Open Thread Non-Petroleum, April 26, 2023

186 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, April 26, 2023”

1. The April STEO page has vanished.

   1. It must have peaked and declined.

   2. Schinzy,

      Decided to revise.

2. https://slate.com/business/2023/04/texas-power-grid-senate-plan-gas-fossil-fuels-renewables.html

   Worth passing along to anybody who doubts renewables but has an open mind.

   1. Thx OFM. Good piece.

3. OFM, I don’t remember if I posted this earlier . Stability of the electric grid .
   https://thehonestsorcerer.medium.com/stable-electricity-a-long-slow-goodbye-b06041a2a1dc

   1. I was going to read the article at the link but OFM saved me the time. It is obviously another piece of Koch funded think tank inspired, FUD spreading BS, full of false or misleading information. There are increasing numbers of electricity grids that are experiencing periods of renewable generation approaching and even exceeding 50%. May I again remind you of the web site http://www.energy-charts.info where users can interactively examine the electricity generation data for most (if not all) the countries in Europe. The screenshot below was taken from the following link: https://www.energy-charts.info/charts/energy_pie/chart.htm?l=en&c=DK.

      There is also the case of Australia and even the US. In the US wind and solar contributed a 15% share of the electricity generation in 2022. In the US there are states where renewable energy contributes way more than the national average but, the only reports of sensational outages have come from Texas, a state that has decided to keep it’s grid isolated from the grids that surround it for reasons best known to the state government.

      You really ought to take a more critical look at the articles you read. If you are aware of the biases of some of the stuff you post here, you are certainly not letting on that you are. When I post stuff I do not have to declare biases because they should be obvious, blatantly so in most cases. I rarely post links from sites with neutral sounding names. I briefly glanced at the web page you linked to and note that it begins with a strawman argument about how much batteries it would take to store enough electricity to supply the US for 24 hours from batteries alone. That is not even worth consideration as a thought experiment. Mark Jacobson from Stanford University among others has studied what it would take to go 100% renewable and his work is far more useful than this FUD spreading article.

      

4. Good paper on EROEI at link below.

   https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098

   From conclusion of paper:

   The analysis performed herein represents a much-needed update and harmonization of the EROI literature, and it advances the conversation surrounding the viability of renewable resources in the energy transition process. A common argument is that the EROIs from renewable energy technologies are supposedly lower than those provided by fossil fuels, and that transitioning to RE technologies would therefore result in a large loss in net energy. The results of this analysis rebuke that sentiment, noting that the three most important technologies for the energy transition–wind, PV, and hydropower—all have EROIs at or above 10 (even when the output is weighted in terms of primary energy equivalent assuming a future-proof life-cycle grid efficiency of ηG = 0.7, i.e., 1 unit of electricity per 1.4 units of primary energy). This means that greater than 90% of the energy produced by these technologies is delivered to society as net energy.

   Perhaps more interesting still, the EROIs from liquid fuels, including the EROI from conventional oil production, are less than 10 once the costs of refining and delivery to the point-of-use are included. Oil is widely considered the most important fuel for the economy, used mostly in the transportation sector. This means that oil delivers less net energy to society for each unit invested in extraction, refining, and delivery than PV or wind. The transition to electric vehicles, according to these results, will actually increase the amount of net energy delivered to society (even more so when considering the higher efficiency of electrical power trains vs. internal combustion engines).

   It is clear from these results that EROI estimates at the point of extraction can be wildly misleading. As a case in point, even if crude oil were measured to have an EROI of 1000 or more at the point of extraction, the corresponding EROI at the point of use, using global average data for the energy “cost” of the process chain, would still only be a maximum of 8.7. Furthermore, as the quality of oil, gas and coal continue to decline in the future, the energy “cost” of the associated process chains will increase, further reducing the EROIs. On the other hand, as the technologies used to harness renewable energy improve, the corresponding EROIs will continue to increase in the future.

   Finally, it is also important to observe that, in the future, a significant increase in the penetration of renewable technologies into the electricity grid mixes will have to be accompanied by a concomitant deployment of electrical storage, to compensate for the intrinsic intermittency or renewable energy availability and ensure the continued real-time matching of the supply and demand curves. However, detailed scenario analyses of the net energy performance of even highly decarbonized grid mixes relying heavily on PVs, based on high temporal resolution grid balancing algorithms rather than blunt assumptions, indicate that the additional energy investment for electrochemical energy storage does not significantly affect the overall EROI(PE-eq) of the resulting electricity mix.

   1. While interesting, and within the typical ranges I’ve seen for later studies on energy sources, it really doesn’t account for the fact that you’re moving from a fossil energy to a mineral energy paradigm. It’s not really news that electric motors are more efficient than even the best Carnot cycle engine.

      https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/14/15/4508

      https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/executive-summary

      Which, yeah, don’t hold your breath here. It’s no different to “we can beat climate change, with the proviso we produce DAC magic tech at a pace with no historical precedent at all for any tech rollout”.

      Also, at a time when the globalised world order is falling apart, I might add.

      EDIT: RECORD oil refining capacity this year. #oilisdead

      1. Kleiber,

         It shows that the claims of low EROI for PV and solar are bunk, just a matter of getting to work and doing it.

         1. But we already knew they’d have to be acceptable to even warrant moving to them, otherwise what was the point? It was always a question as to how much surplus we’d have access to. I don’t think anyone said they were negative EROI or barely break even in all scenarios of usage, though maybe that they are overly reliant on already established infrastructure using FFs to rollout. The issue isn’t, and never was, technical solutions. It has always been will and timing. All these things were looked at in the ‘70s and the tech was also there, if not in solar and wind, then in nuclear.

            The simple metrics to assess how well we are doing are:

            – What direction is CO2/methane etc. output going in?
            – What direction is fossil fuel usage going in?
            – Are plastic and other pollutant compounds increasing?
            – How much non-renewable resource is being used?
            – Is biodiversity improving?

            That’s all that’s needed. The answer to any of those being anything other than down by orders of magnitude rates and continuing, means nothing changes.

            1. …but, but EVs and … er, more EVs!

               1. Straw man,

                  EVs take care of land transport which is a big piece of oil use, wind, solar, batteries, and an upgraded grid take care of most coal and natural gas as an energy source, though they will stiill have uses as chemical inputs.

            2. Kleiber…I hope you weren’t expecting some technological cure to Overshoot.
               That is first and foremost a population dynamics issue.
               Less damaging technologies can’t cure that.

               Complete and utter reliance on depleting energy sources could help cure Overshoot more quickly. If that is the goal, there are other measures that could also be deployed.

               1. There is actually one technological fix I can think of…

                  World leaders solve overshoot with this one weird trick (total thermonuclear war).

                  Just gotta hope they don’t think they can “win” in that kind of scenario.

               2. Kleiber…I don’t think that policy suggestion is going to get you elected or posted to a decision making board. Just saying.

               3. Kleiber,

                  Things take time. On fossil fuels consider this from BP stats, the natural log of fossil fuel consumption Worldwide in exajoules, where the natural log indicates rates of growth.

                  Rates of growth shown for 1967-1979, 1982-2001, 2006-1016, and 2017-2021 (dropped 2020, including that gives a negative slope for 2017-2021, dropped as an outlier).

                  Further progress is likely to be made over the 2022-2035 time frame, by 2040 fossil fuel use may have dropped to 10% of the 2021 level.

                  

            3. ” The answer to any of those being anything other than down by orders of magnitude rates and continuing, means nothing changes.”

               This is patently not true, but it’s acceptable as hyperbole.

               We’re on a collision path with disaster, no question.

               Getting out of the hospital after a bad accident alive, with a missing leg and eye, with scars, but still functional, is a far preferable to being dead.

               We don’t necessarily need a fully functional global ecosystem, such as we had prior to the rise of civilization, in order to survive, and maybe even thrive… some of us at least.

               This sort of comment reminds me of the cartoon of a kid pouting and telling his mother there’s no point in doing his homework, or even continuing to live, because he learned in school that day that the sun is going to boil the oceans dry and then burn the rest of the Earth to a crisp, and then destroy it altogether when it expands sufficiently…….. a billion years into the future.

               I’ve said right along that a lot of us, maybe most of us, are probably going to die hard before this century is out.

               But some of us have at least a fair shot at pulling thru with the lights on.

               1. This was a lot of verbiage to say “I think we’ll be alright, it’s not that bad really.”

                  It’s major cope, and I know deep down you know it too, because otherwise you have to embrace the fact that nothing here makes any difference to the overall trajectory.

                  If your response to the projected total collapse of complex civilisation and mass die off of life is being one of those still keeping the lights on and kicking the corpses of the former scientists shouting “But not EVERYONE died, did they!” I don’t know if that’s a win.

               2. Kleiber,

                  He is saying that things may be bad, but not as bad as you believe in his opinion. You are saying you disagree, not much point in discussing further, I agree with OFM. We could take the stance that nothing we do will make a difference and do nothing, or we can try to act to improve future outcomes. The doomer point of view tends to lead to oh well, get some popcorn, I think we can do better.

               3. I agree we can all do things. They just won’t change anything, because the system has been optimised on the maximum power principle (e.g., Lotka et al.) to keep on acquiring resources. Which works fine, until it doesn’t.

                  For instance, the move to another energy source that enables continuation of the status quo only furthers overshoot. Never in human history has the species opened up new resources and frontiers and decided “this is enough”.

                  If, indeed, the RE build out leads to BAU, or worse, acceleration in what we have now as the basis for our civilisation, then things do not get better.

                  Remember, REs have been additive so far and are still a minuscule percentage of total energy expenditure. And extrapolations of growth for things are fraught with difficulty, especially as large increases of nothing are still effectively nothing.

                  I feel, as I’m sure Ron does too, that the mischaracterisation of the doomer view is not helpful. Contrary to what may be projected on me and Ron, I am not worrying myself to sleep at night and running around wearing an A-board saying “The end is nigh!” in the day. I get on with enjoying my partner, my dog, what remains of the local nature wilderness, and whatever games or books I have going at the time.

                  This? The blog and any other places I frequent for up-to-date news and interesting discussion on matters of energy and economy and ecology, are purely another hobby that I find fascinating. It doesn’t make me catatonic with impotent rage or wish to slit my wrists. It makes me want to see how this unfolds, even if I can’t do anything to change the path we’re on, I see no reason to not learn about the truth. I am, after all, a scientist and curious minded soul (I’m sure you relate to that), and as stated in the oil thread, false hope that things are working out is actually to the detriment of our situation. There is no evidence to say that promoting things as being less bad so people don’t realise what they need to do helps, whereas there is evidence for shocking people into giving a shit.

               4. Kleiber,

                  If most people beieved as you and Ron argue that nothing anyone does will make any difference, then that is the path they may choose, just go with the flow.

                  If on the other hand one argues that there are serious problems that need to be addressed and there are solutions that may address some of these problems, it might be a call to action for some for better policy.

                  Just a different take on how to deal with problems. When I see a problem I try to fix it, you may be different.

                  Also I am not arguing for the status quo, but surely a head in the sand gets us there.

                  I believe in radical change, the opposite of the status quo.

         2. Right, anything about 10 is fine. An EROI of 20 sounds a lot better than an energy EROI of 10, but it’s 95% instead of 90%, so not really decisive.

5. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-drops-price-model-y-suv-under-average-cost-us-vehicle/

   Tesla has dropped the starting price of its Model Y, and now the mid-size SUV costs $759 less than the average new car or truck in the U.S. The Model Y, the top-selling electric vehicle in the U.S. in 2022, now starts at $46,990, according to Bloomberg.

   Note that this price is without any rebate, when the $7500 tax rebate for families with joint income less than 300k is included the price after rebate is $8259 less than the average selling price for new light duty vehicles in the US.

   That’s a big milestone. Also the Model Y was the 4th best selling vehicle in the US for 2023Q1 behind the three US pickups F150, Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram.

   1. Have Americans tried not buying two tonne monstrosities to compensate for other deficiencies? Does everyone work a ranch over there or something?

      1. Have Americans tried not buying two tonne monstrosities
         A small penis problem?
         Or just maybe a class issue?

         1. I get that a lot of small cars are obviously gay and don’t make money, so manly Americans need to have the biggest pedestrian crushing conveyance as is their god given right. But still, I often wonder if another way is better.

            Someone on a street near me got rid of their Peugeot 208 and got a Kia EV6. They told me it was a better choice for the environment.

            I had to stop myself from suggesting the local cow pasture also be razed and the cows blown up to save some carbon too, because they might have taken it at face value.

            1. Status and class definitely have a lot to do with Americans driving oversized vehicles . There’s definitely a penis projection issue, lol, but it’s difficult ( almost said HARD, lol) to say how serious this is.

               Things ARE different here. The streets are wider, parking lots are bigger, houses are bigger, and gasoline is WAY CHEAPER… around half what it costs in Europe. Things are MUCH farther apart.

               And up until the last few years, we have generally had more disposable income to spend on cars and trucks than most Europeans. That’s still probably the case for people buying new tricked out trucks and full size suv’s.

               Probably half the people I know have downsized to a mid size or compact car over the last few years……. mostly because they cost less to buy and get better fuel economy.

               Gasoline in this country is a relatively small slice of the total cost of ownership of a vehicle, compared to purchase price, tags, insurance, depreciation, maintenance and repairs and so forth.

               Mass transit is mostly a joke, and you can make a car payment, and commute, if you don’t count the seat time as working time, and live out in the boonies, meaning the far edges of suburbia, or at least a few miles from downtown, in a much nicer home for considerably less total money on a monthly basis.

               My place would rent for three or four thousand a month in Greensboro, Raleigh, Roanoke or Charlotte, in a nice neighborhood within five to ten miles of the business district. On a golf course, in a ritzy neighborhood , it might go for up to twice that.

               Out here where I am….. six to eight hundred would be tops. It would cost me twice as much as it would to commute to get anything similar in nearby Mayberry, Mt Airy NC, Andy Griffith’s very real hometown, only twelve miles away.

               And even in this nice quaint little city……. you just about HAVE to have a car of your own, unless you’re willing to spend quite a bit on cabs. Walking distance communities exist…… but they’re few and far between.

               Commuting in this country does cost an arm and a leg….. but living in town, equally well, generally costs a LOT more.

               Ask just about anybody here in the business, and they will tell you that pickup trucks and truck based suv’s outlast cars and are actually cheaper to own and drive than cars, excepting SMALL cars.

               I can buy a car in comparable condition, compared to a pickup truck, from the same manufacturer, same basic equipment level…… ten to twenty years old…… for less than half what a similar used truck costs. Sometimes for less than a quarter of the cost. A decent late nineties F150 sells for as much as four or five times the price of a Crown Vic, same year, same overall condition.

               The Crown Vic is a legendary car, the cop car, one that lasts as well as a Toyota…… but it won’t stay on the road nearly as long as a well maintained pickup, because the car depreciates to the point it’s not worth spending the money on serious long term maintenance work.

               Three thousand for a new rebuilt transmission for the truck is a deal, but for the car, it’s a deal killer. You get another car.. a later model that gets better mileage anyway.

               And when you need suspension or transmission or engine work at twenty years and three hundred thousand plus miles…… such work is really and truly more long term routine maintenance than repair work.
               My elderly F150 will have over half a million miles on it before I’m done with it.. assuming I last myself, lol. Cheaper than trading.

               We live in suburbia. We DO haul stuff….. and if you actually use a truck once every couple of months to haul something other than groceries, the extra cost of gasoline, due to lower fuel economy, can be and often is less than the cost of renting a truck for a day or two, never mind the hassle.

               Now if jobs and homes were farther apart in Europe, if roads were wider and gasoline cost the same as it does here…… I think maybe Europeans would be buying American sized vehicles by the millions.

               At times I have owned compact cars and trucks. They’re seriously uncomfortable on long trips, compared to a typical Yankee land yacht, and when everybody else at rush hour is an a Suburban or Expedition…… and you can’t see shit because you’re eyes are at their bumper level……..it’s SCARY.
               So your next vehicle, if you can afford it, is a big one.

      2. Klieber there are three big pickup truck brands and thousands of other choices in cars and SUVs, in rural areas pickup trucks are very common in the US, in urban and suburban areas less so. In 2022 about 1.6 million of the top 3 brands of pickup were purchased out of 13.7 million or about 12% of all passenger vehicle purchases.

   2. Dennis – Try and actually configure MY 7 seat, it’s still ~$60k, not sure why anyone would want a 5 seat MY vs 5 seat M3…

      1. Kengeo,

         I imagine the last two seats would only work for small children, the MY has higher ground clearance, more space for cargo and is a hatchback, the higher seats in the rear seats make it more comfortable for adults.
         My family prefers the Y over the 3. By the way the Y is 54630 for 7 seat long range AWD, minus 7500 tax rebate makes it 47130 if income is under 300k for married filing jointly. The 5 seat version is 3000 less. The base version is 48630 including destination fees, drops to about 42k with tax rebate, range for base version is 279 miles vs 330 miles for long range version, base version is not available in 7 seat configuration.

      2. Having been an owner of a M3 and now a MY, I know the answer in my case is ergonomics (front and especially back seating), space utilization for a small decrease in range that can be made up by driving slower. Being older, the M3 front seats are lower and not as easy to get out of. Back seats don’t have the leg room and height of the MY. For loading and unloading heavy objects in the M3, the objects have to be short enough to go over the transom and under the truck opening. With a MY, the objects slide in above the transom and out the same way. Objects can be a lot taller and longer like a bicycle. If on the highway, the range is 358 (M3) vs 330 (MY) miles; a 28 mile difference that can be made up by driving slower or stopping a half hour sooner.

         At home, I back in and it takes 20 seconds to open the port, stick the plug in, handshake, and then watch the recharging begin. I can peer into the car and read the monitor screen that tells how long it will be before my MY reaches my preset pack capacity setting (around 80%). I’ve been doing Level 1 (120 V, 12 Amps) for 4 years now.

6. H i H,
   While I must agree with the basic premise, that we’re in a desperate situation, especially in terms of the wider world, this piece is written in such a fashion that it could be a great piece of subtle troll work created by a fossil fuel shill…….. one better informed than most of course.

   First off, there’s essentially no meaningful acknowledgement of fossil fuel depletion. That alone disqualifies it as worth a flying fuck as far as making any meaningful contribution to the discussion of energy so far as the public is concerned.

   There’s just one or two lines buried WAY down about depletion….. meaning that the TYPICAL reader will come away with an entirely one sided picture of the actual truth involving renewables.

   Anybody with an abc level of understanding of the physical and life sciences cannot avoid reading this as propaganda.

   ” Just like a human body, the grid heals itself… but only up to a certain point. Then ageing takes over, and even the best maintained system, like the healthiest person, dies one day.”

   The grid evolves, technically. It doesn’t heal itself, and it’s not an individual or even a species, and while it probably will cease to exist, along with humanity, someday……… this is bullshit.

   It can be and will be rebuilt piecemeal as necessary, just as people reproduce.

   ” just like our civilization will lose its ability to power every gadget we have and take care of our every need.”

   We will undoubtedly lose some of the grid…….. but there’s ZERO evidence to lead a reasonable person to believe it MUST cease to exist in any meaningful time frame.

   “Wind and solar are inherently intermittent and cannot produce the stable flow of electricity needed to run an arc-furnace, which consumes power by the megawatts and only feasible in locations where electricity is cheap — or in our case: used to be cheap.”

   More bullshit. There are plenty of ways to keep ESSENTIAL industry running to the extent necessary, depending mostly on wind and solar power for at least another century…….. by rationing coal and gas for making steel as necessary. By building long distance high voltage power lines. By building pumped hydro.

   By USING LESS STEEL. By painting or plating the steel we DO use so that it will last for generations, rather than years. And incidentally, somewhere over ninety five percent of all the steel used these days IS recycled.
   “Over 500 million tonnes of steel are multi-cycled worldwide each year. Approximately 85% of structural steel is recycled and used as a scrap charge in furnaces, and 12% is used directly for new structures. Only 3% of all steel is lost to landfills or rust.Sep 5, 2021”

   “Hydro power is also limited by the number of locations available for damming,”

   True in essence, but there are at least a few hundred entirely satisfactory places in the USA ALONE to build substantial hydropower infrastructure of the pumped storage type. Most of them are off limits FOR NOW…….. but they won’t be, once the energy shit is in the fan.

   And while climate change means drought in some places, it will also mean tropical monsoon level rain in some other places……….

   “The same could not be told about solar panels and wind turbines, transformers, inverters and the rest: additional (external) energy needs to be invested in their decomposition, then another round of energy expenditure for building a new generation of energy devices — none of which they can self-generate and store.”

   The parts of wind and solar farms that WILL need regular replacement can EASILY be recycled using renewable energy produced by these same wind and solar farms. This is the same bullshit argument that’s been pushed for YEARS saying it takes more energy to build a wind farm or solar farm that it produces over it’s working lifetime……. a flat out lie that’s been endlessly rebutted but is still quite often repeated.

   “Technology and the civilization it brought about is unsustainable. ”

   This is unproven,and cannot be proven.

   It’s doomer bullshit.

   I’m a realist, and I expect a substantial portion of the human species to die hard within the easily foreseeable future, but with a little luck, some of us will pull thru with the lights on, the toilet flushing, and food in the stores.
   There will be far fewer of us, and we will be using far fewer resources per capita.

   There will very likely, almost certainly, be a crash and burn hard landing from our current overshoot position. The odds of this in my estimation are in the high nineties, but it IS possible that since birth rates are falling like rocks that we could turn the population corner without the Four Horsemen taking us out wholesale, rather than piecemeal.

   We’ve proven time and again that if something concentrates our resolve and will power on an existential level problem, we will fight together to protect our existence…… and in modern times we have something that seems to be almost ENTIRELY ignored in terms of solving our three biggest problems…. Leviathan, the nation state.

   Given time, the population problem is going to pretty much solve itself, saving Mother Nature the trouble of doing so by her usual impartial ways, such as famine, disease, and violence.

   The people in places that ARE desperately overpopulated will die in place…….. because they will NOT be allowed to migrate to better off places by the tens of millions.

   I used to believe the fossil fuel depletion problem would mean the end of civilization as we know it.
   In my wildest imagination, I never believed renewable energy WOULD get so cheap, so fast, to the point that building out renewable infrastructure is a no brainer bargain in large parts of the world, on a dollars and cents basis alone.

   There will come a day when we realize that we have to spend more on wind and solar farms, on pumped hydro, on HVDC transmission lines, etc, than we do on tanks, planes and ships.

   This piece says essentially NOTHING about what can be accomplished by way of radically improved efficiency and conservation measures.

   How many readers here realize that there are literally tens of thousands of nice houses sitting empty in Japan because the old folks are in nursing homes or dead?

   How many people on the street in the USA understand that in reality, they could get along just fine with a micro mini car that goes only fifty to a hundred miles on a charge, by renting a car occasionally for trips or a truck to haul stuff once in a while?

   We could build five to ten such cars using the same amount of copper and cobalt as it takes to build one hot rod mid size Tesla that will go three hundred miles.
   Such cars CAN be built to last for generations.

   Commercial trucks are built this way already, and last at least a decade…… running all day almost every day……. and they could easily be refurbished to run another ten years, except newer models are even BETTER designed and built to be safer, cleaner, and more economical to own and operate over the long run.

   A thousand otherwise out of work carpenters could refurbish a thousand older houses in six months to use half or less the energy, with the materials cost being recovered by energy cost savings, within a very few years. If we’re going to be putting them on the dole, because there’s no work for them…….. well, we might as well insist they work for their welfare bennies.

   It’s not game over.

   There’s no reason to give up.

   Now as far as the climate problem goes….. It’s impossible to know how bad things will get.

   But I’m willing to hazard a guess that here in the USA in particular, and quite a few other countries as well, we will be able to maintain at least fifty percent of our current levels of food production.
   This could involve eating a lot less meat, and a lot more beans, and it might mean even beans would be very expensive.

   But we aren’t likely to actually starve to death in substantial numbers…… at least not in the modern western world.

   But I sure as hell wouldn’t like to be trapped in a place such as Egypt or Indonesia when the shit hits the fan.

   1. “But we aren’t likely to actually starve to death in substantial numbers…… at least not in the modern western world.”

      Climate change has entered the chat. It’s absolutely bonkers that people in the first world think their voting for the Leopard Eating Face party will also not have to deal with losing face to said leopards.

      If you genuinely think the US and Europe are going to just have to pay a bit more for energy and food and have couple of funky seasons now and then, you’re going to have a bad time.

      We know how bad it’s going to get: worse and faster than all predictions so far.

      https://www.scihb.com/2023/04/yet-another-study-warns-were-on-track.html

      3°C is basically “end of civilisation” levels of disruption. We’re not talking having to use bikes to get to work instead of EVs and having a trouble importing out of season produce. We’re talking total collapse of industrial society, which is why I find renewable and electric car/truck/plane talk kinda passé. It’s totally irrelevant and changes nothing now. We had a good run.

      EDIT: Also, agree on not wanting to be in Egypt or any of the poor brown people places. But lol, Americans and Europeans are absolutely not going to just stop consuming. They’ll get that Model Y instead of the petrol powered equivalent SUV and wring their hands over how terrible it was half of India just keeled over to heat one day. The Apple TV series Extrapolations had one really good episode essentially showing India being a place you can’t go outside in the day to do anything without flat out dying in minutes. The rest of the show was boring guff with Black Mirror tech saving or appeasing the wealthier masses whilst the biosphere collapsed.

      1. “If you genuinely think the US and Europe are going to just have to pay a bit more for energy and food and have couple of funky seasons now and then, you’re going to have a bad time. ”

         I’ve been saying that right along.

         That we will have to downsize out the ying yang, eat beans instead of steak, drive micro cars that go fifty miles, maybe a hundred, on a charge, give up air travel, spend a large portion of our military budget on renewables and conservation, etc.

         “3°C is basically “end of civilisation” levels of disruption. We’re not talking having to use bikes to get to work instead of EVs and having a trouble importing out of season produce. We’re talking total collapse of industrial society”

         Bullshit.

         I’m perfectly ready to agree that poor people in poor countries are going to die hard by the hundreds of millions, and that large portions of the Earth may become uninhabitable, due to heat or drought, etc. BEEN saying that sometimes myself. I’m a farmer by profession, and I’ve pointed out that it isn’t the AVERAGE temperature that’s the problem, it’s the HEAT WAVES that will take out staple crops on the grand scale.It’s drought that kills, early frost, late frost that kills.

         I might have to give up apples…… because apples don’t do well as far south as Georgia, except at the very highest elevations, and even then…… it’s just too warm for apples.

         But I’m putting in pecans, not for myself, but for today’s little kids ….. and pecans do very well in Texas. I could grow rice on my bottom land, rather than corn….. except that I’ll be dead well before that’s necessary.

         I’ve pointed out that in my hillbilly hard core Baptist family, the two oldest generations will be leaving enough nice houses for the two younger generations…… because the birth rate in my own ‘ Bible Thumper” family is at or below replacement rate.

         We won’t be buying energy or much of anything else from other countries if the world wide economy crashes…. but ya know what?

         There’s not much AT ALL that we HAVE to obtain outside North America in order to produce everything we use today…… and we can substitute or do without as necessary.

         We CAN get by using far less sophisticated technologies. Cars and trucks do not HAVE to be computerized. We don’t HAVE to have convenience foods. We don’t HAVE to eat beef. We don’t even HAVE to eat pork and chicken, although I expect we will be able to afford some chicken and a little pork as well, and even SOME beef, a few generations down the road.

         IF we stay after it, we CAN build out the wind and solar industries to the point we have enough electricity enough of the time to continue to live civilized lives.

         Farmers have been making hay when the sun shines for thousands of years.

         We can live in houses kept just above freezing, if necessary, for weeks or months at a time. That’s what winter clothing is FOR.

         If it gets just plain old TOO HOT in Texas…….. well, with the birth rate falling like a rock, “damnYankees” might even be glad to see some Texans thinking about moving to NY state, lol.

         We aren’t going to need new highways, or shopping centers, or air ports, or new giant water reservoirs for the cities once population starts declining.

         And you can bet your last can of beans the population WILL be declining…. if not for cultural reasons, then because Mother Nature will take care of the problem HER way…. meaning some variation of the Four Horsemen theme.

         We could build enough HVDC transmission lines to move wind and solar juice to where it’s needed from where it can be produced within the next ten years…. as well as the wind and solar farms necessary to produce it…….

         For what we spend on frivolous junk today, such as tobacco, alcohol, oversized cars and trucks, air travel, junk food, sports stadiums, etc etc etc.

         And if we get lucky, and we get my often mentioned Pearl Harbor Wake Up events soon enough and often enough….. we’ll do what we did back in WWII.

         We did what HAD to be done then.

         We can do what HAS to be done again…… assuming we come to realize it’s do it, or die.

         1. All of which would be great if your family and their lifestyles were around millions of years ago, when the world was last in this state. Not only has no civ ever experienced what we’re heading to, no Homo sapiens has.

            Agriculture under best case purely temperature impacts will drop yields by up to 40%. That’s ignoring the trajectory we’re currently on and not even attempting to change, that this also ignores water, phosphate and nitrate deficits and extreme weather. These were things Dr. Battisti was warning about six years ago, and things have only been accelerating from that given more recent papers. No one expected wet bulb temps like we’re seeing now already, this side of 2050.

            I mean, people hear of ocean anoxia and temperature being a problem for coral reefs and whales and think “that really sucks, I wanted to swim with those one day” and I’m reading papers talking about these same conditions in the Permian killing off practically everything that respired on Earth aerobically (https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aat1327). Then the evening news just talks about children only being able to see these creatures at Sea Life, they just omit the “and also anyone who relies on the sea for food and breathing will also kick a bucket”. Guess it doesn’t play well for the advertisers.

            But sure, maybe it will all be fine because people did things in the past in completely inequivalent conditions. The Easter Islanders and Mayans just didn’t commit to surviving hard enough.

            1. FROM up above:

               If your response to the projected total collapse of complex civilization and mass die off of life is being one of those still keeping the lights on and kicking the corpses of the former scientists shouting “But not EVERYONE died, did they!” I don’t know if that’s a win.

               It’s sure as hell a win for the ones who do survive. You do realize that NOBODY gets out of this world alive, right?

               We’re ALL worm food in the end, from microbes to cockroaches to blue whales to Popes and Ivy League professors. The Koch brothers and various other billionaires may have their bodies frozen to near absolute zero, but it’s damned unlikely they will ever be brought back to life.

               I find myself coming to the conclusion that you simply don’t want to acknowledge the physical realities that define the natural world, while insinuating that I’M the one failing to face up to reality, lol.

               There are people on the Eastern Islands and while the Mayans no longer exist as a distinct cultural or ethnic group, they’re not exactly EXTINCT….. having interbred with Europeans. Their former lands are well populated with people carrying their genes……. TOO well populated, to be sure.

               But birth control pills, IUD’s, tubal ligations, vasectomies, condoms, etc look as if they’re going to solve the population problem for us, given another generation or two, at least in the richer Western countries.

               Mother Nature has her ways, and She will deal with the rest, without even a moment’s thought …… given that she’s not sentient ………. but I’m repeating myself.

               We are NOT going to run out of water. It’s NOT going to quit raining. We will have to give up on farming in some places, go to dry land farming rather than irrigating in other places, and put a lot of hard work into producing food using methods I understand quite well, being a pro in the field, and having grown up on a farm where we continued to do things the OLD way to a substantial extent……. not because we had to, but because the old folks WANTED to, for old times sake.

               People have migrated to greener pastures, so to speak, since the dawn of our time as a species, as changing conditions dictated.

               People have farmed for thousands of years all over the world without manufactured fertilizers or pesticides, or diesel fuel or electricity…… We don’t HAVE to have nitrates or phosphates except to maintain the status quo.

               The status quo is a dead man walking.

               Rice farmers will move north. Apple growers will move north. If there’s not land enough up north, well, more people will starve or die fighting for access to food and shelter.

               And of course it’s entirely possible that the climate will go nuts to such an extent that NONE of us survive.

               But I don’t hear much of that sort of talk from serious professional scientists. That sort of talk is usually geared to making a name and a reputation.

               I have never said it would be easy.

               I KNOW how hard it will be, having actual experience plowing with a mule, hoeing corn by hand in August sun, chopping wood, winding water up from a well by hand, going outside to an outhouse to take a dump in zero Fahrenheit weather on a dark night in a high wind.

               It’s apt to be harder than middle class people who shove paper and electrons can even IMAGINE.

               It’s true I haven’t done this sort of thing since I was a kid, except on rare occasions, but I did do it. I lived in what would be today called a hovel or rural slum until I was nine years old, two rooms, no bathroom, no running water, a wood fired kitchen stove, eating mostly food grown within a quarter of a mile of that house.

               But we worked hard, and we were fortunate enough to work our way up into the middle class, or maybe the lower middle class, depending on whose definitions you prefer.

               No….. there won’t be many divorce lawyers or hair dressers making Lexus and Mercedes money. No siree.

               There won’t be many people selling fast food burgers.

               BUT there will be PLENTY of work for people willing to do it. Doing it will involve calluses and aching backs and sunburn. The majority of us even today, on world wide basis, are still doing hard physical work in order to live.

               Species come and go, ice ages come and go, asteroids hit once in a while, super volcanoes erupt, pandemics happen, but life goes on.

               In the natural scheme if a handful of us survive, well, that’s a WIN for the ones of us who DO survive, and a win for our species.

               Most of us have lived hard and died hard all the way back to the time we lived in trees, before we evolved into more or less human form.

               “Agriculture under best case purely temperature impacts will drop yields by up to 40%.”

               So Egyptians and Indonesians starve. Sub Saharan Africans starve. Yankees eat down the food pyramid. We’ll be healthier for it. There will be far fewer of us.

               This is no surprise at all to a university trained farmer, yours truly, who keeps up with the science news. I got a third of my credits in the same classrooms at the same hour using the same textbooks as biology, chemistry, geology and various other science majors. Most of the rest were hard science based in the same fields, with an emphasis on application, the way engineers take physics and math courses with an emphasis on applying these sciences to their chosen profession.

               My great grand parents generation produced a big surplus of food with horses and mules, no tractors or trucks, no purchased fertilizers or pesticides, food enough to support people in towns and cities. Of course a substantial percentage of us WERE farmers back then.

               1. I admire your can do attitude and willing to go along with dealing through adversity with sheer gumption, really, I do. There are obviously way more people these days who prefer to deny any possible badness on the horizon as they go through the stages of grief. When we get to bargaining and anger, we may get some interesting effects on the global stage.

                  But real time: do you think those survivors would really be all that better off? Like, if a nuclear exchange happened, even if only between India and Pakistan, do you feel it would be a blessing to have come out of it the other side? I simply can’t relate to that view. Maybe I’ve watched Threads too many times and heard about what my grandfather saw in France and West Germany immediately after WWII, but I just don’t see how anyone can think being the net survivors from something like that, only multiple times more extreme, will be good for their mental health and survival.

                  Don’t get me wrong, no one gets out of life alive, I appreciate that. It’s just that most of the people did not expect things to go as badly as we are now seeing reported. I personally know people whose response was on the order of “Yeah, well I’ll be dead before climate wars kick in, so who cares?” and I think a lot of them now are freaking out because there’s this dim, yet growing, awareness to how things are unfolding.

                  Remember, while people did survive before without the modern world, they did so at a time of a stable climate, multiple times fewer people, more renewable and non-renewable resources, and without the pollution and biodiversity loss already encountered. We are NOT going back to living like our forefathers did on the frontier. There are no bison and predictable rain seasons or abundant aquifers now, and plenty of things like chemical stores, nuclear power plants, oodles of weapons etc. etc.

                  I would love to go back to a more turn of the century style existence, only with modern tech and fewer people supplementing the toil on the land. We could have had a nice long time with fewer people or consuming fewer resources. Too bad capitalism did a thing and we wanted those treats so bad.

      2. We have evidence of what might happen. In the mid-1600’s during the Mini Ice Age it was snowing in Europe in August. I’m not sure how many crops would survive a few weeks of snow in the middle of the growing season even with industrial tech.

7. Montana Plant Hits Clean Energy Milestone, Turning Beef Fat Into Jet Fuel — Barrons.com
   3:00 am ET April 27, 2023 (Dow Jones) Print
   By Avi Salzman

   A Montana refinery that has been pumping out fossil fuels for years announced this week it has started making a much cleaner product that could become the fastest-growing fuel in the country.

   The owner, Calumet Specialty Products (ticker: CLMT), says its Montana operation makes it the largest producer of sustainable aviation fuel in North America — a milestone that says more about how small the industry is.

   “We’re at the infantile stage of what we think is going to be an explosive growth story,” said Calumet CEO Todd Borgmann in an interview. Calumet says it has a contract to sell 30 million gallons of sustainable jet fuel a year to an unnamed customer.

   Calumet uses oils gathered from animal fats and plants and processes them in such a way they become essentially indistinguishable from jet fuel derived from crude oil. Airplanes have flown safely on 100% renewable fuels, though the average flight uses a minuscule amount today, if it uses any at all. The renewable stuff is mixed with fossil fuels at airports.

   Sustainable aviation fuel is the avenue that holds the most promise to decarbonize aviation, according to Rhodium Group, an energy research firm. Aviation is responsible for more than 2% of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

   But the cleaner jet fuel made up just 0.1% of aviation fuels in 2021, and has barely improved from that level today. The IEA says it needs to increase to about 10% of aviation fuel by 2030 to reach the agency’s net zero target and avoid some of the more extreme effects of climate change.

   New funding and rules should accelerate the industry. The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act subsidizes producers of sustainable aviation fuel with a per-gallon credit. And companies including United Airlines (UAL) and Boeing (BA) recently launched a $100 million venture capital fund to jump-start the industry. Europe is planning to make airlines use a fuel mix that is made up of 2% biofuels by 2025 and 70% by 2050.

   Getting to those levels will take an effort on the scale of the space program. Calumet now makes about 1,000 gallons a day, a tiny drop in the seven million barrel a day global jet fuel market. It expects to get to between 2,000 and 4,000 barrels a day by the summer, and potentially grow sevenfold in the next couple of years. Other companies making sustainable aviation fuel include privately held World Energy, which has a plant in Los Angeles, and Neste (NTOIY), a Finnish company.

   Sustainable fuel also costs much more to make than traditional fuel and airlines are unlikely to be willing to pay extra for it.

   “With the airlines, everybody is fuel-price sensitive,” said Megan Boutwell, president of fuel consultant Stillwater Associates. “They don’t want to pay any more, or pass costs onto consumers.”

   Federal and state credits can make up the difference, although the value of some of those credits fluctuates in ways that can be hard to predict. Low carbon fuel credits in California, for instance, are down 60% from their 2020 highs. The California credits have been a key incentive for various kinds of renewable fuels, and the decline has forced some producers to rein in expansion plans.

   Calumet executives say they are confident they can amass enough credits to earn strong margins from all their renewable products — the company also makes renewable diesel for trucks at the plant. It says it can earn $1.25 to $1.45 per gallon before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.

   The refinery is just 100 miles from the Canadian border, and Canada is set to launch a low carbon credit program in July. British Columbia already has one. And in the U.S., Oregon and Washington state have joined California in creating a low carbon credit system. Some states, including Illinois, have their own clean aviation fuel tax breaks.

   Calumet also says its location gives it another advantage, because it has access to cheap local sources of animal fats and corn and canola oil that will be the feedstocks for its fuels. Although numerous other players will soon enter the sustainable aviation market, Calumet executives are confident their advantages will make them one of the most profitable producers.

   “The geography just sets us apart from everyone else,” Borgmann said. “We sit on top of a boatload of feedstock.”

   The meaning of “feedstock” for jet fuel is starting to change. One day, it may have more to do with soybeans and cows than crude.

   1. Meanwhile, in green washing.

      Carlyle Group’s Carbon Emissions Doubled Despite Climate Leadership Claims

      1. Over 40% Of Americans Say Their Next Car Will Likely Be Electric, Meaning These EV Stocks Could Be Ready For Takeoff
         9:56 am ET April 13, 2023 (Benzinga) Print
         Electric vehicles have been gaining popularity in America. And based on results from a new poll, we are about to see a whole lot more of them on the road.

         The poll, conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, finds that 41% of U.S. adults say they are “somewhat likely,” “very likely” or “extremely likely” to get an EV the next time they buy a car.

         Meanwhile, 47% of respondents indicate they are either “not too likely” or “not at all likely” to go electric for their next vehicle purchase. The remaining 12% of respondents say they have no plans to buy a car.

         To be sure, electric car adoption is still at an early stage. Only 9% of respondents report that someone in their household already owns or leases an EV.

         What’s Holding Them Back?

         The poll also sheds some light on the obstacles that stand in the way of more widespread EV adoption.

         Notably, six in 10 respondents consider the high cost of new EVs a major reason for not buying one. Moreover, half of the respondents believe that the lack of charging stations to be another main hurdle for going electric.

         “While there is plenty of interest in purchasing an electric vehicle, the high upfront cost of owning one and concerns about the country’s charging infrastructure are barriers to more people driving them,” said Jennifer Benz, deputy director of the AP-NORC Center in a statement.

         1. After driving EVs for 4 years now, the initial cost is high but the maintenance is very low. Once every two years, I’m scheduled to go in for an air filter replacement plus some other checks. Tire wear is higher.

            As far as the charger networks are concerned, I have not had any instances where I could not charge. For family reunions in the mountains or along the shores, I check with the home owner to ask about an outside 120V socket. I bring a heavy gauge extension cord and my Tesla extension cord unit and have had no problems adding 60 to 80 miles overnight.

            The Supercharger network is superb!! I’ve had no waits. That said, my son drove a Chevy Bolt and some of the J1772 stations had issues but he was never stranded. A reinsertion of the plug, a move to the next recharger space or a call to customer service usually did the trick; all of which are a PITA but doable. But I can understand a non-Tesla owner’s concern.

            I have read articles where battery energy densities are increasing and in some cases the Lab reported densities are 3 to almost 5 times that of the energy densities of a Model 3 battery. That’s 1074 to 1790 miles if these batteries could replace a Model 3’s batteries OR keep the same range and reduce the size of the pack by a factor of 3 to 5 and therefore the cost. But we’ll see…

8. Endless Record Heat: Asia Experiences Highest April Temperatures

   I’m sure this is just a one off.

   1. Biden’s EPA moves closer to first-ever restrictions on greenhouse gases from power plants
      7:58 am ET April 24, 2023 (MarketWatch)
      Print
      By Rachel Koning Beals

      Proposed regulations would promote carbon capture for existing power plants, responsible for 25% of U.S. emissions. The oil and gas sector, plus many Republicans, are likely to object.

      The Biden administration is nearing plans to push tougher regulations of earth-warming greenhouse gas emissions from existing and newly built power plants, according to reports Saturday.

      It’s a step that widens previous stalled intentions to clamp down on the emissions from any new power plant to come on line but that would have let most operational coal- and natural gas-burning plants to be grandfathered in, according to the New York Times and other outlets, who were briefed on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plans before any official announcement.

      As proposed, almost all coal and gas-fired power plants would have to cut or capture nearly all of their carbon dioxide emissions by 2040, according to the people familiar with the regulation, who asked not to be identified because the rule has not been made public, the New York Times reported

      MarketWatch’s request for comment from the EPA Saturday was not immediately returned.

      The EPA’s move would force more of the energy and power industries to quickly bring up to scale carbon- and methane-capturing technology, a nascent field that has champions in both the private and public sector and across the political spectrum, but which some environmental groups say doesn’t do enough to slow demand for fossil fuels at the outset.

      Currently, carbon capture, sequestration and storage, or CSS as it’s known, is believed to be used at only a dozen-plus of the nation’s 3,400 coal and gas-fired electricity plants. It’s a different process than other technology currently being tested, which captures emissions not at the point of combustion, but from the air.

      If implemented, the proposed EPA regulation, which would be advanced by executive order and not require congressional approval, would be the first time the federal government has restricted CO2 emissions from existing power plants.

      The rules would face a comment period and can be rewritten. For sure, objections are likely from the fossil-fuel industry (CVX)(XOM), power plant operators (SO)(NEE), states that rely on energy revenue, and the industry’s allies in Congress, where energy lobbying contributions are significant. The rules are likely to draw an immediate legal challenge from a group of Republican attorneys general that has already sued the Biden administration to stop other climate policies. Plus, a future White House could also weaken the regulation.

      1. Gonna be a lot of sad faces when Biden can’t stop a global famine.

         1. He’s doing wonders for Big Oil though, and really, they deserve it. Other countries just need to stop sucking and grok the American model.

         2. 🙂

            Overweight and obesity statistics 2023

            These obesity statistics help explain the obesity epidemic that affects 500 million adults worldwide
            Cropped SingleCare logo
            By SingleCare Team | Updated on Feb. 3, 2023
            Medically reviewed by Karen Berger, Pharm.D.

            Obesity is a medical condition characterized by having too much body fat, which can cause health problems and complications. Learning more about obesity is a helpful first step toward managing the condition and living a healthier life. Let’s take a look at some obesity statistics, ways to treat obesity, and how to help prevent it.

            What is obesity?
            Obesity is a medical condition that happens when someone has an excessive amount of body fat. Having too much body fat can increase the risk of getting additional health problems, and it can cause health problems of its own.

            Healthcare providers can diagnose obesity based on body mass index (BMI), waist circumference measurements, and other symptoms. BMI factors in someone’s height, body weight, age group, and sex. A BMI of 30 or higher often indicates obesity. Moreover, a waist measurement of over 35 inches for women and 40 inches for men may also indicate obesity. Additionally, here are some common symptoms of obesity:

            Being overweight
            Tiredness
            Joint or back pain
            Low self-esteem/low confidence
            Snoring
            Increased sweating
            Treatment for obesity often involves exercise, new eating habits, nutritional supplementation, medication, and in some cases, surgery.

            How common is obesity?
            On average, one out of every three adults is obese, which is about 36% of the population. (Harvard, 2020)
            The age-adjusted prevalence of obesity in adults from 2017-18 was 42.4%. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2020)
            By 2030, an estimated 20% of the world’s population will be obese. (National Center for Biotechnology Information, 2016)
            About 18.5% of children ages 2 to 19 are considered obese in the United States. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019)
            Obesity epidemic: How many people are obese in the world?
            Obesity doesn’t just affect people in the U.S. People in many countries experience obesity, and it’s becoming a global epidemic.

            An estimated 500 million adults in the world are obese.
            If unaddressed, an estimated 1 billion adults will be obese by 2030.
            More than 25% of U.K. adults are obese.
            Forty-four percent of women in Saudi Arabia are obese.
            (Harvard, 2020)

            Global hunger is now more a problem of price than availability
            As always, women and children are the worst affected
            BAIDOA, SOMALIA – SEPTEMBER 3: Habiba Hassan Leesow, who had to leave her home due to drought, sits outside her tent with her daughter Najima Barre in a displacement camp for people impacted by drought on September 3, 2022 in Baidoa, Somalia. Extreme drought has destroyed crops and seen a hike in food prices, leaving 7 million people (out of a total population of 16 million) at risk of famine in Somalia.
            Nov 18th 2022

            By Avantika Chilkoti: International correspondent, The Economist

            The world is entering 2023 in a hunger crisis. The World Food Programme (wfp), a un agency that co-ordinates the distribution of food aid, reckons the number of people facing acute food insecurity jumped from 282m at the end of 2021 to a record 345m in 2022. As many as 50m people will begin 2023 on the brink of famine. And with governments still reeling from the covid-19 pandemic and grappling with slowing economic growth, many of those people could be starving in the coming months.

            Until now, the problem has largely been spiralling prices rather than availability. Russia and Ukraine were among the top five global exporters of barley, maize and sunflower products in the world. So when war broke out, supplies of many staple foods were seriously affected. The countries worst affected were among the poorest in the world. Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda, for example, relied on Russia and Ukraine for over 40% of their wheat imports. But the effects were felt everywhere. Global food prices soared as other countries, including Argentina and India, responded with trade restrictions.

            1. You also have to keep in mind that exports of subsidized farm products from the EU at least, and probaly from US and others also, has seriously hurt local farmers and limited local production.

      2. “Proposed regulations would promote carbon capture for existing power plants”

         I suppose that would a partial back door path to a de facto carbon tax.
         It takes money, and energy, to accomplish carbon capture.
         I haven’t seen any analysis of the energy cost of carbon capture…
         what percent of the potential energy output from a coal or nat gas fired generating station would be
         required to capture the carbon from that facility?

         1. “I haven’t seen any analysis of the energy cost of carbon capture…”

            But you know the true cost of burning fossil fuels and manufacturing dumping waste products into the air and water freely without constraints includes global warming and cancer.

            1. Surely.
               And for the record I am in favor of an across the board carbon tax, gradually increasing, with the proceeds used for electrification and habitat protection.

               I am very skeptical about the usefulness of carbon capture from a net energy standpoint, but I have not seen a solid report on that.

               1. There is plenty to be skeptical about. Just because I posted the information doesn’t mean I’m all in. But on the other hand, 15 years ago nearly everyone would have been skeptical about EV’s and soon ICE will be dinosaurs.

                  In the past, auto manufacturers have always resisted better mileage and emissions regulations stating cost. They have basically always met the regulations and the additional costs have been offset by better mileage and emissions. Hopefully the new regulations are based on doable science and engineering. You have to try to do something to know if it obtainable.

               2. Hickory,

                  CCS is simply to reduce carbon emissions, obviously net energy would decrease, the point is to provide backup, it is possible using synthetic fuels would be cheaper than CCS and perhaps that is what you meant. Energy won’t really be a problem the important metric is full economic cost, including all positive and negative externalities, net energy is only important on a total societal level.

               3. Dennis- my point about carbon capture/sequestration is that all of the talk about it that I see fails to consider that this is not some ‘free’ solution to fossil fuel combustion/global warming.
                  It consumes some of the energy that the fossil fuels are being combusted for, and it is expensive in terms other than energy as well.

                  It would be a nice mechanism [if perfected] to offset carbon emissions in a world that had plenty of extra/inexpensive energy and had a great balance sheet…debts paid down, great income stream, low interest rates,etc.
                  But in our world it is an attempt to put a small and expensive bandaid on bad wound.

                  I think all of the money and effort spent on the attempt would be better directed to replacing combustion with other energy mechanisms and energy efficiency, as quickly as can be accomplished.

               4. Hickory,

                  I agree. The move for CCS may simply be a way to reduce new fossil fuel power plants as this makes them more expensive, probably not a good idea to subsidize them, but it may have been a compromise to get Manchin to sign off on Inflation Reduction Act. The money would be better spent on HVDC grid upgrades, wind, solar, pumped hydro, and energy efficiency including subsidies for air and ground source heat pumps.

                  No legislation is perfect, but the Inflation Reduction Act was a pretty big accomplishment.

            2. CCS and green hydrogen are being peddled by the same industry that learned of climate change by their own scientists in the ‘70s and sat on that data because it would hurt their bottom line. What does that tell you?

               1. Your a “right wing Chomsky wannabe and speaks with authority on things” you “know nothing about” and “always comes off as a very neurotic and unsettled sort”.

                  You asked

               2. Since I guess I have to do some dooming:

                  CCS being bunk (of which, many such examples): https://environmentaldefence.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Buyer-Beware-FFS-2022.pdf?ref=readthemaple.com

                  Hydrogen boondoggle (a thing in the UK being pushed by Centrica because they own pipes for NG to go to homes and, dammit, they want to keep making money and staying relevant just like telecoms when everyone started going wireless): https://time.com/6098910/blue-hydrogen-emissions/

                  For a bonus, take a drink every time you hear of a DAC facility removing the equivalent of a million cars of CO2 and this being pushed as some solution or something.

9. Over 20,000 excess deaths in Europe in 2022 from heat…

   https://www.isglobal.org/en/-/isglobal-y-lshtm-piden-incorporar-indices-de-estres-termico-en-la-comunicacion-de-olas-de-calor

10. In accordance with tendencies of keeping my finger on the pulse of humanity, I decided to watch 2 episodes of Jordan Peterson’s “Dragons, Monsters & Men”. Episode 2 features JP’s poor take on Paul Ehrlich, as well as copious shilling for right wing think tank grifter Marian Tupy.

    “Every single high school shooter is fatherless” ~ Jordan Peterson.

    While I’m not in the habit of fact checking idiots, that one is verifiably false. Jordan Peterson is a mountebank.

    1. Jordan Peterson is obviously very intelligent. But he is also a narcissistic fool who thinks his postmodern rhetoric has everyone snowed. He is just trying to baffle us with bullshit.

       1. Has some serious benzo problems.
          But, that is not the only one.

    2. Jorp is fine if he keeps to his lane. The problem is, he’s the right wing Chomsky wannabe and speaks with authority on things he knows nothing about. Helps that he’s basically given up his tenure through obstinate social media usage and is now shilling for the far right audience he accrued these last few years.

       He also always comes off as a very neurotic and unsettled sort. His run in with death probably didn’t help his mental state.

11. Interesting mentions of El Niño in this article

    “The Big Melt” has arrived as early season heatwave spikes flood concerns; Cut-off low to bring cooling trend but also possibly thunderstorm outbreak next week

    https://weatherwest.com/archives/26039

    1. My personal preference is to stick with the NWS/NOAA and avoid those commercial weather forecasters. I just want to see what the weather is going to be like a day from now, three days from now, a week from now, and so on. I do not want to be given some sales pitch by a climate activist blowing everything out of proportion to get attention, like giving names to every low pressure system that causes snow or using stupid phrases like “bombogenesis” or “polar vortex” to scare people into a frenzy. And I also remember this being done all the way back in the 1970s when schoolteachers were saying that by the year 2000 the coasts would be underwater because of sea level rise so I just comfortably ignore all the climate garbage.

       1. You want to be using the peer reviewed reports and preferably the latest stuff from the specialists in the field, for sure. The IPCC reports are a good summation of things, though suffer from needing to dig deep down to find the truth given the politicking in the executive summaries. That, and they’re way out of date.

       2. Joe. I know you like to keep thing real real simple.
          But I must introduce just a little complexity here.
          Weather refers to the next couple days, like an individual tree.
          Climate refers to the big, longterm picture, like the whole forest.

          I won’t use any fancy words. The earth is getting warmer, quickly.
          Warmer adds up to unsettled weather.

          1. It snowed in March and science told me the Earth was getting hotter, so checkmate, scientists. Everything will be fine.

             I love that there are actual US politicians that use that as an argument. Great to be ruled by some of the oldest and dumbest of the imperial core.

             1. Correct Kleiber , The people get the leaders they deserve . Dementia Joe , Sausage Olaf , Clown BoJo , Midget Macron , Blackface Trudeau , Scorpion Arden ( good riddance to bad rubbish ) and dumpkof Van lyden . I will stop because the list is too long . Dumb, dumber and dumbest . The race is on and the circus is in town .

                1. Klieber , you are on the dot . Leading contenders for NATO leadership . Add UVDl and the clown BoJo to the list . What me worry ? — Alferd . E . Neuman ( MAD magazine ) .
                   https://ras-nsa.ca/who-will-be-natos-next-secretary-general/

                2. Leaders are a reflection of the voting populace. They follow.

                3. @Hickory

                   Alas, sadly too true. People may not have a truly open democracy, yet what control they do have leads to reflections of what the commons want.

                   And they want people to keep the boat from being rocked in a way that acts to the detriment of themselves. Not groundbreaking, I know. Frame that as the basis for any change, and you see why revolutionary action is just not happening. And even historical major upsets via successful revolutions take decades on average.

12. https://www.powermag.com/epri-head-duck-curve-now-looks-like-a-canyon/

    The regulars here know all about the duck curve, but this is still worth reading because it’s recent, and because the ducks belly is now dragging the ground.

13. I should point out that I have no argument against taking the climate science establishment seriously.
    I DO .
    But there’s generally no balanced discussion at all, when we read, watch and listen to what they’re doing.

    It’s virtually always all about the problems, and nothing or next to nothing about what we can do to live with these problems, with the exception of feel good descriptions of new technologies that might or might not work, or cost many times too much to be implemented.

    Consider the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The pundits were totally and universally all about doom and gloom.

    Poor little Ukraine wouldn’t last a week, or at best no more than a month under the heel of the giant Russian bear.

    They’re in one hell of a tough situation…….

    They might not win in the end……… but they ARE NOT GIVING UP.

    I want to talk about hanging in there…… because our grandchildren are going to have to hang in there, or die.

    1. “climate science establishment”
       I don’t expect that group of people to be involved in telling everyone else what to do about a heating world.
       Unless you mean they should get involved in geo-engineering research to help predict
       the outcomes of these various proposed experiments.
       I suppose that would be a reasonable branch of the climate science field.

       btw- I very much appreciate the basic reality that you bring to the table. It seems to me that many of the people in the world have become so very far removed from basic tasks of living, or have become so specialized in just a few things, that they have lost so much of the common survival knowledge and skills that were near universal before the wide availability of machines and the routine purchase of cargo and services from out of town.
       I can grow potatoes, change out a master cylinder and bleed the brakes, or cut an umbilical cord, but there is a hell of a lot I don’t know squat about. Like livestock…I don’t know anything about raising and preping goats or chickens for food. Seems to me that many more people are going to have relearn a lot of basic things.
       I have wondered how the world would look if everyone (yes everyone) turned off all of the devices for one year,
       and spent all of their time in the real world and with real people.

       1. Hi Hickory,
          You get it, as usual, lol.

          But I should probably have used words other than ” climate science establishment”. I should have simply said climate scientists, or climate researchers, or something to this effect.

          The people who are proposing various technical solutions ARE worth hearing them out, but anybody who is actually pushing a certain technology or solution is also apt to have making some money on their mind, lol.
          Consider carbon capture on site at power plants for instance.

          It’s as obvious as the noonday sun that this could be made to work….. but only at mind boggling expense in terms of money, materials, and energy.

          It’s equally obvious that spending the same resources on conservation or building out renewable energy infrastructure will return a bigger bang for the buck……. probably as much as a five to ten times bigger bang.

          And going the conservation and renewables route means we will be SOLVING the resources depletion problem rather than making it worse.

          Plus it spreads the money around. I don’t have any particular problem with big labor, or big contractors, or big utilities….. but being a world class rolling stone, I have had enough contact with such outfits to know that they’re in it FOR THEMSELVES, and will hog every possible dime.

          Going renewable means the money gets spent all over the country and the world, in rural areas, small towns, big cities…. with some of it being spent hiring local people to do do local work, such as building power lines or wind farms or refurbishing older houses and buildings etc.

          A local wind or solar farm can be and often will be the difference, in the future, between having a small local manufacturing business make it……… or close or move away to a place with cheaper electricity.

          History is NOT over.

          My personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that the odds are at least fifty percent we will see a dozen hot fights over the next few decades involving access to oil, gas, and maybe even coal. Maybe over the water in a river passing thru different countries. There will be local small wars over the control of land suitable for raising food.

          Any one of these events could metastasize into a war between major powers.

       2. I literally had to show someone how to open their Prius’ bonnet (hood) last month as it was steaming from a coolant leak.

          I think we’re very far from the robustness people had even three decades ago, never mind a century back. Unless there’s an app for if, I guess most people will just kinda starve or do without.

          Can you imagine what happens if the net goes down and never comes back? The loss of knowledge is bad enough with the web becoming more and more fractured and closed off and at the same time libraries are closing down.

14. All this talk of EVs saving the planet. They’re still bloody cars that need parking lots, bridges, and plastic tires. Wouldn’t it be better to focus on establishing more green spaces, nature reserves, and all the places where animals, plants, fish, birds, insects, etc. can thrive? Or is the Car Culture so deeply engrained that we can’t think beyond it.

    1. Doug,

       EVs will simply reduce demand for oil, helps a bit perhaps vs burning fossil fuel, but I have never said they will save the planet, wind and solar may reduce demand for coal and natural gas and as they ramp up, along with EV use, carbon emissions may be reduced, this helps reduce the risks of severe climate change. This also does not “save the planet”, more green space, is a great idea, somewhat less connected to peak oil, seems reducing total fertility ratios with better education for women and more equal rights for women migh reduce population and would tend to increase green space as human population declines.

       1. UN Population projection for East and Southeast Asia

          https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/1832

          

          1. After following the peak oil meme for the last couple of decades I cringe whenever I see a graph that has a slope inversion “next year” or so.

             1. Yes, but the smooth functioning of the status quo depends on eliminating concavity, so all sorts of bookkeeping tricks will serve to hide it.

             2. JJHMAN,

                Population projection for Japan, click on chart for larger view. Notice the peak is 2010, China and South Korea will soon follow this trajectory along with much of the resto of southeast Asia, Total Fertility ratio in South Korea and China are aleady below the Japanese level.

                

                1. Meanwhile, according to UN projections, India’s population is expected peak at about 1.7 billion in 2064.

                2. Doug,

                   Yes , by the median projection that’s about right, China’s population falls to 1.15 billion from 1.43 billion in 2021 by around 2065 for median projection.

                   https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/156

                   For India see

                   https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/356

                   Note that median projection probably overestimates population as it assumes TFR flattens from recent trend of -2%/year for past decade to 0.34% per year in the future (2022-2060) for median projection, the 80% probability lower bound has TFR decreasing at a more realistic 0.65% per year. India currently has a TFR of about 2, South Korea had its TFR decrease from 2.17 in 1983 to 1.17 in 2003 (a 21 year period). This is largely a function of education and the Indian population is very well educated, TFR will likely drop like a rock, just as it has done in other Asian nations in the past (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc).

                   For the lower 80% probability bound, Indian population is about 1.52 billion in 2065 and 1.4 billion in 2082.

                   Note that for China as well the lower bound of the 80% probability envelope uses a more realistic TFR assumption than the median scenario. For that projection China’s population falls from 1.4 billion in 2021 to 0.6 billion by 2100. For India and the lower bound of the 80% probability envelope population is 1.2 billion by 2100. For the two nations combined population falls from 2.8 billion in 2021 to about 1.8 billion in 2100.

                3. The plots are a lot more credible when they show results instead of projections. I accept that slope inversions do occur. If I had kept all of the slope inversion projetions from the old Oil Drum we could all have a good laugh.

          2. Population projection for South Korea, population peaked in 2020.

             

    2. I’m not renewing my license when it expires.
       Time to face reality, and not keep up with delusions.
       Any joiners?

       1. How is it even possible to survive without having a driver’s license? I can’t even imagine it.

          1. That is the problem.
             I grew up in LA.
             I drove a VW to Costa Rica and back.
             No license?

             1. See How Cyclists Have Outnumbered Drivers in The City of London

                https://www.cursor.org/business/2023/03/21/cycling-outnumbers-motorists-london.html

          2. Lolly , in India I could drive lifelong without a license . Just grease the palms along the road . The planet is not flat . 🙂

       2. Do you vote? Republicans are trying to use licenses. Do you have an alternative?

    3. “All this talk of EVs saving the planet.”

       I must have missed the headlines…didn’t realize that people were talking about how a transport mechanism could ‘save the planet’
       I thought they were for moving people and cargo around.

       In regard to ‘saving the planet’…besides not having children and learning to live shorter lives,
       the next big thing would be to give some cattle land back to wildlife preserves [eat less meat everyone]
       An updated report shows that 5 domesticated livestock species (cow, buffalo, sheep, pig, and goat) outweigh all of the terrestrial wildlife mammals by a factor of over 24:1.
       And 70% of that is cattle.
       When you throw the weight of humanity to the equation, you are left with a factor of over 50:1

       Simply, 8.1 Billion bits of humanity have gathered almost every single little bit of global sustenance for itself.
       The Monster is us.

       https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.2204892120

    4. So far as the car culture is concerned, we’re absolutely HOOKED, especially in the USA.
       Without cars, our entire economy would crash and burn within a day.
       Climate would be totally forgotten that same day.

       Our existing housing stock cost us more in REAL wealth, meaning concrete, copper, lumber, steel, skilled labor, energy, machinery, etc, than all the ephemeral stock market wealth imaginable.

       I’ve yet to hear anybody explain why Microsoft or Apple programs are truly worth any more than open source software…… given that we could collectively spend a very minor fraction of what these stocks are worth in terms of market cap…… and have equivalent programs, plus countless more, for a very few pennies on the dollar.

       Steel, concrete, lumber, copper, land skilled labor , etc, are three dimensional physical realities. They can’t be whipped up out of thin air.

       We’ve GOT to have houses, the only houses we CAN have are the ones we have already…. and to live in them we’ve got to have cars, as a practical matter.

       We can get by with far fewer cars, and far less expensive cars that use far less energy…… but we cannot give up cars for at least two or three generations to come, while keeping the wheels of the economy turning.

       But at least we have lucked out in terms of cars, because it IS possible to build them for pennies on the dollars compared to today’s new ones, so that they will last indefinitely while using one quarter or less as much energy. We’ll drive them, and get used to it, because that’s all we’ll be able to afford.

       Long, low, narrow, bullet shaped, two seats fore and aft, no luxury touches, fifty mile range on a charge… double or triple the miles per kilowatt hour of a current day Tesla, only ESSENTIAL features… and STANDARDIZED. BUILT to be repaired, as necessary, for a couple of generations at least.

       Call it communism. Sometimes communists , not that there were ever any REAL ones , have the right ideas……. WORKABLE ideas.

       Replacing our built housing stock, short term, is utterly out of the question, impossible, so it’s either cars or crash and burn for now.

       So…… as things stand right now, we’re damned in the medium to long run if we continue using cars and trucks that burn oil.Depletion and climate troubles guarantee it.

       And we’re damned in the short term without them, so we can’t give them up.

       But over the course of a few decades, we can switch to electric cars while changing our lifestyle so as to drive far less.

       Assuming we turn the corner on population without a crash and burn landing, we can hopefully manage the transition to electric vehicles. We’ll be driving far less per capita, and there will be far less of us.

       The people who live out in the boonies and drive to town to work will be moving closer and driving cars will likely need charging every night. Charging every night at home, assuming the grid is up, will be less of a hassle than humping it down to the nearest bus stop by a mile.

       A bus can’T go even a block out of it’s way for you to get your groceries or pick up your kids. Even the most bare bones electric car will be good enough to handle a minor detour on the way two or from work.

       And assuming we can still afford the technology………. with self driving, perfected or otherwise…….

       within another ten years you will have to REALLY screw up to have a serious accident.
       Rear end collisions, t bone accidents at stop signs or traffic lights, reckless speeding, driving under the influence, et, will likely be impossible. Mandated software will make such events so rare as to be flukes.

15. CO2 as measured yesterday.

    Apr. 28, 2023 425.01 ppm
    Apr. 28, 2022 419.16 ppm
    1 Year Change 5.85 ppm (1.40%)

    1. Those are rookie numbers. We can do better!

    2. Well, as humans, we have never experienced levels this high—-
       And no other organisms have for a few million years.
       That is quite a rise.
       hint:
       99.99% of animals that evolved are now extinct.

       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction#:~:text=As long as species have,that ever lived are extinct.

       1. And, like those, humans too shall pass. We’re not going to pull a rabbit out of the hat. When you realise that we as a species with our manifested complex civilisation is merely a large dissipating structure following the same rules that govern all else thermodynamically in this universe, you kinda just accept that things are on an immutable path.

          It’s widely believed, and has empirical evidence to show, that consciousness is merely a trick to post-rationalise decisions made at a more fundamental level. I can’t really get too bent out of shape when I remember that all of humanity is stuck with this evolved determinism that makes sure nothing remarkably different transpires, than to what we expect of a complex adaptive system tailored to maximising energy usage.

          From the lowliest peasant to the highest ruler, we play a game, as Ginsberg wrote:

          0. A game exists
          1. You can’t win
          2. You can’t break even
          3. You can’t quit

          1. “And, like those, humans too shall pass. We’re not going to pull a rabbit out of the hat.”
             We shall pass, eventually, no question.

             But in the meantime……. we have figuratively pulled countless rabbits out of our technological hat, starting as far back as stone tools, fire, and clothing. We can survive and thrive on a more varied basic diet than any other large animal. Nothing alive larger than a mosquito (malaria) is any serious threat to us.

             We live in larger numbers over a wider portion of the face of the Earth under more varied conditions than any other large species that has ever existed, and we’re more capable of fast adaptation to new circumstances than any other species by a factor of a hundred or even a thousand.

             So……. we MIGHT all be gone within a few more decades………

             But we might still be around, like turtles, pretty much the same old Homo Saphead, a few million years down the road. A thousand of us are enough to serve as a viable self supporting population capable of repopulating the planet after any event short of a major asteroid collision.

    3. Hi Doug, I appreciate just about all of the links and info you provide, but I don’t understand why you post comparisons of one day’s CO2 with a that of one year earlier. The Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2 chart at https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/monthly.html shows CO2 levels fluctuate over even the course of a week. Your daily comparison can look like you are cherry picking. Why not report the monthly average, or the ten year comparison – the trend is just as awful, and no one can argue by pointing at a few days earlier when the trend might even be down.
       March 2023: 421.00 ppm
       March 2022: 418.81 ppm
       1 year change still going strong at over 2ppm 🙁
       Phil S

       1. Hi PHIL S —

          L.O.L Yes, posting a Daily CO2 is a bit silly. The April average will be available soon, will post it.

          It wasen’t Cherry Picking though, just a random event on my part. You were right to criticize me.

16. A good article from Wired on the ocean SST situation now being addressed by the mainstream media.

    https://www.wired.com/story/an-ominous-heating-event-is-unfolding-in-the-oceans/amp

    Probably deserves more coverage going forward since this anomaly record is on the tail end of a long La Niña and the last record was during the last El Niño. So it’s kinda mental that it’s this high already. Marine heatwaves are devastating the flora and fauna of the seas.

    Also, because no policy or technology can deal with ocean heat being belched back into the atmosphere. It’s entirely doing its own thing with thousands of years of consequence locked in.

    1. Just for information purposes . The winter in Europe has been mild but prolonged . We enter May but my heating is still on , Day time temperature is max 15/17 degrees between noon and 6 Pm . Night is about 10/12 degrees centigrade . This is in Benelux . South Europe is a different story .

       1. Much more strange than that according to meteorologist veterans such as Henson and Masters

          https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2023/04/a-mystery-in-the-pacific-is-complicating-climate-projections/

          “the thermocline depth normally varies from about 450 feet in the west to only about 50 feet in the east. “

          A shallow thermocline means that cold water is always not far from the surface, and any tugging on this thermocline will change the surface temps drastically. Right now surface ocean temps off of Peru are way above average.

          https://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/151000/151183/perussta_mur_2023094.jpg

          Mind you, this is specific to the equatorial thermocline, but that’s the center of the universe as far as global climate-warming El Nino events are concerned.

       2. UK checking in. Visiting family in the north west and yesterday was sunny and warmish, around 17°C until the clouds came round. Rained most of today. Otherwise, heating been on low for most of the heat so far. Last year I had a BBQ in March and was gardening in a t-shirt. This year it snowed that same week and barely went above 5°C.

          Shit be weird.

       3. An update . Today’s daytime temperature at noon was 25 degrees centigrade . A 10 degree rise in just 4 days . As I post this it is 8.00 pm and the temperature is 21 degrees . Astonishing .

          1. Send some this way, It’s almost half past May when summer is scheduled to kick in with 80’s & 90’s and high dew points (>68 degrees F). Today and the past several days, I’ve been wearing a sweatshirt outside.

    2. Great! Won’t it be wonderful to take a deep dive off the coast of Maine without suffering hypothermia.

       /sarc

17. Hey Ron,
    I wonder if you have given much thought to some big things that have changed since you formed your base assumptions and framework of thinking about Overshoot and Limits. Any thoughts on if these developements have adjusted your thinking much?

    -Peak fossil fuels has come later and with a much bigger plateau phase than many of us had thought
    -Photovoltaic, and Wind Energy, costs have dropped precipitously and thus have become relatively cheap and affordable before the shortage of fossil fuels has begun.
    -Transport capability of the world is not about to suddenly dissipate, with EV’s now ready to absorb the pending transport affordability problem with ICE’s (due to oil depletion).
    – The population of some big countries has peaked without a big event [energy shortage, warfare, famine, pandemic] including China, Japan, Italy, Poland…soon to be joined by Russia, Germany, South Korea and Spain by 2030. ‘decline early…beat the rush’
    – The global population growth trend overall is down as well, and peak may be under 10 billion
    – And Soylent Green is still a future scenario, so far.

    1. Current solar and wind production as a percentage of total world primary energy is about 1.6%. 2,900Twh compared to total use of 176,000Twh in 2021. All solar and wind energy collection devices are mined, processed, manufactured and transported with fossil fuels.

       Less fossil fuels means increasing cost of energy for everything, including mining, manufacturing and building renewables, something most here seem to forget.

       Agriculture as currently practiced dies without fossil fuels. What will be left for capital investment in renewables when the cities are staving??

       It’s stunning to me that people on this forum that have an understanding of peak oil, can’t widen their thinking to look at a multitude of problems presenting themselves at the same time due to lack of cheaply available energy and massive human overshoot. All renewables will become useless for grids within a decade of no fossil fuels, due to lack of parts and maintenance. One transistor, or rectifier fails in your inverter or wind turbine and it becomes a statue without a replacement part. Any transistor of rectifier factories nearby?? Can the existing factories get the raw minerals without fossil fuels, then transport them to you across the world without fossil fuels??

       1. Hideaway,

          Although I argue that SOME of us have a fair to good shot at pulling thru the bottleneck with the lights on, I’m fully aware and cognizant of everything you have said at one twelve am.

          There’s still enough remaining so far unexploited natural resources for SOME of us to manage the transition to renewable energy, etc,

          IF we get on with it.

          Of course IF despite having only two letters is arguably the biggest and most important word in English.

          Most of us are likely to die hard before we turn the population corner.

          Please join OFM’s Church of Pearl Harbor Wake Up Events, and join my two or three ragged but devoted disciples in praying that we get a series sufficient to bring us to the collective realization that we’re in a do or die situation.

          Given time The INVISIBLE HAND could and would save us.

          Time is too short.

          We need Leviathan on the job, and on a wartime footing. NOW. Ten years ago would have been much better, but maybe it’s not altogether too late.

          That’s our best and probably our only real chance for SOME OF US to pull thru with the lights on.

          1. OFM, it was the middle of the afternoon when I posted, not everyone lives in your time zone.

             The way we do everything now is based on economics, which allows the cheapest source to out compete all others, sending them broke. The cheapest way happens to be using long supply lines of raw materials and processing plants spread around the world at present.

             When this is no longer possible, it does not automatically mean we’ll do all the mining and processing needed to keep incredibly complex systems going at all. In fact the most likely outcome is that all systems become far more simple as the complexity is just not possible on a smaller more local scale. This will mean parts for the complex renewables will become unavailable, so they will become statues when something in them breaks, and a simpler system will be built, but it wont be at the complex scale of a grid.

       2. Hideaway,

          BP has different numbers see

          https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-sites/en/global/corporate/pdfs/energy-economics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2022-full-report.pdf

          For 2021 World electricity generation was 28466 TWh, wind and solar generation was 2894 TWh for the world which is about 10%, solar is growing at about 32% per year over the 2011 to 2021 period and wind at 15.5% over the same period.

          There are likely to be enough fossil fuels as wind and solar continue to grow, probably much more than needed. Indeed there are many problems, reducing fossil fuel use helps to reduce the impact of climate change and expanding wind and solar helps to reduce fossil fuel use.

          1. Dennis
             In my opinion, there is a serious mispricing of electricity at the present time. Ask anyone who operates a data center, aluminum smelter, pulp mill, steel mill , city traffic light system, etc. and they will tell you intermittent unpredictable power supply is virtually worthless, they will pay whatever they have to for reliable power ( or go out of business, or move somewhere that reliable power is affordable). Others will be able to adapt to unreliable power supplies by installing backup systems or just putting up with outages in return for a cheaper price.
             Natural gas is already sold on this basis on the industrial scale .
             An example from my own experience:
             A pulp/paper and sawmill complex in Turkey had co-generation capability for about half of its electric power needs, the rest came from the grid, with a history of voltage fluctuations and short outages. We designed the power distribution centre with two bus bars, one for the plant generated power, the other connected with the grid. Individual departments could be connected with either bus, the ones with critical power requirements went on the co-generation bus.
             Extra cost? Yes
             Good investment? Definitely

       3. Hideaway…”Less fossil fuels means increasing cost of energy for everything, including mining, manufacturing and building renewables, something most here seem to forget. Agriculture as currently practiced dies without fossil fuels…
          It’s stunning to me that people on this forum that have an understanding of peak oil, can’t widen their thinking to look at a multitude of problems presenting themselves at the same time due to lack of cheaply available energy and massive human overshoot.”

          To the contrary, I think most people who are thinking/talking about these issues are doing so exactly because they are aware of the problem of impending fossil depletion and just what that means for a global population utterly dependent upon the abundant energy that has been provided over this extraordinary growth bubble in human population/civilization over the past 150 years.

          A push towards wind and solar, for example, is an attempt to offset some of fossil fuel depletion that is inevitable. Places that deploy these alternatives quickly and at big scale will have a better chance of having a somewhat more manageable contraction, than if they didn’t.

          Global heating is a second issue with fossil fuel, but the answer is similar.
          Extreme concentration of resource (wealth) is a third problem with fossil fuel, but the answer is similar.

          On that last point, every dollar that I don’t send to a very small elite sector of the population in Russia, or Saudi, or Texas for oil is a dollar that goes somewhere else in the economy. Almost every other place that dollar may go is a big win in my book. I do regret that the US has let so much of the future energy system industry go to offshore competitors, such as China, when we could have decided to be a big player in these industries. Much of this is still up for grabs if the emphasis was heavily focused.

          1. Bad news on the adaptation thing.

             https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/02/many-europeans-want-climate-action-but-less-so-if-it-changes-their-lifestyle-shows-poll

       4. H , I could not agree with you more. I have been following Peak Oil for decades, and havebeen ridiculed for even mentioning it. But on this forum we have some who believe that unreliable renewables (rebuildables) are the answer to our problems. Partially yes, but not without a lot of issues with reliability and lifespan. The sheer volumes of raw amterials that will be required to achieve such a goal are mind-boggling. Some of the ideas expressed here would lead to a dystopian world where a woke elite would rule over the peasants. To build all those renewables is going to take a lot of petrochemicals, and as I work in theis sector I am aware of some of the crazy ideas of the IPCC mobsters. By that I mean a large number of uninformed people who have interpreted the IPCC report in a particularly draconian way and claim that there is a climate emergency; how many times have we been warned of an apocalyptic sea level rise. The climate does change, all of the time. Is it an emergency when carbon dioxide reaches 400 ppm. There is not a lot of concrete evidence and anyone looking into the physics properly would have severe doubts, as I do, about the absorbtion of IR energy by carbon dioxide that is causing a “climate crisis”. Water vapour is a much greater IR absorber and is present in the atmosphere at levels of 10000-40000 ppm. In addition the lower molecular weight of water means that it is even more potent on a molar basis.
          The west is on a path that will lead to hardship and poverty for all. Meanwhile the Chinese, Indians and most of Africa continue to grow their populations and consume fossil fuels at ever increasing rates. They care not about carbon emissions. Most do not even have a flushing toilet. How are you going to get them to redyuce consumption. Peak Oil is not far away. I have no solution to the problem because there is not a solution that will please everyone. Contracting economies tend to collapse and as the complxity of the global econo0mies increase , capital and resources are wasted on woke projects collapse is all but inevitable.

          1. Is it an emergency when carbon dioxide reaches 400 ppm. There is not a lot of concrete evidence and anyone looking into the physics properly would have severe doubts, as I do,

             Thank you, Dude On The Internet, for setting us all straight.

          2. “…believe that unreliable renewables (rebuildables) are the answer to our problems.
             …a woke elite would rule over the peasants
             …the IPCC mobsters
             …claim that there is a climate emergency
             …an apocalyptic sea level rise
             …severe doubts, as I do, about the absorbtion of IR energy by carbon dioxide
             …resources are wasted on woke projects collapse is all but inevitable…”
             Reading between the lines I conclude: Oh never mind.

          3. 176k Twh vs 28K
             Although diehards are arguing full electrification focusing on Dennis’ 28K looks possible given the recent advances. If solar conserves FF all the better. Nat.Gas is the battery storage in the short term.
             Maybe Hideaway is correct but as everyone pts out do we do nothing amusing ourselves to death?
             (Good the AI crystal ball sucks; hard imagining a dystopian future after a technological peak)
             Pukite pointed out water vapor dissipates quickly compared to co2 etc..
             I’m a nut who agrees with you on CC but who cares? If the propaganda stops FF waste then that’s something given that immediate peak oil is only for foolish parlor room debate.
             Recession, depletion, stagflation I’m alway in jammed traffic.

       5. Hideaway – Good points. I’d add that by continually kicking the can down the road our financial and political structures have increasingly become set up to make any collapse much worse than it might have been (tending towards stressed rigidity rather than flexible resilience) and that climate change is still following worst case RCPs despite all the COP bloviating, possibly to beyond the point of no return, and the consequences of extreme events are proving to be much worse than anticipated. Also we won’t just lose the equipment and materials to repair complex systems but the skills and knowledge (something that may already being seen in labour and skills shortages in high tech areas). From first hand experience I can say it was very difficult to find all the necessary skills for a multi-billion oil and gas. project without looking globally, even in large OECD countries.

18. Grid operators and transmission planning regions would be required to be able to transfer at least 30% of their peak load to neighboring regions under a bill Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., is preparing to introduce. Building those lines could produce a “stunning payoff,” Daniel Palken, an aide to Sen. John Hickenlooper, D-Colo., said. “The technical term for this would be ‘a gold mine.’”
    https://www.utilitydive.com/news/senate-hickenlooper-bill-transfer-capacity-regions-wires-spp-miso/648886/

    Do it.

19. ‘Statistically impossible’ heat extremes are here: Study identifies the regions most at risk

    https://phys.org/news/2023-04-statistically-impossible-extremes-regions.html

    1. Its a different map, if you look at it from a food production standpoint.
       Which breadbasket is at the earliest risk of a major failure from heat?
       I don’t know if there is a scientific consensus on that.

       1. I believe Asia’s rice crop is critically important AND the most likely to be impacted right now by virtue of the heat domes they keep getting and random monsoons.

          EDIT: Oh and Europe. https://twitter.com/channel4news/status/1652726759073411072?s=46&t=CkxUTFewBhsxPVoqA_wgtQ

20. I know almost nothing about the design of electric motors, but it seems intuitively reasonable to me that if you cut the power out put by half, you could also cut the amount of very expensive and hard to source materials needed to manufacture the magnets in such motors used to run cars and trucks.

    And it’s a sure thing that we do NOT need crossovers and pickup trucks that are faster in drag races than the legendary hot rods from back in the days of the muscle car.

    Would using a hundred horsepower motor, which is MORE than enough, versus two hundred horsepower, in a smallish commuter car enable the manufacturer to use half as much of rare earth and other costly materials per vehicle.?

    1. That’s not how the economy and people are made, though. For every increase in range and power efficiency, we apply that to make larger and faster or more powerful vehicles. I’m seeing more and more of the latest EVs being performance saloons or SUVs with 4×4 capability they don’t need. Again, same as with ICE vehicles where we had every improvement go into something other than bettering range and efficiency for the planet.

       It’s great to see the improvements in EV lead to people driving like total dicks just as they did in ICE cars.

       1. As an old car nut I read a lot about the movement of car builders to the EV world. The latest one that really cracked me up was the newest Lotus SUV. 900 hp and weighs over 5,000 pounds.
          All three of the Lotus cars that I owned didn’t weigh that much in total. The Europa weighed less than 1400 pounds. The Elan weighed 1460 pounds. The Cortina was about 1800.
          Colin Chapman, the genius who created the company, said the secret to his cars was to “simplify and then add lightness.” They were all enormously fun to drive.
          We could use some of that thinking today.

    2. I agree completely. I was looking at old 8mm movies my dad took in Saudi Arabia while working for Aramco. Slow moving tractors and trucks pulling big loads, A basic V8 pickup in the sixties had about 120 hp. My ‘72 Dataun pickup had 70 hp. Quality of life or productive motive work didn’t require the ability to accelerate to 60mph in 7 seconds or tow a 5000 lb boat at 75 mph on the freeway.
       All these efficient high powered vehicles purchased with tax credits and fueled with subsidized fuel. It’s nuts.

21. But gnawing at many industry insiders is a fear that they are releasing something dangerous into the wild.
    Generative A.I. can already be a tool for misinformation. Soon, it could be a risk to jobs. Somewhere down the line, tech’s biggest worriers say, it could be a risk to humanity.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/01/technology/ai-google-chatbot-engineer-quits-hinton.html

    It requires a lot of processing power so I’m guessing free general public use is costly. But the 64m$ question is what version does the DOD have?

    1. There are already variants that have reduced the costs of running such models to the point that in five weeks post GPT-4 release, they got processing reductions down to levels not expected for eight or so years. I believe this was Stanford Uni looking to get a system like this working off home computers with minimal processing usage and acceptable trade offs in efficacy of compute.

       We also have Agent-GPT and Reflexion and Baby-AGI out there in open source usage. Even without a farm of NVIDIA’s new H100 ASICS, people are managing to match what OpenAI is charging for still and without the model being able to access the live Internet.

       Honestly, the last two months have been incredible for improvements, to say nothing of the last year. Google’s BARD is really quite tame compared to what Microsoft and OpenAI and DeepMind have.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPI8fB2XL3w&t=51s

    2. “could be a risk to jobs.”
       That is probably the understatement of the era. Perhaps it will be the straw that breaks the back of technological society by making it obvious to everyone (finally) that the modern economy really does not care how much human suffering is created by our way of structuring society. We will have AI taking jobs in spite of whatever the unions or government regulation intends. The time where tech innovation took the job from the buggy whip maker and created an assembly line job in an auto plant have been gone for a long time.
       Some time in the 1970s the benefits of modern American society began to increasingly accrue to a shrinking fraction of the population reversing the trend from the end of the Great Depression. A sensible society would be structured to provide the most benefit to the largest part of the population. We, instead, harness human greed to make as much “stuff” as possible and expect “the best of all possible worlds” to result. While most have benefitted to some degree , very few have not paid an increasing price in some manner. The levels of homelessness, drug addiction, job insecurity and doubts about the future are certainly higher than they were in the fifties, sixties and seventies in spite of the cold war, Viet Nam and civil unrest.
       I assume that hunter/gatherer societies have shorter individual life spans but I do wonder if they have more satisfying lives.

22. Old Chemist,

    A highly interconnected system powered with wind and solar requires minimal backup, some can come from hydro, pumped hydro, biofuel, synthetic fuel, or natural gas backup. Yes for some uses intermittency will not be tolerated, in other uses people can adjust demand and demand pricing can be used to adjust loads for those non-critical uses.

    This paper from 2012 explores scenarios for optimizing a grid powered with renewable energy.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759

    The paper above uses a number of simplifying assumptions that makes it not very realistic.

    Also an interesting piece which looks at bigger picture at link below (this is more comprehensive than first paper).

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435121001513?via=ihub

    Title is “The challenges of achieving a 100% renewable electricity system in the United States”

    1. Dennis
       Thanks for the link. It seems to me that the seasonal shortfall issue will be very difficult to resolve in any economical way in more northerly regions particularly, unless demand is modulated to reflect the supply realities.
       The highly interconnected system you envisage is certainly possible but given the political realities of today’s world I think it is highly improbable that a fully functional system will happen.

       1. Old Chemist,

          In the US most of the grid except Texas is already connected. Canada and Mexico could be added with HVDC lines installed North to South and east to west. Also excess power from wind and solar could be used to produce synthetic natural gas or some other fuel such as hydrogen or ammonia to be burned in peaker plants, compressed air, thermal storage, and pumped hydro are other options, as is burning biofuel.

          Often the cheapest option is to overbuild wind and solar capacity and use the excess power in summer to produce synthetic fuel to be stored for winter use. That approach combined with HVDC grid upgrades seems to be the most viable way forward.

          More detailed research is needed.

          1. “In the US most of the grid except Texas is already connected. ”

             But connected relatively weakly in many locations, and capacity on many of those links is small compared to the scale of electricity transfers that the country will need for smooth grid function.

             1. Hickory,

                Not sure if that is the case, are you referring to specific peer reviewed research?

                I agree the US could use a better grid, particularly HVDC transmission.

                1. No Dennis…I don’t have peer-reviewed research on the status of the grid.
                   Despite my shortcoming, the are abundant reports in the industry media that indicate a weak grid is a big bottle neck to energy transition.

                   btw- this website regularly has very good articles/news on the utility/grid sector
                   https://www.utilitydive.com/

    2. There are some interesting thoughts on how to organise the grid in a system with overbuilt renewables and less back up power generation. Not a problem right now, but eventually relevant.

       The idea is a three layered solution, where 3 different grids exists. One to operate 24/7 year round for critical usage. A second one to be backed up to operate 24/7 for only f.ex 20% of normal demand, with possible scheduled black out periods where storages of energy are built up in different ways. It has to be a heavy demand control built in for it to work without too many black outs. And the third would be micro grids a for a cluster of homes or businesses (or one) investing in battery back-up probably based on solar energy or something like diesel generators.

       The nitty gritty of this is of course very complicated as to what consumption and industries to prioritse for 24/7, and what the rest is that can find solutions by scaling down.

       1. Partial example of this recently in Lebanon, where currency shortages restricted the public utility to a few hours a day of service. There were many micro grids with diesel generators supplying local residences as and when they could get fuel . Service hookup came with a 5 amp breaker (demand control).

          1. In nations with political instability and weak institutions we are likely to see poor infrastructure. This is not a new problem.

             1. China started an international, global HVDC initiative 5 or so years ago. Connecting countries and continents via HVDC lines. They seemed to be making good progress The USA has chosen not to participate. At the time, the US had one short HVDC line.

                What does that say about the US?

                https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/global/pb/en/insights/eye-on-the-market/high-voltage-direct-current-lines-china-leads-us-lags.pdf

                “Meanwhile, power authorities everywhere are watching. Gregory Reed, a DC transmission expert who runs the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Energy, says China’s UHV grid puts it far ahead of the rest of the world. “They’re investing significantly, and they’ve gone right to the highest levels of technology capability from day one. There’s no comparison anywhere else in the world. It’s like we’re all still pedaling our bicycles, while the Formula 1 race car goes flying by.”

                from 2019 https://spectrum.ieee.org/chinas-ambitious-plan-to-build-the-worlds-biggest-supergrid

23. The seventeenth century climate induced global crisis has as much or more to say about what’s coming at us as the Bronze Age Mediterranean collapse. I’ve just finished, and highly recommend, “Global Crisis” by Geoffrey Parker. Despite being the size of a doorstop it’s a really easy, if scary, read. It’s about the little ice age and its effect around the world – initially almost endless crop failures, wars, famines, epidemics and revolutions. One lesson is that, but for a couple of almost accidental decisions, government actions in response to climate change made things much worse. Eventually most populations across the world dropped by about a third and at least ten percent of adults became forced or voluntary migrants at any given time, cultivated acreage dropped significantly, towns and villages were abandoned or destroyed. After more than fifty years things started getting a bit better, despite the cooling persisting, which is probably not going to be the case for us in the near future as we face similar (but ever worsening rather than stabilising) climate change induced predicaments, together with four or five other concurrent and equally bad issues.

    A feedback loop mentioned that I hadn’t heard of before is the possibility of a an El Nino redistributing ocean bed pressure, which increases volcanic activity and cooling, which then also strengthens the El Nino. The author doesn’t mention higher albedo from deforestation following population growth and migration as a cause, which I thought was the current theory around the little ice age.

    1. Thanks for the recommendation. This looks fascinating and has one of the highest scores I’ve ever seen on Goodreads. Just purchased and am beginning to read.

24. The Antarctic sea ice loss rate has, if anything, sped up (chart below is anomaly from 1981 to 2010 mean). I have still not seen any study showing how the drop in albedo has contributed to the acceleration in the earth energy imbalance recently, but it must be significant. Sometime around 2012 Peter Wadhams had calculated that the loss of Arctic sea ice was contributing about half as much as green house gases to earth warming. The Antarctic area loss, from its 2014 maximum, is greater, and the sea ice is at lower latitudes than in the Arctic so gets more direct sunlight and the effect of its loss is greater. Accelerating the melting there must mean that the collapse of the southern overturning circulation is likely also to start earlier than 2030.

    Here’s an honest assessment of the current state of the climate:

    “Faster, Higher, Hotter: What we learned about the climate system in 2022”
    https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/_files/ugd/148cb0_1a1c67b4f3c64cf2be87979e3144a58d.pdf

    

25. Upthread where I mention the sheer complexity of renewables and why they are not the possible solution, I find it interesting that others somehow use that to assume climate change is not real. My work has nothing to do with the very real climate change that is happening. It’s idiots that don’t want to look at real world data that think increasing CO2 in the atmosphere is doing nothing. We are clearly overheating our biosphere..

    Likewise, there are people on this site, that are very intelligent, but seem to rely on peoples papers here and there to justify their beliefs about a rosy renewable future, yet never want to have a look at the numbers themselves. I particularly highlight Dennis’s beliefs here. He wants to believe that renewables return 25:1 on EROEI, with nothing but some shill’s work for whatever industry to make the case.

    Here is what we know.. The world spends about 8% (varying between 6-10%) of World GDP (GWP) on primary energy extraction, that gives us a return of energy for everything else of around 12.5:1.

    This includes all capital, operating and maintenance cost spent on oil, gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, biomass and every other minor bit of energy gathering. For this price and cost of energy, the world gets around 176,000Twh of primary energy (in 2021). This gives the world an average cost of energy in 2021 of around $46/Mwh.

    This $46/Mwh number comes to an overall ~$8T on a worldwide basis (from IEA), that is ~8% of the $102T of world GDP (from world bank).

    A new oil well in Saudi Arabia that costs $10m to sink (in 2021 dollars), produces 10,000bbls/d for a couple of decades, joined up to existing pipelines, for cents/bbl of production, is what the world has been running on. It’s what built all the existing infrastructure. These type of wells use to be in East and West Texas plus a lot of other places around the world. They give an energy return of over 100:1

    If we used the methodology of EROEI that the solar, wind and nuclear industries use for EROEI, being the energy used to make the steel pipes, the fuel used in the drill rigs, the energy in making the cement casing etc, instead of the $10m actual capital cost, it would only be in the thousands instead. The 100:1 oil well would have an EROEI of thousands to one using those industries type of calculation.

    On one of the World Nuclear Associations pages they talk about the energy cost of the steel, concrete, copper etc etc, to justify their claimed 100:1 EROEI for nuclear. It’s all bunk. If I dropped the appropriate number of tonnes of steel, concrete, copper etc, etc, on the front lawn of the WNA it wouldn’t magic itself into a nuclear reactor. It takes very specific, planning, construction of shape and form of all the intricate parts that come from factories around the world, made from minerals mined around the world to build a nuclear reactor, plus the existing, operating factories that can manufacture the correctly shaped unique parts, and the experts that know how to put it together in the correct order.

    Instead of a couple of million dollars that all the steel, concrete and copper etc, etc cost in a general form, nuclear reactors cost billions of dollars to actually build. This capital cost is reflective of all the energy inputs into the nuclear reactor that the nuclear industry does not want to count. The capital cost is what’s included in the ~8% of GWP by world authorities, plus the O&M costs. It is the only true reflection of the energy inputs because it takes into account all the separate embedded energy in expertise of permitting, design, manufacture and building. Likewise for both solar and wind industries.

    Both solar and wind industries would need to have a capital cost of 10% of what they currently do (as in real cost, not the cost after government subsidies to build them), to show a EROEI of closer to 10:1. O&M costs of solar are relatively low while they have no moving parts, but those with trackers increase O&M costs after the first decade of use to unacceptable levels. Wind turbines have major O&M costs the older they get. Plus it’s all built with fossil fuels.

    If we could easily do everything with electricity as we do with fossil fuels, then you could go out and buy solar panels made entirely from electrical processes, but the reality is this does not exist after 2 decades of hype about renewables, massive subsidies and talk of the climate change dangers.

    The reality is that cheap solar panels come from China that is still vastly increasing fossil fuel use, from mines run on diesel equipment, heat processes run on gas and coking coal, then transported on bunker fuel burning ships, then transported by large semi-trailers using diesel. As the costs for oil, coal, and gas rise due to depletion, so also does the cost of the renewables manufactured from the fossil fuels.

    For decades we have been papering over the decreasing EROEI of fossil fuels with increasing debt, but hid it all with lower interest rates, until now. The inflationary effect of decreasing EROEI can no longer work as all tricks used to hide the increased costs, including globalization and increased efficiency have been used up. Sure there will be further increased efficiencies gained, but the easy big stuff is already part of the system. 40T dump trucks of the 1960’s are now 400T trucks in large mines and far more efficient. They are not going to 4000T trucks, due to physical constraints of metals.

    Have a look at Simon Michaux’s work, he looks at what is planned by Governments around the world, and clearly shows not close to possible. A further hint, USGS ‘reserve’ numbers for different metal availability is bunk and easily provable. (I’ll go into this in a different post one day).

    If you believe the numbers being put out by industry interests about how easy and cheap the transition is, you are being conned, it’s that simple. Only real research across a range of subjects, probably taking years that I’ve been spending on this will get you close to the truth.

    We are in a clear overshoot predicament, with zero chance of a modern western lifestyle for most of humanity in the decades ahead. As we try to maintain our modern western lifestyle for a diminishing proportion of humanity, we are crossing climate boundaries that will exacerbate the overall problems, all while trying to mine lower grade ores with lower quantities of energy (not possible), yet expecting much higher quantities of minerals to build the future.

    1. Great rant – I’m probably going to cut bits out for later quotation.

    2. +1 Hideaway . We are now living by feeding ourselves from the reserve of seed corn .

    3. English is not my first language, so I can’t articulate myself as much as I want to, yet I wanted to comment.

       Thank you for the great insight to look into the real energy – price situation. I believe your approach has strong point that non-other author(C.Hall, J. Tainter,Tim Morgan, etc) of this subject some might have a hint of it but not fully understood. Your idea glues the EROI and diminishing return, and other overshoot idea into a useful tool to understand true reality.
       I hope and seriously suggest that you should start your own website(substack, medium, youtube or any kind), lay out your idea and develop it further.

       Hope you consider it and look forward your full articles of various kind of energy and economy.

    4. Have a look at Simon Michaux’s work,

       I like this guy’s vid presentations (they are all over Utoob, see Nate H especially.)

       However, he thinks we need to switch to “organic” farming.

       That will solve the problem, all right: billions will die.

       I absolutely deplore both his and Nate’s advocacy of that anti-GMO zealot and crank named Vandana Shiva.

       But over all they both do great work informing people of the current crisis.

    5. Hideaway,

       You need to include all costs to point of use, read the paper, you are wrong on EROEI, keep in mind only about 30% of primary energy from oil gets utilized, rest is waste heat. Also refining, water handling, and distribution all have to be taken into account. The transition will not be simple, I have never said as much, the problems of intermittency can likely be overcome.

       David Murphy ( a student of Hall) was lead authr of the EROI paper, did you read it?

       1. Dennis the last 3 papers you pointed to don’t have David Murphy as an author. The odds are whatever you are pointing to I have read, as I’ve read thousands of papers on the topic over the last couple of decades. I use to believe what was written until I started working the numbers out myself from known reliable sources. It’s easy to find what EVERY paper promoting renewables as the future leaves out if you write down a list of everything they include, then think independently of what they miss out on.

          It’s easy to get crazy good numbers for EROEI returns if you leave out the major energy inputs.

          How about instead of you pointing to papers, you provide a list of the energy inputs to a 1Mw solar array and how you came to those numbers. I’ll then point out everything you missed. If you can include the total energy costs, you will find that it equals the capital cost of buying and installing it at an energy cost of around $46/Mwh for 2021 builds.

          $1m for 1Mw installation, costs about 21,739Mwh because industry pays around the wholesale cost for all energy inputs, including the education and experience of the designers, engineers and construction workers. Can you link to a single paper that includes this cost? I’ve not read any. It’s the background energy cost of the existing system, that is subject to entropy like everything else.

          BTW, the nearest aluminium smelter pays $14/Mwh for electricity, while I would pay $320/Mwh for effectively the same power along the same line, except it made perfect sense to take up the government subsidies for myself to install solar and get a premium for what I send back into the grid.

          I don’t care what paper or professor states which cost should or shouldn’t apply, or something is too hard to cost in energy terms, they are just wrong and trying to push an agenda.

          The only true way to account for the full energy cost is using the capital, O&M cost over the life of whatever energy production unit, using the base cost of world primary energy (on average $46/Mwh in 2021). Then you can compare the energy return of all types of energy production units.

          Dennis, you’ve mentioned making synthetic fuel a couple of times recently for spreading the load of intermittent supply of renewables. Here are some numbers from the Haru Oni project, the shining light of modern use of renewables according to Exxon, Porche, Siemens energy and a few others like German Government, Chile Government etc, for making synthetic fuel..
          A 3.4Mw wind turbine, operating 70% of the time in the most consistent wind in the world will produce 130,000 litres of synthetic fuel per year. This will give you the process efficiency, which of course will be reduced once capital, O&M costs are included.

          1. Hideaway,

             See

             https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098

             You are mistaken that using an average dollar cost for all energy in the World will give a accurate analysis for EROEI for individual types of energy, it might give a rough approximation for energy in general, but that’s all.

             Read the paper and get back to me. Hand waving and asserting that all peer reviewed research is crap is not particularly convincing.

             Summary of paper at this comment

             https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-april-26-2023/#comment-756405

             Also realize that in your oil example you exclude refining, and distibution of the product, for Saudi Arabia there is a huge cost of handling the produced water. Even if oil at the wellhead had an infinite EROEI, by the time it is ready to put in your gas tank the EROEI is about 8 to 9, less than Wind of PV solar.

             I would suggest you read the paper. Murphy wrote a number of important papers with Hall.

             1. Dennis, I’ve read that paper before, and just happened to have it open in the background when I saw your link to it, as I had done a search to see if there was anything from Murphy I had missed.

                First thing they do is change the parameters, then refer to a whole heap of papers that all do the same thing in forgetting about the embedded energy cost of the background system that makes building anything possible. They also like most of these papers have a built in cost of transporting fossil fuels over great distances compared to renewables that are just part of the local system.

                I’m not arguing that the EROEI of fossil fuels is not getting smaller, it clearly is. This has been happening since the late 60’s, hence why the world is awash in debt which is the economic system trying to hide the diminishing EROEI. More debt in the system means a greater percentage of income must be directed to debt repayments leading to less percentage of income available to be spent on everything else, with everything we spend money on having an energy component. It’s all part of the same system, but most want to take energy out as if it were separate.

                In your argument above about Saudi oil, you want to include downstream costs. OK, fine, but do the same with renewables, include the energy cost of HVDC lines needed, include the battery storage so there is dispatchable power that gets held from summer to winter for solar, include the overbuilding of the system to include hydrogen electrolysers or synthetic fuel plants, but don’t hobble one form and assume the other will seemlessly fit into the existing system.

                Instead of like that Murphy paper in making up fictional examples, lets look at a real one, coal fired power in the Latrobe valley of Victoria Australia….

                We have a choice of building a new coal power station at around $1b to produce 1gw of electricity for the next 40 years or putting in the equivalent solar.

                I’m not talking about scrubbing out the emissions, just built in the way they were in the past, including belching huge amounts of CO2 and soot into the atmosphere. The coal sits in a pit right next to the power station.
                In 2021 dollars this would cost about $1B to build the coal plant, with lifetime O&M costs around $5/Mwh of production (about $40m/a). This is not how a new coal plant would be allowed to operate, which have high royalties on the mined coal, have scrubbers, CCS etc, all which lower the EROEI.

                Instead solar at same location, to produce the same power would need to be a 8Gw array (just under 3hrs/d at this location, which is around world average for all solar from IEA 11.4% capacity factor).
                It would cost around $8B to install and assuming an industry average O&M cost of 2% of capital cost/yr. (solar varies from ~1% O&M in first decade to 3-4% after year 10, so I’ve averaged at 2%, which comes from solar industry) This works out at $20/Mwh over the life of the solar installation.

                Before you start picking on the numbers, the solar could be moved to a much better location , say semi desert 600km away, that gets 6hrs/d of solar, so only need half the installation. OK but then include the transmission lines back as part of the capital cost, and up the O&M cost as this new transmission line needs to be included in O&M.

                What’s left out of the solar installation costs above are the following…
                Intermittency issues, no allowance for covering 24 hrs/d..
                Intermittency between seasons, no allowance for long term batteries, synthetic fuel, hydrogen or whatever is going to be used.
                Variation of output from zero to 8Gw throughout the day, that needs to be smoother, the existing transmission lines handle 1Gw at most which the coal power station is matched for.
                No allowance for the 121km2 of vegetation that must be cleared for the size of the 8Gw solar array (average density of large solar arrays in Australia around 66w/m2.

                My way of making a direct comparison, using zero cost of money, when it has a real energy cost, is the following..
                Coal power station capital cost $1B, lifetime cost in 2021 dollars, $5 X 332,000,000Mwh produced = $2.66B divide this cost by average wholesale cost of energy ($46/Mwh) = 57,826,000MWH of energy to build and maintain. 332,000,000Mwh produced divided by energy input of 57,826,000Mwh = EROEI of ~5.7:1

                Solar installation (assuming 40 years operation) 332,000,000Mwh, capital cost $8B, O&M cost $20 X 332,000,000Mwh = $14.6B divide this cost by average wholesale cost of energy ($46/Mwh) = 318,260,000Mwh of energy to build and maintain. 332,000,000Mwh produced divided by energy input of 318,260,000Mwh = EROEI of 1.04:1.

                Here’s the reality, the solar wont last 40 years, so the number is worse. You can argue the price of energy to build is wrong, but it doesn’t matter as the relationship between both remains the same no matter what dollar value is placed on the energy cost. The $46/Mwh is what primary energy cost in 2021 according to IEA and World bank figures for energy and world GDP, but you can use whatever you like, but do it for both sides.

                The Murphy paper you referred to is just bullshit referencing other bullshit papers, that twist reality to suit their agenda of producing hopium. We are clearly headed to a world of less energy use, which means a lot less complexity because of the direct link between world GDP and energy use.
                I’m not advocating for fossil fuels over renewables, just stating that the numbers clearly show renewables cannot replace fossil fuels.

                The trillions of dollars so far invested in renewables, over decades now, without any of it being mined, processed, manufactured and built fully by these renewables, should by itself tell you there is something terribly wrong with all the numbers touted by the renewable industry. BTW, same applies to nuclear, all totally reliant on fossil fuels.

                1. Hideaway,

                   I read your comment with great interest and find it hard to fault you analysis, especially the last paragraph. I, too am sceptical of some of what Tom Murphy has written- perhaps in haste. I recently criticised the so called climate crisis the carbon dioxide is supposed to be creating. The connections are tenuous at best and by no means proven . 400 ppm of carbon dioxide ( or 0.78g per cubic metre of air AMSL) is not the problem. Water vapour is present in the atmosphere form about 10000-40000 ppm and is a much more potent heat absorber- look at the absobtion bands. Why is it at night in an arid desert that the air is so cold- the absence of moisture might be the answer.
                   As we embark on this fantasy mission of decarbonization I am involved on my job on the impact on the chemical industry- love it or hate it but without petrochemcials you can kiss renewables good bye. One of the dumbest concepts is carbon dioxide recycling. Photosynethsis does it , albeit with low efficiency, but the ideas being proposed are a new form of lunacy. DAC ( direct air capture) of carbon dioxide is a great example- in excess of 2000 kWh to capture 1 tonne of carbon dioxide, before compression and transmission. Recycling carbon dioxide in a FT process gives a mind boggling EROEI of about 0.35 depending on the configuration, and that is before distribution. Collosal amounts of renewable power is required to produce the hydrogen to reduce the carbon dioxide. 2/3 pf the hydrogen ends up as water in the process.

                   Keep beating the drum. Renewable sound great, I have a large solar tracking PV system and battery storage. Does it make sense- not really. It just about powers my house in the summer months but is next to useless in the winter.

                   As for all the nonsense on wind turbines you are correct. It is dispatchable powet that is important and Wind Turbine should be costed on the basis of dispatchable power and all the additional costs that that entails. Then it is possible to make a memainful comparison between renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuels. I know Peak Oil is coming – I just do not know when but most likely in the next 10 years. My trusty 14 year old Prius uses 300 litres of fuel per year- producing about 1 mt of carbon dioxide. I am doing my best. I would really like to see the embedded carbon is a Tesla. It will scare the pants of you.

                2. Hideaway- Faulty analysis. For example you say PV capacity factor is 11%, whereas in fact for the US utility scale PV actual data shows nationwide average of 24.7%
                   https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39832

                   I will watch what the utilities decide to purchase to show what the best 30 year forward electricity investment is for their region. They happen to have a hell of lot more expertise and skin in the game than do you.

                   Proof in the [Utility] Pudding-
                   “Natural gas, solar, and wind continue to be the dominant
                   forms of new generation capacity, accounting for 99.74%
                   of all capacity additions in 2021, and projected to account
                   for 98% of capacity additions in 2022”
                   “Solar capacity has increased dramatically — with more
                   than 25,000 MW gained since 2020, a 60% increase. Solar
                   was the leading source of new utility-scale capacity in
                   2021, the first time it has been the leading resource. ”

                   https://www.publicpower.org/system/files/documents/Americas_Electricity_Generation_Capacity_2022_Update.pdf

                3. Hideaway,

                   The embedded energy of the backup system applies to all forms of energy, the analysis uses life cycle analysis with similar system boundries for all types of energy.

                   HVDC lines are used to move energy around in the system, whether coal or wind or PV is the source of power.

                   Your example of a coal mining operation right next to a power station that is near a city should be compared to a PV facility near a city. In many cases both the coal mine or the high solar insolation areas might be far from where the electricity is needed.

                   Note that your 11% capacity factor for solar doesn’t sound right, using BP data and using the midpoint 2021 capacity for World solar (as capacity at the end of the year would not have neen producing for the whole year) I get an average 15% capacity factor for World solar. For the US the capacity factor weighted average was about 24% in 2021.

                   https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/research/usual-sun-states-shine-bright-at-top-of-us-solar-capacity-factor-leaderboard

                   There may be low resource places where the capacity factor is as low as 11% (Germany and UK perhaps), it probably does not make sense to install solar PV in those places. Using BP data for 2021 Australia’s PV capacity factor was about 19.6% and US PV capacity factor was about 22.5%.

                   I disagree that the David Murphy at al paper is bullshit. I would be convinced if you provide some links to peer reviewed research supporting you viewpoint.

                4. I think it would be useful to include the relative “collateral” costs between fossil fuels and replaceables ( I hate the word “sustainable” too). Those costs are pretty difficult to address but they exist. Here’s my quick-and-dirty list:
                   1. Short term respiratory damage, especially to children
                   2. Pollution of air, waterways and soil (Coal ash, mercury, NOx, particulates, VOC, PAH) affecting not only human health but other animal and plant life.
                   3. Political unrest (associated with the incredible wealth potential of ff, particularly oil)
                   4. CO2 ( the ongoing destruction of the ecosystem enabling humanity)
                   Just because the costs are not paid directly by the users does not mean they shouldn’t be accounted for.

             2. Dennis,

                I’d take anything mdpi publishes with a grain of salt. They do have a bit of controversy surrounding them with regards to their practices and predatory publishing.

    6. Thank you I almost gave up on this site.

26. jjhman, The Oil Drum archives are still available. Some good charts here, including all liquids peaking at 90 mbpd in 2012-ish (4th chart down).

    http://theoildrum.com/node/10163

    1. Thanks John.
       That will be fun to review and compare to what I remember and to tody’s data

27. WORLD SHOULD PREPARE FOR EL NINO, NEW RECORD TEMPERATURES: UN

    The UN’s World Meteorological Organization said it now estimated there was a 60-percent chance that El Nino would develop by the end of July, and an 80-percent chance it would do so by the end of September.

    Since 2020 though, the world has been hit with an exceptionally long La Nina—El Nino’s cooling opposite—which ended earlier this year, ceding way to the current neutral conditions. And yet, the UN has said the last eight years were the warmest ever recorded, despite La Nina’s cooling effect stretching over nearly half that period.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-05-world-el-nino-temperatures.html

28. Paul Beckwith steps you through a paper that will be liberating for many observers here–assuming you are in the lower 90% income bracket [my partner and I subsist at below 35k/yr].

    Why worry about your carbon footprint when those in the top 10% contribute such an appalling amount? The numbers will shock you.

    Millionaire spending will kill us all.

    More and more, I don’t worry about my coal, firewood, gasoline, diesel, kerosene and electricity consumption but follow the words of the writer of Ecclesiastes: Eat, drink, be merry, and

    “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

29. Up above Hideaway made this declaration-
    ” All renewables will become useless for grids within a decade of no fossil fuels, due to lack of parts and maintenance.”

    One point on this- like many others a mistake is made by jumping to a hypothetical scenario of ‘no fossil fuels’.
    The ‘no fossil fuel’ scenario is not relevant to to phase of the next 50 years on earth. [I won’t speculate what happens after that].

    There will be a huge amount of fossil fuels still combusted by humanity for along time…climate be damned.
    Some of that fossil solar energy will be used for important uses, such as N fertilzer or industrial processes such as energy infrastructure manufacture and deployment.

    I am not asserting some rosy future where growth continues,
    but to claim that solar or wind, or deployment of more energy efficient mechanisms such as EV’s or heat pumps, will need to occur in a vacuum is fallacious.

    On EROI, the reports that I have seen calculate an Energy Payback Time of less than 2 years if deployed in favorable locations. Older reports of poor EROI are from before the era of mass production, which has dramatically lowered the manufacturing energy input/panel.

    1. Hickory, I tend to agree with you that it will be many decades before we are using no fossil fuels, despite governments talking replacing all fossil fuels and/or net zero by whenever.

       Once we are well past peak oil and everything gets vastly more expensive with economies in near perpetual recession because of energy constraints, I expect people to get elected on promises of better economies based on coal to liquids and/or similar, with thought about quelling climate change relegated. Talk will become more about adapting to new climate, etc.

       I deliberately don’t put a time frame on when we will be without fossil fuels, but whenever, it will be at best a decade or so that grids survive.

       1. I used to think we’d be fighting in the guzzoline wars a la Mad Max by 2040. But as FFs have been notoriously reticent to drop off a cliff globally, we’ll be instead getting a first hand experience of how well humanity survives sans-biosphere.

       2. “better economies based on coal to liquids ”

          It may come to that for some places, some seasons.
          But for about 80% of the people 80% of the time
          solar and/or wind and/or residual nat gas and/or hydro
          are going to be cheaper options.

          And some places will have some biofuels and nucs as part of the mix.

          It will be a scramble. I would like to see things wind down slowly…less slaughter that way.
          We will be reaching Peak Global Combustion (all fuels, including dung) in the 2030’s.
          The exact day depends on many factors, including for example just how much of the worlds residual forests we strip bare for fuel.

       3. Hideaway,

          Fossil fuel energy demand will decrease as more energy is provided by wind and solar, coal to liquids is far more expensive and is not likely to be able to compete with lower cost wind and solar power or with natural gas. Oil use will be replaced as an energy source by lower cost forms of energy as EVs become more common and demand for oil will fall so that oil will be available for a long time, your vision of high energy prices and constant recession is likely to be incorrect. Over time most fossil fuel use as a source of energy will be reduced substantially.

          There are lots of other problems besides peak oil and climate change and there may be policy solutions to those problems as well. An important part of solutions besides transition to electric transport, more wind, solar and hydro (including pumped hydro), and higher energy efficiency and better recycling of materials through better product design (with recycling considerations designed into products) is better education for girls and women and equal rights for women which will bring down births per women and lead to a faster demographic transition.

          Despite what some believe, good policy can make a difference.

30. DNA of the world is being haphazardly analyzed (MetaSUB – 5).

31. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12043535/Nato-fears-Russia-laid-mines-critical-European-undersea-infrastructure-points.html

    NATO fears Russia has laid mines on critical underwater infrastructure.

    1. What’s the first sentence of the first chapter of the war manual?
       “Never fight a land war with Russia in Europe.”

       1. ..especially in winter..

32. Copper mine flashes warning of ‘huge crisis’ for world supply

    https://www.mining.com/web/copper-mine-flashes-warning-of-huge-crisis-for-world-supply/

    “There’s no way we can supply the amount of copper in the next 10 years to drive the energy transition and carbon zero. It’s not going to happen,” adds Kirwin, now an independent consulting geologist. “There’s just not enough copper deposits being found or developed.”

    1. *Looking at my extrapolated EV sales chart and sweating hard*

       But it has to!

       1. Many people will be thankful for a small vehicle like this one now for sale…with a small mineral and energy footprint (relatively)-
          Wuling Bingo
          The SAIC–GM–Wuling (SGMW) joint venture
          https://cleantechnica.com/2023/05/04/the-wuling-bingo-shines-in-china-silver-badge-good-news-for-global-market/
          “It will have two options, one with a 30 kW (41 hp) motor and another with a 50 kW (68 hp) motor. These options will come in a 17.3 kWh and a 31.9 kWh version with a range of 203 km or 333 km, respectively. It also starts at a very appetizing $8,682 in China. That’s $8,682 for a decent 5-door car with a 17.3 kWh battery and a 30 kW (41 hp) motor. ”

          If you don’t have a horse its a great option. 8 bushels of potatoes cargo to market.

          1. I love it! It reminds me on my Mini Cooper.
             One big complaint about it and most other EVs; I hate dashboards that look like a misplaced laptop. Give me round instruments in front of the steering wheel please.

    2. Wow, thanks for posting this. Parts of it sound straight out of one of Simon Michaux’s talks:

       Even more worrying, though exploration has ticked higher of late, is that spending remains far short of what is required. And what does emerge tends to be smaller and lower grade, meaning the percentage of metal in the ore is more slight, so more effort (and waste) is required to hit the same production levels.

       I also suddenly realized I was misreading the phrase “green metal” as I read the article. I pictured corroded copper.

       Oh my god, the irony . . . .

       1. In other news: Electric car growth forecasts downgraded https://stocks.apple.com/Amo79nAWDSUmfir9hBvCP8A

    3. Yeh… only 47% of current global ICE light transport capability can be replaced by EV’s
       as a result of mineral shortages. Oh well.

       1. The other 53% will be too poor and/or unemployed to do much with a vehicle anyway.

          1. Between the 47% and the residual ICE fleet on the road,
             light transport mileage shortage isn’t going to be the end of the world.

             Maybe most frivolous uses will get weeded out a bit, except for the rich of course.
             I hope you like your local area, as a place live and get food from.

             1. Can’t say I’ll lament boy racers vanishing, so that’s a silver lining.

33. A new open thread Non-Petroleum has been posted.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-may-4-2023/

    A new thread reporting on US oil production has been posted

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/small-drop-in-us-february-oil-production/

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