Weekly Brief
The STARK way scientists and engineers see where an energy-poor country like the Philippines is headed
In review and in prospect
We may be greeting the New Year with hope but more than a few news outlets are convinced that doom and gloom will greet us back over the next twelve to 18 months. Demand from the world's biggest markets — China, Western Europe, and North America — is dipping and supply chain disruptions continue to contribute inflationary forces on weak economies like that of the Philippines.
Many of these “externalities” are being politicised by the usual suspects in the Philippine Opposition. However, the fact is that much of the effects of these disruptions to a global trade of brittle interdependencies that holds much of the world's peoples hostage merely serve to highlight the precarious position Filipinos find themselves in. The Philippines may be 110-plus million “strong” but there is no strength in such an enormous number only made possible by the product of foreign capital and a dependence on imported fuel and fertilisers to keep people leading some semblance of a “modern” standard of living.
Specifically, the absolute absolute input into any economy regardless of how developed or underdeveloped it may be is energy. Be it captured from fossil, “renewable”, or nuclear fuels, whether transmitted/distributed using using cables, pipes, or vehicles (such as oil tankers) to its final consumers, energy is what is behind everything about our modern way of life. Seen from this perspective, no amount of “financial” or “economic” management will deliver any workarounds to the physical reality of the important task of sourcing and channeling energy into activities essential to human survival and standards of living. In that regard, it is easy to see that the Philippines is living off borrowed time.
This year, we will be focusing on the the way scientists and engineers — not “economists” or “financial managers” — see where a society pathetically dependent on imported energy (and the global supply chains that deliver it to its ports) is headed.
Last two weeks' blogs
December 22, 2022 by benign0
"...it seems the revered 'documentarist' would rather believe disembodied voices on Twitter than a reliable source-of-truth such as a page from the Korean Embassy website."