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Recent Posts
- Electrifying freight trains in the U.S. is a bad idea
- Why Nuclear Power can’t replace fossil fuels
- Energy, Water, & Climate Change are interdependent
- Why fusion power is Forever Away
- Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries
- Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”
- Homes & Buildings
- Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina
- Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
- Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil
- “More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written
- The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire
- Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out
- Catton on Collapse “Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse”
- Book Review of Grain Brain: Extraordinary claim not backed up by evidence
Category Archives: Energy
Why is everyone afraid of AI or thinks it will solve all our problems?
I question how useful and existentially threatening AI really is. I am not denying that AI can do marvelous things, especially finding patterns, which is terrifically useful across many fields. It is best when it has very narrow objectives, such … Continue reading
Posted in Artificial Intelligence, Critical Thinking
Tagged AI, artificial intelligence, critical thinking, hallucination
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Do you want to eat, drink, or fly?
Preface. In this post the New York Times writes about renewable airplane fuel from corn ethanol, and questions whether there is enough water and a few other problems. First I’m going to summarize their issues with this, and then follow … Continue reading
Posted in Airplanes, Biofuels, Biomass EROI, Groundwater, Peak Water
Tagged aquifer, aviation fuel, corn, EROI, ethanol
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Want to survive Peak Everything? Become a Mormon
Source: Salt Lake Tribune. For Latter-day Saint families, preparing for emergencies is the norm Preface. Ted Koppel’s book “Lights Out” highlights the many risks to the grid from cyber and physical attacks, electromagnetic pulses from weapons or solar flares, large … Continue reading
Posted in Blackouts, Electric Grid & EMP Electromagnetic Pulse, Energy Books, Where to Be or Not to Be
Tagged Black out, grid crash, LDS, Mormon, survival
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Why tight fracked oil and gas is mostly extracted in the US
Source: Smithsonian. May 2013 map of shale oil and gas formation. fource U.S. EIA & USGS. Preface. Unconventional US (and some Canadian) fracked tight oil was over 90% of how oil production increased after conventional oil peaked in 2008, but … Continue reading
Posted in Oil & Gas Fracked
Tagged china, fracking, natural gas, oil, Poland, tight, UK
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EV charging not possible when restricted or grid down
Preface. I have many posts at energyskeptic on the myriad reasons the grid will fail or disrupted in the future. Climate change is causing droughts and reservoirs too low to generate much hydropower, and nuclear plants must shut down if … Continue reading
Posted in Electric Vehicles, Electrification, Energy Climate Change
Tagged climate change, electric grid, electric vehicle, EV, heat wave
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Risks of cyber attack on Infrastructure
Delacourt TP (2022) Cyberattacks on Critical Infrastructure as the New WMD. Homeland Security. Preface. What follows are several articles on how cyber attacks could harm our infrastructure across at least 16 systems we depend on. Although it is the decline … Continue reading
Posted in CyberAttacks, Electric Grid
Tagged cyber attack, electric grid, infrastructure
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Infrastructure interdependencies: an attack on one is an attack on all
An Attack on Energy Infrastructure would affect all other Infrastructure I should consolidate my many posts on cyber attacks, EMPs, and other ways the electric grid could come down, but our dependencies are just so widespread that I don’t want … Continue reading
Posted in CyberAttacks, Infrastructure & Collapse, Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Interdependencies, Natural Gas, Oil
Tagged cyberattack, EMP, energy, infrastructure, interdependencies
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Why biofuels can not scale up to replace petroleum
Preface. This is my favorite paper on why we can’t replace crude oil with biofuels. Of course, oil is a biofuel. But alas, not renewable, since it took over 100 million years to make them. Every year we burn fossil … Continue reading
Posted in Biofuels, Oil, Peak Biofuels
Tagged peak biofuels, peak oil
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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, 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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