Overshoot Doubt? Chris Clugston Kills It

Preptip: Reusable Canning Lids

Standard Bernardin/Ball canning lids bother me for several reasons:
– they’re expensive ($0.47 each here)
– they’re single use
– they’re frequently out of stock (especially during crises when you need them most)
– they recently changed a proven 50+ year design
– new design now seals for only 18 months or less (old design was good for years)
– new design no longer pings to confirm seal
– new design has thinner gasket meaning you can’t cheat and reuse a 2nd time
– some users are reporting more seal failures with new design

I went down a rabbit hole today looking for a reusable lid.

There are two brands available:
– Tattler https://reusablecanninglids.com/
– Harvest Guard https://canninglids.com/

The same family started both companies.
Both products work.
They are compatible with each other.
Lids can be reused many (6-10+) times.
Harvest Guard may have slight design edge with thinner plastic lids making them easier to secure with rings.
Harvest Guard is less expensive with an additional 10% discount using code: homestead.

Heads up that Alice Friedemann has published a new book titled “Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy”.

I have read the table of contents and I expect the book will make an important contribution to our understanding of human overshoot.

I am reading the book now and plan to write a review.

This book is a reality check of where energy will come from in the future. Today, our economy is utterly dependent on fossil fuels. They are essential to transportation, manufacturing, farming, electricity, and to make fertilizers, cement, steel, roads, cars, and half a million other products.

One day, sooner or later, fossil fuels will no longer be abundant and affordable. Inevitably, one day, global oil production will decline. That time may be nearer than we realize. Some experts predict oil shortages as soon as 2022 to 2030. What then are our options for replacing the fossil fuels that turn the great wheel of civilization?

Surveying the arsenal of alternatives – wind, solar, hydrogen, geothermal, nuclear, batteries, catenary systems, fusion, methane hydrates, power2gas, wave, tidal power and biomass – this book examines whether they can replace or supplement fossil fuels.

The book also looks at substitute energy sources from the standpoint of the energy users. Manufacturing, which uses half of fossil fuels, often requires very high heat, which in many cases electricity can’t provide. Industry uses fossil fuels as a feedstock for countless products, and must find substitutes. And, as detailed in the author’s previous book, “When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation,” ships, locomotives, and heavy-duty trucks are fueled by diesel. What can replace diesel?

Taking off the rose-colored glasses, author Alice Friedemann analyzes our options. What alternatives should we deploy right now? Which technologies merit further research and development? Which are mere wishful thinking that, upon careful scrutiny, dematerialize before our eyes?
Fossil fuels have allowed billions of us to live like kings. Fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, we changed the equation constraining the carrying capacity of our planet. As fossil fuels peak and then decline, will we fall back to Earth? Are there viable alternatives?

Tom Murphy today on denial.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/05/to-what-end/

We are lamentably ill-equipped to appreciate the abnormality of our time and assess a more accurate picture of what long-term “normal” must look like. Failure to do so leads to uncontrolled…failure. Evolution may well have discovered by its usual blind experimentation a limit to how smart a successful species may be.

In summary, we can ignore the warning signs and insist on continuing the current trajectory, only tolerating minor tweaks as long as we experience little or no inconvenience. But to what end? If that approach leads to failure of civilization, is it still the right choice? We’re smart enough to have dug an impressive hole for ourselves. Are we wise enough to look past our shovels to understand where this ends, and change behaviors enough to avoid the worst fate? I am eternally and perhaps irrationally hopeful that we are, but still yearn for reassuring evidence.

Interesting find by Alice Friedemann today.

http://energyskeptic.com/2021/the-end-of-fracked-shale-oil/

The end of fracked shale oil?

Conventional crude oil production may have already peaked in 2008 at 69.5 million barrels per day (mb/d) according to Europe’s International Energy Agency (IEA 2018 p45). The U.S. Energy Information Agency shows global peak crude oil production at a later date in 2018 at 82.9 mb/d (EIA 2020) because they included tight oil, oil sands, and deep-sea oil. Though it will take several years of lower oil production to be sure the peak occurred. Regardless, world production has been on a plateau since 2005.

What’s saved the world from oil decline was unconventional tight “fracked” oil, which accounted for 63% of total U.S. crude oil production in 2019 and 83% of global oil growth from 2009 to 2019. So it’s a big deal if we’ve reached the peak of fracked oil, because that is also the peak of both conventional and unconventional oil and the decline of all oil in the future.

Some key points from this Financial Times article:

– A fracking binge in the American shale industry has permanently damaged the country’s oil and gas reserves, threatening hopes for a production recovery and US energy independence.
– The damage was done by operators who carried out such “massive fracks” that “artificial, permanent porosity” was inadvertently created, reducing the pressure in reservoirs and therefore the available oil.
– Wil VanLoh, chief executive of Quantum Energy Partners, a private equity firm that through its portfolio companies is the biggest US driller after ExxonMobil, said too much fracking had “sterilized a lot of the reservoir in North America”.
– Wells have often been drilled too closely to one another…. so “for the last five years is we’ve drilled the heart out of the watermelon.”
– Mr VanLoh goes on to say that it is physically impossible to produce more than 13 mbd because the reservoirs are so messed up. Predictions from 3-4 years ago will not come true.
– Production from the Permian, the prolific shale field of west Texas and New Mexico, peaked even before the crash this year, Mr Waterous said. At current prices, only 25 per cent of US shale was economical

The most interesting thing about this article is that they deny and/or do not understand the underlying non-renewable energy depletion cause. As usual, they discuss everything except what matters.

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/record-34-all-household-income-us-now-comes-government

A Record 34% Of All Household Income In The US Now Comes From The Government

…Personal Current Transfer payments which are essentially government sourced income such as unemployment benefits, welfare checks, and so on. In March, this number exploded to a mind-blowing $8.1 trillion annualized, which was not only double the $4.1 trillion from February, but was also $5 trillion above the pre-Covid trend where transfer receipts were approximately $3.2 trillion.

Stated simply, what all this means is that the government remains responsible for a third of all income, or 33.8 to be precise!

Putting that number in perspective, in the 1950s and 1960s, transfer payment were around 7%. This number rose in the low teens starting in the mid-1970s (right after the Nixon Shock ended Bretton-Woods and closed the gold window). The number then jumped again after the financial crisis, spiking to the high teens. And now, the coronavirus has officially sent this number to a record 34%!

Nice essay today by Albert Bates with a couple great images.

https://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-great-pause-week-58-gift-oftime.html

“A year at a time” is how we are taking life now. It is preparing us for our future. Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” has a corollary: “Watch where everyone is moving and go where they aren’t.” Maybe you would be better off painting water colors, moving to an ecovillage, or running the kitchen in an Ecosystem Restoration Camp than whatever it was you were doing before. Plant some trees, help with a whale census, bag the peaks. Now is the time. Skate to where the puck is going.

Antonio Turiel today discusses the depletion of NRR’s, and what we should do, but does not mention population reduction.

https://crashoil.blogspot.com/2021/04/la-transicion-que-no-fue.html

note: Google translate, not Turiel, is responsible for the awkward English.

Since my appearance in the Spanish Senate , some people have sent me various reports on the state of some industrial sectors in Spain. All of them are related to an issue that I mentioned in my appearance and about which I already wrote here, the end of cheap plastic . The reports always mention the same thing: more than significant price increase in the last year of plastics and other raw materials (wood, aluminum, rolled steel, etc.), companies declaring force majeure for not complying with their supply contracts, stock break in some cases. And in general, no one expects these problems to be solved before 2022 or 2023.

If one reads the analyzes on the causes of these supply problems, one usually finds a variety of problems mentioned. The scarcity of raw materials is often mentioned (sometimes presented elliptically; for example, “mismatches between supply and demand”), but many conjunctural issues of variable influence are also mentioned, but which are clearly exaggerated in these reports: from the snow storm in Texas, the obstruction of the Suez Canal or the increase in the consumption of certain hygiene products derived from the measures against COVID. The truth is that in 2020 consumption in general fell a lot, and the shortage problems were already notorious at the end of 2020, so all those problems mentioned sound like excuses rather than the true cause of so much disorder.

And it is that at the root of all these problems is the accelerated decline in oil production in which we are already immersed. I am not going to repeat here once more the same arguments in full detail; consult, if you consider it necessary, what was discussed in the post ” The Great Waste”. The summary of the argument is as follows: the oil companies discovered a few years ago that there are no profitable oil fields left, because despite being at record prices they were losing money by the handful; thus, since 2014 they have been drastically reducing their investments and for this reason, the International Energy Agency itself anticipates a very important and unstoppable drop in oil production, which could reach up to 50% in 2025 if we do not react. Even if there is a strong reaction, a drop of 20 % seems inevitable. Such a large drop in oil production augurs a real economic disaster. This year alone, production could already fall by 10%. The shortage of certain raw materials that is being observed indicates that we are indeed going down that path .The price of a barrel of oil has not yet skyrocketed in price, but because of Liebig’s law of refineries (which we commented when talking about the shortage of plastics ) plastic is already in short supply. The shortage of other raw materials, such as microchips or some metals, has an energy component and another that depends on many other factors, but in any case it will be exacerbated by the decline in oil.

But, for the same reason, because we are already beginning the descent, there is no time for the solutions that are being proposed for the Energy Transition, motivated by the fight against Climate Change but which should also be valid to face the energy shortage and material that is coming our way. We have been discussing the pros and cons of the renewable transition for many, too many, years. We have been discussing the limits of renewables for many, too many years , with legitimate discrepancies that have yet to be resolved. Nothing was done when it had to be done because, deep down, it did not seem so urgent. And now, simply, what we had planned can no longer be.

Latin America passed its energy peak in 2016 , and just before COVID its energy consumption surpassed its production . With the current global worsening of the energy problem, will Chile continue to send us its copper, especially now that its costs have skyrocketed due to the poverty of the mines? Will Argentina continue to export its lithium for batteries? Will Mexico continue to send us its oil? The latter we already know not: Mexico’s oil consumption has already exceeded its production for a couple of years.

Will solar panels continue to come from China as before? And the neodymium? And the cobalt from the Congo? Niger’s uranium?

We have waited too long. In the middle of the fire it is not the time to hold a neighborhood meeting to approve the installation of a fire escape. On a seriously damaged plane, when the captain says “brace, brace” this is not the time to discuss what we will visit first when we arrive at our destination. There is no time for that.

…the focus should be elsewhere. We should equip ourselves, as soon as possible, with the capacity to be self-sufficient in food production. We should ensure the supply of water, in potable conditions, and the ability to purify wastewater. We should relocate the production of everything that is relocatable. We should open our landfills and junkyards to reuse everything that is reusable. Recycle everything that is recyclable and reengineer industrial processes to promote recycling, especially of certain metals.

h/t Panopticon

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-24/the-grocery-food-price-bill-is-going-to-get-more-expensive

Corn, wheat, soybeans, vegetable oils: A small handful of commodities form the backbone of much of the world’s diet and they’re dramatically more expensive, flashing alarm signals for global shopping budgets.

This week, the Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index — which tracks key farm products — surged the most in almost nine years, driven by a rally in crop futures. With global food prices already at the highest since mid-2014, this latest jump is being closely watched because staple crops are a ubiquitous influence on grocery shelves — from bread and pizza dough to meat and even soda.

Mac10 thinks about denial today.

https://zensecondlife.blogspot.com/2021/04/all-warnings-ignored.html

Today is Earth Day of course. However, to most people it’s just another day to take the blue planet for granted. So I thought I would dedicate this post to discussing my views of the environment and the great reset that began last year, from an economic standpoint. One of my recurring topics prior to the pandemic was my uncontrolled rage at the denial of global climate change by people who are in denial about everything. Climate change being the least of their worries. My opinion is that if this deep reset via COVID – which is orders of magnitude beyond anything imagined at any climate conference – doesn’t work, then nothing will.

Tom Murphy yesterday used more poetic words to say the same thing as Clugston.

Murphy does not mention population reduction policies.

https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/04/in-breach-of-contract/#more-1746

So one answer, on one extreme, is to abandon technology and live more as part of the wild world. We obviously won’t (and can’t) flip a switch and do this, being unprepared in terms of requisite skills, psychological disposition, and even physical condition.

More hopefully, we could appreciate that our endpoint needs to dovetail back into nature, and establish a glide path by which we could do so smoothly and deliberately, in such a way as to preserve hard-won knowledge of the way the world works and assure the survival of critical technologies to at least preserve knowledge, if not expand upon it.

I don’t know if this is possible. Continued growth—the ways of the last few centuries—is manifestly impossible. A high level of resource use characteristic of today is impossible to maintain in present form over the very long term. A high-tech world may therefore be impossible for nature to support more than temporarily: fundamentally incompatible. A mostly natural world keeping a veneer of technology may be possible. And a primitive existence is certainly, demonstrably possible.