181 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, Feb 10, 2023”

  1. Very OT:
    “Cop accused of discrimination against Black drivers arrested for possession of child porn”

    Police are necessary, but how can we attract a better bunch?

    Western Europe seems to have less of a problem.
    Any ideas?

    1. Canada does much better also. I would suggest higher standards of selection and training. Given that the first stage of selection is Self Selection, policing, then, needs to attract a better bunch aka people who aren’t racist. Tough call in America, I guess.

    2. In Germany the police have two and a half years of training before starting work. In the US its more like six weeks.

    3. Perhaps if they were dressed like professionals and not soldiers, wore lightly tinted sunglasses, and smiled rather than scowled.

    4. There are so many law enforcement agencies at county, city, state and federal levels that any borderline sociopath who gets rejected by one will likely find a welcome somewhere else, especially as they get increasingly militarised. Even single highways sometimes have dedicated police. I’ll always remember finding out that not only did the local university have its own police department but within it a dedicated homicide division. If half I’ve read is true deputies’ clubs are worrying.

      1. The better educated, more CIVILIZED people in the USA aren’t generally interested in law enforcement careers except maybe as suit wearing prosecutors with political ambitions. The prospects for advancement and money just aren’t there, as already pointed out.

        Typical attractive university educated r young woman: “I’m not about to settle down with a man who risks his life every day , leaving me and my children alone.”

        Typical young man from my cultural and social background, who grew up with first hand knowledge of violence ranging from playground tussles to getting teeth knocked out or killed over a woman, or a bet, or a drug deal gone wrong, or sometimes, just an insult……..

        He’s not interested in a seven to three or eight to five job, because he’s just not going to find one that pays well…. and if he does…… the employer will get rid of him before very long.

        Cop pay, considering the work, looks damned good to him, riding around in a paid for car, with paid for gas, with a badge and a gun, poking his nose into other people’s business, which is one of his favorite things, little or no actual physical work, insurance, vacation, holiday pay, even a pension….

        So …… his girlfriend won’t likely care, she may actually WANT him to get the job. The prospects of making some easy side money is there. There may be opportunities to make some serious side money, and if he manages that without getting caught…… which is not all that hard to do…… he’s set for life. The life style will suit him to a T.

        And as has been pointed out, he will be hired, one place or another. He doesn’t have to be a psycopath or nut case. He may turn out to be a great cop, but if his morals/ ethics run towards personal honesty ( dealing drugs he gives good honest value to his customers, etc) but he often has zero respect for the law as an institution or code to be lived up to, depending on WHICH law applies to any given situation.

        So…. he may be an excellent cop when it comes to busting guys who beat their wives, or guys who rob stores or break in houses. But he may feel zero guilt about being involved in gambling, or taking bribes from drug dealers…. seeing them as morally equivalent to lawyers, judges, rich people, politicians, etc. In my area, he knows older people who went to jail for making liquor….. while also knowing that rich people get and stay rich doing the same, because they have an ARRANGEMENT with the government, lol. He knows people who legally make more in a day than he could ever hope to make in a week stealing and dealing….. such as the dentist who charged him three hundred bucks to extract a tooth, taking well under an hour.

        If he gets hired by a department where corruption is the norm, he’ll fit right in.

        The point is……. such a man or woman doesn’t feel guilty about breaking various laws. Getting caught is just one more occupational hazard…… like falling off a roof, or being in a motor vehicle accident on the job, etc.

        1. Wanting to be Police is a Red Flag. Smart agencies, so to speak, know this and put effort into selection, so as to weed out the mentally and cognitively unfit.

          1. A director of hospital security once told me that a red flag was someone who was eager to wear a gun.

            1. Psychopaths want power. Policing attracts them. Studies show police population has a higher prevelance of individuals with psychopathic tendencies than does the general population. Applicants need to be thoroughly screened and selected.

            1. “Trump’s gonna have to sell a LOT more of our nation’s secrets to Putin, Saudis and anyone else who will pay him in order to pay this.”

              Referring to Trump fine.

  2. From the last week post-
    it was said that “Emissions [of CO2 may be at peak]. Of course, because our oceans suck up huge amounts of the gas each year, the average CO2 molecule does spend about 5 years in the atmosphere.”

    I suppose that CO2 emissions could be peaking shortly. I have been thinking it would be in the mid 2030’s, since there is a long fat tail of oil and coal production on the horizon (after they peak at some point) , along with rising nat gas combustion. Add to that about 80 million people per year of greater demand. The global per capita energy use has been gradually increasing over the past many decades.
    Peak Global Combustion Day will be an epic moment in the history of the world.
    I still think it is something like a decade in the future.

    To clarify-
    In regard to the 5 year timeframe indicated- “It is true that an individual molecule of CO2 has a short residence time in the atmosphere (something like 5 years). However, in most cases when a molecule of CO2 leaves the atmosphere it is simply swapping places with one in the ocean. Thus, the warming potential of CO2 has very little to do with the residence time of individual CO2 molecules in the atmosphere.”
    Rather the effective atmospheric 1/2 life of emitted CO2 is over a hundred years.

    1. Peaking shortly? One wonders.

      Daily CO2

      Feb. 10, 2024 = 425.87 ppm
      Feb. 10, 2023 = 420.33 ppm
      1 Year change 5.54 ppm (1.32%)

      1. I think Hickory is talking about a peak in the rate of increase (2nd derivative), not a peak in CO2 concentration.

        1. I was responding to what Doug had said the other day-
          “The bad news, big jump in (daily) CO2; the good news, it might (finally) peak this year.”
          Maybe he was referring to a peak in the rate of yearly increase, as you indicate.

      2. Emissions may be about to peak (or may not) but the jump in sea surface temperatures means the oceans are losing capacity as a sink. Even though there is a greater driving force from higher CO2 in the atmosphere this is more than offset by the lower equilibrium concentration for a higher sea surface temperature so the actual rate of absorption into the oceans is lower this year than last.

    2. World fossil fuel consumption per capita data from Statistical Review of World Energy 2023.

      1. Good chart. Seems like 4 eras. Global oil driven prosperity boom. Then oil crisis and stagnation (although the stagnation of the 90’s at an aggregate level hides the collapse in USSR consumption and corresponding ramp up elsewhere). Then the China coal boom. Then back to stagnation with no end in sight. I wonder if there is another boom anywhere in the pipeline. Not sure if India is capable of the same sort of coal driven boom that China managed.

        1. That chart is per capita. Even where the per-capita FF energy use stagnated, population #’s increased, so global annual FF energy-use, and the concomitant annual CO2 emissions, continued to climb in those years, too. As Doug noted above, we just passed the 425 ppm threshold, w/ a 5 ppm annual increase. That means 450 ppm – the number many climatologists say bakes in 2deg. C temp rise – is just 5-6 years away at current global FF energy use rate.

          Our current FF use-reduction efforts – that many claim are over-reaching and a drain to our economies – are still woefully insufficient to effect any substantive change in our course to a worst-case climate future.

  3. https://insideevs.com/news/708156/shell-closes-california-hydrogen-stations/

    My personal opinion is that hydrogen as motor vehicle fuel is an idea that’s arrived before it’s proper time.

    But five or ten years from now, maybe a little later, it’s likely that there will be quite a few hydrogen fueled trucks running on highways where there’s traffic enough to justify selling it….. assuming of course that it’s cheap enough.

    And I’m thinking that the wind and solar power industries will be on a roll for at least another two or three decades, assuming the economy doesn’t crash. So there’ll be plenty of otherwise surplus cheap juice to run plants to strip it out of water.

    As I see it, the real issue or question is not whether hydrogen can be a practical motor vehicle fuel, but rather whether it can be cheaper than batteries.

    It’s a given that sooner or later gasoline and diesel fuel will be prohibitively expensive due to depletion……. unless we switch to hydrogen or batteries or both to run our trucks and cars.

    Hydrogen and or batteries even at three or four times the total operating cost of gasoline and diesel will be a better deal than doing without.

    1. H2 still suffers from too many $-expending and entropy-increasing processes to convert electrical source-energy to useful mechanical work. Entropy, like rust and depletion, never sleeps.

  4. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewable-energys-share-german-power-grids-reaches-55-2023-2024-01-03/

    Considering that Germany isn’t exactly blessed with sun and wind, compared to lots of other countries……..

    The renewable naysayers tend to overlook the fact that in constant money there’s still a TON of room to lower the cost of construction of wind and solar infrastructure… and that just maybe natural gas may be one hell of a lot more expensive than they expect ten or twenty years down the road.

    And they fail to acknowledge that a solar farm twenty five years old can be outfitted with new panels,etc, at a rather minor fraction of the cost of building new from scratch… because the land, rights of ways, security fences, grid connections, permits, etc, will all be history for the most part.

    The same holds for a wind farm, but good data on how much of the infrastructure will still be good is hard to come by. Turbine blades and generators will be replaced with new ones….. but some or maybe most of the towers will still be good, the cables used to conduct the electricity will still be good, the grid connection will be in place…. etc.

    Tower foundations are almost sure to be good. Nearly all the steel and concrete used to build towers can be recycled.

    1. OFM, I’m not expecting we’ll have much in the way of good supplies of oil, gas or coal in aa few decades time. We have mined all the easy to get stuff and what’s left needs a lot of modern complexity to get it out of the ground. The energy cost of this complexity will continue to get higher until it’s just not worth the effort, long before we run out of any of them.

      However, just because fossil fuels are clearly not the long term answer, even before looking at the environmental damage being done via their burning, does not mean ‘something’ else is the answer. Everything about nuclear and renewables totally relies upon fossil fuels for every facet of their existence, deployment and ongoing operation.

      The numbers have to add up for something to be viable in the longer term. Anything that is only built with and operated from continuing fossil fuels inputs will not survive anything other than very short term after fossil fuels are no longer available. There are no new turbines nor solar panels once we no longer have fossil fuels. We simply don’t know how to make any of it without fossil fuel inputs, from both energy and products points of view. We don’t have silicon wafers without coking coal, we don’t have turbine blades without polymers and plastics, we don’t have insulation for wires either..

      We have built the modern civilization on things like Saudi Oil that still give us 1TWh of energy for a cost of around $1.7M (in today’s dollars), or the Walyering Gas Project also around $1.7M/TWh and coal bought us a slightly lower technology civilization at a cost of $8-9M/TWh, while solar and wind are around $34-35M/Twh with nuclear over $66M/TWh.
      Every dollar spent on the building of the energy producers of tomorrow totally overlooks the very important products we get from fossil fuels, as if they will magically appear out of nothing, which means the people thinking any of it is possible are not system thinkers and do not understand the complexity of the system that needs to be replaced.

      After the collapse of our existing civilization, at some point as oil supply diminishes at an accelerating rate, there will be no grid and despite lots of metals existing in the rubble of cities, the energy needed to collect and take it to wherever, it can be smelted simply wont exist!! The odds of any draught animals surviving starving humans during the collapse is highly unlikely. The odds of any agriculture as the climate becomes more unstable due to climate change, just as availability of fertilizers, seed, pesticides, herbicides and fuel for farm machinery collapses is no more than wishful thinking. There will be no new factories in 50-100 years time as there is no energy available to build or operate them.
      You can’t expect the collapse of modern civilization with massive population declines to happen, while still being able to get parts or new turbines with all their complex parts from around the world at the same time, likewise for nuclear fuel. None of that makes any sense.

      Once we have lost modern civilization, that’s it, it’s gone forever on this planet. There just wont be the high grade easily available resources, especially energy, for any future intelligent species to use from scratch to work up to our level of technical modernity.

      It’s the failure of the vast majority of people in recognizing that we are in extreme overshoot due to fossil fuels use, and that we don’t have an answer that is ‘easy’, that guarantees we get complete collapse of civilization. It’s simply denial of the bad outcome that awaits all humanity and wishful thinking/hoping that is our biggest weakness. A truely intelligent species would recognise the problem and have taken serious action many decades ago to stop the population reaching massive overshoot numbers in the first place.

      Maybe it’s the reduction in human brain size by 10% since pre agricultural times that has brought us here..

      1. Hideaway,

        I can only endorse fully you reply to OFM.

        I have stated many times that Wind Turbines are short lived as they undergo huge stress cycles in their limited life span. Building durability adds weight. Weight increases a whole range stress cycles, especially centrifugal stresses, and gravitational stresses. These are aircraft.

        Building bigger is not really an option as the inputs increase cubically. My guess is that most wind turbines will be built in the 5MW capacity and that realised power density will be about 2W per square metre.

        OFM has again been on the Hopium and somehow expects unreilables to provide low cost power to make hydrogen. That will turn out to be a dead end as will drilling the earths crust for hydrogen, geothermal power at scale.

        The lowest cost process ALWAYS prevails. If unrelaibles were cost effective we would not need subsidies and they would have already displaced fossil fuels.

        I will lay down the challenge again. Show me one viable process for the production of base petrochemicals or synthetic hydrocarbon fuels (including hydrogen) – just one.

        Then show me a process to make high strength steel from scrap without using any coking coal.

        1. Carnot,

          There will be coal to use for making steel so little need for a requirement of no coking coal. Electric arc furnaces can produce high strength steel from recycled materials, this already occurs for about 30% of World steel production.

          1. Dennis and OFM

            you maight le to hae a look at these links. There are plenty more. Just look for tramp metals in scrap steel.
            Some years ago China built a high speed rail system and had a host of issue with the rails, because they included scrap steel in the process

            http://www.eng.cam.ac.uk/news/future-global-steel-recycling

            https://transitionasia.org/scrap-steel-explainer/

            I made reference to high strength steels, the sort of steel that would be used for stressed applications like bearings, drive shafts, axles, railtrack, and so forth. Wind turbines would require high grade steel made predominantly from virgin steel i.e from iron oxide- haematite. This needs to be reduced either using coking coal ( or your biochar) or with a mixture of CO and hydrogen, also known as syngas. Carbon will also be required for hardening the steel.

            Tramp metals such a copper and tin seriously comprimise the steel quality and removal is only possible by special sorting of the scrap. There is no current method to remove the copper in the slag in the furnace, and electric arc furnaces are the only process that can handle high loadings of scrap steel.

            In addition the slag contains a high proportion of iron which is not economically recoverable.
            so you might lke to rethink you comment above.
            In the recycling business there is always a limit of what can be acheived and steel is no exception.

      2. Hideaway. Your discussion considers two extreme scenarios, rather than recognizing that the path traveled will be somewhere in between….to be determined.
        One extreme scenario is indefinite energy abundance with the continuance of the path of growth that we are now on.
        The other path is complete global loss of energy, and thus civilization.

        As OFM has pointed out many times, there will be some places with plenty of energy and materials for civilization to continue on in some form. Yes, it will be different and that should be expected. There may not be aspects that we now take for granted, and population will become smaller.
        Some outcome between what we have now and what we had in the pre-industrial era is what will pan out. At least for a while.
        Hopefully some of the wonderful species of the world will survive our trail of destruction.
        Manatees, I hope.

        1. Dugoing, dugoing, dugong as an old T-shirt used to say.

          If the earth heats to three degrees, and somehow stays there instead of running away to a hot house, where do you think the climate will be stable enough to support agriculture? I think it almost certain that there would be consecutive harvest failures within decades if not years, after which everyone would be dead or have moved. Any attempt at permanent infrastructure to support renewables would be doomed.

          1. If we are talking about civilization extinction risk then yes- sudden climate warming to 3 degree extent is a more severe risk than is the fossil depletion scenario that is upcoming.

            1. I understand OFM to be saying there will not be civilisation extinction because it will continue in some pockets around renewable energy infrastructure of some kind. I am asking if that is sufficient because there would have to be assurance of a reliable food supply as will, which means agriculture probably (although there’s a theory early Peruvian civilisations were based around fish and seafood I think). It wouldn’t need sudden warming, just steady rise for a few decades in line with the higher earth sensitivity numbers that some recent research is pointing to. The problem would be the volatility, not just the overall decline in yield, because a bad couple of years can be final, and would never be made up for with any number of good ones. There was a reason the agriculture and civilisations only thrived once the stable Anthropocene was established and the Little Ice Age showed what happened with just a small perturbation (i.e. 30 to 50% population loss in some places).

      3. Hideaway,

        The amount of fossil fuel used can be gradually reduced while non-fossil fuel energy ramps up. The more non-fossil fuel energy grows the less fossil fuel energy will be needed. No rational person believes this will happen overnight. Much that people think cannot be done at one point in history is proved wrong in the future. We will see, non-fossil fuel energy consumption has been growing far more rapidly than non-fossil fuel consumption. From 2013 to 2022 for fossil fuel energy consumption the annual rate of growth was 0.7% and for non-fossil fuel energy consumption the annual rate of growth was 4%.

        If the trend of the past 5 years for non-fossil fuel and total energy growth continue (4.2%/year growth for non-fossil fuel and 1% per year growth for total energy consumption) then fossil fuel energy use falls to zero by 2077 based on Statistical Review of World Energy Data trends.

        1. Dennis

          I think you made a typo

          “We will see, non-fossil fuel energy consumption has been growing far more rapidly than non-fossil fuel consumption”

          Does the 0.7% growth in fuel fuels consumption in TWh exceed the 4% growth in non-fossil fuel consumption in TWh? I do not think so, but I am open to persuasion. This is a bit like EV sales growth statistics.

          Do you really believe the EI Statistical Review. I don’t. Foercasting is always difficult especially when it involves the future. Forecasts out to 2077 are rather optimistic in my opinion and by then the world will just about have exhausted all the critical raw materials many times over.

          There simply not enough raw materisl to build out a robust energy supply to power the global economy of 8 billion let alone the 12 billion that are likely to exist in 2077, unless of course the collapse has taken place, in which case all bets are off.

          1. “There simply not enough raw material to build out a robust energy supply to power the global economy of 8 billion”
            It looks like the world population will likely peak around 2050. People will have to get used to less abundance of material bonanza than has been the case over the past decades of your life.

            Carnot- how many people can be sustained in the UK from local food and energy?

          2. Carnot,

            I disagree. There are likely to be adequate raw materials, the measure used by the Statistical review of World energy may be flawed, but is what I used. It reflects energy that is equivalent to primary energy from fossil fuels from nonfossil fuel sources. Makes sense to me as a TWh of electric output from fossil fuel requires about 2.5 times that energy from fossil fuel on average.
            So we can either divide primary energy fossil fuel by 2.5 or multiply the electical output from the non-fossil fuel to make an equivalent comparison.

            1. Dennis, the substitution method used for renewables is a totally flawed method. It ignores all the products also obtained from oil, gas and coal. It would need to have the reverse energy calculation included to have real meaning.

              This reverse calculation being the energy from renewables needed to capture carbon and make the basis for all these products, like Haru Oni is making synthetic fuels (except they haven’t got the carbon capture bit done) and just the process is appallingly inefficient (1.77%!!!).

              We have a system, not separate parts that can ignore important aspects of the overall energy system, and products gained from fossil fuels are vitally important.

              One day we wont have fossil fuels for any purpose, then what?? Should we continue to damage our environment in the hope that one day someone comes up with something, while we continue to build renewables with fossil fuels??

            2. Just an addition to the flawed nature of the substitution method used in OWID. It seems lots of people are now using the ‘new’ numbers for all the electricity generators as the ‘real’ numbers of power produced.
              I noticed even Steve St Angelo made this mistake in a recent video podcast…

              A much more honest ‘substitution method’ would have been to reduce the coal and gas used to generate electricity by a factor of 2.5 (not all coal and gas). I did this at Un-denial …
              https://un-denial.com/2024/01/21/by-hideaway-energy-and-electricity/

              One aspect then stands out; we are totally reliant on oil for the major part of our energy.
              If we reduce coal, gas and oil that is used to make electricity, then use the real numbers of electricity production for everything else, we find that 79% of all energy use is for non electrical applications 105,604TWh while total electricity makes up just 28,659TWh of total energy used.

        2. Dennis, You’re a smart person, yet somehow answer a multitude of problems as if they were one simple thing.

          We built our modern civilization on high EROEI energy, plus used a lot of products from fossil fuels. The high EROEI came from energy that ‘costs’ around $1.7M/TWh. No matter which way you look at it wind and solar at around $35M/TWh is much lower EROEI energy. Nuclear is worse.

          Every cent spent on the energy represents energy directly used and indirectly embedded in the background system to produce new useable energy. At $35M/TWh for solar and wind, there is no allowance for the intermittency, nor the extra transmission lines needed, which will just make the energy cost higher.

          In the last 20 years, from 2002 to 2022 fossil fuel use has increased by around 40,000Twh while solar and wind have added 3,408Twh. In other words fossil fuels have added over 10 times the energy to the overall system. You can cherry pick the statistics to try to prove a point on growth rates, but it is meaningless. If there had been no growth from fossil fuels, we wouldn’t have the solar and wind growth.
          If you expect solar and wind to continue growing, then you are expecting fossil fuel use to grow as well, as that is how we build the ‘renewables’. All that’s going to happen is that total energy needed to run modern civilization will continue to rise, just like it has during the renewable buildout up to now.
          While we continue to chase our tail building more renewables, the damage to the environment will grow passing more tipping points that we probably don’t even know about. All the mining for all the metals of lower ore grades leading to larger and larger waste dumps and toxic sludge ponds, let alone the increased energy and carbon pollution to do it all. Of course it assumes there are enough fossil fuels to keep building the renewables at the increasing rates needed.

          Do you think we should bother trying to build any renewables without fossil fuels, or should we just continue totally relying on them to build renewables until we can’t? If it was ever going to be possible to do it, then perhaps we should see if it’s possible by actually doing it??

          I contend that it’s not possible to build renewables without fossil fuels in anything like an economically viable operation, nor a way that produces a net energy, so it’s not being done, nor being planned to be done anywhere by anyone.

          Of course once again you ignore the ‘products’ side of the equation. Please tell us what we will replace the asphalt, fertilizer, explosives, plastics and polymers, coking coal, herbicides, pesticides, solvents, greases, tyres etc, etc.

          Everything you go on about how the future proves the past ‘thinking’ incorrect has occurred in a world of massively growing fossil fuel use. There is zero evidence that we can continue this progress in a world of decreasing fossil fuel use, especially when we make the ‘alternative’ world with fossil fuels!!

          1. The short answer is that we will have a variable mixed source energy system indefinitely.
            Not a choice, not a theoretical discussion…just the way it is
            and what humans will make do with.

            1. Hickory as usual is pretty much dead on. We’ll be using both fossil fuels and renewables indefinitely.

              Now if I may say so, an attentive audience following this discussion without any preconceived notions of what may or may not be possible would not describe me as hooked on Hopium, lol.

              I have consistently pointed out that I expect a large portion of our kind, maybe even nearly all of us, to die hard within this century….. which is after all nothing more than Mother Nature’s textbook solution to an overshoot scenario.

              So…… the first thing they generally fail to acknowledge is that we won’t be needing energy resources for eight or ten billion people indefinitely…… EVEN THOUGH THEY themselves are adamant about a built in crash and burn end to our current industrial civilization.

              Such an attentive audience will notice that I acknowledge that a fast collapse is possible, and that the end result might be that survivors, if any, have no choice but to revert all the way back to a life style consisting of primitive agriculture supplemented by hunting and gathering.

              (In this case they would STILL possess a great deal of knowledge of many kinds unknown in ancient times. Some books will survive, highways will still exist, lots of tools will be around and potentially put to use, etc. So they won’t have to create a new society from scratch.)

              A second thing they fail to acknowledge is that given time to adapt, meaning a decade or two or three or four, or thereabouts, we can and will learn how to live on half, then a third, and then maybe a fourth of our current per capita energy consumption.

              It’s undoubtedly true that civil society might more or less cease to exist even in a country such as the USA…….. I’ve given a good bit of thought to that possibility myself, and it’s possible but very unlikely, due to my age, that I’ll see it myself. I’ve made plans appropriate to the possibility.

              But it’s ALSO unquestionably true that modern societies, call them nation states or Leviathans, dictatorships, or whatever, are quite capable of doing things that would at first seem utterly impossible…… once their leaders once come to understand that it’s do or die time.

              Let’s consider a very real possibility involving hydrogen production a decade or two down the road. It’s possible, and very likely according to many experts in the field, that we will build out two or even three times the nameplate capacity of wind and solar power necessary to keep our economy up and running…… so as to have ENOUGH, or close to enough, during times when the wind dies down and the sun is hidden by clouds. I personally believe that unless the economy crashes sooner, this is pretty much a done deal, down the road.

              So…… if we can run trucks using hydrogen fuel cells, maybe we can run trucks without much need for diesel. If we have to, we can build powerlines along highways and run trucks electrically, using a diesel or battery electric system for the last few miles.

              And once the economy reverts, and it WILL, because it HAS to, due to NECESSITY, we won’t need more than maybe one truck out of every three or four we have now. Eventually we might need only one out of ten. We won’t be hauling beer or potato chips or throw away furniture hundreds of miles. We can get along fine using ten percent of the clothing we use today, because we mostly throw our clothing away, rather than buying clothes made to last. I have a leather coat that’s at least thirty years old which I wear quite often….. and it’s worth pointing out that somebody ate the cow that provided the hide used to make it.

              Things that are routinely thrown away in four or five years today can be and will be made to last thirty or forty or fifty years, due to being designed to BE REPAIRED…… and they WILL BE so made, because there will be laws mandating the same. And of course we will learn, if we must, to get by without these things. I would hate to give up my washing machine, but I would get along just fine without my dryer.. I don’t use it very often anyway, mostly only when the weather is bad and I don’t want to hang my clothes out in the sun.

              We got by ok with one car or truck for every two or three families in this rural area when my Dad was a young man…. now we have at least two on average per family. We can and will be doubling up, and sharing a vehicle, once gasoline is routinely rationed a few gallons at a time. Sharing homes, sharing apartments, meaning sharing water and sewer systems too. Sharing grid connections, which will gradually fail at the far ends out in the boonies, as maintaining them gets to be prohibitively expensive.

              Raw materials and intermediate products that are ESSENTIAL to maintaining essential industries will be rationed and available only to such industries…. So….. farm tractors, yes, luxurious automobiles and boats, no.

              Electric cars with fifty mile range will serve quite well, so long as it’s still possible to build them, and sell them. We used to get by with horses and mules, fer Chrissake, lol.

              So…….. while I maintain that some people in some places may pull thru the bottleneck, I’m saying MIGHT , some people, some places only.

              And the reason I’m fairly confident this is possible is that ORGANIZED people, meaning countries, can and will do whatever they find necessary to ensure their own survival…… up to and including simply taking any wanted resources from weaker countries.

              The naysayers insist that there won’t be enough raw materials…….. but they don’t consider the possibility that other materials may be substituted for many or even most purposes…. or that even if the cost of such materials goes up several times, in constant money, it may still be that using them is a far better option than doing without.

              Lithium at current day prices may be UNOBTAINIUM in ten or twenty years…… but at six times the price it may be plentiful…. and using it to make batteries to run essential motor vehicles may be a damned sight cheaper than DOING WITHOUT such vehicles.

              Right now putting some pipe in an insulated pit under a house filled with gravel or even ordinary soil may not be a cost effective way to store heat energy collected by solar panels or solar water heaters…… but later on…… maybe such practices will be mandated by building codes.

              And for what it’s worth….. maybe the naysayers are wrong, maybe it IS possible to build out enough new renewable energy infrastructure to maintain a functional industrial economy…… especially if it’s supplemented by existing water power, etc.

              Coal will be plentiful for a very long time,a thousand years or more, especially if we restrict burning it to running essential industrial processes such as smelting various metals, etc.
              We could, if we have to, build trucks to run on coal……. and if the climate is fucked anyway…….

              In any case, if collapse is inevitable whether or not we put any available resources into renewables…. it doesn’t make a damn either way.

              The climate may go nuts to the point we can’t produce enough food…..I’m not saying it won’t. But there’s reason to hope that at least in places such as the USA etc that there will be some places where we can continue to raise enough food for a seriously reduced population……. even if doing so means moving millions of people back onto the land.

              I’d rather give up a suit and tie for a shovel and a hoe rather than starve to death.

          2. Hideaway,

            As I said the process will be gradual, there is no need to build anything with no fossil fuels, they will continue to be used in smaller and smaller proportions, roughly 60% of fossil fuel energy is wasted and produces heat which is not put to any use.

            From 2002 to 2022 total consumption of fossil fuel energy was 9283 EJ, of this only 40% was put to any use doing work, that is 3713 EJ. Over the same 2002-2022 period about 1637 EJ of non-fossil fuel energy was consumed, with about 655 EJ providing useful work.

            The fact is that non-fossil fuel energy consumption has been growing faster than fossil fuel energy for the past 5 years (at over 10 times the annual rate of growth, with non-fossil fuel consumption growing at 4.2 times the rate of overall energy use). My simple model just assumes these growth rates continue in the future and is likely conservative because slowing population growth and improving energy efficiency is likely to lead to a decrease in the rate of growth for total energy over time rather than a constant 1% growth in total energy use as I have assumed. A gradual decrease in energy growth rates to zero by 2060 might allow energy from fossil fuels to cease by 2070. This does not preclude fossil fuel from being used as material inputs for chemicals and fertilizers as needed, but note that sewage could be processed and utilized for fertilizer in place of natural gas if needed, alternatives for pesticides might also be utilized. Concrete could be substituted for asphalt, though there is a lot of bitumen that can be used for that purpose, the concrete could be green concrete that reduces carbon in the atmosphere an might help a bit with the climate change problem.

            1. Dennis,

              If I understand correctly, you’re combining all low-carbon sources: wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and possibly nuclear.

              I’d suggest that a projection on this basis will gradually become too low: hydro and geothermal have been stagnant, and nuclear is growing very slowly. Wind and solar will provide most of the growth – heck, solar is growing distinctly faster than wind, so separating wind and solar is probably a good idea as well.

            2. Dennis, “As I said the process will be gradual, there is no need to build anything with no fossil fuels, they will continue to be used in smaller and smaller proportions”

              That’s one of my main points, where you are totally wrong. Fossil fuels are not being used in smaller and smaller proportions, their use is growing. There is no transition, all that’s happening is that renewables are being added to total energy used to the detriment of the environment.
              In the last 20 years total fossil fuel use rose 10 times the amount added by renewables. Building more renewables means using more fossil fuels to do so.

              More renewables and of course the batteries to overcome the intermittency issue, means digging up more of the natural environment to gain access to the lower grades of ores we have to use to get the metals required to build the renewables. It’s done almost entirely with fossil fuels, with a growing rate of use..

              More renewables means more fossil fuel use!! The environment wont remain in the Holocene type stable climate with the continued burning of fossil fuels, yet you and Hickory think burning more, digging up more, further destroying the natural environment is OK.

              Renewables cost about 20 times as much to produce a terawatt hour of energy as the cheap oil and gas energy supplies. That 20 times cost represents 20 times as much energy in gaining the terawatt of energy, and it’s only electricity that doesn’t supply products.

              With a hand wave, and never any energy calculations you claim we can fertilize the world using sewerage repurposed. Do you really think in a falling energy environment, coming ‘soon’ when we are past peak oil, with an accelerating decline in oil availability, humanity will have ‘spare’ energy to build such things??

              It’s not happening now on any type of scale while we have overall energy increases from fossil fuels, so what will change?? Even in places like the UK where entropy is taking it’s usual toll on the human built world, raw sewerage is being pumped into the sea because we just don’t have the money (energy) to treat it properly.

              Green concrete instead of asphalt? To produce the hydrogen needed, and all the new smelters needed (different design to using coke), all the metals to do so, will either magically appear out of thin air, or a lot more mining using fossil fuels will be necessary, especially oil, which is about to become much harder to obtain.

              Everything hydrogen based needs massive amounts of Molybdenum, something that is mostly produced as a byproduct of copper mining in the ppm range. Do you have any energy calculations showing how this is possible?? Or is it just another hand wave of what’s ‘possible’ without regard to energy, environment and resource limits??

              Dennis, what you propose is more of the same as we have been doing over the last 20 years, which has lead to increasing fossil fuel use and a more unstable climate, all while we clearly recognise that material limits mean this increase can’t continue indefinitely.
              Only around 15% of humanity made it to a modern lifestyle, like all of us who post on these threads, despite the damage we are doing to the environment while using up all the high grade minerals.

              Continuing to do the same thing in the next 20 years as we have done in the last 20 years and expecting a different result, is the very definition of insanity.

              I wonder if you can see the stupidity in what’s happening in the world. My first solar panel, now over 39 years old was made solidly and can still generate electricity. The panels made 12-15 years ago are often being replaced because they were made of thinner materials, seem to be failing much more often, and the lifetime seems to be shorter than the very old ones, despite the 25 year warranties they came with.

              The newest ones come with claims from the companies that make them, that they will have longer lives (yet shorter warranty periods), even though they are made with thinner silicon wafers, have thinner connecting pastes, use thinner glass, with greater surface area, all while being exposed to an environment of stronger storms, greater variations of temperatures and larger hail stones.

              The math and physics of replacing fossil fuel use with renewables doesn’t go close to adding up. We can’t replace the system we have with one that costs 20 times more in both energy and money to build, despite magicking up money (debt) to do it. We can magic the money, but not the resources.

              Forget the hand wave of things we will do instead of using fossil fuels, do the math and resource availability instead, for a change.

            3. Continuing to do the same thing in the next 20 years as we have done in the last 20 years and expecting a different result, is the very definition of insanity.

              And yet that seems almost certainly what we are going to try to do judging by recent news. In the UK green initiatives are kind of fading away as investors see they don’t make as much money as they’d hoped and politicians find they don’t win votes. Populist parties are increasing their influence even if not always getting elected, and they are not green generally. Trump doesn’t really believe in or understand any of it but will deliberately target existing green initiatives just to openly defy anyone he considers his enemy (which he would consider anyway who doesn’t overtly brown nose to. him at every opportunity).

            4. I don’t think the decline of fossil fuel will be all that gradual. The industry does not exist to keep the lights on, as some here seems to believe. It exists to make money.

              When an industry stops being profitable, it declines rapidly, because profit is the lifeblood of every industry. The extreme fall in price of renewables are already depriving the industry of irreplaceable revenue.

              The trends of the last few decades are irrelevant because the price situation has completely changed. It’s like the indigo market in the 1840s. South Carolina planters were minting money with their slave plantations and had been for decades. Suddenly cheap Prussian Blue dye appeared on the market, and the economy collapsed overnight. It didn’t matter how well positioned they were before Prussian Blue appeared. There was no gradual decline. Their revenues dried up, and they went bankrupt and stopped production.

            5. Alimbiquated … “When an industry stops being profitable, it declines rapidly, because profit is the lifeblood of every industry. The extreme fall in price of renewables are already depriving the industry of irreplaceable revenue.”

              I agree entirely, yet despite renewables getting much cheaper, they still need subsidies and grants, plus beneficial market rules to get built. Why is that??
              Currently a terawatt hour of energy from a Saudi oil well or a gas project in WA is costing $US1.7M while a terawatt of electricity from utility scale wind and solar in Australia is costing $US35M (after subsidies!!), while electricity from an existing coal fired power station is costing $US9M. So tell me exactly which forms of energy are cheapest?

              In the AEMO market in Australia, renewables are certainly putting coal, gas and hydro power stations out of business, but they are also stopping further development in solar and wind as well. There is no money to be made despite the current subsidies to build more.
              So what will happen over the longer term when more coal power closes down, blackouts and brownouts across the country as the grid reliability collapses. Those that can afford their own batteries to back-up their own use of electricity will do well, as the grid prices have risen massively over the last couple of years..

              What happens to Industry, especially heavy industry, is it leaves for wherever they can get consistent cheap power/energy.

              I’m sure it’s just a coincidence (NOT!!) that the Aluminium smelter in Western Australia is closing down at the same time the grid closes down the last coal fired power station.

            6. HIDEAWAY,
              You tell me what will happen when the traditional energy business shuts down and we’ll both know.

              Meanwhile good luck trying to persuade yourself that renewables aren’t the cheapest energy source. Not sure why you WANT to persuade yourself of that, but whatever.

              Here’s a take from Lazard, found on Wikipedia.

              https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Electricity_costs_in_dollars_according_to_data_from_Lazard.png

              It’s a bit dated. PV prices fell by about half in 2023. Here is more complete information from Lazard in 2021.

              https://www.lazard.com/media/sptlfats/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-150-vf.pdf

              The chart on page two gives an unsubsidized range for CC gas of $45 to $74. It gives that range for thin film utility scale solar PV of $28 to $37. For wind it has $26 to $50.

              And again, that is based on old data. PV prices have fallen dramatically in since then.

            7. Alimbiquated … The numbers I’ve used are actual examples of solar, wind, coal, gas, oil and nuclear plants.
              It varies greatly from what Lazard reports say because in the Lazard reports they have a range of ‘assumptions’ that don’t apply in the real world for the output of energy and deliberately handicap coal and gas by applying CCS as a cost (which doesn’t exist) plus adds a dollar cost to coal and gas.

              Let me reiterate, coal, gas, sunshine, wind, oil, geothermal are all free to humanity, we just need to build machines to make the energy useful for our needs.

              We built our system on power plants being set up next to coal pits with the only expense being the cost to extract and transport the coal into the power plant. This is how all power plants were set up in this country and how they operate.

              Solar panels being cheaper, is NOT a system of providing power.
              The numbers I put out about the costs are real existing plants (in the case of Hinkley using current expected cost). I’ll also put the names next to each one so you can go and check for yourself…
              Saudi oil, refined $1.7M/TWh
              Walyering gas Project $1.7M/TWh
              Kogan Creek Power Station (coal) $9.1M/TWh
              Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm $34M/TWh
              New England Solar Farm $35M/TWh
              Hinkley PC (nuclear) $66M/TWh

              They are real existing projects all recently built or still being built, based on the operators own numbers for lifetime and expected capacity factor, or actual capacity factor, plus the industries own actual costs and/or expected costs. All dollar numbers are $US.

              The Kogan power station operates right next to the coal pit, with the coal being transported by conveyor into the power station, there is no dollar cost except what the company actually spends, around 10% of what Lazard reports claim. It is also Australia’s newest coal power station. There is also no CCS, just like every other coal plant in the world.
              The NESF (solar) has an expected capacity factor of 5.5hours sunshine/day at a latitude of 30 degrees South, a fairly sunny area.
              The Mt Gellibrand Wind Farm had an expected capacity factor of 37%, but over the first 6 years of it’s life it has been 24%.

              It should be obvious to you how biased the Lazard reports really are, just by the assumptions they make, if you read deep enough into the reports, they are not real world situations comparing like for like, there are deliberate biases.

              Most people want to use the wishful thinking numbers, like in Lazard’s reports as it shows a nice comfy future, not real world numbers of what is actually happening.
              If you have real world numbers of actual plants either very recently built or even in the planning stage, then please put them up..

              Also please notice there is no allowance for the intermittency factors from the solar and wind projects, it’s just based on actual output. Industrial society cannot run on intermittent power, there needs to be backup, batteries, pumped hydro or whatever. I have not added any costs for this, so in reality to run industrial civilization the numbers are much worse.

              Just the simple fact that coal, oil and gas pay royalties to governments around the world, while solar and wind get subsidised around the world should tell you what is actually cheapest on economic grounds.

              Of course that doesn’t count the environmental damage done by burning oil, gas and coal, but deluding ourselves on economic grounds that one is cheaper than the other, when they are clearly not cheaper, doesn’t help our situation at all.

              I keep coming back to the simple question I’ve asked before. If solar power and wind power with appropriate backup, really were cheaper than coal and gas, then why are there no Aluminium smelters going off grid with their own ‘cheaper’ solar and wind power??
              There would be an economic advantage in doing this, if true, but no-one is doing it, anywhere in the world. How do these simple realities escape you??

            8. HIDEAWAY,
              Not sure I should bother, but cherry picking the data, using old data when prices have changed rapidly and confusing primary energy with energy delivered is not helpful or interesting.

            9. Alimbiquated, as I asked, if you have any data, I would love to look at it.

              It’s not old outdated data I put up, nor is it cherry picking data, it’s what I could obtain. The New England Solar Farm, it’s total cost includes phase 2 which is still being built, so pretty up to date with phase 1 only starting last year. How much more up to date do you require?

              Walyering gas project is gas into the pipeline including all costs, only started delivering gas in late 2023. How much more recent do you want?? It’s not primary energy, it’s the gas into the pipeline after processing, straight to industrial consumers (including a chemical plant for product).
              Likewise for Saudi oil, it’s from a UN document from 2022 and includes refining cost.

              Power producers are all power into the grid, obviously except Hinkley PC that is not yet complete, if the price of that build goes up again, then the number will just be higher.

              The wind farm is 6 years old, but the real weakness for it is the actual capacity factor is way below what was planned. Even if they achieved the planned capacity factor of 37% the cost is still $23.2M/Twh. The capital cost of the project sits smack in the middle of the current Lazard’s capital cost profile, while the operating costs I used were way below Lazards. If I’d just used Lazards latest costs, the costs for the wind farm would have been higher.

              Interesting you have to claim huge bias, instead of checking any of them out for yourself. Which one are you claiming is ‘old data’, and which ones are ‘cherry picked’?

              I will freely admit freely that Saudi oil is very ‘cherry picked’, because that is what we built our modern civilization with and all the benefits that came with cheap energy. To continue with modern civilization in the future, the energy sources we need to build the future, have to be of similar cost (the Saudi costs ARE 2022 costs, not 1970 costs!!).

              Renewables and nuclear are clearly not anywhere near similar costs which means one of a range of possible outcomes…

              1.. We get much cheaper solar, wind and nuclear, down to the actual costs of what we built the system with, to continue modern civilization.
              2.. The number of people that can afford modern civilization falls dramatically as we ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels.
              3.. The current modern civilization is not possible without the cheap fossil fuels that are leaving us anyway..

              Please also note, which you seem to have forgotten in your reply, that the solar and wind costs EXCLUDE any extra transmission lines and any type of backup storage, which would make them much more expensive. Both are clearly needed in an all ‘renewable’ scenario, as admitted by EVERY expert in the field.

              Do you realistically think renewables and nuclear can get down to just 5% of their CURRENT costs for utility scale setups, including whatever backup?? If the answer is no, then modern civilization cannot continue for the 15% of humanity that enjoys it, in anything like the same manner.

              Of course, all of the above, never takes into account the continuing decline in ore grades at mines, especially for copper, which will increase costs of building anything as more and more energy is used just for the mining bit.

              Fossil fuels are leaving us, they are a dead end, even before we take the climate damage into account. The EROEI of fossil fuels is increasing until we wont be able to afford mining them one day, unless everything collapses first, due to violent weather destroying the ability to farm due to climate change.

              The alternative to fossil fuels, have to be as cheap, as what we built our civilization with, if we want to keep running modern civilization as we know it. They are clearly nowhere near good enough!! It’s not by a bit, it’s the proverbial country mile.

              Interestingly, the numbers clearly show that we cannot run our modern civilization off coal fired power either, as it’s way more expensive than the cheap oil and gas.

              What I’m actually trying to do, is work out the full cost of all energy types, compared to what we built and operate modern civilization with, as in what’s most viable. All my initial research found so much bias and so much energy cost left out of every calculation, often because it was too difficult. This applied across all energy industries, no exception.

              So far, nothing even comes close, including fossil fuels in the future, as their costs rise!!
              Most people don’t have the time to do the research as I do, so if you have any full costs, energy output and lifetime of any energy project, whatever it is, please post it!! I’ll do a comparison using exactly the same methodology I use for EVERY energy type.

  5. Alexander Khurshudov wrote a paper on the prospects for gas production in the USA:
    Review of the state of the American gas industry
    👁 12.8K 17:58 – 12/Feb/24 [Improved account] Alexander Khurshudov
    [Russia]
    User avatar Alexander Khurshudov

    In recent months, supplies of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe have decreased slightly. Analysts explain this by the rise in transportation costs due to the danger to sea routes in the Middle East, as well as the onset of cold weather in the United States itself. To better understand the situation, I decided to make a short overview of the state of the American gas industry.

    1. Gas production

    At the end of last year, a quarter of US gas was produced from conventional (gas and oil) reservoirs, and the rest from shale formations. Hard-to-recover (shale) reserves of natural and associated petroleum gas form 7 large formations or provinces in the United States. They are shown in Fig. 1. Three of them contain predominantly natural gas, the rest contain oil with associated gas.

    Fig.1. Location of US shale provinces

    Last year, gas extraction from productive formations in the United States amounted to almost 1.3 trillion cubic meters. Over the past 10 years, it has grown almost 1.5 times, which is 30% of global production. The largest gas-producing states are Texas and Pennsylvania (Fig. 2).

    Fig.2.

    However, not all of this gas reaches the consumer. For example, 100 billion m3 is produced in Alaska, but few people need it there, and therefore 90% of the gas is pumped into oil reservoirs for storage and/or enhanced oil recovery. It is curious that after some time the injected gas (minus losses) again enters the oil wells, and therefore it can be produced several times, useful for happy statistics.

    Where oil production is growing rapidly, part of the associated gas is flared. Five years ago, 15 billion m3/year were burning; now this amount has been halved. There are other losses that are difficult to account for. As a result, supplies of dry fuel gas last year amounted to 1.07 trillion m3.

    Almost half of the gas is produced in the three largest shale provinces: Andarko, Appalachia and Haynesville (Figure 3). Let’s briefly describe each.

    Fig.3

    The Andarko province covers an area of 130 thousand km2, mainly in the states of Texas and Oklahoma. It contains several formations, the oldest of which is the Barnett Shale, which was combined with the Woodford formations called Andarko. Oil reservoirs have been discovered in eastern Woodforth and drilling continues. The maximum Andarko gas production in 2019 was 218 million m3/day, since then it has decreased by 12.4%, which corresponds to 70 billion m3/year.

    The Appalachian province, with an area of 480 thousand km2, combines two formations, Marcellus and Utica, which are located in the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. Total proven reserves at the end of 2021 (there are no more recent data yet) were estimated at 5 trillion m3 (including 4.3 trillion m3 produced in 2022-23). This is the largest gas province in the United States. Gas extraction is now at its maximum, 1.02 billion m3/day, or in annual terms – 371 billion m3. A slight decrease (4-5%) was observed in 2022.

    The province of Haynesville, with an area of about 30 thousand km2, is located in Louisiana, partly in Texas; the productive formation there lies at depths of 3-4 thousand m. It is represented by fairly strong rocks, and therefore horizontal drilling there is more difficult and expensive. The first maximum production was reached in 2015. However, it seems that the technical problems have been solved, because gas production over the past 7 years has increased to the current 470 million m3/day (175 billion m3/year). Proven gas reserves at the end of 2021 were estimated at 1.1 trillion m3; taking into account subsequent production, the balance is 820 billion m3.

    From Fig. Figure 3 shows that in recent years in three gas provinces production has increased slightly; Even in 2022, with high prices, it grew weakly due to sales restrictions. The main increase fell on the share of oil and gas shale (Fig. 4).

    Fig.4.

    The champion here is the young Permian province, where gas production has increased 4.75 times over 10 years and reached 245 billion m3/year. But even in the venerable Bakken, the growth was 3.4 times, and gas production in 2023 was 34 billion m3.

    A well-known phenomenon manifested itself here: a decrease in reservoir pressure during oil extraction leads to the release of gas in the reservoir. And since gas is more mobile, it overtakes oil when moving to the bottom of production wells.

    Oil workers know these processes well, and for a wider audience I will explain them in detail. Oil in a reservoir always contains dissolved gas, the deeper it is, the more of it. Let’s assume that 300 m3 of gas is dissolved in each cubic meter of oil. At some lower pressure (it is called the saturation pressure of oil with gas), gas begins to separate from the oil. Let’s assume that it is equal to 240 at. Then, already at 120 atm, approximately half of the gas will be released from the oil.

    In reality, wells are operated with a bottomhole pressure of 20-50 at. In this case, an oil and gas mixture with a gas content of 75-90% will move in the bottomhole zone. Such a mixture is more difficult to filter, while the oil flow rate decreases and the gas flow rate increases.

    The best illustration of this is the change in the gas-oil factor over time, this is the amount of gas entering a barrel, cubic meter or ton of oil. Its dynamics are shown in Fig. 5.

    Fig.5.

    Over the past 10 years, in the Eagle Ford province, the gas-oil factor (already very high) has increased 1.5 times, and gas production has reached 75 billion m3/year. However, as the reservoir pressure decreases, the wells switch almost completely to gas, and then they are turned off. Therefore, in the Bakken province in 2021-23, the gas-oil factor stabilized in the range of 530-590 m3/m3. And in the Permian province (2017-2020) it even decreased, which is associated with intensive drilling of formations; new wells initially supply less gas. Let’s move on to the dynamics of well drilling.

    2. Drilling

    The number of active gas drilling rigs is shown in Figure 6 compared to spot gas prices at the Henry Hub terminal.

    Fig.6.

    Drilling activity, of course, follows price movements, but here, as they say, there are three big differences. In the province of Andarko, drilling has dropped to almost zero; there is nowhere to drill for gas. Appalachia is also declining, but slowly. And in the province, Haynesville is growing, with an average of 64 machines operating here in 2022. Now, however, there are 39 left, but that’s still a lot.

    In the oil and gas provinces, drilling for gas zones is very weak; last year, from zero to 5 rigs were drilled for gas in each province. Production there is ensured by wells drilled for oil with increasing gas production. There, too, drilling is being curtailed, with the exception of the Permian formation.

    3. Gas consumption

    Over the past 10 years, gas consumption in the United States has increased by 21.4% and reached 914 billion m3 per year. Part of this gas is used by the gas industry for its own needs, to power pumping compressors and process units. Gas consumption volumes in 2022 are shown in Table 1.

    Table 1

    Not much gas is spent in the United States for the needs of the gas industry, 9.6%. More than 26% of gas is used for heating homes and companies, of course, mainly in winter. In industrial production (26.4%), gas is usually a raw material, including the production of fertilizers and the entire range of gas chemical products and plastics. And the largest consumer of gas (37.5%) are gas power plants.

    This idea is good. The maximum amount of heating gas in the United States is used in the winter, and electricity – on the contrary, in the summer. Therefore, the government, as best it could, stimulated gas generation, which was located near the largest fields. As a result, gas consumption for electricity generation has increased 1.5 times over the past 10 years. Last year, 16 gas power plants were commissioned with a total capacity of 8.6 GW, and approximately the same number is planned to be commissioned in the next 3 years. There is only one tricky question about this wonderful scheme: how many years will the energy sector’s reserves of gas fields last?…But more on that later.

    4. Export-import operations

    Both the import and export of gas through pipelines across the borders with Canada and Mexico have existed for a long time. Canada, with its small population, produces 180 billion m3 of gas per year and exports about half to the United States. A third of Canadian exports are offset by returns to other parts of Canada (border trade is beneficial), and almost 60 billion m3/year from Texas goes to Mexico.

    American LNG exports began in 2014 and have now reached 120 billion m3/year. The dynamics of gas exports over 10 years are shown in Fig. 7.

    Fig.7.

    Currently, 10 more LNG plants with a total capacity of 124 billion m3/year are being built at various stages. The following 7 projects are at the stage of obtaining export permits. But President Biden’s administration recently suspended consideration of these licenses, causing outrage among American businesses, along with Japan and Europe. Among them, the Alaska-LNG project with a capacity of 40 billion m3/year with an estimated cost of $45-65 billion has been waiting for permits for the third year. If an export license is obtained, the project could be completed in 2030.

    All we have to do is indicate the recipients of American export gas. The volumes of supplies to major consumer countries are shown in Table 2.

    table 2

    During these years, the main supplies of LNG from the United States went to Europe, and only last year, as a result of lower European prices, the volumes of supplies to Southeast Asia increased slightly. Let’s move on to American gas prices.

    5. Gas prices

    Average annual domestic gas prices are shown in Fig. 8. Until 2021, the exchange prices of the Henry Hub terminal were very low ($72-111), then there was a 3-fold jump (!!!) and a return. Average monthly prices of the exchange (see Fig. 3), at their maximum in August 2022, reached $311.

    Fig.8.

    The figure clearly shows that gas producers get little from the large gas pie: their share in the final gas price is 28%. Mainline transport receives 12%, and 60% goes to city networks and sales. At the peak in August last year, prices for supplies to municipal consumers varied from $263 (North Dakota) to $1337 (Ohio) per 1000 m3, averaging $820 (!!!).The triple increase in gas prices in 2022 has become a serious test for gas chemists and energy engineers; However, now prices have almost returned to their previous low values.

    Changes in import and export prices are shown in Fig. 9.

    Fig.9.

    Americans are great traders, and therefore they get the cheapest gas from Canada. There, production is concentrated in the southwest of the country, while the industrial southeast of Canada receives gas from the United States at a higher price; in some years the difference reached $40. Canada is building an LNG plant, but it is not finished yet. But cheap imported gas in the United States helps maintain low prices within the country.

    LNG exports looked very cheap until recent years, but to this price we must add the cost of transportation and regasification. For example, Poland in 2016-19. received gas at an average price of $201 per 1000 m3; At that time, renting gas carriers cost $40-50 thousand per day, and therefore the buyer’s costs for gas delivery did not exceed $100 per 1000 m3. And in 2022, supplies to Poland increased in price multiple times, reaching a maximum in November ($1,028/1,000 m3). In addition, the market was critically suffering from a shortage of gas carriers, the rental cost of which soared to $450 thousand per day.

    Even a simple comparison of these gas prices indicates that the global gas market is still unstable. It can stabilize at levels of $250-300 only in the event of a constant excess supply of gas. And it depends on geological reserves.

    6. Reserves in the subsoil

    At the end of 2021, the Energy Information Agency EIA estimated the total proven gas reserves of the United States at 17.7 trillion m3. In my opinion, the figure is overestimated; there is no data for 2022 yet. Taking into account price jumps, the difficulties of geologists are understandable: no one can reasonably predict further price movements, which have become critically dependent on the political situation in the world.

    Current proven gas reserves (which are profitable to produce at current prices) in the Haynesville province are estimated at 820 billion m3. With current production (175 billion m3), they will be extracted within 5 years. But so far both drilling and production are growing.

    The reserves of the Appalachian province (4.3 trillion m3) will last for 11.5 years. Here drilling is being reduced and gas production is almost stable.

    Using core samples and geophysical data, geologists have long calculated how much gas is contained in each layer. But the gas recovery coefficient (how much gas can be produced without losses) is determined only by practice. And there is practically no such experience.

    The only example of sufficient gas shale production is the Barnett Shale formation in the Andarko province with initial proven reserves of 924 billion m3. The gas recovery coefficient there was adopted at 10%. In 2014, it was completely drilled out, production began to decline and now, according to my rough estimate, 470 billion m3 of gas have been produced. The average well there supplies only 3 thousand m3/day. In the next 10-20 years, we can hope to extract another 120-150 billion m3, then gas recovery will be 6.7%. In terms of geological and commercial characteristics, this is undoubtedly the best formation of American shale: depths of less than 2 km, porosity of 6-18%, interlayers of siltstone and even sandstone. In other deposits the return will be even less.

    On the other hand, there are reserves for increasing current production. In the last 3 years, 460 gas wells have been drilled but not developed in the Appalachian and Haynesville provinces. At the right time they will be taken out of conservation. The entire Fayetteville formation, with reserves of about 0.5 trillion m3, is idle due to man-made earthquakes and the subsequent ban on hydraulic fracturing by the state of Arkansas. Part of the Appalachian formation in New York State fell under the same ban. But if there is a strong need for gas, the bans will be lifted.

    For these reasons, I do not see any way to reliably estimate American gas reserves. Neither I, nor the authorities, nor the mining companies have sufficient information for this. Purely intuitively, I am inclined to the value of 12 trillion m3, but I won’t bet on it, it could be less or more.

    Therefore, the administration’s recent ban on export licenses for new LNG projects has some basis. Ecology is just a reason here; gas is the cleanest fuel. But imagine: construction will begin on another 200 billion cubic meters of LNG, and after 5-6 years it will turn out that the reserves have been halved and we will have to look for something to feed the newly created gas generation.

    7. Summary

    Four years ago, I already did a similar review of the American gas industry and came to the conclusion that it was provided with resources for 6-7 years. This conclusion was completely confirmed. But here’s what I noticed back then:

    American gas exports are caught between two fires. If domestic gas prices rise, it becomes unprofitable. And if domestic prices drop significantly, exports will set records, but mining companies will suffer losses and reduce production. The situation is risky for both sellers and buyers.
    ​

    US gas production remains heavily dependent on gas prices. But now the amount of information has decreased significantly. No one, like the Texas authorities previously, publishes data on the production of wells and fields. No one, like the previous geological department of the US Department of Internal Affairs, makes calculations of the reserves of entire formations. Statistics are based on company data. There are hundreds of them, and each strives to present their business in the best possible way. No one analyzes the production of layers, gas recovery coefficients, because no one needs it.

    In general, I have the impression that the industry is rushing somewhere at breakneck speed, under the motto “Grab your bags – the station is leaving.” Now prices are falling and production may fall. But there are growth reserves for the next 4-6 years, and with rising prices we will see another small renaissance.

    It is on this complex, iridescent note that I will end my review. One thing I can say for sure: an irreversible decline in oil production in the United States will begin earlier than gas production.
    link:https://aftershock.news/?q=node/1344317
    ​

    1. Good review and summary- nice to add reporting to this site on occasion, instead of endless opinion threads. Now do one for Russia!

  6. Opinion on whether AMOC is going to collapse or not changes every few months, but this paper seems to put the risk quite high. A collapse would have a huge impact on global agricultural production, apart from what happens to European winters and East Coast USA sea levels.

    https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2024/02/new-study-suggests-the-atlantic-overturning-circulation-amoc-is-on-tipping-course/

    https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adk1189

    Loss of Barents Sea ice is likely to be the first identified tipping point to be passed and has been connected to a possible cascade to AMOC circulation slowing.

    1. The AMO and other Atlantic SST’s are used to characterize the AMOC. Have to figure out whether the AMO is cyclic before anyone extrapolates the AMOC trend.

      1. Thanks for posting this Hick. The CH4 trajectory is particularly concerning.

      2. I wish I could find a paper that properly explains how the secondary GHGs impact the “doubling” sensitivity. As I understand it in the doubling calculation the other GHG concentrations are kept constant an the CO2 doubled. Therefore the pre industrial equivalent should be a bit above 300 but our present equivalent would be closer to the doubling, which would be around 600 (is that right?).

  9. On the whole “using FFs to create a renewable economy” issue:
    https://www.distilled.earth/p/a-fossil-fuel-economy-requires-535x

    “Every year, about 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are mined and extracted. That’s about 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy would require in 2040.

    Part of the reason for this massive difference in mining requirements is the fact that fossil fuel infrastructure is much less energy efficient than clean energy technology. Gas-powered cars are three times less efficient than electric vehicles. Gas furnaces are three to four times less efficient than heat pumps. Coal, oil, and gas all need to be transported long distances from mine or well to the source of combustion.

    A clean energy economy just requires much less energy than a fossil fuel economy. ”

    Rgds
    WP

    1. Well… the main reason for this massive difference in mining requirements is the fact that fossil fuels themselves require an enormous amount of extraction: 80 million barrels of oil per day! 6,000,000,000 tons of coal per year!!

    2. Please don’t tell us you believe this claptrap…
      ” Every year, about 15 billion tons of fossil fuels are mined and extracted. That’s about 535 times more mining than a clean energy economy would require in 2040.”

      Where are the pure 100% deposits of copper, lithium, nickel, molybdenum, rare earths, tin, silver, etc, etc, that are going to be mined??

      Or is it more likely the copper grade currently around 0.5% on average will continue to get lower?? 0.5% means around 220 tonnes of ore are needed to be mined and processed for 1 tonne of copper (recovery is often around 90% for low grades, 92-93% for high grades, plus there is dilution of ore mined by the diggers including waste in nearly every bucket of thinner seams of ore), plus of course all the overburden waste mined just to gain access to the ore bodies of open cut mines, that has to be blasted then removed by diesel powered dump trucks.

      Only 4 times as much?? Did anyone bother to go look at the assumptions in the annexes?? Often from papers 12-15 years old, based on much less energy than we currently use, assuming the ore grades are as high as they were back then.

      Every one of these types of reports makes simple assumptions without consideration of lower grades of everything and unlimited energy availability to do it.

      We are using lower and lower grades of fossil fuels to gain access to lower and lower grades of ores, all while an increasing proportion of an overpopulated world wish to use more resources. It’s only possible while we mine more and more fossil fuels to make it happen, which means more damage to climate and environment, which is most likely already past many tipping points. Feedback loops affecting everything, something never looked at in these simplistic articles.

      Yet because people ‘want’ to believe it’s all possible, they jump on every piece of rubbish like this article…

      1. I’ve been thinking that I shouldn’t feed the trolls, but you’ve replied to a comment of mine, and it’s something we’ve debated before, so…what the heck…

        First, you’re changing the subject: this is a discussion about amount of material extracted. The material that has to be processed in order to extract something like copper is not itself extracted. It may be processed and may be disturbed, but it’s not extracted.

        If you want to talk about the total amount of material that is processed, then you might want to include the vast amounts of water that are extracted along with oil: there are wells where every barrel of oil brings 100 barrels of water… Oil stained water…

        Then we’d have to talk about the disposal of all that water, and the resulting earthquakes and miscellaneous other problems they create.

        And then we’d have to discuss the disposal of all that carbon that comes from burning those fossil fuels, and the other things: sulfur, mercury, radioactive particulates from coal, ultra small particulates from diesel that cause asthma, etc. etc.

        1. Nick, I’ve never argued that burning all that fossil fuels is ‘good’, in fact I keep saying that we don’t have a future doing it for both depletion and environment problems, but that doesn’t mean renewables nor nuclear can replace them.

          The only sure way to save what’s left of the natural environment is to massively power down and massively reduce population, which we should have started decades ago. Instead we get simple thinkers stating we can solve all the problems by just doing ‘xxxxxxx’, as if there was unlimited energy and resources to do whatever ‘xxxxxxxx’ is.

          Every ‘more renewable argument’, means more destruction of the environment while burning more fossil fuels to do it. We are just chasing our own tails by trying to attempt it. Currently the money and energy inputs for renewables are 20 times the rate of fossil fuels to produce the same amount of energy. That’s today, despite all the improvements over the last few decades. It also doesn’t allow for overcoming the intermittency issue, nor does it replace the products supplied by fossil fuels.
          The numbers are proof that all we are doing is digging a deeper hole for humanity and all other life on this planet.
          I keep challenging you to come up with the numbers to show that a renewable future is possible, but you never do. Instead you point to other people’s work that I have easily picked up all the flaws in.
          So how about you do the work, show the numbers of how it is possible, instead of this incessant ‘there is no alternative’. Remember it’s a system, if you think hydrogen is viable, show the numbers of how much, and how we make all the high grade stainless steel, including the mining given current and falling ore grades etc.
          It’s a lot of work, but just ‘believing’ it’s possible as you do, means you gloss over the massive overshoot we really are in and miss most of the energy inputs needed to build what you envisage.

          1. you point to other people’s work that I have easily picked up all the flaws in.

            No, you really haven’t. You just make stuff, and there’s no way to argue with that. So, I’m sorry, I’m not going to try.

            For other readers: this is a classic example of trolling. Pretend to care about the environment, but in the end the message is always the same: do nothing about climate change and other environmental problems, and just Drill, Baby Drill.

            Sometimes the message is climate change is unimportant, so let’s drill baby drill.

            Sometimes the message is that only fossil fuels keep civilization going, so let’s drill baby drill.

            Sometimes the message is everything is hopeless, so wemay as well just drill baby drill.

            It always ends the same: do nothing about Business as Usual, and drill baby drill…

            1. “It always ends the same: do nothing about Business as Usual, and drill baby drill…“

              Nick, that is such bullshit. Nobody is saying that. And you are showing how correct Hide away is about you by not taking up his challenge. I totally get what he is saying. It’s not rocket science. It’s logical. Geez 🙄

            2. No, sadly, that’s exactly what he’s saying.

              He says renewables are counterproductive. That’s absolutely completely absurd bullshit. He just makes stuff up, and does it in large volumes, which is commonly known as a Gish Gallop. And now he’s got us fighting and wasting our time and wasting space on this blog- which is classic trolling.

              Such a waste of time, caused by someone who is obviously just defending his industry.

              Fortunately this argument is really irrelevant. In the scientific community there is a clear and strong consensus that climate change is a serious risk which must be addressed urgently. This consensus is reasonably strong in the business and political spheres, such that renewables strongly dominate new generation, are clearly the future of light transportation, and Net-zero is the consensus politically. There are, of course, still politicians and political parties that are controlled by fossil fuel interests, but they are clearly fighting a losing battle. They can still inspire quite a few trolls like Hideaway, but they’re clearly a fringe.

              Unfortunately, that losing, rear-guard political battle is slowing us down, so that we are moving much too slowly. But it’s obvious where we are going: the intellectual argument is over and done.

            3. “It’s about the destination not the journey mean?

              The quote clearly states that success isn’t about the final outcome, it is about adding real value along the way. It doesn’t mean the destination is irrelevant, but the journey shapes the destination. So, the path you are walking to achieve success has a greater role in your satisfaction.”

              “Don’t Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good

              We should all strive to do our best, but if you always aim for perfection, you may blow deadlines, annoy your colleagues, and miss out on opportunities. Instead of never being satisfied with “good enough,” talk to others about their standards. What does a good job look like to your boss, peer, or client? Seek their feedback on expected results, costs, and timelines rather than trying to meet your extremely high standards.”

              The day HIDEAWAY was born it was a known fact he was going to die. Yet, someone invested their own energy and resources in feeding, cleaning the shit coming out of his ass, dressing him to keeping him warm and educating him. Why ? He’s not perfect. He consumes limited resources.

              What he seems to not understand is that others before him invested into an environment that is not perfect, but supplies a better quiality of life than living in a cave eating rodents. HIDEAWAY is a quitter. He’s going to get all the modern comforts of todays society and has selfish interests not to promote the next advancement forward. All based on the theory we are all going to fail eventually as a civil society. Which is nothing new and been baked in from the beginning of man.

              Quitters are a guaranteed loser for the advancement of mankind and contribute to collapse. Here at POB it should be called HIDEAWAY disease.

            4. Nick .. LOL. I’m not in favor of drill baby drill, nor is there any post suggesting I’ve ever indicated that’s a good idea. In fact if you read my posts, you can see I’m against all the burning because of the damage to both climate and environment.

              We are in deep overshoot, changing our climate way too fast for natural processes to catch up, killed off most Ocean life, reduced insect numbers by an estimated 70% since 1970, reduced wild mammals not part of our farming to just 4% of total world mammals by weight.
              It’s humans that are destroying our own environment just like yeast in a vat of sugar water, using up every resource available while polluting the living surrounds until we kill ourselves off.
              The concept of building more, faster (of anything !!!), is totally self defeating because the numbers don’t go close to adding up.

              You showed your own ignorance of the situation above in your comment about mining ….. “The material that has to be processed in order to extract something like copper is not itself extracted. It may be processed and may be disturbed, but it’s not extracted.”

              That’s a load of rubbish. Most copper is mined in open pits, like the giant Escondida mine in Chile. This is how 90% of the world’s copper is mined..
              https://www.google.com/maps/place/BHP Minera Escondida/@-24.2782718,-69.0750117,9516m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x96a5f98787b698d9:0x6f12b4f3fe321ffa!8m2!3d-24.270757!4d-69.0718966!16s/m/0vpxb9w?entry=ttu

              Have a good look at the waste dumps that are separate from the tailings dams. The waste dumps are where the rock that surrounds the ore body goes to. It is blasted, dug, then moved.

              All this to gain access to the ore body that is also then blasted, moved to stockpile, moved again to ROM pad, crushed, then ground, then has chemicals added like potassium amyl xanthate a highly toxic organosulphur compound that makes the copper sulphide ‘float’ (made mostly from dimethyl sulphide, where the carbon and sulphur comes from fossil fuels). The copper concentrate from the floatation, often 25-35% copper and the rest of the waste gets transported to a smelter.

              The remaining ore grade at Escondida, the largest copper mine in the world, is around 0.59% for the massive sulphide ore body, the largest in the world. The strip ratio is 1.7:1 at Escondida.
              BHP and Rio Tinto the major owners of Escondida have been high grading the mine for decades, the actual grade of ore they have been mining is around 0.9-1% copper. Of course using up the higher grade at present, means the average grade left declines.

              They, like everyone else leaves the lower grade stuff for later, which will take much more energy to bring the same quantity of copper to the market.

              No Nick, it’s not me that is the troll on the peakoilbarrel webpages, it is you who keep dreaming of a bright green future, or nuclear future all based on zero evidence that any of it is possible. All with no understanding the carnage that will happen to our civilization when oil extraction goes into an exponential decline. Mines like Escondida will be abandoned when we don’t have the oil available to extract the copper. The remaining oil will be needed just to try and feed the world’s population during the massive decline as those in charge prioritise trying to keep the masses at bay, instead of bright green lies..

              Drill baby drill is of no help to anyone, all it would do is make the collapse happen from a higher level, with a worse climate and ecosphere. If you want any part of modernity to have a chance of surviving then SOMETHING like Jack Alpert’s plan is the only way possible. It’s a plan that gets rejected as totally unacceptable by people like yourself that believe in fairytales..
              https://skil.org/position_papers_folder/PlanForUnwindingThePredicament.html

          2. Mother Nature is going to take care of the population problem for us as sure as sunrise tomorrow.

            And while some people seem to think the gazillion impoverished people in seriously over populated countries (which are virtually certain to suffer a crash and burn economic and environmental collapse considerably sooner than richer countries without population problems ) will somehow manage to emigrate to those richer more fortunate countries……. for the most part it just isn’t going to happen.

            Things are going to be tough and getting tougher even in places such as the USA and Canada……. and once the local people in such countries are seriously worried about their own old age and their children’s future, etc…… there will be politicians in office who are quite willing, no EAGER, to close national borders with Iron Curtain style fences……. with the only difference being the fences and guns are to keep people OUT rather than IN.

            And in another generation or so, assuming Old Man Business As Usual manages to stagger along that long…… we’re looking at peaking and even declining populations in the richer and better educated countries.

            The people of the so called third world aren’t going to play all that big a role over the rest of this decade…. unless by some miracle the world economy continues to grow rather than stagnate and shrink or collapse……. in which case, they’ll mostly just die miserably in place.

            And the people of the richer, more powerful countries will gladly go in and rob them of whatever mineral resources they may yet possess.

            “There are no rules in a knife fight.”

            In the past, the people in such places as Vietnam and Afghanistan were able to drive out powerful enemies such as the Americans and the Russians.

            But then…… then we Yankees and even the Russians were playing by rules….

            Later on, if it’s expedient to do so, and it’s do or die time for the invaders….. they’ll play by new rules….. expressed by such sayings as ” Kill’em all and let God sort’em out. ”

            And killing them all won’t be any problem at all, once the decision is made to do so.

            The world is going to be a far nastier and dirtier place than even the worst of the pessimists want to think about….

            But some of the survivors may manage to maintain something in the way of a modern industrial civilization.

            Maybe there will never be a sustainable industrial civilization…….

            But for the next century or two or three, there’s a strong possibility that between using up the last of our one time gifts of fossil fuels, easily mined metal ores, and declining population, etc, there will be industry, there will be electrical grids, working water and sewer systems, etc.

            The longer run is no more nor no less than an academic question….. and none of those of us who are debating it now will be around to see the end result.

            And Mother Nature is incapable of giving a damn, even if we wipe out ourselves and ninety nine percent of the current biosphere. She’s in no hurry, it’ll grow back, eventually, and besides…… there are likely millions of other planets scattered thru the universe with life on them anyway.
            The very idea that we may be the only living creatures in the universe is about as idiotic as Twain’s beetle sitting on the spire of the Eiffel Tower thinking the world was created solely for his benefit.

    3. WP:

      You might like to provide some numbers instead of just throwing numbers out of the air. It is not that difficult but you expect us to believe this claptrap without providing valid information. For instance you could use the BP Statisitcal review in which case you numbers would be TOO low. (2022 data)

      Coal 8.8 billion tonnes
      Oil 4.4 billion tonnes
      Gas 3.4 billion toe

      Citing these numbers and the saying unreliables can reduce that figure by 535 X is plain crass.

      I have repeatedly asked to the unreliables camp to come up with plausible pathways and calculations on how the future production of unreliables can be scaled up to the extent that they can power the economy, produce base chemicals using non-fossil fuel pathways, and finds methods of mining and purification of metals, and other CRM using renewables power.
      What process would be used to produce PV silicon wafers?
      How would high strength steel be produced without coal to make wind turbines?
      How would cement be produced at an affordable price?
      How would carbon fibre and epoxy resins be produced for wind turbines?

      Would you like me to continue. Too date no-one has come up with any answer. Just plain repitition of BS from the internet

      Hideaway , myself and other have been labelled as trolls. What crap. People like yourself don’t like the truth. Hopium is not a solution and all these crackpot ideas need to be challenged. I make no apologies for working in oil and petrochemicals. I know full well how totally dependent our societies have become on fossil fuels. I fully aware the party will end and I am doing my bit to try and find pathways. I have spent 45 years in this business and and I know that developing viable working alternatives is a major challenge. Too date there is not one base petrochemical that can be produced economically using renewable pathways. Same applies to metal extraction.

      The myth promulgated on POB that unreliables are cheap is simply untrue. Show me the proof that a major western economy can operate solely on unreliables is pure fantasy. Look at Germany and the UK. Billions poured into wind and PV and still most of the power is produced by gas. Result de-industrialisation and ever more dependency on China.

      1. It is unclear where the author got all the information from that led to the conclusion that non FF’s can save 535x of what we are currently using. Two links mentioned in the article: https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions and https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/mining-low-carbon-vs-fossil but that doesn’t tell me a whole lot aside from general direction – using more metals / materials.

        Obviously the notion what we can simply switch to renewables is fantasy – it would be a gradual transition with lots of other negative side effects ( I choose to not call them externalities) but what is the choice really? To not go down that avenue and simply keep burning FFs until they run out? To not even try to get off FFs?
        One thing that I find personally attractive is that once you make a (solar panel) it keeps producing after it’s embedded energy payback. And even if it didn’t, using those same inputs to make some consumer good has zero energy generation so which option is preferable?
        To me the choice is obvious hence my favorite somewhat rhetorical question of “is it better to use a certain quantity of resources to make a F-150 or a stack of solar panels?” The question to that answer in my mind is quite clear.

        Rgds
        WP

        1. WP … “It is unclear where the author got all the information from that led to the conclusion that non FF’s can save 535x of what we are currently using.”

          The 535 times is the 28M tonnes of ‘materials needed’ times 535 to get to 14.98B, close enough to the 15B claimed for fossil fuels use.
          The 28 million tonnes doesn’t even go close to the sniff test in being all the materials needed either. Just the concrete bases of all the wind turbines in Australia would go well past the 28 million tonnes mark.

          For the whole planet we would need in excess of 28 million tonnes of just copper per annum. Mining an average grade of just 0.4% (we are talking about the future), would need about 270 tonnes of ore. Even with a low strip ratio of 2:1 this would mean blasting, digging and removal of 540 tonnes of material to gain 1 tonne of copper, meaning total material moved of over 15B tonnes just to get access to the copper, let alone everything else.

          Going to this document from IEA shows mineral intensity needed for their scenarios.
          https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions

          Scroll down and the part on copper shows 2 methodologies where the mineral intensity relative to 2020 is mentioned for 2040. Copper is around 1.7- 2.7 times 2020 levels, or up to 54M tonnes per annum. How much material would we humans need to blast, dig, and move to gain access to this 54Mt? Just under 30B tonnes, or well in excess of double today, meaning much more energy used to do it. (assuming we can get access to all this copper at a 0.4% grade, it might be lower!!)

          What’s actually happening is that we are using lower EROEI fossil fuels to gain access to lower grade metal ores, that are often deeper and have a higher ore hardness index, meaning there is an exponential rise in the energy used to gain the same quantity of metals out of the ground, let alone keep increasing the rate of metal extraction.

          The newer mines are on average in more remote locations, meaning higher cost to get equipment to these locations, which is why they were left until last to mine, as they are more expensive, due to higher energy costs. Because they are in remote locations, they totally rely upon fossil fuels, diesel in particular for every aspect of their existence.

          The scale of mining needed for the bright green future many people believe in, all of much lower ore grades, increasingly in remote locations, with an exponential rise in the energy needed to do it, all before considering the massive negative effect on the natural environment in these areas, appears to be a blind spot in the thinking.

          It’s also not a one off event. At the same time we need to feed a growing population using industrial agricultural methods that also use vast quantities of fossil fuels, all in a world where the very use of fossil fuels is causing massive disruption to the climate which is only going to get a lot worse.

          Up thread Nick G accuses me of being drill baby drill, whereas it’s those promoting the bright green future that are in favor of drill baby drill, they just don’t realise it’s what they are promoting, as they have no idea about mining.

          I’m in favor, because it’s what the numbers show what we must do, of powering DOWN, less building of everything. We needed massive population control decades ago, we need to rewild a lot of agricultural land, to have an environment we humans are able to live in. We have ignored all the warnings for decades, or centuries if we go back as far as Malthus. We have a belief that technology will save everything, totally blind to the reality it was cheap easy to access energy in the form of fossil fuels that built our modern civilization. Fossil fuels are leaving us, we have mined all the easy to get high quality resources, leaving much lower EROEI resources. Using more energy to gain energy to build renewables is a fool’s errand, making the situation much worse, distracting people from the real problem of massive overshoot.

          1. Hideway-
            Thanks for the elaborate and well thought out reply.
            What would happen though in the theoretical case where all energy required to extract / process the various metals and minerals were provided by renewables? In that case the limiting factor would be time, no?

            I think that there may be several other factors though. As of right now the US constitutes about 4ish% of the population yet consumes more than 20% of all energy. So although the total population on earth is likely to increase as long as the poor stay poor it effectively is not an issue ( aside for the total environmental disaster this would create, but that is primarily locally so what do people in Seattle WA care about what is going on in some country in Africa. In reality not much – just change channels / web pages if the news is too unpleasant. The chance of the ROW having a western lifestyle is effectively zero, and that, combined with readily available information about life and lifestyles across the world can easily fuel widespread anger. Watching the Kardashians as your own kids are illiterate and malnourished does not make for a good combo and that tension will manifest itself at some point, in some way.

            I don’t we’ll ever get there because I think that the probability of a mass casualty event is reasonably large – developed countries won’t scale down consumption voluntarily although perhaps Japan is an exception to this, but perhaps the forced disarmament after WWII has something to do with that. Hard to invade other countries if you don’t have the means. The rapid population decline in China is clashing with its ambitions. The male/female imbalance can quickly be fixed by sending the excess young men to war and have them not come back.

            All that aside, China doesn’t have the blue water navy to go and grab resources overseas but Russia is right next door and is rapidly depleting its stock or working age men in Ukraine creating a window of opportunity. Hard to see the west spending too many resources defending Russia against China.
            So I think that there are many different pathways in which this resource puzzle can all play out but any specifics are anyone’s guess.

            Rgds
            WP

            1. WEEKENDPEAK … “What would happen though in the theoretical case where all energy required to extract / process the various metals and minerals were provided by renewables?”

              Going back a few years I was one of the largest shareholders in a company that owned the rights to the West Musgrave mineral deposit, one of the last known major undeveloped Nickel/Copper deposits in Western Australia. Around the time I was a believer in the green renewable future. As a large shareholder I had access to all the information I could possibly want about the deposit plus all the local wind and solar characteristics of the area from the companies own weather station.

              The area of the mine is extremely remote, more than 1,600km from the nearest grid, with only dirt/gravel roads for hundreds of kilometers. It’s very much desert out there, which is precisely why it hasn’t been developed yet.

              Try as much as I could, The cost of renewables with the appropriate backup batteries for power, didn’t come close to being economic. You need all the diesel generators no matter how much solar and wind. In fact the current plan (PFS) for the mine is for solar power to operate as much as possible so that the diesel generators use less fuel, but trying to replace the diesel generators with just renewables and batteries makes the mine nowhere near economic.

              Without diesel generators, it’s just not economically possible, as these mines run 24/7 all year round. You can’t have expensive fly in fly out staff sitting idle being paid big money, which is an important consideration, just because the wind is not blowing and sun not shining.
              At the time solar and wind were being touted as comparable to coal in costs, yet no allowance is ever considered for the intermittency factor. Overcoming the intermittency is the huge cost. I even halved the renewables and battery costs to allow for future price reductions and still couldn’t make the numbers go close to working for the whole mine.

              Fully electric dump trucks working off a catenary system doesn’t work on a mine site, as the trucks are changing where they will be going all the time. If it’s waste rock, it goes to location A, until that location gets filled, then the next area is used for waste and so on. If it’s ore it can go to the stockpiles, but it depends on exactly the grade of that truckload of ore, for which stockpile the load goes to.
              An ore body is not just one big homogenous body, there are seams of lower and higher grade all over the place. What is mined gets placed into the appropriate grade stockpile, then when the processing happens it is a consistent mix of these different grades, so that the chemical mix of xanthates (floatation chemicals) is appropriate for the exact grade of ore being processed, so maximum recovery for cheapest cost can happen.

              If you notice any mine that has some catenary wires for electric trucks, it is the main route up out of the pit only, not beyond. These trucks then switch to diesel for most of trip to wherever, once out of the pit. It saves on fuel if there is a cheap power supply. They are always diesel electric trucks, not ever fully electric dump trucks.
              Even with the West Musgrave mine, I was only considering the processing plant, but the numbers just don’t work once batteries are included.

              It should be easier than the grid as remote mines use diesel power for everything, which is much more expensive than coal and gas fired power, plus the cost of getting diesel to the remote site greatly increases it’s cost, yet the upfront capital cost of a lot of solar, wind and batteries can more than double the overall capital cost of the entire mine, turning something with a cap cost of a few hundred million into over a billion dollars, just for the processing plant’s electricity requirements. The cost of money then comes into the equation.

              Solar on remote mines is used to save a bit of diesel, especially when the government throws in some incentives to do so, plus it looks good for the ESG requirements. However it adds complexity to the operation of the whole system with the diesel generators still running while solar or wind are providing power, in case the output suddenly drops because of clouds etc. A 22Mw ball mill running on suddenly lower power is likely to cause massive heating and damage to expensive equipment, so instant back up power is needed.
              My suspicion is most mine managers would prefer to operate without the token solar or wind input that head office demands these days, because of the extra complexity added by another set of machines and connections.

              Most people do not have a clue how a mine operates (as in Nick G’s comment up thread), because they have never been to one, nor studied the detail of the operation, so claim with a wave of the hand how easy it is done with renewables, even though there are precisely zero examples of mines running fully off renewables with batteries.

              The people running and paying for mining operations are not stupid. If the operation was in any way cheaper to run from renewables and batteries then they would all be doing it.

            2. “The International Energy Agency and Rystad forecast that [global] fossil fuel use in electricity generation will decline this year in absolute terms. From there it is a one-way street.”

              Non-essential uses of fossil fuel can and should be rapidly snuffed out, with the essential or harder to replace uses to be prioritized (such as some of the mining operations that Hideaway described). This effort not to allow for perpetual growth and business as usual, rather to allow some semblence of smooth economic function as the world begins its long decline toward 1 billion.

              What are these non-essential uses of fossil fuel? A quick and easy starter list includes all aircraft travel (perhaps with some exception for some non-luxury cargos) and all light transport on land. A large, punitive level, and progressive carbon tax applied to these particular sectors would be a feasible way to rapidly phase in these changes.

              By 20 years, most of this change can be instituted. And not long after that the population will be at peak, for a variety of reasons.

              Its all going to be messy as hell, regardless of choices made. Don’t be surprised to see a large portion of the worlds countries to be deep in, or flirting with, failed state status.
              I hope you have had the fortune to have had a sense of prosperity and civil stability in your life. That is a rare and precious thing.

          2. Hideaway

            Well said

            “We have a belief that technology will save everything, totally blind to the reality it was cheap easy to access energy in the form of fossil fuels that built our modern civilization. Fossil fuels are leaving us, we have mined all the easy to get high quality resources, leaving much lower EROEI resources. Using more energy to gain energy to build renewables is a fool’s errand, making the situation much worse, distracting people from the real problem of massive overshoot.”

            Technology requires cheap energy and it will disappear first. Last in first out principle. Already smart phone sales are declining and used phones are 21% of the market. They’re becoming too expensive. The supply lines for high technology are very long and very fragile. Semiconductor manufacturing is a massive investment and a massive energy sink all of that needs to be addressed in any energy transition calculations. And to add insult to injury you must have 24/7 power none of it can be intermittent.

            The entire history of industrial development is simply chasing low cost energy inputs. This includes labor. And guess what we did it!!!! Yes we have moved every industrial process to the most efficient locations globally and scaled it up to its most efficient level of production and shipped it all over the world. It’s kind of like playing Monopoly but everyone forgets that when someone wins the game the game is actually over.

        2. Weekendpeak, the answer to this question is not as simple as it seems…
          “To me the choice is obvious hence my favorite somewhat rhetorical question of “is it better to use a certain quantity of resources to make a F-150 or a stack of solar panels?” The question to that answer in my mind is quite clear.”

          The 2 ‘builds’ have different resource and energy requirements to build, so it’s not a matter of one or the other.
          Let’s say your answer is build the solar panels. How good is that choice if there is no copper wire? Likewise for the F150, how good is that choice if there’s no fuel or roads?

          Everything we build relies upon the rest of the system of modern civilization to operate normally so whatever is built is useful.

          What happens if you have your solar panels and find wire after the collapse, but there are no inverters to change the electricity into a form useful for whatever equipment you have to run off electricity?

          My answer would be to build neither, save a little of the fossil fuels you would burn to make either, and hopefully the ecosphere is just a tiny little bit better off.

          As far as humanity as a whole goes, the most likely scenario is we will burn the fossil fuels to make more of both, but in the long term it wont matter one iota which one was made, as neither will be of any value to anyone in 100 years time.

          Humans wont do what’s necessary for the long term survival of some modernity, this being strong population control, like a lottery to have any children, power down to save whatever resources we still have as much as possible, while sending billions of people back to the country for a simple life based on as much self sufficiency as possible, while rewilding as much agricultural land as is possible while the population rapidly declines. (plus a whole lot of other drastic actions)

          Because humanity as a whole refuses to look at the massive overshoot predicament we are in, it will be pedal to the metal until it all falls apart, that’s where we are heading. It doesn’t matter what we build with the resources, the burning of fossil fuels to make ‘stuff’ using lower and lower grades of metals, is the predicament we have got ourselves into.

          Many decades ago it was a problem that with drastic action we could have solved, but instead we (collectively) chose to go flat out with as much industrialization as possible, until recently when the multitude of predicaments have raised their ugly heads as was always going to happen. Climate, resource depletion, ecosphere damage, massive reduction of insects and wild mammals, ocean fish devastation, pollution etc, take your pick which one has highest priority.

          Using resources to build either F150’s or solar panels means your stuck in the mindset that modern civilization will go on in some form or another so all the bits to make either ‘work’, are always available, which means more and more stuff.

          We, as in humanity, have been ‘building more’ for over 200 years, none of us can possibly understand a world of ‘less’, it’s beyond our capability of thinking as we, since we were children have always known the world of ‘more’, just like our parents and grandparents, just go to the shop and buy whatever to make the solar panels or F150 ‘work’. Try to think of when there is no ‘stuff to buy” to make either work, what is your choice then??

          1. I understand your reasoning, but I think that it is human nature to improve. And (hopefully) eventually the collective coin will drop that we should be serious about getting off FFs and take serious action in that direction. It just seems to go again the very essence of human nature to give up and just do a BAU-lite version until we all starve. So IMO the better option is to go for the proverbial pallet of solar panels vs F-150. Key is the political will to make that happen and as long as politicians are priced so cheaply it’s hard to envision any kind of serious, material change in that aspect.
            Rgds
            WP

            1. We’ve know about the damage being done to the climate by fossil fuels for over 30 years, yet our collective response has been to build what we deem to be an alternative, but still gives us modernity. All the building of renewables and nuclear has done is increase fossil fuel use over the last 20 years. The numbers don’t lie, fossil fuel use has increased by 10 times the energy added by renewables, with nuclear declining over that period. It’s around 37,000Twh added from fossil fuels while total solar and wind is only 3,410TWh in the same period.

              We outsourced the manufacture of renewables to mainly China, that gave them income to improve the lives of their citizens. It’s come at the cost of a massive increase in fossil fuel use. In mining Calvo, Mudd et al found that a 30% increase in copper production came with a 46% increase in energy use in the 10 year period between 2003 and 2013, right while China was expanding.

              For an individual buying a pallet of solar panels makes much more sense than an F150 truck, unless you need the truck to take produce to a market, so you can pay the taxes on your property. If you can’t pay your taxes you lose the property, so the solar panels on the roof don’t assist you in that situation.

              I keep mentioning that it is an entire system we are in, and taking any one minor part as being a ‘good’ aspect or something else as ‘bad’, is ignoring the overall situation.

              We are in massive overshoot but most don’t want to realise it. We have only ever made modern lifestyles available to 15% of the human population, with the rest aspiring to what everyone capable of reading this blog has.

              We have killed of about 70% of all insects in the last 50 years and they are currently declining at a rate of around 2%/yr. If we don’t stop doing this it’s entirely possible we wont have any food supply for reasons we don’t understand about the positive effects an insect population has on plants (not just pollination). Or perhaps it’s some tipping point in climate that suddenly changes and makes agriculture impossible, we just don’t know.

              What we do know is that we can’t keep using fertilizers at the current rate, let alone the 50% increase the IEA or World Bank or whoever states we need to increase food supply by in the next 26 years. We will eventually run out of cheap to access gas, we will run out of enough fuel for tractors and heavy transport vehicles. We will run out of enough fuel to keep the mining at even current rates as ore grades fall.

              Humans are smart enough to realise that infinite growth on a finite planet is just not possible indefinitely, but dumb enough to believe in fairytales of happy endings no matter what we do.

              Every human civilization throughout history has collapsed because of some resource constraint in the past, so why is it so hard to believe that our current civilization, magnitudes larger than any previous one, encompassing the entire world, with massive resource requirements that we are reaching the limits of; (the combination of lower EROEI fossil fuels and lower grade ores, not either alone), yet put our collective heads in the sand that life can go on as normal, by vastly increasing mining to change from fossil fuel use to renewables and batteries.

              You should look up a whole range of Professor Bill Rees work. He is one of the few that really get the overall situation.
              This one from 7 years ago when he still had a bit of hope, it’s short 9.5 minutes.
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Hg-E_-qPo

              Then this one from more recently, longer, more detail and his overall focus has changed, there was much more ‘climate change’ 7 years ago, now he’s realised how it’s attracted all the attention, but is only one symptom..
              https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hc-AsQkunHQ&t=1072s

      2. Carnot,

        If you don’t want to be regarded as a troll, then, please try to avoid troll tactics. These include not presenting legitimate best case arguments from the “other side” (and instead presenting “Straw men” and false dilemmas) and throwing out lots of points that appear to be an attempt to overwhelm any debating partner (Gish gallop).

        Ask yourself: are here to just make trouble and start arguments? Or do you really want answers to your questions? A better style would include doing your own research on ideas that you disagree with, rather than just challenging people.

        So, let’s address one single foundational point: I believe you’ve stated disagreement with the idea that climate change due to fossil fuels is a serious risk that should be addressed urgently. If so, have you changed your mind?

        1. Nick G

          You are the troll. Maybe a Mann troll. You are the Gish Gallop man because you cannot substantiate any of your claims, and repeat BS that you have copied and pasted from others. I will ignore you pathetic loaded question for what it is.

          Maybe you should do some homework on carbon dioxide but I guess that is beyond your comprehension because you have a polemic belief in climate change. Perhaps you might like to enlighten me, in your own words, the mechanism of carbon dioxide warming with a proof, which will be a first in your case.

          I am more than happy to debate, but calling me a troll is THE lowest form of debating and only demonstrates your total ignorance. of the subject matter Typical of certain climate change followers ( sheep)

          I provide information based on years of experience which is more than I can say of your rhetoric. Step ut to the plate with facts, not dodgy opinions.

          What are your qualifications, if you have any? Before you ask I am a petroleum chemist.

          1. Sigh. Well, if you’d like a bit more on my perspective please read my last response to hideaway above on the state of the world’s consensus on climate change and net-zero. Beyond that, it’s clear that talking to you is unproductive. I’ll go back to turning off your comments. I’d ask you to stop clogging POB, but that seems unlikely.

            1. Nick G

              Do as you please, and I will do likewise. All your replies lack any detail, just your opinion, based on your internet searches. Hideway at least has provided incredible detail on his mining project which you simply dismiss as BS.

              You are unable to accept the truth, and if someone writes a piece you do not like you call them a troll. Good science depends on proper debate, and clearly you do not like debate.

            2. “Good science depends on proper debate”

              In science, a proper debate is actually no debate. In historical terms, all issues have been resolved by presenting through the peer-reviewed literature, or through demonstration, via inventions, etc. Never have I have heard of an actual debate being cited to judge a scientific outcome, such as in a criminal case. Scopes monkey trial?

          2. Carnot,
            Yeah, you do sound like a troll.

            The physics behind climate change didn’t pop out of the air last Tuesday – there’s a long trail of relevant science going back to the early 1800s. By the mid-1950s, the physics was robust enough to persuade the geophysicists at the oil majors. And the science has only become stronger since.

            You could check with ExxonMobil, but I think you already know it, and you’re just saying things hoping to provoke a response.

            And yeah, that’s what a troll does.

            1. Fluid dynamics is a tough nut to crack, and that’s what controls all the natural variability in climate. Massive computer simulations are used as a smokescreen to hide the fact that no one can figure out something as important as El Nino.

              In context, this is what I submitted to a RealClimate discussion this morning:

              The concept of “forcing” as applied to immature scientific disciplines such as climate science is one of my pet peeves. There are essentially 2 classes of responses to a stimulus as described by mathematical physics — a natural response and a forced response. IMO, too may scientists are infatuated with the natural response even though that is rarely observed in isolation, as most observed responses are a mix of primarily a forced response that is filtered by the natural response. Sometimes the natural response is barely detectable, as in pushing a baby stroller where it just moves as you push it. In climate science, the main forced response is in the daily response to the sun rising and setting and in the seasonal cycle. The natural response to these two is primarily described as a lag or delay until the forced energy of sunlight kicks in. Of course one can consider a GHG such as CO2 as a “forcing” but it is dwarfed by the strong forcing of the daily and seasonal cycles; it should be better considered as a forcing modifier or forcing feedback term.

              The observation of the response to a stimulus such as Hunga Tonga volcano provides an excellent but rare chance to watch the evolution of a natural response almost in isolation. In science and engineering, natural responses are always best characterized by measuring the response to an impulse, such as with a volcanic eruption. I predict that in a few years time, the H-T event will provide some dividends in increasing our understanding of the roles of water vapor and aerosols in the stratosphere.

              More problematic, and this is where my pet peeve comes in, is in reference to climate variations. Anytime a climate science mentions chaos or the Lorenz butterfly effect, it is almost always in the context of a natural response, and nothing to do with a forced response. In fact, many times a predicted chaotic natural response will be easily made deterministic by the application of a synchronized forcing. Think about it — the seasonal forcing will always override any extended chaotic tendency. That’s not to say that the forced response of a non-linear solution of fluid dynamics is necessarily straightforward. Just that the majority of the studies of natural chaotic responses published in the climate science literature are useless taken in isolation — i.e. without the proper forcing terms applied.

              The forcing, including daily, seasonal, and GOD forbid tidal, is the heartbeat and metronome in what will keep all the erratic climate cycles such as ENSO in check. Yet, no one in climate science is actually really looking at this aspect.

              The ChatGPT4 response to what I wrote above: https://chat.openai.com/share/bf0a810a-6bea-40d4-829e-6936a3f4de20

        2. Nick,

          “….climate change due to fossil fuels is a serious risk that should be addressed urgently. “

          You are writing this for more than 15 years, since TOD.
          Yet Hideway, and some others that you call trolls, are right imho. They connect dots, all the dots.
          FF use is rising, along with solar, windturbines, etc.
          In quite a few Asían and African countries (also the) middle class is booming. They don’t, f.e., travel, on solar and windenergy.
          In a developped country like the Netherlands the electric grid is not ready for an increase in use of electricity. Many companies are waiting to get connected. Then the millions of EV that are expected to hit the road in about ten years, that in a country with only 18 million inhabitants.
          Climate change and poverty will increase migration.
          Desperation will lead to hate. Already happening. Ain’t seen nothing yet.
          In the UK 1 in 3 have in their saving account £ 1000 or less. Also a developped country. Many people more probably trying to buy a second hand EV than a new one.
          And yes, of course a rather rapid transition away from FF need massive amounts of FF.
          How much FF are wasted now on stupid wars ? How much failed states there are now ? How many more countries are going to waste whatever it takes to go to the moon ? It’s insane. Turkey is next.
          A rapid transition won’t be a smooth transition, that some might think.
          And last but not least: shortage of water will cause wars earlier, on average, than shortage of energy.

          1. HN,

            I have been beating on about water( and P&K) for some time. I completely agree with your comment. Fresh water, that is suitable for drinking ,is in short supply in many continents

            Now we will have experts saying that water can be desalinated. Yes is can but it is very energy intensive and if RO is used it needs and expensive membrane made from petrochemicals.

            Most large scale sea water desalination plants use multi stage flash evaporation, integrated into a power plant. It will be interesting to see if KSA seeks alternatives to its sea water distillation plants.

          2. Han,

            I like honest debate. I like analysis, and sharing of information.

            But I’m finding that arguing with someone who is only interested in finding ways of protecting their industry is pointless. They make stuff up. They change the subject. They Gish gallop. They ignore sensible comments and repeat themselves endlessly. They waste everyone’s time.

            Have you ever tried to argue with a flat earther, or a creationist? FF industry defenders are similar.

            They’ll deny climate change if that works. of course, even Exxon has abandoned that particular talking point.

            And they’ll deny that renewables are economic.(they obviously are)

            When that stops working they will deny that they’re low carbon.

            Well, that’s obviously absurd. So they’ll argue that there aren’t sufficient resources to build renewables. (There are)

            Then they will argue that renewables aren’t growing fast enough. (True, but not really relevant: it’s a political problem).

            Then they will argue that fossil fuels are necessary to build renewables. (They aren’t, except in the very short term)

            Then they’ll argue that climate change isn’t the most important environmental problem (it is).

            Then they’ll argue that we’re all doomed, so what’s the point in worrying about it anyway?

            And on and on it goes. Arguments repeat endlessly because there’s no desire for resolution, just obstruction.

    4. “A clean energy economy just requires much less energy than a fossil fuel economy. ”
      Amen!
      We’ll be running on renewables using from half to a quarter of our current energy consumption simply because there will be only a quarter to half as many of us. We’ll be using only a half to a quarter as much energy per capita as well.

      And if I’m in the ball park, in terms of believing that once the shit is in the fan, there will be a MANAGED economic contraction, in many respects. Large personal vehicles will be taxed out of existence, non essential air travel likely ditto, construction of any new infrastructure not actually needed to keep the wheels going around won’t be permitted…… so no new athletic stadiums, etc.

      People will not only double and triple up to save money, as a matter of necessity; in some places they’ll be forced to do so. Refugee camps will be common place. Farmers still working will be provided with enough in puts to do their work, but told to produce more calories and protein by way of raising beans and potatoes, etc, rather than beef.

      Money currently being spent for various purposes ranging from museums and urban renewal to preservation of wild spaces and parks will be diverted to paying for upgrading the energy efficiency of homes and other buildings.

      So long as some cars are still running, you won’t have to call UBER. Some of your neighbors will be running entirely informal cab services, taking three or four of you to work or to the store for groceries…. stopping for groceries on the way home, maybe. You’ll be happy to pay for his gasoline or electricity.

      Everybody who can afford one will learn to be satisfied with a micro mini electric car that will go forty or fifty miles on a charge….. and people who have one, once new ones are no longer available, will be able to trade or sell them for four or five times their value when new…… to somebody who has his own solar panels.

      The overall population is as likely as not to crash dramatically on a regional basis a damned sight sooner than any reputable demographer, or any demographer at all, so far as I know, well before 2050 or later, when it’s predicted to peak.

      The global climate doesn’t have to go nuts to wipe out people by the tens and hundreds of millions in various regions if local food production fails. I’m not all that well informed about the specifics of climate in various parts of the world, but there seems to be quite a few professionals who think it’s going to get so bad in a lot of places that crop failures on the grand scale are likely to be the norm rather than the exception over the next few decades. There isn’t likely to be nearly enough food available, or money to pay for it, etc, to save such people.

      Bottom line, if we can get thru the next fifty years or so, we won’t likely need energy for more than half our current population, and maybe even one fourth of it, assuming we manage to avoid a crash and burn scenario.

      And we’ll be able to get by just fine, using one fourth or less energy per capita, assuming a managed contraction, while still having electricity, water and sewer, etc.

      And while it is obvious that manufacturing solar panels requires chip fab plants, etc…. consider the fact that in the forties and fifties last century, we had an industrial economy running on machinery with just about zero electronic components, and we were pretty well off in terms of the essentials, food, shelter, water, etc.

      We can revert back to that level of industrial technology, if we have to, given time. We’ll have enough rare earth metals, etc, and enough oil and gas, to support the essential industrial production of solar panels, wind turbines, etc.

      And somehow or another, we’ll manage to pay for them…….. because we either pay or revert all the way back to a pre industrial economy, if any of us survive.

  10. The non-petroleum threads just get better with a wide range of intelligent discussions about the future. There’s one thing that’s not been mentioned yet and that’s the very human response of panic. Panic will destroy the value of money; panic will destroy trade, both locally and worldwide; panic will destroy the distribution of food; panic will destroy employment; panic will destroy manufacturing.

    Survivors post collapse, if there are any, will be in small communities.

    1. Senegal is interesting at the moment. It has a bit of offshore oil discovery, not as much as was hoped for, but there is social unrest that may frighten of the IOCs from looking for more or risking long term investment in marginal or complex developments.

    2. WG

      No-one is really able to predict a definitive pathway of any collapse, but I firmly agree with you that panic will have a major influence on the overall process.

      Panic will trigger a number of effects:
      Mass migration which will result in borders being closed (wishful thinking)
      Hoarding of raw materials and foodstuffs
      Civil disobedience and lawlessness
      Monetary collapse.
      – and that is just a few.
      I am not even sure that gold will have any value in the longer term.

      1. Come on now.

        Do you really think closed borders are “wishful thinking”?

        I do recognize that such is a real possibility, assuming people in one country are trying to emigrate to another, more fortunate country, en masse…… but this assumes the more fortunate country, and the people thereof, are so disorganized, and in such dire straights themselves, that they won’t be able to close their borders.

        Maybe I’m wrong, but closing borders isn’t much of problem at all…. not if you go about doing it the easy way….. by simply shooting people wholesale. I don’t see a country worth emigrating to being unable to defend its borders…… once the chips are all on the table.

        In any case, if it ever comes to the point that we have uncontrolled mass immigration on our Yankee southern border,half the people I know personally won’t hesitate to kill any immigrants who show up locally……. once they’re reasonably sure there’s near zero likelihood they’ll be arrested for doing so..

        And if there’s still law enforcement….. there won’t be any such mass of immigrants into my country……. nor any other once the local people have had ENOUGH.

        ( Now as a personal matter, I wouldn’t mind having a couple or three well behaved immigrants come live with me in such a situation……. in exchange for making sure they would have a decent home, plenty to eat, etc, and maybe even a modest wage. I’m too old to do much hand work anymore, lol.

  11. We had a storm go through yesterday that greatly affected the states power supply. This is the damage that was done to a couple of transmission lines.
    https://live-production.wcms.abc-cdn.net.au/c4e04c709eff5c8bf5907057e35b8e4e?impolicy=wcms_crop_resize&cropH=2617&cropW=4653&xPos=0&yPos=208&width=862&height=485

    They will be repaired/replaced by diesel driven trucks and cranes, made with steel made from coking coal in China, from Iron ore transported to China in bulk ore carriers run on bunker fuel, then after the steel is made brought back to Australia in ships using bunker fuel, but no-one bothers to consider all that with our ‘renewable’ future…

    In the attempt to have a lot more renewables, the ‘authority’ in charge of the transmission lines wants to build a lot more of these transmission lines and towers all over the place, despite the knowledge that climate change is going to make the storms stronger.

    It’s too expensive to go underground according to Ausnet, so more transmission lines and towers it is, trampling upon the rights of those that own the land underneath these new lines.

    Do you think they could be bothered to make the transmission more robust to withstand much higher level storms?? Nope, that would also be too expensive, so we will just build more of the same and expect everything to be alright, or perhaps just go wrong after those currently in charge retire and it’s someone else’s problem..

    So despite the current world average temperature being around 1.5 degrees above pre industrial times, (or is that 1960-1990 levels?) already, and obviously going higher with the increasing CO2 and methane levels still rising, we are only prepared to build assuming we keep the temperature below the 1.5 degrees..
    It’s the stupidity and hubris of humanity that will bring our downfall, denying bad outcomes, believing in fairytales….

    1. What I can’t believe are some people seemed shocked (pun not intended) that power won’t be restored tomorrow. But when I looked for a photo to post, a even bigger lesson was that behind the twisted transmission tower the trees looked they had survived fine (ok I know wind damage is really random, but still, hopefully its representative of nature’s resilience after modernity’s collapse).

  12. Her studies have become controversial over the years because Zharkova has shown that the current climate changes is caused by the orbital motion of the Sun and variations of the solar activity not being related carbon dioxide variations. Zharkova emphasized that the global warming will become irrelevant in the next three decades during the modern grand solar minimum (GSM), which started in 2020 and will last until 2053, This GSM will cause a decrease of the average terrestrial temperature by up to 1oC in the next 30 years and not its increase as warned by the IPCC people.

    Here’s a recent interview:
    https://itsrainmakingtime.ch/the-elephant-in-the-climate-change-space/

    Zharkova still believes in this GSM.
    But it looks to me the the current cycle 25 is surpassing 24. But data from nasa/noaa predict very low solar activity in cycle 26.

  13. Not good.

    AMAZON RAINFOREST AT A CRITICAL THRESHOLD

    “The Southeastern Amazon has already shifted from a carbon sink to a source—meaning that the current amount of human pressure is too high for the region to maintain its status as a rainforest over the long term. But the problem doesn’t stop there. Since rainforests enrich the air with a lot of moisture which forms the basis of precipitation in the west and south of the continent, losing forest in one place can lead to losing forest in another in a self-propelling feedback loop or simply ‘tipping,'”

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-amazon-rainforest-critical-threshold-loss.html

  14. Hideaway on copper:
    >> Or is it more likely the copper grade currently around 0.5% on average will continue to get lower?? 0.5% means around 220 tonnes of ore are needed to be mined and processed for 1 tonne of copper (recovery is often around 90% for low grades, 92-93% for high grades, plus there is dilution of ore mined by the diggers including waste in nearly every bucket of thinner seams of ore), plus of course all the overburden waste mined just to gain access to the ore bodies of open cut mines, that has to be blasted then removed by diesel powered dump trucks.
    <<

    JN on copper:
    – price today $3.72
    – price 10 years ago $3.34

    1. JOHN —

      All good points. Per the source below I see that for copper only mines, the average ore grade has decreased roughly by 25% in just ten years. Also, in that same period, the total energy consumption has increased at a higher rate than production (46% energy increase over 30% production increase).

      https://www.axios.com/2024/01/22/climate-change-co2-paris-target

      Also,
      EARLY STAGE COPPER PROJECTS HAVE GRADES ONE-THIRD BELOW OPERATING MINES

      The next generation of copper mines will not only have less copper but sharply declining grades, according to a study by Mining Intelligence. Operating mines currently have an average grade of 0.53% while copper projects under development have an average grade of 0.39%.

      https://www.mining.com/copper-supply-deficit-worse-think/

      1. Doug/ John

        At last. Common sense prevails.

        Remember the Best -First principle.

        The easiest resource is the richest resource and the first produced. This applies to oil and minerals. Now we are into resources of declining quality and ever increasing energy inputs- DECLINING EROEI – stab me vitals.

        1. Another aspect is that so called world reserves of copper by groups like the USGS are often highly inflated. For instance about 66% of Australia’s copper reserves, simply don’t exist. The USGS included all the lower grade resources from the Olympic Dam mine as reserves, when they will never be economical to mine.

          OD has over 10B tonnes of copper ore at an average grade of 0.57%, all located between 350m to 1300m deep. What they are mining is the 810Mt of higher grade 1.55% ore with an underground mine. The mined grade has been close to 2% over recent years, but even with this high grading they have continuously lost money on the operation over the last 15 years.
          There is no way any of the low grade ore will ever be mined as it’s too energy expensive, and the USGS counting it as a ‘reserve’, is just a joke on humanity. It makes me wonder how much of the rest of the ‘reserves’ claimed for the world are similar junk..

          1. Interesting how there are no comments about these ‘official’ reserve numbers from any of the usual cornucopians.

            What it really means is that the amount of energy needed to extract the copper, there are billions of tonnes of very low grade copper, is way higher than most believe. We could probably use all the remaining fossil fuels just to mine copper, and still not have enough bring a modern lifestyle to all of humanity with renewables or nuclear.

            We don’t have the minerals nor the useable energy to continue with our current modern lifestyle of the golden billion, for much longer, let alone drag the rest of humanity up to our ‘standards’. (not that there is any real attempt to do so by the ‘west’)

            Because people refuse to acknowledge the reality of our predicament, the collective we will just continue ignoring reality until it all falls apart.

            1. Hideaway

              Good point. It only goes to show how little the experts know about metals. You forgot to mention the xanthates. I did a project on xanthates 46 years ago. How are the cornucopians going to produce copper ( and other metals ) in the future without xanthates, which are based upon petrochemicals.

              I guess they will be reaching for the Hopium.

  15. The last part of this has the author of last year’s paper THE BEHAVIOURAL CRISIS DRIVING ECOLOGICAL OVERSHOOT (which explained why just raising awareness of ecological issues hasn’t really had any effect, in fact may have been negative – read any thread here to see that nobody ever changes their attitude no matter what facts or opinions are presented). It is well worth a listen. Prof. Rees was a co-author of the paper, which was one of the widest read of last year.

    https://www.ecoshock.org/2024/02/cat-6-grid-down-the-behavior-crisis.html

    1. George, Dogs do what dogs do, cats do what cats do, fleas do what fleas do, and no-one expects any of these species to change their behavior. It’s pretty obvious humans behave in the same way, we do what humans have always done.
      Even in pre agricultural societies, we had mass extinctions of mega fauna around the world, human behavior in getting what’s needed for the present to survive and make their lives better in the present, with no thought of the future.

      Humans have a ‘belief’ system that has been advantageous to groups of early humans that is now working against us. The simple fact that all the fossil fuel use over the last 200 years has only dragged about 15% of humanity into a modern lifestyle, while we struggle to find more oil, the master fossil fuel, by itself means it’s not possible for all humanity, that aspires to a modern lifestyle all of us on this blog have, to get to our level of lifestyle.

      I know of no examples of hunter gatherer peoples that have come into contact with modern civilization, that have desired, en masse, to return to their original lifestyle, and wholistically decline all modernity. People everywhere like the comforts of the modern world, so will do whatever is necessary to keep it, including telling ourselves delusionary stories that we can have it all without fossil fuels, as if that was the only problem.

      In the pre agricultural world the 4-8 million humans were already having a devastating effect on the natural mega fauna of the world, probably meaning we were in overshoot back then, because of our large brain, collective co-operation and use of very basic tools, gave us a massive advantage. To think that with over 8 billion humans on the planet can have anything other than a catastrophic outcome, is naive at best.

      We have obtained our current lifestyle (for the few) and overall numbers by using every resource we could find use for, no matter the cost to the rest of the ecosphere, mostly without understanding changing the climate, biodiversity, and living environment would end badly for us. The attitude, even here on these pages of ‘peakoilbarrel’, of some, that everything will be fine if we just do lots more mining (as in destroying more natural environment, sending more species extinct, etc), and build different machines using the last easily obtained fossil fuels (ie keep burning more to save the planet), is in any way different to what we have been doing, just seems like self deception to me.

      I’ve mentioned Jack Alpert’s plan before and I’m sure there are similar types of plans by various people, which are dismissed by 99.999% of people as ridiculous, as believing in magical outcomes is far more credible. We’ve had religions for thousands of years, which clearly show how humans can ignore reality for their current convenience.

      People just don’t want to believe that massively controlling population and completely powering down is the only way to save a habitable world, and the more any facts are revealed about the future, the greater the pushback by those that want continued ‘growth’ (by green means of course), the exact reason we are in our predicament.

      Those that have called for restraint of growth and simple sustainable lifestyles have always been out competed throughout human history, because of our innate nature built over many thousands of generations. It’s precisely why we are headed to catastrophic collapse and will take most of the remaining biosphere with us in the rest of the sixth mass extinction.

      1. Nicely put. I also don’t know if all hunter gatherer societies have welcomed modern civilisation with open arms, it would be nice to think some tried not to. The hunter gatherers we see now have already been marginalised by a few centuries of exposure to encroachment by agricultural societies so aren’t fully representative of what they used to be. Most of the societies in the Americas (not really hunter gatherers though) weren’t very impressed when they first came across “civilisation” from Europe, but didn’t have much say in the matter because the various diseases bought across the Atlantic quickly wiped most of them out (the biggest genocide in history by some way).

        1. My understanding and reading of hunter gatherer interactions with modernity is that it’s the elders that are mostly reticent, but the younger ones get seduced by tobacco, alcohol, cars and the bright lights.

          Here in Australia, there is always the cry for more to be done for the indigenous people, in the way of health, jobs, land rights, etc, but none seem to be advocating for a return to their natural lifestyle pre white invasion of the country. Despite the massive genocide that happened here, because of diseases , shooting, etc, (ie same reasons as in the US), there are 3 times as many people that identify as indigenous now as existed when the first fleet arrived.

          Here’s an extract from the last group of indigenous people coming into the modern world here in Australia ….
          “McMahon did not want to put the group under any pressure to join the community, but he witnessed the moment they were persuaded. “It was unthinkable that they would stay out there because the modern world was so seductive. One of the fellows suggested, ‘Give them a taste of the sugar and they’ll be in for sure.'”

          Indeed, the taste of sugar had a big impact on the Pintupi Nine and it is this aspect of their story which now animates them most. “I tasted the sugar, we didn’t know what it was, but it was so sweet. I tasted the sugar and it tasted so sweet – like the Kulun Kulun flower. My mother tasted it and it was so sweet. It was good,” says Warlimpirrnga.”

          From …
          https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30500591

          My biggest fear for the ecosphere is that there will be nothing to hunt for any type of hunter gatherer society after modern civilization collapses. The process of collapse will see starving billions kill anything that moves for food, so maybe rats and rabbits will be all that’s left. Afterall somewhere between 4-8 million humans were able to kill off a lot mega fauna causing many extinctions in the 100,000 years before agriculture. Now there are over 8 billion people with guns and enough ammunition for many decades.

          1. The process of collapse will see starving billions kill anything that moves for food, so maybe rats and rabbits will be all that’s left.

            I disagree. There won’t be any rabbits left.

            1. I went to Hanoi about 20 years ago. Even the tiniest snails were collected and sold at the street-side markets.

            2. Ron —

              I remember working in Beijing and being invited out for a “special lunch” and halfway to the restaurant was told: “It’s great because they specialize in endangered species.” That’s when I decided humanity has no future.

            3. HICKORY —

              I remember working in northern Viet Nam many years ago and asking if there were any poisonous snakes I should worry about. My Vietnamese work mates just laughed and said: “Relax, we ate all the snakes a long time ago.”

            4. Hickory —
              I went to Hanoi about 20 years ago. Even the tiniest snails were collected and sold at the street-side markets.

              Snails are good food (if you know how to cook) and less wasteful than warm blooded animals.

              Meanwhile Vietnam is the second or third largest exporter of rice. Probably thanks to IRGC 58 and its ilk, which allow 3 harvests a year in tropical countries. Rice breeding is obviously a work in progress.

              https://gringlobal.irri.org/gringlobal/accessiondetail?id=58

              https://wtocenter.vn/chuyen-de/23499-vietnam-stands-a-chance-of-dominating-global-rice-market

            5. Alim…we were talking about how humans are harvesting all of the animals of the world, and/or claiming their habitat for our own monoculture harvest.
              At least that was the context of my comment.

            7. Nocturnal mammals will do ok against human predation. Coyotes will perhaps be the largest mammal alive on the planet by 2100. Cannibalism is easier than trapping coyotes.

  16. “A DAY LIKE NONE IN HISTORY – thousands [of all-time heat] records all over Asia and also from Spain all the way to South Africa.’

    They forgot to mention S.America. Perhaps the sentence was getting too long.
    This is just the beginning.
    This will be considered a nice cool year by those looking back at the past temperatures charts, in year 2032.

    1. HICKORY —

      I think my biggest regret is for all the plants and critters that have gone/will go extinct because of our reckless treatment of planet Earth.

  18. I love copper myself. It’s really great stuff, our best affordable conductor, easy to work, extremely corrosion resistant, etc.
    But I’ve worked with aluminum wiring, and I’m seeing a lot of aluminum used as a substitute for copper already.

    We could probably substitute aluminum for half or more of the copper we use today, if we were to have no choice.

    And the people who keep on insisting that we’ve got to have X amount to support a Y population in the future just don’t seem to get their head around their own arguments to the effect that the population IS going to crash. Y will very likely fall by a factor of three or four or and maybe even ten or more.

    Plus we can, if we manage well, simply do without large amounts of copper for some of today’s purposes.

    I’ve lived in a building with one washer and dryer for every thirty or forty people. We all ate in a kitchen that served hundreds… rather than having cooking appliances for each individual couple or family group. That cut copper consumption by probably ninety five percent for these particular uses for this group of people at that time.

    I also once lived in a grand old house that was cut up into four individual apartments. Illegal mother in law and garage apartments are quite common already in many cities….. and the authorities are reluctant to enforce the laws against the same…… for fear of creating even worse housing troubles.

    In times to come, once the old people living in big houses are gone, and nobody much has money enough to live in them by ones and twos with maybe one kid……. they’ll be cut up into duplex or triplex apartment buildings.

    Shared bathrooms and kitchens will be quite common.

    Somebody living in such a neighborhood will be cutting and styling hair…. with their customers walking or biking to them. They won’t have a business license nor a permit for their business address. But they’ll eat, and hair will get cut.

    Somebody else will be selling whole baked or bbq chickens….. no sales tax , no kitchen inspection. But they’ll be baking a dozen at a time in one big oven, rather than twelve customers heating up their own oven for one chicken.

    I’ve eaten such a chicken myself a time or two when I was living and or working in a so called slum community in Richmond Va not that many years ago.

    This was and still remains the way people in some places get their bread……. the kids run to the baker and bring it back still hot for breakfast. It’s cheaper that way than baking it for themselves, due to the price of fuel.

    People are adaptable. The hard core pessimists tend to forget adaptation.

    2. Also many of the poverty and energy waste problems in America could be solved by legalizing corner stores and sidewalk vending.

    3. We could probably substitute aluminum for half or more of the copper we use today, if we were to have no choice.

      Quite a bit more, really. For instance, electric motors can be built with aluminum windings instead of copper.

      Copper is more convenient in some cases: different density, different ductility, but it could be made to work in probably 90% of cases, if really needed.

      1. John Norris —

        Aluminum is cheaper than copper but you need more of it because it isn’t as good a conductor. Also it doesn’t bend as well.

  19. Here is just another example of how E.S.G. is collapsing

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-15/jpmorgan-asset-management-quits-68-trillion-climate-group?sref=6uww027M

    The reality is all the hopium around renewables was only affordable with 0% interest rates, and huge subsidies on top of that . This is where the rubber meets the road.

    Tim Watkins expresses it this way it’s what can and can be done. Yes Man can fly to the moon but he hasn’t done it for 50 years as a matter of fact, Man has not left low earth orbit meaning 60 miles for 50 years.. Is it because we don’t have the technology or the know how to get there? No it’s energy constraint, so what we used to be able to do we can’t do any longer.

    Hideaway and Carnot bring a pragmatic reality based approach to the energy issue which in a nutshell is we can meet all the green energy dreams as long as we have unlimited amounts of fossil fuels and minerals. Since that is precisely the problem why are we doing this? Combined with the fact that the climate cure is actually exacerbating the problem if we believe CO2 is the entire problem then who is ruining the planet F150 drivers of solar panel crazies.

    The crazies who are too simple to understand depletion or the consequences of it just go into emotional tantrums because anyone who says no is a troll. I know some 3 year olds who have a similar belief system.

    Are we really so stupid not to recognize that the biggest manufacturing economy in the world is also the biggest polluter? China’s coal consumption has nothing to do with its industrial output and that the two go hand in hand? Combined with smug western economy’s who are consuming all these products saying how bad China is as a polluter. Has anyone stop to consider that at its peak of power and economic development the UKs favorite city was nicknamed the big smoke. Why?

    It can easily be argued that capitalism provides no profit if its lifecycle costs were actually included. The entire function is to find a resource turn it into a revenue stream then walk away once it has been depleted. Leaving behind environmental carnage and impoverished communities that the government has to deal with which are your tax dollars. The UK is a poster child of run down post industrial waste land and as the first industrial economy is the future for the rest of the industrial economies.

    What can’t be done won’t be done. No amount of determination will change it.

    2. Well said. I would really like the cornucopian and green energy transition band wagon boys and girls to be right. I fear for my children. But i keep asking myself, “what do they think they know that the likes of Donella Meadows and her crew did not?” And the recent updates modeling LtG still conclude it will be resource depletion that kneecaps industrial civilization and forces collapse under the weight of overshoot. The denial of that is fascinating to watch. It is similar to climate change denial in reverse. No one talks about regressing to simpler, more efficient systems except OFM. collecting the shaft mechanical energy off a small waterwheel or windmill and using it directly to do work is sooo much more efficient than solar panels, inverters, large scale wind, electrical grids, and it is that scale that will define the future of energy use. And I can do it with the tools I have in my shop. IMHO.

      1. Tom … ” I would really like the cornucopian and green energy transition band wagon boys and girls to be right.”

        I think all of us ‘wish’ for the same. Going back a few years I use to be one of the cornucopians, until I couldn’t get the numbers to add up on a mining project, that was going to be using expensive diesel that had to be transported by truck over 1600km for their electrical needs. According to all the literature renewables were getting to be the ‘cheapest’ form of electricity.

        If that was even slightly true, then a solar and wind set up, with batteries covering the intermittency, in a windy desert with an average of over 7hrs/d sunshine, should easily be cheaper than diesel powered electricity. It wasn’t even close, if I halved the actual cost of the renewables (which were going to be much more expensive than my initial numbers anyway, because of the remoteness of the location). That’s when I decided to do the research myself, and I mean the full research, not just point to the first paper that comes along supporting whatever belief I had.

        One of my pet peeves is documents like Lazard’s reports on LCOE do not do any type of comparison with what we built our system with, in today’s dollars, in terms of cost compared with what we are trying to replace it with. For example they don’t consider a cheap and dirty coal power plant sitting next to the coal pit, without a ‘dollar’ coal cost.

        That’s the real comparison we need, not just the comparison between all future prices of different electricity producers, because without a comparison with the past it tells us nothing about the possibility of modernity for the 15% of humanity who currently enjoy it, continuing in any shape of form.

  20. Oops, not good.

    KAZAKHSTAN: METHANE MEGA-LEAK WENT ON FOR MONTHS

    One of the worst methane leaks ever recorded took place last year at a remote well in Kazakhstan, new analysis shared with BBC Verify has shown. It is estimated that 127,000 tonnes of the gas escaped when a blowout started a fire that raged for over six months. According to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Equivalency Calculator, the environmental impact of such a leak is comparable to that of driving more than 717,000 petrol cars for a year.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68166298

      1. I have long believed it would be methane that will be the trigger to sudden climate change as has happened in deeper history. Once we reach a point that starts that feedback loop going nothing we do will matter much.

        1. Isotopic analysis suggests the increase in methane is coming from wetlands, which could include permafrost melt, and emissions from oil and gas is pretty steady. With a growing inventory of aging wells and pipelines, and with the largest IOCs usually pulling out of the late life producers as soon as they can find a buyer, it is going to be difficult to find the political and investor will to address the issue. But at least it is possible to envision a solution. With permafrost melt and changing rainfall patterns impacting wetlands the issue isn’t even close to being understood and there is very little data collection going on that could help (in fact none now in Siberia, which might be the biggest factor).

  21. Anyone surprised?

    ANTARCTIC SEA ICE IN CRISIS

    “Any day now, scientists will learn whether this summer’s Antarctic sea-ice extent has beaten last year’s record summer low of 1.77 million square kilometres – 36% less than the long-term summer average. Will the declining trend seen since 2016 continue, or will there be a reprieve?”

    https://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2024/antarctic-sea-ice-in-crisis/

    1. Notice that the West is getting hotter while the Southeast is cooling down. It’s a result of the dehydration of the region brought about by poor land management.

      This is what much of the American West looked like before the beavers were wiped out. Slowing the flow of surface water rehydrates the landscape and raises the water table. It stops erosion and automatically stores carbon in the topsoil.

      Carbon stored in the soil mostly remains there in case of fire, because the fire only singes the surface. The vegetation is less prone to burning because the is better access to ground water. The widened streams are natural fire breaks.

      Reducing forest fires promotes natural processes that break wood down to soil. Termites play an important role in this process. The focus on wood as a resource undermines these processes and degrades the soil, making fire more likely and more damaging.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnO8JtJffAM&ab_channel=EmilyFairfax

  23. Depletion is an impossible thing to overcome and it’s baked in to the system. The existing infrastructure has depleting energy stocks that must be replaced by depleted mineral resources that require ever increasing energy inputs just to maintain the system. If you can’t grow your energy supply what happens? Kinda of a 101 issue no one can argue around it. Entropy wins ask your great great grandfather he’ll explain it to you. There is no steady state.

    1. JT
      Few people realize just how heavily humanity has leveraged it’s well being with non-renewable resources. A short time ago OFM said heritage seed stock is part of his emergency prep. Very prudent! Modern agriculture has developed cultivars optimized for an environment with a surfeit of fertilizer, and no competition from other plants ,(also known as weeds),insects or diseases. Consider rice and wheat, bred with short,stiff stems to bear the load of large seed heads. These seeds require maximum solar energy to mature, so ,in an environment bereft of artificial fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, the present strains will struggle to survive , and the few that do survive will not be able to raise their seed heads high enough to surmount the weeds.
      Back to heritage stock with perhaps half the yield potential .

      1. OC

        And that is just one of the insurmountable problems, facing in overly complex industrialized society. If you look at everything is embedded energy, the problem becomes much more focused.. every telephone pole every concrete roadway every asphalt road every steel constructed bridge every water pipe every sewer line every electrical wire are all in the process of decay. It has to be met with ever greater energy because the cost of renewal is higher than the cost of development.. If you live here in the United States where I do your benefiting from an industrialized development that happened 60 years ago almost 70 now. Much of what’s been built needs to be replaced. It’s at the end of it’s life cycle, but there is no possible way for that to be done..

        I personally believe that’s the reason why people are so fixed on climate change CO2 not because it isn’t a problem, but it’s a problem they think they can do something about. However, unfortunately, even the climate system is so complex we don’t know all the feedback loops that are being triggered who would’ve thought low sulfur, bunker fuel could lead to higher rates of global warming.. ants who would’ve thought that the massive increase in solar and wind would have no effect on reducing CO2 going into the atmosphere.

        When we look at the predicament from a much broader perspective, I think it’s foolish to dismiss a sudden collapse. in every way we have pushed the envelope beyond, what anyone thought we were capable of doing.

        The higher we climb, the harder we fall

        1. I do not grieve the lack of replacement of ageing infrastructure with identical or even grander projects- generally speaking, it would be a bad investment for the smaller population to come, with their much smaller energy budget. A few thoughtful exceptions probably exist, for example, of all the bridges over the Hudson River, replace one or two with bridges designed to last a few hundred years with minimal repair. It can be done, when I was working in Turkey, I drove over bridges built 2000 years ago. Two hundred years from now, it will not matter if the traffic over those bridges is horse-drawn wagons or fusion powered cars, they will probably still be valuable assets.
          I agree sudden collapse is possible ( nuclear war, deadly pandemic, etc.) but I think collapses will more probably be regional in nature, exacerbated by the declining ability of unaffected regions to provide assistance.
          I have no hope that humanity will respond in any other way than carpe diem behavior. The ride down will be very rough because the solution to the problem is a much smaller human population and individuals do not give up easily – just look at Gaza: how many tons of bombs? how many bullets? and the population of Palestinians ( as a whole, not just Gaza) has increased.
          OFM is right to be focusing on individual survival, in many cases the best strategy will still not be enough to survive, but on the path to a sustainable population, those who do not have a plan and live day-to-day will be early contributors to the solution to the problem.

    2. This reminds me of the death of Navalny. Why did Putin wait so long to kill him? He was waiting for the presidential elections to start. The message that the murder of Navalny brings is that there is no hope, resistance is futile.

      It’s the same message the doomer trolls here are so desperate to spread. Why?

      1. It’s the same message the doomer trolls here are so desperate to spread. Why?

        Alimbiquated, as a cornucopia troll, just why are you doing what you do?

        I was born into a world of 2.2 billion people. There are now over 8 billion people here, 3.64 times as many as at my birth in 1938. I have witnessed the raping and pillaging of our environment. If you think what is happening now can continue for another hundred years, then you must be super dumb.

        There is no doubt whatsoever that there will be a severe crash of the human population sometime in this century. It will be a terrible time to be alive. I know you really don’t want to hear that shit, so you people who tell you call us “doomer trolls.” Why? I think I know why. You, like other cornucopian, believe human ingenuity will figure a way out of this damn mess. You have to be fully aware that we are in the middle of the sixth great extinction and that our massive population is destroying the current ecosystem. But, apparently, in your mind, humans are all that matter.

        1. Well said Ron, I guess the UN is a “doomer agency” as well?

          UN REPORT: NATURE’S DANGEROUS DECLINE ‘UNPRECEDENTED’; SPECIES EXTINCTION RATES ‘ACCELERATING’

          “Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history – and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the summary of which was approved at the 7th session of the IPBES Plenary, meeting last week (29 April – 4 May) in Paris.”

          https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/nature-decline-unprecedented-report/

          1. Doug
            Being a doomer is not the same as publishing bad news. Being a doomer is publishing ONLY bad news.

            One of the key precepts of propaganda is that it can’t all be lies, otherwise nobody will believe it.

            But you knew that. You just don’t care.

        2. Yes Ron, you were born the year before the beginning of the over populated Europe World War 2. How many children and grand children do you have ? What did you learn from the greatest loss of life civilized humanity event has ever experienced ?

          You had the forsight to reject your fathers religious beliefs at a young age and spend your free time writing books about some theory on how the universe begins. You have taken jobs that are on the other side of the planet. You travel around the country with your home attached to your pick up truck.

          Yes Ron, you can pretend to know the future and care about the ecosystem. Talk is cheap. But, actions speak louder than words.

          You bought into cornucopia a long time ago and will enjoy the progress of humanity to the end of your life. Tell us when was the last time you ate meat, bought gasoline, turned a light on or used the internet ? Take, take, take. Denial runs deep.

          Alimbiquated has a better grip on reality than yourself. Dennis says almost everyday he can try to predict the future and the only guaranty is that he will be wrong.

          “doomer trolls here are so desperate to spread. Why?”

          It’s easy to be a quitter and complain. But, humanity has no choice other than to move forward. A doomer attitude isn’t even mentally healthy.

          1. Huntingtonbeach, I live in the world I was born into. Everyone does. It really burns my ass when sanctimonious people like you criticize people for driving cars, flying in planes or eating a hamburger. Just what the fuck do you expect us to do, live in a cave and eat roots and grass?

            Predicting the future? Hell no, I am talking about what’s happening right now. Did you read the article Doug linked to?:

            UN Report: Nature’s Dangerous Decline ‘Unprecedented’; Species Extinction Rates ‘Accelerating’

            Or how about this one: Wildlife in ‘catastrophic decline’ due to human destruction, scientists warn

            Wildlife populations have fallen by more than two-thirds in less than 50 years, according to a major report by the conservation group WWF.

            Only one species of megafauna does not face certain extinction in this century, Homo sapiens. Two out of every three are already gone, and the last one will be gone soon. Any goddamn fool can see that. It’s what’s happening right now. I am not trying to predict the future. All I am saying is what’s happening right now will continue to happen. The destruction of our environment is not getting better; it’s getting worse! And you want to blame me for it because I must live in the world I was born into. I am not blaming you, I am just telling you, and the rest of the cornucopians, what is happening. And damn! You just call me a doomer and tell me to live in a cave and eat roots and grass. Just where the fuck do you get off?

            2. “It really burns my ass when sanctimonious people like you criticize people for driving cars, flying in planes or eating a hamburger. Just what the fuck do you expect us to do, live in a cave and eat roots and grass?”

              Strawman- weak or imaginary opposition (such as an argument or adversary) set up only to be easily confuted. 2. : a person set up to serve as a cover for a usually questionable transaction.

              “I must live in the world I was born into”

              You were born into a world of your fathers religious beliefs. Yet you questioned them and changed. Overshoot is the underpinning issue here. You had a choice and followed the crowd of cornocopians. “apparently, in your mind, humans are all that matter.”

            3. Huntingtonbeach, the two links I posted above are what you and Alimbiquated would call “doomer porn.” They are nothing but news. News you do not like to hear. What is happening to the earth’s biosphere is very old news but still news.

              I am not making an argument; I am just reporting what is happening. If you don’t want to believe it, that is your problem. If you don’t want to believe the BBC when they report that two-thirds of the earth’s wildlife has already gone, that is your problem. But there is no argument there, just stating the facts.

              When I say “I must live in the world I was born into” I am just stating the facts, not making an argument. It means I must drive cars or fly in a plane if I am going very far. To criticize a person for doing that is just goddamn stupid. It is not a strawman argument or any argument at all.

              Neither you nor I are to blame for the situation the world finds itself in. It is just a tragic predicament. But to call us doomers for simply stating the facts is just plain dumb.
              If you don’t want to hear that shit, then you should write to the UN and the BBC and tell them to stop posting doomer porn because it upsets you to hear such bad news. If you don’t hear it, or read it, then you don’t have to believe it.

            4. Ron- “Alimbiquated, as a cornucopia troll”

              Ron- “Why? I think I know why. You, like other cornucopian, believe human ingenuity will figure a way out of this damn mess.”

              I’m leaning on the above statements aren’t facts or news. There Ron’s opinion. That’s some crystal ball you have there. What I read out of Alimbiquated comments is a list of things that can be done to improve a bad situation. He doesn’t seem like a quitter and is up for a challenge.

              Ron- “But to call us doomers for simply stating the facts is just plain dumb.”

              HB- “You had a choice and followed the crowd of cornocopians”

              HB- You bought into cornucopia a long time ago

              You seem very confused with the facts Ron. I didn’t call you a doomer, but if I remember correctly you have called yourself a doomer in the past. Correct me if I’m wrong. I don’t have the time to find it.

              Ron- “It means I must drive cars or fly in a plane if I am going very far”

              Let’s all hope you don’t hit a deer or a flock of birds doing what you must do and you leave some resources for the next generation of life, “apparently, in your mind, humans are all that matter.”

              Ron, you forgot to mention how many children and grand children you have on this planet.

            5. Ron, you forgot to mention how many children and grand children you have on this planet.

              I have three children and six grandchildren on this planet. What the hell does that have to do with anything? I never claimed that I was not one of the 8 billion humans now overcrowding the earth. And yes, I drive my car and occasionally fly in planes. That is what I had to do to survive.

              I am through with this conversation. You can have the last word. Bye now.

            6. Ron, this is the game of the cornucopians. They first make up a lot lot of stuff about how well the future looks, always taking one possible solution, to one problem, not acknowledging that there are negative feedback loops to everything humans do. Then when it’s proven to them that their favourite ‘scheme’ can’t work with with actual real world examples.

              They then claim you are making everything up, when it’s they that makes stuff up. Then claim your a troll and quitter as if name calling proves anything, then blame the messenger for what they have done in their lives. They fully expect anyone that has worked out the human predicament to never use the internet, to go off grid and back to a primitive lifestyle if we really believed what the numbers actually show..

              Another good trick is that of Nick G, complaining that I bring in too many variables for him to work with.

              I’m one of the 8.1B problems, and admit it. How do I spread the message of how bad the future is going to be if I don’t spread the message?? Sorry HB, Alimb and Nick G, trying to spread the message of how stuffed modern civilization is, is not giving up, It’s an attempt to spread the word with real life examples of how bad our situation really is, and how bad the entire ecosphere is becoming because of our actions.

              The ones who are quitting are those pretending everything is alright, the next green tech will be the ‘gamechanger’, forgetting that it was human technology, starting from over 100,000 years ago, that placed us into the massive overshoot we are in.
              More of the same will not solve the overall problem, it just makes the collapse happen from a much higher level, whenever it does happen!!

            7. Ron- “That is what I had to do to survive”

              No Ron, that is what you have chosen to do in you life. Most humans on this planet have never flown in a plane and don’t own a car. You seem every comfortable in cornucopialand.

              “He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount.”

              Myself, no children. The buck stops here.

              BTW Mr. Knowitall, I never claimed “how well the future looks”. That’s just your strawman gig full of delusion. But I have to say, life is good and very comfortable. $20 a gallon, bring it on. Life will be even better with more clean air and EV’s.

  25. Will these be extinguished before coming summer fire season?

    ‘ZOMBIE FIRES’ BURNING AT AN ALARMING RATE IN CANADA

    Even in the dead of Canada’s winter, the embers of last year’s record-setting wildfire season remain. So-called zombie fires are burning under thick layers of snow at an unprecedented rate, raising fears about what the coming summer may bring.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68228943

  26. I guess the US doesn’t make it decisions based on EROEI (Hideaways version).

    “The US Energy Information Agency issued its latest report on February 15, 2024. According to its Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory, the US energy sector expects to add 62.8 GW of new utility-scale electricity generating capacity in 2024. That in and of itself is not startling news. The EIA says the US generates nine times more electricity today than it did in 1950. As electricity continues to replace fossil fuels to power vehicles, heat and cool buildings, and make industrial products like steel and cement, the demand is expected to double or triple again by 2050.

    That 62.8 GW of new electricity capacity planned for this year will be 55 percent more than the 40.4 GW of electricity that was added in 2023. The vast majority — 36.4 GW, or 58 percent — will come from new utility-scale solar installations. Last year, only 18.4 GW of solar capacity was added to the grid as supply chain and permitting issues continued to impact the solar industry. In addition, another 14.3 GW, or 23 percent, will be provided by new battery storage facilities, 23 percent of the total. In all, solar and battery storage will be responsible for more than 80 percent of all new electricity capacity in the US this year.”

    None of this new capacity will be coal.
    2% will be nuclear -Votgle 4 comes on line, after beginning construction 15 years ago. You don’t want to know how much it costs.

    btw- I still don’t understand why battery storage is counted as new generating capacity. Seems like double counting.

  27. Gets my vote — in spades.

    EIGHT WAYS THAT THE STOPPING OF OVERFISHING WILL PROMOTE BIODIVERSITY AND HELP ADDRESS CLIMATE CHANGE

    “Amid the escalating threats of a warming world, and with the latest annual United Nations global climate conference (COP28) behind us, there is one critical message that’s often left out of the climate change discourse. Halting overfishing is itself effective climate action. This argument is the logical conclusion of a plethora of studies that unequivocally assert that stopping overfishing isn’t just a necessity, it’s a win-win for ocean vitality, climate robustness and the livelihoods reliant on sustainable fisheries. The intricate relationship between climate change and ocean ecosystems was the subject of recent collaborative research—led by researchers at the University of British Columbia—that highlighted the crucial links between overfishing and climate change.”

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-ways-overfishing-biodiversity-climate.html

    1. Good luck with getting people to stop eating. They will eat everything they can get there hands on. In countries that currently have enough, well we have a shot at regulating fisheries……until we don’t. 17 of the 18 worlds great ocean fisheries are already in a state of collapse, this when there were fewer people on this planet. A bit late for the hand waving in my opinion. In my boyhood I could go catch haddock. I could catch doormat sized flounder. Even then the fishery was a ghost of its past, all gone now. The gulf of Maine is shot, and this in a country that still exports calories, how can you think that the Tragedy of the Commons has not already occurred? I have personally witnessed the collapse of Bahamian coral reefs, gone, shot, 90% collapse in many areas. I fight every year with my regional State biologists to do more to protect the last remaining wild eastern brook trout stocks, to reduce harvest, to not be reactive, but proactive……. to no avail. I fight with Maines DEP when i see poor enforcement of logging best practices along headwater streams. Join the fight, I will continue to fight, but I don’t expect the win/win you seem to believe will magically appear. I give testimony in legislative committees, I work with my hands on watershed projects, I sample streams for water quality, I survey streams for spawning fish. I have seen more loss than I care to think about, a few wins, a few saves. I cry for the Earth.

      1. Tom —

        I don’t expect anything to “magically appear”. In fact the state of the world’s fisheries totally depresses me. Then there are the dolphins and whales who need to eat to survive. All I’m saying is that I’m for marine reserves, the more the better.

      2. Tom
        Thank you for your posts

        I happen to be a fellow Mainer born in The County which is lucky enough. I’ve lived now in the NYC metro for 30 years

        When I was 12 I remember working with my father in a supermarket cutting refrigeration lines because they were moving. As all the Freon vented out I thought this can’t be good it must be going somewhere. Well my intuition served me well and still does at a much much deeper level.

        Understanding thermodynamics unlocks any mystery of what is happening. Entropy is times arrow and is nothing more or less than the loss of information. Life is information.

        As I type this I’m presently overlooking Greenwood lake in NJ and admiring the seagulls that are standing on a sheen of ice that is melting away. My admiration is knowing how the heat exchangers in there legs preserve their body temperature. The elegance of design in that simple bird is astounding. But nothing compared to the Monarch Butterflies life cycle. I could droll for hours. My point is we have achieved nothing and honestly less than nothing. What we were given exceeds anything we have ever done. And we torched it.

        Energy be damned we are novices on a planet of incredible design.

  28. One can’t help but wonder what wars are doing for CO2 levels in our atmosphere. I suppose someone out there is researching this?

    WHAT CONTINUED DRONE STRIKES ON RUSSIAN OIL REFINERIES COULD MEAN FOR WAR WITH UKRAINE

    “Hostile drones have been winding their way across the Russian landscape this winter, striking refineries and related oil and gas infrastructure all the way from the Baltic Sea in the northwest to the Black Sea in the southwest.”

    https://ca.yahoo.com/news/continued-drone-strikes-russian-oil-090000137.html

    1. Doug,
      Who really cares? Really. As in cares in an actionable way. CO2 would be one the last reason in a very, very, very long list of reasons to stop hostilities that I can think of. It is almost laughable if the situation wasn’t so tragic to begin with. It should be studied or you suppose someone is studying it? You need to get something to do between meals Bub. Even my responding to your day dreaming is a waste of energy and time. WTF.

      1. Tom, respecting CO2, I was just expressing an idle thought. Obviously wars are tragic beyond description. And, not just for soldiers. All the innocent people tortured, raped, killed or injured. Their homes destroyed. Lives ruined. Pets anandoned to scavange and starve in a wastland. I could go on but won’t bother.

  29. I’d guess that there is a lot of cognitive dissonance in the cornucopian camp at the moment because it is becoming apparent that nothing that they expected to happen to ensure that their middle class BAU will continue is succeeding, and they are looking for someone to blame. Like most on the “doomer” side I started off somewhere around “concerned but optimistic” and after looking deeper ended up pessimistic, but at every stage, however pessimistic I’ve been, things have turned out worse. I read Hideaway’s pieces and the sense I get is that he has tried every way to get the numbers to add up differently and each time they come out worse (forgive my presumption if I am wrong). Who would have expected the Keeling curve to continue without a single dent from any green initiative. Who expected EVs to turn into nothing much more than a virtue signalling distraction, which is just now showing its inadequacies as a solution. Who would have expected such large temperature jumps in the last two years. Who would think we could initiate the fastest extinction rate ever seen and devastate most of the wildlife, insects and fisheries in just fifty years and without really noticing as it happened or realising that this is a really bad thing.

    The future scares the shit out of me but I don’t own any super chromatic peril sensitive sunglasses so have to face it. As the freight train approaches it just gets clearer and louder. The past I see with some confused and overwhelming sense of guilt, grief but, especially, regret at my own, perhaps wilful, ignorance.

    It took time to understand that overshoot is a systemic issue where the individual symptoms (peak oil, climate change etc.) cannot be solved individually but only by eliminating the overshoot. Biodiversity loss is an unavoidable consequence of overshoot because almost all species compete with others for resources. Usually dynamic equilibria are eventually reached, but not with industrial humankind, we just keep on steamrollering over everything. I see no technical solutions to the other issues that won’t ultimately make this one worse.

    The UK seems to be about to lead the way in economic decline amongst (putative) developed countries (plenty of opportunities for schadenfreude ahead). We might miss out on a swing towards right wing populist demagogues for a few years as we currently have a conservative government that will be voted out in a potential landslide, but I expect it will be coming as things deteriorate. Currently ESG and “green” initiatives and action are all getting pushed aside by economic issues. In my personal life it might well go the same way, short term acts to keep me half way comfortable in the short term will likely trump long term environmental concerns when push comes to shove.

      1. Have to recall the skewering that Michael Moore went through with his association with the Planet of the Humans documentary

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

        The doc wasn’t very good and there is clearly an agent provocateur , Ozzie Zehner, involved with the project, but the larger truths hold true — that resources are constrained and overshoot is on the horizon. Climate change is really a smokescreen hiding deeper problems.

        If I was ever to make a documentary, I would have a sub-theme about the limited knowledge and ignorance of climate scientists, geophysicists, and earth scientists in general and their inability to apply modern analytical methods to understanding the problems we face. They are such an insular bunch with no real curiosity to look outside their disciplines. These are sciences that are SOLELY and ONLY about analysis since nothing is ever built from the knowledge and no controlled lab experiments are possible, yet they seem resistant to any new ways to understand nature. IMO, lots of naval-gazing verbiage and not much progress. I only have this viewpoint based on research I’ve done, but can see how a layperson can get the impression that it’s all geniuses at work.

    2. 99%+ of all animals that have arisen , are now extinct.
      I doubt if us humans will be an exception.

      1. Hightrekker, barring a worldwide catastrophe, like a meteorite wiping out the human population, it is not likely that humans will go extinct in the next few million years. Animals do not just go into extinction; they are driven into extinction by another species taking over their territory and food source. Or there may have been a few cases where they failed to adapt to radical climate change.

        No other species will ever take over the human niche because our niche is the entire world. Also, the human species is very adaptive. We have adapted to almost year-round snow and ice and year-round tropical climate.

        I see no other species on the horizon that could possibly drive humans into extinction. Of course, our population will someday be but a small fraction of what it is today. But we will survive, even after we have taken over the niche of every other species larger than a rat.

    4. Great summary George. I’ve been aware of our situation for 49 years since learning about Limits to Growth in an Environmental Studies tertiary course in the mid ’70’s, always looking at the ‘problem’ from the point of view of what would humanity do to overcome the problem.
      I’ve even been very much in favour of the turn to renewables in the past, as I’ve previously mentioned buying our first solar panel in 1985 and other solar setups since.

      It’s only in the last few years I’ve come to the realization that all the ‘fixes’ are an elusion, the numbers simply don’t add up, when I do the full calculations for myself, instead of just believing a whole lot of the literature that states wonderful numbers of a technological future, by deliberately (or perhaps inadvertently) leaving out great swaths of energy inputs into the construction.

      Of course energy is just one part of the overshoot problem, something never acknowledged by the cornucopians. We have myriads of other problems that more mining for “renewable minerals” (sic) just exacerbates.

      It’s probably a very nice existence believing everything is going to fine in the future, very calming believing technology will solve everything and magic energy grows on wind turbines and solar panels, however I don’t know of any situation where denial of reality worked in the long term.

  31. Maybe he banned you cause right or wrong you seem like kind of an asshole? Just a thought

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