We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇪🇺 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 If China is rising and America stagnating, Europe is gambling with a steep, shocking decline into poverty and irrelevance. | Palladium Magazine
🔶️ Energy scarcity, aging workforces, and institutional paralysis don't combine to create social-democratic utopia but a closed, deindustrializing society:
🔶️ Europe has set itself up to lose the two most basic ingredients for industrial competitiveness and sustainability: cheap energy and cheap labor.
🔶️ You can maybe maintain an industrial society by offsetting one against the other, but to maintain one with neither is ludicrous.
🔶️ China has coal. America has fracking. But Europe's energy strategy is to install solar panels on the world's least sunny continent and build windmills that don't make sense anywhere in the world.
🔶️ This is almost explicitly the opposite of a strategy for cheap energy.
🔶️ European countries have banned fracking and failed to pursue oil and gas exploration opportunities, while the deal for cheap Russian gas has been exploded by war in Ukraine.
🔶️ Meanwhile, Germany shut down its nuclear plants and other countries are planning to follow.
🔶️ That some peripheral European economies like Finland, Poland, or Romania are pursuing new nuclear plants just underscores the problem of a future without nuclear in larger economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain.
🔶️ Except for Japan and South Korea, the world's oldest countries are all European. Nor are European fertility rates anything to brag about.
🔶️ There is no amount of immigration that can make up for such wide and deep aging of the workforce.
🔶️ Aging populations and social democratic entitlements might work with a growing economy, but without it, they just lead to a dysfunctional, extractive political economy where the old oppress the young.
🔶️ The resulting political gridlock and institutional paralysis is perhaps Europe's single biggest problem, because it makes solutions and reforms extremely hard to implement.
🔶️ Europe's energy crisis, for example, could be solved almost literally just with a few strokes of a pen.
🔶️ This looming European decline is not a cause for celebration in America or China. Europe is not a cautionary tale, but the canary in the coal mine for aging industrial societies that do not reform.
https://fxtwitter.com/palladiummag/status/1818979675034501428
Speaking at the WEF, Savor CEO Kathleen Alexander boasts about how her company is "saving the planet" from the evils of agriculture by replacing real butters and oils with synthetic versions made from carbon dioxide and methane. 😳
"Savor is part of bringing transformation to the food system by re-imagining how we make an entire macronutrient—fats and oils."
"The result is that we can dramatically lower the planetary footprint of our food system."
"Our food system today uses about 50% of the habitable land on the planet. It's 20-30% of our greenhouse gas emissions."
"And we can reduce all of those by 50-100%."
Source
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🔥 Top Stories
• Middle East risk flares — IDF hits Hezbollah sites in south Lebanon; Houthis threaten Saudi assets; France deploys naval/mine-countermeasure assets near Hormuz.
• U.S. oil market scrutiny — DOJ/FTC say they’re monitoring crude for price-fixing/collusion as Brent settles at $72.12/bbl.
• Trump pardons saga — Trump signs pardons for six and faces fresh scrutiny after NBC reported undisclosed stock purchases before tariff pause.
⛽ Oil & Energy
• Gulf crude exports topped 10M bpd in June but remain ~40% below pre-conflict levels; Fitch flags ongoing Iran/Mideast risk to corporates and oil forecasts.
• CMA CGM warns Hormuz transit charges would be “devastating”; Airbus says defense cooperation remains pressured.
📊 Markets & Macro
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🇮🇷🏆🇺🇸 Iran Is a Bigger Defeat Than Vietnam | Foreign Policy
At his second inaugural, U.S. President Donald Trump pronounced his hope “that our recent presidential election will be remembered as the greatest and most consequential election in the history of our country.” By losing his Gulf war, Trump has achieved that goal. His choice to launch a campaign against Iran was encouraged by others, but fully his own. It has led to a reversal that marks a strategic calamity far greater than the U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War.
Defeat in the Iranian war looks, on the surface, nothing like other U.S. military defeats. The speed of the war and its remoteness have lent an air of unreality to the whole endeavor. The White House has not been burned, as it was in 1814; there have not been protests against a nonexistent draft. The absence of substantial U.S. casualties in this conflict also masks the scale of the U.S. defeat. To be sure, the war has been deadly: Thousands of Iranians, ...
According to The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump reviewed military options for a full-scale war against Iran to “finish the job,” but has decided, for now, not to move forward.
The report says Trump is concerned that renewed military conflict could hurt the chances of a diplomatic resolution and of dismantling Iran’s nuclear program, and that he’s shown willingness to let indirect talks in Qatar run past the August 18 deadline. He is said to be fine with continuing limited strikes on Iranian targets if Tehran violates the current temporary deal - as it already has, repeatedly.
How are those negotiations going?
Not well. It seems JD Vance’s “historic” face-to-face achievement was a one-off. Washington has been quietly downgraded from talking to the Great Satan to negotiating with the Little Satan instead - a senior Qatari official confirmed that U.S. envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner met Qatari officials in Doha, but there are currently no high-level U.S.-Iran meetings ...
