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 for millennia.
Of all the many 62000 or more chemicals not regulated because they were “grandfathered in” after the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA) without being reviewed for safety or requiring companies to provide health or environmental safety data on them, they may be the most dangerous to ecosystems and human health of all because it will take millennia for them to break down.
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 a tremendous amount of outcry against them by scientists and journalists. The history and reasons of how forever chemicals came to be immune from regulation is described in the book Blake M (2025) They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals, which you should read, and Feb 3, 2026 I will publish a book review of it with a few excerpts.
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. We have already exceeded 6 of the 9 boundaries: Richardson K et al (2023) Earth beyond 6 of 9 planetary boundaries. Science. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Not surprising that pollution is one of them given that the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), allowed 62,000 chemicals used in commerce to be “grandfathered in”, without being reviewed for safety or requiring companies to provide health or environmental safety data on them
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.
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
Each bill shows the yea and nay votes, if you select a bill you can see how your house or senate representative voted.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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!
