I wonder about your Europe point, though. I go to Europe a lot, and paradoxically, when I go there, I feel like it's going into the future (relative to the U.S.), not the past. They've already got way more modern, high-tech manufacturing than the US, and are way way further along the curve in the transition to energy-saving renewables. It's possible that these advances are "too concentrated" and that they won't emerge a strong as the U.S. But I think that, conversely, the U.S. has too far to sprint to catch up (thinking of your $150 tln figure here) and it is too mired in political crisis to even focus on the "real building" it needs to do, expanding on the examples you've pointed out. (After all, our administration just killed a huge swathe of in-progress renewables rebuilding, setting things back a ton).
Yes, great question. I think when it comes to Europe, different countries will fare very differently. Norway looks better than most - Europe's biggest gas exporter, a $1.7 T sovereign wealth fund, 90% hydropower, and higher energy prices help them. Also, Sweden has both a hydro and nuclear grid, a real industrial base - SKF, Volvo, Sandvik, and produces 80% of the EU's iron ore.
Two I am less confident in - Germany, a fifth of their GDP is manufacturing, BUT that is very reliant on Russian gas, and Italy - imports 75% of energy and has 137% debt-to-GDP - also has the lowest fertility in Europe!
Germany is largely weaned off Russian gas, US LPG is coming in. However, they still burn a lot of coal. Von der Leyen recently admitted it was a mistake to close down nuclear. If you know German culture you will realise that is a cultural earthquake around 7 on Richter's scale.
Europe's strength historically has been closely related to its pluralism. EU in its central Brussels administration has not understood this. That has had some very negative effects. One is resistance to EU as such. Another is the work to make everything uniform. That has only benefitted Germany, until now. Germany has been arrogant and they have resisted change except when it comes to the energy transition (Die Energiewende), which has been a disaster. That has now come fully home to roost.
If you look closer Europe still has industrial knowledge across almost all industries. Scaling is in many cases more to the point than reinventing, scaling combined with innovation. Innovation has unfortunately been hampered by the rotating door culture of politics and dominant old industrial complexes. The current crisis is an opportunity to discard those chains.
US lpg will never replace cheap abundant pipeline gas, there is also a 2x cost factor. German auto manufacturing is in decline and BASF is shutting down and relocating a portion of its Ludwigshafen complex to the US and China.The age of European imperial power is in decline and Ukraine and Iran will accelerate that.
Correct, the LPG will always be more expensive. However, my main point is that Europe has been busy strangulating innovation. And the energy policy disaster has accellerated tje decline if the traditional industries resisting innovation.
Ukraine is among the most innovative countries in the world. A major American liability is our inability to see this. If we are ever to be accepted again by our true allies, whom Trump has worried so hard drive away, Ukraine will be a core power that keeps the Russian bear at bay.
I'm pretty sure that the EU will ditch USA LPG for Russian. Europe's pluralism makes it too weak to be an empire, so its only reliable move is to make nice with Russia again. Maybe after Russia Oreshniks the shit out of Kiev and tells EU: you're next.
This was has only begun to get hot. The heat is 90% USA's fault, and will be returned to it and then some after push that went to shove turns into genuine fisticuffs.
Russia is struggling. Ukraine has been systematically hitting their oil installations including ports. So even though price has gone up volume has gone severely down. And they lack the capability to rebuild in some cases. Consequently income is falling. Economy is being hit badly, inflation high.
iT'S BRUTAL. dRONES AND SATELLITES HAVE CREATED A NEW VERSION OF SLOW-MOVING ENTRENCHED FRONTAL WARFARE ALEBIR OFTEN FOUGHT AT VERY REMOTE RANGE. ACAPS oops)
But Russia has overall superior manufacturing, tech development, natural resources, and something else: friends. Real friends.
Russia will be alright. It's tough.
WWIII actually began, imo, in 2013-14 when Russia took control of Syrian skies, that is, asserted its personal aerial turf over its holdings and shot at our stuff... and we didn't respond. Maidan around the same time, the Chechnyan consolidation, ongoing sanction wars and decapitation strikes, then Russia makes a decisive (and wise, imo) move in Ukraine, proxy wars keep mounting, then the hokum Oct 7 attack on Israel, more self-inflicted than not (911 redux), and pretty soon, we have a serious hot war on our hands just as a madman is losing the last of his marbles while another madman, Netanyahu, leads him around by his ego's terror of icky images and such coming forth.
This will continue until either our military mutinies (risky, requires eliminating/neutralizing a LOT of Mossad and IDF personnel stateside) or the Zionistas get their nuke game on whereupon I believe we will see a shitload of Oreshniks and such rain on Israel from Belarus and elsewhere, and all hell will break loose, including possible surgical strikes on the USA mainland just to show us that they can.
Military silos and Air Force bases in North Dakota are often fairly remote from large populations, and cluster warhead Oershniks bearing tactical nuke warheads would be a stunning blow to US morale without the outrage caused by massive civilian casualties. Just heavy military casualties and materiel destruction.
Also, there's this, courtesy some ai named Frederico mu-Tasim:
"The U.S. nuclear arsenal is facing significant, well-documented challenges due to aging, with systems often relying on decades-old technology like floppy disks and 1970s-era computers. As detailed by the AP News and reports from The Heritage Foundation, the U.S. is launching a $>\(\$750\) billion effort over the next decade to modernize all three legs of its nuclear triad (bombers, submarines, and ICBMs) to address these risks. Key Concerns Regarding the Aging Arsenal:
Decaying Infrastructure: Many nuclear warheads, along with their storage and production facilities, are decades old and were not designed to last this long.
Technical Obsolescence: The arsenal uses antiquated components, including 8-inch floppy disks for controlling systems, making maintenance difficult and creating potential cyber vulnerabilities. Production Delays: The U.S. has not built a new nuclear warhead since the end of the Cold War, relying instead on life-extension programs. There are significant delays in producing new plutonium pits—the triggers for nuclear weapons.
Personnel & Safety Issues: GAO reports have highlighted declining morale and training issues among missile crews responsible for the aging systems, raising concerns about safety and reliability*.
Modernization Efforts: Cost: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that sustaining and updating the arsenal will cost over \(\$750\) billion from 2023–2032.
Replacement Plan: The plan involves replacing almost every component of the current, aging system with new technologies.
Strategic Concerns: Experts argue that failing to modernize will leave the U.S. with an unreliable deterrent in the face of rising nuclear capabilities from China and Russia."
And, to misquote Strongbad, "Hold both hands before you like you're holding two crystal orbs and let the weirdness flow."
"Russia has ... Real friends" Hey, that's a good joke. "Real friends" like North Korea and Iran. And then there's China: with friends like that, who needs enemies?
"when Russia took control of Syrian skies" How's that looking now?
"Russia has overall superior manufacturing, tech development" Another good joke. Like we all want to buy Russian cars, Russian electro-tech, Russian computer chips, Russian cell phones.
In PPP terms, Europe's economy is about 4 times that of Russia, and its advantage in industrial capacity is similar.
I know the capabilities (or not) of the Russian oil services. It is rudimentary. The exports speak for themselves. Ukraine will continue to hit the terminals and other installations.
As for the US nuclear installations, yes the problems are well known. What you ignore is that both US and Russia have arsenal enough to obliterate civilisation (such as it is) several times over. So even if a significant proportion does not work it does not matter. And that is why it will not be used.
Russia never wanted to conquer Ukraine. They don't want the headache of acquiring the mess that is Ukraine. They don't need Ukraine's minerals or even grain. They are not working to 'win' or 'conquer'. They are looking to achieve enough overwhelming leverage to create a new world order of stability and peace. Just because you have superior tactical weapons doesn't mean you should use them willy-nilly. There are these things called nukes, and they swing both ways, and the USA still has around 6K of them, and I've conservatively venture that a third of them still work.
Just because a boxer's best move is a strong right hook doesn't mean that the proper opening is yet available to make that swing, in the process opening yourself up to your opponent's strike.
Putin/China/Iran aren't playing 5-D chess, just simple old-school rope-a-dope. The dope is about roped, so now is a time when knockout punches can be effectively delivered without turning your local geopolitical landscape into a death zone.|
Germany/EU blather about invading Russia and arming Ukraine to do so... which increases the likelihood of Ukraine turning and attacking Europe when they can no longer withstand Russian force and sign a real peace treaty. EU will have its hands full just keeping refugees from overwhelming their borders more than already.
When it comes introducing major tactical escalations that outclass all your opponent's non-nuclear arsenal, you better be prepared to face that arsenal, especially with a senile megalomaniac at the USA/Israel helm.
German companies are relocating production to the United States and China due to significantly cheaper and more stable energy costs. This trend has accelerated since 2022 due to high energy prices in Germany, driven by the reduction in Russian gas supplies and the transition to renewable energy.
I think you need to look at heliumcartel.com to see what the hidden issue is... also, America does not manufacture the fertilizer required to grow our foods but more importantly is the Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) required for every Diesel tractor, truck and pickup to run since 2010/13 is made of 35% urea... fertilizer.
The Haber process that makes ammonia (and downstream from that, urea) runs on natural gas, which the US has plenty of. The fertilizers that the US does import are potassium (Canada) and phosphate (Morocco). US and Canadian agriculture will still run, but it will require higher prices because the inputs will cost more.
Don't forget sulphur which among other things fertiliser depends on. Prices are high as a lot of that came via Hormuz as well. There are already US farmers who have switched to soy beans because the corn math does not add up. That in turn will cause shortage in animal feed stock, driving meat prices up (and probably farm bankruptcies).
"Corn math" in general only holds up because 40% or more (30 million acres) goes to the ethanol which American drivers are forced to buy at the gas pump. At this point, the requirement is nothing more than a national subsidization of midwestern farmers, with an energy-out to energy-in ratio of little if any more than zero.
Europes big problem is that renewable wind and solar are not competitive nor green on a full cycle basis. That is the reason their manufacturers like German car makers are fleeing Germany and establishing new factories in the US,
Mexico, Brazil and China.
Unless they embrace nuclear energy promptly they are doomed to continue burning coal and wood.
I did some quick research on this, and it seems quite not true. Europe gets so much gross electricity from renewables (> 48% as of 2024 figures), there's not really a quantity issue (which I take to be the meat of your "full cycle" criticism). However, there is a cost issue. Electricity is way too expensive in Europe for the competitiveness of power-heavy industries. But (and this is key) the cost issue cannot be disentangled from the impacts of (first) the Ukraine war, and now, the Iran war.
Logically speaking, then, if renewables expand enough, supply increases and costs will come down through market forces. Sure, nuclear or coal could also achieve that, but there's no indication that more renewables (plus grid-scale storage and better transmission infrastructure) wouldn't continue to expand exponentially and achieve this outcome.
“Gross available” and “used when needed” are very different things that the green army rarely interrogate. Large scale batteries will just produce enormous pits of toxic metals waste (not to mention that already produced by the wind turbines and solar).
Solid coal waste from burning enough coal to equal energy produced by solar panels installed in 2024 would be 80 to 100 times greater than panel waste. No mention of how toxic that solid coal waste is, and no mention of how many times greater the waste is that goes into the atmosphere. Lithium batteries are already largely recyclable and will continue to become more so.
Good point, but think you refer to primary waste. I mean the secondary and tertiary waste from lithium and rare earth metals production for what is at best a 10-15yr product (for batteries). The recycling of the batteries is a distraction from the huge toxic tailing pits, massive chemical (oil) inputs in extraction and raw diesel input in its production (like coal I’ll admit). I’d love lithium or other battery tech to work, but a transparent comparison is critical. The energy (coal/gas) input into carbon fibre turbines blades (for a 20yr lifespan and patchy on again off again peaky output) is questionable too.
Recycling directly addresses the mining waste issue by reducing the amount of mining needed: https://www.abiresearch.com/blog/ev-battery-recycling-in-us It is also the case that at least one major recycler has found that it can extend the life of more batteries than it actually has to recycle.
Let’s see what happens with European “green” experiment. Would love to see it succeed for the sake of our planet. But Nuclear is going to be necessary until renewables become a LOT cheaper. How they going to decrease cost of renewables with prices of the industrial metals required to build solar panels and windmills about to explode higher.
If nuclear is so cheap, how come the only way it can be built is with massive state subsidies? Hinkley Point C is now up to £48bn for 3.2GW and still a long way behind schedule. Compare with solar at <£2bn for the same capacity or 5x (£10bn) to match output. Note that newly built Flammanville only achieved 25% load factor in its first year of operation….
Renewables don’t supply energy when you need it look at the German data much of their renewable energy is exported they only use a small amount themselves. Smoke and mirrors.
I worked in the wind tower industry for over a decade and I'm afraid that you have a misconception about cost. Wind towers are not less expensive means to produce power by any means. When you factor in all costs they need to maintain around $50,000 MW to just break even for the first 10 years iirc. They are far more expensive than other forms of energy production.
Iowa produces over 60% of its electricity from wind. They're not doing it because they're green any more than Texas is (leading U.S. state for wind production). Iowa electricity is cheaper than in other mid-West states (like Indiana, which has discouraged wind in favor of coal).
In my opinion, that subsidy has been appropriate for a growing energy sector. We'll see what happens when the subsidy for new projects is greatly reduced starting July 1 of this year. But if you want to talk about energy subsidies, I'd like to bring up the 30 million acres in corn for ethanol and 15 million acres in soy for diesel which American drivers pay for at the pump which has virtually no net energy gain. If used for solar or wind, that acreage could produce 60-80 times as much energy for turning the wheels of vehicles.
It isn't sold for less, it's sold generally at a slight to moderate profit. The average home uses less than 3k kwh per year while a tower will produce enough to power approximately around 300 homes at current usage and prices. This will enable them to pay off the tower in its usable lifespan while making a mild profit.
Yes, though the price per Kw doesn’t fully encompass the complex and expensive challenges that come with transmission, storage, and voltage regulation. The great news is these engineering challenges will be resolved. The current price of electricity in the UK is very uncompetitive and a drag on the economy. Ironically, its abundance of wind, nuclear buildout, and Rolls-Royce’s SMR program could make U.K. energy some of the cheapest in Europe in 10-15 years. It’s a bitter pill today in the hope of more energy independence in the future.
Excellent article but you left out one very important factor in any industrial or manufacturing operation. Experience.
While the US was deindustrializing, the industrial (particularly mining) and manufacturing world was going through an information, automation, and basic technology revolution. Not only did this provide actual participants the real world experiences that are critical to creating “best practices” processes. It created the experience and knowledge base to not only develop those practices, it created the understanding to integrate those practices in to the entire interconnected system.
Interconnectiveness is critical, which you apply noted in general. In specifics, that experience and information base is something America lacks. You can’t create 30 years of revolutionary experience overnight. Once behind, You can’t get that disadvantage back easily.
A final point. Going through that development process not only shapes the processes, it screens and shapes the people needed for that world. Give the dismal state of American education, we don’t have the people to execute an industrial renaissance. And unless there are massive changes in the stultification of American education, it will take generations to educate the people needed. Time we don’t have.
That said great article. I always think of the classic article I read in my youth “I, Pencil” when I think about interconnectiveness. If everyone understood that article, you great work you be unnecessary. “I, Pencil” should be taught to every child and every politician. And maybe your Uncle.
Aaron, perhaps your anecdotal observations could go a little deeper and take into account the evidence-based research that's out there if you look for it. Expansion has been tried; Germany spent around $500B on renewables and to what end? They admit themselves that it didn't work. Intermittency and the need to have stable backup power e.g., natural gas generators that are available instantly when the wind droughts come or the sun goes behind clouds are needed to prevent the blackouts that happened in e.g., Texas, Spain and Portugal. Solar and wind rarely meet their nameplate capacity, and unlike nonrenewable energy supplies, are inconsistent at best. The levelized cost of energy is higher for wind and solar than for non- renewables. This was all true before both wars you mentioned. Show me one city on the planet that runs totally on renewables.
You can't change physics, you can't change the fact that energy is the economy and that energy density is an important aspect of economic development, but you can examine your perspectives. The author of this essay has pointed the way to considering interconnectivity and you seemed to like that. Considering e.g. climate change to the exclusion of everything else and thinking that renewables are the only possible solution to the climate change scenario advanced by some is foolish and even the IPCC has abandoned its unattainable RPC 8.5 objectives.
"They admit themselves that it didn't work." Who is this "they"? I don't think it is who you imply it is. On the other hand, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said in March 2026 that Europe’s move away from nuclear power was a “strategic mistake”.
Also, in 2025 the EU estimated that 500 billion EUR was needed for the period to 2030 to upgrade the grid. Even assuming the money is there (it is not and the quarrel is getting bad) the industrial base is not capable of anything like that. Until recently I used two years as the lead time for transformers. About a month ago it became clear it is now more like four years. And even if the equipment was ready the experienced crews to install and commission is nowhere near the required capacity. You don't pull those out like rabbits from a hat.
I think we can be successful at setting things back technologically but also be successful in bringing this country forward spiritually, much above the rest of the nations. The rest of the world can have their AI tech and globo homo.
All true but they are not equal due to lack of full availability. To equal availability of nuclear wind and solar need to have at least double the maximum total generation and storage capacity of nuclear that has 97% availability. What happened in Spain and Portugal is instructive. If that were to happen in Northern Europe in winter it would be humanitarian disaster.
"What happened in Spain and Portugal is instructive" True, but what it was actually instructive of was not that solar and wind were inappropriate, but that they require corresponding upgrades in network management--which Spain and Portugal are undertaking. Average residential kWh cost in Germany is about 70% more than in Spain.
Europe and renewables are a complete dead end. Take it from someone in the industry. You can't have renewables power industry. It needs to be reliable, you must have 100% non renewable backup, including for the peaks, such as if you have a cold winter. It just doesn't work and Europe is completely losing the renewables battle anyway, China has way better technology and cheaper than anything Europe has got. Nuclear, the only way out of this conundrum is barely being debated in Europe. It's frankly a complete and utter joke. European industry is dead and the only way out is to secure cheap energy reindustrialise, not do everything possible to destroy industry and literally become commies.
As for Iran, this is all just posturing now, the war is over and has been for weeks. The only places the current situation will absolutely decimate us Europe and parts of Africa. There will be a little pain for everyone else no doubt, but ARC (America, Russia, China) are willing to pay this price to kill the globalists in Europe and the Middle East.
This battle is way bigger than it seems. ARC are at last taking the pricing power and control of trade routes, away from these people and ending the forever wars. It's not going to be easy, there will be pain, and it will take time, but the reasons why the first world is so finished is because we don't make anything any more. If you do, wages rise, the productive economy grows and everything fixes itself, but saying citizens can't pay more when they are already poor is missing the point. It is a chicken and egg, you have to bring productive (non extractive) jobs home if you want to save the country. On balance, it's never actually "cheaper" to outsource your manufacturing/productive jobs. It is in the short term, but when it kills the good wages at home, you end up where we are now. Bringing back the manufacturing is not going to be easy and you will need tariffs etc initially to make it even remotely viable, as you point out, but it MUST be done. There is literally no other choice, but it is something we must support if we don't want to turn into some commie hellhole.
With all due respect, I thought I made it very clear why that means nothing. You need that energy ALL OF THE TIME. Not when the wind blows, or when the sun is out, it needs to be available 24/7. You can't just shut down production because there isn't enough power. For some production facilities, restarting after a shutdown could take months and if it's disorderly, then you might lose the facility altogether. I'm sorry but industry just can't work that way, and the only reason it hasn't already been a disaster is that so much industry has already left, that electricity demand is way down from its peak some years ago. I mean Spain has already had blackouts, even with the reduced demand. I have no idea what it did to industry, but I am certain it wasn't good.
If you don't make anything, you will soon be fkd, the fact that our leaders don't even understand this is already all the information I need to state categorically that Europe is finished unless we get rid of these delusional commie Marxists in charge and become the old Europe we were before the EU.
It also needs to be cheap, which renewables absolutely are not, especially if you need 100% backup. I think solar can work when it's on houses and you use the electricity yourself, otherwise it's all terrible for the environment and ironically, even for CO2, because all that production just leaves for China or India where it's way more CO2 intensive and they ship the products right back to us, while destroying our industry at the same time. We're even paying them to do it by giving them CO2 subsidies… It's just pure insanity, the whole lot of it… so sad to see…
With all due respect, comments about "when the sun doesn't shine, when the wind doesn't blow" might have made some sense 5 years ago, before battery prices dropped by 50% or more, but they don't now. As far as "terrible for the environment" goes, coal produces 80 to 100 times as much solid waste (full of heavy metals) for the amount of electricity produced as solar even before you start counting the CO2 added to the atmosphere. For a huge variety of circumstances where solar makes sense for a nation you can look at Pakistan, where individuals have chosen to install behind-the-meter solar amounting to 50% of the national grid capacity, or Australia where 39% of homes have solar and electricity prices are falling, or Saudi Arabia, where they are installing solar to replace a million barrels of oil a day which they burn to generate electricity and account at $4 a barrel so they can sell it on the market at today's price, or look up "solarpunk in Africa".
I'm just telling you how it is as far as industry sees it. The amount of storage that is available is still pitiful anyway and isn't going to change the situation any time soon. You can also build clean coal plants that don't spew all those heavy metals into the atmosphere and, they've been around for decades. Also don't forget we're taking about Europe here, not some sunny place… and I mentioned that personal solar for your own use is fine and works by some metrics, but it's useless for industry.
You can continue to delude yourself about renewables all you want, but it doesn't change the facts. Thanks for engaging anyway.
Here's perplexity: "yes, coal pollution controls can dramatically cut heavy metals, but the statement is not a good argument for coal being clean. In the context of clean electrification, the stronger point is that solar’s end-of-life waste is a manageable materials problem, while coal’s waste is ongoing, large-scale, and includes both toxic ash and massive CO2 emissions".
Also, regarding the assertion that solar is "useless for industry", check this out:
The point is well taken that Europe is less than ideal for solar, but considering that Germany’s southernmost point is about 47.27° N, about 75-80% of the world's population lives in sunnier places, between 47.27° N and 47.27° S.
That's certainly a way to plug the current gap quickly, but europe must stand on its own eventually. That means developing it's fossil fuel reserves and embracing nuclear. There is no other choice, unless they are intentionally trying to destroy themselves... Which they are I suppose, but that's a whole other conversation...
Europe is far worse off than America. Industrial output in Germany, the industrial engine of the EU has fallen yet again, the continent is deindustrializing and many industrial conglomerates are moving their production to Asia and yes: The US. (The reasons are multiple.)
As for “modern high tech manufacturing” it is behind America and far behind Asia.
Great points. I think Europe’s largest vulnerability is the lack of software/A.I./tech firms that are driving the American and Chinese economies. This also creates huge issues with reliance, cyber security, and data privacy. Building a Silicon Valley in Europe will require a lot of collaboration between government, top-tier universities, and private capital. Maybe something similar to what the U.K. has done with engineering and life sciences in the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. There’s cities in Europe with thriving tech scenes, but none of them have achieved critical mass.
Energy saving renewables? My understanding is that they are wildly inefficient, particularly windmills (construction, maintenance, etc.). Solar is similar.
Im curious about your EU comment, in BCN, people (except perhaps at the top) seem oblivious. Sure, some talk about being green, but “complicated” things are totally out of conversation, in my experience.
you make sense at a time when almost nothing in the media does make sense
I would like to know what you think about priorities and realistic schedules for
this "re industrialization", seems to me that it will take a long time and radical changes in government policies and public expectations will be required
Thank you. I agree. It wasn't a coincidence that both of my innovation/industrialization "success stories" had nothing to do with the government. - I'd actually repeat my note to an earlier comment - entrepreneurs thrive despite politicians' best efforts, not because of them. I am not a Rep or Dem, not a red or a blue; I find both parties disdainful. But as long as the reward system is in place, entrepreneurs will play the game in front of them. Now this can change if the rewards are removed - think Argentina pre-1929 versus post.
I’m constantly comparing us to Argentina. The government enriching themselves and running the country into the ground while the majority of Argentinians (and now Americans) have no idea it’s happening as they grow poorer and poorer.
The only thing is, we absolutely, positively do NOT need, nor should we be moving into, a world based around AI. AI is a false savior.
Take your example, Weyerhaeuser. AI will apply the same wrongheaded forest “management” logic that Wall Street has been using for decades, only on steroids. The results will be disastrous on many levels.
The people programming the data collection drones have no understanding or interest in what a forest actually is: a vastly complex living being that exists both above and under ground, and which changes and evolves over time. It is NOT just a collection of one or two species of trees that our (temporary) modern civilization finds physically useful. Nor is it strictly an engineering equation that can be managed to yield a consistent long-term “answer” through human-initiated inputs based on limited understanding and patience. Unlike biologically impoverished factory tree farms, forests are dynamic systems that take time to think and respond to ever-changing conditions. But debts must be paid and investors need yield NOW!! So who wins in that scenario? The forests? Humanity in the long run? Or the investors and tech companies “optimizing yield” through constant costly re-arranging of hydrocarbons and other raw materials which, as we’re seeing right now, can be threatened very easily, leading to not only ecosystem simplification and illness, but also mass chaos when the management system
inevitably breaks down? The Big Pharma model of environmental management is profitable in the short term, but disastrously deadly in the long term.
The ecocidal logic of our monetary system can’t replicate the long-term understanding of forest health and productivity possessed by aboriginal peoples and classically-educated foresters of old. Living forests don’t understand, and can’t cope with, the cold mindset of young engineers whose only experience with nature is the occasional mid-day jog through chemically managed grass and ornamental trees of a city park. Robots do not correct the deficits in understanding and insight caused by a culture that emphasizes disconnection from nature, self and society; it multiplies them. And creates both denatured, unsustainable tree farms where forests used to be, and denatured, unsustainable robots of flesh where humans used to be.
The subtle shift from machines thinking like humans to humans thinking like machines has already begun and been advancing for the last several decades, with the rise of the internet. I remember how I struggled to understand how to use search engines with key words, because that doesn’t comply with creative thought. And look at how creativity in young people has declined! Basic curiosity, as well. As have social skills and even fundamental education. Ask an “old person” raised in analog data to find major countries on a map, and that’s easy for them. Ask a lot of people raised during the digital age, when all the world’s knowledge is contained in a glowing square at their fingertips, and they struggle to identify the nation they were born and live in.
Ever more basic stupidity, coupled with an “I don’t give a crap, why do I need to know anything because the world around me takes care of everything?” attitude is the promise, and the result, of an ever more technologically advanced world. And that is reflected in the culture and environment we create around us. First, wisdom is lost, then fundamental education, then even any desire to learn, or, if not that in the wider sense, then the desire to understand the world beyond how it can be bent and manipulated to one’s will, and how to design increasingly unforgiving tools to do just that. Technology becomes a one-way street to our own extinction.
Listening skills, in every sense, are among the first casualties of increasing technology, and once lost, the deficits in insight and then wisdom, are virtually impossible to reclaim. I fail to see how stunting the ability of human beings to hear and extract any information from the many complex levels of the environment, beyond the most immediate and obvious surface data, can be good for our species, or the living Gaia we depend upon for our survival. Maybe the executives at Weyerhaeuser understand, and can explain if they get a moment to look up from their quarterly spreadsheets. But the pied tech bro pipers assure us that more tech is the only yellow brick road to future human survival and happiness, and we blissfully follow them, ignoring the corpses of our own fallen victims littering the road to the increasingly stripped down, wasted, sterile, financially impoverished and unforgiving Utopia.
In the end, the worship of technology (and, yes, it does have all the essential qualities of religion), will continue to drive the gaps and divides among an increasingly fragmented human race, and give ever more wealth and power to the few while creating the self-defeating Idiocracy for the masses. The benefits of technology don’t accrue along a straight line that slants up and to the right. They accrue along an n-shaped curve with a wicked downslope that will be as easy to climb out of as it approaches bottom, as the interior curve of a porcelain bowl for a bug trapped at the bottom.
I guess the coming technocalypse will either smash the bug, or shatter the bowl. Maybe the outcome for each of us will depend largely upon how much of our minds, bodies and souls we’ve already outsourced to the machine instead of to the forest. I think most of us are in for some rude awakenings.
Hear, hear! I am also an analog-raised person who has seen the rise of thd digital world - good and bad. In the beginning of the digital age there was a saying: garbage in, garbage out. AI has so far shown itself to be garbage out. But what do you expect from imperfect humans? Does no one remember The Terminator? Geez.
Impressive. That is an impassioned, thoughtful rebuttal. Comments such as yours are why a came to Substack. To digest your above comment surely deserves a longer article. Bravo, well done. I can only hope the torch light of your opinions will shine further. Thank you for the gravitas of your contribution.
There is nothing that AI and drones can do that humans can’t! And humans were doing this for thousands of years in various parts of the world for millennia before anybody even thought of having robots do it for us.
Programmed by people who may or may not be good at understanding how to work with living ecosystems, or motivated by regenerative instead of extractive principles.
Who runs the world, after all? The regenerates, or the extractors?
And what happens when there are vanishingly few humans who actually have any experience with farms, forests or nature in general? What happens after we outsource all of our knowledge base and even capacity to listen to mature, to the robots? We lose our last connections to our biological roots, all the psychological influence the natural world has upon us, our caring about the real world, even much of the rest of our gut bacteria. We lose a great chunk of what makes us human. And do my think for one minute that having robots do our forestry and farming is going to “free people up to relax in nature, write poetry, sing to the animals” and other nonsense that the Universal Basic Income peddlers spew. It will just unemploy many if people whose jobs still involve working directly with nature, and enable ever more masses to live in sterile urban environments where their only connections to the natural world will be reduced to raising a goldfish in a bowl, or playing video games in which avatars compete to kill animals or each other in hyper realistic electronic representations of the outdoors. While they really on totally unloved food that’s been grown, and eventually cooked and served, by humanoids. Because, hey, they can be us better and more efficiently and conveniently that we can be ourselves, so why not? In the name of making our lives easier and more enjoyable, of course.
It’s a great step along the way to turning ourselves into the gray aliens. Is that the future you want? NOT me!!
Thanks for your analysis, Jay. Well prior to this war, there were a few who said a commodities super-cycle was coming. Granted, they didn't expect it to land with a bang but they understood those who produced important elements needed in multiple processes would be in the driver's seat as demand increased.
In America is for every success story, there are many who came out of high school without the skills and knowledge they should have. Shop classes were shut down, as if everyone were going to college and even some colleges leave a lot to be desired. With so little industry left, these typically get lower-paying service jobs and struggle most of their lives. Many K-12 schools are a disaster. The kids are just pushed through, regardless. It is criminal, but no one seems to care enough to do something.
The idea America can build more factories again is pure fantasy. No country which deindustrialized has ever made any successful drive to bring back manufacturing and America is no different. While the Administration' jawboned about new factories built, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing continued to slide this last full year and continues to do so. There cannot be any significant number of plants built when manufacturing jobs are drying up.
A billionaire President made the worst miscalculation of his career and everyone else will pay for it. All those factories you mentioned shutting down for lack of certain key elements means those employees are not paid. Many, will slip from the edge of middle class back into poverty, which is tragic The billionaire President probably won't lose a dime. His whole family has no doubt made money on this war. There may be no justice is this world, but there will be in the next. Thanks again, Jay. Will be passing this columns on to family and friends.
Vietnam hasn't reindustrialized; they were never industrialized before. Not to mention that Asians aren't afraid of work. The Post-WWII economies still had lots of people, including the management and engineers who knew how to run industries. All they needed were the buildings to be rebuilt, which had been bombed. America is different; we have effectively been deindustrialized for decades now. All the managers, engineers, and workers are long retired and most Americans don't want to work in a factory. Americans are soft; Asians will work and work to make a business go. The ones who come to America; their kids are going to college for math and science degrees because their parents want and push them to succeed. Too few Americans have that kind of drive; they sit around and wail about the inequalities. The Asians see nothing but opportunities. It is how one views the world which counts ultimately in life.
You're wrong about Germany post-WWII. There was literally a deindustrialization campaign across the country immediately after the war. Nearly half of German men were killed or wounded in WWII.
America is the preferred destination for young people seeking university education. Asian industrial powerhouses are built and run primarily by Asians with US degrees and training.
Americans are flocking to institutions like Universal Technical Institute (UTI), which now has over 27,000 students. UTI grows its student body by over 10% a year, while traditional US universities are capping class sizes, shrinking, or closing. The demographic group with the highest SAT scores (after Asians) has already been systematically removed from traditional U.S. universities, where the entire nationwide student body is only 22% white males.
American youth, like youth anywhere, are ambitious when they get rewarded for their efforts.
You are referencing the Morgenthau Plan, which was a proposal to weaken Germany following World War II by eliminating its arms industry and civilian industry. That proposal came from Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. With the Soviet Union getting the atom bomb and effectively putting up the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe, any thought of neutering German industry died a quick death.
India is an up and coming economy; we are a declining economy. No worries, when the Dollar is worth nothing, we'll probably make things for the rich Chinese and we'll make precious little doing it. Auto plants are assembly lines. Much of the product is already together like the engine and transmission. Even Ford ran a recent TV ad stating how many vehicles they "assembled." This is the term they used. Not to mention that foreign companies bring the money back home.
RedBaron, what an inept and unsustainable comparison.
Let's look at one single stat, which is my favorite when comparing the vigor of economies: GDP per capita
US -- GDP per capita, 2026 estimated by the IMG = $94,430
India -- $2,813
The US is the largest economy on the planet, the wellspring of innovation and technology and India is a third world country bravely growing out of what is essentially one of the poorest nations on the planet.
The US is a whale whilst India is a tadpole.
The USD -- using "DXY" as a proxy for relative strength v a basket of other convertible currencies -- shows a slightly above average strength and no evidence of comparative weakness looking at the last 20 years.
As to the auto industry, one of the greatest foreign trade triumphs in American economic history was the wholesale relocation of foreign produced cars to the continental US -- to avoid threatened tariffs -- resulting in massive capital plant expenditures, massive payrolls paying American taxes, income taxes paid to the IRS by the plant, and massive property taxes.
These are public companies so much wealth was created for American shareholders.
You will need some facts to overcome the reality of America's fierce and successful economy. Big news: it gets better and better in the future.
Comparing Vietnam to USA is insanity. Sure in the sense they are countries, but to think the people of USA can unite as a community/communist state and re industrialize... America is so inbred with the idea of capitalism, all people there would rather die than work together as a community. The elite rulers of corporate fasict America would never let it happen even if there were some who did want it.
Add to the metals shortage the shortage in diesel and you have the makings of a a compounding crisis in food production and goods production, leading to a collapsed world economy and starvation “at scale”.
Then consider what is going on in our natural environment. Grim hardly begins to describe it.
Right now in the United States and Canada sulfuric acid and sulfur compounds are being produced as byproducts by different types of mines and are not being monetized. I wonder how hard it would be to turn those into commercial products.
Yes indeed, I once worked at a gas plant in Evanston Wyoming that had a 26% sulfur content. They gave tankers of molten pharmaceutical grade sulfur away just to get rid of it, tons and tons of pure sulfur free for the taking.
Founder and Co-Chairman Robert Friedland commented:
Ivanhoe has a portfolio of tier-one mines powered by hydroelectric and solar power… built to withstand disruption. Our company is ideally positioned in this volatile environment, with exploding global demand for the copper, zinc, nickel and precious metals that we produce.
“Our Kamoa-Kakula Copper Complex and smelter are ramping up in a very strong price environment for the two most critical elements on our planet: copper, which is the King of Metals, and sulphuric acid (H2SO4), which is the King of Chemicals. Kamoa-Kakula benefits from a powerful natural hedge: our sulphuric acid production. H2SO4, which is a by-product of our copper smelter, is growing into a one-million-dollar-a-day operating credit, massively offsetting rising diesel prices. This advantage is supported by our high-grade ore, which has the lowest hydrocarbon intensity per tonne of produced copper of any major mine in the world.
. . .
Kamoa-Kakula's Q1 2026 smelter operating costs averaged $0.27/lb., which were more than offset by $0.32/lb. in sulphuric acid by-product credits.
. . .
Kamoa-Kakula's on-site copper smelter produced 117,871 tonnes of high-strength sulphuric acid during the quarter, with 107,700 tonnes sold to six offtakers at an average realized price of $467 per tonne. The production rate is currently approximately 1,350 tonnes per day, which is equivalent to approximately 60% of design capacity. A sulphuric acid offtake contract was recently signed for delivery next month at $725 per tonne. The remaining contracts will be retendered and repriced by the end of the quarter.
i agree that restoring manufacturing would be very expensive - especially with all the graft going on across the whole economy, but to say we need to replicate what China built over 30 years is a large overstatement. they have grown to produce enough for the whole world many times over in production capacity, they literally have crested so much production capacity that they can price themselves to zero if they ran everything all at once. we simply need a fraction of that.
Maybe people might start reading ingredient labels, look around their home and ponder just how many elements found on the periodic table go into the production of items taken for granted.
Oh yes, go to the auto parts store for your quart of 40 weight oil. Hope you can make a decent dinner with it. Dress yourself and your family with it. Pay your bills with it.
Americans, not all of course, but too many think WE HAVE IT ALL (and have ownership in the rest of the planet's natural resources)!
What a shock it will be to find out WE DO NOT.
The world runs on a global trade system. Very soon many will find out just how important this network is for everyone.
Isolationists have some weird fantasy of returning to the mores of the 50's. I dont think that reality will be pleasant at all.
RE Jay Martin's: "Every great economic transition in history has had casualties. The casualties were the people who refused to see the transition coming. The survivors were the ones who looked the change in the eye and adjusted. Honest question - what am I missing?" [Not much except the solution(s)?]
But, 70yrs of your events was well outlined, with one glaring omission> 'the western governments and their party systems> of offering only partisan centred ideologies created the ongoing chaos and traps, unable to adapt to the 21stC - pure and simply put; "the casualties are the people 'who cannot see'...blind to the transitions".
Canada's part in this fiasco is legendary, no need to repeat, yet in fact its also the solution> "look change in the eye and adjust our governance style!" (Canadians> immersed in denial have yet to reach it)
An old friend, long gone, always commented; "we will never smarten up until down upon our knees" - so history, transitions and casualties may be that catalyst - hope springs eternal!
Excellent article, Jay. I didn’t know that America is now copying Shenzhen, China in Austin, Texas. I’ve lived in Shenzhen for 20 years and have seen a miraculous rise in this new city in China since I first visited in 2004. I doubt that America will catch up to Shenzhen anytime soon simply due to the fact that so many high level university graduates are flooding companies that have been innovating for decades.
The amount of wealth of human and financial capital in China far exceeds what America is producing and the speed at which Shenzhen can produce is unmatched anywhere in the world. Everyone works hard here and is dedicated to making China the world’s leader in technology, science and innovation.
It will take another decade or so for Proto-Town to catch up to where Shenzhen is at today. By then, AI, robotics, new technologies and medicine research will be much farther along here than ever. There’s no place like Shenzhen anywhere else on earth. This of course, is my humble opinion.
Jay, your analysis of sulphur, supply chains, and industrial cascades is sharp. But reading it from the Global South, something becomes immediately visible: we appear in your story only as gears in a machine built somewhere else. The DRC, Zambia, Indonesia, Peru, Chile, they enter the narrative not as societies with people, politics, and histories, but as nodes whose value is measured by how their shortages affect American portfolios.
When you write:
“The DRC is an important gear inside the machine.”
…you are describing a truth, but only from one side. Because when that gear jams, the consequences for us are not “higher prices” or “portfolio adjustments.” They are unemployment, currency collapse, IMF conditionalities, food insecurity, and political instability. Your cascade is real, but the human cost of that cascade lands first and hardest on the countries you treat as industrial inputs.
You warn Americans that the era of cheap materials is ending. For many of us, that era never existed. Shortages, shocks, and dependency are not a future scenario, they are the normal operating conditions of our economies. What you call a “transition” is simply our everyday reality.
You close by saying:
“That is where my money is going.”
From here, that line reads differently. It sounds like our instability is an investment thesis. Our minerals, our vulnerabilities, our exposure to global shocks, all become signals for capital allocation in a system we do not control.
None of this makes your analysis wrong. It simply reveals its frame. You are writing from inside a North American worldview where the world’s pain becomes America’s inconvenience, and America’s inconvenience becomes America’s strategy. From the outside, the picture looks different: we live inside the consequences you model.
If you want to understand the full cascade, you have to include the part of the machine that bleeds when the gears jam.
It's too much to ask of most Americans, they unfortunately find themselves in a bubble of seriously ingrained 'exceptionalism'. They can't connect the dots,because they don't see them. It's only about the US for them. It comes down to incredibly slick generational brainwashing.
Re: "You are writing from inside a North American worldview where the world’s pain becomes America’s inconvenience, and America’s inconvenience becomes America’s strategy."
See:
The Underlying Operating System of Chinese Manufacturing: The R.I.C.E. System (The China Trilogy Part I)
While the world is still arguing about “subsidies,” China has already completed an operating system upgrade from Newtonian mechanics (Lean) to Quantum mechanics (Emergence).
Epilogue: Generational Transcendence
The R.I.C.E. paradigm is not an imitation of the traditional global supply chain; it is a Dimensional Strike against it.
It uses R (Redundant Infrastructure) to trade for asset-light enterprises;
It uses I (Integrated Clusters) to annihilate physical latency;
It uses C (Computational Parallelism) to compress time cycles;
It uses E (Cruel Evolution) to trade for the absolute toughness of the species.
This is why Western “anti-subsidy investigations” targeting single products always fail. You cannot stop a bottom-up upgrade of an industrial operating system by imposing tariffs on a few parts.
However, as an objective analyst, I must issue a warning: No perpetual motion machine is perfect.
R.I.C.E. is an overclocked engine designed for “Catch-up” and “War.” It has a greedy appetite for external resources. As the global environment undergoes drastic changes, this machine is facing a severe thermodynamic crisis.
In the next article, we will leave engineering and enter thermodynamics to explore the limits and fate of this machine.
I keep telling folks that the gas prices are the least of the additional costs that are coming from this war. But they don’t believe me yet. What really sucks is I don’t have the disposable funds to stock up the way I need to. I feel like a mouse watching the approach of a venomous snake - all I can do is stay very still and hope it doesn’t eat me. It’s a very frightening place to be
Fantastic post.
I wonder about your Europe point, though. I go to Europe a lot, and paradoxically, when I go there, I feel like it's going into the future (relative to the U.S.), not the past. They've already got way more modern, high-tech manufacturing than the US, and are way way further along the curve in the transition to energy-saving renewables. It's possible that these advances are "too concentrated" and that they won't emerge a strong as the U.S. But I think that, conversely, the U.S. has too far to sprint to catch up (thinking of your $150 tln figure here) and it is too mired in political crisis to even focus on the "real building" it needs to do, expanding on the examples you've pointed out. (After all, our administration just killed a huge swathe of in-progress renewables rebuilding, setting things back a ton).
Yes, great question. I think when it comes to Europe, different countries will fare very differently. Norway looks better than most - Europe's biggest gas exporter, a $1.7 T sovereign wealth fund, 90% hydropower, and higher energy prices help them. Also, Sweden has both a hydro and nuclear grid, a real industrial base - SKF, Volvo, Sandvik, and produces 80% of the EU's iron ore.
Two I am less confident in - Germany, a fifth of their GDP is manufacturing, BUT that is very reliant on Russian gas, and Italy - imports 75% of energy and has 137% debt-to-GDP - also has the lowest fertility in Europe!
Germany is largely weaned off Russian gas, US LPG is coming in. However, they still burn a lot of coal. Von der Leyen recently admitted it was a mistake to close down nuclear. If you know German culture you will realise that is a cultural earthquake around 7 on Richter's scale.
Europe's strength historically has been closely related to its pluralism. EU in its central Brussels administration has not understood this. That has had some very negative effects. One is resistance to EU as such. Another is the work to make everything uniform. That has only benefitted Germany, until now. Germany has been arrogant and they have resisted change except when it comes to the energy transition (Die Energiewende), which has been a disaster. That has now come fully home to roost.
If you look closer Europe still has industrial knowledge across almost all industries. Scaling is in many cases more to the point than reinventing, scaling combined with innovation. Innovation has unfortunately been hampered by the rotating door culture of politics and dominant old industrial complexes. The current crisis is an opportunity to discard those chains.
Having your main gas delivery system from Russia blown up will sure sped up your weaning
North Stream was just one more. The real weaning only came with expanded LPG receipt capacity in EU harbour(s) and US sourced LPG.
US sourced LPG…Mission accomplished
US lpg will never replace cheap abundant pipeline gas, there is also a 2x cost factor. German auto manufacturing is in decline and BASF is shutting down and relocating a portion of its Ludwigshafen complex to the US and China.The age of European imperial power is in decline and Ukraine and Iran will accelerate that.
Correct, the LPG will always be more expensive. However, my main point is that Europe has been busy strangulating innovation. And the energy policy disaster has accellerated tje decline if the traditional industries resisting innovation.
Never replace the nukes. Were they decommissioned so that they can't be brought back online?
Ukraine is among the most innovative countries in the world. A major American liability is our inability to see this. If we are ever to be accepted again by our true allies, whom Trump has worried so hard drive away, Ukraine will be a core power that keeps the Russian bear at bay.
German arrogance or based on bankrolling the whole thing...?
I'm pretty sure that the EU will ditch USA LPG for Russian. Europe's pluralism makes it too weak to be an empire, so its only reliable move is to make nice with Russia again. Maybe after Russia Oreshniks the shit out of Kiev and tells EU: you're next.
This was has only begun to get hot. The heat is 90% USA's fault, and will be returned to it and then some after push that went to shove turns into genuine fisticuffs.
Russia is struggling. Ukraine has been systematically hitting their oil installations including ports. So even though price has gone up volume has gone severely down. And they lack the capability to rebuild in some cases. Consequently income is falling. Economy is being hit badly, inflation high.
iT'S BRUTAL. dRONES AND SATELLITES HAVE CREATED A NEW VERSION OF SLOW-MOVING ENTRENCHED FRONTAL WARFARE ALEBIR OFTEN FOUGHT AT VERY REMOTE RANGE. ACAPS oops)
But Russia has overall superior manufacturing, tech development, natural resources, and something else: friends. Real friends.
Russia will be alright. It's tough.
WWIII actually began, imo, in 2013-14 when Russia took control of Syrian skies, that is, asserted its personal aerial turf over its holdings and shot at our stuff... and we didn't respond. Maidan around the same time, the Chechnyan consolidation, ongoing sanction wars and decapitation strikes, then Russia makes a decisive (and wise, imo) move in Ukraine, proxy wars keep mounting, then the hokum Oct 7 attack on Israel, more self-inflicted than not (911 redux), and pretty soon, we have a serious hot war on our hands just as a madman is losing the last of his marbles while another madman, Netanyahu, leads him around by his ego's terror of icky images and such coming forth.
This will continue until either our military mutinies (risky, requires eliminating/neutralizing a LOT of Mossad and IDF personnel stateside) or the Zionistas get their nuke game on whereupon I believe we will see a shitload of Oreshniks and such rain on Israel from Belarus and elsewhere, and all hell will break loose, including possible surgical strikes on the USA mainland just to show us that they can.
Military silos and Air Force bases in North Dakota are often fairly remote from large populations, and cluster warhead Oershniks bearing tactical nuke warheads would be a stunning blow to US morale without the outrage caused by massive civilian casualties. Just heavy military casualties and materiel destruction.
Also, there's this, courtesy some ai named Frederico mu-Tasim:
"The U.S. nuclear arsenal is facing significant, well-documented challenges due to aging, with systems often relying on decades-old technology like floppy disks and 1970s-era computers. As detailed by the AP News and reports from The Heritage Foundation, the U.S. is launching a $>\(\$750\) billion effort over the next decade to modernize all three legs of its nuclear triad (bombers, submarines, and ICBMs) to address these risks. Key Concerns Regarding the Aging Arsenal:
Decaying Infrastructure: Many nuclear warheads, along with their storage and production facilities, are decades old and were not designed to last this long.
Technical Obsolescence: The arsenal uses antiquated components, including 8-inch floppy disks for controlling systems, making maintenance difficult and creating potential cyber vulnerabilities. Production Delays: The U.S. has not built a new nuclear warhead since the end of the Cold War, relying instead on life-extension programs. There are significant delays in producing new plutonium pits—the triggers for nuclear weapons.
Personnel & Safety Issues: GAO reports have highlighted declining morale and training issues among missile crews responsible for the aging systems, raising concerns about safety and reliability*.
Modernization Efforts: Cost: The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that sustaining and updating the arsenal will cost over \(\$750\) billion from 2023–2032.
Replacement Plan: The plan involves replacing almost every component of the current, aging system with new technologies.
Strategic Concerns: Experts argue that failing to modernize will leave the U.S. with an unreliable deterrent in the face of rising nuclear capabilities from China and Russia."
And, to misquote Strongbad, "Hold both hands before you like you're holding two crystal orbs and let the weirdness flow."
https://youtu.be/V72NKRyX1NA
* it is openly reported that drug use is a big prob with these guys siloed up for weeks at a time. Psychedelics. Ketamine. Good times.
"Russia has ... Real friends" Hey, that's a good joke. "Real friends" like North Korea and Iran. And then there's China: with friends like that, who needs enemies?
"when Russia took control of Syrian skies" How's that looking now?
"Russia has overall superior manufacturing, tech development" Another good joke. Like we all want to buy Russian cars, Russian electro-tech, Russian computer chips, Russian cell phones.
In PPP terms, Europe's economy is about 4 times that of Russia, and its advantage in industrial capacity is similar.
I know the capabilities (or not) of the Russian oil services. It is rudimentary. The exports speak for themselves. Ukraine will continue to hit the terminals and other installations.
As for the US nuclear installations, yes the problems are well known. What you ignore is that both US and Russia have arsenal enough to obliterate civilisation (such as it is) several times over. So even if a significant proportion does not work it does not matter. And that is why it will not be used.
"Maybe after Russia Oreshniks the shit out of Kiev and tells EU: you're next."
It's been four years. At this point Russia is on track to conquer Ukraine by 2080.
Russia never wanted to conquer Ukraine. They don't want the headache of acquiring the mess that is Ukraine. They don't need Ukraine's minerals or even grain. They are not working to 'win' or 'conquer'. They are looking to achieve enough overwhelming leverage to create a new world order of stability and peace. Just because you have superior tactical weapons doesn't mean you should use them willy-nilly. There are these things called nukes, and they swing both ways, and the USA still has around 6K of them, and I've conservatively venture that a third of them still work.
Just because a boxer's best move is a strong right hook doesn't mean that the proper opening is yet available to make that swing, in the process opening yourself up to your opponent's strike.
Putin/China/Iran aren't playing 5-D chess, just simple old-school rope-a-dope. The dope is about roped, so now is a time when knockout punches can be effectively delivered without turning your local geopolitical landscape into a death zone.|
Germany/EU blather about invading Russia and arming Ukraine to do so... which increases the likelihood of Ukraine turning and attacking Europe when they can no longer withstand Russian force and sign a real peace treaty. EU will have its hands full just keeping refugees from overwhelming their borders more than already.
When it comes introducing major tactical escalations that outclass all your opponent's non-nuclear arsenal, you better be prepared to face that arsenal, especially with a senile megalomaniac at the USA/Israel helm.
https://youtu.be/ccdC_EPih2E
You’re right and you’re wrong. EU still imports plenty of Russian gas and oil, just through third parties to “sanction wash it”.
That of course only adds to the price, and high energy costs is one of the reasons why Europe is so screwed.
German companies are relocating production to the United States and China due to significantly cheaper and more stable energy costs. This trend has accelerated since 2022 due to high energy prices in Germany, driven by the reduction in Russian gas supplies and the transition to renewable energy.
I think you need to look at heliumcartel.com to see what the hidden issue is... also, America does not manufacture the fertilizer required to grow our foods but more importantly is the Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) required for every Diesel tractor, truck and pickup to run since 2010/13 is made of 35% urea... fertilizer.
No urea, no Diesel trucks.
The Haber process that makes ammonia (and downstream from that, urea) runs on natural gas, which the US has plenty of. The fertilizers that the US does import are potassium (Canada) and phosphate (Morocco). US and Canadian agriculture will still run, but it will require higher prices because the inputs will cost more.
Don't forget sulphur which among other things fertiliser depends on. Prices are high as a lot of that came via Hormuz as well. There are already US farmers who have switched to soy beans because the corn math does not add up. That in turn will cause shortage in animal feed stock, driving meat prices up (and probably farm bankruptcies).
"Corn math" in general only holds up because 40% or more (30 million acres) goes to the ethanol which American drivers are forced to buy at the gas pump. At this point, the requirement is nothing more than a national subsidization of midwestern farmers, with an energy-out to energy-in ratio of little if any more than zero.
Europe is screwed both in the medium to long term.
High energy prices, debt issues in many countries. Low fertility combined with social problems. And meanwhile borrowing money to give away to Ukraine.
The EU has wedded itself to failure by going all in on the war in Ukraine.
And yes, obviously exactly HOW bad they’re off depends on which part of Europe you look at.
Europes big problem is that renewable wind and solar are not competitive nor green on a full cycle basis. That is the reason their manufacturers like German car makers are fleeing Germany and establishing new factories in the US,
Mexico, Brazil and China.
Unless they embrace nuclear energy promptly they are doomed to continue burning coal and wood.
I did some quick research on this, and it seems quite not true. Europe gets so much gross electricity from renewables (> 48% as of 2024 figures), there's not really a quantity issue (which I take to be the meat of your "full cycle" criticism). However, there is a cost issue. Electricity is way too expensive in Europe for the competitiveness of power-heavy industries. But (and this is key) the cost issue cannot be disentangled from the impacts of (first) the Ukraine war, and now, the Iran war.
Logically speaking, then, if renewables expand enough, supply increases and costs will come down through market forces. Sure, nuclear or coal could also achieve that, but there's no indication that more renewables (plus grid-scale storage and better transmission infrastructure) wouldn't continue to expand exponentially and achieve this outcome.
“Gross available” and “used when needed” are very different things that the green army rarely interrogate. Large scale batteries will just produce enormous pits of toxic metals waste (not to mention that already produced by the wind turbines and solar).
Solid coal waste from burning enough coal to equal energy produced by solar panels installed in 2024 would be 80 to 100 times greater than panel waste. No mention of how toxic that solid coal waste is, and no mention of how many times greater the waste is that goes into the atmosphere. Lithium batteries are already largely recyclable and will continue to become more so.
Good point, but think you refer to primary waste. I mean the secondary and tertiary waste from lithium and rare earth metals production for what is at best a 10-15yr product (for batteries). The recycling of the batteries is a distraction from the huge toxic tailing pits, massive chemical (oil) inputs in extraction and raw diesel input in its production (like coal I’ll admit). I’d love lithium or other battery tech to work, but a transparent comparison is critical. The energy (coal/gas) input into carbon fibre turbines blades (for a 20yr lifespan and patchy on again off again peaky output) is questionable too.
Recycling directly addresses the mining waste issue by reducing the amount of mining needed: https://www.abiresearch.com/blog/ev-battery-recycling-in-us It is also the case that at least one major recycler has found that it can extend the life of more batteries than it actually has to recycle.
Coal mining wastes outweigh solar and wind gear wastes by orders of magnitude. The "transparent comparison" is what you get in the "life-cycle" analysis cited here: https://www.aap.com.au/factcheck/wind-turbine-energy-claim-is-all-spin-and-no-power/
Let’s see what happens with European “green” experiment. Would love to see it succeed for the sake of our planet. But Nuclear is going to be necessary until renewables become a LOT cheaper. How they going to decrease cost of renewables with prices of the industrial metals required to build solar panels and windmills about to explode higher.
If nuclear is so cheap, how come the only way it can be built is with massive state subsidies? Hinkley Point C is now up to £48bn for 3.2GW and still a long way behind schedule. Compare with solar at <£2bn for the same capacity or 5x (£10bn) to match output. Note that newly built Flammanville only achieved 25% load factor in its first year of operation….
Renewables don’t supply energy when you need it look at the German data much of their renewable energy is exported they only use a small amount themselves. Smoke and mirrors.
Germany is net importer of electricity. It produces and consumed roughly 530 TWh of electricity in 2025. Renewable production approached 280 TWh.
In the UK we have lots of wind energy. The problem is we are compelled to buy it at the much higher price of other sources of energy.
They are literally scared to charge the economic rate for Wind energy because it undercuts the other sources.
I worked in the wind tower industry for over a decade and I'm afraid that you have a misconception about cost. Wind towers are not less expensive means to produce power by any means. When you factor in all costs they need to maintain around $50,000 MW to just break even for the first 10 years iirc. They are far more expensive than other forms of energy production.
Iowa produces over 60% of its electricity from wind. They're not doing it because they're green any more than Texas is (leading U.S. state for wind production). Iowa electricity is cheaper than in other mid-West states (like Indiana, which has discouraged wind in favor of coal).
This is because the federal subsiding of wind power.
In my opinion, that subsidy has been appropriate for a growing energy sector. We'll see what happens when the subsidy for new projects is greatly reduced starting July 1 of this year. But if you want to talk about energy subsidies, I'd like to bring up the 30 million acres in corn for ethanol and 15 million acres in soy for diesel which American drivers pay for at the pump which has virtually no net energy gain. If used for solar or wind, that acreage could produce 60-80 times as much energy for turning the wheels of vehicles.
It doesn’t blow 24/7
Yet the energy they produce can be sold for less.
Odd that.
It isn't sold for less, it's sold generally at a slight to moderate profit. The average home uses less than 3k kwh per year while a tower will produce enough to power approximately around 300 homes at current usage and prices. This will enable them to pay off the tower in its usable lifespan while making a mild profit.
Yes, though the price per Kw doesn’t fully encompass the complex and expensive challenges that come with transmission, storage, and voltage regulation. The great news is these engineering challenges will be resolved. The current price of electricity in the UK is very uncompetitive and a drag on the economy. Ironically, its abundance of wind, nuclear buildout, and Rolls-Royce’s SMR program could make U.K. energy some of the cheapest in Europe in 10-15 years. It’s a bitter pill today in the hope of more energy independence in the future.
Excellent article but you left out one very important factor in any industrial or manufacturing operation. Experience.
While the US was deindustrializing, the industrial (particularly mining) and manufacturing world was going through an information, automation, and basic technology revolution. Not only did this provide actual participants the real world experiences that are critical to creating “best practices” processes. It created the experience and knowledge base to not only develop those practices, it created the understanding to integrate those practices in to the entire interconnected system.
Interconnectiveness is critical, which you apply noted in general. In specifics, that experience and information base is something America lacks. You can’t create 30 years of revolutionary experience overnight. Once behind, You can’t get that disadvantage back easily.
A final point. Going through that development process not only shapes the processes, it screens and shapes the people needed for that world. Give the dismal state of American education, we don’t have the people to execute an industrial renaissance. And unless there are massive changes in the stultification of American education, it will take generations to educate the people needed. Time we don’t have.
That said great article. I always think of the classic article I read in my youth “I, Pencil” when I think about interconnectiveness. If everyone understood that article, you great work you be unnecessary. “I, Pencil” should be taught to every child and every politician. And maybe your Uncle.
Very good point. An Industrial Revolution in the U.S. won’t likely happen until there’s significant pain in living standards (think Argentina).
Agree with the education argument. Average young person doesn’t want to be an engineer. They want to be a social media influencer.
Aaron, perhaps your anecdotal observations could go a little deeper and take into account the evidence-based research that's out there if you look for it. Expansion has been tried; Germany spent around $500B on renewables and to what end? They admit themselves that it didn't work. Intermittency and the need to have stable backup power e.g., natural gas generators that are available instantly when the wind droughts come or the sun goes behind clouds are needed to prevent the blackouts that happened in e.g., Texas, Spain and Portugal. Solar and wind rarely meet their nameplate capacity, and unlike nonrenewable energy supplies, are inconsistent at best. The levelized cost of energy is higher for wind and solar than for non- renewables. This was all true before both wars you mentioned. Show me one city on the planet that runs totally on renewables.
You can't change physics, you can't change the fact that energy is the economy and that energy density is an important aspect of economic development, but you can examine your perspectives. The author of this essay has pointed the way to considering interconnectivity and you seemed to like that. Considering e.g. climate change to the exclusion of everything else and thinking that renewables are the only possible solution to the climate change scenario advanced by some is foolish and even the IPCC has abandoned its unattainable RPC 8.5 objectives.
"They admit themselves that it didn't work." Who is this "they"? I don't think it is who you imply it is. On the other hand, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, said in March 2026 that Europe’s move away from nuclear power was a “strategic mistake”.
Also, in 2025 the EU estimated that 500 billion EUR was needed for the period to 2030 to upgrade the grid. Even assuming the money is there (it is not and the quarrel is getting bad) the industrial base is not capable of anything like that. Until recently I used two years as the lead time for transformers. About a month ago it became clear it is now more like four years. And even if the equipment was ready the experienced crews to install and commission is nowhere near the required capacity. You don't pull those out like rabbits from a hat.
That is the country I meant, to be clear. Reopening closed coal mines was also an admission of failure.
Setting things back a ton is the Mantra of this Administration. And it's not just renewable energy.
I think we can be successful at setting things back technologically but also be successful in bringing this country forward spiritually, much above the rest of the nations. The rest of the world can have their AI tech and globo homo.
All true but they are not equal due to lack of full availability. To equal availability of nuclear wind and solar need to have at least double the maximum total generation and storage capacity of nuclear that has 97% availability. What happened in Spain and Portugal is instructive. If that were to happen in Northern Europe in winter it would be humanitarian disaster.
"What happened in Spain and Portugal is instructive" True, but what it was actually instructive of was not that solar and wind were inappropriate, but that they require corresponding upgrades in network management--which Spain and Portugal are undertaking. Average residential kWh cost in Germany is about 70% more than in Spain.
Europe and renewables are a complete dead end. Take it from someone in the industry. You can't have renewables power industry. It needs to be reliable, you must have 100% non renewable backup, including for the peaks, such as if you have a cold winter. It just doesn't work and Europe is completely losing the renewables battle anyway, China has way better technology and cheaper than anything Europe has got. Nuclear, the only way out of this conundrum is barely being debated in Europe. It's frankly a complete and utter joke. European industry is dead and the only way out is to secure cheap energy reindustrialise, not do everything possible to destroy industry and literally become commies.
As for Iran, this is all just posturing now, the war is over and has been for weeks. The only places the current situation will absolutely decimate us Europe and parts of Africa. There will be a little pain for everyone else no doubt, but ARC (America, Russia, China) are willing to pay this price to kill the globalists in Europe and the Middle East.
This battle is way bigger than it seems. ARC are at last taking the pricing power and control of trade routes, away from these people and ending the forever wars. It's not going to be easy, there will be pain, and it will take time, but the reasons why the first world is so finished is because we don't make anything any more. If you do, wages rise, the productive economy grows and everything fixes itself, but saying citizens can't pay more when they are already poor is missing the point. It is a chicken and egg, you have to bring productive (non extractive) jobs home if you want to save the country. On balance, it's never actually "cheaper" to outsource your manufacturing/productive jobs. It is in the short term, but when it kills the good wages at home, you end up where we are now. Bringing back the manufacturing is not going to be easy and you will need tariffs etc initially to make it even remotely viable, as you point out, but it MUST be done. There is literally no other choice, but it is something we must support if we don't want to turn into some commie hellhole.
Spain’s electricity mix was about 55.5% renewable in 2025. Germany's was about the same. Doesn't look much like a dead end.
With all due respect, I thought I made it very clear why that means nothing. You need that energy ALL OF THE TIME. Not when the wind blows, or when the sun is out, it needs to be available 24/7. You can't just shut down production because there isn't enough power. For some production facilities, restarting after a shutdown could take months and if it's disorderly, then you might lose the facility altogether. I'm sorry but industry just can't work that way, and the only reason it hasn't already been a disaster is that so much industry has already left, that electricity demand is way down from its peak some years ago. I mean Spain has already had blackouts, even with the reduced demand. I have no idea what it did to industry, but I am certain it wasn't good.
If you don't make anything, you will soon be fkd, the fact that our leaders don't even understand this is already all the information I need to state categorically that Europe is finished unless we get rid of these delusional commie Marxists in charge and become the old Europe we were before the EU.
It also needs to be cheap, which renewables absolutely are not, especially if you need 100% backup. I think solar can work when it's on houses and you use the electricity yourself, otherwise it's all terrible for the environment and ironically, even for CO2, because all that production just leaves for China or India where it's way more CO2 intensive and they ship the products right back to us, while destroying our industry at the same time. We're even paying them to do it by giving them CO2 subsidies… It's just pure insanity, the whole lot of it… so sad to see…
With all due respect, comments about "when the sun doesn't shine, when the wind doesn't blow" might have made some sense 5 years ago, before battery prices dropped by 50% or more, but they don't now. As far as "terrible for the environment" goes, coal produces 80 to 100 times as much solid waste (full of heavy metals) for the amount of electricity produced as solar even before you start counting the CO2 added to the atmosphere. For a huge variety of circumstances where solar makes sense for a nation you can look at Pakistan, where individuals have chosen to install behind-the-meter solar amounting to 50% of the national grid capacity, or Australia where 39% of homes have solar and electricity prices are falling, or Saudi Arabia, where they are installing solar to replace a million barrels of oil a day which they burn to generate electricity and account at $4 a barrel so they can sell it on the market at today's price, or look up "solarpunk in Africa".
I'm just telling you how it is as far as industry sees it. The amount of storage that is available is still pitiful anyway and isn't going to change the situation any time soon. You can also build clean coal plants that don't spew all those heavy metals into the atmosphere and, they've been around for decades. Also don't forget we're taking about Europe here, not some sunny place… and I mentioned that personal solar for your own use is fine and works by some metrics, but it's useless for industry.
You can continue to delude yourself about renewables all you want, but it doesn't change the facts. Thanks for engaging anyway.
Here's perplexity: "yes, coal pollution controls can dramatically cut heavy metals, but the statement is not a good argument for coal being clean. In the context of clean electrification, the stronger point is that solar’s end-of-life waste is a manageable materials problem, while coal’s waste is ongoing, large-scale, and includes both toxic ash and massive CO2 emissions".
Also, regarding the assertion that solar is "useless for industry", check this out:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2022/02/03/pv-to-deliver-100-renewables-at-australian-mine/
The point is well taken that Europe is less than ideal for solar, but considering that Germany’s southernmost point is about 47.27° N, about 75-80% of the world's population lives in sunnier places, between 47.27° N and 47.27° S.
"European industry is dead and the only way out is to secure cheap energy reindustrialise"
cough, cough, RUSSIA, cough, cough...
That's certainly a way to plug the current gap quickly, but europe must stand on its own eventually. That means developing it's fossil fuel reserves and embracing nuclear. There is no other choice, unless they are intentionally trying to destroy themselves... Which they are I suppose, but that's a whole other conversation...
Of course, Nuclear, the red-headed stepchild. China is far in the lead on this tech, afaik.
…their civil infrastructure has been heavily invested in. The cost of US deferred maintenance is missing from the analysis.
WUT?!
Sorry, this is nonsense.
Europe is far worse off than America. Industrial output in Germany, the industrial engine of the EU has fallen yet again, the continent is deindustrializing and many industrial conglomerates are moving their production to Asia and yes: The US. (The reasons are multiple.)
As for “modern high tech manufacturing” it is behind America and far behind Asia.
Great points. I think Europe’s largest vulnerability is the lack of software/A.I./tech firms that are driving the American and Chinese economies. This also creates huge issues with reliance, cyber security, and data privacy. Building a Silicon Valley in Europe will require a lot of collaboration between government, top-tier universities, and private capital. Maybe something similar to what the U.K. has done with engineering and life sciences in the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. There’s cities in Europe with thriving tech scenes, but none of them have achieved critical mass.
Energy saving renewables? My understanding is that they are wildly inefficient, particularly windmills (construction, maintenance, etc.). Solar is similar.
Im curious about your EU comment, in BCN, people (except perhaps at the top) seem oblivious. Sure, some talk about being green, but “complicated” things are totally out of conversation, in my experience.
Enjoy your analysis
you make sense at a time when almost nothing in the media does make sense
I would like to know what you think about priorities and realistic schedules for
this "re industrialization", seems to me that it will take a long time and radical changes in government policies and public expectations will be required
Thank you. I agree. It wasn't a coincidence that both of my innovation/industrialization "success stories" had nothing to do with the government. - I'd actually repeat my note to an earlier comment - entrepreneurs thrive despite politicians' best efforts, not because of them. I am not a Rep or Dem, not a red or a blue; I find both parties disdainful. But as long as the reward system is in place, entrepreneurs will play the game in front of them. Now this can change if the rewards are removed - think Argentina pre-1929 versus post.
I’m constantly comparing us to Argentina. The government enriching themselves and running the country into the ground while the majority of Argentinians (and now Americans) have no idea it’s happening as they grow poorer and poorer.
Great analysis.
The only thing is, we absolutely, positively do NOT need, nor should we be moving into, a world based around AI. AI is a false savior.
Take your example, Weyerhaeuser. AI will apply the same wrongheaded forest “management” logic that Wall Street has been using for decades, only on steroids. The results will be disastrous on many levels.
The people programming the data collection drones have no understanding or interest in what a forest actually is: a vastly complex living being that exists both above and under ground, and which changes and evolves over time. It is NOT just a collection of one or two species of trees that our (temporary) modern civilization finds physically useful. Nor is it strictly an engineering equation that can be managed to yield a consistent long-term “answer” through human-initiated inputs based on limited understanding and patience. Unlike biologically impoverished factory tree farms, forests are dynamic systems that take time to think and respond to ever-changing conditions. But debts must be paid and investors need yield NOW!! So who wins in that scenario? The forests? Humanity in the long run? Or the investors and tech companies “optimizing yield” through constant costly re-arranging of hydrocarbons and other raw materials which, as we’re seeing right now, can be threatened very easily, leading to not only ecosystem simplification and illness, but also mass chaos when the management system
inevitably breaks down? The Big Pharma model of environmental management is profitable in the short term, but disastrously deadly in the long term.
The ecocidal logic of our monetary system can’t replicate the long-term understanding of forest health and productivity possessed by aboriginal peoples and classically-educated foresters of old. Living forests don’t understand, and can’t cope with, the cold mindset of young engineers whose only experience with nature is the occasional mid-day jog through chemically managed grass and ornamental trees of a city park. Robots do not correct the deficits in understanding and insight caused by a culture that emphasizes disconnection from nature, self and society; it multiplies them. And creates both denatured, unsustainable tree farms where forests used to be, and denatured, unsustainable robots of flesh where humans used to be.
The subtle shift from machines thinking like humans to humans thinking like machines has already begun and been advancing for the last several decades, with the rise of the internet. I remember how I struggled to understand how to use search engines with key words, because that doesn’t comply with creative thought. And look at how creativity in young people has declined! Basic curiosity, as well. As have social skills and even fundamental education. Ask an “old person” raised in analog data to find major countries on a map, and that’s easy for them. Ask a lot of people raised during the digital age, when all the world’s knowledge is contained in a glowing square at their fingertips, and they struggle to identify the nation they were born and live in.
Ever more basic stupidity, coupled with an “I don’t give a crap, why do I need to know anything because the world around me takes care of everything?” attitude is the promise, and the result, of an ever more technologically advanced world. And that is reflected in the culture and environment we create around us. First, wisdom is lost, then fundamental education, then even any desire to learn, or, if not that in the wider sense, then the desire to understand the world beyond how it can be bent and manipulated to one’s will, and how to design increasingly unforgiving tools to do just that. Technology becomes a one-way street to our own extinction.
Listening skills, in every sense, are among the first casualties of increasing technology, and once lost, the deficits in insight and then wisdom, are virtually impossible to reclaim. I fail to see how stunting the ability of human beings to hear and extract any information from the many complex levels of the environment, beyond the most immediate and obvious surface data, can be good for our species, or the living Gaia we depend upon for our survival. Maybe the executives at Weyerhaeuser understand, and can explain if they get a moment to look up from their quarterly spreadsheets. But the pied tech bro pipers assure us that more tech is the only yellow brick road to future human survival and happiness, and we blissfully follow them, ignoring the corpses of our own fallen victims littering the road to the increasingly stripped down, wasted, sterile, financially impoverished and unforgiving Utopia.
In the end, the worship of technology (and, yes, it does have all the essential qualities of religion), will continue to drive the gaps and divides among an increasingly fragmented human race, and give ever more wealth and power to the few while creating the self-defeating Idiocracy for the masses. The benefits of technology don’t accrue along a straight line that slants up and to the right. They accrue along an n-shaped curve with a wicked downslope that will be as easy to climb out of as it approaches bottom, as the interior curve of a porcelain bowl for a bug trapped at the bottom.
I guess the coming technocalypse will either smash the bug, or shatter the bowl. Maybe the outcome for each of us will depend largely upon how much of our minds, bodies and souls we’ve already outsourced to the machine instead of to the forest. I think most of us are in for some rude awakenings.
Hear, hear! I am also an analog-raised person who has seen the rise of thd digital world - good and bad. In the beginning of the digital age there was a saying: garbage in, garbage out. AI has so far shown itself to be garbage out. But what do you expect from imperfect humans? Does no one remember The Terminator? Geez.
Impressive. That is an impassioned, thoughtful rebuttal. Comments such as yours are why a came to Substack. To digest your above comment surely deserves a longer article. Bravo, well done. I can only hope the torch light of your opinions will shine further. Thank you for the gravitas of your contribution.
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
There is nothing that AI and drones can do that humans can’t! And humans were doing this for thousands of years in various parts of the world for millennia before anybody even thought of having robots do it for us.
Programmed by people who may or may not be good at understanding how to work with living ecosystems, or motivated by regenerative instead of extractive principles.
Who runs the world, after all? The regenerates, or the extractors?
And what happens when there are vanishingly few humans who actually have any experience with farms, forests or nature in general? What happens after we outsource all of our knowledge base and even capacity to listen to mature, to the robots? We lose our last connections to our biological roots, all the psychological influence the natural world has upon us, our caring about the real world, even much of the rest of our gut bacteria. We lose a great chunk of what makes us human. And do my think for one minute that having robots do our forestry and farming is going to “free people up to relax in nature, write poetry, sing to the animals” and other nonsense that the Universal Basic Income peddlers spew. It will just unemploy many if people whose jobs still involve working directly with nature, and enable ever more masses to live in sterile urban environments where their only connections to the natural world will be reduced to raising a goldfish in a bowl, or playing video games in which avatars compete to kill animals or each other in hyper realistic electronic representations of the outdoors. While they really on totally unloved food that’s been grown, and eventually cooked and served, by humanoids. Because, hey, they can be us better and more efficiently and conveniently that we can be ourselves, so why not? In the name of making our lives easier and more enjoyable, of course.
It’s a great step along the way to turning ourselves into the gray aliens. Is that the future you want? NOT me!!
Thanks for your analysis, Jay. Well prior to this war, there were a few who said a commodities super-cycle was coming. Granted, they didn't expect it to land with a bang but they understood those who produced important elements needed in multiple processes would be in the driver's seat as demand increased.
In America is for every success story, there are many who came out of high school without the skills and knowledge they should have. Shop classes were shut down, as if everyone were going to college and even some colleges leave a lot to be desired. With so little industry left, these typically get lower-paying service jobs and struggle most of their lives. Many K-12 schools are a disaster. The kids are just pushed through, regardless. It is criminal, but no one seems to care enough to do something.
The idea America can build more factories again is pure fantasy. No country which deindustrialized has ever made any successful drive to bring back manufacturing and America is no different. While the Administration' jawboned about new factories built, the number of Americans employed in manufacturing continued to slide this last full year and continues to do so. There cannot be any significant number of plants built when manufacturing jobs are drying up.
A billionaire President made the worst miscalculation of his career and everyone else will pay for it. All those factories you mentioned shutting down for lack of certain key elements means those employees are not paid. Many, will slip from the edge of middle class back into poverty, which is tragic The billionaire President probably won't lose a dime. His whole family has no doubt made money on this war. There may be no justice is this world, but there will be in the next. Thanks again, Jay. Will be passing this columns on to family and friends.
Thank you!
Post-WWII economies are great examples of re-industrialization. More recently, places like Vietnam have re-industrialized.
It's incorrect to say America can't re-industrialize.
Vietnam hasn't reindustrialized; they were never industrialized before. Not to mention that Asians aren't afraid of work. The Post-WWII economies still had lots of people, including the management and engineers who knew how to run industries. All they needed were the buildings to be rebuilt, which had been bombed. America is different; we have effectively been deindustrialized for decades now. All the managers, engineers, and workers are long retired and most Americans don't want to work in a factory. Americans are soft; Asians will work and work to make a business go. The ones who come to America; their kids are going to college for math and science degrees because their parents want and push them to succeed. Too few Americans have that kind of drive; they sit around and wail about the inequalities. The Asians see nothing but opportunities. It is how one views the world which counts ultimately in life.
You're wrong about Germany post-WWII. There was literally a deindustrialization campaign across the country immediately after the war. Nearly half of German men were killed or wounded in WWII.
America is the preferred destination for young people seeking university education. Asian industrial powerhouses are built and run primarily by Asians with US degrees and training.
Americans are flocking to institutions like Universal Technical Institute (UTI), which now has over 27,000 students. UTI grows its student body by over 10% a year, while traditional US universities are capping class sizes, shrinking, or closing. The demographic group with the highest SAT scores (after Asians) has already been systematically removed from traditional U.S. universities, where the entire nationwide student body is only 22% white males.
American youth, like youth anywhere, are ambitious when they get rewarded for their efforts.
You are referencing the Morgenthau Plan, which was a proposal to weaken Germany following World War II by eliminating its arms industry and civilian industry. That proposal came from Roosevelt's Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, Jr. With the Soviet Union getting the atom bomb and effectively putting up the Iron Curtain around Eastern Europe, any thought of neutering German industry died a quick death.
The greatest restraint to attracting new industry would appear to be your volatile government, which is why Toyota and others are shifting to Canada.
Throw India into the mix. Total nonsense that any country cannot build or re-build its industrial base.
A great analogous example is the wholesale movement of the foreign car industry to the US when the US began to impose tariffs on foreign car imports.
Foreign car manufacturing -- and attendant parts companies -- is a perfect example of industrial growth. Gigantic.
India is an up and coming economy; we are a declining economy. No worries, when the Dollar is worth nothing, we'll probably make things for the rich Chinese and we'll make precious little doing it. Auto plants are assembly lines. Much of the product is already together like the engine and transmission. Even Ford ran a recent TV ad stating how many vehicles they "assembled." This is the term they used. Not to mention that foreign companies bring the money back home.
RedBaron, what an inept and unsustainable comparison.
Let's look at one single stat, which is my favorite when comparing the vigor of economies: GDP per capita
US -- GDP per capita, 2026 estimated by the IMG = $94,430
India -- $2,813
The US is the largest economy on the planet, the wellspring of innovation and technology and India is a third world country bravely growing out of what is essentially one of the poorest nations on the planet.
The US is a whale whilst India is a tadpole.
The USD -- using "DXY" as a proxy for relative strength v a basket of other convertible currencies -- shows a slightly above average strength and no evidence of comparative weakness looking at the last 20 years.
As to the auto industry, one of the greatest foreign trade triumphs in American economic history was the wholesale relocation of foreign produced cars to the continental US -- to avoid threatened tariffs -- resulting in massive capital plant expenditures, massive payrolls paying American taxes, income taxes paid to the IRS by the plant, and massive property taxes.
These are public companies so much wealth was created for American shareholders.
You will need some facts to overcome the reality of America's fierce and successful economy. Big news: it gets better and better in the future.
Cheers.
Comparing Vietnam to USA is insanity. Sure in the sense they are countries, but to think the people of USA can unite as a community/communist state and re industrialize... America is so inbred with the idea of capitalism, all people there would rather die than work together as a community. The elite rulers of corporate fasict America would never let it happen even if there were some who did want it.
I am very skeptical, as you can see.
Add to the metals shortage the shortage in diesel and you have the makings of a a compounding crisis in food production and goods production, leading to a collapsed world economy and starvation “at scale”.
Then consider what is going on in our natural environment. Grim hardly begins to describe it.
Right now in the United States and Canada sulfuric acid and sulfur compounds are being produced as byproducts by different types of mines and are not being monetized. I wonder how hard it would be to turn those into commercial products.
Yes indeed, I once worked at a gas plant in Evanston Wyoming that had a 26% sulfur content. They gave tankers of molten pharmaceutical grade sulfur away just to get rid of it, tons and tons of pure sulfur free for the taking.
Now that you mention it:
Ivanhoe Mines Issues 2026 First-Quarter Financial Results
5-6-26
https://stockhouse.com/news/press-releases/2026/05/06/ivanhoe-mines-issues-2026-first-quarter-financial-results-overview-of-operations
Founder and Co-Chairman Robert Friedland commented:
Ivanhoe has a portfolio of tier-one mines powered by hydroelectric and solar power… built to withstand disruption. Our company is ideally positioned in this volatile environment, with exploding global demand for the copper, zinc, nickel and precious metals that we produce.
“Our Kamoa-Kakula Copper Complex and smelter are ramping up in a very strong price environment for the two most critical elements on our planet: copper, which is the King of Metals, and sulphuric acid (H2SO4), which is the King of Chemicals. Kamoa-Kakula benefits from a powerful natural hedge: our sulphuric acid production. H2SO4, which is a by-product of our copper smelter, is growing into a one-million-dollar-a-day operating credit, massively offsetting rising diesel prices. This advantage is supported by our high-grade ore, which has the lowest hydrocarbon intensity per tonne of produced copper of any major mine in the world.
. . .
Kamoa-Kakula's Q1 2026 smelter operating costs averaged $0.27/lb., which were more than offset by $0.32/lb. in sulphuric acid by-product credits.
. . .
Kamoa-Kakula's on-site copper smelter produced 117,871 tonnes of high-strength sulphuric acid during the quarter, with 107,700 tonnes sold to six offtakers at an average realized price of $467 per tonne. The production rate is currently approximately 1,350 tonnes per day, which is equivalent to approximately 60% of design capacity. A sulphuric acid offtake contract was recently signed for delivery next month at $725 per tonne. The remaining contracts will be retendered and repriced by the end of the quarter.
I did some research. Sulfuric acid sales from this mine were first reported in January 2026.
Thanks for the info. I wonder how long they’ve been monetizing the sulfur.
i agree that restoring manufacturing would be very expensive - especially with all the graft going on across the whole economy, but to say we need to replicate what China built over 30 years is a large overstatement. they have grown to produce enough for the whole world many times over in production capacity, they literally have crested so much production capacity that they can price themselves to zero if they ran everything all at once. we simply need a fraction of that.
Yes, that's a very important point.
Maybe people might start reading ingredient labels, look around their home and ponder just how many elements found on the periodic table go into the production of items taken for granted.
Oh yes, go to the auto parts store for your quart of 40 weight oil. Hope you can make a decent dinner with it. Dress yourself and your family with it. Pay your bills with it.
Americans, not all of course, but too many think WE HAVE IT ALL (and have ownership in the rest of the planet's natural resources)!
What a shock it will be to find out WE DO NOT.
The world runs on a global trade system. Very soon many will find out just how important this network is for everyone.
Isolationists have some weird fantasy of returning to the mores of the 50's. I dont think that reality will be pleasant at all.
RE Jay Martin's: "Every great economic transition in history has had casualties. The casualties were the people who refused to see the transition coming. The survivors were the ones who looked the change in the eye and adjusted. Honest question - what am I missing?" [Not much except the solution(s)?]
But, 70yrs of your events was well outlined, with one glaring omission> 'the western governments and their party systems> of offering only partisan centred ideologies created the ongoing chaos and traps, unable to adapt to the 21stC - pure and simply put; "the casualties are the people 'who cannot see'...blind to the transitions".
Canada's part in this fiasco is legendary, no need to repeat, yet in fact its also the solution> "look change in the eye and adjust our governance style!" (Canadians> immersed in denial have yet to reach it)
An old friend, long gone, always commented; "we will never smarten up until down upon our knees" - so history, transitions and casualties may be that catalyst - hope springs eternal!
Excellent article, Jay. I didn’t know that America is now copying Shenzhen, China in Austin, Texas. I’ve lived in Shenzhen for 20 years and have seen a miraculous rise in this new city in China since I first visited in 2004. I doubt that America will catch up to Shenzhen anytime soon simply due to the fact that so many high level university graduates are flooding companies that have been innovating for decades.
The amount of wealth of human and financial capital in China far exceeds what America is producing and the speed at which Shenzhen can produce is unmatched anywhere in the world. Everyone works hard here and is dedicated to making China the world’s leader in technology, science and innovation.
It will take another decade or so for Proto-Town to catch up to where Shenzhen is at today. By then, AI, robotics, new technologies and medicine research will be much farther along here than ever. There’s no place like Shenzhen anywhere else on earth. This of course, is my humble opinion.
Very interesting, thank you
Great read Jay
And spot on, as a former skilled trades guy for over 50 years there’s lots of opportunities for the young
Exactly this.
Jay, your analysis of sulphur, supply chains, and industrial cascades is sharp. But reading it from the Global South, something becomes immediately visible: we appear in your story only as gears in a machine built somewhere else. The DRC, Zambia, Indonesia, Peru, Chile, they enter the narrative not as societies with people, politics, and histories, but as nodes whose value is measured by how their shortages affect American portfolios.
When you write:
“The DRC is an important gear inside the machine.”
…you are describing a truth, but only from one side. Because when that gear jams, the consequences for us are not “higher prices” or “portfolio adjustments.” They are unemployment, currency collapse, IMF conditionalities, food insecurity, and political instability. Your cascade is real, but the human cost of that cascade lands first and hardest on the countries you treat as industrial inputs.
You warn Americans that the era of cheap materials is ending. For many of us, that era never existed. Shortages, shocks, and dependency are not a future scenario, they are the normal operating conditions of our economies. What you call a “transition” is simply our everyday reality.
You close by saying:
“That is where my money is going.”
From here, that line reads differently. It sounds like our instability is an investment thesis. Our minerals, our vulnerabilities, our exposure to global shocks, all become signals for capital allocation in a system we do not control.
None of this makes your analysis wrong. It simply reveals its frame. You are writing from inside a North American worldview where the world’s pain becomes America’s inconvenience, and America’s inconvenience becomes America’s strategy. From the outside, the picture looks different: we live inside the consequences you model.
If you want to understand the full cascade, you have to include the part of the machine that bleeds when the gears jam.
It's too much to ask of most Americans, they unfortunately find themselves in a bubble of seriously ingrained 'exceptionalism'. They can't connect the dots,because they don't see them. It's only about the US for them. It comes down to incredibly slick generational brainwashing.
Re: "You are writing from inside a North American worldview where the world’s pain becomes America’s inconvenience, and America’s inconvenience becomes America’s strategy."
See:
The Underlying Operating System of Chinese Manufacturing: The R.I.C.E. System (The China Trilogy Part I)
While the world is still arguing about “subsidies,” China has already completed an operating system upgrade from Newtonian mechanics (Lean) to Quantum mechanics (Emergence).
Epilogue: Generational Transcendence
The R.I.C.E. paradigm is not an imitation of the traditional global supply chain; it is a Dimensional Strike against it.
It uses R (Redundant Infrastructure) to trade for asset-light enterprises;
It uses I (Integrated Clusters) to annihilate physical latency;
It uses C (Computational Parallelism) to compress time cycles;
It uses E (Cruel Evolution) to trade for the absolute toughness of the species.
This is why Western “anti-subsidy investigations” targeting single products always fail. You cannot stop a bottom-up upgrade of an industrial operating system by imposing tariffs on a few parts.
However, as an objective analyst, I must issue a warning: No perpetual motion machine is perfect.
R.I.C.E. is an overclocked engine designed for “Catch-up” and “War.” It has a greedy appetite for external resources. As the global environment undergoes drastic changes, this machine is facing a severe thermodynamic crisis.
In the next article, we will leave engineering and enter thermodynamics to explore the limits and fate of this machine.
https://chinarbitrageur.substack.com/p/the-underlying-operating-system-of?utm_source=publication-search
Thanks much, this correlates with other stuff I’ve been reading
I keep telling folks that the gas prices are the least of the additional costs that are coming from this war. But they don’t believe me yet. What really sucks is I don’t have the disposable funds to stock up the way I need to. I feel like a mouse watching the approach of a venomous snake - all I can do is stay very still and hope it doesn’t eat me. It’s a very frightening place to be
Insightful and very eye-opening. Ty