It Bears Repeating: Best of Overshoot Essays

Denis Rancourt just released a new paper updating his estimate of covid all-cause mortality from 17 million to 30 million.

In summary most of the deaths were caused by our incompetent/evil leaders and experts and we would have been far better off if a pandemic had not been declared.

https://correlation-canada.org/covid-excess-mortality-125-countries/

The spatiotemporal variations in national excess all-cause mortality rates allow us to conclude that the Covid-period (2020-2023) excess all-cause mortality in the world is incompatible with a pandemic viral respiratory disease as a primary cause of death. This hypothesis, although believed to be supported by testing campaigns, should be abandoned.

We describe plausible mechanisms and argue that the three primary causes of death associated with the excess all-cause mortality during (and after) the Covid period are:

– Biological (including psychological) stress from mandates such as lockdowns and associated socio-economic structural changes
– Non-COVID-19-vaccine medical interventions such as mechanical ventilators and drugs (including denial of treatment with antibiotics)
– COVID-19 vaccine injection rollouts, including repeated rollouts on the same populations

Unusual clots that began appearing coincident with mRNA transfections are still a thing and are still being ignored and not investigated by the “professionals” our tax dollars pay to protect us.

https://energyskeptic.com/2024/colonization-of-mars-the-moon-a-book-review-of-a-city-on-mars/

Colonization of Mars & The Moon: a book review of “A City On Mars”

About half the book is on governance in space, but given finite fossil fuels on Earth and none at all on other planets we will never colonize space and need to think about governance.  There are so many other issues this book covers. It can’t happen. But like Peak Everything, the 9 existential environmental boundaries, and the 6^th extinction, most people don’t want to know about it. We’ve been raised on Sci-fi movies and Star Trek.

But if you can handle reality, it is very interesting to see the challenges of space colonization. Without fossil fuels that requires resorting to renewables, but those work in space either. Hydropower requires flowing water. Wind power requires wind. Although there are, in fact, occasional proposals for Martian wind power, to make use of the ultra thin atmosphere the turbines would have to be huge. Geothermal energy, where heat is drawn from deep underground, won’t work on the geologically quiet Moon. It might work on Mars, but would be another enormous on-site construction project, and the best locations for geothermal power may not be the best locations for an early Mars habitat. Solar won’t work because space dust will clog the panels. Nuclear power may explode in a giant Ka-Boom!

The solar and galactic radiation that washes over Mars, which at its closest is 34 million miles away from Earth, is potentially 700 times as great as what passes through our magnetic defenses.

Asteroids and other planets are not made out of platinum, lithium, and other valuable minerals. There is zero economic incentive to go into space, except by a few billionaires with bloated egos engaged raising investments in a hopium scam.

Basically the book makes the case that even if climate change ravaged the planet with heat, drought, and more, if a nuclear war caused a nuclear winter for a decade, and so on — the Earth would still be a better place to be than Mars or the Moon.  I am sure you’ll agree if you see what some of the difficulties are. I discuss other obstacles at energyskeptic.com in post: “Escape to Mars after we’ve trashed the Earth?”. If this topic interests you, I highly recommend Mary Roach’s “Packing for Mars”, which was very funny. So is this book.

Lots of hard work in high temps at the farm this week.

The blueberries are ripe so I needed to get the electric fence tuned up to keep the bears out. I flail mowed both sides of the fence on the entire perimeter using the BCS walk behind tractor. Then went down both sides of the fence again with a blade installed on the gas strimmer to cut the grass and weeds underneath the fence. Then fixed all the shorts from falling branches, etc. Voltage is back up to 9.5kV on the entire perimeter which means we should be in good shape.

My crops are producing well. I’ve got more beets, carrots, swiss chard, basil, and cherry tomatoes than I can eat.

The farm has extra cooler space so I plan to bulk store carrots and beets.

Tomorrow I’m going to try making a big batch of refrigerator pickled beets. My plan is to steam them, cut them into slices, transfer to a mason jar, cover with vinegar, salt, and sugar, and store in the fridge. If anyone has any tips on vinegar concentration and salt/sugar or other spice amounts it would be appreciated.

Good one today by Hideaway…

https://peakoilbarrel.com/open-thread-non-petroleum-july-10-2024/#comment-778475

OFM … “Arguing for no growth economic policies in the real world is pretty much equivalent to a political death wish.”

I fully agree, that no-one will ever have degrowth as a policy, no-one would ever get elected on that type of platform, while others are promising growth forever, which is precisely why the suffering and collapse will be way worse than it needs to be.

Solar, wind and batteries are not renewables, they are replaceables or rebuildables and are no answer to anything. They have a limited life, so in 10 years for batteries, 20 years for wind and if lucky 30 years for solar, they need replacing, with more digging up of minerals from lower grades on average..

Did you see up thread how the largest battery recycling company in Australia is charging $5.63/kg to take old lithium batteries? For average Joe it will be far cheaper to dump batteries than to recycle them, so the recycling rates will be much lower than most expect. It’s the only way the company can make money as selling the recycle scrap is not profitable!!

Only by destroying the last of the rainforests and natural areas to gain access to all the remaining higher ore grade bodies of every metal, and by using up all the remainder of the fossil fuels would we be able to build all the HVDC transmission super grid and solar and wind out the ying yang for the whole world, then what?, as it all crumbles over the next couple of decades??

It’s not the fortune it costs, it’s the immense quantity of materials and energy needed to build it, that’s the problem. Plus of course it’s all built with fossil fuels, and so will the next generation, if there are any fossil fuels to build it..

BTW, the first generation of wind farms are up for replacement or rebuilding only a couple of hundred kilometers from here. They are all going to be torn down with diesel equipment, including the foundations, which will be an enormous operation, powered by fossil fuels. There are currently zero plans to replace them, mainly because the wholesale price of electricity goes negative when the wind is blowing and sun shining here.

We have lived in a world of growing energy availability, as did our parents and grandparents. The downslope will be vastly different as there will NOT be the energy available to rebuild anything!! People everywhere will be scrambling just to survive.

The complexity of all our energy systems is so massive, relying totally upon 6 continent supply chains, that when it all collapses, that’s it, modern civilization is over. There will not be the fuel available to take an old truck around to old cities and grab scrap metal to take to smelters, as the smelters will not have the fuel to operate!!

None of it can get going as people everywhere are starving as farms wont have fuel and over 80% of the populations in developed countries are in cities. There is no fuel to take them to the country and build them anywhere to live. Without a grid in operation and no fuel available because all the easy to access oil as used up, rebuilding anything will become a non starter..

It doesn’t matter how much willpower or organisation there is, as the only oil available will require really complex technology to gain access to, the type of complexity we have today with high level computers helping to operate horizontal drill bits 10,000 ft below ground in a very narrow precise area, but wont have after collapse.

There will be no, simple to gain access to, energy available, with the remaining forests being shredded by people to just keep warm.

OFM …” What we have to do, in the here and now, is come up with and implement ways to save as much of the living environment as we can, while stretching out our limited and depleting one time gifts of nature such as oil, natural gas, and metal ores, etc.”

Except none of that is happening.. We keep using excuses to build another Thacker pass, or rip up more rainforest in an effort to make more renewables available. That’s what’s actually happening, so by the time the renewable world is ‘built’, there will not be much of a natural environment left.. There will never be enough renewables either, as building MORE always requires a higher energy use to do, which raises the base level needed in civilization, so MORE needs to be built, meaning destroying more of the natural world to do it. It’s a never ending feedback loop.

The simple reality is that it all ends when the available energy declines at an accelerating rate, as the lower energy will feedback upon itself making less energy available the following year, no matter what the energy is.

Another simple reality is that drilling a hole in the ground to gain access to another million cuft of gas every day for a decade or 2, to be sent into a nearby pipeline requires a fraction of the energy needed to build a solar farm of equivalent energy output (hundreds of MWh plus GWh of batteries !!).

Of course the gas provides energy 24/7, every day including middle of winter when the sun doesn’t shine, plus, provides the building blocks for many products that are essential for the modern world.. The solar doesn’t do either of these while taking so much more energy and materials to build!!

We get to the stage where fossil fuels are too difficult to gain access to as depletion sets in, plus destroy the climate in the process, so they are NOT an answer. But neither is using lots more fossil fuels, to build out a system of lots of eventual statues after a short life span.

We should have had population control and a simplification of everything decades ago, but instead chose as a species to use up every available resource possible to reach the current level of plague phase, where the only option is to reduce numbers by one or 2 orders of magnitude fairly quickly. We can chose to do it or let nature do it to us.

We have been choosing to let nature do it to us, by denying that unlimited growth on a finite planet is not possible, nor was ever possible. Because of entropy and dissipation, we always need MORE materials from lower grades in even a steady state economy. Materials from lower grades means more growth in energy use, just to remain stable, which is impossible in the long term…

Sarah Connor explains that she also doesn’t have anyone in real-life that she can discuss overshoot with.

https://www.collapse2050.com/the-first-rule-of-collapse/

The poly-crisis is the most important issue facing humanity. Not the election, not the Middle East, not inflation. These issues are all intertwined, but the driving forces behind almost all of our current and future problems – war, polarization, wealth disparity, etc. – are biosphere collapse and resource scarcity.

So why don’t I talk about it, despite my writing on this website and Twitter? I don’t discuss the state of civilization much with friends, family or colleagues – this is precisely why I began writing about it.

There is one number that impresses me more than any other: 100,000,000.

That’s the number of barrels of oil we consume per day.

The biomass required to produce that volume is unimaginable for my brain.

100,000,000 * 159 * 365 = 5,803,500,000,000 liters per year!!!