Transportation: How long can we adapt before we fall off the Net Energy Cliff?
Introduction The problem we face is a liquid fuel crisis. Absolutely essential vehicles, such as agricultural tractors and combines, railroads, and trucks run on diesel fuel, ships on bunker fuel....
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Expressways & Interstates are only designed to last for 20 years
Figure 2-5. Tonnage on U.S. highways, railroads, and inland waterways (U.S. Department of Transportation FHWA FM&O 2007). Roads are Essential There are 4,016,741 miles of roads in the United...
View ArticleTerrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System. National Academy of Sciences.
Much of what follows is from the 2012 National Academy of Science report written for the Department of Homeland Security: “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System“ Introduction Electricity is...
View ArticleWhen trucks stop running, Civilization stops running.
If Trucks Stopped Running by Alice Friedemann, October 1, 2014 In “Why You Should Love Trucks” I showed that essential supply chains depend on trucks partly or completely in the movement of goods...
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Electric grid large power transformers take up to 2 years to build
[Large power transformers are essential critical infrastructure to the electric grid, and are huge, weighing up to 820,000 pounds. If large power transformers are destroyed by a geomagnetic...
View ArticleVaclav Smil: Why Energy Transitions take such a long time
[The RATE of World oil production (also known as Peak Oil) peaked in 2005 and has been on a plateau since then. Hirsch wrote that we ought to prepare 20 years ahead of time for peak production, but he...
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Why is Detroit falling apart so fast?
Using Google street view history, www.goobingdetroit.com records the decay of homes in Detroit. Above shows homes September 2009, September 2011, and September 2013 I’ve been fascinated with the...
View ArticleOff Road vehicles and equipment need diesel fueled engines for power,...
[ I’ve written many articles on why trucks are not likely to ever run on batteries or overhead catenary wires (and why a 100% renewable electric grid is probably not possible). Nor can trucks run on...
View ArticleBig Fight: 21 top scientists show why Jacobson and Delucchi’s renewable...
[ Seldom have I seen such a vitriolic fight among scientists. As you’ll see below, I think all of them miss the main problems with trying to create a 100% renewable energy system, though I can only...
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Will the Navy go out with a whimper instead of a bang?
Preface. This house hearing is about the continuing decline of the Navy There are fewer and fewer ships. The remaining ships are overused, some past their normal lifespan, and under-maintained. As the...
View ArticleThe Fragility of Microchips
Preface. This is an introduction to how microchips are made to give you an idea of how difficult and amazing they are. This is a very high-level overview gathered mostly from the textbooks of Quirk...
View ArticlePentagon report: collapse within 20 years from climate change
Preface. The report that the article by Ahmed below is based on is: Brosig, M., et al. 2019. Implications of climate change for the U.S. Army. United States Army War College. It was written in 2019,...
View ArticleImplications of Refinery closures for Homeland Security & critical...
Preface. The talk of electric vehicles saving the world from greenhouse gases is nonsense, a red herring to distract everyone from what’s really at stake, and from the material requirements to build...
View ArticleSkyscrapers: A bad idea as energy declines
Preface. One reason Paris is such a lovely city is that it was built to human scale, with buildings of five stories or less, because that was about as high as people were willing to climb, so not...
View ArticleInfrastructure interdependencies: an attack on one is an attack on all
An Attack on Energy Infrastructure would affect all other Infrastructure I should consolidate my many posts on cyber attacks, EMPs, and other ways the electric grid could come down, but our...
View ArticleOff-Road vehicles & equipment need diesel fuel
Preface. Move over semi-trucks. You are not the most important truck in the world, even though I gave you the starring role in “When Trucks Stop Running”. What really matters are the trucks that grow...
View ArticleThe tremendous material and energy toll of the digital economy
One minute on the internet around the world. Source Infographic by @LoriLewas and @officiallyChad, 2020. Preface. This is a book review of Pitron’s “The Dark Cloud”. Of note is the huge amount of...
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