157 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, February 6, 2021”

  1. I was just doing a search to find if I had posted a story from ABC Australia about a promising treatment for covid-19 when I saw something that struck me:

    From the web site of the Australian govenment’s Therapeutic Goods Administration:

    No evidence to support intravenous high-dose vitamin C in the management of COVID-19

    The TGA is aware of a report that intravenous high-dose vitamin C may be beneficial in the management of a COVID-19 infection.

    We have investigated this report and found there is no robust scientific evidence to support the usage of this vitamin in the management of COVID-19.

    No published peer reviewed studies in the medical literature were found to support the usage of this vitamin for COVID-19. We are aware of some studies underway in certain countries and should these be positive, the TGA would welcome the submission of an application for vitamin C in treating COVID-19, accompanied and supported by appropriate research.

    Two recently published open-label studies relating to the use of vitamin C in other types of infections, associated with septic shock and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), were identified and reviewed. In both of these studies, where vitamin C was used as monotherapy (used alone) or in combination with other products, there was no clear evidence of benefit. It cannot be concluded that intravenous vitamin C is an effective treatment of ARDS (resulting from COVID-19, or otherwise).

    More research is needed before any recommendation for the use of intravenous vitamin C in the treatment of COVID-19 can be made.

    From the ABC Australia web site (the article that was the subject of my search):

    COVID patient with sepsis makes ‘remarkable’ recovery following megadose of vitamin C

    Experts urge caution

    While the result seems promising for the seriously ill Melbourne patient, and the animal studies, experts said previous studies using large doses of vitamin C to treat sepsis have been mixed.

    Professor Simon Finfer, from the George Institute for Global Health, has been researching sepsis for more than 25 years.

    “We have seen so many treatments that seem to work in animal models and case reports but haven’t proven effective in big studies,” he said.

    But also he said it was important to keep an open mind.

    “If something is proving useful, we need to conduct trials to determine if there is a benefit or not.”

    A 2020 review of scientific evidence published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found high dose vitamin C given on its own or with steroids did not provide “significant survival benefit” for patients with sepsis or septic shock.

    The review found giving high dose Vitamin C “just in case” or “as a measure of last resort” could have negative consequences such as delaying proven therapies, such as prompt use of antibiotics.

    New trial could bring answers

    Professor Bellomo said many of the previous trials used a lower dose of vitamin C than the researchers did in both the animal study and the Austin did in the COVID-19 patient.

    The amount of vitamin C given in this trial was 50 times greater than any other tried before for sepsis.

    Doctors at Melbourne’s Austin Health have now begun a randomised controlled trial, giving some patients with septic shock a megadose of vitamin C and some a placebo.

    Blood samples will be collected to gauge the patients’ immune response.

    It would seem that there are people that do not want this “remarkable recovery” story to be true. What I find particularly disconcerting is that from as far back as 1949, a doctor Frederick R. Klenner M.D. claimed to have prevented some 60, mostly juvenile patients with symptoms suggesting the onset of polio from advancing to the debilitating stage of the disease, using high doses of injected sodium ascorbate (non acidic form of the vitamin). Fast forward to the eighties and Robert F. Cathcart advocated the use of the same compound to treat a wide variety of conditions where oral administration was not up to the task. Cathcart categorized conditions by the amount of ascorbic acid that could be taken without causing loose bowels in the following document published around 1981(Cathcart cites four papers by Klenner):

    The Method of Determining Proper Doses ofVitamin C for the Treatment of Disease byTitrating to Bowel Tolerance

    Conclusion

    The method of titrating a patient’s dosage of ascorbic acid between the relief of most symptoms and bowel tolerance has been described. This titration method is absolutely necessary to obtain excellent results. Studies of lesser amounts are almost useless. This method cannot by its nature be studied by double blind methods because no placebo will mimic this bowel tolerance phenomenon. The method produces such spectacular effects in all patients capable of tolerating these doses, especially in the cases of acute self-limiting viral diseases as to be undeniable. A placebo could not possibly work so reliably, work in infants and children, and have such a profound effect on critically ill patients. More stable patients will tolerate bowel tolerance doses of ascorbic acid and almost uniformly have excellent results. The more suggestable unstable patient is more likely to have difficulty with the taste.

    So 70 years ago a doctor claimed high doses of a naturally occurring substance could be used to cure polio. Nothing came of that, with vaccines leading the fight against polio to this day. Again in 1981 Catcart published his paper outlining how this same substance can be used to ameliorate many medical conditions. Response? Crickets. Now in 2020 this group from Australia has made this “discovery”. Will anything change? Will Peak Oil force a change in how we treat illness? I’m not holding my breath!

    1. Man oh man,

      Every so often someone posts an anecdotal report about how vitamin C cures the cold, or prevents…. etc etc.

      And afterwords, a scientific study debunks it.

      And every so often someone passionately writes how vaccines gave their ___________ autism, and science is forced to debunk it.

      I grew up with eggs are bad for you, fat is bad for you. And recently we had the Hydroxychloroquine nonsense, even bleach. Nice to see an article based on science. Too bad they are forced to disprove rumours.

      regards

    2. I think you misread the article. They are suggesting Vitamin C as a treatment for septic shock, not Covid 19.

      1. Nope I did not misread it. What I did is extrapolate.

        Sepsis is a long standing, severe challenge for ICUs across the world as can be gleaned from looking at the work of Dr. Paul Marik who came up with a “novel” treatment for sepsis back circa 2016. Marik’s ideas have proved highly controversial, with a study carried out by some of the same people from Monash University in this recent ABC Australia article finding no difference between Marik’s protocol and the placebo group for the specific outcomes being measured in the study. Marik was highly critical of the study when it was presented in Belfast, Ireland just over a year ago.

        I first brought the name Paul Marik up in a comment I posted back in April 2020. I will not repeat what I posted save for the conclusion of the post:

        So the theory is that, there are certain conditions that lead to rapid depletion of vitamin C levels in the blood, resulting in what Dr. Cathcart referred to as Acute Induced Scurvy. The way to prevent that is by replacing the vitamin C at a rate comparable to the rate of depletion. This could well amount to several grams a day. I put it to you that sepsis and Covid-19 are just two such cases where large doses of vitamin C have the potential to save lives. I rest my case.

        If you go back and read my April comment, this controversy has been going on since at least 1950. I have seen information that this therapy (for viral infections) was first floated in 1935 by a doctor Claus W. Jungeblut, MD, professor of bacteriology at Columbia University, More at http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/

    3. India’s Fight Against Agricultural and Medicinal Plants’ Biopiracy: Its Implications on Food Security, Traditional Rights and Knowledge Degradation

      “…At present, about two-third of the Indian population relies on indigenous knowledge of biological resources and have conserved their knowledge and culture through their traditional lifestyles and local economies. More than 7500 species of plants are utilized for the traditional purposes in India. The economic value of traditional knowledge in the herbal medicine and pharmaceutical sector is estimated to reach around 5 trillion by 2020. Since Indian agriculture is highly rich in biodiversity, it becomes an easy prey of biopiracy in agriculture-based business corporations. Biopiracy term is generally used when multinational corporations or companies profit from the medicinal and agricultural uses of plants known to indigenous or native societies and fail to compensate those communities. Traditional Knowledge (TK) plays a key role in the preservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. There is a threat to the future of TK due to globalization of production systems and the distance between the holders of knowledge and its exploiters. Many cases have been registered in India where attempts have been made to steal the indigenous knowledge from India due to its easy access which affect food security, livelihood of indigenous people and even cause changes in consumers’ choice. Indian government challenged many patents in the last two decades by providing numerous research papers predating those patents and these patents were thus rejected. India is the pioneer country in the world to have set up an institutional mechanism – the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL) – to protect its TK.”

  2. I saw an interview with Jim Rickards in which he predicted a pandemic in 2019 in his book Aftemath published that year. The fact Jim has worked with the U.S. intelligence services and has friends in the Federal Reserve who would’ve made him privy to the details of the ongoing U.S.\China trade talks. Especially the force majeure (pandemic) clause.

    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-usa-trade-idUSKBN1ZX219

    The fact of the matter is China signed a deal which was almost wholly in America’s favour and both sides knew China would have to trigger the clause. The U.S. needed China to honour the trade agreement as the deal would allow America to begin to reduce it’s current account deficit. The U.S. would much rather China purchase U.S. treasuries as they had done prior to 2013. Although they could understand why China (among many others) had ended that arrangement.

    When President Trump toured Europe he had asked European leader for greater assistance with the NATO defence budget and remuneration for services rendered by the U.S. on Europe’s behalf.

    He was given short shrift.

    So when China went into lockdown the U.S. decided to do the same and force the rest of the world to follow suit. The U.S. backing of OECD countries was put on temporary hold. At least that’s the understanding those countries have.
    The plan is for China use up it’s foreign currency reserves through domestic consumption during covid with little ability to replace them through globe trade. Thus resetting the U.S. China relationship.

    2. My great grand parents never believed that trucks and tractors could replace horses and mules, lol.

      There’s enough wind and sun to giterdone a hundred times over, if we are willing to invest the materials and manpower necessary…… which we will do, unless the card fall wrong.

      The only question is WHEN, rather than IF.

      Fossil fuels come out of holes in the ground, and ( hat’s off to the Borowitz Report!) I’ve checked all my old textbooks, and consulted with dozens of other farmers, and talked with hundreds of people in the oil biz on web sites such as this one.

      And guess what?

      Coal, oil and gas don’t grow back like potatoes, lol.

      In another generation or so, factories at all levels of production, from processing raw ores to packaging finished products, are going to be so automated that there really will be only one man on site…… whose job will be to watch the instruments in case anything goes wrong. He will be accompanied by a large well trained dog……. whose job is to make sure he doesn’t actually TOUCH anything.

      The machinery that transports goods, and that builds infrastructure such as wind and solar farms will be automated too. So the bottom line is that once the decision is made to DO IT, the wind and solar farms will be built, as many as necessary.

      OK, it may take a century for them to get built with people still in the way of the machines, but it will eventually happen even so. Unless the cards fall wrong.

      Falling birthrates, helped along with a few crises such as hot wars, pandemics, and famines will take care of the overpopulation problem, eventually. This is another WHEN, not if question.

      I won’t be around, nor will anybody reading these words today likely be around, but eventually our offspring will live quite well using all or almost all renewable energy, by way of conservation and changing lifestyles, ASSUMING the cards don’t fall wrong.

      If they DO fall badly, well, it’s pretty likely a few survivors will be left to start over again at about the same technological level as prevailed for the last few centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution.

      There will be billions of artifacts to help them get along ok, from stainless steel and ceramic cooking pots and kitchen knives to guns and ammo to kill each other to make sure the overpopulation problem doesn’t recur for quite some time.

      1. hello OFM,

        I don’t often post but maybe this will be of interest in the automation front

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvTdNwyADZc

        Also a lot of white collar jobs can be automated, what will American laywers do when theres an app ?

        take care , nice to see you have time for some more posts , thanks

        Forbin

    3. The interview seems to be for investors, suggesting that demand will be high for metals related to renewables and so prices will rise and there will be investment opportunities…

      If you see a clear statement that “renewables can never scale”, please provide the time mark in the video.

  4. Is there a decent quality, peer-reviewed research study that looks at the fossil fuel gigajoules of energy consumed in the US today and explores the renewable energy strategies-systems that would be needed to replace those gigajoules in a useable manner – ie time-of-day, season-of-year, transmission-to-consumption-location, etc?

    1. Always remembering that the U.S. only has 4% of the world’s population and most growth in energy use is coming from elsewhere. Air cons (projected to grow by 48.6 million units annually — with a compounded growth of 5.5%) being one example! 😉

    2. There’s more stuff published than you will EVER have time to read. Most of it’s bullshit, because it comes out of the fossil fuel forever camp.

      Some of it’s probably quite accurate so far as it goes.

      But of all that I’ve looked at so far, none of it seems to be intellectually honest from a dispassionate viewpoint, excepting some that comes from the environmental camp. And to be perfectly honest, the environmental camp seems to be a little gung ho and possibly overoptimistic, at least for the short to mid term.

      The problem with the stuff coming from banks and economists, most of whom are indebted to the business as usual world for their daily bread, is that it doesn’t take into account efficiency, conservation, changing lifestyles, and external costs.

      Consider for instance the obvious fact that cars CAN be built to last for generations…… even if they’re ordinary cars propelled by ordinary ICE’s. Or that we don’t NECESSARILY need to be flying across and between continents by the millions of people on a daily basis. Or that we could spend an extra ten thousand or maybe twenty thousand bucks when building a new house, and save eighty to ninety five percent on the energy needed to heat and cool it for the next three centuries….. because yes a house OUGHT to last that long at least.

      Or that electric cars can and DO run on twenty to twenty five percent of the energy necessary to run them on gasoline or diesel fuel.

      Or that we don’t necessarily need new furniture every few years. As a matter of fact, most of my furniture is already fifty to a hundred years old, and will last indefinitely, barring a fire. It’s hand made, out of locally harvested timber, never been in a store, never been in a warehouse, never been in a cardboard box, and will likely eventually wind up in a museum, a century or two down the road.

      Out it farm country, we still “make hay when the sun’s shining.” There’s little reason, no reason at all really, to think that we can’t adapt most or maybe even nearly all industrial processes to intermittent production when the sun is shining and or the wind is blowing…. somewhere within a thousand miles or so, because we WILL have plenty of long distance electrical transmission lines, eventually.

      There’s no reason we can’t shift most of the energy loads in our homes to times when wind and solar power is plentiful, by adding some thermal mass and smart appliances.

      Batteries are eventually going to be cheap enough that we can easily manage any household loads that can’t be shifted can be economically and conveniently managed that way.

      Robo cars and trucks will cut the amount of driving we are compelled to do now by a substantial amount. One car can stop at four or five houses to drop off groceries for instance.

      I could go on all day but you get the idea , I’m sure.

    3. There are a wide range of solutions, which need to be used in an integrated, optimized way. Many analyses look at simple solutions, used for everything: 100% solar, or 100% chemical batteries, or 100% enormous HVDC transmission bands, etc. These will be very expensive.

      A big one is supply diversity: many regions have either onshore or offshore wind resources. Wind is a bit stronger at night and during the winter, so a balanced mix of solar and wind will do much better in winter than you might expect.

      Another big one is overbuilding: the current US grid has a capacity of 1,050GW, while average demand is 450GW. A renewable grid would do something roughly similar.

      Finally, seasonal backup (that is, winter) storage is unsuited to chemical batteries, which have a relatively high cost per kWh. You want something similar to current natural gas storage: “wind-gas”, probably hydrogen in salt domes.

      Some studies:

      Going green will pay off in 7 years, says study

      Stanford University professor Mark Jacobson published a study that says going 100% green will pay for itself in seven years. Jacobson’s research underpinned the Green New Deal, according to Bloomberg.

      Jacobson’s study, which is titled, “Impacts of Green New Deal Energy Plans on Grid Stability, Costs, Jobs, Health, and Climate in 143 Countries,” was published in the journal One Earth.

      It would cost $73 trillion to revamp power grids, transportation, manufacturing and other systems to run on wind, solar and hydro power, including enough storage capacity to keep the lights on overnight.

      But that would be offset by annual savings of almost $11 trillion, the report found.

      Jacobson claims in his paper:

      Studies among at least 11 independent research groups have found that transitioning to 100% renewable energy in one or all energy sectors, while keeping the electricity and/or heat grids stable at a reasonable cost, is possible.
      —
      Stanford engineers develop state-by-state plan to convert U.S. to 100% clean, renewable energy by 2050
      http://news.stanford.edu/pr/2015/pr-50states-renewable-energy-060815.html
      The Solutions Project accelerates the transition to 100% clean, renewable energy for all people and purposes. To achieve this mission, we engage the public, celebrate and convene leaders, and advance partnerships and policies that make strides on the road to 100%. We implement this integrated model at the state level. To maintain our national reach, we develop inspired content, amplify stories and media, and create opportunities to celebrate and activate leadership across the country.
      http://thesolutionsproject.org/
      100% clean and renewable wind, water, and sunlight (WWS) all-sector energy roadmaps for
      the 50 United States
      Broader context
      This paper presents a consistent set of roadmaps for converting the energy infrastructures of each of the 50 United States to 100% wind, water, and sunlight(WWS) for all purposes (electricity, transportation, heating/cooling, and industry) by 2050. Such conversions are obtained by first projecting conventional power demand to 2050 in each sector then electrifying the sector, assuming the use of some electrolytic hydrogen in transportation and industry and applying modest end-use energy e?ciency improvements. Such state conversions may reduce conventional 2050 U.S.-averaged power demand by B39%, with most reductions due to the e?ciency of electricity over combustion and the rest due to modest end-use energy e?ciency improvements. The conversions are found to be technically and economically feasible with little downside. They nearly eliminate energy-related U.S. air pollution and climate-relevant emissions and their
      resulting health and environmental costs while creating jobs, stabilizing energy prices, and minimizing land requirements. These benefits have not previously been quantified for the 50 states. Their elucidation may reduce the social and political barriers to implementing clean-energy policies for replacing
      conventional combustible and nuclear fuels. Several such policies are proposed herein for each energy sector.
      http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/USStatesWWS.pdf

    4. Bicycle Dave- If you are serious about the pursuit of knowledge on this- this may lead you to information you want-
      “Mark Z. Jacobson, professor at Stanford University and cofounder of The Solutions Project, about transitioning the world to 100% renewable energy”
      https://woods.stanford.edu/news/stanford-study-charts-path-green-new-deal-143-countries

      I think it almost funny to hear some people say ‘we can’t replace all of the fossil fuel with renewables’
      Its a nice theoretical issue to discuss, but on a real world basis we don’t need to replace all of it. Lets get to 50% for a start and then see what the path looks like.
      What we need to be concerned with is the next 20 year transition period with peak oil (and eventually nat gas) on one hand, and a rapidly growing solar and wind capacity on the other.

      Its a race. Will oil depletion happen faster than renewables growth. Or will renewables growth match the decline. We will know the answer by the price of oil. $100 bucks is a reasonable guide. If oil gets and stays over $100 (in inflation adjusted dollars) then I assert that shift to electric vehicles and renewable energy is falling far behind the race.
      It will be very interesting to watch this great race unfold. In the next few years economic activity post-pandemic will pick up, along with oil demand. And yet electric vehicles are beginning to make a big presence on the global scene.

      And as you may know, an electric vehicle uses only about 1/3rd of the energy to travel a mile than does the petrol driven comparison vehicle-
      “According to the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, “EVs convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.”

      1. !
        “And as you may know, an electric vehicle uses only about 1/3rd of the energy to travel a mile than does the petrol driven comparison vehicle”-

        “According to the US Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, “EVs convert about 59%–62% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 17%–21% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels.”

        AND insofar as the two BIGGEST problems associated with oil are concerned, namely pollution and depletion, wind and solar power come out smelling like roses. Neither will ever deplete, and the amount of pollution associated with building wind and solar infrastructure is trivial compared to burning fossil fuels to produce equivalent quantities of electrical energy.

        Efficiency is important at the limits of the energy problem, IF the SOURCE of the energy is limited, but with wind and solar power, the limits don’t count, except in terms of the cost of providing the infrastructure.

        The infrastructure associated with wind and solar power will last indefinitely with only moderate maintenance costs, once originally built. Refurbishing electrical transmission lines costs next to nothing compared to building new ones. With the right of ways in place new towers or poles can be installed piecemeal or wholesale, as warranted, within a few days.

        Neither a wind nor a solar farm will EVER wear out. The foundations under towers are going to last indefinitely, and if a tower is maybe a little questionable a smaller turbine unit can be fitted, and then eventually the entire farm shut down maybe a quarter or half at a time to refurbish the old towers.

        Today’s turbine/generators typically last twenty to thirty years. In years to come, they will typically last twice that long, as better materials come available, and as patents expire, and all the manufacturers can use the best of every component design previously developed.

        EVERYTHING associated with wind and solar farms will get cheaper in terms of constant money and production, except possibly land for installation sites and right of ways for transmission lines.

        And so far as a solar farm is concerned, I can’t see ANYTHING significant ever needing replacement in less than a century except the panels and inverters or other electronics. I’ve had plenty of experience around industrial wiring installations as much as sixty or seventy years old, and such wiring is seldom ever replaced except if ADDITIONAL CAPACITY is needed.New cable runs installed in conduit today will last a century unless I’m badly mistaken.

        Panels can be installed one at a time or a hundred at a time by a two man crew, lol, with only a very minor loss in generating capacity during maintenance work. So upgrading can be done without losing a thing in terms of production. It can even be done at night, lol.

        PRODUCTION efficiency absolutely doesn’t matter two cents worth, with unlimited sun and wind as the energy source. The only IMPORTANT metric is the cost of construction per kilowatt hour of expected production.

        ( This is not to say that it won’t be economic and practical to replace existing turbines and panels with newer more efficient ones. It will be, so long as the MONETARY cost is lower going this route. But you can’t really WASTE sun and wind. Both are free and inexhaustible.)

    5. Hi BD, I’m not aware of anything peer reviewed that meets your request, but the peers here at POB have given this one a good treatment, and it was a spicy good time 🙂

      https://www.peakprosperity.com/getting-real-about-green-energy/

      “So the math here is simple: to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, the world would need to deploy 3 [brand new] nuclear plants worth of carbon-free energy every two days, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050. At the same time, a nuclear plant’s worth of fossil fuels would need to be decommissioned every day, starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050…. we can substitute wind energy as a measuring stick. Net-zero carbon dioxide by 2050 would require the deployment of ~1500 wind turbines (2.5 MW) over ~300 square miles, every day starting tomorrow and continuing to 2050.“

      2. Why, if the US wanted to supply every adult with a horseless carriage, they’d have to build one over two seconds, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year!

        Get a horse!!

        ————————————-

        That was an attempt to illustrate with humor the problem with an argument that basically says: “Wow, that’s a big number!”. You have to provide context, and an arguments as to why that number is too big.

        The world is a big place. The world economy is very large. The world’s energy consumption/production is very large – way too large to be able to grasp with any human scale, intuitive measure. It’s ginormous!

      3. Cut that in half because we can live just as well as we do today without sacrificing anything worth mentioning on half the energy via improving efficiency.

        Cut it in half again because we will also be building as much or more solar capacity, and it will almost certainly be cheaper by a factor of two or more since it’s going to be ground level and avoid the use of large amounts of concrete , steel, and other materials needed to build wind farms.

        (Heavy construction doing large excavations, pouring big foundations, fabricating and erecting heavy components is essentially a mature technology. There’s not much reason to expect the cost of building a wind farm from scratch to decline nearly as fast as the cost of building a solar farm, because the high cost component of solar farms is the solar panel itself. That cost is falling by half every three to five years or so.)

        Cut it again by at least another ten to twenty percent of the fifty percent because we can adapt our business and lifestyles as necessary without actually lowering our standard of living significantly, by for instance flying less.

        We can use more mass transit and work from home more, or from local offices more, rather than in centrally located large buildings.

        Wind Turbine Cost: Worth The Million-Dollar Price in 2020?
        weatherguardwind.com › how-much-does-wind-turbine…
        Mar 24, 2020 — What’s the cost of a wind turbine? $1,300,000 USD per megawatt. The typical wind turbine is 2-3 MW in power, so most turbines cost in the $2-4 million dollar range. Operation and maintenance runs an additional $42,000-$48,000 per year according to research on wind turbine operational cost.

        That cost is probably going to be down to a thousand bucks per megawatt within another couple of years.

        My wild ass guess, without even using an envelope, is that we could build that many wind farms on a daily basis for no more than three billion bucks or so.

        The total economic cost of smoking in the US is estimated at more than $300 billion a year. This includes nearly $170 billion in direct medical care for adults and more than $156 billion in lost productivity due to premature death and exposure to secondhand smoke [2].May 10, 2016

        How Much Can the USA Reduce Health Care Costs by Reducing …
        http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › pmc › articles › PMC4862676

        The cost of excessive alcohol use in the United States reached $249 billion in 2010, or about $2.05 per drink. Most (77%) of these costs were due to binge drinking.

        Excessive Drinking is Draining the U.S. Economy – CDC
        http://www.cdc.gov › alcohol › features › excessive-drinking
        Search for: How much does alcohol cost the US?

        total cost of using oil us annually
        This statistic represents the total capital expenditures by the United States oil and gas industry from 2010 to 2018. In 2018, the U.S. oil and gas industry’s capex totaled around 136.4 billion U.S. dollars.Sep 18, 2020

        • U.S. oil and gas industry total expenditures 2018 | Statista

        Domestic gasoline demand – United States 1990-2018. In 2019, domestic gasoline demand nearly reached 145 billion gallons in the United States. Here, gasoline consumption is largely related to highway travel with this mode accounting for about 93 percent of the total.Jun 10, 2020

        • U.S. domestic demand for gasoline 1990-2018 | Statista

        It’s damned easy to impress people by presenting only one side of the argument, lol.

        And unfortunately, the majority of people aren’t paying even a quarter as much attention to life and death questions as they are to pop music, soap operas and ball games.

    6. Thank you folks very much for the interesting comments and especially the links to articles. I’ll carefully read each of them. And I’ll throw this one into the blender:
      National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine

      I was an avid follower of the Oil Drum from the time it started about 15 years ago until it ended in 2013. Since then I’ve been an on-and-off follower of the issues this site regularly deals with – and a big thanks to Mr. Coyne for keeping the flame burning.

      From the OiI Drum days, I very clearly remember OFM and Nick G – who could forget 🙂 I probably commented on the Oil Drum something to the effect that we could save the planet with a new super-powerful “Trinity” – OFM for lifestyle, Nick for technology, and me for human population issues. Fantasies are fun!

      More seriously, preventing unpleasant consequences for future generations of humans and all the other flora and fauna on the planet, may or may not be realistic. Definitely possible if there was such a thing as my imaginary Trinity – but, as OFM just pointed out: few people are even paying attention.

      I asked about an comprehensive energy study because it seems we should follow one of the first principles of science: hopes, wishes, myths, and delusions are no substitute for the kind of conclusions obtained by a disciplined adherence to the Scientific Method – which will be no surprise to the readers here. Perhaps it would be useful to have a very solid, realistic, science based analysis and a plan, that has been widely debated and peer reviewed, and then distilled down to it’s essentials, to present to world powers in a somewhat unified manner. But, I fear this is also mostly a pipe dream.

      The articles and research mentioned in the comments appear to an excellent start – especially the State by State one. But only if people are paying attention. Perhaps someone will rise above the chatter and actually provide some realistic leadership – I haven’t noticed one yet.

      1. Bicycle Dave,

        You are welcome. A big thanks should also be given to to Ovi, George Kaplan, Islandboy, and of course the founder of this blog Ron Patterson.

        And to all the great participants who provide inciteful comments.

        1. Your reply is great. I can’t resist a bit of humor:

          “inciteful comments”

          That participant has been impeached…

            1. Well, I’ll take Presidents for $200, Alex.

              Before Huntington Beach, did you live in San Clemente?

            2. Who is Tricky Dick ?

              I’ll take Moved to Florida for a $1000

          2. Dumb spelling mistake.

            Thanks for the catch, Nick.

            I would prefer fewer inciteful comments, most comments are insightful, and are appreciated.

  5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2hH8hUAPuY

    There’s nothing yet in the news that explains just what happened to the glacier, but my guess is that it must have simply collapsed to a substantial extent due to melt water penetrating into the depths of the ice and softening it to the point it started to flow. Such flows once started tend to accelerate very quickly indeed sometimes.

    1. OFM , just like you I don’t know what happened to the glacier , but I know what happened downstream and that is ” deforestation ” on a massive scale . So some history . In 1975 a plan was made to build a dam in the valley which is also a seismic zone . The locals developed what is called the ” Chipko” movement . ” Chipko” in Hindi means “tree hugging ” . Whenever the authorities came to cut down the trees for the dams ,the locals would surround and hug the trees to prevent the cutting . This movement was a great success . In 1991 the Indian economy shifted from a socio economic model to the market economy model . Result , there was economic growth and mass migration of the rural youth to the urban centres . This resulted in not enough individuals to do ” Chipko ” or tree hugging . The contractors who had a vested interest in getting the dams built moved in and annihilated the trees . The founder of the ” Chipko” movement Mr Sunderlal Bahugna had warned against the building of dams and the resultant deforestation of this in 1980 . I hope this helps in everyone understand the perils of the destruction of the ecosystem . By the way, are you aware of the farmer movement now going on in India against the corporatizing of agriculture ? So,so massive that it can lead to the toppling of the govt or a massacre of the protesting farmers . Half a million farmers have laid siege to the capitol New Delhi since October . The largest non violent protest in the world ever . If you want more info let me know , I will post videos for your interest .
      P.S : As of latest 150 people working on the dam downstream from the glacier are dead .

  6. Are EV ranges improving in cold weather? I am traveling in the Windy City and have done a lot of driving. I have only seen one Tesla so far, and this summer I would typically see several here.

    It was -12F when I first went outside and only got up to 5F today.

    I was surprised how many people were out driving on the interstates the past three days with the cold, snow and COVID still being a major problem.

    Another thought, absolutely need to make sure there is enough wind and solar backup. A blackout in this kind of weather would be fatal.

    On the way up and over, I will note the wind mills were cranking. Likewise, I assume when there is snow on the ground the solar panels perform even better?

    1. I assume when there is snow on the ground the solar panels perform even better?

      Actually, they do: output goes up in colder temperatures…

      1. That’s what I thought. Add in reflection from the snow on the ground, they will perform higher than the rating is what I read after posting.

    2. Shallow sand,

      If you dress warmly to minimize the use of the heater during winter weather then the range in cold weather is not affected very much (maybe a drop of 15% in range), obviously you would still need to use it to keep the windshield clear, but this can also be minimized.

      Newer model 3 and the model Y use a heat pump rather than a resistance heater and that should improve winter range, my old model 3 (2018) has the inferior heating system, but it is fine in the Northeast.

    3. Lots of EVs, mostly Model 3s, Xs, and Ys in/around Minneapolis.

      There are hundreds of community solar gardens in the greater Twin Cities area, 1MWac to 20MWac each, most are fixed tilt with monocrystaline modules, mix of central and string inverters, interconnected to Xcel’s distribution grid. The cold, clear skies make for excellent production, typically exceeding the PVSyst modeled output for the time of year.

  7. Some people like to shout- “Renewables can never fully replace fossil fuels!”
    As if the whole discussion ends with that simple shut-down statement.

    Get real! That belief gives no shelter from the reality that fossil fuels are depleting, and we have 7.8 B+ consumers of energy.
    Regardless of whether you have been enthusiastic about Solar/Wind, or a big naysayer, its not like there are a bunch of other choices sitting around dusty on the shelf.
    A smart civilization will build out wind and solar as fast as possible now (at great bargain pricing) in advance of the inevitable decline in fossil fuels- regardless of any global warming concerns.

    In the USA we won’t need to import fuel from outside the continent if we are smart and quick about it, even as our domestic oil declines.
    This is all so simple even young children can understand it.

    1. Yes, and by only talking about “green energy solutions” we can conveniently ignore population overshoot, the destruction of ecosystems; habitat destruction; the extinction of wildlife (flora and fauna); pollution; decrease in the pH of the Earth’s oceans; etc. For example, the world now produces more than 380 million tonnes of plastic every year, much of which ends up entering our natural environment. Lets put on our rose colored glasses, ignore this kind of stuff, and all talk about how EVs will save the world. 😉

      1. Hey Doug.
        I am certainly not suggesting that solar and wind are some kind cure for mass population overshoot. The only cure for that is to stop having kids and to stop trying to live so long. It would also help to use a lot less resources as you go about your life.

        The only thing solar/wind are good for is decreasing the energy shortage we face as fossil fuels deplete. Oh, and perhaps creating jobs.

        So, I think you are posing a false argument- “by only talking about “green energy solutions” we can conveniently ignore population overshoot,”
        Since when are discussions of these topics mutually exclusive?

        Maybe some do naively think we ‘can ignore population overshoot’, but I don’t think most do.
        It is the biggest problem by many magnitudes.

        1. Yes, it’s a false argument, a distraction. Fertility levels are crashing around the world, with the exception of Africa and MENA. Except for the Thanos solution, there’s very little that can be done about population in the short term. Anything that we should do, is something we should do urgently for other reasons, like educating women and eliminating childhood diseases.

          Focusing on population distracts from dealing with our primary environmental problem, climate change, and the primary solution, eliminating fossil fuels.

          Doug: do you agree that we should eliminate fossil fuels ASAP?

          1. Nick – I happen to disagree with you on this.
            Overpopulation is by far the biggest problem.
            Gross population overshoot.

            I was pointing out to Doug that we can discuss two issues at the same time, but otherwise am in close agreement with him on this and most issues.

            1. I’m with Hickory on this particular point. There’s no way in hell this planet can support seven plus billion people long term, even as subsistence farmers.

              In general I agree with Nick on almost every major point discussed here, but his eternal optimism irritates me sometimes. It’s as if he’s a paid spokes person, spouting a never ending stream of talking points at times…….. which I find irritating, personally, no matter which side such a spokes person represents.

              But he DOES acknowledge the points made by people who disagree with him. He’s NOT a damned partisan politician.

              He’s a ok, but I suspect that his every day job is public relations or advertising, lol.

            2. Hickory,

              Of course we all agree on the importance of “population overshoot, the destruction of ecosystems; habitat destruction; the extinction of wildlife (flora and fauna); pollution; decrease in the pH of the Earth’s oceans”. That’s something that any experienced environmentalist will agree on.

              In this context, though, those are distractions. The discussion was about “green energy solutions”. Doug changed the subject away from “green energy solutions”.

              I’d like to stay with the topic of renewables and electrification until we’re agreed that they are essential policies. After that I’d be delighted to discuss population, and the others. But…first things first.

            3. OFM,

              I think if you take a moment and look at what I said, you won’t see anything optimistic. Is this comment optimistic? “Except for the Thanos solution, there’s very little that can be done about population in the short term. ” I don’t think it’s optimistic, it’s just realistic: there’s very little we can do to change population in the next 10 to 20 years.

              In the meantime, the IPCC is saying we have to reduce GHG emissions by 50% in 10 years, and 100% in 20. That can be done, and even if we don’t succeed in doing it (which I’m not optimistic about) any progress towards it is enormously valuable.

              As I know you agree with.

            4. I acknowledge what you are saying Nick.
              Its hard to discuss a topic here without getting tangled up in other related subjects, or often just torpedoed by flaming arrows of ignorance or foolery across the bow.

              “inciteful”- hah

          2. With a little more thought, I have come to think that overpopulation/overshoot is the second biggest problem of humanity in/on this world.
            The biggest problem of all is human nature.
            Sure we are clever as heck and often innovative, and skilled with our fingers.
            Yet we are by far the cruelest organism in all the wide universe- intentionally inflicting pain on others. On a horrific scale.
            And we are impulsive, fascinated by destruction, rude, greedy, and often extremely ignorant considering the brain size.
            We are extremely poor stewards of this world, and of ourselves. F grade.

            I know, someone will say that we can change.
            Its true.
            Can vs Will is a different consideration.

            1. HICKORY —

              Good point, it’s not so much what we can do but what we will do. That’s the question — an existential question.

              LIMITING WARMING TO 2 C REQUIRES EMISSIONS REDUCTIONS 80% ABOVE PARIS AGREEMENT TARGETS

              “In 2017, a widely cited study used statistical tools to model how likely the world is to meet the Paris Agreement global temperature targets. The analysis found that on current trends, the planet had only a 5% chance of staying below 2 degrees Celsius warming this century—the international climate treaty’s supposed goal. Now, the same authors have used their tools to ask: What emissions cuts would actually be required to meet the goal of 2 C warming, considered a threshold for climate stability and climate-related risks such as excessive heat, drought, extreme weather and sea level rise? The University of Washington study finds that emissions reductions about 80% more ambitious than those in the Paris Agreement, or an average of 1.8% drop in emissions per year rather than 1% per year, would be enough to stay within 2 degrees.

              To some extent, the discourse around climate has been: ‘We have to completely change our lifestyles and everything,'” Raftery said. “The idea from our work is that actually, what’s required is not easy, but it’s quantifiable. Reducing global emissions by 1.8% per year is a goal that’s not astronomical.”

              https://phys.org/news/2021-02-limiting-requires-emissions-reductions-paris.htmlhttps

            2. Hickory, Doug,

              What we will do would be important if we could predict that. If we were psychic, we could know. But…we’re not psychic.

              What is important is what we could and should do. What is important is what we try to do. What is important is what we set as goals. What we work on. What we urge our friends, coworkers and government to do.

              So…are we all agreed that we should eliminate fossil fuels as soon as possible?

            3. God, give me grace to accept with serenity
              the things that cannot be changed,
              Courage to change the things
              which should be changed,
              and the Wisdom to distinguish
              the one from the other.

              Living one day at a time,
              Enjoying one moment at a time,
              Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
              Taking, as Jesus did,
              This sinful world as it is,
              Not as I would have it,
              Trusting that You will make all things right,
              If I surrender to Your will,
              So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
              And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

              Amen.

            4. Peak Oil Barrel’s Atomistic/Piecemeal Preoccupations

              There may be a way out of this conundrum without having to worry, at least as much, about population, and that is that we live in holistic/systemic harmony and balance with nature. We get to know it, and properly. Nature also includes our own, which includes true community, true family, being in touch with natural surroundings, and having a general, meaningful knowledge of what it takes to be truly self-sufficient in a natural, holistic, sustainable context… In short, repopulating the ‘atomized monocultures’ that we’ve become, with our human ‘native flora and fauna’.

              This also means, we reduce, if not effectively eliminate, our technological footprint. We may have very little choice.

              What is the antonym of holism and systemic? A couple are atomistic and piecemeal, respectively.

              A preoccupation with, say, electric cars, Tesla touch-screens, solar panels, and industrial output in general, as well as the reduction of fossil fuels is atomistic and piecemeal at best and seems to speak of members of a terribly lost and confused species, communicating, as they do, atomized through their communications medium, rather than in person, face-to-face.

          3. Hi Nick, about a dozen years ago we discussed population – let’s guess 2008 when the world population was about 6.8B. Today, it’s nearly 7.8B – so a billion increase since we last commented together. When I was born, it was a little over 2B and the UN projects a possible 11B by the end of this century. Of course, many things could derail that projection. But, so far the 4 horsemen have barely dented this growth rate.

            I appreciate your priority for immediate, practical action and your optimism and insight (incite 🙂 ) regarding technology. But, some folks are also more optimistic about population than the Thanos Solution. There is only one rational (if not particularly realistic) solution for the population problem and it’s the One Child Family. The impediments for this idea are enormous and I’m not especially hopeful. However, there are optimists out there:
            World Population Balance

            Also, I think this is one of the better sources of data on the subject:
            Future Population Growth

            1. Those are very interesting websites.

              I agree that a one-child approach would be very helpful.

              The funny thing is that a lot of women are dying to have fewer children, and are forced to have more than they want. They don’t have to be coerced or convinced to have fewer children, but they need freedom through education, career opportunities, contraception. Improved childhood health and old-age support helps enormously, as well, so parents are assured their one child will grow up, and that the parents won’t need children to take care of them in their old age.

        2. Well COVID may have helped some in terms of population. Not surprising if you stayed at home with a kid during lockdown. One friend said “If there’s going to be a baby boom it’ll have to come from first time parents” LOL

          https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/covid-19-pandemic-baby-bust_l_6010ac0dc5b6b8719d8828ee?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAC0lZs_FC24Ghpw1CWwWoOZt6nIeZ2lm4SCMhIOaZ7Z52F2CKkoZnmMx6SJPSDWxI0IIkfdoVKvPpW3qE_owVvskqaaNEeimTtD_9UrFLVSs2jk3cWfP5AqtpTOAdM8mt9AK1iPbdzU9DwGFH_HUMAnIPgo5xSRRkDm8cWtxJctL

    2. I watched the video linked to in the comment in question and here’s a quote from the transcript that I found intriguing:

      But, really the biggest concern I have is just the scarcity of platinum. The loadings today of platinum on fuel cell vehicles are about 30 times higher than what’s in the catalytic converter and what’s in the emission control system. So again, we’ve got to do a vast amount of design thrifting but, where is the platinum going to come from long term?

      The person speaking seems to think that every vehicle with a catalytic converter is going to be replaced by vehicle with a hydrogen fuel cell. Based on the current trends, it would appear that way less than one in thirty of the current vehicle fleet is going to be replaced by vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells. In that case, it should be possible to reclaim (recycle) the required platinum from the current fleet as it is scrapped.

      There was no expression of concern about the platinum supply under a BAU scenario, where x% more catalytic converters would be needed each year. Needless to say that is a moot point since as others have pointed out EV sales grew last year despite the fact that the overall market contracted.

    3. There is potentially 1000 years of stored natural gas in methane hydrates. Requires advances in extraction techniques. Mining uranium from the sea while difficult is not impossible.
      Greater use of bio-digesters to collect municipal waste which can be turned into fertiliser and biogas.
      Banning all residential motor vehicles would alleviate the rapid fossil decline. I would include electric vehicles as their production uses a fair amount of fossil fuels and the material for making them is being depleted. Better education about overpopulation. Including an easier path to sterilisation.

    1. Piggly-Wiggly

      As I’ve already written previously hereon, human population is at what it is, which must be compared with the average population during the fossil fuel age. This is because this is going to affect things, such as material availability, going forward.

      We have run out, or are running out, of much of the low-hanging fruit of not just practically everything, but of wiggle-room as well.

      1. “We have run out, or are running out, of much of the low-hanging fruit of not just practically everything, but of wiggle-room as well.”

        Out of the mouths of babes and ( even) Caelan ONCE IN A WHILE comes great wisdom.

        1. ^ This and all your ‘mansplaining’ over the years here on POB:

          Pure dope.

          Mansplaining

          “Mansplaining (a blend word of man and the informal form splaining of the gerund explaining) is a pejorative term meaning ‘(of a man) to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner’. Author Rebecca Solnit ascribed the phenomenon to a combination of ‘overconfidence and cluelessness’. Lily Rothman, of The Atlantic, defined it as ‘explaining without regard to the fact that the explainee knows more than the explainer, often done by a man to a woman’.

          In its original use, mansplaining differed from other forms of condescension in that it was said to be rooted in the assumption that a man is likely to be more knowledgeable than a woman. However, it has come to be used more broadly, often applied when a man takes a condescending tone in an explanation to anyone, regardless of the age or gender of the intended recipients: a man ‘splaining’ can be delivered to any audience. In 2010, it was named by the New York Times as one of its ‘Words of the Year’. American Dialect Society nominated Mansplaining as the ‘most creative’ new word in 2012.”

          Kids Cover 46 and 2 by Tool

  10. Quasi-Peer-Review, Absolutely Crazy Things And Occam’s Razor

    …

    SARS-CoV-2 is well adapted for humans. What does this mean for re-emergence?

    “Abstract

    In a side-by-side comparison of evolutionary dynamics between the 2019/2020 SARS-CoV-2 and the 2003 SARS-CoV, we were surprised to find that SARS-CoV-2 resembles SARS-CoV in the late phase of the 2003 epidemic after SARS-CoV had developed several advantageous adaptations for human transmission. Our observations suggest that by the time SARS-CoV-2 was first detected in late 2019, it was already pre-adapted to human transmission to an extent similar to late epidemic SARS-CoV. However, no precursors or branches of evolution stemming from a less human-adapted SARS-CoV-2-like virus have been detected. The sudden appearance of a highly infectious SARS-CoV-2 presents a major cause for concern that should motivate stronger international efforts to identify the source and prevent near future re-emergence. Any existing pools of SARS-CoV-2 progenitors would be particularly dangerous if similarly well adapted for human transmission.”

    The Lab-Leak Hypothesis For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if…?

    “What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out.”

    The most logical explanation is that it comes from a laboratory
    The well-known Norwegian virologist Birger Sørensen and his colleagues have examined the corona virus. They believe it has certain properties which would not evolve naturally. These conclusions are politically controversial, but in this interview he shares the findings behind the headlines.

    ” ‘I understand that this is controversial, but the public has a legitimate need to know, and it is important that it is possible to freely discuss alternate hypotheses on how the virus originated’ Birger Sørensen starts to explain when Minerva visits him in his office one morning in Oslo.

    Despite the explosiveness of his statements and research, Sørensen remains calm and collected.

    Sørensen has been a point of controversy ever since former MI6 director Richard Dearlove cited a yet to be published article by Sørensen and his colleagues in an interview with The Daily Telegraph. The article claims that the virus that causes Covid-19 most likely has not emerged naturally.

    ‘It’s a shame that there has already been so much talk about this, because I have yet to publish the article where I put forward my analysis’, Sørensen says in the form of an exasperated sigh…

    Sørensen explains that they in their dialogue with scientific journals are encountering a certain reluctance to publishing the article – without, however, proper scientific objections…

    ‘Of course, it’s in my interest that my research becomes known, but I am being completely open and have declared all my interests.

    At the same time, I argue that it must be possible for those of us who work for smaller biotechnology companies to present our findings and get them discussed properly. If anyone wishes to contest my findings, they are of course welcome to do so, but I hope they will engage thoroughly with the arguments rather than derail them by discussing my motives’, Sørensen responds.”

    Chinese scientist who defected to US: COVID-19 not from nature but created in lab
    Chinese whistleblower Dr. Li-Meng Yan just published a scientific paper summarizing how the ‘unusual features of the SARS-CoV-2 genome suggest… sophisticated laboratory modification rather than natural evolution’

    “September 15, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – The coronavirus was man-made and did not originate from a wet market in Wuhan, says a Chinese whistleblower and one of the first scientists to study COVID-19 in China.

    Dr. Li-Meng Yan, 36, a medical doctor and virologist who fled to the US in April to tell the world about the origins of the virus, said that based on her own research the coronavirus ‘did not come from nature at all. It was created in a lab.’ “

    Top Russian Microbiologist claims Wuhan lab ‘did absolutely crazy things’ in coronavirus research enabling it to infect humans

    “I don’t believe Luc Montagnier is considered a credible source…” ~ GerryF

    “First, this kind of research appears relatively well-known or common and to have been going on for some time. Second, one doesn’t have to be seen by someone anonymous online as a credible source to be one or to get it right.” ~ Caelan MacIntyre

    “You shouldn’t believe everything you read!” ~ GerryF

    AFAIK, no one’s making any suggestion to do so.

    In a similar sense, however, one should keep an open mind, especially where it might challenge one’s, and/or society’s, ‘schemas’ and pressures to conform to them. ‘Play the game’; ‘toe the line’.

    “It came from a lab? Well, like all great historians I ask the question – ‘so what?’…

    I’m a planner. What’s the plan? Wear a mask and wash my hands- same plan.” ~ Survivalist

    “Tesla: Recalled touchscreens were meant to only last 5-6 years” ~ Survivalist

    News on such things as the recalling of Tesla’s touch-screens appear more important to you, Survivalist, at least hereon, than some silly ol’ virus.

    Just a reminder:
    Unless this has changed, this site is, in part, a collapse site, by the original owner’s own words.
    In this sense, but even in an energy/civilization sense, Covid-19 is very much something worth keeping an open mind and maintaining a spirit of inquiry about and for reasons that should be plainly obvious.

    1. So what? What’s the plan, gonna give the cartoon villains in China a piece of your mind once you have the evidence of negligence or weaponization, or whatever, all lined up? Do you feel better prepared for the future because you have ‘the truth’, and your finger on the pulse of biolab security negligence and coverups? Sounds kinda Qtardy. It also sounds like a waste of my limited bandwidth (see doesn’t change The Plan). Tesla, on the other hand, is a brilliant tale of human gullibility and naive optimism. A few weeks ago I think someone here posted that Musk being the richest dude on the planet was a moral victory for the environment, I’m paraphrasing. I really like tracking the various fanatics and the techno-cornucopians.
      It’s a hell of a bubble getting blown; making 1/2 a million overrated cars a year. Like as if a new car was the solution to this mess. It’s all very embarrassing.

      https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bitcoin-surges-to-almost-us-45-000-after-tesla-discloses-purchase-1.1560532

      https://apnews.com/article/who-virus-unlikley-leaked-china-lab-7a739e01f0713ebcc031d7ca81c51345

      PS- I’ve been tracking Corona viruses since 2003 ish when it made a big splash. Qtards weren’t invented and Trump was still a WWE character in 2003, so it was a bit less controversial I suppose. The link below is to the first published tell that something was afoot re: COVID. I received it in my inbox within several hours of its release. I have friends who follow these things as a matter of their employment. It helps, I find, to be scanning the horizon ahead, so to speak. Whether COVID came from a market, or accidentally from a lab down the street where they study viruses from the market, seems kinda meaningless with regards to and in the context of what I’ll be planning to do to be better prepare for the future. If you have Google Alerts, set one up for “unexplained pneumonia”. It’s usually an unsettling trend.
      https://promedmail.org/promed-post/?id=20191230.6864153

      PSS- this is the first ever report that COVID was bred up in a lab. There is no evidence, just a statement from some rando.
      https://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jan/26/coronavirus-link-to-china-biowarfare-program-possi/

      A few weeks later Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., becomes the first high-profile U.S. politician to raise the possibility that the outbreak “originated”— or, presumably, was created—in the Wuhan lab — while admitting there was no evidence to suggest there was.
      https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/04/22/the-theory-that-covid-19-originated-in-a-wuhan-lab-creeps-into-the-gop-mainstream/?sh=3fc503614d4d

      Again, all rather embarrassing.

      1. “A few weeks ago I think someone here posted that Musk being the richest dude on the planet was a moral victory for the environment, I’m paraphrasing.”

        That someone would be me and I still maintain that craziness around Tesla’s stock price is a big middle finger to those invested in fossil fuels and the big automakers. I’m just really sorry that I did not buy Tesla stock back in 2008, when I could have. Instead I spent loads buying up solar PV supplies thinking that Peak Oil was going to make everything FUBAR in short order. Note to Caelan: even if my solar fantasies come true, I will not recover what I spent (prematurely). I will just have to work my butt off to stay afloat. Nothing new.

        That brings me to the genesis of this particular virus and like Survivalist said “so what”. If the world (health organisation) does not change it’s approach to how pandemics are dealt with, there is going to be a pathogen that wipes out most of humanity while we wait for the wiz kids to come up with a cure! Maybe that’s just part of our destiny

        In my neck of the woods curfew hours have been extended effective today, following a spike in positive test results and flagrant disregard for public health guidelines by many. Extended curfew hours would be great if the virus was afraid of the dark!

        1. Hang in there IB. I’m not certain where you’re at, but I sincerely hope you have freedom to choose social distancing and other controls. Thanks for the articles you write here, your comments, and the spicy takes. I appreciate it.

      2. Government-Funded Virus Research, Large-Scale Human Error & Lab Escapes, COVID-19, Government Viability and Anarchistic Principles

        I seem to recall you previously writing that you were interested, like I am, in political/geopolitical stuff (vis-a-vis peak oil, collapse, energy and related), and COVID-19 seems about as politicized as it gets. So what’s up?

        Second, it may not matter to you, but ‘so what’ as you write, at least so to speak (and you might see fit to revise that).
        It clearly matters to others and for lots of good reasons beyond your silly cartoonized framing of it, even such as a simple fuck you to government and their COVID-19-related mandates and edicts, etc.. And as I’ve already written, it matters in a collapse/energy/etc. sense– very much in this site’s context.
        So why do you seem to be trying to discourage it? If it is a ‘so what’ to you, then you can just skip over my comments about it, right?
        Maybe your cartoonized framing of it is messing with your own capacity at recognizing other views?

        My angle about a lab release doesn’t appear to be in line with yours and doesn’t have to be. In any case, if it is a lab release or not, then we can take it from there. Being an anarchist, a tax-pimped-population-funded lab-escape and tinkering with nature like this matters at the very least to help underscore why I am one.
        If you want to sheeple around in a ‘face diaper’, as some call it, and wash your hands as if you’ve got OCD, that’s your prerogative, but some ‘would rather live on their feet than die on their knees’, myself included. That’s probably how you best survive, Survivalist…

        Sans gouvernement comme ça.

        BTW, my idea of a survivalist is someone who– you know– knows how to survive in the woods, can recognize wild edibles and medicinals and make fire without matches (on my bucket list) and that kind of stuff. (Maybe you know some of that, and if so, maybe you could share it.) It is not relying, at least forever, on UBI government-pegged fiat currency handouts, solar panels or electric cars from industrial robotic factories. That sort of thing leads to domestication and personal disempowerment– a perfect situation/form, incidentally, by which some power might wish to gain control over. And guess what? It’s already here. Some of it manifests as sort of like this:

        ‘Just wear your face-diaper, shut down your business, get your vax, prove that you did, tell us who you know (contact tracing), and then maybe we will consider helping you with what you need to live, travel and socialize’.

        COVID-19 seems nowhere near worth the disproportionate responses and current problems it has caused and is causing, which I’ve read appear worse, even much worse, than the disease.

        Medicine, as we know it, might very well tank along with it, including virus research. Maybe that’s a good thing, such as if its creating its own viruses and viral problems. But notice how it matters there for example. Medicine and medical research and governments maybe trying to throttle/break/brake the bullshit economy… maybe in part through COVID-19 and lies, damned lies and statistics and people hereon who ask ‘So what’.

        There appears to be no evidence either way at the moment, likely because it is too complex, convoluted, and corrupt. It won’t matter in a sense if governments tank, but it would be nice to know best about it and/to maybe record some of it for future generations, future alien visitors or whoever.

        Special Cases

  11. I’m not a microbiologist or geneticist by even the wildest stretch of the imagination, but I am able to talk to at least one or two people in these fields by phone, and more by email.

    Most of them say there’s always a possibility that any new viral disease COULD be the result of attempts to weaponize the relevant virus, but that there’s no reason whatsoever to assume this is the case barring actual material evidence OTHER than the structure of the virus.

    The viruses are probably capable of greater and faster mutation than any other class of organisms in the biosphere…….. IF you think of them as alive. To me they’re more like zombies, neither really alive, nor really dead.

    I’m ready to believe the one plaguing is now is a laboratory creation……. but not to do so based on the words of just a handful of people who may or may not be honest about having FIRST HAND information about the supposed lab work in question. There are always plenty of people with various reasons to stretch the truth or just fabricate lies that suit their own agenda.

    The one safe assumption for the layman regarding matters of public health is that you are going to be right or at least CLOSER TO RIGHT ninety nine.nine nine percent of the time going with what the medical establishment tells you.

    There will always be people out there qualified in every imaginable field who will grab onto some limited data and claim for instance that coffee is REALLY good for you, or REALLY bad for you, for reasons of their own.

    What you should do is read what the websites of medical schools and public health organizations say about such questions….. which in this case is that so far as we know coffee isn’t harmful in moderate quantities, nor very useful either, except to help you stay awake in a pinch.

    There’s an ENTIRE industry sucking in people from many fields devoted to the promotion of organic foods.

    The truth of the matter is that while there are obviously some ingredients used in processed foods that are potentially or proven to be BAD for you, there’s virtually no evidence to the effect that the minute traces of pesticides found in conventionally grown foods are harmful……. where as there is OVERWHELMING evidence to the effect that having a widely varied including lots of fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, fish, poultry, etc diet MADE POSSIBLE by industrial agriculture is VERY good for you… compared to eating what you would OTHERWISE HAVE TO EAT……unless maybe you happen to be FLUSH with cash.

    (The organic food biz piggybacks on the conventional industrial agriculture business in every important respect, from production to retail distribution. Without the infrastructure associated with industrial conventional agriculture your organic off season grapes from South America would be twenty dollars a pound rather than four or five bucks. )

    I’m not at all opposed to organic foods, but it pisses me off that some people, more than a few, have been convinced to spend double on their groceries while skimping on the dentist and sucking on cigarettes. Their kids would be considerably better off if that extra grocery money were spent on anything enriching their education, etc.

    Highly processed foods ARE proven bad for you, if you eat a lot of them, but that’s another issue for another day.

    1. Maybe you should look up “gain of function” research, as conducted by the U.S. NIH and subcontracted to the lab in Wuhan.

  12. No quick fix on the horizon here!

    INDIA WILL DRIVE ENERGY DEMAND FOR THE NEXT 20 YEARS

    “India will be the biggest driver of global energy demand over the next 20 years as its population continues to increase fast and affluence spreads, the International Energy Agency said in a new report. Currently, solar accounts for just 4 percent of the energy mix while coal reigns supreme with 70 percent. By 2040, these could both account for about 30 percent of the country’s energy mix.”

    https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/India-Will-Drive-Energy-Demand-For-The-Next-20-Years.html

    1. Meanwhile,

      ARCTIC PERMAFROST RELEASES MORE CARBON DIOXIDE THAN ONCE BELIEVED

      “Rising global temperatures are causing frozen Arctic soil— permafrost—in the northern hemisphere to thaw and release CO2 that has been stored within it for thousands of years. The amount of carbon stored in permafrost is estimated to be four times greater than the combined amount of CO2 emitted by modern humans…

      Although the researchers have only studied a single bog area in Abisko, northern Sweden, they have compared their results with data from other parts the northern hemisphere and expect their new results to also be valid in other areas of permafrost worldwide. This means that we have a large new source of CO2 emissions that needs to be included in climate models and more closely examined.”

      https://phys.org/news/2021-02-arctic-permafrost-carbon-dioxide-believed.html

      1. Doug ,Arctic ice is really worrisome . As a follower of Paul Beckwith who studies this day to day I would rate it above peak oil .

        1. HOLE IN HEAD —

          From your post, reality indeed!

          “With this supply of wind and photovoltaic energy, it’s between 0 and 2 or 3 percent – that is de facto zero. You can see it in many diagrams that we have days, weeks, in the year where we have neither wind nor PV. Especially this time for example – there is no wind and PV, and there are often times when the wind is very miniscule. These are things, I must say, that have been physically established and known for centuries, and we’ve simply totally neglected this during the green energies discussion.”

    2. Doug , the guys at oilprice have their head shoved in their a**e . Wait until June / July . Their is a social revolution brewing right now of an unfathomable capacity . There will be only two end results . Downfall and bankruptcy of the state or Tiananmen square 2 . Tks for posting this because not many are aware as to what is happening in India .

  13. Not good!

    2021 A ‘CRUCIAL YEAR’ FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, UN CHIEF TELLS MEMBER STATES

    “The world is far from achieving agreed goals to reduce global warming in line with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the UN Secretary-General warned on Monday in his ongoing bid to secure greater commitment to averting climate catastrophe.”

    1. The UN Globalists always scream the loudest about climate change whenever there’s a significant and historical cold outbreak like the one gripping North America and Europe right now.

      1. Ha! Ha!

        I suspect you don’t know the difference between a ‘significant’ cold outbreak, and an ‘abnormal’ outbreak.

        Historical? Ha! Ha! Maybe Cataclysmic? Maybe Epochal?

        You should read some more about climate and weather.

      2. The UN is mostly a soapbox for nationalist dictators. None of them are globalists. I guess Qtards is what we get after so many years of suboptimal education.

  14. It seems the temporary global cooling effects of La Nina were not enough to prevent 2020 from being one of the three warmest years on record.

    LA NINA CLIMATE CYCLE HAS PEAKED

    “The WMO said there was a 65 percent likelihood that La Nina will persist during February-April. The odds shift rapidly thereafter, with a 70 percent chance that the tropical Pacific will return to neutral conditions in the cycle by April-June.”

    https://phys.org/news/2021-02-la-nina-climate-peaked.html

    1. The solar cycle was at a minimum at the end of 2019 so it will be going up for 5 years or so – a fairly minor effect but every little doesn’t help, and at least it will shut up the ‘new grand solar minimum’ trumpeters.

    1. There is a simple solution to solar panels covered with snow. Clear the snow from the panels at the end of the snow storm. Not sure about others, but I clear the snow from my car before driving. The same can be done with solar panels, this is not rocket science. Natural gas or coal can be used as backup, or energy can be imported from other nations with a highly interconnected grid. In addition demand pricing for electricity can be used so people turn down their thermostats when electricity supply is short.

      1. Dennis , clear the snow like I do it on my car windscreen everyday/ every time ???? . There is a lot of difference in cleaning 2m x 1m and cleaning 200 m x100 m . When I was in school I caused an explosion in the chemistry lab, so I presume as and when I grow up I will make an atom bomb . If cleaning was so simple why are there no solar farms in MENA ? Reason , how to clean them . A major project to make solar farms in Morocco to supply electricity to the EU was shelved for this very reason . A lot of “this and that” in your comment . A lot of difference between what “can” be done and what ” will ” be done .

        1. >If cleaning was so simple why are there no solar farms in MENA ?

          https://gulfbusiness.com/uae-becomes-worlds-first-country-to-produce-aluminium-using-solar-power/#:~:text=The UAE has become the,produce aluminium using solar power.&text=The solar park has a,Concentrated Solar Power (CSP).

          https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2020/07/26/worlds-largest-solar-power-plant/?sh=376397752b65

          https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/UAE-Aims-To-Triple-Its-Solar-Installations-By-2025.html

          https://www.rechargenews.com/transition/china-and-uae-hotspots-for-global-solar-fitch/2-1-925927

          All from the first page of the google search “uae solar”

          The spread of solar has followed political lines. Germany was first in, thanks to Green Party participation in government. California was a decade a head of Texas. Now, thanks to the collapse in price, Texas solar is expanding enormously.

          MENA is not known for its progressive (or to be frank well thought out) policies. The best explanation for the lack of solar is likely to be political.

          Another reason is likely to be lack of demand. In a relatively poor country, electricity demand is low, so new electricity production is implemented slowly. The richest countries in the region have cheap oil and gas, so they have little demand for new power generation.

          I also recommend googling solar in Israel, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.

          1. Change is painful for incumbents. People whose expertise is in fossil fuels and related industries (ICEs, power turbines, etc) are terrified of having to start over. I’ve known people who were successful executives or professionals, but couldn’t adapt to losing their position, and ended up losing everything and working in low level positions (e.g., janitor!). Most people do better than that, but change means a lot of sleepless nights for people in legacy industries. I have a hard time blaming them for fighting the transition…

            1. There is a huge difference between an executive or professional and an owner and/or operator, whether a manufacturer or producer. I’ve said for years that having my company destroyed or effectively outlawed, is orders of magnitude different than changing jobs. Doing something is not the same as building something.

              What makes it so much worse both mentally and emotionally is the blatant hypocrisy of those that cancel by ignorance, without compassion or sacrifice on their part. Having spent years in and around Denver it is a mind screw to watch a population that is hell bent on getting rid of me as an existential threat while they rack up miles and miles in SUVs whose engines never reach room temperature. Heaven forbid that yuppies drive Honda Civics to and from work instead of Escalades and even spend time at home. It’s no wonder people are going nuts not being able to run all over town on a whim during the pandemic. FYI, until I wrecked it, I drove a 4 cyl, 30 mpg pickup truck.

            2. Right Rasputin, your pain is worse than others because this time capitalism marketplace changes are happening to you. Where were you during the 90’s when 10’s of millions of manufacturing jobs got transferred to China in the name of cost efficient capitalism? When you live by the knife, you die by the knife. On the bright side, you’ll have more time to watch your $500, 60 inch flat screen tv.

        2. Hole in head,

          I guess one might claim that all those cars parked outside in winter snow storms are useless. After all one cannot drive a car covered with snow. 🙂

          There are solutions, some are quite simple.

    2. HiH,

      Do you really think this website is a reliable source of information?

        1. As best I can tell, this website aggressively denies climate change is an important problem.

          Is that what you see there?

  17. Nick said upstream (and no one answered him) –
    “So…are we all agreed that we should eliminate fossil fuels as soon as possible?”

    My short answer to that big questions is “Depends on what you mean by soon as possible”

    Simply, the world can’t do that in short order (a few years) without massive crash in the world economy and years of famine, beyond your imagination. It would be one way to rapidly bring down the population to under 2 billion.
    Or, ‘as soon as possible’ could mean at a rate which would not cause death due to loss of job, food, and vital resources in the world. That means a timeframe of decades, minimum. I believe an intentional big downsizing in population and global economy may be necessary to accomplish this.

    Beyond these extreme scenarios, I suspect we are in close agreement on the need for a transition to wind and solar underway at a much faster pace, as if we are serious and determined to avoid an economic catastrophe as oil depletes, and the climate destabilizes.

    1. HICKORY —

      Exactly, there is a good reason no one responded to Nick’s (meaningless) comment. What the hell does “as soon as possible” mean?

      2. Well, you can describe what it might mean to you. But, if you don’t want to, how about this. We could try the following statement.

        We need to transition away from fossil fuels, at a much faster pace than we’re doing now, but not so fast as to cause death due to loss of job, food, and vital resources in the world.

        Would you agree with that?

    2. Hickory,

      Okay, so your answer is ” Yes, we need to transition away from fossil fuels, at a much faster pace than we’re doing now, but not so fast as to cause death due to loss of job, food, and vital resources in the world.”

      Is that fair?

      1. I could more accurately express my views, but it would take more typing (electricity).
        So yes, fair enough.

    3. >Simply, the world can’t do that in short order (a few years) without massive crash in the world economy and years of famine, beyond your imagination.

      Unless the fossil fuel industry is just a parasite.

      1. Yeah, it’s mostly the FF industry that’s at risk.

        About 45% of all oil is used for passenger transportation, and that is disproportionately used by high and middle income folks for low value, low occupancy travel.

        Industrial consumers are far more agile than many assume: long haul trucking, short range delivery, water transportation: all of these have contingency plans for short and long-term adaptation to a transition away from oil.

        We can transition pretty quickly, and be far better off for it.

  18. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/10/china-birthrate-slumps-experts-blame-changing-attitudes?utm_term=79cc7965029d74a9437cfb640e514fa8&utm_campaign=GuardianTodayUS&utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&CMP=GTUS_email

    If you’re truly economically and ecologically literate, read this piece run in one of the world’s best general audience newspapers, one which is very strong on supporting sound environmental policies.

    Unless I missed it, there’s not a goddamned word in this article ( scanned rather than read carefully to be honest ) about the ADVANTAGES of a falling population, or a population trending towards younger citizens…. such advantages are huge of course.

    The most easily understood one is that as old people die off, they free up housing so that younger people don’t have to depend on new construction only.

    Fewer children means fewer school rooms, fewer teachers, and more and more affordable university education.

    Fewer new roads, water treatment plants, sewer systems are needed. Less land is needed to grow food, water for irrigation and domestic consumption is a lesser problem.

    Fewer cars and trucks will be needed.

    In general, less of almost all material goods, and many services as well, will be needed to a substantial extent.

    But the mainstream media, even the greenest of the MAIN portion of the mainstream media, seldom or never point out any of these compensating advantages when talking about an aging population ” crisis”.

    Nor do you see much if anything about the continuous advances being made in health care, and in automation, all the way up to robots, which will make it far easier to care for the large majority of elderly people.

    1. O.F.M. —

      I suspect the lack of discussion on reducing population has a religious component, so, a taboo topic. And yes, especially in Japan, robots are playing in increasingly large roll in the care for the elderly.

      1. Hi Doug,
        You’re undoubtedly correct, painting with a broad brush, about religion and population control, so far as a LOT of the major media are concerned, at least here in the USA. Talk about a good way to get yourself of being accused of being not ONLY a commie, but a RED CHINESE commie! Conservative politics and religion have morphed into bedfellows to a substantial extent here.

        But my thinking is that insofar as there’s actual reluctance to discussing population control in a paper such as the Guardian, it probably stems from a combination of two sources…… fear of loss of advertising revenues and ignorance.

        Even journalists well acquainted with at least the abc’s of environmental issues mostly can’t get their heads around it. They apparently accept eternal growth as a necessary evil with no known solution, in most cases.

        It’s a rare thing to run across a businessman or an economist who doesn’t believe in the necessity of continuous economic growth in order to maintain a prosperous society. If the businessman has even given this question any thought at all, he accepts continuous growth as gospel, the way my backwoods relatives accept Jesus and the fires of hell.

        The economist doesn’t have the excuse of ignorance, being trained in his field. His problem is a lack of critical thinking, accepting questionable assumptions as well proven.

        To be sure, the newer and more modern economists are coming to grips with this problem……. but the older ones, the ones who wrote the textbooks used in universities in all the OTHER departments, aren’t dead yet.

        And not much, if anything, is going to change in the way all the kids in college are taught economics, until they’ve been gone at least a generation or so.

      2. Interestingly, most large Islamic countries have significantly reduced birth rates. Pakistan is a major exception. But after the famine, the mullahs saw to it that birth rates crashed in Bangladesh. Iran’s birth rate collapsed in the early 80s. Indonesia, Egypt and Turkey have low birth rates as well. As does the biggest Islamic country, India.

        1. I’m fascinated by the geographical closeness of Iran and Saudi Arabia, and their cultural distance: Iran is Persian, and Iranians get very annoyed when you suggest that they have a lot in common with their Arab neighbors. Iran, of course, has their fertility under control while KSA really, really does not.

          Why? Well, look how KSA treats women…

    2. OK, but where’s your economic growth going to come from if your country’s population pyramid is weighed toward the elderly and the population overall is declining? That article shows even Red China is starting to realize how terrifying a falling population count is.

      1. Frank- “even Red China is starting to realize how terrifying a falling population count is.”
        With good reason.
        I have not seen any method published on how to manage a contracting economy/population.
        It is going to be chaotic and painful for a long time I suspect.
        Thats the problem with growing too fast and too big.
        When the party ends it is a very ugly situation.

        1. Hi Hickory,

          You’re dead on as usual, lol.
          ” When the party ends it is a very ugly situation.”

          But you’re quite obviously one of the people who understand that the end of the business as usual more of everything more people party IS coming to and end, and that the end is within sight now, if you’re paying attention.

          But one way or another, we will manage it, or die ( literally) while trying.

          I have devoted a lot of thought for years to what must happen, what can happen, what might be politically feasible, etc.

          The biggest problems are going to mostly involve providing enough work, and therefore enough income, to people who lose their jobs in any sort of steady state economy.

          But if you look at one industry at a time, this may not be as bad as it looks at first glance.
          Most of the people who are building new houses for instance can retire as we quit needing so many new houses with the approach of a stable or declining population, and perhaps most of the rest of them can switch over to remodeling and refurbishing older existing houses.

          But what about the people who fix wrecked cars? Now that’s a trade that will necessarily shrink dramatically as self driving cars come to dominate the highway. Fortunately that’s a relatively small industry.

          I don’t really have a clue as to how we’re going to manage the OVERALL transition, if it happens, but I foresee the typical work week eventually shrinking to as little as ten to twenty hours as automation takes an ever bigger bite out of so many kinds of work.

          Now any solution to THIS problem is going to necessarily be mostly political.

          Something in the way of a guaranteed income will probably be necessary.

          As tough as this problem will be, solving it will be a piece of cake compared to failing to solve it.

          If I were a billionaire, I would start paying women and couples to forgo having more than one child, with a bonus for none.

          1. We can watch how other older countries handle their situation, and maybe learn something.
            Japan is older, but they entered the phase with a huge national savings surplus so they have been able to cushion the beginning phase of getting older. Bears watching.
            Italy is older too. Without EU bailout they would be in Greece shoes back after the 2009 bubble break. Bears watching.
            We will be able to print money and keep dollars sloshing around for quite awhile, living on past accomplishments and advantages. Until China decides it has had enough of our monetary system.
            Also, the USA can enjoy the benefits of youthful immigration if we can be a relatively desirable place ,both culturally and economically.

            Overall, in the world we are at a place where we are still growing extremely rapidly, with another billion people to be added to standing stock over the next 13 years, and yet we can also see just beyond the horizon that the ground is starting to crest and then fall off- with an indefinite slope downward.
            Uncharted territory for this species.

            1. The problem is easily solved. It’s called immigration. Just one little problem though, folks have to get over their racist attitudes to make it successful. The US is about the only country that does this successfully despite a below replacement level of births. But everyone else in a similar situation could be doing it too.

            2. Stephen,

              You’re absolutely right.

              The funny thing is that limiting immigration does nothing to deal with over-population on a global level, and yet such limits often get a lot of attention in discussions about population.

              It’s another example of how a large focus on population often leads to ineffective or counter-productive policies (instead of liberating policies like childhood health, education for girls, etc.).

        2. I have not seen any method published on how to manage a contracting economy/population.

          The first big step in dealing with a declining population and a rising population of older folks is to raise the retirement age! People are living longer with lower levels of disability, and that creates financial problems when the ratio of workers to retirees gets too low – Japan is a case study in how not to handle retirement in an era of people living longer. The US, on the other hand, has thrown out the baby with the bath water by mostly eliminating pensions.

          Working is better than being idle (look at all those bored Trump voters!), and living and working longer is better than being dead…

          1. It’s economics. You change the definition of GDP and focus instead on metrics like human welfare that place values on health, environmental quality, longevity, equitable distribution, etc., this gives you a number you can point to as a politician that is growing and prove you are a success. Read some Herman Daly…

      2. Frank,

        The elderly don’t consume as many resources (with the exception of healthcare resources). The important metric is per capita economic growth so if overall economic growth (in real terms) falls due to declining population, it is not really important as long as per capita growth continues. Probably 1% annual growth is sufficient for developed nations and eventually all nations may reach that state. Potentially even zero real GDP per capita growth is viable and with falling population we would see a gradually falling level of World real GDP until some sustainable level of population and output is reached. Needs are not unlimited. Japan’s real GDP per capita grew at about 0.8% per year from 1989 to 2019 (average annual growth rat over that 31 year period).

    3. I suspect most people think of human population through a narrow prism of just our species and how the planet’s resources can support us. Much of the popular environmental concern seems to be focused on fundraising for specific causes (Polar Bears, Elephants, etc) – it’s mostly about giving 19 dollars a month. And another popular concern is about fossil fuel use and other “Green Deals” that promise to create more jobs by building more stuff. Saving bears and conserving energy are certainly noble pursuits, but I’ve never noticed these organizations talk about something like the One Child Family as the primary way to make sure those efforts are actually successful. The simple fact is, as others here have pointed out, that human overpopulation is devastating large chunks of the biosphere – a biosphere that human well-being is totally reliant upon. And this is hardly a newly discovered issue; Paul Ehrlich wrote about this in 1968.

      Concurrent with overpopulation is the issue of technology and automation in particular. Technology has rendered many earlier human skills obsolete and the labor of many people unneeded – right at a time when world population continues to increase. The Guardian article OFM linked is the typical mantra repeated on behalf of those wanting cheap labor, mass consumer markets, and a power base of supplicants. Shrinking population could increase individual human value and dignity at the same time it’s decreasing the extinction rate of other species. The real issue is financial inequality – the fruits of automation primarily going to a small percentage of people. Toffler’s Future Shock recognized this problem in 1970 – he correctly saw the impact of automation, but very incorrectly assumed that nearly all people would benefit.

      So, why the disconnect between the obvious elephants-the-room: the reality of what is happening to the planet and the mis-management of technology? Why the drum beat for growth and the lament for a perceived population decline that is actually not happening on a global basis? Why not GINI instead of GDP as a prime measurement? Did we all forget Toffler and Ehrlich? Their crystal ball was cloudy but the issues are real – easy to poke fun at their mistakes and ignore the real message.

      Doug mentioned religion and OFM mentioned education as obstacles to a rational approach to human overpopulation. I suggest these thoughts can be generalized into notions of mass delusion and cultural indoctrination – along the lines of Richard Dawkins’ meme theory. Religious, political and economic delusions are just horses of different colors. Cultural myths start getting propagated shortly after birth.

      Thinking about fixing this predicament is a mind numbing exercise. One meager suggestion is to think about the curriculum that is used to educate grade school children – and how this curriculum is influenced by local school boards. Who are these board members and what impact do they have on ensuring young children develop the critical thinking skills needed to deal with pervasive myths and delusions? And what about grade schools run by religious organizations? Waiting for college level education is too late.

      1. Religion preys on the uneducated, poor and sick with their system of schools, charities and hospitals.

        1. Which is why American Christians are so opposed to Obamacare, and increasingly to healthcare in general. They also oppose public schools.

          “Boko Haram”, as they say in Nigeria. Rational thinking is taboo.

    1. John ,simple . It is isolated and remote . No airport . Only access is by road or rail via India . They shut both the routes . Nothing surprising all isolated islands have very low or even maybe zero infections . Example Fiji , Madagascar , Tonga etc . The more isolated you are the better . The only island connected to the modern world which had a small problem was New Zealand but they got control of it by banning all inward flights at a very early stage .

      1. Bhutan has four airports, one of which is an international airport.
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paro_Airport

        The Atlantic story is a good read. Bhutan mobilized an effective response. Give them some credit.

        Taiwan, a densely populated island connected to the modern world, also mobilized an effective response, and has also fared quite well (better than Fiji).

        1. Bob, I know there is an airport but it is not modern . Visual landing and takeoff midst mountain ranges covered in mist and fog . It is used mostly for VIP ,dignitaries , military and disaster relief . It does not have the ” fly by wire ” facility as in modern airports . The most used entry point is via rail /road from the town of Phuntsholing on the Indo Bhutan border . I am not discrediting Bhutan . They
          did a got job . No arguments . Yes , Taiwan is a real case study being so close to China . There management has been excellent .

    2. Smart leadership, respect the science, institute control measures (like stopping public gatherings and travelers), and wearing tight masks.
      No mystery.

      The greatest failure of an American president domestically, was the trump dereliction of duty during of this pandemic. In America we call it the trump pandemic.

  20. Most people don’t realize just how close we came to martial law in this country last month.
    The events at the capital came close , very close, to triggering a cascade that could have easily broken down into chaos we have never seen in this country.
    Thank goodness that trump is an incompetent leader, and that the mob he mustered was poorly organized and untrained. A few guns among the white supremacists could have changed the history of the country, and your life.
    The integrity and spirit of this country absolutely remains at risk.

    The mentality that allowed one to vote for trump in 2016, and certainly 2020, is the same exact mentality that had people voting for Hitler. The poison runs very deep here and now.

    1. On one Alabama resident named Lonnie Coffman cops found 11 Molotov cocktails filled with gasoline and homemade napalm in his truck, along with automatic weapons. There were quite a few others with guns too; security video shows them searching menacingly for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice-President Mike Pence. We’re lucky things didn’t twist off more than they did, but I feel a national tier 1 swat team, like the one the FBI has, would have made quick work of them; maybe a few hours OT.

      1. So what, you can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans, and your answer to the problem is more violence.

        1. Poor HB, can’t disambiguate and explanation from a justification, as in- “I’m not justifying it, I’m explaining it”. Not a student of history, I assume. Trumpsters, Biden Bros, Musk-ovites, all look like fanatics to me HB- as being one seems to impedes gaining a grasp on reality.

          “If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”

          I voted Green Party. Done it a few times now. To the Biden Bros that makes me a ‘Russian fossil fuel troll’. What a bunch of fanatics.

          1. Dystopia Lite™

            If you vote green, you are still voting for Dystopia Lite™. Sure, it is not something like, say, that evil Star Trek parallel universe, but at least that universe, or at least its Federation of Planets or whatever it was called, didn’t hold any pretenses to the contrary. It was honest evil. They were all wary of being stabbed in the back. This one isn’t, which is why people are duped into voting green, for example, thinking that, somehow, something will change. Or, if they don’t think so, maybe it’s a matter of simply feeling better about themselves by doing so, rather like maybe having some sort of social consciousness message button on their lapel. Of course this says nothing about voting Republican.

            Remember, as Nick G recently wrote, to paraphrase, let old people work longer. Depending, that ‘policy’ borders on the sociopathic, but stuff like that is not generally noticeable or at least understood as borderline sociopathic in Dystopia Lite™. And that’s the ‘beauty’ of it.

            It’s like, someone else saying something like, ‘Who cares?’ about a possible lab release of an engineered virus on the world population. But again, that’s the ‘beauty’ of it. In Dystopia Lite™, things like that don’t really matter and get mindlessly brushed aside.

            That’s why we have Dystopia Lite™. It helps create its own mindset that then feeds it. Like a feedback loop, or a vicious circle. And as we might all know, vicious circles are hard to get out of.

            BTW, one way to get people to ‘lock down’ or wear masks– you know, that word, ‘mandatory’?– is if you– and they– feel that you ‘own’ them.

            “The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself… Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable…” ~ H.L. Mencken

    2. I agree except for the part about Trump being incompetent. He has been very effective in the damage he has inflicted on the country and our government. Your mistake is thinking that it wasn’t intentional. 80 to 90 percent of Republicans in this country don’t believe in democracy and another 10 percent of them have been blindly following for self interest.

      The battle for the soul of America is not over. Like overshoot and the environment another 40 percent aren’t paying attention and have never thought it could happen to America. They have had America the greatest smoke blown up their ass for to long to see reallity.

  22. Chaper 19: The Oligarch’s Crown
    summary

    ‘There is a fundamentally and increasingly unworkable and disastrous sociotechnological system, espoused and upheld, paradoxically, by those also trapped within it, that releases, whether by accident or by design, one of its ‘products’ upon the world, wreaking, as usual, yet more death, destruction, desolation and despair.

    This product’s release threatens the tenuous pseudo stability, viability and legitimacy of the system and of a certain level of blind, abject technological religiosity for it, where resulting attempts are made to deny, distort, discourage and bury any and all information on the product’s release at all costs.

    This is a chapter in a book of many similar chapters on the deleterious effects of the system that those espousing it would ignore, reject and want ignored, rejected and burned.

    It reads like the grand dystopic science fiction magnum opus that it is that, terrifyingly, has imprisoned in various ways physically, socially and psychologically, all its readers and writers within. The epic tragedy’

  23. Well, according to one source (And, I doubt a few EVs and solar energy panels will fix this dilemma). Meanwhile, according to the experts, we’ll be adding a couple more billion soon! Time to put on the rose colored glasses and party on………

    CURRENT POPULATION IS THREE TIMES THE SUSTAINABLE LEVEL

    Among many other worrisome issues, “Global aquifers are being pumped 3.5 times faster than rainfall can naturally recharge them; topsoil is being lost 10-40 times faster than it is formed; oceans are overfished putting a primary protein source for over 2 billion people is in jeopardy…

    Worldwide, we have lost 68% of the vertebrate species in the air, water, and land since 1970. How many more species can we lose and how many more ecosystems can we destroy before humanity’s own existence is threatened?”

    https://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable

    1. Okay, so you feel that the best solution to our sustainability problems is to reduce our population?

      The IPCC says we should reduce our carbon emissions by about 50% in 10 years, and by 100% in 10 years.

      If every woman in the world chose a “one-child family”, that would reduce births by about 60% (1 child per family divided by the current 2.45 children per family). 40% of the current 140M births would be 56M births. Deaths are currently about 60M, so a one-child family approach would reduce population by 4M per year. That’s .05% of world population per year. Now as the population ages we’ll see rising death rates so the average deaths in the next 10 year might be 65M and so, a none-family policy might reduce population in the range of 1% in 10 years. Over 20 years it might average 70M and maybe we’d see a 2% decline.

      So, we have a goal of 100% reduction in 20 years, and a result of a 1-2% reduction…

      1. Birth rates will continue to fall. What is driving population growth now is rising survival rates. This means there aren’t more and more young people, but more and more old people.

        If someone invents an immortality drug, we will surely all starve.

      2. Nick, This quote from World Population Balance supports your math regarding one child family:

        Nick: “So, we have a goal of 100% reduction in 20 years, and a result of a 1-2% reduction…”

        WPB: “If we got really ambitious and achieved a 1 child average per family we could stop growing the world population in about 20 years – and reduce world population to around 3 billion within 100 years! That would be a great victory for humanity’s future and the future of all other species we share the planet with!”

        I think we need to have both short and longer term goals. Otherwise, even your best ideas won’t help. Obviously, we need an “all hands on deck” strategy to mitigate some very nasty consequences of current human behavior.

        The real problem is that the great majority of countries won’t even discuss the issue, much less set goals. As I’m sure everyone here knows, the previous leader for a one child policy was China and now they are backing away from that as an official policy. Fortunately, the average Chinese person apparently still thinks it’s a good idea.

    2. CURRENT POPULATION IS THREE TIMES THE SUSTAINABLE LEVEL

      The population of homo sapiens over the last 200,000 years has been 1-10 million, with near extinction about 65,000 years ago.
      7.7 billion in a collapsing ecosystem?
      How far can the denial go?

  24. Interesting to see this quantified, interesting to me anyway!

    INCREASING HURRICANE INTENSITY AROUND BERMUDA LINKED TO RISING OCEAN TEMPERATURES

    “Between 1955 and 2019 mean hurricane intensity near Bermuda, measured by the maximum wind speed, increased from 35 to 73mph — equivalent to over 6mph per decade. At the same time sea surface and sub surface temperatures in the region increase by up to 1.1°C, providing the additional energy for hurricanes to intensify.”

    https://phys.org/news/2021-02-hurricane-intensity-bermuda-linked-ocean.html

    1. DougL,

      I can’t understand that first sentence; can you? I think that if “measured by the maximum wind speed” were removed it would make sense. What do you think?

      Or maybe it’s just advancing maturity on my part.

      Ah, it’s after noon–time for Port.

      1. SYNAPSID —

        My understanding is the intensity of hurricanes, employing some modestly challenging math, refers to the angular momentum budget of a hurricane in storm-relative cylindrical coordinates. It’s probably not a suitable topic for discussion here but if you really want to see how it’s done you might refer to an excellent paper titled “The Hurricane Intensity Issue” by N. Krishnamurti et al. Krishnamurti calls the Dept. of Meteorology at Florida State University home, or he did. This is esoteric stuff, so you do well to ask, my friend; it is a topic mostly beyond my experience. Maybe if I lived in Florida it would be different.

        1. DougL,

          I was just asking about the clarity of the sentence (snif).

          It’s the conjunction of “mean intensity” with “maximum wind speed” that puzzles me.

          “Is this a glass of Tawny I see before me? Come, let me clutch thee…”

          1. I think the calculation is: take the maximum measurement of wind speed for each hurricane, and then take the average of that number over all of the hurricanes.

            Make sense?

            1. Nick G,

              That would give the mean maximum wind speed but that number would not be in the range 35 to 73mph. Those speeds aren’t even in hurricane range.

              Then what “increased from 35 to 73mph”? That’s “over 6mph per decade”, it says.

              Earlier the article stated that mean intensity more than doubled over the time span mentioned. That would be the 35 to 73mph change. That’s why I don’t think maximum wind speed should be mentioned. It may be part of determining what hurricane intensity is but putting it in sure deranges (No Pun Intended) the sentence.

              It’s too early for Port. Well, well: Y’all have a nice Valentine’s Day anyway.

            2. that number would not be in the range 35 to 73mph

              Yeah, I should’ve thought of that – I always try to put numbers into a meaningful context (as you did), but didn’t think to do it this time.

              That was a silver lining of a slide rule: you had to estimate the calculation, and figure out the placement of the decimal point in your head. That forced you to think the calculation through, instead of just punching it into something that did all the work for you.

              Which is an illustration of a larger idea: you have to choose when and how to use tools. You have to decide when to walk vs drive, when to climb vs using the elevator, whether to eat a processed food instead of a whole one, or watch TV (or YouTube!) or read a book. There are many examples.

              You have to consciously choose what and when to do something, rather than just using the new thing because it’s there. That takes time and effort, but it’s worth it.

              Which raises another big idea: are humans smarter than yeast? I suspect they are, they just don’t learn as fast we would like. We have high expectations for peoples’ ability to think rationally and learn new things, and they disappoint us when they fail to do so, but people do get there. They just take much longer than would be ideal…

            3. Nick G,

              Slide rules! Yes. My $1.38 plastic Pickett got me through a year of general chemistry, four quarters of calculus, four quarters of calculus-based physics, geochem, geophysics…I hope I still have it somewhere.

              I’ve taught chemistry to college students with calculators and they learn nothing from the caluculations they’re assigned. I’m in solid agreement with you here.

              No Port now, winding up the day.

    2. When climate scientists can tell us how intense each individual hurricane is SUPPOSED to be, then maybe it’ll be worth paying attention. Until then it’s yet more busy work masquerading as research.

      1. Who allowed Alex to vote? What the hell were they thinking?
        Holy crap.
        Maybe he was joking?
        Yeh thats it, he was just pretending to be the fool.

  25. Just got off the phone with my niece who is a Norwegian reservoir engineer, one with no illusions about the so-called “Norway Paradox”. It got me thinking:

    NORWAY’S [AND ONE COULD ADD, AUSTRALIA’S] GREEN DELUSIONS

    “In Norway, the end of summer is the close of “cabin season” during which Norwegians abscond to their hundreds of thousands vacation homes in the mountains, by fjords, or on the coast. They simply love being isolated in the great outdoors. There’s a word for it: “friluftsliv,” which translates to “free-air life” which symbolizes a cultural attachment to natural spaces.

    Of course, crude oil and natural gas amount to half the value of Norway’s exports, which means, one way or another, most every Norwegian is touched by the fossil fuel industry. It’s worth asking how a nation built on and defined by oil can portray itself as green. Maybe it’s because Norway is basically run on hydropower, which meets roughly 95 percent of the country’s energy needs.

    Meanwhile, the country dredges up more oil per capita than almost any other country in the world; most from deep-sea drilling operations in the North Sea. Increasingly, though, it could also come from Barents Sea, which the government opened for oil and gas exploration in 2017. Of course, most of the oil and gas produced by Norway is exported. The country is the one of the world’s top fossil fuel exporters. Beyond that, this country is also a noteworthy global investor in fossil fuels elsewhere in the world. So, we have the Norway Paradox.

    1. So, you feel that Norway should reduce their oil production & exports?

      1. Well, there is, in general, a high level of support for continuing operations in the Norwegian Arctic — if it complies with the highest environmental and safety standards. Norway also finds support on the EU level, as it is one of the main EU natural gas suppliers. I have on opinion one way or the other.

        1. I have no* opinion one way or the other.

          Well, I sympathize with you there – I don’t have a strong opinion about fossil fuel producers. It seems to me that as long as they are honest about the various external costs of what they produce (pollution, oil wars, etc), that asking them to stop producing is going above and beyond the normal call of duty.

          It seems to me that the important thing for everyone to do is to be honest about FF’s true costs, and work hard to reduce consumption. And that’s what Norway is doing.

          Which brings me back to that question: Do you think that Norway is doing the right thing in working hard to move away from fossil fuels?

          * edited for clarity

  26. I’ll take ‘where are they now’ for $500 Alex

    All in all it looks like 2015 will be the year of Peak Warmth for quite some time.” ~ Javier, June 21 2016

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/21/global-temperatures-are-heading-downward-and-fast/#comment-1805345

    https://archive.is/F9a1N#selection-1995.0-2021.289

    “I still think that the conditions look right for the 2016 peak average temperature not being surpassed at least before 2026, perhaps quite a lot longer.”
    https://judithcurry.com/2017/08/07/nature-unbound-iv-the-2400-bray-cycle-part-c/#comment-855945

    How is the old math whiz, still waxing idiotic?

    1. Well…

      The article quoted is from June of 2016. You don’t have to look far to see that it’s wrong – 2015 was not the “Peak Warmth’.

      Judith Curry? That’s a source?

    2. Except when it’s been raining or very windy, I’ve hardly bothered with anything other than a wind breaker this entire winter so far….. and I’ve worked a LOT of days outside, when it was sunny, in nothing but an ordinary cotton t shirt and a light weight flannel shirt. A week ago I shed the flannel for a couple of hours.

      It’s SUPPOSED to be COLD here in the mountains in southwest Virginia in Jan. and February, lol.
      It’s been at least twenty five years since we had a foot of snow on the ground at my place.

      Back when I was a kid, we expected at least a couple of heavy snowfalls most winters.

  27. If any of the regulars here want to go public with a personal estimate or guess as to when twenty five percent of new cars sold in the USA are electrics I’m all ears.

    1. Year 2024.
      Light vehicle new sales (cars and light trucks category).
      This includes EV and PHEV (any vehicle with a charging plug).

      What percent of new light vehicle sales in USA will be pure ICE in 2030?
      4%, says I.

  28. Good video by Rees referenced here; although I’m not big on the MORT theory; what with “Every third thought shall be my grave“, and all that.
    Most people I know accept it. A few worry too much about it. I’ve never heard of anyone who denies it. I seen peeps who deny consuming a pint of gin and a box of cookies a day (quite a feat really- “that can’t be my blood work results! I demand a redraw!”) but never seen one deny their own death.

    https://un-denial.com/2021/02/06/by-william-rees-climate-change-isnt-the-problem-so-what-is/

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