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Recent Posts
- 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
- New war and energy alliances over next resource wars
Category Archives: Wood
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
Wood, the fuel of preindustrial societies, is half of EU renewable energy
Preface: By far the largest renewable energy resource used in Europe is wood. In its various forms, from sticks to pellets to sawdust, wood (or to use its fashionable name, biomass) accounts forhalf of Europe’s renewable-energy consumption. Although Finland is … Continue reading
Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe
Preface. These are updates to Ward & Brownlee’s book “Rare Earth: Why Complex life is Uncommon in the Universe”. If we are one of the few planets with intelligent life, what a shame it would be if we destroyed ourselves … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Human Nature, Planetary Boundaries, Wood
Tagged combustion, complex life, evolution, intelligent life, photosynthesis, rare earth, Theia, venus, water
1 Comment
Deforestation in the news
Preface. I wrote in “Life after fossil fuels” that as energy declined, it would be hard to cut down distant forests with limited oil supplies. I thought this because even in Britain, so denuded of trees people turned to filthy … Continue reading
Posted in Deforestation, Pollution, Wood
Tagged climate change, collapse, deforestion, global warming, mercury, wildfire, wood
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Book Review: The Age of Wood: Our Most Useful Material & the Construction of Civilization
Preface. This is a book review, mainly with excerpts, of Ennos’s book “The Age of Wood. Our Most Useful Material and the Construction of Civilization”. If you know anything about woodworking, you will enjoy the detailed descriptions of how and … Continue reading
Posted in Energy Books, Jobs and Skills, Life After Fossil Fuels, Wood
Tagged evolution, forests, infrastructure, Life After Fossil Fuels, tools, wood
1 Comment
Reforestation can cause rivers to disappear
Preface. We’ll need a lot of forests in the future when wood once again becomes our may source of energy and infrastructure as it was before fossil fuels. But care needs to be taken on where trees are planted. Alice … Continue reading
When wood is again our main energy source, how long will it last?
Preface. Just when civilization is decades from returning to wood as the main energy source (due to peak oil in 2018), climate change is allowing invasive beetles to survive winters and kill trees, with drought and wildfires increasing the damage. … Continue reading
Posted in BioInvasion, Drought & Collapse, Nate Hagens, Where to Be or Not to Be, Wildfire, Wood
Tagged biomass, climate change, fuel, heat, wildfire, wood
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Charcoal for the high heat needed in manufacturing after peak oil
Preface. De Decker (2011) writes: “A large share of energy consumed worldwide is by heat. Cooking, space heating and water heating dominate domestic energy consumption. In the UK, these activities account for 85% of domestic energy use, in Europe for … Continue reading
Posted in Manufacturing & Industrial Heat, Peak Biofuels, Wood
Tagged biomass, charcoal, industrial heat, wood
3 Comments
Book review of Underbug: an obsessive tale of termites and technology
Preface. I read this book mainly to find out where “grassoline” stood. Scientists thought 10 years ago that we could recreate the termite biota system of digesting biomass to create biofuels. But this appears to be far in the future … Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture, Wood
Tagged ethanol, grassoline, superorganism, termite
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Book: John Perlin’s “A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization”
Preface. This contains excerpts from John Perlin’s “A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization”. It’s one of my favorite books about natural resources, exploring the role wood has played in the rise and fall of civilizations since they … Continue reading