Ferg's Finds

This is a short weekly email that covers a few things I’ve found interesting during the week.

Article

It’s great to see this getting questioned.

Will the World Bank Choose Climate Change Over Poverty?

A new G-20 report calls for raising $3 trillion and spending only a fraction of it to help the poor.

It’s easy to treat reducing carbon output as the world’s priority when your life is comfortable. Things can still be tough for people in high-income countries, but the 16% of the global population who live in those countries don’t routinely go hungry or see their children die. Most are well-educated, and the average income is in the range of what was once reserved for the pinnacle of society.

Much of the rest of the world, however, is still struggling. While conditions vary, across poorer countries five million children die each year before their fifth birthdays and almost a billion people don’t get enough to eat. More than two billion have to cook and keep warm with polluting fuels such as dung and wood, which shortens their lifespans. Although most young kids are in school, education is so dismal that most children in low- and lower-middle-income countries will remain functionally illiterate.

Instead of indefensible bullshit like this last year.

EU split over fertiliser plants in poorer nations as food crisis bites

The European Union is divided on how to help poorer nations fight a growing food crisis and address shortages of fertilisers caused by the war in Ukraine, with some fearing a plan to invest in plants in Africa would clash with EU green goals.

Podcast/Video

This was one hell of a deep dive: Luke Gromen: "Peak Cheap Oil and the Global Reserve Currency" | The Great Simplification #91

Quote

“Because valuation is just mental preparation for yourself, right? You’re just being prepared to deploy capital when the opportunity presents itself.”

- Mike Green

Tweet

I'm increasingly seeing the same as all the projections/forecasts don't make sense with the reality of what is happening currently. For example, China and India's coal plans alone break all the NetZero projections, as I wrote about here: Two Significant Energy Events That Got No Air Time.

More and more charts look like this; “next year it’ll pick up…..”

Charts

Energy is going to become a larger and larger proportion of global GDP moving forward.

Which reminds me of this chart. When oil heads north of $120 risk of global recession jumps.

Something I'm Pondering

I'm pondering the last observation here from Marko Papic.

However, when the macro context is dominated by a global capex cycle, as we have argued for years, that is the case today, autocracies can outperform democracies by quite a lot.

It reminds me of this observation by Alexander Tytler.

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.”

It’s not only largesse in spending either its the fact that nothing can get done either, take these examples of US and German vs China;

JPMorgan 2021 annual energy paper

Hope you’ve had a great weekend.

Cheers,

Ferg 

P.S. I'm getting back into more regular interviews. This week, the bromance continues with Nick and chatting away about uranium, coal, oil and tin. Nick is an absolute stud, and you should all be following him on Twitter at @Grainjones

If you’re interested in my story and why I started this Substack, you can read the story here.