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- Lab-grown meat is energy intensive – and up to 25 times worse for the climate than beef
- The Biblical Revelations, critical thinking, and how this affects us today
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- Oil choke points vulnerable to war, chaos, terrorism, accidents, & piracy
- Nuclear weapons must be reduced or we risk nuclear winter
- Fusion is already running out of fuel
- Peak Oil is Officially Here! World oil production peaked November of 2018
- Wood, the fuel of preindustrial societies, is half of EU renewable energy
- Rare Earth updates: recent research on why complex & intelligent life are rare in the Universe
- Book review of “Chip War” and the Fragility of microchips
- The tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy
- Nuclear attack on U.S. could kill 90% of Americans
- What percent of Americans are rational?
- Book review of Lights Out. A Cyberattack. A Nation Unprepared. Surviving the Aftermath
Search Results for: horses
How past societies avoided the Agricultural trap
Preface. There’s a great deal of evidence that past tribes did grow food but deliberately chose not to make that the entirety of the way they lived, preferring a more seasonal styles of life with hunting and gathering, and governance … Continue reading
Posted in Dawn of Everything, Farming & Ranching
Tagged agriculture, dawn of everything
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Dawn of Everything: self-governance not Kings & Slavery
Preface. After the Great Simplification new societies will arise, and I hope copy past civilizations that deliberately avoided slavery, war and autocratic kings. I’ve extracted a few examples of this from The Dawn of Everything below.
Electric Swarm Tractors
Preface. In both my books Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy & When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation, I write that since most “renewables” generate electricity (i.e. wind, solar, nuclear, hydropower, compressed … Continue reading
Food shortages as the energy crisis grows and supply chains break?
Preface. This is a long preface followed by two articles about how supply chains and complex tractors may be affected by energy shortages and consequent supply chain failures in the future.Which we’re already seeing as massive numbers of ships sit … Continue reading
Posted in Cascading Failure, CyberAttacks, Economic Decline, Interdependencies, Liebig's Law, Peak Critical Elements, Peak Oil
Tagged collapse, EROI, interdependency, microchip, peak oil, supply chain
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Review of Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue & Violence in Human Evolution
Preface. This is a fantastic, must read book if you’re at all interested in how we evolved to be who we are today, how we domesticated ourselves, gossip, conformity, violence and more. It reminds me of why I don’t read … Continue reading
Posted in Evolution, Human Nature, War Books
Tagged conformity, domestication, gossip, hunter-gatherer, morality, violence
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So you don’t want to be a farmer postcarbon? City jobs of the future
Preface. This book summarizes the work of Henry Mayhew from 1849 to 1852. He wrote about the people and goods being sold on the streets of London, interviewing hundreds of street vendors. He estimated there were about 30,000 of them … Continue reading
Posted in Jobs and Skills, Life Before Oil
Tagged jobs, skills, what to do
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Rees on Overshoot: Growth through contraction: conceiving an eco-economy
Preface. William Rees writes some of the best and most comprehensible papers of all on the overshoot crisis we are in. We should have begun a U-turn in the 60s after The Population Bomb, or the 70s when Limits to … Continue reading
Posted in Limits To Growth, Overshoot, William Rees
Tagged contraction, ecological footprint, limits to growth, localization, overshoot, steady-state economy
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The Green New Deal is not a solution for the real problem: Overshoot
Preface. Seibert & Rees’ paper is very important. And also well-written, unlike the usual scientific jargon perfect for putting you to sleep at night. It’s short too. In just 13 pages Siebert and Rees cover the most important issues we … Continue reading
Posted in Climate Change, Electric & Hydrogen trucks impossible, Limits To Growth, Manufacturing & Industrial Heat, Overpopulation, Overshoot, Peak Critical Elements, Politics
Tagged biocapacity, climate change, ecological limits, energy transition, overshoot, renewable energy, social justice, sustainability
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Can democracy survive peak oil?
Preface. This is a book review of Howard Bucknell’s Energy and the National Defense. University of Kentucky Press. Bucknell was amazingly prescient as you’ll see in this review, especially about why democracy might not survive the energy crisis. Though the … Continue reading
Posted in Advice, Energy Books, Military, Politics, Rationing
Tagged authoritarianism, Bucknell, defense, democracy, energy crises, energy transitions, rationing, synthetic fuel
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