Cut the fuel, cut the future - by No1 - ( What I find fascinating is the claim of American engineer/scientists to being the world's best in energy usage......while actually shutting down the sources of energy.....trusting their own virtue signaling - CL))

Global oil output is projected to fall 6.6% in Q2 - the largest quarterly drop since the COVID lockdowns shut the world down on purpose.

Tanker traffic through Hormuz collapsed from around seventy a day to fewer than fifteen.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, originally created in 1975 for exactly this scenario, is currently being used for… I don’t know… just about any other scenario. Seven consecutive weekly drawdowns. And then the most recent one, 8.6 million barrels, clocking in as the largest single week on record. With nearly half of the released crude being exported because that’s what’s called capitalism.

Economies are contracting......

.....In 1712, Thomas Newcomen built a steam-powered atmospheric pump to drain the flooded mines. It was enormous and burnt about a tonne of coal per horsepower-hour, which sounds inefficient until you remember that the alternative was the mine being unusable.

Sixty years later, James Watt added a separate condenser and dropped fuel consumption by roughly seventy-five percent. By 1800 Britain had over two thousand five hundred of these things running.

That’s it. That’s the moment. Not because Newcomen and Watt were smarter than Hero. Because they had cheap coal under their feet, and the cleverness humans had been accumulating for two millennia finally had an obstacle to crush.

Once the energy was cheap, everything that had been waiting got built......

Full text:

https://no01.substack.com/p/cut-the-fuel-cut-the-future?publication_id=4094764&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=y7h5a&utm_medium=email 

...Steel, because you could now run a blast furnace continuously. Chemistry, because you could now boil enormous volumes of liquid without going broke. Electricity, telegraphy, refrigeration. Antibiotics, eventually. Computers, much later. None of these were possible without an underlying energy density that nobody had ever previously had access to. The Renaissance had the brains. The 1750s had the brains plus the fuel.

The difference is two centuries of compounding civilisational change.

Energy as the River of Civilization

No1

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