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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: Infrastructure
Sand mines used to frack oil & gas are destroying the best topsoil in the Midwest
Preface. Frac sand is a high-purity quartz sand that is injected into wells to blast and hold open cracks in the shale rock layer during the fracking process. In the United States, frac sand is being mined intensively from sandstone … Continue reading
Drinking water and sewage treatment use a lot of energy
[ Water treatment (drinking and sewage) use tremendous amounts of energy. Some of the statistics from this document “Water & Wastewater Utility energy research roadmap” below are: In 2008 municipal wastewater treatment systems (WWTP) in the United States used approximately … Continue reading
Posted in Sewage treatment, Water Infrastructure
Tagged desalination, energy, utility, wastewater, water
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Electric Cars and Biofuels switch dependence from foreign oil to domestic water and weather risks
Figure 1. Energy/Water Nexus Amy Hardberger, Matthew E. Mantell, Michael Webber, Carey W. King, Karl Fennessey [ This Senate hearing covers a lot of ground. I found the most interesting testimony to be the intersection of water and energy, … Continue reading
Posted in Drought, Energy Production, Hydropower, Transportation, Water Infrastructure
Tagged hydropower, peak oil, peak water, water dependence
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U.S. House meeting on terrorist threats to energy security
[ Even though this hearing was over a decade ago, the issues are still the same. Nothing has changed. Alice Friedemann www.energyskeptic.com author of “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation, 2015, Springer] House 109-70. July 27, … Continue reading
Posted in Caused by Scarce Resources, Chokepoints, Middle East, Oil Shocks, Transportation
Tagged oil dependence, oil shock, Ras Tanura, saudi arabia, SPR, strategic petroleum reserve, terrorism
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Review of “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World” by Steve LeVine
Preface. This is a book review of Steve Levine’s 2015 “The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World”. If you ever wondered why batteries are still not even close to powerful enough to replace fossil fuels, … Continue reading
Posted in Automobiles, Batteries, Energy Books
Tagged battery, electric car
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U.S. House looks at how to improve the nation’s highway freight network
[ Like all books and articles I read on transportation for my book, this session assumes endless growth and worries about future congestion, which will not be a problem on the other side of peak oil, which is coming soon. … Continue reading
Posted in Trucks, U.S. Congress Transportation
Tagged freight, transportation, trucks
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Water as a geopolitical threat. U.S. House of Representatives
Preface. Water scarcity is causing unrest and could led to war in Asia and the Middle East. There’s a website that keeps track of conflicts over water going back for 3,000 years here — 655 of them. The prevalence of … Continue reading
Posted in Caused by Scarce Resources, Congressional Record U.S., Peak Water, Water
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Dams: last 100-200 years, make floods worse, an environmental disaster, most will soon be past their lifespan
Failing Dams in the news: 2017-2-23: America’s Aging Dams Are in Need of Repair. New York Times. 2017-2-20. California Dam Crisis Could Have Been Averted. A dismissed lawsuit to strengthen the dam because of climate change effects predicted catastrophic flooding. … Continue reading
Posted in Dams
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