Preface. Also see related article Limits to Growth? 2016 United Nations report provides best evidence yet.
Nichols (2015) below shows that climate change is already affecting harvests of the world’s top 10 crops that comprise 83% of our calories: barley, cassava, maize, oil palm, rapeseed, rice, sorghum, soybean, sugarcane and wheat. So though the article below says we’re approaching peak food, to some extent we’re already there (Deepak 2019).
Preface. This is a book review of Dyer’s “Chasing the Red Queen”, and I have added additional information and conclusions. This book is not technical and could be read by both high school and undergraduate students as an introduction to soil ecosystems and the damage done by agricultural chemicals, and the science of why this is ultimately not sustainable.
And here’s a new wrinkle, pesticides can increase the number of mosquitoes: Mosquitoes … have evolved resistance to chemicals meant to kill them. The mosquitoes’ predators, meanwhile, have not kept pace with that evolution—and that has allowed the mosquito population to boom. Resistance to the major groups of insecticides is widespread around the world, and especially worrying that mosquitoes are unaffected, since they spread many dangerous diseases (Weathered 2019).
The average American home saves $321 a year on energy bills due to appliance and equipment energy efficiency regulations. Since 1990: Clothes washers use 70% less energy, dishwashers 40%, air conditioners 50%, furnaces 10%, and water heater standards have saved $124 billion in energy and $1800 over the life of the water heater per household (USDOE 2017).
Preface. This U.S. House hearing happened 20 years ago, but it is still a good introduction to why oil is so important to society. At this hearing scientific experts spoke, warning that we will reach peak oil within decades (which does NOT mean running out of oil, but halfway through the supply and getting too late to adapt to a different future with less energy). This hearing was highly unusual since usually only corporations with vested interests speak to promote energy schemes that they stand to profit from with government subsidies and tax breaks.
U.N.Total fertility rate projectionsPreface. Tom Murphy has one of the best blogs on limits to growth, energy resources and more in his blog Do The Math. He is a professor emeritus of the departments of Physics and Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California, San Diego and has a free online textbook with science and math that show why renewable and alternative replacements cannot replace fossil fuels here.
Both extremist “republicans” and liberal democrats want more babies, more growth, more Ponzi scheme births to fund SSN, Medicare, and other institutions that have to end someday because the earth can’t support a trillion people. More like half a billion people can survive without fossil fuels, and with world peak crude oil production in 2018, time is running out, we should have begun encouraging a steady state birth rate back in 1927 when the world had 2 billion people.
Or as Tom says: “Whatever happens after modernity necessarily self-terminates (one cannot choose or decide to continue a grossly unsustainable approach to life), it won’t be planned, and it probably won’t be monolithic. Differing conditions, remnants, and cultural attitudes around the world will lead to different experiments in what to try next. As with modernity, those practices that are not sustainable will eventually fail (possibly destroying sustainable groups along the way, as has happened plenty of times before). Those that are able to find ecological balance (in right- or reciprocal-relationship with the community of life)—and are isolated from bad actors until those actors necessarily fail—stand a chance at longevity. It’s not a choice, but a fact in the long term. Only those modes of living that are sustainable in relation to the ecological whole can survive.
Preface. Now that Trump has slashed the hydrogen budget this is not an issue, but perhaps will be again if Democrats gain power in 2028. Which is fine with me, hydrogen is the dumbest of all the proposed alternatives as I’ve written about in posts here: https://energyskeptic.com/category/energy/hydrogen/
Across America groups are opposing new hydrogen production, mainly funded by $8 billion of government hydrogen hub (H2Hubs) money. The main reasons are a lack of transparency, pollution, and that most hydrogen would cause even more drilling since it will be blue hydrogen made out of natural gas with carbon capture and storage (CCUS). CCUS requires so much water it could double the water footprint of humanity (Rosa 2021).
Water shortages are an issue at a proposed $2.5 billion-dollar electrolyzer facility near Corpus Christi and on Navajo nation land in Arizona, who also oppose a 200-mile pipeline that might rupture and explode (Keetso 2023, Kusnetz 2022, Robles 2024).
IRENA (2023) reports that 35% of future hydrogen production in the world planned by 2040 is in highly water-stressed regions.
Preface. Today the electric grid stays up because of months of backup power from natural gas, coal, and uranium. Most of all natural gas because it can quickly balance wind and solar as they suddenly appear or die out. Natural gas also provides peak power during the hottest and coldest times of the year, and ramps up as the sun goes down massively, since this happens before peak evening demand. Geothermal power can’t provide this balance, it can only be used like coal and nuclear to provide steady baseload power. Still, wind and solar need all the help they can get, especially in California where all of the best wind and solar sites have been built out.
Preface. Obviously the planet is finite. World crude oil production peaked in 2018, and been on a plateau since 2008. Other resources, such as food, are peaking while the polycrisis depletes fisheries, forests, groundwater and more. Yet this reality is denied by most, because economists and politicians tell us human ingenuity can solve all problems, there is always a substitute, and that there are no Limits to Growth. Nor has it occurred to most people that renewables might not be able to replace fossil fuels, and won’t believe it even if you explain why. Hard to blame them, this is rarely written about in the mainstream media, and the challenges that are observed are ones people assume will be overcome. And if hydrogen wont’ work, there’s always geothermal or whatever, the bop-a-mole problem. SOMETHING will work, the scientists will come up with something.
Preface. Coal only formed once on Earth over hundreds of millions of years because they had lignin and cellulose that microbes hadn’t yet evolved to consume. Eventually they did, and today termites, cows and other creatures are able to digest cellulose and lignin by outsourcing the job to microbes in their guts. But it is still such a complex process that scientists haven’t been able to copy it, which is why cellulosic ethanol is still not commercial and takes more energy and money to make than is returned.
Coal is still forming today, but will take tens if not hundreds of millions of years to form again, in far smaller amounts than in the Carboniferous period since it is forming from peat rather than hundreds of billions of trees.
I think that the reason we haven’t detected other civilizations, the Fermi paradox, is because fossil fuels didn’t form on most planets in the universe. If they did, the odds are very high that intelligent life never evolved, as explained in the book by Ward & Brownlee “Rare Earth: Why Complex life is Uncommon in the Universe” (see my review here, and new science about why life may be rare in the universe here). Even if intelligent life evolved, it may have lacked the dexterity of an oppositional thumb. Or a history that led to inventing steam engines, and many more contingencies. Even if intelligent beings on other planets did evolve and discover coal, oil, and natural gas and built civilizations like ours, the distances between planets are too far apart, let alone stars or other galaxies, so they never went anywhere. And we didn’t detect their radio signals because like us, they exponentially consumed fossils until they went back to life before fossil fuels within 250 years.
Preface. This is the Fund for Peace Fragile States Index. The “Download data in excel” column has years 2006 to 2023.
In 2007, there were 17 nations, of 180, more stable than the USA, in 2023, 38 states more stable. Continue reading
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