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Recent Posts
- ‘The oil we eat’. Following the food chain back to iraq
- Vanishing open spaces: population growth and sprawl in America
- Admiral Rickover 1957: Energy Resources & Our Future
- The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot
- A transition from fossil fuels to renewables could take a century – if it ever happens
- 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
Category Archives: Infrastructure
If we really cared about CO2, we’d reduce car size and weight, not make electric cars
Preface. Since my book “When trucks stop running: Energy and the future of transportation makes the case that it’s trucks that need to be electrified to keep civilization going, since biofuels don’t scale up, natural gas and liquefied coal are … Continue reading
Will the Navy go out with a whimper instead of a bang?
Preface. This house hearing is about the continuing decline of the Navy There are fewer and fewer ships. The remaining ships are overused, some past their normal lifespan, and under-maintained. As the U.S. descends into fascist plutocracy enabled by the … Continue reading
Posted in Infrastructure & Fast Crash, Transportation Infrastructure
Tagged fantasyland, house hearing, infrastructure, navy, ships
1 Comment
Given the laws of physics, can the Tesla Semi really go 500 miles, and what will the price be?
Preface: Most people think that electric truck makers need to tell us the specs — the battery kWh, price, performance, and so on — before we can possibly know anything about their truck. But that’s simply not true. We know … Continue reading
We’re killing our food supply and technology can’t save us
Farrell, Paul B. Feb 11, 2015. Opinion: We’re killing our food supply and technology can’t save us. Big Ag can’t feed 10 billion and magical technologies won’t appear. MarketWatch. We’re maxing-out on Peak Food. Billions go hungry. We’re poisoning our … Continue reading
Underground pumped hydro storage is the only technology capable of massive storage for renewable electricity
[ Picard concludes that “None of the candidate technologies for massive-scale renewable and sustainable generation of ‘‘green’’ electricity deliver it in a form suitable for high-efficiency storage. None of the prospectively-massive storage modes for transformed electricity is at present well … Continue reading
Peak soil: Industrial agriculture destroys ecosystems and civilizations: Biofuels make it worse
Preface. In 2018 I thought it was time to reorganize this post, as it grew more and more bloated and disorganized with new information. Eventually it turned into my 2021 book Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative … Continue reading
Posted in Alternative Energy, Biofuels, Biomass, Energy, Peak Biofuels, Peak Topsoil, Soil
Tagged aquifer depletion, biodiesel, biofuel, climate change, EROEI, EROI, erosion, ethanol, fertilizer, hunger, peak soil, pollution, topsoil
2 Comments
Transportation: How long can we adapt before we fall off the Net Energy Cliff?
Preface. There are too many factors besides geological depletion to predict a future timeline of collapse. Plus each region will be more or less affected by each factor, sooner or later as well. This is a unique crash – there … Continue reading