We watched ‘I Swear’ tonight.
A great and important movie.

Do watch it 💙

…the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, bodies of water 200 miles wide at their widest and about 750 miles from Basra in the north to Muscat in the south.

Which makes it roughly the area of Great Britain

…People who have read the entire thread (most of it are not my words) may have noticed:

“about one third of the world’s fertiliser demand” is me voicing James Meadway on the podcast linked at he top.

“Over 40% of internationally traded nitrogen fertilizers” is me quoting Nate Hagens.

Obviously, whatever the actual numbers are matter and are consequential. But for the purposes of this thread, please treat them as a heuristic, a window into astonishing complexity and fragility focused into…

@martinvermeer the Straits of Hormuz are the epicentre of the mother of all flows. Nothing in that context is about one thing only. Everything has nth-order effects.

@tml

@tml Sure.

My point of the above thread is not to cast false certainties or wash away complexity. It’s to try and bring to the fore the fragile interconnectedness that the Secretary of War and his dick-swinging colleagues are blowing up

@carstenfranke aye

@martinvermeer

@violetmadder Yesss!

@urlyman

Permaculture.

Permaculture, goddammit. Everywhere. With wartime urgency and resources. Like these fuckers wanna build all those useless damned data centers. Permaculture.

Rehabilitate landscapes, save biodiversity, grow food, replenish groundwater, prevent flooding and pollution and wildfires, reverse desertification, mitigate climate change and more ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

When I learned these solutions exist, and saw even the "good cop" politicians not even TALKING ABOUT IT much less fucking doing it, that's when I realized we're in extremely deep shit and the powers that be have already written off most of us for dead.

…If there’s a single sentence to take away from the above, it’s:

“Flows feel infinite right up until the stock runs out”.

- - -

But that’s enough for now. If it’s too much for you, then sorry, mute or block me.

I’m not going to be not interested in this stuff.

…“And Secretary of State Rubio said publicly that Iran is producing offensive weapons faster than the US and its allies can manufacture interceptors to stop them. And the Secretary of War suggested this war may go on for months.

The US is historically structured for periodic high intensity bursts, not
sustained engagement. The assumption has always been overwhelming force, short duration, then restock. But that model does not hold if a conflict drags on. Especially a large conflict.”

…“And by the way, each of those interceptors cost millions of dollars and takes months to manufacture.

A PAC-3 interceptor costs like $4 million. In contrast, a Shahed drone made in Iran costs around $50K. That’s a cost-exchange ratio of about nearly 100:1 in Iran’s favor. So Iran doesn't need to win the Air War outright. They probably just need to keep up intermittent launches long enough to limit what the US can shoot back with…

…“The US has historically had the most impressive offensive flow, capacity: shock and awe, precision strikes, the ability to put bombs on target anywhere on earth, within hours.

But the stocks, particularly the stocks of things like interceptor missiles maybe getting dangerously low.

I’m told by people who follow this closely that the US and Israel have been firing 5 to 7 interceptors for every incoming Iranian missile…

…The next bit gets into military asymmetry and dependencies.

“In ecology and economics, stocks are what’s accumulated and flows are what moves through them.

The problem is that flows feel infinite right up until the stock runs out. And I refer to this as the slurping sound with respect to oil extraction.

Stocks and flows apply to military capacity as well…

…At this point, I’ll share where the transcript across the preceding 8 posts is from.

It’s a half hour podcast episode:

‘Wide Boundary News: The Iranian War, Rising Gas Prices, and the Single Point Failure’

https://overcast.fm/+BTumXe5m9g

I’ll go on to share a bit more but I recommend listening to the whole thing.

…“The wide boundary point here is this.

We’re not watching an oil price shock.

We’re watching the exposure of a civilization that organized itself around maximum efficiency and zero redundancy, and built a single point of geopolitical failure into the center of a global physical economy, the Straits of Hormuz and the situation there is the most consequential single location on the planet for the foreseeable future.”

…“Beyond energy, fuel, and inflation, there’s also the supply chain precursors for something like 6,000 distinct products that move through the Straits of Hormuz. Thousands of products, from polyester to medical plastics to semiconductors. They all use petroleum as precursors to their physical products or in the process that makes them…

…“And food inflation in import-dependent nations that have very thin fiscal reserves like Egypt or Pakistan or Turkey, becomes political quite quickly. A recent guest on TGS, Craig Tindale, labeled this situation as a potential globalized Arab Spring…

…“And the [LNG] price spikes are already hitting European importers and futures markets.

There’s also nitrogen fertilizer. Over 40% of internationally traded nitrogen fertilizers originate from or are navigated through the Persian Gulf.

Nitrogen fertilizer starts with natural gas, which is then the feedstock for ammonia, which becomes urea, which goes on the fields around the world, and a disrupted planting cycle could translate into food price inflation very quickly, within months…

…“So here’s another hotter effect: Natural gas.

Qatar sits inside the Persian Gulf. They’re responsible for roughly 20% of all globally traded LNG.

Europe spent two years after Ukraine’s invasion rewiring its entire energy import infrastructure away from Russia’s pipeline gas towards US and Qatari LNG.

So European dependency now runs directly through the closed Straits of Hormuz. And unlike oil, there is no overland alternative for LNG…