132 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, August 17, 2022”

  2. SURVIVALIST, I recently described the Republican (and Evangelical) fear of our “immoral and decadent society”, ie the Democrats and the US government…

    I forgot to include the fake news media. See a letter from a family member to Republican Adam Kinzinger…

    1. “Crime has been a winning issue for Republicans, and they need to be careful not to jeopardize that.”

      “Lol. I’m afraid that ship sailed when they voted for a criminal for president.”

    2. Thanks for being so forthcoming with your story John! To those who find WW1 improbable because all the royal families from the warring sides were related, I can only say, ‘you have obviously never been in a family’

  3. To Ron (and others interested):

    The story of Haber’s fixation of Nitrogen.

    If you haven’t seen this already, you will love it. It is a concise account of the life of Fritz Haber, the most paradoxical character in modern history, in my opinion. The book “The Alchemy of Air,” which I learned about here, is a more complete account, but this short documentary, while truncated, gives the essence of this poor, horrible man’s story. It completely ignores his relationship with Bosch, and elides his Jewishness [the book makes clear that Haber struggled for acceptance in Germany because he was a Jew], but it’s worth a look, nonetheless.

    1. Haber was a nightmare.
      He did double the population of Earth.
      Even his wife checked out over his actions.

    2. Thanks, Mike, I truly enjoyed this YouTube video. I also read “The Alchem of Air”. I read a lot of books but not many cover to cover. But this book I could hardly put down.

      The story of Fritz Haber is a tragedy. A tragedy for him, for his wife, and for Jews everywhere. If only he had known that the country he so dearly loved would, even during his life, try to kill all Jews.

      Thanks for the link.

    3. Not quite on the order of Haber is another technologist whose contributions were both to be praised and loathed was Thomas Midgley. Midgley was the right hand man to “Boss” Kettering at General Motors in the 1920s. Midgley discovered that tetraethyl lead would dramatically increase the octane of gasoline at a much lower cost than the additional refining required to achieve the same results. Within a decade virtually all gasoline sold in the U.S. contained “lead”. It was a boon for the oil companies and the car companies enabling higher profits for both due to the ability to increase performance. Incidentally hundreds and possibly more lost their lives or their health in the production of this incredibly toxic substance. Additional health issues to humans in any poorly ventilated space where gasoline engines were run. Did you ever wonder why forklifts all ran on propane? Even worse the lead ended up everywhere in the environment causing significant health issues whose cause was not determined for decades. Yet even with all of the data available tetraethyl lead was only removed from gasoline when it was found to interfere with the catalytic converters introduced by General Motors in 1973 as emission control devices in response to government mandates.
      Not to be deterred by such trivia Midgley, still at GM, invented the first Freon refrigerant for use in refrigerators sold by GM under the Frigidaire brand. The most damaging of these chlorinated hydrocarbons have been ruled illegal in most countries but may, perhaps, still be manufactured in China. According to the EPA existing refrigerants do not affect the ozone layer but do contribute to global warming.
      In 1940, at the age of 51, Midgley contracted polio, which left him severely disabled. He devised an elaborate system of ropes and pulleys to lift himself out of bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the device and died of strangulation.

      1. The same source as the video above has a good presentation on Midgley as well.

    4. Most people do not understand that for the war effort the Haber-Bosch process was only useful because the Ostwald process, i.e. oxidation of ammonia to nitrate, was available. And always keep in mind that Ostwald was the father of modern catalysis research.

      Haber gives, because he was a patriotic German Jew, a more tragidc figure, in the larger picture Ostwald was IMHO as chemist the more important figure.

  4. – Wind, solar provide 67% of new US electrical generating capacity in first half of 2022
    – Renewables To Equal 22% Of U.S. Electricity Generation In 2022 — U.S. EIA Forecast
    [scalable or not]
    ~ the internet

    1. Cheers John. I found these two recent articles when scanning the horizon the other day. Perhaps others here will like it too.

      2022 renewable energy industry outlook
      “n 2021, the renewable energy industry remained remarkably resilient. Rapid technology improvements and decreasing costs of renewable energy resources, along with the increased competitiveness of battery storage, have made renewables one of the most competitive energy sources in many areas. Despite suffering from supply chain constraints, increased shipping costs, and rising prices for key commodities, capacity installations remained at an all-time high. Wind and solar capacity additions of 13.8 GW in the first eight months of 2021 were up 28% over the same period in 2020. Many cities, states, and utilities set ambitious clean energy goals, increasing renewable portfolio standards and enacting energy storage procurement mandates.”
      https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/energy-and-resources/articles/renewable-energy-outlook.html

      Renewable energy in the U.S. – statistics & facts ~ Aug 4, 2022
      https://www.statista.com/topics/1250/renewable-energy/#topicHeader__wrapper

    2. That’s interesting, but also a stat that may give the wrong impression. Consider a world with declining fossil fuels, there is less stuff to burn, of course it doesn’t make sense to make a new fossil fuel generating plant because there are enough already. The only thing that can possibly be built are renewables, and maybe some fossil fuel plants as a replacement for ones that have reached the end of their life. I expect this percentage to keep going up, but that doesn’t mean civilization is doing great.

      1. Oil may be running out, but there is plenty of coal. But coal can’t compete with renewables.

    1. Meanwhile we´ve had quite a wet and windy summer/early fall in the far north of europe, water storage well filled, even letting water bypass the turbines in some cases, seen it myself. So the gradient in electricity prices between us and continental europe is huge, 10x to 100x or more at times, northern Norway beats us a bit though. There is however some displeasure nationly about running Karlshamn, oil fired 600 Mw plant in the “south”, but all of it is exported at a premium… ( our export is in the range 2000-5000 Mw continously for the last 6 months or so)
      Check out Tromsö prices, Germans and Brits…
      https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/#/nordic/table
      https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Power-system-data/Exchange1/ALL/Hourly111/?view=table
      https://hydro-reservoir.nordpoolgroup.com/rescontent/sweden/rescontent.cgi?area=SE1
      Cold winters at the Arctic Circle, but there´s benefits currently.

      Edit: Point being, insulate, reduce use, increase local renewable production etc. etc. Freezing in the dark is not pleasant from my own experiance.
      Edit 2: heard a business proposal that actually makes some weird sense: buy 1000 Teslas, scrap them but put the batteries on a barge, charge in SE1 or preferably NO4, ship and discharge in DK, DE, GB…
      https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic

  6. The most common “solution” being proposed now for our various predicaments is that mankind will suddenly decide to do the right thing, which doesn’t mean resorting to chucking garbage bins through a pizzeria’s window but would be some kind of secular humanist awakening after which we’d jolly well start thinking and caring about the environment and each other. This usually comes up just after a sentence starting “But it’s still not too late …”., and might be said by a climate scientist who has rightly bemoaned being told by amateur deniers that his science is erroneous, but thinks its OK if he or she assumes behavioural psychology is obvious to all. The chance of this global awakening is zero. There’s increasing evidence that we don’t consciously decide to do anything, collectively or as individuals, and our behaviours are preset through evolution to maximise the survival of our genes into subsequent generations. In the right circumstances this might mean we behave to the benefit of a tribal population and possibly considering multi-generation timescales. A global industrial, consumerist society is not the right circumstances and our “give a shit” compass sometimes seems to extend to ourselves alone and over a period limited by the next quarterly report. So we are done – Chris Hedges says it well here: https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/we-are-not-the-first-civilization?utm_source=email

    There’s a few recent books that are very well written on what really shapes our behaviour (but if you read them all you will be thoroughly sick of the “runaway rail car” thought experiment, which probably indicates how prefatory the study of this subject currently is).

    Behave by Robert Sapolsky is the best popular science book that I’ve read in the past ten years (or at least equal with Almost Like a Whale).
    Moral Tribes by Joshua Green
    The Goodness Paradox by Richard Wrangham
    The Elephant in the Brain by Simler and Hansom
    The Worm at the Core by Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski
    The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow
    Darwin’s Unfinished Symphony by Kevin N. Laland

    1. With that in mind, its eventually coming down to regional tribal warfare then?

      1. I haven’t much idea of how things are likely to play out in the chaos (James Ellroy has a great quote, which he attributes to W. H. Auden, but I think he just made it up, a very Ellroy thing to do: “This storm, this savaging disaster”, which just about covers it). I think of tribes as having some kind of genetic connectivity and bonding, we are more likely to end up with something like disparate war bands without much cohesion. I think there is growing evidence that tribes that evolve with a stable and benign environment can be quite peaceful and enlightened, but those that are the remains of a collapse are more violent. Tribal living isn’t necessary for everyone, if you’re a free thinker you are likely to be bonked on the head at some point.

        1. I was using the term tribal in a less accurate sense.
          Tribal alliances have been based on genetic relation throughout human history.
          And then we had the emergence of the big tribes- religious and then nationalistic.
          And these tribal associations have been the root of grand scale ethnic cleansing, as the big tribal franchises jostle for control of resource and domination.
          Now we have all sorts of tribes that have the potential act as very destructive force- from sports hooligans to drug cartels, neo-nazis to trump magas, anti-fascists to brownshirts, isis to kkk, etc.
          What is new is the enabling force of modern media communication/manipulation and the proliferation of weapons of war in certain countries. That, and the limits of growth.

          1. I feel the trend will be towards agrarian communes; not because I particularity like them, I just feel the bottleneck conditions, the carrots & sticks, will produce it, as somewhat remote groups of people growing food will perhaps do best. There of course will be security problems for those in possession of valuable movables & food, and those atop good land. If things get dodgy I plan on keeping my head down for a few years, as the security problems will likely come from militia types that met on Facey; they’ll run around breaking porcelain for a bit before they tucker out. They seem big into Operator Chic cosplay, but think little about The Big Picture; perhaps lots of MRE’s, but no green thumbs. They’ll starve out or die trying.

            With regards to my own behavior and moral qualms; I feel the best way to confront a thief is to offer some free food and literature on equitable policies. There’s no need to be rude. But if a group is putting in a raid on your family camp then it’s morally permissible to defend it.

            1. Do you think agriculture will be able survive for long as climate change induced instability makes harvests less and less reliable. The impacts from droughts, floods and heat seems to be starting earlier than anyone expected. It may, of course, just be headline grabbing and click bait , and the ultimate losses will be not much more than average over the globe – we shall see. With global markets, UN aid and other humanitarian programs local shortages can still mostly be covered, n different areas and from year to year. As things become wholly local that won’t be possible. One bad harvest would be bad, to in a row would mean every body dead or moved away. At three degrees, or maybe much less, regular failures might be the norm. Bad harvests would not be made up for by subsequent good years as there would be no workers left to plant and tend the crops, even if seeds had been retained rather than eaten. Add to that degraded soil and aquifers that had sunk too deep to be reached by the simple pumps that could be run with the available power and things would be quite precarious. And you only need to meet one psychopath for it to be all over, no matter how enlightened and sharing every one else might be.

            2. Hi George, I feel the agriculture production business model will fall apart once it’s no longer profitable/affordable. I’m very much convinced by Prof Battisti’s presentation, link below for those unfamiliar, that yield volatility will go through the roof, and in doing so will, I believe, undermine incentives to plant large scale crops.

              “Yield volatility is gonna go through the roof”
              Climate Change and Global Food Security: Prof David Battisti
              https://youtu.be/YToMoNPwTFc?t=45m36s

              Prof Battisti points to data that incorporates temperature. I feel we should add in to that a concern for nutrient shortages secondary to decreased fertilizer applications. Two or three bad years in a row, or perhaps 2 out of 3, or 3 out 4, will, imho, see that the business model collapses, and there will then be a lot less work going on at the farms.
              I quite liked Gwynne Dyer’s statement in Climate Wars, something to the effect of ‘any anthropologist will tell you that people steal before they starve’. That concerns me greatly; a few days without food and everybody’s brain gets kinda reptilian.
              COVID seemed a low hurdle, as far as social challenges go, and, imho, we didn’t cope well at all. I’m predicting that perceptions of objective scarcity will go far worse.

            3. Valid concerns, although farmers can be quick to adapt.
              And that can mean switching to varieties that are less desirable in the modern market and or yielding less, but are less fragile and vulnerable.
              People will get used to less fancy food and paying more for it- if they can.

              For those of us with full bellies, lets remember that something like 2 billion people already live in a very food insecure and marginal situation. Maybe 3 billion before long.

              New terminology for me from a friend this week- ‘community foodshed’
              akin to watershed. Buy local and direct to support yours.

            4. ” But if a group is putting in a raid on your family camp then it’s morally permissible to defend it.”

              In the real world, at the individual and community level in a shit IN the fan scenario, with raiders known to be in the neighborhood, the only defense that’s apt to work is to go on the offense.

              My own scientific wild ass guess is that the odds are ninety nine.nine percent that I won’t live long enough to have to deal with such a scenario, and with a little luck, we Yankees, southern flavor, won’t ever descend to the level of Somalia .

              But if I it becomes necessary, I have a contingency plan that basically consists of forting up with three or four other old guys and keeping our options open.

              You won’t be calling the cops in such situations. They won’t show up. There might not even BE any cops. If there are any, they might be AFRAID to show up. Witness their response to the Uvalde school shooter.

              As a general thing I have a lot of respect for my local and state police, but they AREN’T soldiers, and in such scenarios they’re just not up to the job.Combat is not included in their job description.

              A couple of cops, or even half a dozen, aren’t even remotely capable of dealing with just one well armed bandit EAGER to shoot first, from ambush, ASSUMING they still have working phones, you still have a working phone, they gasoline………….

              We don’t have enough soldiers in the National Guard to deal with patrolling the countryside. The regular army doesn’t have that many troops even if it were to be deployed state side, which is legally forbidden anyway.

              But one thing is for sure. Under martial law, a couple of dozen soldiers authorized to deal with such characters could make short work of them……. assuming they don’t just fade away into the countryside.

              There’s ONE thing I’m dead sure of.

              The vast majority of the sort of people who have stocked up on guns, ammo, MRE’s and such stuff aren’t going ANYWHERE……. not so long as they’re not FORCED to go by circumstances.

              They’ll be staying home to protect their home turf and collect whatever welfare bennies they can, such as from organized emergency food distributions. Talking about moving into a tent or primitive cabin in the far off woods is one thing. Actually DOING it is another thing altogether.

              Women don’t like it. The old ones aren’t capable of dealing with it and the younger ones for the most part just aren’t going to go along. They’ll move back in with Momma or find themselves a new guy.

              The vast majority of these wanna be Rambo guys can’t deal with it, and the ones who can will be sick of it within sixty days.

              They’ll stay put in town as long as the water, sewer, and electricity work.

            5. ” But if a group is putting in a raid on your family camp then it’s morally permissible to defend it.”

              In the real world, at the individual and community level in a shit IN the fan scenario, with raiders known to be in the neighborhood, the only defense that’s apt to work is to go on the offense.

              My own scientific wild ass guess is that the odds are ninety nine.nine percent that I won’t live long enough to have to deal with such a scenario, and with a little luck, we Yankees, southern flavor, won’t ever descend to the level of Somalia .

              But if it becomes necessary, I have a contingency plan that basically consists of forting up with three or four other old guys and keeping our options open.

              You won’t be calling the cops in such situations. They won’t show up. There might not even BE any cops. If there are any, they might be AFRAID to show up. Witness their response to the Uvalde school shooter.

              As a general thing I have a lot of respect for my local and state police, but they AREN’T soldiers, and in such scenarios they’re just not up to the job.Combat is not included in their job description.

              A couple of cops, or even half a dozen, aren’t even remotely capable of dealing with just one well armed bandit EAGER to shoot first, from ambush, ASSUMING they still have working phones, you still have a working phone, they gasoline………….

              We don’t have enough soldiers in the National Guard to deal with patrolling the countryside. The regular army doesn’t have that many troops even if it were to be deployed state side, which is legally forbidden anyway.

              But under martial law, a couple of dozen soldiers authorized to deal with such characters could make short work of them……. assuming they don’t just fade away into the countryside.

              There’s one other thing I’m just about dead sure we don’t have to worry about to any real extent, and that’s a civil war started by the hard core trumpster types.

              The vast majority of the sort of people who have stocked up on guns, ammo, MRE’s, rebel flags, MAGA hats, and such stuff aren’t going ANYWHERE……. not so long as they’re not FORCED to go by circumstances.

              They’ll be staying home to protect their home turf and collect whatever welfare bennies they can, such as organized emergency food distributions.

              Talking about moving into a tent or primitive cabin in the far off woods is one thing. Actually DOING it is another thing altogether.

              Women don’t like it. The old ones aren’t capable of dealing with it and the younger ones mostly aren’t going to go along. They’ll move back in with Momma or find themselves a new guy.

              The vast majority of these wanna be Rambo guys can’t deal with it, and the ones who can will be sick of it within sixty days.

              They’ll stay put in town as long as the water, sewer, and electricity work. If the electricity is still on back home thirty days after they pull out, they’ll go back.

            6. “You won’t be calling the cops in such situations. They won’t show up. There might not even BE any cops. ”

              many times it is the cops you’ll have be worried about. ask the indigenous farm workers in Latin America during Reagens war against Latin American Democracy in the 80’s, or an African American in the USA over the past couple hundred years, or Jewish people in 1930’s in Europe, as a few of hundreds of examples.

            7. Hi OFM, I’d like to start by saying that, as you well know, everyone has different experiences and observations. It leads to different opinions, especially on the topic of real world security matters.

              “The vast majority of the sort of people who have stocked up on guns, ammo, MRE’s, rebel flags, MAGA hats, and such stuff aren’t going ANYWHERE” ~ OFM

              Agreed! That shit weights a ton, especially ammo, and unless you got a gassed up truck, a pack animal, or an infantryman’s back, you ain’t going anywhere…. most of them look like sacks of shit. To put it mildly, they’re bugging-in.

              I recommend a community & security group bigger than the one you have identified; or take your little crew and work with a family or two; get a mutual aid network going ahead of time; find some proud gardeners; the folks that volunteer to be HAM radio operators in a natural disaster are usually good eggs; hospital volunteers, whatever…
              I’m in the mountains, bugging-in at a prepositioned retreat, with lots of rough country, channeling terrain & friends; that’s my ace in the hole. If things get worst case we’ll keep our heads down & stay out of the way while the hotheads blow of some steam. The worker bees I crewed up with number about a dozen (and growing); once the ones they care about tag along with them, we’re talking about a family camp well over 50, with an approx 12 pers administrating the application of security needs.
              I’ve got raised beds and a ‘strategic top soil reserve’, aka pile of dirt, going, thin on good soil at my spot, so I had dump trucks bring it in. Prob last a 100 years. It’s quite the job.

      2. I haven’t recently caught up on my reading in the field of evolutionary psychology, so I’m looking forward to reading the books mentioned here.

        But you don’t have to be up to date to realize that we’re tribal creatures, born and bred, EVOLVED to be tribal.

        Something that’s almost always overlooked is that technology has enabled us to morph into ever larger tribes when circumstances are favorable.

        Leviathans, nation states, are capable of extraordinary responses when the leadership and the people come to understand that their own survival is at stake. Nations CAN cooperate, at least on occasion.

        My personal favorite example is the explosive birth and growth of the American tribe in response to Pearl Harbor. Isolationists morphed into globalists overnight.

        NATO can be usefully described as a tribal organization, where in individuals have been replaced by individual nation states, working together at this time to punish a rogue individual nation state, so as to maintain the status quo in favor of NATO countries.

        If we get a series of sufficiently alarming wake up calls, it’s entirely possible that the USA and a number of other industrial nations can go to a war time economic footing and solve just about any problem with only one really major exception, that being the climate problem.

        I’m not suggesting that our present day consumer economy status quo can be maintained. That’s impossible.

        But there’s no reason to assume that industrial civilization is doomed. If we get our collective act together, we can pull thru with the lights on and the toilet working and food in the stores.

        When I first left the farm, with the great outdoors right outside the door, I couldn’t really even imagine ever getting used to living in an apartment, but I did, without any problem, a few years later. My home turf, the space under my direct control, shrank down to about six hundred square feet at one point. I had to park my car a block away sometimes.

        We can get used to electric micro cars with short driving range, if necessary…….. and this may very well prove to be necessary.

        We can live quite well on half the energy we use per capita today, using technology available TODAY, at affordable prices. There’s no REAL reason why can’t get that down to a third, and possibly even a quarter, over the course of a generation or two.

        The basic question, as I see it, is whether we will wake up in time to do it.

        Most of us here in the USA piss away anywhere from a fifth to a quarter of our income on junk that we wouldn’t even miss after doing without it for a year. That’s way more than enough to pay for doing what MUST be done.

    3. If unchained from the shackles of bureaucratic overreach, the private market can provide the proper remediation for the planet’s ills.

      1. …. gotta love Big Tent Conservatism; because you need both those who believe our reptilian overlords are molesting children in caverns under Central Park, and those who believe government should be small and stay out of the way.

      2. If unchained from the shackles of bureaucratic overreach, the private market can provide the proper remediation for the planet’s ills.

        And I thought the flat earthers were the craziest folks around. Anyway, I must save the above quote for posterity.

        2. Hi Ron.

          I’m willing to bet a couple of shots of the last of my dead brother’s artisanal brandy that you have seen the cartoon showing corporate board room, with the speaker addressing top management, or maybe the board of directors.

          He has a couple of charts, one showing that the end of the world is only a couple of weeks away.

          But his second chart indicates that they can make a killing over the next couple of weeks, and that this killing will be the focus of the meeting.

          I would post a link but I can’t find it.

          1. Yeah, I have seen it. Hilarious!

            If you find a cartoon that you wish to post, then just open the snipping tool, clip it, and save it in “Pictures” as a gif. It is important that you save it as a gif and not a jpeg because a jpeg would be too large a file. Then you can click “Choose File” and the pictures file will open. then select the correct link from pictures and click “open”, and then post the comment. The gif file will appear right below your comment. That’s how I post all the graphs that I post. Works just fine.

            1. OK, I can’t resist. this is R. Cobb from the LA Free Press in the ’60s. It says it all about modern Americans response to TEOTWAWKI

            1. I use ImageMagick (https://imagemagick.org) to make my image file sizes smaller when want to post images on this site. ImageMagick is free (open source) software and can resize images and save then in different formats. For this cartoon using the Firefox “take screenshot” feature produced a 311.5 kb .png file. Using ImageMagick to open it and then save it as a jpeg resulted in a 38.3 kb .jpeg file. The easiest way to do this was to right click on the cartoon and choose “Save Image As”. This particular image file is a jpeg and saved as a 39.8 kb .jpeg file.

      3. I always think that the first benefit of this wonderful unshackling will be the return of child labor, probably in coal mines.

        1. Cry yourself out about the kids who will live horrible lives, and die horrible deaths very young, and dry them, and get to work on the REAL problem……. parents having kids who have no hope of taking care of them.

          The world is a Darwinian place.

          Once upon a time, when I was more of a Darwinist myself, I was foolish enough to point out in a university class that the children working in match factories in Old Blighty in the early eighteen hundreds had two choices, to work there until they died of poisoning, or to wander off and starve immediately.

          That remark earned me a C……. probably the first C that particular professor had passed out in years, grade inflation in her department being a real thing even back then.

          1. ” them, and get to work on the REAL problem……. parents having kids who have no hope of taking care of them.”

            Get to work? Exactly what should you do? Go to Africa and pass out condoms? Or to India and preach to the public about the sins of having too many kids?

            Mac, there is not one damn thing you can do to stop very poor people around the world from having kids. You know that Mac, I know damn well you know that. After all, how much are your efforts helping solve that problem right now?

            1. Hi Ron,

              You’re basically right. There’s next to nothing I can do, personally, that will have any direct and immediate influence on birth rates among poor people.

              But I’m doing my small part to help move the political and economic needles in the right direction.

              In general terms, anything you or I can do to help promote the broad agenda of the Democratic Party in the USA, and the various parties that control national governments in Western Europe helps do this.

              Good public policies such as supporting women’s rights, especially the right to an education, are powerful tools indeed.

              But unfortunately it takes a long time to get results this way, but when the results finally happen, it can seem like they happened in a mere eyeblink.

              Birth rate of Brazil fell gradually from 34.4 per 1,000 people in 1971 to 13.5 per 1,000 people in 2020.

              Brazil Birth rate, 1950-2021 – knoema.com

              Selected Countries and Economies
              Country
              Most Recent Year
              Most Recent Value
              Brazil
              2020
              1.7

              https://knoema.com › … › Brazil › De

              Just about every thing I’ve read about this amazing decline over only a couple of generations indicates that it happened mostly for two reasons.

              One, better education.
              Two, easy access to birth control.

              I’m spending a lot of time these days helping drum up support for leaders who support policies along these lines.

              Of course in this respect I’m just one lone foot soldier. I’ll never be a general, lol.

          2. Once upon a time, when I was more of a Darwinist myself, …

            Errrr… exactly what are you right now if not a Darwinist? Are you a creationist? If so are you a young earth creationist or an old earth creationist?

            1. I’m a Darwinist in terms of understanding the physical and biological world we live in, thru and thru.

              But nowadays one needs to be somewhat careful in just saying “I’m a Darwinist” for political reasons.

              Some people on the leftish end of our political spectrum don’t take kindly to Darwinism at all because it can be and has been used to justify just about every kind of crime imaginable at one time or another.

              They’re actually conflating scientific Darwinism with so called “Social Darwinism”.

              From wikipedia:

              Social Darwinism refers to various theories and societal practices that purport to apply biological concepts of natural selection and survival of the fittest to sociology, economics and politics, and which were largely defined by scholars in Western Europe and North America in the 1870s.[1][2] Social Darwinism holds that the strong see their wealth and power increase while the weak see their wealth and power decrease. Social Darwinist definitions of the strong and the weak vary, and also differ on the precise mechanisms that reward strength and punish weakness. Many such views stress competition between individuals in laissez-faire capitalism, while others, emphasizing struggle between national or racial groups, support eugenics, racism, imperialism and/or fascism.[3][4][5]

              I’ve been accused of this sin myself, lol. That’s what earned me a lone C out of all the people in the class I mentioned someplace in this thread.

            2. Some people on the leftish end of our political spectrum don’t take kindly to Darwinism at all because it can be and has been used to justify just about every kind of crime imaginable at one time or another.

              I think you are exaggerating Mac. I even advertise the fact that I am a Darwinian and not once in my entire life have anyone ever accused me of advocating Social Darwinism. For the last twenty years I have always had a Darwin Fish on my car or truck . Only an ignorant Trumpite would so stupid as to think that because you believe in evolution that makes you a Social Darwinist. And I really don’t care what they think.

          3. That was an odd response to my comment. I was responding to the notion of the market solving the world’s problems. I am certainly aware of the situation regarding population. I am also aware the reproduction is the one fundamental truth about life. In pre-welfare state societies children are the only future. You need them to take care of you in your old age. That’s the hurdle you need to overcome. It isn’t about birth control, it’s about empowering women and creating societies that will take care of the old and infirm. they’ll figure out the birth control. The market won’t get you there.

  7. UN flagship reports get more honest, and therefore more dire with each new release. I missed this one when it came out but have been reading it the last two weeks. Land degradation is not something that makes newsworthy stories; for now it is not affecting the west much; there are no sudden catastrophes (although the rising number of Middle Eastern dust storms is probably related) just a slow rolling juggernaut where you wake up one morning and find your back garden is now designated as a desert; and no sparkly, photogenic technological solutions.

    The full reports are generally darker and starker than the summaries, and presumably closer to the authors true findings.

    https://www.unccd.int/resources/global-land-outlook/glo2

    “Land resources – soil, water, and biodiversity – provide the foundation for the wealth of our societies and economies. They meet the growing needs and desires for food, water, fuel, and other raw materials that shape our livelihoods and lifestyles. However, the way we currently manage and use these natural resources is threatening the health and continued survival of many species on Earth, including our own.
    “Of nine planetary boundaries used to define a ‘safe operating space for humanity’, four have already been exceeded: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use change, and geochemical cycles. These breaches are directly linked to human-induced desertification, land degradation, and drought. If current trends persist, the risk of widespread, abrupt, or irreversible environmental changes will grow. [Note – I think it’s more like 5 and a half now, with one and a half not yet assessed]
    “Roughly USD 44 trillion of economic output – more than half of global annual GDP – is moderately or highly reliant on natural capital. Yet governments, markets, and societies rarely account for the true value of all nature’s services that underpin human and environmental health. These include climate and water regulation, disease and pest control, waste decomposition and air purification, as well as recreation and cultural amenities.”

  8. According to a new report by oxfam.

    263 million people have been pushed into extreme poverty since the start of the pandemic over two years ago.

    573 people have become billionaires and made more money in the last two years since the start of the pandemic than in the previous 23 years combine.

    The richest 20 billionaires are worth more than the entire GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa.

    The worlds top ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40% of humanity, that’s more wealth than 3 billion people combine.

    https://www.oxfam.org.au/what-we-do/economic-inequality/resources/

    1. All my nieces and nephews are utterly fatalistic about climate change and feel there is nothing left to do but watch how it all unfolds.
      Family members are trying to excite them about the electrified neo-liberalism that is on its way and will save us all, but they’re not convinced.

    2. And yet, Iron Mike, a commenter above says
      “If unchained from the shackles of bureaucratic overreach, the private market can provide the proper remediation for the planet’s ills.”

      1. “and much of our species is indicating that they want to end the unipolar barbarism of global private finance and its top/bottom anti-humanistic world.”

        Some, for sure

  10. Exerts form this wide ranging article on The Migration Century

    “The UN International Organization for Migration estimates that there could be as many as 1.5 billion environmental migrants in the next 30 years.”

    “In April 2021, Governor Kristi Noem tweeted: “South Dakota won’t be taking any illegal immigrants that the Biden administration wants to relocate. My message to illegal immigrants … call me when you’re an American.”
    ‘Consider that South Dakota only exists because thousands of undocumented immigrants from Europe used the Homestead Act from 1860 to 1920 to steal land from Native Americans without compensation or reparations.’

    https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/aug/18/century-climate-crisis-migration-why-we-need-plan-great-upheaval

    1. California 1st, but that is not a surprise.
      Florida 2nd, which was, given the conservative bent, but warm weather.

    2. US is so very slow to embrace EV because we have large domestic sources of oil/capita.
      China and Europe much less, thus the quicker adoption.

    3. A handful of states are driving nearly all U.S. electric car adoption

      Right, that’s how new technology spreads. You target early adopters before you target the mass market.

      Remember when mobile phones were yuppie toys?

      Remember when flat screens were for wristwatches only?

      The internal combustion engine is a dead technology, like the cathode ray tube, eight track tape and the typewriter. Brilliant, but dead.

      1. I remember when my landline cost me $8 a month. I feel developments in cel phones and flat screens are a poor proxy for benchmarking future predictions in unrelated industries; unless your argument and rebuttal to everything is “Technology!”.
        Lets see how long it takes for USA to achieve EVs at 1% of registered vehicles, and then 2%. It’s 2022 and we’re at 0.6%. Let’s put a pin in it.

        1. I think it is better to measure EV percentage of new car sales as shown in this Bloomberg article. The US and 18 other countries have already passed the 5 percent tipping point to mass adoption.

          https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-09/us-electric-car-sales-reach-key-milestone#xj4y7vzkg

          I register multiple vehicles, EV and ICE, but I drive the EV most of the time and only grudgingly drive the ICE when I absolutely need the hauling capabilities my EV doesn’t have.

          1. Yes, and companies that use their vehicles heavily like taxi and delivery companies skew even stronger to EVs, because of their low operating costs. Percentage of registered vehicles is a poor proxy for total miles traveled. Most cars don’t move 95% of the time.

            Anyway it’s naive to think we have to wait for the registration numbers. Look at the industry. Investment in new engines is crashing and burning. This is an oil website, so people don’t see it coming. But the car industry, including every major manufacturer, have already decided to significantly reduce investment in ICE tech. The next generation of engines has been cancelled. There simply wont be any new models to buy.

            This will take a few years to hit the market, because development cycles in the car industry take a few years, but it’s already happening — it has already happened.

            The industry is also shifting to China. In 2020 China produced more cars than the US, Japan, Germany and South Korea put together. That makes it even harder for people not paying much attention to see where the industry is moving. But it’s a done deal.

            1. Got it. EVs are taking off but vehicle registration data is a poor indicator.

            2. There is probably some truth to that – I have an ICE and an EV and the EV is driven every day – the ICE was last driven over 3 weeks ago.
              Rgds
              WP

    4. https://cleantechnica.com/tag/ev-sales/

      The link above takes a global view of plug in car sales. Percentage of new car sales that come with a plug varies from 83% in Norway to 10.3% in Italy. Latest data from China indicates that EVs took a 28% share of the market in June. As Alimbiquated stated elsewhere in this thread, China produces more cars than the next four largest countries put together (US, Japan, Germany and South Korea).

      The link below is to the 2014 presentation to the Altcars Expo in California by Tony Seba. Seven years old, it has aged pretty well IMO.

      Keynote – 100% electric transportation and 100% solar by 2030 – AltCars Expo

      Here’s a choice quote from the video above:

      “Within eight years by 2022 to 2023, the industry, the electric vehicle industry will be able to disrupt the gasoline car industry”

      1. I had been thinking that vehicles with plugs would achieve 90% of new light vehicle sales in the US by 2030.
        I concede now that it may only be 85%.

        1. How so? In his 2014 presentation Seba projected that by 2030 100% of all vehicle (light and heavy duty) would be electric (not hybrid). In more recent presentations he has said that costs have been falling faster than he originally projected in 2014 so, he has moved the death of the ICE forward to 2025. It is a bit of a stretch but, technology disruptions can happen very quickly. Anybody remember 16mm film (Bell & Howell), cassette tapes (TDK), stencil duplicators (Gestetner), vinyl LPs, reel to reel (Tascam, TEAC), stereo turntables (Garrard), typewriters (Olympia, Royal, IBM) , 35mm cameras (Kodak), “instant” cameras (Polaroid), microfilm (Canon, Kodak), mainframe computers (IBM, DEC), c-band satellite dishes (Paraclipse) etc.?

          While I wouldn’t bet on 2025 for the death of the ICE, I do believe they will be pretty much obsolete by 2030. I used to repair typewriters (IBM Selectric), operate a mainframe computer (IBM 4381, IBM System 36), install and service c-band satellite systems and sell microfilm equipment so, I’ve had a front row seat when it comes to technology disruptions.

          1. Just an opinion, based on watching peoples behavior and attitudes.
            I hope to be surprised on the ev upside of course.

  12. Drought in the American West
    “The American West is experiencing its most severe drought in 1,200 years. The consequences are far-reaching and long lasting. Forests become tinder boxes. Hydropower is weakened. Human health and wildlife are threatened.”
    https://www.circleofblue.org/the-drying-american-west/

    Saw a pic of the Loire River in France the other day, or at least what is a dead arm of it.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62486386

    … Germany too.

    What’s the impact of the drought in the Rhine River?
    https://www.aljazeera.com/program/inside-story/2022/8/19/whats-the-impact-of-the-drought-in-the-rhine-river

    “Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

  13. Tesla Semi reservations closed, new details released ahead of launch
    “If the truck can get 500mi at 2kWh/mi, that means it wd have a 1MWh batt, and to charge to 70% of range (700kWh) in 30min, you’d need a 1.4MW av charge rate from 0-80%. Which means peak charging rate wd need to be >1.4MW…”
    https://electrek.co/2022/08/18/tesla-semi-reservations-closed-new-details-released-ahead-of-launch/

    The Lighting F-150 only get .8kwh/mile pulling a load. No way a semi gets anywhere close to that.
    Elon can’t roll out the semi because it doesn’t exist.

    500m range (roughly) going to need at least 9-10 Model S Battery Packs that’s 9,000 lbs for 1,000 kWh. So battery pack alone is going to be close to 15,000 – 20,000 lbs. That’s 1/4 of the truck max gross weight leaving just 60,000 lbs for the cab, trailer and cargo. Less cargo = a lot less revenue.

    Tractor units have a weight limit per tire. Usually the tractor carries about 40-45% of the trailer load. The battery takes away 20,000lbs of that. The only fix is perhaps more tires = more road wear, less efficiency.

    The weight limits vary by location but they are similar to this. In some states the tractor unit can only be 44,500lbs. Diesel tractors are about 15,000 to 20,000. Allows 24,500 from the trailer. -20,000 battery = 4,500 from the trailer.

    Volvo threw out numbers for their bev. With a 565kWh battery pack, their tractor was 24.5k lbs, they stated trailer weight of 15k, gvwt of 82k, meaning payload of ~42k. So you’re looking at an extra journey every 6th truckload compared to diesel. Tesla will likely be heavier still.

    As Swedish truck company stated already 5 years ago, “great for transportation of potato chips”
    https://www.nyteknik.se/fordon/scania-om-tesla-semi-jattebra-for-att-transportera-chipspasar-6887851

    I’m surely mistaken, seriously. If someone could show me where, then perhaps I’d make some progress. OFM & HB both understand some trucking business, if I recall correctly. I’ve heard short haul, less than 300 miles, is 70% of trucking in America today. Perhaps EV will dominate this sector IF
    their numbers are even close. Last I heard production starts in… 2019 lolz

    1. Hi Survivalist,

      The Semi is reported to be using only two and a half times as much juice per mile as the pickup.
      That’s entirely reasonable, and will come as no surprise to anybody who has some actual hands on experience with trucks. I have that experience, being an OLD world class jackass of all trades, with a never ending compulsion to just be doing something different.

      Modern diesel eighteen wheelers routinely get from seven to almost nine miles per gallon.

      My neighbor who has a late model F250 diesel gets UP TOO twenty five with only a small load of fishing and camping gear in the back.

      My ancient gas hog F150 four by four will get UP TO fourteen miles per gallon, if I hold it down to fifty five on a good road.

      There’s an old joke among marine engineers, to the point that someday they’ll build some ships so big they can just run them with out board motors, because the power needed drops off so fast as the vehicle gets bigger, in terms of cargo capacity.

      A diesel engine plus fuel tank, fuel, and accessory parts such as the radiator and exhaust system typically weighs at least three tons. The transmission weighs close to another thousand pounds, and the necessary gearing in the drive axles weighs upward of another thousand pounds.

      It’s true that this is not enough to offset the weight of the batteries and electric motors, but it helps.

      And half the trucks on the road are running with substantially lighter loads than the legal limit, because so many goods are bulky and leave a lot of empty space in the trailer. It’s very unlikely that the semi you see unloading at your nearest super market was loaded to much over half it’s cargo capacity when it left the warehouse for this reason.

      And my neighbor who runs a grading business uses a semi to haul his small bulldozer….. which weighs only about twelve tons….. not much more than half what he could legally haul.

      So……… there’s a market for hundreds of thousands of electric eighteen wheelers.
      And as time passes, batteries will gradually get a little lighter, and this will help too.

      A company running it’s trucks on dedicated daily routes will be able to use some trucks with as little as two hundred miles of range, thereby reducing the battery weight and increasing the cargo weight by a good bit.

      It’s going to be rather amusing seeing gasoline delivered to stores by electric semi’s. A lot of them don’t go over two hundred miles a day, because they deliver within thirty or forty miles of the tank farm where they load up, and that’s no more than one hundred sixty miles in a day.

      I can’t say when Tesla will finally start delivery of the Semi, but it will happen.

      The market is a wide open seller’s market and some other companies may get into mass production faster than Tesla.

    2. An european truck uses round about 30 liter Diesel fuel / 100 km. That’s 300 Kwh energy. A truck diesel engine has a peak efficiency of 50%, and stays there most time of the drive when using an interstate going at constant 80 Kmh for hours. So it’s 1.5 Kwh / km pure driving energy, an electric truck will drain 1.65 Kwh out of it’s batteries / km then (assuming 90%, including electronics and battery loss).

      There is much optimizing done already, since big logistic companies squeeze out every % efficiency. A liter less / 100km sells a truck over the competition since they are bougt for more than a million km. So I don’t believe the 2 kwh / mile – at least not in the european 38 ton truck format.

      1. A lot of what any diesel vehicle does is drag a radiator through the air to keep the motor from melting. the only way to optimize this is to stop burning stuff.

        1. In reality, very little of what a diesel vehicle does is drag a radiator through the air to keep the motor from melting. The radiator works fine when the vehicle is not moving, and the coolant pump does a lot of the work while requiring not much energy from the engine. Engines with mechanical water pumps run several horsepower less.

          How much horsepower does a mechanical water pump really take to spin?
          https://bangshift.com/general-news/tech-stories/bangshift-tech-how-much-horsepower-does-a-mechanical-water-pump-really-take-to-spin/

          How much of an engine’s horsepower is used by it’s various pumping mechanisms including the water/coolant pump, oil pump, transmission pump and steering pump?
          https://www.quora.com/How-much-of-an-engines-horsepower-is-used-by-its-various-pumping-mechanisms-including-the-water-coolant-pump-oil-pump-transmission-pump-and-steering-pump

          The trucks with the radiators seem to be able get all the goods to market at, in accordance with the above calculations, the expense of 1.5 Kwh / km. Maybe having radiators isn’t a big detriment to the operation; maybe something else is the problem?

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

          Cooling System Basics
          “About one third of the heat generated by the engine goes into the coolant/water mixture and must be dissipated by the radiator.”
          https://www.motortrend.com/how-to/sucp-1204-cooling-system-basics

    3. There are alternatives to carrying a 500-mile battery:

      1. Replaceable batteries. This is a losing idea for cars, but trucks are big, boxy, and don’t have to be stylish. It is easy to standardize a battery and replace the battery at a truck stop in a short time.

      2. Overhead wired electricity. This is a standard technology that is used for buses (e.g. in Seattle) and most trains in Europe. All you need is overhead wires over major interstates, a one-time cost that is not too high, and then the truck only needs batteries for the end points of the trip. Siemens has the trucks, and a demo project at port of Long Beach CA.

      1. Yeh- trucks swapping out batteries at highway stations seems like a very viable scenario.

  14. A link to Simon Michaux’s latest video about how people are missing the big picture in regard to metal availability for the ‘renewable future’.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBVmnKuBocc

    Even he misses some big uses expected from electricity being mining and agriculture.

    The source of most information about metal and mineral availability comes from the USGS in most reports I’ve read over the years. The numbers they give for metal reserves are incorrect. For example they state 880 million tonnes of copper reserves world wide, but a quick look at Australia’s reserve number of 87 million tonnes of copper, show they are wrong. For Australia they have a little caveat, showing they used measured and Indicated resources from JORC standards, which are certainly NOT reserves!!

    The classic example of this is the huge Olympic Dam deposit owned by BHP. It has 62 million tonnes of resources that will probably never be mined because the grade is too low and the deposit too deep. BHP themselves did a study 10 years ago to see if they could mine it, spent hundreds of millions on just the feasibility. The cost of over $US30 Billion dollars was too rich for them.

    The mine itself has not made a profit in the last 12 years, mining a 2.14% grade ore from an underground mine. The reserves are just 8.42 million tonnes of copper at just 2% ore grade, so even now while losing money on it they are high grading it. IMHO most of the reserves will not be mined either as the grade mined continues to fall.

    By itself the Olympic Dam resource is over 7% of the reserves referred to by the USGS, which makes me wonder how many other reserves are also in the probably never financial enough to mine.

    Right now the costs of all mining operations are going through the roof, which I expect to continue to happen, which means what the world currently considers reserves will fall out of the category of reserves. Reserves of everything have increased because of technology, efficiency increases, globalization making pipes, pumps, equipment of all types cheaper, plus money being cheaper to borrow over the last few decades.

    Now we face the problem of all the factors making ‘materials’ cheap reversing, plus the ever lower grades of ores on average continuing to decline, so the downside of peak energy, oil in particular, will be an accelerating decline.

    1. Thanks for the link and info. If you have other insights please share. Real knowledge of the minerals and mining industries is going to become more valuable as the long decent/emergency/fuck up (as you prefer) progresses.

    2. For some reason I find Tim Lenton even more annoying than Michael Mann so it was nice to hear the wind being taken out of his sails at the end.

    3. Hideaway, thanks for the link, and for your insight. Please, do share more.

  15. LONGi (the world’s biggest wafer maker) expects that 1,000 GW could be manufactured globally each year by 2030. Rethink Energy predicts that “Before long manufacturing solar panels will be overtaken by grid integration as the most pressing constraint on the energy transition.”

    Grid integration is a piece of cake , it terms of materials and manpower needed to do it.
    The only real problems with grid interties, from a practical point of view, are political.

    The people who don’t want more renewable electricity are very well connected politically and will do whatever they can to slow down the growth of the wind and solar power industries.

      1. I don’t know his address, but the governor of Texas Abott has a history of being hostile to renewables.
        No surprise- he is republican.
        And you can look up the address of Mar-Lago. Trump is another such example.
        “the noise from windmills causes cancer’

        If you look at voting records, you can find a huge list at the Federal and State level of politicians who have an absolute stance against anything related to solar or wind energy, over the past 40 years.
        Addresses can then be matched using property records.
        And then just look at those politician donor rolls.

        There is an exception to this- when the districts in they represent are going to benefit from deployment. Obviously this has been growing over time- despite the general strong undercurrent of partisan opposition to anything that has threatened the oil and coal industry.

        1. Trump seems very shallow and protean in beliefs, like much of the American citizenry. I think it’s a poor idea to state what Trump is either for or against. I don’t think he knows; and if he did, a grade schooler could convince him to change his mind over a sandwich.

          Abott, more serious than Trump, is, then, showing poor performance, because Texas produces the most wind power of any U.S. state. According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), wind power accounted for at least 15.7% of the electricity generated in Texas during 2017, as wind was 17.4% of electricity generated in ERCOT, which manages 90% of Texas’s power.
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Texas

          Solar seems to be doing well there too.
          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Texas

          Perhaps the people who don’t want more renewable electricity are very well connected politically, and perhaps they will do whatever they can to slow down the growth of the wind and solar power industries, but their efforts don’t seem to matter much in Texas. Perhaps there’s something else slowing the transition to renewables; something besides Democrats and Republicans?

          1. Yes. Inertia, and denial of a big risk gathering on the horizon.
            And failure to realize that it takes a long time to ramp up new systems- A lesson that the country largely seems eager to learn the hard way.

            1. Well, you can of course think of Churchills remark about Americans and doing the correct thing, eventually… /s

      2. Trump and company, coal companies, oil and gas companies, utilities with lots of gas and coal burning infrastructure, the lobbyists who work for them, employees of such companies,

        Politicians dependent on contributions from such people and companies.

        Ignorant people who believe using wind and solar electricity will result in black outs.

        Millions of voters who are automatically opposed to anything the Democrats support.

        1. Tens of “Millions of voters who are automatically opposed to anything the Democrats support.”

          And that is the big story of republican policy on renewable energy and energy efficiency/sustainability policy overt the past 5 decades. Attempt to stall and dissuade at all cost, for sake of the party line.

      3. Rupert Murdoch and Charles Koch are two of the most significant players in the obstruction of RE. Murdoch for obvious reasons and Koch for funding “think tanks” that generate the misinformation that Murdoch media outlets then parrot. Outfits like the Heartland Institute and the Institute for Energy Research are examples of the shit shows funded by Koch.

  18. Very good summary on the global food supply situation

    ‘A reflection on global food security challenges amid the war in Ukraine and the early impact of climate change-

    “But numerous countries, including Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen, are highly vulnerable. They rely heavily on grain imports, have limited stocks, and have low purchasing power. These countries may be hit hard by price increases. More than 1.4 billion people live in such areas, mostly in Africa and Asia; if the global shortage continues and countries deplete their reserves, this figure could increase to about 1.9 billion people.

    The picture is even gloomier when considering some countries’ ability to cope with the fiscal and social consequences of their vulnerability. In many nations, local currencies have devalued sharply in 2022, making US dollar–denominated imported commodities such as wheat and oil even more costly for locals. Largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these countries are already experiencing higher-than-usual budget deficits and levels of unemployment…”

    https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/agriculture/our-insights/a-reflection-on-global-food-security-challenges-amid-the-war-in-ukraine-and-the-early-impact-of-climate-change

  20. EUR/USD (EURUSD=X)
    CCY – CCY Delayed Price. Currency in USD

    0.9947-0.0087 (-0.8660%)
    As of 05:37PM BST. Market open.

    Below a dollar

  21. Shallow Sand, you’ve often mentioned meth usage in connection with labor shortages. The Atlantic has just re-published an Oct 2021 article: A New, Cheaper Form of Meth Is Wreaking Havoc on America. It describes how high cost crystal meth made from ephedrine has been replaced with cheaper meth made from P2P (phenyl-2-propanone). Both versions are neurotoxins but P2P causes more damage faster.

    Quote:
    In community after community, I heard stories like this. Southwest Virginia hadn’t seen much meth for almost a decade when suddenly, in about 2017, “we started to see people go into the state mental-hospital system who were just grossly psychotic,” Eric Greene, then a drug counselor in the area, told me. “Since then, it’s caused a crisis in our state mental-health hospitals. It’s difficult for the truly mentally ill to get care because the facilities are full of people who are on meth.”

    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/the-new-meth/620174/
    (paywall? and apologies if I’ve sent it before)

    1. Meth really weakens the bones. I’ve seen quite a few fractures that seemed exacerbated by osteoporosis secondary to meth use… I’m talking like a tib/fib & calcaneus fracture from a slip/trip/fall.

      I couldn’t imagine the disaster that would be meth addicts in the oil field.

  22. China’s unrivaled 70-day heat wave
    https://www.axios.com/2022/08/22/china-heat-wave-drought-unprecedented

    China heatwave and drought to continue, with power supply hit, shipping halted and crops at risk
    https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3189599/china-heatwave-and-drought-continue-power-supply-hit-shipping

    Drought Negatively Impacting China, the U.S. and Europe, as Ukrainian Black Sea Exports Continue
    https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2022/08/drought-negatively-impacting-china-the-u-s-and-europe-as-ukrainian-black-sea-exports-continue/

      1. I have an acquaintance who, when I mentioned that China is down on hydropower, started going off like know-it-all Cliff Clavin from the show Cheers; talking about how China is idiots and they did it wrong and they put the three gorges dam in the wrong spot, and all kinds of shoot-from-the-lip nonsense. Despite being quite well read and university educated in history, this is how some folks approach such a topic; ‘who shall we (wrongly) point the finger at’.
        I closed the brief convo by saying “I had mentioned China being down in hydropower because I thought we perhaps might chat and consider what happens next, like I dunno- maybe uranium is a buy, let’s constructively ponder tomorrow, not point fingers at who is to blame for China’s hydropower woes…. although it’s perhaps worth mentioning it hasn’t rained much in China in the last 70 days; so I dunno, maybe that’s got something to do with it”.
        What an odd way to think about the world.

    2. Strange how the response to a climate crisis is to do more of what caused the crisis in the first place!

      1. And yet 8 billion people are mostly doing it, even many of the ones who claim they aren’t, so maybe its ‘normal’. Even the people “leading the charge” (Suzuki, Gore, Musk et al.) to “go green”, and I use that term lightly, have massive carbon footprints, and, oddly enough, much cultural cache. Carbon footprint correlates most strongly with income, not with how much one cares about the environment; that is to say, wealthy people who ostensibly care much about the environment have much larger carbon footprints than poor people who couldn’t care less about it, and likely always will. That’s perhaps worth a moment to ponder. FWIW- I have a much smaller carbon footprint than any SoCal cornucopian working in the cubicle patch, and it’s not because I’m poor;… after admittedly living a rather carbon rich life, it is now like I have my own little EPA in my head.

  26. Preview of the Terminal Deforestation Event-
    “Poverty-fueled deforestation threatens Kenya’s largest water catchment…
    “Mau Forest is shrinking as its trees fall to human pressures. Even Mau’s protected areas are not immune. One of these is Olpusimoru Forest Reserve, which has been facing high rates of deforestation as people cut down trees for timber and fuelwood collection.”

    1. Depending on just what they’re made of, they can potentially be ground up, and any metal separated for recycling in the usual way.
      If the other materials are such that they can be mixed with gravel or concrete, they can be used in road beds, foundations for houses and such. It takes a LOT of gravel to build a road. It takes a lot of concrete to pour the foundations for a million houses.

      Mixing in just five percent of old turbine blades would very likely take care of the disposal problem for the next thirty or forty years.

  29. Investigating Rainforest Destruction: The Nickel Mines Clearing Indonesian Forests
    https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/investigating-rainforest-destruction-nickel-mines-clearing-indonesian-forests

    Electric vehicles are great, but the environmental cost of nickel batteries is too high
    https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/electric-vehicles-are-great-but-the-environmental-cost-of-nickel-batteries-is-too-high/?amp=1

    …. EVs are just swapping out pollution streams; maybe we just gotta stop driving about? I’s down at the thrift store looking about, and it dawned on me, we don’t need to make anymore table cutlery either.

    1. True we don’t ‘need’ anything.
      But people seem hesitant to suddenly lay down and cease all operations.

      Driving, and doing everything, less sounds like a good idea.

      1. I started teaching intro on zoom cuz of covid. Works great and haven’t stopped. Lots likely saved on gas by not having all involved commute to classroom. Wish I started it years ago.

    2. Are EV and ICE waste streams comparable? Isn’t virtually every part of an EV system theoretically recyclable? Certainly the nickel and any other metal if recycling is considered early in the design stage.

  30. Hmm— 10 Yr over 3

    10-Yr Bond
    3.1080
    +0.0540(+1.7682%)

    Any insight?

  33. I’ve recently run across some references to robots actually building solar farms, as of NOW, with some super rich guys investing in this automated solar farm construction.

    Who knows something about it?

      1. WHAT EXPLAINS THE SURGE IN THE POTENT GREENHOUSE GAS?

        Levels of the gas methane are growing at a record rate and natural sources like wetlands are the cause, but scientists don’t know how to curb it. “If you think of fossil fuel emissions as putting the world on a slow boil, methane is a blow torch that is cooking us today,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development, and an advocate of stricter policies to reduce methane emissions. “The fear is that this is a self-reinforcing feedback loop . . . If we let the earth warm enough to start warming itself, we are going to lose this battle.”

        https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24082022/methane-surge-greenhouse-gas/

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