Category Archives: ! PEAK EVERYTHING

Food, topsoil, aquifers, phosphorus, rare metals essential to microchip fabrication, windmills, solar, and other products; sand; oil; natural gas

Doomsday: Will peak phosphate get us before global warming?

Price, Ed.  July 22, 2013. Doomsday: Will Peak Phosphate Get us Before Global Warming? oilprice.com Although climate change catches the headlines, it is not the only doomsday scenario out there. A smaller but no less fervent band of worriers think … Continue reading

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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

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Peak coal 2013-2045 — most likely 2025-2030

Preface.  The amount of coal reserves is far less than what the IPCC has assumed in their models, where they used RESOURCES, which is coal that can’t be economically and/or technologically obtained.  Typical economists, they assume humans are so smart … Continue reading

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Peak Uranium by Ugo Bardi from Extracted: How the Quest for Mineral Wealth Is Plundering the Planet

Preface. This is an extract of Ugo Bardi’s must read “Extracted” about the limits of production of uranium. You can find plenty of material saying there is are a lot of uranium reserves and resources  left elsewhere (EMD 2019). The … Continue reading

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EROI of Canadian Natural Gas. A peak was reached despite enormous investment

[ Although I’ve extracted much of this paper, it is not complete—there are missing equations, figures, tables, and text– so see the paper for details (it is available online).  I’ve rearranged the order of the paper.  The conclusion is just … Continue reading

Posted in EROEI Energy Returned on Energy Invested, Natural Gas, Peak Natural Gas | Tagged , | 4 Comments

How Much Oil is Left?

The Power of Exponential Growth: Every 10 years we have burned more oil than all previous decades Preface. There is a lot of oil left. The problem is, most of the remaining oil is unconventional, which needs a lot more … Continue reading

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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

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Are humans an invasive species?

Rob Jordan. April 5, 2016. Populations of early human settlers grew like an ‘invasive species,’ Stanford researchers find. Stanford University. When humans colonized South America, their populations grew like a typical invasive species – an initial explosive growth rapidly reached … Continue reading

Posted in Biodiversity Loss, BioInvasion, Peak Food | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Fruit and nut crops decline as climate change melts fog

Fimrite, P. May 22, 2014. As Central Valley fog disappears, fruit, nut crops decline. San Francisco Chronicle. California produces 95% of U.S. fruit and nut crops that depend on disappearing Tule fog. The soupy thick tule fog that regularly blanketed … Continue reading

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Scientific American: Peak oil and coal may keep catastrophic climate change in check

[ Since conventional oil, 90% of supply, peaked in 2005-6 we’ve been on a plateau.  Since the rate of conventional oil decline exponentially decreasing, and population is still exponentially increasing, it is unlikely unconventional oil like shale “fracked” oil, tar … Continue reading

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