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Recent Posts
- Oil choke points vulnerable to war, chaos, terrorism, accidents, & piracy
- Nuclear weapons must be reduced or we risk nuclear winter
- Fusion is already running out of fuel
- Peak Oil is Officially Here! World oil production peaked November of 2018
- Wood, the fuel of preindustrial societies, is half of EU renewable energy
- Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe
- Book review of “Chip War” and the Fragility of microchips
- The tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy
- Nuclear attack on U.S. could kill 90% of Americans
- What percent of Americans are rational?
- Book review of Lights Out. A Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath
- Off-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel
- Book review of “Prime Movers of Globalization: the History & Impact of Diesel Engines & Gas Turbines”
- Mental Health. Coping with the future: notes from Jackson & Jensen’s “An Inconvenient Apocalypse”
- Tesla Semi trucks hauling corn chips
Category Archives: Corruption & Finance
The 1% have always been with us – even hunter gatherers had inequality
Pringle, H. May 23, 2014. The ancient roots of the 1%. Science 344: 822-825. Don’t blame farming. Inequality got its start among resource-rich hunter-gatherers. In 79 C.E., the year Mount Vesuvius destroyed it, Pompeii was not one city but two. … Continue reading
Taxpayers are paying for a concentrated solar project — Ivanpah– that doesn’t work
Ivanpah in the news: Dvorsky, G. May 21, 2016. The World’s Largest Solar Plant Just Torched Itself. Gizmodo (Australia). Misaligned mirrors are being blamed for a fire that broke out yesterday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the … Continue reading
Posted in Concentrated Solar Power, Corporate Welfare
Tagged concentrated solar power, CSP, ivanpah, solar thermal
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Bankers and Wall Street take cheating to new levels
[ What follows is an excerpt of an interview between behavioral economist Dan Ariely (DA) and Graham Lawton (GL) in New Scientist 16 June 2012 “The Cheating Game“. This is yet another reason another worse crash is inevitable (in addition … Continue reading
Posted in Corruption & Finance
Tagged bank, cheating, corruption, dishonesty, wall street
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U.S. taxpayers lose billions from Powder River Basin bad lease deals and undervalued coal
According to the Center for American Progress: For decades the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has run a fundamentally noncompetitive leasing program, which has been a boon to industry. Since 1990, 96 of the 107 coal-lease sales held by the … Continue reading
Posted in Coal, Congressional Record U.S., Corruption & Finance
Tagged BLM, coal, leases, powder river basin, production
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What if cash were made illegal so your money could be used to bail out too-big-to-fail banks after the next crash?
Ellen Brown. November 23, 2015. Hang Onto Your Wallets: Negative Interest, the War on Cash and the $10 Trillion Bail-In. The Web of Debt Blog (Excerpts) By quietly eliminating the possibility of cash withdrawals, banks can make sure the … Continue reading
Tilting at Windmills, Spain’s disastrous attempt to replace fossil fuels with Solar PV, Part 1
Book review by Alice Friedemann at energyskeptic of “Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution. The Energy Return on Investment”, by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S. Hall. 2013. Springer. Conclusion: the EROI of solar photovoltaic is only 2.45, very low despite Spain’s ideal sunny … Continue reading
Would Tesla, SolarCity or SpaceX exist without $4.9 billion in government subsidies?
[ Tesla has made no new battery breakthroughs. Batteries aren’t much better today than they were 200 years ago. All Tesla did was build a better battery management system (BMS) by stringing tiny batteries together — thousands of them. But … Continue reading
Posted in Debt, Lithium-ion, Photovoltaic Solar, Subsidies
Tagged altnerative energy, debt, renewables, subsidies, tesla
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The Banking system is a House of Cards
Lynn Parramore. April 21, 2015. Our Banking System is a Giant House of Cards. Money & Banking. It Could Fall On You. Anat Admati teaches finance and economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is co-author of The … Continue reading
Posted in Banking
Tagged banks, corruption, risk
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Gail Tverberg The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem
Tverberg, G. March 9, 2015. The oil glut and low prices reflect an affordability problem. ourfiniteworld.com For a long time, there has been a belief that the decline in oil supply will come by way of high oil prices. Demand … Continue reading
Posted in By People, Debt, Gail Tverberg, Inflation or Deflation
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Signs of Peakiness, oil companies are running out of cash
Andrew Nikiforuk, August 29, 2014. A big summer story you missed: Soaring oil debt. The Tyee. Over 100 of the world’s largest energy companies are running out of cash. Photo of Keystone pipeline in Nebraska by Shannon Ramos. Creative Commons … Continue reading
Posted in Debt, Energy Markets, Peak Oil
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