US Truck, Air, Rail freight all down 20% or more and still looking for bottom
by Spiralman
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124044499853045733.html
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The Air Transport Association of America last week said U.S. air-cargo volumes had dropped 21% in February compared with a year ago. That was the seventh consecutive month of year-to-year declines.
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For the first two weeks of April, the U.S. railroad industry’s car-load volumes were down more than 20%, compared with a 17.3% drop for the month of March and a 14.5% drop in February, according to the trade group Association of American Railroads.
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http://fleetowner.com/management/trucking-industry-economic-conditions-0422/index1.html
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Truckload carriers have seen a 23.3% decline in freight, or “the largest six-month drop in tonnage since 1993,” he said. By segment, flatbed carriers saw tonnage decline 30% from a peak in June, 2008, while dry van and tank carriers recorded 25% and 27% drops respectively from peak levels. “And it’s affected all lengths of hauls – short, medium and long,” according to White.
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These are leading indicators of the economy. If things aren’t being trucked, trained, or flown around as much, then that means households and businesses aren’t buying as much, which then means workers will be furloughed, wage reduced, or laid off, which in turn means a lot less driving to work and shopping.
Obviously, these figures also imply a radical decline in oil consumption and therefore emissions. Presumably, also by 20% or more. And this will show up as the year progresses and the speculative contracts for the hoarding of oil on tanker ships, called contango, expire and the oil gets added to an already glutted market.
As I have noted before, the Peak Credit Overproduction Crisis process we are seeing is Spike, Crash, Streamline, Replace.
We saw the Spike up to $147/barrel oil. This helped drive investments in Solar and Wind production capacity and innovations in manufacturing processes that are revealing themselves as radical reductions in the production price of solar panels. The Peak Credit/Overproduction Oil Spike spiked the ball of Solar Power over the net of Grid Parity. In addition, it Spiked over the net, electric hybrid cars and trucks. The new Prius and the others from Honda, Ford, etc. will all cost $20K or less.
We are now witnessing the Crash of demand, driven by Debt Deflation. I fully expected demand for energy to drop by 25% to 50% during this phase. The shipping data above certainly indicates that the higher end of the collapse is now much more likely.
The Spike triggered a dramatic shift that will shape the post-Crash future.
The resulting Crash and Streamlining phases are irreversibly destroying demand for Coal, Oil, Nukes, and Gas.
The rising insecurity of investors of those sectors will ensure that insufficient capital is allocated to CONG, so that not only will solar and wind be ready to carry everything forward after the crash, but the CONG will be unable to ramp up quickly and sufficiently since their investors have to assume more and more that the longterm prices under conditions of overproduction and debt deflation demand destruction will not justify the investment.
When even the most gas guzzling of all passenger vehicles, like GM’s Hummer will be getting 100mpg, when even the heaviest semi-trucks driven by the type of hard-edged working class folks who effete, Green, academic, latte-sipping snobs would least expect to be concerned about the environmental impacts are already deploying new drivetrains that cut diesel consumption by 30% to 50% so they can improve their profitability, when Walmart’s founder was the biggest investor in one of the biggest solar companies producing the cheapest solar panels (not to mention the fact that Walmart has already fielded hundreds of semi-trucks in collaboration with Peterbilt, Curtis and Eaton), it’s pretty clear that just about everything we read about climate change scientist’s projected impacts of Armageddon and the need for punitive, regressive Carbon taxes is completely irrelevant. An echo of an already vanishing era. Identical in form to the real estate houseflipping Ponzi or the stock Madoffs who still continue to claim that things will sharply rebound………always in the next 6 months.
The eco-neurotic’s relentless claims that runaway carbon emissions are just around the corner sound very similar to the refrain that prosperity is just around the corner.
Ironically, those proclaiming an eventual return to economic growth have vastly more truth behind them than the eco-neurotic, who is blind to the phase change in pricing of solar and hybrids that the Peak Credit/Overproduction crisis brought into being.
Humanity will one day consume tens, hundreds or thousands of times as many joules of energy as it did at the Peak Credit moment in Summer of 2008, but it will never again consume them at that level in the form of hydrocarbons.
Change happens. And in the first decade of the third millennium, global changes are happening in chaotic fashion: quickly in some areas and hardly at all in others. Adding to the challenge is the fact that most change still happens according to the raw, rowdy rules of our stone-age ancestry—dominated by instinctual but dangerously volatile, primitive ideas and beliefs. For many of us today, however, a spiritually rooted desire for wise, integral change is emerging. But in order to transform the world, we must begin to understand how transformation occurs—and be willing to transform ourselves. In this teleseminar, join pioneering integral thinker Dr. Don Beck for an in depth look at Spiral Dynamics Integral. Learn about the dynamics of human development from a vertical, developmental, integral framework. Dramatically uplevel your understanding of how human consciousness develops across clans, cultures and countries, on the inner and the outer, personally and collectively. If the most crucial step toward the creation of a new and truly integral culture is enlightening one’s innermost culture, then this teleseminar is sure to be a powerful step toward a better future.
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