Trump tells it like it is!

Disaster: "Trump's policies toward Iraq." Video circulating now in social media in Iraq, key partner in US military strategy against ISIS. pic.twitter.com/upq4fYAIWn

— Borzou Daragahi (@borzou) January 24, 2017

The problem of falling net energy -- the elephant in the room

@NafeezAhmed openDemocracy: "Over the last century, the net value of the energy we are able to extract from our fossil fuel resource base is inexorably declining. The scientific concept used to measure this value is Energy Return on Investment (EROI), a calculation that compares the quantity of energy one extracts from a resource, to the quantity of energy used to enable the extraction.
...
.... Because we need energy to produce and consume, we need more energy to increase production and consumption, driving economic growth. But if we’re getting less energy over time, then we simply cannot increase economic growth.

This has led to a number of devastating consequences. To maintain economic growth, we are using ingenious debt mechanisms to finance new economic activity. The expansion of global debt is now higher than 2007 pre-crash levels....

As global net energy is declining, to keep the endless growth machine running, the imperative to drill like crazy to get more energy out only deepens. So instead of scaling back our exploitation of fossil fuels, we are accelerating it. As we are accelerating fossil fuel exploitation, this is accelerating climate change. That in turn is driving more extreme weather events like droughts, storms and floods, which is putting crops in major food basket regions at increasing risk.

As climate and food instability ravages regions all over the world, this has fueled government efforts to task their militaries with planning for how to deal with the rising instabilities that would result as these processes weaken states, stoke civil unrest and even inflame terrorism. And that escalating breakdown of regional states coincides conveniently with a temptation to use military force to consolidate control of more fossil fuel resources."

What's wrong with electric cars?

• Sprawl. All cars promote sprawl. Sprawl means each house with its own leaf-blower, snow blower, heating and cooling, etc. Sprawl wastes energy.
• Growth. More cars enables more babies.
• Manufacture:

Tesla’s Electric Cars Aren’t as Green as You Might Think | WIRED: "...At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling...."

But the biggest problem with electric cars is that many people see them as a solution to climate and energy problems. By the time the hype has cleared, precious time will be lost, time needed to implement actual solutions.

Trump's Plans for Fossil Fuels Will Shrink the Economy

Motherboard: "It all comes down to physics: the laws of thermodynamics. Economies need energy to function. And to grow, they need extra energy to fuel that growth in production and consumption. But as more energy is required just to extract new energy from fossil fuels, there is less “energy surplus” available to continue driving economic growth—to ramp up even more production and consumption. And increasingly, more and more energy is being used just to maintain the existing infrastructure of society as it is, leaving less room for further growth."

What really happens when you go all-renewable?

A physicist calculates the costs of switching to electricity powered by renewables. Few people are actually "doing the math" as he does. Scientists have been heroic fighting against the denier/delayers. Now we need them to run the numbers on the "solutions."

A Nation-Sized Battery | Do the Math: "What about cost? At today’s price for lead, $2.50/kg, the national battery would cost $13 trillion in lead alone, and perhaps double this to fashion the raw materials into a battery (today’s deep cycle batteries retail for four times the cost of the lead within them). But I guarantee that if we really want to use more lead than we presently estimate to exist in deposits, we’re not dealing with today’s prices. Leaving this caveat aside, the naïve $25 trillion price tag is more than the annual U.S. GDP. Recall that lead-acid is currently the cheapest battery technology. Even if we sacrificed 5% of our GDP to build this battery (would be viewed as a huge sacrifice; nearly a trillion bucks a year), the project would take decades to complete."

When you actually calculate what it takes to switch to renewables, degrowth seems a lot more reasonable.

Outgoing Transportation Secretary Says Private Funding Isn't the Answer

Save this quote. This is exactly what is going to happen. A lot of money will be spent by new US administration on infrastructure and things will get worse.

Outgoing Transportation Secretary Says Private Funding Isn't the Answer – Skift: "But Foxx also cautioned that “you could put $5 trillion into America’s transportation system and if the money isn’t directed in the right way, we will still have congestion, still have problems.”"

Wealth and energy are locked together, decoupling is a fraud

Economics: "The core finding is that simply maintaining our current economic wealth requires continual energy sustenance. Like a living organism, civilization requires energy not just to grow but also to maintain its current size or wealth.  All components of civilization, whether human or physical, have no innate value; instead they acquire economic value through mutual connections since these enable the circulations that define humanity. These circulations between and among us and our stuff require a consumption of energy. Viewed very generally, our total civilization wealth is directly tied to this energetic power through a constant. "

So even if emissions are zero, growth will increase the amount of installed human infrastructure and human activity, which means there will be more heat. No matter what fuel is used. No. matter. what. fuel. is. used. At 2.3% growth, human infrastructure/activity will double in 30 years. Due to 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, energy cannot depart earth faster than a fixed rate based on [fixed] surface area and [fixed] energy transfer rate.

Even emission-free, growth will burn our living space

Solar advocates like to say that the energy from the sun is plentiful and free. That's true. But what should we be doing with it? Is it dangerous? Could we burn ourselves? Is there a lab to test in?

Yes, we are in the lab, and have a big experiment already with concentrated sunlight. We have been burning old sunlight that was concentrated into coal, oil, and gas. We have increased the amount of heat on earth's surface, both land and water.

Fossil fuel has allowed us to become over 7 billion in number.  We have over 350ppm of gases in the air that are trapping more energy every day and will continue for a long time. We have a complex way of living that demands energy use to double about every 30 years. These three things generate heat faster than the earth's infrared radiation can dissipate it into space.

Even if we stop adding heat trapping gases to the air, our activities will turn incoming solar energy to heat, and yes, we will burn ourselves.

Said another way, even if we convert to emission-free energy, we will still cook the biosphere.

What to do? The sunlight coming in must be stored, not used in heat-generating activity. We must reduce our numbers. We must simplify our complexity.  

2nd Law of Thermodynamics prevents decoupling

Why economics is just a physics problem: "Stepping back to see the world economy as a simple physical object, one where people are only part of a larger whole, would be a stretch for a traditional economist hung up on the idea that wealth must be restricted to physical capital. But, crucially, unlike traditional models, it is an idea that can be rigorously tested and potentially disproved. It is a hypothesis that is falsifiable. If the above is correct then we should expect to see that summing up the inflation-adjusted of GDP all nations, over the entirety of history, this very general expression of inflation-adjusted global economic wealth is tied to global primary energy consumption through a numerical constant, independent of the year that is considered. "

Brave candidate calls out false eco "leaders"

The neoliberals are moving heaven and earth to keep the lid on the eco activists who are trying to stop climate change and save the biosphere. They provide "leaders" who misdirect the energy of honest activists. Why do so few eco organizations openly call for free transit? The answer is because they get that phone call from their "funders" re-directing them to a goal that does not threaten growth.

Here a candidate in Scotland openly calls for free public transport and calls out the "green" party to stop misleading.

The @scotgp & Ayrshire Greens are stuck in the past, #FreePublicTransport is the future. Proud to back @FreePublicTrans. pic.twitter.com/Lepl4Urd1P

— Gordon Walker (@Gordon4EAC) January 14, 2017