Category Archives: 1) Decline

Decline will be death by a thousand cuts as too many problems occur and overwhelm societies ability to fix them (i.e. Tainter’s “complexity”). Already our infrastructure (oil and gas pipelines, electric grid, roads, bridges, etc) has a Report Card of D from the American Society of Civil Engineers. All 18 components of essential infrastructure, from the electric grid to the financial system are vulnerable to cyber-attack, The end of growth means bankruptcy for cities, pensions, families, and businesses, and no credit for energy companies to borrow for new projects to obtain oil, coal, and natural gas, the real drivers of the economy (just try putting dollar bills in your gas tank)

Increased flooding

Preface. It’s not just sea level rise, but increased precipitation, sinking land, hurricanes, and dam failures that will cause more floods in the future. Dams will fail more often in extreme rain as at least half are older than their … Continue reading

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Soil salinity and erosion

Preface.  Civilizations fail when their soils are ruined or eroded.  One way conquerors made sure that those they enslaved during wars was to salt their land and burn their homes so they had nowhere to escape to. Erosion is an … Continue reading

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Index of best energyskeptic posts

This is an attempt to boil down 1500+ energyskeptic posts into the 200 of the best ones. Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 … Continue reading

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Diesel is finite. Trucks are the bedrock of civilization. So where are the battery electric trucks?

Last updated: 2023-1-21 Preface. Heavy-duty diesel-engine trucks (agricultural, mining, logging, construction, garbage, cement, 18-wheelers, and more) are essential for doing the actual work of our fossil-fueled civilization. Without them, no goods would be delivered, no food grown, nothing manufactured, no … Continue reading

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We’re Running out of Antibiotics

Preface.  A collection of articles I’ve run across about potential antibiotic shortages some day.  By no means definitive, and maybe the Scientists Will Come Up With Something. Alice Friedemann   www.energyskeptic.com  author of  “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on … Continue reading

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945 U.S. Superfund sites vulnerable to climate change

Preface. The energy crisis is likely to strike soon since global peak oil production was reached in November 2018 (EIA 2020). Let’s use energy to clean up these Superfund sites and nuclear waste, rather than wasting energy on wind turbines … Continue reading

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Trucks running on CNG or LNG

Preface. My books “When Trucks stop running” and “Life After Fossil Fuels” explain why trucks can’t run on electricity — batteries simply don’t scale up, they are too heavy leaving little if any room for cargo. A catenary system has … Continue reading

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Biogas from cow manure is not a solution for the energy crisis

Preface. Smil’s article about biogas sums up why it won’t contribute to energy shortages as fossils decline. Biogass doesn’t scale and is easy to muck up. Hayes (2015) also makes this case, pointing out that even if every ounce of … Continue reading

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The Next Big Thing: Distributed Generation & Microgrids

  Preface. Last updated 2022-9-5   The first article below explains what microgrids will look like in the future.  But first a brief look at what a microgrid is, as Angwin explains in her book  “Shorting the Grid. The Hidden Fragility … Continue reading

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There are over 300,000 contaminated groundwater sites in the U.S.

Preface.  If peak oil did indeed happen in 2018 as the EIA world production data shows, then let’s use the oil we still have, before it is rationed, to clean up the 126,000+ sites that threaten to pollute groundwater for … Continue reading

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