 2020, we’d be avoiding using that 9.1 quadrillion BTUs. That would be enough to knock 23 percent off the expected demand, dropping it below the current national usage. It’s worth pointing out that there’s a bit of a multiplier effect of efficiency efforts, as well—by not producing the energy in the first place, all the losses that occur during generation and transport never come into play. The net result would be over a gigaton of greenhouse gas emissions avoided as well.
As far as the National Academies is concerned, the McKinsey report might just as well have been a chapter in its own publication. “The deployment of existing energy-efficiency technologies,” it has concluded, “is the nearest-term and lowest-cost option for moderating our nation’s demand for energy, especially over the next decade.”[emphasis added]
So could we now get with the program and stop chasing more pollution with less power? Crap like “clean coal” and nukes. And, environmentally less appalling but socially more so: food-sourced biofuels. Here’s yet one more repeat of what’s wrong with them. Continue reading →
While demanding that North Korea release two Bay Area reporters sentenced to prison, the United States has detained a Reuters cameraman without charges in Iraq since September – one of numerous foreign journalists jailed while covering U.S. military actions.
China may have overstocked on commodities, risking a slowdown in buying and a correction in prices in the second half of this year, top economist Nouriel Roubini said on Monday, also reiterating that the global recession would continue until year-end.
Wall Street banks are reaping outsized profits by trading with the Federal Reserve, raising questions about whether the central bank is driving hard enough bargains in its dealings with private sector counterparties, officials and industry executives say.
Harry Reid recommends Republican Daniel Bogden instead of a Democrat even though defense attorneys and prosecutors had questioned his leadership abilities.
The Taliban killed 10 people and critically injured a local police chief in western Afghanistan’s main city on Monday with a remote-controlled bomb hidden in a trash can, officials said.
About 2,000 revelers turned out in all manner of tie-dye for the seventh annual Jerry Garcia Day to listen to live tunes in the amphitheater that now bears Garcia’s name.
This cottage in Knaresborough was photographed by Cliff Ounsley. Covid finally got us, as careful as we've been. He only goes out — masked and gloved — to shop, and I don't go out at all. Now, I mostly sleep. But I'm in no condition to write up how the Supreme Court is overturning The United States of America, so I'll just post what I had […]
The Confluence 