Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe

Preface. I think that Ward & Brownlee’s 2000 book “Rare Earth : Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe” is one of the most important books ever written. There’s a good case to be made that our planet hosts the only intelligent life in our galaxy, perhaps even complex life. After all, there is no goal to evolution.

Though it could certainly be argued that we are not very intelligent given how we’re exceeding planetary boundaries and risking extinction and nuclear war.

But if we are one of the few, or only planets with complex life in our galaxy, what a shame it would be if we destroyed ourselves and millions of other species in this 6th mass extinction.

Last updated 2023-9-19

Related Posts:

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Balbi A, Frank A (2023) The oxygen bottleneck for technospheres. Earth & Planetary Astrophysics. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2308.01160

For combustion to occur, a planet needs an atmosphere of at least 18% oxygen. Less than that might allow complex multicellular life, but without a concentration of over 18%, there can be no fire, no combustion from diesel or gasoline engines, no steam turbines.  So no technology, let alone propelling starships to other galaxies.  You couldn’t even build them: it takes oxygen to generate high heat to extract metals from ores and make steel, copper, and other products such as glass, ceramics, bricks and more.

The article doesn’t go into this, but today that high heat is provided only by fossil fuels, yet another limiting factor for industrial technological civilizations – a planet would need both oxygen and fossil fuels.  See the posts in this category for details: https://energyskeptic.com/category/fastcrash/industrial-heat/  

A planet with oxygen of 30% and above would be a planet on fire since combustion would be too easy.

Perhaps thermal features could provide heat in a low-oxygen atmosphere, but such a civilization would have to remain very local, since geothermal heat isn’t transportable like wood, coal, and oil and impossible in a water world as well where the heat is coming from sea floor hydrothermal vents.

Scientists looking for life in the universe would be wise to look for planets with atmospheres containing 18 to 21% oxygen, the optimum level for useful combustion.  Though today the telescopes viewing exoplanets can’t do that. And there is a chance of false positives where there is oxygen but no life exists, but Krissansen-Totton et al (2021) have found ways to rule them out (here).

If oxygen is the bottleneck that limits intelligent life, that might help solve the Fermi paradox which asks why there is no evidence of intelligent life given the size of the universe.

Sauterey B et al (2022) Early Mars habitability and global cooling by H2-based methanogens. Nature Astronomy https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-022-01786-w

Re-creating Mars as it was four billion years ago using climate and terrain models, researchers concluded methane-producing microbes could once have thrived centimeters below much of the Red Planet’s surface, consuming hydrogen and CO2 while protected by the sediment above. But freezing temperatures of its own making may have driven them deeper, triggering global cooling that caused the surface to be covered in ice, killing them.

Koberlein B (2022) Venus’ atmosphere stops it from locking to the sun. universetoday.com

Of the thousands of exoplanets we’ve discovered, most of them closely orbit red dwarf stars. Part of this is because planets with short orbital periods are easier to find, but part of this is that red dwarf stars make up about 75% of the stars in our galaxy. Most are likely tidally locked, which means that only one side of the planet faces the sun which happens from tidal forces created by rotating around their sun so closely. But there may be exceptions. Earth rotates every 24 hours, Venus every 243 days. So instead of “fire and ice” tidally locked planets, these would be planets with hot, dense atmospheres (my comment: neither sounds friendly to life!)

Voosen (2022) The Planet Inside. Scientists are probing the secrets of the inner core and learning how it might have saved life on earth. Science 376: 18-22.

Earth’s inner core generates the protective magnetic field shielding our planet from damaging radiation. The magnetic field was sputtering to just 10% of what we have today 565 million years ago. Then miraculously, over just tens of millions of years, it regained its strength and not long after the multicellular life of the Cambrian explosion occurred with the birth of the inner core, a sphere of solid iron that spins independently from the rest of the planet. If this hadn’t happened Earth’s developing life in the ocean would have been exposed to far more radiation from solar flares, and rising oxygen levels would have escaped to space from the increased ionization.

Ziyi Zhu et al (2022) The temporal distribution of Earth’s super mountains and their potential link to the rise of atmospheric oxygen and biological evolution, Earth and Planetary Science Letters. DOI: 10.1016/j.epsl.2022.117391

Giant mountain ranges at least as high as the Himalayas and stretching up to 5,000 miles (8,000 km) across entire super-continents played a crucial role in the evolution of early life on Earth, which only formed twice in Earth’s history—the first between 2,000 and 1,800 million years ago and the second between 650 and 500 million years ago. Both mountain ranges rose during most important periods of evolution.
The first range coincided with the appearance of eukaryotes, organisms that later gave rise to plants and animals.
The second range coincided with the appearance of the first large animals 575 million years ago and the Cambrian explosion 45 million years later, when most animal groups appeared in the fossil record.
When the mountains eroded they provided essential nutrients like phosphorous and iron to the oceans, supercharging biological cycles and driving evolution to greater complexity. The super-mountains may also have boosted oxygen levels in the atmosphere, needed for complex life to breathe. There is no evidence of other super-mountains forming at any stage between these two events, making them even more significant.

“The time interval between 1,800 and 800 million years ago is known as the Boring Billion, because there was little or no advance in evolution,” co-author Professor Ian Campbell said. “The slowing of evolution is attributed to the absence of super mountains during that period, reducing the supply of nutrients to the oceans.”

2021 Longer days on early Earth set stage for complex life. Extra light spurred oxygen release by mats of photosynthetic bacteria. Science 373: 607-608

Scientists have struggled to find a satisfying reason of what triggered oxygen buildup and why it took so long. It may be that the increasing length of a day as Earth’s spin slowed enabled more photosynthesis from bacterial mats, allowing oxygen to build up in ancient seas and diffuse into the atmosphere. 4.5 billion years ago the length of a day was only 6 hours long. But by 2.4 billion years ago the pull of the Moon had slowed the spin to 21 hour days, which is when the Great Oxygenation Event occurred, and then again a billion years later. 

2021 Stars less than half as hot as our Sun can not sustain Earth-like biospheres: not enough energy to sustain photosynthesis

A new study of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — has revealed that none of them, despite previously thought to be habitable, may have the right Earth-like conditions needed to sustain life. The research evaluated the amount of energy these Earth-like planets received from their host star and if it was enough for living organisms to “efficiently produce nutrients and molecular oxygen” that are critical for complex life. So planets orbiting cooler stars known as red dwarfs that smoulder at roughly a third of the Sun’s temperature, don’t receive enough energy to even activate photosynthesis. Although the number of planets in our Milky Way galaxy is in the thousands, those with conditions similar to Earth and in the habitable zone are not very common, the study stated. A habitable zone means the region around a star where the temperature is just right for liquid water to exist on the planet’s surface. There is only one exoplanet Kepler-442b, a rocky planet with a mass twice that of the Earth 1,200 light-years away, comes close to receiving the radiation necessary to sustain a large biosphere. Covone G et al (2021) Efficiency of the oxygenic photosynthesis on Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

O’Callaghan J (2021) Venus’s surface may always have been too hot for oceans. New Scientist.

If this is so, then the window of time for planets to become habitable is even narrower than astronomers had thought. Even earth was only able to condense water early in its history because the sun was 25% dimmer, seemingly solving the “faint young sun paradox” when Earth was thought to have been too cold to support liquid water.  Had it formed today, our planet might well have been a “steam Earth” like Venus.

Oluseyi H (2021) Intelligent life probably exists on distant planets — even if we can’t make contact, astrophysicist says. Washington Post.

But just four in our galaxy: If only one in a hundred billion stars can support advanced life, that means that our own Milky Way galaxy — home to 400 billion stars — would have four likely candidates. Of course, the likelihood of intelligent life in the universe is much greater if you multiply by the 2 trillion galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

It also helps that Earth’s atmosphere is transparent to visible light. On most planets, atmospheres are thick, absorbing light before it reaches the surface — like on Venus. Or, like Mercury, they have no atmosphere at all. Earth maintains its thin atmosphere because it spins quickly and has a liquid iron core, conditions that lead to our strong and protective magnetic field. This magnetosphere, in the region above the ionosphere, shields all life on Earth, and its atmosphere, from damaging solar winds and the corrosive effects of solar radiation. That combination of planetary conditions is difficult to replicate.

At the low end of consensus estimates among astrophysicists, there may be only one or two planets hospitable to the evolution of technologically advanced civilizations in a typical galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars. But with 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe, that adds up to a lot of possible intelligent, although distant, neighbors.

Unfortunately, we’re unlikely to ever make contact with life in other galaxies. Travel by spaceship to our closest intergalactic neighbor, the Canis Major Dwarf, would take almost 750,000,000 years with current technology. Even a radio signal, which moves at close to the speed of light, would take 25,000 years.

2021 Water is essential for life – not just the medium but active participant

Water is often seen as the background in which other chemicals like DNA and protein are dissolved, but of 6500 reactions, 40% made or destroyed a molecule of water. When E. coli divides to form 2 new cells, every water molecule it contains is either transformed or drives a chemical reaction 3.7 times on average. This may also be key to the origins of life, since water would have determined which chemicals survived — the ones that were soluble in water and able to react with it.

Abstract: Water, the most abundant compound on the surface of the Earth and probably in the universe, is the medium of biology, but is much more than that. Water is the most frequent actor in the chemistry of metabolism. Our quantitation here reveals that water accounts for 99.4% of metabolites in Escherichia coli by molar concentration. Between a third and a half of known biochemical reactions involve consumption or production of water. We calculated the chemical flux of water and observed that in the life of a cell, a given water molecule frequently and repeatedly serves as a reaction substrate, intermediate, cofactor, and product. Our results show that as an E. coli cell replicates in the presence of molecular oxygen, an average in vivo water molecule is chemically transformed or is mechanistically involved in catalysis ~ 3.7 times. We conclude that, for biological water, there is no distinction between medium and chemical participant. Chemical transformations of water provide a basis for understanding not only extant biochemistry, but the origins of life. Because the chemistry of water dominates metabolism and also drives biological synthesis and degradation, it seems likely that metabolism co-evolved with biopolymers, which helps to reconcile polymer-first versus metabolism-first theories for the origins of life. Frenkel-Pinter M et al (2021) Water and Life: The Medium is the Message. Journal of Molecular Evolution volume 89: 2–11

2021 The right mixture of salts is needed to start life

Chemically speaking, RNA is closely related to DNA. However, in addition to storing information, RNA can fold into complex structures that have catalytic activity, similar to the protein nanomachines that catalyze chemical reactions in cells. These properties suggest that RNA molecules should be capable of catalyzing the replication of other RNA strands, and initiating self-sustaining evolutionary processes. In order to fold correctly, RNA requires a relatively high concentration of doubly charged magnesium ions and a minimal concentration of singly charged sodium, since the latter leads to misfolding of RNA strands. Thes right salt balance might have happened under the conditions on Earth 4 billion years ago. Matreux T et al (2021) Heat flows in rock cracks naturally optimize salt compositions for ribozymes. Nature Chemistry.

2021 Stellar winds can evaporate the atmosphere of planets

Most stars, including the sun, generate magnetic activity that drives a fast-moving, ionized wind and also produces X-ray and ultraviolet emission (often referred to as XUV radiation). XUV radiation from a star can be absorbed in the upper atmosphere of an orbiting planet, where it is capable of heating the gas enough for it to escape from the planet’s atmosphere. M-dwarf stars, the most common type of star by far, are smaller and cooler than the sun, and they can have very active magnetic fields. Their cool surface temperatures result in their habitable zones (HZ) — the range within which the planet’s surface can remain liquid — are close to the star, and because of that especially vulnerable to the effects of photoevaporation which can result in partial or even total removal of the atmosphere. Harbach LM et al (2021) Stellar Winds Drive Strong Variations in Exoplanet Evaporative Outflow Patterns and Transit Absorption Signatures, The Astrophysical Journal.

2021 Planets too small to host life, such as Mars

“Mars’ fate was decided from the beginning. There is likely a threshold on the size requirements of rocky planets to retain enough water to enable habitability and plate tectonics, with mass exceeding that of Mars,” said Kun Wang, assistant professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University. Water is essential for life on Earth and other planets, and scientists have found ample evidence of water in Mars’ early history. Tian Z et al (2021) Potassium isotope composition of Mars reveals a mechanism of planetary volatile retention. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

2021 Planets with a tilt, like Earth, more likely to develop complex life

It is believed that to sustain even basic life, exoplanets need to be at just the right distance from their stars to allow liquid water to exist; the so-called “Goldilocks zone.” However, for more advanced life, other factors are also important, particularly atmospheric oxygen. Oxygen may be one of our most important biosignatures in the search for life on distant exoplanets because it plays a critical role in respiration, the chemical process which drives the metabolisms of most complex living things. Some basic life forms produce oxygen in small quantities, but for more complex life forms, such as plants and animals, oxygen is critical. Early Earth had little oxygen even though basic life forms existed. The researchers found that increasing day length, higher surface pressure, and the emergence of continents all influence ocean circulation patterns and associated nutrient transport in ways that may increase oxygen production. They believe that these relationships may have contributed to Earth’s oxygenation by favoring oxygen transfer to the atmosphere as Earth’s rotation has slowed, its continents have grown, and surface pressure has increased through time. Most of all, how a planet tilts as it circles its star increases photosynthetic oxygen production in an ocean, partly by increasing the efficiency of recycling biological ingredients — similar to doubling the amount of nutrients that sustain life. Too much tilt, like the 98 degrees of Uranus would likely limit the proliferation of life.

Klatt JM et al (2021) Possible link between Earth’s rotation rate and oxygenation. Nature Geoscience.

Cyanobacteria, also called blue-green algae, evolved more than 2.4 billion years ago, churning out oxygen when Earth was inhospitable. Yet it still took an awfully long time — 2 billion years — for oxygen levels to rise enough to enable an explosion of aerobic life on earth. New research shows that earth’s day used to be just 6 hours, not much time to generate oxygen, but when the earth-moon system formed, the rotatation of Earth slowed down to our 24 hours, giving cyanobacteria longer days and more time to generate oxygen

Patel NV (2021) How lightning strikes could explain the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere. MIT Technology Review.

For life to evolve, lightning may be necessary. Here’s why: “You can have all the ingredients in one place—water, a warm climate and thick atmosphere, the proper nutrients, organic material, and a source of energy—but if you don’t have any processes or conditions that can actually do something with those ingredients, you’ve just got a bunch of raw materials going nowhere. So sometimes, life needs a spark of inspiration—or maybe several trillion of them. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests lightning may have been a key component in making phosphorus available for organisms to use when life on Earth first appeared by about 3.5 billion years ago. Phosphorus is essential for making DNA, RNA, ATP (the energy source of all known life), and other biological components like cell membranes.”

Starr M (2021) We’ve Found The Best Time And Place to Live in The Milky Way… And It’s Not Here. ScienceAlert.  Scientific paper here.

More and more, it seems that the existence and persistence of life on Earth is the result of sheer luck. According to a new analysis of the history of the Milky Way, the best time and place for the emergence of life isn’t here, or now, but over 6 billion years ago on the galaxy’s outskirts with the best protection against the gamma-ray bursts and supernovae that blasted space with deadly radiation capable of causing mass extinctions.  In fact, two of Earth’s mass extinctions may have been due to supernovae or gamma-ray bursts, including the end-Pliocene extinction 2.6 million years ago, the Ordovician mass extinction 450 million years ago, and the Late Devonian extinction 359 million years ago.

Tyrell T (2021) How has earth stayed habitable for billions of years? Inverse.

It took evolution 4 billion years to produce Homo sapiens. If the climate had completely failed just once evolution would have come to a crashing halt, and we would not be here now. This is not a trivial problem. Current global warming shows us that the climate can change considerably over the course of even a few centuries. Over geological timescales, it is even easier to change the climate. Calculations show that there is the potential for Earth’s climate to deteriorate to temperatures below freezing or above boiling in just a few million years. We also know that the Sun has become 30% more luminous since life first evolved. In theory, this should have caused the oceans to boil away by now, given that they were not generally frozen on the early Earth. Using a model that took into account factors like asteroid impacts, supervolcanoes and more, there was just one time out of 100,000 that a planet had such strong stabilizing feedbacks that it stayed habitable all 100 times, irrespective of the random climate events. On nearly every occasion in the simulation when a planet remained habitable for 3 billion years, it was partly down to luck. But luck alone was never sufficient, and planets that had no feedbacks at all never stayed habitable. By implication, Earth must therefore possess some climate-stabilizing feedbacks but at the same time good fortune must also have been involved in it staying habitable. Theory #1: The Earth has something like a thermostat – feedback mechanisms preventing the climate from ever wandering to fatal temperatures. Theory #2: Luck. The most likely explanation (read the article for why).

2021 Changes in Earth’s orbit enabled the emergence of complex life

Changes in Earth’s orbit may have allowed complex life to emerge and thrive during the most hostile climate episode the planet has ever experienced when most of Earth’s surface was covered in ice during a severe glaciation, dubbed ‘Snowball Earth’, that lasted over 50 million years.

Strickland A (2021) Record-breaking flare erupts from neighboring star. CNN.

A giant flare over 100 times more powerful than any flare our sun has ever released erupted from the nearest star Proxima Centauri (PC) a red dwarf 25 trillion miles / 4 light-years away. Red dwarf stars are common in our galaxy, and often have exoplanets.  PC has two, one potentially earth-like. PC is about the same age as our sun, but has been blasting its planets with high energy flares for billions of years, several times a day, potentially stripping the atmosphere away, and making the evolution of life challenging, if not impossible.

Mann A (2020) There’s Something Special About the Sun: It’s a Bit Boring. New York Times.

The sun seems a little less active than hundreds of similar stars in our galaxy, which could play a role in why life exists in our solar system.

Heller, J. 2020. Habitability of the early Earth: Liquid water under a faint young Sun facilitated by strong tidal heating due to a nearby Moon. Earth and Planetary Astrophysics.

The sun is thought to have been 70% dimmer its first 100 million years, so faint the Earth should have been a frozen snowball for up to 2 billion years. That it wasn’t has long plagued astronomers, but now we might have an answer: the moon helped keep Earth warm. When the moon and Earth formed about 4.4 billion years ago, the moon was about 20,000 kilometres away versus 380,000 km now. Earth was also rotating much faster, as quickly as once every 3 hours. These two factors mean the gravitational interaction between the two bodies would have been much stronger – enough to produce tidal heating from the gravitational squeeze. This would have slightly warmed Earth and could have triggered the eruption of volcanoes, giving our planet a thicker atmosphere that could trap more heat. But this may not be the right explanation. Other theories include that Earth had a thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere as a result of the planet being molten following the giant impact that formed the moon, trapping more heat. Another is that the planet’s orbit brought it closer to the sun at times, warming it up, or that the sun had more mass at the time and was brighter than we think.

Longrich, N. 2019. Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe. Phys.org

Complex animals evolved once in life’s history, suggesting they’re improbable. Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land. The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once. Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. As far as we can tell, life only happened once. Curiously, all this takes a surprisingly long time. Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth’s formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they’re exceedingly improbable. These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn’t like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again. On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all. Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations—the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself—each with a 10% chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million. But complex adaptations might be even less likely. Photosynthesis required a series of adaptations in proteins, pigments and membranes. Eumetazoan animals required multiple anatomical innovations (nerves, muscles, mouths and so on). So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1% of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible universe.

2019. New study dramatically narrows the search for advanced life in the universe. Phys.org.

Scientists may need to rethink their estimates for how many planets outside our solar system could host a rich diversity of life. In a new study, a UC Riverside–led team discovered that a buildup of toxic gases in the atmospheres of most planets makes them unfit for complex life as we know it. Accounting for predicted levels of certain toxic gases narrows the safe zone for complex life by at least half—and in some instances eliminates it altogether. Using computer models to study atmospheric climate and photochemistry on a variety of planets, the team first considered carbon dioxide. Any scuba diver knows that too much of this gas in the body can be deadly. But planets too far from their host star require carbon dioxide—a potent greenhouse gas—to maintain temperatures above freezing. Earth included. “To sustain liquid water at the outer edge of the conventional habitable zone, a planet would need tens of thousands of times more carbon dioxide than Earth has today,” said Edward Schwieterman, the study’s lead author and a NASA Postdoctoral Program fellow working with Lyons. “That’s far beyond the levels known to be toxic to human and animal life on Earth.” Carbon dioxide toxicity alone restricts simple animal life to no more than half of the traditional habitable zone. For humans and other higher order animals, which are more sensitive, the safe zone shrinks to less than one third of that area. What is more, no safe zone at all exists for certain stars, including two of the sun’s nearest neighbors, Proxima Centauri and TRAPPIST-1. The type and intensity of ultraviolet radiation that these cooler, dimmer stars emit can lead to high concentrations of carbon monoxide, another deadly gas. Carbon monoxide cannot accumulate on Earth because our hotter, brighter sun drives chemical reactions in the atmosphere that destroy it quickly. If life exists elsewhere in the solar system, Schwieterman explained, it is deep below a rocky or icy surface. So, exoplanets may be our best hope for finding habitable worlds more like our own. “I think showing how rare and special our planet is only enhances the case for protecting it,” Schwieterman said. “As far as we know, Earth is the only planet in the universe that can sustain human life.” Source: Schwieterman, E. W., et al. 2019. A limited habitable zone for complex life. The Astrophysical Journal.

Gribbin (2018) Chain of Improbable coincidences

Many things had to go right for us to exist. Serendipity in the timing and location of our home star and planet as well as lucky conditions on earth and fortuitous developments in the evolution of life, resulted in human beings.

Timing. If the sun and earth had been born any earlier in galactic history, our planet would likely have had too few metals to form life. These elements are created during stellar deaths, and it took billions of years for enough stars to form and die to enrich the materials that built our solar system.

Location. The sun lies in a goldilocks zone within the milky way – not too close to the galactic center, where stars are more crowded and dangerous events such as supernovae and gamma-ray bursts are common, and not too far, where stars are too sparse for enough metals to build up to form rocky planets.

Technological Civilization. Once multicellular life arose, the development of an intelligent species was far from assured, and our species may have come close to extinction several times. Evolution doesn’t have a goal of creating intelligence, and if you asked an elephant what the goal of evolution was, she would probably tell you to evolve here extraordinary trunk with its thousands of muscles and consequent exquisite flexibility.  And without fossil fuels, we would have the civilization of what existed in the 14th century.  To become who we are today required language, an opposable thumb, the invention of fire, and much more, all very unlikely to have happened, yet here we are.

Williams (2016) If an alien civilization does arise, it will wipe itself out 

‘Stargazing Live’ presenter Brian Cox believes the search for celestial life will ultimately prove futile. Cox believes that any alien civilization is destined to wipe itself out shortly after it evolves.

“One solution to the Fermi paradox is that it is not possible to run a world that has the power to destroy itself and that needs global collaborative solutions to prevent that,” Cox said.

The physicist explained that advances in science and technology would rapidly outstrip the development of institutions capable of keeping them under control, leading to the civilizations self-destruction: “It may be that the growth of science and engineering inevitably outstrips the development of political expertise, leading to disaster. We could be approaching that position.”

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Book review of “Chip War” and the Fragility of microchips

Major semiconductor producing countries rely on each other for different types of chips. Top semiconductor producers’ 2021 export values by source and destination, billions USD.  Source: PIIE 2022 https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/major-semiconductor-producing-countries-rely-each-other-different-types-chips

Preface.  We have become insanely dependent on technology that can’t possibly outlast fossil fuels, and indeed, is likely to hiccup and produce fewer chips as power outages, wars, earthquakes, financial crashes, pandemics and more disrupt the most precise, complex, and amazing technology that has ever existed, the pinnacle of human invention. Here are just a few examples of disruptions mentioned in the book:

Consider that “our production of computing power depends fundamentally on a series of choke points: tools, chemicals, and software that often are produced by a handful of companies—and sometimes only by one.

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The tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy

One minute on the internet around the world. Source Infographic by @LoriLewas and @officiallyChad, 2020.

Preface.  This is a book review of Pitron’s “The Dark Cloud”. Of note is the huge amount of electricity and rare earth and other critical elements this technology uses – which batteries, utility scale energy storage, wind, solar, electric vehicles and other renewables need as well (and they are dependent on computers and the electric grid).

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Nuclear attack on U.S. could kill 90% of Americans

A map showing modelling by Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security showing the worst-case scenario effects of a strike on America’s nuclear missile silos. Researchers found as many as 300 million people would be at risk of a fatal radiation dose. Scientific American/Princeton Program on Science and Global Security Continue reading

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What percent of Americans are rational?

Preface. Why does rationality matter — what’s the harm in believing there’s a fat “Santa Claus” God in the sky noting down every time any intelligent creature in the entire universe is naughty or nice on the trillions of inhabited planets in the universe every second of every day for eternity?

There’d be no harm if only fundamentalist groups believing in such things and their consequent strict rules didn’t feel compelled to make the rest of us believe and behave as they do.  Some would not allow music, dancing, keep women completely covered and restrict them to cooking and child care, ban all books but the Bible, Koran or other sacred text. Crazy as it sounds, there are Christians who want to bring Jesus back ASAP based on strange interpretations of Revelations and the best-selling books about the Rapture, even if it involved nuclear weapons to hasten it.

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Book review of Lights Out. A Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath

Preface.  This is one of three posts based on Ted Koppel’s book Lights out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath.

There’s also these 2 posts based on this book: “Want to survive peak everything? Become a Mormon” and another with excerpts from this one focusing on preparation.

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Off-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel

Preface. Move over semi-trucks. You are not the most important truck in the world, even though I gave you the starring role in “When Trucks Stop Running”.  What really matters are the trucks that grow our fuel: Food.

And mining trucks to get materials to make trucks, logging for fuel and infrastructure, tanks to fight wars (ugh!) and many others.

This post is mainly about off-road trucks, which are as essential for civilization as the trucks hauling goods over roaads.  This post is also about how amazing diesel and diesel engines are.  Off-road trucks and equipment present an even larger challenge than on-road trucks to electrification because they are often far from the grid.  Though anything other than a drop-in fuel faces the same problem: a completely new distribution system would be required for hydrogen and other alternatives.

Retrofitting off-road trucks with some other kind of propulsion than diesel is also hard since each kind of truck or equipment is custom made for a specific purpose, they aren’t mass-produced like cars. This makes it hard to transfer technology because it costs a great deal more to custom-build and modify.

Whatever energy source is used to move 40 ton trucks uphill has to be quite powerful, and with diesel second only to uranium in energy density, the alternative may only exist in another universe with different physical laws.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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DTF. June 2003. Diesel-Powered Machines and Equipment: Essential Uses, Economic Importance and Environmental Performance. Diesel Technology Forum.

Excerpts:

The diesel engine is the backbone of the global economy because it is the most efficient internal combustion engine – producing more power and using less fuel than other engines.

Of course, an electric motor can be very powerful, but as discussed above, trucks are too heavy to be powered by batteries, off-road can’t be electrified with millions of miles of catenary wires, and on-road catenary is so expensive the number of miles would be limited as well.

The off-road industries that rely on diesel must have a source of heavy-duty mechanical power that is mobile or portable. Other sources of industrial power, such as the electricity grid and steam boilers, are simply not adaptable to mobile applications or are not portable to remote locations. Only internal combustion engines can meet this demand for efficient mobile/ portable heavy-duty power.

Diesel engines have many applications and engine types, making technology transfer difficult and expensive

Non-road diesel engines serve so many different functions that they require a wide range of engine types, sizes, designs, and configurations, from 10 to 100,000 horsepower. This specialization makes technology and emission improvement transfers much harder. Most on-road trucks are custom built as well.

Diesel engines offer more power

Diesels produce more drive force at lower engine speeds. This superior drive force is the result of the diesel engine combustion process, known as “compression ignition.” Compression ignition produces superior combustion force in the cylinder, which in turn provides more power or “torque.

High torque and power at low speeds is particularly critical in non-road applications. Tractors, bulldozers and backhoes must have enough power to both lift, push, pull, and dump as well as propel very heavy machines across rough surfaces and steep terrain.

Diesel engines have better energy efficiency

Although diesel engines and spark-ignition gasoline engines have equivalent power output characteristics, diesel engines will consume 25 to 35% less fuel doing the same work because of the greater efficiency of compression ignition and the higher energy content of diesel fuel (11% more than gasline, 67% more than LNG, and 250% more than CNG at 3600 psi).  This is important for off road vehicles so that they don’t have to refuel often, especially in remote locations.

Diesel efficiency: combustion cycle and fuel energy density

Diesel’s compression ignition process results in greater thermal efficiency – more of the fuel’s chemical energy is harnessed as mechanical energy. Diesel holds this advantage over any spark-ignited engine, including gasoline, CNG, LNG, and propane (“LPG”). Like gasoline engines, these other spark ignition engines are less fuel-efficient because they burn fuel at lower temperatures under lower compression.

Diesel’s combustion cycle is also more efficient than a spark ignition engine’s because it does not rely on a throttle plate to control power which increases “pumping losses,” reducing efficiency. At lower power the throttle plate in a spark ignition engine’s air intake is partially or completely closed, creating a vacuum in the intake manifold. The cylinders must pump against the vacuum to draw air. Considerable work is wasted by the engine just to draw in air for combustion at low/closed throttle positions.  A gasoline engine is at its highest efficiency at high power with open throttle even though most of its life is spent at low throttle.  A diesel engine has no throttle plate. The power output is controlled by the amount of fuel injected and pumping losses are therefore much lower.

Natural gas is not a good substitute

The low energy density of natural gas can be partially made up for by using larger fuel tanks, but the added weight of the tanks lowers fuel economy, and the size of the tanks may be entirely impractical in many types of non-road equipment.

Diesel engines essential for very large applications 

Spark ignition engines cannot substitute for diesel engines used in applications requiring very high power output at low speeds, because most spark ignition engines cannot perform above 400 horsepower, and run much hotter, requiring more cooling than diesel.  This is one of the reasons spark ignition engines can’t be as large as diesel engines, which causes “detonation” or “knock,” from the spontaneous ignition of fuel in the cylinder at high cylinder temperatures.

The fact that diesels produce less wasted heat makes them more suitable for very large applications, like ocean-going ships, railroad locomotives and earth movers. One of the biggest issues in designing large engines is the need to provide cooling systems to prevent overheating. This is a major challenge when dealing with the heat produced in very large combustion chambers. Because diesels waste less energy as heat, they place less demand on cooling systems than spark ignition engines. This permits diesels to be scaled up to very large sizes — diesel engines in some applications have cylinders as large as three feet in diameter.

Durability and Reliability

Diesel engines are legendary for their durability and reliability. Diesels can go far more miles than gas engines before rebuilding is necessary, and also are easier to rebuild. Heavy-duty off-road truck engines usually last for 20 to 30 years, and rail locomotives even longer – often more than 50 years.

Fuel Safety

Diesel fuels are less volatile and safer to store and handle than gasoline. It also ignites at a much higher temperature than gasoline or natural gas, making it less likely to ignite if spilled or released in an accident. Diesel is also safer because it doesn’t require pressurized vessels like CNG. High pressure greatly increases the risk of leaks during loading, unloading and storage.

 

Off-road applications of diesel engines

Agriculture

Farms and ranches use diesel to power 66% of all agricultural equipment — almost $19 billion worth of tractors, combines, irrigation pumps and other farm equipment.     Back in 1945, it took 25 million people, 17.5% of the population to farm America’s roughly 300 million acres of farmland.   By 1997, America had fewer than two million farms and less than a million individuals who identified farming as their principal occupation. The average size of a farm had grown from 195 to 487 acres. The number of tractors grew by 3.9 million—an average of about 2 per farm, and 700,000 farms had either three tractors, and another 300,000 farms had four or more tractors.   In 1983, the last year for which this data is available, each tractor averaged 66 horsepower. By 1997 a million of the 3.9 million tractors had a power output of more than 100 horsepower.

Examples of agricultural diesel vehicles & equipment:

  • Tractors: wheel tractor-scrapers, rotary cutters, skid steer loaders, loaders, sprayers, utility tractors, row crop tractors
  • Balers: Bale handlers, round/square balers, choppers, mowers, forage harvesters, shredders, windrowers
  • Planters & Seeders: air seeder, drills, unit planter
  • Other diesel equipment: Hoes, plows, generators, milking machines, grinders, cotton pickers/strippers, combines, irrigation sets/pumps, swather, tillers

Forestry equipment :

  • Log handling (log loaders, knuckleboom loader, track harvester)
  • Skidders (wheel and track)
  • Fellers/Bunchers: track feller bunchers, wheel feller, bunchers felling heads, cut-to-length, harvesters and forwarders
  • Firefighting & bulldozers, backhoes are key tools in suppression and fighting of forest fires

Construction

Nearly 100% of off-road construction equipment —$17 billion worth — is diesel-powered.

The latest economic census data show that almost 656,000 entities were engaged in construction in 1997, employing 5.7 million people, purchasing $241 billion in materials, components, supplies and fuels.  Much of the diesel-powered equipment used in construction is classified as “off-road.”  Over 440,000 diesel-powered off-road equipment was produced in the U.S. between 1991 and 1995. 10

Examples of diesel construction applications:

General Construction

  • Dozers: Rubber-Tired Dozers, Wheel Dozers, Telehandlers, Landfill Compactors, Pipelayers
  • Loaders: Rubber-Tired Loaders, Skid Steer Loaders, Track-Type Loaders, Track Loaders, Multi-Terrain Loaders, Wheel Loaders, Backhoe Loaders, Integrated Toolcarriers
  • Excavation: Wheel Material Handlers, Excavators, Backhoes, Mass Excavators, Demolition Excavators, Wheel Excavators, Front Shovels

Road Construction

  • Pavers/Paving Equipment: Cold Planers, Asphalt Paving Equipment, Pneumatic Compactors,
  • Compactors: Asphalt Compactors, Vibratory Soil Compactors, Motor Graders
  • Other: Road Reclaimers, Soil Stabilizers

Other applications

Bores/Drill Rigs, Cement Mixers, Off-Highway Trucks, Off-Highway Tractors, Scrapers, Trenchers, Plate Compactors, Concrete/Industrial Saws, Signal Boards, Generator Sets, Crushing Equipment, Welders

Mining

Diesel power accounts for 72% of the power used in mining.  The bituminous coal and lignite surface mining segment of the industry relies on off-road trucks and heavy earth-moving equipment powered. The oil and gas production segment of the industry requires diesel power for 85% of its drilling operations and more than half of its support operations. 13  The largest rubber-tired, diesel-powered equipment is to be found in mining—off-road trucks with engines of over 2,500 horsepower, capable of hauling over 300 tons per load [my note: tar sand trucks carry even more than this now].

Mining equipment examples:

  • Underground Mining Equipment: Articulated trucks, load haul dump trucks
  • Heavy earth-moving equipment: Dozers, loaders, excavators
  • Other: off-road trucks, generators, pressure washers, cranes, forklifts

Freight Transport

One of the economic sectors most heavily reliant on diesel engines is non-road freight transportation. Diesel power moves about 94% of the nation’s freight ton-miles.17  While much of this freight is moved by diesel-powered highway trucks, non-road modes of transportation are also critical to freight transport. In these non-road modes, which include railroads, marine shipping, and intermodal movements, diesel is the exclusive or dominant source of power.

Marine Freight Transport.  The engines that power bulk carriers and container ships are the largest diesel engines made. They can generate over 130,000 horsepower, have as many as 18 cylinders, and stand three to four stories high. 22   According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, there are over 5,000 towboats in the U.S. towboat fleet. These towboats range between 1,800 and 10,500 horsepower, and generate a total of 9.4 million horsepower. 26

Public Safety & Homeland Security: When primary power systems fail, emergency back-up diesel generators are the only source that can provide immediate, reliable and full strength power.  Construction equipment is required to assure safe operation of the nation’s utilities, install public drinking water and sewer systems as well as fiber optic and telecommunications cables. And when disaster strikes, this same equipment plays a vital role in rescue, recovery and clean-up efforts, helping to rescue trapped victims, and remove debris after hurricanes, tornadoes, ice storms and other natural disasters.

Military: Diesel engines propel a wide variety of weapons systems and power auxiliary equipment used by the military such as generators, compressors, pumps and cranes.  The diesel engine’s superior fuel economy means that equipment can travel farther than other fuels. Since the military must transport large amounts of fuel, this greater fuel efficiency cuts logistical support costs and extends the military’s striking range. Diesel’s fuel relative safety reduces the risk of explosion if vehicles and equipment are hit during combat. If need be diesel engines can burn a wider range of fuels than gasoline engines.

Military diesel equipment examples:

U.S. Navy

  • Most of the amphibious force vessels: Vehicles transporting troops, equipment, material to mission sites
  • Auxiliary ships: combat support vessels
  • Military Sealift Command: All oilers and fleet ocean tugs, 50% of dry cargo ships, combat stores, etc.
  • Navy Sealift Force: Tanker and Roll-on Roll-off ships

U.S. Coast Guard

  • All high-endurance cutters are also powered by diesel engines; all non-high endurance cutters are propelled solely by diesel
  • Ice-breakers propelled by diesel-electric systems

U.S. Army and Marines

  • Most armor and self-propelled artillery are diesel powered, with a wide range of uses and functions: M2/M3 Bradley armored personnel carriers, ambulances, mortar carriers, anti-aircraft gun carriers, missile launchers
  • Tank destroyers, self-propelled guns and howitzers: M901, M109, M110
  • Amphibious assault vehicles: LFTP7A1
  • Almost all military vehicles and logistics systems: prime movers, heavy-equipment transporters, special attack vehicles, Humvees”

Conclusion

Off-road truck vehicles and equipment have diesel engines ranging from 10 to 3,000 Horsepower. On-highway diesel engines (i.e. class 8 long-haul trucks) typically range from 120 to 600 HP. Train locomotives use 6,000 horsepower.

Each off-road equipment application presents different mechanical and duty cycle demands on the diesel engine. This diversity of mechanical demands in turn requires a correspondingly wide range of different engine designs and configurations to power each different type of equipment. The operating requirements of off-road equipment subject these engines to a much more strenuous and varying set of demands and duty cycles than on-highway equipment. Most off-road equipment relies on their engines both to propel the vehicle and to operate attachments like buckets, blades and shovels. Off-road vehicle propulsion requires an engine capable of maintaining traction and maneuverability over a broad range of terrain profiles and physical conditions. Most off-road construction, mining and farming equipment also use engine-driven hydraulic pumps to power the attachments that do the lifting, pushing, drilling, pumping, loading and dumping that the equipment is designed to accomplish. These additional accessories create additional unique power demands on the engine that are not found in on-highway engines, where power is primarily used for propulsion.

Off-road engines are also subject to higher-temperature operating environments than on-highway engines. Unlike on-highway trucks, most off-road equipment runs at very low vehicle speeds. As a result, off-road engines must operate without the benefit of “ram air” for cooling. Ram air is the airflow over the engine and cooling system created by the forward motion of the vehicle itself, which for highway vehicles can be in excess of 65 miles per hour. Off-road vehicles are relatively stationary and rarely exceed 10 miles an hour during work operations. The lack of ram air, combined with the additional accessory loads, require off-road engine makers to install more elaborate cooling systems, which typically consume between 10-20 percent of total engine power output. 31

Because the same off-road engine model is frequently used in a variety of equipment applications, off-road engines also require a great deal of versatility within the same design. For example, a portable electric power generator may use the same engine as a front-end loader. But the two pieces of equipment will require the engine to perform over very different operating ranges and cycles. The engine in the electric power generator enjoys long periods of operation at constant speeds and steady loads, whereas that same engine installed in a front-end loader would be typically subjected to a much more challenging and variable duty cycle featuring frequent alterations between high engine speeds and loads, and periods of low-speed idling between tasks.

REFERENCES

1 Willard W. Pullcrabek, Engineering Fundamentals of the Internal Combustion Engine, Prentice Hall, 1997. The temperature in the exhaust system of a typical compression ignition engine will average between 200° and 500°C, whereas the temperature in the exhaust system of a typical spark ignition engine will average 400° to 600° C, and will rise to about 900°C at maximum power. A full list of references can be found at the end of this report.

2 “Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1999-2001,” Robert J. McCahill and Brian C. Moyer, at http://www.bea.gov/bea/an2.htm#GParticles

3 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 55 (October 2000).

4 Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1999 edition, Table 738. 5 USDA, Economic Research Service, Natural Resources and Environment Division, Agricultural Resources and Environmental Indicators, “Production Inputs,” 1995, pp. 135–136. The data in this report include electricity in addition to liquid fuels. However, data on electricity use in agriculture ceased to be available after 1991. The data reported above are for liquid fuels—gasoline, diesel, and LP gas.

6 U.S. Department of Agriculture, 1997 Census of Agriculture, “Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey.”

7 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 55 (October 2000).

8 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 27-28 (October 2000).

9 “Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1999-2001,” Robert J. McCahill and Brian C. Moyer, at http:// www.bea.gov/bea/an2.htm#GParticles.

10 U.S. EPA, Final Regulatory Impact Analysis: Control of Emissions from Non-road Diesel Engines.

11 ICF Kaiser Consulting Group, “Off-Road Vehicle and Equipment: GHG Emissions and Mitigation Measures,” Table 8, p.18.

12 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 55 (October 2000).

13 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 31 (October 2000).

14 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 28 (October 2000).

15 “Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1999-2001,” Robert J. McCahill and Brian C. Moyer, at http:// www.bea.gov/bea/an2.htm#GParticles.

16 Calculation by CRA from 1997 Economic Census, Mining by Subsector.

17 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 8 (October 2000). This figure includes freight transportation by trucks.

18 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 12 (October 2000). Census statistics for 2002 are currently being prepared by the U.S. Census Bureau.

19 “The North American Railroad Industry,” Association of American Railroads, at http://www.aar.org/ AboutTheIndustry/AboutTheIndustry.asp.

20 “Economic Impact of U.S. Freight Railroads,” Association of American Railroads, at http://www.aar.org/ ViewContent.asp?Content_ID=296.

21 “Gross Domestic Product by Industry for 1999-2001,” Robert J. McCahill and Brian C. Moyer, at http:// www.bea.gov/bea/an2.htm#GParticles.

22 2002 Diesel and Gas Turbine Catalog

23 “Diesel Technology and the American Economy,” Charles River Associates, p. 16 (October 2000).

24 U.S. DOT, Maritime Trade and Transportation ’99, Table 1-16.

25 U.S. Maritime Administration, MARAD ’98, p. 39.

26 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Waterborne Transportation Lines of the United States, Calendar Year 1998, Vol. 1, Table 1.

27 Sierra Research, Inc., “Technical Support for Development of Airport Ground Support Equipment Emissions Reductions,” Prepared for Office of Mobile Sources, USEPA, Contract No. 68-C7-0051, December 31, 1998.

28 See, 40 C.F.R. Part 89 (Off-road); 40 C.F.R. Part 92 (Locomotives); 40 C.F.R. Part 94 (Commercial and Recreational Marine)

29 Engine Manufacturer’s Association’s Supplemental Comments on EPA NPRM For Motor Vehicle and Engine Compliance Program Fees (Docket No. A-2001-09), dated January 14, 2003

30 An extensive sampling of the diversity of diesel applications can be found in the U.S. EPA, “Final Regulatory Impact Analysis: Control of Emissions from Nonroad Diesel Engines,” EPA420-R-98-016, p.4, August 1998.

31 U.S. Department of Energy, Off-Highway Vehicle Technology Roadmap, December, 2001 (DOE/EE-0261) pp 30-31.

32 The only diesels not subject to federal emissions standards would be certain vehicles and engines manufactured pursuant to military vehicle regulatory exemptions.

33 EPA established emission standards for diesel locomotives that took effect in 2000. 63 Fed. Reg. 18978 (April 16, 1998) (codified at 40 C.F.R. pt. 92). Standards for large (>37 kW) marine engines will take effect in 2004. 64 Fed. Reg. 73300 (Dec. 29, 1999) (commercial marine); 67 Fed. Reg. 68242 (Nov. 8, 2002) (recreational marine) (to be codified at 40 C.F.R. pt. 94).

34 40 C.F.R. § 89.112, Table 1 (2001) (values in g/kW-hr have been converted to g/bhp-hr);U.S. EPA, “Final Regulatory Impact Analysis: Control of Emissions from Nonroad Diesel Engines,” EPA420-R-98-016, pp. 5-7, August 1998.

35 59 Fed. Reg. 31306 (June 17, 1994); 63 Fed. Reg. 56968 (Oct. 23, 1998).

36 30 C.F.R. pts. 7, 36, 56, 57, 70, and 75.

37 October 30, 2002, letter from EPA, Office of Policy Economics, and Innovation to Small Entity Representatives, Section B Description of Rulemaking.

38 The Diesel Technology Forum maintains a searchable database containing project-specific details of various diesel retrofit programs across the country. See www.dieselforum.org/retrofit/activitymatrix.asp.

39 “Retrofitting Emission Controls on Diesel-Powered Vehicles,” Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, March 2002, available at: www.meca.org/dieselretrofitwp.PDF.

40 “Retrofitting Emission Controls on Diesel-Powered Vehicles,” Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, March 2002, available at: www.meca.org/dieselretrofitwp.PDF.

41 “Retrofitting Emission Controls on Diesel-Powered Vehicles,” Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, March 2002, available at: www.meca.org/dieselretrofitwp.PDF.

42 “Retrofitting Emission Controls on Diesel-Powered Vehicles,” Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, March 2002, available at: www.meca.org/dieselretrofitwp.PDF.

43 “Retrofitting Emission Controls on Diesel-Powered Vehicles,” Manufacturers of Emission Controls Association, March 2002, available at: www.meca.org/dieselretrofitwp.PDF.

44 Alex Kasprak, Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, et al., “Emission Reduction Retrofit Program for Construction Equipment of the Central Artery/Tunnel Project,” Paper No. 206, Presented at the 94th Annual Conference of the Air and Waste Management Association, Orlando, Florida (June 2001).

45 www.bigdig.com/thtml/envair01.htm

46 Edward Kunce and Steven Lipman, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, “Massachusetts Diesel Retrofit Program (MDRP),” Presented at the Innovative Technology/Aftermarket Retrofit Program Workshop, Houston, Texas (September 2000).

47 Alex Kasprak, Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, et al., “Emission Reduction Retrofit Program for Construction Equipment of the Central Artery/Tunnel Project,” Paper No. 206, Presented at the 94th Annual Conference of the Air and Waste Management Association, Orlando, Florida (June 2001).

48 Edward Kunce and Steven Lipman, Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, “Massachusetts Diesel Retrofit Program (MDRP),” Presented at the Innovative Technology/Aftermarket Retrofit Program Workshop, Houston, Texas (September 2000)

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Book review of “Prime Movers of Globalization: the History & Impact of Diesel Engines & Gas Turbines”

Preface. This is my book review of Vaclav Smil’s “Prime Movers of Globalization”. A topic near and dear to my heart after working for the 5th largest shipping company, American President Lines (now Neptune Orient Lines), for 22 years and writing tens of thousands of lines of code. That’s where I came to understand how important trucks are — APL had a fleet of them as well to take cargo to and from origins and destinations.  Every container got on a truck at some point, plus all the raw materials and finished products as well.

I wrote this 10 years ago and shudder a bit at how much I left out, especially jet turbines, though I probably did because at some point of oil decline I assumed air travel would be the first to go.  However, crude oil can’t be refined to just diesel or gasoline or jet fuel (kerosene), each barrel has about 60 products in it are refined. So there will still be some kerosene even as oil declines, much as civilization will wish kerosene and gasoline could be converted to diesel to keep the most essential transportation going.

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Posted in Energy Books, Peak Resources, Rail, Roads, Transportation, Where to Be or Not to Be | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Mental Health. Coping with the future: notes from Jackson & Jensen’s “An Inconvenient Apocalypse”

Preface.  Because I’d been reading non-fiction since college across every section in bookstores for decades before I stumbled on Peak oil in 2000 (full story in about), I understood the horror and tragedy of energy decline and was depressed for months.

Today people accuse me of nihilism because I don’t offer solutions.  Well I do — just not the techno-fixes they want to hear.  My “solution” is to accept we are going back to the 14th century and not waste any time on making renewables, electric vehicles and so on that can’t possibly solve the problem.  We are running out of time, metals, minerals, energy, forests, fresh water, topsoil — if peak energy didn’t get us, there are plenty of other Limits to Growth that will.

I found Jackson & Jensen’s book “An inconvenient Apocalypse” a very important framework for looking at what lies ahead that will help you cope. They explain why optimism and hope are not the goal. It is a common among activists to challenge me since by not offering hope and optimism there is no incentive for people to do anything. Sure there is, garden and other 14th century skills.

I’ve summarized some of the parts from the book I liked most, but I left so much out. it will give you perspective, wisdom, and perhaps better acceptance and ability to cope with what lies ahead so you aren’t driven to despair by your awareness.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen.  An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity

Throughout this book, our goal is to confront difficult issues as honestly as we can, even when our analysis might create tension with friends and allies. We believe this approach is more necessary than ever at this all-hands-on-deck point in human history.

We believe that feeling some despair in the face of these threats is a rational, reasonable, and responsible reaction. Such despair—not over our personal fates but our species’ collective inability to value the larger living world—should be pondered, not waved away with platitudes.

If we stop fantasizing about doing the impossible, we can focus on doing the best job we can to achieve what is possible.

We have faith in the better angels of our nature but realize that those better angels alone won’t save us from what we call “the temptations of dense energy,” which have come most recently in the form of fossil fuels.

Driving less—walking, biking, taking the bus—is a good thing, but it won’t change the world if the larger car culture endures and cities are designed in such a way that living and working without a car is difficult. If you think trading in your gas-burning car for an electric vehicle is the solution, think again. The energy consumption and resource extraction required to manufacture EVs make them an ecologically unsustainable choice as well.

Our thesis is that while not every individual or culture is equally culpable, the human failure over the past ten thousand years is the result of the imperative of all life to seek out energy-rich carbon.

The global North—which is to say, fossil fuel–powered capitalism as it developed in Europe—bears primary responsibility for the shape of the contemporary crises, and those societies have failed to meet their obligation or, in some cases, even acknowledge an obligation to change course. In our lifetimes, the primary force behind that failure has been the United States. Within affluent societies, the wealthy and powerful bear the greatest responsibility for destructive policies. But if there is to be a decent human future, we have to realize that human-carbon nature is at the core of the problem, a reality that exempts no one. We cannot ignore the relevance of “we.

Our task today is not only to learn how to live “lower on the food chain,” but how to transition from the existing infrastructure and organization of contemporary societies to infrastructure and organization that is consistent with a sustainable future. And we have to do this living with population densities far greater than any previous phase of human history, with an eye toward dramatic reductions in population. No past or existing society or ideology provides a workable model or viable plan for this task.

The task before us today is far more daunting: a down-powering on a global level with the goal of fewer people living on less energy, achieved by means of democratically managed planning to minimize suffering. Daunting, indeed.

No one has yet offered a program to achieve the task before us. Simply invoking previous societies that lived with less energy and lower population densities is not a program.

Because planning for transition on this scale is difficult to imagine, people are quick to embrace technological optimism and imagine that we will invent our way to a just and sustainable future without harsh reckoning and dramatic realignment. This optimism slides all too easily into a technological fundamentalism that undermines people’s ability to acknowledge and face the difficult challenges.

This optimism allows the fantasy that societies can continue at existing high-energy levels through endless innovation that can be fueled by low-cost renewable energy that will become abundant enough to replace fossil fuels.

Because capitalism is, and always has been, a wealth-concentrating system, a relatively small number of people reap most of the financial benefits from the ecological destruction that comes with modern economic growth. In short, the first world is rich, and much of its wealth is concentrated in the hands of a relatively small segment of those societies’ populations. Some people who benefit from these arrangements are dedicated to maintaining the hierarchical systems at the heart of the unsustainable economy and its unjust distribution of wealth.

No individual, political movement, or government has a viable plan for transitioning from an unsustainable high-energy, interdependent global society of nearly eight billion people to low-energy societies with sustainable levels of population and consumption. While lessons from low-energy societies will undoubtedly be valuable, there is no way to flip a switch and return to a previous era’s living arrangements and lower population densities.

Technological innovation and renewable energy will play a role but cannot power the infrastructure of a world built with the highly dense carbon of fossil fuels.

It is our human nature, like the nature of all life, to seek out energy-rich carbon. To be alive is to go after carbon. Over time, humans have gotten exceedingly good at tapping into five major carbon pools—soils, forests, coal, oil, natural gas—and maximizing the extraction of all the carbon we can get our hands on. There are few exceptions to that pattern. Our greatest success as a species has become our most profound failure, given the many negative consequences of all that carbon grabbing.

To put it as bluntly as possible: Any policy that does not understand and account for the temptations of dense energy will fail. Humancarbon nature matters.

We routinely talk with people who assert that the problem is not that there’s too much aggregate consumption but that the distribution of that consumption across the human population is unequal and inequitable and that capitalism creates wasteful consumption by manipulating human desires in pursuit of profit. Those observations about capitalism’s unjust and wasteful character are accurate, but they don’t undermine the importance of asking critical questions about consumption more generally.

We are anticapitalist, on moral, political, and ecological grounds. Capitalism, with its growth imperative and wealth concentration, has proved to be inconsistent with basic human decency, democracy, and sustainability. But this assessment shouldn’t lead to a demand for political purity today. Given the global dominance of capitalism’s regime of ownership and finance, for now, any strategy for advancing justice and sustainability has to account for that power and maneuver within that system. We have no plan for vanquishing capitalism and are open to any and all creative proposals for change. Still, we believe it’s crucial to point out the pathological nature of capitalism and endless growth economics, both to guide immediate action and to keep us focused on the eventual end of that system.

Our vision of a just and sustainable future includes a rejection not just of the capitalist worldview but also of the industrial worldview’s expectations for expansive energy consumption. We do not think that even a well-designed socialist system is up to the challenge in front of us, unless it emphasizes the need for collective self-imposed limits on human energy expectations.

Why? Because of our humancarbon nature. Is there any reason to believe that socialists would not have acted from the species propensity to maximize the amount of carbon we could extract from the environment? We have no doubt, however, that a well-designed socialist society would have used that energy for different, and more socially beneficial, purposes than a capitalist society. Instead of maximizing return on capitalists’ investment, a socialist system could seek to maximize human flourishing for everyone.

Nor is there reason to believe that a more egalitarian system today would be able to limit ecological destruction in significant ways, unless it embraced a collective rejection of the contemporary high-energy “lifestyle” and prioritized a collectively imposed cap on the amount of carbon we use. Yet this component of a viable plan for ecological sustainability—a clear statement of the need to dramatically reduce human aggregate consumption—is either absent or downplayed in current socialist and ecosocialist programs. Instead, these programs tend to suggest that continued development of renewable energy will solve our problems without a dramatic reduction of economic activity.

A preference for the industrial solutions made possible by the dense energy of fossil fuels is not the product of capitalist indoctrination. It’s just easier on one’s back. Given the current crises, we should constantly look for places to abandon high-energy tools in favor of lower-energy methods and reassess the need for the work those high-energy tools do. In the contemporary United States, we have yet to see such questions asked.

Surplus-and-hierarchy predate agriculture in a few resource-rich places, which produced what anthropologists sometimes call complex hunter-gatherers or affluent foragers.  Human nature is variable and plastic. When living under conditions that generate surpluses over which people might struggle for control, it’s within our nature to abandon the egalitarian features of our gathering-and-hunting history and create hierarchies. It’s all part of human nature, all connected to the scramble for energy-rich carbon that is at the center of life on this planet. That is who we are.

No one talks about the individual choices that foragers made a hundred thousand years ago, or fifty thousand years ago. What should we say about the first farmers, the first smelters of ore, the first people who tapped fossil fuels to do work in machines? All of them contributed to the mess we are in but without knowledge of the consequences of their actions.

How many churchgoers who have doubts about their congregation’s doctrine decide to squelch their questions out of fear of losing friends and community? How often do people in intimate relationships avoid confronting tension because they know a problem can’t be resolved and speaking of it will bring the end of the relationship? How many people have delayed a trip to the doctor because they know that an examination will lead to a diagnosis they don’t want to deal with?

We often avoid hard questions precisely because they are hard. What we experience individually is also true of the larger culture. There are hard questions that, collectively, we have so far turned away from, either because we have no answers or because we won’t like the answers waiting for us. As we have already said, contemporary societies face problems for which there likely are no solutions if we are only willing to consider solutions that promise no dramatic disruption in our current living arrangements.

Here are some of those hard questions we must confront now: 1) What is the sustainable size of the human population? 2) What is the appropriate scale of a human community? 3) At what speed must we move toward different living arrangements if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences?

When we have raised these issues in conversation, the most common response is that those hard questions may be interesting, but they have no bearing on what is possible today in real-world struggles for justice and sustainability. The implication is that such questions either somehow don’t really matter or are too dangerous to ask. We’ve heard this not just from people within the conventional political arena but also from environmentalists and activists on the Left. Their argument tends to be:

Those questions raise issues that most people simply will not engage and suggest a need for changes that most people simply will not make. Sensible environmentalists and activists know that you cannot expect people to think about such huge questions when they face everyday problems of living and making a living, which take up most of their time and energy. And what’s the point of thinking about these things anyway, when we all know that politicians can only move so far, so fast in our political system? Why ask questions and offer policies that are certain to be ignored?

Sensible people, we have been told, are those who accept the “Overton Window.” Named after the late Joseph P. Overton from the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the idea is that politicians “generally only pursue policies that are widely accepted throughout society as legitimate policy options. These policies lie inside the Overton Window. Other policy ideas exist, but politicians risk losing popular support if they champion these ideas which lie outside the Overton Window.

That can be a useful concept for thinking about what laws might be passed today, but it becomes an impediment to critical thinking when people use it to avoid hard but necessary questions that can’t be put off forever. When confronting questions of size, scale, scope, and speed, we encourage people to climb out of the Overton Window to get a wider view of the world, to think not about how human political processes limit what actions are possible today (which they do) but about what the larger living world’s forces demand of us (which dictate the material conditions in which we live our lives). When attempting to come to terms with biophysical realities, refusing to look beyond the Overton Window guarantees collective failure. That window certainly exists in the realm of environmental policy: politicians fear the loss of support if they move too far, too fast. But that doesn’t exempt anyone from asking those hard questions. The environmental policies that are possible today are important, but we also must recognize that we likely face a dramatically different set of choices in a far more challenging tomorrow. And that tomorrow isn’t as far away as we may want to believe.

We realize that asking these hard questions in the mainstream political arena today is nearly impossible and that the key actors in our current political system will not engage those questions anytime soon. But to cite those two impediments as a reason not to ever grapple with those questions in any context is not sensible.

As one science writer put it, people who take Malthus seriously “cannot let go of the simple but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction.”

The goal of our planning can be stated simply and clearly: fewer and less. Fewer people, less stuff.

Many people, including many environmentalists we know, prefer not to talk about the growth of the human population as a problem or about population control as a component of a viable environmental policy. Why? Three reasons seem to push people away from this discussion.

The first is that such concerns about population have been associated with a lack of compassion and/or racism, ethnocentrism, and class prejudice. Some of the most vocal supporters of population control also espouse white supremacist and anti-immigrant sentiments.

We are grateful that some environmentalists, such as Eileen Crist, are willing to speak bluntly: “The dismal consequences for Earth and for humanity of an oversized global population are indisputable.”

The second reason people might avoid the subject is that no one has ever proposed a viable non-coercive strategy for serious population reduction on the scale necessary, because no such strategy exists.

The other side of the population equation—the death rate—is even more vexing.

The ease with which some politicians were able to scare people with such claims indicates how far the United States is from an honest discussion on the subject of the appropriate level of intervention to prevent death, especially as we age. We need such a debate about setting policy, not only on when to withdraw care from the terminally ill, but also on the wisdom of using a range of life-extending medical procedures (e.g., heart bypasses, organ transplants).

Many of the key problems we now face as a species are second-order effects of reduced mortality.

Also important to social stability is what is called the dependency ratio, the relationship between people of working age and those who are not working. The strain of longer lives and low fertility, leading to fewer workers and more retirees, threatens to upend how societies are organized and may also require a reconceptualization of family and nation.

People also avoid the population issue because everyone recognizes that raw population numbers are meaningless without attention to per capita consumption.

Behind all the denial is the techno-optimism that assumes we will always invent our way out of any problem, which may turn out to be the biggest impediment to meaningful change.

Reasonable people with good track records on understanding ecological limits suggest that the human population could stabilize at about two billion. (That was, by the way, the human population in 1927.)

It may not be possible. In fact, if human history is any guide, it’s almost certainly not possible.

Refusing to acknowledge difficult problems doesn’t allow us to escape them. Instead, denial of reality opens up space for people peddling pseudo-solutions. When reasonable people stay silent, the voices of unreasonable people dominate. Progressives who are unwilling to address the issue of human numbers and consumption cede this terrain to political actors without progressive values who want to use ecological crises to pursue an ugly agenda. To press the question of population and consumption is not reactionary but rather an attempt to forestall reactionary political projects.

The analysis just presented is not new, nor are we alone today in this analysis. For a half century, insightful scholars have been making these points.  In the early 1970s, Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren offered the “IPAT” concept to capture the impact of human activity on the environment by looking at population, affluence, and technology. In their 1972 book, The Limits to Growth, Donella and Dennis Meadows and coauthors used computer modeling to warn that humans were moving beyond Earth’s carrying capacity. After years of these authors being dismissed as alarmist, an increasing number of people are recognizing they were right.

The ecologists William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel developed ecological footprint analysis to make the unsustainability of contemporary societies easier to grasp, publishing Our Ecological Footprint in 1996. Such work continues with scholar-activists such as Richard Heinberg and his colleagues at the Post Carbon Institute.

Our genetic endowment makes some things possible and some things impossible. No human being can fly in the sense that a bird flies or live underwater in the sense that fish do. But our technological prowess has led people to forget the obvious. Airplanes create the illusion that we can fly and submarines, the illusion we can breathe underwater.

Another example of this pattern is the megachurch, congregations with thousands of members, which in addition to large spectacle worship services offer myriad specialty groups. In these small groups, members of the congregation build strong connections to a manageable number of people, a cell model of organizing. Megachurch pastors learned something that should not be surprising given our evolutionary history: “The small group was an extraordinary vehicle of commitment.” Such models can also be found in political groups.

No matter how difficult the transition may be, in the not-too-distant future we will have to live in far smaller and more flexible social organizations than today’s nation-states and cities.

Moving from eight billion people living in large political units to a sustainable human population living in smaller social organizations is a difficult task, unlikely to be achieved by planning in the existing political and economic systems in the time available. There are myriad ways that human-built infrastructure and social systems can—and likely will—fray, falter, fail, and fall apart before we humans can figure out how to manage that task. The unraveling of large systems in the past has generally resulted in social dislocation and intensified conflict, along with lower levels of available material resources and considerable deprivation.

That’s not a pleasant future to ponder and prepare for, so it’s not surprising that many people, especially those in societies whose affluence is based on dense energy and advanced technology, clamor for solutions that claim to be able to keep the energy flowing and the technology advancing. Jackson has long labeled this approach “technological fundamentalism. If there is to be a decent human future, we face the tasks of reducing the number of humans and aggregate consumption, moving to smaller and more flexible political units and social organizations, and recognizing the limits of our intelligence to manage complex systems.

That leaves the question of speed: how fast must we move toward these dramatically different living arrangements and collectively self-imposed limits if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences? It is folly to offer precise predictions, but this does not mean we should abandon attempts to understand the trajectory of human societies or stop trying to deepen our understanding of where we are heading. A good example is the debate over peak oil, the point at which humans will have extracted about half of all oil that will ever be extracted. After that point, petroleum extraction will permanently decline.

It seems clear that even if greenhouse gases weren’t a problem, the era of cheap oil is over and we can assume the end of the era of oil is coming. We don’t need exact predictions to assess the trajectory and act on that assessment. The warning light has been flashing red not for years but for decades, in some ways even for centuries. If year after year the evidence piled up and still there was no meaningful collective action to deal with questions of size, scale, and scope, what makes us believe that piling more evidence in business-as-usual fashion will produce the change we need at the speed required?

It’s unwise to believe that what is often called the magic of modern science and engineering can actually work magic.

When research from the insurance industry starts sounding like it came from environmental groups, perhaps we should pay attention. “A fifth of countries worldwide at risk from ecosystem collapse as biodiversity declines,” reports Swiss Re Group, a leading reinsurance firm (the firms that regular insurance companies call when they need to lay off some of the risk in policies they have written). The company’s study “highlights the dangers of these economies potentially reaching critical tipping points when essential natural resources are disrupted.” A year later, another Swiss Re report predicted that on the currently anticipated trajectory, the world could lose up to 10% of total economic value by midcentury from climate change.

Hard questions lead to painful conclusions. We are starting too late to prevent billions of people from enduring incalculable suffering. We are starting too late to prevent the permanent loss of millions of species and huge tracts of habitat. We are starting too late, but we have to start. We do not believe the world will end. Human abuse of ecosystems cannot destroy Earth. Nor do we expect the human species to become extinct anytime soon.  Our chances of coping successfully with the “end times” of those human-created systems increase if we are diligent in learning how the laws of physics and chemistry, along with the lessons of biology, are relevant to our struggles.

We use the term “royal” not to describe a specific form of executive power but as a critique of a system that concentrates authority and marginalizes the needs of ordinary people. The royal tradition, in this context, describes ancient Israel, the Roman Empire, European monarchs, or the contemporary United States—societies in which those holding wealth and power can ignore the needs of the majority of the population if they so choose, societies in which the wealthy and powerful tend to offer pious platitudes about their beneficence as they pursue policies to enrich themselves.  This corrosive consciousness develops not only in top leaders but throughout the privileged sectors, often filtering down to a wider public that accepts a power system and its cruelty: “The royal consciousness leads people to numbness, especially to numbness about death.

The inclusion of the United States in a list of royalist societies may seem odd, given the country’s democratic traditions (however frayed), but it is a nation that has been at war—either shooting wars or cold wars for domination—for our entire lives. Economic inequality and the resulting suffering have deepened in our lifetimes, facilitated by a government so captured by concentrated wealth that attempts to renew the moderate New Deal–era social contract seem radical to many. Brueggemann describes such a culture as one that is “competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing,” though an empire’s competence wanes over time, a process visible in the United States today. Much of the intellectual establishment—not just the right wing but also centrists and liberals—either explicitly endorses or capitulates to royal power.

When prophetic warnings have been ignored, time and time again, what comes next? That is when an apocalyptic sensibility is needed. Again, to be clear: “apocalypse” in this context does not mean lakes of fire, rivers of blood, or bodies raptured up to heaven. The shift from the prophetic to the apocalyptic can instead mark the point when hope for meaningful change within existing systems is no longer possible and we must think in dramatically new ways. Invoking the apocalyptic recognizes the end of something. It’s not about rapture but a rupture severe enough to change the nature of the whole game. The prophetic imagination helps us analyze and strategize about the historical moment we’re in, typically with the hope that the systems in which we live can be reshaped to stop the worst consequences of the royal consciousness, to shake off that numbness of death in time.

In a culture that encourages, even demands, optimism no matter what the facts, it is important to consider plausible alternative endings. Anything that blocks us from looking honestly at reality, no matter how harsh the reality must be rejected. To borrow an often-quoted line of James Baldwin, “Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

To speak from the royal tradition is to tell only those truths that the system can bear. To speak prophetically is to tell as much of the truth as one can bear and then a little more. To speak apocalyptically is to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, then a little more, and then all the rest of the truth, whether one can bear it or not.  If it seems like all the rest of the truth is more than one can bear, that’s because it is. We are facing new, more expansive challenges than ever before in history. Never have potential catastrophes been so global. Never have social and ecological crises of this scale threatened at the same time. Never have we had so much information about the threats that we must come to terms with.

The human species faces multiple cascading social and ecological crises that will not be solved by virtuous individuals making moral judgments of others’ failures or by frugal people exhorting the profligate to lessen their consumption. Things are bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than we expected. This is happening not just because of a few bad people or bad systems, though there are plenty of people doing bad things in bad systems that reward people for doing those bad things. At the core of the problem is our human-carbon nature, the scramble for energy-rich carbon that defines life.

Ironically, in those more developed societies with greater dependency on high energy and high technology, the eventual crash might be the most unpredictable and disruptive. Affluent people tend to know the least about how to get by on less.

When presenting an analysis like this, we get two common responses from friends and allies who share our progressive politics and ecological concerns. The first is the claim that fear appeals don’t work. The second is to agree with the assessment but advise against saying such things in public because people can’t handle it.

We are not trying to scare people at all. We are not proposing a strategy using the tricks of advertising and marketing (the polite terms in our society for propaganda). We are simply reporting the conclusions we have reached through our reading of the research and personal experience. We do not expect that a majority of people will agree with us today, but we see no alternative to speaking honestly. It is because others have spoken honestly to us over the years that we have been able to continue on this path. Friends and allies have treated us as rational adults capable of evaluating evidence and reaching conclusions, however tentative, and we believe we all owe each other that kind of respect.

We are not creating fear but simply acknowledging a fear that a growing number of people already feel, a fear that is based on an honest assessment of material realities and people’s behavior within existing social systems. Why would it be good strategy to help people bury legitimate fears that are based on rational evaluation of evidence? As Barbara Ehrenreich points out, an obsession with so-called positive thinking not only undermines critical thinking, but also produces anxiety. Fear is counterproductive if it leads to paralysis but productive if it leads to inquiry and appropriate action to deal with a threat. Productive action is much more likely if we can imagine the possibility of a collective effort, and collective effort is impossible if we are left alone in our fear. The problem isn’t fear but the failure to face our fear together.

Who are these people who are either cognitively or emotionally incapable of engaging these issues? These allegedly deficient folks are sometimes called “the masses,” implying a category of people not as smart as the people who are labeling them as such. We assume that whenever someone asserts that people can’t handle it, the person speaking really is confessing “I can’t handle it.” But we have no choice but to handle reality, since we can’t wish it away. We increase our chances of handling it sensibly if we face reality together.

We think modern systems are coming to an end, and we need to lift the veil that obscures an honest assessment of what those end times will require of us. But we are not scholarly “collapsologists,” a term that has been used by some to describe an emerging research community studying systemic risk in industrial society.

Basic questions are impossible to avoid. How much time do industrial societies have left, and what is their collapse going to look like? For some people in the most vulnerable locations, collapse has already begun. Is collapse coming for us all? The questions are now common enough to warrant a feature in the New York Times Magazine that summarizes the scholarly research on collapse. The same newspaper ran a story on the popularity of a British professor’s paper arguing that it is too late to prevent a breakdown in modern civilization in most countries within our lifetimes. Curiously, the article ran in the “Style” section.

Scholars study past collapses and look for patterns that can help us plan for the future, but they have yet to come up with a widely accepted definition of collapse. If one key marker is a reduction in population, what level of human die-off over what time period constitutes a collapse? To what extent do the political institutions of a society have to fall apart to warrant use of the term? From whose point of view do we say a society collapsed? That last question is particularly important, reminding us that not everyone in a society is equally affected by social and ecological disintegration. Vulnerable people may suffer more during the process, but those who are most exploited by centralized power might benefit in the long run from the collapse of that power.  They are intellectually interesting but not necessary to resolve for our purposes.  Change is likely in a matter of decades. Big change is coming, sooner than any society is ready for.

For our purposes, Jared Diamond’s definition of collapse is an adequate starting point: “a drastic decrease in human population size and or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”  Collapse is not about the failure of a leader or of elites more generally, though when societies fall apart leaders and elites often make bad decisions. Neither is it simply the result of a society exhausting natural resources and polluting the environment, though the degradation of ecosystems is usually part of the process of collapse.  Collapse is not all bad, that there are positive consequences to the end of complex systems.

Our focus is on how to minimize the human suffering and ecological damage done as a system collapses.

When that process begins, we can expect a loss of “social resilience,” the capacity of a society to cooperate effectively to achieve shared goals. Peter Turchin, another prominent scholar of collapse, suggests that structural trends that undermine social resilience have been building in the United States for decades.

Taking seriously the questions about size, scale, scope, and speed, attempts to make the existing system more robust are likely a losing proposition. Better to invest in resilience. Investing in electric vehicles may make the existing system more robust in the short term—we may be able to keep driving longer—but that investment in new technology to keep alive an old idea of personal car ownership will undermine resilience. Investing in mass transit, along with the recognition that in a low-energy future we will travel less, will enhance resilience.

The ecological costs—not only in direct fuel consumption but also in metals and other resources to produce the cars and their batteries, along with infrastructure construction and maintenance—will be just as unsustainable for electric vehicles as petroleum-fueled cars.

One reaction to the possibility/inevitability of collapse is to join the “prepper” or “survivalist” movements—folks who are actively assembling the means and materials they believe will allow them to survive the societal disintegration they believe is imminent. Depending on one’s wealth, prepper actions range from ordinary people stocking up on survival supplies and packing “bug-out bags” to the more affluent folks buying space in a survivalist bunker compound to the mega-rich building a community that can float in the ocean and claim political independence.

There is nothing wrong with individuals or communities taking action that might enhance short-term survival in crises. It’s a good thing for individuals to expand basic skills in food production and storage that will be needed when cheap energy is no longer plentiful and reliable. Being more self-reliant is a good thing. Developing such skills in cooperation with neighbors is an even better thing, enhancing the self-reliance of a group. But those activities should go forward without illusions that individuals or small communities can successfully cope with collapse on their own. No person or community can build a wall high enough or dig a moat wide enough to guarantee survival. And if that were possible, what kind of survival would it be?

Along with any individual and community action, a larger political process is necessary to deal with the dramatic changes coming. Being ready for a radically different life for everyone as part of a radically different ecosphere requires planning. Such a process will need to not only build new political and economic systems but also cultivate a more ecological vision to replace the dominant culture’s current linking of a good life to an industrial worldview, what in other writing we have called a “creaturely worldview.”

We should expect different people, depending on their talents and temperaments, to focus on different aspects of the challenge. We aren’t proposing a specific plan for life on the other side of a collapse. We are suggesting it is reckless not to consider the question.

For all of our adult lives, the two of us have lived in a culture that assumed expansion—more people, more energy, more technology, more abundance. Hunger and poverty were problems that could be solved in an ever-expanding world. That was the future we assumed was coming. It’s time to retire that notion.  The future we are going to have to cope with—will be defined not by expansion but by contraction.

If we accept the high probability of coming changes that would warrant the term “collapse” on a global scale, we should be thinking about what lies beyond. What comes after existing social, political, and economic systems are no longer functional?

One place looking at this is the Heidelberg University which established the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies in 2021.

We assume that the first instinct of people still reading this book is not to stockpile dried food and shotgun shells, an approach that says, “The hell with everyone except me and my loved ones.” There may come a time, if things get desperate enough, when that will be the default response of most people.  Most of us find disturbing precisely because such scenarios aren’t hard to imagine. But we’re not there yet.

We don’t play the prediction game, and we also are not in the prescription business. We don’t pretend we can see the future, and we also aren’t arrogant enough to think we know enough to dictate to people exactly what they should be doing in response to the maddeningly complex challenges before us.  [Hello, that’s partly why I’m reading this book, for ideas on “What to do”]

People—and we mean everyone, ourselves included—are only capable of doing what we are capable of doing.

People with a similar view of the human trajectory and similar objectives can pursue very different projects. That’s fine with us. If no one can know for sure how to achieve common objectives, as Mao Zedong said, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend.

Since we cannot produce much indefinitely, desiring little is going to become more important.

We know that the most basic needs for survival are food, water, clothing, shelter, healing, security, and sociality. Everything else in our lives is in the category of a want, a desire, a yearning—the things we can live without and still live fulfilling lives.

This process of down-powering should not be confused with the “new minimalism” fad of the 2000s, the project of “decluttering and design for sustainable, intentional living.” The use of “sustainable” in that context has little or nothing to do with ecological sustainability. There’s nothing wrong with “tidying up” one’s home or office, and it may improve one’s mental health. But we shouldn’t expect such superficial changes to be “life changing,

We’re focusing on the day when this move to simpler living will not be voluntary. Frugality will have to be imposed through collective action. Whether that imposition will involve what we recognize today as “government” or some new form of political association depends on a trajectory we cannot predict. But at some point, “fewer and less” will not be a matter of choice but will be reality, whether we like it or not. We will have to manage collectively the choices within new limits. We see no reason to believe that, in the time frame available, human societies will embrace public policies that significantly change the collapse trajectory.

But once we are faced with new limits, societies will need to work out strategies for democratic self-management of resources at the local level, allowing people to hold each other accountable without centralized power. How to do that is neither easy nor obvious.

A capitalist culture dependent on mass consumption cultivates a close connection between people and our stuff. Many people’s identity is tied to activities that require buying a lot of goods and services, and we should not be naive about how much struggle will be involved in leaving that consumption behind.

Most of our stuff—including the stuff that we think is important in defining who we are—is not only ephemeral, but soon will be unavailable.

It would be folly not to recognize and try to root out the Consumer in ourselves. Rejecting the Consumer in us all and embracing a new identity isn’t so easy. Capitalism has depended on both state and private violence to get established and survive; think of imperial wars to acquire resources and establish markets and decades of strike-breaking. But the strength of the identity of Consumer is maintained primarily through pleasure. For most people it feels good, at least in the short term, to consume. Once we settle into the Consumer identity, it’s surprisingly hard to escape,

A saving remnant will need new stories born of resistance to the Consumer. What stories can we tell about what it means to be human that will help us on the other side of collapse? We especially will need a story about why so many people continued to be so short-sighted and cruel, even when the knowledge of coming collapse is widespread.

Electricians, carpenters, construction workers, plumbers, and people with applied engineering skills of all kinds will be the truly essential workers in a down-powering world.  In hard times it is hands-on skills and experiential knowledge that carry the day over management skills and abstract understanding.

In a low-energy future, agriculture that is not so heavily dependent on fossil fuels and does not answer to agribusiness multinationals will require more people on the land with more practical skills. Human and animal muscle power will replace the dense energy of oil and natural gas that currently provides traction, fertility, and weed and pest control. Much farm labor is hard work and also requires complex knowledge and skills that precious few in the United States and other affluent countries still have.

Those people living farthest from the temptations of dense energy—what many affluent people look down on as “the peasantry”—possess far more of those skills than the affluent.

Many people are already moving in this direction, learning to garden, hunt, preserve food, and cook without prepared foods. Everyone will need to be capable of “tinkering,” repairing things in our domestic and work lives that are designed to be thrown away and replaced with new items.

Online resources are incredibly helpful today, but we should not neglect the importance of face-to-face communication, aware that in a low-energy future that will again become the dominant—and perhaps eventually the only—form of human interaction.

We will need more public spaces for the kind of human interaction that doesn’t depend on high-energy/ high-technology communication infrastructure. The construction of such spaces requires rethinking contemporary living arrangements in affluent cultures, from the obsession so many have with spacious private homes to the layout of towns and cities. It also requires a shift in our thinking about human relationships. Instead of constructing our lives around protection of the private sphere (typically family and close friends) we will have to learn to anchor our lives in the public sphere (typically the concept of community).

What’s important is having a place where everyone knows to gather, whether it’s a fairly permanent temple or a deliberately temporary tabernacle. We are convinced that a big part of the attraction of religion—so important that many people keep coming long after they no longer believe in the doctrine or dogma—is that sense of familiarity and comfort in a familiar space.

We can learn much about how to organize low-energy communities from paying attention to the spaces and routines of religion.  One might be tempted to cite bars and pubs as well.

Belonging to a community-sized congregation provides a fellowship of familiarity, an assumption of acceptance, and shared struggle. But unlike a bar, there’s also a commitment to a shared worldview and accompanying ethic, even if it is lived imperfectly. There’s a great deal of hypocrisy, as members of a congregation articulate noble ideals but ignore them in practice.  It’s important that the ideals are articulated and regularly reinforced in that space, and returning every day or week to be reminded of those ideals is a good thing.

Attempts to keep the existing systems going will simply accelerate the movement toward collapse and leave future generations with fewer options.

“What should we do?” Our approach suggests that those of us living in affluent societies start with a different question: “What are we willing to give up?

Our evolutionary history reminds us that we evolved to take care of each other in small groups that can maintain a rough equality by developing social practices to control human arrogance and greed.

Even though the ecosphere does not love us, it gives us everything we need to continue living, just as it gives other organisms what they need to continue living. We aren’t on top. If the ecosphere favors any creatures, it would appear to be partial to bacteria, which were here before us, are here all around us and inside our own bodies, and will be here long after we are gone.

The material abundance generated by civilizations is the result of expansive and effective methods of capturing and storing energy—first in the soils that produced the annual grains domesticated in agriculture beginning ten thousand years ago, then in the forests used to smelt the ore of the Bronze and Iron Ages, and more recently in the coal, oil, and natural gas that have powered the Industrial and Digital Ages. That annual grain agriculture and its energy surpluses gave rise to class societies based on hierarchies, in which craftspeople, scribes, soldiers, and kings did not have to produce their own food. This led to new ideas about ownership (not just owning objects but also people, starting with men’s claim to own women and children and the creation of patriarchy), social systems of hierarchical control, and greater potential for expansion and conflict. The systems that institutionalized that control have varied over time and place: slave economies, feudal economies, capitalist economies.

The down-powering that is necessary presents new challenges that we could potentially meet with planning that strives to be democratic and rational. But the deep denial of biophysical limits by most people in most cultures today makes such planning difficult. In some cases, the impediment is the depth of people’s cult-like devotion to various systems that promise miracles. Some people believe that it is God who can be trusted to work whatever miracles are necessary for the faithful. In economics, some believe in the miracle working of capitalist markets, while others argue against markets and have faith that socialist systems and deeper democracy will somehow create sustainability.

The unintended consequences of civilization now leave us a choice: use the big brain that makes us so clever to face honestly our problems or continue denying, minimizing, and ignoring. The former path is uncertain; the latter is guaranteed to end ugly.

We should be willing to speak apocalyptically, not to preach the end of the world, but to acknowledge that there is no decent human future possible within existing economic and political systems, that we are at the end of the age of those systems.

There will be a time when even the financial instruments hoarded by the wealthy, and the political power such wealth can buy, will offer little privilege or protection.

So “Is there any reason to have hope?” and “How do you sustain hope in your life? Hope is not something that one person can give to another. The value of the idea is in a call for collective action.

“Hope for what outcome?” As we have made clear, we have no hope that eight billion people can live on Earth in anything like the current social, economic, and political systems. If that’s the goal, then we counsel giving up. Better to articulate new goals that are consistent with what we know about ecology and basic biology, operating within the biophysical limits set by the laws of physics and chemistry. Let’s say that the new goal is getting to a world of two billion people who consume far less energy and resources. Do we have hope that our species can get there, with as little human suffering and as little ecological destruction as possible?

How do I sustain hope? I don’t, because I can’t sustain what I don’t have and never had. Hope has never been terribly relevant in my life, never been a big part of my motivation to act in the world.

Why has a kind of joyful hopelessness been second nature for me? While introspection is not a perfect method for answering such questions, here’s my best guess. My early experience in the world was defined by trauma, on multiple levels from multiple sources, fairly relentless and with no safe harbor.

I was lucky eventually to have opportunities for higher education and satisfying professional work, but by that time I had found a way to live that did not require hope.

I had concluded that the only meaning in our lives is created through our own thoughts, words, and deeds. I don’t recall ever searching for the divine or seeking epiphanies to provide meaning. Instead I developed a rather banal workaday attitude: get up in the morning, day after day, try to find something worth doing, and then do it as well as possible, realizing that failure will be routine but that small successes—sometimes really small, maybe even too small to see in the moment—make it possible to continue.

The systems that govern the world have demanded that I give a fair amount of my time and energy to a boss. Like most of us, I have had to meet the demands of various employers so that I can pay my bills and live a kind of normal life. But I have carved out as much space as possible for activities that challenge me personally and intellectually. I have sought the company of others who also seek those challenges. I have tried to create opportunities to help remedy problems in whatever small way possible. I have done this not out of hope for dramatic change in the world but because it has been for me the best way to live a decent life.

What does matter is getting out of bed in the morning and finding work that is worth doing. I believe in this path not just because it has sustained me, but because I have seen it sustain others, and sharing this perspective with others

Over the years, people have often put the question to me, “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” In years past, I usually responded with something like, “I’m not an optimist, but I am hopeful.  In recent years, I have done my best to avoid using the word hope. The reason has to do in part with a growing recognition that we are all caught in one big Ponzi scheme that started with agriculture. Although it began without fraudulent intent, the human pursuit of carbon is the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all and now nearly eight billion people are dependent on keeping that carbon-extraction scheme going.

But here we are now, stuck with our place near the end of the long line of Ponzi investors. People have been drawing down the ecological capital of the ecosphere ever since agriculture, taking from Earth in ways that reduce options for future generations.

If this intensified carbon seeking kicked off by agriculture is a kind of Ponzi scheme, paying off one generation by drawing down the assets of the next, what kind of hope makes sense? Ponzi schemes only end one way, with some people paying for the illusion of other people’s embrace of endless growth and high returns. Where’s the hope if that’s what we’re up against?

We can do our best to understand the signals that the ecosphere is sending and act intelligently, for our own self-respect and for the sake of the planet’s creatures, human and other. Our species propensity for cooperation, combined with our cognitive abilities and symbolic capacities, has gotten us into trouble. But those same attributes are also available to help us atone. We are stuck using the same big brain that brought us to this place in history to try to prevent more suffering, lessen the destruction, and create a soft landing after existing social, political, and economic systems are gone, either because we worked to transcend them or because of collapse. We are stuck using the assets that got us in trouble to try to get out.

When facing difficult truths, it’s tempting to want to slide out of trouble with an invocation of love, and there’s nothing wrong with that so long as the invocation doesn’t become a mode of evasion.

 

 

 

 

 

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Tesla Semi trucks hauling corn chips

Preface.  Many dismiss my writing about why battery electric trucks can’t replace diesel trucks because commercial electric trucks exist.

Most famously the Tesla semi trucks, which are under a trial at the PepsiCo Frito-lay plant in Modesto California. It is hard to imagine an easier test to pass. It would be hard to find a lighter cargo. Lay potato chips weigh 56 kg/cubic meter (m3), lighter than rice Krispie’s 90 kg/m3, corn chips 178 kg/m3 or marshmallows 210 kg/m3. There will be no hills, central California is flatter than the Midwest.  The roads are in excellent shape and so great for rolling efficiency, and wind so calm there is little aerodynamic drag.

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