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JMGreer with some hard-nosed energy realism

Environment
#1

Billed by John as the first of a new series looking yet again into the matter (as he’s been doing methodically for fifty years!), this essay once again sketches out the absolutely unyielding physics realities which bind us into our current energy strait-jacket. I don’t just mean the Russian gas saga, though that’s a smallish part of the whole global issue. The energy catastrophe which the West in general, and Germany most particularly are now inflicting on themselves - out of hysterical, irrational Russiaphobia - is just one gruesome highlight of the whole steady slide away from two centuries of idiotic energy ultra-profligacy, the slide which has been picking up speed steadily since peak-SLEG (sweet, light, easy-get crude) happened, around 2005.

This, more than anything else, is what’s shaping our near future right now. Even the - inevitably self-correcting - human population overshoot episode through which we’re going right now doesn’t overshadow the energy predicament. It’s the energy starvation above all which guarantees our slow, hiccuppy descent away from hitech industrial society over the next century or so.

Note also two other things:

John is adamant that nuclear - despite even the new nuclear technologies which Dmitry Orlov describes as arising in Russia right now - will never overcome its too-small real net energy delivery. As John points out, this is physics flexing its non-negotiable realities; but the endless, insupportable costliness of nuclear tech is a good proxy for the - over-riding - physics.

John also maintains his long position that some degree of climate shift - though pretty certainly not the imminent apocalypse that the shysters keep pushing for their dirty political purposes - is bound to happen, as a direct result of all the release of long-sequestered hydrocarbon deposits.

The competing narratives continue. The inherent uncertainty continues to prevail:

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#2

PS: nice spoonerism picked up from a btl on this piece; by an Irishman, wouldn’t ya know; the craic showing it’s mercurial inventiveness, as ever: ‘phart smones’! Love it! Goes well with ‘fart chuckers’… :laughing:

#3

And another gleaning: “The Limits To Bloat”! :slight_smile:

#4

Hi , @RhisiartGwilym , I can’t reconcile JMG’s comments ( here:
"Meltwater on the Greenland ice cap. Say hi to the future.

That’s the wave of the future. Despite all the rhetoric about climate change, and despite the hard (if considerably less apocalyptic) realities behind that rhetoric, those nations that have fossil fuels to sell will continue selling them, and plenty of nations will be lining up to buy them, since the alternative is a bitter economic slump of the kind that’s hitting Europe right now. Yes, this means that carbon dioxide is going to keep pouring into the atmosphere. That in turn very likely means that drought will continue to tighten its grip on the western half of the United States and the southern half of Europe; it also very likely means that low-lying coastal cities are going to have to be abandoned to rising seas over the course of the next century or two." )
with what what we have learnt from Valentina Zharkova, Denis Rancourt, Anthony Watts, Herman Harde, and recently from Javier Vinós and Andy May ( 5 parter here :

and from TCW , William Kininmonth :

For Island states I wonder why tidal power has never been given the money that other renewables ( the intermittent kind) have been swimming in?

cheers

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#5

I note the discordant assertions too, C. I report them all because I don’t know what to conclude about it. I’m interested in Denis Rancourt’s assertion that after a certain level of CO2 is in the atmosphere, adding more isn’t likely to cause more than the most marginal extra warming. He insists, out of his professional expertise as a physicist, that this is simply in the mechanics of CO2 molecules; quite apart from the - apparent - fact that water vapour is by far the major greenhouse creator.

Who’s right? Well, seeing that it seems to be one of those things that simply can’t be decided by experiment and hypothesis, we’re just going to have to wait and see.

I am persuaded, though, that there is indeed a determined effort to fool us all into being stampeded in fear, by people who don’t give a damn about ‘saving’ the Earth, or ‘saving’ us, but who want to bum’s-rush us into the authoritarian system that they want to impose.

And then there’s the curse of craven careerism, which causes people to toe lines which - were they being strictly meticulous - they’d have to admit don’t stack up; but which can be doublethunk into acceptability by sufficiently pliable minds. There’s an awful lot of superficially impressive technocrats who are on that band-waggon, I sense.

Where I stand right now is in a state of undogmatic uncertainty: I don’t know how serious is the climate shift idea, but I doubt that we’re getting an accurate picture from those shouting ‘Alarm! Alarm! Catastrophe! Crash priority!’ - even if they really believe what they’re saying, as many seem to do.

I’m impressed by the power of determined propaganda campaigns, sustained over years like self-fuelling machines, to stampede lots and lots of people, even when there’s really no cause. This past two-plus years of the covid swindle has made that blazingly clear. And none of us seem to be immune to the stampeding effect when a new idea is launched, with great emphasis, by apparently credible people. This is what happened with the covid scam, after all; and long before that, I confess to having bought - unthinkingly and for a long time - into the climate crisis narrative; which I no longer believe so unquestioningly…

And meanwhile, strictly cosmos-induced cyclical climate oscillation continues, as it’s done for billions of years, on the star-and-planet scale, on which human agency can have barely any impact at all. On that reckoning, we’re already into the latest Ice Age, with plenty more cooling to come! WhoTF knows what to believe? But it behoves a website with the sort of header that this one sports to question everything, and never, ever, to give in to propaganda stampeding. That much I believe firmly.

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#6

PS: Tidal has always been one of the more reliable ‘renewables’, as is wave-power harvesting. I don’t see either of them being able to supply energy in anything like the amounts we splurge it now, though. Still, could be useful in the future, as they have been in the past on modest scales; but of course, they produce electrical power, whilst the really crucial fuel gap is in highly energy-dense liquid fuels for powering transport. Nothing anywhere on the horizon seems to offer any credible replacement - at current splurge levels - once the fossil hydrocarbons begin to get tight; as they will inevitably, eventually. We are destined to live at a simpler, lower-tech level of human society, do what we will.