Honestly, we've been saying that forever and look at the yield of farm land from people like Fritz Haber and Norman Borlaug. We haven't even touched indoor/robotized vertical farming w/UV LED's & hydroponics yet. Wait 'til we drop all conspiracies around GMOs as people become more educated. I do echo Mercor's notion that we're likelier to build underwater sealed structures for living rather than pipe dreaming about terraforming Mars. I think we'll just end up urbanizing more land as farms go vertical or yields increase personally.
The thing is if you get away from the cities there are hundreds of thousands of acres of land unused. it is not being used because it is too far from any city or civilization. Drive between Richmond VA and Raliegh NC as an example and it is miles of absolute nothingness. We have plenty of land for whatever we need, people just dont want to live there. Maybe as technology keeps progressing people can live further away from population centers as long as they have access to wifi, utilities and shopping.
This book is $50 on Kindle, for 131 pages, so I won't be buying it, lol. Here is a review. When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation: Review By Allan Stromfeldt Christensen, originally published by From Filmers to Farmers May 8, 2017 NOTE: Images in this archived article have been removed. I left off last week’s post – “Money Doesn’t Grow on Trees, Industrial-Scale Renewable Energy Does” – by mentioning the existence of a rather excellent resource. By that I didn’t mean an energy resource, but rather a book – a book that nonetheless gives a rather fine breakdown of our various energy resources and their applicability to a world in the midst of peak oil and declining EROEI levels. That book would be When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation by systems analyst Alice J. Friedemann. But before I get to the book, it’s worth reiterating from said previous post the notion that just as the coal lobbies, nuclear lobbies, and all the other “dirty” fuel lobbies are wont to exaggerate and obfuscate the specifics of their energy resources, so too are lobbyists for the large-scale application of “renewable” energy sources more than willing to exaggerate, obfuscate, and even fudge the facts when it comes to conveying the benefits and advantages of their energy resources. And as I also pointed out, the latter is just as often the work of PR agencies and other marketeers, the goal effectively being anything but conveying a clear understanding of our current energy situation. Friedemann perfectly explains why this is (italics mine): In business, …analysis is essential to prevent bankruptcy. Yet when scientists find oil, coal, and natural gas production likely to peak within decades, rather than centuries, or that ethanol, solar photovoltaic, tar sands, oil shale, and other alternative energy resources have a low or even negative energy return on the energy invested, they are ignored and called pessimists, no matter how solid their findings. For every one of their peer-reviewed papers, there are thousands of positive press releases with breakthroughs that never pan out, and economists promising perpetual growth and energy independence. Optimism is more important than facts. And, it’s essential for attracting investors. So don’t let a title like When Trucks Stop Running give you the impression that Friedemann’s book is simply one about the energetic options for the trucking industry, since what it actually does is use trucks as an interesting starting point for how to understand the viability of the various energy options available to our declining industrial way of life. While it was coal-powered trains and railroads that, as described, allowed for extensive inland settlements distant from shipping ports, it was cheap oil supplies after WWII that allowed for the even more distant and scattered suburbs – “truck towns” – thanks to the proliferation of diesel-powered trucks (ten million trucks in the U.S. alone), the millions upon millions of miles of road (4.1 million miles in the U.S. alone), and the just-in-time transport enabled by it all. With our industrial civilization now largely built around the continued operation of these trucks, Friedemann then explains that if our current way of life is to be maintained – and since supplies of various fossil fuels are finite and have begun, or are to soon begin, peaking – this suggests a turn towards renewables to power those trucks. But as is pointed out, renewables themselves are just as dependent on trucks as the rest of our modern, industrial civilization is: trucks are needed to transport massive wind turbine blades and the rest of their thousands of components (more than 8,000 in all), they’re necessary to transport the cement needed for windmill sites, they’re necessary to build and maintain the very roads they themselves travel on, and so forth. You don’t see many Amish men and their horses hauling those things around on dirt roads The underlying question then becomes: How can the trucking system be adapted to run on alternative fuels in order to remain viable in a world of depleting fossil fuels of which said trucks rely on? Because if the trucking system can’t be adapted, then there wouldn’t be much reason for building out the large-scale windmill, solar photovoltaic, and all the other fandangle electricity generating ideas being hyped. For starters, diesel-engine trucks can last decades, this implying a decades-long replacement time due to the billions of dollars already sunk in said trucks of which isn’t going to be thrown away. Simultaneously, a chicken-and-egg problem exists of an aversion to buying alternative-fuel trucks due to the non-existence of fuelling stations, buttressed by an aversion to the building of alternative-fuel stations since the alternative-fuel trucks don’t exist either. What is ideally called for then is a “drop in fuel” – a fuel that utilizes the existing infrastructure and so works with the engines and pipeline systems we’ve currently got. But as Friedemann explains, ethanol and biodiesel can’t travel in oil pipelines for a variety of reasons, one of these being the resultant corrosion of said pipelines. (Instead, ethanol will continue to travel by trains and trucks powered by twice-as-energy-dense… diesel.) Furthermore, hydrogen isn’t a drop in fuel for the simple reason that it can’t be used in existing engines, never mind that it would ruin existing oil and/or natural gas pipelines anyway. And although natural gas already has pipelines to be transported through, it can’t be used in existing engines either. In short, a drop in fuel doesn’t exist. That being the case, Friedemann proceeds to break down the three most notable alternatives to diesel-powered, internal-combustion-engine trucks: battery-powered trucks, hydrogen-powered trucks, and trucks running on a catenary system (an overhead wire system as used by trolleys/trams/streetcars). Battery-powered trucks: While it might be possible to get a battery-powered remote-control Tonka truck with a cute little Tesla sticker on it, the battery-powered trucks that matter are the massive ones that can haul 30 tons of cargo or pour cement, generally weighing more than 40 times your average car. Problem is, the amount of batteries needed to allow a truck like this to travel an appreciable distance results in a significant dent in available cargo space, which is then made even worse by the decreased amount of payload a truck can carry due to the sheer weight of the batteries themselves. This doesn’t make for economical transport, and nor does it help that the advancement of batteries is bumping up against physical and thermodynamic limits (as Friedemann has explained on her blog, Energy Skeptic). But supposing you’ve got the money to burn (and/or have made some key donations to people in the right government departments and/or positions) and wack it all together anyway, the inherent limitations to the energy density of batteries not only dictates the need for more frequent stops, but for prolonged stops of several hours in order to recharge the batteries. As if that weren’t bad enough, battery-powered trucks have many performance issues, such as mediocre acceleration and problems driving up steep hills, shoddy performance in subzero temperatures, declining range as batteries degrade, and simply cost much more than a conventional diesel truck. As a result, the battery-powered trucks currently in use are heavily subsidized by governments and exist in the form of smaller-sized hybrids used for garbage pickup since this allows them to utilize all the stopping and starting to recharge their batteries. In other words, they aren’t even the type of truck that hauls large loads and travels for long distances without stopping. I stand corrected. Even Tonkas use diesel – turbo-diesel! (photo courtesy of Dana Martin) Hydrogen-powered trucks: As should go without saying, hydrogen isn’t a fossil fuel we mine from the ground but rather an intermediary of sorts that other energies (such as from wind, solar, etc.) can be transferred over to for storage or other means of usage. In other words, hydrogen isn’t an energy source but more like a battery, and since it takes an enormous amount of energy to split hydrogen from water (water which must be very pure), 96% of H2 is derived from natural gas. In effect, hydrogen has an abysmal efficiency rate due to the multiple stages where energy is lost – liquification, hydrogen re-forming, fuel cell efficiency, etc. On top of all this, hydrogen-powered trucks are so horrible at acceleration that they actually require a secondary propulsion system – batteries – which results in a single truck costing more than a million dollars each – in comparison to the $100,000 or so for a diesel truck. Catenary system: Problems quickly appear here due to the frequency of trucks travelling on the system – once every few seconds versus trolley/tram/streetcar systems in which passenger vehicles generally come once every ten minutes or so. This puts a significant strain on the system due to the enormously large loads of electricity that must pass through the overhead wires. Moreover, the tens of thousands of trucks that would travel on a single system each weigh twice as much as one of the few hundred trolleys/trams/streetcars on an urban transit system and so require much more energy to move. Then there’s the massive overhead costs to install such a system over tens of thousands of kilometres (at several million dollars per kilometre) and the abhorrent amounts of electricity that tens of thousands of trucks would necessitate, compounded by the fact that catenary enabled trucks also require an added battery or fuel cell system for those times when trucks need to drive off the catenary system towards a delivery/pick-up point (or simply overtake another vehicle), or for those times that the power goes out and one doesn’t want the highways to turn into McParking lots. And that’s all supposing that there’s even enough energy in the first place to charge those batteries, or to be a feedstock for the hydrogen fuel cells, or to power the overhead catenary system. Because while being a slim and easy-to-read 131-page book, When Trucks Stop Running also gives a barrel-by-barrel, kilowatt-by-kilowatt account of why none of our fossil fuel energy sources – not oil, not coal-to-liquids, not natural gas, not even any of their combination – are capable of maintaining the trucking system and thus our current industrial way of life. Likewise, the book also conveys why no amount or combination of renewable energies are enough to maintain a trucking system which is needed to maintain a… renewable energy system. And sorry, Friedemann also explains why energy storage systems are a crapshoot as well. In effect, you aren’t going to find much in When Trucks Stop Running to help sell your favourite brand of snake oil in order to prop up your Madison Avenue lifestyle. Otherwise, it’s an excellent read. That all being so, Friedemann suggests in summation that rather than waste the fossil fuels we’ve got left on attempting to build out systems that won’t have much of a shelf life, we’d be much better off using that fossil energy to convert away from industrial agriculture, to build passive solar houses and buildings, maintain and upgrade domestic waterway transportation infrastructure as well as other low-energy systems. Regardless, no PR agency, or energy lobbyist, or charlatan is going to be content with letting Friedemann get away with the last word here. For as was mentioned in the passage of hers I quoted earlier: [W]hen scientists find [uncomfortable facts], they are ignored and called pessimists, no matter how solid their findings. For every one of their peer-reviewed papers, there are thousands of positive press releases with breakthroughs that never pan out… And you know what that means, right? Elon Musk just announced the unveiling of the Tesla Semi truck!! And it’s “Seriously next level”!! Okay, okay, I don’t mean to say that the latest MuskMobile will “never pan out”, just that Concordes generally necessitate too much energy to make them viable without significant subsidies of one sort or another. And that isn’t to say that there’s anything inherently wrong with subsidies either, just that while Friedemann also points out that “it is energy, not money, that fuels society”, it is also energy, not money, that fuels subsidies (money is after all a proxy for energy, as I’ve previously written). In other words, using energy to subsidize energy probably isn’t much of a viable long-term plan, but it can certainly score you the starring role as the latest messiah in this age of optimism being valued over facts. Sorry there Elon, but it looks like even the big boys realize their Tonkas have no choice but to use diesel – mighty diesel! (photo courtesy of Wallace Shackleton) https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-05-08/when-trucks-stop-running/
I agree to an extent, you drive through the midwest and there's thousands of little towns scattered all over the place that can potentially blow up to mid-sized cities. Problem is not just infra though (and satellite internet will likely solve much of our comm. woes), but resources. Most large bodies of fresh water are already spoken for and were pivotal for sustaining large populations. Millions of acres in the SW are useless because of lack of water for instance. If nuke powered desalination becomes a thing, it'll be in coastal areas near ever expanding urban centers.
Ricter, from your post. "For starters, diesel-engine trucks can last decades"... Huh? We run over 1000 class 8 trucks, and purchase approximately 200 new ones a year for an average 2.5yr tractor age. Sure, you can run them up to 10 years, but the massive maintenance costs make that a fool's errand. All the major trucking companies replace far before that. Engine/transmission rebuilds, etc. They don't "last decades". That's a complete fabrication. Batteries don't work (as the article indicated) for reasons of load and power. Hydrogen is a matter of refueling. We had that Nikola guy (the one who went was charged with fraud) come in to do a presentation years back, and I remember telling him "our drivers drive millions and millions of miles each year, all over the US. Where do they refuel?" His answer was "we've got two stations in production currently, with plans to expand to 15 by 2030." I said great, call me in 15 years.
It always cracks me up going to Latin America and seeing ancient repurposed American school buses and semis.
https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/01/22/shrinkflation-at-the-pumps-is-just-depressing/ Shrinkflation at the pumps is just depressing 18 hours ago Energy 604 Views Since the 2008 crash, we’ve all had to get used to “shrinkflation” – where, at least until recently, manufacturers kept prices down by shrinking the content. A 150 gram bar of chocolate, for example, would become a 125 gram bar but would sell at the same price. Okay, that’s easy enough to understand when it comes to packaged food or cleaning products, but how is it possible to have shrinkflation at a petrol station? After all, we continue to buy petrol by the litre… and a litre of petrol is a litre of petrol, right? Wrong! Petrol just isn’t what it used to be. Indeed, in Britain since September 2021, a litre of petrol has five percent less petrol in it. Long before that, allegedly for environmental reasons, Britain had been adding five percent ethanol to the mix. But in September 2021, this rose to ten percent – which is what the “E10” at the pumps means. Ethanol is a few pence cheaper than pure petrol, but any price saving there may have been, was lost in the post-pandemic price spike. This, in itself, might constitute shrinkflation. But the bigger problem is that the energy content of ethanol is about a third less than petrol. As Paul Hudson at the Telegraph explained last year: “Concerns immediately arose about the fuel’s efficiency, with claims from the AA that fuel costs would rise by about 1.6 per cent purely as a result. “That’s because ethanol is about a third less energy dense than pure petrol. In the USA, research by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) showed between a three and four per cent reduction in fuel economy using E10 compared with pure oil-based petrol.” According to Kate Galbraith at the New York Times, the difference between petrol and E10 is around three miles per US gallon. So, not only did the price of petrol spike up after E10 was introduced in Britain, but we needed to fill up more often. Shrinkflation indeed: It is unlikely that many motorists noticed. After all, the range lost from things like under-pressured or worn tyres is likely greater. Moreover, the stop-start nature of driving in urban areas – which is where most trips are made – will cause fluctuations in range anyway. And when it comes to older vehicles, most people would likely blame any consistent loss of range on wear and tear. Nevertheless, the broad point stands – E10 petrol provides less exergy – the fraction of energy which is converted into useful work – than pure petrol. In this sense, a petrol car can be seen as a simple model for the way in which the economy as a whole uses energy. In short, the less energy that goes in, the less useful work that can be done. This is important because it reminds us that economics is ultimately about thermodynamics. That is, in order to produce anything requires that we must first consume energy… even if this just means eating something so that we can engage in manual labour. Today’s complex global economy depends upon millions of years of fossilised sunlight – together with a sprinkling of stardust – to provide us with the energy with which to transform raw materials into the trillions of goods and services which make the world go around. Indeed, it is now so vast and complex, that most people have lost sight of the energy which makes it all work: For the best part of three centuries, humans have been able to add ever more energy to the mix in order to continue to grow the economy and, indeed, the human population, to undreamed of heights. So, it would be something of a problem if, say, the fossil fuels – coal, gas, and oil – which still account for some 80 percent of the energy we use, turned out to be a finite resource. This, after all, is the central problem raised by the supposedly discredited “peak oil theory.” Not that it was ever a theory. Rather, petroleum geologists like Marion King Hubbert simply observed that there was only so much oil in the Earth’s crust, and that sooner or later, we would reach the point when we were producing the most we could ever produce. And since there was roughly a 40-year span from the discovery of an oil field to the peak of production, Hubbert was able to correctly estimate the peak of US conventional oil production. Moreover, using that 40-year timeframe, Hubbert figured that since peak global oil discovery occurred in 1964, then global peak oil ought to occur in 2004. Okay, Hubbert was a year out on that one. The world peak of conventional oil production came in 2005, and proved to be the spark which set off the 2008 crash. What Hubbert hadn’t anticipated was the extent to which unconventional oil extraction – such as from deep sea, tar sands and shale deposits – might drive oil production up to new highs. Indeed, even recent discussion of whether a peak was reached in November 2018, might yet prove to have been premature. As Art Berman has shown, following lockdown, at 100 million barrels per day, world oil production is almost back to its 2018 102 million barrel high point. So, does this mean that peak oil has once again been discredited? Not so fast. As Berman points out: “The good news is that U.S. oil production has recovered to pre-pandemic levels. The bad news is that only 60% of it is really oil… The rest is non-petroleum and comes from natural gas, corn & refinery gain… “Total world liquids production has recovered to 99% of 2018 average level but crude oil plus condensate has not and remains more than 4 mmb/d below late 2018 levels…” As Berman reminds us, those raising concerns about peak oil tended to get wrapped up in predictions about when it would happen. But that was never really the issue. The more important concern was the impact on a largely oil-powered economy once we were forced to get by on less oil every year. This, in turn, was always about thermodynamics rather than volumes. That is, like the E10 fuel powering your car, it is the thermal content, not the quantity, which matters. And just as your car can’t take you as far as it used to, so the economy as a whole has been unable to continue doing the things it used to prior to the November 2018 peak. As the amount of energy returned from the energy invested declines, so the wider economy must shrink: This, of course, has been hidden to a large extent by two years of lockdown and the USA sanctioning Europe in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – both of which (although they insist on misspelling them “the pandemic” and “Putin”) continued to be blamed for the economic depression by the political class. Nevertheless, the implication of the loss of thermal content in the fuels we depend upon is that even if the pandemic and invasion hadn’t happened, the process of decline would have happened anyway… just a little slower than it has done. There is little agreement as to exactly how this will play out in practice. Conventional – i.e., wrong – economics holds that as demand for energy outstrips supply, so prices will spike even higher than they did either side of the 2008 crash. This sounds straightforward enough. Just as you have to put more E10 fuel than petrol in your car, so global industrial processes have to consume more of these lighter oil products in order to obtain the thermal content they require. The result is that, even if total “oil” production increases, its thermal content is still too low to meet global demand. Hence, supply and demand kicks in and prices rise accordingly. Except that this isn’t what happens in the real world. As Gail Tverberg has demonstrated, what actually happens is that the weakest businesses and households are bankrupted by the higher prices, thereby generating a recession which causes prices to fall. This would suggest a period of see-sawing where every time the economy begins to grow, excess demand for oil causes prices to spike, ultimately causing the next recession. But, as Tverberg argues, it is far worse than this, because the recessionary response to higher prices deters potential investors, thereby guaranteeing future shortages as old wells deplete and new wells fail to be drilled. There is no longer a goldilocks price which is low enough for consumers but high enough for potential producers: This suggests that the old adage that “the answer to high prices is high prices,” is not enough. Certainly, what we have witnessed over the past 18 months demonstrates the validity of the demand side of the adage – spiking fuel (and food and electricity) prices resulted in a big shift in spending away from discretionary items. In the UK, Christmas 2022 is shaping up to be the worse for retailers since the early 1980s. A similar crash in demand has also occurred in the USA, where tech firms like Microsoft and Amazon have recently announced tens of thousands of layoffs, and where a repeat of the events leading to the 2008 crash look likely. The problem is that the supply side is not behaving in the way conventional economics expects. What ought to happen is that higher prices lead to more investment which, in turn, results in more supply. The additional supply eventually outstrips demand, and an equilibrium is achieved. But whereas a decade ago, investors were prepared to squander money in the US shale plays, this time around, investment has been muted. In part, because too many investors got burned spending billions of dollars to produce millions of dollars of fracked oil. In part, because various “green” laws and ESG regulations have turned long-term investment into a fool’s game. As Juliet Samuel at the Telegraph argues of the current European energy crisis: “The meeting goes like this: ‘We need you!’ say the politicians. The producers scratch their heads as they mull $20 billion, 20-year investments, and wonder whether, when the war is over and the green bandwagon rolls back into town, the politicians will still sound so sweet on them. ‘Your green targets still say we need to shut down by 2030,’ they point out. To which Europe says: ‘Well, of course. Fossil fuels are evil!’” The UK government has already responded to energy shortages by giving further subsidies to the North Sea drillers in the vain hope that a few million more barrels can be squeezed out of the depleted fields. And ultimately, other governments will follow suit because that is the only way of halting the unfolding depression – although most likely only after a few more years of failing to provide the energy needed using non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies, and just making the economic crash even worse. This though, is where the crisis before us becomes a predicament rather than a problem. Because, in a discussion with Nate Hagens on the Great Simplification channel, Art Berman drops an even bigger bombshell – the thermal content of the remaining reserves is also falling. That is, while we have long known that we have produced oil on a “low hanging fruit” basis – starting with deposits just beneath the land surface before working our way to deep sea and fracked deposits – few had appreciated the quality of the oil involved. Nevertheless, the process by which oil was created, using the pressure and higher temperature in the Earth’s crust, means that the heaviest – and thus most energy-dense – oil is found closer to the surface. And the problem is that not only have we found most, if not all, of those deposits, but almost all of them are already in decline. Deeper and smaller deposits – which account for most of what is left – have been over-cooked and over-compressed, making the oil recovered far lighter and less energy-dense. So that, even if governments act as investors of last resort in an attempt to increase oil production, the thermal content will continue to fall anyway… a bit like going from E10 to E20 and pretending that you will still be able to drive the car the same distance. The Great Depression of the 1930s was largely caused by the declining energy return from coal, which was still the primary power-source of the European and Japanese economies. It was oil – used to power the Allied war machine during the Second World War – which put the USA on the road to recovery. And it was the switch from coal to oil power across Europe, Japan and South Korea which fuelled the post-war economic boom. This time around, there is no energy-dense alternative to oil with which to power the future economy. And whichever way you cut it, that means that we are going to be consuming a lot less stuff than before… so get used to it.
Earth’s Core Has Stopped and May Be Reversing Direction, Study Says The surprising finding might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena. Earth’s inner core has recently stopped spinning, and may now be reversing the direction of its rotation, according to a surprising new study that probed the deepest reaches of our planet with seismic waves from earthquakes. The mind-boggling results suggest that Earth’s center pauses and reverses direction on a periodic cycle lasting about 60 to 70 years, a discovery that might solve longstanding mysteries about climate and geological phenomena that occur on a similar timeframe, and that affect life on our planet. Earth’s inner core is a solid metal ball that is 75 percent the size of the Moon. It can spin at different speeds and directions compared to our planet because it is nestled within a liquid outer core, but scientists are not sure exactly how fast it spins or whether its speed varies over time. “Some researchers are still arguing that the temporal changes do not come from the inner-core rotation, but from localized deformation at the inner core boundary,” Yang and Song said. With their new study, the pair “tried to gather more data over a longer duration to test different models.” To that end, the team studied seismic waves that passed through the inner core made by earthquakes that occurred since the 1960s. In particular, they looked for “doublet” events, which are “repeating earthquakes with nearly identical waveforms at common receivers,” according to the study. By analyzing the slight temporal changes between these doublets, Yang and Song were able to probe the rotation of the inner core. As it turned out, the temporal changes reached a minimum around 2009, suggesting that the inner core had paused rotation around this time, creating seismic observations that seem more static. The team was even more astonished when they identified a similar turning point in the early 1970s, hinting that the core stops and reverses rotation on a periodic cycle. For instance, the team notes that the same multidecade cycle has also been observed in Earth’s climate system, as global mean temperatures and sea level rises appear to oscillate every 60 to 70 years. The length of Earth’s day, which shifts slightly over time, also seems synced to the proposed cycle. For this reason, the new findings “may imply dynamic interactions between the deepest and shallowest layers of the solid Earth system,” according to the new study. https://www.vice.com/en/article/xgy...ped-and-may-be-reversing-direction-study-says