Peak oil, food & the “King of Chemicals” sulfuric acid

Posted on December 2, 2022 by

Preface. I first learned of sulfur’s existence when my grandmother told me how she loved going to tent revivals on the edge of town where it was common for preachers to get converts by burning sulfur to make the fire and brimstone damnation of Hell seem real (during the 3rd Great Awakening).

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Sulfuric acid is called the “king of chemicals” because it is the most widely used chemical on earth. Over 260 million metric tons were produced in 2021 for lead acid batteries, chemicals, detergent, rayon, paper, iron and steel pickling, glass, cement, adhesives, sugar refining, fireworks, rubber vulcanization, explosives, pesticides, drugs, plastics, pigments, water treatment, and 30,000 other products.  Sulfuric acid is also used at mines and smelters to produce copper, zinc, cobalt, lead, and nickel can also be used to extract metals.

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Hibernating freeze-thaw molten salt batteries for seasonal energy storage

Posted on November 25, 2022 by

The prototype freeze-thaw battery in the laboratory is the size of a hockey puck

Preface.  A 100% renewable grid can’t happen without long-term energy storage. Today that’s done with natural gas (with a little help from hydropower in the 10 states that have most of it). Meanwhile nuclear and coal chug along at a minimum baseline power since they’re damaged by ramping up or down faster than within a few hours. This is why scientists are trying to build batteries that can store energy seasonally.

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Most plastic isn’t recycled, burns in fires at recycling centers

Posted on November 18, 2022 by

Preface.  Plastics are just one of 500,000 products made out of oil and gas, but very important to just about every aspect of society, from making vehicles lighter so go further using less energy, to clothes, food storage, bags, toothbrushes, buckets, garbage bins, toys, carpets, fleece, plastic lumber, chairs, bottles and more.

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The toxic chemicals harming you are yet another symptom of overshoot

Posted on November 11, 2022 by

Source: Byrd J (2022) What is PFAs in Drinking Water? Water filter Guru.

Preface. PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. The compounds are ubiquitous, and linked at low levels of exposure to cancer, thyroid disease, kidney dysfunction, birth defects, autoimmune disease and other serious health problems. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally degrade.

You are surrounded by forever chemicals in your home:  2023 All The Stuff in Your Home That Might Contain PFAS ‘Forever Chemicals’. Time magazine

And I hope you don’t live near one of the 50 U.S. military sites polluted with forever chemicals. It will cost at least $31 billion to clean them up, but the money being spent to do so is so small it will take over 50 years to accomplish (Perkins 2023).

When I first wrote this post in 2011 at energyskeptic, nothing was being done, despite years of work by Arlene Blum.  She’s the one who discovered that flame retardant TRIS in children’s clothing caused cancer and got it banned in 1977. Then she moved on from chemistry to mountain climbing and became famous for leading an all woman team up Annapurna.  After 30 years of adventures she returned to Berkeley and discovered that TRIS-like chemicals were in even wider use.

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The nine boundaries we must not cross or we may go extinct

Posted on November 4, 2022 by

Preface. This post has excerpts from the famous paper by Rockström et al (2009) as well as a more recent proposal by Running (2012) on an easier measure of how close we’re coming to rendering the planet uninhabitable.

The media almost exclusively focuses on climate change even though there eight other existential boundaries. Steffen et al (2015) has since then found that four of the nine are now breached:  climate change, species loss, land-use change, and altered bio-geochemical cycles from overuse of fertilizers. The other five are ocean acidification, chemical pollution, atmospheric aerosol loading, global freshwater use, and the phosphorus cycle, summarized below.

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Track congress: the bills and congressional members

Posted on November 1, 2022 by

Now that the right-wing authoritarians are getting dangerously powerful and in general the military, political, and economic systems are increasingly corrupt, govtrack.us is one way to see what Congress is up to, help you how to decide to vote in the next election, and maybe even write a few letters

Bills under consideration by committees (Aging, Agriculture, etc):

Bills & Resolutions coming up, trending now, top bills tracked by GovTrack users

Voting records

Each bill shows the yea and nay votes, if you select a bill you can see how your house or senate representative voted.

Track Members of Congress

Homepage https://www.govtrack.us/ 

Find legislation that affects you on

  • Agriculture & food
  • Animals
  • Armed Forces & National Security
  • Arts, Culture, Religion
  • Civil Rights & Liberties, minority issues
  • Commerce
  • Crime & Law Enforcement
  • Economics and Public Finance
  • Education
  • Emergency Management
  • Energy
  • Environmental Protection
  • Families
  • Finance
  • Foreign trade & international finance
  • Geographic areas
  • Government Operations and Politics
  • Health
  • Housing & community development
  • Immigration
  • International Affairs
  • Labor and Employment
  • Law
  • Native Americans
  • Private Legislation
  • Public Lands and Natural Resources
  • Science, technology, Communications
  • Social Sciences & History
  • Social Welfare
  • Sports & Recreation
  • Taxation
  • Transportation & Public Works
  • Water Resources Development
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Heinberg on how to avoid an energy crisis

Posted on October 28, 2022 by

Visualcapitalist (2022) Europe’s Energy Crisis. European gas prices have skyrocketed 8x higher than their 10-year average, throwing the continent into crisis.

Preface.  I sure hope that government leaders are reading Heinberg’s columns, since action needs to take place at a federal, state, and local level. There’s nothing we citizens can do to cope with the energy crisis on our own that would make much difference.

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Hydrogen hopium: Storage

Posted on October 21, 2022 by

Source: Russel Rhodes (2011) Explosive Lessons in Hydrogen Safety. https://appel.nasa.gov/2011/02/02/explosive-lessons-in-hydrogen-safety/

Preface.  What is hopium? Irrational or unwarranted optimism. An addiction to false hopes. A metaphorical substance that causes people to believe in a false hope (H + opium). And Hopium makes fuel cell hydrogen cars!  What could be more suitable for today’s post.

No container can contain hydrogen for long. Use it or lose it. Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements, the smallest of them all, and will boil off and escape no matter how many gaskets and valves there are on a container and at every pipeline junction.

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Hydrogen hopium: green hydrogen from water

Posted on October 14, 2022 by

Additional energy consuming steps not shown: pumping water to the electrolyzer, purifying the water, compressing or liquefying to -423 F, pumping into storage container, the trucks to deliver H to stations costing $75 million each, since pipelines are super expensive and may leak, corrode, and explode (Zhao 2018). For hydrogen trucks that don’t exist because fuel cell technology is still far from commercial.

Preface. For all the reasons why hydrogen is not going to replace fossil fuels, see the other posts in they hydrogen category, especially Hydrogen: The dumbest & most impossible renewable.

As the Russian war with Ukraine is making clearer, we are far from being able to abandon fossil fuels, so perhaps that is why there are more hopium articles than usual to keep people convinced we can move to renewables and save the world climate change. And doing nothing to prepare for the coming energy crisis.

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The French Energy Sobriety Plan

Posted on October 7, 2022 by

Preface.  Below is the announcement of the French Energy Sobriety Plan by Prime Minister Borne. The energy crisis is coming to all nations, and we should all be implementing their action plan (and family planning, birth control, abortion, limited immigration).

It’s hard for me to imagine a U.S. politician delivering this speech, though it will have to happen when fracked oil declines at 80% a year within 5-10 years. Though if fascist republicans are in power, they are more likely to “ration” by price, blame the Middle east, and start a war. Or blame Democrats and start a civil war.  If that sounds extreme, please read some of the books here.  Democrats are more likely to give a similar speech, very reluctantly, since Jimmy Carter wasn’t re-elected partly due to a similar one, known as his “malaise” speech (here).

After the speech I summarize the 50 pages of the French energy sobriety plan. What a great title. A good one for Richard Heinberg if he writes a sequel to “The Party’s Over”.

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