Climate Change dominates news coverage at expense of other existential planetary boundaries

Posted on June 23, 2026 by

Preface. Almost all environmental stories in the media are about greenhouse gases. Yet there are dozens of others in the meta/polycrisis and existential boundaries (Rockström 2009). Overpopulation is the driver, but the severity and magnitude is made possible by fossil fuels — which also hide what deep trouble we are in: Fresh water can be pumped up from hundreds of feet below in droughts to grow food, homes and cities rebuilt after natural disasters, the last schools of fish caught at the ends of the earth by factory ships, industrial agriculture and food distribution. Before fossil fuels, human and animal muscle power could not do permanent harm. 

Below is a list of polycrisis issues, many of them as harmful, if not more so, than greenhouse gases

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Posted in Acidification, Biodiversity Loss, BioInvasion, Climate Change, Critical Thinking, Peak Oil, Planetary Boundaries | Tagged , , , , , , , | 17 Comments

Excerpt from “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars”

Posted on June 16, 2026 by

Preface.  This is an excerpt from Philippe Le Billon’s (editor) anthology “The Geopolitics of Resource Wars.”  The coming energy crisis and climate change are likely to trigger resource wars as nations  sink into starvation and poverty. Indeed, this is already happening with Russia’s invasion of resource-rich Ukraine, and elsewhere — see my book review of Ahmed’s “Failing States, Collapsing Systems BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence” 

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Homes & Buildings

Posted on June 9, 2026 by

Preface. To prepare for the day when there is no natural gas, oil, or coal to heat homes and buildings, the best possible way to prepare for the future and lessen suffering would be retrofitting homes to use less energy and insulate them from extreme heat or cold. As well as cooking boxes and other energy efficient appliances, such as hot water bottles for cold weather.  Without electricity to power elevators, future generations will be grateful to whatever 6-story or less tall buildings exist. This is already true in North Korea, where it is the poor who who live in skyscraper penthouses, who must walk up tens of stories in dark stairwells to their home. But perhaps skyscrapers will be good for storage.   

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Book Review “The Outlawed Ocean” by Ian Urbina

Posted on June 2, 2026 by

Preface. This is a book review of Urbina’s “The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier.”  So many fishermen are enslaved for years, yet another reason to pay more for local fish at higher prices.  

Globally, so many fish have been caught that fishing boats have to venture farther  to break even. Fuel costs typically eat up at least 60% of a long-haul vessel’s earnings, double what it did two decades ago. Until oil declines, factory ships will continue to go to the ends of the earth to get the last schools of fish.

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Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future

Posted on May 26, 2026 by

Preface. This is another “Scientists Warnings to Humanity” by many famous scientists, including Paul & Anne Erlich, John Harte, Peter Raven, and Mathis Wackernagel.

Some of the challenges they point to are loss of biodiversity and consequent 6th mass extinction, human population growth which has led to ecological overshoot and overconsumption, climate change and consequent mass migrations. They conclude there will be mass extinction, declining health, and war over resources and many other grim consequences.

They conclude that “…only a realistic appreciation of the colossal challenges facing the international community might allow it to chart a less-ravaged future. While there have been more recent calls for the scientific community in particular to be more vocal about their warnings to humanity, these have been insufficiently foreboding to match the scale of the crisis. Given the existence of a human “optimism bias” that triggers some to underestimate the severity of a crisis and ignore expert warnings, a good communication strategy must ideally undercut this bias without inducing disproportionate feelings of fear and despair. It is therefore incumbent on experts in any discipline that deals with the future of the biosphere and human well-being to eschew reticence, avoid sugar-coating the overwhelming challenges ahead and “tell it like it is.” Anything else is misleading at best, or negligent and potentially lethal for the human enterprise at worst.”

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Extinction, Overshoot, Scientists, Scientists Warnings to Humanity | Tagged , | 5 Comments

Motherboards: too complicated to make after oil

Posted on May 19, 2026 by

Preface. The wood world of the future simply won’t have the energy and minerals required to make electronic devices and the precision machine tools to make them.  Once diesel fuel starts to decline, all supply chains will be affected. There are no supply chains that don’t have diesel trucks, locomotives, ships, barges or some combination.  Especially the industrial agriculture system that produces the vast majority of food with diesel tractors, harvesters, and distribution by trucks. 

I have another post called “The Fragility of Microchips” which explains why these will be one of the first high technologies to fail, and are even more difficult and complex to make than motherboards.

It’s past time to preserve knowledge on something more long lasting than microfiche or acid-free paper. Meanwhile, buy books you’d like to see preserved in the future in hard or softback, not e-books, since they will all (and most journals) vanish when the grid goes down.

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“More and More and More” one of the best books on energy ever written

Posted on May 12, 2026 by

Preface. This is about Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s book “More and More and More”, an amazing history of energy and explanation of why there never has been an energy transition or will be. We just keep burning more and more and more wood, coal, oil, and natural gas.

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The staggering destruction of knowledge by Christians in the Roman Empire

Posted on May 5, 2026 by

Preface. Ever since reading Gibbons “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” I’ve been fascinated by the complexity of reasons for why the Roman Empire fell.  But so many books and writings were lost that much remains unknown. Mainly due to Christians destroying and looting books, temples, art, statues, and anything deemed Pagan.  It is estimated that  less than 1% of ancient literature survived to the present day. Yet the role of Christian authorities in the active suppression and destruction of books in Late Antiquity has received surprisingly little sustained consideration by academics.

This is a book review of Nixey (2019) The darkening age: The Christian destruction of the Classical World, a book about how Christians destroyed most of the books of ancient philosophies, encyclopedias, and other writings. And much more. Other books on this topic include Rohmann (2016) Christianity, Book-Burning and Censorship in Late Antiquity, and Ovenden (2021) Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge.

This is not only a fascinating, and horrifying book, but important now that American Christian Nationalist and other evangelist sects are trying to ban books (Rosen 2023 Banned in America! Christian Nationalists are demanding the removal of books from public and school libraries across the country in a growing wave of culture war battles, Baeta 2025 The Normalization of Book Banning, Randal 2022 Why Christian Nationalists want to ban books.

And rewrite textbooks and school curriculums (Laats 2023 The Right-Wing Textbooks Shaping What Many Americans Know About History, Clossen 2025 Inside a new bible-infused Texas English curriculum, Christian textbooks used in thousands of schools use an alternate version of history and make Christian nationalism more mainstream).

This is quit upsetting for me because I write about why the collapse of our fossil fueled civilization is likely to be triggered by diesel shortages, since there are no supply chains that don’t depend on transportation provided by heavy duty road and off-road trucks, ships, and locomotives.  Consequently, the Preservation of Knowledge has been one of the overriding themes of my website energyskeptic.com. I would sure hate it if Christians triumph and create the fiction that God did it because we had danced, partied, and used scientific knowledge to give us joy and awe of the universe rather than Accepting Jesus As Our Savior.

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The staggering cost of Net Zero in Britain

Posted on April 28, 2026 by

Preface.  Below are excerpts from cost estimates for achieving net zero in Britain. The £7.6 trillion by 2050 leaves out the trillions required for the gobsmacking cost of massive transmission and energy storage systems to back up, store, and balance solar, wind, and other alternative energy resources. Plus the increasing costs of copper and other minerals and metals to construct them as ore concentrations continue to decline and the energy cost to get them out of ores increases. Not to mention the cost of the coal to make the steel and cement in blast furnaces and kilns, and the diesel transportation to move ores and parts to fabrication plants and final delivery.

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Why the R/P Reserves to Production ratio does not show when oil will run out

Posted on April 21, 2026 by

Venezuela has an incredibly high oil reserves-to-production ratio
This is calculated b dividing proved oil reserves by its annual production. That tells us how many years proved reserves would last if production stayed constant, and no new reserves were discovered or became economic. Since these numbers can change it shouldn’t be interpreted as the number of years before the country “runs out”.  Source: Ritchie H (2026) Five(ish) charts that give some context to Venezuelan oil.

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