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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
Far out power #1: human fat, playgrounds, solar wind towers, perpetual motion, thermal depolymerization
Preface. Plans for hydrogen, wind, solar, wave and all the other re-buildable contraptions that use fossil fuels in every single step of their short 15-25 year life cycle and hence are non-renewable, are just as silly as the ideas below, … Continue reading
How a pandemic or bioweapon could take civilization down
Preface. I just listened to a 3.5 hour podcast on pandemics and bioweapons with the best up-to-date coverage I know of, and more interesting to listen to than reading a book or article. Just one of many scary problems: synthetic … Continue reading
Posted in 3) Fast Crash, Biowarfare, Interdependencies, Pandemic Fast Crash
Tagged biowarfare, bioweapon, collapse, CRISPR, interdependency, pandemic, synthetic biology
3 Comments
Fall of Indus valley & Akkadian civilizations from climate change
Preface. Any civilization or region that survives energy decline must then survive climate change for many centuries. As far as the wind systems that collapsed the Akkadian empire, it’s already happening: “Greenhouse gases are increasingly disrupting the jet stream, a … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Collapsed & collapsing nations
Tagged climate change, collapse
Comments Off on Fall of Indus valley & Akkadian civilizations from climate change
Nuclear Power problems
Preface. There are half a dozen articles below. Although safety and disposal of nuclear waste ought to be the main reasons why no more plants should be built, what actually stops them today are the high costs: it can take … Continue reading
Fossil-fueled industrial heat hard to impossible to replace with renewables
Preface. Cement, steel, glass, bricks, ceramics, chemicals, and much more depend on fossil-fueled high heat (up to 3200 F) to make. Except for the electric-arc furnace to recycle existing steel, there aren’t any renewable ways to make cement, other metals, … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Manufacturing & Industrial Heat
Tagged electricity, heat, hydrogen, manufacturing
2 Comments
Invasion of feral hogs yet another hazard for the future
Preface. The Decline category used to be Death By A Thousand Cuts. Feral hogs are yet another cut for anyone who survives peak oil. Not only will climate change be drastically cutting back food production, feral hogs will too, and … Continue reading
Posted in Biodiversity Loss, BioInvasion, Disease, Farming & Ranching
Tagged agriculture, Bioinvasion, disease, feral pigs, wild hogs
3 Comments
Energy Slaves: Every American has 200 to 8,000 or more
Preface. The range of 200 to 8,000 comes from the articles below. Perhaps even more. Former Navy Admiral Rickover wrote in 1957 that it takes at least 2,000 men to push an automobile along the road, a locomotive engineer controls … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Slaves
Tagged buckminster fuller, energy slave, muscle power, population, tad patzek, walter youngquist
2 Comments
Antonio Turiel: Explaining Peak Oil the Easy Way
Preface. Turiel writes an excellent blog “The oil crash” at http://crashoil.blogspot.com. Turiel explains eloquently why the amount of oil will decline even though there are vast pools of oil left underground. If you read my book “When trucks stop running”, … Continue reading
Shale gas is only good for plastics, not transportation fuels
Preface. The oil industry is making more plastic because electric cars have cut gasoline use, but because shale “fracked” gas is so light plastic is about the only use. It is not a transportation fuel that can save us from … Continue reading