YouSaid · the spoken record

Doomberg

lines on the record: 86
first: 2022-05-05
most recent: 2022-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“We've priced it to be as affordable as possible given the cost and the time that goes into these things. And we'll always be free on Twitter and producing original content there as well at Doombert, like you said. But the work of our life is Doomberg. It's been a thrill. Really happy to have been here today with you, Jack. And anytime you want to have a spec, we're always happy to come on.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so for paid substacks, yes, I believe we're as of this recording number four, which is amazing and stunning and humbling and thrilling all at the same time. We opened up our paywall on April 6th. We're recording this on April 27th. After April 30th, all of our pieces will be behind the paywall, and we hope to convert as many of our prior subscribers as possible to paid subscribers. This has been an incredible journey for us, but we've written and researched and edited and created 105, we hope, thoughtful and insightful articles. And that comes at both a direct cost and an opportunity cost compared to what we could have been doing at that time. And our dream is to do Doomberg for a living. And the early response after opening up the paywall, but still keeping everything free seems to indicate that that's going to be a real possibility. We're excited to continue to earn people's business and to continue to grow as a paid newsletter.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reading our pieces and reaching out to us and staffers in Congress. And so we do believe we're having an impact in shaping the narrative, and that's great. But yeah, we're not pessimistic people. We are sort of defensively pessimistic in the sense that we're prepared for worst case scenarios, but ultimately this will all resolve. These crises will pass. Technology continues to grow at an exponential rate, and we're ultimately long-term excited about the future. We just wish that we would take better paths to get there because the path function matters.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doomberg is optimistic in the long run about humanity. Doomberg is optimistic that we will, in fact, come to our senses. We're generally optimistic in our own lives. We're long the human spirit. We're long human engineer. We're long human technological development. We try hard to focus on the positive emails that we get as opposed to the negative ones. And Doomberg is a bit satire. I mean, it's a great name. And people don't take us literally, but we hope they take us seriously. Part of the mission of Doomberg is to highlight these things before it's too late such that more people understand the inevitable consequences of poor decisions earlier so that maybe we can bend the curve. And if in our own way on the nano scale, we were able to bend that curve, then we've at least done our part. And so to the extent that we can be educational, we've had, we have many members of government.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, unfortunately, broadly speaking, this is obviously a generalization, but the word nano is very closely associated with the word hype in our minds. Not all of it. We happen to know a fair bit about nanotechnology, but in the pantheon of things that we're interested in and in the news headlines, we're hoping to see the word nano rarely makes an appearance.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That intermittency almost always comes from, say, natural gas expensive peaking plants. And so those costs are real. And they don't get counted in the denominator. Now, long term, if we can figure out technologies that can cost effectively convert solar into baseload power, then you have a winning strategy. Now, you still have to pay the penalty. Where does that energy come from? And we're pro practical renewable in the proper context of co developing it with nuclear and optimizing the limited amount of fossil fuels we will have to use in all scenarios such that we can get the maximum life for the least CO2 emitted.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That gets papered over, glossed over, or obfuscated nefariously is the fact that these renewable projects produce intermittent power. And so when people, here's a great test. If you ever hear somebody talk about the levelized cost of electricity as a way of accurately measuring the cost of solar or wind, they either don't know what they're talking about, or worse, they know what they're talking about and they're being deceptive. When you supply intermittent power to a grid, that creates real costs that have to be paid by the grid operators to levelize the grid, balance the grid, you know, balancing a grid is a symphony. It's a miracle that it works as often and as reliably as it does. And so when you overload a grid with intermittent power, like they've done in Germany and like they're doing in California, you see blackouts and you see higher prices for a reason. And that reason is intermittent power is expensive. It has to be offset and offset.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we are far more supportive of solar than we are of wind. And we outlined in the piece 20,000 volts under the sea what we think will be necessary to make those investments, have the optimum effect possible, the most important of which is to figure out a way to convert solar power into baseload power. And the nice part about that project, which we described as kind of an exception that proves the rule because they have near perfect wind and near perfect solar and a giant battery such that at least as they propose it, they will be able to transmit base load power to the UK grid. That's great. If we could solve that problem economically, that would be a huge boom. And assuming we solved the problem of making these solar panels at scale, which again, you can't do these things in isolation. Those solar panels have to come from somewhere. And the big issue.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I hope that most people walking away from this interview will. Have a more nuanced understanding of just what quote green policy as it has been called, some of the consequences of that. For example, not investing in nuclear and then having to rely on coal. I mean, just by definition, that is not green. But are there, quote, green policies in the mainstream such as subsidizing green energy like wind and solar that you think are pro-energy and hence pro-life? I agree that shutting off investment in fossil fuels, that's anti-energy and hence, according to your framework, anti-life, but what about boosting up via the government, the fiscal engine, green energy like wind and solar?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“BEVs, you know, these are just facts, there's not enough cobalt nickel, or lithium in the world to electrify our vehicle fleet. There's a fair amount of it to abate a significant amount of our oil and gas use if we do it smartly. We're not doing it smartly. So I don't know why we're expecting a good outcome.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In a bait a lot more oil that way. And so when we talk about electrification of vehicles, we are focusing on reducing the maximum amount of gasoline burned in the quickest amount of time possible for the reasons we just talked about. We're trying to minimize the number of CO2 emissions as quickly as possible. Having a huge battery pack of one car while the other three cars rely 100% on fossil fuels makes no sense. You can abate 80 to 90 percent of four people's emissions from oil as opposed to 100% of lung driver. The math is very clear. In fact, the real way to do it is to use the Prius system. If battery constraints are really the driver here and they are, we need to manage those constraints. And so we're not serious yet until we refocus our policy on plug-in hybrids over full before.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Preserve those fossil fuels for things like the generation of needed chemicals like fertilizer and so on. And concentrate the use of diesel in mines where we need these materials to affect that transformation. But you can't do it without nuclear power and you can't do it without a resurgence of natural gas. And you can't do it without a few more miraculous inventions on the energy storage front. One of the policies we've advocated for, for example, is to shift our focus away from full battery electric vehicles and towards plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. And here's why. The battery materials aren't available. Like they're just literally not available to fully electrify our fleet on any kind of time horizon that matters. If a full battery electric vehicle has an 80 kilowatt hour battery pack in it, you could divide that battery by four and spread it to four plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I said earlier, energy is nothing more than how much standard of living you can create and store. Like a home has a lot of previous energy spent in it to, you know, right angles don't happen to nature. They have to be imposed. They have to be made. Your home is stored energy that you continuously benefit from. It's well insulated and so on. But you still need a huge amount of energy input into your home to keep it running, to keep it ordered, to keep a good standard of living. How much standard of living do we want to deploy? How equitably do we want to deploy it? And how few CO2 emissions can we do to achieve that are the core questions. And that's why when we write a plan comprehensively, we take into account things like nuclear, solar, storage, and natural gas. There is a world where you can use far less oil and transportation and you can use far less coal and power production.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Number. So in our context, we believe better is better and perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the good. If you desire, again, everybody forgets the fact that we are effectively reallocating standard of living here.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very difficult to contemplate a world where the entirety of our fossil fuel dependence can be abated in any reasonable timeframe for any reasonable amount of money. It is just too useful. It is just too energy intense. Even if we solve the grid, the grid is only a small part of our, quote, energy needs. We still need to create fertilizer. We still need to electrically powered diesel trucks in these mines are not going to last very long. And it would be highly inefficient use of our limited resources to completely eliminate fossil fuels. So net zero, in fact, doesn't get you to zero, right? I mean, this is all reference to, I believe, what, 1990 as the basis point. So we'd like to have no incremental emissions over. It might be a different year. But again, the word zero gets tossed around a lot. We like to say zeros and emotional.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, as we said earlier, energy is life. And if one of the parameters that we deem is important, if it involves creating as much life as possible with the least amount of carbon emitted, that forms the foundation of our entire energy proposal. And so we take as an axiom that society has decided it wants to do that, whether those projections are real, whether those models are consistent, whether the consequences of such change wouldn't be readily handled with much less money by simply preventative and responding to those consequences. Our debates for other people to engage in and frankly have evolved to the point where it doesn't make much sense to get involved in those debates because people are entrenched in their ideas and they will never change their mind. We take as an axiom that it is desirous to minimize our carbon emissions.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to close by asking you a series of questions about the environment and emissions. And there are tons of trade-offs we have here. It's very expensive to electrify the economy as you just laid out and the extraction of a lot of these minerals are themselves very bad for the environment. But how do you sort of weigh the risk reward of renewables versus fossil fuels when according to the United Nations report, and I'm curious if you agree with this scientific finding because you do have a hard science background, we have about 400 gigatons of carbon emissions yet as a budget before it's very likely in order to remain within a one and a half degrees Celsius temperature rise. And again, according to the same study, like.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of basically stranded natural gas in the US. Why don't we recapture the capacity to produce cheap solar here using natural gas that is still at $92 per million, $42 per barrel of oil equivalent? You can't do that in isolation, though. You actually have to unleash U.S. natural gas producers, otherwise, you're just going to make the price of natural gas soar to unacceptable levels on the home front. So if you unleash American ingenuity and technology and capital to create more natural gas, build the pipelines needed to unlock it and to lift it out of the region, while simultaneously building polysilicon production facilities in the fields while simultaneously reawakening our nuclear strategy and deploying small modular reactors everywhere we can, we will get to a point where we produce more than enough energy for the home front with far less carbon footprint and the ability to export even more of that to project our geopolitical power more effectively. That has to be the answer. The only question is how long it takes for us to get there and who suffers between now and then?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here. You have to pay the penalty up front. And so I just, as we were talking, I pulled up the price of polysilicon in China. And if you look at the sort of five-year chart, we're at $34 per kilogram today. And in June of 2020, at the depths of the COVID pandemic, it was down to $6. So we're at five and a half or six times the price, not five and a half percent, but $5 and 550 or 600%. That's huge. And that's just physics. The choice to take that cheap thermal coal and to make polysilicon has to be measured against the need to use that same coal to produce electricity to keep the lights on in China today. And the Chinese have made their decision. And so that's why in a piece that we put out several months ago called a serious proposal on US energy, I believe it was called something to that effect, we said, since we have an abundance.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In Morocco, to make the world's largest solar and wind farm, and most importantly and critically, and we praise the project for this, to try to produce baseload power and send it 3,500 kilometers under the sea to Britain in the form of baseload power. That's an enormous amount of energy. Whereas the polysilicon going to come from, the price of polysilicon in China is something like $30 a kilogram up from eight or nine. Why is that? Well, because silicon, polysilicon, is basically just energy. The number one input into producing solar panels is energy. And it takes four or five years for those same solar panels to return the initial energy up front. And so if you're going to deploy a huge amount of energy to create a machine that produces energy, the amount of upfront payment has to come from somewhere. Where is that going to come from is our question? There's no perpetual motion machine.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, it's all a matter of how much energy do you want to deploy to create that power? And we wrote a piece just this weekend called 20,000 volts under C, where we talked about this interesting project in”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in the European plan to get off Russian natural gas, two and a quarter billion cubic feet per day would be replaced by renewables, namely wind and solar. What's your outlook there? How possible do you think that is?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On an energy equivalent basis. And so the price of natural gas in the US is a huge advantage for our manufacturers because they produce products that are priced globally. And so that will increase the demand for financial gas as long as that arbitrage is open. And that's how it flows.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say U.S. domestic natural gas for the reasons we outlined earlier, which is it has two sources of arbitrage. Oil is more expensive than natural gas on an energy content basis, and oil is more expensive in Europe than it is here. And both of those serve to put a bit under U.S. natural gas. And since natural gas is used for three really important things, heating, producing electricity, and creating chemicals, the price elasticity of demand, which will set the marginal price, will be paid by the industry that has the highest value potential to afford it. And it's always better to have three bidders than one. And so I would say natural gas, if you push me, we're not stock pickers and we don't give investment advice. Natural gas seems to have at $7 per million BTU, like we discussed earlier, that's the equivalent of $40 oil. If oil stays above $100 or goes to 150, it's hard to imagine that natural gas stays down.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And if we had to say with WTI crude oil at about $100 a barrel, natural gas at $7.20, where do you see the prices having the most potential to explode higher? In other words, which are you more bullish on?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The volatility is really, really crushing to the economy, and ultimately, I wouldn't say there's any particular difference between how price spikes and natural gas and oil affect the market. They're both critical to the economy, clearly.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difficult for fully integrated supply chains like, say, the chemical industry is at each node, you're priced on the previous node and from a cost perspective and your revenue comes from the node ahead of you. And if the node behind you is really volatile, it can put you out of business quickly. So imagine you would have pre-sold a bunch of natural gas at a low price as a producer to hedge and then gas spikes and then the gas you actually have to go out into the market and buy to deliver that puts you out of business. That's why you're seeing so many power companies in the UK, for example, go out of business because the volatility is just killing them. So the spikes are a real problem in and of themselves. Just like a spike high could kill you too because you buy at that price and then your product is tied to oil, let's say, is a reference point and the price of oil collapses. Well, the last buyer at that price lost a lot of money effectively.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, and if I said that, I didn't mean it. I just mean generally energy prices, oil, gas, coal are incredibly, you know, these types of spikes, especially the volatility, Jack, that's a real issue. So if you haven't worked in industry before, this might be a nuance that you haven't considered before. But give it enough time to work these price spikes through your contracts. You can handle steadily rising but low volatile price action. It's the price spikes that really put people out of business. So if you're, you know, just because the price is quoted, that doesn't mean that this is how these commodity companies interact with their clients. I mean, they might use those price as reference points. But there's all kinds of B2B contracts that have various payment terms, that have certain trailing average of price spikes. And it's very heterogeneous the way businesses actually transacted. And one thing that's really...”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why is it unless I misunderstood you, why is it that you say that oil will destroy demand faster than natural gas? Is there something special about natural gas where it's even more inelastic than oil?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of whether these all producing nations want to be paid in US dollars, which is a topic for different podcasts, but it's not as near the crisis as natural gas. It's not near as heterogeneous as natural gas. The technical solutions to stop the importation of oil from Russia and to replace that oil with external sources is a far easier one than natural gas. And so oil could go a lot higher, but again, those types of price spikes tend to self-correct in the sense that they destroy demand and destroy the economy. And so the only question is at what price level do we trigger economic recession and or depression if we're not already on the path to war?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we're seeing with each month the Department of Energy report that drillers are completing previously drilled wells, which is kind of the cheapest, easiest way to get incremental supply. Now, there are lots of great things about the shale patch. One of the downsides is these wells tend to dissipate in their productivity far quicker than traditional fields. And we suspect, and many others have suspected as well, that once we've exhausted this cheap and easy access to incremental supply, that we could even begin to see U.S. oil production turn over. And that would be a real challenge. And then there's also questions about OPEC's ability to increase its own supply. And there's some really smart people who have been saying for a very long time that the quote-unquote spare capacity of OPEC's or the OPECs plus nations is a mirage. And then there's the whole question.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mental sense, but in the political sense. So the real challenge with oil is twofold. One, the one that we outlined earlier, which is the lack of capital, but also a big challenge in the US shale patch is these companies have been basically decapitalizing the industry by completing almost the entire inventory of drilled but uncompleted wells. So post-COVID. The production of oil in the U.S. has not yet eclipsed the pre-COVID highs.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, there's some differences between oil and natural gas, the most important of which is oil as a liquid. And so oil at room temperature. So oil is a liquid at room temperature means that the technology needed to ship it around the world is far simpler, which means that market is far more global and less heterogeneous than natural gas. You need deep ports, basically, to load big tankers, nothing more. That matters, of course. There's certain ports that are not deep and they require sort of ships to run between small ships to run between the big ones. These are inconveniences. But by and large, the market for oil is global. And you can expect, because it's not like at the margins these commodity markets are the cleanest or the most ethically run, that much of Russia's oil will eventually find its way into the market and that will displace sort of clean oil from the sort of clean dirty as it pertains to Russia's dirty oil and oil produced here is clean and not in the environment.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks for clearing that up. So that's natural gas and fertilizers. Talk to us about oil. My understanding that Russia doesn't have as strong of a stranglehold on the European oil supply. But what's going on in the oil market? I know prices have surged from, I mean, literally being negative for spot prices in April of 2020 to now over $100 in the case of Brent and WTI, although I'm not sure where it is today. How high do you think the price of oil could go and just tell us what you're seeing in that market?”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From $7 a bushel two years ago, we'll pay that price. Not many people can. And so that's where the next wave of this crisis will be. To be clear, we're not calling for, didn't call for, haven't called for, food shortages in the US. Our prepping philosophy is predominantly a tail risk, but also a hedge against inflation because we store what we eat and we eat what we store. We've just increased our working capital. That's it. So the return on that investment has been very positive for us because most of the inventory we have in our home was purchased at much lower prices. But if I were living in a developing country, I would have a lot more food in my house, assuming you could acquire it and store it and afford it. It's just a real tragedy that not many can.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of perverse policies like that that are affecting the market to, and we close the piece by saying, man, what a grotesque spectacle this almost seemed to those who are fighting for edible food on a daily basis. It's crazy. So farmers today in the developing world are going to not be able to afford fertilizer, not be able to get fertilizer. They're going to see lower yields. There's going to be food shortages there. There will be food riots there. We will pay any price. We will bail out farmers. We will provide stimulus checks to economically challenged. We suspect that the U.S. government will do everything it can to make sure there are no food shortages here. And the primary way they'll do that is we'll pay any price. That only exacerbates the exportation of inflation. And so the clearing price is set by the richest marginal buyer. And so we are that buyer. And that's why you're seeing soy at $17 a bushel up.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For dinner, where we showed that, in fact, much of the increase in soy has nothing to do with fertilizer. It has to do with the fact that there are these mandates to produce something called renewable diesel from soy oil, which basically means we're taking all of this fertilizer, all these chemicals, all this energy to grow food, to burn it for energy. It's the most circular, insane policy you can imagine. We're doing it at scale.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I don't believe the US will ever have a food crisis where we see empty grocery store shelves for very long across big swaths of the country. You might see it in spots as supply chains break down. The challenge, and we wrote a piece called Farmers on the Brink that captured this. The challenge isn't here, the challenge is there. So natural gas prices and fertilizer prices are already so high that it's going to cause a famine. And that's because to farmers in the developing world that aren't as financially sophisticated don't have the resources, weren't able to hedge, weren't able to pre-buy. The current prices are a crisis. And it's going to affect yields. It's going to affect availability. And most importantly, it's going to lead to what we call economic vapor lock, which is where a cascading series of protectionist policies are implemented in an effort to at least show up the home front, but ultimately has the long-term effect of making it harder for everybody else, including those countries. And we saw that just last week. We put out a piece this morning, your question around connecting it to diesel called diesel.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it does. Thanks. So I think right now we're kind of at the weakest link part of the supply chain cycle where, okay, corn uses way more fertilizer than soybeans. So farmers are planting more soybeans and nowhere near enough corn. So there's going to be a shortage of corn, but there's going to be a surplus of soybeans. So it's kind of a lack of one, but it's replaced by an oversupply of another. At what stage do you think it becomes sort of there's a lack of everything? And could you perhaps relate it to the cost of diesel, the cost of natural gas? If natural gas is here now, how much higher does it have to go before You think, oh, me prepping is not just a tail risk hedge, but it's something that I think is quite possible within the near term future.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Supply chains breaking and imports being stranded in China because of their COVID policy. All of these things put at risk the just-in-time efficiency over robustness supply chains in the food sector that we've become accustomed to over the years. And we have a strong desire to instulate our family from that, not forever. We don't have years worth of food, but we could go weeks. We could go months, stretch at the months. Very few people could. And we've encouraged as many of our friends to consider it as possible because it's not crazy to conceive of food shortages eventually making it here. We don't think they will, but if they did, we would at least like to have that extra level of preparedness on the home front. Hope that answers your question.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have a preparedness mindset. The members of Team Doomberg and many of our friends, prepper is kind of a derogatory term. I don't like it. I prefer preparedness and self-sufficiency. But we store extra food and supplies. Not crazy, not hoarders. We'd like to be able to persist. If the grocery stores didn't have food for two or three weeks, it would be inconvenient for us, but it wouldn't be life or death. Many people have very low working capital in their homes. We view our homes as factories and we view elevated working capital to run those factories as prudent and both a hedge against inflation and an insurance policy against being destocked. You know, the average grocery store has three or four days worth of food in the inventory. And all of that food gets replenished using diesel trucks. And you could imagine like with trucker shortage and diesel price skyrocketing.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Price of that input goes up, or its availability goes down, the price of the product has to go up. It's just simple. Again, this is just the transmission function of physics. If you don't use fertilizer, you get lower yield. If you get lower yield, you have less food. If you have less food, the ultimate inelastic commodity, people riot. It's very simple A to B to C to D. And it just inevitable. It's sad that it's inevitable. It's one of the reasons that we're preppers to make sure that we can bridge ourselves to a regime of sanity. But we don't doubt for a second that we're going to have to suffer a lot more insanity before people wise up.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, energy is life. The primary inputs into fertilizers, for example, are natural gas to create ammonia, potash and... Potash and potassium are mined, and this requires diesel to power the tractors and electricity and water to run the concentrators and the smelters and so on. And so literally we spend an enormous amount of energy to grow food. Luckily for the US, a lot of it comes naturally through sunshines and river, you know, river waters make for great irrigation systems that are low or free energy effectively, but you have to supplement that. You have to supplement it with fertilizer. You have to supplement it with herbicides. You have to supplement it with fungicides and with tractors and labor. All of that is an energy penalty. So again, if you reorient your calculations around return on energy as opposed to return on dollars, it becomes very clear that there's a finite amount of energy that needs to go in to make a certain amount of calories.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And explain the knock on effects of the price rise in energy. Obviously, energy alone, it's so important you drive a car, anything that can use electricity uses some form of energy, but it's not just that explain, for example, how the surge in price of natural gas can cause directly the price of corn doubling, the price of wheat tripling. Walk us through how that happens.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We need to take that over, do it right, run it more environmentally friendly. Understand that there is no magic wand. Understand that all decisions come with trade-offs. Have an intelligent discussion about what those trade-offs are, positive and negative, and make the best decisions possible for society such that the maximum number of people have the highest standard of living possible. We'll have to get there eventually. There will be riots. We've said many times on the path from abundance to starvation as riot. We're going to see revolts. People won't accept it. We're seeing it already at the periphery, and soon it will come to the core. It's just inevitable. And so eventually, we will have to make the physics, you know, the decision that physics would guide us to, or we have to suffer consequences that are unimaginable to your listeners. And we suspect that we'll probably do a bit of the latter before we end up at the former.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's all Putin's fault. And so this is the great excuse for everything. The Putin price hike, right? So I don't know. I don't know how these people who should know better sleep well at night. Again, they aren't the primary victims of their incompetence. It's the people right on the cusp at the lowest rungs of the economic ladder within our Western society. And even worse, people in developing economies that will fall victim to this even worse, those are the ones that suffer the consequences of energy ignorance. There is no worse Policy to get wrong than energy. And we've got it wrong. It's just no other way to say it. There is a path. We understand the path to a cleaner, higher energy future. It involves proactively replacing coal with natural gas, recognizing that not all fossil fuels.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Well, even I, who's not nearly as in the weeds as Team Doomberg is on this, even I can see how obtuse it is when you have two billion of that $15 billion of cubic fee per day having to come from coal, which is by far the dirtiest pollutant known demand, essentially, is the irony lost on these people that They are turning to the most carbon emittant intensive fuel. And how do they justify it? I mean, are there people on the left wing who must object to it? Surely they must, right? Yeah.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so one wonders what the genesis of this insanity is, whenever you see something so obtuse and so antiphysics, the mind begins to wander. And I think once the full history of this unfortunate scandal is written, we will be surprised at the depths of the corruption potentially at the center of it.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Expertise to turn those three nuclear reactors back on. And so I don't understand the German reticence on this issue. I think there's probably a scandal at the center of it. There's an awful lot of powerful people in Germany that got rich off of Putin taking over that market share, including a former chancellor.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think they could do more. And I think the easiest decision to make is to keep existing power plants that we have on now. We've railed about this forever. There is no cheaper incremental energy available that is both carbon-free and baseload power than nuclear. And the last remaining nuclear power plant in California is scheduled for closure, Diablo Canyon. That might be the single dumbest policy decision on offer in the United States today. There's no other way to say it. That energy is safe. It's clean. Nuclear waste is a canard. It produces an enormous amount of energy. It costs nothing, barely anything to maintain. We need to keep those plants open. Step one. And Germany could certainly do that. And they just shut down three reactors over the New Year's holiday. They could turn those back on. There's all kinds of excuses in the German media. Believe me, the country of Germany has sufficient engineering.”
2022-05-05 · Forward Guidance · The Food & Energy Crisis Has Only Just Begun | Doomberg · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT