Economic
We will have a 1973/1981 recession very soon because of gas prices
Hormuz closed. Saudi East-West pipeline out of comission for 1 month minimum. Russia is producing 60% of their normal production due to Ukraine attacks. China not buying oil for now, but when it starts it will increase the price even further. Saudis told Europe that they are not getting any oil in September/October.
Gas prices in Europe are approaching 2.5 Euros/Liter.
In the US they are around 5 Dollars/Gallon.
Renting a tanker costs 1 Million Dollar/day. Just one year ago it was 200k.
Transportation, industry and consumers cannot take this for long.
US household savings rate is down to just 3%. Credit cards maxed out. Auto/student loans at an all time high.
EU gas reserves are just 2/3 of their maximum. By this time last year they were at 80% capacity.
And winter is coming. This means more gas for heating. This means more gas for vehicles.
If gas prices dont normalize and the flow resumes within a month or so, then a recession by the end of this year or the beginning of next year is almost certain.
Then we also have the AI bubble where AI is burning through money and investment is drying up.
Food yields will be lower due to farmers not being able to afford gas and El Nino wrecking agricultural production.
Considered that the US is 40 Trillion in debt and most people are living hand to mouth, a recession could mean a depression very soon.
Gas prices we see at the pump have not caught up with reality of the market. They should be a couple dollars more than they are and they will catch up soon enough. I don't doubt we'll see $7.50-$8.00 a gallon here in the states in the next month, and diesel hitting $12-$15 a gallon. Food prices are going to soar along with most other things. I see a bad Christmas for everyone.
I never paid attention about how we store our oil reserves before but we're losing our unique salt storage facilities. They pump in water to these underground salt storage caverns so they dissolve away the salt and make room for oil; the oil then floats on the water for long term storage. The problem comes when they are drawn down and back up again and again. We've done this so many times the salt has been dissolved away too much and we soon won't be able to store oil this way ever again.
The Boomers’ generational gamble is that they’ll die in opulence before the bill comes due.
We can understand that everyone alive after that solipsistic event horizon doesn’t matter in the least to them as a cohort, or else they’d have started acting differently at any point in their lives. They collectively haven’t, and there’s your Scorpion & Frog fable in a nutshell.
Before the main character energy performative outrage that selectively follows any Boomer-critical comment starts: yes, obviously there are exceptions and if you or your dad or gran are one of them then cheers to you; however, if you feel a certain way about this, try to rememberhit dogs holler.
Maybe the first subsets of boomers. The latter (1955-64 born) will probably live to see the collapse, and they'll have no framework for how to survive it, as all their investments inflate to worthless junk.
But yeah, this is just a reminder that you don't hate boomers enough
My parents are not the exception. They were all for school Levy's while we were in school and now that their youngest is out they don't vote for them anymore.
They absolutely have a "I got mine, why are you being lazy?" personality
They are going to collapse. If they haven't already. This was news a couple months ago warning that the reserves were as low as they've ever been and were in danger of collapsing. Then, the news stopped reporting it. Not because they were refilled, because they probably collapsed and it's being withheld from the public. If true, it's really big, and really bad news for our country.
That is the stupidest speculation I've heard. A) You can't fucking hide a collapse that size from seismology B) We are still withdrawing from the reserves which means they are not tapped.
The public will know whether the administration wants them to or not. They stopped reporting on it because you can't have a story everyday that's just, "Still the lowest they've been, might still collapse" every single day. What else is there to report? We got there, they reported on it, now there's nothing left to say.
I would do anything for just a crumb of critical thinking.
Then you should use some critical thinking. This administration is hiding so much shit that some of the corruption leaks out and they don't give a shit about it. But this country is fucked for a long time to come. AI can't help us, Democrats can't help, no one can. We're on a downward spiral and there is no coming back. Maybe 30 to 40 years ago if we'd elected leaders that had a backbone and cared about humanity but that didn't happen.
Last time I had hope in/for America was when Obama was president. Seems sooooo long ago when we all had hope and things were good, or a hell of a lot better than today.
I'm old. I have never had hope. Obama was very clearly not going to fix anything. That was obvious by his approach to healthcare. And when he left the campaign trial to vote to give the telecoms retroactive immunity.
"The first key moment came when Barack Obama was elected in 2008. Though Obama had won a sweeping victory and the country was in the midst of a catastrophic economic crisis, McConnell told his caucus they had a path back to power: Obstruct everything Obama tried to do, regardless of whether Republicans had any substantive objections to it. Only if they forced Obama to fail could they retake power."
That's the exact issue: we can't do these bit by bit half measures to make up a football field of ground. There needs to be radical unflinching change, on scale with actual revolution. Nothing else will come close to solving these issues, and nobody is able or willing to try to do it.
Obama's presidency oversaw some of the most productive Congresses in modern times, and still it didn't come close to true change.
As time goes on, that HOPE messaging bothers me more and more. I'll never vote red, but in a nutshell, hope is all the democrats have offered me in the last... 20 years? Deliver some change. Some justice. Something other than weak opposition to capital.
I did understand the hope he generated but looking back and concluding his 8 years in office he didn’t accomplished very much, at least nothing long lasting considering Trump got in power after him.
I think $7-8 gas within the next 30 days is pretty unlikely. I think we'll see that before the end of the year, though. There's nothing being done right now to reverse the situation, so it's just a matter of time.
I'm so curious what this will do to communities around the states that are more isolated, like hey, the poor rural car-dependent village I currently live in. Will people start creating bubbles/factions when they can simply no longer leave because theres no gas? We already have issues with people poaching trees off of others' land to burn for heat stoves in the winter, i feel like soon we'll see a lot more folks rustling trees, crops, livestock soon enough because this is farm country. Feels like things are gonna become wild west cowboy-style living pretty soon, only with more meth. Cant wait to spend my evenings in a rocking chair with a cigar and a shotgun to warn off the tweakers coming for my shit in the night
This is far north in the continental US, so we'll see it worse here due to the cold winters. This state was actually clear-cut once before, and has recovered beautifully with a lot of people very grateful for the return of forests and game. I can imagine things getting very ugly when tree poaching ramps up, people are already willing to go vigilante for the protection of the state forests, let alone the trees on their own land.
We've also had a couple more animal poaching cases here and the next state over, at least more than I'm used to hearing about in a given year. People are outraged for now (it's been deer and bear poachers) and I think that there will be a lot more poaching for meat and pelts soon enough because they sell, or because farmers are just out of patience for co existing with wildlife. Very sad :/
There’s still a lot of already-purchased gasoline that hasn’t been pumped into vehicles yet. The price at the pump doesn’t yet reflect the true market. It’ll get worse
Plus building solar farms and windmills at a rate greater than the rest of the world combined.
China has restricted driving rules in major cities to reduce pollution. I think it involves which days you can enter the city, based on license plate numbers. But EVs get a special green license plate that makes them immune from such restrictions. So that is another incentive to buy them.
Some sort of paradigm shift is due eventually. Chinese manufacturing is too competitive even without the energy crisis, displacing the market shares of the advance economies. But by 2030s, advances in labor-saving technology in the form of robotics, automation, and AI will divorce labor input from productive output. If "Full Employment" is still the objective of most countries, then that undermines it and chances are the private sector that is profit-driven can no longer be trusted as so-called "job creators" in countries that emphasis capitalism as their ideology. Throwing in the current global crisis into the trend accelerates the timeline towards the eventual questions. Difference is the coming technological underemployment will be experienced amid scarcity rather than in abundance.
This may be true, but the gas recessions earlier didn't occur also when we had a massive concerted effort by corporations to shed every job possible. We are likely in the second gilded age, but even in the first gilded age corporations were forced to have a large number of people on staff. We are losing even that. The corporations and the rich want an economy where the middle and lower classes don't participate at all.
This coming recession is not going be like the others you mentioned. It's going to be worse because of climate change and failed crops, so food and water scarcety is also coming. Not just fuel
The Great Depression happened at the same time as the dust bowl. If you read accounts from that time it sounds a lot like what we expect ecological collapse to look like.
while it has some insight, it wasn't planet-wide, and the population of Earth was a fourth of what it is now. In addition, that was a temporary condition and we're faced with worsening conditions every day that will just keep getting worse.
This is what blows my mind. Global and complex systems which rely on other global and complex systems which relies on energy which we are now dealing with an energy crisis.. plus fascism on the rise AND a fucking TERRIFYING El Nino cycle.. like holy shit. "It happens slowly then suddenly" - it's hard to imagine the 'suddenly' isn't just a few feet away...
I understand that your life is being cut short (I'm sorry man) however I think you will see the 'sudden'... too... ....
I'm ready to go. Like, I've got my exit plan before shit gets too bad. I've too many chronic health issues and I'm not going to suffer once I can't get insulin anymore.
In 2008 it was just a financial crisis too. The physical output and resources were all there, people had just gambled too much with numbers on a screen.
This time the collapse is from the resources themselves, and the numbers on the screen are what is trying to make things look normal.
Thought this was a joke at first. There was widespread ecological collapse occurring in the 1970s, the threat of global nuclear annihilation, social & political turmoil. In 2026, we still have all those things, and even more threats including accelerating ecological collapse on a global scale!
Beginning as a recession, eventually unravelling into something like the first twenty minutes of Dawn Of The Dead.
My favorite president, Franklin Roosevelt might say: [The only thing we have to fear is pretty much everything, especially humans with a sense of entitlement a mile long.]
Shit will turn into a movie real fast when people go a few days without food. Even up to the minutes before then, people will be laughing it off with each other.
I meant 1973/81 recession as in caused by fuel shortages and gas prices.
But yes it will be much worse. Comparable to the Great Depression. Probably worse due to El Nino/Climate Change/ water shortages and decreasing food yields.
Don’t forget the Dust Bowl. It’s the double tap, because the coming (re)aridification impacts the ability to be more self-sufficient in times of economic hardship
I dreamt last night that regular gasoline was $7.29/ gallon. It was very specific, haha. My wife and I had decided we were going to be walking everywhere from now on.
It's going to be a very difficult winter and spring for people who already can't afford food and don't have benefits anymore. Over the last few years I've purchased some urban foraging books. I have a feeling they might come in handy.
About six months ago, I realized that if the Internet went down (or couldn’t afford it), we lose the ability to access that wealth of information that we’re so used to. I purchased used books through thrift books.com for subjects like foraging, gardening, a how to do anything type book and also a natural illness, first aid type book as well.
It’s pretty funny 😭 that the survival foods I bought during the buildup to the 08 crash, wheat berries, beans, and rice along with a can of seeds might be what saves me through all this.
Yup. I have been buying medical books, herbalism books, foraging books, budget cookbooks etc. I haven't tracked down any pet medicine specific books, but I do look on occasion. I live in an apartment with no outdoor space, so I can't really do any gardening. I have some extra medicines like Pepto and ibuprofen. It would probably be good to learn basic sewing skills.
I don't think a full scale collapse will look like an apocalypse movie. I think it looks like prices getting higher and people not affording extras, and then basics, and then necessities. The middle class (what's left of it) will feel it, upper class not at all, but the lower classes will end up poorer, with more intergenerational cohabitation in less than ideal conditions, working as much as they can, or succumbing to drugs because it's too hard. So basically we're in it, but we haven't reached the peak by a large margin.
There may be a community garden near you.
Or start one if you can.
Sprouting seeds (for, like, sandwich sprouts) can be done in a glass jar on a window sill (especially if you can get a special lid for air flow). That might be a source of fresh greenery.
It's almost like using all the energy stored for millions of years within a 100 year span is not a good idea
Thanks for the awards. I'd recommend everyone read Energy and Civilization by Vaclav Smil. It really puts into perspective the magnitude that our Civilization has "advanced" in the last few millenia.
THAT WAS ALREADY PAID FOR!!! This guy is so good at business that he is paying billions of taxpayer dollars to CANCEL SOLAR AND WIND PROJECTS THAT WERE ALREADY PAID FOR!!
The only and I do mean only bright spot that I can see right now. Is that the Fanta Menace is fucking up so badly he is uniting the rest of humanity against my country, not super enthused about it, and fucking up the oil and shipping industries so badly that it honestly might force every country into a green revolution.
There that is all the positivity I have left. We are fucked…
In a weird twist the oil industry may have monkey's pawed themselves with this latest presidency. Other countries are investing heavily in green infrastructure due to the straight of hormuz closure and the global instability of oil and gas. Now we just have to do finish building the renewable energy sources and then do something to lower global temperatures.
I think the concentration of the stock market into just 7 companies at the heart of the AI bubble will result in a 1929-like result, not 73-81. In '29 I think it was railroads.
1 gallon of diesel was $11,40 today where I live in the Netherlands. Petrol was $11 per gallon. It will only get more expensive and a lot of people will no longer be able to afford to go to work with their car.
Many large towns have gone out of their way to remove intercity bus stops. I think they are scared of the possibility of drifters, or maybe just itinerant family members.
Which I can't use to get to work. I actually bought a speed pedelec and my commute to work is now just 10 minutes longer but I save a ton of money on gas.
Guy I went to HS and College with, was riding his bike in the bike lane of our college town, when a city police officer ran him over in his squad car “accidentally” (however that happens).
Dead at 21yo cause he had the nerve to ride a bike in the designated bike lane.
And of course the police officer and police station at large suffered no real consequences.
Well considering that he stopped all quarterly reporting, we have no idea what’s going on. But we do know that he’s made billions with all this market manipulation.
No no, it’s time for another unprecedented/“once in a lifetime” economic collapse, then the next 500-1,000+ year disaster just to really kick us when we’re down right in our soft collective underbelly.
You’ve gotta keep staggering them for maximum human suffering, since apparently that’s the only way God can cum.
Also '81. I'm fucking tired. Plus I messed up with money. I saw a calamity coming but thought it would hit a lot earlier, so I "retired" after finishing school and lived on the fringe for a long time. Then I begrudgingly came back into the job market and have been busting my ass for garbage money.
So NOW it's happening, and I didn't have the money to prepare :) Oh well, I guess we're all going to the fringe soon.
I think we all deserve this for being spoiled little shits for the past 30-40 years. I hate that it’s affecting me personally but it’s gonna affect THEM too. The people in charge will also have their life drastically change.
We don't know what the future holds. In all likelyhood you would never need it, but I'd rather have one and not need it, than need one and not have it.
Only if a massive solar event knocks everything offline for a long time but then you have other things to worry about but the planet would at least survive
Another Carrington event would be a lot more thorough though. There's apparently no way to harden grids against them. The supply chain for replacement components is both long and slow, and already backlogged.
The human population demographics are much worse position now than previous crisis. In addition to being much more top-heavy and larger headcount, there is also more dependence on disintegrating interconnected systems.
That Nate Hagen's interview with the IPCC approved human population estimator left me speechless at the faith in models.
"The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune." --TRUMP v. UNITED STATES SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting July 1, 2024
The Supreme Court gave Biden the authority to do the right thing when he was in office. He could have dealt with Trump. He didn't. I don't think he was a bad president, but he definitely failed us.
Biden was a terrible president who failed us in every way imagineable.
He chose to be a Carter when we needed an FDR.
He failed to follow through on his campaign promises for a $15 fed min wage or free college, which completely and permanently alienated GenZ from the democratic party.
He failed to prosecute Trump in a timely manor, which allowed him to escape prosecution entirely
He failed to reign in all the corporate greed and shit that caused fake inflation and price hikes that stayed around long after the pandemic.
He fucked the entire voting base out of a primary and forced the most unpopular candidate, Kamala Harris, onto the ballot and allowed Trump to return to power.
Joe Biden should go down in history as one of the worst presidents ever. IMO behind only Trump himself, and Rutherford B Hayes.
I'm with you there. Obama could have done more too. If Biden had ran after Obama, instead of Hillary he would have won hands down and could have had a healthy two terms. When Biden ran he said something about one term, and I thought "OK". But its like there was no plan and his idiot "team" was hiding his health issues to the point they put him on TV spacing out.
I'm thoroughly convinced now that the parties aren't in charge ... its the corporations who are getting rich on all this, that's why the stock market is doing fine. The 0.01% Goldman-Sachs, Epstein oligarch class are calling the shots.
Why don't we just admit that it's all Kennedy's fault, and somehow Barry Goldwater would have led conservatives into actually embracing solar power and public transportation 80 years ago if not for the pesky Civil Rights Act.
EDIT: as is Reddit custom, " /s ". I'm joking everyone.
A beautiful depression. Amazing depression. The world has never seen such a big and beautiful depression. Pure strength, best numbers! Do you remember the 1929 depression? We will make it look so small. Tiny. Like a DemocRAT. This all, of course was caused by crooked Joe Biden and his squad of evil lemmings. Obamacare! Covfefe; Vote for me, I shat my pants. Thank you for you attention to this martyr, xo xo xo DONLAD J. Trump.
Even the US pulled out it would take at least 2 months for any oil from the mid east to change anything. I am stocking up on survival food just to avoid the giant price hit. I predict mass riots and government going full Nazi gastopo tactics to try and stay in power.
AI is starting to be pretty incredible and will wreck some industries. At the same time, there's probably a significant overvaluing of the AI sectors. The housing bubble is also back.
There's multiple problems aligning. It's hard to believe there won't be a crash.
I've never been happier to have gotten rid of my car and rely on my ebike to get everywhere. I know the hikes are going to increase other prices and that does concern me but I'm hoping that my saving instead of spending on car insurance / car repairs / etc can hopefully shoulder the burden a little bit. But I feel for those where that may not really be such an option.
Seriously, I cannot imagine having to worry about the price of gas for a vehicle right now, on top of every other rising COL. Feeling super grateful that I can choose not to drive, and still be able to live & work... at least for now, lol.
Yup. Whole thing happened by circumstance in October last year, right before all this shit started kicking off and prices started going up. Car got illegally towed and I never felt so helpless, and that was the final straw for me.
And like all the other times, I don't suspect anything will be truly learned from it, dooming us to make the same mistake until environmental catastrophes or other issues not addressed finally prevent this progression from moving forward entirely.
Didn’t everyone say we were in a recession like around 3-4 years ago, then they changed the definition of what a recession is and everyone was like oh ok cool? Weren’t gas prices just as high if not higher around 3-4 years ago?
Higher for short periods for understood reasons we didn’t cause and had known remedies. A refinery breaking down is understandable and known and fixable. Hormuz/Iran isn’t remotely fixable with current administration.
Back then we got the North Sea and Alaskan North Slope oil to bail the economy out. Regan and Thatcher got to claim credit for the economic recover it caused. Don't think that's going to happen this time.
Given the most of the western world has inflated a property bubble, and with the AI bubble on top of it, it does seem like we get to have great depression #2.
It’s not the same situation.
Sure oil prices are high, but contrary to 1973, there are lots of alternative, and those high prices are boosting the adoption of those alternative, like electric vehicle or renewable sources of energy.
What will we probably see if prices keep being that high is the slow collapse of the oil sector, which is probably a good news for the planet.
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