You can spend the day wondering about Omicron and why on earth the WHO could not use the letter Xi. If the new variant is more dangerous and the reason for the 32 mutations on the spike. Television will do just that.
But here's a much better use for your time: Are we there yet? In this world imagined almost 100 years ago by Aldous Huxley.
Link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPkQ57cXrPA
This is a good conclusion for the Glasgow show of the last few days, but more than British Ambitions, it is the reset nonsense which was sent packing back in Glasgow.
I am old enough to remember that "islands" started sinking, in the press at least, in 1989 and would soon be underwater if we didn't do something drastic "before" the year 2000. Since, I started diving all over the place, and saw no drowning whatsoever, except due to human activities. No coral destruction except due to human pollution. We need to do more to save ourselves, (The planet is fine to paraphrase George Carlin!) but the efforts must be local, not global. Local people know what they must do and with the right incentives, they will. The cabal between large corporations and governments only serves private interests while having the community pay for it and professing through propaganda to do exactly the opposite of what we can see with our own eyes.
Authored by Rupert Darwall via RealClearEnergy.com,
The Glasgow climate conference represents a strategic defeat for the West, and for Britain in particular. Boris Johnson unleashed everything he could muster. The royal family hosted receptions for multibillionaires. The Foreign Office sent climate envoys around the world.
Glasgow would show the world that Britain could outdo France’s performance six years ago at the Paris climate conference.
Wrong. Whereas the French knew what they were doing in Paris, the British were at sea in Glasgow. The result was a display of the rank amateurishness of the British state.
If Boris Johnson and his ministers had done their homework, they would have known they were on a road to nowhere. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol failed because it exempted the developing world from cutting its emissions. The West attempted to remedy this at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 with a climate treaty that would bring the major emerging economies under a multilateral regime of emission targets and timetables. The attempt was sunk by China, India, South Africa, and Brazil acting in concert.
The West accounts for a declining share of global emissions.
“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Barack Obama had boasted in 2008.
Obama and the West were desperate for a climate agreement to justify increasingly punitive domestic climate policies. The Paris agreement is the climate equivalent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s Sinatra Doctrine, under which the captive nations of eastern Europe could do it their way. It signalled that the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War. In similar fashion, the Paris agreement signalled that the West had accepted its defeat and had given up its attempt to create a multilateral regime of emission cuts. Instead, the Paris agreement is based on nationally determined contributions. Each party to the agreement would do it its way.
After Copenhagen, small island states lobbied intensely to tighten the temperature target from 2 degrees above industrial levels to 1.5 degrees. Their islands, they claimed, were in danger of sinking beneath the waves. The West swallowed the sinking island sob story, which is how 1.5 degrees came to be included in the Paris agreement as a subsidiary ambition to the 2-degree target. It was fake science, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) later confirmed. “Observations, models and other evidence indicate that unconstrained Pacific atolls have kept pace with [sea level rise], with little reduction in size or net gain in land,” the IPCC said in its net zero report.
Because Paris included 1.5 in its text, the IPCC brought forward the indicative timetable for net zero from the second half of the current century to 2050. In the waning days of her premiership in 2019, Theresa May decided to make net zero her legacy. It was incorporated as a binding target under the 2008 Climate Change Act after a ninety-minute debate in the House of Commons, even though MPs had no idea how much it would cost or whether it was remotely feasible. But one thing is clear: whatever net zero costs Britain, it is pointless for Britain to decarbonize if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. The regulatory-impact assessment accompanying the Climate Change Act signed by Ed Miliband as climate and energy secretary could not have been clearer:
“The UK continuing to act while the rest of the world does not, would result in a large net cost for the UK.”
The benefits of UK climate action would be distributed around the world, but the UK would bear all the costs.
The Climate Change Act was passed in the runup to the Copenhagen climate conference, which was supposed to produce a binding climate treaty. “Showing leadership through the Climate Change Act, the UK will help to drive a global deal,” Miliband asserted, showing that climate hubris is embraced by all Britain’s political parties.
Now, for a second time, a UN climate conference has produced a dud. The fantasy that Britain would lead and the rest of the world would follow has been exposed. The question mark over net zero has been answered. After Glasgow, we now know that net zero is all pain for no gain. With Britain’s political class committed to the disastrous, dead-end path of net zero, bring on the referendum.
PS: If you need to see the "real" problem, here's a good start!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yV3Uj8qbCU
Hiding the everything bubble popping behind an artificially created health crisis was a deeply thought out genius idea dating back to the initial scare of 2008. It is still an ongoing process and it is therefore difficult to know how it will play out in the end.
But unlike the 1990 bubble which was confined to Japan, this one is worldwide with its epicenter in China and it is consequently from China that the tsunami of default will spread around the world.
While, Evengrande, the first blast, is still reverberating around the world, the 55 trillion dollar Chinese real estate market is seizing up. It will be relentless. As happened a few times recently, 1968 and 1989 come to mind, 2022 will likely be a year when history happens.
No economy has been able to ignore a property bubble and even less so offset it and continue to grow replacing the bust of the real estate sector with other parts of the economy. Heavily regulated economies from Iceland to Spain have failed to contain the negative impact of a real estate sector collapse. It will not be different in China.
China’s real estate problems are three:
The massive size of the sector,
its excessive leverage, and
the amount of developer debt in the hands of average households and retail investors.
According to The Guardian, “China’s real estate market has been called the most important sector in the world economy. Valued at about $55tn, it is now twice the size of its US equivalent, and four times larger than China’s GDP”.
Considering construction and other real estate services, the sector accounts for more than 25% of China’s GDP. Just to consider other previous examples of property bubbles, the average size of the sector was somewhere between 15 to 20% of a country’s GDP. And none of those economies managed the excess of the property sector.
Of course, the problem of a real estate bubble is always excessive leverage. Developers take too much debt and the smallest decrease in housing prices makes their equity vanish and their solvency ratios collapse.
In the case of China, the level of debt is simply staggering. According to Messari Capital Securities, the average net debt including minority interests of the fifteen largest Chinese developers stands at 60% to total assets. Evergrande is not even the most indebted. The three largest developers stand at more than 120% net gearing. The top ten most indebted Chinese developers amply surpass the level of debt to assets that made Spain’s Martinsa Fadesa collapse.
Chinese and foreign retail investors are also heavily exposed to the real estate and construction market. Evergrande was the biggest issuer of commercial paper and developers’ debt was sold to small investors in different packages. Furthermore, Chinese families have around 78% of their wealth tied up in property, more than double the U.S., according to a 2019 study by Chengdu’s Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and BloombergQuint. China has also launched nine REITs (Real estate Investment Trusts) that raised more than $5 billion in just a week in over-subscribed offerings in a market that could reach $3 trillion, according to Bloomberg.
These three factors mean that it will be impossible for China to contain a bubble that is already bursting. According to the Financial Times, prices of new homes across China’s biggest cities fell in September for the first time since April 2015. New home prices dropped in more than half of the seventy cities relative to August.
With high leverage, prices that have risen massively above real GDP and real wages, and a population that is heavily exposed to the sector, the impact on China’s economy will be much more than just financial. Even if the PBOC tries to disguise the fiscal impact with liquidity injections and bank direct and indirect bailouts, the real estate bubble is likely to hit consumption, utilities that have built infrastructure around empty buildings, services and sectors that manufacture parts for construction.
The Chinese government may contain the financial implications, but it cannot offset the real estate sector impact on the real economy. This means weaker growth, higher risk, and lower consumption and investor appetite for China exposure. Furthermore, the central bank cannot solve a problem of solvency with liquidity.
Property bubble-driven growth always leads to debt-driven stagnation.
This interview of Ben Norton is quite a broad and knowledgeable analysis of the whole world situation right now. Quite long but very info...
