"As Chinese carmakers diversify beyond CATL batteries, Beijing warns of market overreaction"

From the South China Morning Post, September 23:

MIIT-linked commentary dismisses “de-CATLisation” concerns as normal supplier diversification and warns cutthroat price competition poses a far bigger threat 

A publication under China’s industry ministry has pushed back against market chatter of “de-CATLisation” as a growing number of the battery giant’s automotive partners diversify their suppliers, with the company’s shares falling recently.

The commentary, published by the news centre of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said supplier diversification and in-house battery projects are standard commercial practices. Such moves should not be portrayed as deliberate attempts to weaken leading battery makers like Contemporary Amperex Technol­ogy Limited (CATL) or drive a wedge between carmakers and suppliers, it said.

The publication followed several Chinese carmakers, including Xiaomi, Li Auto and Xpeng, expanding partnerships with battery suppliers other than CATL or announcing plans to develop batteries in-house. The moves this month have fuelled talk of a shift away from the industry giant and speculation about its market position.

By Wednesday, CATL’s Shenzhen-listed shares had fallen about 25 per cent from their mid-August level and nearly 35 per cent from a record high reached in early May. The shares were down 1.19 per cent on the day.

CATL remains the dominant player in China’s battery market. In August, it accounted for more than 41 per cent of the power-battery market by installed capacity, about double the share of its nearest rival, BYD, according to the China Automotive Battery Innovation Alliance.

Supplier diversification is not a new trend. CATL’s scale has made its batteries difficult to replace entirely, but many carmakers have adopted multi-supplier strategies or invested in in-house battery production in recent years to reduce their reliance on the company....

....MUCH MORE 

It's been a tough year for the stock (300750:Shenzhen/3750:HK), this chart is the Shenzhen listed shares in CNY:

 

TradingView, 1-year, down 18.21% over the twelve months

Recently:

Sept. 15 - "CATL Signs Egyptian Battery Deal Two Weeks After Xi’s Visit to Cairo" (3750:HK)

"After Latest Swing Past Sun, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Checks in"

The thing is moving quickly.

From NASA, September 10: 

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe completed its 29th close approach to the Sun on Sept. 4, again matching its record speed and distance from the solar surface. This time, the spacecraft trained its camera on structures and activity near the Sun’s north pole.

The spacecraft transmitted a beacon tone indicating that its systems were operating normally on Sept. 7. Flying around the Sun on a trajectory that limited communications with Earth, Parker had been out of contact and operating autonomously, as planned, for nine days centered around closest approach.

The flyby, which brought Parker to within 3.8 million miles of the Sun at a top speed of 430,000 miles per hour, allowed the spacecraft to race through and sample almost 40% of the solar circumference within one day during this encounter. During this solar encounter, which started Aug. 30 and ended Sept. 9, Parker’s four scientific instrument packages gathered data from inside the Sun’s atmosphere, or corona.

Parker will begin returning detailed spacecraft telemetry on Friday, Sept. 11, with science data transmission set to run from Sunday, Sept. 13 through Sunday, Sept. 27....

....MUCH MORE 

Here's NASA's Parker Solar Probe blog - https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/parker-solar-probe/ 

That 430,000 MPH (692,000 KPH) is the highest speed ever attained by something made by humans.

"US diesel futures fall after report of export ban plan, which the White House denies"

From Reuters, September 23:

• White House official calls report of flat temporary export ban incorrect
• Wright says any plan to boost diesel supply would be voluntary
• October ultra-low-sulfur diesel futures trade down ​4.01% at $4.7437 gallon 

US ultra-low-sulfur diesel futures fell 4% on Wednesday after Politico ‌reported that the White House is preparing a plan to ban diesel exports for 90 days, which the Trump Administration denied.

 

Average US diesel prices are sitting near record highs at $6.52 a gallon, according to AAA, straining the farming, transportation and other industrial ​sectors that rely on the fuel. Wars in Iran and Ukraine have sharply cut exports ​from some of the biggest producers such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United ⁠Arab Emirates.

 

A White House official said a report the US is considering a flat, temporary export ban ​was not correct.

 

The October futures contract was last trading at $4.7437 a gallon, down 4%, after earlier declining more ​than 6%.

 

Trump said on Tuesday he backed a ban on diesel exports, as Republican candidates in some of the tightest election races in November called for the measure as a way to curb record fuel prices. Diesel's surge has come as US diesel ​inventories have dropped to less than 97 million barrels, or about 13% less than the seasonal average ​over the last five years.

 

However, US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Wednesday that a US ban on diesel exports would ‌not ⁠work and could push up gasoline and jet fuel prices....

....MUCH MORE 

 

Here's the Politico story: 

‘Dammit, something has to happen’: White House preparing plan for 90-day diesel exports ban

Earlier today:

Inflation: "$6.53 Diesel US Average, $8.25 in California, Worsens Already Hot Inflation, amid Record US Diesel Exports. Gasoline & Jet Fuel Prices also Spike"

And September 21:

Inflation: "Global Refinery Crunch Pushes Diesel Prices to New Records"

And September 18:

"Goldman Warns Diesel Crisis Is Setting Up The Next Gasoline Squeeze..."

And September 11:

"Diesel Crunch Set To Worsen As Refining Capacity Falls Short, Industry Warns"

Or:

July 12 - The World Runs On Diesel and Diesel Is Running out

With Russian shipping and refining capacity getting whacked we're seeing crack spreads greater than the price of crude itself.

July 15 - "JPMorgan shifts focus from Hormuz oil chokepoint to Russian refining crisis"

It's a pretty important story. 

Capital Markets: "Greenback is Bid"

 From Marc to Market:

The US dollar is stronger against all the G10 currencies and most emerging market currencies today. The euro has approached $1.14, despite firmer than expected preliminary September PMI. Japan’s markets re-open tomorrow for the first time this week, and the market has taken the dollar to almost JPY158, around where it peaked before last weekend. Optimism about supply and talks has kept November WTI mostly consolidating today below $90 a barrel.  Yet, interest rates are little changed. 

The Trump-Xi summit is drawing much attention, but expectations seem relatively low.  At most a short extension of the tariff truce may be seen but the current agreement doesn’t end until early November, so there is ostensibly no urgency.  The central banks of Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden meet tomorrow. There has been a shift in recent days today a Norges Bank hike tomorrow. A week ago, the swaps market had a little less than a 50% chance of a hike discounted, and now it is a little more than a 50% chance....

....MUCH MORE 

Inflation: "$6.53 Diesel US Average, $8.25 in California, Worsens Already Hot Inflation, amid Record US Diesel Exports. Gasoline & Jet Fuel Prices also Spike"

When it is said that the price of diesel fuel goes into everything it is not hypebole.

May 2022 (Russian invasion) -  Diesel equals Soybeans; Soybeans equal Diesel (in more ways than one)

....Way back in April 2008, the U.S. was still in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gaddafi in Libya and Morsi in Egypt had not yet been overthrown, the Maidan coup in Ukraine was six years in the future and the Russian invasion was fourteen years ahead, the price of oil was going parabolic on the charts, on its way to the record futures print, $147+, and I was thinking about substitution and pseudo-fungibility:

What Proportion of Food Price Increases is Attributable to Ethanol?

If I recall correctly it takes about five gallons of fuel to plant and harvest an acre of corn (I just spent 60 seconds trying to remember if that was conservation tillage or traditional. Then I realized that farm management was not the focus of this post, I'll go with 5 gal./acre), so the argument that rising input prices is a factor has merit....

Some things never change. But they should

Related, noted in a 2015 post:

Remember, the rule of thumb is it takes around 10 crude oil calories to produce 1 row crop (mainly corn and soybeans) calorie.
Most other food prices are similarly dependent on their input costs.
One oft-cited bit of nuttines is the fact it takes 127 calories of aviation fuel to get a head of lettuce from California to London.... 

March 2021 -  Vaclav Smil: "How Much Energy Does It Take to Grow a Tomato?"

And the headline story from Wolf Richter at Wolf Street, September 22:

I’m worried about the inflationary mindset taking off again. It’s the Fed’s job to step on the brakes before inflation turns into a runaway train.

The average retail price of on-highway diesel spiked by 24 cents in the latest week, and by 88 cents in four weeks, to a record $6.529 a gallon at gas stations on Monday, and that’s for the US overall, according to the EIA this morning. Year-over-year, the price of diesel has spiked by 74%.

California diesel prices spiked to $8.246 a gallon. While driving by gas stations, we’ve seen over $8 a gallon for weeks.

These are sobering sights, setting off the inflation alarm bells.

Republicans called for a diesel export ban. There is a shortage of diesel in the rest of the world, and US refiners provide much needed supply.

Year-to-date through August, the US produced 5.1 million barrels per day of distillate fuel oil (mostly diesel); imported almost none; and exported a record average of 1.74 million barrels per day over the past two months.

Diesel crack spreads, which are a rough measure of US refinery profit margins for diesel, are at record levels. And they come on top of the high price of crude oil. The result is a record high retail price of diesel.

So Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) urged President Trump on Saturday to impose a temporary diesel export ban, with the hope that such a ban would narrow the crack spread and thereby allow diesel retail prices to cool before the midterms. Trump today endorsed a diesel export ban when talking to reporters. A decision, he said, is coming “fast, one way of the other.”

The weekly diesel export data from the EIA is the most current measure, but also the roughest most incomplete estimate, and very volatile from week to week. And it’s seasonal. The 8-week-average provides a sense of the recent trends:

Diesel impacts inflation in the overall economy. Only a small portion of consumers drive vehicles with diesel engines (some pickups and SUVs, and some older European imports), so diesel prices impact only a small number of consumers directly.

But diesel prices – along with jet fuel and gasoline prices – feed into all kinds of transportation costs that consumers pay for directly, such as ecommerce shipping charges and airline fares.

And they’re also part of the input costs for a broad range of businesses, directly or via higher prices of goods and transportation services. And businesses will then try to pass on those higher costs via higher prices for their goods and services to consumers, other businesses, and governments.

The GDP price deflator, released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, tracks inflation facing all economic entities: consumers (separately tracked by the CPI and the PCE Price Index), businesses (separately tracked by the PPI), and governments. It tracks inflation in the overall US economy and is the broadest inflation index in the US.

Inflation has been worse for businesses than for consumers as businesses could not fully pass on the cost increases without losing sales. This has shown up in the much hotter PPI inflation (overall PPI +5.4%; services PPI +4.5%; core goods PPI +5.0%; energy PPI +24%). So inflation in the overall economy has been worse than inflation that only consumer face....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Wolf Street: 

Treasury Yields of 2 Years & 3 Years Spike toward 5%, but 10-Year Holds at 5%, Yield Curve Bulges: Some Thoughts on What’s Brewing

"SoftBank’s $50B data centre group slows IPO plans as investors balk at valuation"

SB Energy was tapped to build the huge (9.2 megawatt, 2nd largest in the world) gas-fired power plant in Ohio.*

From CryptoBriefing, September 22:

SB Energy's massive backlog and zero operational data centers are giving prospective investors pause 

SoftBank’s data center subsidiary SB Energy has hit the brakes on what was supposed to be one of the largest IPOs of 2026, pushing back its listing from September to at least mid-to-late October. The culprit: investors aren’t buying the $50 billion price tag for a company that hasn’t actually turned on a single data center yet.

The company filed its S-1 registration statement with the SEC on September 1, seeking to list on Nasdaq under the ticker SBE and raise between $5 billion and $7 billion while keeping SoftBank as majority owner....

....MUCH MORE 

Previously on the big one:

February 24 - Ahead of Tonight's State Of The Union: Hoping For Clarity On The Gigantic Gas-Fired Electrical Generation Plant

Everything other than the fact it is Japanese money funding the beast and a Japanese company (SB Energy  sub. of SoftBank) overseeing the project and Japanese companies expressing interest in developing same, a mention of American corporate participation could be rocket fuel for a couple of our favorite names.

First up, Barron's last week, with the overview: 

February 20

A Gargantuan Natural Gas Plant Is Planned for Ohio. These Stocks Could Benefit. 

July 20 - Not Good - "Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center"

The quarter-trillion guarantee would be risky no matter who NVDA was co-signing for but the fact it will be for Mayoshi Son and Sam Altman is nuts.

Our last mention of the Ohio property was February 25's Transmission: "Central Ohio Set for Major Grid Expansion as PJM Approves 765-kV Lines"

We didn't get any further information on the immense Ohio natural gas power plant in last night's State of the Union message but as a possible consolation prize for the hyper-concentrated mini-portfolio we see this from Construction Review, February 17...

 And a few more.

"Swedish probe into suspected vote influence could lead to Dalarna re-run"

The article notes "preliminary national figures put the centre-left opposition at 176 seats and the outgoing right-wing bloc at 173," so this case would not flip the election should a re-vote go the other way. However, there is a second seat, won by Ahmed Abas Omar, that may also be contested.

From EUalive, September 23:

Prosecutors are examining pre-marked ballots after a Left Party newcomer won a Riksdag seat; a re-run could tilt the election result to the right 

The probe raises questions about the narrow national parliamentary balance, as it could potentially flip seats and tip the Riksdag to a 175-174 right-wing majority

Swedish prosecutors have reopened an investigation into suspected election irregularities in Borlänge after a Left Party newcomer unexpectedly won a Riksdag seat through personal votes.

Mohamed Abdukardir Ali, of Somali origin, stood ninth on the Left Party list in Dalarna County. He received 648 personal votes in the 13 September 2026 election, enough to overtake climate spokesperson Kajsa Fredholm and take the party’s only parliamentary seat from the constituency. Ali had been a party member for about a year, told reporters he ran no personal campaign and had no campaign material of his own, and was granted Swedish citizenship in February 2026 after an earlier denial linked to debts.

Swedish media including Expressen confirm an active investigation by the National Anti-Corruption Unit into suspected electoral fraud in Borlänge, with police surveillance of a car linked to Left Party candidate Mohamed Abdukardir Ali distributing cash and pre-filled ballots to Somali-background* voters during early voting....

....MUCH MORE

*As has been said about Somalis in the UK: 

We shouldn’t judge a whole ethnic group based on the actions of 99% of them.

And maybe about Somalis in Maine, and at the "Quality Learing Center"

"U.S. Markets to begin trading 23 hours a day, Monday-Friday, beginning on December 6" (plus how to know if you are having a stroke)

From CryptoBriefing, September 17:

Starting December 6, 2026, US equity markets will operate 23 hours a day, five days a week. The one-hour break each evening, from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET, is reserved for maintenance. Every other hour belongs to the traders.

The Securities and Exchange Commission approved the infrastructure changes needed to make this happen, and the agency has gone a step further: it’s openly exploring whether full 24/7 trading should come next.

How the new schedule works....

....MUCH MORE 

Our first post on stroke symptoms was in October 2008 during the Great Unpleasantness:

How to Recognize the Symptoms of a Stroke (and what to do)

It came with a three minute video. 

Then in October 2016, a couple weeks ahead of an Nvidia earnings report:
"Earnings Jolt Stocks Like Never Before as ETFs, Algos Get Blame" (NVDA; FSLR)

Yes, I am thinking about NVIDIA'a upcoming numbers* and I still get butterflies riding an extended stock that is priced with zero-tolerance for disappointment.

We went through the same thing with First Solar, out in public here on the blog, every three months, pretty much from the $20 IPO in November 2006 to the $317 top-tick in less than 18 months and then down to $11.43 over the next four years.
On some report days the options would move through five or six strike prices.

It got so rollery-coastery we'd do stroke symptom identification drills using the American Stroke Association's F.A.S.T. protocol:

Face drooping:  -no, that's just a hang-dog expression
Arm weakness:  -no, she just threw a monitor across the room
Slurred speech: -no, that's the director of customer relations/client retention just returned  from a three grand lunch.
Time to call an ambulance: no, time for some rapid-pulse chair aerobics as the algos move faster than even seems possible.

Hmmm....this intro seems to be going to a dark place.
On a lighter note, here's the headline story from Bloomberg....

No video. 

And our newest go-to diagnostic test: 

Honestly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen https://t.co/aqA1vpVt8Y

— Aelfred The Great (@aelfred_D) September 20, 2026

Meanwhile, At The Washington Post....

correction

A previous version of this article incorrectly quoted President Donald Trump. He said that "the war will be over very shortly after the election," not that "the world will be over very shortly after the election." 

—appended to September 10's "Trump makes case for Iran war, promises $5,000 payouts if GOP wins midterms". 

AI Narratives: "How Effective Altruism Bought the Media"

From Effort News, September 2, i.e. before the Coxon resignation tweet heard round the world:

AI Doomers are Funding Circular Potemkin Articles 

The fight for control of the AI narrative has reached egregious new heights. An Effort investigation uncovered Potemkin articles, in which claims are fabricated, corroborated, and published as journalism by members of an insular donor ecosystem. To understand how this works, follow us through this Guardian article. Of its 6 participants — including the journalist and publisher — 6/6 are paid for by three megadonors.

The publisher
The Guardian
$3,000,000+

The reporter
Aisha Down
$60K–$110K


Quoted 'Expert'
Malcolm Murray
$129,376 + $47.1M to affiliated institutions
Quoted 'Expert'
Henry Papadatos
$620,000
The subject
Daniel Kokotajlo
$2,851,166
Quoted 'Expert'
Andrea Castagna
$30,000 + 2 undisclosed grants

Coefficient Giving pays the salary of the journalist through the Tarbell Fellowship. It pays the publisher, the Guardian, more than $3M. AI 2027, the subject of the article, was given $400K from Coefficient, in addition to $2M from SFF. The three other pseudo-experts quoted in the article are all paid by SFF, Coefficient, or Effective Ventures Foundation.¹

The Guardian does not disclose that it is funded by Coefficient or that the journalist is entirely paid for by Tarbell. In a fundraising statement attached to the article, the Guardian proclaims its “fierce independence.”

Down declares her fellow Coefficient funding recipients “experts” without justification. She proclaims Kokotajlo “a leading artificial intelligence expert” without any specific record or achievement. Kokotajlo and the other authors of AI 2027 and AI 2040 already admitted their predictions were off by years, if not decades.

All six belong to a circular ecosystem known as “AI Safety,” united around the belief that AI will end the human race.² What Down promotes as ‘expertise’ is not merely unrigorous or exaggerated — it is a work of cultlike fiction which openly promotes their vision of the AI apocalypse. This belief underwrites millions spent annually on promoting a firehose of anti-AI narratives with the goal of banning AI outright — the price of preventing the apocalypse.

This ecosystem is bankrolled by three megadonors — Dustin Moskovitz’s Open Philanthropy, Sam Bankman-Fried’s Center for Effective Altruism (CEA), and Jaan Tallinn’s Survival and Flourishing Fund. The media arm of this empire has over $40 million in donations and includes paid journalists, influencers, and religious groups....

....MUCH MORE 

We last visited Effort News on September 20 for his take on Irregular, the company that allowed the various breaches of containment, including the attack on Hugging Face.

My takeaway was that either Irregular doesn't know what they're doing or more likely that they know exactly what they're doing.

Regarding Effective Altruism, most of our links were related to Sam Bankman-Fried:

November 2022 - How Media Aided and Abetted The Rise of FTX and Bankman-Fried 

November 2022 -FTX/Bankman-Fried: When Outlets As Disparate As The Spectator and Vanity Fair Call For A Media Reckoning You Know Something's Up 

November 2022 - Prudent Bet Sizing And The Best Quote About FTX, Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (to date)

Setting aside the whole stealing your client's money thing, which has been covered by other commenters, one of the lessons of the FTX/Alameda Trading blowup is maximizing your gains while minimizing the risk of gamblers ruin.

First up, some of the armchair psychoanalysis based off of FTX investor Sequoia Capital's fluffer piece "Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex—And Maybe You Should Too"....

It Seems A LOT Of People Were Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried
From Time Magazine, March 15, 2023:
Exclusive: Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed

September 2023 - "Brace For Impact: The Trouble With The Non Profit Newsroom"

The question that Michael Lewis has not answered re: FTX and Alameda is: At what point did he know it was a multi-billion dollar scam?

Did he know while he, Caroline and Bankman-Fried were hanging out, but decided to turn a blind eye to the fraud for the sake of his book and the inevitable movie?

Or did he find out what was going on literally under his nose (if some of the drug stories are to be believed) only along with everyone else in November 2022, which rather diminishes his street cred as a financial insider? Talk about having to thread the needle in your narrative.

Still a good wordsmith though....

Finally, I wish the EA peeps hadn't co-opted Ida Tarbell, we are sort of fond of the old gal.

February 2024's "Information Asymmetry: Ida M. Tarbell Presents An Investment Opportunity" 
Ms Tarbell was one of the original muckrakers. More on them after the jump....

Has a few of our earlier links.

Some of our posts on the Muckrakers:

Media: Where Are The Muckrakers? The Rise and Fall of McClure's Magazine

 As noted back in 2016: 

Over the years, simply because the blog is composed of things that caught my eye rather than some grand plan, we've from time to time mentioned some of the early 20th century journalists who got appended the term muck-rakers but when I did a quick search of the blog I was surprised how many we'd named, although usually just in passing.

Some links below.
And from Allegheny College, a swell repository of all things Ida Tarbell:

“The Explosions of Our Fine Idealistic Undertakings”....

Ida M. Tarbell: "John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study"

One of the original Muckrakers in McClure's Magazine's January 1901 issue.
This piece is a bit later, McClure's July 1905 via the Tarbell Collection at Allegheny College....

....As to Mr. Rockefeller's origin it is typically American. He sprang from one of those migrating families which, coming to this country in the seventeenth century, has moved westward with each generation seeking a betterment of condition. He and his brothers were the first great product of a restless family searching a firm footing on new soil. The first word heard of the Rockefeller family in Richford, Tioga County, New York, where John D. Rockefeller was born, was in the early 1830's when his grandfather, Godfrey Rockefeller, moved to that community from Mud Creek, Massachusetts. There are still alive in Tioga County many men and women who remember Godfrey Rockefeller. It is not a pleasant description they give of him — a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit, but held to a certain decency by a wife of such strong intellect and determined character that she impressed herself unforgettably on the community.....

In 2011 we visited Ida Tarbell in "Ida M. Tarbell: 'John D. Rockefeller: A Character Study'" in part because I wanted a searchable link to the Tarbell collection at Allegheny college and partly because she described John D.'s grandfather, Godfrey as "a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit".

In February 2016's "Oil Tankers and Interest Rates and Scallywags and Time" one of the Rockefeller minions, Thomas Lawson, got a mention, not for his exposé of his copper dealings with Standard Oil honcho Henry Huttleston Rogers, Frenzied Finance, but because of the ship for which Lawson was namesake.

Staying in 2016, it was Ida's buddy Lincoln Steffens in "Goldman Sachs: Death Of Capitalism Averted, Time For Working Schlubs to Partaay!", again not for the work he was most famous for, in Steffens' case his Shame of the Cities (St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh et al) but because of his famously wrong statement about Soviet Russia in a letter dated April 3, 1919: “I have seen the future and it works.”.
It didn't.

In 2015 there was Jacob Riis because I was reminded of one of the photographs from "How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York":
Jacob Riis Lives! "San Francisco Housing Bubble Goes Subterranean: $500/Month To Live In A Crawlspace"
 
And along the way Theodore Dreiser got a major link (possibly one of the best business novels ever) in "Switzerland Begins Two-Year Trial of Driverless Buses (plus money, art, glory and sex)"

So yes, more than wary reader might have anticipated and I've probably forgotten a couple.
Circling back to Ida, here's an online version of History of the Standard Oil Company.

Although there are quite a few critiques you can raise about her book it was pretty important and was one of the factors that led to the breakup of Standard Oil in the Supreme Court decision "Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States" seven years later. So Mr Rockefeller probably considered the book important.

It ranks #5 on NYU's Journalism school's list of the 100 best works of 20th-century American journalism. (via the NYT) 

Seriously, who among the Effective Altruist minions is going to craft a thumbnail description better than Ida on J.D. Rockefeller's grandfather:

"a shiftless tippler, stunted in stature and mean in spirit" 

Piddington Saved By Great Crested Newt

Having missed my chance to get on the ballot for the Clacton by-election with the campaign slogan "Taking out the trash" re: Binface I resigned myself to having to wait for the next general election to rep. Piddington and then Piddington became the Principality of Piddington, and I was crushed, once again, before even entering the arena. But now....

Great crested newts could thwart Piddington migrant camp
Home Office ecological assessment failed to identify protected species on the site, potentially opening legal challenge  

...In an apparent blunder, the Home Office’s ecological assessment of the area, submitted as part of its planning application, claimed that there was no evidence of protected newts, bats or reptiles.... 

....MUCH MORE 

Should the newts prevail, Piddington remains and I run for election. Alternatively I thought of nominating myself for a Dukedom but Oxfordshire already has the Marlborough gang with that big house so probably not. 

However, glancing at Burke's, what came to light is the fact the Earldom of Oxford is dormant and though quite a ways down the totem pole from where I believe I should be hangin' with the peerage homies it would be a start and maybe in a couple hundred years.... 

El Niño: "The ARkStorm Scenario Could Flood California's Central Valley like a Bathtub and Cost $725 Billion"

First posted May, 2011.
From the U.S. Geological Survey:

The U.S. Geological Survey, Multi Hazards Demonstration Project (MHDP) uses hazards science to improve resiliency of communities to natural disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, landslides, floods and coastal erosion. The project engages emergency planners, businesses, universities, government agencies, and others in preparing for major natural disasters. The project also helps to set research goals and provides decision-making information for loss reduction and improved resiliency. The first public product of the MHDP was the ShakeOut Earthquake Scenario published in May 2008. This detailed depiction of a hypothetical magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas Fault in southern California served as the centerpiece of the largest earthquake drill in United States history, involving over 5,000 emergency responders and the participation of over 5.5 million citizens.

This document summarizes the next major public project for MHDP, a winter storm scenario called ARkStorm (for Atmospheric River 1,000). Experts have designed a large, scientifically realistic meteorological event followed by an examination of the secondary hazards (for example, landslides and flooding), physical damages to the built environment, and social and economic consequences. The hypothetical storm depicted here would strike the U.S. West Coast and be similar to the intense California winter storms of 1861 and 1862 that left the central valley of California impassible. The storm is estimated to produce precipitation that in many places exceeds levels only experienced on average once every 500 to 1,000 years.

Extensive flooding results. In many cases flooding overwhelms the state’s flood-protection system, which is typically designed to resist 100- to 200-year runoffs. The Central Valley experiences hypothetical flooding 300 miles long and 20 or more miles wide. Serious flooding also occurs in Orange County, Los Angeles County, San Diego, the San Francisco Bay area, and other coastal communities. Windspeeds in some places reach 125 miles per hour, hurricane-force winds. Across wider areas of the state, winds reach 60 miles per hour. Hundreds of landslides damage roads, highways, and homes. Property damage exceeds $300 billion, most from flooding. Demand surge (an increase in labor rates and other repair costs after major natural disasters) could increase property losses by 20 percent. Agricultural losses and other costs to repair lifelines, dewater (drain) flooded islands, and repair damage from landslides, brings the total direct property loss to nearly $400 billion, of which $20 to $30 billion would be recoverable through public and commercial insurance. Power, water, sewer, and other lifelines experience damage that takes weeks or months to restore. Flooding evacuation could involve 1.5 million residents in the inland region and delta counties. Business interruption costs reach $325 billion in addition to the $400 billion property repair costs, meaning that an ARkStorm could cost on the order of $725 billion, which is nearly 3 times the loss deemed to be realistic by the ShakeOut authors for a severe southern California earthquake, an event with roughly the same annual occurrence probability....MUCH MORE, including three PDF's

HT:  the WaPo's Joel Achenbach* who, writing at Slate, says:
The Century of Disasters

Meltdowns. Floods. Tornadoes. Oil spills. Grid crashes. Why more and more things seem to be going wrong, and what we can do about it.

This will be the century of disasters.

In the same way that the 20^th century was the century of world wars, genocide, and grinding ideological conflict, the 21^st will be the century of natural disasters and technological crises and unholy combinations of the two. It'll be the century when the things that we count on to go right will, for whatever reason, go wrong.

Late last month, as the Mississippi River rose in what is destined to be the worst flood in decades, and as the residents of Alabama and other states rummaged through the debris of a historic tornado outbreak, physicists at a meeting in Anaheim, Calif., had a discussion about the dangers posed by the sun.

Solar flares, scientists believe, are a disaster waiting to happen. Thus one of the sessions at the American Physical Society's annual meeting was devoted to discussing the hazard of electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) caused by solar flares or terrorist attacks. Such pulses could fry transformers and knock out the electrical grid over much of the nation. Last year the Oak Ridge National Laboratory released a study saying the damage might take years to fix and cost trillions of dollars.

But maybe even that's not the disaster people should be worrying about....MORE

*Joel may just be putting his profound understanding of new media into practice:

...When in doubt, go with the most hysterical headline.

(Rule one of blogging is that the End Of The World will be good for page views.)

-World War Five

Although the potential for the ARkStorm has been known since the great storm that started on Christmas Eve 1861 and continued for 43 days (see "The Coming Megafloods") the term ARkStorm came to prominence in 2011 with the publiction by the US Geological Survey of  "Overview of the ARkStorm Scenario" and by Scientific American of "The Coming Megafloods".

We last saw a co-author of the latter, Berkeley's Professor B. Lynn Ingram in September's "California: The Last 200 Years Were The Happy Time For Weather, Get Ready For A Return to The West Without Water".

She knows hydrology.

This little stroll down Memory Lane was brought to mind by an article at the San Jose Silicon Valley Mercury-News, September 21:

Newsom declares state of emergency as California prepares for historic El Niño this winter  

The risk of floods, mudslides, power outages and severe weather are increasing, experts say

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Somebody in California government remembers their history.

In 1861 - '62 it rained for 44 days and the state capitol had to be temporarily relocated to San Francisco because Sacramento looked like this:

Leland Stanford went to his gubernatorial swearing-in in a rowboat just before everyone headed downriver to S.F.

Sadly, we probably won't get to see Governor Newsom in a rowboat.

Capital Markets: "Lower Oil Prices Could Help Snap the Nearly Two-Week Rise in the US Two-Year Rate"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex, September 22:

Ahead of the North American session, the US dollar is mostly a little softer.  It has initially extended its gains in the Asia Pacific session, where Japan is still on holiday, but has retreated in the European morning. Optimism about the amount of oil making its way through the Strait of Hormuz and pipelines has seen November WTI extend the pullback that began last week after the foray above $100.  It approached $89.25 today, its lowest level in two weeks.  It is weighing on yields, and the US two-year note yield is threatening to fall for the first time since September 3. 

Neither of the US two new initiatives have impacted the broader markets.  First, the deal struck with Denmark/Greenland do not appear to give the US anything it did not have under the earlier agreement. That foreign countries cannot have bases there seems to affirm what is already taking place on the ground.  Second, the idea that the US-China have a framework for an AI dialogue seemed to have been agreed upon in May.  Both sides seem to be slow walking it. Notifying each other about AI incidents that threaten national security seems to be a minimal step.  

Prices....

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Carbon: China's Approach To Net Zero Will Bury Western Industry And AI

From Tablet magazine, September 16:

China’s Net Zero Advantage 

Beijing is pursuing a climate strategy that weakens the West while strengthening its own competitive position 

In its competition with China, the United States holds a natural advantage: abundant oil and cheap natural gas. Reliable energy powers factories, data centers, transportation networks, and military operations. It lets the United States combine technological innovation with industrial scale, an advantage that China, dependent on imported oil and gas, cannot easily reproduce.

But China has found a partial answer: the Net Zero movement. For years, a large, influential, and well-funded Western network has campaigned to restrict the production and use of fossil fuels. Many of the same campaigning organizations also oppose nuclear power, the largest source of emissions-free electricity in the United States. Climate advocates seek to persuade the American government to surrender its energy advantage voluntarily. Beijing agrees.

Over the past two decades, therefore, an alliance in all but name has taken shape. On one side stands the Chinese party-state. On the other stands a Western climate community much broader than its activist core: environmental organizations and the philanthropies that finance them, research institutes and international agencies, journalists who cover the transition to renewable energy, officials drawn from the movement’s own ranks, and the investors, asset managers, and financial institutions whose returns depend on the policies the movement secures.

The Net Zero community is not uniform. Its radical wing seeks to end capitalism and usher in a new socialist experiment. Its wealthiest participants intend to profit from the transition to wind and solar. What binds them is not a pact or a chain of command but a convergence of interests. Many, if not most, of them would deny that the alliance with China exists at all.

On the surface, it looks like a relationship of strange bedfellows. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases and the largest producer and consumer of coal. Its power system still runs mainly on coal, and it burns more coal than the rest of the world combined. By the climate movement’s own stated goal, the reduction of emissions, China should be its principal target. It is not. The organizations working to avert climate change aim their strongest instruments—divestment, litigation, regulatory pressure, public shaming—at Western energy and industry, and at the governments that decline to restrict them.

Of China, they speak in an entirely different register. The respect accorded to Beijing by Christiana Figueres, who ran the U.N. climate secretariat and midwifed the Paris Agreement, is instructive. In November 2025 she said that in three decades of climate diplomacy, the Chinese had “always under-promised and over-delivered,” a habit she attributed to integrity and humility. John Kerry, then the United States climate envoy and the movement’s most senior American official, put the matter more starkly. At the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, on the day Washington announced a cooperation agreement with Beijing, Kerry was asked about the forced labor of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, where most of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon is produced. The subject, he said, was “not my lane.” His job was to move the climate agenda forward.

Figueres credits Beijing with integrity. Kerry declines to look at what Beijing does. Neither is an outlier. Between the diplomat who built the climate regime and the envoy who bargained with the world’s largest emitter lies the settled disposition of the Net Zero movement: Contrary to all available emissions evidence, China is the morally serious party, and the West is the laggard. Why?

Several well-publicized cases suggest that one reason China appears to be above Net Zero criticism is that Beijing is playing a major role in funding the climate movement. For example, Neville Roy Singham, an American technology entrepreneur, has reportedly been the subject of a federal grand jury inquiry in New York. Singham sold his consulting firm Thoughtworks in 2017 for $785 million, moved his operations to Shanghai, and began financing a global network of nonprofits and media outlets. In August 2023, The New York Times reported that Singham, working closely with the Chinese government’s media apparatus, financed the spread of its messaging worldwide through nonprofits and shell companies. Singham denied receiving funds or instructions from any government or party, including the Chinese Communist Party.

One recipient of his philanthropy has been Code Pink, the antiwar group cofounded by Jodie Evans, whom Singham married in 2017. In November 2025, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) asked the attorney general to investigate Code Pink under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

At the heart of the grand bargain is an agreement over Western and Chinese policies defined by simple arithmetic. China adds. The West subtracts.

Cotton’s letter noted that, before her marriage to Singham, Evans had demanded that Beijing stop repressing women’s human-rights defenders. After it, she discovered China to be a defender of the oppressed. Code Pink stopped criticizing Beijing’s treatment of the Uyghurs and instead took up its defense, launching, in 2020, a campaign under the slogan “China is not our enemy.” Entities linked to Singham, Cotton’s letter said, had supplied Code Pink with more than $1.4 million since 2017, roughly a quarter of its funding, a figure the letter drew from the Times investigation.

Code Pink also praises China on the climate question. But if Chinese money is shaping American energy policy, the organization under the most serious scrutiny is Energy Foundation China, a California charity that keeps a San Francisco address and a large office in Beijing. By its own account, its China office is registered with the Beijing public-security bureau and supervised by the National Development and Reform Commission, the ministry that writes and administers China’s five-year plans. That self-description, and a report by the national-security group State Armor, was enough to prompt a December 2025 letter from 26 state attorneys general, led by Montana’s Austin Knudsen, asking the Justice Department to investigate the foundation as an unregistered foreign agent. The attorneys general likewise relied on Energy Foundation China’s published statement that the Beijing office is “supervised by” the NDRC.

Energy Foundation China’s chief executive, Zou Ji, is a Chinese national. He previously served as deputy director general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, an NDRC agency, and was a member of the Chinese negotiating team in the years leading to the Paris Agreement. He also sits as a special adviser to the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the State Council advisory body chaired by a Chinese vice premier. Other senior staff have come out of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Beijing Municipal Ecology and Environment Bureau, and the National People’s Congress system. The foundation partners with Chinese ministries and state institutes.

By its own account, its principal business is moving Western philanthropic money into the Chinese policy system. Its major donors include the Hewlett Foundation, ClimateWorks Foundation, Climate Imperative, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and similar houses. Energy Foundation China grants that money onward to Chinese government research bodies and universities: the National Center for Climate Change Strategy, the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and others.

But it also makes grants in the other direction: to American universities and advocacy groups. Harvard University, the University of California, the Rocky Mountain Institute, the International Council on Clean Transportation, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have all received money. Energy Foundation China says it accepts none from any government or political party. No published investigation has documented otherwise.

The grounds for suspicion, however, are obvious. An American charity, financed by American and European philanthropy, operates in Beijing under the industrial-planning ministry, is led in part by former Chinese officials, disburses Western money to Chinese government institutes, and then writes smaller checks to organizations that work on U.S. energy and climate policy.

That said, most of the money does not lead where the worst suspicions point. The dollar sums moving west into the United States are relatively modest: hundreds of thousands to low millions per American recipient.

Nor does that make the westward grants harmless or the suspicions unserious. A channel built to put large sums of Western money under the control of former Chinese officials in China and under the supervision of the state is a channel that Chinese intelligence could easily abuse. Energy Foundation China has written checks, for example, to the Rocky Mountain Institute, which in 2022 published the gas-stove asthma paper that Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm helped turn into a national fight over gas in the home. Destroying the much-deserved reputation of natural gas, which is abundant in the United States, as a low-polluting source of cheap energy has obvious national-security advantages for China.

The Rocky Mountain Institute paid for its work using its pooled funds, which included the $820,000 in EFC grants. However, no public document shows Beijing specifically commissioned the U.S. paper. Even if we assume it did not, the mere possibility still explains why the cozy relationship between former Chinese officials and American philanthropy deserves scrutiny. Hundreds of thousands of dollars may not be enough to buy the Net Zero movement as a whole, but it certainly can generate a study designed to arrive when city councils and federal agencies are already looking for a reason to sideline natural gas. The point is not that such an operation clearly took place. It is that the current arrangement makes one too easy for comfort.

Chinese intelligence did not create Energy Foundation China. It began as the China program of the Energy Foundation, a San Francisco grantmaker launched in 1991 with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation under Energy Foundation founding president Hal Harvey. Harvey later led ClimateWorks as its first CEO, founded Energy Innovation and Climate Imperative, and helped establish the European Climate Foundation; ClimateWorks and Climate Imperative now rank among Energy Foundation China’s major donors. What began as a Western philanthropic initiative became the principal channel through which Western climate money enters China’s policy system. It is not an outpost of the Chinese state inside Western philanthropy. It is an outpost of Western philanthropy inside the Chinese state—or so Western philanthropists prefer to believe.

Following the money is nearly impossible. That’s because large climate philanthropy, in no small measure thanks to the work of Harvey, is organized around regranting. Money passes from an original foundation to a pooled fund, from the pooled fund to a national or regional grant maker, and only then to the organization that does the work. Each entity in the chain is separately incorporated and files its own return, and each return shows a single hop: the immediate donor and the immediate grantee. Nothing in the public record connects the whole chain from the first name to the last.

Arrangements of this kind are both lawful and common enough in American philanthropy, and there are legitimate reasons for the arrangement. A foundation with an enormous endowment and a small program staff cannot manage 400 grants across 30 countries or judge which Indonesian transport group deserves the next check. Intermediaries buy that expertise once and deploy it widely. Pooled funds let a dozen donors act as one, with a single strategy instead of a dozen overlapping ones. And the law requires some of it. An American foundation cannot simply wire money to a Chinese state research institute; it can do so only through a registered entity operating under a state supervisory unit.

The architects of Net Zero’s funding system did not design it to cover the tracks of Chinese intelligence. In practice, however, they created a system in which a trustee whose foundation supplies the first tranche of money has no practical way of learning that the last link is a Chinese government institute—which may then reroute American money back into the United States to buy political influence. Outside auditors cannot trace the money from original donor to recipient....

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A quick search of the blog (https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=China+coal) surfaces this post on top:

June 26 -  "China Gives Coal Room to Grow in New Five-Year Energy Plan" 

It is quite possible that cheap electricity from coal-fired power plants will win the AI race for China....

We've been chronicling and warning that China was playing the West for chumps for a couple decades. There are hundreds and hundreds more posts on one part of the puzzle or another.

As noted introducing October 22, 2021's Global Warming: London's Mayor "to call for cities like London to have greater powers and funding":

In the introduction to October 14's BlackRock's Larry Fink: "Rich Countries Must Bear the Cost if We Can Ever Hope to Achieve a Net-Zero World":

Having studied the science, economics, politics, finance, psychology, law, messaging, regulation, sociology, and policy prescriptions of global warming since 1992 the overriding lesson learned is:
It's always about the money.

If you take away nothing else from this little blog, take that.

And save yourself an eighth-of-a-million pages of reading.

I obviously wasn't thinking large enough.

It's also about power.

And although the two are to a large extent fungible (see the next post for an example) money and power are separate and distinct manifestations of the reality of human existence....

Inflation: "Global Refinery Crunch Pushes Diesel Prices to New Records"

From OilPrice: September 21: 

• U.S. diesel prices have surged above $6.50 per gallon, as lost Middle Eastern and Russian fuel supplies collide with limited global refining capacity.
• Washington is debating a diesel export ban to ease domestic prices, but opponents warn it could worsen the global shortage and potentially trigger similar restrictions elsewhere.
• Europe is particularly vulnerable, having closed significant refining capacity while becoming increasingly dependent on imported crude and refined fuels from the Middle East and other regions.

U.S. diesel prices broke another record last week, topping $6.50 per gallon. In Europe, fuel prices are soaring, and shortages are looming over already struggling economies. There is simply not enough refining capacity in the world to make up for the loss of Middle Eastern and Russian barrels. And there is no quick fix.

Last week, Russia said it would extend a ban on diesel exports until the end of October, as Ukrainian drone attacks on refineries continued, despite President Donald Trump’s call on the Zelensky government to stop attacking energy infrastructure, blaming the diesel price surge solely on those attacks. The latest attack came on Sunday, targeting one of Russia’s largest refineries.

However, the loss of fuel supply from the Middle East is much larger, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing figures from the International Energy Agency showing the amount of diesel output lost in the Middle East was three times as high as lost Russian supply....

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"'More advanced' farming women married hunter-gatherer men in Europe thousands of years ago, ancient DNA reveals"

So you're saying there's a chance for all the Afghani and Syrian guys in Germany? 

From LiveScience, March 8:

Two researchers discuss how ancient DNA is used to track how people moved and lived during Britain's Bronze Age. 

When ancient DNA studies began to gain attention, little more than a decade ago, the view took hold among geneticists that everything we thought we knew about the peopling of Europe by modern humans was wrong. The story was simpler than anyone was expecting: Europe was settled in just three massive migrations from the east.

First came the hunter-gatherers, more than 40,000 years ago. Then, after 9,000 years ago, there was an expansion of farming people from Anatolia during the Neolithic age.

Finally, from 5,000 years ago, the Corded Ware people expanded out of the Russian steppe to inaugurate the European Bronze Age. The Corded Ware were named after the cord-like impressions in their pottery and carried a distinctive genetic signature previously absent from most of Europe. Genetically, most present-day Europeans have some of each.

This was always an over-simplification, however. Our new paper, produced with colleagues from the U.S. and across Europe, has highlighted some of the more complex interactions between ancient populations that took place in north-west Europe.

Our research untangles the origins of prehistoric populations across Belgium and the Netherlands, as well as identifying the source population for a migration into Britain during the late Neolithic that seems to have led to a 90% replacement of Britain's Neolithic farmers....

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Resource Nationalism: "Philippines Halts Exports of Fresh Purple Yam as Demand Rises"

From Bloomberg, September 13:

The Philippines has suspended exports of fresh purple yam to protect scarce planting stocks as global demand rises.

The indefinite suspension, imposed in mid-August, covers the crop also known as ube and its propagative planting material, the Department of Agriculture said in a statement on Sunday. The aim is to build production capacity and turn the crop into a bigger export earner, it said.

“We severely lack planting material ourselves, and we don’t want to export it to countries that could use Philippine ube varieties to compete with us,” Agriculture Secretary Francisco Tiu Laurel Jr. said....

....MORE

Also at Bloomberg, September 20: 

It’s Tough Being a Small Economy in an AI Boom

You play the hand you're dealt as you work to improve the hand. 

Inflation: "AMD Reportedly Plans 10% Price Hike for GPUs, AI Chips, Chipsets in 4Q26 as TSMC Costs Rise"

From the market intelligence wizards at TrendForce, September 18:

Rising foundry costs could soon ripple through AMD’s product lineup. According to TechPowerUp, citing sources from ChannelGate, the chipmaker is reportedly preparing price increases as silicon costs rise.

With much of its silicon manufactured by TSMC, AMD is expected to pass some of the higher costs on to customers. TSMC has reportedly notified customers of foundry price increases of around 10%. ChannelGate notes that AMD has also notified multiple customers of increases of roughly 10%, with the adjustments expected to take effect in 4Q26. The reported hikes cover AI accelerator chips, consumer graphics processors, and motherboard chipsets.

Notably, CPUs are not explicitly mentioned in the reported adjustments. Wccftech notes that there is currently no confirmation of higher Ryzen pricing, although AMD’s reliance on TSMC for its client processors means CPUs could also face cost pressure if wafer prices rise.

Price increases for AMD’s motherboard chipsets have been less common than those for its CPUs and GPUs, TechPowerUp notes. Graphics card and motherboard manufacturers are reportedly assessing their own pricing in response, with product prices potentially rising alongside higher chip costs....

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"Defending against cyber foes is among factors hitting food price inflation, report finds"

Quite a few things feeding into food price inflation.

From The Register, September 7:

UK food supply chain at risk from hostile attacks  

A UK watchdog is warning that cyber criminals making moves against online systems in the food supply chain could cause serious upset, following damaging attacks on the Co-op and Marks & Spencer last year.

The National Audit Office (NAO) named cyber-attacks as one of the major threats to the food supply chain and said the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) should work closely with industry to help prevent severe shocks.

“Recent disruptions have shown the resilience of the UK’s food supply chain, but risks are increasing in likelihood and severity. Defra should learn from approaches taken in other countries, and strengthen preparedness for emergencies by testing plans with local government and industry,” said Gareth Davies, head of the NAO.

In its report published late last week, the NAO said the sector had shown some resilience to cyber-attacks, but the government needed to work with the sector to help mitigate their impact.

The report found businesses in the food supply chain have faced increased costs and, in some cases, disruptions to day-to-day operations, for example following 2025 cyber-attacks on retailers such as Marks & Spencer and the Co-op.

Leading UK retailer Marks & Spencer estimated the cyberattack that took place in April last year will cost it around £136 million ($177.2 million) in total. The retailer said one of the earliest actions it took in its incident 

response was to disconnect its warehouse management systems, which in turn meant online and in-store orders were adversely impacted.

Food retailer the Co-op confirmed that thieves stole data from 6.5 million of the organization's members during a cyberattack last year.

In its report, the NAO said: “The way the food supply chain has developed over time has prioritized efficiency, which reduces costs for businesses, and therefore for consumers. However, it leaves the supply chain more vulnerable to disruptions. Defra and food supply chain stakeholders see risks increasing, and businesses are investing to address growing risks such as increased threats of cyber-attacks. Defra is less confident about the ability of businesses to withstand shocks without government intervention in the next five to 10 years because of increasing risks and the potential for more severe disruptions.”....

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"Iran’s Attempts to Get Around the Hormuz Blockade Are Hitting a Wall"

Iran, as a theocracy not directly answerable to the people should be doing better at coping while Americans are reminded of gasoline prices every time they drive down the street or access the internet, but reading this article it seems the battle of hearts and minds is fairly evenly matched.

From the Wall street Journal, September 16: 

While Saudi Arabia and others find workarounds, bottlenecks are threatening Iran’s economy

Iran vowed to respond to a U.S. blockade by pushing more trade overland. On the ground, it isn’t going according to plan.

Hundreds of Iranian truck drivers are currently stuck at Iran’s border with Pakistan, unable to send their goods into Tehran’s neighbor. They say they are facing worsening bureaucratic hurdles and costs, many caused by their own government. The same thing is happening at Iran’s land borders with Turkey, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan, dealing Tehran a self-inflicted blow and throttling trade through its few remaining economic release valves.

Tons of stranded apricots have been spoiled because of the delays. Lucrative cargoes of iron ore, cement and bottled gas are stuck at entry points to the Pakistani and Afghan borders, truckers say.

“Neither Iran is taking responsibility for the situation, nor is Pakistan allowing us to unload our cargo,” one driver says in a video posted by the Union of Truckers and Drivers Organizations Across Iran over the weekend. 

The economic war in the Persian Gulf is dictated as much by how much the countries in the region can move their exports over land rather than through the Strait of Hormuz. Some have found workarounds. Saudi Arabia is moving more of its oil west across the Arabian Peninsula. The U.S. Navy is helping some of the Gulf nations shift their oil through the strait.

Iran’s attempts are faltering. The U.S. is isolating its economy with new sanctions and launching strikes on Iranian tankers in reprisal for Tehran’s attacks on its Navy, collapsing seaborne exports.

In another setback for Iran’s plans to bypass Hormuz, the country’s Mahan Air, which is sanctioned by the U.S., said Wednesday that it was suspending flights to Oman and Turkey, state-affiliated media in Tehran said. Last week, the U.S. Treasury imposed new sanctions on companies it said were supporting Mahan, which operates cargo and passenger services.

The U.S. blockade has also hurt Iran’s imports of basic goods, 70% of which normally go through the blockaded ports. Though humanitarian goods and food are ostensibly exempt, the reality is that shippers are reluctant to service Iran.

Videos posted on social media last week show cranes at the Port of Shahid Rajaee, Iran’s largest commercial container port, at a standstill. Thousands of containers are stranded in ports in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, transportation professionals in Tehran last month told the Mehr News Agency, which is affiliated with Iranian security services.

***

Iran has tried to compensate by pushing more trade through other routes. Transits across the Caspian Sea have grown by 70% in the past five months, according to Iranian officials. Iran imports large quantities of its wheat, corn and cooking oil from Russia, according to commodities data provider Kpler and Iranian trading websites.

“We are trying to turn this threat into an opportunity,” Hadi Haghshenas, the governor of the Iranian province of Gilan, on the Caspian Sea, told state news agency IRNA in late August.

A freight railroad from Tehran to Xi’an in eastern China has jumped from once-a-week journeys to every three or four days since the blockade started, according to the state-controlled Tehran Times. Iran imports industrial machinery, electronics and automotive spare parts from China. 

But in a sign of how vulnerable the alternative routes are, Iraq over the weekend temporarily closed cargo terminals at the Iran border after alleging Iran had used its territory to attack Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, trucks carrying Iranian onions bound for Iraq were forced to turn back as a result, according to Tehran’s Central Fruit and Vegetable Market.

Iran’s land borders were a mess before these latest closures, though. This summer, for example, the number of trucks going through Pishin, one of the main crossings into Pakistan, increased from about 40 vehicles to as many as 130 vehicles a day, local governor Rahimbakhsh Balidehei told the semiofficial ISNA News Agency. The result is that customs officers across Iran’s land borders are struggling to cope, Ehsan Malekzadeh, chairman of the Iranian International Transport Companies Association, told the Mehr News Agency.

Malekzadeh said 3,700 trucks were stranded on the Iranian side of the crossing to Turkey, with delays reaching 20 days....

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