Baltic Dry Index. 1145 +61 Brent Crude
46.55
Eurasian Snow cover. (How bad will
winter be?)
On two occasions I have been
asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the
right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of
confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
Charles Babbage
We open today with China and Japan trying to come
to terms with President Elect Trump. Like the politicians of the dying EUSSR,
few in Asia expected a Donald Trump victory, and as with Brexit in Europe, no
one seems to have prepared for a Donald Trump presidency. Unlike Brexit, which
has turned into a snail’s pace car crash, the Donald Trump presidency is like
preparing for an asteroid hit on January 20, 2017. So much to do and so little
time.
China, U.S. must avoid excessive mutual suspicion: Chinese envoy
China and the United States must avoid being overly suspicious of each
other's strategic intentions, China's ambassador to the United States said on Wednesday
while looking ahead to the Presidency of Donald Trump.
Trump lambasted China throughout the U.S. election campaign, drumming up
headlines with his pledges to slap 45 percent tariffs on imported Chinese goods
and to label the country a currency manipulator on his first day in office.
He has also vowed to build up the U.S. Navy in what advisers say will be
a strategy to reassure countries in the Asia-Pacific worried about China's
assertive pursuit of territorial claims.
China's Washington envoy, Cui Tiankai, told a film screening to
commemorate the 1979 normalization of U.S.-China ties that after “a most
unusual political season,” it was important to build consensus and identify
common ground.
He said both countries were already cooperating on many issues, but
added:
"We have to make greater efforts to promote better mutual
understanding and we should be careful not to be overly suspicious about each
other’s strategic intentions.
"There are people here in the United States who believe that
everything that China does is aimed at challenging the United States' s global
dominance, and there are people who believe that everything the U.S. is doing
is aimed at containing China.
"I think both views are wrong."
There would inevitably be problems and challenges in the next four
years, Cui said, "but ... I am quite confident that, on the whole, the
relationship will move forward on a stable and right track."
Cui said the countries had a shared responsibility to cooperate on
issues such as terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
"We both want stability in the world. We both strive for a stronger
global economy, and we both need a better natural environment. Common goals
call for a close partnership."
Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spoke by phone on Monday and Xi
told the U.S. President-elect cooperation was the only choice for the world's
two largest economies, while Trump said they had established a "clear
sense of mutual respect."
Nevertheless,
Trump's election has created uncertainty when Beijing hopes for stability as it
faces daunting reform challenges at home, slowing growth and a leadership
reshuffle that will assemble a new party elite around Xi in late 2017.
More
China Tells Trump That Climate Change Is No Hoax It Invented
November 16, 2016 — 3:38 PM GMT Updated on November 16, 2016 — 8:29 PM
GMT
China couldn’t have invented global warming as a hoax to harm U.S.
competitiveness because it was Donald Trump’s Republican predecessors who started
climate negotiations in the 1980s, China’s Vice Foreign Minister Liu Zhenmin
said.
U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush supported the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in initiating global warming talks
even before China knew that negotiations to cut pollution were starting, Liu
told reporters at United Nations talks on Wednesday in Marrakech, Morocco.
Ministers and government officials from almost 200 countries gathered in Marrakech this week are awaiting a decision by President-elect Trump on whether he’ll pull the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement to tackle climate change. The tycoon tweeted in 2012 that the concept of global warming “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” China’s envoy rejected that view.
“If you look at the history of climate change negotiations, actually it was initiated by the IPCC with the support of the Republicans during the Reagan and senior Bush administration during the late 1980s,” Liu told reporters during an hour-long briefing.
More
Japan PM Abe seeks to build trust with Trump, stresses alliance vital
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Thursday that he wants to
build a relationship of trust when he meets U.S. President-elect Donald Trump
this week, stressing that the two-way alliance is the core of Tokyo's diplomacy
and security.
Abe, set to meet Trump later on Thursday in New York, is expected to be
the first foreign leader to do so since the U.S. billionaire real estate
magnate's election on Nov. 8.
The U.S.-Japan alliance "is the cornerstone of Japan's diplomacy
and security. Only when there is trust does an alliance come alive," Abe
told reporters before leaving Tokyo, Kyodo news agency reported.
However details about the meeting remain unclear, with Trump's
transition team not responding to requests for comment on the meeting.
On Wednesday, Japanese officials said they had not finalised when or
where in New York it would take place, who would be invited, or in some cases
whom to call for answers.
More
U.S. panel urges ban on China state firms buying U.S. companies
U.S. lawmakers should take action to ban China's state-owned firms from
acquiring U.S. companies, a congressional panel charged with monitoring
security and trade links between Washington and Beijing said on Wednesday.
In its annual report to Congress, the U.S.-China Economic and Security
Review Commission said the Chinese Communist Party has used state-backed
enterprises as the primary economic tool to advance and achieve its national
security objectives.
The report recommended Congress prohibit U.S. acquisitions by such
entities by changing the mandate of CFIUS, the U.S. government body that
conducts security reviews of proposed acquisitions by foreign firms.
"The Commission recommends Congress amend the statute authorizing
the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to bar Chinese
state-owned enterprises from acquiring or otherwise gaining effective control
of U.S. companies," the report said.
CFIUS, led by the U.S. Treasury and with representatives from eight
other agencies, including the departments of Defense, State and Homeland
Security, now has veto power over acquisitions from foreign private and
state-controlled firms if it finds that a deal would threaten U.S. national
security or critical infrastructure.
If enacted, the panel's recommendation would essentially create a
blanket ban on U.S. purchases by Chinese state-owned enterprises.
More
We
close for the day with good/bad news for oil. As we reported a couple of months
ago with Pioneer’s West Texas oil discovery, oil may be heading much, much
lower, for far longer. Short tar sands, short Saudi Arabia, short Scotland,
short OPEC.
Shale oil in Permian’s Wolfcamp formation biggest in U.S.
November 15, 2016 2:26 PM
In a troubled oil world, the Permian Basin is the gift that keeps on
giving.
One portion of the giant field, known as the Wolfcamp formation, was
found to hold 20 billion barrels of oil trapped in four layers of shale beneath
West Texas. That’s almost three times larger than North Dakota’s Bakken play
and the single largest U.S. unconventional crude accumulation ever assessed,
according to the U.S. Geological Survey. At current prices, that oil is worth
almost $900 billion.
The estimate lends credence to the assertion from Pioneer Natural
Resources Chief Executive Officer Scott Sheffield that the Permian’s shale
could hold as much as 75 billion barrels, making it second only to Saudi
Arabia’s Ghawar field. Irving-based Pioneer has been increasing its production
targets all year as drilling in the Wolfcamp produced bigger gushers than the
company’s engineers and geologists forecast.
“The fact that this is the
largest assessment of continuous oil we have ever done just goes to show that,
even in areas that have produced billions of barrels of oil, there is still the
potential to find billions more,” Walter Guidroz, coordinator for the
geological survey’s energy resources program, said in the statement.
Oil explorers have been flocking to the Permian Basin in West Texas and
New Mexico to tap deposits so rich that they can generate profits even at lower
oil prices. A race to grab land in the Permian has been the main driver of a
surge of deals in the energy patch and the industry’s main source of good news.
Although the Permian has been gushing crude since the 1920s, its
multiple layers of oil-soaked shale remained largely untapped until the last
several years, when intensive drilling and fracturing techniques perfected in
other U.S. regions were adopted. The Wolfcamp, which is as much as a mile thick
in some places, has been one of the primary targets.
ConocoPhillips, the world’s largest independent oil producer by market
value, increased its estimate for the size of its Wolfcamp holdings on Nov. 10
to 1.8 billion barrels from 1 billion last year. A day earlier, Concho
Resources CEO Timothy Leach told investors and analysts that two recent wells
it drilled in the Wolfcamp were pumping an average of 2,000 barrels a day each.
Truth is ever to be found in
simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.
Isaac Newton
At the Comex silver depositories
Wednesday final figures were: Registered 30.90 Moz, Eligible 146.34 Moz,
Total 177.24 Moz.
Crooks and Scoundrels Corner
The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally
doubled over.
Today, so why does America have an
Electoral College? Mad King George’s revenge?
Blame the British Empire for the Electoral College
Nov 15, 2016 9:42 AM EST
By Noah
Feldman
There are two truths about the Electoral College: It ought to be abolished,
and it never will be. Calls for changing the constitutional election system
abound now that Hillary Clinton has won the popular
vote and lost the electoral vote, as Al Gore did in 2000. But it turns out
that the same Constitution that enshrines the Electoral
College effectively protects the small states from an amendment they don’t
want. The problem goes back to the nation's founding -- and short of abolishing
the states as effective sovereigns, it basically can’t be fixed.The small states, which benefit from candidates’ attention, would never consent to being marginalized through a proportional system that favors the interests of densely populated states. But replacing the Electoral College would take a constitutional amendment approved by two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the state legislatures. Even if the first bar could be cleared -- which is wildly unlikely -- overcoming the second is unimaginable.
The Catch-22 is no accident. It goes back to the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention and the summer of 1787. The most enlightened Founders, including James Madison, pressed hard for a proportional Senate alongside the proportional House. The small states blocked it. And along the way, the small states also entrenched an amendment process that makes it essentially impossible to overcome their will.
The story of the small states' stand is fascinating and deeply consequential, but let me clarify that the Electoral College itself was not primarily a concession to the small states. Rather, the Electoral College was a compromise between selection of the president by state legislatures or election by popular vote.
Madison and other centralizers, such as James Wilson of Pennsylvania, didn’t want the state legislatures to have too much power. They feared the states would pull the country apart, as seemed to be happening under the Articles of Confederation. But direct election, which Wilson strongly favored, had its own risks, including a splintered election if the populace hadn’t heard of the candidates -- or the election of an (ahem) unsuitable candidate by the untutored people.
The Electoral College is, however, almost proportional to population -- unlike the Senate, which was the small states’ main accomplishment.
---- So why did the Articles of Confederation give all states an equal say in Congress? Because on July 4, 1776, the United States came together in part as a union of 13 states that had been British colonies until that day. Acting as separate states, the new states gave each other equal weight -- like nations in the general assembly of the United Nations.
In other words, the accident of British colonial charters gave rise to
the system we now have -- and the great difficulty of amending it. This made no
sense in 1787, and it makes no sense now. But short of abolishing the states as
sovereign entities -- which plenty of reasonable people (from big states)
preferred at the founding -- there was no choice but to let the small states
get away with it.
The upshot? When it comes to the difficulty of amending the Constitution
to get rid of the Electoral College, you can blame it on the British Empire.
Solar & Related Update.
With events
happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this
section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap
AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards? DC?
A quantum computer next?
Trump cannot stop the clean energy revolution
Published: 15 Nov 2016, 14:58
It was some bitter irony the election of Donald Trump as US president
came during climate change talks in Marrakech.
Just as we heard 2016 could be the hottest year on record, just as
sentiment around the renewable energy sector was mounting new heights, a
political hand grenade was thrown into the ring from mid-West America.
Trump has had only contemptuous words for global warming memorably
insisting it was a Chinese hoax to undermine America.
On the campaign trail he vowed to scrap the Paris climate change
agreement ratified by Barack Obama barely two months ago.
One of the former game show host’s first acts since he beat Hillary
Clinton to the White House last week was to appoint another climate sceptic,
Myron Ebell, to head up the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump has promised to bring back coal and get America drilling for oil
again at full speed while disdaining Clinton’s message to build the US into a
world number one renewable powerhouse.
So is it all doom and gloom for clean tech in a world which also
threatens to become increasingly protectionist too? Will Trump influence
negatively impact already fragile green business confidence in post-Brexit
Britain?
It would clearly be foolish to think that Trump’s accession can be
positive, even if over the past week he has pedaled a slightly softer line on
issues such as the Obamacare health programme and that infamous pledge to build
a concrete wall with Mexico.
He may yet realize that threats to send cheap Chinese solar panels
packing back to Shanghai might be counterproductive.
Even if he did try to unpick the Paris climate agreement it is expected
to take years to complete. And he may have other priorities.
But the real reason why renewable power should not be devastated by
governments run by Trump - or even Theresa May – is that it is on a roll. The
price of clean power is falling all the time and even if politicians are
unwilling to act on that, many businesses are taking matters into their own
hands anyway.
New estimates from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial
Strategy released last week showed government expects the costs of large-scale
solar PV built in Britain to fall to £67
per megawatt hour by 2020. That compares to the £92 figure used just three
years ago and the £92.50 subsidy used for Hinkley Point C nuclear power station
running for 35 years.The solar figure for 2030 assessed by BEIS is £60, cheaper than onshore wind and combined cycle gas turbine plants.
More
The monthly Coppock Indicators finished October
DJIA: 18142
+32 Up NASDAQ: 5189 +31 Up. SP500: 2126 +46 Up.
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