Preface. Horses will not only play a key role in agriculture in the future after oil decline, they’ll replace the dozens of kinds of trucks that exist today, and play a key role in future wars.
Preface. China has been destroying itself for many decades now. In Mao’s “great leap forward” about 35 to 50 million are estimated to have died from starvation from 1958 on, as you’ll read in my book review of” Shapiro J (2001) Mao’s War Against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China in this post. China continues to destroy itself by leveling mountains for more flat land, eroding topsoil, creating land and air pollution, destroying forests and more (Li 2014).
Preface. One the greatest tragedies of energy decline will be the nuclear waste left to harm 30,000 future generations so 3 generations could keep the lights on. We owe it to the future to clean up waste while we still have the fossil fuels to do it, since digging a hole deep and large enough requires serious offroad vehicles burning 50 gallons or more an hour. The great grandchildren sure won’t be able to do it with shovels.
The U.S. abandoned Yucca mountain in 2010 and has yet to find a new place, or even start a new agency to do this and oversee its construction. Crude oil production, a subset of All oil production, is where diesel fuel comes from, and it reached a plateau in 2018, clearly we are near oil decline, this has to happen now, or we will leave radioactive waste at every nuclear power plant.
If we do nothing, 263,000 tons of nuclear waste will poison the world.
Preface. Two forms of soil erosion may bring back the Great Depression Dustbowls. The first is that Great Plains grasslands have been replaced with corn crops to grow ethanol, which have increased the amount of dust 100% over the past 20 years. The second is the destruction of biocrusts (also known as cryptobiotic soils). These are a thin glue containing a thriving community of fungi, lichen, moss, cyanobacteria, and other microbes that cover 12% of Earth’s surface and provide essential nutrients for plants and retain moisture.
Preface. Dennis Meadows is a co-author of The Limits to Growth. In 1972, the team of 66 scientists he assembled for the original Limits to Growth study concluded the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity. This post has a longer explanation from 2012 explaining their model. Since conventional peak oil happened in 2008, and all oil, conventional and unconventional probably in 2018 (see Chapter 2 of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy), perhaps we are ahead of schedule.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
