Categories
-
Recent Posts
- We already have a date for the zenith of civilization: 2025-2026
- Escape to Mars after we’ve trashed the Earth?
- Spermageddon: Sperm is declining around the world
- Thorium nuclear bombs and reactors have too many challenges
- Who Killed the Electric Car & more importantly, the Electric Truck?
- President Carter’s energy solutions 1977
- Peak Menhaden
- Hemp for paper, textiles, the war on drugs, and more
- Why towns have a hard time adding EV, solar, heat pumps
- Building a national super grid in America
- 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
Category Archives: 2) Collapse
Population explosion to destroy 11% of remaining ecosystems and biodiversity
Preface. According to a recent paper in Nature Sustainability (Williams et al 2020), we are on the verge of destroying 11% of earth’s remaining ecosystems by 2050 to grow more food. We already are using 75% of Earth’s land. What … Continue reading
Posted in Chemicals, Deforestation, Food production, Overpopulation
Tagged agriculture, birth control, climate change
4 Comments
Why we aren’t mining methane hydrates now — or perhaps ever
Preface. Methane hydrates are far from being commercial, and probably always will be. Scientists and companies have been trying to exploit them since the first energy crisis in 1973 to no avail. Nor are they likely to trigger a runaway … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Global Warming, Methane Hydrates
Tagged clathrate, climate change, gas hydrate, global warming, greenhouse, hothouse, methane apocalypse, methane hydrate
Comments Off on Why we aren’t mining methane hydrates now — or perhaps ever
The History of Drunkenness
Preface. This is a book review of “A short history of Drunkenness” by Mark Forsyth. I expect alcohol to be a big part of life postcarbon not only because most cultures have embraced alcohol, but to drown the sorrows and … Continue reading
Posted in Advice, Agriculture, Human Nature
Tagged Alchohol, drunkenness, religion
Comments Off on The History of Drunkenness
Pentagon report: collapse within 20 years from climate change
Preface. The report that the article by Ahmed below is based on is: Brosig, M., et al. 2019. Implications of climate change for the U.S. Army. United States Army War College. It was written in 2019, before covid-19 and so … Continue reading
Posted in Arctic, Blackouts, Climate Change, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Military, Over Oil
Tagged climate change, collapse, military
2 Comments
A Relentless Growth of Disparity in Wealth
Preface. I write a lot about why electric vehicles won’t be widely adopted. One reason is that the bottom 95% can’t afford them. This tremendous unfairness will likely make peak oil decline more violent and chaotic than it would have … Continue reading
Posted in Distribution of Wealth
3 Comments
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
Comments Off on Life After Fossil Fuels: manufacturing will be less precise
Forests make the wind that carries the rain across continents
Preface. This is a controversial theory that if true, “could help explain why, despite their distance from the oceans, the remote interiors of forested continents receive as much rain as the coasts—and why the interiors of unforested continents tend to … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Deforestation
Tagged climate change, deforestation, rain, wind
Comments Off on Forests make the wind that carries the rain across continents
We’ve wiped out two-thirds of wildlife in just 50 years
Last updated 2022-4-28 Preface. Human over-consumption is driving extinction far more than climate change. Humans began reducing biodiversity 4 million years ago, when large carnivores in Africa began disappearing (Faurby, S., et al. 2020. Brain expansion in early hominins predicts … Continue reading
Slavery in the Roman Empire
Preface. After fossils decline, we go back to wood as our main thermal source of energy for cooking, heating, smelting metals, ceramics, bricks, glass and other products that need the high heat of wood charcoal. Sadly, another source of energy … Continue reading
Kurt Andersen: “Evil Geniuses” & wealth
Preface. This is a well-written book with original insights into the economic, cultural, and politics behind how we got to a right-wing wannabe fascist incredibly unfair distribution of wealth. But Andersen is unaware that energy, not money, is the basis … Continue reading