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

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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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Posted in CAES Compressed Air, Drought & Collapse, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Hopium, Hydrogen, Trucks | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Hydrogen hopium: Storage

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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Will global warming drive us extinct? A review of Peter Ward’s “Under a Green Sky”

Posted on October 7, 2022 by

Canfield purple ocean, Green Sky

Preface. Thank goodness for world peak oil production in 2018. We’re out of time to destroy the planet! We’re about to dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption, unwillingly, as it declines at 8% or more and resource wars ensue!  Basically there aren’t enough fossils left to drive the planet into the green sky Hell Ward envisions. Since oil is the master resource that makes every product and activity possible, including coal and natural gas, peak oil means peak everything: peak food, peak steel, peak cement, peak computers, peak coffee.  Coal and natural gas can’t substitute for diesel in transportation, so poof there goes civilization in a week when trucks can’t deliver goods, plant and harvest crops, log trees, construct roads and buildings and so on.  Fossils are also essential for manufacturing with high heat, for the fertilizer that feeds 4 billion of us, is the feedstock for 500,000 products and more, none of which electricity can do.  Or hydrogen. Or biofuels…

At least a dozen geologists modeled climate change using realistic fossil reserves and said the most likely outcome was from 2.6 to 4.5 — and this was before we reached peak oil in 2018 — there are less fossils than they’d estimated so 2.6 is probably the most likely.  See the last chapter of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy for details and citations.

The reason that the IPCC even came up with scenarios of 6 and 8.5 and above was because they didn’t model fossil fuels!  They assumed that we would be exponentially burning them until 2400! No need to put them into the equation.

But it is unquestionable that future generations for many centuries will suffer.  Rising sea levels are locked in. Crop production will fail from drought, heat, floods, lack of natural gas fertilizer, soil erosion and more. Then there are the radioactive wastes in nuclear spent fuel pools that will be released because waste disposal isn’t a priority, and impossible politically. Talk about Not In My Backyard!

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Look Before you Eat

Posted on September 30, 2022 by

Preface. This post is a book review of Be Wilson’s Swindled. From Poison Sweets to Counterfeit Coffee – The Dark History of the Food Cheats.

Wilson explains why cheating has always gone on and always will, especially in societies with laissez-faire governments who prefer promoting commerce to protecting their citizens.  In the United States and Britain, there is very little testing of chemicals added to food, and most chemical additives don’t need to be listed on labels. Caveat Emptor!

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How the grid works, why a distributed grid won’t work

Posted on September 23, 2022 by

Preface. This is a book review of Angwin’s 2020 “Shorting the Grid. The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid”. It is a good primer on how the grid works, especially why Volt-Ampere Reactives (VARs) are important and why renewables don’t provide them, yet another reason why it will be hard for renewables to replace fossil electricity, which in 2024 provided 60% of electricity in the U.S.). VARs are essential for keeping the grid stable and not coming down, which Angwin describes as a bit like “riding a bicycle. The energy you put into the pedals will move the bike forward:

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Posted in Blackouts, Blackouts Electric Grid, Distributed Generation, Electric Grid & Fast Collapse, Electricity Infrastructure, Energy Books, Grid instability | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on How the grid works, why a distributed grid won’t work

After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation

Posted on September 16, 2022 by

Preface. This is a book review of: Giles MacDonogh (2007) After the Reich. The Brutal History of the Allied Occupation.   In trying to understand what life might be like as energy declines, I’ve read a lot of books about failed and failing states, and what it’s like to live in war or civil war zones during and after wars. This is a pretty dark post, but may motivate you to move to a place that is still under carrying capacity, since a lot of the violence occurs because people are desperate due to lack of food and other necessities. Hard times are coming: world oil production probably peaked in 2018.

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Book review of “Agrarian Dreams”

Posted on September 9, 2022 by

Preface. This is a book review of Guthman’s “Agrarian Dreams.  The Paradox of Organic Farming in California”.  Since world oil production likely peaked in 2018, and renewables can’t replace fossil fuels (read my books), there’s no choice but to go back to organic farming. Industrial agriculture today depends on finite fossil fuels. Natural gas based fertilizers keep 4 billion of us alive (Fisher 2001; Smil 2004; Stewart et al. 2005; Erisman et al. 2008).  Crops are planted, harvested, distributed, refrigerated, and cooked with fossil fuels.

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Posted in Agriculture, Books, Farming & Ranching | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments