Open Thread Non-Petroleum, February 2, 2024

104 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, February 2, 2024”

1. FAO [global] Food Price fell further in January mainly on lower wheat and maize prices. See (short) red line…

   

   1. Almost back to 2021. But I don’t think prices at the grocery store have managed the same round trip. Still, it should help.

   2. I´ve heard that French and German farmers are quite unhappy that cheap unregulated crops are flowing into EU from the east (accompanied with personell) for some “strange” reason, my guess would be that it´s due to Victorias dilligent efforts to F Europe.
      Not /S
      Edit: and Polish, etc.

2. Going back to the last time around,
   “OFM .. “We’re not going for FORCED reductions in birth rates. We’re not going to an austerity lifestyle, period”

   Exactly!! That’s what I keep saying, no-one will accept the reality of the situation, so we go to collapse. it doesn’t matter if we build more renewables or not, none of it it is going to save civilization.

   There is only one possible solution, but no-one is interested because it means everyone is worse off, so everyone denies it as acceptable and instead goes for the fantasy of renewables or nuclear. They are just derivatives of fossil fuels.”

   Cutting half my argument out is a classic right wing tactic frequently used to misrepresent the actual facts and make people interested in anything favored by the American political left look as if it’s dangerous nonsense.

   It may be the case that people such as Carnot are utterly ignorant of history in general terms.

   Now I will not argue that supply chain issues,depletion of critical minerals, etc, will NOT lead to a FAST collapse, to a Seneca Cliff scenario.

   But this is very unlikely, because modern countries just aren’t going to collapse overnight. If for instance we were to be unable to import any parts for cars and trucks, this would create one hell of a problem…. but in actual real life terms, we could manage quite some time with the ones we already have, and we could go back to building them using some older but readily available technologies within a matter of months, or a year or two at the most. There’s not a single piece of my older cars and trucks that require any technology not widely used in the USA forty or fifty years ago.

   Maybe half of what we use to support a modern lifestyle in richer Western countries today barely existed fifty years ago, if it existed at all, at the consumer level.

   It’s pretty much bullshit to say modern day workers can’t learn to use these old manufacturing technologies. Anybody who can run a modern day machine tool can learn to run an old manually operated machine in a week or two…… and an OPERATOR, as opposed to a MACHINIST, can run such a machine for days on end, so long as it maintains it’s working adjustments. When it starts turning out scrap, he calls the machinist to service it.

   It somehow escapes naysayer’s attention, POSSIBLY because they’re suffering from precisely the same problem they accuse me, Hickory, et al, of…… delusional thinking and beliefs.

   Now let me ask Carnot, Hideaway……. and their like minded friends….. do you actually think the NATO countries would simply stand aside and let ( comparatively speaking) two bit countries to destroy our economies?

   The FLIP side of having vast military industrial complexes is seldom mentioned, in terms of our own and friendly countries, but it’s VERY VERY REAL.

   When the shit hits the fan, we will collectively do WHATEVER is necessary to maintain our basic economy. If that means invading some smaller country in South America, or Africa, or right up to the borders of China or Russia, we’ll do it, if the choice is to do it or suffer a hard collapse.

   Of course there will be a great deal of austerity involved in such situations…. We probably won’t be able to buy a fancy new car, or maybe not even a micro mini car for quite some time.

   It’s more or less impossible to just load up a chip fab plant in short order and haul it off, but quite a bit of the equipment in such a plant CAN be moved, and once the BIG PICTURE, the world wide big picture, is clear to the people who DESIGN, maintain and run such plants, most of them will be very glad to get in a Yankee or NATO plane and start over in the West.

   Sure people still living as peasants in third world countries will have a better shot at survival than Western urbanites…… but under any realistic wartime economic scenario……. and such WILL be the case….. We richer Westerners can do what we have to do. Going back to yester year’s farming tech won’t be a problem at all, in technical terms. It WOULD be one hell of a problem, in economic and political terms…… but I must point out…….

   That the choice will be as easy as falling off a log…….. eating or starving.

   I could if necessary accommodate a dozen or more people on my SMALL place, with everybody having the use of a bathroom, kitchen, good place to sleep…. and enough to eat, supposing they’re willing to WORK at producing it. And there would be a surplus, on average, to feed that many more people.

   One pair of real jeans, one pair of real work shoes, one shirt, when the chips are down, will clothe a man or woman for a YEAR. I grew up without paper towels, I never had a throwaway diaper on my ass.

   For now, my part time helper just came thru the door, and duty calls. I’ll be back.

   But the odds are

   1. OFM

      “It may be the case that people such as Carnot are utterly ignorant of history in general terms

      It’s pretty much bullshit to say modern day workers can’t learn to use these old manufacturing technologies. Anybody who can run a modern day machine tool can learn to run an old manually operated machine in a week or two…… and an OPERATOR, as opposed to a MACHINIST, can run such a machine for days on end, so long as it maintains it’s working

      Now let me ask Carnot, Hideaway……. and their like minded friends….. do you actually think the NATO countries would simply stand aside and let ( comparatively speaking) two bit countries to destroy our economies?

      The FLIP side of having vast military industrial complexes is seldom mentioned, in terms of our own and friendly countries, but it’s VERY VERY REAL.

      When the shit hits the fan, we will collectively do WHATEVER is necessary to maintain our basic economy. If that means invading some smaller country in South America, or Africa, or right up to the borders of China or Russia, we’ll do it, if the choice is to do it or suffer a hard collapse”.

      Wow. Maybe you would like to think about your rant. For the record where I live we have thousand of years of history which which more than you can say for the modern US of A which has barely 300 hundred years of history after having displaced the indigenous population in the most brutal way possible at the time. I seem to remember that slavery was a real rather unpleasant feature of your nation building.

      You really believe that following a modern day imperialist approach of invading nations and grabbing their resources will work. I do not think so. You might like to raise the drawbridge bit it will fail miserably. The US will be, as is the current situation, invaded by millions of illegal immigrants which short of shooting them on sight , will be impossible to stop.

      The fact is we are well past the point of no return and stopping migration is next to impossible unless you wish to adopt the most brutal methods which most of the US, especially of the left leaning, will find abhorrent, as indeed I would.

      The society that you describe is little more than the workhouse of the 1850’s – a dystopian society overseen by brutal repression typical of the wild west. Not a lot of people are going to buy into that.

      You seem to forget that now a great deal of knowledge exist is in volatile computer files. Much of that information will be lost. Any car less than 20 years old will contain CANBUS technology. Try repairing that at home. Electronic obsolesence will render most electronics useless within a generation. Do you really think that we can teach people to regress to old technology.

      How are you going to weld metals in the future? I could go on.

      Your polemic belief in denying the reality of unreliables is of no surprise because you and many others are in a state of cognitive dissonence. Unable to come to terms with reality. I do not predict when Peak Oil happen. It will happen some day of that I am sure, but for several decades we have dodged the bullet. In 2009 it was the AFK filed that calmed the oil market and in 2012 the arrival of Shale LTO. We might bump along for another decade, maybe even two, but eventually EROEI, or net energy gain( the same) will take control and we will be cannibalising ever more energy to produce energy which is exactly what unreliables do.

      We will plunder the planet to build unreliables and still fail, only sooner. I do not have a solution that is palatable because no government of electorate would allow it.

      1. Carnot, this bit sums it up perfectly…
         “We will plunder the planet to build unreliables and still fail, only sooner. I do not have a solution that is palatable because no government of electorate would allow it.”

         Same here, any solution I can come up with is unacceptable, so therefore the preference of humanity is to go over a cliff with a rapid collapse. Most people don’t see it that way, they want, and I stress want, to believe in all the bullshit about a renewables led future. I use to be one of those myself, believing all the papers by murphy et al , etc, until I worked on the EROEI numbers, to work out it was all bullshit..

         The problem I found was that the energy for a large mine in a very sunny location, basically desert Australia, with an average of over 7 hrs/d sunshine throughout the year, I couldn’t go close to get working on a money basis for anything close to reasonable (as in a chance of ever being built). I even halved the cost to allow for ‘future cost reductions’, still couldn’t get close to making it viable.
         Could I get that mine to add some solar to reduce the cost of diesel, economically? That bit was easy, provided there was plenty of diesel for generators to back up the plant and run at night. Even then, the solar costs were subsidised by government grant to mines to reduce fossil fuels use, whereas the cost of diesel in the deep outback after transport costs is very high.
         These mines run 24/7 all year long to be close to economical, but there is no way possible it would be developed at all based on just renewables and batteries as backup because of the economics. The interest cost alone on the capital would be as much as total revenue, so it was never going to happen.

         Another aspect of the overall problem is we need mines that are more remote as we have mined all the high grade close to civilization stuff, so just to build the ‘renewable’ future, more mines in remote areas are a necessity, all at lower and lower grades on average. Again something that’s totally overlooked about a renewable future that no-one ever tries to address. We only get all these extra new minerals by using a whole lot more fossil fuels in the process, plus destroy more of the natural world in the name of being ‘green’

         Working out the numbers on the mine (nickel and copper in the West Musgraves in WA, now owned by BHP), made me realise there was something very, very wrong with the way everyone was working out the EROEI numbers, because with an EROEI of 20-30, it should be easily possible to develop such mines economically.
         I changed how to measure EROEI by using money/cost as the representation of input energy, and sure enough oil and gas projects come out at around the numbers needed to run modern civilization.

         I was surprised at how low thermal coal is, and especially surprised at how useless nuclear power is (From an EROEI of less than 1 for Hinkley to a max of 1.5-2 for those in South Korea, India, Bangladesh etc, but these numbers from developing nations are a bit rubbery) .

         We basically can’t run modern civilization off just thermal coal and/or nuclear. The biggest problem being they both produce just electricity, which doesn’t support modern agriculture, mining, nor heavy industrial processes, nor supply any of the products from fossil fuels that are critical for modern civilization.
         Solar, and wind, while better than nuclear on an EROEI output basis, are way worse once intermittency and long transmission lines are taken into account.

         The only possible solutions were the massive powering down of civilization and reduction of population via compulsory 1 child policies decades ago. Now any possible solution would have to start with rapid degrowth of both population (perhaps a lottery to have children, 1 in 10 to 1 in 50 couples, withholding of medical care to those over 55-60 and encouragement of assisted suicide for those with disabilities, high pain, etc) and similar drastic actions. All while a powering down to a lower energy method of farming and conservation of energy from ‘recreational uses’ takes place.
         I can never see any of the above happening so nature will do it to us in an uncontrolled way.

         The difference is we either go down voluntarily or it happens via natural means, which probably invokes all the worst part of humanity and people trying to survive in a world where they trust no-one.

         OFM, all your ‘we will build’… whatever after the worst part of collapse, simply wont happen as there will not be the easy to access resources to allow it to happen. Modern oil wells require modern methods and computer simulations to identify where in the ground the oil is. We wont have those computers, it’s no longer a case of sinking a well straight down to get liquid gold. Without grid electricity even stripper wells are useless. There will be no grid operating, nor piped gas for any of the factories. Nor will there be trucks able to carry vast quantities of metals for the smelters and foundries. Say you were able to find some small pockets of oil in various places around the world where it is easy to get (Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia!?) How do you refine it and move it without today’s technology??

         Do you have a lot of metallurgical coal, near surface within 100km of where your grandchildren live? Because that’s what you need to start repurposing all the metals from the nearby abandoned cities, otherwise it’s just junk. How do you move any of it to your ‘new’ factories making the simple machines with no modern transport and hardly any horses? (assuming horses survive the collapse and don’t all get eaten by starving humans)..

         All I can think of is that you are thinking of a very ‘light’ collapse where ‘most’ of current civilization’ infrastructure still exists, because somehow more solar and wind provide food for cities, and there continues to be plenty of fresh resources available, to build new things with, plus all the energy to do so is easily available/transportable.

         Basically the collapse of modern civilization is going to be far worse and faster than nearly anyone can imagine. It’s going to be an event unparalleled in human and even Earth history. There just wont be the availability of even simple animal power as most, if not all have been consumed by starving billions of people. Where the metals are in cities, will not be near where the remaining coal is to re smelt to make stuff. Transport between A and B, if it’s not walking distance, will become impossible.
         We wont be making anything unless it’s very, very simple, like garden and poultry fences out of bamboo.

         Perhaps I should write a novel about how bad collapse will be, including all the various mistakes every ‘collapse movie’ makes about the availability of ‘stuff’, except nobody would bother buying it, as it would not have a happy ending…

         1. Carnot and Hideaway
            Those are the realities people will not face. And the state of collapse is already rolling over us. The American empire is not much different than the Roman Empire. Rome required expansion through conquest of developed civilizations that could be pillaged for there accumulated goods and slaves. Once the known world was conquered and only barbarian nomadic tribes were left they started building walls to prevent invasion. Barbarians didn’t have accumulated wealth and didn’t understand slavery. America became great because it had the greatest untapped resources the world had ever seen and of the right mix. This allowed it to become the greatest industrial power of its day. This had nothing to do with innovation or political will it was tons of oil coal gas iron copper that’s what made America great. It also recognized that it needed to grow by industrial conquest of foreign resources. That’s why it bombed the snot out of Vietnam Laos and Cambodia ,who were too weak to ever retaliate, to show the world it would defend private property rights globally to facilitate multinational corporate expansion. That was the communist threat and only that. (Not that today’s communist is any better just a different system of abuse and failure)And to that end it has installed puppet regimes globally and maintained them. The problem is now there are no further opportunities for conquest. No more cheap ore resources or labor or energy. Like Rome it must grow or it must die. Like Rome it wants to build a wall and like Rome it will be pillaged and over run. And like the Romans it won’t understand why it will just be angry.

3. I already knew the airline industry was into some bad weather, and that the US skies looks like the London Metro on steroids, but I found an interesting piece, courtesy Airliners.net
   https://richardaboulafia.com/february-2024-letter
   Mostly about a specific company, but there are many lessons to be made there.
   (i´ve followed this drama for quite some time, developing story as you say)

   So buying into BNSF might be a good deal after all. (Didn´t, but some did)

4. It´s unfortunate that wind doesn´t blow in the Nordics at winter, otherwise we could get like 70% of our own consumption from wind.
   But wait, there´s more, currently it´s only 69% so quite close, but one could hope.
   https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Power-system-data/Production1/Wind-Power/se/hourly/?view=table
   https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/Market-data1/Power-system-data/Consumption1/Consumption/SE/Hourly1111/?view=table
   Unfortunately no other country/region has this resource, but that´s life…

   1. Is this all onshore, or a mix?
      And to think, its a very young industry.

      It must be false since people like Carnot and Hideaway say its just not feasible.

      1. “It must be false since people like Carnot and Hideaway say its just not feasible.”
         Yup – rolling over and playing dead does not seem to be in the human genome.
         rgds WP

5. Global sea surface temperatures just set a new record and it looks certain that the anomalies for every day in the twelve months to May will beat every previous day’s maximum, and by a huge margin of around 0.15 to 0.25. All time record highs are likely to continue to be set through at least March. We better all hope this is due to El Nino and will quickly go away or hell is about to be unleashed. Even if it is El Nino how are we supposed to prepare for the next one which seems likely to be even worse?

   https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/

   Also a big storm in the Arctic has lowered sea ice extent, with a slight chance of giving a very early maximum, and both Antarctic and Global extents are close to record daily lows. Most of the ice loss is in the Barents Sea and this is a recognised tipping point with an abrupt loss expected at 1.6 °C (looks about right on present evidence). Loss of this sea ice will considerably affect atmospheric circulation, European climate (for one much stormier, maybe explaining the record wind speeds set by Ingunn in Norway and Sweden last week), and possibly the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. By definition the regime on the other side of the tipping point is significantly different and there is no going back before a lot (centuries worth?) of hysteresis kicks in, and recent studies indicate each tipping may have a domino effect on others.

   https://zacklabe.com/global-sea-ice-extent-conc/

   

   1. It isn’t helpful to proclaim all hope is lost and we are doomed. We are in a super El Nino and are coming off a massive volcano that flooded the stratosphere with water vapor. Also we’re in an active phase of a solar cycle. No wonder there has been warming, but this shall all pass in coming years. They’re saying a La Nina is more likely than not by the end of the year.

      1. The solar (sunspot) cycle is irrelevant. The likely answer is in the ocean, plus the H-T volcano, Not only El Nino in the Pacific but an equivalent spike in the Atlantic via the AMO index , and one in the Indian ocean via the IOD index. The 3 spikes constructively added together do a number on the Earth’s temperature.

         The sad part is that climatologists still have no clue what is happening. Normally a volcanic eruption spits out aerosols and sulphates (SO4) which reflect sunlight and act to cool the Earth, but now it’s the excess water vapor that must be counter-acting that effect by providing more GHG potential in the atmosphere. No one is saying much right now because the likelihood of guessing wrong as to a cause is too great,

         1. Hi, Paul

            My knowledge of the atmospheric sciences is limited to that of a well informed layman or possibly that of someone who has completed an introductory level course or two at a university.

            I don’t understand why we should expect any medium to long term effects from a volcano emitting a lot of water vapor, give that the volume must be minute indeed, compared to daily planetary evaporation and precipitation. So that extra vapor shouldn’t disrupt the water cycle at all, except temporarily.

            Maybe it does because it goes so high up it hangs around for a long time in the upper atmosphere?

            Thanks in advance for any clarification.

            1. Does the water vapor chart show up below?

               

            2. Water vapor is a potent greenhouse gas so should trap IR from escaping high in the atmosphere. This is an enormous change in water vapor density from normal conditions. An experimental physicist would design this kind of experiment in the lab, yet here we have one created thanks to mother nature.

               1. So…… How long is this extra water vapor in the upper atmosphere expected to stay there?

   2. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13047845/umbrella-size-argentina-fight-earth-global-warming.html

      An umbrella the size of Agentina is being designed.

      No Worries Mate!

   3. The research reported on here, https://theconversation.com/a-deeply-troubling-discovery-earth-may-have-already-passed-the-crucial-1-5-c-warming-limit-222601, suggests it’s not all El Nino and actual warming is much more than has been reported so that 2 degrees may be nearer than anyone has previously thought.

      1. It’s not all El Nino in the Pacific. It’s also the huge excursion in the AMO index in the Atlantic and also a huge excursion of the IOD index in the Indian ocean. Adding all these peaks of the sea-surface temperature (SST) in each of the major ocean basins is contributing to the heating spike of 2023 continuing into 2024.

         These appear to be spikes in the readings and not something that will continue, yet climate scientists still have absolutely no clue what causes El Nino — and they argue over whether or not the AMO is even an oscillation in spite of the fact that the word “Oscillation” is in the AMO acronym.

6. This is a pretty good arm wavy sort of look at some of the behavioural issues that are starting to be seen as civilisations decent accelerates. There are plenty of interesting links to follow too.

   I have discussed recently about why people worship technology so much and only tend to see the positive aspects of it and ignore the negative aspects. The cultural conditioning that accompanies civilization and modernity today incorporates a great deal of propaganda …

   The people who are busy promoting these ideas suffer a great deal from optimism bias and, unfortunately, denial of reality. Sure, these folks might be making a living off of marketing their idea, but is the actual idea behind the marketing effort going to provide the solution it is being marketed for? In a nutshell, NO. The trouble here once again is that we aren’t suffering from a problem. We are suffering from a predicament; and predicaments have outcomes, not solutions. …

   The biggest boondoggle within all of this is the web of propaganda, manipulation, cultural programming and conditioning, indoctrination, and belief systems which surround all of us. Our addiction to energy use and technology use prevents us from tackling precisely what would reduce ecological overshoot, and yet because of the belief systems surrounding us, few if any of us really want to reduce our energy use OR our use of technology.

   Though it is written as if we have complete free will over how we choose to address these issues and, I think, it is rather that we follow programmed responses that evolution has built into us and tuned by our lifetime experiences, i.e. our behaviour is pre-determined (but still unknowable in advance).

   https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2024/01/how-intractable-is-our-lack-of-agency.html

   1. Thanks George. Good read on reality, and the link to wetiko I especially appreciated reading. From wetiko read:

      A contagious psycho-spiritual disease of the soul is currently being acted out en masse on the world stage via an insidious collective psychosis of titanic proportions. This mind-virus—which Native Americans have called “wetiko”—covertly operates through the unconscious blind spots in the human psyche, rendering people oblivious to their own madness and compelling them to act against their own best interests. Wetiko is a psychosis in the true sense of the word, “a sickness of the spirit.” Wetiko covertly influences our perceptions so as to act itself out through us while simultaneously hiding itself from being seen.

      Yep

   2. Very well said, George

      I basically agree with you, especially your point on our behavior being basically controlled by our evolutionary history. Evolution provided no brakes on our desire to accumulate stuff, any stuff at all, that we found useful or just “pretty”.

      No brakes were needed, prior to the evolution of cities, countries, etc, we lived as primitive farmers and or hunter gatherers, and it was impossible to create or accumulate goods beyond what could be made by hand using primitive technologies. Metal workers prior to a few hundred years back could produce enough to make spears, shields, axes, hand tools….. but not enough to make anything requiring more than a few kilos of metal….. metal was simply TOO expensive.

      So of course modern civilization and technologies have resulted in our being deep into overshoot.

      And most of us, maybe nearly all of us, are going to pay the ultimate price, in my opinion, within the next century or so, probably within this calendar century.

      Nothing new here , so far, just background info for what I have to say.

      Those of us ( our younger children, grandchildren, old fart such as yours truly won’t likely see it happen) who survive will have the same basic instinctual behaviors…. but we will also be extremely flexible in exercising them.

      And there will be so much useful STUFF of all sorts around, barring a flat out CNBC WWIII, and even after that, that survivors won’t have to start from scratch….. we’ll have all the basic stuff available that people had before the Industrial Revolution, gazillions of excellent quality hand tools of every sort, lots of weapons, tons of books detailing the history of earlier technologies, etc. And we’ll still have the family / tribal/ cultural behaviors tying us together enabling us to work in groups rather than as individuals.

      It’s mostly an academic argument, either way, with a lot of us saying modern civilization will be finished more or less forever,after a hard collapse, due to the depletion of nature’s gifts of minerals, water, soil, benign climate, etc.

      Others such as myself believe that a modern civilization can and will either survive in pockets, or rise again, and in much less time than one might expect.

      Consider the depletion argument. If there are only ten percent as many people surviving, well….. assuming some of them know how to get oil and gas out of the ground…….. there will be oil and gas available.

      There will be at least a billion tons of good to very high quality scrap metal sitting around everywhere , after a hard crash, here in the USA…. that much JUST in the form of automobiles and trucks.

      The EXISTING stock of farm machinery, left sitting, will be enough to last ten percent of the people a couple of generations at least….. assuming diesel fuel can be had, or manufactured, locally.

      ONE bushel of an old pure line cultivar of corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, etc, is enough to produce anywhere from fifteen or twenty bushels of seed for the next year’s crop. Seed will be scarce, for sure, but not unobtainium.

      Most of our larger domestic animals would starve in short order, without farmers looking after them…. but millions of them will succeed in running wild. If I were to live until the crash, there’s virtually no doubt in my mind that I could easily kill ample meat, in the form of feral hogs, horses, cows, goats, etc. The hogs are almost impossible to eradicate as it is……. and they’re moving south from Canada, where it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off of a brass monkey, from the Gulf states where it’s hot enough to melt them off in July and August. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to get into the habit of preying on US…. the ones of us unwary enough to serve as their lunch.

      Now these thoughts make no sense at all……. until you (rhetorical ) stop to consider that in the event of a hard crash, our numbers will be counted in the lower millions, and scattered across continents, rather than in the hundreds of millions, concentrated in cities utterly dependent on modern industrial agriculture, etc.

      There might be only a few dozen survivors within a few days walk or bike ride in my local area for instance. There won’t be any significant number of survivors in a big city hit with a nuke, not with the water, sewer,electricity out, no food deliveries, etc .

      Such survivors as do escape from such a city will be the toughest, meanest, strongest, for the most part. In the worst case scenario. If I were to be still around, this means I would be forted up with some old friends, including retired military, and posting a continuous armed guard for anybody hoping to take over our more or less self sufficient little farm fortress.

      When the question is killing or being killed, most of us who like to think we’re incapable of killing will very shortly realize that killing isn’t all that big a deal…. not if it means saving your own kids or wife or grand children….. or just your own life.

      Maybe these comments sound sort of crazy……… but I’m a born and bred Scotch Irish southern mountain hillbilly, albeit at least outwardly civilized, even well enough educated to get dressed and pass at a university faculty party. I’m probably the only regular here who personally knows half a dozen people in state and federal penitentiaries, a dozen or more people who have at one time or another raped, robbed, or killed somebody for no reason at all, or over a woman, etc.

      Times have changed now, and people are moving into this area BECAUSE it’s quiet and peaceful to retire or start a new life working from home, etc. When I was a kid, just about half the men I knew routinely carried a pistol, and they were generally ready to use them…. the backwoods stereotype hillbilly culture is nowaday mostly forgotten, or the butt of jokes.
      But such cultures still exist in urban ghetto environments in countless places today in the USA, they exist in more third world areas than not. Walking down the wrong street is still betting your life on luck in thousands of communities here in the USA.

      So…. I know first hand what people are capable of, when the chips are down. The preacher who believes in brotherhood and turning the other cheek will grab his rabbit gun and shoot somebody trying to kidnap his daughter without a second thought………… unless maybe he went to SEMINARY and got brainwashed to such an extent he freezes up, failing to act. If he grew up scratching and fighting, he won’t suffer any such inhibitions.

      Bottom line, some people will survive, and they will have the basic resources to get a new civilization under way again. It might be centuries before they can manufacture a new computer chip……. they might NEVER be able to do it, for lack of enough people to have all the necessary subsidiary industries.

      But they’ll eventually create a civilization with most or all of what we had in the WWII era, or the next couple of decades. Maybe it’ll take three or four centuries, or even three or four thousand years.

      But there’s simply NO reason at all, barring bad luck on their part, to believe that it wouldn’t eventually happen.

      Nobody in the continental USA would ever likely need to make stone tools. There will be tens of millions of axes, saws, shovels, hammers, big sturdy stainless steel butcher knives, etc lying around free for the taking.

      There’s enough stuff laying around on my place, and within another four or five miles, that I could build a water mill using hand tools that would suffice to grind corn…. but if you must, you can grind corn with a mortar and pestle, or more likely these days, with a small sledge hammer and a bowl shaped depression hammered into a concrete patio or sidewalk or roadside curb, etc. The concrete will still be there even if the house burns to the ground.

      I personally know and understand this stuff because when I was a kid I spent a LOT of time with my grandparents who grew up without electricity or trucks or tractors, and they continued living to a substantial extent without using electricity or a truck or tractor…. as a matter of choice and just preserving the old ways because they wanted to.

      So…….. I watched and helped make wooden shingles, skin a cow for meat, cure the hide for leather, can or salt down meat, go to the woods and cut down a tree with a cross cut saw, drag it out with a mule, plow with that same mule…. heat entirely with firewood …. wear mostly new clothes myself, because I was the oldest, but by younger brother wore my outgrown shirts , coats and pants……….. And I got only a pair or two of new pants per year.

      We figured it out, or we did without. We were happy, and I didn’t even KNOW we were poor until I grew up and left home.

      The hundred pound woman wearing heels and a nice suit in an office can, if she must, turn into a hellion, and have calluses on her hands as hard as oak knots in a year or two….. not every time, but as often as not.

      Human beings are controlled mostly by our evolutionary behavioral traits…… let’s just not forget that the most powerful trait of all is to survive and have kids and take care of them. Sure we can ignore it, if we so desire.

      But most of us won’t, because we do NOT so desire, especially once the chips are down.

      If that nice young woman, the former office manager, finds it NECESSARY to feed her kids, she will steal to do it, rob to do it, sell her body to do it, if she has no other choice.

      It’s not IN us, not most of us anyway, to just roll over and go quietly into the night, once we finally realize it’s do or die time.

      But I’m not about to argue that a hell of a lot of us WILL NOT die before we realize it IS do or die time, lol.

      And most of us are going to die because we aren’t going to be in a position to do anything about it.

      God help the people trapped by the tens and hundreds of millions in places where their crops will fail, where they can’t import fuel, machinery, fertilizer, etc. They won’t be migrating for the most part, because when they reach a national border, there will be Iron Curtain style fences, mine fields, gun towers, etc, to keep them OUT.

      1. OFM
         I agree the descent is going to be ugly, and you have mentioned the horsemen of the apocalypse previously. Just consider one disease – HIV/AIDS
         Despite billions spent over the last several decades, there is no cure, only a sophisticated cocktail of antiviral drugs that control, not cure it.
         It is 100% fatal, targets people in their prime years and only a tiny fraction of humans ( mostly in northern Scandinavia) have genetic immunity.
         What happens when that drug supply line fails?

         1. I wasn’t referring to your culture’s grasp of history, lol.

            What I had in mind was your obvious personal grasp of history….. You just don’t seem to know apple butter from doo doo except about the BIG PICTURE except as it can be seen viewed thru blinders of the sort my grand parents put on horses and mules so they couldn’t see anything except what was directly in front of them, lol.
            I’ve read thousands and thousands of pages of “RANTS” of the sort you throw out over and over.
            But at least this time you have finally said in no uncertain terms that accepting your argument is pretty much a waste of time, lol.

            “We will plunder the planet to build unreliables and still fail, only sooner. I do not have a solution that is palatable because no government of electorate would allow it.”

            Maybe so. I’m not RELIGIOUS , as you seem to be, about my beliefs. I readily acknowledge that IMO, the world in general is going to hell, a substantial percentage of us, globally, will die hard before this century is out, that you MIGHT be right, that our current day civilization will crash back to something approaching Middle Ages levels, technically, or maybe even back to something equivalent to our earliest actual KNOWN history. Maybe there won’t be any naked apes at all in 2300, maybe we will be extinct.

            Well now…. once upon a time, say twenty years ago, I was a hard core doomer myself, and generally held beliefs compatible with your own.

            For the record, I acknowledge that a crash and burn economic, political, and ecological scenario is again in my own opinion, extremely likely, for billions of us, maybe even almost all of us.

            But again in my opinion, the odds are at least fair to good that some people in some places, maybe quite a lot of people in a lot of places, will be able to pull thru the bottle neck, and continue to live a modern day kind of life, at least to the extent there’s running water, electricity, food in stores, cops on the street.

            They very likely won’t have much in the way of fresh fruit or vegetables shipped from far away, nor will they be flying go get away from the snow, or TO the snow, on vacations. They’ll not have a thousand kinds of highly processed frozen food to microwave or bake, but with some luck they’ll have a nutritionally satisfactory diet.
            Maybe the luckiest ones will have a micro mini electric car with a forty mile range, or a gasoline fueled scooter that’ll go over a hundred miles per gallon. MAYBE.

            I suggest that you should hang out with some birds of a different feather, try some mind altering drugs or something, maybe actually read a few history books, lol.

            Maybe you should go back to university, and take some of the courses I took at a so called ” cow college”, lol. Chemistry with the chemical majors thru sophomore year, a course or two in basic physics, the abc level stuff in geology, etc….. and TONS of courses with the biology majors, thru my junior year. Some as a senior too, and quite a lot more at various times, some of them graduate level.

            ” I do not have a solution that is palatable because no government of electorate would allow it.”

            I think maybe you just might possibly have heard of Darwin, and evolution, lol.
            I’ve only rarely met an engineer who actually UNDERSTANDS biological evolution, but it’s not all that hard a nut, if you’ll give it a serious try. You know, from microbes and viruses to tiny animals and plants, out of the water and onto the land, right on up to apes with bones so like our own that a laymen readily mistakes chimp bones for human bones.

            Electron microscopes, all that stuff. They have ALL of it, super computers, etc in the “College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Believe it or not, some of the faculty took their degrees in math, nuclear physics, electrical engineering, etc, and worked their way into research useful to farmers with shit on their boots, lol.

            ” I do not have a solution that is palatable because no government of electorate would allow it.”

            Governments evolve too. Yep. Sure ‘nuf.

            Believe it or not, there are some very powerful countries that are ruled by people as ruthless as any body you have ever heard of, say Adolf Hitler, or Joe Stalin, or maybe Chairman Mao.

            And some of them have been able to hold onto power long enough to build spaceships, nuclear weapons, engineered virus, tens of thousands of tanks and warplanes……. all while keeping their people under such tight control that saying anything out loud in public meant disappearing into a prison… someplace up in Siberia.

            We have governments in Western Europe that function rather well because the people generally understand the world they live in, we have some such as the ones running Cuba and Venezuela, some run by people such is Idi Amin.

            Governments EVOLVE just like ants. Ants thrive because they’ve evolved a social way of life, which can be usefully thought of as a primitive form of government.

            It’s a given that countless millions of us, often the inhabitants of entire countries, are going to go the way of the grasshoppers and butterflies who lived merrily without a care thru the summer….. laughing at the ant that slaved away, stashing food safely underground, safe from predators, safe from freezing cold..

            But not all people are like grasshoppers, or butter flies. Some of us are more like ants, and some of us are capable of doing some serious thinking, and some of us, in some places, given a certain amount of luck, will come to understand the score, that all the chips are on the table, and it’s literally do or die time.

            My so called Pearl Harbor Events, aka sharp broken bricks upside our collective head, are already arriving on a near daily basis, and they’re going to be coming faster every year, and the pieces are going to be bigger as well.

            I’m at least cautiously optimistic that with a little luck, some people in some places, in some countries, will have leaders willing to do what’s necessary and that the people themselves will come to understand what’s necessary, before it’s simply too late to go proactive and save as much of modern civilization as they can, buckle down and make the necessary sacrifices.

            There won’t BE any shortage of the kinds of knowledge needed to adapt and survive… there will be millions of surviving books and hopefully a few people who have actual relevant hands on skills any place where there are enough survivors to start rebuilding a modern civilization, meaning one with electricity, etc.

            Assuming of course the crash and burn is slow and controlled of course.

            Now assuming it’s fast and crazy……….
            And welding iron and steel……. I’m not very good at it, because it’s only a hobby to me, but I can work steel with a coal or even charcoal fired forge, and make a serviceable tool such as an axe or mattock or plow. I can make shingles without power tools, but I wouldn’t have too…. there’s a metal roof on my masonry farm house, and it’ll last at least another hundred years unless it burns and I paint or tar it every ten to twenty years. ::

            I don’t actually expect to ever need it, but I have a couple of thousand rounds of rifle ammo, useful for trading or hunting or defensive purposes if it were to come to that, and I were to live that long.
            I have a WWI vintage rifle that’s functionally as good as new, and so long as it is protected from moisture, and used only occasionally….. it’ll still be functionally as good as new for another hundred years…. or twice that, easily.

            IF I were to be around another sixty years, and still healthy, it’s a pretty safe assumption that the country side around these parts will be running alive with wild hogs and goats, etc. Maybe even forest bison.

            They will NOT be hunted to extinction, because there will be only a few people around, and some very large areas where there’s hardly anybody at all.

            There may not be any diesel fuel, or parts to be bought, but somebody here, maybe yours truly, will make enough biodiesel to run a farm tractor a few days a year. Between the ones I have, and the ones that will be free for the taking, I’m sure I could keep one running enough to do some plowing,
            etc, for a couple of decades, no problem.

            After that……might have to go back to a horse or ox.

            I have a library, with textbooks and manuals that comprehensively cover disease control, sanitation, basic health measures, first aid, even primitive dentistry, etc.

            I’ve known quite few people who lived to be old who never had a serious medical problem once they reached adult hood, and never got any professional care, other than having teeth extracted. I’ve seen that done with pliers and booze on two different occasions.

            There will be derelict stores with large stocks of synthetic fabric clothing and bedding, stuff that will last for years and that can be stored no problem for decades.

            Now this IS a rant, but if I had time, I would write a novel about this sort of future history.

            With the world wide population just about wiped out, a new industrial civilization can and would eventually arise again. It might never have jumbo passenger planes, or computer chip fab plants, or F250 trucks just for bringing home the beer.

            The beer might very well be brewed right in the neighborhood, but there would be beer.

            It might be centuries before our future off spring have a post WWII life style, in terms of having electricity, water, sewage, etc. They might never have large personal vehicles, or other things requiring lots of energy and resources. But they wouldn’t be living as peasants.

            Or maybe not.

            But think about it. If Hitler was able to seize power to the extent he could turn post WWI Germany into the worlds foremost military power, while being desperately short of material resources in his own country, and do that in less than two decades….. Don’t you think that if he realized he had no choice but to do so……. he would have put all that human energy and all those resources into building a resilient economy…… rather than building his war machine?

            Governments do generally move like glaciers, but not always. Sometimes they can reverse or change course radically within a very few years…… and accomplish amazing things.

            I’m not saying it WILL happen…….. but there’s a serious chance that we Yankees, and some other people, will get enough of those sharp bricks upside our heads that we will do what we did in the WWII era…… get our asses in gear, and do whatever CAN be done.

            And if we’re lucky enough to get started soon enough, well…… maybe we can actually keep our lights on, our toilets flushing, food in our stores, and cops on our streets.

            Maybe not.

            Yogi sez, ‘predict’n’s hard, ‘specially the future.

            And that this place would do a lot more business if it weren’t so crowded all the time.

            This far…… you’re still in your FRESHMAN text books.

            Maybe you’ll encounter a discussion of cultural and technical evolution before you’re a sophomore, maybe you’ll get there your second year. Sometimes it’s slow, in human terms, as for example the Egyptians lived for a few thousand years without accomplishing very much on the technical front, except building pyramids, etc.

            And sometimes it moves at light speed, figuratively speaking, both technically and socially or culturally , economically, as happened with the coming of the printing press and then after that the Industrial Revolution, etc.

         2. Hi Old Chemist,

            It’s absolutely no fault of your own, but the fact that you ask this question, your handle, and your other comments, lead me to understand that you’re a highly intelligent and well educated professional man, with a fairly wide knowledge of the physical world we live in…….. but that you haven’t had any serious instruction in the life sciences.

            That’s all too often the way it is these days. Professional people typically know more and more about some very specialized field, and less and less about everything else,until they know everything about almost nothing,, and almost nothing about everything else.

            So about contagious diseases such as HIV………..
            Most people who get it will die of it, no question.
            But you rarely if ever get it by way of casual contact, such as being in the same room as a victim, the way you get the flu….. by aerial transmission.
            You get it by way of close physical contact.. meaning sex, or at least hugging and kissing, or by a blood transfusion, etc.

            There are apparently a few exceptional cases, infections resulting from handling towels and washcloth or tissue used to clean up an infected person with an open wound, or saliva or sexual secretions being on the cleaning cloth, transferring the virus to the caregiver, especially if the care giver herself has an open wound.

            But a very substantial portion of most local populations will never get infected, because they’re just not engaging in sex with anyone at all, too young, too old, or else with one regular partner, husband or wife, etc.

            People in modern societies as a rule overlook the the power of taboos and other behavioral rules or laws that largely control the behavior of people who are serious about their religion or philosophy.

            I’ve known at least five or six pious women who unquestionably died as virgins, because they never met a man they wished to marry. Most of them were kin or neighbors back in my younger days. My family in times gone, back when I was a kid, believed in the KJB as the literal, absolute, and utterly infallible Word of God. I’m just as serious myself about the word and work of scientists such as Newton and Darwin, etc.

            If you don’t eat pork, you’re largely protected from being infected by certain parasites that can and do kill.

            If you don’t fuck anybody but your own man or woman, the odds are pretty damned good you won’t get any of half a dozen potentially fatal STD’s………. sexually transmitted diseases.

            If you read widely outside your own field, you are as likely as not to know these things. In my case, these topics were also thoroughly covered in biology classes as such, and then applied in other classes devoted to the application of this aspect of biology.

            So.. a knowledgeable farmer isolates or gets rid of sick animals, makes sure they all get plenty of clean water, don’t have to stand around in mud full of worm eggs, or graze on pasture where other animals defecated and deposited parasite eggs on the grass….. eggs which will hatch in their digestive system, and migrate to other organs, etc.

            Nurses sterilize patients bedclothes, as necessary,wash their hands between each patient, etc. There are dozens of disease control protocols both general and specific to various diseases. Just about all of them are discussed in depth in animal science classes , medical schools, nursing schools, etc.

            So….. victims of HIV will die without modern day medicine. Most of us in most places are going to die hard anyway.

            But if you don’t screw around, the odds are for all practical purposes one hundred percent you won’t get it.

            As a matter of unquestionable fact, as many as half to two thirds of all the health issues that kill us or cripple us before our time these days are lifestyle diseases.

            But such lifestyle diseases mostly do their dirty work very slowly, so that we live long enough to reproduce successfully before our diets, air pollution, tobacco, alcohol, lack of exercise, etc, cripple or kill us.

            So we evolve resistance to these killers only very slowly if at all, because they don’t interfere to any serious extent with our reproduction.

            1. OFM
               Sorry I was not a little more explicit in the wording of my comment, and while I do not have your formal training in agriculture, like you I was born and raised on a farm, earned a big part of my university tuition working for farmers and follow the subject with informal interest. When you talk about a mattock, or an adze or a froe, I know what you are talking about, and have developed calluses using them.
               My informal exposure to health ,diseases,etc. includes
               – Married to a nurse for 55 years
               – Daughter a nurse for 30 years
               – Grand daughter just passed North American board exam for veterinary doctor
               – Close friend of mine started a charitable refuge/school for HIV/AIDS orphans in South Africa during the peak of the infections there, and observed the situation getting worse and worse until antivirals became available.

               Celibacy is certainly going to prevent the spread of AIDS/HIV but it is a dead end for the species. Strict monogamy will also work reasonably well, but history says it is pretty rare to see it universally applied ( especially among young people) and in conflict situations. Condoms and birth control pills will also disappear at some point, and of course, as you point out other classical diseases will flare up as well.
               Quarantine and isolation slowed the spread of deadly diseases in the middle ages but was completely unsuccessful in stopping their eventual spread everywhere. Can we make it any different in the coming times?

               1. Hi Old Chemist,
                  I’m sorry and embarrassed that I didn’t know more about your background, but my general point is and was good. Most people don’t know very much about the big picture.

                  You’re right that various contagious diseases have spread to the far corners of the Earth, and that it’s perfectly reasonable to expect more of the same, when not if, with similar consequences, or worse. A new disease, or a newly evolved known disease may kill more people faster than anything known in history.

                  And the odds of such a disease arising are worse than ever, probably by a factor of ten or even a hundred, because we’re deliberately and inadvertently moving people, food, materials, and of course microbes, insects, snakes, rats, etc etc all over the planet.

                  And the die off might be so extreme that hardly anybody is left, except ( probably) a few individuals or small communities that deliberately isolate themselves for quite some time. If they’re lucky, they won’t have much to worry about because after a few years there won’t be any other people or other disease supporting hosts and they’ll be ok.

                  This scenario might mean the occasional survivors will be pretty much forced to revert back to a really primitive economy… basic agriculture and maybe some hunting and gathering.

                  But at least they won’t have to rely on stone tools, there’ll be stuff around to salvage for a very long time.

      2. And who is going to do anything when the grid goes down? Who’s going to maintain the nuclear spent fuel ponds? Who’s going to farm land that is dead earth overrun with pests? Where should people live near an oil well or refinery? And how will they find it without GPS? Now I do agree everyone in the US has guns and will use them until the bullets run out and then they’ll start clubbing each other. But that might happen this fall.

         1. JT & Hideaway,

            Spot on.

            The decay of the infrastructure will start slowly at first and then pick up pace. All the utilities and local services will slowly degrade. Power, water and sewage disposal will become more expensive and finally collapse as the funds to maintain the infrastructure diminish. Roads, bridges, rail networks , ports will slowly crumble due to lack of maintenance.
            OFM’s idea that there will be plenty of scrap materials that can be recycled will only be possible for a short time. Scrap steel can be remelted but the real tricky high strength steels will requires metallurgical coal and iron oxide, none of which is now plentiful and easy to extract.. Within 25 years unreliables will be history. How are they to be maintained let lone be rebuilt. All the skills will be lost, which includes people like ourselves.

            I see pollution as a very real issue. All those nuclear plants will simply be abandoned leaving behind a toxic mess that will last millions of years.

            Ten years after the Peak of Population the survivors will be asking what went wrong, and those with a modicum of intelligence will be wondering how dumb their forefathers were. We burned all the oil resources, we degraded the environment, and we let the population get out of control. We were pretty crap at managing the planet.

      3. If some combination of pollution, climate change and human caused habitat destruction leads to a real mass extinction on a par with the previous ones then there is absolutely no chance of any human, or probably any mammal, surviving. It’s been some time since I read Brannen’s book but I seem to remember that really all that was left after the big one was a type of clam in the oceans and a fern or suchlike on land. Almost all diversity of complex life had been wiped out and it took millions of years to recover.

         1. We are driving species extinct faster than at any time, changing the environment orders of magnitude faster than it is possible to adapt, leaving pollutants longer lived than seen before. In previous extinction the rise in CO2 was slow enough that ocean pH levels were kept relatively constant through geologic processes, not now. Think of what we have killed in the last fifty years, that will accelerate as we burn, eat and trample on everything in order to survive. We haven’t observed serious trophic cascades yet but they are around the corner and then … pffft, it’s all gone. We are too far in overshoot not to have a huge undershoot.

            1. I can see how it is tempting to contemplate the idea that the quicker human population hits the wall and enters sharp decline, the better….from the ecological perspective.
               I do fear that humans will commit a final act of global deforestation prior to a fast fade.

               1. I fully agree that we might trigger a mass extinction that would wipe the last one of us, and nearly all or all of the so called higher animals and plants.

                  I don’t know enough to have a serious opinion as to how likely this might be, but it seems unlikely to me at least that things will get that bad.

                  Now as to a global deforestation, etc, I think it’s rather likely that we will die off faster than we can wipe out the global forest. It takes a hell of a lot of fuel, men, and machinery to move wood long distances, especially from remote areas without roads.

                  The stumps of many species will sprout for many years, so long as there’s some water and the temperature isn’t too extreme either way.

                  As a matter of fact, it’s a never ending job to prevent trees from retaking open land any place the climate is suitable for them. The species mix in such a situation can vary wildly for a few generations of trees, but eventually a new stable balance is established.

                  So let us say the new environment is too hot and dry for the original species distribution…….. the ones that are better suited to hot dry weather will probably do ok, and seeds from places that are historically hotter and dryer will find their way, given time…. on the fur of animals, in flooding streams, in the manure of grazing animals, carried by the wind, etc.

                  This process is slow by human standards but fast on biological time.

                  The trees will probably be ok after a crash and burn scenario because there will be very few people to harvest them in most places.

7. Watch The Price is Right and watch the contestant’s eyes light up when a phone or pad are offered. Makes me cringe – I could care less but oh boy is it the most important thing in so many people’s lives.

   1. On the other hand, a mobile device consumes a lot less resources than a fabulous new car.

      Ride in a crowded train in Hong Kong and you’ll see hundreds of people packed in a tight space, all content to stare at their tiny screens. It’s very efficient.

8. Interesting article about how bots are increasingly influencing political discourse.

   https://epjdatascience.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjds/s13688-023-00440-3

   In the future it will be hordes of artificial voices that drive political decisions. It’s no wonder so much is being invested in the technology.

   Most online providers figured out long ago that “angertainment” is what attracts a following.

9. WEST’S ‘HOT DROUGHT’ IS UNPRECEDENTED IN MORE THAN 500 YEARS

   “Extreme heat and dry conditions amplify one another—a positive feedback loop climate scientists call “hot drought.” Findings show, however, that hot drought has never been this severe, making future projections and mitigation measures more unclear.”

   https://phys.org/news/2024-02-west-hot-drought-unprecedented-years.html

10. Oh dear, maybe EVs aren’t ready to save world yet.

    AUTOMAKERS REEL AS EV DEMAND PLUMMETS

    • Ford and other manufacturers reduced EV production as dealers petitioned against aggressive EV policies due to accumulating unsold EVs.
    • Hertz announced selling off a significant portion of its EV fleet due to high maintenance costs and consumer preference for internal combustion engines.
    • The EV industry faced criticism over a cheating scandal involving inflated efficiency ratings and excessive subsidies, highlighting the need for market-driven consumer choices.

    https://oilprice.com/Finance/the-Markets/Automakers-Reel-as-EV-Demand-Plummets.html

    1. I wonder if that turn away from EVs will change if gas is a buck more.
       Rgds
       WP

    2. Funny how a decline in the rate of growth gets promulgated as the end of EV demand.
       13.6 million EV’s were sold in 2023, of which 9.5 million were BEV’s. Even an innumerate like me knows it’s a lot easier to double sales of a small number than a big one.

       Global electric car sales rose 31% in 2023
       https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/global-electric-car-sales-rose-31-2023-rho-motion-2024-01-11/

    3. Yuck – quoting a right-wing mag claiming that EV incentives somehow equals “central planning”.
       But, Hertz talking about a sell-off because EVs are more expensive to maintain… I thought EVs were cheaper to maintain? Is that not true, or does Hertz suffer especially from the “it’s not my car” syndrome?

       1. Do you need to return a rental EV with a full charge, otherwise you get a surcharge?

          Also think about how many people understand how to recharge an EV and where to do it in a unfamiliar city. People that already own an EV would consider renting, but those that don’t may not want to scale the learning curve just for a rental.

       2. Since when is oilprice.com right-wing?

       3. Supposedly EV renters beat the crap out of them ( great acceleration) leading to lots of damage, which is expensive to fix.)
          https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hertz-cites-weak-demand-high-damage-costs-in-decision-to-downsize-ev-fleet-0996ae17

          rgds
          WP

          1. In one of Top Gear episodes there was a quip that the fastest car is the rental one………..

11. https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?blog=Market-Ticker-Nad

    A little bit off topic, but I did what Karl did and lost 50 lbs without excercising. Could save your life!

    Karl Denninger on a Drunken Rant about the Health Care system (USA), how it is killing you and how he changed his life by eating just what “Hunter Gatherers” ate.

    Namely meat(with the fat) and green vegetables.

12. Hideaway says nuclear power has an EROEI of 1

    What a load of s***

    Nuclear power supplied France with nearly 100% of its electricity needs for 40 years. It was the green peace nutters and the like whose campaigning forced governments to stop funding nuclear research.

    If you calculate the electricity that France used over 40 years against the energy required for steel and concrete to build the plants and the decommissioning costs. You get an energy return of over 60.

    This article includes studies done on nuclear energy return

    https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/energy-and-the-environment/energy-return-on-investment.aspx

    1. Have you factored in the cost and amount of copper, as in the KBS-3, or other expensive materials, to encapsulate the waste for 50 000-100 000 years?
       I would think not.
       Edit: Flamanville 3 will be a big success, and cheap… /S

    2. Charles, the stupidity of that report and their argument is beyond belief.

       They would have you believe that if I dumped the 204,000 M3 of concrete, 70,900t of metal and everything else on your front lawn, you could turn it into a nuclear power plant with no extra energy inputs. Do you believe that to be true??

       Or do you think it would take a fair bit of expertise and exact placement of all the different components, in fairly exact shapes and order to actually build a nuclear plant??

       IMHO it’s the latter, including a lot of people with highly specialised education so they know exactly how to calculate the size of components relative to each other, understand the tolerances of all the separate equipment etc.

       The way that article is written, a nuclear power plant should only cost a few million dollars to build, being the concrete and metal. Yet we all know it takes a whole lot of specialist equipment and specialized people to actually build one, then comes the lifetime of fueling and operating the plant.

       Ask yourself why don’t they want to include any of the embedded energy costs of all the specialized people and equipment into the calculations. The reason should be obvious, the EROEI continues to go down the more energy you include in the construction, operating and maintenance of the plant, so by only including the bare concrete and metal energy costs, the EROEI seems great.

       1. Sometimes the EROEI just doesn’t matter at all.

          Our resident doomers who just don’t seem to be able to get their heads around this slice of reality consistently tell us that they expect ( just about as surely as my parents expected to spend eternity in Heaven with their extended family and friends ) civilization to crash and burn…..

          And that building renewables, or nukes, etc, will simply bring on the crash somewhat sooner…….
          In which case it’s pretty much an academic question given that it’s a sure thing that the energy, manpower, and materials that go into building a nuke, etc, will be expended ANYWAY on more highways, skyscrapers, F250’s, jumbo jets, etc etc.

          We aren’t going to get ANY electricity by flying jumbo jets or driving F250’s etc.

          And it’s also a dead sure but totally overlooked ( by the anti renewable faction) that as the supply of electricity and numerous other things declines, the actual value of each remaining unit often tends to increase in dramatic fashion.

          A single working nuke may be able to put enough juice in the grid to keep a critical industry running even if just about everybody else is denied service. If that industry is the local water and sewer system, well, it’s a DAMNED sight more important than just about anything else I can think of, off the top of my head.

          Consider that I have typically kept a five hundred dollar tool kit in my old truck…… without actually needing it to work on the truck on the side of the road for years at a time.
          But when I DID need it, it saved hundreds of dollars in tow charges, meals in restaurants,hotel rooms, and maybe two or three days of lost time getting home, plus avoiding the possibility of paying several times as much for the repair as the job was really worth.

          Now I’m not arguing FOR building new nukes at this minute.

          (But for what it’s worth, I personally believe the investment in nukes has historically been a very good one, excepting two aspects… weapons proliferation and the potential for catastrophic accidents. For now, it’s obviously a far better use of the needed resources to use them to build wind and solar infrastructure, or implement better efficiency standards, etc. Far better bang for the buck, far quicker.)

          I’m pointing out that there’s a very real possibility that an existing or new nuke might be worth many times what it cost to build it, sometime down the road.

          There’s always a big picture. Every political camp or other clique or faction tends to ingnore the big picture. Communication between polar opposite factions can be and often is more or less impossible.

13. Don’t know if this has been posted before but, if so, it’s still worth a second listen (every single minute has something significant to say and the range of subjects is huge).

    William Rees | Confronting Overshoot: Changing the Story of Human Exceptionalism

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MVmkIYy9aI

    … and this too.

    I wasn’t worried about climate change. Now I am.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4

    … and with credit to Hideaway an interesting post of his at un-Denial, I hope he does more long form comments there (or here if he wants to and Dennis is OK with it).

    https://un-denial.com

    1. This morning on NPR, someone said, very authoritatively, very glibly: “In order to solve the climate crisis, we need to decarbonize the grid as soon as possible.”

       In order to stop this ship from sinking, we need to shift all the cargo and furniture from this end to that end . . . .

14. It seems the future has arrived.

    FREQUENT MARINE HEAT WAVES IN THE ARCTIC OCEAN WILL BE THE NORM

    “Since 2007, conditions in the Arctic have shifted, as confirmed by data recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment. Between 2007 and 2021, the marginal zones of the Arctic Ocean experienced 11 marine heat waves, producing an average temperature rise of 2.2 degrees Celsius above seasonal norm and lasting an average of 37 days. Since 2015, there have been Arctic marine heat waves every year.”

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-frequent-marine-arctic-ocean-norm.html

15. No, it’s not just China.

    INDIA’S COAL PRODUCTION UP 10.3% TO 99.73 MT IN JANUARY 2024

    “The cumulative coal production from April 2023 to January 2024 stood at 784.11MT. 14 rail projects have been taken up for implementation for improving coal evacuation.”

    Read more at:

    https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/coal/indias-coal-production-up-10-3-to-99-73-mt-in-january-2024/107442687

16. Closer to home, oil (tar sands) business booms.

    IMMANENT TRANS MOUNTAIN PIPELINE LAUNCH

    • Following the news that Trans Mountain Corporation will start filling the expanded pipeline in February, with first crude to be loaded from Vancouver in April, Canadian crude prices jumped to the narrowest discount to WTI since August 2023.
    • U.S. refiners used to cheap Canadian crude will need to start budgeting more for the commodity from this spring.
    • Canadian oil producers are preparing for the 890,000 bpd in takeaway capacity growth.

17. Uh-oh!

    300-YEAR-OLD SPONGES SHOW 1.5 °C WARMING

    “Evidence from long-lived marine sponges suggests that the planet has already passed 1.5 °C — a milestone of global warming that nations pledged to avoid in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The ratio of two elements — strontium and calcium — in the skeletons of Ceratoporella nicholsoni reflects changes in water temperature, making the coral-like sponges a proxy thermometer. The data indicate that the planet had already started to warm in the 1860s, around the time when the first ship-based records of sea-surface temperatures began. The approach is still in its infancy, but could indicate that warming has been hugely underestimated, “by about half a degree”, says coral-reef geochemist and study co-author Malcolm McCulloch.”

    https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00281-8#:~:text=By%20the%20time%20that%20official,risen%20by%20half%20a%20degree.&text=The%20planet%20has%20already%20passed,in%20time%20than%20current%20methods.

    1. More like: what does it even mean? There is an almost ~0.5 C warming in sponge proxy estimates from 1850 to 1900, before the instrumental record kicks in

       

       1. Good point Paul.

          1. It instead tracks the global sea-level height

             

    2. January was ‘only’ 1.66 degrees above the 1960-1990 average. We are rapidly heading for much warmer conditions.
       How do people not see that 1.5 degrees above pre industrial times is already dead and buried??
       https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-08/nsw-january-hottest-global-temperature-record/103442160

       1. The average voter on the street just doesn’t really appreciate what a degree or two of warming really means. They just visualize it being a little warmer most of the time, with everything staying about the same otherwise.

          It’s a long, slow job educating them to the consequences, actually already happening , or soon to be happening. Getting it across that this much warming means catastrophic floods, droughts, heat waves, storms, etc, is roughly about as tough as getting it across

          Sometimes I think I’m the only regular here who really understands that half of the people in this country are so abysmally ignorant that they’re absolutely immune to fact based arguments. Another considerable bunch of us are smart enough to understand this immediately……. but so apathetic, so disengaged, that they just don’t even care…..

          And so they often vote on the basis of who they think is best for their wallet, or who they simply like the best. It’s an unfortunate fact that the greater your ignorance, the more likely it is that you will fall for flashy rather than substantial.

          This pretty much explains how a world class conman is the single most important individual on the American political scene in terms of influencing what’s happening in our country.

          His foot soldier camp follows him as if he were a new Jesus, and they care not about anything other than that he tells them what they want to know. They’re convinced he and his homies are on their side, and pretty much dead sure the Democrats are out to take away their guns, their trucks, their way of life.

          Bottom line, this pretty much explains the whole show.

18. Can’t burn it at home, no problem. Ship it where wanted.

    U.S. THERMAL COAL FINDS NEW LIFE OVERSEAS

    “US thermal coal exporters recorded more than $5 billion in overseas sales in 2023, shipping upwards of 32.5 million metric tons of the high-polluting power fuel, according to Reuters, citing data from ship-tracking firm Kpler. These coal export earnings were the second highest since 2017, trailing only behind 2022’s $5.7 billion. This comes as US utility coal usage for electricity generation tumbles to the lowest in this century.”

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Coal/US-Thermal-Coal-Finds-New-Life-Overseas.html

    1. It seems the Australians are especially good at this sleight-of-hand.

       AUSTRALIA CLEANS UP AT HOME, BUT EXPORTED EMISSIONS KEEP GROWING

       Australia is the second-largest exporter of both thermal coal and liquefied natural gas (LNG), which account for over half of all electricity generation and more than 90% of all power sector emissions. That means that on a per capita basis Australia’s contribution to total CO2 emissions remains one of the highest globally, and any continuation of large-scale coal and gas exports will pose a major impediment to long-term pollution reduction goals.

       https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/australia-cleans-up-home-exported-emissions-keep-growing-maguire-2024-01-18/

       1. You’re double counting emissions by complaining about the emissions of the consumer and adding that to the emissions of the producer as well. It’s the same emissions.

          Sounds like the kind of genius bookkeeping that brought us great energy companies like Enron.

          1. I’M double counting? I thought I was was just passing along some coal news.

             1. You aren’t “passing along news”, any more thant Tucker Carrlson is “just reporting” in Moscow.

                You’re a doomer propagandist. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but pretending that you are a neutral source of information is a joke.

19. Thank you everyone for the commentary…good food for thought regardless of who is right or wrong. I hope to be wrong about a lot of it.
    The most valuable thing about talking to other people about these topics is to hear perspectives that you hadn’t considered. Some of it is priceless.

20. WORLD’S FIRST YEAR-LONG BREACH OF KEY 1.5C WARMING LIMIT

    “The world’s sea surface is also at its highest ever recorded average temperature – yet another sign of the widespread nature of climate records. It’s particularly notable given that ocean temperatures don’t normally peak for another month or so…

    An end to El Niño conditions is expected in a few months, which could allow global temperatures to temporarily stabilise, and then fall slightly, probably back below the 1.5C threshold. But while human activities keep adding to the levels of warming gases in the atmosphere, temperatures will ultimately continue rising in the decades ahead.”

    https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68110310

    1. Meanwhile, we keep adding CO2 (and other greenhouse gasses).

       January CO2
       Jan. 2023 = 422.80 ppm
       Jan. 2022 = 419.48 ppm

       1. Looks like we are on track to reach 450 ppm by 2032.
          Sky is no limit.

          Humans are [mal] adapting…
          -Considering adding a new Category 6 to the Hurricane scale.
          https://www.npr.org/2024/02/06/1229440080/scientists-explore-whether-to-add-a-category-6-designation-for-hurricanes
          -And “Some insurance companies are pulling back coverage from fire- and flood-prone areas, leaving homeowners with limited affordable options. This trend may even affect the property value of American homes, experts say. In its announcement, State Farm said too many buildings are being destroyed by climate catastrophes, inflation is making it too expensive to rebuild, and it can’t protect its investments any longer.”

          1. Over the last few years we have had 30%, then 40%, then another 40% increases in our house insurance costs. We live in a bushfire prone area but have never made a claim.

             A friend just up the road from us, ‘shopped’ around getting quotes from different companies recently as his insurance was also rising ridiculously fast. Every other company gave some outrageous quotes, some 4-5 times what he is currently paying.

             It seems a deliberate ploy to stop people in our area and most other bushfire areas buying insurance, so they are not covered when the big fire does eventually come through.

             1. “It seems a deliberate ploy to stop people…”
                In Calif, for example, its no ploy.
                Its simply business reality that vast areas of fire and flood prone areas of the world have been built upon at great (underestimated) risk…and therefore far too expensive to come up with funds to rebuild if/when the building is burnt, flooded, decays.
                The individual home or business owner, nor the insurance company, nor the state has money to cover that kind of risk/loss.

                Insurance costs are one of the big mechanisms which will act to restrain the human footprint in many areas. And its rapidly becoming a much more visible factor as global warming effects ramp up.

       2. This is pretty much the exact same post you publish in every thread. You need to come up with some new material.

21. “We have reached the first 12-month period with a global mean temperature more than 1.5C above the pre-industrial average.”

    At least we are first in something—-

22. Off Topic:

    For the scientifically minded

    Does anyone know what the explanation for why humans shed most of our body hair?

    What was the survival advantage of not having hair?

    Why do Apes in the African Savannah need hair?

    Debating an acquantence that we are apes and fossil and DNA evidence isn’t working (unbelievable).

    The remaining body hair argument is one that can’t be avoided IMO.

    1. Most likely to do with thermoregulation, i.e. it makes it easier to sweat, which is our big advantage when it comes to hunting (allows us to cover much longer distances than our prey during endurance hunting on savannah, a behaviour other apes don’t follow). The hair we have retained provides some sunshade protection when upright, but the rest of the body isn’t as exposed as an animal on all fours. Not needed for warmth once we could use furs and make fire. Losing it may make it easier to keep parasites away and spot diseases. Hair on hands would make tool use difficult. If we don’t need to use unnecessary energy growing it then we have more to be used to improve our reproductive success in other ways. Retaining pubic and underarm hair may be to do with pheromones, beards may also have some sexual selection effect.

       I think the small bit of DNA that is different between us and apes that makes us hairless has been precisely identified, just as have the equally small bits that allow us to move our thumbs so much more and that gives us smaller jaw muscles, allowing bigger brains.

    2. Debating an acquantence that we are apes and fossil and DNA evidence isn’t working (unbelievable).

       Hightrekker, you never struck me as a science denier. Do you deny global warming as well.?Anyway, George explained why we are naked apes very well. The fossil evidence is overwhelming. But if you have a dogmatic worldview that says we were created by God just six thousand years ago or some other such nonsense, no evidence could possibly be sufficient to convince you.

       1. ????
          Not my quote
          I believe it was Andre

       2. “Debating an acquantence that we are apes

          anti-science? I am 100% pro science.

          I am arguing we are apes.

          That we have body hair is an unbelievably obvious sign we are animals.

          Also, that the replicator that we evolved from (DNA) is still here replicating away….is overwhelming.

          Maybe when I said “For the scientifically minded” it made it seem like I am not.”

          That should probably be assumed on this part of the site.

          1. Sorry, Andre. However, your post was everything but clear. You seemed to be questioning whether or not we are apes. You seemed to be implying that if we are apes, we should have hair. But we don’t, so we can’t be apes, or it seemed that was your point. So George, it seemed to me, was explaining to you why we don’t have hair.

             But otherwise, nobody, or at least nobody on this list, was questioning whether or not we are apes. So what was your point?

             1. Sorry for being unclear.

                I have never heard the official biological reason for why we shed out hair/fur.

                Why did humans survive and reproduce more effectively with less body hair?

                One of my family members is a climate scientist, I was convinced after James Hansen first addressed the US Congress in the 1980’s.

                I agree I wasn’t clear.

                1. Something I remember hearing: This is one of those features that followed on the heels of cultural innovation. Humans invented clothing (or, rather, coverings, in the form of furs, etc.), so the genes for hair became superfluous and accumulated mutations without any effect on fitness. It’s the same with small teeth and jaws: Humans invented cooking, it became much easier to eat and digest foods, particularly meats, so the genes mutated in the direction of gracile teeth and jaws. Why build robust jaws (or furry bodies) when you don’t need them? Anything to conserve energy. Think of the Vitamin C making gene that we have that is now disabled. The source for this idea might have been the professor of an evolution class I took about five years ago. I’m not sure. The professor is deceased now.

    3. Plenty of animals in the African savannah have hair or fur. Zebra, wildebeeste, gazelles, cheetahs, etc. So why shouldn’t apes have hair in the African savannah? In any case, I thought apes did not live in the savannah, but in forest – chimps, bonobo, gorilla. They are forest species, living in trees, not grassland species.

       1. Good point.

          I rushed the comment. Might have been the Happy Hour I returned from.

          Just wanted to know the official consensus reason of biologists (if there is one) on why humans shed most of their hair.

          thanks!

          1. The hypothesis I attach credibility to states that as humans developed bipedalism it was to facilitate higher speed and longer range. The loss of hair was to increase body cooling which was also accompanied by development of an increased number of sweat glands, particularly on the front of the body ( humans are almost unique in the number of sweat glands they have). Since they all lived in sub-saharan Africa the loss of body hair left the skin exposed to the tropical sun, which triggered the development of high melatonin concentrations under the skin to protect from UV radiation.
             Once humans jumped the barrier to the north, they encountered cooler weather and started to recognize the need for clothing.

          2. This theory is not supported by the scientific community, but some people attribute the loss of hair to humans going through an evolutionary pinch point in which we lived a semi-aquatic lifestyle (recent discoveries suggest it is possible this could have occurred on the coast of South Africa). Like Dolphins we have not much hair, our bodies are straight (not walking on all fours), our hands and toes are webbed, our nose is tilted downwards so we can dive without water going into it, we have a layer of fat under our skin and so on, plus people just naturally seem to love the water (what is the most expensive land in any city, pretty much anywhere in the world – along the waterfront – why?).

             Like I said, scientists don’t credit this theory, but I always thought it was a lot of coincidences how well we are adapted to the water compared to other primates.

       2. Other apes live in the forest and have fur, we evolved on the savannah and become hairless. Our prey has fur and cannot sweat, hence it cannot travel for as long as we can and we caught it by endurance hunting (i.e. tracking it until it stopped through exhaustion).

          1. Thank you George for saying a few words to help the crowd here.
             Our predecessors gradually were exposed to more and more open savannah/sparse woodlands as the climate of eastern Africa gradually dried. Any adaptation that helped getting across open areas between woodlands was a survival advantage, such as bipedalism and the mechanism of less hair/sweating.

             “Humans walking on two legs only used one-quarter of the energy that chimpanzees who knuckle-walked on four legs did.”
             study-https://news.arizona.edu/story/study-identifies-energy-efficiency-reason-evolution-upright-walking

             As to Alim theory about sexual selection… I must admit that hairless breasts is my strong inclination, but that might have more an effect than a cause…of the way things evolved.

    4. One big difference between humans and most other mammals is that humans sweat. Sweating is a big deal, because it makes humans uniquely good at long distance running. Hair loss may have been related to that.

       Another possible explanation is sexual selection.

       To show humans are ape what you need is a a huge spreadsheet listing animals in the rows and features in the columns. That allows you to cluster the animals by feature similarity. Things like a penis that is not attached to the stomach, flat nails instead of claws, color vision, shoulders that can freely rotate and thousands more confirm humans are apes.

       For example, every bone in your body has a set of bumps and grooves where muscles are attached etc. Combining all these features in different species shows the evolutionary tree clearly. Just an analysis of the bones in your hand compared to the paw hooves or flippers of other mammals is enough to nail it. There are more than 20 bones in your hand, each exquisitely formed. The shapes of these bones is not randomly distributed among different species, but shows a clear grouping of features reflecting their evolutionary origin.

23. FUSION RESEARCH FACILITY’S FINAL TRITIUM EXPERIMENTS YIELD NEW ENERGY RECORD

    In JET’s final deuterium-tritium experiments (DTE3), high fusion power was consistently produced for five seconds, resulting in a ground-breaking record of 69 megajoules using a mere 0.2 milligrams of fuel. JET is a tokamak, a design which uses powerful magnetic fields to confine a plasma in the shape of a doughnut. Most approaches to creating commercial fusion favor the use of two hydrogen variants—deuterium and tritium. When deuterium and tritium fuse together they produce helium and vast amounts of energy, a reaction that will form the basis of future fusion powerplants.

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-fusion-facility-tritium-yield-energy.html

    1. This type of report is so misleading, and most likely deliberately so. they didn’t get a positive amount of energy out at all. They never count all the energy used to hold the plasma in place. Nor do they count any of the energy to build the plant, nor the energy used by the 300 scientists in just getting to the place. Did they count any of the energy used to make the 0,2 milligrams of fuel? Again a big NO.

       Fusion is nothing but a big fancy science experiment, keeping thousands of smart people employed, while using up fossil fuel energy in the process. I assume money is thrown at it by governments to fool the masses that it is possible for a bright green, fusion future, when in reality nothing could be further from the truth.

       1. It’s a racket; a techno-cornucopia circle jerk (to paraphrase JHK); as collapse proceeds many will perceive progress is being made because they’re placed on the receiving end of a wealth transfer program of one sort or another.

          1. Might be true?
             I’m looking at it from the inside.

             https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/417543686_122120602154177644_9115743464248978446_n.jpg?stp=dst-jpg_p843x403&_nc_cat=103&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=c42490&_nc_ohc=86NWYP9vnnwAX8zB3Fy&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&oh=00_AfDNSIB2PdXL7VqaGQC1utYbs8aqwo69YpVjVWmHh-Ix8w&oe=65CD5CF1

24. GERMANY TO REPLACE NUCLEAR WITH NATURAL GAS PLANTS FOR $16B

    • Last April, Germany shut down its last three nuclear power stations, marking the end of the country’s atomic age.
    • Berlin has unveiled plans to spend €16 billion on 10 gigawatts (GW) of new gas-fired power plants in a major overhaul of the country’s energy grid.
    • Germany is also abandoning its short-lived love affair with coal.
    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Germany-To-Replace-Nuclear-With-Natural-Gas-Plants-for-16B.html

25. Not good.

    ATLANTIC OCEAN CIRCULATION NEARING ‘DEVASTATING’ TIPPING POINT

    “The circulation of the Atlantic Ocean is heading towards a tipping point that is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”. The scientists behind the research said they were shocked at the forecast speed of collapse once the point is reached, although they said it was not yet possible to predict how soon that would happen. Using computer models and past data, the researchers developed an early warning indicator for the breakdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc), a vast system of ocean currents that is a key component in global climate regulation.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/09/atlantic-ocean-circulation-nearing-devastating-tipping-point-study-finds

26. The bad news, big jump in (daily) CO2; the good news, it might (finally) peak this year.

    Feb. 8, 2024 = 425.60 ppm
    Feb. 9, 2023 = 420.24 ppm
    1 Year Change 5.36 ppm (1.28%)

    1. What would peak, Doug?

       1. HICKORY —

          Emissions. 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. But the oceans also release much of that CO2 back to the air, such that man-made emissions keep the atmosphere’s CO2 levels elevated for millennia.

27. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/02/05/washington-gas-prices-cap-trade/

    The pitfalls of reducing fossil fuel consumption

28. More on the long-lived sea sponge measurements from the Eastern Caribbean.

    ‘A DEEPLY TROUBLING DISCOVERY’: EARTH MAY HAVE ALREADY PASSED THE CRUCIAL 1.5°C WARMING LIMIT

    “Our findings suggest that in the interval between the end of our newly defined pre-industrial period and the 30-year average mentioned above, the temperatures of the ocean and land surface increased by 0.9°C. This is far more than the 0.4°C warming the IPCC has estimated, using the conventional timeframe for the pre-industrial period. Add to that the average 0.8°C global warming from 1990 to recent years, and the Earth may have warmed on average by at least 1.7°C since pre-industrial times. This suggests we have passed the 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement. It also suggests the overriding goal of the agreement, to keep average global warming below 2°C, is now very likely to be exceeded by the end of the 2020s—nearly two decades sooner than expected. Our study has also produced another alarming finding. Since the late 20th century, land-air temperatures have been increasing at almost twice the rate of surface oceans and are now more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. This is consistent with well-documented decline in Arctic permafrost and the increased frequency around the world of heat waves, bushfires and drought.”

    https://phys.org/news/2024-02-deeply-discovery-earth-crucial-15c.html

29. A new Open Thread Non-Petroleum has been posted.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-feb-10-2023/

    A new update regarding October World Oil Production has been posted.

    https://peakoilbarrel.com/october-world-oil-production-continues-to-rebound/

30. Is anybody here paying close attention to the potential for drilling for pure H2 ?
    Some big names in the venture capital field are apparently putting some serious money into this possibility.

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