LifeItself

In this post, I explain the logic of wishful thinking and plain denial that rules on the Earth in most matters that matter (population growth, power (= energy per unit time) supply, water supply, food supply, progressing destruction of planetary ecosystems, and so on).   I imply throughout that without an ample and continuous supply of power as liquid fuels, chemical feedstock and electricity, the societal activities we take for granted are impossible. I start from formulating a grand postulate that is self-evident, given the finite volume of the Earth's lithosphere and the law of mass conservation: ( The Grand Postulate ) If all hydrocarbon resources in the Earth’s mantle are finite (= A) then there is peak rate of hydrocarbon production   (= B) [as these resources are gradually depleted]: A implies B or A → B This Grand Postulate is logically equivalent to its contrapositive: if not A then not B:  (not A = ~A)  → ~B: If hydrocarbon resources are...

In the last few days, two top newspapers in the U.S., The New York times on the left and The Wall Street Journal on the right, have come up with unusual predictions of the future oil might of our fair United States of America.  I tried to link to the "Report Predicts U.S. as No. 1 Oil Producer in a Few Years," by Elisabeth Rosenthal, published on page B1 of The New York Times on 11/13/2012, but this link did not exist. I guess, Ms. Rosenthal's article belongs to the category of All News Fit to Sweep Under the Rug . The unsigned agitprop piece in The Wall Street Journal: "Saudi America - The U.S. will be the world's leading energy producer, if we allow it,"  dated 11/12/2012, still adorns the Web. At best, the authors of these two articles have shown a lack of rudimentary understanding of what is needed to increase oil production in the U.S. to the short-term levels implied by their narratives. At worst, they purposefully misled readers. Even the already b...

The December 27, 2010, WSJ Opinion piece, "Ag Department Uproots Science," is full of fantastically uninformed thinking so characteristic of medieval alchemists. The piece takes to task the Ag Secretary and the Obama administration for being insufficiently warm towards the genetically modified (GM) plants and insufficiently lax in regulating them. The nonsensical argument that a genetically modified plant is "substantially equivalent" to an unmodified one, because a few different genes weight almost nothing, flies in the face of the very science the opinionator invokes so often. These modified genes express themselves differently in different circumstances, and may cause significant changes in chemical reaction pathways at cellular level. In other words, the modified plant may, and often does, produce chemicals that disrupt the human endocrinal system or are downright poisonous. A good example are GM potatoes. What irks me more than anything is that this roa...