Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Getting Ready for a Post-American World || Peter Zeihan" video.

  1. Looking forward to what you have to say on AUSTRALIA. Since getting the gist of what you mean by demographics and how that plays out I know Australia is in serious deep crap. But even with that there's some other mind numbing issues the top 2 of which are energy and water. We don't have enough of either because we have stupidly done some idiotic things. The most stupid thing we did which has caused both of these issues was following what we called Economic Rationalism which was the Australia version of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. We (all of us around the world) now collectively call this NEOLIBERALISM but its also called Chicago School Economics after the University of Chicago where Milton Friedman, Ronald Corse and other plotted the "Greed is Good" Era. ON ENERGY - we privatised everything back in the 90s under the standard claim that "competition would deliver better services at lower prices" and like everywhere else that PROVED FALSE. The real reason economists preached that nonsense wasn't because they thought that privatising everything would actually be better it was just standard neoliberal ideology. In the time our nation went from 10 to 20 million people we built more than 10 power stations across the nation with output power greater than 1,000 Megawatts (1 Gigawatt) with the largest over 3GW. These are the large bulk delivery power stations that supply the bulk of what's called BASE LOAD POWER. In the time our population has gone from 20 to 26 million we have NOT built a single power station over 1GW. So the backbone of our energy system is not only old but also smaller than it needs to be. So not only do we need to start replacing the older power stations but we need to replace them with even larger power stations. THIS IS ACTUALLY COMMON ACROSS THE WESTERN WORLD and if you bothered to be more engaging with engineers we'd tell you about this. The problem is we have about 22.6 Gigawatts of coal fired power stations to replace. This actually has NOTHING to do with climate change its just a fact that things get old and worn out and eventually need replacing. Right now people are sayin go nuclear, but based on the cost of Hinckley Point C in Britain (because its useable data) that would cost over AU$440 Billion. But based on population projections we'd actually need to double that and then almost triple it to supply all the electric cars, buses, trucks and airplanes that people want us to have. By the time you add in all of the required power grid upgrades that easily jumps to more than AU$2 Trillion AND THAT'S for a country that currently has only 26 million people. What's the bill for Europe, North America, Asia, India,.......? ON WATER - Australia is even in a worse state than most people realise. We are a dry nation and water is simply not as free to use as when we were 10 million which we only reached in 1960 and we were only 15 million in 1980. We are now 26 million and we haven't built any new major water supplies in decades. The projection is that we'll hit 30 million in about 2030 BUT NOBODY knows where those 4 million are coming from OR HOW we'll get them enough water or how they will be able to turn on the lights. He's what I really like about your work Peter. You've opened my eyes to demographics. If you look up the Australian Bureau of Statistics there's a page for the population clock and pyramid. Its got an interactive pyramid where you can see what's been going on since 1981 but with projections going onto 2071. When you use the interactive features of that page there's a really interesting thing that happens and I wouldn't know about it if it wasn't for YOU - so big thanks. Here's what I found In the data for 2022, which is based on the last census in 2021 (so its real data), there's a noticeable notch in our population pyramid for older teenagers (16-19). According to the projections (notice how the color changes) that notch magically disappears. That would mean Australia thinks it can magically pull 40,000 teenagers out of thin air. Which is odd because I thought to make a 20 year old took 20 years 9 months and 5 minutes if your quick and 30 minutes if you have some endurance.
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