Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Peter Zeihan on The Decline of Putin's Russia" video.

  1.  @JordanHarbingerShow  I hope you can get him back on. I'm an engineer and I'd like to see him challenged on a couple of points that I keep hearing him repeat. Sorry this is long, but your interview with Peter was one of the better ones - you asked better questions. 1) He keep saying that once the American service companies leave Siberia those well stop flowing the water in them will freeze and crack all the pipe work. I work in control systems (the computers that run everything) and have some (but not much) work in the oil & gas industry. Yes there's water, but not in massive amounts, so its questionable on that. But more importantly those companies have been there for 20+ years now. To think that the Russians haven't been gaining the experience themselves in techniques and technology for those environments is a VERY BAD ASSUMPTION. Yes their experience will be less and they might miss some experience at the top level of the expertise tree but to claim they are incapable is just foolish. 2) He keeps making claims that Europe is stuffed on renewable energy because of bad locations and to a lesser extent the grid needs upgrading. He's part right on both points. Its great that he is one of the few pointing out that geography is a major part of the energy transition. I have argued with people on the geography subject and its amazing how ignorant BOTH the pro and con-renewable people are on the subject. Peter's right Northern Europe is hopeless for solar for 2/3rds of the year while southern Europe is better but Spain which has the room for extensive solar is also disconnected from the main European grid. Peter doesn't emphasise the grid issue as much as it needs to be. Its arguably one of the biggest issues. We are moving from an energy system with a few major generators that fed energy out through main arteries into a tree like system where all the leaves on the tree CONSUMED energy and ONLY consumed energy. Now we have an energy system where the main generators are scattered and on top of that many of the leaves want to generate energy and inject it into the system. NOBODY anywhere has an energy grid built for that. Its not an undoable task it just has to be thought through which people are NOT DOING. There's some really major level ignorance from people. Here's a story out of my country Australia. I knew about the grid issues a while back but I can barely believe the stupidity of the clown from Windlab (around 1:30) who claims he's a smart investor who's built successful windfarm projects. My question is - If he's so smart then why did he build a wind farm where the grid can't handle what he's generating? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwfsk446iR0 3) This harks back to a much broader topic of basic infrastructure, which Peter does NOT talk about as much as he should. This is arguably the biggest issue the Western Hemisphere has by far. One of the catastrophic mistakes of neo-liberalism has been the "privatise everything" doctrine that's resulted in governments NOT keeping up with infrastructure. Go anywhere right now in the developed world and there's issues with energy infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, water infrastructure, public education (schools, universities & vocational colleges) and public hospitals just to name a few things. Every country has these in different combinations but they all have similar issues. I'd like to hear peter talk more about infrastructure.
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  2. I'd never seen Peter Ziehan until recently. I've been mainly reading and following Mark Blyth the political-economist from Brown U. Peter seems to cover a lot of the same stuff but from the perspective of someone who's concerned about the demographics and how that affects the political landscape while Mark looks at the interactions between economics and the political landscape. Interesting they both have almost the same assessment of Bitcoin and Crypto in general. But I will say this (as I am an engineer) they get their engineering wrong at times, but its mainly in details only an engineer will pick up. I sort of doubted the population of those countries Putin wants control of. They weren't quite right its NOT 300 million its just under 270 million.
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