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Recent Posts
- The Mayflower from the book The Barbarous Years
- Deep Sea Oil
- Book review of “Livewired. The inside story of the ever-changing brain”
- The conveyor belt may be slowing down — Yikes!
- Battery Energy storage batteries (BESS) too complex to ever be commercial
- New war and energy alliances over next resource wars
- Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”
- Why do people vote for Trump?
- Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
- The evolution of the Republican party from 1960 to 2024: from moderate democracy to extreme authoritarianism
- Why some people are conservative and others liberal
- Book review: Bring the War Home: The white power movement & paramilitary America
- Book review: How Democracies Die
- Book Review “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean
- Book review of “The Power Worshippers. Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism”
Category Archives: Infrastructure & Collapse
Skyscrapers: A bad idea as energy declines
Preface. One reason Paris is such a lovely city is that it was built to human scale, with buildings of five stories or less, because that was about as high as people were willing to climb, so not surprisingly, rents … Continue reading
Posted in Blackouts, Blackouts Electric Grid, Concrete, Earthquakes, Hurricanes, Infrastructure & Collapse, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, North Korea
Tagged concrete, electric grid, elevator, high-rise, North Korea, peak oil, skyscraper
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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 them 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
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Structurally Deficient Bridges
Preface. As I explained in my book “When Trucks Stop Running”, if diesel fuel ran out, civilization would end within a week as grocery shelves, pharmacies, gas stations, and all other businesses ran out of supplies. The millions of miles … Continue reading
Aging nuclear power plants should be shut down
Preface. Below are my notes from the Greenpeace 146-page “Lifetime extension of ageing nuclear power plants”. Even if you don’t understand all the terms, read on anyhow, since it certainly conveys why nuclear plants grow more dangerous with age. Imagine … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Infrastructure, Nuclear Power Energy
Tagged corrosion, degradation, embrittlement, lifetime extension, nuclear power
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A Century from Now Concrete Will be Nothing But Rubble
Photo: road abandoned since 1984 in the Florida Keys Preface. Much of the material that follows is based on Robert Courland’s 2011 book Concrete Planet, which explains why concrete is an essential part of our infrastructure. And it’s all falling … Continue reading
Life After Fossil Fuels: manufacturing will be less precise
Preface. This is a book review and excerpts of Winchester’s “The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers created the modern world”. The book describes how the industrial revolution was made possible with ever more precision. First came the steam engine, possible to … Continue reading
Posted in Infrastructure & Collapse, Jobs and Skills, Life After Fossil Fuels, Manufacturing & Industrial Heat
Tagged cannons, guns, machine tools, manufacturing, precision, steam engine
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