327 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum June 7, 2019”

  1. if we combine these charts with the coal extraction and Nat gas I guess we’ll have a good carbon chart and a better sense of the end of the fossil age

    Forbin

    1. forbin,

      I had to move the post so your comment may have been for the Oil shock post. Sorry.

      1. Hello Denis,

        yes it was for the oil shock post – sorry for any confusion

        thanks

        Forbin

        1. Forbin,

          My fault. I forgot the open thread and the only way to fix was to delete and replace with edited open thread.

  2. Whatever happened to Rome 2012 outlooks? CO at 415PPM, dead Pacific due to Cesium, fertilizer pollution all rivers? Less insects? No bees, wheat storage below 50 day… 3rd world riots?

    1. hey cam con. more importantly what happened to christianity. i thought everyone was supposed to be saved and learn to be kind. but still the same old cruel crowd- slavery, genocide, stealing of continents.

      1. Doesn’t the Bible give instructions on how to keep your slaves? 😉

        NAOM

  3. I’ve posted this for people like Javier who appear clueless about the realities of GHGs (not wanting to insult Fred, GF, et al, who are more than familiar with these facts and the depressing state the world finds itself.

    WHY THERE’S MORE GREENHOUSE GAS IN THE ATMOSPHERE THAN YOU MAY HAVE REALIZED

    What is CO₂-e? Although CO₂ is the most abundant greenhouse gas, other gases — including methane (CH₄), nitrous oxide (N₂O) and the synthetic greenhouse gases — also trap heat. Many are more powerful greenhouse gases than CO₂, and some linger longer in the atmosphere. Which means they have a significant influence on how much the planet is warming. As all the major greenhouse gases (CO₂, CH₄ and N₂O) are rising in concentration, so too is CO₂-e. It has climbed at an average rate of 3.3 ppm per year during this decade – faster than at any time in history and is showing no sign of slowing. Yes, this milestone, like so many others, is symbolic. The difference between 499 and 500ppm CO₂-e is marginal in terms of the fate of the climate and the life it sustains. But the fact the cleanest air on our planet has now breached this threshold should elicit deep concern.

    https://phys.org/news/2019-06-greenhouse-gas-atmosphere-realised.html

    1. FUCK!

      In the last thread GF posted a comment where he mentioned delusion.

      Well, given that we are at 500 ppm of CO2-e and we have every government, global financial institution, multinational corporation, politicians, CEOs, economists of every stripe, both on the right and the left, in democratic countries, socialist countries, communist countries, etc… in every corner of this planet all pushing GROWTH, growth is the epitome of delusion!

      Case in point:
      This is what passes for a plan for the future at this particular juncture in human history!

      7 giant airport projects around the world take flight
      Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Cost: $32.67 billion.
      Location: London, England. Cost: $18.5 billion.
      Location: Los Angeles, California. Cost: $14 billion.
      Location: Beijing, China. …
      Location: New York City, New York. …
      Location: Mexico City, Mexico. …
      Location: Istanbul, Turkey. …
      Long Thanh International Airport.

      This is not just delusion it is the hallmark of criminal insanity!

      https://www.constructiondive.com/news/7-giant-airport-projects-around-the-world-take-flight/539244/

      Pick any one of them and it is pure fantasy. Take for example:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvk3CehqJRU
      Vietnam Long Thanh International Airport Passenger Terminal 1

      If you watch that almost 4 minute long video and pay attention you will not see any ground traffic approaching the airport. Truly amazing idealized fairy tale!

      The reality looks more like this:
      https://www.vir.com.vn/ho-chi-minh-city-to-spend-80mn-to-tackle-congestion-inundation-at-airport-44666.html

      Ho Chi Minh City to spend $80mn to tackle congestion, inundation at airport

      Ho Chi Minh City authorities have proposed more than VND1.8 trillion (US$80.6 million) in improvement projects aimed at dealing with inundation at the city’s major airport and congestion and its entrance.

      This is what the traffic really looks like in Ho Chi Minh City and every major metropolitan center in the world!
      .

      1. Thanks, you two. This is why I keep dragging my ignorant ass here to read periodically. Always fascinating frisson.

      2. Airports? Mere pimples on the giant developmental tumor.

        How China’s Big Overseas Initiative Threatens Global Climate Progress

        hina’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), launched by President Xi Jinping in 2013, has been described as the most ambitious infrastructure project in history. It is a plan to finance and build roads, railways, bridges, ports, and industrial parks abroad, beginning with China’s neighbors in Central, South, and Southeast Asia and eventually reaching Western Europe and across the Pacific to Latin America. The more than 70 countries that have formally signed up to participate account for two-thirds of the world’s population, 30 percent of global GDP, and an estimated 75 percent of known energy reserves.

        BRI has the potential to transform economies in China’s partner countries. Yet it could also tip the world into catastrophic climate change.

        Since 2000, Chinese-led policy banks have invested $160 billion in overseas energy projects, almost as much as the World Bank and regional development banks. But unlike the World Bank, 80 percent of China’s overseas energy investments went to fossil fuels — $54.6 billion to oil, $43.5 billion to coal, and $18.8 billion to natural gas — compared with only 3 percent to solar and wind and 17 percent to often-controversial hydro projects.

        https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-chinas-big-overseas-initiative-threatens-climate-progress

        1. Airports? Mere pimples on the giant developmental tumor.

          Yes I know, they are but one minor superficial symptom of the widespread underlying fatal illness. Here is but one American symptom… The derangement syndrome is spreading!

          https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2019/06/08/white-house-blocked-intelligence-aides-written-testimony-saying-human-caused-climate-change-could-be-possibly-catastrophic/?utm_term=.33f078311143

          White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony saying climate change could be ‘possibly catastrophic’

          Officials sought to excise the State Department’s comments on climate science on the grounds that it did not mesh with the administration’s stance.

          1. While, at the same time, they consider immigration, partly due to climate change, as a security threat and national emergency.

            NAOM

        2. More like metastatic cancer than pimples.
          No single spot has more wildlife destruction, point source pollution, wetland and soil degradation than these big airports and their support facilities/industries.
          Except perhaps refineries.
          Plus they enable a huge amount of destruction far afield through their existence.

        3. I can identify with this. Chinese investment in Jamaica is resulting in an economic boom the current administration is only too happy to accept. Several major road infrastructure projects in the capital city are underway with several more proposed across the island. In the capital city their is a boom in construction of multistory buildings, being built mostly by Chinese construction firms.

          The government was in talks with Chinese interests to develop a brand new deep water shipping port in a previously undeveloped area of the southern coast but, it was stymied by the efforts of local environmentalists. Part of this development was to include a new coal powered plant to provide electricity for the facility. A bauxite to alumina (precursor to aluminum) processing facility was acquired from UC Rusal in 2016 with the promise of the development of an industrial park to include an aluminum smelter to be supplied with electricity by a coal fueled plant. The idea of a coal plant was again fiercely resisted by environmental interests who pointed out that spoiling the environment would adversely affect the islands main foreign currency earner, tourism.

          I would have hoped that the Chinese would have been pushing for the development of solar farms on the island, to reduce it’s dependence on imported fuels. Instead I am seeing a flurry of projects that, while improving efficiency of transportation (improved traffic flow) and efficiency of urban land use, will ultimately result in increases in FF consumption.

      3. That looks like a beautiful airport terminal. Vietnam is a classic emergent country with significant growth potential for those willing to understand the market there.

        1. That looks like a beautiful airport terminal.

          No, it’s a fantasy 3D rendering of an airport terminal, completely disconnected from any semblance of reality.

          You have to be completely insane to believe that growing the current system is at all possible! It’s not markets you need to understand, which BTW are also a fantasy, Its the ecosystems on which humanity depends for survival which are incapable of sustaining more growth.

          More growth will only end in collapse!

          Cheers!

          1. The eco-systems you speak of didn’t get to be what they are without growth of their own. Growth is a natural and desirable process.

            1. So is decomposition Frank.
              And erosion, rust, and metal fatigue.
              Its a matter of time.

            2. Nope! That ain’t how it works. Ecosystems contain multiple kinds of life forms, plants, insects, primary predators, top level predators, detritivores, fungi, microbes, bacteria, which recycle nutrients back to the primary producers, etc… While the individual organisms do grow, mature and die within an interacting synergistic web of life. Healthy ecosystems do not grow. They tend to remain in a stable state for very long periods of time.

            3. Fred,

              That’s how human civilizations operate, too. For instance, the US stopped growing about 40 years ago.

              WTF? The US stopped growing 40 years ago?

              Well, car sales plateaued. Home sales plateaued. Steel sales plateaued. Washer/dryer sales flattened out. TV sales too. I could go on…

              So. Why does GDP keep growing? Because the US no longer counts growth in a simplistic way. It no longer just counts the number of cars, or houses, or washer/dryers. Instead, it looks at the quality and value produced. If a PC runs software faster, then it’s more valuable and it’s counted as a bigger contributor to GDP. If a car now has cruise control and Electronic Stability Control as a standard feature, it’s more valuable. It doesn’t have to be bigger, or weigh more, or use more steel, glass or fuel.

              The same is true in Europe, and that will spread to the rest of the world.

              Growth does not require more stuff. It only needs more value…

            4. Growth does not require more stuff. It only needs more value…

              Growth is the antithesis of a stable state.
              Ecosystems do not grow!

              Even if it requires less stuff for equal or more value, the value is contained in information. Today that information is written in 1s and 0s in computer memory and is transferred via digital ledgers.

              Information Theory tells us that this process still has to obey the laws of thermodynamics! So there is no way to completely decouple growth from increases in demand for energy.

              I think GF recently posted something about training an AI having the CO2 footprint of five cars.

              On a finite planet, at some point, growth, by necessity, has to end. Sooner or later everyone will have to deal with this reality!

              Cheers!

            5. Ecosystems do not grow!

              Hmmm. They don’t evolve? Species don’t evolve and become more complex?

              this process still has to obey the laws of thermo

              Could you expand on that? The Earth is an open system, not a closed one…

              One can do incredibly complex design work on a laptop that uses 10W of power. That could come from a small solar panel, or even a treadmill – it’s less than 10% of the power I use just breathing. And my brain, which is many orders of magnitude more powerful than any AI (to this point) only uses maybe 50W.

              Finally, I see that I haven’t conveyed my main point, which is that infinite growth is not necessary to a successful human civilization, and conventional economics doesn’t deal with this because, well…it goes without saying. At some point we’ll have all the stuff we need, we’ll have perfected housing and transportation and healthcare and growth of any kind will just stop. We’ll just dance and write poetry and talk. That’s, of course, if idle hands don’t create mischief…

            6. Nick G,

              The earth is more or less a closed system, since negligible mass is exchanged during asteroid or meteorite impacts.

            7. Fred,
              Although in theory growth has to end some time we aren’t anywhere near that limit.

            8. Iron Mike,

              The Earth is a thermodynamically open system which constantly imports and exports vast amounts of energy.

              The ecosystem works because large photons (visible light) fall on it from a tiny very hot spot in the sky (the sun is about 1/10,000 of the total area), and small photons (heat) are dumped into the entire extremely cold (~2K) rest. The cold is important because it makes the sky (minus the sun) a sink for everything.

              Lots of small packets of energy sprayed a random have more entropy than smaller numbers of larger packets from a single source. Plants use photosynthesis to borrow this difference to add to their own information reserve.

              That’s how life seems to defy the second law of thermodynamics. The entire thing is extremely inefficient, but the vast amounts of energy involved mean there is enough to create the wonderful environment we live in.

              Living systems waste huge amounts of energy to gain information. Fruit and flowers are a great example. Plants are too dumb and immobile to find sex partners and distribute seeds, so they either have to rely on wind and luck, or subsidize an entire ecosystem of bird and bees with energy rich pollen and fruit.

              Animals have highly evolved sensory and motor skills. Flowering plants pay them to deal with the mechanics of reproduction, because developing their own systems would cost much too much information and take eons.

              Buying small amounts of information with huge amounts of energy is only possible in an open system.

            9. alimbiquated,

              Have you studied physics?
              Look at the definition of open, closed and isolated systems.
              http://amoalf.com/files/Open_and_Closed_System.jpg

              The earth is again more or less a closed system, due to negligible mass transfer.

              Since photons coming from the sun are massless it doesn’t count as an open system. Only space debris that collides with the earth which again is negligible.

              The radiation energy from the sun is almost solely responsible for the negentropy of life which we witness here on earth.

            10. The difference between different systems.
              Which one more closely matches earth.

              B. Closed system is the correct answer.

            11. Nick: Growth does not require more stuff. It only needs more value…

              Fred: Growth is the antithesis of a stable state. Ecosystems do not grow!

              I think you two are talking past each other. Nick’s talking about growth in value (information) and not physical size (matter). I think 🙂

            12. The Earth is an open and closed system

              The Earth is a closed system for matter

              The Earth is made up of chemical elements – think of the periodic table. That is a list of all basic elemental materials on our planet. Because of gravity, matter (comprising all solids, liquids and gases) does not leave the system. It is a closed box. And, the laws of thermodynamics, long agreed by scientists, tell us that it’s impossible to destroy matter. So the chemical matter we have on Earth will always be here. The important question is, how are those chemicals organised?

              The Earth is an open system for energy

              It is accepted science that the Earth is an open system for energy. Energy radiates into the Earth’s system, mainly from the sun. Energy is then radiated back into space from the Earth, with the flows being regulated by the Earth’s atmosphere and ozone layer. This delicate balanced transfer of energy maintains the surface temperature at a level that is suited to the forms of life that have evolved and currently exist.

            13. Ron,

              Entropy doesn’t necessarily increase in a closed system as it depends on the mechanics of the system. So creationists are wrong regarding their cherry picking.
              In an isolated system it always does, e.g. the universe.
              I have a masters in physics. But i don’t want anyone to take my word for it, nor do i want to be the authority on the topic. But i believe most reputable physicists or physics textbooks will agree with me.

            14. Hey, I am not going to argue with someone who has a masters in physics. Well, not about physics anyway. We may argue about a lot of other things however. 😉

              I have read many books by biologists on evolution. They all argue that decreased entropy, (evolution), is possible on earth because it is an open system. Perhaps those biologists should talk to a few physicists and get their story straight.

              I am going to open another thread and ask you a question, about physics, not evolution. This is a question near and dear to my heart. Please give it your best try.

            15. @Nick
              “Hmmm. They don’t evolve? Species don’t evolve and become more complex?”
              A species is part of the ecosystem. One species might thrive but another will decline to keep the balance. More hunters – less prey – less hunters – more prey etc. Overall the total remains the same.

              NAOM

            16. Iron Mike,

              You’re high jacking the thread with pointless hair splitting. Ad hominem insinuations about what I may have studied are irrelevant, since anyone (including you) can claim any degree in an anonymous chat.

              As Wikipedia (qv) so elegantly expresses it, “This scheme of definition of terms is not uniformly used, though it is convenient for some purposes. In particular, some writers use ‘closed system’ where ‘isolated system’ is used here.”

              By using the phrase “thermodynamically open” I made my meaning sufficiently clear to any non-antagonistic reader.

              “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

            17. Iron Mike,

              You are correct. This is the source of endless confusion for many. People mostly do not get the distinction between an isolated and a closed system. I think the main point is that second law of thermodynamics arguments only apply to an isolated system and the earth is not an isolated system.

            18. Ron,

              That is completely wrong, i saw the website that you got that from.

              Physics has a clear definition of thermodynamic systems. Look at the pic i posted. Heat or any radiation exchange can be done in a closed system.
              When the earth was forming 5 billion years ago it would be considered an open system. Now it is not. This is a legit link from Vermont university. (It is a pdf)
              https://www.uvm.edu/~cmehrten/courses/earthhist/Earth%20Closed%20System.pdf

            19. Iron Mike. It appears we have competing websites. So it boils down to a matter of semantics. Now I am not a physicist but I have thrashed this straw for over forty years in debates with creationists.

              Creationists argue that entropy must always increase in a closed system, therefore, evolution cannot possibly occur. The only comeback is that the earth receives energy from the sun, therefore, it is an open system.

              I do not accept your website as the final word. There are dozens of websites that give a different story. Try this one:

              Second Law of Thermodynamics and Evolution

              First, as was already pointed out above, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which limits the ability of a natural system to have a decrease of entropy, only applies to closed systems, not to open systems. The planet Earth is an open system and this allows life to both start and to develop.

              Ironically, one of the best examples of an open system decreasing in entropy is a living organism. All organisms run the risk of approaching maximum entropy, or death., but they avoid this for as long as possible by drawing in energy from the world: eating, drinking, and assimilating.

            20. Ron,

              Try Wikipedia.

              People actually pay attention to what is said there and it is corrected when wrong.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy

              The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy. Non-isolated systems may lose entropy, provided their environment’s entropy increases by at least that amount so that the total entropy increases. Entropy is a function of the state of the system, so the change in entropy of a system is determined by its initial and final states. In the idealization that a process is reversible, the entropy does not change, while irreversible processes always increase the total entropy.
              Because it is determined by the number of random microstates, entropy is related to the amount of additional information needed to specify the exact physical state of a system, given its macroscopic specification. For this reason, it is often said that entropy is an expression of the disorder, or randomness of a system, or of the lack of information about it[citation needed]. The concept of entropy plays a central role in information theory.

              You can also just pull a physics text from the library and read the chapter on Entropy, any freshman college text will have this right.

            21. Nick, I have lived in the US for a long time and you are saying no new development has occurred since 1978? I must be in a different country, another US? I have seen lots of development since then and a growing consumption trend.

              How about 15 trillion pounds of CO2 added each year, 55 billion pounds of solid waste added each year, Millions of tons of chemical pollutants released, 38.5 million tons of plastic waste per year added, growing at almost 4 percent a year, 1.3 million new houses added each year, 1 billion pounds of pesticides added each year, 150 pounds per acre of fertilizers added each year, and the list goes on and on.
              Standard economics dismisses most realities, such as the addition of chemicals and soils to the rivers and streams caused by human activity each year, or most waste streams.
              Yes, the US is growing, slower now but when one looks at the full picture it is a fast growing destructive engine in the world.
              Sadly now much of the world is catching up to the US.

            22. Don’t get wrong, we have the most amazing civilization that ever existed. It is totally amazing, yet quite stupid and has a short shelf life.

            23. Don’t get wrong, we have the most amazing civilization that ever existed.

              I agree! technologically and scientifically we certainly do! Unfortunately we can’t seem to get past our biological programming to make the obvious necessary social and political changes that might allow our civilization to evolve and ultimately guarantee our own survival.

              Time is short and things don’t look all that great.

            24. GF,

              We’re talking about growth.

              I’m pointing out that growth in the US, as defined by consumption of hard “goods”, or “stuff”, has stopped.

              What’s the most important driver of growth? Fertility. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the US has been at or below the replacement rate of 2.1 for the last 50 years. That means that US population growth has ended. Of course, Mexico’s TFR has only recently reached replacement level, and they’re still relatively poor, so immigration continues. But US population growth has ended.

              What’s the single largest component of hard “goods”? Housing. Here’s what housing looks like from 1960 to 2018, below. We see that new home construction leveled off about 50 years ago:

            25. Hi Nick, as with all variables growth has both a positive and negative sign.

              I think you are confusing growth with an increase in rate rather than just an increase.

              All of what I spoke of earlier was growth, growth in toxic chemical mass, growth in housing, growth in synthetic agriculture chemicals, growth in import mass, etc. etc.
              All added mass to the US each year. Where does it all go, the waste streams are not really tracked or monitored but the changes are quite apparent.

              I don’t know how much this is true anymore, since the insect world seems to be dying out, but there were 400 pounds of insect biomass per acre in the US. Compare that to the 14 pounds of flesh and bone for a human.
              Humans are in positive growth, insects in negative growth. Mostly due to human activity.
              That more than 2 million people added each year to the US is not growth?
              The billions of pounds of material pulled from the earth, then sent to the air, water and land is not growth?

              But here on this living planet growth is supposed to be fairly balanced by death. However, when growth of the synthetic and the non-living is the major activity, the living planet goes into a negative growth sequence and experiences vast changes in it’s physics and chemistry.

              Maybe AI will fix everything.

            26. confusing growth with an increase in rate rather than just an increase?

              I would use the word “acceleration” to describe an increase in a growth rate.

              The US is indeed adding roughly 2M people per year. 1M is direct immigration, and the other 1M (and more) is the result of previous immigration which has kept the demographic profile of the US at a younger average age. In other words, we’re still in the Demographic Transition due to immigration.

              But…the average US woman is only having 1.73 children. That’s not growth, that’s long term decline. If the US had had no immigration for the last 50 years population would be declining in absolute terms. We can see that in Japan, which also has a TFR well below replacement, but which does not permit significant immigration, and which is seeing substantial declines in absolute population levels.

              So. We’ve covered population, and new home construction. The next biggest category of hard goods is the car industry: it peaked about 45 years ago, as well. A closely related metric is national Vehicle Miles Traveled (from the Federal Highway Administration): it has peaked as well.

              Home construction and car sales; VMT; oil consumption. All have peaked in absolute terms. If we adjust them to per-capita terms we would see an actual, clear decline.

              The US has seen “peak goods”. GDP continues to grow due to value added to manufacturing (faster, better, etc.) and an expansion of services.

    2. So now there just making up CO2 numbers, but letting us know they are made up by putting a -e onto them, and expecting us to change our ways?

      1. Daybeer- if you want to take a minute to understand what the grownups are talking about, here is an explanation that even I was able to understand. Its actually pretty interesting.
        https://climatechangeconnection.org/emissions/co2-equivalents/

        ‘For example, sulphur hexafluoride is used to fill tennis balls. The table shows that a release on 1 kg of this gas is equivalent to 22,800 kg or 22.8 tonnes of CO2. ‘

      2. Hello Daybee,

        well a lot of things are “made up” , like RPI and GDP but in this context the term of
        “Carbon dioxide equivalent” or “CO2e” .

        For any quantity and type of greenhouse gas, CO2e signifies the amount of CO2 which would have the equivalent global warming impact. *

        Carbon dioxide (CO2)
        1
        Methane (CH4)
        25
        Nitrous oxide(N2O)
        298
        Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
        124 – 14,800
        Perfluorocarbons (PFCs)
        7,390 – 12,200
        Sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)
        22,800
        Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3)2
        17,200

        figures are over a time period of 100 years I believe.

        And as this a oil blog, BoE is often used ( and sometimes confused ) like Nat gas is on BP stats . also Russia uses metric tonnes instead of barrels , so conversion is required here too.

        this is all just normal in this world and to answer your last question , no , I don’t think it will change any ones ways in either camp.

        * credit to https://ecometrica.com

  4. Michael Bloomberg Launches Beyond Carbon, the Largest-Ever Coordinated Campaign Against Climate Change in United States

    New York, NY – In a commencement address today at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michael R. Bloomberg will launch Beyond Carbon, the largest coordinated campaign to tackle climate change ever undertaken in the United States. With a $500 million investment — the largest ever philanthropic effort to fight the climate crisis — Beyond Carbon will work to ­put the U.S. on track towards a 100% clean energy economy by working with advocates around the country to build on the leadership and climate progress underway in our states, cities, and communities. Bloomberg and his foundation joined forces with the Sierra Club in 2011 to launch Beyond Coal with the goal of closing at least a third of the country’s coal plants. With 289 of 530 closed to date – more than half the country’s coal fleet – Beyond Carbon will aim to close the rest by 2030 and stop the rush to build new gas plants.

    https://www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/michael-bloomberg-launches-beyond-carbon-the-largest-ever-coordinated-campaign-against-climate-change-in-united-states/

  5. I recently watched a video clip on YouTube of a Town Hall presentation featuring Elizabeth Warren in Fort Wayne, Indiana. At about a minute into the clip a member of the audience asks a question that can be viewed by going to the following URL, https://youtu.be/MVlGJcuzY3k?t=71

    For almost the entire following three and a half minutes there was one thing on my mind. 1366 Technologies.

    Regular readers will know that this company triggers a pet peeve of mine. Warren spoke about US taxpayer funded research that resulted in all sorts of technology that is the basis of multi-billion (trillion?) markets for consumer products, specifically mentioning Apple by name. She then went on to point out that the products resulting from US taxpayer funded research were being manufactured in China or other overseas locations. Which brings me back to 1366 Technologies. This company was based on MIT research as outlined in the following article:

    How 1366 Technologies went from the brain of an MIT professor to a wafer facility in Genesee County

    The 2015 article linked to above references a then proposed manufacturing facility that was supposed to be built in upstate New York. It never happened. Instead, this is what happened:

    US-Incubated Solar Technology Launches at Hanwha Factory in Malaysia

    America first?

    Though Sanderson said a U.S. plant “remains in [1366’s] strategic plan,” the company is looking for an exclusion from Section 201 tariffs to help make it happen. If the company manufactures in the U.S., it would like to see an exemption for cell and module manufacturers that use its product.

    “The ultimate goal is to make that path to a U.S. factory even clearer,” said Sanderson, who added that an exclusion is “smart policy in terms of supporting U.S. innovation and U.S. born technology.”

    The company does still maintain research and development facility in Bedford, Massachusetts that employs about 60 people.

    Locating a wafer plant in the U.S. would also be a boon to the struggling U.S. polysilicon market, which was dealt a blow earlier this month when REC Silicon announced it might temporarily shut down its Washington plant (the company has since decided to keep the plant running at 25 percent capacity). Most polysilicon demand now comes from China, which has leveraged duties against U.S. polysilicon companies, but Sanderson said a U.S. 1366 plant would use U.S. polysilicon.

    Brandon Hurlbut, a co-founder at business advisory group Boundary Stone Partners, said 1366’s move in Malaysia is a sign that the U.S. is losing out on opportunities to foster and capitalize on important technologies. That’s especially true for 1366, which he said “DOE nurtured…every step of the way.”

    Hurlbut worked as chief of staff at DOE when 1366 received its loan guarantee. He said the program is specifically designed to support technologies and companies that repay taxpayers, reap returns for the economy and create jobs.

    “We should be supporting these companies,” said Hurlbut. “The president says he’s for America first and he’s for infrastructure. Well, he’s got tens of billions of dollars sitting there.”

    “That’s not America first to me,” he added.

    Meanwhile, Hurlbut said, other countries such as China are “rolling out the welcome mat” for new technologies.

    In a strange coincidence, though I only saw it this morning, the video with Elizabeth Warren was posted on June 5 while the article below was posted on June 6:

    Prototype modules featuring ‘3D wafers’ on show at SNEC

    Prototype modules featuring 1366 Technologies’ 3D direct wafers were on show this week at the SNEC show in Shanghai, the fruit of a partnership between the U.S-based wafer startup and module manufacturer Hanwha Q Cells.

    According to 1366, the modules feature Q Cells’ PERC based Q.ANTUM technology, and have an expected power rating of 360 W. A company representative told pv magazine 1366’s technology roadmap anticipates efficiencies higher than 22% and the startup’s work to date indicates moving to thinner wafer designs can lead to better power output.

    I had not yet seen the Warren clip but I thought to myself, “Uh-Oh this stuff is now going to appear on the radar of the Chinese”, assuming it hadn’t already. Then I saw the Warren video. There is a real danger of China co-opting this technology to further consolidate their lead in the PV manufacturing space.

    Contrast all of this with the breathtakingly fast construction of Tesla’s new factory near Shanghai, China with the blessing and assistance of the Chinese government:

    Tesla Gigafactory 3’s latest developments hint at full speed interior work

    A recent flyover of Tesla’s Gigafactory 3 site in Shanghai, China, shows that work on the location continues to proceed at full speed. As could be seen in footage taken this Sunday, operation platforms are now present on the site, suggesting that the construction of the facility’s interior, as well as the preparations for the buildout of the factory’s assembly lines, is entering its initial phases.

    Other signs of the work being done in the interior of Gigafactory 3 include the fewer number of cranes on the area. Updated images of the facility’s interior are yet to emerge, though it is not too farfetched to speculate that Tesla’s construction partner is now getting sections of Gigafactory 3’s interior ready for the setup of the Model 3’s production equipment.

    Tesla intends to start manufacturing the Made-in-China Model 3 at Gigafactory 3 as early as possible. Provided that there will be no unexpected slowdowns in the construction of the facility, Gigafactory 3 might very well achieve its target of starting trial production runs of the Model 3 sometime in September.

    The Chinese are not known to have a great deal of respect for IP (what I call “imaginary property”) and there are organizations in China that will copy any product and mass produce it using the lowest cost materials possible with no regard for quality but, that is a subject for another post. For anyone who thinks it is fine for the US to just innovate and generate patent and then license the technology to Asian manufacturers and avoid “the hassle of manufacturing”, I would point out the lack of respect for IP that exists in some parts of the world. I would also suggest that it is a shortsighted philosophy and not good for long term economic development of the US. If I were a US citizen I would be furious that my government is coddling dying (FF) industries and not encouraging the large scale development of the industries of the future. If US citizens do not elect a government that is committed to turning the situation around, China’s dominance in the new energy and transportation industries will be overwhelming, assuming it is not already so.

      1. Right! So who is Neo, the superhero that is going to free the people from The Matrix? Elizabeth Warren?

        1. There is no super hero and no one is going to free the people!
          The Matrix will win until it runs out of human batteries…

          Cheers!

          1. I suppose our best hope at the moment is that the boys and girls will show up to do the job that the men and women haven’t quite managed, at least so far.

            https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/republicans-are-fueling-a-generation-of-democrats/

            I think a larger percentage of younger potential voters are going to actually VOTE going forward. I

            It’s getting easier all the time. Here in Virginia, you can register to vote at your local DMV office anytime you go there.

            And while the older generation has FAUX news, the younger generation has the internet in it’s back pocket or purse, and no longer depends on the local paper or one of the big three tv networks for the news.

            I don’t run into that many youngsters these days, a youngster by my definition being anybody with zero wrinkles, but I’m guessing more of them watch SNL and Stephen Colbert than watch Fox.

      2. Don’t even try coming to Texas and claiming FF industries are dying.

        1. In a few more years, the people who own oil refineries and pipelines and other such oil industry infrastructure in sunny and windy Texas are going to be running their own equipment on wind and solar juice, to the extent they can……. because it’s going to be more profitable to go that route, selling the oil and gas they are burning now to generate electricity, or to run ICE engines to drive pumps on pipelines, etc.

          They may put in their own wind and solar farms, or buy it from a utility… but either way, oil and gas deplete, and must inevitably get to be more expensive to produce,everything else held equal.

          The major oil industry players in sand country, the Middle East, are going to be doing the same thing….. building solar farms to generate as much juice as they can, because they will be able to sell half or more of the oil and gas they use now to generate electricity for more than it costs them to build solar farms.

          But I don’t think anybody who is working in Texas oil and gas today has to worry about the market for oil going away during his own working lifetime.

    1. Do you really want to bring hi-tech jobs back to America? It really isn’t that difficult. The problem is that it simply costs too much to make things in America compared to less developed countries with oppressive governments. Here’s how to do it:

      First eliminate all environmental regulations. Companies hate them because they cost money.

      Eliminate worker safety regulations (OSHA). Before we had them lots of workers died. That’s their problem!

      Eliminate those nasty, snoopy people that report on gifts from companies to government workers.

      Get rid of government assistance (except to corporations) of all kinds. If people are hungry enough they will work cheaper than even the Chinese.

      Re-elect Trump. He has a good start on these and other ways to bring back the good-old-days.

      Do I really have to say /s?

  6. How does a country or company compete with China? I have been looking at the phenomenon of Chinese knock offs with respect to particular products that I am interested in. Someone once told me that they had found a product that normally retails for US$7,000 for about one tenth that price on ebay, brand new. I told them it was fake and thought nothing more of it. I have seen a product from the same manufacturer selling used on ebay for US$1,500 which I assume was reasonable for a product that was probably more than five years old. A guy I know, who repairs this type of equipment told me that people in my neck of the woods, has told me that locals have bought the knock offs and brought them in to him for repairs and that the knock off can be made to work almost as well as the originals by upgrading some of the internal components to original spec, the rest of the item being virtually identical.

    Then there’s the issue of fake electronic components, an issue that has been raised to a national security issue as outlined in the following article that details the different aspects of counterfeiting:

    Counterfeit Chinese Microchips Are Getting So Good They Can’t Be Identified

    To understand how the situation has become so bad — and what can be done to mitigate the problems counterfeit parts cause — it helps to first distinguish between its corporate and military aspects of counterfeit electronics.

    Corporate Counterfeiting
    “As commercial conflicts become more critical to national security, industrial espionage is a very serious issue,” said Feuchtbaum. “The U.S. economy has been steadily shifting away from manufacturing to the development of its intellectual property. We are the genius that powers much of the world’s engines. If … our intellect/design/ingenuity can just be swiped pretty easily because of these products that have been installed that compromise our communications, the consequences for that could be grave.”

    The most expensive part of bringing an electronics product to market is research and development, followed by significant costs in maintaining quality control through production.

    So the way a manufacturer of genuine products makes up for overhead costs and increases profit margins is on the selling of the individual product from overseas plants.
    fake

    But counterfeit manufacturers don’t have much overhead.By developing stuff that kind of looks and functions like the genuine product — so that it passes initial testing and enters the marketplace — counterfeiters only pay the cheap cost to manufacture an inferior product.

    Then they “undersell the genuine manufacturers by very substantial amounts” to create a market force for their fake products.

    The result is that a company’s brand and corporate interests are damaged each time a purchased product fails or doesn’t perform up to its intended specifications.

    So here we have the most populous nation on earth, with a rapidly growing economy based on questionable ethics and an almost complete disregard for intellectual property. The Chinese government is either unwilling or unable to do anything about it, with the possibility that this could conceivably be a deliberate plan to destroy manufacturing capabilities all over the world to end up as “the last man standing”, so to speak. Who knows?

    The end result is that the world is being flooded with low cost manufactured goods that are often substandard or manufactured to the barest minimum of quality control standards. Millions and possibly billions of people who cant afford products that have been counterfeited are only too happy to have access to counterfeit products at knock down prices and often are quite willing to buy them even though they know they are fake. In the process, there is the very real risk that manufacturers of high quality goods might be driven into bankruptcy, leaving consumers with no choice but to purchase only cheap, low quality, throw away products.

    It goes even further than that though. I have seen videos on YouTube featuring fake eggs, fake (plastic) rice, minced meat made from cardboard and other fake food products, made in China. There are several videos showing how fake eggs are made. While these eggs are supposedly edible, I cannot imagine that they would taste good. It leads one to wonder what kind of society produces people that are willing to profit from making and distributing fake goods at such a scale.

    At the same time a lot of decent products are made in China. Many western companies no longer manufacture their products in their home countries, instead using Chinese to reduce manufacturing costs and increase margins. In the case of consumer electronics and computers a very large portion of products and components are made in China, some of which are decent quality products. I was just by my neighborhood gear heads earlier today and they tell me that a lot of the add-on performance parts they use can be had for a fraction of the price, if you buy Chinese made, unbranded products. They showed me some examples and they were precision machined products that did not appear to be low quality, as far as I cold tell. One also has to consider that China is producing roughly two thirds of global PV module production. I have seen examples of Chinese modules that appear to be very high quality and have seen others that were at the other end of the scale.

    It is obvious to me that many Chinese are quite willing to bend or break the rules when it comes to doing business in that:
    1) They do not respect intellectual property and are more than willing to copy designs outright, down to the smallest detail.
    2) When selling unbranded products, they often make not efforts at quality control putting profits ahead of quality.
    3) As contract manufacturers, they are willing to manufacture substandard products to ensure they get the manufacturing jobs, in cases where western manufacturers claim they cannot manufacture below a certain quality product.
    This is all backed by government policies that are aimed at making China the dominant nation in the world when it comes to manufacturing, leading one to wonder if the government is complicit in the questionable business practices that are happening.

    It appears to me that the situation is not as bad in Western Europe as it is in North America in that many of the companies in these countries see themselves as national institutions and would rather go out of business completely than transfer manufacturing of all of their products overseas. The auto industry is an example as are some appliance brands and industrial equipment manufacturers. One wonders if these European operations will be able to withstand the onslaught of lower cost, Chinese competitive products in the long run.

    Below are two pictures of fake electronic components (capacitors). On the left, the ones with gold graphics printed on them are a lower quality print than the white ones, have failed and are most likely fake, even though they appear otherwise identical. On the right a component with lower specifications has been encased in a larger component with higher values printed on the case.

    1. It will be interesting to see if China prefers to have trump shit re-elected.
      They have a big vote on this.
      If they decide they prefer a stupid guy in charge here, they will make a trade deal with trump before the elections.
      If they prefer to have him gone, they will hold out on a trade deal until just after he is gone, even though this will be painful for them in the short run.
      I’m not sure which way they lean.

    2. I don’t believe history is over, or that hot wars between major powers will never be fought again.

      It pains me to point out things that make Trump types look good, but the liberal establishment, and modern day conservative establishment ( meaning Trump types ) both have their heads up their asses so far they will NEVER see daylight again, so far as the BIG PICTURE of world power politics is concerned.

      The left gets its cookies bitching and pissing and moaning about the “American” empire, which absolutely does exist, and it absolutely has and does depend on the American iron fist in the proverbial velvet ( soft ) glove. By this I mean that we Yankees MOSTLY use actual military power only when our leaders believe it’s ESSENTIAL to do so, and use other methods the rest of the time. Such other methods include currency manipulation, keeping the world economy on the dollar, countless schemes designed to ensure our favorable position in relations with any and all other countries, etc.

      China is a rising power, and only people who have their heads up their asses can be so stupid as to think China won’t play the game to win, using whatever methods, tools, and weapons are available to them as a nation.

      This forum is an end product of the peak oil debate. Those of us who have actually read a little of the history of the oil biz know how companies ( countries) with deep pockets take over an industry, driving their competitors out of business, buying up the scraps at fire sale prices………

      The left believes this won’t , cannot, happen because the left is all goo goo stupid about being nice to everybody. The modern day right doesn’t even give a fuck, because it’s going to take a while for the game to play out……. and in the meantime, THEY are getting richer by the minute, and being who they are…….. they DO believe that in the long run, everybody is dead, themselves included, so WHY should they give a fuck?

      I shouldn’t be QUITE so hard on the right, because there are still a few conservatives around who are actually smart enough to remember that accumulating a billion or two isn’t going to matter to their grandchildren who, if they live at all, will live in a third world country under the iron heel of a country that won’t bother with the glove at all…….. if the Chinese win the BIG GAME.

      Sure economic theory tells us that both sides can win, that trade is good, that growth is good, that there can always be more for everybody.

      History and biology offer us different perspectives. Winners don’t necessarily give a fuck about the losers,as is amply proven by reading history, and the ONLY way Mother Nature keeps score is via the fossil record.

      Intellectual property is always easily stolen, and always will be. It’s physically impossible to steal a manufacturing industry……. if we hadn’t been so insanely stupid as to make the rest of the world a GIFT of our textile and furniture industries, and all the other industries we sent off shore in search of short term profits……… we wouldn’t be stuck with Trump today.

      Sure this entire comment is a one sided interpretation of the big picture. But anybody who doesn’t have his head up his ass too far to ever see daylight takes time to consider all aspects of existential issues and questions…….. and this IS an existential issue, in terms of the fate of the USA and western civilization as we know it.

      My elementary school history books taught me that the English used the American colonies as sources of raw materials, and markets for English manufactured goods, to our great loss, leading to our successful revolt and the founding of our country. The English used the glove when it worked, the fist when it didn’t.

      Now every time I go out, I drive past a three hundred acre clear cut a mile from home, where the finest oak trees for miles around were individually labeled and graded and loaded on trucks….. and then on ships…… and sent to China………. to either be used there, or manufactured into fine furniture…….. to be shipped BACK here ……. while our own FORMER furniture workers are on welfare or flipping burgers……… and voting for Trump.

      LIFE isn’t quite as simple as it is portrayed in economic texts , or corporate quarterly reports. It’s really about winners and losers at the ultimate level. The rules are ultimately made by people determined to win, by any means possible.

      None of this is to say cooperation and trade are bad things…. so long as one keeps his wits about him.

      But someday the shit is going to hit the fan, unless civilization collapses for other reasons sooner, in terms of hot war between major powers again, and all the intellectual property and universities in the USA won’t be worth shit….. because the actual manufacturing capacity needed for the production of all the things necessary to fight and win that war will be …… somewhere else, within the borders of an enemy country.

      Unless we change our ways.

      I HATE to sound like a fucking Trumpster……. but FAILURE to think like one is what got us Trump in the first place.

    3. While I agree about Chinese copies and fakes (had some motherboards fail because Intel bought a batch of fake caps) there is another side. Sometimes it isn’t the Chinese copying the west, the western companies look for Chinese goods then have them supplied with their own trademarking and sell them for a much higher price. It happens both ways.

      NAOM

  7. High-Tech can’t last: there are limited essential elements

    “This long post describes the rare metals and minerals phones, laptops, cars, microchips, and other essential high-tech products civilization depends on.

    Metals and minerals aren’t just physically limited, they can be economically limited by a financial collapse, which dries up credit and the ability to borrow for new projects to mine and crush ores. Economic collapse drives companies and even nations out of business, disrupting supply chains.

    Supply chains can also be disrupted by energy shortages and natural disasters. The more complex, the more minerals, metals, and other materials, machines, chemicals, a product depends on, the greater the odds of disruption.

    Minerals and metals can also be politically limited. China controls over 90% of some critical elements.

    And of course, they’re energetically limited. Once oil begins to decline, so too will mining and all other manufacturing steps, which all depend on fossil energy.

    The next war over resources is likely to be done via cyber-attacks that take down an opponent’s electric grid, which would affect nearly all of the other essential infrastructure such as agriculture; defense; energy; healthcare, banking, finance; drinking water and water treatment systems; commercial facilities; dams; emergency services; nuclear reactors, information technology; communications; postal and shipping; transportation and systems; government facilities; and critical manufacturing (NIPP).”

    EVs’ Limits to Growth

    “The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets [alone] for 2050 we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

    A 20% increase in UK-generated electricity would be required to charge the current 252.5 billion miles to be driven by UK cars…

    The metal resource needed to make all cars and vans electric by 2050 and all sales to be purely battery electric by 2035. To replace all UK-based vehicles today with electric vehicles (not including the LGV and HGV fleets), assuming they use the most resource-frugal next-generation NMC 811 batteries, would take 207,900 tonnes cobalt, 264,600 tonnes of lithium carbonate (LCE), at least 7,200 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium, in addition to 2,362,500 tonnes copper. This represents, just under two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018. Even ensuring the annual supply of electric vehicles only, from 2035 as pledged, will require the UK to annually import the equivalent of the entire annual cobalt needs of European industry.

    The worldwide impact: If this analysis is extrapolated…

    Challenges of using ‘green energy’ to power electric cars:

    If wind farms are chosen to generate the power for the projected two billion cars at UK average usage, this requires the equivalent of a further years’ worth of total global copper supply and 10 years’ worth of global neodymium and dysprosium production to build the windfarms.

    Solar power is also problematic – it is also resource hungry; all the photovoltaic systems currently on the market are reliant on one or more raw materials classed as “critical” or “near critical” by the EU and/ or US Department of Energy (high purity silicon, indium, tellurium, gallium) because of their natural scarcity or their recovery as minor-by-products of other commodities. With a capacity factor of only ~10%, the UK would require ~72GW of photovoltaic input to fuel the EV fleet; over five times the current installed capacity. If CdTe-type photovoltaic power is used, that would consume over thirty years of current annual tellurium supply.

    Both these wind turbine and solar generation options for the added electrical power generation capacity have substantial demands for steel, aluminium, cement and glass…”

  8. A question for Iron Mike, who has a masters in Physics. Anyone else may tune in with their opinion, however. We have broached this subject before, about a year or so ago. But I have read a few books and watched dozens of youtube videos, by physicists, since then and my opinion on the subject has really jelled from all this additional information I have gathered… from physicists.

    Mike, what is your opinion on the fine-tuning of the universe. I must add that if you google Closer to Truth the fine-tuned universe you will get videos of dozens of physicists giving their opinion on the subject. At least 19 out of 20 will agree that indeed the universe is fine-tuned for the evolution of stars, galaxies, and eventually rocky planets. Only one out of dozens will say something like, “Yes it seems to be but perhaps there is something in nature that just makes it seem that way.

    But about 70 to 80 percent, (actually I haven’t kept count but an overwhelming majority of them), will say yes, the universe is fine-tuned but that is explained by the multiverse hypothesis. (Not a theory mind you, just a hypothesis.) That is jillions and jillions of universes have been created, and are being created all the time, and one of them, ours, just happen to have all the right particles, forces, and laws that allowed stars, galaxies and eventually rocky planets to form. And of course, eventually life. We just won the lottery, that’s all.

    Others, Paul Davies, Luke Barnes, Roger Penrose just to name a few. Think this multiverse crap is a huge cop-out.

    I agree with Davies, Barnes, and Penrose. What’s your opinion?

    1. “This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’
      Douglas Adams

      1. Fred, that quote explains nothing. No physicist believes the universe was created for humans. Not one that I have ever read anyway. Yet they all agree, almost to the man/woman, that the universe is fine-tuned.

        However, you have put your finger squarely on the problem. People, or more correctly non-physicists, eschew the fine-tuning argument because it smacks of religion. However, it has not one goddammed thing to do with religion. Most physicists, who can clearly see the fine-tuning of the universe, opt for the multiverse nonsense because they want to steer clear of anything that remotely resembles religion.

        Christopher Hitchens was right, religion poisons everything. It even poisons science, especially physics.

        1. No physicist believes the universe was created for humans.

          LOL! And neither do I. My comment was intended to be tongue in cheek!
          Which you came quite close to acknowledging… 😉

          However, you have put your finger squarely on the problem.

    2. Ron,

      Um…we’re in a universe that allows us to exist, instead of one that doesn’t?

      1. Yes, of course. But that statement says nothing. It is in no way related to the question I asked. Did you understand my question at all? Did you understand that perhaps 95% of all those physicists on youtube, all of them have a Ph.D., agree that the universe is fine-tuned?

        So don’t reply to me, reply to them, are they all full of shit or not?

        1. It’s fine tuned because we are here; we are here because it is fine-tuned?
          If so, it sounds like circular reasoning.

          “…are they all full of shit…?” ~ Ron Patterson

          Stardust?

          1. Really now? Where did you get such a screwed up opinion as that? Just who said it was fine-tuned because we are here? No one, you just made that shit up.

            1. Ok, so fine tuned for life then?
              (I wrote, if by the way and added a question-mark to the end of the sentence.)

            2. Ok, so fine tuned for life then?

              Fine-tuned for life because we are here?

              And just who said that? Again, no one. Such an argument makes no sense at all. Perhaps that’s the reason no one is making it.

              Because the conditions that allow us to be here does not mean that those conditions were just for us. It’s a big universe. As I told Mike, if only one in every one hundred billion stars have a rocky planet capable of supporting life, liquid water and all that, then there would still be upwards of two hundred billion such planets in the known universe. Incidentally that would mean there would be only two such planets in the Milky Way Galaxy.

            3. Only two such planets in the entire galaxy? Wow.
              How’s your trip going BTW? Are you netcasting with your expensive equipment?

            4. Yes, if only one in every one hundred billion stars had a rocky planet in the goldilocks zone, where liquid water could be, then that would mean only about two planets in a galaxy like ours. Yet there would be upwards of 200 billion such planets in the entire universe.

              My trip is going great though I am going to cut it short in a couple of weeks to help my lady friend move from Pensacola Fl. to Las Cruces New Mexico.

              I am not netcasting yet and won’t be for several months. My equipment isn’t expensive at all. My camera cost about $200. And all the other stuff less than $100. I already had my computer.

            5. Good to hear about your trip.
              As for a galaxy’s sparse population, if so, it’s small wonder why we haven’t found or heard of any life yet.

          2. The anthropic principle is not circular reasoning. It is just a type of “survivor bias.” We can only observe a Universe that allows us to be here.

            As only what is inside our Universe is amenable to us, it is idle speculation to entertain notions about other universes.

            It is very difficult that other planets might have conditions that allow life to evolve into conscious. The Earth was too small and didn’t have a large metallic nucleus prior to the chance collision that created the Moon and gave the Earth its melted metallic interior that once partially solidified formed the geomagnetic field that prevents the solar wind from stripping oxygen from its atmosphere as it has happened to Mars. Without that chance accident we would not be here.

            CO2 is released from the interior of the Earth by tectonic activity. As the planet cools down tectonic activity decreases and CO2 has a decreasing trend for the past half billion years. In just 150 million years tectonic activity might be too low to produce sufficient CO2, according to some experts. Plants have already evolved multiple times the C4 strategy to cope with the low CO2 levels of the Late Cenozoic. When CO2 levels get low enough complex life will become extinct as food chains unravel. This will happen much much earlier than the Sun becoming so big as to scorch the Earth.

            1. Mysterious cosmos
              Why is our Universe so exquisitely tuned to host life? Using the anthropic principle to explain the world might be a tempting alternative to invoking God, but it’s not science, says Philip Ball.

              “We are lucky to be alive. Extraordinarily lucky. So lucky, in fact, that some people can only see God’s hand in our good fortune.

              Creationists are fond of pointing out that if you mess with the physical laws of the Universe just a little, we wouldn’t be here. For example, if the neutron were just 1% heavier, or the proton 1% lighter, or the electron were to have 20% more electrical charge, then atoms could not exist. There would be no stars, and no life.

              But although creationists rejoice in the divine providence that has made the Universe exquisitely contrived to support life, science has long argued for an alternative explanation: the anthropic principle.

              The theory has been supported by several leading physicists and astronomers, from Fred Hoyle to Steven Weinberg, who claim it reduces the mystery of our existence to a logical necessity.

              Yet the whole idea is roundly trashed by Lee Smolin, a renowned quantum-gravity theorist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada. Smolin asserts, in a preprinted paper on Arxiv1, that the anthropic principle is not a scientific theory at all, because it lacks the basic requirement of falsifiability. It is impossible to prove the anthropic principle wrong – hence it is outside the remit of science.”

            2. Of course it is not science. It is philosophy, as you would know if you had hit the link to Wikipedia: It says so in the first phrase. So it is a strawman argument, as I never said it was science.

              Science is self-limited to its subjects. If you make questions that science can’t answer you can only get answers from philosophy or religion. Whether you find those answers satisfying or not is up to you.

              Nobel prize recipient Jacques Monod wrote a very influential book in 1971: Le Hasard et la Nécessité where he showed that life is the result of pure chance and selection, without any need to invoke final causality. His ideas can be extended to the entire Universe evolution. This universe has allowed the evolution of this life through chance and necessity. Each step looks like a miraculous implausibility. The Drake equation is just the most stupid idea, trying to make probabilities out of conjecture. Perhaps there is life somewhere else in the universe or perhaps not. Most likely we will never know.

              The anthropic principle is an intelligent observation even if it does not explain anything. No final causality is required. A universe that does not allow life will not be studied. A universe that is studied allows life. Its conditions will be found to be compatible with life.

            3. I’m a Smolin fan, and agree the multi universe is a way for confused beings to feel comfortable.
              After the Standard Model was completed (1970’s) we have been wondering in nowhere land in Physics (essentially).
              It has been a while.

              The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next

              https://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/061891868X

              “Nothing is moving in the foundations of physics. One experiment after the other is returning null results: No new particles, no new dimensions, no new symmetries.”

              The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal
              http://nautil.us/blog/the-present-phase-of-stagnation-in-the-foundations-of-physics-is-not-normal

            4. Maybe the multiverse hypothesis with different knob-tweakings tunings is a trick to make the fine-tuning hypothesis work, because if something is fine-tuned for something, then it could conceivably be fine-tuned for something else, or out-of-tune for nothing much in particular.

              Maybe said hypotheses are, in turn, designed to maintain a physics career in the face of a floundering discipline.

              Dog Goes Weightless In Airplane with Zero Gravity

    3. Thanks Ron.

      This is a very hard question for me to answer. I’ll start off by saying that, me personally am very much against the multiverse hypothesis, I believe it falls into the not even wrong category as does most of modern theoretical physics. I am firmly in the camp of the experimentalists.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong

      I’ll try to give my opinion regarding your question. Bear in mind, the unknowns are always much greater than the knowns, so i’ve always tried to base my opinion on the knowns regarding such questions as to not invoke the god of the gaps.

      There is certain aspects of the universe which make me inclined to lean more towards the fine-tuning argument. For e.g. quantum tunneling (one which is not often mentioned). When it comes to star formation, main sequence stars don’t reach hot enough temperatures in their cores to initiate nuclear fusion. So without quantum tunneling there would not be any main sequence stars like the sun. Quantum tunneling allows the coulomb barrier to break to initiate nuclear fusion. If this wasn’t the case, only huge stars would exist and their life-cycle is ~ 10 million years. Nowhere enough time for life to evolve.

      Then there is the myriad of fundamental constants and their relationship to each other. Any tweaking would fundamentally change the universe as we know it. And there there is a list of unknowns one of which suggests we live in a special time in the universe to see all these things play out (as there is an energy balance between dark matter and dark energy).
      https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/cosmic-coincidences/

      On the other hand for me, now this is going to shock people. I believe we are alone in the universe, in the sense that we are the only intelligent life. In my opinion, the probability of a protein molecule, let alone an RNA or DNA molecule forming is EXTREMELY rare. There is a great video here which discusses this possibility.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqEmYU8Y_rI

      Also entropy comes into play for me in such a question lol. We define entropy as the arrow of time. So as time goes on, entropy keeps increasing. It will eventually end once we reach thermal equilibrium (Heat death), assuming that is how the universe ends. It is a relentless force and one can see it play out everyday. For me life seems to a constant battle against entropy, hence the need for reproduction. If the universe is life friendly why have entropy to begin with ? Life is a form of negentropy within a bigger system whose overall entropy is always increasing, this is what creationists ignore.

      Sorry for rambling on here. But i am going to disappoint and say, I honestly don’t know whether the universe is fine-tuned or not. It seems to me to be a dichotomy which cannot possibly be solved.

      1. Mike, thanks for the reply. My opinion is that the universe is very finely tuned. That is the opinion of about 90 to 95% of the physicists that I have read or watched on youtube videos. And I would not dare argue with such a consensus of opinions from such accomplished physicists as that. I think I would be a damn fool to do so. That is, I would be a damn fool to argue with such a huge consense of opinion from the best-known physicists in the world. But I do know many others who would have no problem telling these learned doctors of physics that they are all full of crap. 😉

        I disagree with you that we are alone in the universe. Here is my reasoning:

        1. If only one in every one hundred billion stars has a planet capable of supporting life, there would still be up to two hundred billion stars in the universe capable of supporting life.

        2. The first stars did not form until about 750 million years after the big bang. These stars had to then gather together in galaxies. These first stars then had to explode, scatter heavier elements out into the galaxy. These heavier elements had to circle new, second-generation stars and form rocky planets. This process had to take many more millions of years. Yet the exact particles, forces, and laws that enabled this to be created in the first tiny fraction of a second of the big bang. That is, every particle, force and universal law had to be in place in that tiny fraction of a second for something that would not happen for almost a billion years later.

        Okay, if everything had to be in place during the first fraction of a second after the big bang for the formation of rocky planets with liquid water a billion years later, then it just follows that everything was in place for the possible evolution of life a few billion years later.

        1. Hi Ron,

          I don’t have any problem with your rejection of the multiverse hypothesis….. other than that you have no evidence on which to base this rejection.

          An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

          We ought to get something straight, which is the VERY DEFINITION of the word universe.

          I grew up believing it meant and means EVERYTHING that exists, or might exist, in case the “might” applies.

          These days, and for some time back, the word universe has been redefined to mean only such physical phenomena as we have actual EVIDENCE of.

          This of course requires us to make a distinction between things we know about, or at least THINK we know about, and things that MIGHT exist, things that we have no conception of, because we have no instruments to detect such things, no direct or indirect evidence of their existence .

          Within the last few hundred years we have come to accept that things formerly considered impossible, or at least extremely unlikely, are real, from evolution to radioactivity to microscopic life to lighter than air flight ……. I could go on a while.

          I can’t see any reason to reject the multiverse hypothesis other than that those who reject it do so out of a hard headed ( and usually justified) determination to believe in only such things as they KNOW are possible.

          I don’t have a degree in physics, nor in biology, but I have a lot of courses in biology, and I have read quite extensively in evolutionary theory.

          We don’t actually KNOW what the earliest forms of life were like, and we don’t even have a clear and undisputed dividing line to differentiate between things that are alive, or used to be alive, or MIGHT be alive, and things that are definitely dead or that have never lived.

          We do know now that various physical processes in the natural non living world can and do result in the creation of some rather complicated molecules, and films of such molecules, that can act like bags or bubbles, and trap some things inside, and some outside, etc. Sometimes circumstances are such that such barriers are selectively permeable, or impermeable, allowing some molecules to pass thru, others not, depending on heat, acidity, amount of water present in the substrate, etc. I’m not arguing that life is present in such a case.. but rather that with a great deal of additional research we might eventually tease out at least one possible way life originated.

          It’s not impossible at all, in fact it’s almost for sure extremely likely that DNA, RNA, and similar super molecules are EVOLVED molecules, that came into existence via evolution from simpler molecules in simpler organisms than we see today.

          Some very famous astronomer or another once revealed his ignorance of freshman level biology by stating categorically that evolution could not possibly have produced an EYEBALL, that it would be far more likely for a tornado to tear thru a wrecking yard and assemble a working airliner in the process.

          The million monkeys randomly typing forever will never in a billion years recreate Shakespeare’s work, not even in ten billion years.

          But evolution doesn’t work in a purely random fashion. When a minor mutation creates a tiny little accidental change in a nerve cell in the skin, so that it’s slightly more sensitive to heat or cold or pressure, thereby conferring additional survival value…… that mutation is preserved. When another little accidental mutation comes about, it is preserved as well…… if the combination adds to survival value or fitness.

          Folks who are only into mechanical stuff can look at the evolution of the wheel, from probably a toy to a piece of wood or rock used as a roller to help move heavy stuff to a primitive wooden slab slab shaped into a cart wheel to a spoked wooden wheel… to a modern alloy auto wheel with a tire…….. Evolution and engineering ( much of the time ) are incremental processes that work by preserving useful changes, and building on them.

          I don’t think any biologist with tenure at any respectable university will argue other wise than that DNA and RNA and other such molecules are evidence of,and the RESULT of prior evolution, no disrespect intended to anybody.

          I’m not qualified to say much about physics, but I’m pretty damned sure I’m on solid ground talking about evolution.

          I strongly urge anybody who has not done so to read Darwin, and to read some later works on evolution, such as Dawkins books The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker.

          Neither Darwin nor Dawkins gets every last detail right, but it’s impossible imo to argue against either of them in any truly meaningful fashion.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker

          1. I don’t have any problem with your rejection of the multiverse hypothesis….. other than that you have no evidence on which to base this rejection.

            Mac, it is hard to believe that you don’t see the absurdity in that statement. If I told you there was a teapot in the orbit of Pluto, then I asked you to disprove it, you would think I was crazy, and justifiably so. You would insist that the burden of proof was upon me. Plus, you would likely point out that one cannot prove the non-existence of anything.

            Is there evidence of the existence of an infinite number of universes out there? Is there one iota of evidence of even half a dozen universes? No, there is not.

            Even those who believe in the multiverse crap will readily admit that there is no evidence to support the hypothesis. But at least most of them are honest. They will readily admit is to get around the fine-tuning problem. Not one of them would have the audacity to ask anyone to show evidence of the non-existence of the multiverse. And I will not ask you for evidence disproving my teapot orbiting Pluto hypothesis.

            I will not comment on your complaint that Darwin and Dawkins just don’t get it. You can take that Dawkins. You cannot argue with Darwin, he is dead.

            1. David Deutsch believes quantum computers are evidence of the multiverse.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Deutsch

              In his book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch details his “Theory of Everything.”

              The calculations are happening in parallel universes.

              I am not remotely intelligent/educated enough to agree or disagree

            2. The calculations are happening in parallel universes.

              Oh, now I understand where you are coming from. Parallel Universes no less.

              Nuff said.

            3. I didn’t say it. David Deutsch did.

              I have no clue if he is correct.

              But he certainly is no slouch.

            4. I think the parallel universe Ron Patterson wrote that, not our universe Ron Patterson.

            5. Hi Ron,

              I don’t get your last line, that Dawkins and Darwin don’t get it.

              The portion of my comment about evolution, Darwin, and Dawkins is to show that Mike doesn’t understand evolution. I have zero doubt he has forgotten three or four years worth of math I never learned, but his contention that the likelihood of DNA just sort of happening shows that he has not even freshman college level understanding of what and how evolution IS and how it works.

              YOUR contention that we should dismiss the multiverse hypothesis is in my opinion the result of boneheaded conservatism, a conviction that we know all there is to know, that we will never discover new phenomena.

              Your whole fucking DEFINITION of universe, as the term is used these days, is simply STUPID.

              It leads people with a lack of comprehension of the fact that we don’t know everything to assume that we DO know everything, and that nothing that is unknown CAN EXIST.

              NO. Our comprehension of the universe has been expanding for millenia now. It’s only a few centuries since we have had sure knowledge of the basic structure of the solar system…… and how long ago was it that we believed the earth was only, could only be, a few million years old at the oldest ?

              How long ago was it that we came to realize that we are a little insignificant planet circling an insignificant star in a backwater arm of a very ordinary and common place galaxy, one of billions of galaxies, rather than the whole of the universe?

              You seem to be awfully sure that because there is no proof of other ” universes” there aren’t any.

              I personally prefer to think that so long as the word itself means ANYTHING, it means EVERYTHING that exists.

              So now lets look at it from this radically different perspective and the question becomes not whether ther are other universes out there, but rather whether we know all there is to know about the ONLY ONE, by DEFINITION.

              I’m open minded about this question. Maybe there are ” other universes” that will forever be unknown and unknowable to us….. There’s no evidence that this is true…….

              But WHERE is the evidence it’s not?

              https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/may/02/stephen-hawkings-final-theory-sheds-light-on-the-multiverse

              From wikipedia, here’s a list of physicists, who are eminently well qualified, who support the multiverse hypthesis.

              Proponents of one or more of the multiverse hypotheses include Hugh Everett,[23] Brian Greene,[24][25] Max Tegmark,[26] Alan Guth,[27] Andrei Linde,[28] Michio Kaku,[29] David Deutsch,[30] Leonard Susskind,[31] Alexander Vilenkin,[32] Yasunori Nomura,[33] Raj Pathria,[34] Laura Mersini-Houghton,[35][36] Neil deGrasse Tyson,[37] Sean Carroll[38] and Stephen Hawking.[39]

              Among these physicists are professors at some of the worlds best respected universities, including Greene at Columbia, Guth and Tegmark at MIT, Linde at Stanford,
              Deutsch at Oxford, Suskind at Stanford, Vilenkin at Tufts, Nomura at UC Berkeley , Mersini Houghtin at the UNC Chapel Hill, Tyson director of the Hayden Planetarium, and of course Hawking at Cambridge.

              If I ‘m simply IMAGINING things, I’m in good company.

              Of course I’m willing to admit I might be all wrong.
              Here’s a list, also from wikipedia, of skeptics.

              Scientists who are generally skeptical of the multiverse hypothesis include: David Gross,[40] Paul Steinhardt,[41][42] Anna Ijjas,[42] Abraham Loeb,[42] David Spergel,[43] Neil Turok,[44] Viatcheslav Mukhanov,[45] Michael S. Turner,[46] Roger Penrose,[47] George Ellis,[48][49] Joe Silk,[50] Carlo Rovelli,[51] Adam Frank,[52] Marcelo Gleiser,[52] Jim Baggott[53] and Paul Davies.[54]

        2. And the fine tuning of the universe is one of the points that the stem-cell scientist Robert Lanza concludes points to consciousness preceding matter (in his book Biocentrism).

        3. So the question that would naturally follow the conclusion that the universe is fine-tuned for life is:
          Who fine-tuned it? Or why is it fine-tuned that way? How would you answer that?

          1. Well, that first question would normally follow. That is who, or what did the fine-tuning. But that is a philosophical question, not one for science. That question is beyond scientific discourse. In my opinion, whatever or whoever created the universe is incomprehensible.

            The second question, why, is not even a question a philosopher should even attempt to answer. What is incomprehensible will always remain so.

            1. Hmm. Sounds religious to me. Too much like “it’s a mystery”, and “we’re not meant to know the mind of god”.

              How about a simple “We don’t know yet.”??

            2. No, it is not religious at all. That is the goddamn problem, the religious nuts want to make it religious. Religion implies worship. It implies a personal god who desires to be worshipped. The desire to be worshipped is the vainest of all human emotions.

              A personal god who will send you to everlasting fire if you don’t believe in him. But he loves you. And he wants money. He always needs money. He is all powerful but he just can’t handle money. (Apologies to George Carlin)

              How about a simple “We don’t know yet.”??

              Yet?? No, you simply don’t understand the magnitude of the problem. An entity, or whatever, that could bring into existence, in a fraction of a second, all the particles, forces, and laws that would cause stars with rocky planets to form one billion years later is beyond human comprehension. It’s just that some people have a problem believing anything is beyond human comprehension.

              And yes, the problem is, that to so many many people, it does sound religious. That’s why no one will acknowledge the problem, it just smacks of religion. That really pisses me off. It has not one goddamn thing to do with religion.

            3. Well, when I said religion I was thinking of just not thinking about things in a fresh, flexible way: something that one believes due to authority or arbitrary principles, rather than based on observation and reasoning.

              In this case, there is no evidence one way or the other for the idea that something is beyond comprehension. Just to clarify, I’m not thinking about whether the Big Bang was created by someone, just…having more satisfying answers to the origin of the universe than “it just started at an arbitrary point, with arbitrary matter and laws, who knows why?”.

              “I don’t know” is frustrating. It’s embarrassing. Doctors have been telling patients for centuries that their problems were “in their head”, or incurable, when the truth was….they just didn’t know. But they were unable to say “I don’t know”, or “We don’t know, yet, but we’re working on it”.

              I don’t know why doctors or physicists can’t say that they just don’t have all the answers. Why can’t they just admit it, and say they’re working on finding a better answer?

            4. In this case, there is no evidence one way or the other for the idea that something is beyond comprehension.

              I beg to differ. Every particle in the universe was created in a tiny fraction of a second of the big bang. Every force that would bind them together was created in the first tiny fraction of the big bang. Every law of the universe was created in the first tiny fraction of the big bang.

              And all these things combined would work together to create the first stars, the first galaxies 750 million years later. And these stars would explode throwing the first heavy elements out into the galaxies. And these heavy elements would form rocky planets around new second generation stars that would contain all the elements for the creation of life about one billion years after the big bang.

              And everything for this eventual happening was put in place in the first tiny fraction of the big bang.

              And you say that there is no evidence that this, this happening in that first fraction of a second is beyond human comprehension? You think that we might one day figure it all out?

              Okay, if you say so.

        4. For all practical purposes Iron Mike is correct. Life in the Solar System was the result of a freak accident. The collision between another planet and the Earth. As a result the Earth and the Moon form a binary planet that must be extremely unusual and it is possible that the Moon has been essential to stabilize the obliquity of the Earth’s axis over time allowing a very long evolution of life over land.

          This universe is huge and distances are enormous. Nothing can travel faster than light. If only one in a hundred billion stars has life, than would mean less than a dozen stars in our galaxy and the closest one should be many thousands of light years away.

          For all practical purposes we are alone and the search for planets with life is a waste of time.

          1. Carlos Diaz,

            Just to clarify, i think the possibility of simple “lifeforms” is rare but most likely possible, not just on planets but possibly within the interstellar medium of galaxies.
            Complex lifeforms, very low probability, the conditions, natural selection, stability of the climate etc ( the things you mentioned in your comment above). Seems implausible but still somewhat possible.
            Intelligent life, close or equal to zero probability. The circumstances of this occurring is just unfathomable.

            It seems the universe is more finely tuned for simple lifeforms rather than complex or intelligent. I think one can confidently make that statement.

            1. There’s no reason at all to assume that the universe is TUNED so as to allow life to exist. It’s infinitely simpler to assume that either we don’t know all about THE UNIVERSE we live in, and that there may be parts of it where the physical laws known to us don’t always or necessarily apply, OR that the KNOWN universe is only one of many universes unknown to us, where the laws are different and life as we know it could not exist.

              It’s much much simpler and cleaner to assume we are just the lucky lottery winners, marveling at our luck, that the numbers all line up on OUR ticket, so that we can exist. That way we don’t have to assume we exist on some sort of very special plane DESIGNED by SOMETHING OR SOMEBODY with deliberate intent.

              And furthermore there’s no real reason to assume that advanced life forms will not evolve on any planet where simple life evolves or arrives via space rocks or whatever.

              If the planet has water, minerals, an atmosphere, and varied climate, not too hot or too cold, etc,evolution is INEVITABLE, and more advanced or technically complex forms of life are expected to evolve, in accordance with evolutionary theory, because complexity confers survival value, under many many many scenarios.

              This is not to say intelligent life WILL evolve on any given planet, even if it has favorable geological and other properties, such as liquid water, varied climate, etc. But evolution is inevitable, so long as life survives on any such planet. How complex it gets to be, after billions of years, is an entirely open question.

              People who want to see something SPECIAL about humans that sets us apart from the rest of the living world generally have their heads up their intellectual ass, presuming and claiming that speech is unique to humanity, that critical thinking or thinking at all is unique to humanity, that human behaviors are unique to humanity, etc.

              We may not have known better prior to a couple of hundred years ago, but we certainly know better NOW. The vocabulary of crows and chimps may be VERY limited compared to the human vocabulary, but denying that it composes a LANGUAGE is pure and simple bullshit……. UNLESS you are unwilling to consider that LANGUAGE, simply defined, consists of, IS, verbal communication among humans, and apply the SAME definition to chimps and crows vocalizations.

              Assuming that intelligence has not or never will evolve on other worlds is an example of the ultimate conceit of such people who get their cookies feeling superior to the rest of the living world.

              Having said all this, it IS very likely that the nearest intelligent alien species is probably a great many light years away, because there aren’t that many stars nearby, etc. and not many of those that are nearby will have planets with the right conditions for life, and of those, not many are likely to actually HAVE life, and out of THAT remainder, probably only one, more likely NONE have intelligent life.

              But the known universe has so many stars it boggles the mind to even try to comprehend how many there are, so that there are likely billions of planets somewhere in it that host life. Out of those billions, it’s likely that lots of intelligent species exist or have existed or will exist in the future.Millions of them.

              This is about simple arithmetic. Nothing more. Nothing less. Plus a freshman university biology major’s level of understanding of well accepted evolutionary theory.

              And it’s for damned sure we have a better grasp of evolutionary theory than we do of astrophysical theory, having had many thousands of scientists working on it for going on two centuries now, compared to a few hundred astrophysicists who have had good instrumentation other than visible light telescopes for only the last few decades.

        5. Reading all of this leads me to what I consider very fundamental questions that have nagged me ever since I heard the big bang theory and even when I read Genesis. I won a debate back in sixth form (12th and 13th grade of the UK style secondary education system), arguing the the story of Genesis was in fact the story of evolution, written in a language that the folks back then could understand. With the scientific knowledge that existed back then, it would have been impossible to describe the formation of the planet and the evolution of life as we know it in any other way. I did not believe that a belief in science was necessarily a contradiction of the story of Genesis. That was back circa 1979-1980 and of course, the internet as we now know it did not exist. Had the technology we use now been in place, I would have known for sure I was not alone, as shown in the following Huffington Post article that makes precisely the same arguments I made back in high school:

          Genesis And Science: More Aligned Than You Think? | HuffPost

          Having said that, here are some of my questions.

          What existed before the big bang? In the big bang I assume something exploded. What was that thing that exploded during the big bang? If heavier elements were all created by fusion of lighter elements in the fusion engines that are stars, then at the time of the big bang, I assume the only element in existence was hydrogen. Where did all that hydrogen come from? Something cannot be created from nothing, so whatever exploded must have existed before the big bang.

          I’m also curious as to what lies beyond the universe? What is the universe expending into? Are there any limits to the expansion of the universe? Will black holes eventually get so massive and have such expansive event horizons that they all start to coalesce into one giant, super massive black hole that swallows the entire universe? Then what? Is that when time would come to an end?

          I suppose that all leads to perhaps the most fundamental question, when did time begin and when will it end?

          1. islandboy

            I’ll attempt to answer some of those questions you posed.

            What existed before the big bang?

            This isn’t a scientific question. When you mention the word before, it implies time. In the current cosmological model, space and time began with the big bang. Science deals with what occurs within the space-time continuum. Anything beyond that is outside of scientific inquiry.

            What was that thing that exploded during the big bang?

            I believe the current understanding is an infinitely dense singularity filled with matter-antimatter particles annihilating each other. There was obviously an asymmetry between matter and antimatter. This is one of the unsolved problems in cosmology. Baryon asymmetry
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_asymmetry

            Where did all that hydrogen come from?

            The hydrogen was what was left over after the annihilation ended.

            I suppose that all leads to perhaps the most fundamental question, when did time begin and when will it end?

            Time began with the big bang. The ending of the universe is not known. But there are 3 main scenarios that could play out depending on the friedman equations. And whether the cosmological constant is actually a constant, or does it change with time possibly. If it is a variable it is called quintessence. For entertainment purposes i believe the cyclic universe model is an interesting one. If expansion turns into contraction, one possibility is that entropy will start to decrease. And if anyone was alive to witness it, it would be a rather bizarre world.

        6. The universe is finely tuned to support life forms like ours because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe it. That’s what physicists call the Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Since the universe has to be tune that way anyway for the conversation to start, it’s hard to us it as proof of anything.

          Invoking a deity to explain the wonders of the universe is pointless, because you end up with with the question of how the deity came to be, which is at last as mysterious as the question of how the universe came to be.

          Or, to quote Bertrand Russell:

          If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’

          1. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, ‘How about the tortoise?’ the Indian said, ‘Suppose we change the subject.’
            .

          2. The universe is finely tuned to support life forms like ours because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.

            The last half of that sentence, after “because” is true. But the first half, including the “because”, is meaningless. That is not a reason so the sentence makes no sense whatsoever.

            Invoking a deity to explain the wonders of the universe is pointless, because you end up with with the question of how the deity came to be, which is at last as mysterious as the question of how the universe came to be.

            If you solve one question but that leads to an even mystery, that does not make it pointless. Of course, it leads to a deeper mystery. But that is just what science does. Almost every mystery science solves leads to an even deeper mystery. That does not mean it was pointless to solve the first mystery.

            But that’s not the point. Everybody misses the fucking point. Fred Hoyle was an atheist. But after many years of study and experimenting, he finally solved the carbon resonance problem. He said, “It’s a put up job.” He never became religious, however. He had better sense than that. Most people don’t have that much sense. They think if there was a mind or consciousness had anything to do with it, then that is religion. That is just small minded bullshit.

            Talk:Fred Hoyle

            How about “The Universe is a put up job”, a one liner that is very evocative, though I don’t know where Hoyle wrote or said it. His teleological views were the result of his work in nucleosynthesis. The higher elements are nicely cooked up in the interior of suns, and stacked like onion rings from near the centre out. When the star reaches its end and blows up in a nova, or less dramatically sheds its outer rings, those elements are widely dispersed into interstellar space where they can later coalesce and form planets with complex geological and organic forms. Hoyle thought this entire process was so exquisitely geared to encourage the growth of complexity in the universe, that it must have some kind of intelligent hand behind it.

            And the point is, that there is a point. That is, as Hoyle put it, the Universe is a put up job. There is a point to the universe. It was not just an accident. It has meaning, a reason for being.

          3. I know little about these subjects.
            I offer up this one simple notion-

            The universe is not fined tuned.
            It just is what it is.
            On the other hand,
            Life on earth, is extremely fine tuned to the Universe
            (or atleast this little corner of it).

            1. Stepping into the realm of belief-

              I believe that for all practical purposes,
              Gravity is real.

              I believe that for all practical purposes,
              Life only happened once. Here…

              [be nice to it]

            2. The universe is not fined tuned.

              I know little about these subjects.

              That is quite obvious.

              I have a problem here. Why do so many people who know nothing of physics insist that the universe is not fine-tuned when a vast majority of physicists insist that it is? Why do people who know virtually nothing about physics insist they know more about the physics of the universe than these noted physicists do? Why?

              Go to the link below for an opinion by about a hundred physicist who insist that the universe is fine-tuned and a couple of biologists who doubt that it is.

              Is the universe fine tuned?

              There is ONE physicist who doubts that the universe is fine-tuned, Sean Carrol. And even he opts for the multiverse theory as a possibility for what he calls the “apparent” fine-tuning.

            3. Got it- obviously I/we tend to embarrass ourselves when we speak about things we know nothing about. Thanks for the gentle reminder.

            4. Best to stay away from these purpose built traps and not follow the rabbit down the hole.

    4. @Ron
      I would tend to agree that the universe is fine tuned – for this universe. However, if the universe was a different one then the fine tuning may be different. It tends to fly in the face of science to base the concept on a single example, though we seem to be short of other examples to study 🙂 I only ‘tend’ to agree since we still do not have a complete picture of the physics. There are still unexplained anomalies in the cosmic background radiation, a possibility of a new heavier Higgs Boson existing, no certainty that the standard model is complete, no Grand Unified Theory, questions about strings and the number of dimensions etc. I think that we can only claim fine tuning once we can answer all the questions.

      NAOM

      1. About 95% of all the notable physicist in the world would disagree with you. They are claiming fine-tuning right now. And I’ll be dammed if I am going to argue with them.

        Everyone should realize that if there were not a fine-tuning problem then there would be no multiverse hypothesis. It was posited only to explain the obvious fine-tuning of the universe.

          1. Peak Beer, nowhere on the webpage you posted did David Deutsch make that statement. There is no evidence for the multiverse and David Deutsch, to my knowledge, does not claim there is. Here is the only place he mentions anything resembling the multiverse. And he says “multiversal” not “the multiverse:

            In his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, Deutsch details his “Theory of Everything.” It aims not at the reduction of everything to particle physics, but rather mutual support among multiversal, computational, epistemological, and evolutionary principles. His theory of everything is somewhat emergentist rather than reductive. There are four strands to his theory:

            1. “Quantum computation […] will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes” – David Deutsch, “The Fabric of Reality

              https://sociable.co/technology/quantum-computing-multiverse/

              I’m pretty sure when I read his book that is what he was saying.

              I have no clue if he is right or not.

              I was just trying to point out that there are credible physicists who “support” the multiverse hypothesis.

              I believe Hugh Everett (Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics) and Richard Feynman also atleast played around with the idea.

              I realise it is hard to tell on the internet, but I generally agree with Ron about stuff. And who the fuck cares what my opinion is anyway…LOL

              BTW, what is difference between “multiverse” and “multiversal” …..???

              thanks!

            2. There are many versions of the multiverse. Parallel Universes is just one of them, and it is the most bizarre of all. It implies that there are universes just like ours with people like you and I existing in these universes.

              But these universes and ours split off into other parallel universes. And split again and split again, doubling the number of universes with every split. And doubling the number of us, you and I, with every split.

              And this splitting is supposed to be happening almost constantly. (To explain the quantum weirdness. Schrodinger’s cat is alive in one parallel universe but dead in another.

              If the universe split just once a second, then after just 5 minutes you would have 1 times 10 to the 90th power universes. That’s about 100,000,000 times the number of atoms in the known universe.

              Needless to say, I don’t think much of the parallel universe hypothesis. And I don’t care how many physicists sign on to it. But I must add, a lot of physicists accept the multiverse theory as a possibility but only a few of them think parallel universes are a possibility. So I am not bucking any generally accepted theory of physicists.

              And I might add a lot of physicists think the multiverse hypothesis is crap. Paul Davies being one of the most outspoken opponents.

    5. “We have broached this subject before, about a year or so ago.” ~ Ron Patterson

      “But bear in mind that the universe is being interpreted through mathematical symbols and whatnot.
      It is perhaps small wonder that some people (i.e., the late Stephen Hawking?) would suggest that the universe could be a simulation. One could suggest that that could be a manifestation of a species that uses symbols and ‘gets lost on/in the model’…
      Like ‘funny money’ and the ‘commodification or monetization of reality’.
      Likewise with fine-tuning, as if the universe comes with a bunch of knobs (not talking about the human kind haha) that It can adjust/tweak at will like humans can with so much symbols.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

      “Victor Stenger argues that ‘The fine-tuning argument and other recent intelligent design arguments are modern versions of God-of-the-gaps reasoning, where a God is deemed necessary whenever science has not fully explained some phenomenon’. Stenger argues that science may provide an explanation if a Theory of Everything is formulated, which he says may reveal connections between the physical constants. A change in one physical constant may be compensated by a change in another, suggesting that the apparent fine-tuning of the universe is a fallacy because, in hypothesizing the apparent fine-tuning, it is mistaken to vary one physical parameter while keeping the others constant.” ~ Wikipedia

      1. What’s True
        In the late 2000s, Al Gore made a series of high-profile statements suggesting the possibility that Arctic sea ice could be completely gone during the summer by around 2013 or 2014.
        What’s False
        Gore did not himself make these predictions but said (in some cases erroneously) that others had; Gore never referred to a year-long lack of ice for both poles, but instead largely referenced Arctic sea ice in the summer.
        https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/

        1. I did not expect him to make the predictions himself, but he has communicated them. And he is an authority with his movie, the Nobel Prize and the ex Vice President title. And he has got resources to check facts and get things right. and still he has done a poor job. But when he has mentioned predictions about climate, he has always used the most scary ones. I think he loses his credibility when he chooses to communicate only these particular predictions.

      2. Tom, regardless of the specifics, time has shown , and it will become increasingly obvious,
        that Al Gore was correct in keeping abreast of what the vast majority of the scientific community who have specific expertise on climate had been saying.
        And he was brave for doing the politically incorrect thing- talking publicly about it.
        It is rare for a politician to be candid about ‘inconvenient truths’ that can threaten their career.
        He will be remembered historically as being brave for that.
        The naysayers who don’t comprehend the science will be seen as either delusional for false belief, or merely ignorant.

        We can do a little practice here. repeat-
        I understand gravity, a little bit.
        I understand evolution, a little bit.
        I understand climate science, a little bit.

        A little bit can become more, with study. Find good sources.
        Take note- no ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ is necessary.

        NASA- https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming

        1. A little bit can become more, with study. Find good sources.
          Take note- no ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ is necessary.

          There is however, one thing that ties the understanding of gravity, evolution and climate science together, indeed it is the intellectual foundation upon which all scientific theories are built.

          This is a very nice essay about the lingua franca of the universe.

          https://aeon.co/essays/the-secret-intellectual-history-of-mathematics
          Mathematics as thought
          Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history. So why do they get so little attention?

          1. “Mathematical ideas are some of the most transformative and beautiful in history.”

            Indeed, so true Fred. For me, the only thing that meets the Dirac relativistic wave equation for pure beauty is Bach’s Chaconne from his Partita in D minor for solo violin. And, supporting your point, one might add: “What makes the theory of relativity so acceptable to physicists in spite of its going against the principle of simplicity is its great mathematical beauty. This is a quality which cannot be defined, any more than beauty in art can be defined, but which people who study mathematics usually have no difficulty in appreciating.” — Paul Dirac

            1. Doug, while my personal fluency in mathematics is quite rudimentary, beauty aside, I have learned that without it, it is almost pointless to to try to understand most scientific concepts!
              Cheers!

            2. Fred, you underrate yourself – in a good way! BTW here’s a bit of trivia for you, speaking of mathematical beauty. Now, raise your glass for Herr Riemann. 😉

              CURVED SPACE LECTURE MAKES HISTORY

              “On this day, June 10, 1854, Riemann gave his classic lecture on curved space. His landmark lecture included a workable definition of how someone might measure the curvature of space. Riemann asked the question of how we might define an n-dimensional space. This resulted in the definition of Riemann space and laid the foundation for the field of Riemannian geometry. Next, he discussed the dimension of real space and what geometry one should use to describe it. The lecture was extremely successful even though Riemann’s ideas were so advanced that only few could truly understand them at the time. The lecture was published two years after his death in 1866, and is considered one of the most important works in geometry.”

              https://www.space.com/39251-on-this-day-in-space.html

            3. Indeed!
              You might also enjoy this little video about the Riemann hypothesis

              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvYprW73WZw
              Bernhard Riemann: Riemann hypothesis

              And then if you really want to have fun, (its above my pay grade)…

              https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/911c/58341a41d9a126b5815a54f3bafd11c460fd.pdf

              Fractal Complex Dimensions, Riemann Hypothesis
              and Invertibility of the Spectral Operator

              Oh yeah, and a little music to boot!
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUlJus5kpY
              Jonathan Coulton – Mandelbrot Set

              Cheers!

          1. It was banned in UK schools due to several scientific errors.

            That’s incorrect. A judge found that it’s overall message was correct, and that it could not be banned.

            The judge found that it had several errors, which must be explained to students when it was aired (otherwise the presentation would be unbalanced). But, again, the overall message was found to be correct.

            1. OK. But some of the exaggerations are really misleading. The claim that the sea level might rise 20 feet in the near future (whatever the near future means) is meant to scare rather than to inform. And that’s something that has generally gone in wrong in the climate debate. The media will only use the most extreme numbers they find in a report even though the numbers are far from the most likely. And these numbers are picked up from the man on the street who believe the quoted numbers are the most likely outcomes.

  9. From The Archives: When Supply Mutates To Support, Courtesy, ‘Fernando G Magyar‘(?)

    ” ‘A 1-acre permaculture farm supplies 50 families’

    ‘Show us the data that supports your contention that permaculture can produce enough surplus energy to support 8 to 9 billion humans.’ ~ Fred Magyar

    ‘Show us where that contention was made.’ ~ Caelan MacIntyre

    Response:

    ‘Drop us a line when you actually have a farm that can support 50 families.’ ~ Fred Magyar “

    1. My grandparents and great grandparents practiced quite a bit of what’s called permaculture today.

      There’s nothing really new about it.

      And there’s no way in hell we can go that route and feed seven billion plus people. It’s not even possible, as a political matter, to go this route even in the USA, which is one of the best off countries in the world in terms of population versus agricultural resources , meaning farmland, climate, water, etc.

      The only way to get urbanites and suburbanites out of their apartments and mc mansions and back out into the country would be to murder maybe half of them in the process of moving the other half into tents, because there’s no housing out in rural areas for more people than are there already.

      We’re stuck with industrial agriculture in even worse ways than we’re stuck with oil, because at least there’s some very real reason that we can electrify transportation, within a time frame that means something. We can get our electricity from the wind and sun, without moving very many people, none at all, actually, except a handful who might have to move in order to make room for new transmission lines.

      But there’s no way, for now or for the easily foreseeable future, that we can do away with farming on the industrial scale, for reasons economic, political and technical.

      1. I am the model small contemporary farmer: I’ve grown food as best I can to feed my two-person household (me & my husband) in the US Northeast, but never enough to completely support us. That’s because we have a modern diet, not an 18th century diet.

        It’s also because we suffer every year with 7 months of the shittiest weather this side of Mars.

        I can also say that I would NOT be able to grow the potatoes, corn, apples, asparagus, strawberries, squash, tomatoes, onions, beets, beans, etc. without the following:

        Glyphosate herbicide
        Captan fungicide
        Sevin insecticide
        Imidan insecticide
        2, 4-D herbicide
        Topsin fungicide
        Malathion insecticide

        We’ve grown enough summer vegetables here on two acres to supply 20 families for 20 weeks in a CSA. But it’s so much goddamn work that we’ve stopped doing it and now just sell apples, eggs and asparagus to markets.

        The moral of my 30+ years of experience is quoted from OFM above:

        We’re stuck with industrial agriculture!

        1. I agree—
          In NoCal I grew enough food (with chickens) to sort of feed myself and my wife for 60% of needed calories. The plumb, olive, walnut trees (and a few others) added to the food.
          I had horses, llamas, and donkeys for fertilizer, although food needed to be brought to the property.
          It is harder than imagined.

          1. Yeah, and imagine trying to use all that manure without a diesel-fueled tractor!

        2. People who haven’t worked to grow food have no place at the table discussing how it could/should be done. Even if they had read a hundred books on permaculture or such subjects. You know who I’m talking about.

          1. Farming Wrong

            “People who haven’t worked to grow food have no place at the table discussing how it could/should be done. Even if they had read a hundred books on permaculture or such subjects. You know who I’m talking about.” ~ Hickory

            ^ What a remarkably ignorant comment– (worthy of someone who appears to like to roll their own echo-chamber/groupthink, via their often-advertised use of the ignore button)– which, at once, shoots the messenger; makes an insinuated, unsubstantiated and irrelevant claim on the messenger’s experience; while, at some level, attempts to discount all those around the world who are trying, through permaculture and similar/related, to transcend a particular industrial system of, and/or particular approaches to, agriculture that is/are clearly and unequivocally unsustainable.

            Pouring chemicals all over everything, for example, is the wrong kind of experience.

            See also.

            “Perhaps a factory farm/feedlot operations manager might have indignantly told us, upon inquiry, that, after decades of experience, they knew cows, despite, for example, feeding corn or some of their cow-wastes back to the cows, the administered antibiotics, or the crowded and inhumane conditions. Mad cow? Who’d have thought?!

            What appear important are things like locality, scale, observation, ethics, caution and thought, etc.. Experience? Sure. But the right kinds.” ~ Tribe Of Pangaea- First Member (AKA, Caelan MacIntyre)

        3. So I guess all those years I and my wife spent growing organic vegetables did not happen.

          Enjoy the dying world.

          1. “So I guess all those years I and my wife spent growing organic vegetables did not happen. ”
            What do you mean? Who were you responding too?
            I’m sure if you grew food, it was real.

            1. What, are you on a cell phone and can’t follow the comment line up to whom I responded?

            2. I wouldn’t have asked if was clear. You know that.
              Adios. I’m going the other direction. Pronto.

            3. Didn’t know you were English…
              I guess that explains some things.

            4. No, definitely not of English descent. Thought you had run away, did you get lost and end up back here? 🙂

        4. Yes but organic is not the opposite of industrial. You probably wouldn’t need most of those poisons if you used greenhouses.

            1. Then you use parasitic wasps. This kind of agriculture is widely practiced in Holland. Parasitic wasps work very well if you start soon enough, which means you need to monitor your crops closely. They are also much cheaper than chemical poisons because they make copies of themselves. They also disappear automatically when they are no longer needed.

              But the Dutch are a few steps ahead of the rest of the farming world.

        5. “It’s also because we suffer every year with 7 months of the shittiest weather this side of Mars.” ~ Michael B

          Where are you located?

          “I can also say that I would NOT be able to grow the potatoes, corn, apples, asparagus, strawberries, squash, tomatoes, onions, beets, beans, etc. without the following:

          Glyphosate herbicide
          Captan fungicide
          Sevin insecticide
          Imidan insecticide
          2, 4-D herbicide
          Topsin fungicide
          Malathion insecticide

          We’ve grown enough summer vegetables here on two acres to supply 20 families for 20 weeks in a CSA. But it’s so much goddamn work that we’ve stopped doing it…” ~ Michael B

          But as you admit, you and your husband grew stuff not just for yourselves, but for others as well (Duh it’s so much goddamn work if you’re not just farming for yourselves.), who may not have been farming for themselves (and so perhaps exchanging some of their produce to you for yours), and whose diets may have been supplemented with a grocery store from the industrial agro system. That’s a big deal, since it’s suspected by many that more of us will be doing farming as the years progress. And, if civilization declines sufficiently enough and we know what’s good for us, with far less chemicals.

          My position WRT farming, incidentally, is about simply growing good, clean, healthy, unadulterated food for oneself and the family/community, rather than about making a living or, in other words, turning a profit in a crony-capitalist plutarchy context.

          It is expected that, as time goes on, more people will become farmers.

      2. We’re all going to have to bail on industrial agriculture and other unsustainable ways of living for plenty of reasons that have already been repeatedly discussed and, if we’re serious about our own survival and thriving as a species, get into improved, sustainable, resilient, ethical and life-enhancing (etc.) ways of living.

        In those regards, permaculture is one such response.

        “Permaculture is a set of design principles centered around whole systems thinking simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems. It uses these principles in a growing number of fields from regenerative agriculture, rewilding, community, and organizational design and development.

        With its system of applied education, research and citizen-led design permaculture has grown a popular web of global networks and developed into a global social movement.” ~ Wikipedia

        I wouldn’t doubt that your family practiced certain elements that are part of permaculture, but…

        The term permaculture was developed and coined by David Holmgren, then a graduate student at the Tasmanian College of Advanced Education’s Department of Environmental Design, and Bill Mollison, senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology at University of Tasmania, in 1978. The word permaculture originally referred to ‘permanent agriculture’, but was expanded to stand also for ‘permanent culture’, as it was understood that social aspects were integral to a truly sustainable system as inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka’s natural farming philosophy.” ~ Wikipedia

    2. It depends on what the definition of “support” is. It’s a vague, weasel word.

    1. I’m thinking that perhaps the biggest problem with convincing typical middle of the road voters and social conservatives to support renewable energy is that we talk too much about climate, and too little about local economics, local jobs, and eventually lower costs to end use customers, meaning Joe and Suzy SixPack.

      There’s no way in hell to convince a typical trump voter to support wind and solar power by talking about climate. You might as well try to talk evolution to a backwoods preacher.

      If you want results the way to get them is to discover and push your target’s hot buttons.

      It’s time now to lay off the climate rhetoric, not to abandon it, but to quit playing it so hard, and put the major focus on purely economic concerns, which are not only far far more important to the typical man or woman on the street, but also concerns about which he does not HAVE TO CHANGE HIS BASIC THINKING.

      The people who are LITERATE, the people who are capable of UNDERSTANDING the climate issue are pretty much on board, and will STAY on board, just as the GLBT community is on board with the D/ liberal wing of our political system. We don’t NEED to cater to the technically and ecologically literate community to get it’s vote, nor to the GLBT community to get ITS vote , etc. I’m not saying ignore them, I’m just saying we don’t need to EMPHASIZE their concerns, we would do better to target people we can WIN OVER to our side.

      Talk about local tax collections, talk about local jobs, and talk about LOWER prices, now maybe and for sure later on, for electricity and gasoline. It’s true that building wind and solar farms can result in electricity prices being higher in the short term, if the cost of building them is incorporated into rate structures… ADMIT IT. EMBRACE IT. Just point when you do so that the costs of new nuclear plants, new coal fired plants, new gas plants, new hydro is also generally incorporated into the rate structure.

      ADMIT AND EMBRACE the fact that the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun isn’t always out, even during the day, even in desert country. Just immediately point out that we use school buses only a very minor fraction of the time, ditto large trucks actually sit more than they are driven, farm machinery runs only a few months out of the year, etc etc. The family car is typically used no more than two hours a day.

      Tens of millions of us own large trucks or vans as a matter of necessity ALSO own small cars or trucks, because although we must have big vehicles to manage our business affairs, we save a ton of money driving a forty mpg car as opposed to a ten mpg truck ANYTIME we can.

      Wind and solar farms run basically fuel free, the only fuel needed being for maintenance vehicles. Even the hardest headed of trump types understands that oil, gas, and coal must eventually get to be more expensive as the easier wells and mines play out, and that the price of fuel is added to the cost of building and operating their electric utility.

      They never caught on, imo because GM never really pushed them, didn’t put them on dealer lots, etc.

      It’s time that skinflint types should be hit with ads about just how cheap it is to drive a plug in hybrid, or a pure electric car. Skinflints don’t care about the climate, but they grieve over every dollar they are forced to spend.

      It’s time to talk about the fact that the more wind and solar electricity we use, the less gas and coal utilities must buy to generate electricity, thereby saving not only on the quantity purchased, but also saving a little on the price as well, because the smaller the market for it, the lower the price of any commodity.

      Ditto oil. Every electric car on the road means twice as much gasoline available for one conventional car. Electric cars are our only real hope of avoiding two hundred dollar oil, sooner or later. Sooner, imo, but there’s no real need to emphasize sooner.

      1. Makes me wonder how humans existed before the industrial revolution. No electricity, no computers, no shelves full of toxic chemicals, no giant industrial complexes. How did they manage?
        My ancestors grew up without all that, guess they all died. 🙂

        1. My ancestors grew up without all that, guess they all died.

          Yep. I did some genealogy some years back, and was astounded by how many of my many-times great aunts and uncles died in their first 5 years, and how many women died in childbirth: the records were full of 2nd and 3rd wives.

          I think the general statistic was something like 50% infant mortality, 75% child mortality (which includes infant mortality) and very high maternal mortality (don’t have the percentage, but could be 50%).

          Life was short and miserable.

          1. I believe that tuberculosis was the #1 cause of death in the US in 1900.

          2. Sorry to hear that about your family, there were few child deaths in mine back as far as the early 1800s. Most lived to ripe old ages and some were businessmen, craftsmen, and supervisors. Even one inventor. So times were not tough for everyone.
            Now they die at all ages and we traded curable diseases for heart failure and cancer. There are still places in the world with high infant and child mortality, so the developed countries are experiencing a short period outside the norm.

            1. Well, thank you, but I’m afraid that it’s much more likely that those deaths were simply not recorded – infant & child mortality was so routine that it was taken for granted. My ancestors were also solidly professional, and their health could be expected to have been as good as possible. The difference, I think, was that they were seriously into genealogy over several generations, and kept very unusual records.

              Remember, high child mortality doesn’t mean that you can’t have long-lived people. But it makes parenthood hellish.

            2. Nick G said
              ” but I’m afraid that it’s much more likely that those deaths were simply not recorded ”
              “The difference, I think, was that they were seriously into genealogy over several generations, and kept very unusual records.”

              You know nothing about my family, nor the written records they kept yet you presume to make grandiose erroneous claims about a specific set of events you know nothing about, my family.

              Then you talk to me as if I am a simpleton “Remember, high child mortality doesn’t mean that you can’t have long-lived people”
              It is you who presumed to apply averages to a specific set of events, not I. That is an error made by a number of people on this site and is rife through the so called educated.

              Did you even consider your claim of 75% child mortality? That would mean a family would, on the average, have to have eight children to get 2 to survive to adulthood. Replacement during a time of fast population growth?
              Then you say that half the women died in childbirth. Was that after the tenth child so population could grow?
              Credibility falling fast, hit bottom, dug in.

              The real rate of death from childbirth was at it’s highest about 4 percent over a lifetime, aided by doctors not washing their hands and other procedures.

              In the United States today, about 15 women die in pregnancy or childbirth per 100,000 live births. That’s way too many, but a century ago it was more than 600 women per 100,000 births. In the 1600s and 1700s, the death rate was twice that: By some estimates, between 1 and 1.5 percent of women giving birth died. Note that the rate is per birth, so the lifetime risk of dying in childbirth was much higher, perhaps 4 percent.
              and
              One piece of evidence Loudon uses to attribute blame for unnecessary early 20th century deaths to doctors is that rich women were more likely to die in childbirth than poor women
              From Slate
              https://slate.com/technology/2013/09/death-in-childbirth-doctors-increased-maternal-mortality-in-the-20th-century-are-midwives-better.html

              I live in the northeast. I recommend wandering graveyards and looking at the ratio of young children buried to parents. I have never found a high ratio of young children graves.
              Maybe the high numbers were concentrated to certain cities and places. One side of my family was more city and the other more rural so it covers the spectrum.

              Yes, life was cruel to the poor. Children were often forced to start work as low as age five to satisfy the greed of the educated business classes. The work was often dangerous and toxic in the industrialized cities. But that was major social problem corrected by changes in law and society. Poor diet forced by very low wages made many suffer nutritional and other diseases.

            3. Well, I looked at some data. Always a good idea, rather than going on impressions.

              So, one source gives 43% child mortality for the world in 1800. https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

              The US seems to not have great data early on, but infant mortality in 1850 was around 20% – child mortality would be substantially higher, so that’s reasonably consistent with the other source. https://eh.net/encyclopedia/fertility-and-mortality-in-the-united-states/

              Overall fertility seems to have been around 7 children per woman, so the average number of survivors would have been about 4.

              Now, my estimate for maternal mortality seems to have been way off – I think it was sent astray by research on Afghanistan, where the rate has been astronomical.
              So, the US historically has had higher maternal mortality than Europe: https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(11)00962-8/fulltext

              If US 1800 maternal mortality was 1.5% and the average woman had 7 children that would give a 10% lifetime mortality. Not quite so bad, but…bad enough.

            4. On further thought, I remember where I got that 75% mortality figure.

              First, keep in mind that your comment which started all this was about pre-Industrial Revolution. So, we’re talking about a hunter-gatherer or agricultural era, where labor productivity grew at a rate of around .01% per year. That means that population can’t grow, which means that births must equal deaths.

              With no contraception, and a high death rate, fertility would be maximized – at least 8 children per woman, and probably 12 or more. If we assume 8, then we know there have to be only 2 survivors to breed the next generation. So…75% or more of children must die before they reach the age of parenthood.

              They can die as children, or they can die as adolescents fighting the tribe from the next valley for territory, but die they must.

              A hellish life.

            5. OMG, Nick you are still spilling on this?

              Of course I know what all started this, I wrote it and it was a joke. Read it again. Of course all my ancestors are dead, everyone dies! Please, no more fertilizer, it was a lark.

            6. Of course I knew it ended with a joke.

              But…there seemed to be an element of nostalgia for pre-industrial life, and I think we should be clear: life then was very, very hard (including a very high death rate) and life now is much, much better.

              If you disagreed with the details of the last comment, I’d be curious to hear why, as it seems like an interesting subject.

            7. Nick, stop with the bullshit. You clearly don’t have a clue as to the horrors created by the industrial revolution for most people. We now live in a slightly elevated way because of the death, illness, injury of generations of children and adults forced into mines, mills and tenements to feed the growing industrial complex. Children from age 5 and up working 12 hours a day in mines, breakers, mills, etc. in some of the most toxic, dangerous and polluted environment. People had to die in the street fighting to get a livable wage and it looks like we are quickly headed back to the total wage slave even in the US. It still exists in many parts of the world so you can enjoy your goods and services.
              Maybe you are too young to remember the brown rings around the horizon, the grey domes around industrial cities, rivers running with colors from direct dumping and mine waste, ash falling from the sky and that was in modern times, 50’s and 60’s, 70’s. How about the death fogs?
              Now we found out that the whole industrial/development system is wrecking the world.
              Romanticizing the industrial system of today with rose colored glasses while pretending that since a small portion of people think they are living well (while dying at high rates of cardiovascular disease, mental illness and cancer) and that things are better now is a huge piece of propaganda swallowed by the few or the mentally/morally bankrupt.

              Life was mostly agrarian prior to the industrial revolution. At least the kids had a place to run around, clean air and water and nature to enjoy. Not so as they got drawn into the industrial sites and cities.

              The grand benefit of industrial civilization, other than the continuous pollution and waste stream covering the globe, is that now there are so many more people to suffer and die. 151,600 dying each day.

              Tell your tales to the people making your clothes and other products in the sweatshops around the globe.

              Me I worked in heavy industry and chemical production for a while. Now that was hellish and very dangerous. All so those products keep rolling out onto the shelves and parking lots.

            8. Wow. Okay, I gotta say it: I think that’s complete bullshit. Ordinarily I would just say i disagreed, or that it was unrealistic, but that seems to need a “back atcha” reply.

              Now, can we stop with the name calling, and actually have a real discussion?

              First…do you disagree that the mortality rate for hunter-gatherers or agricultural people would have been at least 75% up to the age of parenthood? If so, why?

            9. Nick G you can call reality BS all you want. It saves you from actually studying the subjects and listening to those who actually experienced those times.
              Have fun living in Disneyland.

            10. You can insult people who disagree with you, all you want. You won’t learn anything, and you won’t convince anyone.

              Industrial life is often very hard, but we shoudn’t romanticize pre-industrial life. It was grim and tedious work, and deadly.

              Think about it: human hunter- gatherers were just like other wild animals: always living on the edge of starvation: for few years food might be plentiful and the death rate would go down and the population would expand. Then the food supply would contract and there would be general starvation. Women were forced to have way too many children, and watch them die.

              Agricultural life was a little better, but not much. Most people were badly nourished and worked incredibly hard, and famine happened a little less, but people still lived on the edge of the food supply, which was still precarious: there was a reason that they worshiped gods of earth fertility, and their priests built enormous calendars to predict the growing seasons.

              A really grim life.

              So…let’s try discussing the specific thing I raised: how many kids would you guess the average woman had in a hunter-gatherer, or agricultural society? What reduces fertility, or keeps population stable? And, finally, what percent of children in agricultural society are slaves (aka serfs)?

              Here’s one discussion:

              “…maternal nutritional health influences birth spacing significantly. Specifically, undernutrition causes longer postpartum amenorrhea. Therefore, lower fertility rates follow longer birth intervals. Research shows that poor maternal nutritional health does not prevent the fetus from surviving and growing. Yet mothers who do not consume many calories often have low birth weight infants. These infants are at high risk of dying because they have little to no fat reserves and they consume inadequate amounts of nutrition since the mothers cannot make sufficient amounts of milk.”

              https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12283361

            11. Just a fast off-the-cuff 2¢ from on the road and with the qualification that I skimmed this subthread…

              Although you both seem correct, comparing industrial to pre-industrial nevertheless seems kind of pointless on some levels, since, for example, industrial is predicated on large-scale resource drawdowns/hard-core extractions of various sorts that will not last and that’s fucking up the planet.

              For some academic-style support in that regard, perhaps see what Nicholas Taleb or David Korowicz has to say about that. (It is suspected you already more or less know anyway.)

              Second, some of what we have and know now, we didn’t have and know before, but then again some of what we knew and had before we have lost.
              Many of us no longer make or know how to make our own homes, grow or recognize our own food and/or make our own clothes. It’s all done for us and we’ve ‘sold ourselves out’ to ‘the machine’, relinquished our self-empowerment and many aspects of our freedom and infantilized/self-domesticated ourselves.

              As for data, while data is all fine and nice, it can turn into its own Achilles heel if you get mired/swamped/bogged-down in it; it’s the wrong kind or misleading; and/or it starts to blind you from other things, like ‘analogue reality’, and/or other forms of data.

              Majestic
              “Accelerated eco-meltdown,
              no-one gives a damn
              Keep everyone in debt
              while the big banks own their land
              Orwellian, Machiavellian, Hegelian dialectic
              World management has come,
              and it’s to be expected

              You cannot tell the people
              (But some of us have guessed it)
              Every day is a blessing,
              I feel the best yet
              Majestic
              yes I feel
              fantastic…”

      2. True indeed OFM.
        I’ve find it interesting that fossil/ICE hardcore proponents don’t find EV’s as a great development, since like you said- “Every electric car on the road means twice as much gasoline available for one conventional car.”.

        The whole discussion became a lot easier when , by and large, wind and solar deployed on favorable spots became cheaper than coal.
        That is hard to argue with, except regarding the cold dark winter.

        1. One very effective work around the electrical energy storage problem is to use as much electricity as possible for transportation and so forth when the wind and sun are cooperating, and stock pile any available fossil fuel for use later on those cold dark winter days.

          It put a smile on my face to see this.

          https://electrek.co/2019/06/10/yamaha-ec-05-electric-scooter-gogoro-batteries/

          There’s a Yamaha dealer in the town nearest my home, and a Honda motorsports ( as opposed to automobile ) dealer as well.

          My opinion, for what it’s worth, is that two wheel electric transportation will be mostly a curiosity here in the USA until such time as you can buy your electric bike, motor scooter or motorcycle from a trusted manufacturer with a local dealership. When people who know and trust in such names as Yamaha and Honda see electric bikes in their local showroom, and people they know riding them, sales will take off like a rocket.

          Unfortunately it looks as if the electric models are going to be a while arriving in the states.

          1. One very effective work around the electrical energy storage problem is to use as much electricity as possible for transportation and so forth when the wind and sun are cooperating, and stock pile any available fossil fuel for use later on those cold dark winter days.

            Yep. Take a look at the caiso.com site for 5/8/19: California’s grid went CO2 negative for about 4 hours! Renewables not only powered the state, but CA exported clean power and displaced FF in other states.

            It’s early days. This will expand…

            1. That is good news, especially considering the federal environment now.

  10. If the outlook for life from a ‘big bang’ is 2 exponent 225..is that fine tuned?

    1. Democrats want your money to geo engineer direct CO2 removal from the air. Which only makes the left richer, along with waste your money. You should plant a tree which has the additional value of adding Oxygen also.

      1. Hickory posted a link to a headline that read:

        Geoengineer the Planet? More Scientists Now Say It Must Be an Option

        Lakrystal Lasha replied:

        Democrats want your money to geo engineer direct CO2 removal from the air. Which only makes the left richer, along with waste your money.

        What the fuck? Do you think “Scientists” is a synonym for “Democrats”? Perhaps it is. Just about every Republican I know is far too dumb to be a scientist.

      2. Note to all readers- My best guess is that this “Lakrystal Lasha” is a fake russian account. One of Putins agents who would like to re-elect an orange mental weakling.
        Be on the lookout.

        1. Perhaps, but if so, they can’t possibly think they could get a very high conversion rate on this particular blog. They need to employ their trolls and bots on more fertile grounds…

          1. Good point. the other possibility is that it was an example of
            ‘Domestic Ignorism’.

            1. “along with waste your money’ wasn’t written by an native speaker. And “geo engineer direct CO2 removal from the air” wasn’t written by an illiterate fool.

            2. Good observation.

              So, this ‘Lakrystal Lasha’ is an example of a foreigner trying to participate/influence domestic politics.

              We all must train ourselves to distinguish real from fabricated, as best we can.
              I think we are at the point where even astute and skeptical observers will not be able to reliable make this distinction accurately.
              People will resort to what they want to ‘believe’ , even more so.

  11. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01810-6

    NEWS 10 JUNE 2019
    World’s largest plant survey reveals alarming extinction rate
    Since 1900, nearly 3 species of seed-bearing plants have disappeared per year ― 500 times faster than they would naturally.

    “Massive scale of destruction”
    Even though the researchers carefully curated the plant extinction database, the study’s numbers are almost certainly an underestimate of the problem, says Jurriaan de Vos, a phylogeneticist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Some plant species are “functionally extinct”, he notes, and are present only in botanical gardens or in such small numbers in the wild that researchers don’t expect the population to survive.

      1. Some years ago, Forbes reported on a quote by the now-deceased Steven Schneider, the former professor of climatology at Stanford and the author of UN climate reports.

        “We need broad-based support to capture the public’s imagination, we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

        So ‘climate crisis’ is something they’ve been cooking up for quite a while now.

        1. So how much of Schneider’s work have you actually looked at?
          https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c8g1630q/entire_text/

          That quote, which you have taken deliberately out of context, is simply a recognition that the public at large, being mostly mathematically and scientifically illiterate, are ill equipped to understand the implications and the urgency of the existential crisis humanity faces due to climate change.

          Furthermore due to the massive well funded misinformation campaign which individuals like you willingly participate in, Dr. Schneider was simply recognizing the fact that the public would be unlikely to take this crisis seriously based on the the science itself, and therefore the scientific community needed to find ways to to effectively fight back against the obfuscation!

          I suggest you read this report:
          https://climateextremes.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/What-Lies-Beneath-V3-LR-Blank5b15d.pdf

          What Lies beneath THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF EXISTENTIAL CLIMATE RISK

          It’s pretty fucking scary!

          1. “There’s a crazy man making pretend ‘deals’ in the White House and almost everyone is going about trying explain events in a calm and reasoned manner.

            For decades most denied ‘smoking’ was killing us.”

            Often reality is just too much to face?

            1. Time to panic was about 12,000 years ago. We are at the end of the ride now and not many want to get off. It’s prison world lock down time and there is no escape. Not even the elite have much wiggle room and must follow the pattern.

    1. Fred, plant species dying at 3 per year is notable but since this civilization most likely has a very short time left, it would not make much of dent if the loss rate stayed the same. With fast advancing climate change, plants can’t move, so the rate might accelerate dramatically this century. With collapse of civilization, plant and animal species might suffer greatly for a time.
      More great reasons to slow the rate of change as quickly as possible.
      The height of a tsunami is not significant until it reaches shallow water.

      What do you think of this?

      Why everything will collapse
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsA3PK8bQd8&t=771s

      1. Since it rained non stop for the last week and a half and the sun was out this morning I wanted to go kayaking. As I approached the beach I was overwhelmed by the stench of rotting organic matter. Sargassum weed! I took a bunch of pictures I’ll just post two… The first a panoramic view of my favorite launch spot and the second below a close up.
        But As I paddled out I could see acres and acres of dead weed on the sea floor. Can you imagine what that does to an already stressed coral reef ecosystem. Note this is in Dania Beach and just down the road we are doing a beach replenishment project for the benefit of the tourists in Hollywood…
        .

        1. Here’s a closeup of all the plastic embedded in the rotting seaweed. BTW, while that doesn’t scare people like Jason T. It scares the shit out of me.
          .

          1. I think that the ocean is sending us a message. Artists should frame these collections and display them for all to see.

            1. I think that the ocean is sending us a message.

              As is just about every system on the planet!
              .

    2. I am deeply disturbed by the two studies on insect biomass decline in Germany and Puerto Rico that were published last year.

      “Climate -driven declines in arthropod abundance restructure a rainforest food web”
      https://www.pnas.org/content/115/44/E10397

      “More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas”
      https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

      I was recently in Germany, on the outskirts of a major city, and I did not see a single bee, despite abundant wildflowers. Or really any winged insects for that matter, and I was looking. The same seems to be true where I live on the North American east coast.

      I am imagining this? Do we know for sure that these declines are only due to temperature and not something more insidious? I remember reading that high levels of CO2 can affect human cognition – meaning it affects our biochemistry. Are we confident that insects wouldn’t be even more sensitive to rapid changes in CO2, or CO2 equivalents?

      If insects are rapidly disappearing, as the empirical studies suggest, then the bottom could be dropping out of the ecosystem. And if it’s happening in protected regions in two very different geographical locations, then I don’t see why it couldn’t be happening everywhere – at least to some extent.

      1. I have come across reports of flying insect reductions from a number of diverse locations in the US. Along with these go diminishment in all the insectivores, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish and more.
        Collapse seems to occur right in front of our eyes. I noticed local collapse quite a while ago but at that time the larger picture had not been formed.
        Each time I question older people about how often they have to clean bugs off their windshields, I get that momentary look of puzzlement, then realization. No more bugs on the windshields of vehicles.

        Tropical insects are more vulnerable to temperature changes, although almost all flying insects have a fairly narrow window of flight temperatures. The vast amount of pesticides and aquatic herbicides in use are a big factor in insect population reduction. Draining of wetlands and other development also impinges on insect population. We really do not know all the factors or the degree that factors effect individual species. At this point tipping points have been crossed and the wishes of billions of people for the insects to go away is coming true.

      2. Does anyone have any information of the rate of insect decline in pest species vs beneficial species? (ignoring the bugs iz birdfood argument)

        NAOM

        1. Does anyone have any information of the rate of insect decline in pest species vs beneficial species?

          First, how exactly do you define a pest species? That happens to be a serious question.

          https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/insect-declines-are-stark-warning-humanity

          Now a new global study of the drivers of insect decline says habitat loss by conversion to intensive agriculture is the main driver of the declines. Agrochemical pollutants, invasive species and climate change are additional causes.

          “A rethinking of current agricultural practices, in particular a serious reduction in pesticide usage and its substitution with more sustainable, ecologically based practices, is urgently needed to slow or reverse current trends, allow the recovery of declining insect populations and safeguard the vital ecosystem services they provide. In addition, effective remediation technologies should be applied to clean polluted waters in both agricultural and urban environments,” says the study.

          40 per cent of insect species are declining

          Across the world, more than 40 per cent of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles. The total mass of insects is falling by a precipitous 2.5 per cent a year, according to the best data available, suggesting they could vanish within a century.

          If you combine the data about all the different things that will already have gone wrong by the end of this century, hell on earth will be an understatement.

          Cheers!

          1. “First, how exactly do you define a pest species? That happens to be a serious question.”

            Quite, honey bees that can be used for fertilisation vs Africanised bees that enjoy attacking anything that gets near might be one example. alimbiquated’s wasps vs white fly, those that eat plants vs those that eat those that eat plants etc. A tough question.

            NAOM

            1. Quite, honey bees that can be used for fertilisation vs Africanised bees that enjoy attacking anything that gets near might be one example.

              Well there you go! It is not so simple.

              To begin with honey bees are an introduced species in the western hemisphere. Africanised bees are a hybrid of honey bees and are actually excellent pollinators. They were originally bred in Brazil and they escaped from a lab before they were domesticated so to speak. While they are much more aggressive than European honey bees it is possible to learn to live with them. They are less of a killer than most people think. I happen to have personal experience with them on my cousin’s farm in Brazil.

              So myths aside, one person’s pest can be another’s beneficial species.

              http://www.columbia.edu/itc/cerc/danoff-burg/invasion_bio/inv_spp_summ/Apis_mellifera_scutellata.htm

              Benefit(s):
              Africanized honeybees in the tropics directly influence 25-30% of the reproductive success of the flora. The flora depends on the bees for pollination, and in turn, flora provide seeds and fruit for their own reproductive success and as food for other organisms.

              There are two views about the influences that Africanized Honey Bees have on crops. Pollination of crops can continue even if an area has been fully colonized by Africanized bees. The first argument contends that farmers’ costs to produce crops increases because of the required public protection from Africanized bees and the increasing costs of purchasing European Honey Bees for pollination. The other view argues that Africanized honeybees are better pollinators than European honeybees because they emphasize brood rearing and colony growth instead of honey production. The shift in resource management allows Africanized honeybees to forage more for pollen than European bees. Therefore, Africanized bees can be regarded as superior pollinators. In Sinaloa Mexico, Africanized honeybees have invaded the area but have not caused any problems in crop harvests and production.

              Cheers!

            2. Yep, here in the Western Hemisphere honey bees are an invasive species.
              Pinnacles National Park has over 400 species of native bee.
              And it isn’t that large. (one of my favorite places)
              https://www.nps.gov/pinn/learn/nature/bees.htm
              ( Bee diversity at Pinnacles ranks among the highest known anywhere on Earth.)

            3. Yeah, we have them around here and they are aggressive little b***ers. There have been several attacks and a dead dog. I get them in here and have to deal with them as, if they find something they like, they come back with their mates for a punch up. It is bad enough whacking one small, aggressive f***er but a bunch of them …

              NAOM

          2. Fred asked “First, how exactly do you define a pest species? That happens to be a serious question. ”
            Here is a serious answer, humans the ultimate pest species. They attack everything including their own kind and totally mess with things.

            I find loud classical music drives them away but does not really get rid of them. Some old Frank Sinatra tunes worked the other day. Much better than hearing their chatter and noise box “music”.

  12. Hi Ron (I wish you had put this in a stand alone thread.),
    You asked
    A question for Iron Mike, who has a masters in Physics. Anyone else may tune in with their opinion, however. We have broached this subject before, about a year or so ago. But I have read a few books and watched dozens of youtube videos, by physicists, since then and my opinion on the subject has really jelled from all this additional information I have gathered… from physicists.
    Later you said
    And the point is, that there is a point. That is, as Hoyle put it, the Universe is a put up job. There is a point to the universe. It was not just an accident. It has meaning, a reason for being.
    Could you make it clearer what you think the point is?
    Cheers, Phil

    1. I don’t think I could have made it clearer than that. The point is the Universe exists because it was meant to exist. The Universe is a put up job. It was intentionally created for a purpose. That is the point. What was that purpose?

      Whatever or whoever caused all that to happen in the first fraction on the big bang is beyond human comprehension. Therefore the meaning or purpose is also beyond human comprehension.

      That does not imply that ancient Bedowins, writing from their tent in the desert, knew jack shit about anything. And all the modern day carnival barkers selling religion are just as dumb. But to give themselves power and prestige, they say that they know who did it and why. They know absolutely nothing.

      The great failing of modern-day academia is that they also associate the creation of the universe with religion. They believe, that if they believe as what Hoyle figured out, that the Universe is a put up job, then they are acknowledging the biblical god. So they try to say it was all an accident.

      Many, nay, most, modern day physicists have figured out that this “accident hypothesis” is also bullshit. They have figured out that the Universe is so finely-tuned, that it couldn’t have been an accident. But… but… they say, if it happened almost an infinite number of times, then once, just once out of an almost infinite number of times, it could happen. They are saying, in effect, if you flip a coin an infinite number of times, sooner or later you are bound to get a thousand heads in a row.

      Can’t you see what really pisses me off? Even in science, of all places, fear of religion has caused everyone to espouse bullshit. Christopher Hitchens hit the nail on the head. Religion poisons everything.

      Phil, if you would like to discuss this personally, then you can email me at DarwinianOne@gmail.com .

      1. I agree with you that physicists are trying to explain the obvious fine tuning.

        But, also they are just taking a literal interpretation of the math!

        What is the math that works really saying?

        It is saying that particles travel in all possible ways. Richard Feynman’s multiple histories. Hugh Everett’s Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

        My own personal bias is that the universe is just what humans call MATH. That is why you never encounter anything that is mathematically impossible.

  13. In the past I have lamented the lack of direct investing opportunities for individuals to purchase into PV projects away from their own rooftop,
    Such as a mythical construct- ‘The USA Solar Bond’

    Well, in Spain there is new development along this front that is a good start.
    We have nothing of the sort in the USA, as far as I know.

    Crowd funded large scale solar project-
    ” A Spanish firm has broken new ground in the complex world of solar contracting with what is thought to be Europe’s first large-scale power-purchase agreement for a crowdfunded plant.
    Holaluz, a clean-energy retailer, signed up to take the output from up to 75 megawatts of solar capacity to be built over the next three years by Fundeen, a specialist renewables crowdfunding platform, in Spain and Portugal.”
    “Fundeen allows individuals to invest 500 euros ($567) or more in renewable energy plants and get an average annual return of 7 percent.”

    https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/spanish-firm-signs-ppa-for-crowdfunded-solar-plant#gs.hrd40s

    I see no good reason why their can’t be thousands of such projects across this country, available to individuals, companies, pension funds, municipalities. A teachers union in Seattle could be owning a PV block in Yuma,AZ. A renter in Milwaukee could be an owner of a block in Amarillo, and pass it on to their children when they go, etc.
    The concept just needs to have the road paved at a utility policy level.
    The whole country might become enthusiastic about solar, if everyone had a piece of the bright pie.

  14. http://crookedtimber.org/2019/06/11/green-new-deals-and-natural-resources/

    My attention was caught yesterday by a press release from the UK’s Natural History Museum, authored by a group of British geoscientists:

    The letter explains that to meet UK electric car targets for 2050 we would need to produce just under two times the current total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production.

    A friend alerted me to a piece by Asad Rehman of War on Want, provocatively entitled The ‘green new deal’ supported by Ocasio-Cortez and Corbyn is just a new form of colonialism which makes the point:

    The demand for renewable energy and storage technologies will far exceed the reserves for cobalt, lithium and nickel. In the case of cobalt, of which 58 per cent is currently mined in the DR of Congo, it has helped fuel a conflict that has blighted the lives of millions, led to the contamination of air, water and soil, and left the mining area as one of the top 10 most polluted places in the world.

    In a sense hybrid cars are more promising as they have much smaller battery and as such consume less rare elements per car.

    It looks like the current stress on “pure” EV is really unhealthy and unscientific.

    1. You are right in your belief that people will not want to change their lifestyles, but they will, there will be no choice and soon they will mostly forgot how it was in the past.
      2050 will be a very different world than the present, and 2080 will again be a very different world.
      Specific societal projections into the future beyond about 10 years are pure fantasy and should be ignored.
      Some major physical changes are underway on this planet which will change everything. Those should not be ignored.

    2. Yep -fake facts.

      There’s an enormous amount of lithium out there – far more than the proven reserves of the USGS, which were never, ever intended to be used for this kind of long-term planning exercise. But…it doesn’t really matter.

      There are many, many different chemistries for making batteries. Lead, aluminum, sulfur, iron…the list is almost as long as the periodic table. Lithium has a little higher energy density than most, but…they’d all work, in a pinch.

      For instance, there was a company recently developing an advanced lead battery that was at least twice as energy dense as convention lead-acid and half the cost, but it couldn’t quite compete with the li-ion juggernaut, and it went out of business.

      Think VHS vs Beta. Beta was better, but VHS was a bit cheaper and better marketed, and got to economies of scale before Beta. Both worked.

      Think Laserdisc vs Blueray. Laserdisc was a bit larger, and it didn’t quite compete with DVD and Blueray. But…it worked just fine.

      1. The one really critical point that Tesla bashers are VERY careful to avoid is that Tesla’s market cap at the lowest point a few days back was still roughly eighty percent of Ford’s and not much less than that, about sixty five percent ( mental arithmetic in both cases) of GM…. and that Tesla manufactures only a tiny percentage of the volume of these two old line companies. FOR NOW, lol.

        Folks who bought GM years ago haven’t seen any stock price appreciation worth writing home about it. Ditto Ford.

        Tesla even in the dumps is a big winner for long term investors.

        1. Investors buy growth, and Tesla has delivered the growth that it originally promised.

          Tesla will continue to grow until legacy car makers really get serious about EVs.

          The latest commercials from Audi and Nissan suggest that they begin to really “get it”, but they’re still moving pretty slowly.

  15. Fred —

    DOLPHINS FORM FRIENDSHIPS THROUGH SHARED INTERESTS JUST LIKE US

    “When it comes to making friends, it appears dolphins are just like us and form close friendships with other dolphins that have a common interest. The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B by an international team of researchers from the Universities of Bristol, Zurich and Western Australia, provides further insight into the social habits of these remarkable animals.”

    https://phys.org/news/2019-06-dolphins-friendships.html

    1. Yes, Very interesting stuff! Tks.
      Here’s a good talk (no pun intended) about research on Dolphin communication.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfb6zoB_yII
      Denise Herzing: “Dolphin Communication: Cracking the Code” | Talks at Google

      I also read something a few years back that there is some speculation that dolphins might be able to transmit 3D sonar images to each other. If that is confirmed it adds another level of complexity to their communications. So far this has not been scientifically confirmed.

      https://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/index.php/2014-10-21-00-13-26/dolphin-communication

      Echolocation
      Some people suggest that dolphins are able to share complex 3D images with each other using their echolocation, and often label this something like ‘holographic communication’. At present, there is no evidence that a dolphin’s echolocation ability is able to transmit anything like an image to other dolphins, so this suggestions is purely fanciful at this point. However, it has been shown that a dolphin who is positioned close to their friend can overhear the click echoes that are produced by their friend who may be echolocating on an object. By listening to these echoes, a listening dolphin might get a mental image of the object even though he/she is not engaging their own echolocation. This is not necessarily a form of communication – unless of course dolphins purposely echolocate on objects because they know that their friend will be receiving the click echoes. In this case, it may be something like communication – there is not yet any evidence that this is the case, although scientists are actively researching this area to learn just how dolphins use their echolocation in the wild.

  16. Here’s Proof That Electric Cars Are Displacing Gasoline

    According to a recent report from the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (via Charged), plug-in vehicles displaced 323 million gallons of gasoline in the US in 2018. That’s still a mere drop in the gas can: it amounts to 0.25% of all gasoline used in the US in that year (another dose of reality: the increasing popularity of trucks and SUVs has more than wiped out all the emissions reductions from EVs).

    However, the trend of falling demand for gas is gathering speed. The amount of gasoline displaced was about 42% higher in 2018 than in 2017, and about double the amount in 2016. Furthermore, the share of pure electric vehicles is growing. Gasoline displacement from pure EVs versus plug-in hybrids was evenly split in 2012 and 2013, but in 2018, EVs accounted for two thirds of the displacement.

    As gas consumption begins to fall, electricity consumption is rising. Another DOE report shows that the amount of energy consumed by plug-in vehicles in the US has nearly doubled in the last two years, from 1.44 terawatt hours in 2016 to 2.85 TWh in 2018. Here we also see the trend toward pure EVs – in 2018, pure EVs accounted for 61% of electricity consumption from plug-in vehicles, while plug-in hybrids accounted for 39%.

  17. Does anybody here know anything about any warranty extension plans that Tesla might or might not sell or plan on selling at some future time?

    The very thought of being at the mercy of Tesla, or ANY manufacturer of really expensive machinery, for any essential repair work is enough to scare me, personally, away from the purchase of something as expensive as a new car, or the purchase of an old used car.

    Of course not everybody is a Scots Irish skinflint. I’m not hard up, but I’m always short of cash, because I like to spend whatever I can put my hands on, leveraging it by doing the work myself, for instance building my own private lake, thereby increasing my net worth by as much as ten times what I’ve actually spent in cash.

    I have a friend who runs a garage where I there are always at least four or five newish diesel pickups waiting for repairs that seldom run less than four or five thousand dollars… but at least the owners have the option of taking them to him, rather than back to the dealer, where the same work would cost them at least fifty percent more.

    I expect to drive my ” new” old Ford truck fifty thousand miles over the next ten years for five grand, including everything other than fuel, routine maintenance, taxes, tags, and insurance, etc. INCLUDING the initial purchase price.

    An old Tesla isn’t going to be worth much if the word gets around that it may cost an arm and a leg to keep it running, once it’s out of warranty.

    Unless maybe gasoline is ten bucks a gallon due to a hot war keeping the tankers in port………. or in case the Russians or some other major producer shuts off exports in pissing match of the sort our nit wit president starts every few days.

    1. An old Tesla isn’t going to be worth much if the word gets around that it may cost an arm and a leg to keep it running, once it’s out of warranty.

      I don’t think I’d worry about that at all! I highly doubt these people do either…

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOx5uCufB2Q&t=25s
      Amazing Electric Conversions – EV West | Fully Charged

      But i do very much worry about ecosystem collapse which could make all these other worries moot!

    2. Everything I see about Tesla, the million mile motor, the half million mile battery, all seems to point toward cars as a service not as private ownership but for fleet ownership. The whole autonomous push is aimed at making the car as the service. Ford would like to do that also. It makes sense too, build a more expensive longer lasting low maintenance product and sell it for more profit to fleet owners that can afford it and don’t flinch at repair costs. Why build 500 million cars that you hardly make a profit on when 50 million good profit cars will do and some profit can be made maintaining them? The company does not have to constantly try and figure out what the public wants at the moment, just build a few really good models to fit the various needs of limo and taxi services.
      At least that is where the pointer seems aimed at in a few years.

      1. At least that is where the pointer seems aimed at in a few years.

        You mean solar powered robotaxis on a biologically dead planet?

        1. I have it all figured out Fred. When I am dead I will not be using any energy or materials. So that time will extend to infinity and the amount of materials and energy saved will eventually approach infinity or at least be very large. That is massively more than I can do while alive. 🙂

      2. I can see cars as a service industry, but my personal conviction is that it’s going to take a rather long time for it to come to pass. People have to get to work and to school on fairly tight schedules, and that means most of the traffic has to be on the road at about the same time, morning and evening, and that sort of thing. So it’s hard to see enough robo taxis being on the road to meet that need, and then mostly just sitting around the rest of the time.

        Eventually, society would adjust, with employers realizing that allowing some scheduled and reliable variation in employment hours will pay off in happier and more reliable employee relationships, etc. This would allow robo cars to get more people to work, etc. Plus more people will be working at or from home.

        My seat of the pants guess is that it will take twenty plus years for autonomous cars running as robo taxis to displace more than a quarter of the cars on the road today.

        I’m thinking this is more of a lifestyle and cultural issue than it is a technical and engineering issue.

        So what’s a man going to buy that he can put on public display to demonstrate his superior earning power and taste and impress the girls with his worthiness as a mate once the car culture is dead?

        1. “So what’s a man going to buy that he can put on public display to demonstrate his superior earning power and taste and impress the girls with his worthiness as a mate once the car culture is dead?”

          Oh thats easy- Photovoltaic Panels.
          Your production will be displayed on a digital holographic readout that hovers over your head.
          Its like an energy credit score.

    3. It is a very good question OFM.
      I know two people (very close acquaintances) who have a hell of time getting minor Tesla repairs done.
      One a windshield cracked by a piece of road gravel.
      The other a damaged fender from a minor incident (they were hit while parked).

      It is clear from these incidents that Tesla is working hard to fill orders for new cars, but is woefully inadequate at being ready for repair/maintenance work support. These folks had the impression they had to wait for replacement manufacture, rather than shipment from a warehouse.
      How does 6 weeks to get a windshield 30 miles from the Tesla headquarters sound?

      Big growing pains.
      Hope they get better.
      Or they will get rolled over by others.

  18. https://electrek.co/2019/06/11/electric-scooter-recharges-5-minutes-storedot/

    I wouldn’t mind having a cell phone with one of these new batteries, but I can’t see the charging hardware being robust enough to put a couple of hundred miles or more worth of juice in a car battery in that short a time period.

    But it might turn out to be practical to build charging stations for over the road trucks with that much capacity. Then you could charge your car in five minutes at a truck stop, assuming the hardware is compatible. Or maybe some sort of super batteries will become cheap enough to charge them slowly and then discharge them this fast , so as to make a five minute charge a reality at public charging stations.

  19. Back in the discussions following the “Electric Commercial Vehicles, a ten year update – Part 2”, NAOM posted a comment in which he wrote, “Hydrogen, have we got enough precious metal for all the catalyst needed and if you think Lithium has a risk for going bang?”

    Hydrogen Fueling Station Explodes: Toyota & Hyundai Halt Fuel Cell Car Sales


    Blast was so big it set off airbags in nearby cars.

    A hydrogen refueling station exploded and stood in flames yesterday in Sandvika, Norway, which could make June 10, 2019 the day when the perception about hydrogen stations and hydrogen fuel cell cars, in general, will forever change.

    According to reports from the Uno-X station, the explosion was huge. It triggered airbags in nearby cars and caused the necessity to close off the busy E18 and E16 intersection. A safety zone of 500 meters was recommended by the fire service.

    The good news is that there are no reports about direct injuries, but some reports say two people were sent to the emergency room because of injuries sustained from airbags in their cars.

    1. …two people were sent to the emergency room because of injuries sustained from airbags in their cars.

      OMG! We should immediately ban all airbags!! 😉

      1. E FredM,

        A friend of mine has a small pickup truck with this window sticker:

        No airbags. We die like real men.

    2. That is something I have worried about for some time although blowing peoples homes up when the car is parked. Given how Americans are prone to unauthorized maintenance … er … tinkering with their cars I see a leak as highly likely. Hydrogen leaks easily, has a wide explosive concentration range and burns without visible flame. NASA’s recommended way of checking for a Hydrogen fire is approach with broom extended in front of you.

      NAOM

  20. In addition to my reply to NAOM’s post above regarding insect pests.
    http://peakoilbarrel.com/oil-shock-model-scenarios/#comment-679203

    A sad turn of events with regards an already severely stressed ecosystem. And this one is deeply personal on so many different levels! To me this is the epitome of crimes against the environment! It certainly is 180 degrees in the opposite direction of where we should be going! It is time to put these criminals on trial in the Hague!

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/12/hundreds-new-pesticides-approved-brazil-under-bolsonaro

    Hundreds of new pesticides approved in Brazil under Bolsonaro

    Brazil has approved hundreds of new pesticide products since its far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, took power in January, and more than 1,000 since 2016, a study has found. Many of those approved are banned in Europe.

    Of 169 new pesticides sanctioned up to 21 May this year, 78 contain active ingredients classified as highly hazardous by the Pesticide Action Network and 24 contain active ingredients banned in the EU, according to the study published on Wednesday by Greenpeace UK’s news agency Unearthed. Another 28 pesticides not included in the report were approved in the last days of 2018.

    “It really appears that they have accelerated their approvals process,” said Prof David Eastmond, a toxicologist at the University of California, Riverside. “Some of these are highly hazardous and this raises concern.”

    Brazil began accelerating pesticide approvals in September 2016 after Michel Temer, a conservative politician with close agribusiness links, assumed the presidency. Bolsonaro also won the presidency with strong support from the agribusiness sector.

    Since Temer took office, 1,270 pesticides have been approved – double the number in the previous four years. Of those, 193 contained active ingredients banned in the EU, Unearthed found using data from Brazil’s agriculture ministry.

    “We have never had such a big release of pesticides. This is certainly a political decision,” said Marina Lacorte, an agriculture and food campaign coordinator at Greenpeace Brasil. “The industry puts profits ahead of the population’s health.”

    1. Oh my, Syngenta, DWDP, and Bayer, Oh my.

      Isn’t committing suicide illegal? Or is government approved mass suicide legal?

    2. Oh for ****s sake! Kill all the insects then wonder why your crops fail. I’m going to be checking everything I buy to make sure it does not come from Brazil!

      NAOM

  21. Warning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers

    The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists.

    Insects are an integral part of life on Earth as both pollinators and prey for other wildlife and it was known that some species such as butterflies were declining. But the newly revealed scale of the losses to all insects has prompted warnings that the world is “on course for ecological Armageddon”, with profound impacts on human society.

    Three-quarters of all flying insects are gone? Why isn’t everyone running through the streets screaming?
    Insects are an absolutely necessary part of life on earth. Without them, all life would disappear.

    What if insects disappeared from the planet?

    Insects are an important part of the food chain, and not just for the adventurous eaters who dine on beetles, crickets and grasshoppers in Thailand. Some animals, like small birds, frogs and other reptiles and amphibians, survive almost entirely on an insect diet. If there were no bugs for these animals to eat, they would eventually die off. That, in turn, would eliminate the food source for other animals farther up the chain. Breaks in the food chain eventually would work their way all the way up to humans, many of whom maintain meat-heavy diets [sources: Purdue University, Brown].

    So, without insects, everyone would just have to become a vegetarian, right? Not unless you count dirt as a vegetable.

    Which of the following do you agree with?
    A. All this talk about collapse is a myth.
    B. People have been preaching collapse for a long time, maybe at some point they will be correct, but I doubt it.
    C. The world’s ecosystem, the part that supports human life, is in the process of collapse right now.

    1. Source cause? a) insecticides? b) GMOs? c) herbicides? d) radiation from japan? e) loss habitat? f) virus (new)?; g) 8B folks… one world connection via ships.. everything everywhere

    2. Three-quarters of all flying insects are gone? Why isn’t everyone running through the streets screaming?

      I tried that many years ago and just ended up losing my voice!
      .

    3. I just squashed a flying insect that invaded my bathroom, so they’re not all gone yet.

    4. 9B and way forward: biodynamic gardening in greenhouses on top of organic gardening with all volcanic type trace minerals (lost in west soils over 100 years)… recommended for small, Russia type farms in a post warming period (aka now little ice age) and CO2 variable weather (when it rains it pours like Clinton said about houses next to the rivers)…

      1. True Fred, Denial and Delusion are rampant in these times. Not sure whether the cornucopians or the trump supporters are more dangerous.

        Could epidemic mental deviations or illness be a condition in a pre-collapse society?
        Or is it just the toxic brew we live in, drink, breathe and eat causing various forms of mass psychosis?

        It’s a warming world for the Mad Hatter’s party.

        1. Or is it just the toxic brew we live in, drink, breathe and eat causing various forms of mass psychosis?

          Just watch the video I posted on:
          Climate Change, Insect Biology, and the Challenges Ahead

          The whole video is a must see IMHO! But if you skip ahead to the 41 min 30 sec mark he talks about drought and reclaimed water and what is in it and how that effects plants and insects and ultimately ourselves. I think, that with your particular background, you will very quickly get the point! To be frank, I didn’t really have a clue about some of the consequences and had considered myself to have been reasonably aware. It blew my mind! It’s one more punch to the gut.

          I think the time is fast approaching to find something more constructive to do with my time than posting comments on the internet. There is much to do and not a whole lot of time to do it in.

          Cheers!

          1. Thanks, good video.
            We are always missing things and then being blindsided. To be expected in a highly dynamic and complex system.

  22. The future of America’s worst freeway
    by Mark Kaufman

    https://mashable.com/feature/green-new-deal-los-angeles-405-freeway/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

    On June 17, 1994, some 20 police cars chased O.J. Simpson’s white Ford Bronco down Los Angeles’ 405 freeway. It proved to be an especially bizarre pursuit, set in motion after the Los Angeles Police Department told Simpson to surrender in connection with the murder of two stabbing victims, one of whom was his ex-wife.

    Amid the evening rush hour, great lengths of the highway were free of gridlock as officers cleared the lanes. It was a rare sight. In any given year, the 405 is either one of the worst or literally the worst trafficked highway in the U.S. It takes extraordinary circumstances to relieve this notorious concrete behemoth of overcrowding.

    “It’s the most congested artery in America,” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti told me, as he fittingly rolled slowly through traffic on another infamous LA freeway, the 110.

    Yet, after decades of deadlock, the 405 may be able to shed its infamous reputation. Or, at least, there’s cautious hope for the long-beleaguered, 72-mile highway. Garcetti revealed “L.A.’s Green New Deal” in April — an aggressive plan to confront the planet’s accelerating climate change by slashing the city’s carbon emissions. The far-reaching vision intends not just to electrify Los Angeles’ polluting vehicles, but to dramatically ramp up public transit across the West’s largest metropolis, a sprawl blanketed in asphalt and peppered with palm trees.

    Garcetti’s Green New Deal calls for unprecedented change, a transportation revolution that will make some traffic-jaded Angelenos roll their eyes. No one thinks clearing out the 405 will be easy.

    The plan expects that by 2035, half of all trips through the city will take place in — gasp — something other than a single occupancy car. And, critically, the cars left on the road will no longer puff air pollution nor the potent heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide from their tailpipes. In fact, many cars may not have tailpipes at all. By 2025, Garcetti wants a quarter of all vehicles to run on electricity or zero-emission fuels. By 2035, he expects this number to leap to 80 percent.

    Fortunately for the 405 and its begrudging patrons, Garcetti’s scheme is getting a potent kick. In 2028, the Olympic games are coming back to Los Angeles. When the 34th Olympiad begins, the city intends to showcase a modernized, electrified transportation system, so city dwellers and visitors alike won’t need to drive themselves to the Games — in terrible traffic. Instead, they’ll use rail, subways, and electrified buses. “We can use the Olympics as a sense of urgency,” said Matt Peterson, the mayor’s former chief sustainability officer and now president of Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, an organization promoting a climate-friendly city.

    But getting Angelenos to ditch their automobiles has historically been a grand failure. And, as you’ll see, the greatest hurdle of all might not be initially getting cars off the 10-lane roadway.

    It will be keeping the majority of them off, for good.

    1. Robo cars will take over in places such as LA sooner than anywhere else.

      A two seater fore and aft low slung electric robocar won’t take up much space on the highway, and it will decelerate or stop very quickly if necessary, allowing it to follow another car almost bumper to bumper.
      But the real change will finally come when the people in such cities finally take back their government from the special interests that control zoning and other such regulations. People that own commercial property are going to fight tooth and claw to make sure old convenience stores aren’t converted to neighborhood supermarkets, that houses can’ be used as doctor or lawyers offices, that large houses can’t be converted into duplex or triplex units, etc.

      MOST of all the travel inside or very near a city such as LA can eventually be done away with. But it’s going to take quite a while for this sea change in the way we live to come to pass.

      It’s already possible even in the boonies where I live to have your groceries ready for pickup, and put directly into your car without even going into the supermarket to pay for them. It’s already possible to find an enterprising individual who will pick out and pay for your groceries and drop them off at your house for a modest fee…… less than anybody with a well paid job can earn, after taxes just taking his TIME into account, never mind wear and tear and gasoline for his car to do his own grocery shopping.

      In ten years robocar grocery delivery may well be so cheap in a place such as LA that hardly anybody will WANT to drive to the store for groceries. It will be CHEAPER than driving to the store, never mind the hassle. A modest tip to one’s favorite ” picker ” once in a while will guarantee one’s tomatoes and lettuce are the nicest and freshest the produce department has to offer.

      UNLESS vested interest businesses such as car dealers and real estate owners and banks, etc, manage to outlaw robo cars……………

    2. I do wonder, since previous additions of mass transit failed, why they would think another addition of mass transit will succeed?
      Subsidies to car pooling might encourage people to reduce traffic.

      The advantage to cars is they actually get people to their destinations, rather than some preset point possibly far from their destinations. I remember back in the 70’s using rail for travel, I would sometimes have to walk miles with a suitcase to get to my destination. The buses that worked that area are long gone and the passenger rail is now centered around commuters so finding trains in the off hours is difficult to impossible.

      1. When I was in the UK, the local bus service stopped about the time the first commuter train arrived from London. When you got off the train, especially if it was late as usual, there was no bus. The result was that everyone needed to use their own car/motorcycle/bicycle.

        NAOM

      2. Yep.

        Rail in high traffic corridors is wonderful. Fast, safe, and leaving you to read, meditate or work.

        Buses are pretty miserable: slow, noisy and very inconvenient. There’s no way to make mass transit sufficiently convenient for 24 x 7 outside very dense urban areas. LA does not qualify!

  23. Climate crisis be damned.

    AUSTRALIA APPROVES VAST COAL MINE NEAR GREAT BARRIER REEF

    “The mine is slated to produce up to 60 million tonnes of coal a year, boosting Australia’s exports by around 20 percent. Coupled with the construction of a railway link, it could open a swathe of Queensland to further exploitation and new mining projects. If all the coal in the Galilee Basin is burnt it would produce 705 million tonnes of climate pollution each year, which is more than 1.3 times Australia’s annual pollution from all sources, including cars, industry, energy and agriculture.” according to Australian Conservation Foundation.

    https://phys.org/news/2019-06-australia-vast-coal-great-barrier.html

    1. Meanwhile,

      AUSTRALIA SET TO BECOME THE WORLD’S BIGGEST EXPORTER OF NATURAL GAS

      “According to the latest quarterly resources outlook from the chief economist at the federal department of industry, innovation and science, the title is likely to be somewhat short-lived, however, as US exports ramp up over the following years. The report said Australia was likely to overtake Qatar as the biggest gas exporter, before the US assumes the mantle in the mid-2020’s.”

      https://www.businessinsider.com.au/australia-natural-gas-exports-growth-2019-2018-1

    2. Strange- this article looks so similar to one published in 2014-
      http://theconversation.com/carmichael-mine-is-a-game-changer-for-australian-coal-29839

      Regardless, it brings up an interesting debate. Where does responsibility lie when it comes to pollution?
      In this case is it the producer Australia, or the big customer India. The articles say that if they don’t produce the coal, India will just source it from elsewhere.
      Similarly, is China’s coal pollution solely attributable to them, or to the customers of their steel and other exported goods that the coal energy enables? Every country whose ports are unloading cargo container ships from China are in effect demanding that the coal be burnt.

      Bottom line in this train of thought- too many customers, too much demand, too much waste and frivolous consumption,
      for this planet to handle.

      1. State approval of Adani mine, the BBC version,

        Adani mine: Australia approves controversial coal project
        The mine, in Queensland’s Galilee Basin, has been the subject of years of hold-ups over environmental approvals.

        But it was given the go-ahead by the state government on Thursday, after earlier receiving federal approval.

        Critics say the project’s true impact remains unclear. Approval could pave the way for six more mines in the area.

        Construction at the mine site could begin within days, but Adani must wait for additional approvals before it can begin extracting underground coal, for export to India and other countries in Asia.

        https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-48618774

      2. “Bottom line in this train of thought- too many customers, too much demand, too much waste and frivolous consumption,
        for this planet to handle.”

        Hickory, in my (not so humble) opinion, it’s human population overshoot that’s our most pressing environmental issue: a crisis aggravating the myriad of forces behind global warming, environmental pollution, habitat loss, and the consumption of finite natural resources, such as fresh water, arable land and fossil fuels. We talk self-righteously about recycling, EVs, etc. while proceeding to add a couple of billion people to our planet. Hungry people will eat the last fish, crab, dolphin and whale. I’m not sure why this isn’t talked about more. Religion? Ego? It almost seems like Taboo Territory. To quote:

        “For years population has been increasing faster than many vital non-renewable and renewable resources. This means the amount of these resources per person is declining, in spite of modern technology. Other massive social and environmental problems … political instability, loss of freedoms, vanishing species, rain forest destruction, desertification, garbage, urban sprawl, water shortages, traffic jams, toxic waste, oil spills, air and water pollution, increasing violence and crime … continue to worsen as our numbers increase by more than 70 million more people every year. Solving these problems will be [would be] much less difficult when [if] we stop[ed] increasing the number of people affected by them. Two billion people live in poverty, more than the population of the entire planet less than 100 years ago. Today there are more people suffering in misery and starvation in the world than ever before in history.” ~World Population Balance

        1. I completely agree Doug.

          I first became away of these issues beginning at age 15 when my 9th grade science class studied Limits to Growth, in 1975.
          I refrained from reproducing, as a result of what I learned.
          Now I’m over the hill, and plan to depart earlier than most.
          Its the best I can personally do on population, other than leaving this week.
          But it doesn’t seem like time just yet.

        2. Yep! During my lifetime alone, we have increased the human population by roughly 5 billion people. And we have concentrated 50% of the planet’s resources and wealth in the hands of a very tiny minority of super rich. We have embraced a global system that promotes continuous economic growth regardless of environmental consequences.

          So while I do agree that population is a huge issue it can not be decoupled from the economic system of eternal consumption and never ending growth.

          I don’t see any fix to the system and at this point, I fully expect near term collapse. While there is certainly the possibility that there will be pockets of some form of technologically advanced civilization surviving in the near term. If we don’t solve the ecological crisis then even these surviving pockets will likely be overwhelmed as well, in the longer term.

          Brazilian saying: If you run, the Beast will catch you. If you stay, the Beast will eat you!

          Cheers!

        3. Human population overshoot WILL be corrected. The only question is how.

          NAOM

    3. AUSTRALIA APPROVES VAST COAL MINE NEAR GREAT BARRIER REEF

      In response:

      Mother Nature decides to discontinue 8,000 year old Great Barrier Reef renovation project near Australia.

      The project, which had been underway on the 500,000 year old reef system since the end of the last ice age will be completely shut down over the next 5 to ten years, claims Mother Nature. Instead she will be transferring all her resources into increasing the number of toxic oxygen depleted dead zones that are more suitable to jellyfish, cyanobacteria and other extremophiles.

      Cheers!

      1. Australia- 70% uninhabitable due to desert. 30% uninhabitable due to Australians.

        1. If Australia was serious about military defense ( nuclear submarines ).

          It might be a great place to live during the collapse.

          Lots of farms, lots of coal, lots of natural gas, small population, large country, lots of seafood, etc.

          Australia needs to be able to put a nuclear submarine on China/Indonesia/Japans/Indias border that discourages invasion.

          I must go now….I am getting a vasectomy.

    4. Elections have consequences and last month Australian voters returned one of the most FF friendly, global warming denying governments in the world to power. Australia like the US is somewhat unique in that it has gargantuan coal reserves that are controlled and exploited by a relatively small group of very wealthy individuals. Coincidentally, these people have as an ally, the owner of one of the largest news organisations in both countries, Rupert Murdoch and as such have had a deluge of “news” favourable to their causes targeted to the voting population. Apart from the federal government , Queensland voters were made to believe that coal mining is a certain route to prosperity and that there are little if any other options. I tend to go to reneweconomy.com.au for the other side of the story (as opposed to News Corp’s take):

      Queensland clears way for Adani to begin work on Galilee basin “carbon bomb”

      The Adani project has faced criticism for its environmental impact, including the contribution coal produced at the mine have to global warming. Criticisms have extended to claims that the economic benefits of the project have been overstated, with many still questioning the economic viability of the mine.

      “This decision will be remembered as an infamous failure of good governance of our precious country. Coal is the number one driver of the climate crisis in Australia, which is exacerbating droughts all over the country,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO David Ritter said following the announcement.

      “We are in the midst of the climate emergency, the extinction crisis and a water crisis. By giving this groundwater management plan the go-ahead, the system is acting to legitimise the madness.”

      According to an analysis prepared for Adani, the Carmichael Mine is set to create up to 1,464 construction jobs but supporting around 100 ongoing positions. Pro-coal campaigners, as well as Adani itself, have at times claimed that Adani would support up to 10,000, potentially raising false hopes for job creation in struggling parts of regional Queensland.

      The lions share of the benefits of this project will accrue to Gautam Adani and his family. With an estimated net worth of $11.5 billion, it is essential that this project succeed so that the figure can go higher. Any downsides to this project will likely be endured by a larger pool of folks, like 7 plus billion.

      1. “This decision will be remembered as an infamous failure of good governance of our precious country. Coal is the number one driver of the climate crisis in Australia, which is exacerbating droughts all over the country,” Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO David Ritter said following the announcement.”

        No, coal is not the number one driver of the climate crisis in Australia! Because there is no isolated Australian Climate Crisis! It is a global crisis without borders. For me, this statement vividly underscores, why framing what is for all practical purposes a global planetary crisis can not, nor should it ever be, put in strictly national terms. What happens in Australia, or China or India or The United States does not stay in any of those nations!

        I see this as a very profound failing of vision from what is an otherwise rational and well meaning observer. Obviously this perspective is a very widespread one, to say the least. Nationalism is the wrong frame to be using. It is being used by demagogues to manipulate the public at large in very dangerous ways.

        A pox upon Rupert Murdoch’s and Gautam Adani and his family’s houses!

  24. Already being discussed on the Petroleum related side of this blog so I won’t post any links here…
    But IMHO the attacks on two oil tankers in Gulf of Oman that have already caused a rise in oil prices should be great for Tesla stocks! /sarc

    1. Seems like the storm is always brewing there, which distracts people from the real problems.

      Iran could disable the whole Saudi Oil complex in an hour and block the Strait.
      But what would that accomplish and what would it gain Iran?

      1. Seems like the storm is always brewing there, which distracts people from the real problems.

        Yeah, I have a hunch that isn’t exactly a coincidence…

        But for entertainment, I usually go read the petroleum side of this blog.

          1. “Add to that, who really doesn’t want war is the US because it would lose (again). Various war games have shown this to be true. Also common sense: The US has 50,000 troops at bases adjoining the Persian Gulf, including its largest foreign base in Qatar, plus other bases in nearby Iraq and Afghanistan, all zeroed-in rocket/missile targets, plus Hez missiles aimed at Israeli cities, plus nearby warships including a 5,000 man aircraft carrier . . .we’ve been over this before.
            So that frees up Iran to rock(et) the boat”

            We shall see—-

            1. Iran attacking US bases and ships on a large scale?
              What happens next?

              Iran as a glassed over radioactive badlands with no one living there.

            2. A video was released by the US as an evidence that the Iranians attacked the tankers. But what exactly does the video prove? Does anyone find the video as an evidence credible?

  25. Saw this over at the EIA’s Today in Energy page yesterday:

    Southwestern states have better solar resources and higher solar PV capacity factors

    On average, utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants in the United States operated at about 25% of their electricity generating capacity, based on an average of annual values from 2014 through 2017. This measurement, known as a plant’s capacity factor, is based on the plant’s electricity generation as a percentage of its summer capacity value for plants with a full-year of operation, as expressed in terms of alternating current (AC) power. States in the Southwest United States tend to have better solar resources—and higher capacity factors—than those in the Southeast or Northeast.

    Arizona’s utility-scale solar PV plants performed better than those in any other state, achieving a 29.1% capacity factor from 2014 through 2017. Arizona’s installed utility-scale solar PV capacity was 1.7 gigawatts (GW) at the end of 2017, about 7% of the national total. Utah’s 0.9 GW of solar PV plants ranked second, with a 29.0% capacity factor. California’s utility-scale solar PV plants—totaling 9.4 GW, or 37% of the national total—ranked third with an average capacity factor of 28.4%.

    By comparison, states in the Southeast, such as Georgia and North Carolina, had substantially lower PV capacity factors than southwestern states at similar latitudes. States in the Northeast, such as New Jersey and Massachusetts, had even lower capacity factors.

    Three main factors largely determine a solar PV power plant’s capacity factor: resource quality, tracking capabilities, and inverter-sizing considerations. Sunnier locations, such as in the southwestern United States, have more hours of direct, high-angle sunlight per year, and as a result, the solar PV modules can capture more sunlight.

    In the solar PV business, capacity factors above 25% are to die for and four state in the graphic below are over 27%. By comparison the best locations in Germany can expect less than half of that. One wonders if existing coal plants in the southwest will be able to survive much longer. The largest coal plant west of the Mississippi, the Navajo Generating Station is set to cease operations by the end of this year. Not hard to see why, it is in the state with the highest solar capacity factors (low cost of electricity from solar PV).

    1. Note that while lots of people think of North Carolina as redneck republican territory, they’re second only to California in solar power.

      It’s possible to separate BIZ’NISS an POLERTIKS. Maybe we should devote some time to learning why NC is such fertile solar territory.

            1. Google has a renewables mandate and is trying to get state monopoly suppliers to change to renewables.

              NAOM

          1. San Franciscans need very little in the way of either heat or cooling, which is the primary reason their per person electricity consumption is lower than anyplace else.

            But I most emphatically agree that the rest of the country should follow California’s example in the fields of conservation and renewable energy.

            Someway or another, the people and politicians in North Carolina have managed to separate their political convictions from their day to day practical problems and lives in the case of getting serious about solar energy.

            You can talk to a random Tar Heel on the street, and he is all in favor of bringing new business into the state, even if it’s something you would expect him to laugh at, such as solar farms. He understands that North Carolina doesn’t have coal or oil or gas, but that NC has plenty of sunshine, and plenty of land, and plenty of young people eager to find decent jobs that can’t be exported the way the furniture and textile industries were exported.

            If he voted for Trump, that vote had more to do with presenting the middle finger to the snooty liberal establishment that looks down on him, and seldom bothers to make a secret of it, than it did Trump style economics.

            I despair of the fact that people as smart as some of the regulars here never miss an opportunity to insult and demean their fellow citizens who happen to take their religion seriously.

            That’s about as SURE a recipe for guaranteeing they vote R next election as I can think of. It’s a dead sure recipe as can be imagined for guaranteeing they won’t follow and participate in a forum such as this one, even though they may be VERY interested in peak oil, natural resource issues, climate, and all the other things we talk about here.

            The biggest problem, perhaps, with the environmental camp message is that the majority of environmental preachers are engaged almost exclusively in preaching to the choir.

            There’s a lot to be learned about human behavior from a study of that old KJB, although it’s not very useful as a SCIENCE text, lol.

            Jesus said you must get out among the SINNERS, and associate with them, and work with them, in order to SAVE them.

            If you want the VOTES of the people who are inclined to vote for Trump, the first absolutely essential step to winning it is to quit badmouthing them PUBLICLY.

            There’s plenty of common ground to be found if you will meet them halfway, and establish a respectful working relationship with them.

            Once that’s established, you can gradually introduce the weeds of liberal thought into their conservative mind gardens, where they will in spite of all the efforts they can make to prevent them from growing, they will GROW ANYWAY.

            At the nearest country store where I go for conversation and coffee and odds and ends of stuff, the regulars are ninety percent Trumpsters. The other ten percent don’t say much about politics, lol, not THERE, anyway.

            I have a respectful working relationship with them, they’re all on good terms with me, even though they think I’m a little confused about such topics as oil, climate, and electric cars. Most of them view me as a friend, and they are my friends as well, but not CLOSE friends.

            None of them have anything much negative to say about the Canadian health care system these days, when one or the other of them points out that his meds cost an arm and a leg. Why ? Because for a while now, I’ve been talking about all of us getting ripped of by our health care system.

            I just say the fucking rip off drug companies and drug stores and doctors and hospitals in this country should all be fined to hell and back or thrown in jail for being so goddamned determined to get rich on our backs, and point out a couple of examples of people we know now who are actually going to Canada or ordering their meds from Canada, for a small fraction of the price they have to pay for the same identical meds here.

            I DON’T mention Republicans, or Trump, or socialism or socialized medicine. They’re smart enough, half of them anyway, to make that connection, to make the mental leap, to come to the conclusion that they would very possibly, even LIKELY, maybe even FOR SURE be BETTER OFF in terms of their health care if we were to have a Canadian type system. This takes a little time, a year or two, or even longer, but it WORKS.. eventually.

            Frontal assaults on peoples belief systems and values are almost always doomed to fail. If you want to succeed, you must do so using somewhat stealthy tactics, introducing new thoughts and new ways of thinking gradually, without preaching.

            Talking about climate isn’t going to convince a Republican to support the wind and solar power industries.

            But talking about LOCAL JOBS, LOCAL tax collections, and local self determination, without even MENTIONING Democrats and Republicans will result in your target gradually coming to realize that maybe wind and solar power are GOOD things, in terms of his own personal economic welfare. My man on the street Tar Heel understands that money spent on coal and gas from out of state isn’t doing his community and state nearly as much good as if that money stays in state.

            He may never have given the matter any thought, but if you point it out to him without preaching, he will quickly understand that the LESS oil and gas and coal he uses, the less his electric utility uses, the LESS it will cost to purchase these things, saving money TWICE…. once on the quantity NOT purchased, and a second time on the price of the quantity that IS purchased, because lower consumption means lower prices for commodities.

            He’s likely old enough, if he voted for Trump, to remember thirty cent gasoline, and bread that would NEVER COST A DOLLAR A LOAF, and new cars , NICE new cars, that cost no more than three or four thousand bucks. He believes in inflation, and when it occurs to him, he believes in long term planning. He’s smart enough to understand that a wind farm or a solar farm will for all intents and purposes run FOREVER with only routine maintenance, replacing worn out equipment, with a NEAR ZERO fuel bill, just enough to run the maintenance equipment.

            Just remember to keep his religion out of the discussion, and keep politics out of it.

            If the matter of subsidies does come up, be truthful, and admit that wind and solar subsidies do cost in terms of tax dollars, and that when the cost of new wind and solar farms is rolled into utility rate structures, rates may go up, for years to come….. but not forever.

            Be honest about this, and then respectfully point out that the rates for water and sewer service, new highways, higher taxes for public schools, more police, etc, are rolled into our lives either directly via higher monthly water bills or gasoline taxes or higher taxes of some other sort.

            Wind and solar farms are good long term investments, just as new roads, better schools, reliable and safe water systems, etc, are good investments, but they DO have to be paid for.

    1. “Though hybrid technology probably won’t be available until a few years later, Airbus is confident that airlines would be prepared to wait for the step-change in efficiency that a hybrid would provide, according to the people. (Airbus has targeted reducing CO2 emissions by 75% by 2050.) “

      At the moment, synthetic fuel is too expensive to compete with oil, at roughly $2.50 per litre. That’s pretty certain to fall sharply, but even if it didn’t it would be no more expensive than oil is today, if aviation fuel consumption dropped by 75%.

      1. Oh good.
        Then we will be able to all go on a chartered field trip to Ecuador on an ecotourism jaunt.
        See the place where they used to have real living frogs all the way up to year 2027.
        Marvelous.
        We could ask Caelan to read us stories from his book on the theoretical aspects of indoor permaculture. [no questions about practical matters will be entertained].

        note- sarcastic tone deployed here

  26. Incompetent Farming

    “The moral of my 30+ years of experience is quoted from OFM above:

    We’re stuck with industrial agriculture!” ~ Michael B

    Union Of Concerned Scientists: Industrial Agriculture
    The outdated, unsustainable system that dominates U.S. food production.

    “Today, the majority of American farmland is dominated by industrial agriculture—the system of chemically intensive food production developed in the decades after World War II, featuring enormous single-crop farms and animal production facilities.

    Back then, industrial agriculture was hailed as a technological triumph that would enable a skyrocketing world population to feed itself. Today, a growing chorus of agricultural experts—including farmers as well as scientists and policymakers—sees industrial agriculture as a dead end, a mistaken application to living systems of approaches better suited for making jet fighters and refrigerators.

    The impacts of industrial agriculture on the environment, public health, and rural communities make it an unsustainable way to grow our food over the long term. And better, science-based methods are available.”

    ‘Jet fighters and refrigerators’…

    Incidentally, I have read in more than a few places that the use of chemicals in agriculture is part of what is threatening arthropods (and by association, other species of course).

    Strange and perhaps sad that I feel I have to write this comment to a forum that occasionally seems to like to pat itself on the back WRT to its enlightenment in these kinds of regards.

    1. In case you didn’t read the article, this point is specifically addressed in discussion section of the PNAS paper:

      https://www.pnas.org/content/115/44/E10397

      “Research on causal factors has focused on anthropogenic disturbance and pesticides (57, 58). Given its long-term protected status (59), significant human perturbations have been virtually nonexistent within the Luquillo forest since the 1930s, and thus are an unlikely source of invertebrate declines. Due to the ongoing reduction in agriculture and associated farmland, pesticides use in Puerto Rico also fell up to 80% between 1969 and 2012 (SI Appendix, Fig. S7). Most pesticides have half-lives measured in days, not decades (60), making it improbable that, despite precipitous declines in their use, remaining residues are responsible for waning arthropod abundance.”

      The reasons for the declines in Germany are less clear, but the effects of pesticides were obviously not ruled out.

      1. chilyb,

        Caelan doesn’t have the capacity to understand the nuances of complex non linear dynamic systems. He seems to have a strictly black and white view of the world. He is the typical blind man tapping only one part of the elephant and unable to get the full picture. You’ll have better luck explaining this to a bright six year old!

        But here’s a few papers to show how complex these things can be ( no pun intended)

        https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/11/181113080927.htm

        New findings published today in the journal Nature Communications reveal that heatwaves damage sperm in insects — with negative impacts for fertility across generations.

        The research team say that male infertility during heatwaves could help to explain why climate change is having such an impact on species populations, including climate-related extinctions in recent years.

        https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13277

        Differential effects of climate warming on reproduction and functional responses on insects in the fourth trophic level

        https://www.panna.org/sites/default/files/CC%20insects&pests.pdf
        Climate Change Effects on Insects and Pathogens

        https://www.fs.usda.gov/ccrc/topics/insect-disturbance-and-climate-change
        Insect Disturbance and Climate Change

    1. I assume missing means no data? Or does it mean no more ice left to melt?

        1. Maybe we could float large styrofoam panels in those areas… /sarc

          1. Does anyone know how much ocean level rise there will be in case all the Greenland ice melts and how long time it would take?

            1. Well, the last time CO2 levels were this high was during the Pliocene about 3 million years ago! Temperatures then were 2-4 °C warmer than today and sea levels were roughly 20 m higher.
              We don’t really know how long before we actually see those temperatures or sea levels due to lags in the system but we know from the geologic record that that is what we can expect.

              Though things will probably get much worse than that!

              https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/06/are-past-climates-telling-us-were-missing-something/

              And yet, the climate won’t stop changing in 2100. Even if we succeed in limiting warming this century to 2ºC, we’ll have CO2 at around 500 parts per million. That’s a level not seen on this planet since the Middle Miocene, 16 million years ago, when our ancestors were apes. Temperatures then were about 5 to 8ºC warmer not 2º, and sea levels were some 40 meters (130 feet) or more higher, not the 1.5 feet (half a meter) anticipated at the end of this century by the 2013 IPCC report.

              The latest data make even that scenario seem optimistic!

              Cheers!

            2. “I hope nobody holds their breath, I don’t think that would be good for the health.”
              Could be good for the Earth 😉

              “but that will take 14000 years with the current rate”
              Remember the exponential, the rate of melting is x^n not x!

              NAOM

              PS Check Doug’s first post in the new thread.

  27. In the previous non-petroleum thread, the EPM report, OFM started a sub-thread discussing using land for solar PV as opposed to agriculture. He and others might find the following linked article interesting:

    Why solar parks should replace agricultural land

    At first glance, solar parks are technical installations that devalue the surrounding landscape and nature. At second glance, solar parks offer enormous potential for nature and biodiversity conservation.

    Particularly when solar parks are built where intensive farming has been practised, areas of arable land with few species are transformed into high-quality, species-rich plant communities for nature conservation purposes. Solar parks offer a special habitat for plants, insects and small mammals, which are rarely found in the intensively used cultural landscape. Solar parks thus make a significant contribution to the conservation of many native species.

    On grassland, the main reason for the decline in biodiversity is too much or too little use. Only a few grasses and herbs can cope with frequent mowing and heavy fertilization. The populations are monotonous and poor in species. If they are not mown at all, competitive grasses and woody plants displace the herbs. Insects also lose an important food source.

    Species protection

    Solar parks are not subject to agricultural utilization pressure. So that the modules do not shade, or even trees and shrubs have a chance, mowing is carried out at least once a year. There is no fertilization at all. Solar parks thus have a huge potential for diversity, which can be very valuable for the protection of species.

    1. Oh yeah, he’s another of those CO2 is food for plants proponents. He has zero scientific publications on anything related to climate science.
      These people all need to be locked up in asylums for the criminally insane!

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