We are so screwed!

MindPrep 173 – We are so screwed!

This is a copy of our latest newsletter. I wanted to “share it with the world” because it highlights a BIG problem that my generation keeps ignoring — I hope the young “up and comers” can fix what we’ve messed up. Please.

The following article makes me wonder if the political and corporate “leaders” of the world are focused on letting the human race go extinct while they work to stay in office and maximize their bonuses!

What ever happened to the idea of “for the common good?”

***********************************************************

Source: Axios.com, Axios Markets newsletter, September 10, 2022

“The world’s energy infrastructure is failing, in entirely foreseeable — and foreseen — ways.

Why it matters: For more than a decade, policy wonks urged global governments to take advantage of low interest rates by spending trillions of dollars on making our economies resilient to inevitable climate change. Now, that window of opportunity has closed, and the necessary investments are going to be a lot more expensive.

State of play: Around the world, governments have consistently made astonishingly short-sighted decisions about their energy infrastructure.

• Germany steadily increased its reliance on Russian gas while reducing alternative sources of energy such as nuclear power — even after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.
• Britain closed its last major gas storage facility in 2017, leaving it no cushion against the volatile prices that were caused by Germany’s decisions.
• Texas built a market-based system that gave private operators no incentive to build in resilience to rare events like the winter storms of 2021.
• California’s grid is overburdened by the kind of heat wave that is only going to become more common. It was saved from blackouts only by a desperate emergency text alert.
• China invested massively in hydropower, without diversifying sufficiently into alternative energy sources that wouldn’t literally dry up in the event of a drought.
• India needed $1.5 trillion of energy investment between 2015 and 2040, per an International Energy Agency report in 2014; eight years later, it has yet to even get started on that kind of expansion.”

************************************************************

We may have to revise our tagline to “if you neglect to learn from the past and deal with today you won’t have a future.” Or something realistic like that.

Sorry for the rant. I’ll try and be a bit more upbeat in the next issue of MindPrep. In the meantime, please prepare for the future.

Bill