A Tour Of America's Blue-topias

Heat Dome Halts German Trains After Track Sealant Liquifies Europe's heat wave is now quickly morphing from a public health crisis into an infrastructure nightmare, with power prices surging, more than 1,000 excess deaths reported across France, and extreme temperatures bringing parts of Germany's rail infrastructure to a halt. The local German outlet Leipziger Zeitung reports that after a week of sweltering temperatures above 30°C, with readings climbing toward 40°C on Saturday, critical transport infrastructure in Leipzig failed under the heat. The city, located in the eastern German state of Saxony,...

Gulf Energy Shock Spreads To Global Plastics As War Sparks Force Majeure Wave Building on our earlier "Global Demand Destruction" note, which mapped how the Gulf energy shock is spreading globally and the immediate effects of rationing, price controls, and fuel shortages, another second-order disruption is quickly emerging: supply chain disruptions in critical plastic feedstocks. Plastics are core to the modern economy, and a troubling new Bloomberg report indicates that several producers of monoethylene glycol (MEG) and purified terephthalic acid (PTA) have declared force majeure, as tanker flows through the Strait...