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If we build them out of wood, large wind turbines could become a textbook example of the circular economy.

Illustration: Eva Miquel for Low-tech Magazine.

For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change. It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.

New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again – not just the blades, but also the rest of the structure. This would solve the waste issue and make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials. A forest planted in between the wind turbines could provide the wood for the next generation of wind turbines.

How Sustainable is a Windmill Blade?

Wind turbines are considered to be a clean and sustainable source of power. However, while they can indeed generate electricity with lower CO2-emissions than fossil fuel power plants, they also produce a lot of waste. This is easily overlooked, because roughly 90% of the mass of a large wind turbine is steel, mainly concentrated in the tower. Steel is commonly recycled and this explains why wind turbines have very short energy payback times – the recycled steel can be used to produce new wind turbine parts, which greatly lowers the energy required during the manufacturing process.

However, wind turbine blades are made from light-weight plastic composite materials, which are voluminous and impossible to recycle…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Alien Planet Earth

June 12, 2024

Alien Planet Earth

The world of just a few lifetimes ago

Watching the climate change is like waiting for your hair to grow. You know it’s happening, but you can’t really tell from day to day. However, from a greater chronological distance, the damage humanity is inflicting on our planet is clear.

Where I live, bats have disappeared over the past couple decades. I remember watching them swoop at the evening insects, a couple even finding their way into my house. Now I never see them.

Others speak about fireflies that no longer dance at night. Or windshields bare of insect residue.

While insects are still a significant portion of global biomass, we’ve increasingly become a planet of humans, human food and anthropogenic mass.

We’ve terraformed the planet to feed our insatiable needs, at nature’s expense. This myopic stewardship pushes the planet to the edge. Robust systems are diverse and redundant. Ours is monolithic and fragile.

Source: Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass

Wild animals are vanishing because humans are pushing them out and replacing them with domesticated animals. Today, it’s difficult to imagine what the world looked like hundreds of years ago, before we chopped down the old growth trees and overfished the oceans. Luckily, we have documented evidence from centuries past.

The photo below illustrates the sheer destruction humans can inflict.

“At the close of the 18th century, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the continent. By the time of this photograph, that population was reduced to only 456 wild bison.” Source: The Conversation

Michigan Carbon Works in Rougeville, Mich., in 1892.

I recently found several accounts from the first Europeans that explored and settled in the Chesapeake bay area. There were more fish to catch than could be preserved.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“We designed mRNA to kill” – CIA Whistleblower?

June 11, 2024

“We designed mRNA to kill” – CIA Whistleblower?

“In a world without laws, where might alone makes right, all of us will ultimately be the losers.” —Jonathan Cook

And this by Scott Ritter:

“In a war of attrition, grinding the enemy down is just the first part. Stretching what remains until it breaks is how you finish the job.”

Scott is, of course, referring to the US / NATO (Ukraine) war against Russia; the latter being close to finishing the job.

The same war-time allegation or strategy, is taking place now in our “civil” (not to confuse with civilized) world, where we, the People, are gradually extending our knowledge of crimes committed during the past hundred-plus years by a powerful clan of elites, coming to culmination in the past four years – is like stretching the enemy, the all-powerful elite, to the breaking point. This crucial moment is near – it is only a question of time, but irreversible.

Light is overcoming darkness.

Many of us knew it all along, that the mRNA vaxxes are made to kill, are part of the depopulation agenda, compliments of the World Economic Forum (WEF), especially Klaus Schwab, who prides himself having authored the Great Reset, concluding in “You will own nothing but be happy”.

The UN Agenda 2030, which is supported by the UN Secretary General Mr. Antonio Guterres, a gutless character put in this position and prolonged in this position by the United Sates, sounds like the God-given salvation for humanity, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Until you look at them closer, and you will see the hidden message behind the SDGs. They are an announced death sentence for humanity.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Earth breaks heat and CO₂ records once again: ‘Our planet is trying to tell us something,’ officials say

June 11, 2024

Earth breaks heat and CO₂ records once again: ‘Our planet is trying to tell us something,’ officials say

Humanity is ignoring major planetary vital signs as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar to all-time highs and Earth records its 12th consecutive month of record-breaking heat, international climate officials warned this week.

At 60.63 degrees Fahrenheit, the global mean temperature in May was a record 2.73 degrees hotter than the preindustrial average against which warming is measured—marking an astonishing yearlong streak of heat that shows little signs of slowing down, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

“For the past year, every turn of the calendar has turned up the heat,” António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said during a speech in New York on June 5. “Our planet is trying to tell us something. But we don’t seem to be listening. We’re shattering global temperature records and reaping the whirlwind. It’s climate crunch time. Now is the time to mobilize, act and deliver.”

According to the Copernicus service, May was also the 11th consecutive month of warming beyond 2.7 degrees, the Fahrenheit equivalent of the internationally agreed-upon limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius intended to reduce the worst effects of climate change.

Not only was it a warm month, but the global average temperature for the last 12 months—June 2023 through May—was the highest on record, at 2.93 F above the 1850–1900 pre-industrial average.

Guterres said the world is warming so quickly and spewing such considerable CO₂ emissions that the 1.5 degree Celsius goal is “hanging by a thread.”

“The truth is, global emissions need to fall 9% every year until 2030 to keep the 1.5 degree limit alive, but they are heading in the wrong direction,” he told a crowd at the American Museum of Natural History. “We are playing Russian roulette with our planet, and we need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Whiff After Whiff

June 11, 2024

Whiff After Whiff

Image by Anne and Saturnino Miranda from Pixabay

The word “whiff” is used in baseball to describe when the batter swings and makes no contact with the pitched ball. The term presumably derives from the sound of hitting nothing but air.

This off-sequence post acts as a brief update that I wanted to present, without making a full-fledged blog post out of it (in hindsight, I may have failed). In the last two posts (here and here), I noted that recent rapid drops in child birth around the world could conceivably put us on track for an earlier population peak than previously anticipated—possibly as early as 2040 vs. the 2080–2090 timeframe.

That would be big news, and makes me continually ask myself: where is the disconnect? Is it possible that demography models are that wrong? I have discussed already (and will revisit in the next post) some of the potential blind spots for how this century develops. But here I look backwards to see if the recent drop in child births was itself a surprise to the demographers. If so, then it speaks to dynamics at play not captured in demography models, and that’s important.

I used the 2022 United Nations World Population Prospects (WPP) data (public) to build a list of countries that had the largest fractional declines in total fertility rate (TFR) from 2010 to 2019 (pre-COVID), and that also had projections in previous U.N. WPP products back to 2010. I show how (not) well the U.N. expectations match the actual story for these cases. I also throw in a few other countries of interest, including the three most populous ones.

The Top Drops

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment

June 11, 2024

Moving from Naive to Authentic Progress: A Vision for Betterment

The Great Simplification #126 with Daniel Schmachtenberger

Today, I welcome back Daniel Schmachtenberger to unpack a new paper, which he co-authored, entitled Development in Progress, an analysis on the history of progress and the consequences of ‘advancement’.

Current mainstream narratives sell the story that progress is synonymous with betterment, and that the world becomes better for everyone as GDP and economies continue to grow. Yet, this is an incomplete portrayal that leaves out the dark sides of advancement. What are the implications when only the victors of history write the narratives of progress and define societal values? What are the value systems embedded in our institutions and policies, and how do they reinforce the need for ongoing growth at the expense of the natural world and human well-being? Finally, how do we change these dynamics to form a new, holistic definition of progress that accounts for the connectedness of our planet to the health of our minds, bodies, and communities?

N-wrecked

June 11, 2024

N-wrecked

The way that humans have messed with the Earth’s carbon cycle rightly figures as planetary eco-problem No.1 in public debate, but the way we’ve messed with its nitrogen cycle probably ought to get more attention than it does. In the former case, farming often gets a bit too much of the blame in my view, whereas in the latter case there’s no doubt that it’s the key culprit. The consequences for nature loss, human health and climate change are serious. If humans somehow manage to get over their fatal attraction to the fossil fuels that drive our messing with the carbon cycle while retaining anything like present patterns of energy use, then our messing with the nitrogen cycle will loom all the larger as a problem of high-energy human civilization. According to the planetary boundary framework, human use of nitrogen (and phosphorus) is already a long way past levels compatible with the stability and resilience of earth systems.

The inimitable Gunnar Rundgren has been writing an excellent series of articles about farming and the nitrogen cycle. I’m not going to cover much of the same ground, but I’d recommend taking a look at his analysis. Instead, I focus more on arguments about … well, arguments about arguments about nitrogen. And an argument about how we might get by with using less of it.

But let me get into that by outlining what seems to me a problematic modern mythology around nitrogen in agriculture that goes something like this: prior to the invention of the Haber-Bosch method for ammonia synthesis, people were miserably yoked to the soil as servants of the natural nitrogen cycle. But once Messrs Haber and Bosch had worked out how to transcend this nature-imposed limit, a world of abundant cheap food opened up for humanity…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Bird Flu Triggers Supply Chain Snarls In Dairy Industry As “Farmers Increasingly Culled Cows”

June 9, 2024

Bird Flu Triggers Supply Chain Snarls In Dairy Industry As “Farmers Increasingly Culled Cows”

The latest US Department of Agriculture data shows bird flu has infected at least 80 dairy herds across ten states. There are growing concerns about rising cow mortalities from the virus and the risk of farmers culling cows to stop the spread. This could ignite economic stress across the farm belt and unleash a supply shock.

Reuters spoke with a USDA spokesperson who was aware of H5N1 virus-related deaths among cow herds but said that most cows recovered. No official figures have been provided on the number of cow mortalities in South Dakota, Michigan, Texas, Ohio, and Colorado.

Here’s more on the cow deaths:

In South Dakota, a 1,700-cow dairy sent a dozen of the animals to slaughter after they did not recover from the virus, and killed another dozen that contracted secondary infections, said Russ Daly, a professor with South Dakota State University and veterinarian for the state extension office who spoke with the farm.

“You get sick cows from one disease, then that creates a domino effect for other things, like routine pneumonia and digestive issues,” Daly said.

A farm in Michigan killed about 10% of its 200 infected cows after they too failed to recover from the virus, said Phil Durst, an educator with Michigan State University Extension who spoke with that farm.

Michigan has more confirmed infections in cattle than any state as well as two of three confirmed cases of US dairy workers who contracted bird flu.

In Colorado, some dairies reported culling cows with avian flu because they did not return to milk production, said Olga Robak, spokesperson for the state Department of Agriculture.

Ohio Department of Agriculture spokesperson Meghan Harshbarger said infected cows have died in Ohio and other affected states, mostly due to secondary infections.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Scientists sound the alarm on pharmaceutical pollution crisis

June 9, 2024

Scientists sound the alarm on pharmaceutical pollution crisis

Credit: Unsplash

Our increasing dependency on pharmaceuticals comes at a major environmental cost, researchers have warned.

In an article published in the journal Nature Sustainabilty, researchers warn that discharges to the environment during drug production, use, and disposal have resulted in ecosystems around the globe being polluted with mixtures of pharmaceuticals, posing a growing danger to wildlife and human health.

While emphasising that pharmaceuticals are indispensable in modern healthcare and will remain crucial in the future, the researchers highlight the need for designing and manufacturing more sustainable drugs to combat this issue at source.

“A wide variety of drugs have now been detected in environments spanning all continents on Earth,” said Assistant Professor Michael Bertram, a researcher at The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and shared first author.

“Exposure to even trace concentrations of some of these drugs can have severe impacts on the health of wildlife and human populations, and has already led to severe population crashes in vultures throughout India and Pakistan, as well as widespread sex-reversal of fish populations exposed to the human contraceptive pill.”

Pharmaceutical pollution is a complex problem that demands a multifaceted solution. So far, environmental protection efforts have mainly been focused on upgrading wastewater treatment infrastructure to remove drugs before release into waterways more effectively.

Despite being an important part of an overall solution, wastewater treatment is unable to address this issue in isolation.

In the article, 17 leading international scientists call for an increased focus on designing greener and more sustainable pharmaceuticals to tackle this issue at its source.

“Because drug design is the first step in the life-cycle of pharmaceuticals, greener drugs reduce the potential for pollution throughout the entire cycle” said Gorka Orive, a scientist and professor of pharmacy based at the University of the Basque Country.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Power outage-causing storms are on the rise. That’s already impacting food insecurity

June 9, 2024

Power outage-causing storms are on the rise. That’s already impacting food insecurity

Major power outages have increased tenfold since 1980

Straw bales and storm (Getty Images/BalazsKovacs)

As rounds of severe weather — complete with thunderstorms, hail and flooding — continue to pummel Dallas and surrounding Texas counties, many of the over 650,000 people who were left without power are grappling with the question of how they will afford to replace the food they lost in the nearly week-long outage. According to the Food and Drug Administration, perishables like milk, eggs and meat can only keep cold for about four hours in an unopened refrigerator, meaning that for many Texans, the entirety of their fresh food supply had to go in the garbage.

They aren’t alone.

Just a few weeks ago, Community Food Share, a Colorado food bank that serves Boulder and Broomfield counties, lost 1,500 pounds of food during a windstorm with gusts up to 100 miles per hour, which prompted a preemptive power outage from Xcel Energy. It’s a tremendous loss, but one that chief executive officer Kim Da Silva has cautioned could have been worse.

“We were actually able to salvage almost all of the food that was in our freezers and our refrigerators,” she told local Colorado television station KUSA. “Which we’re so thankful for that because that was about $80,000 worth of food.”

All in all, it was a stroke of luck, but with power outage-causing storms on the rise, luck can only go so far in preventing similar — and larger — losses, which means that food pantries are increasingly having to adapt their operations to account for the effects of climate change.

As reported by The Conversation, many Americans think of power outages as infrequent inconveniences, however data shows that major power outages have “increased tenfold since 1980, largely because of an aging electrical grid and damage sustained from severe storms as the planet warms.” …

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification

June 9, 2024

Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification

Third of world’s ocean surface particularly vulnerable to threats driven by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, new research finds

The world’s oceans are facing a “triple threat” of extreme heating, a loss of oxygen and acidification, with extreme conditions becoming far more intense in recent decades and placing enormous stress upon the planet’s panoply of marine life, new research has found.

About a fifth of the world’s ocean surface is particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at once, spurred by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the study found. In the top 300 meters of affected ocean, these compound events now last three times longer and are six times more intense than they were in the early 1960s, the research states.

Dr Alex Hearn and his colleagues in a boat in fading light tagging a shark in the Galápagos marine reserve.

The study’s lead author warned that the world’s oceans were already being pushed into an extreme new state because of the climate crisis. “The impacts of this have already been seen and felt,” said Joel Wong, a researcher at ETH Zurich, who cited the well-known example of the heat “blob” that has caused the die-off of marine life in the Pacific Ocean. “Intense extreme events like these are likely to happen again in the future and will disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world,” he added.

The research, published in AGU Advances, analyzed occurrences of extreme heat, deoxygenation and acidification and found that such extreme events can last for as long as 30 days, with the tropics and the north Pacific particularly affected by the compounding threats.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It Leaked From a US-Backed Lab

June 9, 2024

It Leaked From a US-Backed Lab

For The New York Times, which started this whole fiasco dating from Feb. 27, 2020, with a podcast designed to drum up disease panic, it’s been a drip, drip, drip of truthiness ever since.

A fortnight ago, the paper finally decided to report on vaccine injury from shots that vast majorities never needed and that stop neither infection nor transmission. And now, as of June 3, we have as decisive an article as one can imagine that shows that “a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.”

“Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them,” the article reads. “Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.”

The author is scientist Alina Chan of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For purposes of documentation, let’s go through the points she makes.

1. The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, Hubei Province, the Chinese city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

2. The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan Institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

3. The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

4. The hypothesis that COVID-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the Electric Vehicle Panacea Crashing in California and America?

June 9, 2024

Is the Electric Vehicle Panacea Crashing in California and America?

The idea that the panacea of electric vehicles will end “climate change” may have finally crashed into the wall of reality.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was interviewed on May 26 by host Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation.” The full interview is on YouTube. Ms. Brennan is the most informative and objective of interviewers in the mainstream media.

Although “Mayor Pete,” as he came to be known, was merely the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, population 103,000, in 2020, he won the Iowa caucuses, briefly gaining national attention. He previously worked at McKinsey & Co., which hires really smart people to consult for corporate clients. According to Mr. Buttigieg, his work “consisted of doing mathematical analysis, conducting research, and preparing presentations” on studies for clients. That means he’s one of the smarter people in the Biden administration.

At 9 minutes and 30 seconds, Ms. Brennan said, “Donald Trump repeatedly talks about President Biden’s decision to force the industry toward making 56 percent of car batteries electric by 2032, 13 percent hybrid.” She then played a video of President Trump at a rally in New Jersey.

“We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars subsidizing a car that nobody wants and nobody’s ever going to buy,” President Trump said.

Then she continued, “He’s not wrong—”

“Oh, he’s wrong,” Mr. Buttigieg interrupted.

Ms. Brennan continued, “—on the purchasing. He’s not. Of the 4 million vehicles purchased, you know, what, 269,000 electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. market.”

And the electric portion is just 6.7 percent of the total. She didn’t mention the time period, but Cox Automotive ran the numbers, and it’s the first quarter of 2024.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

June 9, 2024

The Military-Industrial Complex Is Killing Us All

We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy.

Bombs also make people rich.

When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent saving a life from a preventable death, a dollar not spent curing cancer, a dollar not spent educating children. That’s why, so long ago, retired five-star general and President Dwight D. Eisenhower rightly called spending on bombs and all things military a “theft.”

The perpetrator of that theft is perhaps the world’s most overlooked destructive force. It looms unnoticed behind so many major problems in the United States and the world today. Eisenhower famously warned Americans about it in his 1961 farewell address, calling it for the first time “the military-industrial complex,” or the MIC.

Start with the fact that, thanks to the MIC’s ability to hijack the federal budget, total annual military spending is far larger than most people realize: around $1,500,000,000,000 ($1.5 trillion). Contrary to what the MIC scares us into believing, that incomprehensibly large figure is monstrously out of proportion to the few military threats facing the United States. One-and-a-half trillion dollars is about double what Congress spends annually on all non-military purposes combined.

Calling this massive transfer of wealth a “theft” is no exaggeration, since it’s taken from pressing needs like ending hunger and homelessness, offering free college and pre-K, providing universal health care, and building a green energy infrastructure to save ourselves from climate change. Virtually every major problem touched by federal resources could be ameliorated or solved with fractions of the cash claimed by the MIC. The money is there.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Are We Communitarian By Nature, or Merely Tribal?

June 9, 2024

Are We Communitarian By Nature, or Merely Tribal?

image above from the wild human initiative

This month, Aurélien has wandered a bit afield and speculated on the fundamental nature of the human animal. I think most of us can agree that the cult of rugged individualism that has prevailed in the west over the past century, encouraging the unrestricted pursuit of selfish goals and zero-sum-game self-interest as virtuous, is in no one’s best interest, except perhaps the hawkers of weapons, fashions, and identity politics.

We could never have survived this far as a species if we were, by nature, preoccupied with our personal welfare to the exclusion of that of other humans. We lack the speed, the teeth and claws, and other attributes needed to thrive as solitary creatures.

So we have, of necessity, evolved to live in groups. The question is whether this is an ideal way of living for humans (one that will make us happier than any other possible way of living), or whether it’s an unhappy compromise. Nature is replete with examples of species that seem perfectly happy to live in large groups, where the individual is, when necessary, willing to sacrifice its life for the collective good. And there are many examples of other creatures where there seems a permanent tension between its members, as if they would actually prefer to live alone but know they can’t survive that way. And there are examples of yet other creatures that coexist only with their mates and unfledged offspring, and only then as long as they must to ensure the survival of the species.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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