90 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum, June 19, 2024”

  1. 4:45 pm PJM interconnect load 142.6 GW. Wind contribution 1.0 GW. Draw your own conclusions.

    1. Thank you for allowing me to draw my own conclusions. I was so worried that you were going to intervene and prevent it.

    2. ERCOT (texas grid) current fuel mix : Jun 19, 2024 18:34 CT
      Nat gas 37%
      Wind 36%
      Coal 11%
      Nuclear 8%
      Solar 7%

      Draw your own conclusion.
      I’ll add that they haven’t started deploying much solar yet…maybe 1% of low hanging fruit.

      1. They can deploy as much as they want, at 10:00pm the output will still be zero.

        1. Ervin,

          Much of the demand for energy is during the day, luckily that is when the sun tends to shine.

          1. Dennis
            No argument about solar power, it’s been sunny all week. Right now the load is at 140 GW and the contribution from wind is 0.3 GW.
            I was at my barber today and he told me he had to do 8 haircuts a day to cover his costs for his shop. A 2 MW turbine also has a minimum kwh number required to cover it’s costs but it’s the production tax credit and the per kWh subsidies and don’t forget the “first in line” rule that make the turbine profitable for the owner not the raw production of electricity.
            I see this every summer, PJM is loaded to 140 to 150 GW and the 10 GWs of installed wind capacity is nowhere to be found. As a side note PJM is burning oil to supply 2.5 GWs.

    3. Ervin. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there is no perfect.
      All energy sources have pros and cons.
      All over the world people use a mixture.
      Choices are made to find the best combo for the region.
      Its how things work.

    4. I’d draw a conclusion for you but I seem to have misplaced my crayons.

  2. Hi Gang

    My new book has been published:

    A Wider Choice

    It basically covers the same subjects as my first two books, except this book goes much deeper and hits much harder than either of those books did. My first two books were just not that good. I should have waited, but I thought I had little time at the time and rushed it. The first book was just a book of separate essays.
    I tried to do a better job the second time around, and I did, but it was still not good enough.

    In this book, I cover the fact that both religion and materialism are based on faith, not evidence. Yes, science is based on evidence, but materialism is not. Materialism is the philosophy that nothing exists except matter and energy. But neither religion nor materialism is based on hard evidence. In this book, evidence is paramount. Most materialists are unaware of the amount of evidence for the non-physical world.

    This will be my last book. However, I plan on writing essays, which I will post on my new website, which will be ready in about three weeks or so. I also plan on posting video debates with others who have different opinions on the subject than I on that site.

    I am going to Colorado in August for my grandson’s wedding. There I will interview my son Rusty, who is a hard-core atheist and materialist. That will likely be my first interview on the site. But I hope for many more. Of course, most of them will be phone interviews. So let me know if you are interested in participating. But, like this site, I will also have a comments section. One main point of discussion on the website will be; “Why evidence doesn’t matter.” That is, people have their worldview and no amount of evidence will change that. I briefly touched on that in the book, but not in depth.

    Click on the blue title above to bring up the Amazon page for my book. There, you can read the first two chapters and the back cover.

    I priced it as cheap as they would allow. I am not interested in making much money, just selling many books. The paperback is priced at $4.99. I make 63 cents on every book sold. The rest goes to printing costs and Amazon’s retail markup.

    My other website, Thefinetuneduniverse.com, is inactive. I plan on reactivating it in a few weeks. My new website, “Awiderchoice.com,” is not yet up. So, until it is up, in two or three weeks from now, I will reply to any questions here on the “Non-Petroleum Page of this site.” I hope Dennis doesn’t mind. But after my site is up, I will only respond to comments on subjects of this nature there.

        1. You sell yourself short on your previous books. My father and I liked them.

          You can’t sell books if you don’t promote them. People won’t randomly stumble upon them on Amazon and buy.

          Will write a review.

          USD 3.99 for a kindle is “cheap as chips”.

          1. I know about the promotion, Andre. I will promote it on both my new and current websites. I am studying SEO to promote them both. I am looking forward to it. I will let you know when the websites are live.

            1. Ron, 3 Quarks Daily is seeking additional writers. I don’t know what their conditions are, but perhaps you could write an article for them which would also serve to promote your book. P.O.B. board participant Mike B. publishes there.

    2. Thanks Ron, I’ll read your new book soon.

      Good to see that you are doing ok. I’ve been following things here now for many years, since oildrum days. I remain as sceptical as ever with renewables and still make it out into the field, offshore, from time to time. Working on… new wind farms, which let me sit and watch nearby wind farms when the sea-state is too high.

      The whole shebang sort of ticks along, but there’s an awful lot of servicing required by the diesel fleet. Our price in the UK remains too high at £0.25/kWh, with the promise of ‘reduced bills’ in future; Never Never Land, it feels like.

      Best wishes, Jonathan

      1. Thanks, Jonathan. Although my book does not mention resource depletion, it has always been of great interest to me. But I must keep the two separate. As you may know, I am a pessimist about renewables replacing fossil fuels. I am rooting for renewables, but I think I am betting on a losing horse.

        My new website will be up in a week or less. I hope you check it out.

          1. The website is not up yet. I don’t know what the delay is as I am not building it myself. It should be up in a week or less… I hope. I will post the link here when it is up.

    3. Congratulations on your grandsons wedding! As a born again Christian, I think marriage is a great thing.

      Oh how wasteful mankind has become in the pursuit of filling the black hole of neverending loneliness and meaningless that our secular society seems to inadvertently create. Why can’t we all just hold hands and sing songs together on Sunday?

      1. Why can’t we all just hold hands and sing songs together on Sunday?

        Honda, the reason we cannot do that is because there are too many born-again Christians telling us to “Hate thy neighbor if he is not a Christian, Hate thy neighbor if he is gay, hate thy neighbor if he is not white, and hate thy neighbor if he is not a Republican.” It is hard to understand why some Christians, especially the born-again type, cannot understand that all the hate is on the right and all the love is on the left.

    1. I mean, extend that mentality to just about anything we’ve done since industrialisation. No one reaping the benefits now and who is in their twilight years is going to give a shit, and if you’re younger, you likely don’t have any power to change this anyway.

      Love our short sighted species.

  4. Buenas Ron,

    Perhaps Nate Hagens would welcome a discussion about your book on his YouTube channel after a side bar detailing your thoughts on resource depletion. Given how Nate ties the underpinning of our ways of being with its role in our exploitation of the planet maybe your insight into the human condition could shed some additional light.

    Hasta luego,

    Bren

  5. Maybe this year?

    FOSSIL FUEL USE REACHES GLOBAL RECORD DESPITE CLEAN ENERGY GROWTH

    The world’s consumption of fossil fuels climbed to a record high last year, driving emissions to more than 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time, according to a global energy report. Despite a record rise in the use of renewable energy in 2023, consumption of fossil fuels continued to increase too. The Energy Institute, the global professional body for the energy sector, found that while energy industry emissions may have reached a peak in advanced economies, developing economies are continuing to increase their reliance on coal, gas and oil.

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jun/20/fossil-fuel-use-reaches-global-record-despite-clean-energy-growth

    1. Meanwhile,
      SHIFTING CLOUD PATTERNS ARE EXACERBATING CLIMATE CHANGE

      In a warming climate, cloud patterns are changing in ways that amplify global warming. A team of researchers led by Professor Johannes Quaas from Leipzig University and Hao Luo and Professor Yong Han from Sun Yat-sen University in China have discovered increasingly asymmetric changes in cloud cover—cloud cover decreases more during the day than at night.

      https://phys.org/news/2024-06-shifting-cloud-patterns-exacerbating-climate.html

    2. Doug the 40 Gt is CO2 equivalent the CO@ is about 35 Gt, CO2 from fossil fuel combustion in chart below from SRWE 2024

      Perhaps it will finally level off this year.

  6. John Norris on Lazard and Weekendpeak on Columbia Law

    In reply to John Norris and Lazard LCOE I think this link does a good job. Dennis might like to read the comments on conductors – page 24 80 million kms of power lines needing refurbishment.

    https://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/HALFWAY.pdf

    As for the drivel from Columbia.Law.edu it is just a mish-mash of dubious legal arguments based upon opinions not facts.
    Time will will be the final judge on Wind, Solar and EV’s.. If. and it is a big if, that Wind, PV and EV’s can save the world without being subsidized by fossil fuels, and still be affordable, then we should know with-in the next 10 years..

    I suggest that the above paper might also be a good argument to rebut the claims of Columbia Law. Lawyers should stick to what they know.

    1. Carnot,

      The grid is mostly in place and needs to be upgraded in any case to accomodate future needs. In most cases the low cost option is to use existing ROW as that avoids the NIMBY crowd, using advanced conductors roughly doubles capacity relatively quickly, converting to HVDC for some lines can increase capacity further. Highly interconnected widely dispersed wind and solar resources require very little backup a small number of gas fired backup plants (which do not need to be built as they exist at present) can be kept online with ongoing maintenance for emergencies, hydro, pumped hydro, nuclear, biofuel, and geothermal can supplement wind and solar, batteries, vehicle to grid, and demand management are other avenues for managing electric supply and demand. The technical challenges can be worked out with existing technology.

      1. Dennis,

        You cannot quite get yur head around the cost of all the intercnnectors, back-up generation, batteries, pumped storage etc etc and subsidies. It does not come at zero cost . There is CAPEX and OPEX and that gets added to the delivered cost of power, not the LCOE, which why our power is outrageously expensive

        The idea that people will connect their EV’s to the grid is nice idea in pure fantasy.

          1. Energy has to be cheap, which means plenty is wasted, for there to be a modern civilization where over 90-95% of people work outside the energy industry.

            Going back to hunter gatherer times virtually 100% of people were involved in the energy industry, gathering food.

            1. It’s true that rural Africa would benefit greatly from cheaper, but not true that underpriced energy in rich countries does anyone any good.

              The Soviet Bloc made energy more or less free. It was a failure. I have stayed in hotels in the region where you had to keep the windows open in the summer because the heaters ran 24/7 all year round.

              The same applies to the West now. Oil is mostly wasted on oversized vehicle and poorly planned cities. People drive 3 ton vehicles to parks to walk their dogs. Buildings are under-insulated and over heated or cooled. Vast quantities of natural gas are flared off.

              You are like the three princes of Serendip in the classic play, wandering around 18th century Europe thinking they are in the best of all possible worlds. Change is coming because the way we do things now is fraught with inefficiency.

            2. Hideaway,

              Absolutely correct. Energy dense fossil fuels raised living standards and enabled most of the population to escape from manual labour employment and better nutrition. What we are now trying to do is maintain our current lifestyle with low energy density biosphere flux requiring multiple times the resources of fossil fuel energy resources.

            3. Carnot —
              Fossil fuel is energy dense but rare, hard to convert to something useful and unevenly distributed. Ambient energy is everywhere, low density and directly convertible to energy services.

              Anyway it isn’t very interesting to argue about. It’s up to fuel salesmen to prove their product is worth buying. We’ll see how that goes.

        2. Carnot doesn’t appear to be able to get his head around anything other than the current day business as usual state of affairs.

          Sometimes I think he’s no more, nor less, than a fossil fuel troll….. albeit one far more intelligent and far better informed than usual.

          So… suppose we consider the cost of special synthetic materials used to manufacture super strong transmission cable cores that won’t stretch excessively at high temperatures.. sure they’re expensive at this time.

          Now let us suppose we want fifty, or a hundred times as much of this material…. so that production is scaled up accordingly…..

          The odds are very high that the unit cost of this material will fall substantially.

          Instead of discussing the possibilities involved in diverting money, manpower and material resources from other uses, as best I can remember, he seldom if ever has anything to say about this or other possible partial solutions to the energy and raw materials problems……

          Except maybe to say such solutions are too expensive, forget it.

          He and his homies are basically insisting that everybody else accept their assumptions without questioning them, and strongly implying, if not saying so in so many words, that we’re up shit creek without a paddle… and that there’s nothing to be done about it.

          But there’s plenty, and I do mean PLENTY, that can be done, even if we don’t go proactive on a society wide basis. Businessmen, engineers, bankers, etc, are coming up with and creating solutions to particular problems simply because there’s money to be made doing so.

          Some of these solutions will always be niche in nature….. applicable only to a certain kind of problem, at a limited scale….. but here and there, a few of them will scale up to the point they’re part of every day life. LED lights are a prime example.

          WWIII could wipe out industrial civilization today, or any day. There’s a very real possibility the climate may go NUTS in such short order that little or nothing can be done to maintain our current way of life. A new disease, natural or man made, could wipe out nearly all of us, world wide. Hell, there may be an asteroid out there with our name on it… one big enough to wipe out most of the biosphere, maybe even nearly all of it.

          But we’re not going quietly into the night. The odds, in my estimation at least, are that as the bad news arrives faster and faster, as the shit hitting the fan hits it faster, we’ll collectively wake up, at least in some countries, and get busy doing what we can to save our collective ass.

          It’s WAY past time to quit endlessly debating whether a sustainable industrial civilization is even POSSIBLE….. Maybe it isn’t….. maybe it is….. depending on the assumptions used in debating the question.

          In the meantime……… it’s a fucking academic question.

          EVERY question is an academic question except in relation to whether we live or die, over the longer term. If we were to utterly destroy the biosphere as we know it, Mother Nature wouldn’t give a damn… she’s not sentient. Given time, a few million years, or a billion, she will recreate a new biosphere… one utterly strange to us in most respects…… but I digress.

          Solutions to problems don’t have to be perfect. Better or perfect may and sometimes IS the enemy of good enough.

          Half of the arguments made by people who don’t believe in renewable energy are couched in terms of the costs involved in the short to medium term…… as if these costs are the result of PHYSICAL laws, rather than economic and or political costs.

          Sure it’s one HELL of a problem now, and it will be an even bigger problem later, paying to maintain enough backup generating capacity to keep the lights on at night when the wind isn’t blowing.

          BUT maintaining this capacity isn’t a technical or engineering issue…. it’s an economic and political issue. We’ll either find a way to pay for it, or do without it. Paying for it means we can use more and more wind and solar power, for years and years to come. Doing without it, hanging with the fossil fuel status quo, means we’ll come up short of affordable fossil fuel juice that much sooner.

          I’m at least in the ballpark, right now, estimating that we’re saving pretty close to ten percent of what we would otherwise be spending on coal and natural gas to generate electricity here in the USA, assuming the PRICES would be the same. In reality, the more we use of these depleting resources, the more expensive they must inevitably be.

          ( It’s cheaper to haul coal from the upper midwest near surface or strip mines to Georgia these days than it is to mine it underground in West Virginia and haul it a third as far. People in half the world are getting their coal from overseas already. How much will it cost them in the future? )

          The more wind and solar juice we use, the cheaper natural gas will be, period. That means cheaper fertilizer, cheaper feed stock chemicals of many kinds…. chemicals that we need to manufacture everything from toothbrushes to airliners.

          Sure there’s a glut of electric cars available at this time, or at least there HAS been such a glut recently. But electric cars are getting cheaper, in comparison to comparable conventional cars, year after year.

          Just about every major manufacturer is investing mega bucks scaling up electric car and truck production…..

          Now maybe the people running these industrial giants are all wrong…… but they have PLENTY of engineers reporting to them….. and there’s very little doubt in my mind that they collectively believe one, that gasoline is eventually going to be prohibitively expensive, and two, that before very long, electric cars are going to be the customer’s PREFERRED choice.

          We need to be talking about what we can do to get thru the next few decades. Further out than that, there are so many variables in play that it’s tough to impossible to know what we will be doing in the future.

          Now I may be entirely wrong in some respects….. but I know more than the average layman about a number of industries. In my area, a company I once worked for quarried stone to be crushed for gravel for a year or two at a time at a given location, and loaded up and hauled the equipment fifty or a hundred miles to run it at another quarry for a couple of years, leaving behind stockpiled gravel sufficient for local sale in each case.

          It’s not that big a jump to just leaving the equipment in place, and running it whenever the sun is shining, and the wind is blowing. It’s shut down every Friday afternoon, and restarted every Monday morning, no problem at all. So…….. it could be run for days or weeks at a time, depending on the weather forecast, when wind and solar power is in ample supply.

          Sure gravel would likely be more expensive…… but in the future, we’re going to need one hell of a lot LESS gravel… and we’re going to divert some income from less important purchases, as necessary, to buy gravel.

          I’m a regular customer at a small scrap yard near my home. I take my scrap metal there, and being a regular, I have buyer’s privilege….. meaning that if somebody else scraps some good pipe or angle iron, etc, I can buy it.

          The owner allows a couple of people well known to him to salvage copper, aluminum, and brass from discarded electrical and plumbing appliances. They sell what they salvage to him, for very close to the going market price. This sort of thing is very common in some other countries. It’s going to be very common here within the next decade or so. Point being, recycling rates can go up quite a bit, once the price of these metals justifies the expense.

          Damned near everybody I know either has a refrigerator that’s running fine after ten or twenty or even thirty years, or knows somebody who does. And damned near everybody I know has either scrapped a new refrigerator within four or five years, or knows somebody who has.

          We could go back fifty or sixty years and build refrigerators the way we used to….. and by using twice as much insulation, they would run as cheap, or cheaper, than the new ones in stores… while lasting as much as ten times longer without need of repairs.

          Assuming we have plenty of wind and solar juice on the grid, this is probably the way to go.. in terms of adapting to energy supply problems.

          I’m not qualified to design the electrical controls, but if had good drawings, I could build a heat pump using purchased components that would run on natural gas or propane using a small ICE to run the compressor and fans or blowers, etc….. by combing in with a small generator tied into the house. WHY?

          Because the compressor and other parts would run on the same amount of energy, grid connected or not… and I could capture all the excess heat usually dumped into the atmosphere at power plants for space heat or heating hot water, etc, for as much as eight months of the year in northerly locations.
          And when there’s no call for that otherwise wasted heat…… well, it could run on grid juice as usual.

          Every component needed can be bought off the shelf, or fabricated, using off the shelf components.

          If this were standardized and scaled up, it’s quite possible that using the same amount of gas, you could get twice the bang for your buck….. because that salvaged heat would mean running the compressor far fewer hours for space heating.

          I have a sunroom which is my favorite part of my home, during the winter… it helps heat my entire house on cold but sunny days, and I can and do let the rest of the house chill out except when I have company. When it’s too hot, I just quit using it doing the day for the most part…….. but I do use AC in this room in the evenings and at night, as suits my needs for the moment.

          At one time there were five of us living in this house , and sometimes six or seven for short periods. I’m here all alone now, and I’ll be gone myself before very long. If it doesn’t burn, the house is easily good for at least a hundred years with routine maintenance….. maybe twice or three times that long, if it’s WELL cared for.

          It’s easy to conclude that any present day housing crisis is going to solve itself, in substantial part, within the next couple or three decades, given falling birth rates.

          Adaptation is possible, and doing with less is easily possible. Austerity is no fun at all, but it’s far preferable to any sort of collapse scenario. Austerity it’s going to be, but collapse…… just maybe we can avoid that at least to some degree some of us some of the time.

          I’m willing to bet that not more than one out of every ten regulars here uses an electric blanket.

          With a programmable thermostat, you can save ten or twenty times the energy needed to run the blanket by letting your bedroom or house cool down a few degrees between bedtime and alarm clock time.. and probably sleep better to boot.

  7. https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-nuclear-submarine-tracks-back-010807333.html

    What does it suggest Russia is thinking to send a nuclear sub to Venezuela.

    “U.S. officials had previously said they expected the Russian ships to go to Venezuela and conduct military exercises in the Caribbean.”

    “Last Wednesday, the Russian combat vessels and the submarine passed very close to Florida shores on their way to Havana”

    Andre:
    They were showcasing their next generation stealth nuclear submarine and showing it can get to Cuba and Venezuela.

    1. https://apnews.com/article/venezuela-russia-lavrov-maduro-caracas-visit-negotiations-ac89e24a5ac652759dec00b6e98bc7c2

      Did Andre say that Venezuela was going to play a huge role in our Post Peak Oil future, Andre did say that didn’t he?

      “Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reaffirmed Tuesday his government’s support for the administration of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, expressing commitment to strategic cooperation in numerous sectors, including technology, energy and culture, during an hourslong visit to the South American country”.

      Would Russia benefit from improving Venezuela’s technology and culture sectors? no.

      Would Russia benefit if they had access to the Orinoco Basin?
      Bingo!

  8. Solar hits new global peak in northern summer solstice, and Australia still leads per capita

    “At a 20 per cent share, solar is now a serious global electricity source,” says Kostantsa Rangelova, an electricity analyst at Ember.

    “Battery costs have collapsed, meaning solar power is already being used in the evening, not just in the daytime. Solar power is the fastest growing source of electricity and will undoubtedly rise to become the biggest source of electricity, and ultimately of energy.”

    According to a new Ember study, there are now 34 economies that generated more than 10% of their electricity from solar in 2023.

    In the EU, the solar share across June is expected to be more than double the global average at 20%, up from 17% in June 2023, with Spain having a solar share of around 30 per cent. On average, for the entire year 2023, the EU’s solar share was 9.2%.

    Happy summer solstice everyone!

      1. If all you had was wind and or solar, yup that will be the case.
        Most utilities who are deploying wind and solar and hydro and nuclear and geothermal and storage to go along
        with coal, oil, and nat gas
        plan to have a mixed source grid,
        in order to still provide stable electricity for a long time.

        Just hanging with fossil fuels is of course a recipe for ever increasing price with brownouts leading to forever black outs.

  11. There’s no doubt at all that we’re headed for some very tough times within the easily foreseeable future.
    I’ve never argued that a sudden ecological and or economic collapse won’t happen. A world wide crash and burn scenario is an entirely realistic possibility.

    Seneca’s Cliff, on the grand scale……

    But it’s rather likely, in my opinion, that while the economy and the climate will go to hell at an ever increasing rate, this won’t happen so suddenly that there won’t be plenty of opportunity for some countries, and some people, to go proactive and save a significant portion, possibly even most of their modern lifestyle.

    Barring war, oil production is going to peak and gradually decline, such that there will be more than enough oil for essential needs for a decade at least, probably longer. This is long enough for the general public to come to understand that the price of gasoline WILL be going up and staying up. It’s long enough for government to tax new three ton personal vehicles out of existence.

    We may abruptly run out of drinking water in some places, but in most cases, there will be enough, with rationing, to get by for quite some time, decades at least.

    Nation states will do what they have to do to preserve themselves, right or wrong. Mistakes will be made, but war time economic measures will be implemented, such that the economy will continue to function to the extent that people in a rich country such as the USA will have a roof over their head, running water, food, and such. The food may be mostly bread and potatoes. The roof may be shared with double or triple the usual number of friends and family.

    It’s long enough for those of us who seldom or never fly to force airlines to pay fuel taxes just as the rest of us pay highway taxes.

    It’s long enough for people with limited incomes to rediscover the use of pots and pans, and kitchen stoves, rather than living on fast food and microwaved frozen food that comes in packages that cost more than the ingredients there in.

    It’s long enough for the economy to adjust to substantially less convenience store traffic.

    It’s long enough for hundreds of millions of old farts like me to pass on, our places left empty by babies that aren’t being born.

    It’s long enough for motor vehicle and insurance laws to be changed, or forgotten, so that workers with jobs can work out car pooling arrangements .

    It’s long enough for millions of people to earn their welfare by working on public service jobs such as planting trees or refurbishing existing housing for energy efficiency…. or looking after old people unable to look after themselves.

    It’s long enough for countries with the military muscle to do so to take essential mineral resources from weaker countries at gun point…… while actively encouraging highly trained workers to migrate to a new home in need of their expertise.

    It’s long enough to give up throw away consumer goods in favor of goods made to last indefinitely.

    It’s long enough to mandate standardized light vehicle designs so that automobiles and small trucks are good for half a million or a million miles, by way of making them fast and easy to repair.. using standardized parts.

    And it’s long enough to build some HVDC transmission lines, some wind and solar farms, and millions of electric vehicles sufficient to offset enough oil consumption to allow us to continue to use existing farm and construction machinery, existing heavy duty trucks, etc.

    It’s long enough for people to get used to wearing warm clothing indoors in winter, and get used to using fans in the summer…… and to abandon desert cities that really ought never to have been built in the first place.

    It’s long enough for neighborhood bakers and brewers to do their thing for local customers.

    And it’s long enough for people to get used to living this way……. because they’ll be encouraged to do so, to the extent necessary, at gunpoint, by men and women in uniform.

    It’s long enough that wind and solar electricity can be used most of the time to run essential industries such as the refining of aluminum and steel, thereby substantially reducing the need for coal or natural gas.

    It’s long enough for the much reduced stream of garbage going to landfills to be sorted by hand so as to recover nearly all of the copper, aluminum, and steel in this waste stream.

    It’s long enough to re design our sewage disposal tech to capture the bulk of the plant nutrients in it, for use on the farm.

    We most likely won’t ever get it perfect.
    But we can do whatever we can. Giving up is not an option.

    1. Good write up OFM.

      I believe when countries realise that oil production is in decline. They will be hesitant to export their oil or atleast as much of it.
      (Jeffrey Brown’s ELM)

      Also, all of the 3 biggest oil producers have obvious problems:

      1) Russia is at war and run by a guy that fantasizes about controlling his advesaries thru energy.

      The Ukraine is actively trying to blow up Russia’s oil infrastructure.

      2) Saudi Arabia has a growing domestic oil consumption problem. The middle east is an absolute powder keg and the strait of hormuz is risky (pakistan could nuke it based on some apocalyptic prophecy).

      3) USA Shale have massive decline rates and tier 1 spots are running out.

      I know you know all this. But this is easy to forget when assessing the state of things.

      This plateau that we are on is extremely risky.

      If there is anything riskier in the near term, I would be surprised. Climate Change on the long term, but in the next decade?

    2. OFM … This bit, is the contrary bit that most people never seem to want to understand….

      “to build some HVDC transmission lines, some wind and solar farms, and millions of electric vehicles”

      The, to build whatever, takes a lot of mining of raw materials to do, of on average lower grade ores than we’ve had in the past. This means more energy needed to do it, then transport it, then process it, then transport it again to manufacturing facilities, that need to be built and have machinery installed before they can make anything, which is more energy in raw materials, more experts needed to plan, build, equip and run these new factories etc.
      It means the entire system needs to grow to make it happen, more energy needed to be used, to make it happen.
      What do we do? We use more coal to make more cement, more coal to make more steel for both the buildings and machinery in the buildings, whether processing plants at mines or in manufacturing facilities.

      Once peak oil has set in, with prices skyrocketing, and new production just not happening, (because it’s the real peak!!) then the energetic ability to do any of this new grand building has gone.

      With a lag from peak oil, coal and gas will also peak, as we use oil to gain access to coal and gas, all currently done with incredible complexity. As the system of modernity unwinds from a high energy using complexity, to a simpler system, we will no longer have the complexity to gain the oil from many remaining fields, which will accelerate to downslope of oil availability.

      The situation will be completely the opposite of what has happened in the last 200 years of increasing energy availability, the rules of economics from the last 2 centuries will no longer apply. No-one seems to want to understand this. The real problem is the 8 billion humans and still growing about to be confronted by less energy, less food, more unstable climate, where the natural world is rapidly disappearing.

      To think “Build more” is any type of solution, is a failure to understand the problem of humans building too much already, by too many of us, depleting all the high grade resources. A single 350 tonne excavator at a large opencut mine, with 2 drivers operating in 12 hour shifts will move the earth that it would take 54,000 fit, healthy, humans to do the same. These types of machines are highly complex, relying on a huge supply chain of fuel and parts that will all be non operable in a world of falling energy availability.

      The hand wave of we’ll build more of this, that, or whatever, is not going to happen in a world of an accelerating decline in oil availability. Those resources we currently get from isolated places will become unavailable and that’s where all the new mines are on average, as we’ve mined out all the close to civilization minerals…

      Once collapse happens, there will be no areas of modernity left, as all modernity relies upon a 6 continent supply chain remaining active. The fall of complexity will make most of the remaining required resources, unobtainable, all while a rapidly falling population fight each other over the last scraps of food and vegetation for heat..

      1. Hideaway,

        I fear we are wasting our time. We can spell it out with words of one syllable and it still does not connect .There is this mystical belief that with the wave of hand we can build out a whole new energy sytem in a generation, with technology that has not even been invented yet.

        Just look at the so-called sustaibale aviation fuels, that will be in place by 2050. Then of course there is nuclear fusion, and then the ubiquitous hydrogen. That magic wand is going to be busy.

        1. CARNOT: I fear we are wasting our time.

          Not at all. I seldom post but I have really enjoyed HIDEAWAY’s posts. I suspect there are many others. HIDEAWAY has forced long time board members to sharpen their arguments.

      2. To think “Build more” is any type of solution, is a failure to understand the problem of humans building too much already. . .

        Yes, this. Just this.The solution to the problem is to indulge further in the problem, double down.

        I keep calling it THE HAIR OF THE DOG THAT BIT YA.

      3. “We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false. ”
        — CIA Director William Casey, 1981

  12. The emissions cut gap gets worse with every passing year. If emissions peaked in 2010 a very reasonable decline rate of 1% would have been sufficient. Unfortunately emissions have grown far beyond what climate scientists hoped.

    https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022

    Cutting oil consumption by 30mb/d, coal consumption by 3 billion tonnes per year by 2030 is impossible.

    1. Man created God. Then some powerful people realized they could control the masses with the fear of god. Now it’s being used with hate for the same purpose by the rich and selfish to control the Republican party poorly educated.

      Anti-abortion is all about men controlling women and keeping them powerfully and economically down.

  14. The 5th largest bank in Japan, Norinchukin has been in the news lately. This is a Eurodollar bank. Yen carry trade. They use Japanese assets as collateral to acquire dollar funding and invest outside of Japan.

    Basically they are being forced to sell US treasuries because their dollar funding cost are higher than the yield they are receiving from assets they have bought. Stated another way. They have a negative carry and are losing money.

    Crazy thing is they are being forced to sell safe and liquid assets. And they will be buying more CLO’s which are derivatives. CLO’s or Collateral loan obligations are basically loans that are packaged into securities. A lot of corporate debt has been package into these CLO’s

    So they are being forced to chase higher yielding assets that are way more risky. In a recession CLO’s will lose value. Big time!

    I think we are edging closer to a global banking crisis.

    The majority of people don’t understand that when the Yen carry trade unwinds the dollar goes higher. As it was the currency borrowed into existence using Japanese assets as collateral.

    Most people believe the yen carry trade is people swapping Yen for dollars and when it unwinds they swap dollars back into yen driving the yen higher.

    1. Is a lot of this related to that intervention the BoJ did recently and the US saying “Don’t do that again”?

      1. Nothing at all to do with the BOJ. The BOJ’s recent record intervention. It amounted to something like $65 billion dollars. They wasted $65 billion. They don’t have an endless supply of dollars to use to fight currency depreciation. They are pissing into the wind as the Eurodollar market is where the value of their currency is determined.

        When the price of dollar liquidity goes up the value of their currency goes down. High oil prices are just part of the problem. It takes more dollars which they have to source before buying oil. You need Eurodollars to play on a global stage regardless of what your buying or selling.

        It’s the network of global banks that make global trade and finance happen. Not governments or central bankers. These banks demand the use of Eurodollars.

        1. Thanks
          HHH
          I kinda understand the Eurodollar system but you really help clarify the interplay on the global markets. Japan is in real trouble but it’s so big so are everyone else.

        2. Informative. Thanks. Looking forward to our financial system imploding for the fifth time in as many years.

        3. But what will happen when BRICS+ launch a competitive alternative?
          Inquiring minds would like to know…

  16. Sounds as if Climate Change has arrived with a vengence.
    Sounds as if Climate Change has arrived with a vengence.

    EXTREME WILDFIRES DOUBLED OVER PAST TWO DECADES

    For the first time, researchers were able to plot a global trend for the most destructive types of fires responsible for major economic damage and loss to animal and human life. The study was published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Using satellite records, they studied nearly 3,000 wildfires of tremendous “radiative power” between 2003 to 2023 and established a 2.2-fold increase in their occurrence over that period. The intensity of the 20 most extreme blazes in each year had also more than doubled—a rate that “appears to be accelerating”.

    https://phys.org/news/2024-06-extreme-wildfires-decades.html

    1. Meanwhile,

      ‘OUT OF CONTROL FIRES’ IN BRAZIL WETLANDS

      Experts say the blazes are a result of a harsh drought and deliberate fires set to expand agricultural land into the forest that burn out of control. According to environmental satellite data from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, 627,000 hectares of the Pantanal have already gone up in flames since the start of the year.

      The Pantanal, a region slightly bigger than England, experienced its worst year for fires in 2020, when 30 percent of the wetlands were affected. So far this year, there are 33 percent more fires than seen over the same period in 2020.

      https://phys.org/news/2024-06-brazil-wetlands-state-emergency.html

    1. Yes, and they’re just getting started. AI is about the only thing anyone in the computer business talks about any more.

      1. I wish it was just the computer space.

        https://youtu.be/F_HOrMmWoMA

        I’ve seen dumber applications than even that, but the stuff going on with Adobe and other companies rebranding things that were just normal computer tools as now being “AI” is fascinating. Even text-to-speech or lens filters are being classed as some kind of AI to get investors stoked.

        Gonna be incredible when this bubble pops. NVIDIA just lost $500 billion in value since last week, not long after becoming the biggest valued corporation on Earth.

    2. “regurgitate total bullshit as fact ”
      So far, its a good reproduction of what humans do.

      1. I mentioned a year or two ago that Facebook built several server halls here in the north of Sweden, using hydro power since it´s cheap, but also likely to claim it´s green. However, that power could have been used so much better, but stupid is what stupid does, if I understand that saying correctly.
        Bitcoin mining comes to mind, as an example, I have plenty more.

      2. Touché.

        Although businesses see better returns from these bots over humans now. Wonder at what point that reverses. Maybe everyone needs an Air Canada chat bot incident to wake them up to this not actually being proper AGI like the peddlers want it to be.

  18. Not good news lads!

    CO₂ PUTS HEAVIER STAMP ON TEMPERATURE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT

    A doubling of the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could cause an increase in the average temperature on Earth from 7 to a maximum of 14 degrees. This is shown in the analysis of sediments from the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California, by researchers at NIOZ and the Universities of Utrecht and Bristol. Their results were published in Nature Communications.

    “The temperature rise we found is much larger than the 2.3 to 4.5 degrees that the UN climate panel, IPCC, has been estimating so far,” said the first author, Caitlyn Witkowski.

    https://phys.org/news/2024-06-heavier-temperature-previously-thought-analysis.html

  19. 6 times?
    “Do you really want your next president to be someone who has filed for bankruptcy six times?”

    If you are a player, bankruptcy is probably going to happen.
    6 times?
    That is really pushing the edge.

  20. The biggest hydraulic excavators, such as the ones used to mine coal, weight about a thousand tons.
    At least ninety percent of that is steel.

    There’s enough steel in about five hundred typical automobiles to build such an excavator.

    The cars are going to be scrapped, and replaced, to some unknown extent, by much smaller cars. The population is going to be shrinking, the recycling rate of steel will be in the high nineties. Such an excavator could have been built back when I was a kid with next to nothing at all in the way of rare earths, electronic components, or anything not routinely used in ship building, railroading, etc.

    As a matter of fact, I remember seeing such excavators back then on numerous occasions…… the only real difference being that they were much smaller….. but big enough for the jobs they were on.

    A world wide supply chain is nice, and critical, in many respects, given current day conditions. But we didn’t have a world wide supply chain when we built ships back in WWII here in the USA. The point being, as the economy inevitably shrinks, assuming it doesn’t simply crash and burn, we can and will go back to doing things using simpler methods, and materials that are not in critically short supply.

    Yes, the price of numerous resources such as copper will continue to go up….. but we’ll pay the price, as necessary, to build ESSENTIAL infrastructure, by diverting copper to essential uses, and using little or none for other purposes such as roofing and plumbing.

    Let’s not forget that the larger part of the world is NOT going to get rich. Let’s not forget that my comfortable and very well built farmhouse is ample for a family of five or six, without any crowding at all…… and it will be empty when I’m gone. The younger women in my family are averaging only about one point four kids each. Typical, in terms of educated western women. HIgh in comparison to lots of other countries.

    It would be a piece of cake, from an engineering and economic POV, to build cars and light trucks that will last forty or fifty years….. using half or less the amount of material in typical new car or light truck.

    Put the speed limit at thirty five, and you can haul half again more, for the same amount of fuel or juice. Be safer on the road, without modern electronic driver aids, such as automatic braking. AC…… that’s what windows are for.

    Tens of millions of people who currently work in various fields that contribute little or nothing of actual VALUE to the economy can be and will be put to work doing anything possible to help keep the wheels from falling off. Urban farming will be a very real thing, gardening for home consumption and marketing will be a very real thing. If you know how, and plenty of people DO know how, you can produce double or triple the usual yield per square meter of land, using very little, sometimes nothing at all, in the way of manufactured fertilizer or pesticides. Sure this is intensive as hell in terms of labor…… but given the choice of doing it, or starving, it will be done.

    I don’t have good figures, but I know more than enough about the amount of money most people spend these days on clothing…… which is more often than not discarded before it shows any serious wear at all.

    I can afford nice clothes, and I have some .. such as a goose down all weather winter coat, and a quality suit suitable for funerals, weddings, and court, if the need arises. But I like khaki and blue jeans, and cotton shirts….. and I need only buy a new pair of pants, and a new shirt, maybe once every year or two. Well made clothing LASTS. We can collectively reduce our consumption of clothing by at least eighty percent…… if the materials needed are in short supplies of just about everything are pretty much baked in, but there’s hope there will be ENOUGH, considering a shrinking population and routine austerity.

    I have an electric dryer, and I use it quite often….. but I also have a clothes line on the back porch, and hanging my wet every day clothes takes only a minute or two longer than it takes to put them in the dryer.

    If I were young enough to make good use of it, I would buy an electric bicycle or motorcycle and cut back driving my old truck by fifty percent or more during good weather. It’s not just about saving gasoline….. every trip on a bike means one more necessary trip in the truck before it’s worn out.

    If you watch a movie scene showing upper class Englishmen having dinner, especially with guests, you’ll notice that they’re well dressed….. warmly dressed. This is no accident, because the dining room temperature is apt to be low enough that some wines usually served chilled in this country are served at room temperature. Heating their huge old ancestral mansions took so much coal that even rich people took care not to waste it.

    I’ve fifty black walnut trees started in discarded buckets….. which I will give away to friends, neighbors, and anybody else who wants a couple of them. In twenty years, planted in a decent spot, they’ll be dropping fifty to a hundred pounds of nuts some years and us much as five hundred pounds when they’re fifty years old.

    I made a solar cooker some years back, mostly to amuse myself. I never use it, except once in a while to show somebody how well it works. It’ll boil a gallon pot of stew in less than two hours, and finish it in four or less.

  21. When it comes to energy consumption and AI we have a pending problem similar to energy consumption in many other sectors.
    The energy goes to the purchaser with the most capital…be it rich people taking luxury trips, sports teams flying around, orange men in their glitzy towers, stealth jets and rocket men blasting through the biosphere.

    Point being that AI and all the other digital based sectors (internet, finance transactions/stock/crypto, surveillance, social media) have the capital to get the electricity it needs, and suppliers will sell to the highest bidder. The highest bidder is not going to be the average human being.
    And yes, there will be autonomous robotic security enforcement.
    Perhaps by the 2028 US presidential election cycle, certainly by 2030.

    “One example is an agreement announced in March, after Amazon signed a contract to buy more than a third of the electricity generated by one of the nation’s largest nuclear facilities, the Susquehanna power plant in Luzerne County, PA. “That deal disturbed a lot of people,” Zubaty said. “When massive data centers show up and start claiming the output of a nuclear plant, you basically have to replace that electricity with something else.”
    Or do without.

    1. At least robot security dogs or whatever, I can make sense of. They have a purpose. A horrible, dystopian one, sure, but they do. Crypto, NFTs, the metaverse and “AI” are basically ways to vaporise vast quantities of fossil fuels or absorb all RE capacity brought online, to make… nothing.

      1. I disagree with your assessment about AI doing nothing.
        Its going to be extremely capable and economically valuable/disruptive.
        Don’t judge it for the capability now, this is just the preview stage of a very long story,
        and yet it solved the protein folding challenge in 2020
        “DeepMind’s protein-folding AI has solved a 50-year-old grand challenge of biology”
        https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/30/1012712/deepmind-protein-folding-ai-solved-biology-science-drugs-disease/

        But it will also come with huge problems, including in the energy sector, disparity of wealth, cybersecurity/privacy, bioengineering, and governance, for example.

        AI applied to military is going to enable a major leapfrogging by whoever deploys it effectively. Better hope it not an adversary of your economic block with aggressive intent.

        1. AI has been around for a long time. What has changed is moore’s law, the internet ( astronomical training data), globalisation, neural network backpropogation, etc.

          AI does not or is anywhere near close to feeling emotions, thinking, having desires or having a worldview.

          Hickory is correct it will be disruptive.

          Only someone who has never programmed it before can’t see its limitations.

          When linear regression or a neural network starts feeling love and the ability to self replicate without human intervention

          then I’ll agree the Singularity or a potential takeover is upon us.

          AI is not as adaptable or motivated as humans, it is called overfitting.

          AI algorithms are purposely, by humans, altered (throttled) because overfitting and the “curse of dimensionality” (too much data! ) are such a problem

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

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

  22. In 1980 there were 13 US billionaires. Now there are 748.
    Progress?
    (s)

    1. See? The economy is doing great.

      So many temporarily embarrassed billionaires in the making soon. Number go up.

  24. A couple of decades back I was a hard core doomer.

    Peak oil, peak minerals, peak farmland, overpopulation, war, a modern day Black Plague that couldn’t be controlled, hot war, you name it, I was convinced one or another of these things, or more likely, a combination of three or four of them, would wipe most of us out, and leave the rest of us living a pre industrial life style.

    But it gradually dawned on me that just maybe things might turn out, if not well, at least not so very badly after all. Birthrates were showing signs they would be falling , and technology was marching on.

    The odds seemed to me to be pretty good that we would solve the cancer problem. It seemed likely that we had an excellent shot at keeping the peace, globally, at least to the extent that nobody would fire off any nukes.

    But the one thing that led me to understand that while technology enabled us to get ourselves into the troubles we were IN at that time, technology, liberally laced with some plain old good luck, could at least potentially get us OUT.

    The two key facts enabling me to become cautiously optimistic about the survival of industrial civilization were falling birth rates and the falling cost of solar electricity, as the industry was gradually moving from the adopted baby stage to the time when you could buy panels adding up to an arbitrary peak load cheaper year after year.

    I’m an armchair student of history, and so I was reasonably well acquainted with the more important turning points starting with the control of fire, invention of weapons, birth of agriculture, emergence of organized larger scale society , right on up thru the end of the horse and mule era and the arrival of the internal combustion engine that enabled us to have cars, trucks, and farm tractors.

    My own primary work, farming, meant keeping an eye on things right up to the current day. I actually worked one of the last mules commonly used on farms in my area as a farm kid, and learned to operate trucks and tractors while most kids were playing ball or whatever.

    I witnessed the arrival of the personal computer, and the cell phone, and marveled at the fact that both these technologies grew as fast as a runaway wild fire.

    It dawned on me that the solar electricity industry was growing, and would almost dead sure continue to grow at a blistering pace…….. and it has continued to do so right along. I believe it has the potential to keep on growing, adding ever more new capacity year after year well into the future, to the point that it can shoulder ENOUGH of the load currently carried by the fossil fuel industry to enable at least some of us to continue enjoying a sustainable industrial economy.

    Of course our resident pessimists are utterly convinced this scenario is out of the question, that there just isn’t enough in the way of oil and gas, metal ores, etc, to allow it to happen.

    I’ve unexpected company now, and I’ll have to leave this until later.

    Back at everybody soon.

    1. “OFM- 06/26/2024 at 2:20 am”
      “I’ve unexpected company now, and I’ll have to leave this until later.”

      You never cease to amaze me. Who says old fossils run out of fuel ? It’s no wonder why you’re no longer a doomer. How many daughters do you have ?

    2. OFM —

      “A couple of decades back I was a hard core doomer.”

      L.O.L. Maybe if you read Climate Science (Change) papers you’d have more reasons to be concerned now than two decades back.

    3. Hahahaha, no.

      https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47676-9

      Show is over, my friend. Palliative care is what we discuss here, not any kind of rejuvenation of a civilisation done right with a more parochial mindset and no fossil fuels, only clean energy and better morals. That paper above talks about a massively understated ECS value to what we were expecting, which validates the hot model movement Hansen and others had been pointing to the last few years which was handily suppressed by those with vested interests in maintaining some positive facade. Kinda like Yergin saying we got tonnes more oil and it was just an investment, not a geology issue. It’s lies and, I hate to say it, the pessimists have been proven correct time and again here, owing to the meme “faster than expected”. Well, now worse than expected too.

      The biosphere is cooked, and in a way that will make complex life difficult to have hanging around, not in a “but maybe we can eke out in 1950s style living”. Complex industrial or any organised society, is coming to an end. It’s a matter of when. The peak oil thing is kind of academic to me these days with how far advanced climate change is over what we thought back in 2007 when I first started on TOD.com.

      1. What percentage of your “faster than expected” and “worse than expected” predictions have panned out? Predicting the future is hard. Case in point (with citations).

          1. That list of citations is very lol. I even saw the “CO2 is plant food, actually” argument.

            It’s like you retards haven’t cracked open a book in the last twenty years and are still pushing talking points that even Big Oil gave up on.

            Truly the biggest brains working at *checks notes* American Enterprise Institute, the home of Free people. Free markets. American strength.

            EDIT: Haha, Breitbart? Really?

            This is to climate science what Answers in Genesis was to evolutionary science. Getting nostalgic for dealing with creationists at uni telling me if Darwin was right, why do monkeys not evolve in the zoo.

  25. Rysted projections out to 2030
    -“Total US electricity demand has remained relatively stable at around 4,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) since 2010, but as electrification accelerates, that’s about to change. The build-out of data centers and more widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is expected to ramp up electricity demand in the US in the coming years, with Rystad Energy’s research predicting these two sectors alone will add 290 TWh of new demand by 2030.”

    The data center/chip foundries electricity consumption growth is projected to be much higher than than that attributed to EV sector.

    “Solar PV capacity is expected to increase by 237 GW between 2023 and 2030, while wind capacity is projected to grow by 78 GW. The strong growth from these two sources should be sufficient to meet the rising power demand brought by data centers and EVs in the US, while continuing to displace coal in the generation mix.”

    https://www.rystadenergy.com/news/data-and-ev-create-300-twh-increase-us

    1. Hickory

      It is a big ask to electrify the economy. The best option overall even for exporters of fossil fuels imo (Saudi Arabia etc).

      In most cases historically renewables have served as an add on to fossil fuel energy. What we are trying to do many places is to place oversized renewable generation on top of much lower fossil consumption. In theory electrifying the economy should work, even with a low fossil fuel baseload. The critical level could be something like 20% fossil fuel consumption compared to now (talking way into the future). The best case scenario would be to hold that level for a long time and in addition get to it as soon as possible.

      In practice people are probably too gready short term. The naysayers on this blog always portrait the situation as “all or nothing” when it comes to renewables. It is very difficult not to put the arguments in the camp of fossil fuel vested interests, and also maybe the ones arguing for gold, bitcoin or to a lesser degree real estate as a store of value. But if this energy transition fails in a major way, because we are unable collectively to pull it through, the store of value would also be under threat.

      We have to establish an economy that is somewhat stable and underpins everything, and not willingly set up “crash and burn” some decades ahead. Electrifying the economy requires a lot of discipline of some sort.

  26. WILDFIRES RAVAGING ARCTIC CIRCLE – AGAIN!

    Wildfires are once again ravaging the Arctic Circle, the EU’s climate change monitor – Copernicus – is reporting. It is the third time in the past five years that high intensity fires have swept across the region.

    As climate change raises Arctic temperatures, wildfires have shifted north where they burn through boreal forest and tundra, releasing vast amounts of greenhouse gases from carbon-rich organic soils. Carbon emissions in the region are the third highest for June in two decades

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c25l17v7qn0o

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