75 thoughts to “Open Thread Non Petroleum, Feb 19, 2024”

    1. About half of all CO2 added by anthropogenic means remains in the atmosphere. Therefore the amount of effort to remove this is roughly equivalent to reversing the flow throughput of 1/2 of all the smokestacks and tailpipes that have emitted CO2 over the course of the last 150 years. Since filtering this volume is complicated by diffusional and dispersional mixing (anything that gets filtered needs to be refiltered many times over — think of a fishtank), it will be many times worse in terms of effort. This is just mind-boggling that anyone even thinks this is possible to sequester CO2, not even taking Murphy’s Law into account.

      1. It would probably be more because as the atmospheric concentration is reduced the oceans would start degassing as geological and biological processes haven’t had time to sequester the carbonate there. Rockstrom says it would have to be biological solutions and leaves it there, without explaining what they are or how they’d be implemented (e.g. more whale feces, BECCS …).

        1. Actually it would’t start degassing more, as that is strictly a temperature effect. The reason only half the CO2 gets absorbed is because of the process of diffusion. CO2 is constantly entering and exiting the ocean as a random walk so that ~1/2 is the ocean/(ocean+atmosphere) ratio as long as the CO2 is not easily sequestered. OTOH, the equilibrium amount of CO2 dissolved in the ocean is based on thermodynamics. So it may be more if that 1/2 that goes into the ocean pops back out.

          I don’t think geophysicists understand these concepts very deeply. Being in the semiconductor industry and calculating vapor pressures and dopant diffusivities, I realize that these kinds of processes have to be characterized to the Nth degree to get reproducibility. CO2 is really no different than trying to get a P-or-N-type dopant to diffuse into a silicon wafer. Unfortunately there are no controlled experiments possible, so climate scientists are just guessing as to what’s happening.

      2. Paul,
        that’s why the only solution to getting the CO2 out of the atmosphere has to be biological. It has to be plants as self assembling air scrubbers.

        That’s the idea being tried by organizations like Ondernemers Zonder Grenzen or Lignaverda. They plow ditches on contour in the Sahel to catch rainwater and hope for the best. The idea is to maximize ROI.

        1. Here’s an example of what happens when you plough ditches in the Sahel on contour and wait a few years.
          https://www.google.com/maps/place/Téssékré, Senegal/@15.8643037,-15.1208456,3547m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0xeeb5788900c5345:0xbaefd414d59822bf!8m2!3d15.816667!4d-15.066667!16s/g/1thvv1bl?entry=ttu

          In the rainy season the water flows across the surface but doesn’t seep in to the hard soil. The ditches catch this water and stores it. I don’t know if they seeded the ditches or not.

          It may not look like much, but it is very cheap and could be done to huge areas. And is grows itself, kicking off a feedback loop to reverse desertification.

          1. Biological lifeforms won’t work. They eventually die and release the CO2 back as methane decomposes into CO2 plus H20. It won’t sequester unless one buries it, and then it’s back to square one as to the monumental effort required.

            1. Not really. Well managed land has much higher carbon content than degraded land.

              Degraded soils can have a little as a half a percent carbon, but organic soils can can have 15% or more. Good soil has maybe 7% carbon content.

              How much carbon is that?
              Assume soil is half the weigh of water. So a cubic meter is 500 kg. Take the top 10 cm of soil. That’s 50 kg per cubic meter. 1% of that is a half a kilogram.

              The Sahel Zone is about 3 million square kilometers, or three trillion square meters. Add 2% carbon content to that (to make the math easier) is capturing three trillion kilograms of carbon, or three billion tons. (3×10^9). The soil would still be very poor.

              The total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 3×10^18 grams. Most of that is oxygen of course, so call it 10^18 grams of carbon, or 10^12 (a trillion) tons. So adding two percentage points to Sahel soils would not solve the problem by itself, as it could only sequester maybe a third of a percent of the atmospheric carbon.

              The total land area of the planet is about 150 m square km. Increasing soil carbon content by 2 percentage points would sequester about 15% of the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, bring it down from 420 ppm to maybe 360 ppm, which is still high.

              I strongly disagree with your claim that vegetation can’t store carbon. It’s a loggers’ argument, but it is crap. Deforestation increases atmospheric carbon dioxide, and reforestation decreases it.

              Carbon rich soils store water well. Artificial fertilizer give farmers nitrogen rich soil, so soil carbon content is neglected. Traditionally, nitrogen and carbon content were roughly proportional. So carbon content has been steadily falling in modern farms. But that creates water problems, as the soil loses its ability to store water, and releases a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. It make farmers more dependent on fertilizer companies as well.

              Improving the soil would allow soil in arid and semiarid regions to hold a lot more water, and support nitrogen fixing organisms, which would significantly increase plant growth. I can’t think of an easy way to guess by how much though.

            5. ” … various states of decay”

              which means they create methane CH4

              Further decomposes
              CH4 + 2 O2 => CO2 + 2 H2O

              So back to square one, CO2 back in the atmosphere.

            6. Paul
              I know this is a little complicated, but the question is not how fast the carbon cycles in and out of the system, but how much is in the system at any given time. It’s not for nothing that we call this the “carbon cycle”.

              Think of this like a bathtub. On top you have a faucet with water coming in. At the bottom you have a drain with water going out. If the amount of water coming in is greater than the amount of water going out, the amount of water in the bathtub increases. If the amount of water coming in is less than the amount of water going out, the amount of water in the bathtub decreases. If the amount of water coming in equals than the amount of water going out, the amount of water in the bathtub stays the same. Different water molecules are in the water at any given time, but that doesn’t matter.

              We think the deforestation of the Amazon is a bad idea because the amount of carbon leaving the system is larger than the amount entering the system. But even before that, there was a huge flux of carbon entering and leaving the system.

              If we improve soil the amount of carbon in the soil increases. If we retain that carbon content level, carbon will continue to enter and leave the system.

              I think a big problem people have is that the they think the world is the way it is because it is the way it is. That is a wrong headed point of view. The world is the way it is because there are forces pushing it around, and they are in rough balance. The world is a fundamentally dynamic place.

              In the case of soil conservation, the idea is not to trap the individual carbon atoms in the soil. The idea is to ensure that the amount of carbon leaving the system is roughly in balance with the amount of carbon entering the system. Improving soil means making sure more carbon enters the soil than leaves it.

              Fortunately, biological systems, especially plants, do the hard part by themselves, given the right environmental conditions.

            7. Fungi, along with many bacterial kingdoms allies, are not on board with the idea that carbon can be sequestered in soil to the extent that would be meaningful or measurable in relation to the amount added by humanity during the Great Combustion Event.

              But it would be nice to return much of the land cleared for agriculture, commercial and industrial uses back to nature for other reasons. Reasons such as wildlife habitat restoration.

            8. Alimbiquated,

              You quantified soil carbon starting here: “Degraded soils can have a little as a half a percent carbon, but organic soils can can have 15% or more. Good soil has maybe 7% carbon content.

              How much carbon is that?…”

              Could you provide sources?

            10. That quote (and the question in it) was just pulled from the beginning of your discussion.

              That compilation of articles looks like just the thing, thanks.

    2. Paul Pukite is right, at the fundamental level.

      Doing everything we can to restore soil quality, reverse desertification, increase forest cover, etc, is well worth doing……. but doing these things, even if we were successful in doing them well world wide, wouldn’t be enough to make a serious dent in atmospheric CO2 and methane.

      And while I’m no expert in carbon capture and sequestration technologies, everything I’ve read indicates that we would have to burn at least a third more coal to capture the CO2 and pump it down into old oil wells or whatever, at an enormous cost.

      The numbers are clear…… glaringly clear. It’s far more economical and practical to spend our money and manpower on energy efficiency… and simply burn less fossil fuel, thereby lowering the amount of CO2 emissions to some extent.

      And of course any improvements we make in using energy more efficiently will enable us to live better longer as fossil fuel production peaks and declines.

      My guess is that oil and gas will peak within a decade or so at the longest but there’s so much coal available we’ll burn more of it every year well into the future, barring success on the grand scale in renewable energy production…… or a crash and burn overshoot scenario, which would pretty much put an end to heavy industry over most of or maybe the entire world.

      I can’t see any way we aren’t headed for higher average temperatures well into the future, certainly for a few centuries, and maybe for thousands of years…. because Paul Pukite is right…… There’s no way we can possibly hope to remove enough CO2 and methane from the atmosphere via biological technologies to make a worthwhile dent in atmospheric concentrations…. at least in human terms.

      Of course he knows what he’s talking about. He’s dead on, but he overlooked putting a key piece of information in his comments that throws plenty of bright sunlight on the problem.

      Fossil fuels are created over millions and hundreds of millions of years by way of organic materials being buried deep within the earth due to geological processes. The pressures and temperatures involved gradually cook organics into gas and oil…… or coal.

      So the natural carbon balance in our time, meaning our geological time, is based, or WAS based, on the the fossil fuels we’ve burnt being safely stored or sequestered in the ground. The biological and atmospheric carbon cycle as it existed up until the fossil fuel era, which for practical purposes didn’t begin until only three centuries back, didn’t involve any significant amount of fossil carbon, although volcanic activity played a major role at various times.

      There’s just no way biological and geological processes can put all this extra carbon back underground again except on geological time scales.

      The only process I know of that’s removing or capable of removing any truly significant amount of atmospheric CO2 is that some of it, which gets dissolved into sea water, is captured at the lowest level of the sea water food chains, and winds up sinking to the sea floor…… where given a few million or tens of millions of years, it will be covered by sediments and eventually converted into oil and gas ……… over millions of years.

      Barring some unforeseen miracle, the CO2 we’ve put in the atmosphere is there to stay for a very long time.

      CO2 does play a major role in geology on land, by either dissolving some kinds of stone, or being incorporated into other kinds being formed……… but these processes operate on geological time scales, and thus are totally irrelevant to our short term naked ape climate problems.

  2. I commented in the old thread with my opinion of the state of geophysics research
    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-10-2023/#comment-770619

    Is anyone impressed by any recent research? In climate and other areas, it’s just more and more mysteries that keep piling up. This is the NASA climate head — completely mystified by the global heat wave
    https://www.rawstory.com/2023-s-record-heat-partly-driven-by-mystery-process-nasa-scientist/

    The NASA budget was decimated and many jobs were cut at JPL
    https://nasawatch.com/personnel-news/a-former-jplers-take-on-the-layoffs/

    That’s just not all deep-space stuff as NASA is responsible for most satellites that monitor the Earth. The JPL guy commenting doesn’t really mention that.

    1. From the second link:

      “But the record-shattering temperatures of 2023 have nonetheless alarmed scientists, and hint at some “mysterious” new processes that may be under way, NASA’s top climatologist Gavin Schmidt tells AFP.”

      This does not inspire confidence. He’s also been pretty outspoken about dismissing the near team danger of subsea methane release from the arctic shelf. Not sure how he can say anything like that given how rapidly the arctic has warmed, but maybe it’s just his job.

      1. I have little confidence in in their large-scale climate models or even in their interpretation. One that frustrates me is climate scientists wishy-washy claims of the Atlantic AMO cycle not being an oscillation, despite the word oscillation being in the acronym. So it has been an oscillation for a few decades until Michael Mann wrote a paper a few years ago saying it wasn’t.

        https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13823-w — “Absence of internal multidecadal and interdecadal oscillations in climate model simulations”

        Mann’s rationale is that their models don’t show cycles, so therefore it doesn’t exist.

    2. That’s the sort of thing that is increasingly likely as the overall EORI for society declines. The first things to go will be those with the longest term remit and the least to do with day to day operating.

      1. Very possible. I worked in the past with a scientist from NASA JPL who is in charge of an oceanography database called PODAAC. Anyone can use it and ask JPL for help with a retrieval script if needed. If that disappears, there goes years of curated data on spatially dated measurements. Do wonder what happens if the funding for that project gets eliminated. It has nothing to do with outer space and everything to do with the Earth.

      2. Things are getting smaller—-

        “Pepsi replaced its 32oz Gatorade bottle with a 28oz for the same price. Nabisco shrunk the family size box of Wheat Thins by 12%. General Mills shrunk the family size box of Cocoa Puffs by 6%. Frito-Lay shrunk the size of a bag of Doritos by 5%.”

  3. So……. It seems obvious that a great many scientists are thinking this past year’s numbers are solid evidence that we’ve passed a tipping point, and that the rate of climatic change for the worse is likely to accelerate, the consequence being that the changes predicted by climate models towards the end of this century will come far sooner, with some of them happening even now, and more of them happening within the next ten or twenty years.

    I’m not by any means an expert, but I do know a thing or two about probability, and when so many variable factors change so fast as happened last year, the odds are a gazillion to one against this being the result of plain old luck, the way the cards fall. Something is WRONG, in a very big way.

    Back when I was an undergrad, and plate tectonic theory was just coming into it’s own, I happened to have a discussion about it with a mathematician, and showed him the well known evidence about plant and animal distributions, mineral deposits lining up between continental borders, shorelines corresponding, etc, and he said it was ” PERFECTLY ” obvious that the theory was essentially correct……. and that if geologists and other scientific types had had a BETTER GRASP of mathematics, they would have accepted tectonics fifty or even a hundred years sooner as REALITY, without agonizing over the lack of a viable explanatory mechanism.

    And I know a thing or two about institutional inertia. Most people, just about everybody in fact, who work in bureaucracies are extremely reluctant to stick their necks out for fear of getting their career heads chopped off by their higher ups……… who in turn may be in danger of being tossed out with the trash by politicians …….. who in turn are routinely elected or defeated by way of big business spending megabucks on the ones willing to vote their way on environmental issues, etc.

    I’m cautiously optimistic that the Biden will win this fall, and that the Democrats will at least hold their own in Congress and at the state level.

    But if the so called Republicans win, it’s a sure thing that political hacks by the hundreds will be appointed to high level positions in just about every federal agency or organization…. Useful work will come to a halt, and agency spokes people will toe the MAGA line or else.

    It’s do or die time, politically.

    Vote blue.

    1. “Trump 2.0 Set To Gut Biden’s Energy and Climate Policies
      By Tsvetana Paraskova – Feb 20, 2024, 6:00 PM CST

      Former officials in the Trump Administration and Republican policy consultants are already drafting blueprints of energy and climate policies for a second Trump term in office.

      Donald Trump, the most likely Republican presidential nominee, is set to overturn or at least try to dismantle many of President Joe Biden’s energy and climate policies if the former president wins the November election.

      The Biden Administration’s methane rules, LNG export pause, EV mandates, federal oil and gas leasing, and even the Inflation Reduction Act will be all on the chopping block in a second Trump term in office.

      Trump would look to boost oil, natural gas, and coal development in the United States and, once again, withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Republican policy advisers tell Reuters.”

      https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Trump-20-Set-To-Gut-Bidens-Energy-and-Climate-Policies.html

      “It’s do or die time, politically.

      Vote blue”

    2. OFM said:

      “when so many variable factors change so fast as happened last year”

      No one even knows if something akin to the additive change due t multiple natural factors occurring. Consider tides — they are comprised of multiple forces with the strength caused by reinforcing combinations of these forces. So can have the moon, and it can have 3 reinforcing factors related to its perigee, declination, and strength of declination (a longer period). These can be combined with reinforcing factors due to the sun. These are all incommensurate in their timing so the maximum tides can get quite complicated and the more there are the longer the time between the extremes. No one in climate science is really acknowledging that as a possibility. When and if this current heat spike goes back to normal, that’s when the searching for mechanisms will start. If it stays up then the man-made AGW will get the focus.

    1. If you look at the lead photo of the article, you can see some panels on the rooftops.
      But you can imagine the same neighborhood if it had been built with an energy orientation in mind. Rooftops would be all gable, gambrel or shed style- oriented along an east-west axis. In short, we would be designing neighborhoods as if we actually lived on a planet that had a predictable relationship to the energy source upon which all organisms are based (except the tiny showing of chemotrophs at deep sea vents or thermal hot springs).

      Maybe if we were so thoughtful in a basic way we would also keep water as clean as possible, and we would cherish healthy soil above all else.

      You can rank soils based on their inherent capacity to sustain lush plant growth, including for what we use as crops or for what other lifeforms use as the base of the foodchain. For crop production there are measures such as Soil Potential Index. How many here have even a simple notion of the components that factor into the determination? Other more life general rankings of locations are things like Net Primary Production, which is a reflection of soil and climate suitability to support plant, and thus animal, life.
      And then there is “Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP)”
      Good sample article on this topic here- https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0704243104

      We are on a failed trajectory simply because these basic topics and concerns are at the bottom of our interest, expertise and planning.
      Who are we?

      1. Thanks for that HANPP link. It was quite a bit lower than I would have thought ( but that is based on absolutely nothing, just a WAG). Makes me feel a little better.
        Rgds
        Vince

      2. True

        I remember being at a family cottage (off grid) in the 1990’s where we experimented with a solar panel feeding into a battery – lead based almost the size of a normal car battery. Electricity was generated just enough to feed lighting (LED lights would have been better, but not on the horizon at that time) and television/radio to some degree. Cooking and heating was done by propan gas mainly. There were times when the electricity and the TV was out of power, and that was not optimal, but with weather allowing it, 1-2 days was enough and sometimes much shorter to allow enough power to be stored into the battery to resume usage. It was not the end of the world to experience a restrained battery capacity environment.

        Considering you could add more solar panels, add a better battery, introduce induction based cooking based on electricity, play around with heating requirements when it comes to heat pumps – this was not even meant to be optimal in any way, sort or shape. In other parts of the world the solar panels yields 3 times as much power, but air condition is more important than heating. When they say solar panels lasts 20 years, I have many examples that they last more than that in the far north. Maybe it is the chill enviroment with lots of rain on hopefully a somewhat cheltered location for the natural elements that is the reason. I hear of solar panels lasting 30+years from people around me. Probably a decay in efficiency over time, but still functional. The bad panels just gets replaced, but are relatively few.

        The potential of being off grid with solar panels with a small battery is probably underrated. That it is problematic to add this to the 24/7 “normal” grid with price issues, are to be expected. But what about being predominately off grid, with an emerengy back up option to use the “normal” grid. Perfectly doable in a more world more energy constrained than today.

      3. Naked apes.

        We’ve evolved to be what we are, because what we are has been, up until now, a winning combination of basic instincts supercharged by our evolved superior ability to think, accumulate, and pass on information of every sort……. leading us to become one of, or perhaps the very most successful multi cellular animal species of all time…. on this planet, anyway.

        The rats may survive us, but they’ll never be anywhere close to domination as we are.

        But evolution, aka Mother Nature, doesn’t provide extra features unless such features confer greater fitness, meaning greater odds of success in the struggle for survival over time.

        So…… we don’t have any real brakes on our basic animal instincts. Such brakes have never been needed before, because when we were in overshoot, locally, at various times, there were plenty of us elsewhere to take the places of any who perished due to flood, famine, war, or disease.

        Of course the relatively small fraction of us who are well enough educated to understand our current situation are capable of thinking of solutions to our overshoot problems, etc……

        But unfortunately……. we’re generally not in a position to force the rest of us to listen and support us by understanding and implementing such solutions.

        It seems to me that most of the people in Western Europe are well enough educated to understand the overall real score and and at least try to do the right thing, or things.

        But here in Yankee Land……. it’s pretty much a toss up, according to public opinion polls, etc.

        I’m cautiously optimistic that the Democrats will win this fall. They’ve won a lot of special elections, and if trump is convicted of a couple more charges, etc. ….. if younger women are paying enough attention to know who is on their side, etc…….. There’s real hope.

        Vote blue.

        1. “Abolition of a woman’s right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: a form of rape by the State.”
          ― Edward Abbey

  5. I’ve just finished “The Rise and Reign of Mammals”, which I’d put up there with “Behave” and “Almost Like a Whale” amongst the best popular science books.

  7. Read this and pass it along to anybody you know, especially younger women, who may not be paying much attention to political issues.

    It’s a free newsletter.

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    The Emerging Republican Theocracy
    White Christian nationalism is the creed of red America
    Robert Reich
    Feb 23

    READ IN APP

    Friends,

    In a case centering on wrongful-death claims for frozen embryos that were destroyed in a mishap at a fertility clinic, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled last Friday that frozen embryos are “children” under state law. As a result, Alabama in-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics are ceasing services, afraid to store or destroy any embryos.

    The underlying issue is whether government can interfere in the most intimate aspects of people’s lives — not only barring people from obtaining IVF services but also forbidding them from entering into gay marriage, utilizing contraception, having out-of-wedlock births, ending their pregnancies, changing their genders, checking out whatever books they want from the library, and worshipping God in whatever way they wish (or not worshipping at all).

    All of these private freedoms are under increasing assault from Republican legislators and judges who want to impose their own morality on everyone else. Republicans are increasingly at war with America’s fundamental separation of church and state.

    According to a new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution, more than half of Republicans believe the country should be a strictly Christian nation — either adhering to the ideals of Christian nationalism (21 percent) or sympathizing with those views (33 percent).

    This point of view has long been prominent among white evangelicals but is spreading into almost all reaches of the Republican Party, as exemplified by the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling.

    It is also closely linked with authoritarianism. According to the survey, half of Christian nationalism adherents and nearly 4 in 10 sympathizers said they support the idea of an authoritarian leader powerful enough to keep these Christian values in society.

    During an interview at a Turning Point USA event last August, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said party leaders need to be more responsive to the base of the party, which she claimed is made up of Christian nationalists.

    “We need to be the party of nationalism,” she said. “I am a Christian and I say it proudly, we should be Christian nationalists.”

    A growing number of Republican voters view Trump as the second coming of Jesus Christ and see the 2024 election as a battle not only for America’s soul but for the salvation of all mankind. Many of the Trump followers who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, carried Christian symbols, clothes, and signs invoking God and Jesus.

    An influential think tank close to Trump is developing plans to infuse Christian nationalist ideas into his administration if Trump returns to power, according to documents obtained by Politico.

    Spearheading the effort is Russell Vought, who served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget during his first term and remains close to him. Vought, frequently cited as a potential chief of staff in a second Trump White House, has embraced the idea that Christians are under assault and has spoken of policies he might pursue in response.

    Those policies include banning immigration of non-Christians into the United States, overturning same-sex marriage, and barring access to contraception.

    In a concurring opinion in last week’s Alabama Supreme Court decision, Alabama’s chief justice, Tom Parker, invoked the prophet Jeremiah and the writings of 16th- and 17th-century theologians. “Human life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God,” he wrote. “Even before birth, all human beings have the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

    Referring to the Book of Genesis, Parker noted that “the principle itself — that human life is fundamentally distinct from other forms of life and cannot be taken intentionally without justification — has deep roots that reach back to the creation of man ‘in the image of God.’”

    Before joining the court, Parker was a close aide and ally of Roy Moore, the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was twice removed from the job — first for dismissing a federal court order to remove an enormous granite monument of the Ten Commandments he had installed in the state judicial building, and then for ordering state judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision affirming gay marriage.

    So far, the U.S. Supreme Court has not explicitly based its decisions on scripture, but several of its recent rulings — the Dobbs decision that overruled Roe v. Wade, its decision in Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District on behalf of a public school football coach who led students in Christian prayer, and its decision in Carson v. Makin, requiring states to fund private religious schools if they fund any other private schools, even if those religious schools would use public funds for religious instruction and worship — are consistent with Christian nationalism.

    But Christian nationalism is inconsistent with personal freedom, including the First Amendment’s guarantee that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

    We can be truly free only if we’re confident we can go about our private lives without being monitored or intruded upon by government, and can practice whatever faith (or lack of faith) we wish regardless of the religious beliefs of others.

    A society where one set of religious views is imposed on a large number of citizens who disagree with them is not a democracy. It’s a theocracy.

    2. The best hopes might be that Trump is so ignorant and incompetent that he won’t be able to achieve much and that he is such a repugnant human being that no one can stand to be around him for more than six months so neither will his team. Otherwise splitting up into the nine nations of North America may be no bad thing overall either way.

          1. Bob,

            Probably most people don’t understand irony, especially when it’s in written form…

            1. *sarcasm

              I do want to clarify one thing. My sarcasm wasn’t meant to mock anyone, least of all George who is 100% top shelf.

        2. I’m reading a book called “The Great Leveler” which posits that there are four ways to significantly reduce inequality: mass mobilisation warfare, reformative revolution, state failure and deadly pandemics (or combination thereof). A combination of the first two could lead to a break up of the USA to a small set of more equitable nations. The federal organisation of the USA might make it theoretically easier than most countries to break up, with governors and state institutions already in place. It wouldn’t be easy but quite violent, however we are heading for collapse and it’s going to be extremely unpleasant whatever path is taken.

          1. “A combination of the first two could lead to a break up of the USA to a small set of more equitable nations.”
            That could just as well go the other way…resulting much less equitable ‘nations’.

            1. No, because history shows that doesn’t happen. Extreme inequality grows over many years in the absence of the four violent disruptions listed and disappears when any of those events occur, but not otherwise. It’s probably more nuanced but I’m only a third through the book.

            2. Failed state status is not the type of equality that any one wants.
              Except for warlords. And they don’t tend to encourage equality.

          2. Social equality, unless you’re fat. I sense some internal tensions in that thesis. The ones who will survive are those who are best organized and prepared for it; takes all types.

        1. I have been doing some reading/listening on AI coming effect on culture. A commentator said that mass social persuasion is the biggest potential issue to be aware of. Imagine a message AI Trump amplified over Musks social media network. We have already seen how mentally vulnerable the republican voter/Fox news zombie crowd is to manipulation.
          I feel that our sense of civil stability is a paper-thin mirage.

          1. CNN, etc., is just as bad or worse. There’s no unbiased media… or people who run it. Or Gemini (LOL).

  8. Going back to last weeks big question, namely whether we can ( eventually) have a modern industrial economy based on renewable energy…..
    One point the naysayers seem to miss…….. perhaps deliberately? …… is that while we do know approximately what renewable energy costs based on today’s technologies, is that today’s technologies aren’t by any means MATURE, it terms of what can and will very likely be achieved going forward, due to economies of scale, and general agreement among various governing authorities involving the building codes, environmental regulations, permitting processes, etc… problems that for the most part were solved decades ago for existing energy industries.

    For now, getting a permit from a local building inspector for a residential or small business solar system can be quite a headache, and once you have the permit…… finding a contractor who is well acquainted with solar installations isn’t necessarily easy.

    You can’t go down to your local big box store and buy all the stuff you will need for a solar installation for now…. but I’m betting that five years from now, Lowe’s and Home Depot and other such companies will have everything you will need either on hand or available within a day or two.

    Everything I need to wire a new house from scratch is routinely kept in stock at the nearest LOWE’s store.

    Competition works wonders when it comes to lowering prices, lol.

    And while it’s perfectly obvious that for every twenty or thirty articles I read about “breakthroughs” in solar panel or inverter or switching or battery technology, etc, only one or maybe two of these will actually be put into production anytime soon, if ever.

    But there’s still a ton of room for improvements in battery technologies, and I’m rather optimistic that within a few years there will be batteries on the market that use very little nickel or cobalt, etc, because there will be suitable substitute materials discovered and perfected that are considerably cheaper, or safer, or longer lasting, or possibly even all three.

    Batteries used in electric cars are likely to eventually be built to specific size and performance parameters, so that if you need a new one for an electric car or truck……. you will be able to get one from three or four or maybe even six or more competing companies….. the way you can buy tires for a given car from numerous competing companies today.

    Now the car companies may not WANT you to have this option…….. but depending on how the cards fall, they may have to get used to it in order to get the lowest possible price on new batteries themselves……..

    And standardization may be mandated as a necessary efficiency measure, just as safety and pollution control measures are mandated today.

    We can and will downsize and learn to like it, because we won’t be able to afford today’s oversized and over powered vehicles. Just about every reasonably competent and successful tradesman or farmer or small business owner I know has a full size pickup or van…. because such vehicles are actually quite affordable to people who need them, or just want them. Anybody doing ok in the work place can generally afford a new pickup truck.

    But I know three or four personally who have retired, and they’re living on half what they used to make now. And when they buy a new vehicle, it’s typically half as big and twice as fuel efficient as the one they trade in.

    I know an older woman who just sold her McMansion for three quarters of a million……. who bought a two bedroom two thousand square foot house because she decided that’s all she actually NEEDS or wants…. but she paid almost as much for the new small house because likes her new exclusive neighborhood even better than her old one.

    I’m helping another older lady, one who has just enough money to make ends meet remodel her older mobile home aka house trailer for energy efficiency. We’re putting an inch of rigid foam insulation all over the ceiling and all the exterior walls, and covering that with dry wall….. adding storm windows, closing up all the air leaks, etc…..

    And exclusive of labor, donated by friends and family, this upgrade won’t cost her much over three thousand bucks.She’ll save every dime of it back within three years…. maybe even within two years on her heating and air conditioning bill.

    I”ve put a good bit of time into looking into what it will cost to upgrade a typical existing residence, say a thirty or forty year old two to three thousand square foot rancher, to cut the amount of energy needed to maintain the same level of convenience and comfort by half or more….

    And so far as I can see, this can easily be done for less than the price of a typical new car…. thirty thousand bucks or so. Somebody who undertakes this job doing most or all of it himself can do it for even less… and these energy savings will be good for the life of the house.

    We’re not going to just run out of oil or gas or coal…… we’ve got at least a generation or two to get the job of switching mostly or entirely to renewable energy.

    And peeing and moaning about the climate during this time frame is entirely pointless…… because we’re going to be burning MORE fossil fuel in the long run if we don’t get on with it.

    I’m too old, personally, to put a whole lot of time and money into serious energy efficiency measures, because I won’t be around long enough reap the benefits. But I’m sitting here typing with a thick shirt on, and a blanket in my lap, and no heat at all….. with the temperature inside in the lower sixties….. perfectly comfortable. I’ll sleep with an electric blanket tonight…. which will cost me maybe twenty cents Yankee by morning, lol. I’ll bake a chicken and a pork roast together later, heating the oven only once where as I used to just turn it on without a thought. I’ve wrapped my water heater with an extra four inches of insulation, which cost only about twenty bucks…….. and which seems to be saving me at least five to ten bucks per month on my electricity bill. I swapped out my old ac window units for new more efficient ones which are programmable, so that I can have them turn on ten minutes before I expect to get home …… rather than just leaving them on all day. And unless I have company, I generally run only one at a time, in whichever room I’m using.

    I used to use three or four hundred gallons of heating oil, sometimes more, every winter. Got that down to twenty five to fifty by going back to burning wood since I have it for the gathering and need the exercise anyway. Will have to get a heat pump eventually…….. but maybe not for another four or five years, in which case I’ll be getting a better one for my money. When my refrigerator quits, I’m going to get one like the ones found in a typical German home…….. they run on half as much juice.

    There’s a hard crash headed our way, world wide, but with a little luck, we might be able to avoid the worst of it in countries such as the USA……. if we’re lucky enough to have good leaders and get enough Pearl Harbor Wake Up bricks upside our collective head while there’s still time to go proactive in terms of implementing efficiency measures and lifestyle adjustments before it’s too late.

    1. Good points as always OFM
      On batterries, there is already a big shift underway towards Lithium Iron Phosphate for cars.
      And we may be on the verge of pretty big upgrade from the big Chinese manufacturers on the cost over the next couple years. They do note that the US may be near the end of the customer line on this.
      https://cleantechnica.com/2024/02/26/catl-byd-to-slash-battery-prices-by-50-in-2024-boom-evs-win/

      (that website tends to big on hype, so we will have to wait and see if there is really meat in this soup)

    2. Good post. I too have witnessed the significant reduction in energy consumption (other than embedded health care resource consumption) people go through once they hit their 80’s.

      Everything you say about the decline being manageable if we have competent leadership, keep our heads and don’t panic or do anything stupid makes sense, I just worry about those big ‘ifs’ in the previous sentence.

      The situation reminds me of Isaac Asimov’s classic ‘Nightfall’ story, about a planet with 6 suns that never has darkness except during an eclipse that only happens every few hundred years. The eclipse doesn’t last that long, so if they could just get prepared and keep themselves from panicking and doing stupid things, they’d
      be fine, but can they?

  9. Mike,

    You might do better if you posted your comment on the correct thread.

    To call everyone on the blog as retarded is far from reality, though I do agree that there are a number mentally challenged commentors from time to time.

    Might I respectfully suggest that if you wish to be taken seriously provide your proof in a coherent form and educate us.

    1. It might help if you were to use better known acronyms. I’m not taking you seriously at all, but I would like to know what RRC means, and what PEHE means……. but not to the point I’m going to look them up.

      The only problem with simply blocking your comments is that doing so creates a problem following other comments, but if Dennis doesn’t ban you again, I’m blocking you in my feed.

  10. All users of the site will forever remain retards, oblivious to all.

    I suppose that must include yourself then, as a user of this site.

  11. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/27/japan/society/japan-2023-births-record-low/
    Somebody here probably knows what the demographers were saying about birth rates in countries such as Japan ten or twenty years ago.

    I’m betting they weren’t even in the ball park in terms of predicting the long term trend to ever lower birth rates in Japan.

    And I’m willing to predict that birth rates are going to crash well below predicted levels in more than just a few countries over the next couple of decades.

    The world wide population is going to peak sooner than expected in my opinion. Birth rates will fall faster than predicted, and people are going to die hard by the millions over the same time frame. The horsemen will be running wild.

    1. OFM,

      Japan’s population decline was fully forecast several decades back. Japan’s fertility rate has been below replacement for 60 years, well below for 40 years, and was as low as it is now 25 years ago (and has risen very slightly lately).

      As Japan has essentially zero immigration, the current population decline was perfectly inevitable and fully anticipated. It is true that there was some hope among policy makers that fertility rates could be raised by making parenthood easier or more lucrative, but it turns out women are delighted to be free of children. So much for a genetic desire for population growth…

      https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/fertility-rate

      1. Sorry, OFM is correct here. People have known that Japan has a low birth rate for a long time, but in Japan and in many other countries, the continuation and speed of declines in birth rates has consistently come in below forecasted levels, just like OFM said.

        For example, the 2017 UN forecast had global population peaking at 11.2bn in 2100 and continuing to grow thereafter. The 2022 update to the UN forecast had global population peaking at 10.4bn in the 2080’s and then starting to fall. That is a huge miss on the 2017 forecast, revised by 20 years and almost a billion people, only 5 years later, and reflects that fertility is falling faster than expected. Having said that, Japan is not the most dramatic case, the fall in births in South Korea is astonishing and will be very interesting to track in terms of impacts on society.

    2. Worth noting that Japan’s population decline has nothing to do with death rates.

      It’s primarily caused by women, with education and independent careers, choosing not to have children with a society and potential mates who are much more conservative.

      Japan is similar to Italy and S. Korea in that regard. We hear echoes of this in Brazil, where the slogan among women is “the factory is closed”.

      1. That’s going to be a tough slog moving forward if people lose their careers and universities go bankrupt. At the same time, though, collapse will kick in where those left off.

        1. Well, there’s no sign of collapse yet. Limits to Growth scenarios were supposed to kick in by now, but there’s no sign at all of any of the parameter changes that would show the beginning of collapse.

          1. Nick G, perhaps you should go and read Limits to Growth before criticizing it!!
            Nick G …. ” Limits to Growth scenarios were supposed to kick in by now,”

            Yet in the actual book, if people bothered to read it quite clearly states…. on pg 92-93, if you want to go and check…..

            “The output graphs reproduced later in this book show values for world population, capital, and other variables on a time scale that begins in the year 1900 and continues until 2100. These graphs ARE NOT EXACT PREDICTIONS of the values of the variables at ANY PARTICULAR YEAR in the future. They are indications of the system’s behavioral tendencies only.”

            Once again you are totally wrong. They spelled it out very clearly that they didn’t have enough information to go into exact years for the changes in any of the variables. It was a model that has been uncannily accurate with patterns following exactly as they predicted, as shown by various authors in recent decades like the recent Gaya Herrington report..

            Apparently the loss of insects by nearly 70% since 1970, and the loss of 70% of wild mammals in the same time period, plus the rise to 425ppm CO2 in the atmosphere are not signs of collapse in your world.

            Sorry they are in mine and anyone that gives any thought to what’s happening in the world.
            Again you are totally wrong, the signs of collapse are everywhere if you just opened your eyes and bothered to look!!

            1. No question, the authors made a strong point of LTG being a set of highly simplified scenarios which should not, not, not be treated as predictions. If that’s the case, it’s not appropriate to try to validate their accuracy.

              And, most of all, they’re not evidence of the likelihood of collapse. They simply weren’t meant to predict anything, and it’s inappropriate to use them that way.

              And then…the authors (Meadows, et al) went ahead and treated them as forecasts, along with everyone else. Just look at what you just said: ” It was a model that has been uncannily accurate with patterns following exactly as they predicted, as shown by various authors in recent decades…” You, and these authors, treated them as forecasts to be relied upon.

              Sigh.

    3. OFM

      I am just an amateur when it comes to demography. But it still just takes a modest level of statistical knowledge to use the UN population data from the last review in 2022, to figure out that a lot of countries do not have a high enough replacement ratio to expect anything other than decline in population barring an influx of immigrants going forward.

      When it comes to the economy, the mention of degrowth and limitations resulting in lower standard of living are sensitive issues. It is probably essential that people have an incentive to improve life, no matter if the overall trajectory is not that great. If that is not in place, there is more reason to take on board the collapse scenarios that some in this discussion forum like to promote.

  12. “If America were dominated by old, white, election-denying Christians who didn’t go to college, former President Trump would win the general election in as big of a landslide as his sweep of the first four GOP contests.”

    Old and dumb?
    Kinda like me, I’m afraid.
    But I went to UCSB, and currently a socialist.

  13. I’ll take Buckle Your Chin Strap for $500, Alex

    “At least one-third of the global land surface will experience a significant change in “phytoclimate” – a term used for the climate conditions that underpin plant growth – by 2070 under global warming, a new study says.”

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02333-8

    (2040 is the new 2070)

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