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David Fickling Profile picture
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18 May, 4 tweets, 2 min read
What a time to be alive
I actually unironically love that Snoop Dogg's cannabis VC firm appears to be very successful:

techcrunch.com/2020/12/21/sno…
If your VC firm's "About Us" section doesn't look like this, you're doing it wrong:

casaverdecapital.com
Best "unexpected pop star" picture since this legendary Watford Observer article: watfordobserver.co.uk/news/9530466.j…

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More from @davidfickling

David Fickling Profile picture
19 May
One thing worth noting about the radical-sounding @IEA announcement that no new petroleum fields need to be developed any more — this is more or less the lived reality of oil majors right now, and has been for years.

Big Oil stopped investing growth capex around 2016. Image
@IEA There's a few definitions of "new oil" here:

1. "Investment in new fields to *increase* production levels."

2. "Investment in new fields to *maintain* production levels."

3. "Investment in new fields, production may decline."
@IEA Production from a typical oil field declines at 5% to 7% a year (shale is much faster, on the order of 50% or more).

So to hit the IEA net zero output decline path of 4% a year, you arguably still get a little bit of investment in new production.
Read 9 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
18 May
How about this for prescience?

An 1858 article about a demonstration of the world's first commercial ice-making machine, which predicted heat pump technology would be most useful for cooling apartments and food:

trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/arti…
They even predicted that people would have weird debates about whether clear ice or white ice is better!
The coal-powered ice machine was made in London for export to Geelong, in the gold-rush colony of Victoria -- clearly the one place in the British Empire with the wealth to invest in such a wild luxury as refrigeration.
Read 6 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
18 May
Why did no one realize there was a world-class palladium deposit on the outskirts of the mining city of Perth? Turns out, no one was really looking. Great piece from @JamesThornhill6 bloomberg.com/news/articles/… via @business
@JamesThornhill6 @business The crazy context for this is that platinum-group metals like palladium are supposedly found in really only two places on the planet: Siberia and South Africa.
@JamesThornhill6 @business There's a third small area in Montana and another in Ontario, the latter of which is thought to have come about because of a freaking *meteorite impact*.

But no one really thought you'd find commercial quantities of platinum in Australia, yet here it is.
Read 6 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
17 May
I still think until you see RWE do something with its several hundred million tons of allowances, you should be long EU carbon.
RWE is hedged out to 2024 so probably needs about 240m tons of allowances for that alone.

It holds them at an average ~€5.50 and could sell them tomorrow for 10 times as much.

Think about that. The biggest owner of carbon credits *isn't prepared to sell at these prices*.
Also: 240m tons at €55/ton is about €12bn.

RWE holds allowances at cost, so this value isn't reflected in the accounts.

But RWE's entire market cap is only ~€22bn!
Read 7 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
14 May
TIL that the wildlife-rich, largely depopulated landscape of East Africa's savannahs isn't a primeval ecosystem but the product of two late 19th century epidemics:

faculty.umb.edu/peter_taylor/p…
This story is pretty well-known in the Americas and Australia: How epidemics, especially smallpox, devastated Indigenous populations, created huge herds of wildlife, and left the country open to colonial invasion. I had no idea it was the case in Africa.

bbc.com/news/science-e…
Basically rinderpest is introduced by Italian invaders in Eritrea in 1887 and spreads through all of East Africa, devastating cattle herds to the point where the human societies dependent on them starved.
Read 8 tweets
David Fickling Profile picture
1 May
"An IP waiver won't change anything" is to smart Aspen Ideas types in 2021 what "Covid is no worse than the flu" was to smart CPAC types in 2020.
The great thing is if you don't bother engaging with any of the arguments or data, you can just repeat the same three or four talking points while the bodies pile up.
A reminder: We have sufficient manufacturing capacity to get the entire planet close to herd immunity this year — 12 billion doses or more — but half of it is standing idle. bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… Image
Read 5 tweets

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