MrMakabar

The US makes up half of the G7 population. Given Trump, the G7 are always going to fall behind China. Add to that a bunch of the countries having relativly clean grids and you probably not going to see massive deployments.

Economic activity requires energy and therefore economic growth requires are growth in energy supply. It is really hard to reduce fossil fuel consumption, when you also have to meet energy demand from economic growth. If you are at all serious about stopping climate change, the only viable strategy forward is to reduce energy consumption and that basically requires shrinking the economy.

Bradford has two railway stations and those are pretty close together. They are also 700m apart and do not have track connecting them. In other words you can not use heavy rail for any reasonable journey within Bradford. Leeds is better, but we are still talking trains coming every 30min and six stations within the city and some massive gaps in the network. Similar story for Belfast.

I’m a big advocate for trams and light rail but there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for all cities, cities with different geography, density, etc need different transport.

British cities do have high enough density for light rail and the geography is mostly pretty flat. It is honestly the most obvious way to improve the public transport in cities like Leeds and Bradford in a big way. To be fair Leeds might want to think about a light automated metro as well.

In the EU there are currently six cities with a population over 350k, which lack an urban rail system. Bologna is supposed to open a tram system this year, so it is probably five soon. One of those is Sintra, which technically has a tram line, but it is used with historic cars as a museum service, so I count it as lacking one. Also Vilnius, Plovdiv, Bologna and Varna have trolleybuses. The sixth one is Las Palma, which has only buses and due to being on an island not even a train station.

Heavy rail is for transport between municpalities and everybody has a bus system at least in Europe. For a city of a certain size (200k or so) a well designed public transport system is going to have such high ridership, that a tram or other urban rail system is needed. So a lack of one is a pretty bad sign.

Most of the assets have been bought out by Lyten. It really does not matter who owns the companies.

ORACLE = One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison

The bottom is the US having no internal opposition to Trump. One of the biggest differences between the Nazis and the Republicans is, that the Nazis very quickly and violently destroyed the opposition. Somebody like Mamdami would have never been elected under Hitler. The great thing about the US is, that it has centuries of election history. For the most part with some horrible discrimination of women and black people, but still a large part of the population was voting. That is really hard for the Republicans to destroy and that means that there might be somewhat midterms. Obviously the Republicans will make those deeply unfair. However there is a chance of it going the right way.

Just to be clear, this is not going to be easy and the midterms if anything are only a first step.

Oil price is set by supply and demand. Demand is still unfortunatly slowly growing. So if you cut supply, by for example stopping Russian oil exports, you then increase the oil price. The bad part in that is that it probably leads to Russia being able to somehow export oil around those sanctions(like via land to China for example) and actually make more money with it then with sanctions applied. This is made worse by Europe being oil importers, so a high oil price hurts Europe.

Right now a number of things come together. Trump caused a recession in the US(lower oil demand), EVs are growing in sales(lower oil demand), Venezuela Maduro stuff(higher oil supply), OPEC increases oil production(higher oil supply), Trump makes it easier to frack in the US(higher oil supply) and so forth. The only thing increasing the oil price right now, is a potential invasion of Iran. However even that does not seem that likely. In other words cutting off Russian oil supply, is currently possible.

Then Trump seized a Russian tanker and nothing happened and Greenland happened. Therefore Europe knows the risk of doing it are lower then thought and they have to take risks to make sure they do not depend on the US, if Russia starts a war against the EU directly.

Oh and Russia looks weak right now. The economy has some serious problems, so this is likely to really hurt.

So is lithium to be honest. Refining it is just a really dirty process.

It is already hitting hard and not just Western countries. The fertility rate is below replacement on every continent besides Africa already. Countries like China and Thailand have shrinking populations today. The global fertility rate was at 2.3 in 2023 according to the UN.

Volkswagen has just opened a battery factory in Germany, which is able to produce something like 10% of car batteries needed in the EU. There are others as well, like Northvolt. So if China cuts off batteries, then there would still be a car production in Europe and within a few years it would be back to normal. Obviously there are also countries like South Korea producing batteries. However the EU has some strong train manufacturers and the like, which can also reduce the demand for cars, which is another great alternative.

Rare earths are worse though.

2/3 of global trade is done in US dollars. However a lot of that has currency risk, like say Chinese companies paying their Chinese workers in yuan. So if the dollar looses value compared to other currencies, the old contracts can lead to exporters selling their products for less then they are worth. That is not a good situation to be in for a lot of companies.

In other words Northern Rock would be a joke compared to this.