112 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum June 10 2023”

  1. I have published my new book. And this one is priced as low as the publisher would allow. The paperback is $5.95, and the Kindle version is $3.95. It is far better than my previous book, or so the couple of people who have read it tell me.

    The Amazon link: The Soul Survives and Religion Lies

    The book is only 77 pages long, and I have published the first seven pages on my website: TheFineTunedUniverse.com

    For some reason, comments have been disabled there, but you can send comments to me at Darwinian200@gmail.com. Or I post them here in the non-petroleum post.

    The Back Cover

    The battle rages between materialism and theology. The materialist says your life and the universe are just a happy accident with no meaning or purpose, and it will all end, for you, the day you die. The theologians say, no, you were born with the sin of Adam, deserving Hell. But God sent his son as a blood sacrifice to save you from that fate. And if you believe that story, you will inherit eternal paradise. But if you find yourself unable to believe that story, you will burn in Hell forever.

    This book explains why you have been conditioned, almost since birth, to believe only one of those stories or the other. This book presents overwhelming evidence that both of those stories are wrong.

    The universe does have meaning; your life has a purpose, Hell does not exist, and your fate has nothing to do with religion.

    1. I am anxious to see what your argument is.

      From reading your posts I am betting it is really good and well thought out!!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0-tFahPVIU

      The concept of Hell is from Greek mythology (Hades). It came from the philosopher Plato who was speculating.

      It got intermingled into Christianity after a Roman Emperor converted to Christianity (The Roman’s were the ones that crucified Jesus!!!!).

      Many wars later, now Christians believe there is a literal Hell.

      Jesus didn’t believe in Heaven. He believed in a Kingdom of God where he would be king that is on Earth made out of materials found on Earth formed after an Apocalypse that was supposed to happen during his life.

      Congratulations! I wish you success

        1. I bought one for myself.

          I’ll get one for my Dad when I figure out where he lives.

          He loved your first book.

          It must feel good to type “Ron Patterson” into Amazon and see your books come up.

          Great Job!

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66mf3DsavV4

      I’m posting again…because this is pretty important IMO

      Included in the highly classified documents that “The Donald” aka Mr. Trump stole to allegedly sell for personal profit…

      Were vulnerabilities to the USA from a foreign attack!!

      He left these documents where anyone at Mar a lago could grab them

      IMO, he basically went thru these documents to figure out who he could sell them too.

      That is about as unpatriotic as it gets….

      1. That is about as unpatriotic as it gets….
        He got 74 million votes.
        A Nation this stupid, is survival challenged.

        1. Those crackheads give him their money.
          People go to bed hungry in this country. People go without shelter.
          Yet those shits give that sonofabitch money.

          1. “Trump has his own personal judge overseeing the case, one who has no experience with national security cases, and I would not bet even a penny that this will be handled in a professional manner. It’s going to be a circus.”

            1. I’m personally of the opinion that the special prosecutor handling this case is smart enough to play trump’s two bit whore ( he bought her of course, but not for physical sex) like a violin, and get her kicked off the case in fairly short order.

              The circus will be in the street, rather than in the courtroom.

              I’ve been following this thing as closely as possible, considering paywalls, etc. Smith hasn’t missed a comma or forgot to cross a t, so far, as best I can see.

              A couple more of trump’s lawyers jumped ship within hours of the announcement.

              But I must give trump credit for one thing at least. He’s our current undisputed world champion grifter, and he was right when he said he could shoot somebody in the street and his supporters wouldn’t even care.

              I know a hell of a lot of trump diehards. The one thing they all have in common is that they don’t know shit from apple butter about reality, or care.

              They’re true believers.

              I read a book by that title many years ago, True Believers or something to that effect, by Eric Hoffa, if I remember correctly.

              EVERYBODY ought to read it.

            2. Mac, great post. Thanks. I have read “The True Believer” twice. I quote from it frequently.

              Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a god, but never without belief in a devil.

              The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause.

              They want freedom from “the fearful burden of free choice,” freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. They do not want freedom of conscience but faith–blind, authoritarian faith.

              The inability or unwillingness to see things as they are promote both gullibility and charlatanism.

              Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life.

              When we lose our individual independence in the corporateness of a mass movement, we find a new freedom-freedom to hate, bully, lie, torture, murder and betray without shame and remorse. Herein undoubtedly lies part of the attractiveness of a mass movement.

              All the above quotes are from Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”

              Years ago, I started collecting quotes that related to my passion at the time, my rebellion against organized religion. They number in the hundreds and are saved on 115 pages, all stored on my computer. All the above Hoffer quotes are from that collection.

              I would be glad to email a copy to anyone who requests one. No need to post your email address, as I can get it from the comments file.

            3. Assumptions-
              -If trump is the nominee almost all republicans will still vote for him, even if he burned the constitution on the steps of the Capital.
              – If he doesn’t get the nomination, all republicans and many non-committed will vote for the new republican nominee no matter who they are. If elected that republican will pardon trump of everything.
              -So, trumps best bet is to eventually pull out of the race with the understanding that he will work to get all of his supporters and the political capital they give him transferred to the new party designated republican nominee, in return for a promise of pardon/immunity. His big challenge to navigate is timing…how long does he stay in the race to give himself the best prospect. After all, that is always his biggest concern.

            4. Let’s not forget Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by MacKay. It’s a 19th book and contains some thorny prose, but it is a journey through human madness like you wouldn’t believe. His chapters on The Crusades are riveting. I read it in the early days of covid as I was convinced that the trumptards shared something with the “peoples’ crusades” of the early days. I was right.

        2. A population that keeps winning at a rigged game can get pretty stupid over time.

      2. This is hillarious/terrifying.

        Trump allegedly asked ChatGPT how to obstruct justice.

        And is following the results.

        1. Andre, my guess is it’s the other way around, ie, ChatGPT was trained on Trump’s history of evading justice 🙂

    1. Why the heck is he still flying?
      To see it and not react is a failure of mind and spirit.

  4. I don’t mind admitting every once in a while that I’ve been utterly and completely wrong about something really important, or that I failed to consider the possibility that something that looks REALLY good can turn out to be really bad.

    And sometimes of course I’m partly right and partly wrong about such things.

    I understood early on that the internet could be the biggest thing since moveable type in terms of advancing our general level of knowledge and understanding of the world we live in….. and by and large it has proven itself this way.

    But I more or less dismissed the possibility that instead of advancing society and culture that it would turn out to be one of the very biggest dangers to civilized life.

    I just didn’t want to have that low an opinion of my fellow human beings.

    But considering this sort of bullshit, and the number of people who are lapping it up………

    https://www.foxnews.com/media/mark-levin-goes-trump-announces-new-indictment-sick-joke-american-people

    Bottom line, the trump camp can be usefully described as a new religion. The people who believe in it foot soldiers ready to believe anything their leader / god tells them, and dismiss any evidence to the contrary.

    It’s my backwoods Baptist neighbor’s scenario all over again.

    And the worst part is that the lowest common denominator right wing bullshit is not only free twenty four hours a day around the clock around the calendar…….. It’s more popular than anything even remotely fact based.

    If there had never been an internet, or cable television…….. I seriously doubt we would ever have a trump in the White House….. at least not within the last few decades.

    1. “But I more or less dismissed the possibility that instead of advancing society and culture that it would turn out to be one of the very biggest dangers to civilized life.”

      I have felt the very same thing about the authoritarian (fundamentalist) religions over the ages.
      And when it comes to false narratives, AI is only going to greatly magnify the whole enterprise.
      Mass delusion. If you haven’t seen the movie Don’t Look Up, I think you’d find it to be quite a commentary on all of this.

    2. Reading Marshall McLuhan’s ‘Understanding Media’ was a real game-changer for me. It is a bit cryptic but worth the slog. The basic idea, is the impact of a medium is primarily a function of the nature of the medium itself, not of the content it transmits.

      In McLuhan’s formulation, TV is a ‘cool’ (as opposed to hot medium), and it is no surprise that people who watched a lot of TV were considered ‘couch potatoes’, but people who spend a lot of time on social media/online can be called a lot of things, but ‘potatoes’ is not one of them.

      We all know that online interactions make you angry and social media makes it even worse. The ramifications of this are only starting to be felt.

      1. is the impact of a medium is primarily a function of the nature of the medium itself, not of the content it transmits.

        The content isn’t even that important.

  5. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12175195/Crashed-UFO-recovered-military-distorted-space-time.html

    I’m gonna get chucked in the looney bin for this.

    But at a minimum this is a fun read.

    A crashed UFO recovered by the US military ‘distorted space-time’ and was ‘bigger on the inside’, claims a top attorney involved in bringing UFO whistleblowers to Congress.

    Physicists have theorized that propulsion of an advanced craft could theoretically involve warping space-time around it to negate the effects of gravity.

    1. Wow. Who could give us a better report on the distortion of space-time than an attorney?

      1. LOL.

        Look at the attorney’s picture. Looks like he studied at a clown college.

        I personally wouldn’t want to lie in front of Congress.

  6. Sunday morning update on climate.

    GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS ARE AT AN ALL-TIME HIGH AND EARTH IS WARMING FASTER THAN EVER

    “Greenhouse gas emissions are at an all-time high, with yearly emissions equivalent to 54 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Humanity has caused surface temperatures to warm by 1.14°C since the late 1800s—and this warming is increasing at an unprecedented rate of over 0.2°C per decade. The highest temperatures recorded over land (what climate scientists refer to as maximum land surface temperatures) are increasing twice as fast. And it’s these temperatures that are most relevant to the record heat people feel or whether wildfires spawn.”

    https://phys.org/news/2023-06-greenhouse-gas-emissions-all-time-high-1.html

    1. For a minute I thought we were in real trouble but at last someone is being proactive and, thank god and not a moment too soon, they are “…building an open data dashboard that anyone can access to see the data.” So I guess I can sleep easy after all.

      Canadian wildfires in May released 54.8 million tonnes of carbon, that’s available from the already existing Copernicus site.

  7. El Nino comes to town . Ground ( not air ) temperature in Belgium . Yesterday at 15.00 hrs 38 degree Celsius . Today at 15.00 hrs 35 degree Celsius . It is going to be a hot long summer .

      1. I laughed out loud at times at the absurdity of our situation. This is a phenomenal discussion.

    2. I listened to about 1/2 of that so far, so I reserve the right to comment more later.
      -If you accept the gist of their collective sense…the world will run into various limits that will result in a failure to keep the current economy rolling along at 100% scale and function. I agree with that.
      -It is a mischaracterization to call any of these guys EV experts (sorry Nate). There was only a brief mention of the idea that the likely outcome is that small battery vehicles will become the most common form of EV, which makes many of the assumptions presented false from the start (electric mopeds were briefly mentioned)
      -The work Simon M presented was based on bizarre assumption of a system powered by 100% wind and solar. Not useful to spend so much mental energy on a false condition.
      -Nate asserted that the effort to electrify transport and energy generation was all based on the desire to de-carbonize. I think that is a silly notion. Loss of fossil fuels due to depletion, resource nationalization and geopolitical tension/conflict is really the bigger issue on peoples minds, so I think. Regardless, the solutions to both problems are closely aligned.
      – None of these guys really has digested the predicament and the imperative to change…they all still fly in airplanes. Its really more of an intellectual exercise for them, at this stage.
      – There is a tendency to dance around the big issue…a global contraction is on the way. Nate calls it simplification, and Sim M called it ‘degrowth’. I’d like to hear them be blunt about the coming contraction.
      -As oil depletes, people/places/regions who work hard to replace a big portion of their consumption are going to much more functional than those who don’t…or can’t afford to.

      1. I’d like to hear them be blunt about the coming contraction.

        But they ARE blunt about it? You need to listen to the whole thing.

        8% of emissions come from vehicles, so the switch to electric doesn’t solve the problem. There is no way to produce cement, steel, plastics and nitrogen fertilizers without fossil fuels. An INEVITABLE byproduct of this production is gasoline, so it is impossible to reduce gasoline production while simultaneously using fossil fuels for those other purposes. What shall we do with all that gasoline, dump it in the rivers, as they did in Ohio in the nineteenth century?

        A contraction is coming, whether we like it or not.

        1. Nates show showed be called ‘The Great Contraction’.
          He probably realized it would be a concept hard to get people to pay attention to.

          ‘Degrowth’ is an attempt at sugarcoating the story.

          I do agree that the big rush towards Hydrogen is based primarily on decarbonization concerns. It may very well be a false path, considering that we not entering an energy abundant era….the thermodynamics, and thus cost equation, are poor.

          I am glad to see they got around to the concept of peak affordability near the end. That will be the mechanism by which Limitations to Growth will manifest. And I don’t see that being digested too well.

        2. As Art Berman points out at the end (without the specifics) if any hydrocarbons such as gasoline are put through the right combination of partial oxidation, reforming and shift reactor they’ll produce a syn gas (mixture of CO, CO2, H2, H20) and from that you can make what you want: add N2 for ammonia, CH3OH leads to plastics or fuels, Fischer-Tropsch reactor for diesel. It’s just a very wasteful way of using gasoline. If it really is an issue I think someone would work out ways of dimerising C8s directly to C16s (diesel) or adding smaller alkyl units to get cetanes etc. This is already done in refineries but the aim is to get more gasoline, specifically C8 in alkylation units to get higher octane numbers for anti-knock, but (I think) isomerisation units take light naphthas and produce heavier gasoline cuts.

          However the important number is the 8%. Just look at the threads here – I’d guess the ratio of items about EVs to possible solutions for the other 92% is something like 20 to 1. And because some of that 92% is actually manufacturing of the EVs themselves, which take more material and energy than ICEs, the net effect is that the 8% is more like 5 or 6% at best.

          All that has to be done while most of our efforts will actually get turned towards triage for an ever worsening environment as climate change, pollution, soil degradation, water shortages and biodiversity losses run rampant. Nothing will be proactive, everything reactive and short term. All available oil will be used for this because it really is pretty tremendous as a fuel and feedstock, none will be left in the ground because of the CO2 issue, and hence EVs are worse than useless as a means of GHG control. They are solely there to perpetuate the illusion of continuing happy motoring BAU as crude reserves decline while boosting their owners status and virtue signalling capabilities.

          2. “They are solely there to perpetuate the illusion of continuing happy motoring BAU as crude reserves decline while boosting their owners status and virtue signalling capabilities.”

            Rather, EV’s can and will serve as a mechanism to keep some/many people and cargo moving even after petrol becomes unavailable, unaffordable.

            in the US – “Gasoline is the most consumed petroleum product in the United States. In 2021, consumption of finished motor gasoline averaged about 8.8 million b/d (369 million gallons per day), which was equal to about 44% of total U.S. petroleum consumption.”
            EIA…https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-products/use-of-oil.php

            And the GHG impact/mile of going electric with on transportation is indeed large!
            (assuming you are not just charging up with coal)
            the big form of this cahrt can be seen here-
            https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/carbon-cost-of-transportation-ds.jpg

          3. “s Art Berman points out at the end (without the specifics) if any hydrocarbons such as gasoline are put through the right combination of partial oxidation, reforming and shift reactor they’ll produce a syn gas (mixture of CO, CO2, H2, H20) and from that you can make what you want: add N2 for ammonia, CH3OH leads to plastics or fuels, Fischer-Tropsch reactor for diesel.”

            Hitler proved this I believe at 1940’s scale with Coal.

            Enough to try to take over the World.

        3. In the US light duty vehicles are responsible of 16% of greenhouse gas emissions, medium and heavy duty trucks emit about 7% of greenhouse gases in the US, for a total from road transport of about 23%. Not sure where the 8% came from, maybe those are World numbers.

      2. Hickory, OFM, regarding small EVs:

        Silence S04 electric micro-cars with swappable batteries start production

        The first Silence S04 micro-cars are already rolling off the company’s production line. The pint-size vehicles, which Silence refers to as “nanocars,” are classified as L7e quadricycles in Europe.

        They are capable of speeds of up to 85 km/h (53 mph), making them appropriate for city and suburban travel.

        https://electrek.co/2023/06/07/silence-s04-electric-micro-cars-with-swappable-batteries-start-production/

        1. Hi John,
          Assuming of course that Old Man Business As Usual manages to stagger along for another decade or two, it’s my firm belief that short range micro electric cars will be our usual means of every day transportation.

          First off, there’s simply no possibility we can give up suburbia, or the rural countryside. Providing high density housing for so many people just isn’t POSSIBLE. Building it would cost dozens of times, maybe hundreds of times, as much as switching to cheap electric cars.

          The biggest single thing we can do to stretch the supply of critical raw materials is to go to super small short range cars. Providing charging infrastructure for such a car will be a trivial matter…… park one of them eight hours at work, with a twenty amp outdoor outlet, and she’ll be charged for a thirty mile ride back home, and she can be charged with an extension cord, overnight, if nothing else is available, to get back to work in the morning.

          So……… your little son or daughter’s first new car will be a two seater, fore and aft, , low, narrow, bullet shaped, barring breakthroughs in battery technology.

          If we are lucky enough to have good leaders along about that time, the construction of such vehicles will be controlled by a MANDATORY regulatory code, such as applies today to electrical and plumbing work, so that parts and sub assemblies can be easily swapped out and replaced with new or rebuilt parts.

          (You can bolt a brand new electric motor right off a warehouse shelf in a fifty year old machine by taking out the bolts, disconnecting the wires, and reassembly.)

          Cars can be built to last just about forever……. and it’s possible that they WILL be, depending on the availability of materials such as aluminum, chrome, cobalt, copper, lithium, etc twenty years down the road.

          There are some very simple solutions to problems such as rust in vehicles….. solutions which could be implemented for a couple of cents on the dollar on a new vehicle, considering that otherwise it may well be scrap in ten years due to rust……. and with the rust problem out of the picture……. refurbing ten to twenty year old vehicles is extremely practical…… assuming they’re DESIGNED to be refurbed.

          I’m old enough to remember when the SAME identical starter motor worked on V8 Chevy’s for ten or twenty years, and when the SAME fenders, bumper and hood, etc, worked on Volvo’s for twenty years.

          We don’t HAVE to throw things away. I know this is sacrilege according to modern economic practice and theory, but hey….. look how they did away with big pharma and for profit hospitals and million dollar doctor salaries in the rest of the western world already……….

          And such cars can and will go a very long way toward’s solving the affordability problem that’s causing so much grief for low income people today…….. people who have ABSOLUTELY no choice except to have a car to get to work and home.

          Ninety nine percent of all the talk about mass transit is nothing more than pure bullshit in the sky in terms of day to day life for such people for now and for at least a couple more generations to come.

          They CAN’T move, because there’s nowhere for them to move TO, although some of them will be able to work from home.

        2. Yes indeed.
          Its smaller scale in every way, and that will be the trend of civilization.

          And I do think there is a high chance of us seeing a shift to batteries that are based on more abundant chemistries. We already see this with a shift toward LiFePO4 batteries in cars

      3. “None of these guys really has digested the predicament and the imperative to change…they all still fly in airplanes. It’s really more of an intellectual exercise for them, at this stage.”

        Hickory

        Political will didn’t get us this far. Cheap abundant resources of all types did. There isn’t enough left to transition so it simply won’t happen. Doesn’t matter the imperative necessity is not the mother of invention. Opportunity is. Affordability is. However there is no way to walk back our present system. Without petroleum derived fertilizer half of us wouldn’t be here. Most of us live in areas that can’t support agriculture without fertilizer. It’s the height of foolishness to think everyone is going to come to their collective senses and make the right choices as the system collapses. I’d bet the airline industry will beat out the agricultural lobbyists for who gets the last distillate. Because travel is a greater input to GDP than food production. And that’s only if they take the time to consider it given the greater issues of gender reassignment.
        It’s a mad mad world and getting madder by the minute.

        1. “It’s the height of foolishness to think everyone is going to come to their collective senses and make the right choices as the system collapses. I’d bet the airline industry will beat out the agricultural lobbyists for who gets the last distillate. Because travel is a greater input to GDP than food production. ”

          On this we roughly agree, although I see a little differently. As to who, or which sector, maintains access to scarce distillate products, I assert that it will be largely based on wealth. The wealthy will still fly, and eat foods from far away. Scarce petrol derivatives and derived products will at first be ‘rationed’ by higher prices, and later by direct government action.

          I will point out that some important uses of petrol products do not account for high fraction of current production, including on-farm use of diesel or electrical sector energy production or distribution. These important uses will likely maintain a market share for the oil derivatives much longer than other sectors…like tourism and other forms of non-essential travel.

          And of course, regions with vibrant economies, reliable electricity production and grids, and stable culture will have greater purchasing power for petrol derivatives than those who don’t. Just as they do now.

  9. https://www.notebookcheck.net/BYD-to-build-first-sodium-ion-battery-factory-despite-lithium-price-drop.725289.0.html

    I’m assuming sodium batteries are a for real thing now, although I can’t even guess how long it will take for the sodium battery industry to scale up. I don’t know how well they will work in cars, in terms of range.
    But I do know that sodium is DIRT cheap, and readily available to anybody anywhere. ZERO supply problem.

    And if sodium batteries get cheap enough, as I’m hoping they will, then home pv systems will eventually be no brainer dollars and cents bargains for the large majority of home owners and small businesses.

  10. I’ll remind you all that when it comes to the collective action of 8 (soon to be 9) Billion people,
    if they run short on affordable energy,
    there will be one thing that all able bodied people can afford to do for energy.
    And that is to cut down trees.
    At mass scale. It will be a Terminal Deforestation Event.
    If it comes to that.

    -no not a weekend event. It may take a few decades to reach the far corners.

    1. Yes, they will cut down the trees, all of them. And they will kill and eat every wild animal they can trap or kill. They will eat the songbirds out of the trees. When our population collapses from hunger, we will take almost every wild animal on earth with us.

      There will be survivors, of course. Rats and mice and anything living off human carrion will do okay.

      1. Yep, we are in the 6th mass extinction.
        The last one was 65 million years ago, they don’t happen all the time.
        The planet will have a new ecosystem, but we will not be part of it.
        No big deal, 99.99% of species that have arisen are extinct. The big deal, is the mass extinction.

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

        1. The planet will have a new ecosystem, but we will not be part of it.

          HighTrekker, I hate to break this to you, but we will be part of it. With the exception of natural disasters, animals do not simply go into extinction. They are driven into extinction by other species that take over their niche or resources. Then, unable to adapt to any new territory, their population dwindles to such low numbers that they can no longer reproduce.

          Homo sapiens are the most dominant animal that ever occupied the earth. They are able to adapt the almost any extreme climate. No other species will ever be able to take from us what we took from them. Our numbers may dwindle to tiny numbers, but there will be survivors. Our niche is everywhere, and we are able to adapt to any environment.

          Our species will likely be the only megafauna species that survive, but there will be survivors.

          1. I hate to break this to you, but we will be part of it.

            Don’t think so comrade.
            Statically very unlikely.
            Let loose of the illusion of survival.

            1. Statically very unlikely.

              I think you are confusing statistics with odds. They are two entirely different things. We have no statistics whatsoever on human extinction.

              I need your explanation as to why human extinction is likely. That is why a species that has domination over every other species, that populates every habitual niche on earth and is adaptable to every climate except that of the Antarctic, will be driven into extinction?

              Please explain how that could happen.

            2. We have no statistics whatsoever on human extinction.
              Except we just about went extinct:
              https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c
              Scientific American weighs in:
              Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct
              https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct/
              All primates have gone extinct before us
              To paraphrase Lehrer, if we are going to write about human extinction, we’d better start writing now.

            3. HighTrekker, yes, some natural catastrophe like the one that destroyed the dinosaurs could kill all life on earth, including human beings. Or it could just wipe out all the megafauna like the KT extinction did. That would include us.

              The average life span for invertebrates is 11 million years. However, for mammalian species, it is only 1 million years. The Cro Magnon species has existed for about 200 thousand years or less. So if we are only average, we still have about 800 thousand years to go. But if we are not average, we could be extinct in as little as another 500 thousand years. At any rate, it is nothing for you or I to worry about.

            4. At any rate, it is nothing for you or I to worry about.
              With both of us being “elderly elderly”, you are probably correct.
              But 8 billion of us in a crashing ecosystem, it won’t take long.

          2. We’ll very likely preserve a few of the larger species of animals for our own ends. Chickens, sheep or goats, cows, horses, etc, are extremely useful, and will be as well protected, or better protected, as our own children, when the last few chips are on the table……. because people who know how to care for them know these domestic animals will be their likeliest keys to survival.

            And while nearly all of the larger wild species will be hunted to extinction, a few individual animals of some species will survive here and there, simply because the people hunting them will starve out themselves before they get the last few dozen or hundreds of these animals.

            Hunters will eat their deer dogs before they get the last deer out of the swamps…….. and once they’ve been hunted extensively, the last few deer in such a place are so elusive that actual experiment has proven that you can put a hunter in a hundred fenced acres of jungle like vegetation with half a dozen white tail deer and he can stay there a solid week without ever seeing even one of them.

            Domestic cats can kill birds by the hundreds of millions…….. because domestic cats don’t depend on the birds they kill for their own survival.

            People who think you can get trees out of such places without machinery, and transport the wood some distance away for actual use haven’t ever SET FOOT into such a place. I have….. lots of times. I’ve spent a couple of hours trying to just cross such a swampy area only a hundred yards from side to side, toting nothing but my shotgun….. and I was lucky to make it without that shotgun being full of mud, and soaked thru up and muddy up to my neck.

            The people who are prepping for survival in a wilderness area don’t really have a clue as to what they’re going to be up against, once ninety percent of the deer,etc, are gone. They’ll starve out themselves faster than they can get that last ten percent, and shortly conclude that their only real chance of survival is to move to a rural area with open ground, meaning cropland and pasture, and try like hell to raise some corn and potatoes, or whatever is easiest to grow in their local area. There will be more game in such places than in the big woods… although there won’t be nearly enough to survive on it, and ALL of it will be small, such as rabbits, squirrels, and ground hogs. And rats.

            And if there’s no government capable of maintaining at least a famine relief level of food supply and distribution (This can be as simple as bagged corn or wheat which you can buy at farm supply stores to feed your chickens. ) desperate people will very shortly resort to killing each other.

            Anybody who thinks otherwise isn’t thinking. I’m at least semi civilized myself, and a REAL Christian, in terms of my ethics and morals, although I believe in Darwin rather than the KJB.

            (Yes children, there ARE such things as REAL Christians…… people who actually believe in and try as best they can to follow the ACTUAL WORDS of Jesus, even though he might never have spoken them because he might never have existed, lol. I know a dozen of them personally. I know a hundred more by name who MOSTLY live by those same words, except they don’t care to live up to them in cases of dealing with people of other colors, or other religions, or sexual orientation, or from other countries. )

            I would be slow to commit murder to feed myself, but given the choice of seeing a little kid related to me starve, or killing a stranger ready to kill me to feed his own children, I wouldn’t think twice about going proactive.

            The number of surviving people will decline fast enough that some wild animals will survive in some places.

            The population of surviving people will decline fast enough that there will be plenty of trees remaining when the large majority of us are long gone. The stump of quite a few species will survive being harvested pollard fashion for twenty years or more. I know, I’ve seen it happen myself. The goats and goat herder can kill every last tree in a near desert environment, surviving by moving to fresh grass as it regrows from year to year. But there will NOT be enough people surviving to go into a swampy river bottom or delta and cut off all the new growth from the stumps of previously logged trees.

            Without motorized transport, meaning trucks for all intents and purposes, it’s going to be more or less impossible to move firewood more than maybe twenty to forty miles.

            Bottom line, we naked apes will die off faster than trees, and faster than a number of species of animals, if the animal species is present in wilderness areas.

            We won’t be burning all that much wood to stay warm. We’ll double up, and double up again, as necessity demands, and survivors will very quickly come to understand that salvaging insulation and other building materials to be added to their shelter will pay ten times the dividend, on a per day basis, as gathering wood by hand using axes and hand carts, once the nearest trees are a mile away.

            When the population crashes, we won’t need to mine any iron ore for generations in order to have steel. There’ll be hundreds of millions of tons of steel sitting around all over the place…… useless cars. It will take quite a bit of wood to reforge it into new stock, but we won’t need very much new steel at all, once modern industrial society is in the rear view mirror.

            A thousand pounds a year would be plenty, in terms of making the essential tools needed on a rather large farm supporting a couple of dozen people living on the premises working the land with hand tools and maybe a horse or two. A horse will be worth as much as four or five prime young slaves, in the event slavery makes a comeback. Mattocks, hoes, axes, shovels, plows and such don’t wear out all that fast.
            I’m not by any means an expert when it comes to smithy work, but I do have quite a lot of experience working hot metal.

            Given the choice of making such tools using a home made wood fired forge and doing without, I could make serviceable tools, no problem, using steel salvaged from any of the hundreds of machines that will be sitting idle within a day or two’s walk from my home place.

            EVERY question, when the survival of your bloodline is at stake, is an academic question. Dead people don’t have any problems at all.

            1. We’ll very likely preserve a few of the larger species of animals for our own ends. Chickens, sheep or goats, cows, horses, etc, are extremely useful, and will be as well protected, or better protected,…

              Naw, starving hoards will not likely preserve anything. They will eat next year’s seed corn.

        2. I recently read “The Ends of the World” by Peter Brannen. He explains what “mass extinction” means, and we are not there (yet).

          In a mass extinction, WHOLE TAXA disappear.

          It’s bad that species are currently being driven to extinction by “successful” apes, but it’s not like we’re losing whole genuses and families.

      2. Hey Ron, or anyone else with a thoughtful answer… is the use/control of fire by an animal a ‘natural’ event or phenomena?

        The context for my question- Our ape ancestors already had fire in the toolkit long before Homo sapien arose as a distinct species. The evidence now available shows that fire has been intentionally used by earlier ape species (such as what we call Homo erectus) about 1 million yrs prior ‘our’ arrival.
        I propose that fire enabled Homo sapien to emerge outside of the normal process of natural selection. Without the tool, a species like us was unfit for the natural pressures of the world as it was.

        Peak Combustion Day (all fuels) is coming pretty soon, btw.

        1. Kites in northern Australia (maybe southern Australia as well, I’m not sure ) are well known to intentionally spread fire. They are attracted to fire, so that they can catch various small animals fleeing the fire. They will pick up sticks which are alight, fly to a nearby unburnt area,and drop the stick, starting another fire. You should be able to track down a video of this. It was in one of Attenborough’s shows, too.

          1. Thats very interesting…I hope they don’t teach the crows. We’d be in big trouble.

        2. It’s worth mentioning that hominids used fire before there were any homo sapiens.

  11. Ron is right about our survival as a species.

    Barring a major asteroid hit, or something equivalent, we’ll be around for a VERY long time. We’re so spread out that not even a lab creation disease such as Captain Trip or Tube Throat ( courtesy of Stephen King) could ever wipe us totally out.

    And we’re not going to be flying very much at ALL once and if it’s a question between food for the masses and air travel.

    Remember the French Revolution. The POWERS THAT BE, whoever, will not risk being overthrown due to an unstoppable grass roots level uprising……at least not in any more or less modern and more or less stable country.

    Men, women, and children WILL starve, or die hard otherwise, by the hundreds of millions, totaling well into the billions, sometime in the not so distant future.

    But they’re going to die IN PLACE, by and large.

    There’s no way they’re going to travel from the places they ARE, as refugees, to countries such as the USA, or to Western European countries, by the tens of millions.

    Times are going to be TOUGH ENOUGH inside our own borders so that NOBODY, not even the most naive bleeding heart, will support open borders.

    Borders will be CLOSED…… at gun point. LITERALLY. There will be new IRON CURTAINS………. but they won’t be to keep people IN, but to keep people OUT.

    The people in places such as India will live or die in place in accordance with their luck with sun and rain, SOME of them managing to revert to the peasant / subsistence farmer way of life. Even if other countries were to be willing to accept them by the tens of millions…….. there aren’t enough ships in the world to transport them, lol.

    You guys who think the ENTIRE human race is going down just aren’t thinking this shit THRU.

    LEVIATHAN, the nation state, is quite capable of looking after itself, as is perfectly obvious.

    Successful revolutions are few and far between, and whatever nation state arises after such a successful revolution generally lasts for generations, for centuries……… unless it is conquered by ANOTHER more powerful nation state.

    The UTTERLY corrupt Kim Jung Un lives like a king, but he’s for damned sure not going to let his people ACTUALLY starve in large numbers if there’s ANYTHING he can do to prevent it happening, short of giving up his nukes. His VERY OWN personal existence is predicated entirely on having a bottom rung of people, a BASE of the NK economic pyramid, of working people.

    Without those poor wretched people at the bottom, he has no food, no new soldiers to be inducted into his military, no roads, no water and sewer, no electricity, NOTHING….

    HE understands this obvious ( to me at least ) reality perfectly well, and so likewise does the ruling elite of ANY country run by a stable government, no matter the nature of that government.

    This is NOT to say that individuals and sometimes ruling elites don’t make bad decisions.

    Hitler could actually have won WWII, if he had been smarter and played his cards well. Putin has made a very bad mistake invading Ukraine. The Japanese weren’t smart enough to avoid going to war with the USA and her allies.

    The Powers That Be in the future will forcibly ration whatever resources are available, and while the general population of my own country the USA may live on short rations of bread, beans, onions, and potatoes, with maybe a chicken leg once in a while on a holiday, farmers will get what they MUST have in order to keep on farming.
    People who step out of line will likely find themselves out in the boonies digging in the dirt by hand……. part of a labor crew treated more or less like slaves in the Old South.

    My eight great grand parents produced food enough for themselves and maybe another fifty people, and they did it with next to nothing in the way of machinery, using horses and mules. They had no purchased fertilizers, no insecticides, no tractors, no electricity.

    I could put a dozen men and women out in the field and they would produce food enough for themselves and another forty or fifty people…….. given the choice of doing so or starving themselves, or being reassigned to even rougher work, at gunpoint if necessary.

    Sure slaves were treated like livestock…….but my point is that farmers and plantation owners routinely provided food, and something in the way of shelter and clothing, for their slaves…… just as we provide food and shelter for cows and chickens today.

    Countries such as the USA, any country with a substantial military establishment, will TAKE whatever CAN be taken,if it’s NEEDED, at gun point.

    Things are very likely to get to be VERY VERY tough…… but unless the climate goes totally nuts, we’ll still have the capacity to produce ENOUGH food to survive…….. We can eat way down the food latter. It takes a hell of a lot more corn to raise hogs for the table than it does to live on corn bread and a few eggs.

    Millions of people who currently work in offices and service industries will be GLAD to go back to digging in the dirt…… when the choice is dig or starve.

    It’s a mistake to think the elite will continue to enjoy life as usual right up until the entire economic and environmental edifice comes crashing down.

    It’s not going to play out that way, because while we’re all one SPECIES, we’re also all members of human tribes, with the tribe having expanded, evolved, from the family group to the nation state.

    In prehistoric times, we had to worry about the tribe from the other side of the mountain coming for our heads and our property……… unless maybe our tribe went proactive and crossed the mountain first.

    The more powerful and better situated countries will survive overshoot, after some fashion, because that’s the way competition between nation states works.

    There’s zero doubt in my mind that there is going to be a “Great Contraction”, lol. But it can be and it WILL be a managed contraction, and any and all non essential use of resources will be outlawed so as to maintain CRITICAL industries and infrastructure, in the more successful countries.

    The population will contract, quite sharply, as well, even without starvation, violence and disease driving it down. That’s going to happen even if there’s no Great Contraction.

    Most regulars believe otherwise, but my personal belief is that there’s enough fossil fuel, etc, to manage a successful transition to renewable energy to the point we can maintain a viable industrial civilization, because renewables are getting cheaper in real terms year after year.

    Eventually we’re going to be building wind and solar farms the way we build tanks and warships today.
    We can live dignified lives with the lights on, and water and sewer working, with food in the stores and cops on the street, using a third or less energy per capita as we use today.

    1. My argument for human extinction is that we are large animals with equally large energetic needs. We likely destroyed the stable climatic environment that enabled agriculture and killed off most large land animals quite a long time ago. What’s left besides wishful thinking? I won’t go into how we lost almost all cultural survival heritage in favor of fossil fuel powered comfort and we can’t eat concrete. There might be some pockets left but I think most of you are aware what happens to isolated species and our species is already very susceptible to inbreeding due to being reduce to 10.000 members before in history. And this is all assuming our techno-industrial civilization goes peacefully and not use their whole arsenal of ecocidal weapons. How things going I would not be surprised if humans will cut their nose to spite their face.

      1. There are all sorts of ways that humans could go extinct in a few thousand years. If the sperm count keeps declining at the present rate then it could be a few decades. If we transfer to a hothouse earth at 10 degrees warmer then there likely wouldn’t be Hadley cells and the poles wouldn’t be that much cooler than the mid latitudes. Very few animals larger than a cat, and certainly no mammals, would be able to survive that. If the ocean overturning circulation cuts off we will get anoxic layers that could quickly produce enough H2S to kill all aerobic life. Even if we see less severe heat than a full hothouse we are likely to be organised as small bands in ecologically stressed environments. Some anthropologists say we were lucky to come through a couple of bottlenecks when we were organised like that in the past but then we had bigger brains, the ecology hadn’t been trashed, we had a diverse DNA pool and the temperature was that to which we had evolved rather than a few degrees warmer. It’s easy to imagine how such bands could be taken out one by one through disease, strife, stupidity, starvation, predation etc.

    2. OFM , all your posts to what is a ” salvage economy ” etc are useless . Norman Pagett has a view . You underestimate complexity and connectivity . Copy/ paste .
      A salvage economy, other that at a very rudimentary level, isn’t possible
      A junked car, say, might have a ton of steel in it, but to re purpose that steel requires a furnace.
      A metals furnace requires charcoal, which requires trees ,which takes us back to the metal smelting problems of the 1700s
      also……….not possible to have electric anything without precision engineering and machine tools . ”
      My favorite lawyer Perry Mason use to say . I read all his novels as Erle Stanley Gardner and also his pen name as A.A , Fair ( Donald Lam , Bertha Cool ) .

      1. We worked metal with charcoal three centuries ago, and we can do it again……. on a very small scale, compared to today of course.

        And it can be done as easily as falling off a log, in principle.

        People are going to die off far faster than trees.

        Anybody who thinks people are going to wipe out trees and forests has his head up his ass, due to having zero experience working hands on with trees. Being a small scale farmer, with a few credits on my transcripts involving forestry, and a lifetime spent off and on in the woods, with a chainsaw and tractor to drag logs, etc…….. I GUARANTEE you that while any place near enough to a large city with a SURVIVING large population will be stripped of trees…… but it’s simply impossible to move wood very far on the grand scale without machinery. If the entire modern industrial economy collapses, which is entirely possible, there won’t be much in the way of large cities with large surviving populations…… or even small cities with small surviving populations…… at least not for a few hundred years, until a new pre industrial economy similar to those that existed a few hundred to a few thousand years ago comes into being.

        Nobody who has EVER actually DUG UP a tree stump believes it’s possible to dig stumps up by hand, as a general rule. I’ve dug up hundreds of stumps, using a backhoe or dozer. Getting one three foot oak stump out of the ground by hand would take a dozen tough well fed young men a week at least, using nothing but simple hand tools. Stumps SPROUT, and regrow into trees again.

        When I was a kid, I helped my maternal grandfather break ” new ground ” a few days here and there.

        You do that by cutting down the trees, and burning them to get rid of them, if you don’t need the wood, or sell it if you can. Then you keep the shrubbery and briars at bay, by hand, and let grass grow between the stumps, to graze a cow or two. You keep the sprouts trimmed back, and eventually, after many years, the stumps rot to the extent you can plow them out, or hook a chain to them and pop them out with a tractor or mule. Time frame, start to clean pasture or crop land, twenty years or so.

        My grandfather did this because he could, and needed the land cleared, and his people before him did it the same way…… carving little farms out of the forested landscape. He could do an acre or so every winter, working at it for a couple of months during the off season. He was one of the very last people to do this….. because by then almost everybody could earn money working for wages to hire this work done using a bulldozer, in far less time than they could do it by hand. I’m one of the very last people to have actually SEEN it done, and to have participated in the doing of it,as a kid spending the day with his grandfather, at least in a country such as the USA.

        I’m NOT a fucking academic,or author making a buck, talking and writing about shit I know nothing about. I’m a rare sort of individual, one with not only a modern decent technical education, but also one who has actually PRACTICED quite a bit of old time technology. I can’t do a ” good ” job of it, but I CAN make a USABLE horse shoe out of a piece of rebar, and a hoe out of a piece of flat rolled steel, using a HOME MADE forge using home made charcoal. Every once in a while, if somebody who’s a good friend and conversationalist want’s a hand made fire place poker or garden tool, I make it for him or her….. while they watch. I get repaid by getting something in return such as home canned veggies, or help with a computer problem.

        I have a SUBSTANTIAL shop of my very own, and being a rolling stone, I’ve worked two or three months up to four or five years in various trades and professions, for for over fifty years as an adult, as a matter of personal choice. I’ve worn a suit and tie, and worked in an office, and in a classroom, but I like it better hands on outdoors for the most part. Did I say I have credits in forestry on my transcripts? That’s routine for an ag major.

        Now it IS true that a salvage economy must necessarily be a very simple economy. I would never argue otherwise. The POINT is that it’s POSSIBLE, and that survivors will not be using stone tools, or spending a lot of time curing wild animal hides to build a shelter. There’ll be countless surviving buildings for generations to come to keep the rain and wind off. Survivors won’t be reverting to a Stone Age economy.

        They’ll be herders and farmers, or craftsmen… people who know how to make leather out of cow hides, and shoes out of leather.

        And for what it’s worth….. I do understand and appreciate that the climate might go haywire to the point that survival is simply impossible……. it’s entirely POSSIBLE that the entire world wide ecology could go anoxic, meaning the end of animal life.

        But that’s probably not going to happen at all, and for sure not for quite some time to come, if it does happen…… probably thousands of years at least.

        1. Before coal most of Europe was denuded of forest. By a couple hundred million people. With hand tools, and horse carts.
          Humans now have chainsaws and all sorts of mass tree clearing equipment, and there are billions of us.

          I do not think that there will actually be a new synchronous global deforestation event, but in regions where there is an abrupt energy shortfall, the remaining forests will be cut down en mass, in a short decade or three.
          Some places are much more likely to experience this than others, especially countries that have big population, very little domestic energy supply with poor infrastructure, and not enough capital and/or foresight to make plans for energy replacement of imported fossil fuels.

          If you look around at the earth from satellite imaging, such as google earth, and you exclude the boreal forests of the north, the rest of the world has dramatically diminished forest compared to the time before the human explosion. The vast majority of the worlds people live in these zones, and they will go after the remaining forests in a massive way if they can not get kerosene or diesel, LNG or gasoline, coal or electricity.

          Examples-
          “Honduras has a long history of deforestation, with only 16% of its original forest cover remaining, … This is a significant decline from 1990 when forests covered 50% of the country. Unfortunately, Honduras has seen a 37% decline in forest cover between 1990 and 2005”
          “Nigeria is another … with only 1% of its original forest remaining and 90% of its trees cut down. Since 1990, 36% of Nigeria’s trees have been removed.”
          “The Philippines used to be entirely forested, but now only 35% of the trees remain”
          “Ghana’s forests once covered two-thirds of the country, but now only 10% remains… Ghana has seen a 28% decline in forest cover since 1990”

          Clearing of forests for biofuel production doesn’t help this situation. Most of the land used for this purpose is very valuable from a ecological/vegetation/wildlife perspective.

          I do not believe that this progressive mass deforestation can be averted by any crash program to convert to solar/wind/ev’s on a global basis. Such a transition may help in some countries, such as the US if it was much more aggressive about the effort. But most countries and regions will continue to remove the forests at escalating pace, until the populations dramatically decline some day.

          note- there is very little old growth or mature forest in the US. The vast majority has been cut repeatedly and overall is a mere shadow of the original glorious condition. The forested areas that remain uncut will be looking pretty healthy in another 500 years.

          1. Hi Hickory,

            You’re dead on about the deforestation of Europe. The trees were burnt, mostly, for domestic heat or used for building, and for smelting iron as well.

            I can’t prove it, but common sense and practical experience lead me to believe that hardly any of all those tens of millions of trees were transported more than maybe five or ten miles max.

            The people cleared the primarily so they could raise crops or graze cattle. There’s damned little in the way of food to be gathered in a forest, except maybe in tropical areas.

            We will for sure, so long as trucks, logging machinery, and fuel are available, clear cut existing forests by the millions of acres if, and this is a pretty big if, we actually get to the point we NEED all that much wood just to burn it.

            It’s my opinion, speaking of the USA in particular, and most other reasonably prosperous countries such as those of Western Europe, etc, that we will find it more practical and cheaper to expend all that work and associated resources on wind and solar power, upgrading existing houses to use less energy, doubling up, turning down thermostats, putting on more or less clothing as the weather dictates, etc.

            It will cost a hell of a lot less to haul ten tons of dirt to be dumped in a pile to a back yard, than the same amount of firewood from twenty miles away. Dirt can be had a lot closer, and loaded a lot cheaper. Put some plastic pipe in the dirt, and insulate the pile, and you have your thermal battery to store heat gathered by hot water solar panels. This will continue to work for decades. The wood has to be delivered every year, the chimney has to be built, etc.

            I don’t have any numbers, but it’s my guess that not over one house in a hundred built in an urban or suburban area within the last fifty years even has a real chimney safe for use with a wood stove and probably not more than a dozen out of each hundred built in rural areas.

            Wood logged and hauled a hundred miles or more, and delivered to individual residences, is EXPENSIVE.

            But in very poor countries where there’s a large population close to the remaining forests, you’re dead on, the local people will probably wipe out what’s left. It’s easy to find video of people in such countries, mostly women, walking long distances toting enough wood on their backs to do their cooking or maybe trade the wood for beans and rice or whatever.

            I’m not saying existing forests won’t be wiped out, over very large areas. I am saying that they will grow back, excepting in places with very little rain, or in the far north where the growing season is short, one hell of a lot faster than anybody other than a hands on guy would ever guess.

            I took out a really big yellow poplar tree too close to the house for comfort, because eventually a still serious not yet blown out hurricane WILL make it to my place, about five years ago. I haven’t bothered to keep the stump trimmed .

            It has upwards of a dozen stems on it now, two inches or more in diameter, and the tallest ones are twenty feet high. The spread is close twenty feet.

            I’m not bothering with it any more, because I’ll be dead before it’s tall enough to endanger the house again. It’s growing round instead of up.

            In the movies, and so far as I know personally, you can chop your way thru a tropical forest under the canopy with a machete while moving along a slow but fairly steady pace, because the plants in such places are soft rather than hard. There’s not enough sunlight for the undergrowth to be dense and tough.

            Here in the Southeastern USA, if you leave a clear cut mixed hardwood stand undisturbed for ten years, you couldn’t hand chop a path wide enough to walk comfortably for a hundred yards in a whole day …… you just can’t, the hardwood stems and seedlings coming up are too bushy and too tough to cut them this way. Just picking your way a couple of hundred yards across such an area can take an hour or longer, because the vegetation is so thick and tangled as to be impenetrable in many spots.

            You’re dead on about nearly all our forests having been logged several times over. Even in the roughest areas in the mountains where I live, there are only a very few and very far between spots that have never been logged…… these spots being just too rough and remote to have bothered with logging them. Just about all of them are less than five to ten acres in extent.

            You’re also right to be unhappy about trees for biofuel.

            We’ll be WAY better off, infinitely better off, collectively, preserving as much woodland as we possibly can, by way of conservation and efficiency, rather than farming trees for fuel.

            1. Hi Mac.
              My thoughts on this are that you underestimate the usefulness of wood and the extent to which people will go to get it.

              People will follow the wood, and live in tents to get it. They will convert it to charcoal to move and trade it. They will nibble away at the edges, and gradually get it all. There will be some survivors: trees in alpine conditions where they are too small and too sparse to support camping near it to cut it.

            2. To clarify, when I say people will cut down all the trees I am talking about a situation where they can’t get energy from other sources..when they can’t afford to purchase energy or it simply is not available anymore. If they don’t have access to a functional and reliable big grid or microgrid supplied by combustion, or by hydro or nucs or solar or wind, and if they can’t get petrol, or nat gas or propane, they will resort to wood.

              Most of us find that degree of energy poverty hard to imagine, while others have had a glimpse of it.
              The risk here is that billions may find themselves short on fuel and will go after wood as a last resort in attempt to accomplish all of the basic things that got us out of the stone age.

              Where OFM lives there is a huge swath of forest in the region, but people there also will likely have access to coal and nat gas from regional sources for a long time. They have a decent handful of nuclear generators in area and a very good solar reserve on par with Milan, Istanbul and Melbourne.

              I think most other areas of the world are at much higher risk from people tearing down the forests even worse than they already have, similar to the pre-coal era but now with the population demand in the billions and with chainsaws as tools.

            3. In 1800’s and before Russia became Soviet union, a lot of wood was transported by ship from Finland’s lake areas to St Petersburg, mostly for burning; around 1900 most of transport was by small steamers burning wood…
              Also from west coast of Finland lots of wood was shipped by ship to Stockholm, again for heating, mostly by small sailing ships.
              So, where there is navigable rivers and canals, wood can be moved long distances. Also wood was cheap in Canada, so they built a few large ‘ships’ that were essentially large rafts with sails and took them to Britain…. On arrival the raft was dismantled and wood used probably for construction of different sorts. Might have needed a while to dry out first…

            4. A lot of the oaks to build HMS Victory and similar ships of the line came from Germany to Chatham dockyards.

  12. This is so unusual. That’s a *huge* amount of energy being transferred to the atmosphere. Expect extreme temperature and storm records. Just the top few metres of our oceans store as much energy as the entirety of our atmosphere. I’m very concerned for later this year into 2024. —- Dr Thomas Smith on record Atlantic water temperatures .

    1. I think this must be somehow related to the slow down in the southern overturning circulation and/or the reduction in ocean masking from the loss aerosols after the switch to low sulphur emitting marine fuels. I don’t see anything else that has happened over the recent past that could have had such a dramatic effect (but then the SOC slowdown was a big surprise so maybe there’s others waiting).

      1. The temperature of earth’s systems go up and down in cycles of thousands and millions of years. Currently we’re going from a cold cycle into a warm cycle because there was an ice age in the not so distant geologic past. This is knowledge as told in basic earth sciences.

        1. Though that maybe true, the current rate of change is incomparable to previous periods.

      3. The breakup of Thwaites is likely within 5-10 years. This will be the beginning of the end of globalization. Sea level rise of 2’ will occur within a few years and most ports will have key infrastructure submerged. Fossil fuel consumption will likely fall 80-90%.

        This will be an interesting pivot point. Dumping all that ice into the ocean while CO2 emissions plummet could cause an abrupt global cooling to occur.

  13. In the US only about 1 in 5 solar or wind projects that are being considered for development make through the grid connection process.
    https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/utility-integration/one-in-five-projects-survives-the-ne-iso-interconnection-process-report-says/

    This highlights the need for local microgrid setups where the energy is produced, stored and used in the local region. Over the next ten years this decentralized and localized system, within a larger system (the grid), will emerge as a big deal. The incentive for it is huge. The hardware and software underpinnings already exist.

    1. The grid connection gridlock problem will go away, sooner or later, because eventually the PUBLIC will come to understand that we either have wind and solar power out the ying yang, or else we pay double, triple, or even ten times current prices for natural gas and oil, over coming decades……

      Such price spikes WILL come, partly because of depletion, partly because of people in other countries making better use of these resources, and thereby being willing and able to pay three or four or five times as much. ( Fifty gallons of diesel burnt in a truck hauling food or building material is economic at five or ten bucks a gallon. It’s not economic in an F250 used as a commuter car. )

      And they will come as the result of wars, hot or cold. They’ll come as the result of resource nationalism.

      I refer to such problems as being useful …… nothing gets your attention like a mugger’s chunk of sharp brick upside your head.

      Let’s just hope and pray to our favorite snake or mountain or sky daddy that we get the necessary wake up calls in sufficient numbers before it’s too late to get the job done.

      We need to, we HAVE to build out the wind and solar industries at an INCREASING PACE over the next couple of decades at least or else the lights may really go off.

      It’s not ALL ABOUT the climate. It’s also about conserving nature’s one time gifts of gas and oil to make sure we have ENOUGH of them to manage the transition to renewables.

  15. Can Electric Trucks Be More Cost-Effective Than Diesel Ones? New Study Debunks Assumptions
    4:29 am ET May 30, 2023 (Benzinga) Print

    New research from Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology challenges common beliefs by demonstrating that electricity can be a more cost-effective option than diesel for heavy-duty vehicles.

    What Happened: The study, based on data from an actual haulage company in Helsingborg, compared two battery sizes for electric trucks. While the larger battery reduced load capacity, it eliminated the need for on-road charging.

    Conversely, the smaller battery allowed for more load capacity but required quick charging during transit.

    Battery Size Matters: However, the study’s author, doctoral student Johannes Karlsson, believes that with appropriately sized batteries, it is possible to electrify heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) at a cost equal to or even lower than that of diesel engines.

    The ideal battery size, according to the research, depends on factors such as cargo weight, driving patterns, and fast charging costs. Karlsson stated, “A realistic future scenario is that HGVs will have different battery sizes.”

    Other Takeaways: Additionally, the study highlights the long-term benefits of investing in batteries and charging equipment, as commercial vehicles typically undergo over 1400 charges throughout their lifespan. Given this perspective, the economic feasibility of such investments becomes more apparent.

    Why It Matters: This research carries significant implications as various automakers, including Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), BYD Co Ltd (OTCPK: BYDDY) (OTCPK: BYDDF), NikolaCorp (NASDAQ:NKLA), TuSimple Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:TSP), Volvo AB (OTCPK: VLVLY) and Mercedes-Benz Group AG (OTCPK: MBGAF), are currently producing medium and heavy-duty electric trucks.

  16. Trump stole intelligence from his employer

    Any thoughts on what he planned to do with it ?

    1. I think it’s a perfectly safe to assume he sold some of it, and may well have used some more of it to maybe blackmail a few people, etc, and that he would have eventually sold or traded all of it , for one purpose or another.

      The Saudi’s didn’t give one of his family a few billion for nothing. If you believe this was a legit business deal, I’ve got a perfectly good bridge you can have cheap…… and make a killing charging tolls to use it.

      If you’re terminally naive, or just plain STUPID, you can believe that Epstein committed suicide…. and did it while he was the single highest profile prisoner in the ENTIRE USA…… period… and that it was just one of those one in a million accidents that the usual system used to maintain a close watch on such prisoners went down ……. ACCIDENTALLY?

  17. Renewable Diesel Bubble Bursts
    The renewable diesel bubble has begun to burst as costs soar.

    “Agricultural behemoth Cargill Inc. said it has suspended plans to build a giant soybean-processing plant that would have provided feedstock to the renewable diesel industry due to ‘shifting market dynamics,’” reports Bloomberg. “Exxon Mobil Corp. has meanwhile canceled a deal to buy the green fuel from Global Clean Energy Holdings Inc., a company that said it’s facing project delays in part from lack of skilled workers.”

    Made from animal fat and crops, renewable diesel has been celebrated as a chemically equivalent replacement for petroleum diesel. The hope is to cut emissions in transportation by blending traditional diesel with renewable diesel.

    Labor costs and commodity prices are hammering the sector, which was expected to see a sevenfold increase in production by 2025 as compared to 2020.

  18. About starving people eating their seed corn………..

    This has happened before, quite often over the centuries, and it will happen again.

    But there are always some people who DON’T eat their seed corn.

    It’s pretty much a dead sure thing that when the shit hits the fan, there will be SOME people who are well organized to look after themselves collectively. Such people are the ones who throughout history wrote the history books……. given that history is written by the winners, lol.

    There will be such people this coming time around the wheel as well.

    Some people will be well enough organized, in large enough groups, to take care of themselves, and not only defend themselves, but to ” go a ‘viking” as it suits their purposes. The odds are very high that many such groups will have seed corn, and domestic animals as well. They’ll have weapons out the ying yang, and anybody who approaches their territory, other than somebody with something to trade, will wind up dead…… or enslaved.

    Such groups will certainly attack each other, whenever success seems likely…… with some being wiped out of course…… but others will survive and quite possibly be better off as the result.

    Any armchair historian knows this is the way the world has always worked, at least as far back as we have any knowledge of our own deep history. I’ve read a LOT of history over the last sixty plus years.

    There’s approximately zero reason to believe history won’t continue as usual, in this respect.

    1. Mac, I think you are grossly underestimating the chaos and anarchy that would follow a total collapse of civilization as we know it if the world’s food supply were interrupted. With the vast majority of the population living in an urban environment, their only food source would be in the countryside. That’s where they would go.

      You are a farmer with a few pigs, cattle, and perhaps a little corn for next year’s planting. Thousands of hungry people are headed in your direction. So… eh… ???

      2. “underestimating the chaos and anarchy that would follow a total collapse of civilization”

        Lets back it down about 10 notches…big time chaos and anarchy could emerge with only a series of relatively small economic contractions or with events that don’t have an economic basis, rather than following a ‘complete loss of civilization’.

        Most of us grossly underestimate the potential for loss of a somewhat orderly world, with ‘freeish’ trade, open communication, right to choose political leaders, a large measure of enforced law and order, and widespread basic human rights.

        In Germany it was small steps at first, but within 10 years there was wholesale genocide. And World War.
        In the US we had a buffoon step up to the podium 2015, who within a year was the president of the US. And if not incompetent…he could have torn down this democracy rather than merely leaving it heavily damaged. This story is not over.

        People allover are ready to tear down the globalized economy, cede control to autocrats and dictators, build physical and virtual walls around every parcel and peoples.

        You don’t know what you’ve got til its gone.
        Stability is a very thin veneer.

        1. Hickory, I agree, people liking autocrats is a disconcerting trend. As for Germany, Snyder points out in Bloodlands that the genocide was largely not in Germany itself but in Poland, the Baltics, Belarus etc. For example, out of 5.6 million Jews killed, only 165,000 died in Germany. Snyder quotes 14 million non-war casualties between 1933 and 1945. I had no idea…

      3. Ron……

        Do you SERIOUSLY think UNCLE SAM is just going to roll over and DIE? Do nothing when the shit is really and truly in the fan?

        Now if I were twenty miles, or even two hundred miles from Newark, or NYC, or LA, , etc, I would be toast and no question about it, if that were the case.

        Where I am…… well, if there’s actually a flat out collapse…… the hordes are going to have to get here on foot, and while enough of them will probably make it to take me out, the roads, fields, and woods will be literally littered with dead bodies.

        It’s my personal guess that without motorized transportation, three quarters or more of the people in NYC would be dead before they could get fifty miles from the city limits on foot.

        Civilization isn’t just going to have a fucking heart attack and DIE in a matter of a few minutes, or even a few days.

        In the event of a near total collapse of the economy, what’s going to happen is that the states and federal government will institute martial law….. and if the cops and the troops find it necessary, under such emergency conditions, to simply shoot people, they’ll shoot.

        Life will be dirt cheap, but most of the people actually traveling around with firearms, after the first few days or weeks, will be in uniform and smart enough to understand that robbing a farmer is one thing.. but that killing him would be a serious mistake, because he won’t be raising any corn or hogs next year in that case.

        People( civilians) will be shooting each other, and starving to death, at such a rate that probably ninety percent of us would be dead within thirty days in any case……… if effective martial law is not implemented. There’s probably only ten days or less worth of food within the NYC city limits.

        I think a hell of a lot about such things.

        Such thinking has lead me to have some rather serious between us as individuals and god about a few old friends coming to my place and forting up……

        If such a scenario as you envision actually comes to pass, we won’t hesitate to go proactive …. because after all, who would be left to hold us accountable……. the answer being nobody at all, if we kill everybody approaching my place up to the point that some of them manage to kill us.

        I’m actually pretty much of a true blue liberal in most respects…….. but when it comes to guns, I’m VERY well armed, and well skilled, and so are the friends who have the special invitation. Half of them have seen the elephant. ( Civil War era slang for being in hot combat)

        For what it’s worth, my opinion of the odds of things getting this bad are no more than one percent annually for the next ten to twenty years…… and by then I’ll be dead anyway.

        1. Mac, I have no idea how the collapse will play out. It will likely not happen everywhere but country by country over several years. But there is no turning back from a global economy. Every nation on earth is now dependent on other nations for necessary products for the survival of their economy.

          I find your idea that the government will do something more than just a little hilarious. There will not be enough soldiers to protect every cow, pig, or vegetable garden in the nation. And besides, soldiers have to eat, also. Ancient armies of the past, when on missions far from their base, fed themselves by raiding the farms they traveled through. Future armies, if they exist, are likely to do likewise.

          1. I agree with you about ancient armies, and armies living off the land.

            But if things go TOTALLY haywire, there won’t BE any armies. There will only be armed gangs, and they will kill each other off pretty fast.

            Of course there’s a very real possibility such a gang might enslave me, in order to force me to support THEM.

            It’s very likely there will be scenarios along this line playing out quite often in various places.

  19. Antarctic sea ice extent is 2.14 million km² below average.

    About the size of Greenland.

    1. A trend that shows about a six standard deviation change over nine years from a long standing noisy equilibrium condition is indicative of an abrupt system phase shift, and it seems to be speeding up. This paper indicates that the issue is likely a change in wind patterns that are preventing sea ice formation.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-023-01695-4

      Without the heavy brine expelled as the ice is formed, and with dilution from fresh water from melting land ice, the driving force for ocean circulation is slowing, apparently by about 30% by observation, but I think the slow down is accelerating because of positive feed back mechanisms. I don’t know if this is reversible or a tipping point we have already gone through, likely the latter I suspect. This might be the most important thing that is happening in the world at the moment and it barely gets a couple of paragraphs on page seven of a couple of dailies. Whistling past the graveyard is the default option for most people and organisations.

      A couple of other things – Asian and North American snow cover has fallen at record pace from close to all time daily highs to new lows in six weeks, Arctic ice might be about to be clobbered – it’s thin and spread out and some areas are going to get extreme heat anomalies in the next two weeks.

  20. There’s at least one potential bright spot in the news right now.

    The protests or outright riots and violence trump called for, and promised, if he were to be indicted on federal charges, simply didn’t happen at any significant scale.

    People don’t like to admit publicly that they’ve been wrong, or that they have changed their minds about big issues…… so Republicans may well be fibbing to some extent in regards to their support for trump.

    I’m hoping that quite a few of them are quietly abandoning the trump camp.

    1. “The bitter and angry haters, homophobes, bigots, and misogynists had their four years in the sun with Trump as president”

      The Fat Boy never got a majority of votes.

  22. On NPR tonight, big story on Marketfarce, I mean Marketplace, about EVs.

    60% of EVs sold in the US are SUVs. AWD, utility, matter of comfort.

    “It makes a cool spaceship sound when backing up.”

    It fits the lifestyle. It fits the climate.

    Model Y Tesla, best selling.

    Larger vehicles demand larger batteries. Gargantuan batteries. “They require more lithium. They make SUVs even heavier.”

    All for a cool $50K, after rebate.

    “We get to drive around knowing we’re not damaging the environment.”

    THIS IS FUCKING ASININE.

    1. From “The Secret Tesla Motors Master Plan (just between you and me)”
      by Elon Musk, Co-Founder & CEO of Tesla Motors, August 2, 2006

      “So, in short, the master plan is:

      1. Build sports car
      2. Use that money to build an affordable car
      3. Use that money to build an even more affordable car
      4. While doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options

      The Model Y is better than the things it replaces (Suburbans, Tiguans, X5’s, etc.). The fact that the US population demands vehicles this size (and probably see the Y as a “small car”) is not an easily solvable problem. It is not, however, a problem Tesla caused.

      The Tesla Factory being built in Mexico is going to be the pilot line for a smaller Tesla, a $25,000 USD car probably in the size range of a Toyota Corolla. They plan to make 4 million a year across 3 factories, probably starting in 2025.

      Now, I don’t see Tesla’s cars as saving the world, and Elon’s views around sustainability are overly optimistic. And indeed, if we look upthread, things look very bad. But the question is not “Why isn’t he solving all my problems for me?” The question is “Is Tesla making things better or worse?” I think on the whole, considering the economic and political strictures we have in place, Tesla is mostly a net positive. You and I know that tiny cars, electric bikes, and public transit are the way to go, but people driving smaller EV’s rather than Suburbans would still be an improvement.

  23. Took a while but we finally did it, now with a just bit more work we’ll make 2C and after that, the sky’s the limit.

    JUNE TEMPERATURES BRIEFLY PASSED KEY CLIMATE THRESHOLD.

    Researchers at the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said Thursday that the start of June saw global surface air temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels for the first time. That is the threshold governments said they would try to stay within at a 2015 summit in Paris.

    https://phys.org/news/2023-06-june-temperatures-briefly-key-climate.html

  27. this is a good example of our hallucinatory reality.

    “But distinguishing between technology that Beijing could use to advance its military and technology that Chinese companies use for everyday commercial purposes has proven difficult for the Biden administration, particularly when it comes to AI, according to people familiar with the deliberations. ”

    I mean, there is a level of the “the mind makes it real” (The Matrix) when it comes to “the chinese threat” but the article doesn’t actually state any specific threat, and certainly none that is heightened specifically by AI. And then there is the AI itself as some nebulous floating “threat”. This is a case of “we will have to build Skynet to prevent the Chinese from building Skynet”. NOT behind a paywall – because all the best propaganda is free.

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-grapples-with-potential-threats-from-chinese-ai-7d1f2e70

    I think part of this push is just capital controls desired by the large tech companies. convince these numb-nuts legislators that “AI is imminent threat” and you basically get to craft the rules that guarantee your company is “legit” and the door is shut behind you.

    https://cointelegraph.com/news/ai-could-threaten-humanity-in-two-years-says-uk-advisor

    to think these fossilized legislators could POSSIBLY evaluate any actual threats posed by AI is really… I mean the entire enterprise has become a fever dream.

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