Months ago, the news and many other people were expecting a much more massive oil shock. Oil at $150-200 a barrel. Gas lines. No jet flights. An economic crash. But it didn't happen. Why?
China very quietly cut it's oil imports by half, reducing them by 5.5 million barrels a day. According to the video author, "We heard that the world should've ended like 4 weeks ago." - publication date 7/17/2026.
The Strait of Hormuz, before the Iran War quagmire/strategic catastrophe started, carried about 20% of the world's oil or 20 million barrels. There is no slack in the system, really. 100 million barrels are produced
a day and 100 million barrels are consumed (or stored). This global trade happens all in dollars.
So 20% of the oil disappears. But somehow the shortfall is soon changed from 20 million to just 5 million barrels a day. How? The size of China's strategic petroleum reserve is a state secret, but it was believed
to be well above 1500 million barrels, since that is the amount that can be observed and calculated from space and underground caverns are not space observable, plus other oil storgaes that are smaller and perhaps not state owned.
So China bans fuel exports and refines less and conserves, and releases from its reserves. Altogether China reduces imports by about 5.5 million barrels. About 7 million barrels a day can be diverted through under-utilized
Arabian Peninsula pipelines around Hormuz (now threatened by the Red Sea situation). 1 week into the war, 32 countries not named China or Russia banded together to release about 2.5 million barrels a day from their
(oh so finite) strategic reserves. That gets us to 14.5 million barrels of extra oil + reduced oil use. The difference between mass worldwide blackouts and what we got, higher gas prices, more inflation and some
gas lines in Southeast Asia.
The USA's oil reserves are nearing functional zero, where no more can be pumped out of the giant salt caves even now. China's reserves will eventually run out too, although I heard yesterday on NPR that the satellite
observable tanks have not even begun to be depleted (the tops of the tanks rise and fall as oil is pumped in and out). US oil reserves started at 413 million barrels, enough to cover 60 days if 100% of oil imports stopped.
Europe's could cover only 10-20 days, and India's only 4 days (IF 100% of imports stopped). China's oil stockpile would one day run down too. They are or have importing lots of sanctioned oil separate from the global dollar
market from Iran and Russia. But Ukraine's long range sanctions against Russia, the Aral Sea and the Black Sea are disrupting one source and the US blockade of Iran the other. (If Trump was a serious person and went to war
with Iran he'd probably be hitting their oil infrastructure too, but instead he has delusional fantasies of seizing the oil for himself).
So what else did China do other than banning refined products exports and using it's strategic reserve? They have recently been building lots of wind, solar, hydro and EVs, but those were already running before the Hormuz crisis.
They also had been building large coal power plants (unlike oil, China has plenty of coal) and were able to bring many of them online or up to full capacity. Air traffic fell by 5% while rail traffic went up 5%. And EVs are 25%
of road traffic, which is up 33% on the previous year. And their gas prices went up much less than in the USA. So Xi Jinping and his phalanxes of bureaucrats and state owned enterprises (mostly) saved the USA's economy and
Donald Trump's political fortunes (which are still bad, IF the elections coming up are free and fair and IF the real elected congresspeople are successfully seated in January, both under heavy fear, uncertainty, and doubt).
Humans Will Never Live on Mars Permanently
In a recent video, Taylor Lorenz' YouTube show Power User breaks down why it is essentially impossible to colonize Mars with physicist Adam Becker,
author of the new book More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Future of Humanity.
They get into the actual meat of the Mars question starting about the 12 minute mark, but I'll summarize some of the main issues for you here. As much as they try to make it sound like
space could be a consumer product for the masses, it will not happen. Ever. Before I dive in here's the video link (also embedded below):
A Physicist Destroys Elon Musk's Mars Fantasy.
Some of the most hostile features of a journey to or stay on Mars (They concede that you could probably build a research base on Mars but it would be a sad, cramped, underground experience)
"You don't see people lining up to live isolated on the Antarctic ice, but the worst day in Antarctica is far more human-friendly than the best day on Mars":
Muscle atrophy & bone density loss: even with intense exercise astronauts who have spent months in microgravity/zero gravity have difficulty walking
when they return and have to rehabilitate. To leap ahead towards the end, this also makes it likely babies could not survive birth after gestating
in Mars' low gravity (about 38% of Earth gravity).
Radiation en route: The International Space Station still gets about half the radiation shielding from Earth's magnetic field plus some from the thermosphere, which the ISS it's still
inside, and the exosphere, which it's still below. On the journey to Mars, probably on a ship much smaller than the ISS, you have none of that
Radiation on Mars: Mars does not have any significant magnetosphere (magnetic field) like Earth does, and the atmosphere at the surface has about 1% of Earth's surface
atmosphere denisty. Consequently the radiation problem is nearly as bad as outer space unless you spend all your time underground (which is kind of infeasible)
Rockets and Space are Insanely Expensive: "One challenge is the extreme cost of transporting building materials to the Martian surface, which by the 2010s was estimated to be
about US$2 million per brick.[6]" (from Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_habitat)
Not in the video, but no better propulsion technology than chemical rockets, ion thrusters, and MAYBE rudimentary solar sails will ever exist. Fusion is too hot for any materials you could make.
Hyperspace and warp drive are mere fantasies
The dirt is filled with toxic perchlorates which would contaminate all the construction and cause lung disease besides being toxic to crops
How will you get all the construction equipment and materials to Mars?
How will you ever get more than a few dozens of people at most to Mars
Again, there is no air (no, you can't geoengineer or terraform it. That is so far beyond human technological capacity it's just laughable)
All construction of habitats would have to be done in spacesuits while being bombarded with ionizing radiation
They make the point that even the day the asteroid that kille dthe dinosaurs landed was a nicer day than any day on Mars, since mammals, plants, insects and other life SURVIVED it
Estimates are that a self-sustaining high tech civilization would require 500 million to 1 billion colonists, but we can't even get to 100....
As well, there are few launch windows, when Earth and Mars are making approaches to each other and travel time would be 6-9 months in a tiny can, unlike the 3 days to the moon,
which we can launch to every day
It's all a Big Lie, a delusion, a fantasy. That seems like enough for now
Measuring Climate Change Progress by Infrastructure Deployment Rather than Temperature
In a new video, Climate Targets MISSED. What happens now?, the Just Have a Think
YouTube channel discusses a new paper about measuring climate change progress with clean energy targets, not temperature targets,
"to avoid the insidious narrative of climate failure, which risks backlash and doomerism." They go on
"Although the 1.5°C Paris agreement cannot be saved, a tolerable and safe climate -
in which humans and other species can thrive - is still achievable. This will result not from setting distant unachievable goals, but therough a more modest approach:
to produce enough extra clean energy each year to climb the climate ladder towards a safer future without fossil fuels."
The host, Dave Borlace discusses how solar installation has vastly exceeded projections for many years and battery prices have fallen by 90% in the last 15 years. He mentions that (paraphrase)
~~"With renewables electricity becomes a manufactured product instead of an extractive fuel product, and manufactured technologies follow a learning curve, getting cheaper with scale and
deployment and more deployment drives further cost reductions, while fossil fuels extraction gets harder to reach and more expensive over time as the easier deposits are mined out. Global investment in renewables is now roughly
double fossil fuels." --- "Fossil is unique in scale, accounting for about 90% of the CO2 problem (vs. deforestation, wildfires, and soil cultivation mainly), and is uniquely simple to describe and deal with
as it is a one way transfer of carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere directly by humans"~~
Direct quote from 11:15-12:05 in the video:
But I do think there's something quite compelling about measuring progress by practical system replacement rather than simply atmospheric outcomes. Because in the real world it's looking more and more like
the climate emergency won't be solved by fixating on temperature targets. To the extent that it can be solved it'll likely be achieved via infrastructure. If we become convinced that the situation is hopeless then
political momentum collapses, investment collapses, and public engagement collapses. But according to almost every major energy analysis published over the last few years, the clean energy transition is very clearly not
collapsing despite the best efforts of certain political administrations. In fact in most sectors it's accelerating. The real question now is whether it can accelerate fast enough.
Finally here's a chart for the uninitiated of CO2 concentrations from the last 10,000 years (after the last ice age) to now:
Trump NSF Backs Down from Dismantling Critical Ocean Monitoring Systems - CNN
After bipartisan backlash Trump admin backs down from unilateral and sudden dismantling of ocean monitoring network to 'consult' and 'study' 'path forward'
CNN Regular :::
CNN Text-Only Ad-Free. Some of the
kinds of news coverage / content that can be expected to disappear if the Skydance-Paramount / Warner Bros. Discovery merger is able to go through, thus putting Bari Weiss,
saboteur and vandal of The Late Show, 60 Minutes, and CBS writ large, in charge of CNN. It has already been approved by Trump's captive/complicit regulators
but faces challenges from international regulators and state anti-trust lawsuits. Anti-democracy and pro-thought-police shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery approved the
merger 'overwhelmingly' in April.
The Trump administration is U-turning on its controversial decision to dismantle a critical ocean monitoring system that provides vital information on the health of the world’s oceans, after a bipartisan backlash in Congress.
The Ocean Observatories Initiative was established in 2016 and involves around 900 instruments across parts of the Pacific and Atlantic, especially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths.
In late May, the National Science Foundation, which funds the $386 million deep-ocean system, announced it would be pulling up buoys and other underwater equipment from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon, North Carolina and Greenland in what it called a “descoping” of the network.
But Thursday, NSF announced it will halt these plans and convene an expert panel to “identify a sustainable path” forward. One array off the coasts of Oregon and Washington has already been removed, but the NSF said in a statement that it is “developing plans to redeploy the equipment.” The organization confirmed it would “not proceed with further removal or descoping of equipment from the remaining arrays.”
Why Democracy May Prevail - 6/5/2026
An interesting YouTube video, 31.5 minutes, called Why Trump's Power is Fading by UK person
Brendan Miller. I was somewhat heartened by it. He says he's more persuaded by this one but there's also another he made called
How Trump is Building an American Dictatorship. This is of course important for mitigating Climate Change too,
since he's done much of what's in his power (and stuff that isn't supposed to be) to work against climate change mitigation and empower the oil, gas and coal
industries, among them, canceling all federal authorizations for new wind power projects, including some that were already under construction, and he and his lackeys
continue to insist that climate change is a 'hoax'. As if. As if it would even be possible to organize that many disparate people and groups into organizing some kind
of hoax. The biggest weakness to conspiratorial thinking to me is the logical problem of coordination. How many people, how much money, how much message discipline, how
many things that would have to remain uncovered, etc. Here is the video:
Site & Life Updates - 5/25/2026
Updating this site is actually quite a bit of work. Today, I removed the old featured off-site content from every page and moved them to the suggested media and suggested reads pages,
moved the 2024 blog posts to their own page and updated all the links to reflect that, updated the footers, added the table of contents to this page, reorganized the United We Fight It pages
(Every page has a regular and a low-bandwidth version. Plans to do a higher contrast switched version of everything will probably never happen.), added an item to the suggested media page,
made some tweaks to the about pages, and possibly a thing or two I'm forgetting.
Currently, I'm working my way through a months long course in Web Development with Code-You.org (formerly Code Louisville), and will be looking for full time work
hopefully in web development / front end developer in August, September and beyond. Unfortunately their funding got cut, probably because of Trump, so I won't get the opportunity to take 2-4 courses
from them like some people such as my brother in law and the volunteer teacher/mentors have done to launch their careers. This is the last cohort of students they'll be teaching. I'm open to employment sooner
than August too, by the way. Including part time or internship gigs.
The postcard project is mostly on hold, possibly wrapped up entirely... although I do want to get some more of the Save the Oxygen cards and The Key of Sparrows cards made. And maybe see if local art galleries
will carry them, too. The well of poetry also seems to have mostly dried up.
Interest Picks up in Synaptic Syntactic -5/10/2026
In the last week, 57 people have downloaded my ebook of poems from this site, Synaptic Syntactic, 33 of the Kindle (.mobi) version and 24 of the .epub version. This
is a highly unusual number and Dreamhost is very good about separating visitor stats from bot stats, so I have high confidence that these are actual people. Over in the bbots section, it logged
40 facebookxternalhit's this week which is high for this website but I don't recall what it's been aeveraging.
I uploaded it here because I would have rather be read by a few people for free than be read by almost no one and make an insignificant amount of money. That said, money would be
nice, and it is still available for sale on the major platforms; I'll still link the files again here. It would be great if someone would leave a review on GoodReads or other review
aggregators or on the booksellers' sites themselves, like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, iBooks, Kobo, etc. Also if you have enjoyed the book but don't want to buy a copy of something you downloaded
for free, you can also give directly at BuyMeACoffee.
The book has been out for 9 years now in its current form, though not on paper (perhaps a strategic mistake not to use Kindle Direct Publishing which had no set up fee for print on demand).
It would be a great if after all this time in obscurity it blew up, even in a mild/moderate way. I think it had been averaging maybe 5-10 downloads per week for each file type. But my readership is entirely
silent in reviews, blog comments, follows, etc.
I am also working on a second book which I may go with Kindle Direct Publishing for, called Multipersona. All of the poems in it are available (or at least the first/second draft is) on my blog,
LostInMist.blog, but only one by one and not in an organized block.
Interestingly, nobody is downloading the PDF. At some point I had a 5x8" with narrow margins version of one section for a preview that was easier to read on a phone than the 8.5x11"
but that is lost somewhere on my retired site, psychicfuguestudio.net and I'm not going to retrieve it.
Meanwhile, oil disruptions are driving a globe desperately wishing it had gone green and electric faster, while Trump pays companies to shut down planned or even under construction wind projects,
and commits a myriad of other sins abetting runaway climate change, like sabotaging vehicle fuel efficiency and EV buildout
The Green Transition in the Global South - 8/28/2025
[...] Think again. For a wave of Chinese-made electric vehicles is flooding new markets. In the past year sales of EVs have more than tripled in Turkey, where Togg, a local brand, is also popular—they now account for 27% of all cars sold, making the country the fourth-largest European market. Last year more than 70% of cars imported into Nepal were electric. Some 60% of new cars sold in Ethiopia were battery-powered, after the state banned sales of internal-combustion-engine vehicles altogether. EV sales have doubled in Vietnam over the past year owing, in part, to VinFast, a local carmaker. Two- and three-wheelers are surging in popularity, too. The International Energy Agency (IEA), a forecaster, reckons that across developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America EV sales rose by 60% in 2024.
It is a similar story with renewables. In the first six months of the year, Pakistan generated 25% of its electricity from solar power—not far below the 32% managed by California, a clean-energy pioneer. The country’s battery imports are booming as well. Indeed, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think-tank, estimates that on current trends battery storage will cover 26% of Pakistan’s peak-electricity demand by 2030. Meanwhile, over the past year Morocco has increased its wind generation by 50%, becoming the country with the ninth most. India has seen four months of decline in coal-power generation, aided by an increase of 14% in renewable generation.
Lust for Power
Although the principles of international climate diplomacy suggest that poorer countries, being less responsible for climate change, have less duty to go green, many face strong economic incentives to do so anyway. Most countries in the global south are energy importers, and therefore must use scarce foreign currency to buy oil and gas. China and India have coal reserves that play an important role in their economies and power generation, but neither has significant oil or gas reserves. For its part, Ethiopia’s ban on internal-combustion engines was not a green measure—it was designed to cut spending on fossil fuels and save foreign currency.
Moreover, across emerging markets, Chinese-made EVs are now about as cheap as traditional vehicles. In some places, they are even cheaper. The IEA reckons that last year the average Chinese EV sold for around $30,000 in Thailand, compared with $34,000 for the typical petrol-engine car. At the bottom end of the market, old-fashioned vehicles still have an advantage, but only a relatively modest one. Government policies have also made a difference. In Turkey purchasers of EVs typically paid a tax of only 10%, compared with one of between 45% and 220% for petrol-powered vehicles. The recent surge in part reflected car-buyers getting ahead of a reduction in the generosity of the policy. [...]
Old fossil-fuel plants are becoming green-energy hubs
FOR MORE than a decade the Tamaya power station in the Atacama desert in northern Chile powered its local region using diesel. Today a shimmering array of solar panels stands in place of the dirty generator. Engie, the French utility that owns the power station, converted it into a solar-energy and battery-storage plant earlier this year. Juan Villavicencio, the company’s boss in Chile, describes the site as a place where “the past and future of energy infrastructure meet”.
Others share his vision. Developers, governments, startups and utilities around the world are turning former fossil-fuel power stations, and old oil and gas wells, into renewable-energy plants and testbeds for green technology. This way the relics of the fossil-fuel era will be put to good use. “It makes no sense to just throw [them] away,” says Arash Dahi Taleghani, an engineer at Pennsylvania State University. [...]
[...] The sites offer connections to the grid, which can save developers looking to get renewable-energy projects online lengthy delays. Researchers led by Umed Paliwal at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that 1,000 gigawatts (GW) could be added to the American grid capacity if renewable-energy projects were hooked up to existing fossil-fuel plants and probably more if retired sites were exploited. According to the International Energy Agency, an official body, renewable-energy projects that could generate about 3,000 gigawatts (GW) worldwide are waiting for a grid connection. Repurposing could help resolve that issue.
Save the Oxygen promotional postcards: image & text - 6/27/2025
Text:
IN ADDITION TO DEAD ZONES CAUSED BY FERTILIZER RUNOFF, CLIMATE CHANGE THREATENS GLOBAL OCEAN OXYGEN
Oxygen only gets into the ocean by surface mixing and photosynthesis in the top 200 or less meters where light penetrates. The deep oceans must be replenished by the lobal thermohaline circulation, the AMOC [ Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation ] portion of which is weakening. No one knows when it might collapse. Seawater only contains 6-10 mg/kg of O2 (or less), compared to 210,000 mg/kg of O2 in the air. In addition, warmer waters can generally hold less dissolved gases, of which O2 is one. An estimated 91% of global heating from greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed by the oceans.
99.8% of the ocean is 5.6km or less deep. If the Earth were the size of a basketball, that would be about the thickness of a sheet of copy paper. 95% of the atmosphere’s mass is in the lower 6-18km [ The troposphere is deeper at the equator than at the poles ]. The ISS [ International Space Station ] would be [ at ] less than 8mm elevation.
This is actually a design I was planning to get printed in 2024 before I decided trying to help
the 2024 US Democrats election prospects took higher priority. But that boat has sailed now.
This post over on my blog
at 455 unique views and counting has set a new record for most viewed including promoted posts while this one was not promoted. Not
sure where most of the views are coming from, maybe Wordpress.com deemed me worthy of being promoted in
'Discover', but no referrers are listed... This does not count people who stay in Wordpress reader, use tracker/ad blocking,
or only read the email subscription.
You can share the blog post from there with this convenient shorter link:
lostinmist.blog/ocean/, or this qr code:
If you like my work, find it useful, beneficial, etc, please consider contributing at Buy Me a Coffee,
getting a copy of my divination / problem solving tool The Key of Sparrows at Zazzle
or getting a copy of my book of poems at Bookbaby or other major platforms such as Amazon and
subscribe to my blog at lostinmist.blog. I'm not very active on social media these days, but subscribe
on YouTube for curated music playlists, some of which have 4, 6 or even 12
thousand unique listens!.
Paper Thin Biosphere - In the Beginning was the Command Line
I read Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line years before I created this site and I just got another copy. I didn't remember
this but it's possible I got the idea, subconscsiously, for the On Scale: In which I argue that the ocean is very small page using the paper thin biosphere
concept from this book. Someone has put it Online For Free
although I encourage you to buy a paperback if you have spare money. Here is the relevant quote
(I don't have my copy here and the PDF page numbers are not the same so I'll just say around or after page 20):
In your high school geology class you probably were taught that all life on earth
exists in a paper-thin shell called the biosphere, which is trapped between thousands
of miles of dead rock underfoot, and cold dead radioactive empty space above. Companies that sell OSes exist in a sort of technosphere. Underneath is technology that
has already become free. Above is technology that has yet to be developed, or that is
too crazy and speculative to be productized just yet. Like the Earth’s biosphere, the
technosphere is very thin compared to what is above and what is below.
But it moves a lot faster. In various parts of our world, it is possible to go and
visit rich fossil beds where skeleton lies piled upon skeleton, recent ones on top and
more ancient ones below. In theory they go all the way back
(Emphasis added). I never took geology in high school or college and I don't remember it being taught this way in any science class including 5th grade science when I learned about
ecosystems and food webs the first time. But I suppose it could have been a truly original thought on my part too, since I had no recollection of that. Or come from
some unkown numbered XKCD.com comic or one of the XKCD author's other books...
Also available as a .txt file for some Stanford Computer Science course
GEO Girl: New study finds agriculture erodes soil 8-12 times faster than Ice Ages / glaciers
Title kinda says it all, huh? Well not really, there's more, not least the methods used to determine it Total length: 11:37, Intro 0-3:15, Technical stuff (Sediment age measurement, Cosmogenic Beryllium 10 and Optically Stimulated Luminescence techniques) 3:15-8:30, Results 8:30-11:37.
50501 Protests Next Action May 1st
Join the 50501 protests to uphold the constitution and end executive overreach. Next 50 states protest on May 1st. fiftyfifty.one.
It will be the first one I've attended.
