How are you currently coping? Do you believe that we'll see any kind of improvement in the next few months/years? What coping mechanisms have you developed?

Google’s ad revenue falls 8% for 1st decline in 26-year history

July 31, 2020

https://www.marketingdive.com/news/google-ad-revenue-falls-1st-decline-in-26-year-history/582661/

well its all about numbers
take https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by-country/

1    China                10,432,751,400    
2    United States     5,011,686,600

everyone shouts out that china is bad..
yet. you got to put numbers in prospective

Report: The U.S. Military Emits More CO2 Than Many Industrialized Nations

A new report from Brown University has estimated that since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. military has emitted 1,212 million metric tons of greenhouse gases. In 2017 alone, CO2 emissions added up to 59 million tons - more than many industrialized nations including Sweden and Switzerland.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy records carbon dioxide emissions in different countries and in 2017, total estimated CO2 emissions in Sweden came to 48 million tons by comparison. The U.S. military also produced more greenhouse gases than Morocco, Peru, Hungary, Finland, New Zealand and Norway. According to the research from Brown University, the Pentagon would be the world's 55th largest CO2 emitter if it was a country.

War and preparation for it are fossil fuel intensive activities and along with being the single largest consumer of energy in the U.S., the Department of Defense is the world's single largest institutional consumer of petroleum. 70% of all energy gets consumed by moving and utilizing troops and equipment around the world, involving the burning of vast quantities of jet fuel and diesel. Military equipment is not known for its fuel efficiency and it is estimated that the country's remaining fleet of 60,000 humvees only gets four to eight miles per gallon of diesel. Military real estate also leaves a considerable carbon footprint and in FY2017, the Department of Defense spent $3.5 billion heating, cooling and providing electricity to 560,000 buildings at 500 installations.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2019/06/13/report-the-u-s-military-emits-more-co2-than-many-industrialized-nations-infographic/

August 16, 2022

Twenty years ago, as they returned from summer vacations, staff at HSBC Holdings Plc began moving into their gleaming new global headquarters in London’s Canary Wharf. Designed by Norman Foster, the building was one of two new towers to spring up on the skyline east of the City. The other was home to Citigroup Inc., whose employees had moved in a few months earlier. At the time, these were jointly the second-tallest buildings in the UK. They reflected the confidence of their occupants: each vying to be the biggest, most imposing bank in the world.

Two decades later, the buildings now stand as monuments to a bygone age. The global ambitions of both HSBC and Citigroup have been pared back, replaced by a narrower focus on core markets. HSBC has reduced the number of countries and territories in which it operates to 64 from 88. Its largest shareholder, China’s Ping An Insurance (Group) Co., has been agitating for a spinoff of its Asia operations. Last year, Citigroup announced its exit from 13 consumer markets across Asia, Europe and the Middle East and is trying to sell its Mexican business, Banamex.

The shift in strategy of the two banks tracks the arc of globalization.

Back in 2002, HSBC coined the tagline “the world’s local bank” to describe its strategy. In the prior 10 years, it had made a series of acquisitions – in the UK, Brazil, US, France and Mexico – as part of a “three-legged stool” strategy to build a presence across Asia, North America and Europe.

Founded in Hong Kong in 1865, it outgrew its domestic market and began to invest excess capital abroad. The strategy was the brainchild of Michael Sandberg, its chairman between 1977 to 1986. “If you stand still these days you are in fact moving backwards,” he said.

The strategy followed the path laid by Citi. In 1967, Citi promoted Walter Wriston, head of its overseas business, to president. Wriston had already made clear his ambitions at a dinner a few years earlier: “The plan in the overseas division was first to put a Citibank branch in every commercially important country in the world. The second phase was to begin to tap the local deposit market by putting satellite branches or mini-branches in a country. The third phase was to export retail services and know-how from New York.”

Like HSBC, the bank deployed capital all over the world. It does business in 160 countries and jurisdictions. (The United Nations currently has 193 member states).

By the time they moved into their new offices, HSBC and Citi were the most globally diversified of the major international banks. “We fought like cats and dogs,” said William Purves, who succeeded Sandberg as chairman, “but in some ways we were quite close.” As global trade ballooned, the banks benefited as financial intermediaries, riding the coattails of the post-Cold War global economic integration.

But with the global financial crisis in 2008, the prevailing model of globalization began to unwind. As countries turned inwards and regional trading blocs became more dominant, the expansion of global value chains slowed. Having risen in a straight line from 29% of global gross domestic product in 1993, goods trade – the sum of merchandise imports and exports – peaked at 51% in 2008. (In 2021, it was down to 46%.)

As with many important turning points, the shift wasn’t initially obvious. Citi promoted a strategy to become an “urban bank, serving customers in the top 100 cities around the world.” Its post-crisis CEO, Vikram Pandit, argued that “people in these bigger cities have much more in common as customers than they do necessarily by nationality: from a banking perspective, São Paolo has more in common with London than it does with San Juan.” HSBC continued to plaster its “world’s local bank” slogan across jet bridges at major airports until 2016.

But as profitability in their outposts declined and the cost of managing far-flung organizations grew alongside stricter post-crisis regulations, the banks began to shed their global aspirations. Pandit’s successor as CEO, Mike Corbat, exited a number of consumer markets and his successor, Jane Fraser, doubled down, exiting several more, including Mexico, Citi's largest standalone consumer franchise outside the US.

HSBC was similarly withdrawing from multiple markets. Last year, it sold its French business to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management for 1 euro. Hong Kong is back to contributing 30% of its loan book, a level not seen in over 20 years.

Now the group faces its biggest test: a call to dismantle what’s left of its “three-legged stool.” Ping An reckons spinning off its Asian business could release $8 billion of capital and create between $25 billion and $35 billion of additional market value. At its interim results presentation earlier this month, HSBC countered that “structural change risks diluting the economics of our international business model.”

But with globalization in retreat, the value of an international banking network is diminished. From its global headquarters in Canary Wharf, HSBC’s global strategy is a throwback to a different age.


https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-08-17/hsbc-citigroup-and-the-end-of-global-banking

focus on just money

Your username makes the title look like a joke

This makes no sense.

I recently read about Shell building a hydrogen electrolyser hooked to an offshore wind turbine farm. The weird part is that the factory is far from the wind park.
I didn't know it's a challenge to run electrolyers with varying power supply, but that could be the holy grail of wind power and peak shaving. An economic incentive lasts a lot longer than subsidies. Talking about subsidies: they applied, but started building before it's approved.

Russia’s oil production is unlikely to recover to pre-coronavirus levels, according to a government strategy document cited by Kommersant.

In a strategy document outlining prospects for Russia’s critical oil and gas industry, the government said its “base case” — or most likely — scenario, is that Russia’s oil production will never again hit the record levels recorded in 2019.

In the last full year before the pandemic, Russia produced 560 million tons of oil — equivalent to 11.3 million barrels a day. But output dropped for the first time in more than a decade in 2020 as Russia agreed significant production cuts with Saudi Arabia and other members of the OPEC cartel in a bid to support oil prices at the start of the pandemic — pushing production down 9% to 10.3 million barrels per day.

In the scenario labelled most probable, the Energy Ministry predicts Russia’s oil output will grow over the rest of the decade — but fail to hit the record output of 2019, with production hitting a post-coronavirus peak of 11.1 million barrels a day in 2029 before decreasing to to 9.4 million barrels a day by 2035.

Russia vies with Saudi Arabia to be the world’s second-largest oil producer, behind the world-leading U.S. The Russian economy remains heavily dependent on energy exports, with revenues in pre-pandemic years accounting for more than a third of the government’s total budget and all extractive industries — covering oil, gas and other commodities — accounting for almost 40% of Russian GDP, according to the country’s statistics agency Rosstat.

In its most optimistic scenario, the Energy Ministry expects production to pass pre-coronavirus levels, peaking in 2030 at 12.8 million barrels a day before starting to decline. In every scenario presented, the Energy Ministry said Russian oil production had either already peaked, or would hit its maximum level within the next decade, Kommersant reported.

Russia remains poorly positioned to take advantage of the global energy transition to cleaner and renewable sources of energy, experts say. While countries in Europe and the U.S. have put clean energy at the center of their post-coronavirus economic stimulus and investment packages, Russia is reportedly planning to cut state spending on green energy. Analysts estimate that if every project currently in development is completed in time, Russia’s electricity generation from renewable sources, excluding hydro power, will be just 1% by 2024.

“While international oil [majors] are falling over themselves in their business transformation potential to become ‘clean,’ Russians are unlikely to compete with them in this renewables drive,” VTB Capital’s deputy head of oil and gas research Dmitry Loukashov said in a research note last week.

He does believe, however, that the Russian oil and gas industry could capitalize on so-called transition fuels, like hydrogen or ammonia, as well as take a leading role in investment and research into carbon capture technology.

The Energy Ministry strategy outlines that government tax cuts to high-potential oil fields, such as those in the Arctic region, will be crucial in helping the country maximize the potential of the vast energy resources it still sits on.

If oil prices lag, it estimates that only a third of Russia’s proven reserves will be profitable to extract, while even in the most optimistic scenario, with higher global oil prices, only two-thirds of Russia’s recoverable reserves will be taken out of the ground.




https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/04/12/russia-may-have-passed-peak-oil-output-government-a73558

Among the technological visions that seem perpetually futuristic (think commercial nuclear fusion and maglev trains), the hydrogen economy has always been tantalizing. Hydrogen produced from renewable energy or nuclear power, with minimal greenhouse-gas emissions, could be piped or transported pretty much anywhere, using mostly existing infrastructure. It could power trucks, cars, planes, and ships and generate electricity, either in fuel cells or combustion turbines. In short, it could do anything fossil fuels do now, but with substantially reduced climate impact.

Now, after decades of false starts and overly optimistic projections, several factors are giving an unprecedented lift to clean hydrogen. In the United States, sweeping legislation capped a series of moves by the country’s Department of Energy (DOE) over the past year to drive down the cost of low-carbon hydrogen and stimulate demand for the fuel. And in Europe, a looming fossil-fuel crisis has sent officials scrambling to find alternatives to the 155 billion cubic meters of Russian natural gas that EU countries imported in 2021.

“I’ve been working in hydrogen for 20 years, and this is absolutely the most exciting time, the busiest time,” says Keith Wipke, manager of the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Technologies Program at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo. “There’s just so much activity.”

The U.S. legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act, was signed into law by President Joe Biden on 16 August, after being passed in Congress along party lines earlier in the month. It prescribes new spending of US $437 billion over 10 years, of which some $370 billion is directed toward a sprawling range of renewable-energy, electric-vehicle, and other greenhouse-gas reduction measures. But it was the low-carbon-hydrogen provisions that raised eyebrows, for a couple of reasons. One is that they are more generous than many analysts were expecting. The other is that the hydrogen provisions are technology-neutral, meaning that there is no distinction between hydrogen produced by electrolysis with electricity from, for example, a wind farm or a nuclear power plant.

The bill provides tax credits to producers of low-carbon hydrogen at a rate that depends on how much carbon is emitted during production, among other factors. At the lowest emission rate—0.45 kilograms of carbon dioxide emitted per kilogram of hydrogen produced—producers are eligible for a credit of up to $3 per kilogram of hydrogen, making the cost cheaper, in some instances, than that of ordinary “gray” hydrogen, which is derived from natural gas through a process called steam reforming. Production of gray hydrogen creates from 8 to 12 kilograms of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen produced. Costs of gray hydrogen vary but are roughly $2/kg in the United States.

Nearly all of the hydrogen made in the United States, some 10 million tonnes last year, is produced this way. China, the world’s largest producer of hydrogen at upwards of 25 million tonnes a year, derives 62 percent of its total from coal, which creates 18 to 20 kg of CO2 per kilogram of hydrogen. In both the United States and China, production of “green” hydrogen, created by electrolysis using a renewable energy source, makes up less than 1 percent of total output.

The DOE has established goals of getting the cost of low-carbon hydrogen, without incentives, down to $2/kg by 2026, and to $1/kg by 2031. Says Wipke, referring to the top $3/kg credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, “if today’s hydrogen is about $5 a kilogram through electrolysis, clean electrolysis, and you’re able to take $3 off of that, and go from $5 down to $2, well, essentially, you have met, with the incentives, our 2026 goal of $2 a kilogram. Now, technically, you’ve done it through incentives, but the impact is the same. You’re rapidly getting the cost of hydrogen down to where it is very competitive—and in many cases cheaper—than the fossil alternative. So that’s why the community is so excited.”

As compelling as the production credit may prove to be, the provisions are just the most recent of a series of government moves aimed at bolstering clean hydrogen. A year ago, for example, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) pledged $8 billion to establish up to eight regional “hydrogen hubs” in the country. These would be facilities where low-carbon hydrogen would be produced, stored, used, and transported elsewhere.

“I think the combination, the one-two punch of the IIJA hydrogen hubs and the IRA's production tax credit, can help build the full value chain,” says Alex Kizer, senior vice president of research and analysis at the Energy Futures Initiative. “And I wouldn't underestimate the other hydrogen-adjacent funding opportunities in the IRA, because hydrogen is going to need manufacturing, it's going to need fueling, it's going to need distribution…. There’s opportunity up and down the hydrogen value chain. That, in addition to the PTC [production tax credit], is what has me most excited.”

In mid-August there were already some 22 prospective hubs being touted around the country, though a formal announcement of a “funding opportunity” from the DOE wasn’t expected until September or October. Around that time, site preparation is expected to begin on a $2.65 billion project in Delta, Utah, where a consortium of companies led by Mitsubishi Power Americas and Magnum Development will install turbines capable of generating 840 megawatts by burning a mix of hydrogen and natural gas. Backed by a half billion dollars in loan guarantees from the DOE, the Intermountain Power Project, as it’s known, will also have solar-photovoltaic generators and a 220-megawatt electrolysis system to produce hydrogen on site, along with facilities to store up to 300 gigawatt-hours of the gas in underground salt domes.

In Europe, too, a hydrogen-hub plan was hurriedly approved by the European Commission in late July. It sets aside €5.4 billion to fund 41 projects to develop technologies ranging from basic R&D to industrial deployment. A small hub near Hamburg, Germany, is already under construction, and a larger hub is being built at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. “Rotterdam is basically showing the world how to become a hydrogen port,” says Robert Hebner, an IEEE Fellow and director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he helps coordinate R&D on hydrogen. “They have signed agreements with companies to operate hydrogen terminals there,” he notes. “They’re working out agreements with Portugal, [under which] Portugal will make hydrogen from wind power and transport it into the Port of Rotterdam. They’ve announced that they’ll use hydrogen-powered trucks to distribute this through Central Europe. They’re thinking holistically about how to get hydrogen to the port and then how to get it redistributed to where it’s needed.”

But any notion that clean-hydrogen production could be ramped up quickly enough to help mitigate the looming loss of Russian natural gas on the continent is quickly dispelled by analysts. According to Bernd Heid, a senior partner in the Cologne office of McKinsey & Co., “hydrogen is not helping Europe in the current energy crisis.” Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in May, he added, “but in the medium- and long-term we see more momentum for hydrogen use. It will come faster because conventional energy such as oil and gas will become scarcer and more expensive.”

So are we finally witnessing the beginnings of an actual hydrogen economy? “I think, yes, it’s going to happen,” says Hebner. “The Hydrogen Council has over 100 multinational corporations investing billions of dollars a year into making the hydrogen economy real, and they’re making those investments where governments will help them, but this is not government-led. This is industry-led. It’s industries that see a way that they can make money. When I saw that, I said, this one may be real.”



https://spectrum.ieee.org/hydrogen-economy-inflation-reduction-act

Tow No! The Ford F-150 Lightning Struggled in Our Towing Test

Before you hitch an Airstream to your electric truck and set out to circumnavigate the country, you need to understand this: With the largest available battery pack, a fully charged 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning electric truck has less energy onboard than a regular F-150 with four gallons of gas in its tank.

Consider how far a combustion-powered F-150 would tow at max capacity on four gallons of regular unleaded. Thirty five miles? Maybe 40 if you drive slowly?

Now that you understand where we're starting from, you won't be as surprised to learn that the towing range of the electric F-150 is dismal. In MotorTrend testing, an F-150 Lightning Platinum saddled with a camper that nearly maxed out its 8,500-pound towing capacity couldn't even cover 100 miles. Range improved when we hooked up a significantly lighter trailer, but not by as much as you might expect.

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/ford-f150-lightning-electric-truck-towing-test/

So yes, you are right, the training, intelligence and ability that the person who cleans the WC of the company has is the same as that of the CEO.

As a result of the difficult economic times, do you consider that there will be more women entrepreneurs competing with men in this field which it so looks like they currently dominate?

This isn't deflation. This is scarcity and the market law of supply and demand. Deflation is the process of increasing the value of paper money by reducing their quantity. It has nothing to do with rare items.


This isn't inflation.

Hideo Kojima was no CEO and you can read why he left Konami on like every newspaper out there.

We (1st world countries) should find ways to make payments on Bitcoin easier and more user friendly, so that payment on ALL phones can be possible. (not just fancy smart phones)