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Recent Posts
- Can Geothermal power replace declining fossil fuels?
- Telling others about peak oil and limits to growth
- Why coal was only created once
- Failed State Index: nations ranked from failed to stable
- 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
Category Archives: 1) Decline
Who Killed the Electric Car & more importantly, the Electric Truck?
Preface. Who cares about electric cars? Civilization ends when trucks stop running. Trucks can’t run on batteries because they’re too heavy, with 63 times less energy density than diesel. If all U.S. transportation were to be electrified, the existing electric … Continue reading
Posted in Automobiles, Batteries, Critical Thinking, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Electrification, Transportation, Transportation Infrastructure
Tagged battery, BEV, capacity, efficiency, electric car, electric truck, energy density, EV, lead-acid, lithium ion
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Peak Menhaden
Preface. This is a book review of: Bruce Franklin’s 2007 The Most Important Fish in the Sea. Menhaden and America. Island Press. I’d never heard of menhaden until my husband, who grew up in Florida, mentioned them. Just half a … Continue reading
Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
Preface. This is a book review of “Pandemic Politics” about the myriad ways Trump mishandled the covid-19 pandemic. With the 2024 election coming up, it is a good time to remember how spectacularly Trump failed in managing covid-19. In 2016 … Continue reading
Posted in Pandemics, Political Books, Politics
Tagged covid-19, pandemic, partisan, politics, Trump
2 Comments
Why large projects fail. Especially Renewable Energy
Megaprojects over $1 billion in order of likelihood to go over budget and timeline Preface. This is a book review of Flyvbjerg et al “How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from … Continue reading
Posted in An Index of Best Energyskeptic Posts, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Infrastructure Books, Interdependencies, Supply Chains
Tagged california electric rail, hydropower, infrastructure, nuclear, project failure
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Menhaden: the fish at the bottom of the ocean food web
Preface. Oil has allowed us to extract 90% of the fish in the ocean by being able to go to the ends of the earth using sonar and spotting planes to find the last schools. Menhaden have been overfished for … Continue reading
Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Fisheries, Jobs and Skills, Starvation
Tagged extinction, fisheries, menhaden, radioactive shellfish, starvation
6 Comments
67 Reasons why wind turbines cannot replace fossil fuels
Source: Leonard, T. 2012. Broken down and rusting, is this the future of Britain’s ‘wind rush’? Preface Last updated 2023-10-20 The most important problem to be solved is electrifying transportation, otherwise how can you deliver the 30,000 parts of a … Continue reading
European Power plants are burning American forests
Preface. More than half of Europe’s “green” energy comes from burning wood, a lot of it imported from America. Now Denmark would like to import methanol made from pinyon pines and junipers from hundreds of thousands of acres in the … Continue reading
Posted in CO2 and Methane, Deforestation, Wood
Tagged biomass, burning, coal, deforestation, electricity, methanol, pinyon-juniper, wood
4 Comments
The pillaging of Native American coal, water, uranium and more
Preface. This is a book review of: “Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West” by Judith Nies. This book is about how stealing the resources of native Americans lands was made legal, despite enormous Native … Continue reading
Posted in An Index of Best Energyskeptic Posts, Biodiversity Loss, Coal, Energy Books, Energy Infrastructure, Global Warming, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Mass migrations, Peak Resources, Pumped Hydro Storage (PHS), U.S. Congress Energy Policy, Water Pollution
Tagged aquifer, Black Mesa, coal, electricity, Hopi, Las Vegas, Native Americans, Navajo
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