Syrian Conflict: Australia Could Run Out Of Fuel In 43 Days, Would Be ‘MAD MAX World’

Australia is at risk of running out of fuel in the next few weeks due to the ongoing conflict in Syria. The escalating situation in the war-torn country threatens to cripple the supply chains that keep Australia going.

While the International Energy Agency mandates that countries hold a stock reserve “equivalent to 90 days of net imports,” Australia only has 43 days worth of supply, the Australian reports. And that could be cut down even further if a global crisis threatens supply channels from places like the Middle East.

Low oil reserves and an over-dependence on imports is what’s driving Austrailia’s fuel concerns.  Defense Strategy and Capability at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute senior analyst Dr. Malcolm Davis says Australia’s fuel reserves would last “20 days at best” if supplies were cut off, News.com.au reports. “[Australia is] one of the few countries in the world that does not take our energy security seriously,” said Dr. Davis. “It would be a Mad Max world. Our society and our economy would begin to fall apart very quickly… [because] everything depends on fuel to make an economy run. It is very serious.”

The rather ominous forecast comes in the wake of major US-led strikes on the Syrian government. As tensions escalate and threaten to compromise international trade, this could prove dire for Australia: a nation that outsources its oil refining to such international locations as Singapore. “Instead of investing in refinement facilities here for refining fuel, the government has decided it’s cheaper to do it overseas,” said Dr. Davis. “The price they pay for that in a crisis is that China can interrupt flow to Australia [from Singapore] relatively easy and our economy falls apart.”

According to The Daily Mail UK, liberal Senator and former major general in the Australian Army Jim Molan agrees that “we [Australia] stand[s] in real trouble.” Speaking to 2GB on Monday Morning, Molan criticized the government’s passive approach to issues of fuel supply and energy security, calling it “a single point of failure for Australia.”

“The way that we seem to get around this is that we buy credits overseas which ignores the entire problem,” Nolan said. “Those credits say that if things go wrong we can buy from overseas, but hang on: our supply lines of communication by ship are likely to be either threatened or because of insurers nothing will come to us at all.”

Moreover, a chronic shortage of petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel could render the Australian military immobile, and in these times where rhetoric and tensions over a war are high, that could prove disastrous for the country.

Certain Cars Can Be Banned From Streets, Court Rules. Total Ban By 2040?

Image source: Pixabay.com

The country where the internal combustion engine originated might be among the first to ban it.

Germany’s Federal Administrative Court ruled Tuesday that cities have the right to ban gasoline and diesel vehicles in an attempt to curb pollution.

“These vehicles have no place in our cities anymore,” Jürgen Resch, the managing director of an environmental group called Deutsche Umwelthilfe, told The New York Times. Resch’s group brought suit after German governments who had failed to take action against polluting vehicles.

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The suit demanded that German cities start enforcing air quality standards mandated by the European Union (EU), The Times reported. Enforcing those standards would require cities to ban many older diesel vehicles.

“Limited bans for certain diesel cars are within the law,” the court ruled. The Federal Administrative Court is one of the highest in Germany.

The city of Paris, which has some of the worst smog in Europe, has already banned vehicles built before 1997, Car Insurance Samurai reported. The French government wants to get rid of all gas and diesel vehicles by 2040.

Three German cities — Stuttgart, Munich and Dusseldorf — are considering banning diesel. Resch expects the first diesel bans in Germany to be enacted by fall of this year. It is not known how the ban would impact Germany’s auto industry, which has promoted diesel for decades and employs 800,000 people.

Germany was the country where the automobile was invented by Karl Benz in 1885.

“The days of flooding the inner cities with poisonous diesel emissions are over,” Resch said.

Many people around the world seem to agree with his sentiment.

City governments in Madrid and Athens want to ban diesel vehicles completely, and officials in the United Kingdom hope to ban diesel completely by 2040, The New York Times reported. The government of India wants to require all cars to be electric by 2030, CNN Money reported.

China Vice Minister of Information Zin Guobin told reporters his government wants to ban the sale of new fossil fuel burning vehicles by 2030, The Economist reported. Closer to home, Mary Nichols, the chairman of California’s Air Resources board, said she would like to see a ban on internal combustion vehicles by 2040.

What is your reaction? What it in the section below:

California Considering A Ban On Gas-Powered Cars

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Gasoline- and diesel-burning vehicles might become a thing of the past in California if Gov. Jerry Brown has his way.

Brown is considering a ban on the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles in the Golden State.

“To reach the ambitious levels of reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, we have to pretty much replace all combustion with some form of renewable energy by 2040 or 2050,” Mary Nichols, the chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, told Bloomberg Friday.

Nichols revealed that Brown is interested in such a ban.

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“I’ve gotten messages from the governor asking, ‘Why haven’t we done something already?’” Nichols said, referencing a plan by China to phase out cars that run on gas. “The governor has certainly indicated an interest in why China can do this and not California.”

In addition to China, the United Kingdom and France are moving to implement such bans. China’s vice minister of industry and information technology, Xin Guobin, revealed Sept. 9 that such a ban was in the works. The Chinese want to prohibit the sale of all new vehicles powered by gasoline or diesel fuel; older cars could remain on the road until they wear out.

China followed the lead of the United Kingdom, where that government wants to ban the sale of new gas and diesel powered cars by 2040, and France, which is working on a similar ban. The French government has already banned many older gasoline and diesel cars from Paris in an effort to combat pollution.

Governments in Germany, India and Saudi Arabia also have investigated the possibility of banning gasoline vehicles.

The auto industry is taking such threats very seriously. Ford, Mercedes, Toyota, Nissan, Mini, BMW, Jaguar, and even Maserati have announced plans for new electric vehicles. Tesla and Cummins have revealed plans for electric semi-trucks, and UPS is testing electric delivery trucks built by Mercedes’s parent, Daimler.

“There are people who believe, including who work for me, that you could stop all sales of new internal-combustion cars by 2030,” Nichols said. “Some people say 2035; some people say 2040. It’s awfully hard to predict any of that with precision, but it doesn’t appear to be out of the question.”

What do you think? Would you support such a ban? Share your thoughts in the section below:

India Stack and Bitcoin (An Insider's View)

By Chris at www.CapitalistExploits.at

Before the good stuff... the fun stuff.

Here"s a fan mail I received in response to this.

I guess he/she never made it as far as this part:

"Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against EVs, and I’m all for technological innovation."

Though, in all fairness, it may be the collagen talking. Either way, definitely not an Insider member, otherwise he/she/it would be well aware of where we"re actually invested. Ha!

Dregs from the bottom of the barrel occasionally drift into my corner of cyberspace. That they respond like this must be due to this fascinating misconception that I give a damn.

Still, if we poke them hard enough in the chest, they"ll bugger off leaving us with the fine specimens that make up the overwhelming majority of our distinguished readership. Which brings me neatly to:

"Hi Chris,

I"m not sure if this gets to you or is stuck in the admin box.

Love your work, really enjoy it.

Your current one on the knock off effects of banning gasoline and diesel cars made me want to bring up another point that is seldom discussed when people talk about the future of EVs... the profitability of refineries when they don"t have a market for gasoline.

When a barrel of crude is refined, about half of its volume ends up as gasoline.  The other half ends up as diesel, jet fuel, bunker oil, chemical feedstocks, etc... Gasoline is great for running automobiles, but pretty lousy for any other industrial process.  Industrial processes such as mining, refining, transporting, and processing cobalt, lithium, and molybdenum into EV parts.  These processes depend on the other half of the barrel.

Driving away (pun intended) the demand for gasoline by mandating EVs means that refineries have half of their product become much less valuable.  I don"t have the research or know of who has done the research, but I wonder what such a move would mean for the price of diesel, jet fuel, bunker oil, chemical feedstocks, etc...?

Hope all is well, cheers!"

Fair points and worth thinking about.

For example. Do those industries taking up the "other half of a barrel" benefit? To what degree? For how long? And is the market pricing this?

All fun stuff which we spend all most of our time doing here.

Anyway, today I"ve got something special for you and it"s got nothing to do with EVs or gasoline.

Bitcoin and India Stack

It was Raoul Pal who first brought to my attention the incredible galactic sized project that is India Stack.

I"ve since spoken with quite a variety of people both in India and out in order to better understand the dynamics of what"s taking place in India. I think it provides a fascinating and illuminating view into how certain problems can be dealt with.

In particular (and I"ve not seen anyone mention this), the ability to recapitalise a banking system on the brink and to do so while transitioning over a billion citizens onto a digital system.

Pre-cash elimination, India"s banks were in a shocking state. What better way to "fix" them than to get the poor to bail them out.

Ever since man began forming communities, we"ve had a setup where those at the top manufacture ways and means to have those at the bottom pay for the things they want.

Kings told stories about their "divine rights", people believed it, priests told stories about the church"s relationship with God, people believed it. And today politicians tell stories about "the greater good"... and people believe it. Some things never change.

Aside from the banking system being recapitalised...

It"s been fascinating to watch what was up until recently one of the world"s largest cash economies and where millions never even had a bank account suddenly goes digital.

So there were two steps here.

The first being the elimination of cash in the economy, and the second bringing online the digital platform otherwise known as IndiaStack, an open source platform where information is a utility.

The set of open API for developers includes:

• The Aadhaar for authentication


• The e-KYC documents that have been generated


• Digital lockers


• e-signatures (software based as against the present dongle based e-signs)


• The Unified Payments Interface which rides on top of the National Payment Corporation of India’s Immediate Payment System.

You can check out a presentation which provides a decent overview of it here.

I"ve spoken with a lot of guys who see this as being a major boon for India"s economy, eliminating fraud, destroying swathes of bureaucracy, and bringing millions of people into the economy who previously never had access.

I don"t disagree with any of this, but what I wanted to do was to find someone who wasn"t very bullish, someone who would challenge some of these thoughts. And with that in mind, I found and spoke to Deepankar Kapoor.

Deepankar Kapoor - as you can probably infer from his name - is not only Indian but he"s also the founder of Bitcoinwiser, a well known face in the digital advertising industry in India with his most recent stint being as the Vice President & National Strategy Head at Ogilvy India.

He has 9+ years of full time recognised experience in digital business transformation of Fortune 500 brands and won many accolades throughout his career. Academically, he holds an MBA from University of Calcutta wherein he majored in Marketing [Forecasting & Econometrics], BMS from Symbiosis International University and a Diploma in Cyber Laws from the Government Law College, Mumbai. Additionally, he is a Google and Twitter Certified Professional.

You can listen to our conversation below. I apologise for the dodgy line at times - Kenyan Wi-Fi isn"t the best in the world.

And a Question for This Week

Cast your vote here and also see what others think

- Chris

"Change is opportunity." — Suresh Prabhu, Union Minister for Commerce

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Liked this article? Then you"ll probably like my other missives on

this topic as well. Go here to access them (free, of course).

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Air Pollution: The Underestimated Cancer Trigger We Should All Recognize

While it’s true that making the right personal choices to stay disease-free may not be bulletproof, making these ‘right choices’ is still the way to go to avoid cancer and other diseases. What we as a collective need to consider, though, is that cancer prevention isn’t totally an individual effort. A good example of this can be seen with pollution, where a study outlines how some of the highest incidences of cancer rest among the most polluted areas in the US.

For this study, the US Environmental Protections Agency’s (EPA) Environmental Quality Index, a county-level measure of over 200 environmental variables, was compared to SEER state cancer profiles. Data on cancer rates was available for 85% of the over 3100 US counties. [1]

The average age-adjusted cancer rate in the US is 451 cases for every 100,000 people. But the counties with poor environmental quality had, on average, 39 more cases per 100,000 people than those with high environmental quality.

The main factors linked with higher cancer rates were air pollution, the presence of highways and the availability of housing and public transport. Of course, highways, public transport, and the location of houses are factors that affect air pollution too. Urban areas showed the strongest associations, most likely because there are more vehicles which consume fossil fuels.

Environmental Protection is the Best Prevention

As for which cancers were most affected by air pollution, breast and prostate cancers seem to have the strongest associations. Maybe instead of the “early detection is the best protection” line used to promote mammograms (which sounds quite like propaganda), how about “environmental protection is the best prevention”?

This is not the only study linking air pollution to cancer. In 2012, the IARC confirmed that diesel exhaust does cause cancer. In the USA alone, diesel fuel use causes over 50,000 deaths every year, and it’s nowhere near as dirty as the diesel used in other countries! [2]

This doesn’t just include cancer, but also emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease, and severe asthma attacks. There is also a link between acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) and living close to oil and gas wells.

On the other hand, when air quality regulations in California caused the level of diesel pollution to drop by 68%, the risk of developing cancers from the toxins in diesel dropped by three quarters! Cancer incidence in general has declined in the USA too, due in no small part to “personal” air pollution improvement efforts, i.e. smoking, falling out of fashion.

While 451 per 100,000 is still too many, the age-adjusted cancer rate was 511 per 100,000 in 1992, when incidence peaked. So when someone develops cancer, it may not be all their fault. It may be society’s responsibility to clean up the world, so we can all live long, healthy lives, and make what diseases that would remain easier to treat.

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