Energy and Resource Decline and "Renewable" Links

 Energy and Resource

 Decline and 

"Renewable" Links








Why the oil industry's pivot to carbon capture and storage, while it keeps on drilling, isn't a solution


We can't afford to just build greener; we must build less


This Amazon dam is supposed to provide clean energy, but it's destroying livelihoods and unique species

What Europe's exceptionally low winds mean for the future energy grid

Mining firm, eco-activists battle over unique Chile archipelago

Climate change threatens hydropower energy security in the Amazon basin

Lack of power grids sealed fate for early electric cars

Rooftop solar increases electricity use, raising questions for utilities and policymakers

Digital technology: friend or foe against climate change?

Hydropower decline adds strain to power grids in drought

Spain's rare earths pit greens against tech security—and profit

China orders energy firms to secure supplies amid power crisis: report

The hydropower industry is talking the talk, but fine words won't save our last wild rivers

Peak oil and the low-carbon energy transition: A net-energy perspective

Assessing Global Long-Term EROI of Gas: A Net-Energy Perspective on the Energy Transition

Human behavior sabotages carbon dioxide-reducing strategies

What went wrong? Learning from three decades of carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) pilot and demonstration projects

The limits to human domination of nature

New drone technology helps track relocated birds

Study says 'blue hydrogen' likely bad for climate

Over 160,000 miles of rivers are at risk of losing their free-flowing status due to dams

Study reveals an increase in the frequency of nuclear power outages caused by climate change

China restarts coal mines to meet surging power demand

Australia Tesla battery blaze under control after three days

California firm to bury 10,000 miles of power lines to stop wildfires
Crypto crackdown: Malaysian police steamroll bitcoin machines

Merkel: No way back on German plan to end nuclear power use

Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need - A Review of the Literature on Industrial Carbon Removal

Washington state blackouts hit same customers repeatedly

Amazon hydropower plant contributes significant greenhouse emissions: study

Why nuclear energy isn't a safe bet in a warming world

'Green growth' is out: Finding new ways of using and wasting less energy

China doubles down on coal plants abroad despite carbon pledge at home

ITER is a showcase … for the drawbacks of fusion energy

China's plans for Himalayan super dam stoke fears in India

Why the semiconductor shortage won't end soon

Bitcoin price boom 'locking in' vast energy consumption

Field study shows icing can cost wind turbines up to 80% of power production

Renewables need land, and lots of it: Tricky questions for regional Australia

'Destruction by a thousand cuts': The relentless threat mining poses to the Pilbara cultural landscape

Researchers take aim at the evolution of traditional technologies

Past world economic production constrains current energy demands: Persistent scaling with implications for economic growth and climate change mitigation

Why African countries must invest more in earth sciences

Electric transmission operators could benefit from temperature-dependent resource adequacy modeling

Solar panels in Sahara could boost renewable energy but damage the global climate

Shell unveils green strategy after oil output peak

Ford to cut back F-150 production due to chip shortage

New research shows geothermal heating may have limited longevity

Estimation of global final stage energy-return-on-investment for fossil fuels with comparison to renewable energy sources

Digitalization did not increase productivity as expected

Solar panel fire season is all year round and it's getting more intense in Australia

It takes a lot of energy for machines to learn: Why AI is so power-hungry

Carbon capture a tool in climate fight, but at what cost?

Scientists warn of the social and environmental risks tied to the energy transition

'Sustainability is wishful thinking': get ready for the energy downshift

Assessing Carbon Capture: Public Policy, Science, and Societal Need
Climate change could mean fewer sunny days for hot regions banking on solar power
Has global oil demand hit peak? BP says it's possible
Mining for renewable energy could be another threat to the environment
Our energy hunger is tethered to our economic past: study
No more playing with fire: Study offers insight into 'safer' rechargeable batteries
Coronavirus: how the pandemic has exposed AI's limitations
AI's carbon footprint problem
Clean energy revolution may leave disadvantaged communities behind
Total Losses in Power Distribution and Transmission Lines
Lost In Transmission: How Much Electricity Disappears Between A Power Plant And Your Plug?
Hydrogen cars won't overtake electric vehicles because they're hampered by the laws of science
The human factor limits hope of climate fixes
New research shows hydrological limits in carbon capture and storage
Roving bandits and looted coastlines: How the global appetite for sand is fueling a crisis
Ending the daily work commute may not cut energy usage as much as one might hope
Why relying on new technology won't save the planet
Fast-charging damages electric car batteries
Oil price crash: will it affect the move to green energy?
Why is the UAE, where solar energy is abundant, about to open four nuclear reactors?
Study uncovers a potential driver of premature solar panel failures
Where is the greatest risk to our mineral resource supplies?
Plants absorb lead from perovskite solar cells more than expected
Global resource consumption tops 100 bn tonnes for first time
Unsustainable sand mining is threatening lives along the Mekong River in Cambodia
For a greener future, we must accept there's nothing inherently sustainable about going digital
Heat or eat? How one energy conservation strategy may hurt vulnerable populations
We calculated emissions due to electricity loss on the power grid – globally, it's a lot
Researchers: Put a brake on bioenergy by 2050 to avoid negative climate impacts
Grid reliability under climate change may require more power generation capacity
Idaho, Energy Department sign deal on spent nuclear fuel
Climate engineering should not be considered a public good, new research shows
Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos—don't believe the hype
How volcanoes recycle the Earth's crust to uncover rare metals that are vital to green technology
The use of sugarcane straw for bioenergy is an opportunity, but there are pros and cons
In the Amazon, protected areas often lose out when the search for energy is on
Speed bumps on German road to fight climate change
China data centres set to consume more power than Australia: report
A globalized solar-powered future is economically unrealistic
Study reveals new patterns of key ocean nutrient
Making more plastics recyclable
Energy development wins when it's pitted against endangered species
Fold-out energy tower for festivals is ready for practical use
Ecological land grab: food vs fuel vs forests
Clearing up the 'dark side' of artificial leaves
Researchers predict global energy needs will increase 25% by 2050
Earth's 2019 resources 'budget' spent by July 29: report
Resource depletion is a serious problem, but 'footprint' estimates don't tell us much about it
Phosphate shortage: The dwindling resource required to grow food
Vampire algae killer's genetic diversity poses threat to biofuels
Shifts to renewable energy can drive up energy poverty, study finds
Study shows pollution dramatically reducing solar power generation in China
Bitcoin compared to what? New index shows energy consumption
First all-digital nuclear reactor system in the US installed at Purdue University
New approach to energy strategy accounts for uncertainty
The world needs a global agenda for sand
Current green growth policies are not enough to reach Paris Agreement climate targets
More energy needed to cope with climate change
Why we need to look at decline, not just growth
Turning the switch on biofuels
New study suggests automation will not wipe out truck-driving jobs
Leading scientists set out resource challenge of meeting net zero emissions in the UK by 2050
Study assesses impacts of water flow management through El Vado Dam
New study dismisses green growth policies as a route out of ecological emergency
Wood consumption in energy generation continues to increase
Hydropower dams can harm coastal areas far downstream
A war is brewing over lithium mining at the edge of Death Valley
Sweden’s Lack of Electricity Capacity Is Threatening Growth
Why responsible sourcing of DRC minerals has major weak spots
Smart cities: The promises and failures of utopian technological planning
Five reasons experts think autonomous cars are many years away
How artificial intelligence systems could threaten democracy
Americans' energy use surges despite climate change concern
New research exposes extent of mineral demand for renewable energy technologies
Privacy 'poisoning' poses threat to companies using blockchain
AOC's green deal isn't new — it's been a flop in Germany
Germany’s green energy shift is more fizzle than sizzle
Germany’s Failed Climate Goals: A Wake-Up Call for Governments Everywhere
Germany's Energiewende – where we really stand
'You Say You Want A Revolution' In The Physics Of Energy: Good Luck Green New Deal
The complicated future of offshore wind power in the US
Methane promising route for storage of renewable energy from sun and wind
Geothermal plant 'triggered earthquake' in S. Korea
Electric vehicles as an example of a market failure
When green 'fixes' actually increase the carbon footprint
Global energy demand to soar one third by 2040
Newer, lighter cars less recyclable
Carbon capture and conversion must not rely on rare metals
Periodic table - new version warns of elements that are endangered
Fixing the environment - when solutions become problems
Social and environmental costs of hydropower are underestimated
Phosphorus - 350 years after its discovery, this vital element is running out
Switching to a home battery won't help save the world from climate change
Bioenergy crops could be as bad for biodiversity as climate change
Wind power vulnerable to climate change in India
Widespread decrease in wind energy resources found over the Northern Hemisphere
Why we can't reverse climate change with 'negative emissions' technologies
In Quebec, Canada's newest hydroelectric dams nearly ready
Researchers measure carbon footprint of Canada hydroelectric dams
Heavy Oil Shock
A Dangerous Exercise in Self-delusion
No Supply Side Route Out of Climate Chaos
Solar power—largest study to date discovers 25 percent power loss across UK
The down side to wind power
Wind farm 'predator' effect hits ecosystems
Dams and the damage they do
Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2°C
Hurricanes remind us sand is not a renewable resource
Solar panels replaced tarmac on a motorway—here are the results
Concentrated Solar Power - Actual Performance and Foreseeable Future in High Penetration Scenarios of Renewable Energies
Europe's renewable energy directive poised to harm global forests
Renewable energy and the fight over Guatemalan rivers
Are renewables our salvation?
Uncovering sand mining's impacts on the world's rivers
Belo Monte - There is nothing green or sustainable about these mega-dams
Solving secondary problems first
Money trees are magical; energy trees are not
Mapping mountaintop coal mining's yearly spread in Appalachia
Technology is making cities smart, but it's also costing the environment
How Much Degrowth Is Enough?
The Anthropocene Generalized: Evolution of Exo-Civilizations and Their Planetary Feedback:
1) https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2017.1671
2) https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/05/how-do-aliens-solve-climate-change/561479/

The Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere: Responding to the human predicament. Reducing the threat of a shattering collapse of civilization

Why the electric vehicle revolution will bring problems of its own
Our Sustainability Is Someone Else’s Disaster: Cities and the Environment
End the “Green” Delusions: Industrial-scale Renewable Energy is Fossil Fuel+
Tom Murphy - Do The Math
Meet Vaclav Smil, the man who has quietly shaped how the world thinks about energy
The Curse of Energy Efficiency: The more ‘efficient’ our technology, the more resources we consume in a downward spiral of catastrophe
Air pollution casts shadow over solar energy production; hardest-hit areas are big solar investors: China, India, Arabian peninsula
Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?
https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1451
http://socdev.ucpress.edu/content/2/3/265

What is wrong with energy efficiency?

National and international responses to climate change are dominated by policies that promote energy efficiency and by people who take this to be a self-evidently important thing to do. Established criticisms, including those which focus on problems of rebound, draw attention to the unintended consequences of such strategies, but rarely challenge the conceptual foundations of ‘efficiency’ as a topic in its own right. This paper uses Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) notion of purification and Ian Hodder’s Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012) ideas about entanglement to develop a more fundamental critique and to argue that, far from being a solution, efficiency, as currently constituted, undermines that which it is expected to achieve
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09613218.2017.1361746
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-01-10/bedazzled-by-energy-efficiency/

Energy decline

Our Future Is (Literally) Crumbling Before Our Eyes
Upcoming collapse
Why "renewables" won't save us:
http://articulatingthefuture.weebly.com/home/the-significance-of-renewables
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-energy-transition-too-little-too.html

Jacobson's Folly

Bitcoin and Energy; why cryptocurrencies won’t last
Why electric (battery-powered) semi trucks and other heavy industry transportation is economically unfeasible:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-24/tesla-s-newest-promises-break-the-laws-of-batteries
http://energyskeptic.com/2017/can-the-tesla-semi-really-go-500-miles/
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00432

Limits to Economic Growth

The Great Oil Swindle
You're Just Not Prepared For What’s Coming

Wave, Tide, Ocean Current, In-stream, Ocean Thermal (OTEC) power; National Academy of Sciences


High-Tech Can’t Last:
http://energyskeptic.com/2019/high-tech-cannot-last-rare-earth-metals/
http://sunweber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/an-american-childs-future.html
http://sunweber.blogspot.ca/2017/08/heat-for-tomorrow-many-materials-used.html

No way out? The double-bind in seeking global prosperity alongside mitigated climate change by T. J. Garrett

Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis by T. J. Garrett

Tim Garrett interview

Cadillac Desert: Water and the Transformation of Nature

An American four-part documentary series about water, money, politics, and the transformation of nature. The film chronicles the growth of a large community in the western American desert. It brought abundance and the legacy of risk it has created in the United States and abroad. The first three episodes are based on Marc Reisner's book, Cadillac Desert (1986), that delves into the history of water use and misuse in the American West. It explores the triumph and disaster, heroism and intrigue, and the rivalries and bedfellows that dominate this little-known chapter of American history. The final episode, is drawn from Sandra Postel's book, Last Oasis, (1992) which examines the global impact of the technologies and policies that came out of America's manipulation of water, demonstrating how they have created the need for conservation methods that will protect Earth's water for the next century.

EXPONENTIAL FUNCTION - Professor Dr. Albert Bartlett; Full Lecture

PEAK MINING & IMPLICATIONS FOR NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT Presented by SIMON MICHAUX

Last Call At The Oasis

Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables


The Catch-22 of Energy Storage

Energy is Neither Renewable nor Sustainable

The limits of energy storage technology


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why The "War" on Climate Change is Bipolar

Image
  One thing which has become more and more clear as time has moved forward is that the messaging on climate change is bipolar (contradictory; incongruent; hypocritical) in its assessment. More and more articles talk about how we need this and how we need that in order to "fight" climate change DESPITE the facts that climate change is caused by ecological overshoot and building more products (especially building materials) only increases ecological overshoot. Some articles discuss ideas which have already been proven by science to be impossible . Of course, people who deny reality will utilize optimism bias to attempt said impossible anyway. I could continue posting link after link to article after article regarding this same scenario, as there are hundreds of articles which contradict each other in what we need or what we must do or how much it will cost and on and on ad nauseum. So, why is it that there remains this huge disconnect with society? Much of it has to do
Read more

Welcome to Problems, Predicaments, and Technology

Image
Welcome to my new blog - titled Problems, Predicaments, and Technology -  because that is the title to a short article I wrote over a year ago to point out the difference between problems and predicaments (often called dilemmas ) and explain the role technology use (and the culture surrounding it) has had in creating most of the predicaments we face today. While this blog is mainly focused on Ecological Overshoot, Abrupt Climate Disruption ( ACD ) and Energy and Resource Decline (generally associated with peak oil and collapse), there are a myriad of other predicaments closely associated with these three that will also be covered. Many scientists focus a large amount of their lives trying to figure out how to solve these predicaments as if they are problems in the hopes of coming up with a way to at least mitigate some of the harm society is doing to life on this planet. My efforts here are to point out that in a very real sense, this has been rooted in denial of reality  and opti
Read more

What Would it Take for Humanity to Experience Radical Transformation?

Image
Today we shall investigate this question: What would it take for humanity to experience radical transformation of individual and collective consciousness within the next decade? This picture looks inviting, doesn't it? But does it realistically represent the world we collectively live in today? In one word, NO. One look at the news stories of today can easily show how individuals, groups, corporations, and nations of all stripes are arguing and fighting for attention, for purposes, and for goals and strategies. Look at social media and it is ripe with every flavor of disagreement known to society. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that there are few things everyone can agree on, and even when one IS found, nobody can agree on the ways to solve what everyone agreed the problems are. Now, throw in a PREDICAMENT instead of a problem and guess what happens? From my experience, when a predicament is put into the mix, most people still look at it from the same standpoint the
Read more

Denial of Reality

Image
  In my last written post (to clarify the difference between the files, which contain only links to outside material), I mentioned denial of reality. You might wonder what this has to do with climate change and extinction. Cognitive dissonance is one of the most powerful mental issues that affects humans. Rob Mielcarski explains the evolution of how this came to be, quote: " The singular emergence of human intelligence, and its ability to write and read this paragraph, evolved in a gene controlled machine with an unusually powerful computer, that was created by an improbable simultaneous adaptation for an extended theory of mind with denial of reality, and whose complexity was enabled by the increased energy per gene provided by mitochondria, that resulted from an accidental endosymbiosis of two prokaryotes, powered by an unintuitive chemiosmotic proton pump, that originated in an alkaline hydrothermal vent, on 1 of 40 billion planets, in 1 of 100 billion galaxies, and that plane
Read more

Fantasies, Myths, and Fairy Tales

Image
  Advertisement from the mid-20th century I have often used this expression (the title) to describe many things people tend to think of as solutions for one thing or another that either are not solutions or are unrealistic at best in terms of actually solving something. For anyone just joining these articles, this post  will help get you started so as to be able to comprehend what this article is about.  As I have expressed before, my deep passion is to help explain where we are (as a species), how we got here, why we are in this mess, and what can and/or cannot be done to "solve" these predicaments. My very first post explained the difference between problems with answers or solutions and predicaments (or dilemmas) with outcomes. In it, we discovered that predicaments don't have solutions, and that every solution proffered for a predicament winds up causing new problems and/or predicaments or comes with unacceptable costs or just simply doesn't solve anything. The re
Read more

More Cognitive Dissonance

Image
  In my last post , I expressed my concerns regarding methane emissions along with the growing speed which our collective predicaments appear to be gaining. Then I explained precisely why we have thus far not made any real progress on these predicaments based upon our collective denial , which has a considerable amount to do with our basic human psychology. In conclusion, the reality is that very few people are actually paying an ounce of real attention. What they are paying attention to are all the distractions - the hype, advertising, marketing, and propaganda. Today I bring more evidence of the increasing speed of these predicaments as I recall some of my articles which I had privately hoped might be a long way off into the future. I'm not one to try to evade uncomforting news. If I was, I most certainly wouldn't be reading and watching these articles, reports, studies, videos, and other media to try to understand and comprehend fully where we are and where we're heade
Read more

What is NTHE and How "near" is Near Term?

Image
I distinctly remember my first introduction to the initialism (or abbreviation or acronym) "NTHE" which ushered me into a whole new set of exploration. I was a member of a climate change group on Facebook at the time (which I had been a member of for quite some time) and I saw a post which was discussing it. I hadn't seen this abbreviation before and wondered what it meant, so I did a search and a whole list of links was presented (as usual) along with the spelled out version, Near Term Human Extinction. I clicked on one which took me to a website blog by Dave Pollard . I started reading and was introduced to another person, Carolyn Baker, with whom Dave had a video interview with. Through this video, I was introduced to another person, a professor by the name of Guy McPherson. A video of him presenting information at an Indiana university, DePauw, where my grandmother attended, was available; so I watched it. The information was stark and I noticed the looks on the ki
Read more