Our planet on Netflix - please contribute!

Us Walmartians use "toilet paper" as our global currency...

Rather than further list what I do, I think this might be a good time to share an idea. In the middle of America, there is not much geothermal to use. The ground at a certain depth does maintain a constant and comfortable temp though. I've wondered if a "U" shaped aluminum (recycled) tube placed at depth and then capped with an air filter and a fan would aid in regulating household temps.

Creatures in ideal environments with plenty of food breed. When that environment ceases to be beneficial - drought, famine, viral etc factors remove the population to a smaller number. World environs have changed with nature inventing chlorophyll and exotherms. The late George Carlin said "When the Earth gets tired of us, it will shake us off like a bad case of fleas." But is Fossil fuel the biggest problem? I call it the Mesozoic Revenge (Leptraps might call it Montezuma's Revenge but that is another story).

I can appreciate the skepticism. I do enjoy cigars too. Roll some of my own occasionally. Cost of cigars and draconian taxes are a turn off so I learned from a Cuban roller while I lived in Tampa. Rather than worry about others, being personally responsible -a good caretaker-is the goal I seek. Ramming down fear of the end will not work especially when the predictions are consistently incorrect. It is not the fault of science. It appears to be the wrong interpretation of data to fit a hypothesis.

My concern is that supposedly science minded individuals here continue to debate global warming when the oceans are depleted, a fact nobody is denying. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a 95% loss of a fish species has a high probability of extinction. GW is being blamed for coral bleaching but lo and behold, the reefs that still have apex predators don’t exhibit bleaching. How can there be so much concern for one problem and virtually no concern for a known bigger problem? I don’t get it.

I mentioned some time ago that Germany was abandoning wind energy projects only to be denied here by the "true believers". Here is an update and seems solar is also on the chopping block now:

Germany has belatedly but finally come to the realization that renewable energy is a failure, that it cannot power Germany or the German civilization. The reason is very straight forward: renewable energy wasn’t designed to power modern civilization.

Writing about Germany’s renewable energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world, four reporters for the German newspaper Der Spiegel said in a lengthy article earlier this month that Germany acknowledged last year that it was delaying its phase-out of coal and that it would not meet its greenhouse gas reduction commitments for 2020.

Because its renewable energy emissions have flat-lined since 2009.

Announcing last year that it was delaying its phase out of coal, the reporters also said Germany would bulldoze an ancient church and forest to get the coal underneath.

Titled “A Botched Job in Germany,” the reporters said the Energiewende — Germany’ biggest political project since reunification — has cost Germany $36 billion annually, and opposition to renewable energy is growing in the German countryside.

“The politicians fear citizen resistance,” they said. “There is hardly a wind energy project that is not fought.”

Reporting the Der Spiegel story, Michael Shellenberger, a Time Magazine “Hero of the Environment,” Green Book Award winner and president of Environmental Progress, a research and policy organization, said the poor physics of resource-intensive and land-intensive renewables have meant the end of Germany’s rush to renewable energy.

“Solar farms take 450 times more land than nuclear plants,” he said, “and wind farms take 700 times more land than natural gas wells to produce the same amount of energy.”

Of the 7,000 new kilometers of transmission lines needed in Germany, only 8% have been built, while large scale electricity storage remains inefficient and expensive. “A large part of the energy used is lost,” the Der Spiegel reporters said, noting a much hyped hydrogen gas project, “and the efficiency is bellow 40%. … No viable business model can be developed from this.”

As the German government’s subsidies to wind, solar and biogas since 2000 end in 2020 — without which none of the country’s renewable energy would have been built because they’re too expensive — the renewable energy idea in Germany is over.

Pointing out that the Energiewende has become an excuse for the destruction of natural landscapes and local communities, Mr. Shellenberger said: “Tragically, many Germans appear to have believed that the billions they spend on renewables would redeem them. He quoted a reporter who wrote: “Germans would than at last feel that they have gone from being world destroyers in the 20th century to world saviors in the 21st.”

“Many Germans will claim the renewable transition was merely botched,” Mr. Shellenberger continued, “but it wasn’t. The transition to renewables was doomed because modern industrial people, no matter how Romantic [when Germany’s society was agrarian] they are, do not want to return to pre-modern life.

“The reason renewables can’t power modern civilization is because they were never meant to.” He added: “One interesting question is why anybody ever thought they would.”

It’s a question begging for an answer. Particularly in the United States.

May The Lord be with you and May You Be With The BRAAAAAAAP!!!

The graph is incorrect.
The line in developing countries will soon flatten.
The contraceptions are becoming widely available there and families don’t have as many children as they were have one generation ago.
Actually the medicine unbalanced the graph as the mortality in early ages is lower and the live span is longer but people are also having less children as they are more likely to survive to reproductive age so this problem will correct its self.
Nevertheless the impact of population on Earth is huge and we should do all to minimize it.