Juggling Dynamite

Over the next eight years, simultaneous disruptions will transform the energy, transportation and food production industries all at once.  This has massive implications for the world and especially for resource and auto-centric economies like Canada!  This recent update from ReThinkx founder Tony Seba is worth the time.  The precision fermentation revolution that is already transforming food production starts at 45 minutes on the play bar.

Virtual presentation to the Council of State Governments on the occasion of the CSG East 2021 Annual Meeting.  Here is a direct video link.

As with all new technological upheavals, adoption starts slowly until an inflection point is reached and mass adoption moves rapidly through the population (aka S curve).  Electric vehicles are now entering mass adoption because they are better than ICE vehicles.  No one who goes electric wants to go back to dirty, more expensive to operate and maintain gas-guzzling vehicles.

Automakers, consumers, suppliers, gas station managers and governments, who aren’t preparing for this reality will be caught offside.

This year, fourteen of the top fifteen selling cars in Norway are all-electric.  See Norway bans gas cars in 2025.  But trends point to 100% EV sales as early as April.:

Norway is ahead of the game in EV sales, with gasoline’s share of the new car market vanishing more and more every month, faster than almost anyone outside of Electrek‘s Slack channel could have predicted. This has led Norway to have the earliest target for the phaseout of new gas vehicle sales in the world – 2025.

But gas cars might not even last that long. According to an analysis printed by the Norwegian Automobile Federation’s magazine, Motor, the downward trend in sales for gas cars has been so consistent and steep that the last new gas car sale in Norway could happen just seven months from now, in April 2022.

Also, see Air Pollution endangers billions, but a handful of technologies can make air clean again this decade.

This report gives a good overview of the global interconnections in our highly levered financial markets and economies. Deflation in the global property sector is needed.  It will be painful but also helpful longer-term in redirecting capital from realty speculation to more productive investment.

Real Vision’s Roger Hirst uses Refinitiv’s best-in-class data to look at issues surrounding China Evergrande, a leveraged conglomerate that includes property development and banking amongst its operations. Expectations of a default have been running high, but its issues……… and the policy response…… go deep into the transition that China is undertaking. This looks more like a controlled explosion, rather than a contagion event, but the repercussions for global investors will be widespread.  Here is a direct video report.

Also See:  Evergrande debt crisis is financial stress test no one wanted.