As we've often noted on this show, because it's hard not to notice, we are living in one of those moments where so much is happening all at once and information about it all is so tightly controlled that huge history changing events can occur and in fact are occurring right now and nobody seems aware of them. It's pretty unsettling, actually. Here's one example. Europe is descending into poverty. Did you know that? Had someone told you that?
So, the most advanced continent on the planet, the birthplace of Western civilization, our civilization, is getting much poorer very quickly. It's moving backward at high speed. Just a year ago, Europe was a modern place. For example, the overwhelming majority of Europeans heated their homes with natural gas, as modern people do.
In Germany, the continent's richest country, only about 6% of households, most of them rural, heated with cordwood and you'd expect that, given that, again, Germany is a modern industrialized country with central heating and indoor plumbing and all the other trappings of a society that has moved beyond the medieval period. Last year, only about 6% of Germans used wood to heat their homes, but that has changed dramatically. Demand for firewood in Germany has risen so fast that there is none left to buy. You can't get it, so desperate Germans are now cutting their own wood, scouring the forests like their ancestors for sources of heat. Watch.
REPORTER: Some in Germany are taking matters into their own hands, a solution that might look like a blast from the past. About 2 hours outside Berlin, residents of this small town have turned to wood chips for fuel.
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FOREST MANAGER: We have to be innovative, said the project's organizer. If we don't act and just rely on the government to solve, the crisis will never succeed.
REPORTER: This burner will soon fuel most of this village of 60 people.
So, they call it biomass, but it's wood. They're burning wood again, as they did during the feudal period. That's Germany. In Poland, families are standing in line for days to buy coal, not in 1910, right now, tonight, cars queued up outside coal mines hoping for fuel. "This is beyond imagination," one 57-year-old Polish man told Reuters. "People are sleeping in their cars. I remember the communist times, but it didn't cross my mind that we could return to something even worse."
Oh, but it's come. Something even worse has arrived. The French government has announced energy rationing this winter. Just the other day, France had so much energy that it exported it to other countries. It was a net exporter of energy. Now, there won't be enough heat in France for everyone in the country to stay warm. In the U.K., 70% of restaurants are preparing to close to go under. Why? Because when winter comes, they won't be able to afford to keep the heat and lights on, etc., etc. This is happening across Europe, in every country.
So, the question is: why is it happening? And the answer is extremely simple. There is an energy shortage in Europe. Cheap energy is essential. It is the key to everything that a normal society strives for: prosperity, safety, a longer life expectancy for its citizens. Everything depends on cheap energy, but Europe no longer has it and as a result, things are falling apart very quickly.
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Energy costs in Europe are expected to increase by hundreds of percent in coming months. Germany's year ahead price of electricity, that's the benchmark for all of Europe, it's measured in euros per megawatt hour, that price just exceeded €1,000 for the first time in history. For perspective, just a week ago, last Monday, the cost was about €700 per megawatt hour and that was a record. In other words, the price rise is approaching 50% in a single week. In France, electricity went up 25% in one day. That was last Friday. Imagine that happening to you. Here's what Europe looks like tonight.
REPORTER: In Europe, it's lights out at major monuments and tourist attractions as a long, hot summer gives way to what officials worry could be a bitterly cold winter. Skyrocketing energy prices have put Europe on a war footing with Russia as the enemy. "We are in what can be described as a hybrid war," said French President Emmanuel Macron. "Russia uses energy resources like it does food as a war weapon to exert pressure." Oil prices have doubled. Coal prices have quadrupled and natural gas is now seven times more expensive than early last year.
Seven times more expensive. So, it turns out if you don't have cheap natural gas, you can't run the continent. Now, if you've got a graduate degree and live in a city in the United States, you may be shocked to learn this, you may never have heard this before, you may have believed that fossil fuels were on their way out any day now. And you thought that because the Davos people and our own leaders assured us of that for decades. They told us that green energy was the future and the future is here. It's here. As recently as last month, the World Economic Forum claimed that Europe could save "1 trillion in fossil fuel costs by switching to renewables." But it turns out, and this may not shock you, they had no clue what they were talking about. They knew nothing about the subject, the subject they talked about endlessly.
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Green energy cannot replace fossil fuels. Not now, not anytime soon. Fossil fuels remain what they have always been: the key to civilization. That is true now. That has been true since Homo Erectus started the first cooking fire in a cave nearly a million years ago. So-called green energy is not close, is nowhere near replacing gas and oil and coal. It's measurable. We could have known this. Anyone with eighth-grade math skills could have figured out in about 10 minutes that we cannot replace fossil fuels with renewables or green energy and of course, they must have known that. When they told you otherwise, it was just posturing. It was childish and destructive fantasy talk that apparently fooled millions of their citizens and millions of hours.
The Green New Deal means what it always meant. It means poverty and the people pushing the Green New Deal must have known that all along. They don't actually believe climate change is an imminent threat. If they actually believe climate change was an imminent threat, an existential emergency, the first thing they would have done, the very first would be to ban private jets. Oh, but no. To this day, Al Gore still flies on private jets. Barack Obama owns tens of millions of dollars of beachfront property. He knows the oceans aren't rising. Come on. So, they're all in on it. It's a scam, but they don't care because they know they personally will escape the consequences of their own policies.
So, when the French president announces that his people are facing the end of abundance, he's not talking about himself. He's not facing the end of abundance. None of them are. Macron and all of them understand they will always be rich and always be protected. They know that for certain.
What's changed, what's so very interesting, is that suddenly everyone else who's been paying attention can see that they were lying. They are frauds and the entire population of Europe now knows that. Donald Trump, to his credit, whatever you think of him, caught onto this early. Four years ago, Trump warned Europe about its energy future during a speech at the United Nations. The German delegation laughed at him. Remember this?
DONALD TRUMP: Germany will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course. Here in the Western Hemisphere, we are committed to maintaining our independence from the encroachment of expansionist foreign powers. It has been the formal policy of our country since President Monroe.
Oh, they're laughing. We have green parties here in Europe. You have no idea what you're talking about, but they're not laughing anymore. The Europeans have discovered that the real threat to human civilization is not global warming. It never was global warming. The real threat to people is global cooling, otherwise known as winter. Far more people freeze to death every year than die of heat.
In 2019, for example, four times as many people died of cold as of heat. That's according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. So, when temperatures in Europe begin to drop a few months from now, this is a huge problem and that will be obvious to everyone. It's not global warming, it's global cooling. That's what's going to kill your grandmother and when everyone understands that perfectly well, a lot of things are going to happen. The status quo will crumble. Factories will close. Unemployment will rise. Disposable income will disappear and you're seeing signs of that already. Personal savings rates are down dramatically.
In this country, 60% of Americans can't cover an expected $400 expense, credit card debt increasing year over year by 13%. That's the biggest jump in 20 years. Total household debt set an all-time record of $15.8 trillion. That's in this country. It's also true similarly in Europe. So, how will spiraling energy costs affect all of this and what we the cascading effect? Well, when the cost of keeping your apartment warm jumps by hundreds of percent in a single year, you become a completely different person. You change your behavior radically. You're no longer tempted to buy a new $1,400 dollar iPhone or shop at Whole Foods or even pick up an extra cappuccino. The entire consumer economy grinds to a halt because there's no discretionary income. So, it is impossible to overstate the downstream effects on the world of an energy crisis. Everything changes.
How are the central banks responding to this? Not well. They seem to be making things worse on purpose. Now, in the United States, we're told not to notice what the Fed does because the Fed is now diverse and therefore great. Amazing piece in the AP just the other day announcing that, "leadership of the Federal Reserve has become its most diverse ever. There are more female black and gay officials contributing to the central bank's interest rate decisions than at any time in its 109 year history." OK. In other words, "Relax. We've got affirmative action. Everything's fine."
Great, but somehow it doesn't seem to be working. The same central banks that intentionally caused inflation—and they did—those same central banks are hiking rates to destroy demand. The problem is, this isn't a demand problem. This is a supply problem, and it stems primarily from the war in Ukraine. Because of that war, the West does not have enough energy to continue its economy or society. Europe responded to that war by imposing sanctions that they knew would inevitably cause energy shortages. They knew it when they did it. Here's the president of the European Commission back in May.
URSULA VON DER LEYEN: And let's be clear, it will not be easy because some member states are strongly dependent on Russian oil, but we simply have to do it. So today, we will propose to ban all Russian oil from Europe.
Really? Are you going to be keeping your apartment at 49 degrees Fahrenheit? Will you be walking to work? No, of course not. You'll have whatever you want forever, but the rest of us, she informed us, "simply have to do it," and it's not just energy that's being affected by these sanctions. In Brussels, Joe Biden warned that food shortages are inevitable. Remember this?
PRESIDENT BIDEN: With regard to food shortages. Yes, we did talk about food shortages and it's going to be real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia. It's imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.
Oh, we're all going have to buckle down for freedom. We have to shovel billions to Ukrainian oligarchs who clearly hate the United States because it's the right thing to do. We need to hurt Russia because it's our moral duty. So, did these sanctions actually hurt Russia? They caused food and energy shortages throughout the West. No, they didn't hurt Russia. Russia today has more than enough energy, more energy that it can use or sell. In fact, Russia has so much excess natural gas that it simply setting it on fire. That's right. Flaring it, as they say. A Russian plant near the border with Finland is burning $10 million worth of natural gas every day. It seems like a big story. So, how's the media covering this? Well, here's the BBC.
"Scientists are concerned about the large volumes of carbon dioxide and soot it is creating, which could exacerbate the melting of Arctic ice." Really, that's your concern? More global warming, when the immediate effect is to make it impossible for people in Europe to stay warm. You can reach a place in your society where the people in charge and their lapdogs in the media become so completely disconnected from the concerns of actual people, become so totally uninterested in the lives of citizens, the society becomes very volatile, and we are fast approaching that point.
So, we could fix this problem. The solution to this catastrophe is very straightforward: End the war in Ukraine. Reestablish energy flows into Europe and save the global economy, including ours. Is Joe Biden doing that? And other reckless Western leaders like Boris Johnson doing that? No, they're doing the opposite. They're spending billions more from their dying economies to Ukrainian oligarchs and for no good reason. The UK just committed $2.8 billion to Ukraine in a country where 70% of pubs may close because they can't afford electricity.
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This is the governments preparing for power outages in the middle of winter, as the Guardian reported. "Under the government's last reasonable, worst-case scenario, officials believe the UK could experience blackouts for several days in January if cold weather combines with gas shortages to leave the country short of power." Well, of course, cold weather will combine with gas shortages because that's when people use gas, when the weather is cold. Wake up, geniuses. And it's not just happening in the UK. Again, it's happening everywhere. Spain has just approved more than €50 million for Ukraine and that's not including funding for military hardware.
In other news, Spain's Congress just implemented temperature controls on commercial buildings. Air conditioning must be no cooler than 27 degrees Celsius. That's 80 Fahrenheit, by the way, in case you don't live there in August. After 10 p.m., shop windows in occupied public buildings won't be lit. How about Italy? Well, Italy has allocated more than €600 million for Ukrainian refugees and yet at the same time, air conditioning in Italian schools and public buildings has already been restricted in what the government labeled "Operation Thermostat" that began in May.
Italy's Ukraine funding is a lot, but it's not quite as much as France. France has spent more than $2 billion in U.S. to Ukraine and at the same time France is fining shopkeepers for keeping their doors open and running their air conditioning so we can send more weapons to one of the most corrupt governments in the world. In France, illuminated signs are banned from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.
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For our part, the United States has sent more than $10 billion in military, that's 19 packages of weapons, to what Mitch McConnell tells us is the most important thing in the world. Congress has approved more than $30 billion in additional spending. So, how is all that spending working out? Are we winning the war in Ukraine? Have we bankrupted Vladimir Putin like Joe Biden claimed we would?
The ruble just hit a seven-year high against the U.S. dollar in June. Take a look at this chart comparing the Russian ruble against the euro. Russia is doing well. Europe is not doing well at all. Now, Joe Biden is calling for an unconditional surrender from Vladimir Putin. Here's the weird thing. By any actual reality-based measure, Vladimir Putin is not losing the war in Ukraine. He is winning the war in Ukraine and Joe Biden looks at that as we won't stop until you proffer an unconditional surrender.
This isn't bad policy. This is nuts. It makes no sense. In fact, it only makes sense if the goal is to completely destroy the West in order to make way for Chinese global dominance. What would be the other explanation for this behavior?
