Comments by "yop yop" (@yopyop3241) on "Peter Zeihan || Material Processing: The Redheaded Stepchild" video.

The most likely explanation is that you misinterpreted his words. He has always said that demographics are what put a hard cap on China. 2022 was always the year when demographics were going to start to bite. China’s big demographic problem is the retirement of their Boomer generation. China’s Boomer generation came later than other countries’. Where other countries’ signal to give birth to their Boomers was the end of WW2 or the Korean War, the signal that led to China’s Boomers was the end of the 1959-1961 Great Chinese Famine. After 1961, it takes a little less than a year to birth a baby, so China’s oldest Boomers were born in 1962. From there, China’s retirement age is 60. 1962 + 60 = 2022. 2022 is the very earliest start of the crushing tsunami of retirements that will certainly undo China. My guess is that Peter said something along the lines of “China will not survive the decade” while discussing China’s demographic implosion. In Peter’s mind, he was referring to the decade of China’s demographic implosion, the 2020s. In your mind, however, that phrase referred to the decade when he was speaking, the 2010s.
4
A monsoonal climate is bad for green energy potential. The goal is to replace fossil fuels. But if there is a major chunk of the year when your green energy production drops way off, that leaves you needing to have fossil fuel systems during that part of the year. So you need both green and fossil fuel systems. But having two systems ends up being very inefficient, and that inefficiency cancels out most of the benefits of the green system.
3
@youngeebs How about when the basis of the Chinese economy is people with hand tools “mining” ghost cities for their metal content?
1
Empires die. The people who used to call themselves “Romans” produced descendants who now call themselves Italians, Greeks, French, etc. Fifteen years from now, you could have dinky little countries that lay claim to the names of the old empires, plus a bunch of new countries carved out of various swathes of the current Russian and Chinese territories.
1
@Ilamarea Yep. Pretty much. Until we get better tech, most of the world will struggle to switch to renewables. Many places will see benefits from smaller scale implementation as a supplement to their main fossil-fuel-based system, but they will still have to rely mostly on fossil fuels. There are only a few regions that can really do the green energy transition with today’s tech.
1