Texas Could Be The Epicenter Of The Next Subprime Auto Crisis
In a recent report, we outlined how the largest subprime auto lender, Santander, is currently experiencing one of the most significant accelerations in subprime auto loan delinquencies, not seen since the dark days of 2008. Now, in a separate report via the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, there is new evidence that the epicenter of the next auto loan meltdown could start in Texas.
The Texas auto subprime market began experiencing a troughing event in serious auto delinquencies in 2015, with a rapid turn up in 2016. By the end of 2018, the serious auto delinquency rate was at 16.7%, approaching 2010 levels of 18.2%. Despite the “greatest economy ever,” the Dallas Fed admits rising wealth inequality could be responsible for the growing delinquencies in Texas.
“It’s clear something is going on,” said Emily Ryder Perlmeter, an adviser for the Dallas Fed and one of the report’s authors. “The economy may not be working as well for everyone.”
Michael Carroll, an economist at the University of North Texas, suggests the report is a clear indication that consumers in easy money times took on too much auto debt. Carroll also said consumer distress in Texas could be a bellwether for the broader economy and a warning sign that the consumer is weakening.
Perlmeter said rising auto loan delinquencies across the country is a severe problem, but the meltdown unfolding in Texas is much worse than any other major metropolitan area.
The Dallas Morning News noted the average auto loan in the state is $23,500 as of late 2018.
“The reality is we have too many low-paying jobs,” said Woody Widrow, executive director of Raise Texas, a nonprofit group that lobbies for anti-poverty policies. “Just because we have a low unemployment rate doesn’t mean that people have enough money to pay for the things they need.”
For all of 2017, nearly one-third of the jobs in the state paid less than $24,300 per year, which is about the poverty line for a family of four.
Average auto loans have been extended past 69 months to make it more affordable for the lower-income part of the population.
But what happens when the economy falters, and the oil and gas industry in Texas plunges? Consumers lose their jobs, develop a credit crunch, and are unable to service their insurmountable debts.
About 21% of Texans in 2018 had one credit account that was 90 days past due, said Prosperity Now. That was a one percentage point increase from 2017 and is the highest level among large states.
Rising auto loan delinquencies in Texas stem from the 2015/16 oil bust, Perlmeter said.
Many Texans have insurmountable debts (auto loans, credit cards, student debts, and mortgages), depressing incomes, no savings, and are working in the gig economy, can barely make ends meet in an economy that is rapidly slowing. So when the next recession strikes, could be as early as next year, consumers in Texas could be very screwed.
Residents in El Paso will likely be the most screwed in the next economic downturn. Already, the county’s delinquency rate on auto loans doubled from 2014 to 2018 and broke to new highs not seen since the last financial crisis. Other counties have also seen a meteoric rise in auto delinquencies since the oil bust.
“Of the Texas counties in this report, El Paso County experienced a particularly steep rise in serious auto debt delinquencies, with its rate nearly doubling from 2014 to 2018. Unlike other counties and the state at large, El Paso’s serious delinquency rate is currently past its peak during the Great Recession. A few possible factors are at play. First, the average car loan carried in El Paso County is higher than the other four counties, despite El Paso’s relatively low median household income. Secondly, since mid-2017, the performance of auto debt for prime borrowers in El Paso has worsened, while prime performance in other counties has remained relatively stable,” Dallas Fed wrote.
Consumer credit trends in Texas are an eye-opener of what’s to come for the broad consumer in the US. The next recession will especially leave the millennial, which is currently strapped with insurmountable debts, financially paralyzed for a generation to come.
Trump’s victory-lap movie version buries the embarrassing story of deploying tanks to ‘protect’ Syrian oilfields…
What remained of the attack site. Photo: AFP
“He died like a dog.” President Trump could not have scripted a better one-liner as he got ready for his Obama bin Laden close-up in front of the whole world.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fake caliph, ISIS/Daesh leader, the most wanted man on the planet, was “brought to justice” under Trump’s watch. The dead dog caliph is now positioned as the ultimate foreign policy winning trophy ahead of 2020 reelection.
The climatic scenes of the inevitable-as-death-and-taxes movie or Netflix series to come are already written. (Trump: I “watched it like a movie.”) Cowardly uber-terrorist cornered in a dead-end tunnel, eight helicopter gunships hovering above, dogs barking in the darkness, three terrified children taken as hostages, coward detonates a suicide vest, tunnel collapses over himself and the children.
A crack forensic team carrying samples of the fake caliph’s DNA apparently does its job in record time. The remains of the self-exploded target – then sealed in plastic bags – confirm it: it’s Baghdadi. In the dead of night, it’s time for the commando unit to go back to Irbil, a 70-minute flight over northeast Syria and northwest Iraq. Cut to Trump’s presser. Mission accomplished. Roll credits.
This all happened at a compound only 300 meters away from the village of Barisha, in Idlib, rural northwest Syria, only 5km from the Syria-Turkish border. The compound is no more: it was turned to rubble so it would not become a (Syrian) shrine for a renegade Iraqi.
The caliph was already on the run, and arrived at this rural back of beyond only 48 hours before the raid, according to Turkish intelligence. A serious question is what he was doing in northwest Syria, in Idlib – a de facto cauldron-like Donbass in 2014 – which the Syrian army and Russian airpower are just waiting for the right moment to extinguish.
There are virtually no ISIS/Daesh jihadis in Irbil, but lots of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, as in al-Qaeda in Syria, known inside the Beltway as “moderate rebels,” including hardcore Turkmen brigades previously weaponized by Turkish intel. The only rational explanation is that the Caliph might have identified this Idlib backwater near Barisha, away from the war zone, as the ideal under-the-radar passport to cross to Turkey.
Russians knew?
The plot thickens when we examine Trump’s long list of “thank yous” for the successful raid. Russia came first, followed by Syria – presumably Syrian Kurds, not Damascus – Turkey and Iraq. In fact, Syrian Kurds were only credited with “certain support,” in Trump’s words. Their commander Mazloum Abdi, though, preferred to extol the raid as a “historic operation” with essential Syrian Kurd intel input.
In Trump’s press conference, expanding somewhat on the thank yous, Russia again came first (“great” collaboration) and Iraq was “excellent”: the Iraqi National Intelligence Service later commented on the break it had gotten, via a Syrian who had smuggled the wives of two of Baghdadi’s brothers, Ahmad and Jumah, to Idlib via Turkey.
There’s no way US Special Forces could have pulled this off without complex, combined Turkish, Iraqi and Syrian Kurd intel. Additionally, President Erdogan accomplishes one more tactical masterpiece, juggling between performing the role of dutiful, major NATO ally while still allowing al-Qaeda remnants their safe haven in Idlib under the watchful eye of the Turkish military.
Significantly, Trump said, about Moscow:
“We told them, ‘We’re coming in’ … and they said, ‘Thank you for telling us.’” But, “they did not know the mission.”
They definitely didn’t. In fact, the Russian Defense Ministry, via spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov, said it had “no reliable information about US servicemen conducting an operation to ‘yet another’ elimination of the former Daesh leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in the Turkish-controlled part of the Idlib de-escalation zone.”
And on Trump’s “we told them,” the Russian Defense Ministry was emphatic: “We know nothing about any assistance to the flight of US aircraft to the Idlib de-escalation zone’s airspace in the course of this operation.”
According to ground sources in Syria, a prevalent rumor in Idlib is that the “dead dog” in Barisha could be Abu Mohammad Salama, the leader of Haras al-Din, a minor sub-group of al-Qaeda in Syria. Haras al-Din has not issued any statement about it.
ISIS/Daesh anyway has already named a successor: Abdullah Qardash, aka Hajji Abdullah al-Afari, also Iraqi and also a former Saddam Hussein military officer. There’s a strong possibility that ISIS/Daesh and myriad subgroups and variations of al-Qaeda in Syria will now re-merge, after their split in 2014.
Who gets the oil?
There’s no plausible explanation whatsoever for Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, for years, enjoying the freedom of shuttling back and forth between Syria and Iraq, always evading the formidable surveillance capabilities of the US government.
Well, there’s also no plausible explanation for that famous convoy of 53 brand new, white Toyota Hi-Luxes crossing the desert from Syria to Iraq in 2014 crammed with flag-waving ISIS/Daesh jihadis on their way to capture Mosul, also evading the cornucopia of US satellites covering the Middle East 24/7.
And there’s no way to bury the 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) leaked memo that explicitly named “the West, Gulf monarchies, and Turkey” as seeking a “Salafist principality” in Syria (opposed, significantly, by Russia, China and Iran – the key poles of Eurasia integration).
That was way before ISIS/Daesh’s irresistible ascension. The DIA memo was unmistakable: “If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).
True, the fake caliph has been proclaimed definitely dead at least five times, starting in December 2016. Yet the timing, now, could not be more convenient.
The facts on the ground, after the latest ground-breaking Russia-brokered deal between the Turks and the Syrian Kurds, graphically spell out the slow but sure restoration of Syria’s territorial integrity. There will be no balkanization of Syria. The last remaining pocket to be cleared of jihadis is Irbil.
And then, there’s the oil question. The “died as a dog” movie literally buries – at least for now – an extremely embarrassing story: the Pentagon deploying tanks to “protect” Syrian oilfields. This is as illegal, by any possible interpretation of international law, as is, for that matter, the very presence in Syria of US troops, which were never invited by the government in Damascus.
Persian Gulf traders told me that before 2011, Syria was producing 387,000 barrels of oil a day and selling 140,000 – the equivalent of 25.1% of Damascus’s income. Nowadays, the Omar, al-Shadaddi and Suwayda fields, in eastern Syria, would not be producing more than 60,000 barrels a day. Still, that’s essential for Damascus and for “the Syrian people” so admired within the Beltway – the legitimate owners of the oil.
The mostly Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) did in fact take military control of Deir er-Zor when they were fighting ISIS/Daesh. Yet the majority of the local population is Sunni Arab. They will never tolerate any hint of a longtime Syrian Kurd domination – much less in tandem with a US occupation.
Sooner or later the Syrian army will get there, with Russian air power support. The Deep State might, but Trump, in an electoral year, would never risk a hot war over a few, illegally occupied oilfields.
In the end, the “died as a dog” movie can be interpreted as a victory lap, and the closure of a historical arc languishing since 2011. When he “abandoned” the Syrian Demoratic Forces Kurds, Trump effectively buried the Rojava question – as in an independent Syrian Kurdistan.
Russia is in charge in Syria – on all fronts. Turkey got rid of its “terrorism” paranoia – always having to demonize the Syrian Kurd PYD and its armed wing YPG as a spin-off of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) separatists inside Turkey – and this may help to settle the Syrian refugee question. Syria is on the way to recover all its territory.
The “died as a dog” movie can also be interpreted as the liquidation of a formerly useful asset that was a valued component of the gift that keeps on giving, the never-ending Global War on Terror. Other scarecrows, and other movies, await.
A mere day after President Trump announced that ISIS terror leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died “like a dog” in a US raid in northwest Syria, and after spokesman for the group Abu al-Hassan al-Muhajir was also taken out in a joint US-Kurdish SDF operation, the Islamic State is already reported to have named a successor. The now deceased al-Mhuhajir had also been widely reported as a potential Baghdadi successor.
Meet new ISIS chief Abdullah Qardash, according to Newsweek:
Abdullah Qardash, sometimes spelled Kardesh and also known as Hajji Abdullah al-Afari, was said to have been nominated by Baghdadi in August to run the group’s “Muslim affairs” in a widely-circulated statement attributed to ISIS’ official Amaq news outlet, but never publicly endorsed by the group.
Abdullah Qardash (left) is the reported successor of Baghdadi.
Citing unnamed officials, the report describes “Baghdadi’s successor” as previously having been a high ranking military officer in Saddam Hussein’s Baathist Iraq:
Though little is known about the former Iraqi military officer who once served under late leader Saddam Hussein, one regional intelligence official asking not to be identified by name or nation told Newsweek that Qardash would have taken over Baghdadi’s role — though it had lost much of its significance by the time of his demise.
According to a number of reports, citing Middle East analysts, Baghdadi had been little more than a “figurehead” by the time of his death.
As Crisis Group think tank senior analyst Sam Heller observed “Baghdadi’s personal centrality to the organization’s success is unclear,” given that “the group seems to have invested in systematizing and institutionalizing itself in a way that could mitigate the loss of any single leader, even at the very top.”
Thus Qardash’s own role and level of command at the top of the terror group, even if confirmed, remains unclear. Given ISIS has by now largely been driven ‘underground’ – splintered into local cells confined to northeast Syria and western Iraq, any ISIS ‘leader’ position could remain symbolic at best.
Meanwhile, some analysts and prominent ISIS-watchers are hotly disputing the accuracy of Newsweek’s claim that Qardash has taken Islamic State’s helm, though admitting he does hold “prominence” in the organization.
18)Caution: Media reports & Wikipedia pages stating #Baghdadi’s successor is Abdullah Qardash, are based on a fake ’Amaq report, as I previously analyzed over a month ago:https://t.co/5VfIRb6dZv
While he may have prominence, these particular reports are based on FALSE INTEL. pic.twitter.com/s6WF8Oaf1p
This after his name began circulating via jihadist terror media accounts in early August, and possibly even months prior as France 24 – which also contradicted the Newsweek report – relates:
Speculation has abounded around a senior IS figure known as Abdullah Qardash – a former Iraqi military officer jailed with Baghdadi in the giant US-run Iraqi prison of Camp Bucca.
A months-old statement attributed to IS propaganda arm Amaq but never officially adopted by the group said he was selected to replace Baghdadi even before Trump’s declared the self-proclaimed “caliph” dead.
Abdullah Qardash’s prior role in the Iraqi military prior to 2003 is consistent with one dominant theory which has for years circulated among mainstream media pundits and academics — namely that ISIS’ prior rapid rise was due to its ranks being bolstered and led by Sunni former Iraqi intelligence and military officers, who after the US invasion fought coalition forces alongside al-Qaeda.
During a recent BBC radio interview, award-winning journalist Jonathan Steele said that he attended a briefing by a new whistleblower from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) investigation into an alleged 2018 chemical attack in Douma, Syria, who claimed that the OPCW suppressed his findings which contradicted the organization’s official conclusion that a chlorine gas attack had taken place. This according to Steele is a second whistleblower coming forward on the OPCW’s Douma investigation, the first being the leaker of an Engineering Assessment document which surfaced this past May contradicting the OPCW’s official ballistics report which the organization hid from the public.
Here’s British journalist Jonathan Steele on the BBC saying he was in attendance at the OPCW/Douma panel and witnessed a new OPCW whistleblower say his findings were suppressed on the absence of evidence for chlorine gas use on the scene in Syria. pic.twitter.com/JRdGAEnlVf
Steele made these comments unbidden by the show’s host Paul Henley. They read as follows (thanks to Tim Hayward of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media for the transcript):
Jonathan Steele: “I was in Brussels last week … I attended a briefing by a whistleblower from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. He was one of the inspectors who was sent out to Douma in Syria in April last year to check into the allegations by the rebels that Syrian aeroplanes had dropped two canisters of chlorine gas, killing up to 43 people. He claims he was in charge of picking up the samples in the affected areas, and in neutral areas, to check whether there were chlorine derivatives there …
Paul Henley: And?
JS: … and he found that there was no difference. So it rather suggested there was no chemical gas attack, because in the buildings where the people allegedly died there was no extra chlorinated organic chemicals than in the normal streets elsewhere. And I put this to the OPCW for comment, and they haven’t yet replied. But it rather suggests that a lot of this was propaganda…
PH: Propaganda led by?
JS: … led by the rebel side to try and bring in American planes, which in fact did happen. American, British and French planes bombed Damascus a few days after these reports. And actually this is the second whistle blower to come forward. A few months ago there was a leaked report by the person who looked into the ballistics, as to whether these cylinders had been dropped by planes, looking at the damage of the building and the damage on the side of the cylinders. And he decided, concluded, that the higher probability was that these cylinders were placed on the ground, rather than from planes.
PH: This would be a major revelation…
JS: … it would be a major revelation …
PH: … given the number of people rubbishing the idea that these could have been fake videos at the time.
JS: Well, these two scientists, I think they’re non-political — they wouldn’t have been sent to Douma, if they’d had strong political views, by the OPCW. They want to speak to the Conference of the Member States in November, next month, and give their views, and be allowed to come forward publicly with their concerns. Because they’ve tried to raise them internally and been — they say they’ve been — suppressed, their views have been suppressed.
Huge news: a *2nd* OPCW whistleblower has emerged over Douma attack in April 2018. 1st WB leaked an engineering assessment that challenged OPCW conclusion of Assad gov’t responsibility. This new WB was *on the ground in Douma.* Both WBs want to speak out. https://t.co/tHkYdEwk4Opic.twitter.com/2tQHvpIpws
Steele appears to be referring to a Courage Foundation panel meeting which convened in Brussels on October 15th, the findings of which were published the other day by the Courage Foundation and WikiLeaks, though it’s possible the briefing he refers to was a separate Brussels event around the same time. I’ve been unable to reach Steele for comment but will update with clarification if I can contact him.
They are lying to us about what’s happening Syria. Shortly after the political/media class began blaring that Syrian president Bashar al-Assad had killed dozens of civilians with chemical weapons in April of last year, Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal wrote the following in an article for TruthDig:
“In 2007, journalist James Bamford recalled how Americans had been subjected to ‘a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq — the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.’ The dirty war on Syria represents an extension of that strategy, with the mainstream media operating hand in glove with insurgent-allied influence operations like the White Helmets to cultivate public support for another war of regime change.”
Indeed, the narrative manipulation campaign against the Syrian government is historically unprecedented in its depth and scale. From bizarre narrative management operations posing as rescue services, to CNN staging a fake, scripted interview featuring a seven year-old Syrian girl blaming Assad for a chemical weapons attack, to the BBC’s manipulative and transparently bogusSaving Syria’s Children documentary, to the US-centralized empire’s increasingly evident influence over the OPCW, we’re seeing evidence of a campaign to distort the public understanding of what’s going on in a foreign nation the likes of which we’ve never before seen.
Stay skeptical and remember Iraq. These new reports which keep surfacing on unacceptable practices by the OPCW are just one more piece on a mountain of evidence that whenever the political/media class and their hypnotized victims try to bully us into accepting the official narrative about a longtime target for regime change, we should stand firm and insist on an amount of proof which rises to the level required in a post-Iraq invasion world.
The OPCW has a lot of questions to answer, especially since its findings have been cited as authoritative and conclusive in other high-profile events like the UK Skripal poisoning, as well as other incidents in Syria. Journalists like Steele and La Repubblica’s Stefania Maurizi have reported that the organization has been snubbing their requests for comment. Let’s hope the OPCW stops dodging journalists and moves toward bringing transparency and accountability to its processes.
HSBC CEO Vows To “Remodel” Bank After Profits Plunge 24%
With its largest and most important market, Hong Kong, in chaos, it’s hardly a surprise that HSBC, the nominally British lender which has its largest business footprint in Asia (particularly HK) reported a double-digit slump in pre-tax profits during Q3.
The bank said net profit slumped 24% YoY to $3 billion, falling far short of what analysts had anticipated, according to the FT.
With few easy alternatives, and the situation in Hong Kong (particularly its housing market) looking increasingly uncertain, HSBC’s interim CEO Noel Quinn unveiled plans to “remodel” large parts of the bank, according to the FT. Even amid fears that the HK unrest would hurt the bank, Quinn said its results in the region had been “resilient” in the face of these fears.
Surprisingly (or maybe not), the weakness is coming from somewhere else: Europe.
And so begins another restructuring initiative at another troubled European lender. Like Deutsche Bank, which is planning to shutter unprofitable businesses and re-focus resources, cutting what’s expected to be nearly 20,000 jobs in the process, HSBC will likely need to take drastic steps to truly reorient its business.
Though Quinn is only interim CEO, it looks like the bank means business with this initiative: The FT reported earlier this month that the bank’s plan to cut costs and divest businesses could lead to 10,000 job cuts.
But on Monday, the bank took this a step further, and formally abandoned its main profitability target: to generate a return on tangible equity of more than 11% next year (it was 6.4% for Q32019).
The bank blamed a “challenging” environment that meant “the outlook for revenue growth is softer.”
In a video presentation posted to HSBC’s website, Quinn said “there are parts of our portfolio that are underperforming in terms of return. We need to urgently address that, move capital from those low-return portfolios and move it into the higher-return, higher-growth opportunities.”
He added that the bank is still working on “detailed plans to make that happen.”
We don’t know what those might be yet, but we’d venture a guess that thousands more European banking jobs will disappear before this is all over. And HSBC just might rethink its decision to remain domiciled in the UK.
The bank’s HK-traded shares slumped more than 3% after its earnings report, adding to a double-digit decline over the past six months.
For about 70 years the CIA has been undermining a free press. It began with Operation Mockingbird, a Cold War operation against communism. The CIA recruited journalists into a propaganda network. The CIA paid journalists to write fake stories or to publish stories written by the CIA in order to control explanations that served the agency’s agendas. Student and cultural organizations and intellectual magazines, such as Encounter, were suborned into the CIA’s propaganda network.
Thanks to the German journalist, Udo Ulfkotte, we know that every European journalist of any significance is a CIA asset. In 1977 Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame wrote in Rolling Stone that the CIA “has secretly bankrolled numerous foreign press services, periodicals and newspapers – both English and foreign language – which provided excellent cover for CIA operatives.” Like most other people, Western journalists were all too willing to sell out their integrity for money. The few who were not were blackmailed into submission.
The few honest journalists who remain have been forced out of the “mainstream” or presstitute media onto Internet websites. Wikileaks is by far the best news organization of our time. To bring this organization to heel Washington, using its Swedish, British, and Ecuadoran vassals, has persecuted Wikileaks’ founder, Julian Assange, for years. The CIA’s media vassals, including the New York Times and The Guardian, both of which published the material leaked to Wikileaks that is being used to destroy Assange, have joined wholeheartedly in the persecution of the World’s Best and Most Honest Journalist.
Currently Assange is being tortured, apparently to death, while bring held in solitary confinement in a maximum security British prison awaiting his extradition to the US on false charges. As the CIA cannot be certain it has suborned all the federal judges, Washington is just as happy if Assange dies in a British prison as there is no valid case against him under current US law. Probably the absence of a valid case doesn’t matter as the rule of law in the US is very difficult to find.
The worst moment was one of a number of ‘worst’ moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions, This judge, Vanessa Baraitser—actually she isn’t a judge at all; she’s a magistrate—shocked all of us who were there.
Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa’s Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn’t get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.
When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.
The judge watched this outrage without a comment. It reminded me of a newsreel of a show trial in Stalin’s Moscow; the difference was that Soviet show trials were broadcast. Here, the state broadcaster, the BBC, blacked it out, as did the other mainstream channels.
Having ignored Julian’s barrister’s factual description of how the CIA had run a Spanish security firm that spied on him in the Ecuadorean embassy, she didn’t yawn, but her disinterest was as expressive. She then denied Julian’s lawyers any more time to prepare their case – even though their client was prevented in prison from receiving legal documents and other tools with which to defend himself.
Her knee in the groin was to announce that the next court hearing would be at remote Woolwich, which adjoins Belmarsh prison and has few seats for the public. This will ensure isolation and be as close to a secret trial as it’s possible to get. Did this happen in the home of the Magna Carta? Yes, but who knew?
What is astonishing about the CIA’s destruction of Julian Assange is the silence of American law schools and bar associations, the silence of universities, the absence of student and labor union protests, the absence of any protection of Assange’s rights from courts as the last news organization willing and capable of holding governments accountable for their crimes is destroyed openly in full view of the law schools, intellectuals, bar associations, courts, and print and TV media.
The CIA’s control over explanations is as complete as the control Big Brother has in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. And this doesn’t bother the citizens of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Europe. Only a few individuals speak out for Assange, and they, too, are demonized in turn.
The Age of Tyranny has now descended upon the Western World.
Public Bus Swallowed By Massive Sink Hold In Downtown Pittsburgh Rush Hour
Stunning video recorded by a local CBS affiliate captures the aftermath of a bus that was swallowed by a giant sink hole that opened up in downtown Pittsburgh during the Monday morning rush hour.
Emergency crews rushed to the scene after the entire back half of a Port Authority bus went into the ground at Penn Avenue and 10th Street just before 8am as the gaping hole opened up. A statement by the city’s Port Authority indicated the bus“was stopped at a red light when the hole opened underneath it.”
Image source: Tribune Review
Only two people, including the diver, were on the bus when the sink hold opened up and both were able to escape, one with a minor injury — though initially authorities worried there may have been up to ten on the bus.
Currently the front half of the bus is sticking up in the air, and efforts to remove the vehicle are expected to take all day, with surrounding streets and at least one block shut down.
Incredible video of the bus in the sink hole downtown at 10th and Penn. You can see water spraying under the roadway. pic.twitter.com/BBNPmtG3QR
Officials say it will take quite sometime to remove the bus. Afternoon rush hour traffic and fans looking for parking before tonight’s Pittsburgh Steelers game at Heinz Field could be impacted.
It’s further reported that the city could possibly need two large cranes in order to remove the bus from the crater.
Image source: Tribune Review
Other reports say tow trucks are on the scene. The incident is expected to create gridlock throughout the day in the downtown area.
We’ve noted many time before that no matter what your particular political perspective is, if there is one thing that virtually everyone in the United States can agree upon it is the fact that America’s infrastructure is crumbling.
The energy needs of the world’s economy seem to be easy to model. Energy consumption is measured in a variety of different ways including kilowatt hours, barrels of oil equivalent, British thermal units, kilocalories and joules. Two types of energy are equivalent if they produce the same number of units of energy, right?
For example, xkcd’s modeler Randall Munroe explains the benefit of renewable energy in the video below. He tells us that based on his model, solar, if scaled up to ridiculous levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a half-dozen of our neighbors. Wind, if scaled up to absurd levels, can provide enough renewable energy for ourselves and a dozen of our neighbors.
There is a major catch to this analysis, however. The kinds of energy produced by wind and solar are not the kinds of energy that the economy needs. Wind and solar produce intermittent electricity available only at specific times and places. What the world economy needs is a variety of different energy types that match the energy requirements of the many devices in place in the world today. This energy needs to be transported to the right place and saved for the right time of day and the right time of year. There may even be a need to store this energy from year-to-year, because of possible droughts.
I think of the situation as being analogous to researchers deciding that it would be helpful or more efficient if humans could change their diets to 100% grass in the next 20 years. Grass is a form of energy product, but it is not the energy product that humans normally consume. It doesn’t seem to be toxic to humans in small quantities. It seems to grow quite well. Switching to the use of grass for food would seem to be beneficial from a CO2 perspective. The fact that humans have not evolved to eat grass is similar to the fact that the manufacturing and transport sectors of today’s economy have not developed around the use of intermittent electricity from wind and solar.
Substituting Grass for Food Might “Work,” but It Would Require Whole New Systems
If we consider other species, we find that animals with four stomachs can, in fact, live quite well on a diet of grass. These animals often have teeth that grow continuously because the silica in grass tends to wear down their teeth. If we could just get around these little details, we might be able to make the change. We would probably need to grow extra stomachs and add continuously growing teeth. Other adjustments might also be needed, such as a smaller brain. This would especially be the case if a grass-only diet is inadequate to support today’s brain growth and activity.
The problem with nearly all energy analyses today is that they use narrow boundaries. They look at only a small piece of the problem–generally the cost (or “energy cost”) of the devices themselves–and assume that this is the only cost involved in a change. In fact, researchers need to recognize that whole new systems may be required, analogous to the extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth. The issue is sometimes described as the need to have “wide boundaries” in analyses.
If the xkcd analysis netted out the indirect energy costs of the system, including energy related to all of the newly required systems, the results of the analysis would likely change considerably. The combined ability of wind and solar to power both one’s own home and those of a dozen and a half neighbors would likely disappear. Way too much of the output of the renewable system would be used to make the equivalent of extra stomachs and ever-growing teeth for the system to work. The world economy might not work as in the past, either, if the equivalent of the brain needs to be smaller.
Is “Energy Used by a Dozen of Our Neighbors” a Proper Metric?
Before I continue with my analysis of what goes wrong in modeling intermittent renewable energy, let me say a few words about the way Munroe quantifies the outcome of his energy analysis. He talks about “energy consumed by a household and a dozen of its neighbors.” We often hear news items about how many households can be served by a new electricity provider or how many households have been taken offline by a storm. The metric used by Munroe is similar. But, does it tell us what we need to know in this case?
Our economy requires energy consumption by many types of users, including governments to make roads and schools, farmers to plant crops and manufacturers to make devices of all kinds. Leaving non-residential energy consumption out of the calculation doesn’t make much sense. (Actually, we are not quite certain what Munroe has included in his calculation. His wording suggests that he included only residential energy consumption.) In the US, my analysis indicates that residential users consume only about a third of total energy.1 The rest is consumed by businesses and governments.
If we want to adjust Munroe’s indications to include energy consumed by businesses and governments, we need to divide the indicated number of residential households provided with energy by about three. Thus, instead of the units being “Energy Consumed by Dozen of our Neighbors,” the units would be “Energy Consumed by Four of Our Neighbors, including Associated Energy Use by Governments and Businesses.” The apparently huge benefit provided by wind and solar becomes much smaller when we divide by three, even before any other adjustments are made.
What Might the Indirect Costs of Wind and Solar Be?
There are a number of indirect costs:
(1) Transmission costs are much higher than those of other types of electricity, but they are not charged back to wind and solar in most studies.
A 2014 study by the International Energy Agency indicates that transmission costs for wind are approximately three times the cost of transmission costs for coal or nuclear. The amount of excess costs tends to increase as intermittent renewables become a larger share of the total. Some of the reason for higher transmission costs for both wind and solar are the following:
(a) Disproportionately more lines need to be built for wind and solar because transmission lines need to be scaled to the maximum output, rather than the average output. Wind output is typically available 25% to 35% of the time; solar is typically available 10% to 25% of the time.
(b) There tend to be longer distances between where renewable energy is captured and where it is consumed, compared to traditional generation.
(c) Renewable electricity is not created in a fossil fuel power plant, with the same controls over the many aspects of grid electricity. The transmission system must therefore make corrections which would not be needed for other types of electricity.
(2) With increased long distance electricity transmission, there is a need for increased maintenance of transmission lines. If this is not performed adequately, fires are likely, especially in dry, windy areas.
There is recent evidence that inadequate maintenance of transmission lines is a major fire hazard.
In California, inadequate electricity line maintenance has led to the bankruptcy of the Northern California utility PG&E. In recent weeks, PG&E has initiated two preventative cut-offs of power, one affecting as many as two million individuals.
Venezuela has a long distance transmission line from its major hydroelectric plant to Caracas. One of the outages experienced in that country seems to be related to fires close to this transmission line.
There are things that can be done to prevent these fires, such as burying the lines underground. Even using insulated wire, instead of ordinary transmission wire, seems to help. But any solution has a cost involved. These costs need to be recognized in modeling the indirect cost of adding a huge amount of renewables.
(3) A huge investment in charging stations will be needed, if anyone other than the very wealthy are to use electric vehicles.
Clearly, the wealthy can afford electric vehicles. They generally have garages with connections to electrical power. With this arrangement, they can easily charge a vehicle that is powered by electricity when it is convenient.
The catch is that the less wealthy often do not have similar opportunities for charging electric vehicles. They also cannot afford to spend hours waiting for their vehicles to charge. They will need inexpensive rapid-charging stations, located in many, many places, if electric vehicles are to be a suitable choice. The cost of rapid-charging will likely need to include a fee for road maintenance, since this is one of the costs that today is included in fuel prices.
(4) Intermittency adds a very substantial layer of costs.
A common belief is that intermittency can be handled by rather small changes, such as time-of-day pricing, smart grids and cutting off power to a few selected industrial customers if there isn’t enough electricity to go around. This belief is more or less true if the system is basically a fossil fuel and nuclear system, with a small percentage of renewables. The situation changes as more intermittent renewables are added.
Once more than a small percentage of solar is added to the electric grid, batteries are needed to smooth out the rapid transition that occurs at the end of the day when workers are returning home and would like to eat their dinners, even though the sun has set. There are also problems with electricity from wind cutting off during storms; batteries can help smooth out these transitions.
There are also longer-term problems. Major storms can disrupt electricity for several days, at any time of the year. For this reason, if a system is to run on renewables alone, it would be desirable to have battery backup for at least three days. In the short video below, Bill Gates expresses dismay at the idea of trying to provide a three-day battery backup for the quantity of electricity used by the city of Tokyo.
We do not at this point have nearly enough batteries to provide a three-day battery backup for the world’s electricity supply. If the world economy is to run on renewables, electricity consumption would need to rise from today’s level, making it even more difficult to store a three-day supply.
A much more difficult problem than three-day storage of electricity is the need for seasonal storage, if renewable energy is to be used to any significant extent. Figure 1 shows the seasonal pattern of energy consumption in the United States.
Figure 1. US energy consumption by month of year, based on data of the US Energy Information Administration. “All Other” is total energy, less electricity and transportation energy. It includes natural gas used for home heating. It also includes oil products used for farming, as well as fossil fuels of all kinds used for industrial purposes.
In contrast with this pattern, the production of solar energy tends to peak in June; it falls to a low level in December to February. Hydroelectric power tends to peak in spring, but its quantity is often quite variable from year to year. Wind power is quite variable, both from year to year and month to month.
Our economy cannot handle many starts and stops of electricity supply. For example, temperatures need to stay high for melting metals. Elevators should not stop between floors when the electricity stops. Refrigeration needs to continue when fresh meat is being kept cold.
There are two approaches that can be used to work around seasonal energy problems:
Greatly overbuild the renewables-based energy system, to provide enough electricity when total energy is most needed, which tends to be in winter.
Add a huge amount of storage, such as battery storage, to store electricity for months or even years, to mitigate the intermittency.
Either of these approaches is extremely high cost. These costs are like adding extra stomachs to the human system. They have not been included in any model to date, as far as I know. The cost of one of these approaches needs to be included in any model analyzing the costs and benefits of renewables, if there is any intention of using renewables as more than a tiny share of total energy consumption.
Figure 2 illustrates the high energy cost that can occur by adding substantial battery backup an electrical system. In this example, the “net energy” that the system provides is essentially eliminated by the battery backup. In this analysis, Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) compares energy output to energy input. It is one of many metrics used to estimate whether a device is providing adequate energy output to justify the front-end energy inputs.
Figure 2. Graham Palmer’s chart of Dynamic Energy Returned on Energy Invested from “Energy in Australia.”
The example in Figure 2 is based on the electricity usage pattern in Melbourne, Australia, which has a relatively mild climate. The example uses a combination of solar panels, batteries and diesel backup generation. Solar panels and backup batteries provide electricity for the 95% of annual electricity usage that is easiest to cover with these devices; diesel generation is used for the remaining 5%.
The Figure 2 example could be adjusted to be “renewable only” by adding significantly more batteries, a large number of solar panels, or some combination of these. These additional batteries and solar panels would be very lightly used, bringing the EROEI of the system down to an even lower level.
To date, a major reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid the costs of overbuilding or of adding major battery backup is the small share they represents of electricity production. In 2018, wind amounted to 5% of world electricity; solar amounted to 2%. As percentages of world energy supply, they represented 2% and 1% respectively.
A second reason that the electricity system has been able to avoid addressing the intermittency issue is because backup electricity providers (coal, natural gas, and nuclear) have been forced to provide backup services without adequate compensation for the value of services that they are providing. The way that this happens is by giving wind and solar the subsidy of “going first.” This practice creates a problem because backup providers have substantial fixed costs, and they often are not being adequately compensated for these fixed costs.
If there is any plan to cease using fossil fuels, all of these backup electricity providers, including nuclear, will disappear. (Nuclear also depends on fossil fuels.) Renewables will need to stand on their own. This is when the intermittency problem will become overwhelming. Fossil fuels can be stored relatively inexpensively; electricity storage costs are huge. They include both the cost of the storage system and the loss of energy that takes place when storage is used.
In fact, the underfunding issue associated with allowing intermittent renewables to go first is already becoming an overwhelming problem in a few places. Ohio has recently chosen to provide subsidies to coal and nuclear providers as a way of working around this issue. Ohio is also reducing funding for renewables.
(5) The cost of recycling wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries needs to be reflected in cost estimates.
A common assumption in energy analyses seems to be that somehow, at the end of the design lifetime of wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, all of these devices will somehow disappear at no cost. If recycling is done, the assumption is made that the cost of recycling will be less than the value of the materials made available from the recycling.
We are discovering now that recycling isn’t free. Very often, the energy cost of recycling materials is greater than the energy used in mining them fresh. This problem needs to be considered in analyzing the real cost of renewables.
(6) Renewables don’t directly substitute for many of the devices/processes we have today.This could lead to a major step-down in how the economy operates and a much longer transition.
There is a long list of things that renewables don’t substitute for. Today, we cannot make wind turbines, solar panels, or today’s hydroelectric dams without fossil fuels. This, by itself, makes it clear that the fossil fuel system will need to be maintained for at least the next twenty years.
There are many other things that we cannot make with renewables alone. Steel, fertilizer, cement and plastics are some examples that Bill Gates mentions in his video above. Asphalt and many of today’s drugs are other examples of goods that cannot be made with renewables alone. We would need to change how we live without these goods. We could not pave roads (except with stone) or build many of today’s buildings with renewables alone.
It seems likely that manufacturers would try to substitute wood for fossil fuels, but the quantity of wood available would be far too low for this purpose. The world would encounter deforestation issues within a few years.
(7) It is likely that the transition to renewables will take 50 or more years. During this time, wind and solar will act more like add-ons to the fossil fuel system than they will act like substitutes for it. This also increases costs.
In order for the fossil fuel industries to continue, a large share of their costs will need to continue. The people working in fossil fuel industries need to be paid year around, not just when electrical utilities need backup electrical power. Fossil fuels will need pipelines, refineries and trained people. Companies using fossil fuels will need to pay their debts related to existing facilities. If natural gas is used as backup for renewables, it will need reservoirs to hold natural gas for winter, besides pipelines. Even if natural gas usage is reduced by say, 90%, its costs are likely to fall by a much smaller percentage, say 30%, because a large share of costs are fixed.
One reason that a very long transition will be needed is because there is not even a path to transition away from fossil fuels in many cases. If a change is to be made, inventions to facilitate these changes are a prerequisite. Then these inventions need to be tested in actual situations. Next, new factories are needed to make the new devices. It is likely that some way will be needed to pay existing owners for the loss of value of their existing fossil fuel powered devices; if not, there are likely to be huge debt defaults. It is only after all of these steps have taken place that the transition can actually take place.
These indirect costs lead to a huge question mark regarding whether it even makes sense to encourage the widespread use of wind and solar. Renewables can reduce CO2 emissions if they really substitute for fossil fuels in making electricity. If they are mostly high cost add-ons to the system, there is a real question: Does it even make sense to mandate a transition to wind and solar?
Do Wind and Solar Really Offer a Longer-Term Future than Fossil Fuels?
At the end of the xkcd video shown above, Munroe makes the observation that wind and solar are available indefinitely, but fossil fuel supplies are quite limited.
I agree with Munroe that fossil fuel supplies are quite limited. This occurs because energy prices do not rise high enough for us to extract very much of them. The prices of finished products made with fossil fuels need to be low enough for customers to be able to afford them. If this is not the case, purchases of discretionary goods (for example cars and smart phones) will fall. Since cars and smart phones are made with commodities, including fossil fuels, the lower “demand” for these finished goods will lead to falling prices of commodities, including oil. In fact, we seem to have experienced falling oil prices most of the time since 2008.
Figure 3. Inflation adjusted weekly average Brent Oil price, based on EIA oil spot prices and US CPI-urban inflation.
It is hard to see why renewables would last any longer than fossil fuels. If their unsubsidized cost is any higher than fossil fuels, this would be one strike against them. They are also very dependent on fossil fuels for making spare parts and for repairing transmission lines.
It is interesting that climate change modelers seem to be convinced that very high amounts of fossil fuels can be extracted in the future. The question of how much fossil fuels can really be extracted is another modeling issue that needs to be examined closely. The amount of future extraction seems to be highly dependent on how well the current economic system holds together, including the extent of globalization. Without globalization, fossil fuel extraction seems likely to decline quickly.
Do We Have Too Much Faith in Models?
The idea of using renewables certainly sounds appealing, but the name is deceiving. Most renewables, except for wood and dung, aren’t very renewable. In fact, they depend on fossil fuels.
The whole issue of whether wind and solar are worthwhile needs to be carefully analyzed. The usual hallmark of an energy product that is of substantial benefit to the economy is that its production tends to be very profitable. With these high profits, governments can tax the owners heavily. Thus, the profits can be used to aid the rest of the economy. This is one of the physical manifestations of the “net energy” that the energy product provides.
If wind and solar were really providing substantial net energy, they would not need subsidies, not even the subsidy of going first. They would be casting off profits to benefit the rest of the economy. Perhaps renewables aren’t as beneficial as many people think they are. Perhaps researchers have put too much faith in distorted models.
Passengers Pray And Swig Whisky As Boeing 737 Suffers Engine Failure Flying To Florida
A Swift Air Boeing 737-400, registration N420US, declared an air emergency about 30 minutes after takeoff from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on Oct. 22 after engine failure was detected. The pilots made a quick decision to return to Santo Domingo and safely landed the plane 40 minutes later, reported The Aviation Herald.
While it’s still to be determined what exactly happened to one of the plane’s engines, we ask several questions: Did it completely shut off? Was there reduced engine power? As far as incident reports, we cannot find one.
On Monday, a 27-second video filmed by one of the passengers during the air emergency surfaced on YouTube. The contents of the video are truly terrifying as the plane, clearly under reduced power, is in a steep decline. Passengers are seen holding hands and reciting prayers as their fate remained uncertain. Some passengers were seen swigging whiskey as they wanted to numb the emotional pain that their final moments could be on a shitty Boeing plane.
The incident occurred one week before Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg is set to explain to US lawmakers and the American people why two 737 Max planes have crashed within the last 12 months.
Muilenburg will address two key US House and Senate panels this week as the aerospace giant attempts to restore confidence in its planes and get the 737 Max back up in the air by early 2020.
Muilenburg’s meeting with lawmakers Tuesday comes after the Indonesian transportation safety board on Oct. 25 found significant design flaws in the 737 Max that led to the Lion Air crash on Oct. 29, 2018. Authorities have blamed the Boeing Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) as one of the main reasons behind the crash.
The second crash was Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 on Mar. 10, 2019. Authorities have also blamed MCAS for this crash.
Global aviation officials have grounded the 737 Max for nearly eight-months.
At this point, President Trump is right, Boeing needs to rebrand — it should seriously consider a name change after the 737 Max crisis.
A New York Times columnist blamed “whiteness” for an alleged racist attack where two Indian students assaulted an African-American girl at a high school football game in New Jersey.
Yes, really.
The two 17-year-old Indian boys allegedly used racial slurs against a group of African-American girls and urinated on one during the game at Lawrence High School last Friday night.
Who’s to blame for the attack? White people, of course.
That’s according to New York Times columnist Nell Irvin Painter, who says that the Indian boys were “enacting American whiteness through anti-black assault in a very traditional way.”
“In doing so, the assailants are demonstrating how race is a social construct that people make through their actions. They show race in the making, and show how race is something we perform, not just something we are in our blood or in the color of our skin,” she added.
How convenient. By making race a “social construct,” the racist actions of non-white people can still be blamed on white people. Incredible.
“In the New Jersey incident, the heritage or skin color of the boys suspected of the assault doesn’t matter,” writes Painter.
“What matters is that they were participating in this pattern and thus enacting whiteness in a very traditional way.”
Her entire argument appears to stem from her claim that a football game is a “white space” and therefore white people are to blame for anything that happens there.
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