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Recent Posts
- The history of rope making
- What will future societies be like after fossil fuels are gone?
- Phosphate: All hopes for food and LFP batteries rest on Morocco with up to 85% of remaining reserves
- Floating Solar Farms add plastic, metal, PFAS & cut off light and oxygen to life below
- Peak Lithium
- Trump eliminates birth control abroad
- In a world without people, how long would NYC last?
- Network States to replace democratic governments with billionaire Silicon Valley CEO dictators & Republicans
- Why the kerogen in oil shale will never fill up your tank
- ‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq
- Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America
- Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future
- The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot
- A transition from fossil fuels to renewables could take a century – if it ever happens
- Electrifying freight trains in the U.S. is a bad idea
Author Archives: energyskeptic
Limits to Growth: Natural gas fertilizer that feeds 4 billion of us
Preface. In chapter 4 of my book “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy“, I explain how it came to be that fertilizer is made out of natural gas, using the energy of natural gas, and why … Continue reading
Posted in Life After Fossil Fuels, Limits To Growth, Natural Gas, Peak Food, Starvation
Tagged agriculture, food, peak food, peak natural gas, starvation
1 Comment
Far out #7: Ammonia power & recycle wind turbines by eating them
Preface. This optimistic article is honest enough to say that the new process of not emitting NOx when using ammonia for energy is a long way from commercial viability, and has myriad hurdles. This is not the most promising way … Continue reading
Posted in Far Out
Tagged ammonia, fiberglass, hydrogen, natural gas, platinum group, recycle, Ruthenium, skeptic, wind turbine
1 Comment
Implications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical infrastructure safety
Preface. The talk of electric vehicles saving the world from greenhouse gases is nonsense, a red herring to distract everyone from what’s really at stake, and from the material requirements to build EV with rare earth and other scarce minerals … Continue reading
Posted in Automobiles, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Oil & Gas, Peak Oil, U.S. Congress Infrastructure
Tagged diesel, electric vehicle, EV, gasoline, infrastructure, lubricants, peak oil, pipeline, refinery
1 Comment
Review of Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue & Violence in Human Evolution
Preface. This is a fantastic, must read book if you’re at all interested in how we evolved to be who we are today, how we domesticated ourselves, gossip, conformity, violence and more. It reminds me of why I don’t read … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Human Nature, War Books
Tagged conformity, domestication, gossip, hunter-gatherer, morality, violence
1 Comment
Why liquefied coal (CTL) and natural gas (GTL) can’t replace oil
Preface. Here are just a few of the reasons why we aren’t likely to convert enough coal to diesel to matter as oil decines (see Chapter 11 Liquefied Coal: There Goes the Neighborhood, the Water, and the Air for more … Continue reading
Posted in Coal to Liquids (CTL), GTL Gas-To-Liquids, Peak Coal, Peak Oil
Tagged coal-to-liquids, CTL, flow rate, gas-to-liquids, GTL, peak coal, peak oil
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So you don’t want to be a farmer postcarbon? City jobs of the future
Preface. This book summarizes the work of Henry Mayhew from 1849 to 1852. He wrote about the people and goods being sold on the streets of London, interviewing hundreds of street vendors. He estimated there were about 30,000 of them … Continue reading
Posted in Jobs and Skills, Life Before Oil
Tagged jobs, skills, what to do
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The Good News About Peak Oil
As oil declines, the threat of a greenhouse earth & extinction from climate change decline Carbon sequestration, wind, solar, geo-engineering, and other remedies are trivial compared to the effect declining fossil fuels will have on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Natural Gas, Peak Oil, Pesticides, Planetary Boundaries, What to do
Tagged climate change, fertilizer, natural gas, peak oil, pesticide, rationing
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Rees on Overshoot: Growth through contraction: conceiving an eco-economy
Preface. William Rees writes some of the best and most comprehensible papers of all on the overshoot crisis we are in. We should have begun a U-turn in the 60s after The Population Bomb, or the 70s when Limits to … Continue reading
Posted in Limits To Growth, Overshoot, William Rees
Tagged contraction, ecological footprint, limits to growth, localization, overshoot, steady-state economy
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Lithium-ion battery recycling, environmental impact, energy used
Preface. The future of both electric vehicles and utility-scale energy storage are depending on lithium-ion batteries because of their high energy-density, and even though lithium is limited, it’s about the only kind of battery being made for transport (because it … Continue reading
Posted in Lithium-ion, Recycle, Recycling
Tagged battery, energy, environmental impact, LCA, recycle, toxicity
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