The Decline of Fossil Fuels and Limits of Renewable Energy


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  • #88314 Reply
    Demeter

      Oops, meant children are rightbrained until they start school.

      #88315 Reply
      Demeter

        No worries sharing this, a done just now personality result for me which is pretty typical for me:

        https://personalitymax.com/report/?pt=84-1-79-1&mi=90-93-70-80-77-73-77-97&ls=62-59-82&bh=38&name_key=51c20f900a

        Recommend taking the test yourselves, it’s a really good one which changes the questions so often. If you’re borderline you should be able to establish your norm after taking a few tests. Less detailed this test but the 3 absolute constants for me apart from being an ENTP are my Naturalist and Logical intelligence and my Left/Right brained result.

        #88322 Reply
        Demeter

          Unrelated but worth thinking about, i think Jeremy Corbyn won in both ’17 and ’19. Remember how he was demonised despite being such a reasonable person, i loathe how we’re told to be divisive politically, think most people just want a decent person in power, whether they’re left or right.

          Thought he was robbed in ’17 but on the morning of the ’19 election, Laura Kuensberg said it looked bad for Jeremy as the postal votes were against him. There is no precedent for her saying something which is illegal, postal votes aren’t allowed to be opened until the polls are closed, so how could she make that statement?

          It gets more interesting, Lord Ashcroft’s analysis showed 39% of votes were postal votes, when the average is 20%, that’s beyond strange but shows how much power is just taken out of our hands.

          #88323 Reply
          Clark

            Demeter, before I read anything on this page (I’ve deliberately skipped down to the comment form without reading)…

            Since having slept, I regret getting defensive; I’m sorry and I apologise.

            I don’t wish to impose anything upon anyone. I’m merely in the same position as anyone else; the world presents me with facts, and I either have the humility to accept them, or I suffer, and cause suffering, by refusing to accept them.

            I know that rich people conspire, and that corporations project propaganda, usually by distorting facts. It hurts when people insinuate that I’m too naive to recognise that, or that I’m an authoritarian trying to impose lies or distortions upon them. It hurts because I have spent a large fraction of my life’s time and a great deal of emotional and intellectual effort trying to correct such distortions.

            But reality is rather miraculous; it has a wonderful consistency, making it possible to tell distortions from truth. This helps keep me sane; it has literally protected me from suicide over and over again (you’d need to know my life story…). Science (the methods, not the claims) and logic (the practice) have developed wonderful techniques to tell facts from carefully constructed fictions masquerading as facts, and from simple folly. This too is miraculous – good and truth truly are stronger than evil, lies, error and laziness, and this miracle is somehow built into the very fabric of reality.

            I aspire to teach those techniques, and what a Christian might call the Good News – We are not powerless! The power of truth and consistency is woven into the fabric of reality itself, and everyone has access to it, no matter how impoverished or oppressed they are. Many have died horrible deaths at the hands of those projecting falsehoods, but no one and no power could prevent them from doing good.
            – – – – – – –

            I again apologise for getting defensive. I shall return and read comments from last night, later on today. Kia kaha.

            #88324 Reply
            Clark

              COLUMN: Every week, the people who trade electricity in the UK get to quiz the managers of the national grid.

              Listening to them is getting scarier by the week — and suggests keeping the lights on will be more challenging than politicians admit. @opinion https://t.co/DBPWoyZVf2
              — Javier Blas (@JavierBlas) August 26, 2022

              #88325 Reply
              Demeter

                My arms are hugging you Clark, know you’re a good guy but sadly can’t agree with you on some things. I’m not religious but respect many religious people have been totally on the ball for so long, must admit it’s from their using scripture to understand what’s happening.

                I often promote such videos as many are so accurate regarding what’s happening. I’ll try one link which i think is unlikely to work:

                https://odysee.com/@HumanitysVault:a/Early-Warning—1981-film:4

                #88335 Reply
                Demeter

                  Looks like the links have failed to me, so i’ll post the name of the video which is available on Odysee.
                  Barry Smith on Revelation TV (2000)

                  #88337 Reply
                  Demeter

                    Checked the first link, it’s iffy for me so check out Barry Smith on Revelation TV (2000) which is available on Odysee

                    #88338 Reply
                    mods-cm-org

                      Demeter

                      Kindly stop posting links, which you don’t summarise or explain, that are unrelated to the title of the discussion thread. This is a discussion forum, not a posterboard for interesting links.

                      If you wish to talk about real world conspiracies, please create a new discussion.

                      Incidentally, the links don’t work when you post them as plain text, but this can be fixed on a case-by-case basis by moderators.

                      Thank you.

                      • This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by modbot.
                      • This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by modbot.
                      • This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by modbot.
                      #88349 Reply
                      Demeter

                        Appreciate u explaining and still posting my comments, you’ve been more than fair, cheers.

                        #88353 Reply
                        Clark

                          Natasha, I stumbled upon a source that may be very useful to you, and very relevant to issues you have raised in this thread, which you started:

                          https://skepticalscience.com/rcp.php

                          “Many factors have to be taken into account when trying to predict how future global warming will contribute to climate change. The amount of future greenhouse gas emissions is a key variable. Developments in technology, changes in energy generation and land use, global and regional economic circumstances and population growth must also be considered.”

                          #88380 Reply
                          Clark

                            Demeter, I have now caught up with the thread and I’m pleased and surprised by the tone of your replies; so many similar conversations have descended into accusations of stupidity and mendacity against me.

                            Michael Parenti appears a good commentator, though I expect he’d be scathing of sources such as the Express and the New York Post – however, to discuss his political commentary here would be to stray far from Natasha’s topic, as the moderator has said.

                            I also agree that evidence of real conspiracies should be posted under a forum topic of their own, not here. I’m sorry, but I probably wouldn’t contribute much. We’re already well off topic but I would like to give you my reasons. Secret conspiracies indeed happen, but (1) this has little bearing upon conspiracy theory (which is a mode of thought which, ironically, has very little to do with real conspiracies, but that’s for another thread), and (2, important to this thread) by their secret nature, conspiracies tell us little that helps us to judge real world events, unless they get reasonably well exposed.

                            For instance, secret conspiracies almost certainly have influenced the debate surrounding anthropogenic global heating, but we can’t just assume that they’ve concocted or sensationalised the issue, to increase taxes or whatever. What each secret conspiracy will have done will have depended upon whether they considered anthropogenic heating to be real or not, and that’s the very question under examination, so to assume that they’ve created the issue for nefarious ends is circular reasoning.

                            In fact, for each secret conspiracy four broad behaviours are possible: (1) the secret society assessed AGW to be real, and played it up for their own ends; (2) they considered AGW real, but it was in their interests to play it down or deny it; (3) the secret society assessed AGW to be untrue but influenced science and public debate to make it look true, and (4) they assessed AGW to be untrue, and it also suited their purposes to project it as untrue to the public.

                            So attempting to examine AGW (or any other issue) by considering conspiracies will tell us nothing about the issue; we have to consider the issue in its own right.

                            #88386 Reply
                            Clark

                              Demeter, expanding briefly upon my fifth paragraph above, my four examples define the extremes, or four corners, of a field of possibilities.

                              Corner 1 (AGW true, play it up) would include the positions of the environmentalists, but also the “Green Industrial Revolution” advocates and renewable power manufacturers, and the financiers who wish to commodify, own and trade ecosystem services such as pollination, photosynthesis and natural water purification. Note that these would be relatively new entities, battling against old economic giants, trying to forge a place for themselves in the economic system. Such entities have probably helped promote Greta Thunberg, and funded environmental activism.

                              Corner 2 (AGW true, play it down) is now well documented to be the position of Exxon and other fossil fuel companies etc.; more documentation emerges all the time. These are the “old economic giants” I referred to above.

                              Corner 3 (AGW false, but make it look true) could include any of the economic players of Corner 1 above, but not genuine environmentalists.

                              Corner 4 (AGW false, play it down) is presumably the position of some members of the Heritage Foundation, Donald Trump, the US religious right, and others of very limited scientific literacy.

                              I’m sure they all have their secret conflabs!

                              #88387 Reply
                              Clark

                                Of course the worst case scenario is that the argument polarises and the four groups congregate in the corners of the field, from where they throw their own faeces at each other like adolescent chimps.

                                #88390 Reply
                                Clark

                                  Demeter,

                                  what seems vanishingly unlikely is that the science we see is known to be false, and there’s some different, true science that’s only known to “the Elite”. Science is a massive, collaborative, interlocking effort, and it’s developed in public, in the scientific literature – albeit much of it behind paywalls, which is wrong, but it isn’t secret.

                                  For instance, cosmology and astrophysics need nuclear physics for the understanding of stars, and for the relative abundance of the chemical elements produced in the Big Bang. Likewise, findings from astrophysics and cosmology feed back into nuclear physics. Quantum physics is needed to understand atomic structure, which in turn is needed for understanding the properties of the chemical elements, and hence chemistry. Astronomy and spectroscopy confirm the aforesaid findings of nuclear physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Experimental findings from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider etc. establish the unification temperatures of the four fundamental forces, which have to be consistent with nuclear physics, cosmology and the observations of astronomy. And so on. A finding in any one of these fields affects and has to be consistent with all the others.

                                  Closer to the discussion we’ve been having, climatologists need the understandings of biology, present and past. The biology of the past is palaeontology; the study of the climate of the past is palaeoclimatology, and these of course help inform the climatology and biology of the present. And so obviously they all intertwine with microbiology, biological chemistry, genetics, evolutionary genetics and so on. Science may have been taught to us at school as separate subjects that seemed to impinge upon each other only minimally, but that’s not remotely how things are in practical modern science.

                                  Some consequences follow from this.

                                  It takes huge numbers of people to develop such a broad set of interlocking understandings; trying to do better with a much smaller number of people acting in secret, sharing their findings only with each other, really wouldn’t be able to compete. If “the Elite” want science and the multitude of advantages it provides, they have to turn to the public scientific community. The best a secret team could hope to achieve is a minor, temporary advantage in a limited field.

                                  And when you personally say “oh I don’t think oil is a fossil fuel, it’s produced abiotically”, you really have no idea of the ramifications in all the other related and connected fields – and that’s in addition to having to find an explanation for Huppert’s work being correct, and oil wells drying up and oil companies giving up production of entire oilfields, and fracking etc. becoming commercially viable.

                                  You say you’re a hippy type, and one hippy tenet is that reality is a unified whole; everything affects and is connected to everything else. Science indeed treats reality as a unified whole; science does of course use reductionism, but at the larger scales science is a genuinely holistic enterprise. That’s why the “univers” in “university”.

                                  #88391 Reply
                                  Natasha

                                    Clark,

                                    XR’s demand for “a Citizens’ Assembly” chosen by sortition is idealistic at best.

                                    Q: Who is going to inform those so chosen at random to make rational informed decisions without personal internal invisible bias?
                                    A: The recent ‘Citizens Climate Assemblies’ (i.e. the UK national and one in Brighton etc), were completely broken and corrupted by special interest. Following XR’s civil disobedience action plan being unveiled in late 2018, I researched and wrote an answer to their question “What’s the plan?” It’s clear nuclear energy must be in the mix (to maximise the numbers of people who can survive whilst fossil fuels get too scarce and finally run out, but by then even nuclear energy will be severely limited). But those who chose the ‘experts’ failed entirely to invite anyone who could deliver this message to their Citizens Climate Assemblies’ members (aside from the other numerous anti-scientific bias on display).

                                    https://www.thegwpf.com/climate-assembly-was-undemocratic/
                                    https://tinyurl.com/AtomicHumans

                                    This spectacle alone renders XR at best a silly misleading joke, since XR themselves have shown that random selection is even more inferior than the current system!

                                    The obvious way forwards is to simply admit out loud over and over again that we need to work out how to exclude psychopaths from ALL positions of power, not pretend they don’t matter via e.g. random selection sortition nonsense and other ways to be blind and deaf to the nefarious ways of psychopaths.

                                    Clark, please just admit that: an organisation such as XR that has “no energy policy” except “reduce emissions as rapidly as possible, starting immediately” and then claiming this “is entirely consistent with weaning human systems off of fossil fuels” but then FAILING to point out to people like Greta Thunberg etc… that this means global populations much be cut or left to die by 80% in the next half dozen decades, is frankly child grooming by FAILING to address the question: who has to die and not have kids first?

                                    You ask for “a transition to true democracy” and invite us to join “the campaign to transcend fossil fuels” but I submit that it is delusional to assume the XR etc… road map(s) can possibly deliver anything but future irrelevant chaos trying to celebrate their own ignorance.

                                    #88392 Reply
                                    Clark

                                      Natasha, I find your comments very aggressive. I submit to your aggression, and admit all the things you demand. I apologise for my existence.

                                      #88393 Reply
                                      ET

                                        Natasha, what would be your plan to address the climate crisis? I’m not sure I like your condescending style of presentation but nonetheless you do make some valid points. Rather than just pointing out the deficiencies in current plans to replace fossil fuel dependence, how do you propose we proceed?

                                        #88396 Reply
                                        Natasha

                                          Clark, sorry, I’m a ‘Vulcan’ INTJ so tend to obsess until things are straightened out and finished, nothing personal intended. I went to the first few XR meetings and have studied under one of their original inspirations, Prof. Jem Bendal’s ‘Deep Adaptation’ paper and the 2015 ‘Money & Society’ MOOC / MA and Mathew Slater’s local currency work since. But those first XR meetings attracted the same old political careerists who thought they knew all they needed and I was literally banned for saying the ‘N’ word.

                                          https://personalityatwork.co/personality-type/ENTP/vs/INTJ

                                          Meanwhile, here’s some humour, whilst we ponder our guaranteed fossil fuel free future: Demeter, an ENTP and ENTP types share a lot of similarities. However, INTJs are usually much more intimidating than ENTPs (I’ll deal with the abiotic hydrocarbon myth in a later post if you’re still with us Demeter 😉 :

                                          • Stand in front of a mirror and shut your eyes (If you just rolled your eyes or tch’d, you are probably a INTJ)
                                          • Envision something relaxing. A lovely meadow on a gently warm spring day. Light breeze … birds chirping
                                          • Open your eyes.
                                          • If your face could curdle milk you are an INTJ.
                                          • If you have a slight smile and a mischievous glint in your eye then you are an ENTP
                                          • Do most people figure out when you are joking? – ENTP
                                          • When you argue, do you always know that you are right (even when you are not)? – INTJ
                                          • Are you comfortable with public speaking? – ENTP
                                          • Like deep conversations into the wee hours of the morning – that could go either way. You talk out problems – ENTP
                                          • People describe you as intellectual, serious, deep thinker, etc. – INTJ
                                          • People describe you as cunning, mercurial, charming – ENTP
                                          • Do you go to parties to lean on the wall and watch everyone else? -INTJ
                                          • Do you go over to the person leaning on the wall and annoy them? – ENTP
                                          • Do you have RBF?*

                                          https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-know-if-Im-an-ENTP-or-an-INTJ

                                          * https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Do+you+have+RBF&ia=web

                                          #88400 Reply
                                          Clark

                                            Natasha, thank you. I am already very distressed by humanity’s crisis, and my personal feelings of powerlessness to get it addressed quickly enough.

                                            It does not surprise me that the Citizens’ Assembly set up by the Westminster government had deep inadequacies, the most obvious of which was its remit, to examine (partial) decarbonisation by 2050, which is far too late, too slow. It does disappoint me that you linked to the Global Warming Policy Forum to criticise it; it’s a fake charity of rich old men, a political lobbying group for squandering fossil fuels as rapidly as possible in pursuit of short term profit, and I strongly suspect rather high on the psychopathy index! It promotes propaganda and deliberately manufactures public confusion, and it was never going to have a good word to say about any citizens’ assembly.

                                            Westminster’s “Citizens’ Assembly Lite” certainly should have considered nuclear power, but you know what Westminster is like; so reflexively secretive they’re reluctant to tell newcomers the way to the toilet, let alone put unbiased information about anything nuclear in front of a body of ordinary citizens.

                                            “…but by then even nuclear energy will be severely limited”

                                            Indeed; I assume you’re referring to the limited supplies of uranium ore of reasonably high concentration. “Oh, uranium can be extracted from seawater” – which is true… at experimental scales. As well as the time required to scale up to industrial quantities, it could turn out to be bad for marine ecosystems to filter thousands (millions?) of cubic kilometres of seawater to extract the trace amounts of uranium in it. I think the base of Earth’s food (and hence oxygen) chain may be somewhat more important than even a reliable electricity supply.

                                            Big sigh. The history of nuclear power development is a tragedy. We could have been safely using abundant thorium by now if the reactor prototyping programmes hadn’t been shut down in the 1970s. “Alvin, if you’re so concerned about reactor safety, we think it’s time you left atomic power”. Thank you for that, President Nixon. It’s almost merciful that Alvin Weinberg didn’t quite live to see the Fukushima disaster.

                                            Of course practical nuclear power can still be developed, but it again takes time we don’t have.

                                            Hopefully I’ll address citizens’ assemblies soon.

                                            #88401 Reply
                                            Clark

                                              Before I address citizens’ assemblies, I propose immediate rationing. It addresses the issues directly, and worked in WWII. Not compatible with neoliberalism though.

                                              #88402 Reply
                                              Natasha

                                                ET, Sorry about my “condescending style” – I’m simply trying to give as water tight a case as I can. Why? So I can relax, and just accept, which I have now largely done. 25 years ago I wrote, fought and lost several ET applications, but did win one very important one after over half a decade of intense stress. So please excuse my ‘INTJ’ Vulcan style, nothing personal.

                                                ET asks ‘What would be my plan to address the climate crisis? And how do I propose we proceed?’ …

                                                1. Write posts like this to maybe help people see through the psychopathic grooming BS from so-called ruling elites corporations and the media. But as I noted earlier, I’ll be dead soon enough in less than the time scale of fossil fuel depletion (a small handful of decades) and was lucky enough (like I suspect most readers of Craig Murray’s blog & Forums) to be born into aprox. the wealthiest top 1% of those who ever lived, and want to enjoy it now as much as possible, so don’t really care what happens after I’m gone.
                                                2. However, until we get rid of Psychopaths in public office, all of the following, though necessary, will remain very far out of reach:-
                                                3. Allow Thermodynamics MMT and SEEDS energy economics modelling to dictate viable policy and financial space.
                                                4. Ditch ‘Neo-Classical’ / Neo-Liberal / Libertarian B.S. economic theory we currently are ‘ruled’ by.
                                                5. Nationalise everything that is a Natural Monopoly i.e. health, education, housing, infrastructure, transport, energy, land, air, water, minerals, forests, food production etc. etc.
                                                6. Invest in next generation nuclear electricity and process heat (see e.g. Russian & Indian Fast Breeders) and try to electrify industrial process as best we can to give humanity a few more decades to maybe come its senses and be nice to each other whilst we rapidly shrink our footprint as we fall down the ‘Seneca Cliff’ over the next half century or so in a more managed egalitarian way than we’re doing here today.

                                                Meanwhile, this ‘Futurama’ clip sums up my best predictions !

                                                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMSHvgaUWc8

                                                #88405 Reply
                                                ET

                                                  If I were to use acronyms in writing medical notes I’d get whacked on the knuckles for doing so, they are open to (mis) interpretation. So, consequently, I am whacking you lot on the knuckles. If you’re going to use an acronym please at least once write it out in full so I and others don’t have to search for it.

                                                  Off topic rant over. Thank you all for your co-operation 😀

                                                  #88422 Reply
                                                  Clark

                                                    Natasha, thanks for your reply to ET, which gives me a much clearer idea of the person you are.

                                                    I support your list of suggestions. I still think we need civil resistance groups to achieve such objectives, especially in the short time available, and for me XR is one of the best such things I’ve encountered. But that’s my view from within the local groups; I’m not involved with anything above local level and wasn’t at any of the organisational meetings that preceded the first public actions in 2018. I like XR for the Ten Principles, and the practice of respect and attentive listening within groups, because these nurture a supportive atmosphere for people like me, and help build the resilient community connections that can help humanity through the escalating crisis.

                                                    Hoping this will give you some comfort, my pro-nuke arguments seem quite well accepted among ordinary XR members, and even anti nuclear weapons campaigners; they stimulate interest rather than provoking condemnation. Yes, Russian fast breeders seem reasonably promising, and the US IFR and French Superphénix should not have been cancelled. But it would be nicer not to produce plutonium and other actinides; from that perspective I would like to see more development of the thorium to U233 methods.

                                                    I think that screening out psychopathy would help, but I worry that corporate structure itself would undermine such efforts.

                                                    You have twice mentioned that you may have little time left to live. Words seem inadequate for such things, but I wish you happiness and contentment; all the more so if it’s a matter of a recent diagnosis or someone close who has died, or anything similar. Love and rage, Natasha <3

                                                    #88423 Reply
                                                    Clark

                                                      Oops, my comment crossed with ET’s.

                                                      XR = eXtinction Rebellion.

                                                      Natasha, something that worries me about nuclear power reactors is the toxic legacy they would leave should civilisation collapse, though I do understand that this also applies to many other industrial processes.

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