Lebanon's central electricity grid shuts down as fuel shortages continue
npr.org
npr.org
We're still getting electricity from the privately owned generators. The main grid has always had shortage, it never provided 24/7, the reliance has always been on the privately owned generators.
Due to the severe fuel shortages since the beginning of the year, the main grid provided very little hours, less than 2 hours per day in many cases.
The privately owned generators haven't been able to keep up either, we're getting power cuts for several hours during the day, every day. And the fees are increasing.
Here's a rundown of the current situation
- fuel is rare, queues at stations are horrible, it takes up to 6 hours to get some, violence and accidents there has killed many people
- fuel prices have increased 4x since the beginning of this year
- currency inflation from $1 = 1,500 LBP to $1=19,000 since late 2019, max reached 23,000, could reach more
Many payments services are also unavailable in Lebanon for various reasons.
If you are in a position to order things from Alibaba or eBay you are already pretty well off and anything sold locally would be sold at a very steep markup.
US $9.50 5V 1200mA 6Watt Battery Charger USB port DC 5.5*2.1 Charge Regulators Solar Panel 6W https://a.aliexpress.com/_u842IG
Probably won't be sufficient for a router, but it would charge a battery bank or phone pretty well (make sure it's angled 30 degrees south, and use a usb battery bank between it and the phone because the phone usually won't adjust the charging current up and down as clouds come over). For laptops, use a power bank with a laptop 19v output.
People are getting interested by seeing it work for their neighbors and friends, it's still new and people want see some garuntee for such a long term investment.
How would you describe the income level of the clients you shipped solar panels to? Were they building a new house?
I will optimize my sourcing for cost. Thank you for the feedback.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_Lebanon#/media/Fi...
The people there need to over throw the current govt, and remove their own religious prejudices that led to the current state of govt in the first place.
Can someone here more knowledgeable about Lebanon's economic history explain why the currency devalued?
> Prior to the outages, citizens had for months only been given a few hours of electricity per day
and I thought the fuel shortages were a recent phenomenon.
Regardless: does anyone have a link to a decent primer on what's going on (regarding supply chains, fuel, and all the other recent economic disruptions)? I'm not interested in the usual politically motivated "just so" stories, just a list of what's happening, what parts are definitely understood, and what parts are not understood.
But probably the majority of the current crisis stems from the 2006 war.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebanon%E2%80%93Saudi_Arabia_r...
https://carnegie-mec.org/2020/06/09/lebanon-not-expecting-gu...
Is that real or is the World Bank just exaggerating for effect?
The defence expenditure is more than US$ 2 billion higher per year in Lebanon while it is nearly non-existent in Moldova.
It seems absurd to uphold that kind of expenditure, but it's likely a direct consequence of the historical conflict in the region.
Source: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/lebanon/moldova
So both countries have a long standing conflict in common and sadly neither conflict seems to have any chance of being resolved.
Yeah, the security situations in the 2 countries are VASTLY different. Lebanon has militant Palestinian refugees[1], Hezbollah, Israel, Syria, Iran, and ISIS-adjacent insurgents [2] all regularly killing each other (or Lebanese government forces) in their territory.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nahr_al-Bared_refugee_camp#200...
[2]https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-leba...
Your bones are antifragile, but they can be broken. Cities and civilizations can be antifragile, but they're still susceptible to collapse given the right forces.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/the-best-exer...
Physical exercise doesn’t make bones stronger, some physical activity may delay them becoming fragile due to old age but overall actual stresses on your skeleton cause stress fractures they don’t turn you into wolverine.
If that were the case, astronauts wouldn't experience any change in bone density. Let's go to the tapes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaceflight_osteopenia
Bones get stronger where they're subjected to stress. If you don't stress them, they get weaker. If you stress them too much, they break.
Put another way, you're arguing that Hafþór Björnsson, the strongest man in the world, a dude who deadlifted 1,100 lbs, has bones with the same tensile strength as a sedentary man of the same age? Or somehow you've argued that Hafþór's femurs will actually be weaker because of microfractures? LOL
Not that I don't have sympathy for the people suffering, but this is the question anyone with control over that level of wealth would ask.
- State collapse is more common than we think, but not impossible to recover from (Germany post WW2, Iraq post 2010?)
- The international community is willing to cooperate during major natural disasters (2004 earthquake, Japanese earthquake, Haiti earthquake)
- The international community is less willing to cooperate during man-made political disasters with humanitarian consequences (Somalia 1980s, Russia 1990s), though there are notable exceptions (Bosnian War, Kosovo War)
- No one really cares about genocides happening in other countries
- Successful nation building directed by a foreign power is the exception, not the norm.
- Some countries will never achieve prosperity
Seems like a weirdly determinate conclusion for span of time less then one human lifetime.
When that type of culture is ascendant, then things are not only zero sum, but often negative-sum, since the party takes a cut of transferring wealth from winners to losers, and often just transfers wealth to itself.
Mugabe took land away from successful white farmers in Zimbabwe and gave the land mostly to friends and black people who wanted to start farms but had no ability to do so.
The former category might be extorting consumers and workers but he is "doing his job", he definitively values the land. When you give the land for free to friends those friends don't give a damn about the land because they got it for free. It's not difficult to see how this transaction is destructive. Every person involved is less happy than they could be.
The second class of black people who wanted to become farmers faced a completely different problem. They couldn't get loans to start their farms and they didn't get any financial support from the state to start farming, instead farmers were banned from selling their food when the government introduced price controls. It doesn't take much to understand that hyperinflation results in absurd prices and a ban on absurd prices when every price is absurd is a ban on trade itself.
Now back to money. Money is zero sum. One person's dollar is another person's debt. That's not wrong but holding onto money for no reason will require better conditions on the debt (e.g. lower interest rates) or more debt overall to satisfy the savers. So telling the savers to get lost with inflation or negative interest rates will tell them that working to earn money that they don't intend to spend on consumption or investment is not wanted by anyone and they should either start working less or they should spend more. Letting money sit idle for no reason just doesn't make any sense from a societal perspective.
Virtually every part of the world is far more prosperous than it was 100 years ago.
Only if you delude yourself that full time jobs and money are equivalent to prosperity, many have deluded themselves that this is the case but I did not, I live in reality instead of a financial world of made up work.
Which countries these would be?
In the modern era, we have more then enough food to feed everyone: no one goes hungry because there is not enough.
2. Would it actually help? The root cause of this problem is not that 1 tanker got delayed.
By no means am I saying the aid is enough, or that it doesn't involve conflicts, that it isn't being wasted or misused, or anything like that. But it is an artificial storyline that the whole world is ignoring any given crisis, that is never accurate.
- Iran has been sending fuel via Hezbollah.
- The US and Turkey have sent aid to Lebanon's military.
- The Foreign Affairs Committee of the US Congress was calling for "prompt and significant action" from the Secretary of State, around the beginning of October.
- Greece has sent "humanitarian aid".
- The IMF has been talking to the government about a bailout package, off and on for some time.
"The international community has been providing humanitarian relief, but too much of it ends up siphoned off into the corruption networks that rule Lebanon. Some of the aid is smuggled into Syria, circumventing sanctions against the Assad dictatorship, while turning a considerable profit for criminal enterprises, including Hezbollah. More humanitarian relief is needed, but it should be run through reliable international institutions or through closely monitored non-governmental organizations if it is to support the Lebanese people and not the mafia-like syndicates."
A basic problem, obviously, is that different countries and organizations want to help some people and entities in Lebanon, and not others. But it's not an island from humanity.
Corruption would have played a part. If you brought a tanker or free oil, whose business interest, or tax revenue, would be impacted by an influx of cheap oil?
Who is being incentivized not to solve the issue?
Where do you dock the ship?
Who gets the oil for free but then charges the next user down the supply chain?
How can you be sure the majority of the oil does not end up on the black market, exported or not used for grid energy?
Twenty years ago the most advanced economy in the world, California, had blackouts due to fraud and corruption. If it can happen in CA it can happen anywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000%E2%80%9301_California_ele...
Foreign intervention is unlikely without government reform. With traditional donors such as Iran, the United States, the United Kingdom and Persian Gulf nations both hesitant to push money into a corrupt system and also dealing with their own economic problems, Lebanon set its hopes on an International Monetary Fund bailout. But after weeks of discussions, there is no agreement in sight to even begin the negotiations.
The U.S, the largest donor to the IMF, wants any bailout to come on the condition that there is a diminution of Hezbollah’s power. The U.S is also the largest donor to the Lebanese army, making for a delicate balancing act. “We are supportive of Lebanon as long as they get the reforms right and they are not a proxy state for Iran,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said last week.
In an unusual move, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said last week that Hezbollah would be open to receiving help from the U.S. despite calling it “an enemy” of Lebanon. Pompeo’s remarks followed Nasrallah’s comments that Lebanon had an opportunity to buy fuel from “a friend called Iran in exchange for Lebanese pounds.” The secretary of state dismissed the claims as “unacceptable”, adding that the U.S. will do everything necessary to stop Iran from sending crude oil anywhere.
There is little optimism for the future of the IMF talks, which have not even agreed on the balance of losses, let alone the negotiations and have now been stalled. “The government refuses to implement any reform, any prerequisite the IMF had for even continuing the talks,” said Jad Chaaban, an economist at the American University of Beirut. While the political elite argues without much consensus, the refusal to reform is crushing the Lebanese people.
This seems sensible to me; we will help you if you become a friend instead of an enemy.
There is no coherent Lebanon to really even negotiate with, just a bunch of rabid factions playing off each other.
I think it’s actually impossible for ‘Lebanon’ overall to be anyone’s friend without also being their enemy.
When other countries historically have ‘solved’ this problem, it ends up being pretty terrible for the minority groups who either have their land seized when they get displaced or get wholesale slaughtered (see partition when India and Pakistan were formed, Bosnia/Herzegovina and the Balkans War, Rwandan genocide, or the active issues in Israel), and in Lebanon EVERYONE is a minority group [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Lebanon#Reli...].
And if you’re going to say ‘Hey, but Muslims have 60%!’, the current Muslim group are roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shia, which have similar history as Catholics and Protestants - aka they hate each other and have a history of bloody fights. That means each group is actually smaller than the Christians as a whole (who are more like 35-45%), but also larger than any one Christian Sect (which includes said Catholics and Protestants BTw).
So for the most part since no one has enough of a majority to assert who belongs where (and it certainly isn’t obvious to everyone else either) or who would be naturally ‘in charge’, it’s endless jockeying for position, extremist recruiting within their groups, corruption to benefit their minority group and screw over the others behind everyone’s back, and the occasional terrorist bombing.
Fun times eh?
It's pretty terrible in Lebanon now as well, and there was a horrible civil war between 1975 - 1990 which could happen again. I'm just saying - yes change could be for the worse, but it's not like things are peachy now. A split up has advantages even if people need to relocate. Cyprus is a pretty good example on how it could work out. Also as horrible as the clusterf** of Bosnia was, it seems the more separated the different ethnicities are the better.
It seems like a Lose-lose proposition to me frankly, they’d be better off (IMO) trying to minimize the divisions and working together as Lebanese instead of all these fragmented groups, but that seems unlikely considering the history.
Yes that would be awesome. But indeed it doesn't seem likely, seems like religion or ethnicity plays a bigger role in that area of the world than nationality.
Humans don't actually want to cooperate.
The problem the US faces isn't a lack of money directly - it's that there's either an unwillingness to make trade offs or a perception that trade offs are not necessary.
I'm not an expert on Lebanon but from what I've read I think the problems are not dissimilar. A tanker full of fuel would help Lebanon. Who in Lebanon it would help is at least an open question. In anything except the very short term I think the main problem is one of politics. It's going to be hard for people not directly involved in Lebanese politics to fix those problems.