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Recent Posts
- 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
- Book review of “Siege: Trump Under fire”
- Why do people vote for Trump?
- Book review of “Pandemic Politics: The Deadly Toll of Partisanship in the Age of COVID”
- The evolution of the Republican party from 1960 to 2024: from moderate democracy to extreme authoritarianism
- Why some people are conservative and others liberal
- Book review: Bring the War Home: The white power movement & paramilitary America
- Book review: How Democracies Die
- Book Review “Conservatives without Conscience” by John Dean
- Book review of “The Power Worshippers. Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism”
- Fox news estranges millions of families and instills hate and fear in its cult members
Category Archives: 3) Fast Crash
Charles A. S. Hall Conventional oil peak was 2005
The global production of conventional oil began to decline in 2005, and has followed a path over the last 11 years very close to our scenarios assuming low estimates of extractable ultimate resource (1.9 Gbbl) John L. Hallock Jr., Wei … Continue reading
Posted in Charles A. S. Hall, Peak Oil
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Wind turbines hit limits to growth before 50% wind power penetration
Material requirements of 50% wind power in the USA hit limits to growth Also see: Davidsson, S., et al. 2014. Growth curves and sustained commissioning modelling of renewable energy Investigating resource constraints for wind energy. Energy Policy. Fizaine, F., et … Continue reading
Posted in Electrification, Limits To Growth, Renewable Integration, Wind
Tagged cement, concrete, copper, dysprosium, expoxy, fiberglass, iron, limits to growth, neodymium, steel, turbines, wind
2 Comments
Wind’s dirty secret: it goes on vacation in the summer and year-round in the South East
Figure 1. Summer wind across the USA is barely to not economically viable Class 3 (light blue), or not at all economically viable Class 2 (orange) and class 1 (blank) (NREL), with very limited darker blue (class 4) and … Continue reading
Posted in Electric Grid & Fast Collapse, Electrification, Seasonal, Wind
Tagged monthly, seasonal, wind resource maps, wind speed
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Michael Webber on Energy + Water + Food interdependency
Webber, Michael E. February 2015. Our future rides on our ability to integrate Energy + Water + Food. Scientific American. Michael E. Webber is deputy director of the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. His Yale University … Continue reading
Posted in Drought & Collapse, Interdependencies, Limits To Growth
Tagged drought, energy, food, interdependencies, limits to growth, water
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Homeland Security and Dept of Energy: Dams and Energy Sectors Interdependency Study
[Below are excerpts from this 45 page document. Dams not only provide power but also water for agriculture, drinking water, cooling water for thermal power plants, ecosystem health, fisheries, and so on. All dams have a finite lifespan of 50 … Continue reading
Posted in Dams, Energy Production, Interdependencies
Tagged dams, hydropower, infrastructure, interdependency
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Over 21 essential resources have peaked including fish, milk, eggs, wheat, corn, rice, soy
Nature summary of this article: “The rates at which humans consume multiple resources such as food and wood peaked at roughly the same time, around 2006. This means that resources could be simultaneously depleted, so achieving sustainability might be more … Continue reading
Posted in Limits To Growth, Peak Food
Tagged food, limits to growth, overpopulation, peak
2 Comments
Electricity, fuel, and other interdependencies
Freight trucks, trains, ships, airplanes all stop when the electricity is out because the pumps depend on it. Related: Why you should love trucks and When Trucks Stop CR. September 4 & 23, 2003. Implications of power blackouts for the … Continue reading
Posted in Automobiles, Fuel Distribution, Interdependencies, Trucks
Tagged blackout, diesel, electricity, fuel, gas, generator, interdependency, telecommunications
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Solar Photovoltaics (PV) limited by raw materials
This paper (excerpts below) shows that there are limits to growth — there simply aren’t enough minerals in the world that can be produced physically and/or at a reasonable cost for the many of the most common kinds of PV … Continue reading
Posted in Peak Rare Earth Elements, Photovoltaic Solar
Tagged rare earth
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Limits to Growth
Preface. What follows are a bunch of articles on limits to growth, sometimes just a link, sometimes excerpts. Today Wall Street Journal and other neocapitalists scorn the idea, insisting that human ingenuity and substitution can overcome all obstacles, and they … Continue reading
1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed
[ These are my notes that are disjointed but can give you an idea of how fast our fossil-fueled civilization could collapse. We are far more interdependent on much longer global supply chains (a wind turbine has 8,000 parts). We … Continue reading
Posted in Cascading Failure, Collapse of Civilizations, Collapsed & collapsing nations, Drought & Collapse, Interdependencies, Supply Chains
Tagged 1177, collapse, complexity, interdependence, supply chains
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