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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
Category Archives: Books
The staggering level of corruption & kleptocracy in the world
Preface. This is a book review of Frank Vogl’s 2021 book “The Enablers: How the West Supports Kleptocrats and Corruption – Endangering Our Democracy” (well, mostly kindle notes). They couldn’t get away with it if there weren’t so many places … Continue reading
Posted in Banking, Bond Market, Corporate Welfare, Corruption, Crime, Gangs, Corrupt police, Private security, Debt, No Jail for Bankers & Wall St execs, Politics, Scams
Tagged autocrat, corruption, democracy, kleptocracy, kleptocrat
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Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”
Canfield purple ocean, Green Sky Preface. Thank goodness for world peak oil production in 2018. We’re out of time to destroy the planet! We’re about to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption, unwillingly, as it declines at 8% or more and … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Climate Change, Extinction Books, Runaway Greenhouse
Tagged anoxic ocean, book review, canfield ocean, climate change, global warming, mass extinction, peak oil, under a green sky
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Look Before you Eat
Preface. This post is a book review of Be Wilson’s Swindled. From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats. Wilson explains why cheating has always gone on and always will, especially in societies with … Continue reading
Posted in Health, Health What to do, Peak Food
Tagged food, health
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How the grid works, why a distributed grid won’t work
Preface. This is a book review of Angwin’s 2020 “Shorting the Grid. The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid”. It is a good primer on how the grid works, especially why Volt-Ampere Reactives (VARs) are important and why renewables don’t … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Books, Grid instability
Tagged Angwin, blackouts, distributed generation, electric grid, solar, wind
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After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation
Preface. This is a book review of: Giles MacDonogh (2007) After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation. In trying to understand what life might be like as energy declines, I’ve read a lot of books about … Continue reading
Book review of “Agrarian Dreams”
Preface. This is a book review of Guthman’s “Agrarian Dreams. The Paradox of Organic Farming in California”. Since world oil production likely peaked in 2018, and renewables can’t replace fossil fuels (read my books), there’s no choice but to go … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Books, Farming & Ranching
Tagged agriculture, back to the land, california, organic farming
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Book Review of “War: How Conflict Shaped Us”
Preface. This is a very profound and wide-ranging book about many aspects of war, the reasons for fighting, what it’s like to be a soldier, women’s roles during wars, the history and future of war, and more, a really outstanding … Continue reading
Booklist: Pollution, Resource Depletion, Infrastructure, Transportation, Peak Minerals, Life after Fossil Fuels
More booklists Pollution G Pitron. The Rare Metals War: the dark side of clean energy and digital technologies T Colborn. Our Stolen Future: Are we threatening our fertility, survival? J McCormick. Acid Earth: The Global Threat of Acid Pollution. J … Continue reading
Posted in Book List
Tagged infrastructure, Life After Fossil Fuels, peak minerals, pollution, resource depletion, transportation
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The Vory. Russia’s Super Mafia
Preface. After reading this book about the history of organized crime in Russia, I thought surely Russia must be the most corrupt nation in the world. But amazingly there are 47 countries that are ranked even lower of the 180 … Continue reading
Posted in Corruption & Finance, Crime, Gangs, Corrupt police, Private security, War Books
Tagged corruption, criminal, mafia, Russia, Stalin, totalitarian, vory
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