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The Passenger Profile picture
The Passenger
@gordonschuecker
"Realize that everything connects to everything else." Mathematics, statistics of extremes, Metacrisis. Energy, finance, geopolitics, ecology & economics.
Sep 2, 2023 • 11 tweets • 6 min read
Paper Notes [Remastered] | The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change

by @ProfSteveKeen

Why are economists so less concerned about climate change than natural scientists? Because they assumed so to begin with?

#ClimateDamage



1/11 researchgate.net/publication/34…
Image 2/11 A one-time experiment at a planetary scale vs debating about the economics. Especially when considering the following.

"Given the magnitude of the stakes, it is perhaps surprising that much of the debate about the climate has been cast in terms of economics..."
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Nov 1, 2022 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Thread | Climate Tipping Points (TPs)
by Tim Lenton

Fantastic lecture on TPs and early warning indicators - the flicker before the "take off".

My new favorite chart (#2) that shows TP risk assessment increasing with understanding.

1/8




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Image 2/8 Simple tipping point example:


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Aug 25, 2022 • 25 tweets • 8 min read
War and Industrial Policy

Another must-read

"Wars cannot be fought with supply chains that crisscross a globalized world."

"Things make no sense to continue like they used to, be either from a real (trade/production) perspective or a financial (FX reserves) perspective."

1/25 2/25 Chimerica & Eurussia symbiotic relationship is becoming (China + Russia) vs the West.
Aug 5, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Rabo Friday, another great read!

"Meanwhile, government ministries are busily pushing out silly policies. Picking an example would be like shooting fish in a barrel, but closing down nuclear power plants in an energy crisis is very high on the list."

1/6 2/6 "90% of people in most professions don’t know what they are doing. Worse, 90% of those who don’t know what they are doing don’t know that they don’t know what they are doing."
Jun 12, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Thread | The Economics of Oil Pricing

Demand curves are always a bit debatable, this thread will focus more on the production side, which for geological reasons is a lot less subjective.

This is how the production cost curve looks in practice:

1/11 2/11 Cheapest oil to produce is in the Middle East, most expensive in North America. With oil here = world liquid fuels, which have a nice round number for their production of ~100 million barrels per day (mmb/d). (Forget oil grades for now.)
Jun 11, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Rabo Friday (long one)

"To not see the underlying links between geopolitics, national politics, supply chains, inflation, and where rates ultimately end up is to say ‘fiddle Didi’ in Shangri-LaLaLand. As many were happily still doing on 23 February."

1/6 2/6 Isreal vs Iran war next? #WW3

Reminder, only 20% of world production at risk just through the Straight of Hormuz.

eia.gov/international/…
May 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This article too is light on where the new oil is coming from for Germany and more interestingly, how the "musical chairs" are being reorganized. Likely some chairs will be taken away, so if not for Germany, then for whom?

1/4 2/4 If an oil embargo is enacted ("late summer"?), then scenario #2 below is likely to follow, i.e. -3/4 mmb/d going offline. Quite a few dominos to fall or hopefully an end to the war? Even then, Russia's trust may still be shattered.

May 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Rabo Monday

WW2-type updates on the geopolitical front.

"Russia, already accused of war crimes, is talking about “filtration camps” in areas it controls that ‘weed out’ people seen as too Ukrainian, while sending mainly women and children off to Russia to be ‘Russified’."

1/4 Image 2/4 "State TV is pushing a nuclear attack on the UK, or setting off an underwater nuke to wipe out the British Isles with a tsunami."

May 1, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
Another must-read

9 Commodity Chokepoints and QT

(1) neon gas
(2) neon transportation
(3) NG
(4) oil boycott
(5) VLCC shortage
(6) VLCC fleet overtake
(7) Strait of Hormuz
(8) QT (quantitative tightening)
(9) SLR (Statutory Liquidity Ratio)

1/9
2/9 "I continue to believe that STIR traders [or every human being?] will benefit from increased literacy about the world of commodities trading and the workings of commodity derivatives."
Apr 26, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
Predicting oil (and other resource) prices
by IIER

"A majority of people expect them to rise continuously, as oil gets scarcer and maybe moves beyond peak production. Unfortunately, it's not that simple."

Thread & comments

1/9
iier.ch/content/predic… Image 2/9 Marginal cost curves for more or less unrestricted systems.

"When a product gets invented (or a resource first used), production processes are geared at "making things work". With demand growth, production scales up and becomes more efficient, reducing the cost per unit." ImageImage
Nov 12, 2021 • 18 tweets • 8 min read
Thread | On the Absurdity of "Total Factor Productivity" in Economic Models

Economists estimate GDP as determined by only labor and capital. This doesn't explain 100% of GDP, the missing part is then called "total factor productivity" (TFP) or also "human ingenuity"...

1/13 2/13 How flawed this modeling of the economy is well explained in @CareyWKing's book, so I will extensively quote from it here (and is too important to bury in my notes below).

Aug 28, 2021 • 26 tweets • 13 min read
Paper Notes | The Mining of Minerals and the Limits to Growth

by Simon Michaux

tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkis…

Another fantastic must-read on the future of minerals, their tremendous expected growth to shift away from fossil energy vs the likely reality (Peak Everything).

1/25 2/25 TL;DR:

"The rules of industrialization and the sourcing of raw materials are changing into a new era of business model. Change is happening, whether we are ready for it or not."
Aug 26, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Here we go. #geopolitics Image And from the conclusion:

"Did the Biden administration just give away Afghanistan's rare earth minerals to China? There's no way in hell that the Taliban will let Western countries mine the land." Image
Aug 1, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Batteries for $40/kWh sound really promising. Would not have thought to see sodium-ion batteries come to market so soon (expected 2023). This would change quite a bit IMO. This article goes more into depth (but in German):

golem.de/news/akkutechn…
Jun 30, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Great summary of "Bios and Geos: two competing grand narratives" aka 'growthers' vs 'doomers'.

'Bios':

"Change is ubiquitous, necessary, and desirable, the world is generally changing for the better and those who say otherwise are ill-informed or speaking in bad faith.

1/5 2/5 "Part of the readership of this book might confirm the pervasiveness of Bios. Sometimes, one is reminded of this world of opportunity and positivity when scrolling through the bestsellers for businessmen at the airport bookstore. It is as if they belong to a different world." Image
Sep 13, 2020 • 9 tweets • 8 min read
@rustneversleepz @ProfSteveKeen @RichardTol Well, economists should be system thinkers & have a deep understanding of all aspects of the natural world (i.e. not limited to the narrow scope of human-created markets). But somehow, mainstream economists are our most blind members of society!

1/9
@rustneversleepz @ProfSteveKeen @RichardTol 2/9 Just a few things mainstream economics gets wrong:

mostly conflating the role of technology with the role of energy:

Jul 5, 2020 • 48 tweets • 16 min read
Paper Notes | The Appallingly Bad Neoclassical Economics of Climate Change

by @ProfSteveKeen

The subprime moment for Neoclassical economics and how citing/quoting Nordhaus became a liability.

patreon.com/posts/appallin…

1/44 2/44 TL;DR, here is @ProfSteveKeen summarizing the findings of his paper in ~17min:



(Link starts at the right time, though the 1st part also provides great educational and entertainment value, i.e. a more general destruction of Neoclassical eCON.)
May 23, 2020 • 61 tweets • 22 min read
Paper Notes | Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism

by @NJHagens

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Holistic take on economics, energy, ecosystems, finance, society and much more. I.e.:

"Realize that everything connects to everything else."
― Leonardo da Vinci.

1/60 Image 2/60 Abstract:

"At global scales, the emergent result of this combination is a mindless, energy hungry, CO2 emitting Superorganism. Under this dynamic we are now behaviorally 'growth constrained' and will use any means possible to avoid facing this reality." Image
May 5, 2020 • 20 tweets • 9 min read
A thread on energy return on energy invested (EROI), why it is important and how it looks like for fossil fuels vs renewables.

Without energy, there is no economy or as @ProfSteveKeen puts it:

"Labor without energy is a corpse, capital without energy is a sculpture." 1/20 2/20 In fact, energy consumption and GDP are highly correlated for the world as a whole. And correlation 𝘪𝘴 causation here.

(C.f. some more quotes from

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20146764

and how the crash in '08 was likely largely due to the oil price spike).