http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-economy-employment-idUSKCN0W205X
China expects to lay off 1.8 million workers in coal, steel sectors On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 9:41 PM, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote: > > >> That opinion is an overreaction. It will take 20 to 30 years before any >> fraction of transportation is converted over to LENR. >> > > The time it takes to convert is not so important. An economist friend of > mine explained to me that markets respond to likely future events, either > short term or long term. If it becomes generally known that over the next > 30 years most of the market for oil will vanish, that will have an > immediate effect on the price today. Producers will want to sell off their > inventory as quickly as as they can while it still has value. When every > producer does that, the price will plummet. > > They will rush to dig more wells to get as much oil out of the ground and > sold as they can before it becomes worthless. "Rushing" to dig a well means > you do it in 3 to 5 years. It is a slow business. In the context of > building an oil extraction infrastructure, 30 years is a fairly short time. > > Once the writing is on the wall the price will collapse and never recover. > I think it is starting to do that with coal, because natural gas, wind and > solar have taken a large fraction of the coal market, and there is no > reason to think they will not take the rest of it away over the next 30 > years. They are getting cheaper every day, and there is growing public > pressure to reduce carbon emissions. The biggest coal producer is China. > They peaked in 2011 and will soon begin dropping rapidly. See p. 14 here: > > > https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld_Statistics_2015.pdf > > - Jed > >
