LifeItself

When I reminisce about the year 2022, I think about noise.  The loud white noise is everywhere, and it buzzes in my ears even when I am in a quiet wilderness.  For good reason.  There is no truly untouched wilderness left in this Age of Anthropocene.  Humans have invaded and damaged or destroyed every part and parcel of land and water on this beautiful Earth that is still trying to protect us from our mass extinction.  Not for much longer, unless you believe the delirious false prophets of technology who shout ever louder and are getting more aggressive by the minute.  They must shout to make their cult followers suspend sound judgement, but they have little appropriate education and no fig leaves to cover their ugly lust for social power.   The cult groupies keep on clinging to a legion of these frauds, e.g., to the  Michael Shellenberger s and  Elon Musk s ( here too ) of this world.  Draw your own conclusions after loo...

The essence of my unchanging argument is as follows: An exponential growth of human population can be supported for a while by a similarly exponential increase of production of power as primary energy per unit time and food we must eat each day. After a certain time interval , whose length depends on the rate of population growth and technology, both the population and the means of its survival must stabilize or collapse.  The elapsed time to collapse depends strongly on the rate of deterioration of environmental services of the Earth: abundance of clean air, water, good soil, large healthy forests, and biodiversity in general, as well as on the healthy oceans. Please note the two key phrases: "for a while" and "a certain time interval."  My argument is generally  rejected, because most people focus on the here and now, and forget that a few decades are less than a blink of an eye in history of humanity.  In the more sophisticated circles of "main-stream...

Yesterday I gave a presentation to a group of distinguished business leaders.  In my presentation, I tried to show that the global rate of production of petroleum and the associated lease condensate is at an all-time high or a "peak" that at a greatly expanded scale looks like a "plateau."  I used my published, peer-reviewed extensions of King Hubbert's approach to support my arguments. Figure 22 in King Hubbert's report "Nuclear Energy and Fossil Fuels," Publication No. 95, Shell Development Company, Exploration and Production Research, Houston, TX, June 1956. I received a significant push back from several members of the audience.  Their arguments were as follows: King Hubbert tried to address the question of finite resources and today we know he was wrong. Even though Hubbert cycles emerge for individual oil provinces, they cannot emerge for the world.  We have been predicting the peak of global oil production for a long time and it ne...