A post-carbon world could be our opportunity to do better—and make the difficult transition much easier to swallow.
That’s the message of Alice Friedemann on this week’s episode, author of When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation. The transition is coming, perhaps collapse is coming, and if the world as we know it is going to change we might as well make the most of it. She worries we won’t be given the opportunity due to all the misinformation flying around, and gives a cutting analysis of how the climate change conversation is distracting from many other dangerous, concurrent such as biodiversity loss and water scarcity.
For Alice, the big problem is the energy crisis. She explains how oil prices can precipitate nation state collapse, with high oil prices driving 11 of the past 12 recessions.
This is a phenomenally interesting interview, which also manages to be a lot of fun, despite the topics! Listen here on catch it on on Apple or Spotify.
Visit Alice’s website Energy Skeptic and get your hands on a copy of When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation.
You can also follow Planet: Critical on Youtube and support the project on Patreon where I upload a bonus video every Saturday.
I agreed with much of this, but I think there's a case to be made that we don't need gas to manufacture industrial fertiliser. The use of industrial fertiliser and tilling is the reason we only have a few decades of soil left. If you look at the recommended concentrations of NPK added to the soil over the last 100 years it keeps going up, as the soil gets poorer. Using regenerative farming techniques and no tillage to build healthy soil allows the organisms and fungus that populate it to access the minerals that the plant roots can't otherwise reach. Dr. Elaine Ingham's talks are a good resource to learn about this.
On nuclear, there was an interesting talk with someone who had worked with the regulatory body for Nuclear Energy in the US. I think it was on the "Facing Future" YouTube channel. His opinion was that the storage of spent fuel wasn't fit for purpose and that the regulatory body had been "captured" by the industry, pretty much echoing what Alice was saying.
Brilliant, Tim, thanks for these resources. I've got Walter Jehne coming on the show in a few weeks to discuss regenerative farming, and I'll check out Dr Elaine Ingham.
Currently on the hunt for a nuclear expert, too!
A friend pointed me to this. May I spend a few minutes talking about nuclear power, government planning and economics?
Hi Jonathan, email me at rachel@planetcritical.com
all very interesting but Alice is wrong on nuclear energy on many levels (minute 34) , an interview or even a debate with a nuclear engineer would clarify the matter.
Thanks for listening, Roberto. Any you would recommend?
I can pass the message to a couple of nuclear engineers I am in contact with, hopefully they will be happy to make a contribution. In the meantime I can post a link proving that nuclear energy is the only one available for thousands of years with today's fission
(not fusion) technology page 164 and 165 https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_164.shtml
That would be amazing, thanks so much.