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Recent Posts
- Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
- Homes & Buildings
- Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina
- Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
- Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil
- “More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- The staggering cost of Net Zero in Britain
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
- Book Review of Grain Brain: Extraordinary claim not backed up by evidence
- Why did everyone stop talking about Population & Immigration?
- What would happen if trucks stopped running?
- How to survive a nuclear winter
- The insect apocalypse will kill billions more people than climate change
Author Archives: energyskeptic
Sewage Treatment
Preface. Before sewage treatment, cities were hell-holes of foul smells from rotting human waste, industrial effluent, and garbage. Few people lived beyond 50 because of the many waterborne diseases. In fact, sewage and water treatment systems are the main reason … Continue reading
Climate change impacts on agriculture
Preface. There are three articles below on this topic. Plus these articles in the news: Nakagawa T et al (2021) The spatio-temporal structure of the Lateglacial to early Holocene transition reconstructed from the pollen record of Lake Suigetsu and its … Continue reading
Posted in BioInvasion, Drought & Collapse, Extreme Weather, Food production, Heat, Peak Topsoil, Soil, Water, Where to Be or Not to Be
Tagged climage change, disease, erosion, food production, pests, soil, water, weeds
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Nuclear powered airplanes, cars, and tanks
Preface. If trucks, tractors, ships, locomotives, and airplanes can’t run on electricity or the electric grid stay up without natural gas to balance wind & solar (see When Trucks Stop Running), if cement and steel and other products requiring the … Continue reading
Posted in Airplanes, Automobiles, Far Out, Nuclear Power Energy
Tagged airplane, car, nuclear
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Distribution – why it is so hard to add E15 or E85 at a gas station
Preface. One of the huge hurdles to shifting from oil to “something else” is the chicken-or-egg problem of no one buying a new-fuel vehicle with few places to get it, so few are made, so service stations don’t add the … Continue reading
Posted in Biofuels
Tagged distribution, ethanol, service station
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Global oil discovered 7.7 times less than consumption in 2019
Source: Rystad Energy (2020) in “Global oil and gas discoveries reach four-year high in 2019, boosted by ExxonMobil’s Guyana success“. Preface. The global conventional discovery chart above lists natural gas and oil discoveries since 2013. The fossil fuel that really … Continue reading
The U.S. May Soon Have the World’s Oldest Nuclear Power Plants
Preface. This is nuts. Sea level rise threatens many nuclear power plants and drought has shut plants down since they need cooling to operate. As nuclear reactor age, they require more intensive monitoring and preventive maintenance to operate safely. But … Continue reading
Posted in Nuclear Power Energy
Tagged aging, nuclear, safety
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High-level nuclear waste storage degrades faster than thought
Preface. Burying nuclear waste ought to be a top priority, now that it appears peak oil may have happened in November of 2018 (Patterson 2019) and perhaps even sooner if covid-19 crashes the world economy (Tverberg 2020). It won’t happen … Continue reading
Concentrated Solar Power is dying out in the U.S.
Preface. Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) contributes only 0.06 % of U.S. electricity, mainly in California (64 %) and Arizona (24 %) because extremely dry areas with no humidity, haze, or pollutants are required. Of the 1861 MW power they can … Continue reading