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Preface. As you can see in Table 1 below, water transport is far more energy efficient than land transport, especially once we’re back to muscle power after fossil fuels are gone.

Kilojoules of energy used to carry one ton of cargo one kilometer	Transportation mode
50	Oil tankers and bulk cargo ships
100–150	Smaller cargo ships
250–600	Trains
360	Barge
2000–4000	Trucks
30,000	Air freight
55,000	Helicopter

Table 1 Energy efficiency of transportation in kilojoules/ton/kilometer. Source: Smil (2013), Ashby (2015).

To prepare for energy descent, more canals should be created now, while we still have cheap plentiful energy. We’ll also need to keep in mind the maintenance and dredging of canals after fossils as well (De Decker 2018).

The National Academy of Science study (159 pages) found that the selection of waterways projects for authorization has a long history of being driven largely by political and local concerns. The approval and funding process is an irrational, byzantine mess.

***

NRC. 2015. TRB special report 315: funding and managing the U.S. inland waterways system: what policy makers need to know. National Resource Council Transportation research board, National Academy of Sciences.

Inland waterway system stats:

The inland waterways system moves 6 to 7 percent of all domestic cargo in terms of total ton-miles, mostly coal, petroleum and petroleum products, food and farm products, chemicals and related products, and crude materials.
Inland waterways include more than 36,000 miles of commercially navigable channels and roughly 240 working lock sites.
Barges mostly carry energy: coal, crude petroleum, petroleum products, and natural gas based fertilizers

2013 Commodities carried by USACE at http://www.navigationdatacenter.us/wcsc/pdf/pdrgcm13.pdf

Tons
Millions Commodity
312.3 Coal
418.9 Crude petroleum
508.6 Petroleum products
39.9 Chemical fertilizer
140.6 Chemicals excluding fertilizers
53 Lumber, logs, wood chips, pulp
163.5 Sand, gravel, shells, clay, salt, and slag
85.4 Iron ore, iron, and steel waste and scrap
29.5 Non-ferrous ores and scrap
45 Primary non-metal products
72 Primary metal products
270 Food and food products
121 Manufactured goods
62.3 Unknown and not elsewhere classified products
2,275 TOTAL

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

Insect & other BioInvasions

January 24, 2022

Insect & other BioInvasions

Preface. Invasive insects that have no predators in the U.S. can only be somewhat reduced with pesticides, which are made out of oil, and sprayed by diesel machinery and transportation. To prepare for oil decline, more research needs to be done to study native predators as pest control, which takes time since since they might do as much harm as the invasive species. There are 83 known invasive insects harming forests alone, and far more devouring food crops, all of them developing resistance to whatever pesticides are thrown at them within 5 years on average.

Invasion by non-native insects expected to increase 36% by 2050. Europe is likely to experience the strongest biological invasions, followed by Asia, North America and South America (USDA 2020).

Worldwide, forests are increasingly affected by nonnative insects and diseases, some of which cause substantial tree mortality. Forests in the United States have been invaded by a particularly large number (>450) of tree-feeding pest species, with 41.1% of the total live forest biomass in the conterminous United States is at risk of future loss from just 15 pests. Since forests contribute ~76% of North America’s net terrestrial carbon sequestration, this loss may accelerate climate change (Fei 2019).

Perhaps postcarbon survivors will find yet another solution: eating insects, and why not, over 2 billion people eat bugs as a standard part of their diet (Mishan 2018).

Below are specific species that I’ve run across in the news, clearly hundreds of other species could be added.

* * *

Lambert J (2021) These are the 5 costliest invasive species, causing billions in damages. Science News.

The impact from all invasive species cost the global economy at least $1 trillion since 1970. $149 billion: Aedes mosquitoes (A. albopictus and A. aegypti), $67 billion: Rats, $52 billion: Cats, $19 billion: Termites, $17 billion: Fire Ants

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

Life After Fossil Fuels | Alice Friedemann

January 15, 2022

Life After Fossil Fuels | Alice Friedemann

And why the climate change conversation isn’t helping

A post-carbon world could be our opportunity to so better—and make the difficult transition much harder to swallow.

That’s the message of Alice Friedemann on this week’s episode, author of When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. The transition is coming, perhaps collapse is coming, and if the world as we know it is going to change we might as well make the most of it. She worries we won’t be given the opportunity due to all the misinformation flying around, and gives a cutting analysis of how the climate change conversation is distracting from many other dangerous, concurrent such as biodiversity loss and water scarcity.

This is a phenomenally interesting interview, which also manages to be a lot of fun, despite the topics! Listen here on catch it on on Apple or Spotify.

Visit Alice’s website Energy Skeptic and get your hands on a copy of When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation.

Peak Gold

January 4, 2022

Peak Gold

Preface. Both articles below offer the usual techno-optimism of more gold supplies from Man’s Cleverness: robots, AI, and Big and Smart Data Mining.

But both are energy blind. Ores are decreasing in gold concentrations, and found in deeper and more remote places, requiring more energy to process. Where will this energy come from?

Conventional crude oil production leveled off in 2005, and it appears to have peaked in 2008 at 69.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) according to Europe’s International Energy Agency (IEA 2018 p45). The U.S. Energy Information Agency shows global peak crude oil production at a later date in 2018 at 82.9 mb/d (EIA 2020) because they included tight oil, oil sands, and deep-sea oil. World coal may have peaked in 2013.

So where’s the energy to mine, transport ore, smelt it, and distribute the gold?

***

Harper J (2020) How much gold is there left to mine in the world? BBC.

Discoveries of large deposits are becoming increasingly rare, experts say. As a result, most gold production currently comes from older mines that have been in use for decades. There are relatively few unexplored regions left for gold-mining, although possibly the most promising are in some of the more unstable parts of the world, such as in West Africa.

Gold is a finite resource, and there will eventually come a stage when there is none left to be mined. Some believe we may have already reached that point. Gold mine production totaled 3,531 tonnes in 2019, 1% lower than in 2018, according to the World Gold Council. This is the first annual decline in production since 2008.

The below-ground stock of gold reserves is currently estimated to be around 50,000 tonnes, according to the US Geological Survey. To put that in perspective, around 190,000 tonnes of gold has been mined in total.

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

The latest monster ships could be a disaster

December 2, 2021

The latest monster ships could be a disaster

Preface. The article below makes the case for the hazards of one of these enormous ships running aground or sinking, blocking a major shipping line, leaking oil, and possibly impossible to salvage.

In 2020, the largest container ship is the HMM Algeciras at 1,312 feet (400 m) long and 200 feet (61 m) wide, much larger than the Titanic, which was 882 feet long and 92 feet wide (Bell 2020).

To see where the all ships are go this marinetraffic.com link, where you can filter the map by type of ship, weight, and other parameters in the tool bar on the left side.

Gray, W. 20 November 2013. Don’t abandon ship! A new generation of monster ships will be even harder to rescue. NewScientist.

Should any of the new monster-sized ships run aground or sink, the resulting chaos could block a major shipping lane and create an environmental disaster that could bankrupt ship owners and the insurance industry alike. With vessels of this size conventional salvage will be all but impossible.

Despite a steady rise in air and road transport, our reliance on shipping remains overwhelming: ships move roughly 90% of all global trade, carrying billions of tons of manufactured goods and raw materials.

These monster ships are already plying the seas. There are 29 bulk carriers about 360 meters long (1181 feet). Designed to feed Brazilian iron ore to furnaces in China and Europe, each is capable of carrying up to 400,000 tons. More are on order.

The most rapid increase in size has come with container ships. In the 1990s the largest carried about 5000 shipping containers; the Maersk Mc-Kinney Møller can carry 18,000. Shipyards will soon begin work on the next generation, some 40 meters longer and capable of carrying 20,000 containers, and there are rumors of even larger vessels to come.

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

Material and other limits to scaling wind up to 24 GW by 2050

October 23, 2021

Material and other limits to scaling wind up to 24 GW by 2050

Preface. Here are just a few of the many important points made in this excellent paper:

Research showing no constraints on the materials needed to build wind turbines “dismiss potential physical constraints and issues with natural resource supply, and do not consider the growth rates of the individual technologies needed or how the energy systems are to be sustained over longer time frames”
Wind turbines and solar panels depend on scarce minerals (i.e. rare earth)
A fast growth of renewables would add new fossil fuel demand to current demand during a transition period

And ramping up wind turbines given their 25 year lifespan is fraught with difficulties:

“This study investigates the implications of fulfilling these growth patterns by letting wind energy grow exponentially reaching 19 TW by 2030 and 24 TW by 2050. These capacities are then assumed to be sustained to the year 2100. Laxson et al. (2006) describes a sustained manufacturing model, where installed capacity of wind energy grows to reach 1%, 20% and 30% of U.S. electricity demand by 2020 or 2030. After 25 years the capacity installed 25 years earlier are replaced (repowered). The need to replace the capacity after the end of the service life of the wind turbines affects the desired manufacturing capacity of the wind industry. If the installed capacity of wind is to be sustained over a longer time frame, an industry capable of replacing the capacity taken out of use must exist. If the growth trajectory is too slow to reach a manufacturing capacity large enough to replace the old turbines in the future, the actual wind capacity in use can in fact see a drop after the initial goal is reached. On the other hand, if the manufacturing capacity is expanded too fast, the demand for new turbines will drop and leave manufacturing capacity idle.

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

How will 500,000 products made with fossils as feedstock & process energy be created post fossil fuels?

October 9, 2021

How will 500,000 products made with fossils as feedstock & process energy be created post fossil fuels?

Preface. It is quite likely that after fossils are gone, plastics will no longer be made, since they are incredibly complex – PhDs in numerous fields make them possible – and most kinds have been around for only 50 years or less. Thwaites (2011) showed how hard replicating a complex process that we take for granted would be by performing a simple exercise: He tried to make an ordinary toaster from scratch. Even the simplest toaster had 404 parts of plastic, steel, mica, copper, and nickel. After a great deal of struggle, he was able to make the metal pieces, which mankind has made since the Iron Age. But plastics were beyond him. He’d have had to refine crude oil to make propylene, which takes at least six chemical transformations to make into the simplest plastic, polyethylene.

Crude oil is the feedstock for half a million products. What follows is a description of how plastic is made. My book “Life After Fossil Fuels” discusses plastic in more depth — how much biomass is needed, how to replace asphalt and lubricants, and recycling.

***

We consume about ONE BILLION TONS of products a year. We live like kings. Of all the fossil fuels we use in a year, about seven percent – 500 million metric tons of oil equivalent, the weight of all the people on earth – is used as both feedstock and energy to make these one billion tons of products (IEA 2018). Mostly its oil for high-value chemicals. Natural gas and coal are used to make ammonia and methanol, but difficult to turn into other products because they require multiple energy-intensive steps (IEA 2018, KAUST 2020).

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

Rex Weyler: Why is the political process so slow to respond to our ecological crisis?

September 21, 2021

Rex Weyler: Why is the political process so slow to respond to our ecological crisis?

Preface. Rex Weyler is one of the co-founders of Greenpeace in Canada, a brilliant ecologist and journalist, and more. His blog is here: https://www.rexweyler.ca/greenpeace

***

Rex Wyler. September 2021. Ecological crisis: Might as well speak the truth

Why is the political process — worldwide — so slow in responding appropriately to our ecological crisis?

We may point out that most political processes are hobbled by corruption, self-interest, and bureaucratic incompetence. However, there may be a deeper reason, connected to how the status quo protects itself, not just against foreign aggressors, but against dissident ideas that threaten its accepted narrative.

Regarding our ecological problems, the popular narrative of most societies and governments today is that we have a “climate problem,” which can be solved with “renewable technologies” such as windmills, carbon capture, and efficient batteries.

However, global heating is a symptom of a much larger, more fundamental ecological crisis articulated by William Rees, the Limits to Growth study, the Post-Carbon Institute and other ecologically aware observers. Humanity’s urgent and primary challenge is what ecologists call “overshoot,” the predicament of any species that grows beyond the capacity of its environment. Wolves overshoot the prey in their watershed, algae overshoot the nutrient capacity of a lake, and humanity has overshot the entire capacity of Earth. Global heating, the biodiversity crisis, depleted soils, and disappearing forests are all symptoms of ecological overshoot.

All paths out of overshoot (genuine solutions) involve a contraction of the species and a decline of material/energy throughput. There are no exceptions.

Furthermore, the contraction of humanity is inevitable, so all genuine options exist within this framework, whether we respond appropriately or not…

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

Over 250 Cognitive biases, fallacies, and errors

September 21, 2021

Over 250 Cognitive biases, fallacies, and errors

Preface. All of us, no matter how much we’ve read about critical thinking, or have a PhD in science, and are even on the lookout for our biases and fallacies can still fall prey to them, after all, we’re only human.

But false belief systems get dangerous when taken too far, resulting in fascism and cults. Consider Qanon, which has inspired violence, intimidation, discourages vaccinations and denies climate change. Trump has yet to deny these claims or disavow QAnon even after the FBI has called them a domestic terror threat. And good luck dissuading them from their beliefs, they will see you as spouting fake news and a part of the problem.

Conspiracy theories and fascism go hand in hand, to see how, read this article: 2021 American fascism isn’t going away.

A scientific paper on Bullsh*t was recently published: “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit”, which attempts to identify what makes people susceptible to nonsense. The authors defined BS as a statement that “implies but does not contain adequate meaning or truth”. To form a BS Receptivity scale, they used satirical sites such as www.wisdomofchopra.com (a random phrase generator trained on the online excretions of guru Deepak Chopra) to create vapid, portentous-sounding aphorisms, which were then judged by participants for profundity. The authors found that those who judged this BS as profound were more likely to hold a belief in the supernatural, and that “a bias toward accepting statements as true may be an important component of pseudo-profound BS receptivity” (NewScientist 12 Dec 2015).

What follows is from Wikipedia. Yikes — we are all delusional!

Critical thinking in the news:

2020 Even If It’s ‘Bonkers,’ Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories

***

Cognitive Biases: Decision-making, belief & behavioral biases

Ambiguity effect – the tendency to avoid options for which missing information makes the probability seem “unknown.”

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

Soil salinity and erosion

September 12, 2021

Soil salinity and erosion

Preface. Civilizations fail when their soils are ruined or eroded. One way conquerors made sure that those they enslaved during wars was to salt their land and burn their homes so they had nowhere to escape to. Erosion is an even larger nation killer, since not all soils are prone to salinity. These issues are also discussed in my post “Peak Soil”.

Farm Journal Editors (2020) Conservation Practices Reduce ‘Rings Of Death’. Agweb.com

Farming requires a high tolerance for dancing with nature. That’s especially true for North Dakota producers where 15% of cropland has reduced productivity due to soil salinity and sodicity issues. This makes soil layers dense, slow down soil water movement, limit root penetration and, ultimately, hurts yield.

Why Salt Shows Up. Salts and sodium generally make their way into soil from parent material (what soil is formed from) and groundwater discharge. When a soil has too much sodium and overall salt content, the soil’s clay particles repel each other and the ground becomes so hard it is difficult for plant roots to penetrate, and this lowers crop production. They’re hard to drive on when wet and very hard when dry. The solution? Gypsum, which improves soil structure, pore space and water infiltration. In this case it will come from a nonrenewable byproduct of coal-fired plants

Jonathan Watts. September 12, 2017. Third of Earth’s soil is acutely degraded due to agriculture. Fertile soil is being lost at rate of 24bn tonnes a year through intensive farming as demand for food increases, says UN-backed study. The Guardian.

The alarming decline, which is forecast to continue as demand for food and productive land increases, will add to the risks of conflicts such as those seen in Sudan and Chad.

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

Not enough fossil fuels left to trigger another mass extinction

September 12, 2021

Not enough fossil fuels left to trigger another mass extinction

Preface. Since both conventional and unconventional oil peaked in 2018, we clearly won’t be burning fossils at exponentially increasing rates until 2400 as the IPCC expected. Quite the opposite, currently the decline rate of oil is 8% a year, which can be reduced to 4% by enhanced oil recovery techniques. The other 4% could be remedied by finding more oil, but discoveries have been at their lowest point for decades the past 7 years, and with oil prices so low, exploration and new projects are on hold.

Many books, starting with Ward’s “Under a Green Sky” warned that we would bring on another major extinction event burning fossil fuels. News reports continue to assume that this will be the eventual outcome as well. So you may not be aware of what it took to bring on the mother of all extinctions: The Permian. Although it’s commonly said that we are emitting far more CO2 faster than ever in history, this isn’t true.

Amazingly, researchers don’t blame the 300,000 to 1 million years of volcanic traps. Rather, it appears there were two pulses of lava from deep beneath the earth that rose to the surface, burning through underground deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. That released an enormous amount of CO2 into the atmosphere; 100,000 billion tonnes (= 1 × 10¹⁴ tonnes). That is an almost incomprehensible amount of carbon injected into the atmosphere in a short (geologically speaking) period of time. This is more than 40 times the amount of all carbon available in modern fossil fuel reserves including carbon already burned since the industrial revolution.”

Researchers also don’t find methane hydrates a suspect, because it was “highly unlikely based on our data” according to Dr. Marcus Gutjahr from GEOMAR, co-author of the study (SD 2020).

Related articles:

Clarkson, M. O., et al. 2015. Ocean acidification and the Permo-Triassic mass extinction. Science 348:229.

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

The Nitrogen Bomb: fossil-fueled fertilizers keep billions of us alive

September 10, 2021

The Nitrogen Bomb: fossil-fueled fertilizers keep billions of us alive

Preface. There are two articles below that explain why natural gas fertilizers are keeping at least 4 billion of us alive today. If you’re interested in this topic, here are a few more to read:

Erisman JW, Sutton MA, Galloway J, et al (2008) How a century of ammonia synthesis changed the world. Nature Geoscience.
Smil V (2004) Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the transformation of world food production. MIT Press.
Stewart WM, Dibb DW, Johnston AE, et al (2005) The contribution of commercial fertilizer nutrients to food production. Agronomy Journal 97: 1-6

We really ought to be transitioning to organic agriculture and composting to restore soil to it’s former health, which in turn protects plants from diseases, higher production, water retention, and more. Since pesticides are also fossil fuel based (oil), and we’re running out of new ones just like we are antibiotics, there’s all the more reason to go organic before we’re forced to. It can take years for industrial farms to be restored to good soil ecosystem health.

***

Fisher D (2011) The Nitrogen Bomb. By learning to draw fertilizer from a clear blue sky, chemists have fed the multitudes. Discover magazine.

They’ve also unleashed a fury as threatening as atomic energy.

In 1898, Sir William Crookes called on science to save Europe from impending starvation. The world’s supply of wheat was produced mainly by the United States and Russia, Sir Crookes noted in his presidential address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As those countries’ populations grew, their own demands would outpace any increase in production. What then would happen to Europe? “It is the chemist who must come to the rescue of the threatened communities,” Crookes cried. “It is through the laboratory that starvation may ultimately be turned into plenty.”

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

Can democracy survive peak oil?

September 1, 2021

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 it turns out the U.S. may not need an energy crisis to descend into totalitarianism. It’s been coming for a long time, the evolution began with the first cult religious settlers, “white trash“, Pat Robertson, Reagan, Phyllis Shafly, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, evangelism, FOX news and so on (for details read Dean’s “Conservatives without Conscience”, review here). But because of that, perhaps an authoritarian is even more likely to appear during an energy crisis, which in the U.S. means crony corruption rather than fair rationing for all…

Bucknell was once the director of the energy and national security project at Ohio State University. He graduated in 1944 from the U.S. Naval Academy and commanded a number of ships, including nuclear-powered submarines. He has a doctorate in political science from the University of Georgia.

This book is also about the energy crises of the 1970s. At the time, President Carter, Kissinger, Bucknell, and others thought this was the start of energy descent. It’s interesting to see what actions were taken, how energy was dealt with politically, the institutions created to solve the energy crisis, and the issues, failures, and problems encountered when trying to take action in what turned out to be the “dress rehearsal”.

Bucknell’s wrote this book partly to warn military planners that lightning raids on oil fields in the Middle East would be a bad idea, and to get two main efforts started: liquefied synthetic fuels to solve the transportation problem, and energy conservation.

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

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

August 28, 2021

Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Preface. This is another “Scientists Warnings to Humanity” by many famous scientists, including Paul & Anne Erlich, John Harte, Peter Raven, and Mathis Wackernagel.

Some of the challenges they point to are loss of biodiversity and consequent 6th mass extinction, human population growth which has led to ecological overshoot and overconsumption, climate change and consequent mass migrations. They conclude there will be mass extinction, declining health, and war over resources and many other grim consequences.

Unfortunately this important message is once again energy blind. It does mention that ecological overshoot is due to fossil fuels, but neglects to mention that peak oil happened in 2018 or 2008 and peak coal probably 2013, so they assume we will continue on our current population trajectory until the 22nd century! And they assume the worst about climate change as well by not acknowledging that there is a limit to fossil energy and since oil is naturally declining at 8.5% a year, offset by 4% enhanced oil recovery with little discovery of new oil the past 7 years, we may well have only half or less oil remaining by 2030. And a dieoff of billions of people, and 50% less CO2 emissions. Why peak fossils are ignored I can’t imagine, they are very aware of limits to growth.

In the end this is a shout out to their colleagues to be more honest:
“…only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future. While there have been more recent calls for the scientific community in particular to be more vocal about their warnings to humanity, these have been insufficiently foreboding to match the scale of the crisis…

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

Was the fall of the Roman Empire due to plagues & climate change?

August 4, 2021

Was the fall of the Roman Empire due to plagues & climate change?

Preface. Harper (2017) shows the brutal effects of plagues and climate change on the Roman Empire. McConnell (2020) proposes that a huge volcanic eruption in Alaska was a factor in bringing the Roman Empire and Cleopatra’s Egypt down.

In addition, there are other ecological reasons for collapse not mentioned in this book, such as deforestation (A Forest Journey: The Story of Wood and Civilization by John Perlin, topsoil erosion (Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery), and barbarian invasions (“The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization” and “Empires and Barbarians: the fall of Rome and the birth of Europe”.

***

McConnell JR et al (2020) Extreme climate after massive eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43 BCE and effects on the late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Caesar’s assassination happened at a time of unusually cold wet weather, as much as 13.3 F cooler than today, and up to 400% more rain, drenching farmland and causing crop failures leading to food shortages and disease. In Egypt the annual Nile flood that agriculture depended on failed. Although an eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily in 44 BC has been blamed, this paper found evidence that it may have been the eruption of the Okmok volcano in Alaska that altered the climate enough to weaken the Roman and Egyptian states. It was one of the largest in the past few thousand years (Kornei K (2020) Ancient Rome Was Teetering. Then a Volcano Erupted 6,000 Miles Away. Scientists have linked historical political instability to a number of volcanic events. New York Times).

A more nuanced and critical look at this scientific paper can be found here: Middleton G (2020) Did a volcanic eruption in Alaska help end the Roman republic? The Conversation.

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

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