Comments by "looseycanon" (@looseycanon) on "Zeihan on Geopolitics"
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@romariowright9061 I'd say, it depends on what school you come from. But look at the route of the Empire Builder in the US, similar problem and yet, it was built. There is also this train line in Peru (I believe) that runs from a harbour to a mine, where they had to utilize this technique, simply, because they needed the ore (well they used switchbacks for inversion). The point is, there are always resources to exploit, if you want to. Would it be expensive? Sure, But well built railroad works for decades and centuries! Suddenly, discounted, that amount of money isn't so great.
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I'm not that worried about North Africa. I'm much more worried about countries just south of these. Why? One, trade breaks barriers. If Algerians won't be able to have a deal with the US, they will make deal with someone, who'd be willing to trade. Sure, you'd have to import all the way from New Zealand and Australia, but you can ship durable foods. It would likely take few years of really bad diet, but it would be survivable. And then there is the chance for Algerians to swallow the bitter pill, sell oil in Euros to Germany and buy foodstuffs from the French. Hell, down the line, if Ukraine enters the EU and eventually accepts the Euro, they'd be stable in the long term. Libya's the one I'd agree here the most with. I recall an opinion, as end to the crisis, being a East West split of the nation, but if that doesn't happen, somebody will have to go in and bring order. They won't like it, maybe they won't even survive it, but I don't really see that ending another way. Egypt's fine and will be fine. Sure, they have surging population and are dependent on trade, but that's not a problem. Sure, Turks and any nations down the Suez canal system can cause trouble, but even that can be overcome, particularly if Egypt invested in it's own merchant navy that strictly brought in goods for them selves or for them to process and export semi-products or finished goods. This would also help with local food problem, as these ships would not be at port all that often. I'm far more worried about water situation in Egypt. Specifically drinking water, given what's happening in Ethiopia and Sudan.
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There you're wrong, there's a lot of industrial and processing development along the Suez route. Egypt could completely abandon agriculture, if need be, and focus on processing of materials and manufacturing. I see very symbiotic relationship for Europe in this way. They could supply Germany and Czechia (assuming we'll ever accept Euro) with processed materials sourced in the rest of the African continent and particularly East Africa. Egypt has oil and LNG, so those are additional sources of Euros, that are not directly dependent on local food supply. For now, they'll be able to buy from the French and Romanians, who are in much better agricultural situation, and once things settle down in Ukraine, with them as well, especially if Ukrainian membership will be considered seriously and they pick up Euro. So I don't really see food security in Egypt a problem... No, I see water as a much bigger issue, which is, why I'd double down on trade with the EU and possibly even South America, assuming the EU-Mercosur deal doesn't fall through. The problem is water! There is a new dam in Ethiopia, which will, due to evaporation, lower the amount of water going through the Nile, rendering it far less useful, if not unusable, for agriculture. There may very well be multiple new dams down there down the line.
So, what I'd do, would be to double down on this trade strategy, I would try to trade as much with Europe as a whole as possible to get Euros, using particularly European industrial nations and energy needs to my advantage. I would purchase foodstuffs for return cargo and preserve Nile strictly as fresh water source for drinking water and maybe some small scale sweet water fishing. I would then build a number of nuclear power plants around the Red sea to provide vast amounts of relatively clean and safe energy, which I'd then use for primarily industry and desalination plants providing water used in industry, which would be separate infrastructure from drinking water, ejecting brine as side product into suitable places deeper in the desert, letting it evaporate and mine resulting waste to be processed into either technical or, if possible, table salt.
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Short answer? No.
Long answer? The currency, that could take over for the USD is Euro, given it's already second most traded and has the capacity to grow to the volume needed, furthermore, it is backed by actually independent central bank. Question now is, what would happen to the trust in USD, if Trump actually destroys the FED and US debt will grow as high as anticipated, or trade using it will become restricted somehow (such as total ban on renumeration to Chinese entities and with china trading entities). Zeihan is right, that no currency can replace USD by it's own merit, but what if the Americans shoot the USD in the foot or worse? It will definitely not be any currency that BRICS is gonna come up with, unless they literally adopt Euro or a mirracle happens, and they'll make a clone of it.
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@abaddon1371 That is simple. All environemntal policies carry costs, be it actual raise in costs due to new requirements on imputs or reduced availability of final goods thanks to environmental taxes and tarrifs. Costs, that somebody has to pay. People are noticing their lifestiles are getting more and more economically unsustainable as result of new taxes (such as cabron tax on dwellings, that is about to hit us in a yaear or two). This is a problem, because stuff most impacted by these polcies are non-negotiable. Things like having and using cars (because employers don't care, when a bus can and can't get you to work and you have to work to live), having reliable electricity (because wind and solar are completely unmanagable and hydro has other equally important objectives to take into consideration and the greens nearly pushed nuclear out of reenwables and that's not even talking about the Utrecht blackout because of too many EVs charging simultaneously). All these policies are pushed by center left or outright left wing parties, against which the right wing can and does push, the more to the right they are, the harder they push and worse, more easily they get new voters, because they target these polcies far more easily, which is pushing more and more electorate towards them. In short, the more the EU is pushing it's citizens towards "more sustainable" poorer lifestile, the more it fuels scepticism towards the EU itself and thus rise of the right wing parties, because they become the only alternative to economic suicide that is environmentalism, which is currently the ruling dogma.
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I actually think, you are wrong here.
German dmography is a problem, no argument there, but that is in my opinion the sole problem, that cannot be overcome. The only continent that these days has proper demography is Africa and it is close, hungry, and Germans don't have as strong colonial footprint there, meaning they could replace the French in former French colonies. Furthermore, Africa needs machinery to grow itself, so Germans could replace China with Africa and shift back to industrial machinery construction. It would be more expensive, but it could be done long term, eventually, as demography get's worse and worse, transitioning to R&D role. Finally, Europe needs to start putting more emphasis on agriculture, particularly on integrating the supply chain into single entities, eg. a farm will grow the wheat, that same farm will mill it into flour. A ranch is making milk and beef, that same ranch also needs to butcher it itself, and refine the products as much as possible. The farm should tan the leather, sew something out of it and then, sell it them selves.
As for energy, the whole of EU needs to have a very critical look at itself. It emmits laughably little CO2 and yet, is introducing more and more green, economy stifelling policies, that either complicate energy generation or make particularly electricity artificially more expensive. This needs to stop. We need to start our own mines and make them as efficient as possible, as well as scrap any and all emission penalties and taxes.
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@nurseSean One company... We'd have to severely increase our manufacturing and refining output for these materials for cars alone and those don't store that much power. Take that now to about two orders of magnitude more and you'll be about in the ballpark of how much would be needed. Never in the history of the Earth have we doubled our industrial output within a decade. That is what we'd need to do for electric cars alone. Now imagine the amount of lithium and other materials necessary for battery backing of the grid! Odds are, we'd sooner or later run out of easily maneable Lithium, Copper, Molybdenum and other necessary elements, most of which are deeply refined using processes, that majority of, because of how dirty they are, and how cheap Chinese coal based energy is, are done in China. So that's your energy capabilities being geopolitically exposed, not to mention the amount of dirt that'd have to be moved and all that dirty energy in the refining process... you're not just looking at economically and geopolitically non-starter, but also at ecological catastrophy. Maybe shift your focus from the micro of companies to macro of the whole economy.
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Nah, he's wrong on this one. I bet my money on Mediterranean. There is Europe with it's money and though the market is not quite as healthy, there is enough consumption to be had, although nowhere near what the US has to offer... There is already Suez canal, so accessing Asia is easy. No Houthise wouldn't factor into this. They target nations allied with Israel and those are on the other side of Mediterranean and flag of convenience deals with the rest. Africa is getting it's infrastructure built these days, so that's not much of an issue anymore. Hell there are railways that are currently begging for cargo! (mostly built by China, though). More importantly, there is a growing population in Africa, that will want to consume and most African nations there have coastal access, so their markets are wide open (there's a reason, why the most economically advanced nations outside of Europe are coastal!
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@LoganChristianson Not really. It's a very good power source, but it's not too easily controllable one. It's better than wind and solar, which you can't controll at all, but you still need easily controllable and adjustable power sources in the system and how much you need of these, depends on your industry. If you have steel mills, particularly, if they run on hydrogen, you need huge amount of fosil fuel burning stuff, because these eat up lots of energy, but don't run 24/7. Particularly in this case, you'd need equivalent of nuclear power plant in fosil fuel system, to cover the difference between, when the steel mill is working and when not.
All I'm saying, is we should not put our bets one a single card and our energy mix should respect, what kind of industries are in local economy. The more variable the consumption, the smaller nuclear based base load can be.
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This is laughable. Yeah, supply chains will likely shorten, but forget about massive ships not going multicontinental. What I think will most likely happen, is that some economies will further specialize on maritime endeavorus and provide their service globally. Why? Because of specialization (well, overspecialization) in manufacturing! There will always be only so many places, that have the raw resources, that need processing into proper products and there will only be so many, again, highly concentrated places, willing to buy those products, because they can afford them. Everybody in the production chain will want as much efficiency from transportation as possible, which gives rise to even bigger ships, than we have today, because that's fewer hands, more cargo...
There will likely be more stops along the way for these huge ships, which will call for bigger ships and fleets as well as more sophisticated loading schemes, but that's doable. Unless somebody comes up with a way, to keep ridiculously rich and dirt poor people in one country together with the abundance of natural resources and lack of corruption (good luck finding that!) there will always be need for moving shit.
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