Richard Heinberg: Environmental-Political Collapse Accelerates

Preface. Another wise post with great insights and predictions about where we are today from Richard Heinberg, the foremost scholar of Peak oil, overshoot, ecology, and more. Some excerpts:

“…A basic understanding of overshoot reveals that our modern industrial way of life is unsustainable at anything like its current scale and intensity. Whether as a result of pollution or resource depletion, human population and per-capita consumption will peak and start to decline, most likely during the next decade or two. But it gets worse: during our brief binge of industrialism we humans have found strategies (including corporate globalization and the proliferation of credit and debt in a widening variety of forms) to maximize consumption in the short term; when these strategies inevitably falter, the result will likely be an even faster decline in population and consumption than might be expected on the basis of ecological factors alone.

The inability of national governments to forestall climate change could easily have been predicted decades ago. That’s because stopping global warming is fundamentally at odds with the underlying growthist agenda of the modern world. And most political and business leaders care more about advancing that agenda in the short term than they do about ensuring human survival in the longer term.

A metaphorical hurricane is coming. Cover the windows and make sure your family, friends, and neighbors are safe.”

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Peak Helium

Preface.

Attention all you capitalists who think we can grow forever on a finite planet. Stuff can run out! Helium is the only element on earth that is completely nonrenewable.  

A supply crisis is expected by 2060 (Hu 2025). Commercial helium is commonly found in association with natural gas, which is also finite. Only a handful of gas fields in the United States possess commercial value for helium extraction.

Helium has only 30-200 years of reserves, with 90 % concentrated in four countries: 34% in Russia, 25% in Qatar, 18% in the United States, and 1% in Algeria. Meanwhile, you can still get party balloons filled with helium!  Well if it is running, party on, though when you see the industries it is essential for — well, I just hope you never need an MRI. And we can all agree we’re on the computer and watch TV too much, so when helium is gone, there go the optical fibers – the backbone of the internet, telephone systems, computer networks, cable TV.

Helium prices have reached unprecedented levels in 2025, rocketing up 400% in recent years due to fundamental supply-demand imbalances.

 

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Geography, Resources, & the Destiny of Nations

Preface. Jared Diamond’s famous book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” discussed why some nations were so much more successful than others. Much success came from nearby nations who bootstrapped each other up with new ideas, crops, and ideas. Especially Eurasia due to how easy it was to travel across this vast area.

This is a book review of Marshall’s “Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World.”  It goes into more detail about the geography of nations and regions and how that affected their ability to defend or conquer other nations, resources, and their people. Continue reading

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DOGE could have been great. Instead it blew everything up

Preface.  You may remember that a movement called “Code for America” founded in 2009, used technology to improve government services and make them more efficient and accessible.  This post is a book review of Pahlka’s 2023 “Recoding America” about how they made government agencies more efficient and why it is so hard to do.

If only Trump had sent in Code for America to make government more efficient. DOGE did the exact opposite, a corrupt chainsaw – no, an atomic bomb — blowing up agencies by firing employees and dismantling them, making them far less efficient.

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Aside

Preface. After seeing the film “The Power of Community: How Cuba survived Peak Oil” in 2006, I thought about how those lessons might apply to California, which grows about a third of U.S. food.  Much of what follows in the post below is based on the excellent Oxfam analysis of the complexities involved in Cuba and its food production reforms.

After reading the Pulitzer prize winning “Cuba: An American History (2021),” I learned that the main way Cuba coped with the fall of the Soviet Union and consequent lack of oil was to open up Cuba’s economy to development. Europeans built many hotels and vacationed there. Tourism became an even bigger industry than sugar.  And that Cubans are even more wonderful and the U.S. more evil and responsible for their condition that I had known before. You can visit despite all their problems, they are keeping the lights on in the tourist districts according to friends who were there in December 2024.

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The Nuclear Bomb is Back!

Preface. If you are not worried about nuclear war anymore, you should be. We have accidentally come close so many times.

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Nuclear power is not the solution

Preface. This is a book review of Ramana’s “Nuclear is not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the Age of Climate Change.” A great overview that covers many topics, one of the best out there, and most recent. Also some of my kindle notes. But still, so much not covered, and this is such an important topic now that there are billions of dollars of Nuclear Cheerleaders convincing people that Nuclear Is The Answer.  Before buying into the hoopla, read this book to be more informed about what is hype and what is realistic. Especially because most of the public, especially younger generations, have forgotten how dangerous they are. And if you’ve read my books, you know that electricity can’t replace diesel transportation, so all we are doing is creating toxic waste dumps for tens of thousands of future generations as oil declines to drips by 2100 or sooner.

Meanwhile, the nuclear lobby is so strong that Congress and the NRC are pretty much captured and the public brainwashed into thinking nuclear power is great because it doesn’t emit CO2.

For the sake of your future and your friends and family and generations to come there needs to be a lot more opposition. Trump is temporary, nuclear waste is 10,000 to a million years.

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Refrigeration uses up to 30% of world electricity

Preface. This is a book review of Twilley’s 2024 book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. It is a really great book, highly recommended.

Refrigeration plays a much larger role in our lives than people realize. Much of the cold chain is invisible, especially the gigantic chilled warehouses. Food spoils quickly if it isn’t chilled after harvest or slaughter all the way to the grocery store or restaurant.

Refrigeration, air-conditioning and heat pump (RACHP) equipment and systems are widely used throughout the economy, from small domestic equipment (refrigerators, air-conditioners) to very large commercial and industrial systems (warehouses, food processing).  According to current estimates, RACHP equipment represents between 25% and 30% of the global consumption of electricity (UNEP 2018). Or less: IIR (2015) estimates the refrigeration sector consumes about 17% of the overall electricity used worldwide.

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Government of Canada: Disruptions coming!

Preface.

Just in case you do not have enough worries, the Government of Canada has stepped in to help you out with potential future catastrophes. And there are dozens, perhaps a new one to add to your list, such as: People cannot tell what is true and what is not, Energy is inaccessible and unreliable, Biodiversity is lost and ecosystems collapse, Food is scarce, Vital natural resources are scarce, Civil war erupts in the USA,  Emergency response is overwhelmed, Cyberattacks disable critical infrastructure, Billionaires run the world, Healthcare systems collapse, Downward social mobility is the norm, Democratic systems break down, Antibiotics no longer work, Basic needs to unmet,  Infrastructure and property are uninsurable, World war breaks out, Ageing population has no support,  Homemade bioweapons go viral, Household debt reaches a tipping points,and on.

Each has been assigned a range of years for when they might happen and how likely. Since most of these are interconnected, that makes their probability of occurring even greater, creating feedback loops resulting a perfect storm.

So eat, drink, and be merry, and let the Government of Canada do the worrying for you. The U.S. government isn’t (Peter Kennedy May 23, 2025 Is strategic foresight in the US government dead?).

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CCS plants leak, catch on fire, explode, corrode, and contaminate water

Source: Center for Progressive reform (2024) Carbon Dioxide Leak in Decatur, IL, Demonstrates Dangerous Failure of Carbon Capture Storage and Sequestration

Preface. Clearly it is not worth spending billions of dollars to sequester CO2 “permanently” if it may leak. It’s not just bad for air pollution but water pollution as well. The underground pressurized CO2 can leak into drinking water aquifers and pollute them with heavy metals, salts, volatile organic compounds, and radionuclides like radium.

Archer Daniel Midland’s (ADM) facility in central Illinois was the first permitted commercial carbon sequestration operation in the country. It is at the forefront of a multi-billion-dollar carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry that promises to permanently sequester CO2 deep underground. In September, the public learned of a leak at ADM’s Decatur site. Additional testing turned up a second leak, raising concerns about whether more leaks are likely, whether the public has any right to know when leaks occur, and if CCS technology is really a viable climate solution. ADM kept local and state officials in the dark for months about the first leak, detected in March, five months after discovering corrosion in the tubing in the sequestration well.

Who knew these could be dangerous? I didn’t, until I read the second article below (Dela Cruz 2024), which  shows that the ASU and Amine Absorbers have the highest total number of high-severity incidents, with 16 counts each. ASUs are primarily driven by explosions and fires, while Amine Absorbers experience a mix of fires, explosions, fatalities, and material releases. Gasifiers have a high incidence of explosions, with six reported cases, underscoring the critical need for explosion prevention and control. Boilers have a moderate total number of incidents, predominantly explosions, indicating a need for stringent boiler safety protocols. The FGR, Steam Turbine, and Combustion Turbine show lower total incidents but include high-severity events such as leaks, fires, and explosions, highlighting specific areas for safety improvements.

 

This technology is key to government goals of slashing emissions and reaching climate goals. To make CCS happen, the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, has put $12 billion dollars up for grabs for new CCS projects and started a CCS gold rush (DOE 2022 Opportunities to Accelerate Deployment in Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Activities. U.S. Department of Energy).

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